March 6, 2014

On the wedding merry-go-round: Stag&hen parties

Yes, we’re American but stag & hen is just easier to say. 🙂

I was just being grateful that at my age, most of my friends have gone past needing some ridiculous pre-wedding party, with a few exceptions (notably, a recent invitation that I declined that was composed of an overnight stay, bookended by multiple expensive activities).

But no, I was wrong. Gone are the days of having a group of friends get together for a relatively inexpensive spa day, or night off drinks and dancing or whatever it is we did back in the day as broke college grads. Now we’re seeing people ask their friends to fly across country, or meet up at a destination city, there to party it up for a full weekend. Between gifts, time-off, lodgings, travel arrangements, most of these seem to be $1000 minimum.

My physical therapist was just telling me about the great deal her boyfriend got, going to Mexico for “just $1000” for his friend’s stag party! *blink*

“All inclusive” is nice but $1000 for a weekend party with the boys (or girls) is a deal? When did that become the norm?

It almost feels like I woke up one day and our friends all became “wealthy” without us. To be fair, PiC’s friends are actually truly well-off, so it’s really not terribly surprising that a few thousand here and there isn’t cause for pause for them.

I don’t have any philosophical issues with destination weddings: that’s where the couple wants to go? Fine. And invitees are free to go, or not go, according to their time and budget constraints.

But stag and hen parties?  They feel a little more like hostage negotiation when you’re part of the wedding party and the relevant betrothed is asking: so, what do you think of going to [insert international destination, during high season]? Y’all, when you need a passport for the pre-wedding party, I have objections.

We’ll have honest conversations with the friends, of course, because we’re simply not lining up to spend a few thousand dollars between the stag party, gifts and travel to the wedding; it’s not their fault but let’s face it, every wedding we attend requires travel these days.

There just aren’t that many people that we can spend that kind of money on, especially not with a friend getting married every year or two and oh, living our lives?

I’ve organized my fair share of these, there was the memorable year I ‘maided for 4 brides in 1 summer, but this remains too rich for my blood.  Neither PiC or I got either stag/hen parties and I didn’t get a bridal shower, and our budget’s pretty happy about that.

How do you feel about these things? Fun and worth doing as a “once in a lifetime”? Or does it make you want to call for a simpler life? Or somewhere in between?

February 7, 2014

Short term thinking: stop it!

There’s nothing that chaps my ass as much as stupid mistakes, unless it’s stupid decisions that cost me money. Unless it’s stupid, aka shortsighted, decisions that costs me a lot of money.

Part of our auto insurance just spiked by more than 50% because my dad got two tickets in the last two years, and made the foolish decision to pay the fine in court ($100) instead of going to traffic school ($250). Not only did he make this decision on his own without discussing it with me, he never mentioned the tickets at all.

He meant well but clearly he wasn’t thinking of the long term effects. I had to explain to him that his $150 savings will now actually cost me over $1000 in the next two and three years in raised insurance premiums.

He’s now paying for his daily expenses (food, gas, utilities) and stupid crap like tickets, but not for housing or insurance yet. I’m not pushing the issue because I’m keeping an eye on the regularity of the utility payments and have had to make a couple supplemental payments in December as he’s not keeping up with them regularly, he’s still learning how to budget on an irregular budget.

As I suspected when we agreed that he was going to start taking on the regular monthly stuff like utilities, there’s not been a word from him about getting behind in payments.  It seems he’ll simply won’t learn or change on that front, so my instinct not to trust him to talk to me instead of finding himself slowly being boiled in (debt) water that’s been heating up over time was right.

It’s not going to break us but our carefully constructed budget is going to take a hit unless I can find a way to cut back somewhere else to compensate. Which, again, chaps my ass.

*deep yoga breathing*

I managed to talk to him about the consequences of his short term decisions, without losing my temper, but it was tough keeping a lid on it.  The damage is done, so there’s no use hollering about it.

This is NOT what I meant when I said I wanted Stupid Money.

I’m not alone, am I?  (Misery does love company, sometimes.)

December 9, 2013

Eating in, in Hawaii

Our favorite guesting ritual is cooking a meal for our hosts.

There’s always a bit of shuffling figuring out what to make and cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen but cooking a nice meal for hardworking (often parent) friends and cleaning up for them’s a nice way to give them a bit of a break and thank them at the same time.

For our new parent friends especially, going out is not so much the fun and easy time that it used to be. Depending on the age of the kids, and the parenting style, they’re generally on the hook for crying, projectile food, running, screaming… all ingredients for a good time, right?  It’s just easier to eat at home and weird as it is, PiC and I always enjoy a good ramble through the grocery stores wherever we travel.

Grocery shopping in Hawaii was one hell of an eye-opener.

The ingredients for a basic taco night for four adults and 1 child, which probably would have cost about $30 even here in the Bay Area, was a shocking $60. Granted, I wasn’t buying on sale cycles like normal, and didn’t have any coupons either but still, I’m certain we could manage turkey tacos for less than that on the mainland.

