June 21, 2007
Perhaps it’s the parents-are-away syndrome. And it’s the first day of summer!!
I paid my parents’ tax bill eons ago, ages ago, and now the IRS is demanding their money. Again. Uh, NO. I really don’t think so. But that means I have to search through my checking accounts for an copy of the check and, most times, I can’t usually recall which checking account was most convenient account to use at the time.
Thank goodness for online check images!! At least I don’t have to fuss until I get home and then risk major papercuts wading through my returned checks. Still, times like these make me wonder if I shouldn’t just use ONE checking account to make my bill paying/referencing life simpler.
June 13, 2007
Huh, I just found myself on the list of The 100 Most Inspirational Personal Finance Turnaround Stories Online over at Credit Card Lowdown. Admittedly filed under the Money Mistakes section, but hey, who am I to gripe? After all, I’m in pretty good company with Mapgirl, Clever Dude, Rich Minx, and LAMoneyGuy.
I do think it’s sort of odd that SingleMa was categorized under “Debt” because I felt like she fell under Saving, Building Wealth (oh yeah, she’s definitely doing that!) and Real Estate. But given just one choice, I guess her strategizing to pay off Debts has been one of the more powerful themes. Especially since she just paid off her car loan 😉
June 11, 2007
Lately I’ve been caught up in this daydream. Pa and MaDucky are doing well on their own, and they’re financially stable. I’ve got my Masters degree and am happily working in an actual 9-5 job instead of my current 6-8, with lovely coworkers and a reasonable, sane boss. BoyDucky and I have finally gotten married and our cozy little home, where we hang out after work cooking dinner, drinking wine, and spend our weekends doing fun little couple-y things that we just can’t do as a LD couple. Maybe take some early morning walks holding hands, work on our house together, play with our dogs. Ahhh …. this weekend was such a rude awakening.
He came back this weekend for a Saturday night dinner I’d scheduled with my friends because the six of us haven’t spent time together for over a year. That was the official plan. Dinner, in the desert, my friends, Saturday night. Simple, easy, relaxed. Boy oh boy, did reality bite me in the you-know-where!!
Immediately after work on Friday, we went straight to our friends’ surprise birthday celebre. Foolishly, I’d assumed that it was a nice sit down restaurant sort of deal, so I was all dressed up for a sports bar. For three hours. I’ve got nothing against sports bars, but they’re really not my thing after a long day at work. By ten o’clock, BoyDucky and I left because he had practice the next morning and he’d only gotten three hours of sleep the night before.
Way too early Saturday, he worked with his team and I entertained myself for 3.5 hours. Then we had lunch “together,” aka: with the other coaches while they all talked about the rosters for the races next week. And talked. And talked. And talked. Two hours later, we went home for a shower and change of clothes. Far too short a time later, we were back on the road to my friend’s son’s graduation/birthday party for an hour so that he could meet my train friends, and then raced to the next friend’s house to carpool to our last stop for the night in the desert. We got home at 11:30 pm that night.
BoyDucky knocked on my door pre-dawn Sunday morning, and we were back out the door by 720 to carpool for another practice, and did the same reading-MsM, busy BoyDucky routine. I really could have slept in (booooy could I have slept in) except I was being the dutiful, patient girlfriend so that we could have lunch together. Oh but not together, “together.” We left that team lunch at 2pm, and got home for another round of showers, only to be greeted with “Get dressed, we have to go out again” as soon as I finished my shower. *groan* I was not feeling it. But I dragged myself into yet another pair of jeans, and we drove out to Pasadena to spend an hour with his best friend and his girlfriend. Then he drove us 40 miles to dinner with his brother and sis-in-law, 50 miles to drop me off, and another 50 miles to go back to his brother’s for the night.
All told, I think we put about 550 miles on that rental car this weekend. Ugh! If THIS is what being together and married life is going to be like, I gotta rethink some things. Back to back to back scheduling is insane! Can a girl get a weekend from the weekend or what?? These old bones just can’t take this kind of abuse anymore. ;P
June 1, 2007
It’s time for Step One of Financial AA: self-inventory!
I know that my cash flow leaves much to be desired. I’ve cut expenses to the bone. Ruthlessly trimmed anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary to keep the family warm/cool, dry, clean and fed. And transported. Even swallowed my pride, a few times, and still doing it to try and reach an understanding with the job so that I can pay my Completely Trimmed bills. So why in heaven’s name have I not reduced my retirement savings?!?!
Well, at first I just plain forgot. You know how you’re supposed to save first? How you’re supposed to have that money come out of your paycheck before you ever see it so you’re not tempted to use it? Dang, but that works!! I saw it when I logged onto Yodlee, and each time the deposits registered. But in my budget?? Nah. Never remembered that sucker. I made the goal, put that on autopilot and seriously locked it out of my mind.
When it finally occurred to me that – really – I needed to change to make this budget work with all the increased household expenses, I still balked. I had some good reasons. But they were emotional. Fear. Worry. Caution. And, Pride.
Fear: What if I never increase the savings to the current contributions again? What if I get used to having instant gratification and start saving like a pansy? What if I lose the ability to work? What if, what if, what if?
Worry: If I stop now, I’ll never save enough for retirement! I can’t ask my kids to do for me what I’m doing for my parents! And if I don’t have kids? Then I’ll definitely be up a creek!
