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The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.

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Don’t Screw Future-You

Finance, Life

A conversation between me and my temporally displaced self.
Future Me: Excuse me, Jason?
Me: Yes?
FMe: <Slap!>
Me: May I ask what that was for?
FMe: Of course.
Me: What was that for, jerk?
FMe: That was payback for all of the hell you have put me through.
Me: What?!?  I’ve never even met you, before.
FMe: Of course you have.  I am future-you, and I’m sick of getting screwed by past-me, that is, you.
Me: Huh?
FMe: Listen close.  You’re not  the sharpest brick in the box and I don’t want to explain this twice.
Me: ???
FMe: A long time ago, when you first met our wife, you were dumb.
Me: I don’t appreciate….
FMe: Shut up.  I was dumb then, too.  Remember?  You…err…we bought a new truck, built an addition on our…err…your…err…whomever’s house, got married in the same year.  On top of many other expensive decisions.  Do your recall?
Me: Yes, I do.  So what?
FMe: If that wasn’t enough, you and your smoking-hot bride are still shopping like you’re rich. You drive a new car.  Your kids wear new clothes.  You’ve got a house full of new furniture.  How did you pay for all of that?
Me: Naturally, I charged it.  Zero payments, zero interest for a year!  Pretty smart, huh?
FMe: What happens in a year?
Me: I don’t know.  I’ve got a full year to figure that out.
FMe: <Slap!>  I’ll tell you what happens!  Future-you, that’s me, gets screwed!   Your raise didn’t come through.  You had a baby. The truck broke down.  Your wife took maternity leave.  A roommate moved out.  You took a loss in the stock market.  You didn’t plan!  You had no savings to cover any of those problems because you were too busy servicing debt to pay for your current life.
Me: How was I to know?
FMe: <Slap!>  Life happens!  You never know what is coming next.  You need to plan and save for what might happen.  Otherwise, you’ll just accumulate more debt to be serviced by yours-truly.  That is not acceptable.
Me:  So?  What are you going to do about it?
FMe: <Slap!>
Me: Really?  Again?
FMe: <Slap!>  I’m struggling to pay your debt. Your son starts college next year, but you’ve left me completely unable to help.  Your daughter wants to get married in a couple of years, but the Father-of-the-Bride can’t afford a tux.  My wife, your beatiful bride, wants a vacation that I can’t afford.   You’ve screwed me, dude.
Me: I’m sorry.  What can I do to fix it?
FMe: Buy me dinner, first.
Me: Huh?!?!?
FMe: Stop the excess spending. Spend less than you make, for a change.  No credit.
Me: None?
FMe: None.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch.  Only spend what you can afford. Budget.  Pay off those nasty bills.  Don’t leave me hanging.
Me: So, what you’re saying is that, if I don’t have the money, I shouldn’t buy it?
FMe: Exactly.  That’s the path to wealth, freedom, and financial independence.  Live in the real world.
Me: Gee, thanks, Future-Me!  Now I know.
FMe: And knowing is half the battle.

What would your future-you have to say to you?

 

Priorities

Business

I once saw a sign on the wall in a junkyard that said, “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Another good one: “If everything is top priority, nothing is top priority.”

Once a week, I meet with my boss to discuss my progress for the previous week and my priorities for the coming week.   This is supposed to make sure that my productivity stays in line with the company’s goals.

Great.

Once a day, my boss comes into my office to change my top priority based on whichever account manager has most recently asked for a status update for their customer.

Not so great.

At least twice a week, he asks for a status update on my highest priority items.   Each time, he could mean the items we prioritized in the weekly meeting, or the items he chose to escalate later.   Somehow, getting a new task escalated doesn’t deescalate an existing task.

Everything is a top priority.

To compensate, I’ve been working a few 12 hour days each week, and occasionally coming in on the weekends.

I’m dedicated and still behind.

Prioritizing is treated as an art, or in the case I just mentioned, a juggling act.  It should be considered a science.  It’s usually pretty simple.

  • Is the problem costing you money? +1
  • Is the problem costing your customer money? +2
  • Is the problem going to hurt your reputation? +1
  • Is there a deadline? +1
  • Is it soon? +2
  • Is it urgent? +1
  • Is it important? +2
  • Are there absolutely no real consequences for anyone if it doesn’t get completed? -500

That’s it.    Too many times, we get hung up on urgent-but-not-important items and neglect the important things.

The hard part comes when it’s someone else setting your priorities, particularly when that person doesn’t rate things on urgency, importance, and cost but rather “Who has bitched the loudest recently?”

Can I tell my boss that I’m not going to do things the way he told me too?  No.  A former coworker very recently found out what happens when you do this.

Can I remind him that I’m busting my butt as hard as I can?  Yes, but it will just earn me a request to come in on the weekend, too.

