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
Read More
March 3, 2009
While still employed
~ Complete as many Professional Development classes as possible. I might, if I stay employed through April and get off the wait list for one set of classes, manage to get enough classes in before the layoff to complete my Certificate in Management. *cross your fingers for me!*
~ If there’s space, or I get de-waitlisted, I’d like to take Excel and Illustrator classes. We’ll see about approval.
~ A friend’s fiance is a freelance web designer who is willing to teach me web design and programming skills. Whoo! I’m calling it an “apprenticeship” for now, I’ll do work for him, he’ll teach me how, and maybe when I get good, he’ll hire me on! We’ll see. For now, I want to learn some basics since I’m pretty clueless. It’ll come in handy here and professionally.
~ In other good news, when they changed our retirement plan last July, we were automatically vested. So whenever the axe falls, I get to roll whatever little money accrued from my first two years into my existing retirement plan. Since I didn’t contribute anything, it should be qualified for a relatively hassle free rollover. It’s good for a few hundred, I figure. I just hope that it can also be sent into my 403(b) as well. (Hope hope hope).
~ Do the math. Well-Heeled reminded me that if I do that math, unemployment will cover a good amount of my household expenses, even with 3.5 people. So I can breathe a little easier knowing that my e-fund will last longer than previously anticipated. (Now I have to do the math to see how much longer that means.)
~ Need to settle the final details and applications for: renter’s insurance, long term care insurance, life insurance, safety deposit box, my will. Whatever I can get employer rates on (LTC, for one) and is portable is a priority.
March 2, 2009
At the worst of times, I prefer to be proactive more than reactive. Yes, it’s a control thing. It’s also an attitude and optimism thing. Or maybe just an attitude & control thing. Whatever, instead of just fruitlessly moping and hoping, I’m running a little mini-series of things under my control.
This week, I’ll be publishing daily lists as a reminder that there’s always something productive to do rather than sinking into depression. I refuse to let worry and fear dictate my agenda, career and life. The weighty concerns of the economy, at macro and micro scales, are not being dismissed, just given their due measure of consideration and no more than that.
Some of these I’ve actually managed to complete already, so I already have a sense of accomplishment! Nothing like loading the die in your favor. 🙂
Organizing Money and Life:
~
Reviewing my system for money management
~ Converting my one solitary paper bond
~ Roll over an old Rollover IRA from WAMU to Vanguard, eliminating a $25 annual fee
~ Opting out of creepy search/indexing sites. Thanks to Little Miss Moneybags for the heads-up about some of these sites. I hate the fact that there are kids ten+ years younger than me, with my not terribly common name, posting on Facebook and MySpace so that if you Googled my name, you’d get the impression that I’m a 19 year old lacking in all common grammar and syntax capabilities. The idea that my name, age, address, phone number, and family members‘ names can be searched and paid for? Oh no. No way, buddy.
On a similar note, Frugal Zeitgeist’s Faceoff covers many reasons why I neither Facebook nor MySpace. I do use LinkedIn because it’s primarily professional, but am cautious about what I post there as well. Friends think I’m paranoid when I won’t let them tag my photos, or share my personal info online, but there’s a good reason for it. You’ve all heard of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, right? Well, it’s the same concept: so many of us have widespread networks that it’s inconceivable that all my personal-life photos would remain personal, and out of my professional world.
Perhaps I work with a larger population of creepy people than most, but I’ve had coworkers who would window stalk me whenever I stepped out for lunch, and eavesdrop on every conversation. One dude would literally run from one office to the next at the sound of laughter, determined to find the source of conversation and join in even when it was private. If people are comfortable doing that in person, how much more convenient would cyber-stalking be? The notion that someone can easily access information about me, whether I know them or not, for personal amusement or gain, is far outside my realm of comfort. I also know someone who sits around and Googles names to see what information they can find. I’d rather keep available information to an absolute minimum.
With the job search, I’ve considered a professional Twitter, but I doubt it. The benefits have to far outweigh the cost and risk of having more personal information floating out there on the web.
March 1, 2009
Not only is WAMU still charging the stupid $25 annual fee for 2009, they’re also charging a $75 distribution fee, costing my already depleted IRA fund a total of $100 in fees. Unbelievable. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to retain half the value of my original contributions. Then again, I only had several months to contribute at that employer after I turned 21, and before I quit, so it wasn’t a huge amount of money to begin with.
I would have balked, and did mentally, but sting though it might, this is the smarter long-term choice. Paying a hundred dollars now to roll the remaining money into my current employer’s plan under Vanguard is the equivalent of 4 years’ worth of annual fees. That money better be sitting in the retirement account for much longer than 4 more years! That’s my breakeven point.
