June 16, 2014
Change from May: 22% increase
Change from January: 61% increase
On Money
That wasn’t an anticipated, or even mostly a real jump, in Net Worth. I should really get my act together on tracking Net Worth – you’d think that I’d have plenty of practice at this but I totally failed to incorporate the home equity we have; the mortgage liability was included but hello, we do own part of the property. So whoops. Since I don’t feel like going back and correcting every month since January, I have an artificially large increase.
About 3% of that is a legitimate increase though, we had good deposits in the retirement accounts and have been saving steadily with every paycheck.
***
And the deed is done! We have canceled cable and sent the cable box back. We’re now entirely on Roku and while this means I probably won’t be up to date on Hawaii 5-O and Grimm, I am enjoying The West Wing, Studio 60, Downton Abbey, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly and other Doggle-approved shows playing during the day from the comfort of behind my laptop.
***
Even without knowing that our NW was increasing at least incrementally (actually, I tend to assume we’re overspending at any given time), I have been fighting the urges to spend. I want new pillows. I want to swap out a quarter of our furniture for more comfortable stuff like a recliner (for work I swear!), a dresser so I can start to organize that unholy mess that is our closet, a library while I’m dreaming…
In the meantime, I’m doing what I can to earn Amazon money through Swagbucks for the smaller things we need. Feel free to join and help me using this referral link if you like!
On Life
Two Sundays ago, I woke up late. Uncomfortable, as usual, I lay abed for another hour, and finally rolled out of bed. As I wandered over to my desk, it sank in that my limbs didn’t feel inutterably heavy, and my chest didn’t feel like an elephant was sitting on it. Hm!
I actually felt capable of sitting up in a chair! I didn’t need to slump in the corner of the sofa, propped up on cushions, like I’d been doing for … the past five weeks.
The most exciting 70 minutes in 5 weeks ensued: I hopped online, paid some bills, washed a few dishes, ate some breakfast, cleared a two month backlog of mail, signed and sealed documents that needed mailing, scrapbooked several things left over from our reception, scanned documents for my records, sorted my money tracking document, organized photos from the reception into envelopes to be sent out, wrote a card and sorted two piles of leftover wedding crap for recycling. In 70 minutes.
The point I’m making here is if I could pay for energy, I would ABSOLUTELY do it because with this level of effectiveness, I could take on the world with a few months full of energy.
May 15, 2014
Change from April: 2% increase
Change from January: 30% increase
It has been a very strange four weeks since the last update. PiC’s been swamped at work, working longer and longer hours. I’ve been swamped with work and juggling multiple non-work projects, some old, some new, none of which that I can actually talk about yet. But it’s all a lot of work and taking up so much brainspace while it doesn’t feel like there’s anything to report back. I’ve been saving money, spending money to make money, etc. Ye-up.
*
Abby’s post, Chocolate for breakfast, made me smile because in a lot of ways, that’s pretty much what’s happening here. I’m sleeping badly, working through the fatigue and just had a candy bar for breakfast because the recent heat wave has made my body swell up like Violet Beauregarde.
May itself has been a painful month, physically and otherwise. Two heat waves have my joints in total revolt, so I’m barely functional. Just barely. Mother’s Day always makes me even more antisocial than ever, but the day after I can usually remember the supportive, surrogate mother people in my life.
*
Nevertheless there’s been some MONEY progress:
Insurance
– have gotten a whole array of quotes for all our policies and am just a couple decisions away from getting the whole thing sorted. Rates went up thanks to my dad making a bad decision after getting ticket, and some mysterious extra charge on PiC’s auto insurance that I have to get them to correct and refund the difference.
Investing
– have made huge inroads into research, thanks to a really really good friend helping me. Usually I fly solo on these things but I’m no fool, if someone’s an expert and willing to talk me through things, hell yes I’m going to listen.
Cutting cable
– it used to be for PiC but now that I use the tv way more, I’ve been looking for a good compromise since we don’t see a lot of the up to the minute shows anyway and the channels we do have are crap.
1) I roadtested the Google Chromecast HDMI Streaming Media Player
on Kelly’s (Alterations Needed) advice, but it didn’t work out.