Can I ignore the official priorities part of the time, and work on what I feel is most important to keeping our customers happy?  Yes, but it’s easy to go too far.  “Boss, I ignored what you said, but this customer is happy, now!” won’t score me any points if it happens every week.

Priorities are simple, but not always easy.  How do you balance your priorities?

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5 Life Altering Lessons I Learned From My Debt

Finance, Life

Starting position of a chess game. House of St...
Image via Wikipedia

Several years ago, my wife and I dug ourselves into debt pretty deep.   It wasn’t as bad as some, but it was much worse than anybody could actually want.    Recognizing the problem as a problem was a life-changing event.  From there, I’ve been examining every thing else about my life.   As part of that examination, I’ve spent a lot of time really thinking about the ultimate causes of the debt and what it has taken to motivate ourselves to get rid of it.

I’ve realized a few things:

      1. The things I want right now do not matter. I own around 2000 movies.   Up until last spring, every time I went into a store that sold movies, I’d peruse the cheap rack and buy 2-3 moves.  I’d watch them all, but the vast majority were only ever watched once or twice.  The rest may as well have been rented.   I wanted them and I wanted them “right now”, but after watching them once, the value vanished.   Most things I’ve bought on a whim lost their value to me shortly after bringing them home.  Planned purchases are enjoyable longer.
      2. The things I care about do not cost money. I cannot buy a kiss from my kids, or a hug from my wife.   The school project my son did on his hero(Me!) is absolutely priceless.  The TV, the smartphone, a new car, these things are fleeting.   Teaching my kids to read or ride a bike, getting beat by a 6 year old at chess, these things will last us all forever.  It took $30,000 of unsecured consumer debt to drill that lesson home.
      3. Instant gratification is easier than security, but not nearly as gratifying. It is incredibly easy to buy what you want when you want it.    It is much harder to postpone buying something until you can afford it.   Once you build that habit, and see the savings of delayed gratification, it’s worth it.   There is a comfort in having a few months worth of expenses in an emergency fund that no amount of knickknacks can match.
      4. I like getting stuff more than I like having stuff. It’s easy to succumb to the temporary high of a quick purchase.  It’s easy to train yourself to crave that high to the point that it’s impossibly to walk out of a store without buying something.  I did that.    When I cleaned out my entire house this spring, I came to the realization that I don’t need–or even want–most of the things I own.   I wanted it once, but once I had it, the infatuation was gone.  I didn’t have many problems unloading most of my crap.  It felt good to get rid of it.
      5. Owing money sucks. The borrower is slave to the lender.   When our debt exceeded our annual income, we were working 3/4 of the time just to stay afloat.  Instead of being able to spend my time and money on the things that matter, I was forced to spend thousands of hours just covering interest and pretending to make progress on my shackles.  That’s not how I recommend spending your life.   Time is the one thing you have that you can never get back.  Don’t waste it on crap like debt.

 

Have you learned anything from your debt?

Side Hustle: The Garage Sale Preparation

Finance

We had a garage sale last week, as a wrap-up to the April 30 Day Project.  We got rained out halfway through the first day of our 3-day sale, but we still managed to clear $1500.  We held the sale in our neighbor’s garage because it had more space and better visibility.

Wednesday night, while carrying boxes over, I missed the step to their property from our driveway and crashed while carrying three boxes.   That’s a twisted ankle and a bleeding knee.  Naturally, while I’m hopping and swearing, everyone is concerned that I’m okay.   The worry-warts.   Anyway, it hurt, so we stopped setting up while we still had a few boxes left in the basement.

[ad name=”inlineleft”]Thursday morning, I decided to show them all.   At 5:30AM, before anybody else is strongly considering the possibility of maybe thinking about getting ready to hit the snooze button, I decided to get the rest of the boxes ready.   They’d all wake up, worried about how I’m feeling, asking if I’m to stiff to carry boxes.  The best way to show them they don’t need to worry would be to have all of the boxes dealt with before they woke up.   So I started.    Up and down the stairs, with a stiff, twisted ankle, gloating to myself about how tough I was…BOOM, down the stairs. I was on my back, sliding down the stairs.    I caught a stair-tread in the small of my back and another on the point of my tailbone.  Mommy?

After I stopped twitching on the floor at the base of the stairs, I managed to get the last of the boxes ready.   Instead of sympathy, I spent the rest of the weekend getting asked if I needed an inflatable doughnut to sit on.  There are places I’d prefer not to have bruised.

Unpacking the boxes made me glad that everything was priced.  We spent 6 weeks going through our entire house–every room, every dresser, every drawer–to eliminate the clutter.   As something went into a box, it got priced, so we didn’t have to do it all at the last minute.  That is the most important time-saving step for a garage sale.   Price it as you pack it. You don’t want to waste hours pricing stuff while tripping over potential customers.