This should have been done as soon as I established my retirement plan with the current employer, but I didn’t realize that it could be incorporated into my 403(b) without tax implications. In retrospect, it’s already cost me more than a hundred dollars in fees (a $40 distribution fee was charged when I first rolled it over). This is for keeps because I’m signed up for Vanguard’s emailing service which eliminates annual fees on my accounts and I have enough money in Vanguard to just keep it there once I leave this employer.
Just another stupid tax from back when I didn’t know to look out for fees charged for moving my money around. Come to think of it, I was shocked by the $40 distribution fee back in 2004, and could have sworn that I asked about it, but cannot for the life of me remember what the answer was. The cost of naivete and inexperience.
February 28, 2009
| Retirement Savings |
Rollover IRA: $948
Roth IRA: $4,079
401(a): $4,629
403(b): $10,759
Total: $ 20,415 (22,027)
|
| Emergency Savings |
Catastrophe: $ 23,816
Problem Cushion: $ 1,000
Total: $24,816 (22,291)
|
| Short Term Goals |
Car Maintenance: $517
Car Insurance: $1,474
Travel/Con: $400
Taxes: $3,522
Moving: $1,465
Total: $ 7,278 (7,229)
|
| Long Term Goals |
House Down Payment: $101
|
| Investment Loans |
Prosper-ish: $12,630
Personal Loan: $4,000
Savings Bond: $362 (current accrued value)
Total: $ 16,992 (17,998)
|
| Total Assets |
Illiquid: $ 20,415
Semi-Liquid: $16,992
Liquid: $24,816
Expense Acct: $9,039
Goals Savings: $7,278
Total: $ 78,640 (74,072)
|
| Debt and Liabilities |
AX: $183
Citi 2: $122
Chase: $142
Rent: $1,360
Total: $ 1807 (2,525)
|
| Net Worth |
$ 76,833 (71,547)
|
This month’s net worth brought to you by A Series of (Un)fortunate Events:
1 truck sale, rather nice, actually.
1 car crash and totaled car, rather unfortunate.
1 set of nervous willies wherein I call in the loan in $1000 increments. This doesn’t affect the net worth as it’s just moving the money from one asset class to another. Slowly relieving stress here.
The most significant factor was the truck sale. It simultaneously removed the rest of the loan (liability) and supplemented my raided expense account.
Salting away money into the emergency fund helps, but there may be a bit of a drop when I pay my taxes. I have to review the paperwork one more time, because I kind of think (hope!) the accountant did something wrong for me to owe as much as he says I do. Either way, I should start emotionally letting go of that money saved for taxes. Probably shouldn’t have included it in the net worth to begin with, since it now feels like it’s “mine.” Well, it is, but you know what I mean.
February 27, 2009
My worlds of Twitter and blog haven’t converged, though it may seem to have done so in my mind, so I’m posting thanks to a reminder from SFOrdinaryGirl about my recent car rental.
El papa forgot to mention that he needed a car all day on Saturday until Friday night. Yar! I was expecting some car rental fees over the weekends since they can just use my car during the week, but we don’t share as well if I want to do anything but sit at home 7 days a week. With the pressure to job hunt, I’ve been doing that anyway, but I needed my car last weekend. So with about 12 hours notice, I had to get my bargain hunter on and try to find a cheap rental for the following morning.
My usual go-tos, Enterprise, Dollar, and Budget were all out because I required a one-day rental, and all their local offices were closed on Sundays. [Can I just say? That made me downright grumpy. How can you be a business that involves time-based charges and not be open 7 days a week? How can you be closed to rentals or returns on Sunday? GAH. It’s a little bit like being charged in a hotel or a hospital where you have to check out … except there’s one day of the week you can’t! Ok, enough ranting.]
Weekend rentals at Enterprise are usually 50% off, so the car would have cost about $70-ish Friday through Sunday.
Except 1) you can’t return cars on Sunday and 2) it was Friday night and far too late to get a weekend rental.
On the phone with BFF, she suggested that I use her AAA discount to help defray the costs, and while poking around the internets together, she suggested Hertz. Normally, I avoid Hertz like the credit-card charging plague they are, but looked at their site anyway. I mean, I was striking out everywhere else!
And lo: the skies opened and brought me the Hertz One Weekend Day FREE rental deal. No kidding, they quoted me $13.99 in taxes and airport location rental fees for an economy car.
