November 25, 2013
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.
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.
November 21, 2013
“If you could, you’d bring all the stray animals home with you and they’d eat you out of house and home.” – So Said My Parents
I was an inveterate rescuer as a kid, turning up with one stray or another, and always getting the boot because we simply could not afford the luxury of half a dozen pets in a small apartment. While I completely understand not buying new clothes, always wearing hand me downs, and never eating out, my poor pre-adolescent mind couldn’t grasp the idea that we didn’t have room in our home or budget for another stray.
That feeling’s never gone away, not entirely.
And now we’re discussing/planning to take in another sad soul whose owner can’t take care of him anymore. The poor dog has skin issues and has lost a lot of weight, and my heart just can’t take it.
We can’t take him for at least a few months, the wedding planning and travel means we are even more tight on time and money than we’d normally be around the end of our fiscal year, but I’m looking forward to the day we can bring him home, even if only for several months until we help sort his medical issues.
Things that worry me:
1. Time: He and Doggle have completely different energy levels and walking them together might not work well. We need it to, though, because we alternate turns walking the dog according to our own schedules. If we have to take each dog out for a separate walk, we’re spending hours a day walking. Plus, I’m physically not up to that. I only have so much energy to spend per day working, cooking, cleaning, walking dogs, doing things around the house.
2. Space: They’re both big boys. I think they’ll be ok in a confined space generally speaking but New Dog hasn’t ever been solely an indoor dog. Will he feel claustrophobic? (I know, he’s a dog. But a really uncomfortable cooped up dog is destructive.) I may have to sweep out and set him up on our stamp of an outdoor space to get fresh air regularly.
3. Veterinary care and costs: Until we beat his medical issues, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of the vet. I expect to be running tests, trying new diets, and… ?
4. Boarding: Doggle is universally beloved, and we have friends who hate to let him come home after he’s vacationed with them. New Dog, while of the sweetest temperament ever and having never displayed a moment’s bad temper that I’ve seen, looks like a scary breed of pup and our friends won’t be able to accommodate him. If/when we travel, we’ll have to take them both with us or board him. 🙁 I know people do it all the time but I hate the thought.
5. Food and lodgings: we’ll need a new bed for him and good high-quality food. Obviously that all costs money too.
6. Breed: We don’t know what breed he is but he looks like one of the universally suspect breeds and that’s unfortunate for a number of reasons. We’ll have to test him for formality’s sake but I know from long experience that this dog is kind, loving and smart enough to understand what’s going on around him. He was extra patient w/my elderly dog, always giving her her way, he was similarly kind and patient with Doggle when he was very confused about life and offered to be friends but backed right off without batting an eye when he was rebuffed.
Realistically, this may not be a perfect long term situation, but I have to at least try to help him to the best of my abilities. We’ll take it a step at a time.
Link I Love:
SingleMa made Blessing Bags to give away and I think this is a great idea.
November 18, 2013
If you felt a huge gust of wind, it was my WHOOSH of a relieved sigh. After MONTHS of playing phone tag with the landlord and his assistant/representative, and writing a formal letter (which we never used to need because they were totally on top of things), we finally got someone out to address the repairs that have become rather critical in the past few years.
Repairs and maintenance have been a big problem this year; it’s what happens when you can’t stay on top of the more minor repairs and they snowball into bigger ones. It’s also what happens when a house ages and needs more major, regular, maintenance.
At a minimum…
All the plumbing needs work: hot water’s stopped running in one sink, one sink won’t stop dripping, yet another doesn’t drain.
We’ve found mold hiding under the paint and that has to be stripped out, cleaned and repainted.
It’s been over a decade since the last paint job, so all the walls need a new coat.
The doorbell is broken. It’s been broken so long I’d forgotten about it.
There’s more, I just can’t think of it all right now.
