If you know me at all you know that I love to shop. Since we're on an austerity plan, I don't get to shop any more, except for groceries. Back in the day, when I took a sabbatical and lived on my savings, I had $20 a week for groceries. I was single then so I'd make a big baked ziti with ground turkey, buy some turkey bologna and hot dogs and a box of corn flakes. I'd supplement these staples with things like .59 chicken hind quarters (leg and thigh) a sack of potatoes, whatever was on sale. I didn't starve, I didn't even mind it much. But it is challenging when you're trying to decide between toilet paper and tomatoes. (I didn't see a tomato for over a year.)
I subscribe to a service called The Grocery Game, it's similar to Coupon Mom. Both give you a list of loss-leader sales at your local supermarket and match coupons. It only requires paying a little bit of attention and I save anywhere between 30% and 50% when I shop. It's fun for me, I try to see how much I can get for my money.
I have stopped going to the expensive salon Midtown. They charge $55 for a haircut and $135 for color and highlights. I have returned to the Aveda Institute, where haircuts are $15 (done by a student) and I'm going back to color in a box. The good news is that I was able to drive there, get my cut, hit two grocery stores (one for my favorite sponges, BOGO-Buy One Get One free) and still get home in under two hours. If I go to midtown it takes bout 3 to 3.5 hours, with no grocery stops.
Anyhoo, I got lamb chops for $11 at Kroger! They're marinating as we speak and will be grilled for dinner. It makes me want to break open a bottle of red wine, I'm so excited. I also got some tenderloins. I actually waited for the guy with the big basket of meat to mark down what I wanted.
I notice that commercials are using the thrift/value proposition now. "Times are tough, that's why a grilled cheese sandwich made with Kraft singles is so budget friendly." My value proposition is "Times are tough, that's why if you want to eat well you have to wait for them to mark down the meat." Although I like grilled cheese too.
I've rediscovered ramen. You know, it's pretty good. And .17 per serving.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Another Friday
Some times I feel like I'm on a treadmill. Not the kind at the gym, that would actually do me some good, but the kind where you just schlep along, with the illusion of moving forward, but in fact, just killing time until it's time to get off.
Friday represents this for me. It's like, yea, Friday, but then I realize that I've spent another week, doing not much of anything. What did I accomplish, except to remain employed, to do the laundry and to fight back the big chunks of dirt in the house.
We're hacking down a considerable debt. I wish I knew exactly where we racked it up. It's probably from the last seven years, which included the sale and purchase of 3 houses, four moves, multiple luxurious vacations, a two-year sabbatical, three new computers, three new vehicles, and thousands of restaurant meals. I guess it's not so mysterious where the debt came from after all.
I like to think that I'm financially savvy, but I work in sales and you kind of get weird about money. At the end of the year you get your W-2 and there's a six-figure number on it, but the government takes its share, you fund your retirement, you buy a shit-load of insurance and voila, you end up taking home about 60% of what you've earned. Meanwhile, you've been spending like a Texas millionaire.
So this is the year of austerity. We got on board with this about six months ago. We saved a bit in an emergency fund and started paying down the debt, and whammo, we got hammered with household repairs. Some stuff on the house you can put off, you can't put off the replacement of a sewer-pipe. People asked me:
1. Doesn't the city pay for that?
2. Doesn't your insurance pay for that?
The answer: No. If the sewer-pipe is on your property, its yours to maintain. If the sewer-pipe failed because of lack of maintenance, then your insurance won't cover it. The good news (if you can call it that) is that if the sewer-pipe backs up, floods the basement, causes mold to grow and contaminates the carpeting, THEN the insurance will pay. You'll pardon me for being happy that we didn't have that level of sewer-pipe drama.
So what does it cost to dig up your freshly landscaped yard, haul out a collapsed iron sewer-pipe and to replace it with a new PVC pipe? About $7000 and a big patch of your lawn. I don't think I can't explain the trauma of an enormous backhoe digging up a newly planted centipede/zorsia lawn. In a drought. I just can't.
And so there is debt. I flash-back to our rather cool basement apartment some days, knowing that we should have stayed put there. We had plenty of space for the two of us. Yes, the little dog in the apartment above us drove us to distraction with his barking and clickity-clack of his nails on the hardwood floors, but when the neighbors waterpipe broke and flooded our utility room, it wasn't our problem.
