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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January 17, 2010
Daily exercise update, Friday: Ankle weights were not the death of me but they were put up for the day. No use tempting fate, after all. Walked many many blocks in kitten heels post-meeting searching for the perfect grill pan, and even did one set of these stairs. Never found the pan and was pooped the rest of the day.
Daily exercise update, Saturday: Walked to an enormous park with muddy hills and watched dogs chase each other and other various oddments for hours. Stopped at a mall and discount store afterward and logged a few more almost leisurely miles.
Helping abroad: The devastation in Haiti breaks my heart, and the ensuing chaos of trying to get aid to the island and set up infrastructure has been frustrating.
After much contemplation about the donation options available, I’ve decided to support the Haiti cause by donating to Doctors without Borders. I’m skipping the quick and easy donation options like texting because I need to know the money is being sent directly and immediately to the right people. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to minimize the time and maximize the money. To further stretch the donation dollars, I’ve asked a friend whose company matches donations up to a certain dollar amount each year to donate through his work for me. It’ll be in his name, but that’s a worthwhile trade-off of a tax deduction for essentially doubling the pot.
Doctors without Borders on Charity Navigator.
Things to consider: I love The Lost Goat’s timing and thoughtfulness on this subject. She covers some essential concerns I had to address before making my donation decision. Number four is why I’m not donating to the American Red Cross and several other charities during this time.
Also, be sure to check Flexo’s post on Safe Donations to Victims of the Earthquake in Haiti.
January 15, 2010
Back in November, I enjoyed the pleasure of my friends’ company in their well-appointed timeshare in Hawaii.
There are many financial reasons not to buy a timeshare: they’re expensive, they require a substantial upfront fee, they require substantial annual maintenance fees, and unless you’re willing and able to buy a more premium tier in whatever program you buy into – they’re very hard to unload.
My friends, Dee and Jay, don’t have any of the above problems. In their previous lives as relatively high level executives more than ten years ago, Dee purchased three timeshares which they enjoy to this day.
Another friend Bea, my age, bought a timeshare back in 2005. The math she described to me didn’t sound like a wise purchase but I have the benefit of hindsight.
She took out a loan for $14,000 for the base cost of the timeshare, and pays an additional $1200 per year for maintenance fees. Her timeshare works on a points system so for her purchase she receives 7,000 points per year for redemption towards any property in the system. Redemption works much like hotel points. She has the flexibility to hold points from one year to the next, and to borrow and advance from the upcoming year so she can essentially triple her buying power in a trio of years.
The problem here is that at 23, she owed $60,000 in school loans, and at least $20,000 in credit card debt. When she earned her Master’s degree and was making $60,000/year, not an awful lot of that money was paying down the debts, and she was continually spending more money. She admits that a good deal of that money frivolously, like that time she blew through the mall on a $300 shopping spree. I witnessed that one, she told me about a few others of varying costs.
With that shaky background, she finally hit the skids when she was laid off for several months last year and had to live off her modest savings – unemployment just covered her rent. And now that she’s found the guy she wants to marry (this year), the timeshare costs are keeping her from saving because she’s not making enough to pay all the bills and debts and save.
Worse, due to the stint of unemployment, she’s currently upside down on the loan so she must sell it for the amount she owes which is much more than other owners are pricing their ‘shares. It’s definitely a buyer’s market.
From what she’s told me, I can identify the basic warning signs that were ignored:
1. Her existing debts were quite significant.
2. There was no plan to quickly eliminate that debt.
3. She hadn’t factored the cost into her cost of living in case she lost her job.
4. The timeshare wasn’t considered “high value” which has more options and can be more easily sold.
5. An insufficient emergency fund.
My instinct when people are in financial difficulties is to jump in and offer to help, but we all know how well unsolicited advice is often taken. If she wants my help, she knows I’m more than happy to lend an ear and a hand, but in the meantime, I’m wondering what I would advise to start her on a debt-free journey.
As a salaried employee, she can count on the paycheck to be consistent but at the same time, that means that she has to look elsewhere to make extra money.
