February 25, 2019
When I was 7, my parents took all of our money, my life savings from New Year gift packets included, and sank it all into Dad’s business venture. I would call it “theirs” but we all know it was Dad’s brainstorm and his thing. Though I had no use for the money other than buying postage stamps, I was still sad about losing my stash. Even then, I was a saver (*cough* money hoarder). Though, I could have blown the whole thing on books if I’d known how to get myself to a bookstore. I figured out how to take the dog to the vet for shots when I was a preteen, I think the bookstore mystery would have been solved in a jiffy with money in hand.
Once in a while I idly wonder how much I’d have today if my savings had been invested back in 1980-something. It was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000 or $3000 by the time I was seven. Our family tradition tends to gift young kids a lot of cash in your earliest years when you have the least use for it. It’s confusing but a proper steward of that money could have made a real difference with that money.
In any case, that money went to funding a business venture that supported our household for almost ten years and then it all disappeared. The money going away as easily as it did impressed on me the importance of saving relentlessly. That and my health problems.
Today, we make good money. We also live in one of the highest COLAs. Go us. *snort* It wasn’t intentional but it is what happened. (more…)
February 18, 2019
How would you spend…
The dogs and I were walking enjoying a rare spot of sunshine while my mind wandered over to J. Money’s post on what you’d do with a windfall of $50,000. He reminded us of a movie I hadn’t seen before, Brewster’s Millions, where the main character had to spend $30M in 30 days and wasn’t allowed to buy anything that was an asset that could be sold later.
I could do that easily! I have these daydreams a lot about random things I care about.
This time, I started thinking of what I’d do with free millions. The answer: outfit rural libraries!
Coordinate with the librarian of a rural area like one that my friend Andrea lives in to gather the reading wish lists of everyone in the county.
Buy
– $1M worth of physical and ebooks,
– $0.5M in electronic equipment: computers for the library itself, e-readers and laptops for checkout.
– 3 electric vans
– A lot of comfortable chairs for reading in at the library.
Hire three drivers (paying a real living wage) to drive those vans as mobile libraries, delivering and picking up books for kids, people who aren’t mobile, or can’t get to the library for any reason. Ensure the librarian is paid a living wage and that the place is adequately staffed with people to service the mobile libraries. Network all the rural libraries together for an interlibrary loan system.
(more…)
February 11, 2019
Two pairs of leggings, four dresses with pockets, a new rug, two serving bowls, a toilet brush, coffee filters and a platter, a set of glass bakeware with lids. A tablecloth and garden shovel. What’s the theme here?
Let’s see… I bought all but one of them using gift cards. They are useful. We’ve needed most or all of them for months and we’ve been making do without. We now need to declutter 15 MORE things to justify adding so many things to our cabinets and closets. All true.
The biggest thing they have in common: They don’t erase that lingering uneasy feeling about how we’re going to weather the next recession and what further job cuts at our jobs may do to our nascent retirement plans.
Discussing my post and this barely contained feeling of discomfort last week on Twitter with Mr. SSC, he pointed out: one has to have a plan but also have faith that it’ll change, so embrace flexibility. Yeeeeees, but that requires a bendiness of mentality and I’m not yet that evolved.
In part, the crux of this being ill-at-ease is my own fault, not the recession’s. Not that the recession isn’t a big thing, it is, but the bigger problem is we have a couple huge life decisions we can’t seem to get a grip on. They’d likely have an equally, or more, enormous impact on our lives as the recession or a job loss or change in careers. Our waffling is doing neither of us any good but I’m not ready to get into it because I can’t make out head or tails of how I really feel about it. My inner turmoil on those points remains a roiling mass of fog.
Mr. SSC also shared that he’s a stress shopper and boy howdy do I empathize. I’ve been scrolling Amazon deals in a badly concealed panicked state, on a quest to get everything we need for emergencies as if that’ll solve the massive problem of not knowing the shape of the next five years. Thankfully my personal money history means that I’m just wildly window shopping with abandon, but not buying anything. Good habits FTW?
(more…)
January 28, 2019
In 2017, we took on a HUMONGOUS loan. (Was that really two years ago??)
After we signed those papers, we sold our previous home and applied a small chunk of those sales proceeds toward our loan with an eye on recasting the loan – recalculating a new monthly payment based on the new principal amount while keeping the same terms (interest rate and length of loan) at no extra charge.
I made sure, when we were researching loans, to confirm that Chase would do this at no charge and there were no limits on how many times we were allowed to do it.
That first recast, and the second one with double the payment to principal when more sale funds were available two months later, brought down our monthly payment a total of $700. Not TO $700, reduced it BY $700. The remaining payment is still in the multi-thousands. That gives you an idea of how high our mortgage is! YEEKS.