I searched for a catch, an obligation, a must-do and came up empty. They were serious about this “Buy None Get 1 Free” deal.
With no little amount of doubt and perturbation, the reservation was made. The next morning, other than a 45 minute wait in line thanks to a customer in front of me having difficulties with her reservation, the rental was simple. “You have a free day, sign on the line, you have an additional driver, sign on the line, go get your car!”
Huh. Well, no complications except they gave us a frickin’ Toyota Prius and I had no clue how to turn it on. Power button? What? This is a for-real car, right?
Driving difficulties aside, the rental ended up being less than they quoted me, and they didn’t even charge for my dad as an additional driver. (Normally a $10 fee. The agent didn’t even mention the fee or the discount.) And it took me 36 hours before I asked myself, why did I even do that? Why didn’t I just let him rent it in his name? It’s not like I wouldn’t have paid anyway. The whole ten bucks.
The promotion runs through the end of March, and is good once a month so if you had actual need for a rental this month and next, you could get your free day twice. You have this last weekend to get it in, though.
Caveat: I did not take any extras like the insurance, GPS or any other add-ons. The additional driver would normally cost you, I assume that waiting patiently for nearly an hour was my free pass. And I didn’t even pay for gas because the 70 miles driven didn’t put a dent in the gas tank.
Caveat Emptor: I’m not getting paid to promote Hertz in any way – I’m just happy about the deal and wanted to share.
February 26, 2009
As I whined on Twitter, thus shall I whine here about the conversion of my paper bonds to electronic bonds:
1. Treasury Direct’s log-in process is not unlike physically accessing a sealed vault, complete with codes on access cards, little remembered clues to the password you can no longer remember, and a virtual keyboard that doesn’t obscure a single thing.
2. I am just as much of a dolt. My idea of a password hint? A string of words that rely on free association and a particularly on-point pop-culture memory. *shaking head* Honestly. I can hardly remember my name or the name of my company these days. The worst part was that as I reset the password, the last word I couldn’t work out finally made sense. Dangit!
3. The conversion involves opening a Treasury Direct account. That took three weeks. I couldn’t log in without my Access Code/Master Key card, after all.
4. Skip 17 months in which I completely forget about the card, the bond, the account and the password. [This step is optional, for the not completely dumb.]
5. Open a linked conversion account. Don’t register yourself as an owner of a something-or-other twice. Upon registering twice, don’t try to delete your original registration, it won’t stand for that kind of behavior. Delete the second one. (Can you tell the difference? I couldn’t.)
6. Register your bond by entering the serial number and issue date. This also shouldn’t be as difficult as my brain made it out to be. If you have many bonds, do it all at once, up to 50.
7. Create a manifest. There’s a button that allows the site to do this for you, actually.
8. Print and sign the manifest, keeping a copy for yourself, drop in mail with your unsigned paper bond.
9. The conversion should take three weeks. They will not notify you in any way of the completed transaction but are probably still more trustworthy than those Cash4Gold guys who also ask you to drop your valuables in an envelope and post it to them. After all, their website is a virtual Fort Knox. Ok, that doesn’t prove anything at all, but it’s worth reiterating.
February 25, 2009
This morning, a group of parents were sitting behind me, and I could hear every word they said.
Dad 1: Boys are easier. But it’s like they’re brain damaged, the things they expect you to believe. I came home last night and my wife sends me to his room which means he’s in trouble. I walk in there and half his head is shaved. So I asked him, what happened?
Son: I don’t know!
Dad 1: You don’t know? You don’t know what happened to your hair? Son, was your head with you all day???
Mom: We had two girls, and when they were 2 and 4, their dad was working nights. He’d come home, put them down for a nap and then take his nap. One day, he’s asleep, thinking they’re asleep, and is woken up by my mom yelling at him.
MIL: Wake up!! The girls were outside!
Dad: What? What are you talking about? They’re napping!
Mom: It turns out that 4 year old had woken her sister up, taken her little backpack, and took her sister outside in a diaper and were in the front yard. My mom used to come by in the afternoons to help him with the girls, so when she pulled up, there they are, standing in the front yard and she freaks out. When she asked them what they were doing, 4 year old replies “We’re going to take the bus, to the beach!”
Dad 2: And Moms never stop, either. I was going to the mountains with some friends, so I called her up to let her know.
She immediately says: Ok, you’re going to need your jacket, and don’t forget some thermals, and ….
Son: Mom, I’m 33 years old. I got this.
Mom: Well, you’re still going to need your jacket.
I’m 48 now, and she’s never going to stop telling me when I need my jacket.