About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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June 11, 2013
Say hello to the klutzoid
It was like a scene from one of my You’re Awkward as *#$(@ nightmares. Or a really stupid, scripted tv show.
Rushing out to meet my friend, I grabbed a super bulky bag, shoved my feet into flipflops and locked the door behind me, leaving my phone behind because I was only running out for a second. I never leave my phone behind, not even to take out the trash or get the mail. But THIS day ….
As the elevator door opened, I juggled the dangerously slipping bag to get a better grip on it. In hindsight, I should have just dropped the cursed thing.
To my slow-motion, too fast to screech or catch, horror, both the bag and my awkward right hand smacked my kangeroo sweatshirt pouch at just the “right” angle to bounce the house keys right out of the pocket. They hit the wall, slid down, bounced on the ground and fell. Right into the elevator shaft. I heard it more than saw it: *smack* *jingle* *smack* *splash* as it descended to the unknown depths.
I stared at my friend. She stared at me.
Locked out. Keys invisible to the naked eye. PiC not due home for another hour.
My friend could barely contain her horrified, chagrined laughter but it fell on deaf ears. My otherwise benumbed brain was too busy trying to figure out how to break down the elevator shaft, or fish around on the lowest floor in hopes that the keys would be hookable.
No such luck, of course, there was no way to find them peering down into the two inch chasm. I always knew that thing was a disaster waiting to happen!
Stupid tax, stupid tax, stupid tax!
The call to the management company was possibly worse than kneeling on the floor of the elevator calling it names. They’d charge $400 just to call out the maintenance guys, plus labor.
Abandoning the keys would be a security risk – when they finally did come out for a routine check-up, chances were good they would find the keys and then someone would have a set of keys to our lives. Fantastic.
Replacing the keys and locks? Start at $200 for a key fob for the car, and keep adding the costs up from there.
This was too stupid, even for me. It fell into the realm of horrifically embarrassing, even, because it wasn’t just me leaning on the locking door dramatically sobbing quietly. I was keeping my friend hostage to the errand she couldn’t run without getting in our place.
Always have a spare
Neither cost was something I was prepared to pay. It’s more than we budgeted for an entire year of stupid tax/fees!
Luckily, we did have a spare set, otherwise we’d have been pulling out the credit card and docking my allowance. After a few rounds of calls, the company finally conceded that we could wait for a routine maintenance check, whenever that happened, but at least when it did happen, they would retrieve the keys at no extra cost. In a month, or three.
We’d just have to keep phone stalking them until that call was scheduled.
True story: It’s actually possible to be relieved and so angry you could spit at the same time!
In the end, it took a few months of nailbiting and waiting to get a confirmation the elevator servicefolk were coming out and we’d get our keys back without the hefty stupid tax attached.
Please, share a stupid/stupid tax story, stupidity likes company just as much as misery does.
Keys now go into a zipper pocket and get zipped in. Always.
June 10, 2013
From top left, going clockwise…
Our three across the top are Happy Hour appetizers from a little place called Cactus, in Kailua. The waitstaff looked to be shorthanded: they were a bit harried and slow, though very nice. We never make it to Happy Hour anywhere on the mainland but took advantage of our slightly more relaxed schedule on “vacation”. They had both indoor and outdoor seating, and moderately good food. Our friend didn’t like half the dishes we order (by consensus, mind you!) but since I’ll eat just about anything once, it was good enough for me.
Happy Hour beer was a Negro Modelo for $3 (staff took the initiative to substitute it for the foamy and warm Dos Equis) and frozen margaritas were $4.
Meal for three: 7 appetizers and 3 drinks for a total of $32, tax and tip included.
Cactus (tripadvisor reviews)
767 Kailua Road Suite 106, Kailua, Oahu, HI
Lower right corner: sauteed mushrooms.
Honestly, I’m selfish. I don’t even want to tell you about this place because the wait is long enough now if you don’t get there early enough. But it’s pretty amazing. We did a family style dinner, ordering WAY too much food for two people: sauteed mushrooms, pan fried pork chops, fried rice. I don’t even like mushrooms and I would eat these every day and twice on Sunday.
This was much pricier than our usual meals up to that point, having eaten rather frugally, generally speaking.
