Money, Love, and Change

I know, I know.  Everyone is wondering where theirs is.  I can’t wait for ours to arrive – it is already allocated as follows:

$600 – brings savings back up to $5000.  Yippee!

$350 – gas for traveling to OH in 2 weeks, and then western NY over Memorial Day.  This is all to visit family.

$25 – donation to friend who is doing pancreatic cancer walk.  She lost her stepfather last year, and is such a sweet gal.

$35 – basketball shoes for the husband.  He just started playing again, and his old shoes were, well, really old.  After a couple of blood blisters, he admitted that new shoes would be nice.  I used our Discover Cash Back awards to get $75 in gift cards.  With a 15% online discount, they came to $33.  He has a tendency to roll his ankles, so I’m hoping the shoes will help us prevent a $75 co-pay to the ER.

$490 – ??

I know that we won’t be stimulating the economy with additional purchases – I will leave it in checking to pay down bills while I look for a job.  Once I have something lined up, I hope to use it against that student loan!

What are you planning to do with your check?

The ignorance of people never ceases to amaze me.

I do need to divulge a little personal information to put this story in its proper context.  I have dark hair and eyes, but am not sure of my ethnic heritage because I do not know my father.  My mom is Caucasian, but I don’t really look like her.  If I had to guess, I would suspect that I may be Native American as well, but your guess is as good as mine.

So here’s my story:

There is a mother in our parent-child program who is somewhat annoying.  Up to this point, it hasn’t really been a big deal.  In general, she tends to be very judgmental towards others and likes to gossip.  She’s not someone I have a lot in common with, and I’m not there to make best friends.  I’ve always been polite to her, but in general I tend to keep my distance.

At the end of class last week, another parent was asking me about the summer program.  This woman interjects, and asks about my other child – she wanted to know why was I not enrolling my 2-year-old when my other son was going to be participating.

I politely informed her that I only have one kid, and perhaps she has me mixed up with someone else.  She asks the teacher who she has me mixed up with.  It’s a small school, so the teacher responded with the lady’s name right away.

This mother responds, “Oh yeah, the Mexican!”

The teacher says, “Um, actually, she’s Japanese.”

Hold on folks, it gets better…

The mother then looks at me and says, “I don’t know, all you brown people look the same to me.”

At this point the other mom’s jaws need to be picked up off the floor.  One lady actually gasped, which I thought was a nice effect.

I replied, “I’m not even going to respond to that statement.  Have a great weekend everyone!”  I took my son, and walked out the door (we were on our way out anyways).

Maybe it is just me, but I really don’t think this woman is going to change.  Therefore, I felt it would be a waste of my time to open a can of whoop-#$% on her.  Also, there were other children in the room.
I’m not sure what happened after I left, and am interested to see if anything is said this week.

So here’s my question – in my shoes, would you have done anything differently?

Since I am busy on the weekends, I thought this would be a nice idea.  Each weekend, I will try to post one or two quotes for thought.  Here is the first:

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ”What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.”

Author
Joseph Addison

I recently finished Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, and it is a quick and easy read.  I would recommend getting it from your local library – I would not buy it just because there are enough blogs and information on his methods on the web (and you can use the cost of the book as your first snowflake!).  I think that Get Rich Slowly has a nice synopsis of the book here if you want to get the basic idea before investing your time reading the whole book.

Is Total Money Makeover going to change our lives?  I’m not sure.  We have been  working hard to pay down debt, and I am confident that we will eventually reach our goal of being debt-free.  However, this book made me realize that we need more of a concrete plan.  We tend to throw money towards debt in a haphazard manner, but I like the idea of having a psychological boost of seeing something get eliminated.  After talking it over with my husband, we’re going to create a modified version of his plan:

1.  Get our savings back up to $5,000 – Ramsey suggests a $1000 emergency cushion, but this just doesn’t sit well with us.  Maybe it has to do with my lack of dependable income, the recent upheaval we were in as my husband found another job (since his old one will be in China soon), or the fact that our little truck will have to give out someday.  We recently used a portion of the emergency fund to cover some unexpected car repairs, and it is sitting at roughly $4400.  We will both sleep easier at night when it is back up to $5000.

2.  Pay off that *$)!(@ private student loan  – it is not our smallest debt, but it is our highest interest debt (currently at 7.5%).  I hate it.  I don’t care that the interest is deductible.  Every time I log into this account, I cringe.  At roughly $3500, it needs to go.

After these two goals, we have a couple of others, but we are not sure what order they will go in yet:

3.   Max out our Roth IRA contributions – Although Ramsey suggests stopping 401(k) retirement contributions until debt is paid off (in most cases), I just can’t pass up free money.  In a recent post, I talked about how we recently decreased our contributions from 20% to 10%.  My husband’s company match is 75% on the first 6% – keeping at 10% will help us in attaining our goal of $100,000 in retirement accounts by the end of the year.

4.  Pay down our mortgage so that the balance is at 75% of the value of our home – this will allow us to close our escrow account and keep the money in savings.  Since we are about $3000 away from reaching this goal, it seems reasonable.  Although interest rates in savings accounts isn’t so great right now, the lower mortgage payment would be a nice psychological boost.  I know we have enough discipline to put the money aside every month, and I also like the idea of having a little more wiggle room about where our money is going every month.

What do you think of these goals?  Are we destined for failure because we are not following the Ramsey plan exactly?

I thought that I would share this – we’re not spending a lot on home improvements right now, but this will definitely help to fill the kids sandbox and get us some mulch for the yard!

The coupon is good through July 30,2008, and will be e-mailed within 24 hours, according to the website.

