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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November 5, 2007
| Retirement Savings |
Rollover 401(k): $1,456 *Have not received an update for this past month yet.
Roth IRA: $3,557
401(a): $1,711
403(b): $10,239
Total: $16,963
|
| Emergency Savings |
$11,989 |
| Goal Oriented Savings |
Car Maintenance: $638
Savings for BT repayment: $17,015
Savings for taxes: $3,792
Total: $21,445
|
| Investment Loans |
Prosper-ish: $12,630
Personal Loan: $5,000
Total: $17,630
|
| Total Assets |
Non-Liquid: $16,963
Semi-Liquid: $17,630
Liquid: $33,434
Total: $68,o27 |
| Debt and Liabilities |
Truck: $7,755
BT (Brother): $17,015, due 02/08
Total: $24,770 |
The flipside to having a boring set of paychecks through the end of the year is seeing a huge jump in my retirement savings: I’ve finally passed $10k in one of the accounts! I’m finally playing a little catch-up and it feels great. Retirement savings increased 6% overall.
Debts were reduced by 5%, and liquid savings jumped up by 45% but that’s offset by the ongoing drain on my finances due to the truck and taxes due. You’ll see a new category up there: savings for taxes. It’s exactly that. The tax man’s going to come calling for his share of my bonus and I aim to be prepared.
Emergency savings have increased substantially (88%), and I’m very close to achieving the goal again. That wasn’t any amazing feat (other than self control) on my part, though. Soon, the house fund shall rise again!
I wonder if it’d be a good idea to add another section that tracks the debts I’m owed. They’re at the back of my mind, but should it play a role in the Snapshots?
I love that some progress has been made, and might actually even make a net worth goal in the near future. Once I kill this debt and settle accounts with the brother, we’ll talk. We’ve still got the house-buying venture to flesh out, so I’m going to need down payment money in SCADS by next July. Can we do it? Tune in next time! Same Ducky time, same Ducky channel!
November 2, 2007
Time, in this case. Probably money, too, but today’s topic is time. Ever since the OT tap was turned off at work, I’ve had two extra hours every night to myself. The routine was, for time immemorial: Get home at 8:15. Eat dinner: 15 minutes. Take shower: 15 minutes. Tidy up, and get into bed: 15 minutes. Talk to BoyDucky? Some time between 9 and 10 pm, if it works out. My schedule used to frustrate him because we had a short window in which we’d get to talk, or miss each other completely because I had to sleep as close to ten as possible. Getting up before 6 am just isn’t easy. Yes, the whole 8 hours a night thing seems terribly spoiled, but I promise that it’s for the greater good. The more sleep deprived I am, the punchier I, and the worse the arthritis, get. In the pursuit of non-sausage fingers and the avoidance of bum knees, I try my best to get the eight hours in.
Now that I get home around 6:15, there’s a whole lotta futzing around on the internet that accomplishes absolutely nothing. Inevitably 9:15 rolls around and there I am, unshowered, unfed, and unready for bed. The morning alarm is still set for predawn because I still have the 1+ hour commute so it’s not like I’m getting off all that easy with the “8 hour day.”
I have GOT to get it together and either do something useful with that extra time like exercise, cook, or actually get some wedding planning done! *igh* I don’t wanna, though. Maybe I’ll let myself have a few more weeks of doing absolutely nothing useful after work. After all, I’ve got about three years of downtime to catch up on!
November 1, 2007
While mulling over the car repair options on the way to train station, I was struck by a realization: I’m 25. I can now rent a car without paying a supplemental fee!
I think that, and a looming sense of deadlines, are it. That’s all we get. Happy quarter century!
One Frugal Girl and Mapgirl recently blogged about the existing and perhaps unacknowledged abundance in one’s life. They both point out that clothing that’s hidden or stashed is a waste of money if you never using it; likewise with other resources like books or yarn. This is a great reminder of the WWII motto: Use it up, wear it out, make it do!
