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Anna Chapman and Edward Snowden: How to afford a long-distance romance?

100703anna_chapman (Photo credit: alanconnor)

Recently Russian spy Anna Chapman tweeted a proposal to fellow spy Edward Snowden, as in a marriage proposal. News reports covering the Internet event report that Chapman would not reveal whether she was serious but asked reporters to use their imaginations. So it is yet to be seen whether there will be spy marriage ahead for the two notorious leakers. What is true, however, is that no nuptials can take place at the moment, even if Anna Chapman were serious and Edward Snowden. That is because the United States has revoked Snowden’s U.S. passport, and marriage ceremonies cannot take place in the airport where Snowden is trying to buy time. So how can Chapman and Snowden afford a long-distance relationship? Follow this quick guide of tips for helping the spies survive what could be a long road ahead!

Finding Deals

Anna Chapman has the most mobility right now, so she should be looking out for cheap flights to where Snowden is hiding out. A long-distance relationship can be expensive, so that is why finding deals on air travel is key. She can drop into the airport for a quick rendevouz. Why not?

Saving Money

These two potential spy lovers and super team need to save their money at every turn. Hiding out in secrete is costly, so they should create a special account that they both can add to for getaway and meeting expenses. Meeting at the airport is going to get old after a while, so they need to find a safe space where they can enjoy one another and sustain their relationship. Long-distance relationships are known for their difficulty because a couple spend so much time trying to reconnect every time they see one another.

Pick Your Fights

Long-distance relationships have little room for petty fighting. You see each other so infrequently that you have to cherish the time you have together. Instead of talking spy business, Anna Chapman and Edward Snowden should make sure they are focusing on each other by getting to know each other and focusing on the small things that make them happy together. Petty fighting will destroy a long-distance relationship. Chapman and Snowden should part each meeting feeling good about the other instead of feeling frustrated.

Kiss and Makeup

The key to long-distance relationships is always to kiss and makeup before leaving. No matter what the spies face together or apart, they cannot let their professions and media scrutiny come between them. Instead, they need to focus on their love and passion. Make sure to share a passionate kiss before leaving each meeting so that the memory of love and admiration is fresh on the mind. With a little effort in the romance department, Chapman and Snowden will be well on their way to creating harmony in their relationship. Moving from shallow levels to more deeper levels, however, is going to take time.

My Mortgage is Smaller Than My Credit Card Balance

Finance

It’s been one heck of a spring summer for my family, financially speaking, and it turned out to be a bit more than we had budgeted for.

English: Victor Fung and Anna Mikhed dancing a... — English: Victor Fung and Anna Mikhed dancing a ballroom tango. The couple, dancing for the USA, came third in the World Professional Standard Championship 2009. Photo taken in 2006 by Porfirio Landeros, Kwixite Media, in San Diego, California. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here’s what we’ve done on top of our regular spending, so far:

Remodeled both of our bathrooms(at the same time!) ($6000-ish)
Summer camp for two kids ($500)
Swimming lessons for three kids ($350)
Replaced the entire air conditioning system in my car ($1600)
Finished paying for our current round of ballroom dancing lessons($400)
New mattress on our bed($1200)
My wife is off work for the summer. Part time and sporadic hours when it’s not the school year.

Taken in reverse order…

Mattress

The wire frame on our mattress broke. I wish that was a complement to my prowess, but nothing was happening when it snapped. Sleeping with a jagged piece of steel poking you sucks, to say the least.

Dancing

Ballroom dancing is something my wife and I both enjoy, and it’s good exercise, so we decided to keep it up. We are officially in training for competition-level dancing, but now that our favorite place to dance is closed, we may not continue. The lessons are paid for through next spring, though.

Air conditioner

My A/C system “grenaded”. Basically, the insides decided to disintegrate and go flowing through the rest of the system, mucking it all up. And making the car undriveable. On the plus side, this hard-to-find leak I’ve been ignoring in favor of annual $75 A/C recharges is fixed, now.

Swimming, not dying

My youngest kids have never had swimming lessons and my oldest isn’t a strong swimmer. Helping my kids not drown is a good thing.

Camp

We put the down payment on camp back in February, then promptly forgot about paying for the rest of it until the deadline hit. I paused while typing this to add it to my budget so I don’t forget for next year.

The remodel

We had, at one point, $9500 set aside for the remodel, but I raided that account a few times if we went over on our monthly spending. Then, when we got the estimate, we neglected to include one of the subtotals together when we agreed to it, so the job cost more than I was expecting from the start. We still got a great price, though.

Until the tub surround didn’t come in a color we liked and could get in less than 6 weeks. So, we upgraded to porcelain tile.

And the ceiling started peeling.

And we decided to get nice fixtures, so it would be a bathroom we loved enough to demonstrate physically, for years to come.

And we noticed the basement bathroom floor tiles were loose.

So much money just poured out of my credit card.

At the moment, we have approximately $8,000 on our credit cards. That’s the highest balance we’ve carried in years. This month was the first time I’ve paid interest on a credit card since August 2012.

What’s our plan for the credit cards?

I get a $500 bonus every month. Getting this bonus is almost entirely under my control.
We gave our renters(two of our closest friends) a good introductory rent until their current lease expires. Their rent triples at the end of the month.
I stopped paying double mortgage payments.
We have some money in our emergency fund.
We should have about $1000 left in the remodel account when the job is finished.

