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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June 18, 2007
My friend, she of the recent elopement, has also bitten a bullet recently. Since her wedding, she’s begun to seriously listen to finance advice and become involved in the mystical world of personal finance.
Until now, she’s had the good fortune to be parentally-funded for some portions of school, and living expenses, and self-funded for the rest of her wants and needs (ie: travel, internships, living on her own, etc.) She’s not, now, financially up a creek, but she and her hubby are integrating finances and live on a real live budget which is completely foreign to her. If anything, she used The Force. She could afford to as a young single professional woman. There wasn’t any real need to deny herself, and the alternative was always the terrible example I’d set of working too much, and denying yourself. Yes, you turn into ME. š
Thankfully, her hubby has been budgeting for himself as a member of the military for a good number of years, and has a good savings plan set up so now it’s really a matter of “training” one another. Ok, it’s a matter of training her, but she’s up for the challenge and I introduced her to my pets this weekend: Yodlee and PearBudget. Thanks to GoogleDocs, she’ll be able to share the budgeting tools with her hubby (still currently long distance). My friends are growing up and I’m so proud of them!
Two weeks ago I bit the bullet and sent in my change of contribution forms drastically trimming down my 403(b) contributions to little more than the required amount to get the full company match. Today, I added up the amounts of my Rollover IRA that I never look at, the Roth and 403(b), to find it’s a shade over 10k!
It doesn’t seem like much, but that’s a 150% increase in my 403(b), and the Roth is brand new as well (for 2006.) This helps the bitter go down a little more easily, as does the knowledge that I’ll pick up contributions again as soon as I’m able.
June 13, 2007
Huh, I just found myself on the list of The 100 Most Inspirational Personal Finance Turnaround Stories Online over at Credit Card Lowdown. Admittedly filed under the Money Mistakes section, but hey, who am I to gripe? After all, I’m in pretty good company with Mapgirl, Clever Dude, Rich Minx, and LAMoneyGuy.
I do think it’s sort of odd that SingleMa was categorized under “Debt” because I felt like she fell under Saving, Building Wealth (oh yeah, she’s definitely doing that!) and Real Estate. But given just one choice, I guess her strategizing to pay off Debts has been one of the more powerful themes. Especially since she just paid off her car loan š
June 12, 2007
How many times do I have to make the same mistake before I actually learn from it? I do not trust my brother’s financial sense in the least. After all, he acts like he’s got none. I’ve been really good about not trusting him and he knows it, therefore he has to toe the line with me that he completely ignores in his dealings with our parents. At my parents’ behest, 23 months ago, I bought a truck for the family’s use with the understanding that he would pay the monthly bill and the insurance. It was his last chance to repair our financial relationship, after his years of financial transgressions that I’d bailed him out of.
So what did I do? After 20 months of agonizing over how long he’s going to stay on good behavior and pay his monthly bill to me for the car and insurance, after worrying that I’m going to be stiffed with the car bill because I just don’t know that he’s going to maintain a stable job, I went and made the same idiotic mistake of trusting him, with money.
I knew that he and my parents could not do business together, I knew that I would be forced into the position of peacemaker and dealbroker which I don’t have time for, and I knew that I’d be taking a huge risk of losing that money. Given those odds, didn’t that sound like my answer should have been “No no NO! Bloody no!”? Shouldn’t it have? Every instinct in my mind screamed no! But I didn’t listen. Because ….
1. He came to my parents proposing that they work together. He had been working on his own business for about a year with moderate success, and he thought this would be a good way for them to make some money without doing much work.
2. PaDucky came to me asking that I put up the stake because they couldn’t get it elsewhere and this was a chance at financial independence for everyone.
I desperately wanted my family to start functioning normally again, and I thought that my brother had been doing this on his own for about a year with moderate success already, so wasn’t this a history of having learnt his lesson and all? After some long thought, and with deep misgivings, I said yes. Conditionally, of course, that no single party would make any decisions on their own – all business decisions had to be made in group meetings. And he had a friend/partner who was supposed to keep tabs on the cash flow part of the business, and be his check & balance.