That included: 2 lbs of ground turkey, taco seasoning, hard taco shells, tortillas, onions, 5 avocados for guacamole, 2 limes, 1 bag of chips, a few tomatos, and shredded cheese.

I walked the rest of the produce section and aisles to get a feel for the rest of the store and it was equally scary.

Milk is consistently expensive, running between $9-10 per gallon; kale cost 3x more than I would normally pay (between $1-2 per bundle on the mainland; $5 on the island); bananas that are usually between 29-79 cents per pound were $2.49/lb.  Apples were nearly $4/lb; and cereal ran $7-9/box.

We often joke that we can’t afford to feed another mouth around here, PiC snacks enough for three and meals that would serve 4-6 don’t last past the first sitdown, so paradisiacal as Hawaii is, we couldn’t even afford to feed ourselves there!

We’re so spoiled by how reasonable food prices are, even in the Bay Area, and especially in Southern California.

November 25, 2013

Diving into the holiday season

I hope everyone had a happy and fulfilling Thanksgiving Day, full of family, friends, or whomever you chose to celebrate with.

It was probably the first really decent Thanksgiving we’ve had in a while. It’s been over six years and the specter of loss still hovers over the holidays. Both of us have lost parents and other family in the month of November over the years; it’s been hard to shake off the sense of doom associated with the winter months and the holidays.

PiC got a great workout in, in the morning, while I slept late and then we spent the day cooking all kinds of goodies: a really big turkey, a new stuffing recipe, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a new brussels sprouts dish. We shared our Thanksgiving dinner with an entirely new group of family and their friends.

I even managed to resist working all day. I confess to reading several work emails, but I did absolutely nothing with them. #WordsofAWorkaholic

And now that our bellies are full, I have turkey headed for a soup bowl and turkey bound for the freezer, Thanksgiving Day has been enjoyed and shelved.

We can officially look forward to Christmas carols and all things wintery!

The Christmas Carols and commercialism that starts as early as September gets on my nerves, but I will admit to thinking ahead to Christmas even earlier than that if we’re talking about gifts or scheduling holiday plans.

Normally, there’s nothing I enjoy more than snagging great deals throughout the year and wrapping gifts starting in early December but we’ve been a little busy this year with travel and planning wedding things and so on.

Originally, I thought that we’ll get everything done two weeks ahead of the reception but neither vendors nor PiC cooperated with my timeline. So, instead, I’m still working on keeping a level head and stripping out anything that we don’t have time for or don’t have the energy to spend on as time ticks by. I impose the Rule Of Sanity!!

And in keeping with that:

1. Christmas gifts this year are going to be photographic mementos. Originally that sounded like it’d just be easier than trying to go shopping on a straining budget. It’ll be cheaper and perhaps more meaningful but it’s going to take time to dig through for the right photos.

2. Money Matters: I’ll note that I refuse to dip into real savings for the reception, I’m determined to cash flow this. And of course it’ll probably sound like I’m cheating a little, because in order to pay for this out of normal cash flow, which hasn’t been adjusted to accommodate this line item, I am dipping into another “savings”.

In the last few years, I’ve instinctively hoarded any bits and pieces of money that was budgeted for spending in the Expenses savings account. That money was earmarked for spending and instead of being my usual miserly self, I didn’t pop it into the emergency savings account from whence it can never emerge unless one of us loses our jobs, or something catastrophic happens. This gave us a several thousand dollar headstart. And even though all our budgeted categories for 2013 are averaging something like a 90% spent rate, I’ve throttled spending as much as possible where it doesn’t matter as much. Or creatively financed by ….

• Using Swagbucks to eke out $5 Amazon gift cards. (If anyone wants to sign up, I’d be very happy to send you a referral invitation!)

• My three step checklist before buying online: Always check Ebates (referral link) or Fatwallet for cashback; Always check Retailmenot (or just google) for coupon codes; Always double check credit cards to decide which one gives the highest payout for specific kinds of spending. I am a determined bargain hunter, but as eemusings just so wisely pointed out, there’s a tradeoff between time and money. I want to make the most of both so there has to be a balance, and an end in sight when searching.

• SingleMa also shared a great price tracker, in advance of Black Friday, that was really useful for Amazon shopping and comparison shopping.
• When I knew we needed to spend at certain stores, I bought gift cards from Cardpool and ABC GiftCards. Best bargain? 27% off Michael’s gift cards, combined with 50% off coupons at the store. That really stretched our dollars.

3. Moderation: I’ve treated myself to a few things (again, gift cards). New undergarments, a Pacific Rim DVD, a new mouse since my working mouse is driving me crazy.  Life isn’t always about taking care of everyone else.

I hope everyone has happy and sane plans for the month of December!  Do share.

Random thoughts on poverty and the poor

1. PiC and I had a mini rant about Walmart the other day, on the heels of the blowup about their Ohio store’s doing a food drive for their own employees, when we saw a Walmart commercial advertising their “opportunities”. The spokespeople for Walmart would have you believe that the fact that the company culture supports “associates” and takes care of them during the holidays doesn’t highlight the fact that a company could actually “take care of” their employees by paying them living wages and that’s where their responsibilities lay.