Meal for two: 2 beverages, 3 entree sized dishes for $59.50, including tax and tip
Side Street Inn on Da Strip Kapahulu Ave (tripadvisor reviews)
614 Kapahulu Ave, #100, Honolulu, Oahu, HI
Middle bottom: plate lunches
We were searching for a musubi specialty place and ended up here. Ironically? Stupidly? The place we couldn’t find was actually called Iyasame Musubi. And Sugoi didn’t have any musubi at all. What the hell.
Anyway, we got great lunch plates anyway: an amazing garlic chicken and chicken katsu curry. Mmm.
Neither of us was a fan of the mac salad though, it was absolutely glued together with mayo. I’m a fan of mayo but not in that quantity.
Meal for two: 1 beverage, 2 mini lunch plates (1 scoop of rice, 1 scoop of mac salad, entree) for $15.50
Sugoi
1286 Kalani St. #B-106, Honolulu, HI
Bottom left corner: Taiwanese style shave ice
This is why I hate paying cash (aside from not getting points): I can’t remember where we went for shave ice and I have no credit card statement to refer back to. It was pretty good though. It was walking distance from the Hawaii Convention Center though.
We picked the mango combination flavor and shared between three people.
Middle left: Hot pot!
We were told that we couldn’t leave Honolulu without trying this hot pot restaurant. You get to pick your broth which is prepped and brought to the table, order meats from the servers, and fetch everything else (vegetables, seafood, seaweed, etc.) from the two fridge units. They also had a sauce station with about a dozen sauce options for you to mix and match. All my mixes were terrible. Turns out you really can go wrong when experimenting. But it was good.
Oh, and the funny thing? They get so much business that they actually put you on a dining clock. You’re allotted 90 minutes to eat and git! We didn’t keep very good track of our time so we overran by about ten minutes. The one server was pretty grumpy about it.
Meal for three: water all around, about 12 plates of meats, vegetables, noodles, mushrooms, seafood balls, tofu for ~$50.
Sweet Home Cafe
2334 S King St, Honolulu, HI 96826
Other great foods:
Leonard’s Malasadas: A dollar for either a sugar or a cinnamon sugar pastry. Absolutely AMAZING. We’ve decided a hot, fresh malasada is basically the best dessert in the world. [feast your eyes]
Rainbow Drive-in: A bit of a classic recommendation for plate lunches.
Honolulu Cookie Company: they have yummy shortbread cookies and bins of samples in their stores. Mmmmm….
Garlic shrimp trucks: You can find these on North Shore, there’s one in Waikiki and a great one on the way down to Lanikai from PCC.
PCC: If you’ve never done a luau, the Polynesian Cultural Center’s supposed to have a good one. I didn’t feel the need to go to another luau this time because I really just want the food and not the show, but they also have (rather expensive but good) Dole whips here.
Over to you: have you got any favorite Hawaii foods? Did I miss any crucial Must Eats in this list? Or favorite travel foods you’d go the distance to eat?
June 6, 2013
This post about all the reasons a house is a terrible investment (via nicoleandmaggie) made me laugh a little. Most of these ring true as financial reasons my pocketbook doesn’t want a house just yet, even as we’re staring at homes in the area, and starting to save for a new down payment.
If it were a purely financial transaction, I’d really think about six more times about trying to buy a house given the real estate market here in the Bay Area. Everywhere I look: astronomical prices. Apparently this is the “Paradise Tax” according to @isobelcarr, but my heat-loving soul protests.
I grew up renting all our lives and I still think it was a relatively simple way to go considering my family didn’t have steady and at least a bit consistent income. They could manage rent but managing the costs of maintenance and ongoing property taxes probably wasn’t likely. So despite being good friends with people who were firm proponents of real estate as investments, I had trouble picking up that attitude.
I can’t think of my home as an investment, not the home that I live in.
It’s my home and retreat and I’d love it. But I wouldn’t be so enamored as to think we’d ever resell at a high enough price to recoup: down payment, all fees associated with the hunt and the purchase, all the interest (yes, it may be tax deductible but still), any fees associated with refinancing as we’d probably do at least once, and of course, principal payments, insurance.