Making those two moves not only reduced the total balance and our monthly payments, it also saved $102,599.54 in interest! (I used this calculator to figure that savings out.)
I continued to pay a little over the monthly payment due to cut down the principal further, little by little, and made the equivalent of half an extra payment last year.
We don’t have any huge chunks of money coming in this year (that I know of. Feel free to bless us, universe) so I was only aiming to pay down a set amount to principal this year but then I got this email from Chase inviting me to enroll in their New flexible mortgage payment options!
Ok, I’ll bite.
I went in to explore and see if they could offer me anything better than we could do on our own. (I can never resist a do better with money challenge.)
(more…)
January 21, 2019
I’m having a bit of a patience problem.
- I’ve almost closed out the 2018 budget but there’s one last check to be cashed from December 1st (when is it ok to tell someone to take their damn money already??)
- I was fortunate enough to have a choice between maxing out our IRAs this year right away or investing more in our brokerage so I did the former to get it out of our hair.
- I’ve calculated our expected cash flow for the first three months of 2019 and scheduled automatic savings to reflect that.
- I’ve calculated our expected large expenses for the year and scheduled automatic savings to cover them over the course of the year.
What’s left?
Mostly the everyday things.
- Working my job every day with attendant frustrations so I can keep earning that paycheck that feeds our savings and investing.
- Feeding my family – meal planning, grocery shopping, thinking about diet stuff.
- Walking the dogs – training Sera, making sure Seamus has every possible health need covered.
- Making sure to the best of our abilities that JB grows up to be a good and decent human. We also need to get zir into some sports and activities to be a bit more well-rounded and make a few more friends.
- Reading all the good books I can reach (more more more!)
- We’ve got one big trip for later this year to be planned out. After that? Probably staying close to home for a while. Now that Seamus is showing his age (his hearing is suspect, his eyesight seems to be less sharp, he’s definitely much crankier) we’re going to curtail international travel so we can spend this time with him.
These are good things. I’m enjoying them. I’d like to enjoy more of them. I’d like to be out in the garden ripping out the rest of those weeds now that the rains have softened the previously rock hard ground.
I should be pretty content.
Instead, the past few weeks, I’ve been obsessively sitting here staring at our accounts, glaring at them to sprout 100x their income as if Power Stare is a method of investment growth (it’s not). I’ve been cranky and impatient. (more…)
December 10, 2018
As the holidays and focus on gift giving ramps up (we have some obligatory gift exchanges), I like to review my purchases from the past year (and sometimes from the past few years if they were that good) to see if they held up to the expectations.
- Last year: This was a rare impulse buy but I adore my Owl Silicone Coin Purse and so do the dogs. It’s one of the few things I’ve bought solely because it was too cute to pass up, not because it was a gift or because I had a purpose in mind. Three months after buying it, inspiration struck and it became my dog treat pouch – something I’ve needed for years! With silicone, there’s no worry the treats will stain and it’s airtight enough that the tiny treats don’t dry out overnight.
- Last year: I have the sold out dachshund puppy pouch but I adore the Catseye London zip pouches. They’re so thick and sturdy, mine survived a ten month loan to JB.
- Last year: I still adore my only full price clothing purchase: Barefoot Dreams Circle Cardigan. I’ve worn it multiple times every week since buying it last year and it holds up. Of course it gets furry because I keep forgetting and hugging the dogs but it machine washes just fine.
- This year: Hands down, the furnace. Being warm again is such a novelty.
- This year: $7 of fabric purchased on Thanksgiving weekend at 70% off. I’ve started hand sewing again this year and I’m really enjoying the act of creating something useful though my skills are quite limited to just an almost straight seam and a backstitch.
PiC
- This year: An expensive piece of sporting equipment that I’d managed to forget about because 2018 has felt like a DECADE.
- This year: But also the furnace.
JB
A few things stayed on rotation all year long from past birthdays and Christmases:
- Magnetiles and Magformers for building strange architecture and “stables” for zir little animals
- All manner of small animals and figures
- Books books books. We have been slowly building zir library and ze loves rotating through the lot of them, even the baby books.
- A very basic Lego train set. Even simpler than this one but ze loves it.
(more…)
November 12, 2018
I’ve had a hankering for an electric vehicle for a while now, as part of our striving to be as environmentally friendly / sustainable as we can with disastrous climate changes hovering over our heads, but it’s not been in the cards for a few reasons.
We have philosophical differences.
PiC thinks a smaller EV is ok to be our daily driver as long as we have our second car for longer hauls. We tend to the two extremes of driving: very little locally day to day and a few very long distances.