Another preparation tip to do early:  Find tables!   Ask around. You’d be surprised at who has a dozen folding tables collecting dust in his basement.    It’s better to borrow that to rent.    The best price I found was $17.50 to rent an 8′ X 30″ table for a week.   We didn’t have to do that, but we thought we would have to.  I borrowed a few, found a few, and built a few out of sawhorses.

The week before the sale, we placed an ad in the paper. When I placed the ad, the paper called to suggest we change it from running the weekend before to running just the days of the sale.   I agreed, to a point, but their Sunday circulation is miles ahead of the weekday circulation, so why pay to run an ad nobody will see on Thursday?    I ran it Sunday through Tuesday, because I wanted the Sunday ad and we got 3 consecutive days in the price.   Did I actually know better than the paper’s sales-weasel?  Who knows?   I think I made the right decision.

The Sunday before the sale, I posted an ad on Craigslist. Interesting fact: little old ladies use Craiglist to plan their garage-sale adventures.

Two days before the sale, we made signs. Bright pink signs with brighter yellow starbursts. They were all simple. “Mega Sale! 8-5” followed by an arrow and our address. Simple, easy-to-read, and bright. The morning of the sale, after the ibuprofen kicked in, I put the signs up. When you make signs out of paper, always include a crossbar. It rained a lot the first day of the sale, so the signs wilted. The second morning, I went out with some duct tape and crossbars and fixed them all.

The day before the sale, we got cash and change. We had $50 in 1s and 5s and $25 in silver change. No pennies. Nothing was priced to make us need them.

The morning of the sale, we set up two canopy tents in the driveway and pulled the prepared-and-filled table out under them. We finished stacking as much as we could on the tables and called it “open”. There were a few boxes we couldn’t put out due to the rain. We simply ran our of room. At noon, $65 into the sale, we decided enough was enough and shut down–cold, wet, and miserable. Lunch and a nap made the day better.

Later, I’ll discuss the other parts of our successful sale.

Note: The entire series is contained in the Garage Sale Manual on the sidebar.

Update: This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival.

3 Habits Every Soon-to-be-Successful Debtor Needs to Cultivate

Finance

Getting out of debt is primarily a matter of changing your habits.   We’ve all heard people swear by skipping your morning cup of coffee to get rich, but that’s just a small habit.   Much more important are the big habits, the lifestyle habits.  Here are 5 habits to cultivate for financial success.

Frugality

“Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship”– Benjamin Franklin

As Chris Farrel wrote in “The New Frugality“, being frugal is not about being cheap, but finding the best value for your money.  When my wife and I had our second baby, we couldn’t justify spending $170 on a breast pump, so we bought the $30 model.   It was quite a bit slower than the expensive model, and was only a “single action”, but for $140 of savings, it seemed worth the trade.   Six weeks later, it burned out so we bought a new one, still afraid to justify $170 on quality.   This thing took at least 45 minutes to do its job.  When it burned out 6 weeks later, we decided to go with the high-end model.   This beauty had dual pumps, “baby-mouth simulation” and it was fast.  The time was cut from a minimum of 45 minutes to a maximum of 15.   That’s 3 hours of life reclaimed each day fro $140. Six months of breastfeeding for each of two kids means my wife regained 45 days of her life in exchange for that small amount of money.   At the rate of 6 weeks per burnout, we would have gone through 8 cheap pumps, costing $240.   The high-end unit was still going strong when we weaned baby #3.  Buying quality saved us both time and money. I wish we would have gone with the good one from the start.  Sometimes, the expensive option is also the cheap option.

Maturity

A very sad, sad panda :(
Image via Wikipedia

“Maturity is achieved when a person postpones immediate pleasures for long-term values.” -Joshua Loth Liebman

Being a mature, rational adult is hard.   It means accepting delayed gratification over the more enjoyable instant variety. We save for retirement instead of charging a vacation.  It takes a lot of restraint to put off buying the latest toys, clothes, gadgets,  cars or whatever else is currently turning your crank until you actually have the money to actually afford it.   It means planning your future instead of looking like a surprised bunny caught in a spotlight every time your property taxes come due.   (Who knew that the year changed every year?  Do they really expect annual payments annually?  Geez!  There’s so much to learn!)   It means thinking about your purchases and buying what you actually need, actually want, and will actually use instead of resorting to retail therapy whenever you feel like a sad panda.    The only benefit to mature, rational management of your finances is that, given time, you will have the security of knowing that, no matter what happens, you will be okay.   That’s a huge benefit.

