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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July 18, 2008
Now there’s a funny title. Not such a funny article, though.
According to this article, for my age (25 is such a nice cut off), I need to have between $119k to $282k right now if I were to stop investing in order to maintain a 1 million dollar portfolio by age 70, assuming an 8% annualized return and inflation between 3-5%.
Alternatively, assuming my goal is to have a portfolio of 1 million dollars by retirement, and the chart isn’t clear if they’re using age 70 here too, or if they’re using age 65, I’m going to need to save $8,985,008 assuming 3-5% inflation. I guess they’re also assuming an 8% annualized rate of return?
I’m not sure, there seems to be a whole lot of assuming going on here, and you know what that means!
Means we don’t really know what-all’s going on.
To be perfectly honest, I haven’t decided what magic number I’d be comfortable with. I don’t think there is one. After all, I’m 25 and while I’ve been saving diligently, there are a whole lot of other factors that I’d been focusing on. My savings and retirement numbers are just that right now: numbers. I’m doing my best to maintain a higher rate of savings for as long as I can, but that’s because I’m playing catch-up.
If I had to pick a number, I’d ballpark about 2-3 million by the time I’m ready to retire, or go part-time. It seems like enough to provide for a relatively comfortable lifestyle. Nothing terribly extravagant is necessary, but I think it’s good enough for me to be self-sufficient with regards to medical care and daily life, and some travel.
Ultimately, though, I want to enjoy the journey to that point as much as I expect to enjoy life from that point on. I plan to enjoy the next forty years, not spend them anticipating how much fun I’ll have after these pesky in-between years are over!
July 17, 2008
Geez. I had it all worked out: the amounts I had to pull from the expense account, and from the other maintenance (short term savings for car, insurance, and travel) for the enormo credit card bill that was due on Tuesday. And I made the payment when due.
But I forgot one thing. I forgot to transfer the entire collected amount from the expense account to the checking account. Now how do you forget something important like that???
Igh. I still can’t believe that with my obsessive little system, I had all the money, and I still forgot an essential step. Now I have to throw myself on the mercy of Citibank in hopes they won’t charge an overdraft fee since I’ve never made this stupid mistake with them before. Seriously, this is why I’m always paranoid: I make stupid stupid mistakes.
We have got to think before we buy. My parents and I share grocery shopping duties: they buy the Asian groceries and I shop the American sales for staples like bread, milk, juice, eggs, lunch meats, salad, and some fruits. Sometimes veggies. Because I live right across the street from Trader Joe’s, I always stop by there to pick up my eggs for half the price (or less!) of eggs from the other grocery stores. The point is, I’m the egg girl. I always buy the eggs. I thought we had that settled.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I came home laden with groceries on Sunday including two dozen eggs (I splurged because we run out of one dozen too quickly) to find two 18-count cartons of eggs squatting in the fridge. Yep. Three dozen.
Apparently they’d been to Costco and got three dozen for $4.50, which works out to the same price of my eggs. So we had five dozen eggs in the fridge and I don’t know of any recipe that could possibly induce me to use that many eggs. Maybe a good old fashioned pound cake, but that’d probably call for two pounds of butter.
Boiled eggs for breakfast? Egg salad? Deviled eggs? Cholesterol problems via eggs, anyone?
It just seemed like such a waste of time, energy and gas to go back to the store and return them, if I could, for $3. And a silly story, at that. At the same time, I could not stand the idea of not returning them because three people cannot that many eggs consume. Back to the store, then, where I foolishly explained the dilemma and the store manager looked at me strangely, but refunded my three dollars.
It would have been nice to save two trips to TJs had my parents simply picked up their handy dandy cell phones and asked me before buying. Lesson learned? Tune in next week!
July 16, 2008
*arms raised in victory* I have reached my first milestone: my first hundred dollars earned for my House Down Payment Fund! The money hasn’t quite reached my account yet, so I’m pre-celebrating but I’m really really excited. These haven’t been easy months, and it’s so nice to be able to have reached one goal without sacrificing another one.
It actually feels like I’ve made progress despite all the other obstacles in way, nibbling away bits and edges of my salary, and that’s always good for morale around here.
The next hundred will now be cycled to my Travel Fund, and the next fifty after that will be for the Suit/Clothing Fund. I might add a Laptop Fund, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, and I don’t want to dilute this source too much. Obviously, as Blunt Money just pointed out, saving IS addicting.
I’m on check number 861. That’ll be the rent check, looks like. I had to refresh my checks today, and realized that I still have my very first check register from my very first checking account opened three days after my 18th birthday back in 2000. I’m almost positive that I only waited three days because my birthday was on a Friday and I couldn’t go to the bank until Monday. I was THAT excited to open my very own checking (and savings) accounts.
First transaction: Deposit, $200
First finance-related post it note to self: NO MORE PERSONAL SPENDING! (Even back then ….)
First purchase: Checks, $11.50 (These must have been the bank checks you get when you don’t know better, because on the last page of this register, one year later, I bought checks for $16.50. I’m still using checks from that purchase, 7.5 years later.)
Flipping through that register, I sure did keep meticulous records. They’re even highlighted in some color coding scheme that, I’m sure, meant something very particular back in the day. Have no clue what it means now. I also wrote a whole lot of checks for bills that weren’t my own. Hm.
This is probably going to stay on the protected list when I go through and discard all my old paperwork.
July 15, 2008
Thanks to Karen for this tip:
The Hotels.com “welcomerewards program” is simple. After you use the site to book 10 reservations over the course of a year, you’ll get a free night’s stay at your choice of one of 45,000 hotels. What’s simple is that there are no blackout dates and no restrictions on the type of properties, either for earning a chance at a free night’s stay or for redeeming a reward for a free night’s stay.
Sounds pretty cool! I’ve never used Hotels.com myself, but I may look into this when I need more travel booking options.
Brooke’s post on holding onto old things reminded me that I’d never checked on the pricing of a replacement battery for my old Sony Vaio. (I’d been having new-tech cravings, and had been contemplating getting a new lappie. I was all set to justify it, except that it’s not really justifiable. I want a new laptop that runs perfectly, I don’t need it. Even if I did need it, I don’t have the spare cash for it anyway! So there.) Even though I feel like I can’t trust eBay for something like this, I checked there first, and found nothing.
I Googled it, and found one laptop battery site that lists it for $99. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee, and a 1 year warranty, shipped new.
Other sites don’t even list the battery needed for this model. (It’s times like this I’m glad that I’m so ridiculously Asian that I left the information stickers on my computer. Quick and easy model reference right under my left wrist!)
Sony doesn’t even have the model number in their database anymore, or at least I can’t find it on their site anywhere.
So how much is too much for a replacement battery? In comparison to the original purchase price, it’s no more than ten percent of the cost of the notebook, but I doubt that the computer’s worth half that price now.
At this point, it’s likely to be more a matter of what’s more worth it: paying $100 for a battery or $XXX for a new computer. Drat. I know that Option A is the most frugal because there’s nothing major wrong with the computer … but I still covet a new lappy. 😛