Part of this is because Mom and I managed much of the routine household stuff; we did all the liasing with the landlord for any arrangements or requests, and we shared the other housework out enough so that no one was overloaded. Now that I’m not at the house regularly, the few hours I do have on each stopover are spent scrubbing, vacuuming and cleaning which doesn’t make a dent. Dad’s got his hands full with his work, generally, and keeping up anything that’s not an essential, or even those, isn’t a priority. He doesn’t cope with grief and loss by cleaning like I do, or Mom did, he copes by immersing himself in other things.
This makes me a bit crazy that he’s living in such rundown surroundings, that he’s just been making do because he can’t get around to it, but it’s hard to be upset with him; I’m not sure I’d rouse myself to do repairs if I were alone after 30 years of marriage, either.
Thus, the utter relief to finally have cornered the landlord’s contact to get things started: they’ve come by and made a list of things to address. We are lucky, by the way, that while some of these fall under keeping the place habitable, not all of them are and it looks like they’ll go ahead and take care of everything anyway.
We’ll set up a repair schedule in the next couple of days. And I can finally stop feeling so damn guilty that I can’t be in three places at once and hold two jobs to pay for everyone and everything.
November 4, 2013
We’ve survived the week of harrowing (which just kept getting worse as we got into it: the LAX shooting was local to us and affected things, there was an attempted suicide situation, there was another death in the family). There’s nothing we can do about any of the big stuff really, we helped where we could and have to keep moving.
We were so busy we basically skipped Halloween and I didn’t even get to post my fun Halloween sign! So I’m sharing it now. Humor me, please.
How was everyone’s Halloween, btw? I didn’t see much in the way of plans or costumes this year so do share! 
On the bright side, we got a lot done. From that original list, we had to skip seeing friend with new baby and meeting with the photographer; I had two other errands (donations and returns) that we decided to defer as well. Of 12 major things, “only” getting 8 done is not terrible, and I knocked off several other things too: picked up a crafts store GC at a 27% discount; crafted a TON of to do lists and got a good start on filling in most of them; found a lot of photographs to bring back with us; have the next trip back half-planned out.
In case you’re wondering, yes, I’m exhausted.
Spending, spending, spending
~ Wedding costs, extraneous or frivolous ones in my opinion, are starting to add up and I’m retrenching to see where we can save. Friends have offered to help DIY flowers, so we won’t pay for anything more than we use (and not much, at that) and we discovered that friends who are helping with vendor work saves us an additional 60% off their meal cost as vendors are charged at a much lower rate. That’s an unexpected bonus where we were just hoping to include friends and family in a family and friend celebration.
~ PiC’s suit cost about 4 times more than I had anticipated, but it was 50% off so … uh, only 2 times more? And Dad’s suit was right at my mentally budgeted amount so the two of them are very nearly squared away.
~ I’m debating whether to get a discounted GC for Macy’s and buy Dad the really expensive but SUPER nice dress shoes that PiC got for our elopement and has been floating on ever since; Dad insists that he can buy his own shoes but I suspect they’ll be some cheap affair. I don’t want any Sam Vimes Shoe Economy here. Instead he can wear the fancy ones til he drops and they’ll probably still be in good shape.
~ We’ve also failed miserably at continuing our Wine & Money Wednesdays after the first sitdown so we’re going to have to restart that. In the meantime, though, our foray into joint banking is getting better and smoother.
Fun and Frivolity
~ I’m really happy that Grimm is back and the ridiculous The Captain + Juliet storyline is over. Also I’m glad that Juliet isn’t being written as the obtuse idiot they had her play earlier.
~ The funnest thing I did in October was the hardest thing: handmaking the beginnings of a costume for Doggle. It’s not done and I have no clue how to make the rest of it but it was weird and entertaining.
~ We’re hosting Thanksgiving for a couple family members this year and I’m extra excited about it. Not just about the 30 lb turkey I want to cook for 4 people, but also about hosting a Thanksgiving in our home for the first time since we’ve lived here. Nervousness about cooking for not just PiC will set in, probably in 2 weeks. Obviously I’m going for making the best cooked and most frugal meal.
