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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May 29, 2010
Remember that I’m hosting this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance so please submit!
$5K Challenge Reporting: I’m in a holding pattern this week, a paltry $50 check trickled in yesterday but three major invoices are still outstanding. My hope is that they all come in this weekend but it is a holiday weekend.
Total: $2,229.18 [44%]
How did you do?
Speaking of holiday weekends, I’m so relieved it’s here. Work’s been running me right off my feet everyday and only careful planning and advance cooking from the previous weekend ensured that a hearty dinner was on the table by 8 pm every night.
My exhilarating plans include catching up on sleep, bills, playing with the Guest pup one more time before the owners return, preparing the Carnival for your viewing pleasure and setting up a recalcitrant printer/scanner that’s refused to work since moving. Maybe even catching a movie with a friend who suddenly showed up in Oakland. Oh and there will definitely be eating. I’m on the prowl for new recipes to try – please share any of your comfort food recipes!
What have y’all got on tap?
May 26, 2010
Watching MythBusters, I wondered if any or all of the hosts are actually as mechanically, engineerically or otherwise functionally ingenious enough to independently conceive, develop and execute their experiments that they demonstrate for the benefit of the masses. Like Zach and Hodgens from Bones, y’know?
Naturally, that led to wondering if mutual friends who are engineers or mechanical genii (genius, plural) would view this show with rather more skepticism than I, and then, of course, I start wondering what I’ve done with my life since high school.
That path of inquiry has been grooved deeply into my musings, though rather subsumed by the more immediate and urgent call of living life, as I approach a milestone graduation anniversary.
As it happens, I’m not attending this event because….
A) they’re charging more than $100 for admission per ticket (plus flight),
B) I already keep in touch with 90% of the friends I wanted to stay in touch with,
C) In addition to running into 30% of the people I’d be quite happier never seeing again,
D) With no doubt that the 10% I DO want to see won’t actually be there.
Despite my resolution to save both time and money, the event itself continues to engenders these musings.
It’s a perplexing sense of insecurity, or a close cousin thereof, that leads me to question why I’ve not yet become an expert martial artist, developed a craft, attained mastery of some incredibly useful survivalist training in the event of near-complete global disaster. (And yet, I’ve had no interest in that show, Survivor.) Or at least completed graduate education.
Now, I’ve been kicking about the PF blogosphere for years, bouncing around among some major achievers whose blogs have grown exponentially, admiring personalities glowing through the internets garnering praise, media attention, and financial success both related and not to their blogs. From time to time, I turn over the same mental stones about the path to blogger success that Funny about Money articulates in her A PF Blogger’s Glass Ceiling? That doesn’t make me feel smaller than I am, nor do I feel compelled to compare myself to bigger and better blogs to my detriment.
Why then does the memory of high school and the person I thought I’d be by now (delusional teenager that I was) make me step back and wonder: What have I done with myself?
I think it’s something to do with the habit of competing against myself. Perhaps there’s also a touch of competing with others but at the end of the day, when you’re laboring to achieve as much as you once dreamed, you’ve set up a tough crowd to impress.
My voice of reason finally pipes up with admonishments that competing with anyone, including yourself, for the sake of winning at life is sheer foolishness. Living life well and happily is all one needs.
It’s just disconcerting that that memory of high school can so viscerally project itself over the panarama of my real life.
Wise Words
The grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it.
Stacking Pennies
“…it’s just that the things I’ve accomplished haven’t really been plans, just things I fell into.”
Mrs. Micah
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning
May 25, 2010
I’m not big on summer or high season travel but this year’s trips have suddenly piled up as a California highway is wont to do on any given day. Not having the itineraries settled was annoying me at odd times. Completely inappropriately like, say, during meetings my brain chose not to attend. In keeping with my neuroses, I’ve started a joint expenses tracking spreadsheet to total up this year’s travel spending now that Partner in Crime and I are in the same area at the same time.
So we sat down with pencil and paper (seriously!), computers and calendars to map out the summer months.
Airfare is no joke, folks.
I’ve been juicing the value of some Southwest credits (just over $600) to pay for my travel to attend a graduation, the Comic-Con expeditions, and had a little left over for a solo trip that PiC is taking. I have no interest in traveling 3 weekends out of 5 in a month, so he’s on his own for that one. They actually stretched to pay for 7 one-way trips so that’s a big fat sigh of relief, but it most certainly did not cover the wedding in LA.
Road trip! And over the holiday weekend, that last. Pray for me!
With only $100+ in the travel fund, covering my share of the rental car, food, comics, and any other gifts from Con will be an interesting challenge. Though, let’s be honest, if I do well enough on the current savings challenge, I will share some of that bounty with … myself.
I’m also hoarding a couple other travel credits (a free round trip and some other airline credits) in case my hypothesized short vacation to see a host of relatives and friends on the East Coast this fall proves true. But that’s a whole other story. For now, I plan to be a complete homebody in the months of August and September.
What does this summer hold in store for you?