Given the high unlikelihood that a home would reliably turn a profit, it’s a purchase, in my opinion. Unless it’s to be rented out, in which case you have a whole other set of calculations, but we’re talking about a home you live in for the sake of argument.
The case for buying?
There are certainly good reasons to buy. As a homebody, it’s the place I’d spend the most time. Owning would mean having general, if slightly limited, control over the routine monthly costs when I made the initial financial decisions: down payment, term of loan, interest rate (which is still ultimately determined by the market rate).
Assuming no HOA, I would have generally free rein to do with the house as I pleased, and most importantly, rescue any kind of dog I wanted. None of this stupid breedist crap you get from HOAs which assume that large dogs are dangerous when my experience shows that 80% of the small dogs owned by our neighbors are untrained, unsocialized panic or aggression-driven little craps that go for Doggle’s throat every time.
The case for renting?
There’s definitely something to be said for only being responsible for your own conduct in a rental, and not being responsible for routine or emergency maintenance. Having to fix your own EVERYTHING is expensive and exhausting according to multiple homeowning friends. I’m not greatly familiar with the rules outside of CA but landlords must respond to problems within a reasonable period of time, and if we preferred to handle calling in for services ourselves, our landlords tended to be fine with our deducting the bill from our rent.
A good renting and credit record tends to buy you leniency and cooperation from a hands-off landlord too: they don’t mind accommodating requests that might be slightly out of the ordinary.
Having the flexibility to pack up and move with a month of notice may be important if you’re a university student, a young adult starting out with a new job, an adult looking for new jobs in a tight job market, a retiree who doesn’t like to be tied down to a mortgage or a single place … in other words, the flexibility of renting could be important to just about anyone. There’s something incredibly stressful about, say, getting a new mortgage and then unexpectedly getting laid off in a recession or bad job market, even with the best of emergency funds.
The variables…
Cost effectiveness of renting v buying: Depending on where you are, the supply of rentals may be low, driving the cost of renting an equivalent home higher. Or it may be high, in which case you have lease incentives, and more expansive options to lure you as a renter. Toss-up.
Your living space: If you have a good and reasonable landlord, you may have relative freedom as to personalizing your home. Or not. Or your landlord may suck at doing repairs in a timely manner. Or you might, as a homeowner.
HOAs: There’s a bunch of stuff I hate about HOAs. It is nice not to have to worry about the long-term maintenance but I’m not sure it’s totally worth the trade-off. And we feel that much more tightly bound to our neighbors. The good ones, the horrible ones, the really horrible ones. It’s a crapshoot whether the people who run for a seat on the board will be competent as well.
Over to you: what are your priorities when it comes to your living arrangements? Are you a renter, buyer, both? (neither…?)
Confession: I always dreamed of buying a house outright with cash. I don’t think that’s going to happen soon.
June 5, 2013
One of the perks of my current job… wait, no, the perk of my job is that as long as my responsibilities are covered, I can take time off whenever I’d like and as much as I’d like. The reason this perk is offered is because we’re “such a cool company” but in reality, in such a small company, coverage is harder to manage than you’d think.
Since much of my work is currently a combination of deadline work and “staying on top of things,” well, that’s as variable as it sounds. But I swore not to let an unlimited vacation policy go to waste, especially since there isn’t anything to accrue, and pay out at the end of the job.
Not terribly long after this resolution, the opportunity to test my workaholic self came up: friends were getting hitched in Hawaii and I have friends in Hawaii and I have friends going to Hawaii … what’d be more natural than a long (working) vacation in Hawaii?
I made my peace with leaving Doggle behind for two weeks, booked my flight and wrote up a budget.
Transportation: The flight was $415 RT. Not the best price I’ve ever seen but certainly quite as good as we were going to get booking that far in advance.
We needed a rental car and rental companies on Hawaii tend to be ridiculous. After stalking them for a while, and CarRentals.com, I scored a major deal.
The flight over was some kind of miserable. A mother behind me actually encouraged her bratly darlings to kick my seat and slam the tray behind me for four and a half hours. Apparently it kept them from screaming the whole way, or so she implied. It was about a miracle that I didn’t scream by the end of it when other passengers exclaimed about how “good” they were. So much for napping!