That’s $1500 as an immediate payment, plus about $2300 per month on top of our normal spending to pay off the cards.

That means we’ll be down to about $4300 in two weeks. When my wife gets her first full paycheck at the end of September, we’ll have the cards paid off.

Then comes the challenge of catching back up on the mortgage. Until yesterday, we were projected to pay off our house on December 1. Our current balance is $4660, with a mandatory monthly payment of $470.58. That’s about 10 months of payments. We were making an extra $520 interest payment each month, which brought it down to the December payoff date. For the next 3 months, we’re only going to be paying roughly the minimum, which means we’ll have to pay a bit over triple for November and December to be done with it this year.

I think we can do it.

How do we avoid this in the future?

With our renters paying full rent now, our goal is to pretend Linda isn’t getting paid when her work picks up again in September. We want to save or invest everything she makes, on top of the current savings. Not all of that will be long-term, and not all of it will be spendable. That saving will include things like braces for the younger kids, vacations that are more than just long weekends, and maxing out both of our retirement accounts.

That should still let us pad out our emergency fund to 4 months of expenses by spring, which is a pretty good cushion for us.

I hope. I haven’t done the math.

Net Worth, April 2016

Finance

Last year wasn’t a good year for my net worth. It came with a $7000 drop.

Q1 2016, however, was a great quarter.

In December, we had $13,271 in credit card debt. At the time I took this screenshot, it was down to $3836.43. As of this moment, it’s down to $2640.91. If things go as expected this week, I should wake up on Friday to a paid-off credit card. I had to raid some of our savings accounts to make it happen, but it’s happening. Some of it was a tax refund, some of it was the fact that my mortgage payment went away in December.

That’s seven years of hard work, almost to the day. Seven years ago, I was researching bankruptcy, and stumbled across Dave Ramsey. Seven years ago, we were drowning in debt.

Next week, we’re free. No more debt, hanging over our heads. We’re free to take vacations. We’re free to finally save for college, when my son is 16, and stand a chance of being able to pay for it for him. We’re free to do…whatever we want to do. Our monthly nut after the debt is paid–only in fall/winter/spring when my wife is working–is roughly 1/3 of our take-home pay.

That’s how hard we’ve cut to make sure we can pay our bills and make debt die. We do have some things that would be considered extravagant. We’re not savages. But my car is 10 years old. My wife’s is 7. My motorcycles are 35 and 30; one of them was purchased before we cared about our debt.

Back to the net worth….

The biggest change came from our property values, which sucks. That was $36,000 of the difference, which comes with the painful tax bump to go with it. A large chunk of the savings increase was the money we set aside every month to cover the property tax bill, and that will go away next month.

Still, $641,000 dollars is a long way from nothing. I’m pretty happy.

Beating High Drug Costs – OR – A Primer on Smuggling

Finance, Life

Please assume that this post is fiction. I am in no way saying that I have broken the law or advocating that others do so.

First of all, I am actually a fan of expensive drug prices. Drug companies invest billions into research and development and have a relatively short window of time to recoup that cost before their patents expire. That means new drugs are funded through expensive medicines. Without that hefty price tag, we wouldn’t get ground-breaking medicine.

However, when my doctor gives me a prescription that costs $1000, it gives my a serious pause. Yes, that’s for what’s supposed to last 9 months(in reality, about 6), but that’s still a huge chunk of change.

But what are the alternatives?

Some people go to Mexico or Canada for medicine.

Me? I went to alldaychemist.com (Ed. This is not an ad. They don’t pay me anything. I pay them). For real. At least,a hypothetical, fictional for real. ADC is an Indian pharmacy. In India, an awful lot of non-narcotic medicines aren’t considered controlled substances, so they can be sold under different rules than in the US. For example, you can buy antibiotics over the counter or through the mail, legally. At least legally there.

I placed my fictional order using a credit card I don’t use for anything. It is an Indian company, after all. I also won’t give them my bank account information to do a wire transfer, like they would prefer. That would be stupid.

Once an order is placed, it is manually approved, usually within a few hours, depending on time differences and their office hours.

From there, your package is shipped within a could of days. As soon as it hits the New Delhi postal system, you can track the package.

The biggest time delay is customs in the US. That adds about 2 weeks to the shipping time. If, for some reason, customs rejects the package, ADC will ship another right away, but that’s pretty unlikely. Customs has better things to do than inspect every tiny box that comes through. Unless you set up a commercial distribution system (read: drug dealer), you really don’t have anything to worry about.

Are the drugs legit?

Yes. My imaginary order has been doing exactly what I was expecting it to do over the months I’ve been using it.

At 1/100th of the domestic price, it’s totally worth it, you just have to order the medicine about 3 weeks before you need it.

Selling Your Car

Finance

: English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money. Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value. Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”

When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:

Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well. Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.” It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.

When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.

Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses. Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept. Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time. Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car. That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car. “Officer, Sumdood took my car. He was wearing jeans.” That won’t get your car back.
Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer. A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars. It’s well worth the expense.

Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.

Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?

This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.

Search Results for: how-much-should-you-tip/INGDirect/subscribe-by-email/money-problems-day-1-setting-goals/consumer-action-handbook/mistakes-made/experiences-v-stuff/questions-from-a-reader/5-steps-to-save/shaving-for-real

Finding Deals

Saving Money

Pick Your Fights

Kiss and Makeup

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