Communication and Relationships
~ PiC and I have been enjoying an unusually good period of communication on money, family, wedding planning, Doggle. We don’t normally fight all the time, of course, but we also have had to relearn how to navigate touchy territory since getting married and that makes me more grateful than ever that we’re communicating more effectively these days. Part of it has simply been articulation: We had been trading planning duties when one of us was super stressed over work stuff; part of it has been being more flexible about things when the other isn’t cooperating. One of the best pieces of advice a colleague gave me on how her business partnership works well: articulate your problem. Ask for help, don’t just assume you need to do it all yourself unless you actually want to!
~ I’m back in contact with childhood cousin companion, thanks to the wedding stuff actually, and age has mellowed us both out. We’re actually chatting like no time has passed at all, but in fact, so much has that we get along better than ever. This is an unexpected nice thing that wouldn’t have happened any time soon had we not planned a celebration.
October 29, 2013
I’m not normally much of a Halloween person but this year I had high hopes of dressing up my victim … Doggle, and taking him either trick or treating or to a good friend’s house to play. Instead, we’re sadly in Southern California to lend a dear friend moral support and planning support. Her elderly mother, weighed down by a series of illnesses and then a serious fall breaking her hip, simply couldn’t bounce back and I’m grieved to say we lost her. I don’t care how old you are, losing a beloved parent is never easy.
***
This month has been busy as all get out and I’m rather glad it’s coming to an end, or I would be if that wasn’t rapidly pushing us toward a conclusion I’m not ready for (the end of the year). Which means that we have to make the most of this trip down south for wedding stuff as well as life stuff.
We need to (deep breath):
Visit friend with a new baby,
Visit friend who lost her mother,
Meet the photographer,
See the venue for the first time & figure out if anything else needs doing,
Deliver any wedding stuff that we don’t need here so we’re not transporting a moving van’s worth of frippery the weekend of,
Buy suits for PiC and my dad,
Buy or rent a traditional dress for me,
Attend a wedding,
Attend a family dinner,
Oh and WORK.
Talk about your last minute trips!
We decided this would happen only 2 days before and it was a flurry getting ready! (I thought it was wise to start preparing by doing seven loads of laundry…..)
I booked three hotels because it’s a long stinking drive down to SoCal, and if we want to be convenient to certain people without spending 2 hours in traffic either way, it’s a hotel or bust.
Booked 1 hotel for 50% off. Yay for catching billing errors from our last visit and their profuse apologies = savings: ~$100 or less. Includes breakfast or lunch.
Booked 1 hotel with SPG points: 7,000 points + $50 pet fee instead of spending $200.
Booked 1 hotel for cash: $120 + $100 pet fee. Occasionally this fee is waived so we’re hoping for the best.
We’re also renting a car for the week. We’d normally take the Dog Chariot but we need more room for transport of several cases of things and we need to keep the mileage on our personal vehicles low since we get a major discount on the insurance. I booked a week-long rental on Carrentals.com using ebates (3% back): $273.
The funny thing is, if I rented the same car from Tuesday through Sunday, it would have been billed at a MUCH higher per day rate and the total estimate was nearly $600. !!!
In total, this near-week long trip will cost about $800 in travel;
probably another few hundred on wedding clothes that are meant to be rewearable for years after this;
and miscellaneous costs for food.
[insert aggrieved face here] Staying home is so much cheaper.
***
On the bright side, we’ve decided to put about $20K toward principle on the mortgage. We’d squirreled away cash for a re-finance but thanks to some legal mumbo-jumbo with the HOA we can’t at the moment. Might as well put it to work reducing the mortgage, then!
Also, made a dinner at home for friends this weekend. Not counting the cost of garlic or butter, I think we managed to feed four for about $20: Roast chicken, mashed potatoes w/onions & garlic, braised bok choy, and roasted beets. Unfortunately for a cooking-for-guests night, I wasn’t terribly impressed with what I turned out. PiC loved it but I’m convinced he’s far too kind when I cook.