I think a new car needs to be able to hold our whole family (2-3 adults, 1 car seat, 2 large dogs, everyone’s luggage) because I’d rather the EV take the brunt of our driving day to day AND be our comfortable road tripper. But no EV is big enough for that.
That difference of opinion alone will keep us from buying anything until one or both of us compromises or is persuaded to the other’s point of view. I confess I’m not sure which way it’s going to go! I suppose I’m open to persuasion like I assume he is.
Friends buying Teslas a while back told me about federal tax incentives and so on but since I refused to give Tesla any business, I didn’t pay much attention.
Our local dealers have teamed up with the county to offer some incentives but on their own, there’s nothing compelling here for a bargain bin shopper.
Looking at other available incentives, there are a variety:
- Federal Tax Credits for certain vehicle makes and models ($3500-7500)
- Clean Vehicle Rebate ($1500-2500) (San Diego residents can get preapproved!)
- Pacific Gas and Electric Company offers a one-time $500 rebate to customers who own or lease a qualified plug-in hybrid vehicle (San Joaquin gives a $2000 rebate),
- The state of California allows plug-in hybrids like Prius Prime to use the HOV lanes regardless of the number of passengers,
- Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE) and Sacramento Municipal Utility District offers reduced electricity rates for charging the vehicles.
I don’t anticipate any reasonably sized EV would cost us anywhere in the neighborhood of sub-$10,000 that we’re accustomed to paying. For example, the Volt gets $9,000 in rebates, plus a $4,000 discount, which then works out to about $18,000. The investing opportunity cost on that has me squinting.
Our two are working just fine. We paid $7800 for my car about 7 or 8 years ago and it’s just needed some maintenance now and again. We paid $10,000 for PiC’s car two years ago and that happened well ahead of our planned replacement period only because someone crashed into us.
Of course “planned replacement period” implies that we regularly replace our cars. We don’t. Up until I cut off Dad and transferred, I still owned the first car I ever bought, a 2002 model. Why not? She still runs fine. Both our cars run well and we all fit into PiC’s for road trips (though not comfortably) and could squeeze all of us into my car in an emergency, though the dogs would have to consent to be stacked.
My last hesitation: I’m a bit of a Philistine when it comes to cars. The newest cars we drive are rentals and they’re sort of spaceshippy mysteries to me. I’m really in no hurry to have to learn the ins and outs of a new vehicle! (What’s “regenerative braking”??)
——
I’ve been sleeping on this for a while and doing some more research on EVs and hybrids (I also fell down the rabbit hole of hydrogen powered vehicles via the Toyota Mirai but where are hydrogen fueling stations? Here’s a map! But it doesn’t look like they’re available for Federal Tax Credits).
RoadShow has a reasonable overview of the technology out there.
Oddly enough something clicked for me, while doing this research, though we haven’t discussed it any further while I’ve been leaving this to marinate. What I wanted was an EV (battery electric) for everything but we don’t currently have two cars that do everything. We have a people car and we have a whole family car. The people car is for local commuting and half day trips that the dogs can’t come on, the whole family car is for outings and long road trips.
Though I wasn’t seeing it this way before, it can make sense to just replace the people car with a battery electric car and spend this time burning less fossil fuels while we wait a few years to how battery electric and plug in hybrid minivans develop. Battery electrics still don’t have AMAZING range, it makes less sense to jump into one now for our everything car.
We don’t want to worry about running out of charge without a charging station in sight!
The two things that predisposed me to pressing for the battery electric now was knowing a friend who road tripped up the coast of CA just fine in their battery electric, and already being equipped with the necessary 240 volt charging station that was the far-reaching notion of our contractor that we just went along with.
Since I don’t have $45,000 to throw at a plug-in hybrid minivan, which is still just the (very expensive) compromise vehicle, coming around to the smaller battery electric version first seems like a much more sensible approach. Not that I’m eager to sink $20,000 either, but I do feel a strong urge to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible considering what dire straits we’re about to be in with our carbon emissions. I know we need a global solution but I strongly feel that every little bit that we can do matters.
In the meantime, as I return to this post several weeks after saying “Our two are working just fine“, my daily driver is slowly falling apart. It needs new tires ($500-800? haven’t priced this thoroughly yet), the a/c compressor is out ($800), and the automatic shifter was acting really odd indicating we might have a transmission problem. Nooooooooooo….. Considering my car’s served me well for the past 8 years (bought used for $7900) and only needed basic maintenance, I’m loath to give up on it but I’m starting to wonder when we do the math on the continued repairs of an older vehicle. When do we pull out the pot and hand it over for the next daily driver….?
:: When do you know it’s time for a replacement vehicle? What do you plan to get when it’s time? Do you have an actual schedule or do you drive until the wheels fall off?