We had no business buying our house. Atlanta hasn't been a hot housing market since the 1996 Olympics, in fact, it's the number-one area of the country for foreclosures and mortgage fraud. But I fell in love with the house, or rather its potential. Let's just call it a money pit, and leave it at that.
There's good news. We have an FHA, conventional loan with a low payment. Our neighborhood is slowly going up in value, we owe less on the house than it's worth. With the deductions we get from the house, the mortgage is only a couple hundred dollars more than the apartment and we have twice the room.
But getting to my point I measure my days, not in coffee spoons, but in amount of debt we pay off. I HATE wishing my days away to get to the next paycheck. But really, in economic times like this, isn't that what we all do? I am very grateful that I have it all covered and enough left over to properly pay down the debt.
I guess there's no point in regret. I need to embrace the decisions that I've made, be happy about the good ones, learn from the bad ones.
On Yom Kippur we atone, but also, we need to forgive, those who do us wrong, but also ourselves. What's done is done and we're making the best of it.
Friday represents this for me. It's like, yea, Friday, but then I realize that I've spent another week, doing not much of anything. What did I accomplish, except to remain employed, to do the laundry and to fight back the big chunks of dirt in the house.
We're hacking down a considerable debt. I wish I knew exactly where we racked it up. It's probably from the last seven years, which included the sale and purchase of 3 houses, four moves, multiple luxurious vacations, a two-year sabbatical, three new computers, three new vehicles, and thousands of restaurant meals. I guess it's not so mysterious where the debt came from after all.
I like to think that I'm financially savvy, but I work in sales and you kind of get weird about money. At the end of the year you get your W-2 and there's a six-figure number on it, but the government takes its share, you fund your retirement, you buy a shit-load of insurance and voila, you end up taking home about 60% of what you've earned. Meanwhile, you've been spending like a Texas millionaire.
So this is the year of austerity. We got on board with this about six months ago. We saved a bit in an emergency fund and started paying down the debt, and whammo, we got hammered with household repairs. Some stuff on the house you can put off, you can't put off the replacement of a sewer-pipe. People asked me:
1. Doesn't the city pay for that?
2. Doesn't your insurance pay for that?
The answer: No. If the sewer-pipe is on your property, its yours to maintain. If the sewer-pipe failed because of lack of maintenance, then your insurance won't cover it. The good news (if you can call it that) is that if the sewer-pipe backs up, floods the basement, causes mold to grow and contaminates the carpeting, THEN the insurance will pay. You'll pardon me for being happy that we didn't have that level of sewer-pipe drama.
So what does it cost to dig up your freshly landscaped yard, haul out a collapsed iron sewer-pipe and to replace it with a new PVC pipe? About $7000 and a big patch of your lawn. I don't think I can't explain the trauma of an enormous backhoe digging up a newly planted centipede/zorsia lawn. In a drought. I just can't.
And so there is debt. I flash-back to our rather cool basement apartment some days, knowing that we should have stayed put there. We had plenty of space for the two of us. Yes, the little dog in the apartment above us drove us to distraction with his barking and clickity-clack of his nails on the hardwood floors, but when the neighbors waterpipe broke and flooded our utility room, it wasn't our problem.
We had no business buying our house. Atlanta hasn't been a hot housing market since the 1996 Olympics, in fact, it's the number-one area of the country for foreclosures and mortgage fraud. But I fell in love with the house, or rather its potential. Let's just call it a money pit, and leave it at that.
There's good news. We have an FHA, conventional loan with a low payment. Our neighborhood is slowly going up in value, we owe less on the house than it's worth. With the deductions we get from the house, the mortgage is only a couple hundred dollars more than the apartment and we have twice the room.
But getting to my point I measure my days, not in coffee spoons, but in amount of debt we pay off. I HATE wishing my days away to get to the next paycheck. But really, in economic times like this, isn't that what we all do? I am very grateful that I have it all covered and enough left over to properly pay down the debt.
I guess there's no point in regret. I need to embrace the decisions that I've made, be happy about the good ones, learn from the bad ones.
On Yom Kippur we atone, but also, we need to forgive, those who do us wrong, but also ourselves. What's done is done and we're making the best of it.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Company in the Basement
I've got company in the basement, the market. I think that it's interesting that nearly everyone I know believed that passing the big bail-out was going to somehow make the economy better, or if not better, at least protect his or her job. I'd laugh if it wasn't so horrific.
Congress has been trying to sell that trickle-down crap since Reagan. Well, for sure I know that shit runs downhill, and that's about what you can count on with trickle-down economics.