Ironically, I’m probably more in line with WWII than I am with my own generation on that regard. The ability to buy something new and not wearing it immediately was my private, adolescent idea of personal (closet) wealth. Then, as now, I only bought something new if I had to: if I had to replace something else worn and discarded, or simply couldn’t show up to another school/work event wearing the same thing I wore the last three times. But in high school, I had a girlfriend who always found the best deals, and was a nice medium-large size so she could find at least one of everything that fit her perfectly. She was the queen of buying things without ever trying them on, and so was always in possession of a surplus of lovely attire. She had a Mary Poppins closet: every time she reached in, something so new it still had tags on came out! I positively lusted after her ability to always have something new in that closet of many colors. That, back in the day, symbolized financial stability: buying things because you wanted them, not because you needed them.
Years later, that impressionable little self still wishes that I were “wealthy” enough to buy and stash clothing that’s not immediately pressed into service one I get home. Since it clashes with my need to have a perfectly honed, no-waste-here closet, and I don’t truly have the means for a cornucopia of clothing, I artificially cultivate that feeling of having, instead of needing.
The NY trip yielded the two long sleeved shirts and nice sweaters that I needed for work. I’ve defeated the purpose of having shopped specifically to fill those needs by hanging up the clothing and refusing to wear them for at least a week. Sort of a, “hah, I have new clothes but I don’t have to use them right away!” Since I’ve pruned out the old and worn clothes already, I find myself falling back on some really old stuff that probably shouldn’t be seen in public anymore (like this black shirt I’m wearing from high school), but in the meantime the shiny hasn’t been rubbed off the new stuff.
At the same time, I try to clear out my closet regularly and to root out any article of clothing or shoes languishing in the back of the closet, and that helps keep my eye “fresh.” It’s really too easy to stare at the same things, the same way, and thinking “I have nothing to wear!”
In essence, I’m prolonging the sense of newness for as long as I can. It’s a standing shopping moratorium to help combat the I-wants.
Does anyone use this sort of trick to keep themselves from overconsumption?
October 31, 2007
BoyDucky recently caught an erroneous charge to his debit card when he was preparing to pay bills to the tune of $450.
Luckily, BofA is willing to give him a temporary credit because he caught the charge the morning it showed up on his statement, but the onus is on him to disprove the charges, and to prove that the charge was made without his authorization.
If he doesn’t jump through their hoops, however, (returning the affadavit with the correct boxes checked off, the name of the possible perpetrator, etc., within 5 days of receipt; returning a copy of the police report within 7 days of reporting the incident) they’re going to take that temporary credit right back.
On top of being at an out of town hospital with his father 4 of 7 days of the week, he’s had to:
1. Contact the business where he believes the credit card number was stolen by an employee (because that’s the only time the card has ever been out of his sight);
2. Try to get the employee’s first and last names, which means explaining the whole situation to the various Supercuts managers;
3. Wait for the manager and corporate offices and police to review their store tapes. They found that it does look like the employee copied something down onto a Post-It and put it in his pocket;
4. Talk to the police and schedule an appointment to meet as soon as he’s back in town.
5. See if they can track down the charge and if it can be connected to that scuzzy guy who had his mitts on BoyDucky’s card.
I’ve warned him countless times of perils of using debit cards in fraud situations and he’s always shrugged it off. Believe me, I know the pain of dealing with false charges and credit cards are the way to go. If he hadn’t caught the charge immediately, BofA wouldn’t have given him a credit and he’d be out $450 for however long it takes to resolve the situation.
The most work I’ve ever had to do for false charges, like an extra “tip” a restaurant gave itself, was to report it as fraudulent to the credit card company. They immediately sent me verification paperwork to swear on someone’s grave that I did not, and no authorized users, authorized the charge, and then the company had to prove that they were allowed to charge my card. In one case, I had a copy of the receipt with my signature and written tip; in another, I never charged anything to that company so they had to prove that I did. I was never out any money, and the credit card company settled the problems painlessly.
Of course, my fraud problems were directly associated with a business and were obviously due to an employee stupidly trying to line his or her pocket for a whole dollar or so.
We’ll have to hope that the employee conveniently tried to pay on his account or something directly linked to him like that because if not, there’s no way that employee can be sacked based only on suspicion of stealing the card number.
Payday is no longer fun. Yep, that’s right, I said it. It’s not! My darned check is so tiny now that I can’t do anything but throw it into the Expenses fund. My transportation reimbursement goes into my auto insurance savings, and that’s the end of the story for another two weeks. *sigh* There are a lot of boring two-weekses in my future until the end of the year. Bringing home less than half of what I was making a couple months ago is NO thriller.