Housing: I shared lodgings with a dear friend for the first part of the trip and we experimented with AirBnB since all the hotels for around $100/night were … questionable. A bit sketchy, really. Part of that was because we stayed in Waikiki but I suspect that might have applied to just about any hotel on the island.
Splitting a $530 bill to stay at a host’s condo, complete with adorable dog, was an excellent alternative. I don’t know how people choose unreviewed places for the first time but I’m so glad someone took a chance on these hosts before us. We had easy walking access to the beach, grocery stores, a thousand ABC stores, essential dining like restaurants and malasadas. The only thing that was a bit frustrating was the parking situation but in the heart of Waikiki, we couldn’t be upset about having to pay for parking a few days out of the stay. At least we got 24 hour worth of parking out of any $15 parking fee, that salved the wound a bit. Plus I’d budgeted for $10/day originally.
Food and Dining: We ate breakfast at home, saving our pennies for the delicious snacks and meals later. Since I’m not big on breakfast anyway, a light bowl of cereal and fresh fruit enjoying the breeze was a perfect way to start any day. You’ll be treated to a rundown on the dining out later.
The thing that we always ruminate on when we go to Hawaii (“always”, like we go there regularly) is how expensive everything is – especially the food. Groceries are hardly more frugal than eating out, in some cases, and we’re not even talking about the Whole Foods type good stuff.
I brought my Honey Nut Cheerios from home, intending to eat it on the plane 🙂 but realized too late that I’d just make a mess. Saving it for later made it sting a little less when we had to pay astronomical prices for the milk to go with it: $4.60/half gallon, $9.60/gallon.
It’s common wisdom that you should always bring snacks and a water bottle from home to get you through the airport wait and flight, but I’ve been spoiled ordering snacks and meals on a few all-expenses-paid business trips. Those aren’t prices I’m willing to pay out of pocket by any stretch, especially considering what you get, but my palate forgets that it actually likes processed, packaged food when we get on a plane. Actually, I have to confess the biggest part of it is being both lazy and distracted before travel days so I don’t pack healthy fruit and nut snacks. Oh well, we can’t do what we should all the time, right?
In the end …
I couldn’t leave work behind entirely so I made the most of the trip by (oh so generously) sharing out part of my workload and only taking the most critical parts. I probably averaged about 2-3 hours of work a day, across a 7 day work week, and kept on top of just about everything that needed doing. The time zone thing was a bit of a challenge, though, so as usual, I reverted to nocturnal working hours to get the jump on my overseas colleagues. That worked well: play all day, work some at night.
The budget was roughed out at $70 of spending per day, though I had planned to spend less on my solo days. The two week trip came out to approximately $50/day (spending, not including transportation). Not too shabby considering the generally high cost of living and touristing.
Our biggest savings:
1. Staying with friends: we participate in the cycle of “crashing” life by offering our spare room to visitors pretty regularly, and so take up the offer of spare rooms from good friends without guilt. It also means that we spend time with the important people in our lives too. Win, all around! It’s not always possible of course, and we don’t impose if we can tell that they’re too busy or it’s a full house.
2. Being picky about being picky: We didn’t need to do anything fancy like dine at four or five star restaurants all the time. We like great food but we’re happy with unfancy good food too. Whether it’s a cheap plate lunch or a chef’s tasting, we enjoyed our meal and the experience for what it was. And there was no need to fight the crowds to find the “top-rated attractions” if there were other fun things to do, like the swap meet! We picked one or two important themes and stuck with it: Relax. Two beach days.
3. Not checking luggage: Aside from not paying extra fees, the limited baggage space kept us focused on only buying necessary souvenirs like thank you gifts and no more than one thing for ourselves. Of course, we did buy one extremely heavy thing that was an absolute bear to carry … best laid plans, hm?
Edit: Sunblock, guys. I forgot to say: never forget sunblock when you’re going to be out in the sun. Third sunburn of my life and I only just stopped peeling.
Over to you! Vacations and travel, what’s on your mind?
And follow eemusings as she continues her honeymoon around the world!
May 30, 2013
I love Vanguard. I love their service, the easy user interface, the fact I’ve never had to talk to anyone just to get simple things done. Most of all: I love their low expense ratios and the option to buy Admiral Shares to lower the expense ratios even more.