October 26, 2013
There’s perhaps nothing as exhilarating as being DONE with a major professional thing. You’d think that after being in management for a good while, after dealing with as many bad and difficult people-problems as I have, after running things and being a decision maker, talking in front of people wouldn’t be so nerve-wracking but I hate it. Hate hate hate hate it.
I’ll get better at it with practice but I hate that too. I hate the practice, I hate knowing that I have to practice and I hate being bad at it until I’m better at it.
Pretty sure I stopped being an overachiever a while back but I didn’t stop hating being bad at things.
It shouldn’t be any wonder that after I discharged my responsibilities, the entire world seemed a shinier, brighter, happier, wonderfuller place.
Traveling Solo
I discovered:
A) Flying was a lot harder on me than I expected this past week. My back had already been hurting for days and I was tired from preparing for my gig, so despite getting to fly a “nice” airline (still coach class) both departing and returning flights were a torment. I’m praying that this doesn’t mark the beginning of the end of my ability to travel alone. (Every time something gets significantly worse, I worry about this: is it permanent? Can I get better? Will I come back from this? A lot of the time, the answer is no.)
B) Eating almost every meal alone for a few days, in public, is kinda fun. Lots of thinking and reading. And talking to folks on Twitter.
C) I can be remarkably dense. (At least I know it?) For example: walking to a strange destination? Guaranteed that I will take at least 3 wrong turns. Absolutely guaranteed. I stared at the Hubway map up there for at least 4 minutes before it occurred to me that it wasn’t a map for the subway, it was for the bike rentals. *eyeroll*
D) Logan Airport has its drawbacks but all are forgiven because they have ROCKING CHAIRS.
E) I tried Uber for the first time, thanks to ExtraPetite’s referral, and while it took slow-brain about 2 days to figure out the app (also it kept quitting on me), I loved it. They texted me as soon as I booked my ride w/a driver ETA, my driver called me immediately to double check directions, and the app shows you the driver’s photo and the car’s license plate. It was not creepy, as I might have thought riding w/a stranger would be, though the cabs in that area were uniformly alright. Not weird, a bit chatty, but cool.
F) NO street harassment. I walked near an hour through strange streets and construction zones etc., and I wasn’t harassed even once. You may not realize how amazing that is but it really is. I always feel like I’m going through a war zone, on full alert, ready to fight off harassers or call the police if someone tries to pulls something, as they usually do.
Catching up-ness
Catching up on work was a bit of a slog but not terrible so I’m nearly there. With the rare exception of one project that was so bad it took more than 6 times the usual number of hours to fix. *shakes fist at incompetence*
I missed FinCon and I hear a lot of people had a great time. Stephanie and Deena and I had MiniFinCon though, and learned that “Medford, MA” is pronounced “Meh-for” in rough approximation of Bostonian.
Then I got to meet up with eemusings!
I also missed GeekGirlCon and that sounded like loads of fun. Perhaps next year …
PiC replaced our guest room bed set-up, and gave away our lumpy old mattress and box set: $300 for a new mattress, bed frame and really plush mattress topper. Craigslist score! Just in time for visitors, too. 🙂
File Under: Things I Want
(always leaving aside the obvious: a return to old fit and healthy self)
A very cushy rocking chair recliner w/foot rest.
A cushy bean bagA Fabulous TARDIS bookshelf (or a set of…)
Other interesting stuff I caught up on
Nicole and Maggie on missing (or not) high school
A HufflePup is NOSY. And Vicki is going to bring home another corgi pup! PiC just discovered how absolutely adorable Corgi pups are and was nearly ready to bend on his No Small Dogs rule.
Luke crowdsourced his question on what you do if you get a duplicate shipment of an online order.
A lovely Marian call video with a favorite song:
