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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September 12, 2011
Technically, the term is “petite” but either I take that a bit further than everybody else in some areas or stores are even vanity sizing their Petites selections. (If the latter: Please, please stop it.)
As an ambitious professional, I’ve long accepted that my inner slob, the comfort-driven woman who prefers to lounge in a We Aim to Misbehave t-shirt and jeans or sweatpants, is never allowed to meet the people I work with if I want to be taken seriously. Sleepy-drunk self would be less infantilizing than me Au Natural. I was just mistaken for 17 years of age last weekend. Amid all the “oh you should be flattered”s, it’s a bit exasperating because it means I do have to keep trying.
I’ve improved enough, despite hiccups along the way, that current colleagues don’t make ageist comments as former ones did thanks to a combination of make-up assistance from someone way younger than me than I like to admit 😉 and inspiration from our lovely petite style bloggers.
The biggest key in this struggle of finding clothes that make sense, after conquering the basics of what should go on top, what should go on bottom and what scatters in between, is fit.
It’s not enough that you parse the bits about color, layers, seasons if you have them, the culture, and so on. The most paramount decision of all is whether your wardrobe actually fits your body.
Enter, the Tailor
Finding a good fit is nigh on impossible in today’s sizing environment, and that means spending/budgeting extra for the expertise that makes an off the rack piece actually work. Being a frugal dresser already requires tenacity and creativity – adding the cost of a tailor amplifies the challenge to dress professionally in a reasonable budget by a factor of ten.
The tough thing is that my two sides (Budget vs. Career) are constantly bickering over what’s reasonable. They’re like Spy v Spy, locked in never-ending battle. Starting the search for petite clothing that is already in higher demand and lower supply, then adding this Fit Issue, well, the stakes rise even higher.
While combining sales and coupons is the time-honored frugalite’s weapon, the absolute best way to be frugal when it comes to style and fashion is to be stylishly creative: reusing what’s in the closet with a critical eye in thirty bajillion ways so that people think it’s new.
I’m total crap at that.
And then there’s an accompanying caveat that each purchase must have impact – it must be versatile so I can wear it to work or to after-work functions, it must be classic so that cost per wear becomes negligible, it must be the Holy Grail of Wardrobe Additions. *the pressure* It’s no wonder I hate shopping so much.
A Situation
Since moving up to the Bay Area, I hadn’t ventured forth to a tailor. Since the COL is so much higher here, I was hesitant to discover the cost of alterations. After my, frankly, cheap cost of labor in Southern CA, I just knew that sticker shock was in my future. Even actively avoiding it, I had a sense of the cost and a shudder ran up my spine. (A dry cleaner could charge $20-25 for hemming trousers?? Seriously?? I paid nearly that much for a full suit alteration back home! No, Toto, definitely not in Kansas anymore.)
With a pending business trip and a big sale plus a 20% off coupon on a really nice jacket from Ann Taylor, I braved my tailoring demons, and in the doing, found myself with even more questions.
The 00P jacket cost $178 originally. With a sale and a combined 20% coupon, I paid $60 plus tax. Upon arrival, however, the shoulders were a little too wide, the sleeves were a couple inches too long, the back was too wide and the sides needed to be tucked in. Jacket quality was high and this would fill the hole in my closet for a fitted blazer. But I was happy to return it if the tailor felt it needed too much work, or it wasn’t possible, to make it fit me.
After my fitting, in a monumental display of stupidity, I left the jacket with the tailor after having all the requisite pinning done, without getting a quote for the work.
I always get a quote for work beforehand so I can decide whether or not I’m going to even commit to alterations or if the clothes are going straight back. I have no idea why I walked away without one this time. I was even planning to take a different suit with me on this trip, so I wasn’t dependent on that jacket should things not work out.
In any case, when I came back to see the results of this first visit with this tailor, they were spectacular. Like, black eye spectacular. The jacket was really something to behold – it fit so perfectly it looks like a bespoke jacket, but it’ll leave a mark on my pocketbook for a while. The jacket’s tailoring cost more than the jacket: $94.
Total Cost: $156
It was nearly full price for a basically perfect fit. Was it worth it? Would I have paid that much for a jacket that fit exquisitely? I suspect that I still would have tried to wait it out.
Should the question be: “is it acceptable to pay more for tailoring than the cost of the item?” or should it be: “is the total cost of the item that is acceptable?”
For my money, I think the latter is the true question and that has to be part of my whole clothing budget.
::: What’s your experience when it comes to buying off the rack? Can you?
August 26, 2011
Let’s talk careers for a minute. My experience with this has been specific to the younger crowd in their 20s and 30s, but I don’t know if it applies across the board with other personalities as well.
I’m declaring a moratorium on bringing your parents to work.
In person, I have no problem with parents in the workplace. And I’m not talking about as employees, employees who are parents are a-ok with me. I mean parents of employees. In fact, it’s kind of fun when parents want to do the Open House sort of thing and show up to see where their kids work for a short visit and say hello and that sort of thing. It’s not only fun, it’s cute. It shows they care. Take an interest. You know.
The once in a while, planned, or drop in for a quick hello and appropriate to the occasion, visit is not the topic of today’s conversation.
What I’m talking about are today’s employees who bring their parents with them mentally as backup into professional conversations, not just casual conversations.
I’m finding that more and more employees quite naturally make requests for special accommodations, raises or promotions or are engaged in some kind of career decision-making, for some reason, think they should cite their parents in the doing.
“My parents think it’s a good idea.”
“My parents think I’m really good at this.”
“My parents want [me to do] this.”
“I need to discuss this with my parents and get back to you.”
………………….
Why would you do that? Why would you say that? I’m not quite sure if the manager is meant to attribute more weight to the request because your parents thought it was a good idea but I can tell you that it doesn’t entirely paint you in the light that you might intend. What it does do is that it makes it very hard for someone new in their career to be taken entirely seriously. It makes it difficult for an adult to be taken seriously as an adult who can think for him or herself.
In all honesty, I’m sure that most who have a good relationship with their parents quite possibly use them as a sounding board. And there is absolutely no shame in that – it’s the smart thing to do if your parents are sensible, in touch with the professional world or give good advice or love you or whatever the rationale may be. Heck, even if they give bad advice and you just don’t want to hurt their feelings!
But that is a very personal relationship: they are your parents, and if you are using them as your primary justification for your request or suggest that the rationale came from them, it will give the impression that your professional decisions are driven in large or equal part by your parents. How firmly that impression sticks depends on how much you belabor the point.
Don’t.
It’s much like referencing your friends in your decision-making. It’s far too casual, it’s irrelevant, and it’s diminishing your judgment capabilities. Would you really want that?
It’s also somewhat akin to using your parents as a reference. I really doubt that any hiring manager worth his or her salt would accept that because of the clear conflict of interest in that – once again – this is a parent we’re talking about. Go on, Ask A Manager.
But in the meantime, please, please don’t bring your parents to work, and don’t let your friends do it either. It’s not good for anyone.
August 23, 2011
PiC’s sold his car!
This brings down the total final cost of his/Doggle’s chariot to just about $3000. (Give or take, I was … not listening to the registration cost update…. for some reason. “Husband/wife frequencies” have set in. For those not familiar with the phrase, I’m jokingly referring to the supposed phenomenon that people stop listening to their partners after marriage. We really do fail to listen/hear each other because we’re not really paying attention but we just repeat later. Don’t worry, it’s just a running joke.)
It occurred to me, as I was walking the laundry to the bedroom and half listening to the whole sale process update, that I’ve become remarkably hands off with certain things. Then I wondered if I’m leaving those things that are typically left to the menfolk.
Thinking back a year or so to the back-home household, I did everything that I had time for no matter whose domain it might fall in: Searching for grocery bargains/couponing, debt payoff, savings, investing, planning for the future, deciding when to buy, sell, fix and maintain the household vehicles, repairs around the house or arranging for them to happen: all the money, all the time, all my area. There were certain tasks I delegated when I ran out of time, but nothing’s out of my territory.
But time is finite, things have to fall out to others and I had to start trusting that someone else could take the reins. Sharing a household up north, I’ve stepped back to let PiC set the pace rather than just jumping in and doing everything. There was no reason, and certainly it wouldn’t be sane, with another able-bodied and fully capable adult, to take on a second household’s responsibilities solo.
But we never really discussed who would do what, formally or directly. We just did what needed to be done, day to day and month to month. I started thinking about why it was that I left the car stuff to PiC. Was I just ceding the car stuff because it was a “guy thing”?
How do we divide our labor?
We’ve trended toward the things we like best or doing the things that achieve the goals that are most important to us.
I enjoy cooking, cleaning as I go, and serving meals. It’s a thing my dad and I enjoy doing but he always took the lion’s share of the responsibility since I worked more than 60 hour weeks. Now with just the two of us, feeding ourselves isn’t really a choice and I’ve lucked out that PiC’s got an easy palate to please to boot. It also takes less out of me than vacuuming or washing floors if I’m not overly ambitious.
I love finances enough to overcome my reluctance to talk to people after a long day at work, but it’s really important to correct any financial charges or fees, and get the lowest plans so I do all the financial negotiations.
PiC loves Craigslist – I hate it. I don’t like browsing or using it. He loves Craigslisting, doesn’t mind dealing with people at all, and looooves looking at cars, specifically, and furniture. So he’s our resident used things buyer. He also really loves a clean house, or needs it more than I need one in comparison to, say, rest, so he’s the vacuum and floors master.
He’s a great sous chef but he hates new recipes while I get bored with making the same food over and over so we try new things together occasionally but oftentimes I just take over the kitchen entirely.
Physical limitations come into play so that affects the division: I’m not hauling all the heaviest stuff upstairs, but I’m the fastest errand runner/grocery shopper and laundry folder ever. And of course I’m the CFO-consultant (ahem, control freak) before any major decisions are made. (Hi, Chariot.)
We split the laundry and the Doggle duties. I really enjoy laundry duty but we have different ideas on when it should be done. He prefers to do less frequent washing but it all comes out to the same amount of washing. He catches just about all the Doggle walking, we share the Doggle bathing, but I do almost all the Doggle doctoring. Fair? Sort of. Each to their own strengths on that point – it’s because Doggle pulls like he’s in the freaking Iditarod much of the time and that’s rough. Doesn’t mean I don’t do it, just that I do it less often.
At the end of the day, I can’t say that we don’t observe some gender biases. I doubt they are specifically because of our sexes. We weren’t taught to do certain things because we were born male or female, though my parents did decline to teach me how to play a guitar because I was too little to hold one. We tend to play to our strengths and preferences according to our values.
*****
How are chores split in your family?
August 16, 2011
As I raised my fork a last time, scarfing the final bite of my turkey meatball, PiC’s expression registered in my brain.
“Whaff?”
“You didn’t even cut it up!”
I chewed. I swallowed. “Why would I? It’s the last thing I had to eat.”
“It’s huge!”
“…so? Now I’ll only remember the best stuff.”
Ah yes, after nearly (counting on my fingers now … 7? 8? years), I can still horrify my beloved future spouse with my eating habits.
Actually, the fact that I engulfed half a “huge” turkey meatball in a bite was less weird to him than the fact that I saved an entire meatball out of my bowl of pasta, brussels sprouts, and cucumber salad. But it’s what I always do. At least, it’s what I always do when staring down a food I don’t enjoy.
We all know brussels sprouts have to be done right and they were verily not done right that night. Facing still-bitter brussels sprouts, I immediately reverted to my nine-year-old self’s reliable strategy: choke down all the bad stuff first, paired with the good stuff in small amounts, save some thing really good for last to eliminate the horrid flavors to save the meal by finishing off with the best flavors again. No bad aftertaste for me!
Plus, I don’t know about your parents but the more you whined about the gross stuff, the more you risked annoying them so you shut up and you ate it. None of that napkin business, either, Eagle Eyes would give you a few dozen reasons not to sit for a week. At least that’s what I assume, never having been bold enough to try it.
I got to thinking. Didn’t he know that was normal?
