January 4, 2016
Have we been throwing money away on our auto insurance?
I semi-regularly shop around for better rates but totally forgot to reconsider the coverage itself. We tend to select fairly comprehensive (not to be confused with the coverage itself called “comprehensive”) policies, but the recent kerfuffle reminded us that our vehicles are old and not worth much so any real damage wouldn’t call for a repair job, it’d be a total loss so far as the insurance is concerned.
Car #1, the 11 year old that took the hit this Christmas is a great road tripper, with generous space for us and the kids, and relatively good mileage. We love the little amenities that we’d never considered before when buying newer and therefore pricier: seat heaters are pretty awesome. Not necessary but awesome. Unfortunately, for all its utility and functional value to us, the KBB value hovers around a paltry $4000. That’s not even halfway to a used car even the way we shop. It’d be a Major Surprise if insurance will agree to cover the repairs, but we live in hope. Cross your fingers for us while we work on that.
Meanwhile, Car #2, my 12-year-old car that serves my dad has nearly 200K miles, and is (probably generously) BlueBooked at about $3100. It likely only clocks in at that much because they stopped making that model a year later making it a “limited” edition.
And Car #3, my 12-year-old daily driver is worth an astounding $5000 if we were to sell to a private party now. That’s not terrible when you consider we didn’t pay much more than that for it 4 or 5 years ago but it’s still only enough to dent the cost of any replacement on the used private-seller market.
(We’re resolved never to buy new again unless there are such major discounts as to negate the drive off the lot depreciation, so only the used market has any bearing on our decisions.)
Our comprehensive coverage/deductible runs $42/year for Car #3 while Car #2 costs $90/year. That plus the $62/year we were paying on the Crunched Car doesn’t add up to the wildly extravagant waste of money I was imagining when I fired up this train of thought.
We have the savings to replace any of the cars outright if we have to, not that I’d love paying that bill, but we can. Then again, at $200 a year for all cars ranging from $3000-5000, does it make sense to keep our comprehensive coverage? The math suggests we wouldn’t want to pay that for more than five years before that cost and the deductible combined are about half any money we’d get back assuming it’s totaled. Less than that if it’s just a minor thing. (My math may still be iffy, I’m still recovering from holiday horrors.)
What kind of coverage do you carry? For what kinds of cars? Are you happy with your insurer?
August 17, 2013
Friend 1: “Why didn’t you ask for help?”
Friend 2: “PSH, Revanche? Ask for help?” *proceeds to laugh her head off*
– On me nearly unsuccessfully heaving a suitcase into the overhead, thinking I’d be damned if I didn’t get it in there myself.
There’s something almost therapeutic about old friends who know my foibles. I’m terrible at this.
It’s 2:30 in the morning. PiC and I have just set the date for our reception that’s oh, about 2 years overdue or something like that and now it’s time to actually plan this thing. I only get the occasional rage-attacks that tend to leak out when I think “wedding” and “Mom” and “family that was horrible” so this should absolutely go smoothly now.
For the three years since our engagement, the idea of asking people to be involved, to help or stand by me as I navigated the road of being engaged and getting married tasted sour. It was hard to fathom how it wouldn’t be an imposition, that family or friends who hadn’t volunteered might actually be willing to lend an ear, a hand or a brain.
And for the past four months, talking about setting a date and finding a venue, the thought of even asking them to make time to attend felt like a definite imposition. As much as I don’t care about what people think in the abstract, that non-caring only works when I’m doing my own thing and working on my own life. Not when I have to *shudder* share part of my life. Setting a date was something of a random process, filtered and narrowed down as I frantically tried to ensure that the really important people wouldn’t be put out too much.
Not all of this is the rambling of a paranoid, oversensitive loon. More than some of my oldest friends have moved thousands of miles away and it’s no small thing to travel cross country for a wedding.
I mean, weddings. High probability of mediocre food, questionable music, and dozens if not hundreds of strangers surrounding you while you don’t spend quality time with the person you came to celebrate. (yes, i a wildly sentimental.) That hasn’t been the case for most weddings I’ve attended since becoming an adult but only because I started self-selecting out of the ones where I don’t love the person enough to put up with nearly anything for them years ago. As a kid, I was the unwilling baggage at dozens of family weddings, and believe me, when you’re related by way of dad’s mom’s sister’s brother in law’s nephew’s elephant’s trainer, “family” didn’t make them any more special. (Kidding about the elephant trainer because honestly, I would have been 100% all over the elephant trainer thing.)