What an idiot I was. What an utter absolute idiot. As predicted, within weeks of their working together, everything fell apart and I’m left as go-between, as peacemaker, and one completely frustrated-to-smithereens loan originator, and kicking myself every single day for making such an idiotic decision. I can’t even express how deeply angry I am at everyone involved, either, because I have to focus on being the peacemaker go-between to make sure that I get as much of that money back as possible as my brother is still working on it, on his own. He’s made one of 7 scheduled payments, missed one, and I’m still trying to get a straight answer about the next one.
I’d used my BT money to make the loan, which gave me a year-long loan of interest free money. I had initially intended to put that money into a high interest savings account and earn my $50 interest a month. I should have done and found another way to support my family. Instead, I have to consider what to do at the end of 12 months when and if he doesn’t pay me back in full. Right now, I have enough in my savings to pay it off completely when the time comes, but that will utterly wipe me out. All that I’ve saved, everything I’ve worked so hard for, scrimped and saved for over the last 2.5 years, gone.
I’ve been trying to make my peace with that. After all, I was the idiot who ultimately decided to go out on this limb in the first place without really truly considering the dire circumstances. I couldn’t even say that even if I have no emergency money, I would at least be debt-free. Because I’d still have that car note. I have one investment that will pay out in a couple more years, but other than that, I’d be back to zero.
This lesson is particularly painful because, well, I was an idiot. I didn’t even really seriously think: Can I pay this off entirely, by myself, if he doesn’t pay up? Every single day, I ponder how much this, losing my life savings because I made a really stupid decision, is going to suck.
And I can’t even guarantee this’ll never happen again. Not even after I collect whatever I can collect. Just because I’ve learned from this lesson doesn’t mean that they won’t need me to help them again and I need to gauge what help I can give vs. what help I should give. I have to understand that my family is collectively financially unsavvy and peculiarly waterproofed against my attempts at helping them make better long-term decisions. So I have to be even more careful not to follow their well-intentioned paths to ruin, again. I can’t keep starting over because of them.
There. My blogging head has been in the sand for a while now because of this. I actually still don’t feel much better for having “said” it aloud. I hoped that I would, but I don’t. It’s like admitting out loud that you kick puppies, or something like that. I did a stupid thing and I’m paying for it.
I definitely need alternate streams of income.
And boy, do I ever hate that it’s so much quicker and easier to get into trouble than it is to get out of it!
June 11, 2007
Lately I’ve been caught up in this daydream. Pa and MaDucky are doing well on their own, and they’re financially stable. I’ve got my Masters degree and am happily working in an actual 9-5 job instead of my current 6-8, with lovely coworkers and a reasonable, sane boss. BoyDucky and I have finally gotten married and our cozy little home, where we hang out after work cooking dinner, drinking wine, and spend our weekends doing fun little couple-y things that we just can’t do as a LD couple. Maybe take some early morning walks holding hands, work on our house together, play with our dogs. Ahhh …. this weekend was such a rude awakening.
He came back this weekend for a Saturday night dinner I’d scheduled with my friends because the six of us haven’t spent time together for over a year. That was the official plan. Dinner, in the desert, my friends, Saturday night. Simple, easy, relaxed. Boy oh boy, did reality bite me in the you-know-where!!
Immediately after work on Friday, we went straight to our friends’ surprise birthday celebre. Foolishly, I’d assumed that it was a nice sit down restaurant sort of deal, so I was all dressed up for a sports bar. For three hours. I’ve got nothing against sports bars, but they’re really not my thing after a long day at work. By ten o’clock, BoyDucky and I left because he had practice the next morning and he’d only gotten three hours of sleep the night before.
Way too early Saturday, he worked with his team and I entertained myself for 3.5 hours. Then we had lunch “together,” aka: with the other coaches while they all talked about the rosters for the races next week. And talked. And talked. And talked. Two hours later, we went home for a shower and change of clothes. Far too short a time later, we were back on the road to my friend’s son’s graduation/birthday party for an hour so that he could meet my train friends, and then raced to the next friend’s house to carpool to our last stop for the night in the desert. We got home at 11:30 pm that night.