If memory serves, that’s always been par for the course. If I had to do something I didn’t want to do and had the choice between Now vs. Later, I’d want to do it now so I could have all of later to myself.
If I came home from school with homework, my desk lamp flipped on and the homework was laid out to be done first … well, because I was a nerd and actually thought it was fun at first. When the shiny wore off and it was just work versus playing with the dogs or reading, I did the work first so that I could play ALL NIGHT. Never mind that I might actually go to bed in half an hour if the homework took too long, I would still work first, play after. Play after always felt more fun. It wasn’t tainted by the foreboding of stuff to do later.
As a teen, I came home on Fridays to clean my room and did the laundry. Why? Because if I did all the chores on Friday, then I had the whole weekend to do absolutely nothing I didn’t want to do. And it didn’t matter that something could come up. It would just be a blip on the radar of all that free time. Weekends were great because at least I could guarantee it wouldn’t be interrupted by anything silly like something I knew I could have done the day before.
This extended to how I felt about Things: given a cache of candy, I’d hoard it for later. It was insurance that Later, I would have treats. Same with money: everything went into a piggybank. When I had bills, I paid them and saved everything else. I couldn’t think of anything more sweet than having that cash for later, because that was security. Whatever Later was, it was better.
Time off, oh yes, I definitely hoarded paid time off. When I left one job, I had something like 350 hours of vacation time. I loved that big squeezeable number that meant if anything happened, I could take all the time off I needed to deal with it.
When I discovered Fatwallet and PF blogs in the early 2000s, it was like nerd nirvana, y’all. Savings Valhalla. So. Many. Ways. To. Save! Even now, I daydream about making six figures mostly to play-budget how much I can save.
Now, I realize this might sound insane. But this is precisely the mechanism that made it possible to do what I did for those 10 years. It’s like I was engineered to be thrilled to pay off debt (that wasn’t even mine) because “later, I’ll be happier when I’m done.” I was so focused on the outcome of “later” that the Now wasn’t an issue. The only conflict was in that the paying off debt part meant I couldn’t save, but that eventually resolved itself when I worked a (few) thousand hours of overtime to pay everything and then start saving.
*****
These days, the idea that Now Matters has sunk in.
Balance is still fairly foreign to my vocabulary, but I’m liking the idea. I think PiC has a lot to do with that because he’s very much the opposite. He enjoys the present and prefers to have his goodies now rather than later; it’s weird to me to keep running out of his favorites. He enjoys sharing good times and good foods with me and family now rather than solely focusing on the future, and this has distracted me from my intense focus more frequently. We’re finding ways to meet closer to the middle.
I spend a lot of time Now taking care of it Later, but it lies in the background more than ever before. I still love saving the best for last, still hoarding my Kit Kats but now I actually enjoy one when the craving strikes instead of pretending they don’t exist.
…. but I always refuse to eat the last one until there are more. Because I’m still a saver/hoarder at heart. 😉
Can anyone relate to this? Or am I also the circus freak among my PF friends?
{————Carnivals————}
My thanks …..
to Nelson at Financial Uproar for hosting this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and for including my post An Annual Evaluation, Belatedly. Be sure to submit to next week’s Carnival.
August 13, 2011
Our open enrollment provider’s been beating the tribal drums for WEEKS. There was this big run up to the open enrollment period with fancy brochures, posters, flyers, emails, and presentations.
It was exciting for the first few seconds except they wouldn’t let me log in when they first announced it. I have a short attention span for things that are routine these days. Since they were just doing it up big for a two-week period when they would actually let you in, I was exhausted long before launch. I want in when you tell me about it, not three weeks later.
There are only two changes planned for the upcoming year: calculating my FSA contributions and upping my commuter benefits by about $15/month because I have to take the BART more than usual and it’s expensive. I’ll double check that I’m not getting screwed on medical/dental plans but nothing is changing with them that I saw on the changes/no changes comparison table.
And our possible upcoming marriage in a few months (civil, we’re thinking) would upend the changes anyway so I’m even less fussed.
*****
What you shouldn’t forget when Open Enrolling
Medical: Did anything change? Do you need more coverage? Less coverage? (uh, doubt it?) Can you afford your premiums and copays? Do you know what they are?