But it’s time. It’s time to commit to a thing that’s supposed to be special, supposed to be for us to enjoy with our family and friends, and supposed to be memorable in good ways and not the kind that leave me up at night pondering the meaning of life. And for that, it might also be time to learn how to ask for help in a way that lets our loved ones know we want them to be part of it.
We didn’t get here all unwilling after all. We really did want to share some part of this with good friends and family.
~
And speaking of loved ones, maybe I’ll learn how to talk to Dad again. Those conversations have not been going well these past months and I feel like the World’s Worst Daughter for it.
In trying to talk about wedding receptioning, he and I have butted heads far more severely than I ever imagined possible, leading to my insisting that he’s obligated to support me and my decisions rather than insisting that we must invite “all or none” of our relatives. The grief hasn’t been doing either of us any good, and in this situation, being the only child he’s likely to parent at a wedding, I understand that he’s suddenly got a vested interest in “Doing It Right” culturally but … guys. “All” is approximately 500+ people. I would lose my mind. I’m going to do that anyway, what’s the thing after that?
Ach.
In any case, we have a date and a possible venue and we’re going to spend twice as much as my stingy soul’d prefer but whatever. Full service. Small wins, right?
June 16, 2011
Doggle’s Details, continued.
Now that I’ve shocked and appalled you all with the high cost of living in California, and particularly in Northern California… 😉
I’ve never paid more than $50 to adopt a pet, and rarely even that much, in the past, so this adoption was quite a bit unusual in a number of ways.
I have never considered purchasing from a breeder or a pet store – my philosophy against that is clear. Those future pets will eventually find homes because they were bred with the intent to be sold and someone has a vested interest in placing them elsewhere; animals in shelters and rescues are only a step away from euthanasia. I am an adopter, always. I was that kid hauling home strays trying to figure out who they belonged to and how to get them home if they had a home. Once in a rare while, we would become the new home. My parents were sympathetic but they weren’t crazy or wealthy so it was a meal and a roof until the dog could be placed somehow.
It was a lot easier, back in the day down south, when we had a yard. Someone was sort of always around to keep an eye on the pups running around or keep them separated if you had a new stray in. Surrounded by friends and family nearby, you could even easily phone someone for a quick drop in if you really had to on an extra busy day to feed the dog(s). We never did that but you always knew the safety net was there.
Now, though, PiC and I wanting to bring home a dog is a very different story. The simple lack of a yard alone changes the game entirely. Add in the frequently inclement weather, our working hours and commute times, all of these spelled out a need for a completely different approach.
Suddenly, we had to satisfy a profile if this was to work. We couldn’t just pick a nice looking friendly pup and call it a day. We especially couldn’t have a puppy: they need attention, socialization, training, access to the outdoors/potty pads every few hours while they’re learning bladder control since neither of us wants to have to unteach bad habits we helped instill.
I’d been wanting an older dog; PiC prefers larger dogs. We knew we needed a dog that enjoyed going for walks but could tolerate being indoors for long periods of time. This dog had to be dog-friendly and kid-friendly because there are loads of both running around here, and not a barker by nature. We’ve been living with a barker below us and it’s driving us batty but we tolerate it. I guarantee you, however, that the neighbors would not be so tolerant in return. There are some incredibly petty people in this HOA.
Looking at shelters alone didn’t quite cut it. While they were great starting points because they had all kinds of lovely dogs we were limited from the outset against adopting specific breeds, and the local shelter is heavily stocked with those specific breeds. My favorites were cut straightaway, the jerks! They don’t allow Rottweilers, Pit Bulls, Dobermanns, etc. Breedists. I despise blanket restrictions like that. I love dogs of just about any breed and pit bulls especially because they can be so very good-tempered, intelligent and trainable, and the local shelters prescribe mandatory training classes when they adopt out pit bulls which is absolutely smart, so it’s a great set-up for their lives, but noooo…. *still bitter about this*
We stumbled across a specific breed rescue that pulls northern breeds from shelters and puts them into foster homes directly, and while Doggle’s actually not really a pinpointable member of any of the breeds they cater to, he’s close enough that they couldn’t resist him.
He’d been with them a year, had a surgical procedure and follow-up, vaccinations, a microchip placed, and was mellow the whole time. Reviewing that year with him, his foster mom was able to give us his history of behavior, preferences, reactions to people, other dogs, changes, diet, toys, length of time he was happy to be left alone – all of this practically before we ever came to see him. When we met him, he was this chubby cheeked cheerful fellow that just radiated curiosity and goodwill. He’s been that way ever since. It would have been tough to get that consistent and detailed a perspective from most shelters.
