Someday A Goat

Little farmer's market ducky

We went to a local farmer's market this weekend, and found a wonderfully shaped red potato. Beak added courtesy of a leftover lemon rind, a toothpick and a wonderful husband.

Lingering attachment to putting a check in the mail

One of my coworkers is continually amazed by the fact that I still use checks for a good portion of my bills. Over the past few months, I've been migrating more toward online payments, but I've come to realize that like many things related to money, emotions and habits sometimes trump logic.

I've been running up against some of those emotions and habits, and trying to balance my personality against being illogical.

Just can't shake that feeling

Although I'm pretty young, personal computers were not a common sight in homes and schools until I was in about 5th or 6th grade. When my grade went to the mock city field trip in elementary school, where we had a mayor and businesses and had to learn how to work together to run the mock city, I worked at the faux bank. Everything was still based on ledgers and paper records, and a checkbook balanced by hand. I now use a computer for many things, but some of those early habits are imprinted on my mind.

If I haven't put an envelope in the mail, I have the disconcerting feeling that a bill is unpaid. This habit has served me well for many years, in which I rarely missed a payment due date. Now that I pay bills with money already set aside from a previous paycheck, that feeling has been particularly hard to shake,

Early days of online banking

I've been using online banking for more than a decade, and my Quicken file goes back to 1999. When online bill pay first came about, all it entailed was the bank printing and mailing a check for you. It hadn't evolved quite enough to be completely reliable -- checks would take days to arrive and heaven help you if something got lost in the mail. I trusted myself more than the bank, so I mailed my own checks.

Once electronic transfers became more common, I started using bill pay more often. When my husband and I moved in together, the joint account we opened happened to be at a bank with a terrible online bill pay interface (we both already had individual accounts at that bank, so it seemed easiest). So I slid back into writing checks more often. If I used online bill pay, it was most often through the web site of the company we owed. 

Mailing payments has just gotten too expensive

With stamp prices rising almost every year, my check writing has come under scrutiny. While I will always write a check to the IRS and our garbage company isn't set up for online payments, I will be moving toward online payment as much as possible. Strangely, for one of my credit cards, I can only make payments from the associated bank account. So if I want to pay for that card from any other account, I have to first transfer money into the associated bank account and then to the card. Which is way too many transactions to enter in Quicken, so I will probably stick to checks for that.

Speaking of checks, I was cleaning out a bag and found a box of checks. I have another box of checks with almost all the same check numbers. That means I was an idiot and bought a box of checks I didn't need to because of disorganization. We all have our faults, and I now have added incentive to make the checks last as long as possible.

My office has toilet-flushing gremlins

Every so often, a toilet in the 3-stall restroom on my office's floor gets possessed by flushing gremlins. The toilet will flush constantly, for hours on end, until someone comes and fixes it. I've never seen toilets do this, yet these gremlins attack our little bathroom every few months.

On an environmental scale, it makes me sad, especially since my region has had ongoing water problems for years. As a matter of pure money, I can't imagine that it benefits our property management's bottom line at all. I wonder if their inability to provide functional plumbing has any affect on our lease rates?

Along the same lines, our office HVAC system is screwy. Since I spent a good amount of time editing a commercial real estate trade magazine, I know that providing consistent temperatures and a comfortable environment is notoriously hard in multi-office buildings, especially in buildings below the Class A level. Thermostats often control space in another office, and particularly if the building is older and has been fitted out repeatedly for different configurations of offices, the HVAC system loses all semblance of logic. Barring redoing the entire duct work, there's really not a solution. That's not even really a solution from a property owner's perspective, because even if all that money is spent redoing duct work, your tenant could up and leave at the end of a lease.

But what is ridiculous is that not only is the HVAC system turned off on the weekends, which is pretty common for the size and type of building, they turn it off at night. I can't possibly imagine how that is an efficient and money-saving strategy because not only are most employees who work in the building miserable on a daily basis, it has to take more energy to bring temperatures back up to bearable in the dead of winter. Sounds like they need to start reading some PF blogs :-)

It got me to thinking -- what are some of the small things we do on a regular basis that might be saving us money? Could any of them be shooting us in the foot?

• If it's yellow, let it mellow. Last year, in the midst of serious drought restrictions and the possibility of water rates going up, we went pretty hardcore with this old hippy saying. I now have to remind myself when we have guests that there's a time and place for everything. I could see this going haywire, however, if you end up with too much TP in the toilet when you finally do flush and end up having to call a plumber in for an expensive repair. I try to be conscious of the amount of toilet paper used, and will readily flush if it looks like there's too much in there.