We all got our stock statements a couple of days ago. I didn't even open mine. There's no point. I feel great about my portfolio though. It's strong, and I believe that it will all go up. If not, I'll always be able to make money, so in the grand scheme of things, I have my health, I have a great husband and if we all have to start over, so be it.
People are sheep when it comes to economics and the economy. They credit their savvy when the market is up, and they blame the economy when their investments tank. Here's a clue, if you know about it, and you're Joe Lunchbox you're already too late. There's a story that J.P. Morgan knew it was time to get out of the market in 1929 when his elevator operator was giving him stock tips.
About ten years ago I was with my folks visiting some friends in Phoenix and we were having lunch with a long-time friend of the family. The joke is that both the husband and the wife are medical professionals, one a doctor, the other a therapist and as much money as they've made, they've lost twice that to a cocaine addicted financial adviser, terrible investments and plain fraud. They wouldn't know a stock tip if it bit them on the ass. So we ladies are eating our goat cheese salads and Mrs. Professional starts telling me about what a great investment Enron is. I wasn't under a rock, I knew that lots of people were really excited by Enron and the growth of its stock and had jumped on the bandwagon. I had tried to understand what the company did, but the more I read, the less I understood and I gave it a miss. Turns out that the little voice in my head whispering "Emperor's New Clothes" was dead-on.
A high tide raises all boats. It's easy to look smart when you can't make a bad investment. People flipping houses in California in 2005 could do the dumbest things and still make money. They weren't smarter than the average bear. They were just in the right place at the right time.
I did something really stupid in 1999. I took a loan against my 401(k) to buy a house in Florida. Except the 401(k) was my MCI WorldCom stock and the house was $140,000 on a water lot. When I sold the house in 2002 I sold it for $260,000. The MCI stock was worth zero. Was I smart? No. I was lucky.
The same people who were worth $1 Million according to their MCI WorldCom stock holdings in 1997, were broke and unemployed in 2003. Only five years between smart and stupid.
Very few people are smart enough to beat the market. The rest of us should put the dough in an indexed stock fund, make the same investment every month with dollar cost averaging and hope to hell that the miracle of compounding interest will save our soft, white asses when we're ready to retire.
Congress has been trying to sell that trickle-down crap since Reagan. Well, for sure I know that shit runs downhill, and that's about what you can count on with trickle-down economics.
We all got our stock statements a couple of days ago. I didn't even open mine. There's no point. I feel great about my portfolio though. It's strong, and I believe that it will all go up. If not, I'll always be able to make money, so in the grand scheme of things, I have my health, I have a great husband and if we all have to start over, so be it.
People are sheep when it comes to economics and the economy. They credit their savvy when the market is up, and they blame the economy when their investments tank. Here's a clue, if you know about it, and you're Joe Lunchbox you're already too late. There's a story that J.P. Morgan knew it was time to get out of the market in 1929 when his elevator operator was giving him stock tips.
About ten years ago I was with my folks visiting some friends in Phoenix and we were having lunch with a long-time friend of the family. The joke is that both the husband and the wife are medical professionals, one a doctor, the other a therapist and as much money as they've made, they've lost twice that to a cocaine addicted financial adviser, terrible investments and plain fraud. They wouldn't know a stock tip if it bit them on the ass. So we ladies are eating our goat cheese salads and Mrs. Professional starts telling me about what a great investment Enron is. I wasn't under a rock, I knew that lots of people were really excited by Enron and the growth of its stock and had jumped on the bandwagon. I had tried to understand what the company did, but the more I read, the less I understood and I gave it a miss. Turns out that the little voice in my head whispering "Emperor's New Clothes" was dead-on.
A high tide raises all boats. It's easy to look smart when you can't make a bad investment. People flipping houses in California in 2005 could do the dumbest things and still make money. They weren't smarter than the average bear. They were just in the right place at the right time.
I did something really stupid in 1999. I took a loan against my 401(k) to buy a house in Florida. Except the 401(k) was my MCI WorldCom stock and the house was $140,000 on a water lot. When I sold the house in 2002 I sold it for $260,000. The MCI stock was worth zero. Was I smart? No. I was lucky.
The same people who were worth $1 Million according to their MCI WorldCom stock holdings in 1997, were broke and unemployed in 2003. Only five years between smart and stupid.