1. Accept that money will be tight for a while
2. Honestly evaluate all wants and needs, and decide what level of commitment you’re willing to make towards paying down the debt
3. Hunker down and start cutting away any fat in the budget (there IS a budget, right?), putting all the money toward debt and savings
4. Make some realistic decisions about the prospective wedding
5. Consider ways to generate extra income to put towards the debt
6. Start an emergency fund
I’d say that given her career choice in the education field and the non-existent hiring she’s described, this is probably enough to work on for the next six months.
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Daily Exercise Update: I found 3 pound wrist/ankle weights at Target, and proceeded to walk in them for an hour. A veritable cripple I may be by the time you read this. Pity me.
January 14, 2010
Daily exercise update: About 15-20 minutes of brisk walking, skipped the weights.
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Back in 1998, I sat down for a career chat with my history teacher. Thinking he’d have some insight, and privately perhaps even be flattered, I asked what he thought of my majoring in history.
He laughed.
It probably wasn’t that I was bad at the subject, though in hindsight, I certainly lacked that spark of brilliance you associate with the historians with a scent for the stories behind every door. It was that, as he baldly stated, unless I wanted to teach high school level or below, or was prepared to make very little money for the kind of education I’d need to pursue a Ph.D. and then have to fight and scrabble for years in academia for the scraps towards a tenured position — it’s not worth it.
As a Native American, he said, he had the benefit of the Indian scholarships for college and his graduate degree. Without that, he would have been deeply in debt and doubtlessly would have had to make more than a few compromises in terms of lifestyle and career choices. He wasn’t living in high style by any means, but he and his family were comfortable because his education had been paid for and he had more freedom to choose from good programs without concern about repaying undergraduate debt.
Nice circumstances that we can’t all replicate of course, but that’s not the point. The point is that that’s the first and only time I ever encountered a teacher specifically counseling for or against a particular course of action by taking into consideration the real life circumstances.
No generic platitudes or pie in the sky rationalizations that vaguely assure you that people will retire and hand over their cush jobs for me. Just the truth, thanks.
This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (via Moneyapolis) with its handy list of financial qualifications for pursuers of higher education in the humanities further supports my eventual decision not to take a Masters in English Literature or some other liberal arts program.
Personally, I’m grateful. At that point a reality check was no bad medicine because it got me thinking about practical things like making a living and sustainable professions. Not a bad seed to plant in a 16 year old’s mind.
Ten years later, everyone remembers him as the loud and mean history teacher, I remember him as the guy who reminded me that once you get out of school, you’re in the real world with consequences and bills.
January 13, 2010
Daily Exercise Update: Speed-schlepped 500 yards carrying about 15 pounds of bulk in my turtle shell-like backpack.
Genetically anomalous tidbit: I have a male friend whose mother and aunts are all color blind. All the males descended from that matriarchal line are colorblind, except him. Oh, chi square, what happened?
Posts in other places: Read the post up at the Carnival of Personal Finance site about my fun times with having my identity exposed. (I had to reword that so as not to imply the CoPF site did the exposing.)
January 12, 2010
Daily exercise update: My legs were screaming at me, I had to pass.
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Pure indulgence I always thought Amazon Prime was, for the infrequent buyer like me. While free two-day shipping and zero minimum orders would be awesome, I’d never really had an issue with bundling orders and filler items. I avoid filler items, actually, but that’s beside the point.
That $79/year may not seem like a whole lot over the course of a year, it’s just under $7 a month, but I always knew there were better uses for my almost $100. It seemed kind of like the skip to the front of the line pass at an amusement park. I don’t mind lines so much in good company, so it never seemed worth it.
So I never knew, and none of the reviews I’d ever read of the service ever mentioned, that an Amazon Prime membership holder can actually invite up to four household members to use their services. You could potentially split that membership more than two ways to defray the cost of a Prime membership to a more reasonable $20 or $30/year if you really wanted the luxury of fast and awfully cheap (you are still paying the membership fee, after all) shipping.
This could be useful if you’ve got family members away at college: they’d be able to save on shipping for *ahem* textbooks, and such. You know, the school type stuff. 😉
January 11, 2010
Daily Exercise Update: I spent 20+ minutes at the park playing with a friend’s 15-month-old daughter. Aka, chasing tiny little gigglefest around sand and dirt. I feel creaky.