• We line-dry probably about 25% of our clothes, and have for years. It really makes items like jeans last much longer, and I find that I like the stiffness that clothes get when they've been line-dried. I've also lost a few shirts to one of our cats, who likes to climb the drying rack. If it were a favorite or expensive blouse, I could wipe out my annual savings by having to replace clothes. The sooner I get the clothes folded, the less likely this is to happen.

• We do a good amount of bulk cooking, and it only saves us money if we actually take the time to portion out the food and vacuum-seal it. This doesn't always happen, unfortunately. It's like leftovers, sometimes it's stupidly hard to do the easiest things. I try to plan a little bit better with the timing, we most often let food go to waste when we finish cooking late at night and just don't have the energy.

• Install a programmable thermostat is wise advice often given to those looking to save money. No problems there! We have one already. That isn't programmed. We've lived in the house for 1.5 years, and still haven't programmed the thermostat. Why? No one knows. I'll spend hours updating my price book, but don't program the thermostat. And I know exactly where the manual is. In some ways, I'm just as bad as my office property managers and their toilets.

Credit card rates going lower is getting tempting

Our credit card interest rates have drastically fallen in the past year as prime rate has gone down, and on one card we have a lower rate than on our mortgage. Obviously, our rates are variable, rates could skyrocket and credit cards can basically be called due at any time, but still it tempts me to stray from responsibility.

The adult in me knows that paying these cards off should be our first priority, but when I see how little interest we're paying on what feels like huge balances to me, I'm tempted. Tempted to put that little extra money into the travel savings instead of an extra payment to a card. Tempted to spend a little more than we should. Tempted to take a portion of my husband's bonus that hasn't been allocated and get supplies to start veggies from seed instead of putting it toward the cards. Tempted to just ignore the balances since after all, we pay way over the minimum.

Ghosts in my head

I started this post last weekend while I was reconciling accounts. The finance charge on our lowest interest card was just over $20, and I thought why am I working this hard and running things so close to the wire when it's just an extra $20 a month on one card, and not a whole lot more for the other? I started thinking about bolstering our emergency fund. I started dreaming of spending.

As I typed up the beginning of the post, the people that might read it popped into my head. People who just lost jobs and have no emergency fund. People who had those same thoughts as I have, and then one day realize that their minimum payments are simply not doable. People about to be foreclosed on. People I don't want to be. I couldn't finish and publish the post or maybe even admit to myself that these thoughts weren't quashed immediately.

We've been turning our financial lives around since June 2008, and it seems silly to stop now that we're just starting to see results. This kind of thinking is exactly what got us into credit card debt in the first place. But we've hit a plateau of enthusiasm, and it's getting harder to keep telling friends, sorry, we just can't afford it. I feel like all we do is work and worry about money. 

Facing reality

Last night, as I watched a Suze Orman episode off the DVR, my stupidity almost smacked me in the face. My imaginary readers, they were right there on her show. Tens of thousands of credit card debt. Student loans out the wazoo. Totally unaffordable mortgages. Gaps between expenses and income that ran into thousands of dollars. Job loss. Just desperation all around.

We don't have student loans, and only one car loan. Our mortgage is a bit of a stretch, but it's fixed and just barely within our means. Our cars are pretty new. All in all, we have it good. Once we deal with learning to spend less than we earn and get rid of this credit card debt, the future is wide open. We just can't lose focus. Why is that so hard?

A turning point within sight

My husband and I are just getting to the break-even point, our net salaries are finally about to cover our monthly expenses, barring emergencies. I received a raise in February, and signs are pointing toward getting a bonus at the end of March. He finds out this week whether he will receive a raise and a bonus. It’s been a long couple of months since we bought the house and the cost of a roof over our heads went up 60% in terms of rent/mortgage payment alone.

When we bought the house, we knew that there would be a period of time where our expenses would pretty much outstrip our net take-home pay, but like most things in life, we didn’t realize that it would be this hard. Every day I try to be thankful that both of us are still employed and this isn’t anything compared to what others are experiencing, but some days I just want to stomp my foot and give up.

Making small changes one by one

On one hand, we’ve been making GREAT progress on escrowing our irregular expenses. We have four payments for our car insurance policies, the first is due March 3 and the last should be due around May 22. The first and last payments will be completely covered out of the insurance escrow account, and at least half of the second and third payments will be covered. This time last year I had to pull money out of the stock market in order to meet those payments, and I think that I might have even put one payment on a credit card. By this time next year, I hope to have a fully stocked insurance escrow account that will cover all payments in full.