Very few people are smart enough to beat the market. The rest of us should put the dough in an indexed stock fund, make the same investment every month with dollar cost averaging and hope to hell that the miracle of compounding interest will save our soft, white asses when we're ready to retire.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Laughing all the way to the bank
hSo Wells Fargo beat Citigroup to the punch and bought Wachovia, all without the help of Uncle Sucker. Ha, ha, ha. I'm sure that Citigroup was sure that the government was Uncle Chump (and they are) and would do anything not to have another financial institution go under, meanwhile, in the marketplace, Wells used their own money and bought them outright.
That's the free market, and sometimes, it works. Of course if the government continues to reward the fat cats who were the idiots that got us into this mess, then why not take stupid risks?
I was channel surfing the other night and Fox News had some Bettman Archive footage on, and I paused because I love that stuff, and learned that although it seemed that Roosevelt saved the US during the depression actually, in the world according to Fox, he and the democrats set the economy back at least two years. (Or something like that, I got disgusted and turned the channel.)
James and I were discussing some social ideas at the dinner table. If you (I) were in charge of the world, how would you handle the issue of Welfare, the unemployed and the impoverished? (This should give you insight into our marriage, we actually talk about stuff like this.)
I hate Welfare as an entitlement because it seems to sap initiative from the people who are on it. It's not really enough to allow a family to live well, but it's too much to incent the head of that family to go out into the workforce. Welfare also does nothing to prepare its recipients to move from Welfare to work. Why should I give up food, housing, a stipend, health care and free child care to work at Burger Circus, especially when I lose my health benefits? See, no incentive.
I believe that everyone is entitled to education, health care and a safety net in case of financial disaster. That's what Welfare should be, a safety net, not a way of life. If an able bodied person gets a government subsidy, then that person should work. Even if it's in a make work program like the WPA. We got some really nice stuff out of the WPA. My high school was built as a WPA project. Hoover Dam. TVA. Some great art. Between the CCC and the WPA this country got real pretty and electrified.
James brought up the workhouse in England, I mentioned The Great Chain of Being, and we decided that if there were people out there who just refused to work, we shouldn't let them die, but the accommodations wouldn't be so great and neither would the food. James stops short of the Sheriff Joe Arroyo plan of pink underwear, tents in the desert and bologna sandwiches breakfast, lunch and dinner. More like a cot and school lunch. You won't die, but you might want to.
So, we've got corporate Welfare, where if the government bails out the big, corporate interests, they have no incentive to do a good job, and we've got individual Welfare, where the recipients have no incentive to do any kind of job. Good times. Good Times.
That's the free market, and sometimes, it works. Of course if the government continues to reward the fat cats who were the idiots that got us into this mess, then why not take stupid risks?
I was channel surfing the other night and Fox News had some Bettman Archive footage on, and I paused because I love that stuff, and learned that although it seemed that Roosevelt saved the US during the depression actually, in the world according to Fox, he and the democrats set the economy back at least two years. (Or something like that, I got disgusted and turned the channel.)
James and I were discussing some social ideas at the dinner table. If you (I) were in charge of the world, how would you handle the issue of Welfare, the unemployed and the impoverished? (This should give you insight into our marriage, we actually talk about stuff like this.)
I hate Welfare as an entitlement because it seems to sap initiative from the people who are on it. It's not really enough to allow a family to live well, but it's too much to incent the head of that family to go out into the workforce. Welfare also does nothing to prepare its recipients to move from Welfare to work. Why should I give up food, housing, a stipend, health care and free child care to work at Burger Circus, especially when I lose my health benefits? See, no incentive.
I believe that everyone is entitled to education, health care and a safety net in case of financial disaster. That's what Welfare should be, a safety net, not a way of life. If an able bodied person gets a government subsidy, then that person should work. Even if it's in a make work program like the WPA. We got some really nice stuff out of the WPA. My high school was built as a WPA project. Hoover Dam. TVA. Some great art. Between the CCC and the WPA this country got real pretty and electrified.
James brought up the workhouse in England, I mentioned The Great Chain of Being, and we decided that if there were people out there who just refused to work, we shouldn't let them die, but the accommodations wouldn't be so great and neither would the food. James stops short of the Sheriff Joe Arroyo plan of pink underwear, tents in the desert and bologna sandwiches breakfast, lunch and dinner. More like a cot and school lunch. You won't die, but you might want to.
So, we've got corporate Welfare, where if the government bails out the big, corporate interests, they have no incentive to do a good job, and we've got individual Welfare, where the recipients have no incentive to do any kind of job. Good times. Good Times.
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