The price point was perfect ($30-35 on Amazon); the size and portability was exactly what I wanted (just a USB stick sized doohickey); and you can stream directly from your computer. Set up was dead easy. However, for us, it would only ‘cast Amazon Prime from my work computer as my other computers are too old; I’m not yet prepared to add a streaming service (Hulu, Netflix) yet, AND upgrade our internet, the streaming speed couldn’t handle ‘casting or give us a more than half-decent picture. So while we would have started saving 1 month after cancelling cable, it wasn’t a good enough substitute.
2) I then roadtested the Roku 3 Streaming Media Player
on Katie’s (@grlredballoon) suggestion and that has been 85% good. It was $90 on Amazon for the device and an HDMI cable; I don’t love the cable being visible but the device itself is tiny. It was very easy to set up and I can stream just from Amazon Prime now, and choose to add whatever other service in six months after the device has paid for itself and actual savings have been recouped.
Comparing the numbers against each other, it may seem like I’d still be saving more with the Roku at $30+$10/month for any streaming service right off the bat but I don’t think it’d resolve the internet problem; the Roku has hiccuped a few times but not with the frequency that the Chromecast did.
Cable: 34/month = 408/year
Chromecast: 35 (device)+ 10/month (streaming service) = 155/year + internet upgrade
Roku: 90 (device) + 10/month (6 mos streaming service) = 150/year
I’d love to upgrade our internet to something that’s actually good but the cheapest non-Comcast, non-AT&T option that I’ve found runs $170/month which is far too rich for my blood at this point.
I’ll settle for saving $200/annually for the moment and worry about the internet later.
*
Eventually, this month-long horrors that is my worthless barely functioning shell of a body experience has to settle down… eventually. *grump*
I hope you’re all having a much much better time of it than I!
April 21, 2014
Change from March: 5% increase
Change from January/1st Quarter: 20% increase
It was just a minor increase this month from last month, so I had to mess around with numbers some more to make myself feel better about our progress. Spoiled by last month’s bump which wasn’t going to happen again with just a regular month: making the money, saving the money, spending the money. In that order, mind you. Part of both our paychecks have been set to go to savings first, before anything is spent.
I’ve been doing that since I started working, just after I got out of the “didn’t have a penny to spare and savings had to pay the bills” phase.
I’ve also set up a couple automatic payments out of the checking account for the first time. I don’t trust companies to regularly take money out of my accounts without trying to sneak in extra fees or overcharging, but this works because the checking account is set up to send checks, not allow auto-withdrawals.
At some point, we’ll start experiencing that thing where only truly major spending or saving moves the meter. Obviously that’s a good thing but it’s hard to viscerally accept the prospect of being bored with my money. More obviously, I don’t have to settle. I’m going to go find something new and exciting to do to make money once the routine stuff truly doesn’t take up any time or brainpower.
This is actually really important because a) Baglady Syndrome, I have it; b) My job is, more than most in the past, not guaranteed. Our lifestyle, while not lavish, is quite comfortable and I don’t want to jeopardize that by getting too comfortable & lazy, and income-less. So I’ll just get right on that ….
Happily, PiC’s job is in a really good place right now and quite stable for the nonce so we can take that a little bit more for granted. (For now.)
March 17, 2014
Hot hickory doolittle!
I’d decided to start with not sharing actual net worth numbers back in January and I didn’t want to admit it but some of that was shame-driven. I’d worked so hard to get to a respectable, almost-comfortable, net worth. To combine our assets and liability and come up at near enough to zero as I did? It was a little infuriating and a little worrying. And a little embarrassing.
What it should have been was confusing and a red flag to reexamine my math. Turns out I’m simply not as good at money math as I think I am, some days. (This is what fatigue brain will do to you, sometimes.)
I’d set up my spreadsheets to include the name of each financial institution, account, and amounts. Then I added them up by category. But! You know what happens when you don’t double check your equations? You leave out cells. Important cells. Cells that add to your net worth!
There was a whopping big difference.
Suddenly I want to dance a jig and share our Net Worth because I DO have something to show for the last decade+ of working. 🙂
I’ll chew this over for a bit, but I’ll settle for percentages for now:
February: 3% increase
March: 11.7% increase
The big jump in March was that I finally deposited most of the wedding gifts, and PiC’s bonus came through. We usually opt to put most of it into the 401(k) so that we’ll be on track to max out his 401(k) again this year, for the second year in a row. HOORAY!
January 17, 2014
Yep, I said it. I’m still Happy New Year-ing y’all. It’s been busy!