I’ve been trying to remind myself that all these baby steps will get us ahead eventually. I can now pay the bills when they arrive in the mailbox instead of hastily sending a check right before it is due. We’re regularly saving money from each paycheck above and beyond our 401K contributions. We’ve started saving cash for a trip to New Orleans in late April (fingers crossed for bonuses – we might be able to go all-cash on this trip). We haven’t made great progress on the credit card debt, but we’re going in the right direction. We haven’t taken money out of the stock market to meet bills since June – not that it would do a whole lot of good these days. We’ve been able to rely upon our pantry and freezer to feed us when the budget is tight, which is extremely satisfying.

On the other hand, I really want to the debt and car loan to be gone, and have at least three month’s expenses in savings, but with these slim margins between net income and expense, it will be years before we can do that. We can’t cut expenses much more without selling our house, so we’ll focus on income. And not stomping our feet.

Grand plans and reality

I had all this time off work, with grand plans of elaborate posts and long series. All I actually accomplished was getting the checkbook balanced. But it is very balanced, and I’m feeling more up-to-date than I have in a good long while.

We made a serious dent in credit card debt, despite the holidays, and most importantly kept it from growing. We also started an online saving account with ING. We’ve got money stashed in various checking accounts, adding up to an emergency fund, but in 2009, I’d like to be more deliberate about savings. More deliberate about everything, really, including this blog. Look for changes over the next few weeks, from improved content to some design adjustments.

Happy new year!

Lack of coupons makes me sad

I know it's ridiculous, but I get bummed around holidays throughout the year with no coupons to clip. Coupons inserts don't come out on certain weekends, and what has been coming out the past few weeks hasn't been that great. It also seems like the inserts are getting thinner and there are a lot more ads for weirdly shaped undergarments and elastic-waistband pants. Not that there is anything wrong with either, but dang. I don't want to collect coin sets, I want to clip coupons.

I have a feeling that as marketing budgets get cut, the quantity and quality of coupon inserts like SmartSource and RedPlum will drop. I actually got through a whole insert without seeing a need for a single coupon inside last week. I honestly don't think that's ever happened, even though over the past year I have scaled back the amount of coupons I bother to clip.

I could probably feed a small village with the barrage of refrigerated uncooked dough coupons, but there's nary a high-value coupon anymore for the toothpaste we use. And batteries have been on sale everywhere lately. Do we have extra batteries on hand? I could go check the battery bin, but even if there is a need for batteries, I have so many coupons and they're on sale everywhere and I would probably just be indecisive and totally miss any savings. It would require a massive strategic comparison (taking all of 4 or 5 minutes in reality), but I would make lists and who knows what else and never actually just buy the stupid batteries on sale if we need to stock up.

I'm clearly spending too much time thinking about coupons and not enough finishing up with holiday preparations.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend!

I'm out of town visiting family, so I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post this weekend. Hope everyone has a happy and safe Thanksgiving weekend! I'm so thankful to live in a free country -- freedom of words, freedom of thought, and freedom from fear. Many blessings to you and yours.

Is the marine and fish store doing that well?

I was catching up on my Suze Orman episodes last week, and while watching her 10/18/08 episode, I saw local commercial for fish/marine store down the street from our house. It occurred to me that the store must be doing well in the down economy to be doing TV ads. Of course, the price for spots has probably gone way down with ad budgets starting to get cut as current contracts expire. How well must the business be run for it to be advertising when discretionary spending is going down? Or maybe it's a last-ditch effort for extra sales, although the store has been there for years.

My husband has more experience with broadcast, and he did make the good point that it's a Saturday evening show on cable. We'd have to look closer at her ratings to see whether they've been going up lately, but my guess is yes.

The marine store could also be well-positioned to take advantage of inexpensive advertising--maybe with additional online sales? I'm tempted to drop by next time I'm in the area just for a look-see.

Heard on the radio this morning

On my way into work this morning, I realized that almost every commercial on the handful of radio stations that I listen to was for people with bad credit, people wanting to refinance, basically just any sort of service that a person with less-than-stellar credit (and likely an emergency fund also) might need. There has been a noticeable increase in these types of commercials just this week, which isn't unusual at all when a company wants to align message with current events.

What really caught my attention was a commercial for a computer company. "How are you supposed to afford a laptop if you have bad credit?" Um, pay with cash. Sheesh. Not that I'm perfect, but financing is not the only option in every situation. The only target I think that statement can apply to is possibly a student. Sometimes radio advertising makes me sad.