Caution: Aren’t I supposed to be contributing as much as possible now to maximize the amount of time my money has to grow? Is reducing the contribution REALLY the best or only resort I’ve got left? Won’t that mean losing [insert outrageous sum here] worth of compound interest?
And my good friend, Pride: I really really really want to hit 10K in my 403(b) this year. In January, I set the goal. If I give up now, that’s what we call “failure” because I failed to meet my goal. And I really want to see it reach that “magic” number before I feel like my efforts weren’t half-arsed.
Yep. My own independence is kicking me around the block. How’s that for irony?
I’m not going to give up retirement investing entirely because there’s no way I’d forgo a 2-to-1 match, but my 403(b) is not me. I am not my 403(b). If it’s a little smaller right now, that’s ok. There are other obligations ogling my cold harsh cash, and if the office can cough up a (little) extra money to help me out, I can give myself a raise, too.
May 31, 2007
I’m such a baby. My neck pain is back and that means a week-long, or more, cycle of pain—> tension—> more pain —> more tension. Yoga breathing and slow stretching isn’t really doing anything to alleviate the discomfort and I can feel my appetite ebbing away. Ugh, this would happen on my friend’s birthday: we’re having a combination of Cuban and Thai food for lunch! None of that fusion business either, it’ll be honest to goodness Cuban bakery goods, and Thai food from our usual Thai place.
So, no real posting; I’m just praying this wears off soon.
May 30, 2007
Foggy gloom is marching ’round my window at work and matches my work mode perfectly today. I’m playing boot camp sargeant, making everyone work on projects according to my priorities because they clearly don’t understand that their other-topic conversations are wasting time and jettisoning any prayer we had of completing this project on time. I’m (we’re) down to missing the deadline by hours, and there’s not a thing I can do about it until these people, from Big Boss on down, get their dawdling doodads together and get their durned tasks DONE!
I’m not sure what’s worse: that their attention is STILL wandering after I’ve rudely interrupted their conversation and sent them back to work, or that Big Boss thinks I enjoy being slavedriver to these big babies!
To tell the truth, being bossy is boring. I can’t do anything else until they get their work done, so I’m just setting ’round waiting to crack the whip on the next hapless fool who interrupts Little Boss with a “good” excuse to stop working on his part of the project.
On the other hand, I’ve got my heater going full blast and I’m trying to untangle/understand PearBudget’s analysis. It starts the counter for the month in the negatives, and then either works its way to positive with income, or muddles around in the negatives throughout the month if spending matches the income. If savings is a “regular expense” line item, does that mean not saving as much as planned is a negative or positive as calculated in the analysis? It’s calculated as an expense, so wouldn’t that actually show up as a positive because it’s not “spent”? Hummm ….
May 29, 2007
Wow, happy Tuesday everyone! What a jam-packed weekend it’s been! I hope y’all got as much done with just as much free time in between things to relax and enjoy.
The Friday elopement took FOUR HOURS. We raced from my work to the courthouse, only to arrive about 5 minutes late for their appointment. The clerk reassured them that it would be fine, they’d just have to wait a little while. 30 minutes later, we realized that perhaps Friday courthouse weddings were a tad more popular than we expected. I wondered what everyone’s story was: were they here because it was spur of the moment? (well, as spur of the moment as it can be, since you have to have your license all worked out before you can make an appointment for the ceremony) Were they avoiding the big wedding hullaballoo? Were they trying to avoid the big Asian ceremony that I’m dreading?
Surprisingly, once we stepped into the wee chapel, the whole thing became extremely nerve-wracking. I thought I’d made my peace with the idea of keeping this a secret, and that my best friend was getting married. But no, it hadn’t sunk in yet. Still hasn’t. Quite frankly, I couldn’t believe we were actually going through it all. Then we stood in line AGAIN after the ceremony to turn in the application for the certificate. Two hours of standing in line rubbed off some of that just-married glow. But when the new hubby left us in line so he could feed the meter, some guy walking past did a double-take and leered because he thought that it was us two girls who’d gotten married!! Of course we started giggling. Who wouldn’t? Apparently he didn’t see this sign:
(Yeah, there were signs posted that we could only take pictures in the chapel. No, I sure didn’t see them until after I’d taken all my illicit photos of the other signage.) Wedding: 15 minutes. Waiting in line and traffic: 3.5 hours. Ugh!
I spent Saturday running errands and attended a coworker’s father’s funeral. I haven’t been to an American funeral since high school, so I ended up wearing all black – isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Had no idea, so I picked out all my black, warm-weather clothing and called it an outfit. It was insanely hot too, I found myself sweating within seconds of getting into my car.
Sunday, I ambused my water-hating dog and gave her a bath outside. We sunbathed for about an hour waiting for her to dry after I washed my car. I should have taken a picture of her, she was being too cute! She kept pushing my book out of the way so she could lay her head in my lap, or rolling onto her back for a belly rub. She’s really not actually lapdog-sized, either. Don’t tell her that though, she still hasn’t figured it out. Then I spent the rest of my day resting the rest of the righteous: feet up on my desk, reading a book, and NOT working. Mmmmm… yeeeeeesss…. that was good.
Monday was a pick-up-and-get-done day: I had work and laundry to get done, and my friends came back from their year in France/Morocco/Spain so we hit Coldstone’s for some good, old-fash, overpriced specialty ice cream and free gossip. The Citrus Sunsation smoothie was surprisingly good, despite the THREE dollar price tag on a little 6 or 8 ounce cup. And they use styrofoam, I just can’t get behind that.