My accounts have mostly been lying fallow for the past few years as my employer sponsored plans were with another, much more expensive, company. It was, for a saving junkie, a pretty depressing sight: fund changes fully dependent on the whim of the market and not on my active saving. And my savings rate was dismal: I only put away enough to maximize the match because my cash flow needs were awkwardly high.
Three years down the road, my contributions, match and any gains totaled about $19k in the new account.
Time to clean house
1. We finally processed the rollover IRA paperwork, months after I should have done it. Stupidly, I couldn’t just take care of it myself, my former employer had to be involved. But: done.
2. Three years ago, my very first sub-$3000 401(k) had no place to go with Vanguard’s $3000 minimum to open any normal account. My only choice was a STAR fund. It had a whopping 0.34% expense ratio but that was still better than those other firms that charge nearly 1%. Into the STAR fund it went.
3. The new Rollover IRA money went into the STAR funds account and the whole shebang was used to buy up new Admiral Shares.
Voila!
I now have $74k split into three accounts across a variety of funds:
- 70%: split between a large blend (large cap and a blend of growth & value) and foreign large blend index funds.
- 20%: split between an emerging markets index fund, a mid-cap growth fund, a small cap investor fund, and a total stock market index investor fund.
- 10%: in treasury bonds. (Roth)
It’s no $100K saved by age 30, despite putting something away every year since I was 21, so I’ve got some catching up to do. Also, my current employer doesn’t yet offer a retirement savings plan so it’s time to research ways to put away money on my own.
On the plus side, we arranged for PiC to max out his plan this year to make up for my lack of a plan so that’s great.
How’s your saving for retirement or just plain savings going?
April 25, 2013
Do you remember the first six months of your best relationship?
Full of newness, and discovery, questions and sometimes “terrible” decisions.
We remember sitting on LA freeways for hours. Both ways. At completely, utterly unreasonable hours. Very scheduled phone calls post-9 pm to take advantage of those unlimited night minutes and lasted hours about nothing. Flowers every month, just because. Overly fancy restaurants (for us, at the time) the better to bat our eyes at each other. Cramming in one social obligation after another, stacked with work and school obligations, because sometimes, that’s the only way we could see each other without abandoning our friends or family. I’m sure there were more foolish decisions, and a lot less eye batting than I assume, but I can’t remember now.
A mutual friend laughed at our rueful reminiscing: the first six months don’t count! You do stupid things in your first six months together.
This is true, we did do stupid things to be together. We spent stupid money sometimes. Things that my normally pragmatic self would laugh at now, or even raise an eyebrow over wondering if this was setting ourselves up for a lifetime of impulse buys and trips. [I did (politely) ask PiC to stop bringing flowers every month around month 6 or so. I loved the thought but hated the idea he was spending so much.] And the first six months theory is a handy “it’s ok!” dismissal of it all. But you know what?
The first six months did count.
We spent time frivolously and had a great lot of fun. We enjoyed each other’s company without undue worry, which was a huge thing for me in my early 20s otherwise weighed down with worry and pain, and learned how to communicate. Even before we became a long distance relationship, we learned how to disagree and even fight efficiently and effectively, if you can believe it, and as much as talking about fighting wouldn’t seem like the most positive thing about an early relationship – it was how we learned to communicate better and waste little to no time on dramatic flounces.
We enjoyed each other as people, and made stupidly grand gestures to show it. We also chose to share the utterly mundane to share, like the Costco hot dog dinner. There was, as it turned out, plenty of time to be 90% sensible later. We are sensible now. But those short six months were full of laughter and learning how to care for and about each other. Rather priceless.
And the silliness of the first six months didn’t just end there. We still consciously make “stupid” decisions for each other, to make each other happy or laugh, despite being a boring old married couple. But it’s ok – we’re not wearing blinders when we do it. 😉 We have a budget.
What do you think of the six months theory? What were your first six months of a solid relationship like?
Did you travel unnaturally long distances to see each other? Spend hours on the phone? Sit in traffic forever just to see each other?