BoyDucky knocked on my door pre-dawn Sunday morning, and we were back out the door by 720 to carpool for another practice, and did the same reading-MsM, busy BoyDucky routine. I really could have slept in (booooy could I have slept in) except I was being the dutiful, patient girlfriend so that we could have lunch together. Oh but not together, “together.” We left that team lunch at 2pm, and got home for another round of showers, only to be greeted with “Get dressed, we have to go out again” as soon as I finished my shower. *groan* I was not feeling it. But I dragged myself into yet another pair of jeans, and we drove out to Pasadena to spend an hour with his best friend and his girlfriend. Then he drove us 40 miles to dinner with his brother and sis-in-law, 50 miles to drop me off, and another 50 miles to go back to his brother’s for the night.
All told, I think we put about 550 miles on that rental car this weekend. Ugh! If THIS is what being together and married life is going to be like, I gotta rethink some things. Back to back to back scheduling is insane! Can a girl get a weekend from the weekend or what?? These old bones just can’t take this kind of abuse anymore. ;P
June 8, 2007
So it begins. Sure, it started with an unexpected elopement, but real wedding plans are beginning to surface for the first of my dozen closest high school friends. Since we’ve only managed to pair off one pair of friends within the group as a couple to reduce the number of weddings we’re going to have, that’s left 11 weddings on the forseeable horizon. We’ve even plotted out the pairings, assigned prospective years to each couple, and charted the bridesmaid rotations — we’re (organizational) geeks. The goal is to spread out the weddings so we don’t have more than one a year, and so we don’t have to attend a batch of weddings each summer and shiver in the winter cold, broke and sad.
Now that that’s out of the way, it’s past time to start saving up for the merry-go-round of wedding gifts and dresses. Or maybe I can get one nice dress to serve as my all purpose wedding-attending dress! Is that too cheap?? š
Seriously, though, these are all close friends so I should expect to spend roughly, on average, $200-600 per wedding, whether it’s for a gift, clothing, travel + lodgings or any combination thereof. A small part of me hopes that almost everyone gets married here in California. While it’d be great fun to attend a wedding in New York, weddings – plural – could be a budgetary disasater. My wallet cringes as I’m sure we won’t be able to cram everyone into a friend’s apartment for free. Two to four freeloaders? That’s fine. 20? Eee…. probably not.
June 6, 2007
I haven’t got anything exciting to report: I made it through no-spend months of April and May by hook and by crook, and not without some scars to show for it. Definitely didn’t no-spend like I had intended, having bought a couple few things here and there, but I was, at least, hyperaware of overspending my budget of ZERO. For example, the money spent on eating out was minimized greatly as I didn’t allow myself to slip in the occasional bought lunch at work, but I still took my family out for Mother’s Day. I’m mean, it was Mother’s Day. You don’t skip Mother’s Day for budgetary reasons unless you’re actually broke.
I was still allowed to spend on highly routine things like grocery shopping, and the odd fill-up. And, er … *guilty conscience* a pair of jeans because I couldn’t squeeze into my existing pairs of jeans. Come on, girls, you know what I’m talking ’bout, right?? Apart from looking like you’ve got sausages for legs, it’s just not comfortable. In defense of my professionalism, I needed some jeans that fit. And boy, these fit.
Oh, but the other way I avoided spending was not my usual ya-don’t-need-need-it routine. That only worked for a few things. For other things, I just put off buying until later. My tickets for Comic Con, for instance. I should have bought them at the end of last year’s Con as usual. But I didn’t. And every month thereafter didn’t seem like a good month for frivolous expenses. Now that it’s June, I’m fresh outta time. I had to buy them now because after June 7th, the prices go up again!
And then I decided to commit to another round of yoga for part of the summer. After wasting my money on the last set of classes last year and not attending every class, I’ve learned my lesson. It’s only $51/6 classes, but 1) I have to leave work an hour early, and 2) that’s another chunk of money I’m spending. And it’s only the first week of June!
Forget bored-spending, I have to watch this rebound spending!