This is how I know recovery is nearly complete from the Devil Flu + infectious friends: my brain starts insisting on money talk. This is the first chance I’ve had to really look over last year’s money and do a quick review. We combined our finances last year and started to work from a combined budget spending plan. That was rocky, we have totally different perspectives and styles when it comes to money. Still, we had to start somewhere! So we did.
2013 highlights
SPENDING
We went over (between 2-100%) the budgeted amounts in half our specified categories, and under (between 2-50%) in the other half. This was, of course, a disappointment. Overall, we overspent 20% over and above the budget. Most of that, as it shakes out, was the wedding but that was paid for in cash so that’s some solace. I’m NOT thinking about the travel we could have paid for instead. 😉
I do have to keep reminding myself that we pay about $17,000 annually for my dad’s upkeep and that makes a big dent in the disposable income.
SAVING
We maxed out PiC’s 401(k) contributions which has never been done before. WOOT! We also saved 25% off the top of our paychecks through the whole year. Two thumbs up!
Disappointments: I don’t have a retirement plan through the new company so I intended to set up my own. Researched, yes. Decisioned, no. So that’s a fail.
BEST OF
The renewed relationships that came out of planning the wedding. I mended fences with a few relatives that I haven’t spoken to in years. And even more surprisingly, for whatever reason, MIL suddenly thawed towards me a month before and spoke to me like she hasn’t since before PiC and I started dating. Whatever the reason, however long it lasts, I’m grateful that even if I’m not “part of the family,” we can actually behave like non-antagonistic humans. That’s all I ever wanted.
Also: savings. We actually did a good job of saving cash despite all the spending 🙂
Also: Year of the least number of bad surprises (like the car was towed because they didn’t tell me that they were behind on payments! or like, Mom fell and hurt herself! or, Mom was in the hospital with pneumonia for a few days!)
WORST OF
The pained and strained relationships. It’s like I’m just now living the teenage angst years that I never had with my parents, with my dad. Nothing he said when it came to the wedding planning was ok, it was always inflammatory to my overly-sensitive, culture-betraying mind and we argued A LOT. Unnecessarily, I think but it was hard to rein in those feelings. 2 days before the wedding that I had a long painful talk with him over how his reactions made me acutely aware of how I’d failed the family: how I’d failed to straighten out my brother, how I’d failed to provide for my mother, and how I was now failing to properly represent the family as a “dutiful bride”. In turn, he reminded me that I’d done the best I could and more than was expected, and a big portion of these ‘failures’ were his; that the fact that he couldn’t “give” me a wedding was a huge failure as a parent. That he was making his peace with my decisions and in the end, he only truly cares about whether PiC and I are happy. I really needed to hear that. I just wish it hadn’t taken several months of fighting to get there.
Also: no retirement plan for me. This is the first time since age 21 that I haven’t been investing in retirement. No bueno!
:: What were your bests/worsts? How’d you do with saving/spending?
November 20, 2011
I’m back. Thank you for all the thoughts and condolences, everyone.
It’s a -something- getting my head and feet back where they need to be so, as usual, I turn to working with finances for comfort.
We’re nearly through November, so at this point, I don’t know what to call this.
Retirement Accounts
Just as I predicted, my new retirement account through my “new” job (I guess I should call it the Now Job) is fairly mediocre to poor.
Overall Rate of return on the new 403(b): -4.94%
Balance over 1 year timeline: 747.01 to 6661.87
All the increase is in contributions with losses, not gains.
Vanguard rallied this month, though.
Brokerage account
This account sees steady (tiny) increases every quarter generally. $700 of that 1,915.05 is just cash I’m holding for a future purchase that I may or may not make. Still, neither of my stocks have lost money over the time that I’ve held them (though it only matters at the time I sell) and one pays dividends so it’s throwing off income in the meantime. A whole $4 every quarter!
Cash
There was a modest false bump in the cash calculations because I locked myself out of my Ally Bank account at the end of September and never bothered to get back in again. That’s where my CDs are and so I haven’t been getting accurate data on the interest earnings for the CDs.
It turns out that my cash holdings passed the $50K mark this month after recouping the cost of the funeral from funeral gift monies and adding the remainder (a very modest amount) as a separate category to take care of remaining costs as they come.