Here’s the link: http://www.loweswinners.com/LifeTakesVisa/

Enjoy!

After finishing the taxes, we decided to decrease my husband’s 401k contributions from 20% to 10% with the intention of putting this money into our Roth IRAs.  The next day, we get a letter in the mail with regards to our health care plan.

They have changed the salary tiers and the contribution limits.  My husband now falls into a higher tier (if he made $1 less, he would still be in his lower tier).  The contribution limits have also increased.  When all is said and done, he is now making less than he did before his raise after he transferred to a new position at the end of last year.

Ironically, he works for a company that deals with health care products that is still trying to convince their employees that “they come first”.  My husband has a hard time digesting this – he was forced to transfer to his new position because his old job is being outsourced to China (his boss actually had the nerve to bring the blueprints for the plant in China to a meeting to show how big the improved facility was going to be!).

Although this really sucks for us, I am thankful that we had the cushion of our retirement contributions to fall back on so that things even out.  We come out $150 ahead (after taxes) in each paycheck after taking the health care increases into account.  Not as much as we had hoped for, but we plan on snowflaking this into a student loan, and then into retirement.

Have you been screwed by your job lately?  We really weren’t expecting this, but it hardens our resolve to get out of debt so that we’re not slave to the company (aka the man) for the rest of our lives.

It seems to have worked for me! I was having some trouble tonight after my hard drive started whirring on my (less than one-year old) MacBook. I’ve had the hard drive replaced once (this is why my published thesis is about 20 pages shorter), and was pretty ticked to hear it causing a commotion once again (no pun intended).

The thought of traveling over 1.5 hours to the Apple Store tomorrow after my son’s class was not appealing, so I decided to take matters into my own hands – after backing everything up, of course. Turns out that a couple of gentle knocks to the bottom of my MacBook with a rubber mallet has solved the problem.

This whole thing got me thinking – should I purchase an extended warranty for my MacBook? I can’t believe that I am really thinking about this. I still do not understand why Apple stresses customer service and the quality of their machines but wants you to pay $250 to extend your warranty from 1 years to 3 years. If this MacBook dies, I would have to fork out roughly $1000 for a new one. Right now, I cannot justify forking out 25% of the cost of a new computer for a warranty on an older (but perfectly functional) one.

Why get a Mac in the first place? I am really smitten with the iLife applications for creating home movies, and have been thinking of trying to sell my services locally. I recently made a dvd using the pictures from a relative whose wedding was in the 1950’s, and it was really rewarding to be able to give her such a timeless gift. I also love having a machine that runs multiple operating systems at the same time.

One other thing is that we don’t feel the need to have the newest technology right away.  We like to keep computers for as long as possible – my old Dell laptop is on her way out after 6 years. We cross our fingers every time we have to reboot, since it doesn’t always like to start up. The Inspiron 9100 is a great computer, but the processor was made for a desktop. Despite adequate ventilation, it overheats and shuts off periodically, and it has been doing this more frequently. We’re putting aside Best Buy gift cards from Boomertowne towards the purchase of a new desktop (hopefully we can find one that still has Windows XP!).

What would you do if you were in my shoes? The warranty for this one doesn’t expire until September (I think), so I still have some time to think about it.

I am not sure what to think of the new Entrecard changes.  I really like being able to see how many times a blog has dropped on you in the past 30 days – I am using this information to comprise a drop list for myself.  I used to be a member of the Recipro-drops list, but was surprised to see that some members were hardly dropping any cards at all.  I think that doing a little extra work and getting a consistent list of droppers for my blog will be worth the effort.

I am not sure what to think of the new pricing system.  It does not make a lot of sense to me.  I understand that it will take some time for the numbers to adjust, but using a “power of 2″ system doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for the the most popular blogs to separate themselves.   Asking someone to pay roughly 8000 credits vs. 16000 credits vs. 32000 credits is a big difference – to me, it will come down to luck.  If you are lucky enough to catch a spot on a popular blog when an advert has just finished up, you will pay a reasonable price.

Personally, I think that dropping cards is a more likely way to gain an audience, as opposed to advertising on a popular site.  This is because most Entrecard traffic comes from other Entrecard members.

I don’t want to beat this to death, but what do you think?  Am I missing something here?

Ok – I admit that this is off topic.  But I can’t seem to find enough time to get anything done when the weather is nice – it’s just too much fun being outside!

Today, for example, I took my son to a dairy farm.  We’re reading about cows this week (more about that later), so I thought it might be nice if he could see them in person instead of just as pictures in books.  Plus, he should know that the couple of gallons of milk he consumes each week doesn’t magically appear in the carton!

So off we went – it was only a 20 minute trip, and the gentleman let us hang out with the sheep and the calves for as long as we wanted.  A baby calf licked my son, and he had so much fun!  I also picked up a pint of their ice cream and some chocolate milk in the old-fashioned glass bottle.  It was a blast, and I’d like to try to stop there every couple weeks during the summer to support our local dairy farmers.

Which brings me back to my original question – how do you blog when the weather is nice?  I honestly didn’t even think about the computer until after the kid went to bed.  I don’t want to stop blogging – I really enjoy it – but I think I might have trouble making it a high priority!

We were cleaning out the basement this weekend, and had a lot of packing peanuts that we wanted to get rid of.  Throwing these out makes me feel guilty, as I know they take a long time to decompose in a landfill.

A quick google search helped us come up with a solution, and I just wanted to share the link.  The Plastic Loose Fill Council has over 1500 collection sites in the US – you just need to fill out an online form to find the collection site nearest to you.  Hope this helps someone out!