It’s all down to the bonus, really. It was a big chunk of cash that went directly into my Save-For-Taxes, Expenses and Savings accounts. That meant that not only did I not pay taxes on it yet (and will have to later), no retirement monies were deducted! My retirement funds aren’t having any of that neglect, so the paychecks are responsible for making up the shortfall. It’s sensible. I know it is. It’s just B-O-R-I-N-G!
In other news, I received a bill for $15 from Wamu Investments. *smack* goes my palm to my forehead. EVERY stinkin’ year I forget to roll over the IRA from my first long-term job to Vanguard where I will pay NO annual fees. *sigh* And every year I get this bill that reminds me that once again, I’ve been a fool by waiting too long to shift from Washington Mutual to Vanguard. Why not put all my eggs in one basket, hm? One small no-annual fee basket.
Even when I think there’s nothing to do, like a kid on summer vacation, there’s still something to do. My 4th Quarter resolution: Pick a fund in which to dump this small Rollover on the 2nd of the year. Because if I’m going to pay them $15 for the year anyway, they’re going to take care of the fund until the end of 2007! Or should I do that before the end of 2007 to avoid even a nominal 2008 fee?
October 29, 2007
that I owe FB is here!
Names will be obscured for the sake of preserving my anonymity 🙂
I’ve been friends with BoyDucky’s sister, let’s call her One, since 7th grade. She was quite a few years younger than her brothers, so we knew them by name, reputation, and portraits hanging on the family staircase. Those of us girls who were closer to One in our younger years knew the brothers personally, but I only knew them from the hilarious/sweet stories she’d tell about her ridiculously cool brothers. And in passing, when I had dinner with her family and he was in town, he’d invariably help remind her parents that I didn’t speak Chinese when they’d start talking to me in Chinese. But other than that, BoyDucky was just One’s brother, or another Boy.
Three years ago, I started a new job at a university, the sun was setting on my relationship at the time, and I was rather wishing that I’d landed this job when I still had friends at the Uni. I had no idea that One’s brother was completing a Master’s degree on campus at the time, nor that she’d passed the word to him that I was now working there. Nice guy that he was, he offered to take me to lunch to introduce me to the campus, and we started lunching every once in a while. Lunches became longer and more frequent as we talked about everything under the sun. My proof that he had no ulterior motives in taking me to lunch was that he’d do the same for any friend of his sister’s, and he can’t remember what I was wearing the day of our first lunch. He remembers what I wore to just about everything else after he started to like-like me. 😉
Eventually I developed a well-hidden crush on Boy even as I realized that my 4 year relationship was truly lifeless and that I was guaranteed a good day NOT seeing the Ex. I’d given the Ex so many second chances over the years that it led to a Christmas ultimatum in which I laid out my major concerns (not the first time) and asked if he saw any resolutions forthcoming, if he wanted things to change, and if he thought the relationship was worth the effort. He said no, no and no, and we ended our relationship.
Lo and behold, Boy guiltily confessed to having feelings for me some weeks later and, though shocked, I had to similarly confess. We agreed to a trial date on which he wooed me with proper flowers and a lovely dinner, and we’ve been lucky enough to have a relatively drama-free, loving relationship ever since. He’s wonderfully supportive and understanding, even to the point of accepting my boy hair 🙂 and appreciates all the efforts I make to take care of him. I, in turn, adore him. I also loved, but stopped, the monthly flowers that he’d bring me for our monthiversaries, and the gestures of homebaked goodies and lunches he’d bring to my office. I like to think my contributions of staying with him but entertaining myself while he studied was an equally valuable gesture. Neither of us are perfect, but we compliment each other’s strengths and weaknesses pretty well. He’s learned to sense my guilt complex a mile away and soothe it from 500 hundred miles away, while I have the right to smother his temper boiling over as I see fit, or bring sanity back to his schedule and life organization. Of course, he’s never experienced the vaunted MiniDucky temper so, until then, the pot shall continue to call the kettle black.
Happily, One got over her weirdness about the relationship several months later, and even let me know that she’s glad we’re together because I make him happy and keep him even-keeled. Now, why can’t other people see it that way? 🙂
And that’s the story of how one Boy became BoyDucky.