Dental: Same as above
Vision: Same as above
“Extras”
Flex Spending Account (FSA): Do you know approximately what you will spend next year? Do a calculation of your copays, your medications (if any), any projected major procedures you can anticipate before you set your number. It’s a little tricky because of the use-it-or-lose-it aspect – you don’t want to overestimate and lose any money by the end of the year but it’s rather annoying to find yourself just paying out of pocket as well.
Commuter Benefits: Do you use public transit and have the option to pay pre-tax? Use it. Save yourself a bit of money and automate to boot.
Employee Assistance Program (EAP): This rarely costs anything or requires enrollment. You just need to use it if you need it. They offer all kinds of stuff: counseling for personal, family and work-related concerns, legal and financial advice, online resources, health and wellness information. You should at least check it out to see what might be there.
August 8, 2011
I grew up on a steady diet of books like Margeret Sidney’s Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (available free on Project Gutenberg!), Gertrude Chandler Warner’s The Boxcar Children, and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. (Also all the sci fi and fantasy I could get my hands on, but that’s irrelevant to this conversation.) I wondered if I’d romanticize the notion of families and raising children under less than rosy circumstances as a result of that early brainwashing.
I do think families should pull together and do whatever needs to be done to get through tough times, and I do think families should take care of each other. Obviously. But econo-philosophically, I developed in my teenage years a much more “I will never be poor again!” determination a la Gone With the Wind than any willingness to try to lead the loving but impoverished lifestyle.
That’s not to say that I think money is the answer to a good childhood or a happy home life. I grew up poor, as a first generation immigrant kid. My parents arrived on these shores with nothing but the clothes on their back and a babe in their arms. But we were, in my opinion, still relatively well off: we didn’t have to beg, dig through bins for leavings to put food on the table. Mom and Dad found just enough opportunity to work incredibly hard, and we kids pitched in as well, we used hand me downs and didn’t shop new until I was a teenager so our basic needs were always filled. But we did live on the edge of poor, spiral-dancing that line between not having much and poverty.
And we can’t deny that money is one of the major factors that may have significant impact on the outcomes of a child’s life. While I suspect that much of my sibling’s manipulative and attentive seeking behaviors were natural, I did also see that he was quite affected by having less than others, and not having our parents around enough during those formative years to instill the sense of confidence and gratitude for what we did have certainly didn’t help. If I’m having kids and there’s any external factor that I can influence to prevent the development of risky behaviors, it’ll be my job to do it.
From a purely practical standpoint, there’s no question that having financial freedom does make life more manageable these days. Leaving aside the luxuries, being able to easily make ends meet and still have time to spend with your little ones are core requirements of having them to begin with, to my thinking.
The thing that was missing from my childhood, though, was a chance to spend real time with my parents. Time “with” Mom and Dad was helping them at work, or doing chores with them at home. Or the talks at night after dinner if they weren’t too busy or tired. While I didn’t precisely resent it at the time, I was always sad we rarely did much as a family. I definitely do regret it now that I’ve lost the chance to truly enjoy their later years with them.
***
When I envisioned that stage of my life, I simply could not see choosing to start a family at a low-earning point in my career knowing that I would have to miss key years of my childrens’ lives while fighting an uphill climb of long hours and probably political battles to advance. Looking forward, it was just unlikely that our generation was going to be settled into a single and easy career straight out of college. So far, that’s definitely been the case.
***
Now that I prepare to move into that stage of my life, it seems like whether or not I’ll be having a family of my own is a question I should have an answer for. But I don’t.
I don’t know if I want children.
That’s basically blasphemy around some of these parts. I’ve caught the lecture that “children are the reason you get married.” Because you couldn’t possibly want to have a partner without procreation following quickly thereafter. That was a disconcerting moment, coming from someone nearly ten years younger than me. I expect it from the (specifically judgy individuals of the) older generation: we’re selfish, we’re lazy, and we’re [fill in the blank] if we don’t have kids. But it’s weird when a youngun judges you for maybe not wanting kids.