May 24, 2010
While I apply for regular credit cards with almost reckless abandon to get a new round of bonuses every year (no more than 3 per year, noted on a spreadsheet for maximum bonus and cancellation efficiency), my store credit cards have been limited to Macy’s (unused), Victoria’s Secret (unused) and Best Buy (long since canceled).
And now, Banana Republic. On my Desperate for a Sweater shopping trip, there were no coupons or sales. Le horror! Unfortunately, I simply wouldn’t have time to shop again for weeks and I wasn’t going to survive another week in the frozen tundra of an office space so I bit the bullet and bought a lightly discounted sweater.
Confronted by the usual “do you have a store card, and do you want to sign up for a 20% discount today?” I halfheartedly waved the baited hook away until I realized that that was the only worthwhile discount option. No gift cards in hand, no coupons, no cashback. It was the store card or nearly full price. My bargain dependent heart couldn’t take it and so I did. Take the card, that is. Oddly enough, I promptly forgot about the card. Three weeks later, it appeared in the mail, I paid the bill and noted the various ways they get you to keep the card:
1. Bonus points for purchases at their stores
2. Loyalty tiers for spending at least $800. per year.
3. Cash outs for every 1000 points, which means any points that are leftover are held prisoner until you spend more.
4. Bonus points for making a purchase outside their stores within 30 days of activation. This is to get you accustomed to spending with their card all the time.
I’ll keep it open long enough to benefit from the bonus point for signing up for paperless statements (500 points) and for making an outside purchase (2000 points). That nets me a $30 credit. But beyond that, is it worth keeping this card?
May 23, 2010
This is the clearest, possibly best round of chicken stock cooked up yet!
As I write this, I’m watching people on the water with my feet hiked up on a deck chair, squinting in the sun. Max brightness setting has nothing on the direct sunlight! I’ve been firmly scolded that weekends are not for working. Luckily, I did bust my butt to finish up a major project two weeks early just so I could invoice it out and claim that income for this challenge, so I can cooperate with my “orders” to rest and relax.
The reports on the challenge for last week:
Ciawy saved $215 of the intended $250 per week, brought lunch and snacks to work every day and fell to the siren call of the farmers’ market. But she bought fruit so I can’t really argue with that!
Candace of Cody and Candace saved another $124 which brings her to 57% of the goal.
The Fit Lounge committed to saving at least $1000.
Anyone else out there? @ConvertingMe? @tiredofbeingbroke? Frugal Scholar? Funny about Money? I know you’re working at it, and I’d love to hear about your progress!
My progress this week was incremental again: $2,179.18 [43%]
Not so incidentally: Single Ma is tearing up the Fitness part of this challenge, blogging about it every day AND experiencing all the glorious ups and downs of training.
May 21, 2010
Speaking of weddings ….
The furthest distance I’ve ever traveled for a wedding was Miami. [2348 miles]
The furthest distance I’ve been invited to go is Greece (no go, sadly). [6900 miles]
Before age 25, the furthest I’d ever gone was Atlanta, and that was also the furthest I’d been invited to travel. [2190 miles]
The lowest cost (to me) destination wedding attended: Nashville [$350]
The highest cost (to me) destination wedding attended: Miami [$500]
The lowest cost (for them) wedding attended: Los Angeles [under $100]
The highest cost (for them) wedding attended: tie between Miami and Napa [both were six-figure weddings]
May 19, 2010
It’s amazing how much you can get done without a regular 9 to 5 taking up most of your day. Your day can start as, well-rested and refreshed, you have that leisurely cup of coffee or tea, basking in the morning sun with the paper. Work and errands are queued up, run on your schedule and so much more gets done.
Or does it?
Sometimes, after a round of several appointments and errands I’d feel terribly accomplished, but there was a sneaking suspicion that it simply wasn’t sustainable productivity. After all, it was rarely producing any income. On the flip side, getting up pre-dawn for work five days a week and squeezing in the personal stuff when and if you can feels so constrictive that the lure of the open schedule is a siren song. Of course, that alone is hardly good reason to stop working full time and I’d be unhappy if I weren’t being productive and earning money to hoard like a treasure-loving dragon.
There are days, though, that the idea of building an empire of something that is nearly self-sustaining, doesn’t require endless meetings to keep alive or keep moving, and doesn’t rely on the vagaries of a single entity for survival is awfully enticing. That and all the new Dr. Who and Caprica episodes that I know I’m missing are nibbling away at my patience. Ok, again, I know, not a valid reason. As a reforming workaholic, I claim right of not yet knowing how to balance work and play.
Have you considered the merits and drawbacks of being your own boss? If you could make an honest and respectable (however you define that number) wage, would you?
Mrs Micah recently asked Are You Ready to Become Your Own Boss?
I know that’s Nicole of RainyDaySaver‘s goal;
VH of Funny About Money is doing quite well sort of running her own show between the CopyEditor’s Desk and her community college classes;
Mrs. Money’s really liking the idea of ditching her full time position because she’s not happy with her job, thence to perhaps become a SAHM for at least a year;
On the other side of the fence, Paranoid Asteroid has no intentions of going freelance or entrepreneurial, and several people agree with her. Unfortunately I can’t find that post!
Which side of the fence do you prefer?