2. For a good part of my childhood, my parents were small business owners who took very little salary for themselves, but paid their employees both as decent salaries as they could afford and Christmas bonuses. Admittedly this wasn’t the best financial decision they could have made for our family in the short term, but if health problems hadn’t prevented them from continuing to run the business, we would have slowly built up enough savings to make it worth it in the long run. In the meantime, we knew our employees were able to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads. And as crap as it made my 20s, and as much as I would have made some minor changes to how things were run if I had a more active hand in business decisions (yeah because I was all of 9 years old. totally plausible), I’m comfortable with knowing our employees didn’t have to struggle just to feed and clothe their families, they just had to do a good job while they were with us.

3. Abby’s ruminations on J.Money and his thoughts on Tom Corley and Linda Tirado’s Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense remind me that people who have always had enough to eat, money for a rainy day, and a support network find it much harder to understand the decisions that poor people make, that seem to obviously be bad choices, but in reality, many of them aren’t really choices at all. I’ve been there, and remember the things that burned in my gut much like shame when I had to make those “stupid decisions” because I didn’t have the cash to make the smart one.

Note: I never smoked, drank or did drugs to get by but damn if I didn’t understand the desire, at times. I never gave up because I had my parents to support, while I wouldn’t call it hope, I never acknowledged that not fighting was an option. Still, when I was affected by THEIR bad decisions, that really sucked too.

A. You don’t have float money. You have exactly “enough” to get by from day to day which means if there’s a sale at the grocery store on pasta, you don’t have the extra $5-10 to buy enough to last you until the next sale cycle. So you buy off sale cycle, you only buy enough for today and tomorrow or even just right now. You resort to super cheap, filling, but super unhealthy fast foods, compromising your health. I used to buy a 99 cent corndog for lunch/dinner on days that I didn’t have food to bring from home and I had to run from school to work. It was the cheapest thing I could get, and I guarantee that was not a healthy choice. But I loved corndogs and it was a dollar for a few minutes of “happy” and food on any given 14-hour day. Or you can’t fill your car up with enough gas to last the week, you can put in $5 for now, and milk that until you hit E and then have to pay whatever price-gauge is at the next station. Also you buy cheap stuff because you can’t afford the higher quality stuff. So it breaks or falls apart, and you have to buy it again. And again. And again.

B. You don’t have time. You can work enough to pay the bills but then you don’t have time (or money) to go to school so you can stop working a dead end job without any hope of advancement or decent working conditions. Or you can work less, and struggle to pay all the bills in any given month. So you pay what you can, week to week, day to day. Bills slip, and it only takes one late fee to really screw up what you thought you were going to be able to clear that month.

C. *Observed: You don’t have hope. So you make stupid decisions like buying crap you don’t need, because your luck is crap anyway. After all, you scrimped, saved, and did without and where’s that gotten you? Nowhere. So you also think that luck has more to do with your life and what happens than what you do (I saw this develop in more than one family member, my incredibly strong, adaptive, and hardworking mom included.)

Confession: I had hope for several years, then I gave that up and just relied on gritting it out.

D. You live in the short term. Today’s work, tomorrow’s bills: rent, utilities, food, gas. Saving for a rainy day doesn’t exist when every day seems like one, saving for retirement sure doesn’t exist. You have to be willing AND physically able to find ways to squeeze every last penny out of every last opportunity: overtime, credit card rewards (without ever paying interest or late fees), loyalty programs. This takes time, which you don’t have, and attention which you don’t have.

That’s definitely only scratching the surface.

I made it out of there by working my ass off, taking every scrap of overtime available ever, and by good luck and good fortune. I was fortunate enough to be employed by the people I worked for: whether they were good people or not was irrelevant, the fact that I was able to make it work so that I could claw my way out of debt and to build up savings was a blessing.

I was fortunate enough to gain the respect of good people who would vouch for me when I needed it.

I was fortunate enough to become friends with people who had retired from super high income, high powered careers who were willing to advise me and help me make the hard professional decisions as a neophyte to the business world. My parents were decidedly blue collar, working class folks who didn’t know enough about today’s world to help. They could only listen and try to help guide.

I was fortunate enough to have just enough brainpower to plan a career path, at least somewhat vaguely, and not just focus on the immediate horizon.

I was fortunate enough to have discovered Fatwallet’s Grocery and Finance Forums in the early years. They taught me to save every scrap, every penny, that I possibly could, while trying to generate a little extra creative income AND to think about the future.

I was fortunate enough to always have been able to pay the internet bill: the source of my inspiration, ideas, and money blogs that taught me things that FW hadn’t.  For all the crap that the internet represents, it was an amazing resource.

While we all have culpability in the choices we make, it’s far too simplistic for people to say: being poor is your choice.

And this is why SingleMa’s post on giving always resonates with me. People may not have given me money, my path may not have been smooth, but at every step of the way, while I struggled and fought for what I needed, I was given a helping hand by people who had zero obligation to do so, whether they knew they were helping me or not.