April 13, 2007
I’m officially the office birthday monkey. Last month, I made the resolution that I would never again be caught unawares and find myself searching for the funniestcardever on the night before an officemate’s birthday. Now I’ve two weeks to make reservations and purchase, wrap and otherwise conceal gifts for Little Boss’s birthday at the end of this month.
I’ve been searching the inter-webs for Riedel wine glasses of a particular shape and a really nice corkscrew with a leather case and possibly a wood box of some sort for storage. No luck on the corkscrew thus far. It’s a little weird trying to bargain hunt for “office supplies” (any number of weird things fall into that category) because Big Boss has such a specific idea of what he wants.
Normally, I would just use the office credit card to order online, except Little Boss gets the statement and I don’t want him to find out what we’re getting him before his birthday. But it seems just a little tacky to charge it on my card and then say: here, can I get a reimbursement? He’ll know what we spent anyway, but still. Just sayin’ it feels a little tacky.
April 8, 2007
April 6, 2007
All week I’ve been thinking: I can have Good Friday off if I want. Do I? I have lots of work, should I really take another day off after taking Monday off? Finally I decided to go for it since I’ve totally put in my time working weekends and such for the past … entire time I’ve worked at this job.
Apparently it never sank in. I was at the ATM this morning, frustrated that I didn’t have a pen even though I specifically thought “put a pen in your pocket for the ATM”, and wondering why on earth the bank’s doors were still open at 2pm on a Saturday.
………
*lightbulb* It’s not just Friday for me!! Happy Good Friday, everyone!
I got lots of financial stuff done today:
Recycled a few bagsfuls of cans – $6.15 (Oh, the irony: walking around the recycling station, people had littered … their bottles and cans. Come on!!)
Deposited my reimbursement from work for my train pass and various transportation, and birthday gifts purchased for the office: $128.13
Deposited a payment from BroDucky for some money I’d loaned him. (*cringe* I know, I swore that I’d never do that again and … I regretted it as soon as my resolve slipped. But, never again!! It is way too stressful dealing with finances, much less allow family and trust issues get into the mix. That’s just ugly.)
Filled in most of the remaining blanks in the past three months’ worth of bills on my Pearbudget file.
(I like the fact that I can make it web-based via Google Docs, but does anyone else find the navigation of the site really slow?)
Decided that April and May have to be no-spend months to make up for the free-flowing money in January and March. That leaves me all of June to save up for whatever budget I get for Comic-Con at the end of July!
Still left to do:
Trawl CashDuck to make some extra monies so the April and May’s budgets aren’t so squeezed that they start looking like those Pillsbury Dough tubes!
I have to get new windshield wipers for the DuckyCar. She’s needed wipers for a while now, but I just never got ’round to that.
Put together PaDucky’s resume. Keep your fingers crossed!!
April 5, 2007
Tchah! On the plus side, I’ve been hunting for a good budgeting tool that wasn’t MSN Money or Quicken because I don’t want to deal with importing information from a million places. PearBudget does that. And PearBudget does all sorts of little calculatory things that I like, like giving me immediate spent/budgeted totals for my categories. It also has this cool analysis page with monthly totals columns.
On the minus side, I’m now obsessively inputting charges from the past few months. I’m having extreme difficulty tearing myself away. And though I’m usually very careful about how and when I spend money, I can already see a pattern of spending way more loosely than I suspected in the past few months. Yes, finding spending patterns is the point of tracking all the expenses and the only way to plug holes, but it’s still sort of a horrific feeling. Thank goodness for credit cards, though. If I’d spent that money in cash or using checks, this would be ten times more frustrating.
What I’d love to see:
(For my neurotic side) An ability to enter every single transaction separately, even on the same day, with a description column so I know exactly where every penny went.
(For my other neurotic side) A section dedicated to savings: regular savings, retirement savings, etc.
To compensate, I may take the savings category out of the Regular Expenses section and create a column under the Variable Expenses section, but that doesn’t feel quite right.
Any suggestions?
April 4, 2007
or, in my case, half drown me. Usually, I bring a water bottle because I remember to drink water more often, and it’s less wasteful than using, and tossing, a cup a day. Something about a water cup just doesn’t register on my “drink me” radar. Unfortunately, I forgot my water bottle today.
Coworker offered to make me a cuppa hot chocolate right after I’d filled up my 12 oz cup with cold water. Torn, I decided to down the water so that I could get in on the hot choc action without wasting another cup. Apparently, coworker didn’t believe that I’d do that and started laughing at me when she realized that I was really drinking all my water in one go. Of course, that started me laughing and I nearly drowned myself.
All to save the office/environment another wasted cup. Go Mother Earth!
April 3, 2007
I feel vaguely dirty.
I stumbled across my coworker’s blog address while looking for her friend’s website (on which she sells pretty pretty bags, but that’s for another post). I promptly typed in the address and checked it out.
Her most recent post was about her discovery that one of our coworker’s pending layoff, and her feelings about the matter. I discovered that everyone’s impressions to the contrary, she actually doesn’t like him or having to talk to him. (There are peculiarities about him that puts everyone off, rather Miltonish.) These are all things that no one overtly discusses in the office, probably because it smacks of gossip and seems mean-hearted.
Let’s be clear here: she posted the address with her picture online, on her friend’s public webpage. There didn’t seem to be any attempts at anonymity, and she’d mentioned before that she had a blog, in utter contrast to my blog which is cloaked in secrecy and positively drips of shadows and daggers. However, it’s not like she mentioned “I have a blog …. which you can/should check out.” So, I feel kind of dirty.
March 25, 2007
A couple years ago, the university I work for conducted a survey of the staff about their satisfaction with the existing retirement plans and what they wanted to see change. The current plans are split between the exempt and non-exempt staff.
Currently, exempt staff are required to contribute 5% pretax monthly earnings, and the university contributes an additional 10%. Employees are vested immediately.
Non-exempt staff, however, have the university contribute 2.2% of their salary to a plan they are not vested in until they’ve been with the university for 5 years. The types of compensation used to calculate the 2.2% amount was limited, and there was a preset pension plan. Their lame excuse was that, in previous years, the exempt plan was available to all staff but since the non-exempt employees didn’t bother to participate, they were given the stepchild’s version of a retirement plan. No choices, no control, and no matching. Boy, they really taught us a lesson! No wonder the non-exempt employees “believed that the features of the Faculty and Exempt Staff Retirement Plan were more advantageous” and “have asked to be included in the defined contribution plan and have sometimes gone to extraordinary lengths to try to qualify.”
The only way to actively contribute to a retirement plan through work, and reduce taxable income, was to use the Supplemental Retirement Plan, which I did, to contribute to a 403(b) without the benefit of matching.
They’ve finally decided to make some changes, and starting in July of this year, all staff will be automatically enrolled in a new program at the highest contribution level of 5%. The employees will be able to reduce their contribution rates if they wish, and the university will reduce their match correspondingly: Employee 4%, University 9%; Employee 3%, University 8%, and so on. But, if the employees choose not to participate at all, the university will still contribute 5%. AND your contributions will vest immediately. You literally cannot lose with this plan. (I think.)
The previous contributions made on our behalf will be frozen, but we’ll still retain access to those benefits if we stay at the university for 5 years. And, we can continue to contribute to our existing Supplemental Plans, so long as we adjust the amounts to make sure that we don’t exceed the IRS limits of contribution.
Now, that is awesome!!