Pleasure

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“Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.” – Thomas Jefferson

If it hurts, you won’t do it.   You have to learn to take pleasure from from things that won’t make you broke and you have to learn not to hate putting off the things you can’t afford.    Take pleasure in the little things.  Enjoy the time with your family.  Presence means so much more than presents. So many people never learn how to enjoy themselves.  Take the time to experience life and enjoy doing it.

Update:  This post has been included in the Carnival of Debt Reduction.

I Smell a Scam

Finance

I hate scammers. Whether it’s the garage-sale shoplifter, telemarketing “charities” with 99% overhead, 3-card-monte

shell game
shell game (Photo credit: mixatal (Clive Power))

dealers, or the guy who begs Grandma for cash every week, they all need to be strung up.  Since vigilante justice is generally illegal and occasionally immoral, it’s best to just avoid the problems from the start.  Here are some scams to watch out for.

Pyramid Scams – All of the little parties people throw to earn free items at the expense of their friends are pyramid schemes.  Most of those are legitimate money-sinks.  A few, however, exist solely to get their “consultants” to bring in more consultants.  The sales aren’t the actual way to make money.  If you don’t have anyone “downstream” you won’t make any money.  If the focus isn’t on selling an actual product or service, but is instead on bringing in people under you, you have entered the world of pyramid scams. Generally illegal and always immoral.  Don’t sign up and, if you do, don’t ask me to participate.

Advance Fees and Expensive Prizes – If you win a contest and you are expected to send money to claim your prize, it is a scam.  You don’t have to pay sales tax in advance.  You don’t have to pay transfer fees.  Real prizes are delivered free, accompanied by a 1099, because prizes are income.   No prize requires pre-payment. No loan service requires “finder’s fees”.   If it doesn’t sound right, don’t pay it and certainly don’t give your bank information to anyone you can’t verify.

Work at Home – The most common work-at-home job I’ve found is stuffing envelopes.  You see the signs on telephone poles all over the city.  “Make $10/hour stuffing envelopes from the comfort of your own home!  Just send $50 to….”   When you get the instructions, you are told to hand up signs telling people to send you $50 for instructions on how to make $10/hour stuffing envelopes.  Everybody is feeding off of everybody else.

Charity – Never give money to a charity over the phone.  Always take the time to verify where you are sending your money.  Some freak may call to tug on your heartstrings with a sob story, but you don’t have to give them money.  At least ask them to send it in writing so you can do some checking, first.

Phishing – Simply put, don’t click on any link in any email, unless you know where it is going.  If it is a link to a financial institution, go enter the address into the address bar yourself.   If you find yourself on a site you don’t recognize, don’t give them your personal information and don’t ever reuse your usernames and passwords.   If you do, one bad site could get access to everything you do online.

[ad name=”inlineleft”]Foreign Lottery – To be clear, Spain did not just hold a international lottery and randomly draw your email address. No lottery in the world works that way.  If you didn’t enter the lottery while you were in Spain, you aren’t going to win it.   The scam is that you need to provide your bank information, including a number of release forms so the scammers can transfer money to you.  In reality, you are signing over control of your account and will be wiped out.

Nigerian/419 Emails – Ex-Prince WhateverHisNameIs wants your help to get his fortune out of WhereverHeIsFrom.   The New Widow Ima F. Raud has an inheritence that she won’t live long enough to spend.  They’ve both been given your name as a trustworthy person to handle the transactions in exchange for a mere $10 million.   What friends do you have that would make this seem legitimate? Once again, they will get your bank information and take your money.  At a minimum, they will try to get you to pay a few thousand dollars for “Transfer fees”.  Don’t do it.

Overpayment by Wire – I had this one attempted on my last week.  You sell something online.  A potential buyer agrees to purchase the item, sight-unseen.  They’ll send a cashier’s check and, after it clears, one of their agents will pick it up.  Unfortunately, the buyer’s secretary screwed up and added a zero to the check.  Would you mind wiring the overpayment back, minus a small fee for the hassle?  The check is bogus and there is no way to verify it.   You’ll deposit the check and it will be assumed to be real.  The bank will make the funds available well before it comes back as fraud.  You’ll see the available funds and send the money by non-refundable Western Union and some thug in Nigeria gets a new iPhone.

Foreclosure Scams – Some scammers try to prey on the vulnerable because they are, well, vulnerable.   If you are facing foreclosure, be very careful about where you turn for help.   One scam is to get you to sign over your home “temporarily” to clear the title.  That doesn’t work, but you won’t find that out until you are handed an eviction notice and told you still owe the money.

Stranded Friends – You get an email from a friend saying he’s in London/Moscow/Sydney/Wherever, and he’s been mugged.   He’s got nothing and needs $2500 to get home.  Can you help?   Do you really have friends close enough to ask for a $2500 international bailout, but not so close they tell you about the vacation ahead of time? Would they really be too timid to call you collect instead of begging for change to use an internet cafe?