Spending has been OUT OF CONTROL though. In the week we were down south, we spent more on gas, food, and incidentals than we’d normally spend in a month, I think. I haven’t had time to comb through everything yet.
New
Family Budget:
I’m creating a combined budget for our money going forward. It’s sort of good timing in that we’re at the end of 2011 anyway, so I’m taking all our liquid cash and pooling it to create a fresh set of household funds similar to my current set-up.
I’ve never had this much to work with but there are two of us in our little family and Doggle now, and two extended families to plan ahead for. Now I need to figure out which banks to use.
Mortgage:
We’ve explored some refi options and I am now pondering on the wisdom of the financial risk we’d be taking in committing to one or another of these options. More research to come!
Benefits:
Now that we’re married, we can combine our benefits. Costs will go up on PiC’s side, and go down on mine. I don’t think we actually come out ahead, though, as I do the math.
Insurance:
It’s time to reevaluate the cost of our auto, home and other insurance. We currently carry our insurances separately, of course, so it’s time to see about combining them for cost-effectiveness and discounts.
Upcoming Spending:
* We need a new mattress for the bedframe that PiC Craiglisted earlier this month. I really hate mattress shopping. All those options and I can’t tell the difference in how one mattress feels from the next, but there’s this imperative to pick the right one because you’re going to have it for a trillion years. And you know the bargain hunter in me would absolutely have to know we’re getting the best deal possible. It’s possible I’m a little more gripey than usual about it because I’m tired but … I’m probably exactly as gripey as I normally would be.
* I need to plan our Christmas shopping – I already have some small gifts for other people earlier this year but there are primary gifts for family that haven’t been bought yet.
In sum: Tons to do and I feel like I need to do it all right now. Surprisingly.
October 5, 2011
I don’t even have the heart to post it, the progress has been so meager in the past two months.
Retirement Downturn
Since the last time I viewed my Vanguard fund, the fund that contains all the retirement monies I’ve saved between ages 21 through 26, it’s lost another $7000. In two months. !!! Yes yes, long term horizon, blah de blah. STOP THAT.
I’m still contributing to my current employer’s retirement account but that’s in a different fund at a different company. It still irritates me. I’ll stop looking now.
Cash Savings
The expense account did come up a significant amount (40%) but so did my spending (220% over last month). That figure’s actually misleading though – $1200 of that cash is a reimbursement for business expenses and so are the corresponding credit card charges. Part of it is prepayment of expenses as well.
Also, we are experiencing the first true combinations of expenses between PiC and me. We have combined forces to rack up all chargeable expenses on a single American Express card to meet a minimum spend threshold in order to earn a 20K point bonus for Starwood points.
On that plan, I’ve prepaid 2 months’ worth of cell phone bills, paid up on auto insurance and vet bills. O, vet bills.
Other Investing
I had grabbed a chunk of cash for my TradeKing account in case I made a decision about investing in a few more stocks. I’m steadily making a whopping $4.70 every quarter in dividends from my stocks. With the huge dive in the market, I thought there might be a worthwhile discount to buy. Nothing really caught my fancy, though, so that cash is still just sitting in the brokerage, waiting.
Total Net Worth
Up about a thousand dollars. I should really be doing better.
******
Specific Spending:
Wedding/Honeymoon: The reason we’re racking up the hotel points and miles is to defray upcoming travel spending. As much as possible, I’d rather use awards to pay for actual travel as much as we can. Starwood points are excellent for hotels and for exchanging to airline miles as well. They add a bonus 5,000 miles for every 20,000 miles you trade in.
Mortgage: I’m keeping an eye out for any other good refinancing options that we could qualify for and considering how quickly we might pay down the mortgage.
Saving Goals:
Emergency Cash: I’m really close to the $50K cash cushion that I wanted to hit for my peace of mind. It’s in a combination of CDs and savings accounts but I need to find a higher rate of return home for it. Or ladder all of it into CDs.
Then I think I’m setting my next cash savings goal at another $50K. The first $50K is total emergency fund only. (Hey, remember when you could earn real interest on CDs and such?)
Pie in the Sky? As an academic exercise, I sort of want to map out how we might work out life on a single income around here. Just to see what that might look like. Or perhaps one and a half at first.
Non-notables:
I don’t think I like spinach anymore.
Doggle now gets time outed. And he knows when he’s misbehaving so when he’s getting walked to time out, he walks himself the rest of the way.