Please check out this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance at Darwin’s Finance!
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I’m due for a good overhaul.
Not only have I done nothing about the previous list of repairs, I’ve gone and racked up another couple To Dos: the heater’s gone out since we last discussed the ole horseless carriage, and it’s time for another oil change. Already.
This is the flip side of loving an old car. And I doubt I’ve got time to rack up enough Driver’s Edge purchase point credits to apply towards the repair costs because I derailed that plan with the credit card promotions I wanted to fulfill. Ooops. That was my fault, I just didn’t think about the poor timing and make a better final decision.
Keeping the two plans separated should not have been too difficult. Typically I’d accomplish one goal, earning points on the Driver’s Edge card first with only normal spending, and then move on to the next set of credit cards. But while we’re second guessing decisions here, let’s calculate the cost-benefit of splitting up my spending across the three cards for promos. I’ve got a nice spreadsheet for tracking the promotions:
Chase Sapphire: $100 cash ($6 spent)American Express: $150 in GCs ($1100 spent)
Citi Forward: $100-110 in GCs ($250 spent)
Had I collected that spending ($1356) on the Driver’s Edge card, I would have earned 1356 points, which translates into $13.56 in Driver’s Edge dollars. That frees up the same amount of Drive mile dollars ($13.56).
On second thought, the net gain is higher this way because even doubled (by adding the existing Drive miles points in dollar value), I’d still have less than $50 to spend on repairs. The Chase promotion, paid in cash, more than covers that amount.
I made the right decision there, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve still got to get the car to the shop. We’re only a few thousand miles away from a 100,000 mile check, too, so I should gird myself for spending a fair chunk of the car maintenance fund on this set of repairs. Wish me luck!
January 10, 2010
Well-Heeled’s sort of convinced me to join her small army of Jillianators. Almost. There’s something creepy about the name “Shredders.” Oh, right, Shredder a la hunter of Ninja Turtles! No no, I can’t be part of that.
I don’t have any interest in losing weight, or getting toned ’cause I’m happy with the shape of my body. I am interested, however, in regaining some of my lost stamina. Y’see, I just realized that I’ve been saying, “when I was in shape, I could ….” for ten years. That’s right, this year is my ten-year reunion. Not that I’m going ….
My physical activity’s just fallen off a cliff since high school. I did martial arts, I rode horseback, I ran track, and I remember being 17 years old, swearing that my workout routines would not change one iota once I started college.
I meant well, and hung on for a few more years. Then life got in the way. Between my joints, which had been steadily deteriorating, and 80-hour work and school weeks, I couldn’t keep up the active lifestyle. After graduating, work consumed my life, and the constant joint pain meant high impact was off the table. All I knew was high impact, I was the fishy not allowed to swim anymore! [Ironically, I can’t swim.] I blinked, and my ability to exercise for three hours at a time was just … gone!
It felt like it happened overnight, but that’s not the case. It’s taken this long to accept that getting back to exercise means starting at the very beginning like I’m a freshman in high school but with the joints and fatigue of an 75-year-old and finding a new level of fitness. Not acting like I can do everything just like when I was 18. That was the key to my failure every other time I worked out. Haunted by ghosts of What I Used To Do, I’d push myself far beyond my abilities and end up flat on my back.
Older and wiser, I’m going to join the periphery of the group by taking up my own challenge of working from 20 up to 30 minutes of free form cardio activity each day. It’s nice to have a sense of solidarity, even if it’s virtual.
As a tester, I did 20 mins of wind sprints with a dash of free weights yesterday. I’m going to hang at 20 minutes for a while because my knees were like jelly afterward. But I didn’t reach the point of severe bedridden pain.
As hard as it is to start over, I can’t wait to experience the joy of exercise again. The endorphins, the hard-earned sweat that clears out your pores, the yellow cake I’d bake from a 99 cent mix and eat afterward. Awesome.
If anyone is interested in the Shred, head on over to Well-Heeled’s and join the group! If you just want to hang out and chuckle at my geriatric efforts, you’re more than welcome. Chime in at any time if you have low-impact activity suggestions to add to the mix.
Oh, and don’t be surprised if my daily updates all start with “I almost died.” I’ll mean it, every time.