April 17, 2013
We’re a little more than three months into living on a combined budget. And even though this is the first time PiC’s lived on such a detailed budget, we still seem to be doing sort of ok.
I say “sort of” because:
+ we’re not fighting tooth and nail over living by a budget (yay!)
+ we’re not fighting over anything budget at all (yay!) (yes, I assume there’s going to be some amount of disagreement and conflict when you’re learning to live in new boundaries)
– we’re not exactly ON the budget in some places (boo!)
– we still need to discuss how to offset some of the early spending highs (boo!)
It’s a wash, as far as operations go.
As far as execution … we’re having a touch of trouble staying in our budgeted amount in certain categories and not yet doing a good job of pulling back in specific areas to make up for it. This goes against the grain. I’m a money hoarder and I would much rather spend on the low side of any budgeted amount throughout the year and have some left over. This is, of course, not PiC’s style. 🙂
Nearly four months into the year, I’d expect that our spending should be at about 33% of the budgeted amount across all categories. I’m seeing spending as low as 3 and 7% (less regular/essential categories) and as high as 47 and 53% (ahem someone’s allowance).
Overall, though, we only went over our monthly total once in the last three months and the monthly averages are very close to what we expect to be spending each month. That helps ease the sting of what feels like budgetary failure.
Management is….
a bit complicated right now: we primarily use my American Express, and his Southwest Visa when it’s a non-American Express establishment. Then we have the odd cash or check expenditures. It all gets tallied into a spreadsheet on a (we try) weekly basis.
We’ve also finally opened a joint checking account to pay the bills from so that’ll help smooth out the problem of taking it turnabout to pay bills. And, happy day! I may be able to start closing out some of my other banking accounts. I’ve got accounts across four banks right now.
Admittedly, I’ve been refusing to close my oldest checking account because it’s the one I opened when I first turned eighteen and was allowed to open my very open checking account. (PF sentimentality!) And I enjoy the freedom of having the choice of accessing ATMs for two B&M banks… but considering I have two branches of the other bank nearby and go to the ATM about 6 times a year, that’s not a good reason.
Observations …
We eat a lot. Or rather, we spend a hell of a lot of money on not terribly fancy food. We don’t even buy beer (except once in several months), we only get basic (but good IMO) cheddar, we have a regular rotation of relatively “cheap” food & recipes around things like whole chickens but it’s more than offset by the handful of convenience foods that we buy for my fibro-body benefit.
Saving Money …
I’m over the moon about changing our cell phone plan with T-Mobile. SingleMa and I got into a conversation on Twitter about cell phone plans. Next day, we found the new contract-free plans and each saved a ton! She reduced her bill by $40/month, ours should be less by $50/month. Woot! That annual $600 will go a long way to making up for buying a new phone a bit earlier than I wanted to. I hated dealing with the nonsense of their customer service which has gotten pretty iffy these past couple of years. It used to be rock solid but not so much anymore. A shame. I also finally sent in Mom’s death certificate to cancel her phone line, something I’m trying to be totally pragmatic about but I have to admit gives me a bit of a pang.
And after a couple months of paying too much for internet ($43) when our last promotion lapsed, I surfed AT&T’s promotions for Internet without a Phone Line while signed into my account and lo! They still pulled up the cheap-cheap plans! I experimentally put it in my cart, put the live customer service chat on, and found that I could indeed switch to the $20/month plan without cancelling service. Check. That. Out. AT&T, making life easy for an existing customer. Unbelievable. And I love it.
Total to be saved this year (8 months of each line being cheaper): $400 + 160 = $560!
Tax Time …
We got bitten by AMT this year. Sonnuva … it wasn’t terrible, insofar as the money’s concerned. My headache was another thing entirely, trying to learn everything specifically relevant I could about AMT on the fly. There was definitely cursing associated with this year’s taxes.
I managed to get all the forms in for an April 14th filing but then found out afterward that one of the forms was an estimate and the “responsible” (@$$shole) accountant didn’t bother to say so until well after the fact. Again: cursing. Bitter? Yes. Now I have to file amendments for this year as soon as those new forms are in. Another hour and a half of my life re-committed to doing unnecessary taxes. Still, the bulk of it’s done and that’s something to be grateful for.
::How are you folks doing with your money these days?