While our local shelter does do fostering and would have been half the price, they didn’t have anyone that fit enough of the profile that wasn’t a Pit. (I love our Doggle and wouldn’t trade him but I’m still annoyed on behalf of the Pits who won’t get placed because of places like ours.) I truly look forward to moving into a home where the only rules are our own: a dog that is in need of a home, trainable and gets along with other dogs and people.
The high(er) cost for his adoption, then, was because of the rescue organization that we went with. They are non-profit, yes, and it also costs a lot to rescue, care for and maintain the dogs for the length of time it takes to get them to their permanent homes. All the volunteers, going all the way up to the top of the organization, work for free. (I checked.) While I’m not one to pay a higher price for perceived value, this was a higher price for something we put a high premium on: knowledge that we could rely on and the availability of a pet that was the right fit.
Also, let’s not kid ourselves about the cute factor.
May 8, 2011
I suppose this is a fitting enough post for Mother’s Day. Happy Mother’s Day!
In the aftermath of my venting posts about my brother, The high costs of Parenting Fails, or a Bad Seed Part 1 and Part 2, I feel I did my parents a disservice. In focusing on the mistakes that we made specific to my brother, I seem to have implied that my parents were a) ungrateful, and b) hadn’t done anything right.
Those two bits couldn’t be more wrong.
To compound the wrongness, some, especially after the Consumerist picked up the latter post, said I was asking the wrong question, that I ought to have asked how much I ought to be supporting my parents instead of how much parents should support their children.
To be clear, I wasn’t asking any question in the first place, I was just mad at my brother for being a clown.
But if I were, my simple answer would be this: parents are to love their children completely and equip them with the skills they need to become fully functional, independent adults. Many times, that will mean not just giving them things or money but rather imparting the knowledge of how to obtain those things. And the material support does have an end. The complicated answer is complicated.
Before I can answer the question of how much help this adult child should give her parents, I have to put in context this adult child and her parents as there were a number of assumptions drawn from the limited and rather irrelevant posts above.
Without getting into the details of their lives before us, some of which you can read here about my mom and a brief synopsis here, there was plenty that they did right and much they did to have inspired my desire to support them in return.
This isn’t a blind, enculturated sense of filial duty. Certainly it’s filial but it starts from the knowledge that they chose to sacrifice their established lives to come to a foreign country, learn a new language, and start over to give us a better shot at good lives. They could have stayed but instead chose to trade in their quality of life for an automatic “one up” for us. It was a roll of the dice whether their lives would improve or not since “Land of Opportunity” or not, life in America was equal parts luck (ill or good) and much hard work for the first wave of immigrants; we had relatives already in the States who could testify to the amount of work necessary to make it here. There was no such thing as an easy ride and they still chose to make the leap for us.
Making life even more challenging for themselves, they moved into a tiny predominantly Caucausian suburb instead of the established community enclaves, guaranteeing our better education and assimilation; the freeways creating concrete barriers between us and the vortices of gang violence developing in the LA/Orange County areas where much of our family had already settled.
Upon their arrival, my parents worked every single day, 14 -16 hour days. They never took a day off, never took a holiday and only alternated three vacations between the two of them in thirty years in order to do their duty in taking us home to meet our grandparents. We couldn’t afford those trips, of course but it was incredibly important for us to know them. We occasionally drove into the city on the weekend for a morning to run an errand as a family, but otherwise, my parents worked constantly to make the bills and send us to the best school possible. I never heard a single complaint, so I never knew this wasn’t “normal.”
During my teenage years, the hours actually got longer because they put my brother in private high school having seen one male cousin fall in with the wrong crowd at the public school and come to a tragically early end, planned to pay for our college education and ran two businesses to afford it all. They paid for music lessons and three sports of my choosing before my senior year of high school.
By the time everything started to unravel at the start of my college years, my parents had worn themselves to a thread giving us as much as they could. That didn’t mean they’d given up, though.
Despite Grandma’s illness, living with us, bedridden, and in the past…
Despite Mom and Dad having to tend to her every day even though Mom herself was quite ill requiring surgeries and rounds of medications that weren’t working…
Despite the businesses going south between the embezzlement and the health problems…
Despite the remaining credit card debts from the business and taking us back to the old country to meet our grandparents…
Despite Dad’s inability to get a job due to a combination of ageism and a limited resume that only had “business owner” on it…
Despite Dad’s losing money on his attempts to make money which caused him to spiral into further depression…
Despite Dad’s particularly tough realizations that he’d spent our entire childhoods working only to have his legacy for his family disappear and fear that he might well have lost his family into the bargain…
They still fought for their pride, for my sake, for our survival. Dad kept searching and digging, working odd jobs for old friends who would find something they needed his skills for. Mom was willing to put up with the worst of environments as long as she was helping me with a bit of cash at month’s end. They were driving themselves crazy (and me, into the bargain) for nearly nothing in return but to spare me an hour of work and I couldn’t stand it, so I took everything over. But as long as they could, they tried. We were at emotional cross purposes, all fighting, pulling each other away from our positions to protect one another from pain.