I don’t know if I don’t want children, either.
As a teen, I was certain that they weren’t in my future. Other people’s children were adorable, but every child has obnoxious mode. I babysat them all the time and most of them were cute some of the time but they invariably turned into Gremlins and they did not wait for a predictable trigger like feeding after midnight or being splashed with water so it just wasn’t worth the effort. And I mean: childbirth. Ugh.
More than ten years later, it’s not the idea of children that is shudderingly bad but rather the concern about motherhood that looms. My health issues aren’t getting any better so how could I be a fully present, fully capable mother? And I worried enough about my sibling, could I take on the challenge if I had a kid like my sibling? With no intentions of projecting that expectation on my spawn, I still have to be aware that there is a chance that one or more children might inherit whatever combination of whatever led to that mess, and do my best to guide him or her out of it before it became a real disaster.
To further complicate things, I can’t be certain that I’m capable of working full time and managing a pregnancy or raising a child. The responsibilities of taking care of Doggle alone, who is fairly low-key, are enough to take up my limited reserves. And I can’t count on getting better. It hasn’t happened yet.
Adoption was always my go-to option but again, children deserve time, attention and require energy.
I wanted this to be my decision, and the right decision for me and my spouse. But it’s one of those I’ve not felt strongly for or against, other than not making a mistake. When do you know you’re ready for kids? How do you know that you know, if you were never completely certain from the very beginning that you wanted to have them?
Once in a while, I find myself second-guessing my decisions. Should I really have waited this long, even though I’ve never felt that driving urge to have children? PiC really wants a family and perhaps I could have physically handled it earlier? I certainly thought I was making the wisest choices at the time, but was it really?
Once upon a time, I swatted away the cautionary notes, the “there won’t ever be a good time”s, the “if you don’t now, then when?”s like annoying gnats. But I’m finally there. On the cusp of my thirties, I’m at the point where I have to admit that for childbearing, I’m not getting any younger. It’s time to make some real decisions, even if not yet time to commit.
August 7, 2011
It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Over six months, in fact. I have been keeping track of some months but it’s been sporadic. Life has been consuming.
In the past six months I’ve ….
– been traveling which still hasn’t been fully documented.
– loving my Doggle (talk about for better or for worse!)
– started, stopped, got sick of planning, budgeted for (on paper), and started saving for a wedding that I still haven’t actually started planning again.
– consolidated all of our phones onto a cheaper cell plan to save money.
– gone to My Mecca (SDCC) with bloggy friend.
– generally worked on surviving the master plan of earning my way up the ladder. I need a new plan, this one is beyond exhausting and doesn’t leave any time for real life.
There was far more spending than saving in the daily scheme of things but in the background, the automated investing and savings allocations are ticking along, doing their jobs. I had a glance over my Vanguard funds’ performance the past four months to find that they’ve horrifically lost all their gains of this year:
Huge losses. Just huge. Given the turmoil in the government this month, I can’t say August’s losses were a surprise but it’s an eye-opener.
And except for that last item (working my tuchus off) which, though it paid off, has me pondering those workaholism tendencies, infiltrating all corners of my life again, it’s not necessarily the worst way to have spent many months. More rest, though, would be wonderful, and I want (nay, need) to see far more progress in the savings ledger in upcoming months.
With the state of the economy, the uncertainty of the jobs market, the recent downgrade of the credit rating, it’s time to do massively better.
This isn’t just prompted by general concern for the state of the union or personal insecurity, though. I’ve done that “what happens in case of a layoff” exercise a thousand times. And I’ve done it in real time. This isn’t that faux-planning; this stems from wanting to grow beyond the rat race.
When I start making choices in the near future, I want real choices, not just be limited to picking from the limited array that my employer at the time is offering. Which means that if we want One Frugal Girl’s flexibility if we decide to start a family and get thrown a curveball in the process, or if we want to consider adoption, or we want to move out of the Bay Area, we definitely need financial security in multiple forms.
Besides, working into an early grave isn’t precisely the endgoal, and staying in this routine, driven by my need to achieve in the confines of a traditional environment, is setting myself up for that very thing.