Of course they made mistakes. Desperate people make mistakes. Desperate people care.
Mom’s health deterioration was jagged. Reduced to menial jobs, places where supervisors and coworkers were abusive, she was shorted on wages because her mental and physical health was diminishing in loops and fades; she couldn’t truly function or keep a job. Until I made her stop, she was taking every job she could secure. Even then she tried strongarming my dad into taking her to job interviews when I was away even though she wasn’t capable of working because she was so pained about my working such long hours. She didn’t peacefully accept the loss of her functioning.
My parents are both very grateful to me for my help and communicate that. I’ve no doubt of that just as they know I love them and will always care about them. It may be a frustrating cognitive dissonance to know that and reconcile it with their actions toward my brother that ripple back to me. But at the same time, I understand because just as much as they love me, they love him. He is their child every bit as much as I am.
(More their child, ahem. Nope, not bitter, grumble grumble.)
In all seriousness, I love and respect my parents because for better or worse, they did the best they could with what they had. They always strove to be strong and good people. The choices and mistakes they made out of love for their other child that I disagree with doesn’t change the fact that they also raised and cared for me deeply and deserve to be well-cared for as best I can manage. If the circumstances were different, if they were a bit less unlucky in their health and business manager (the thrice-cursed embezzler!), perhaps things would be different but that doesn’t necessarily follow that different is better.
Perhaps some people might say that having supported them for the past ten years as I have was too much and “enabling” but there’s a hugely important factor: You can’t compare my brother to my parents because they are completely different people.
He might have worked all of three years in his total of 30+ years of life. They’ve worked two lifetimes. He’s done little but been an influence in my life. My parents both gave me life and nurtured me, succored me when I was ill, and would still do anything they could to ease my way now if they were able.
Supporting my brother would be enabling because he could, if he chose, find a way to earn a living and support himself. My mother is no longer medically able to care for herself or be independent and my dad has to care for her around the clock. Supporting them is a matter of their survival as the clock on their finding and holding jobs has long run out.
These past years have been challenging and I know it will take quite a lot more planning and resources to provide for them in their later years. But it’s not really a question for me whether or not I’ll do it.
How I’ll manage it has been a question posed a time or two (thousand).
Getting them safely into a protected home environment where idio-sib can’t moosh in with them is only the first in many steps we’ll have to take to get there since living together’s not really an option.
Getting back to the question: how much should I (we) support them? Well, no amount of money in the bank is worth the loss of my parents from my life, forgotten and uncared for. And PiC, bless his heart and soul, is on board even though I’ve only newly introduced him to Ship Support the Parents as it’s been such a private journey for so long.
Their basic needs will always be provided. They won’t be living in luxury. I can’t afford that unless y’all decide I’m a genius blogger, share this with millions of your friends and I become the next dooce.com. Hardy-har. But they will live in safety. They will always have enough to eat. They should always have some form of safe transport and access to medical care. The cost, even now, is stiff. Each time a situation or a crisis arises, I have to evaluate the situation to see what can be afforded or what the right solution might be given the circumstances and the resources remaining for the year. I hate that I can’t simply wave a wand or a card and throw money at the problems, sometimes.
They try to help in their own way, though I’d not asked for these things. They don’t go anywhere they don’t have to, unless it’s very local so as not to use gas, and they don’t go out to eat, ever. I think they’re doing their very best to show in their daily lives that they respect how hard I work to provide.
The cost in the future will be even higher so as ever, Planning. Earning. Saving. Investing. It all keeps the reality of needing a strong financial edifice at the forefront of my mind.
In the end, everyone has to answer this question for themselves in the context of their own lives and their own finances and their own relationships with whomever they may be called upon to support.
If they hadn’t raised me with love and respect, if they hadn’t treated me with so much care, humor and just plain sanity during my formative years so that for those brief moments before everything went to mush we had a great relationship, this would likely be a very different story. And I know for many of you, or for many of the first time readers who came to the other posts, it is a different story. That’s ok. It makes sense. This is what makes sense for us.