Live Real, Now

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

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-05-29

Misc

The Luxury of Vacation

Finance, Parenting

This was a guest post I wrote last year to answer the question posed by the Yakezie blog swap, “Name a time you splurged and were glad you did.”

There are so many things that I’ve wanted to spend my money on, and quite a few that I have.  Just this week, we went a little nuts when we found out that the owner of the game store near us was retiring and had his entire stock 40% off.  Another time, we splurged long-term and bought smartphones, more than doubling our monthly cell phone bill.

This isn’t about those extravagances.  This is about a time I splurged and was glad I did.   Sure, I enjoy using my cell phone and I will definitely get a lot of use out of our new games, but they aren’t enough to make me really happy.

The splurge that makes me happiest is the vacation we took last year.

Vacations are clearly a luxury.  Nonessential.  Unnecessary.  A splurge.

When we were just a year into our debt repayment, we realized that, not only is debt burnout a problem, but our kids’ childhoods weren’t conveniently pausing themselves while we cut every possible extra expense to get out of debt.  No matter how we begged, they insisted on continuing to grow.

Nothing we will do will ever bring back their childhoods once they grow up or—more importantly—their childhood memories.  They’ll only be children for eighteen years.  That sounds like a long time, but that time flies by so quickly.

We decided it was necessary to reduce our debt repayment and start saving for family vacations.

Last summer, we spent a week in a city a few hours away.  This was a week with no internet access, no playdates, no work, and no chores.  We hit a number of museums, which went surprisingly well for our small children.  Our kids got to climb high over a waterfall and hike miles through the forest.  We spent time every day teaching them to swim and play games.   Six months later, my two year old still talks about the scenic train ride and my eleven year old still plays poker with us.

We spent a week together, with no distractions and nothing to do but enjoy each other’s company.  And we did.   The week cost us several extra months of remaining in debt, but it was worth every cent.   Memories like we made can’t be bought or faked and can, in fact, be treasured forever.

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How to Prioritize Your Spending

Finance, Uncategorized

Jewel-Osco - monster shopping cart truck
Image via Wikipedia

Don’t buy that.

At least take a few moments to decide if it’s really worth buying.

Too often, people go on auto-pilot and buy whatever catches their attention for a few moments.  The end-caps at the store?  Oh, boy, that’s impossible to resist.  Everybody needs a 1000 pack of ShamWow’s, right?   Who could live without a extra pair of kevlar boxer shorts?

Before you put the new tchotke in your cart, ask yourself some questions to see if it’s worth getting.

1. Is it a need or a want? Is this something you could live without?   Some things are necessary.  Soap, shampoo, and food are essentials.  You have to buy those.  Other things, like movies, most of the clothes people buy, or electronic gadgets are almost always optional.   If you don’t need it, it may be a good idea to leave it in the store.

2. Does it serve a purpose?  I bought a vase once that I thought was pretty and could hold candy or something, but it’s done nothing but collect dust in the meantime.  It’s purpose is nothing more than hiding part of a flat surface.   Useless.

3. Will you actually use it? A few years ago, my wife an cleaned out her mother’s house.   She’s a hoarder.   We found at least 50 shopping bags full of clothes with the tags still attached.   I know, you’re thinking that you’d never do that, because you’re not a hoarder, but people do it all the time.  Have you ever bought a book that you haven’t gotten around to reading, or a movie that went on the shelf, still wrapped in plastic?   Do you own a treadmill that’s only being used to hang clothes, or a home liposuction machine that is not being used to make soap?

3. Is it a fad? Beanie babies, iPads, BetaMax, and bike helmets.  All garbage that takes the world by storm for a few years then fades, leaving the distributors rich and the customers embarrassed.

4. Is it something you’re considering just to keep up with the Joneses? If you’re only buying it to compete with your neighbors, don’t buy it.  You don’t need a Lexus, a Rolex, or that replacement kidney.  Just put it back on the shelf and go home with your money.  Chances are, your neighbors are only buying stuff so they can compete with you.  It’s a vicious cycle.  Break it.

5. Do you really, really want it? Sometimes, no matter how worthless something might be, whether it’s a fad, or a dust-collecting knick-knack, or an outfit you’ll never wear, you just want it more than you want your next breath of air.  That’s ok.  A bit disturbing, but ok.  If you are meeting all of your other needs, it’s fine to indulge yourself on occasion.

How do you prioritize spending if you’re thinking about buying something questionable?

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Time Management

Finance, Relationships

Clockwork egg timer.
Image via Wikipedia

My wife told me that I don’t do enough around the house.

She is, of course, correct.

I could make a list of excuses, but none of them matter.   There’s really only one reason: I have problems with time management.   I’m easily distracted.

For example, in the time it’s taken me to write the above three lines, I stopped to check a website, updated my Evernote installation, and added a new contact to my address book.

That’s not multi-tasking, that’s inefficiency.   People don’t actually multi-task.  Instead, they break concentration and completely switch gears.  Repeatedly.   They pretend they are doing a lot of things at once, when in fact they are doing a large series of individual tasks.  That’s serial single-tasking, poorly.

On top of that, I focus to the point of obsession.   The entire world goes away when I am working.

No, that’s not a contradiction.    I’m good at procrastinating and I am interested in everything.   If a random thought floats to the surface while I’m working, I follow it to Google and, if it’s interesting enough, I get lost.   It generally only happens during research or while doing a job I hate.

For those of you following along at home, I can be easily distracted from some tasks, then lock on to some tangent and have an evening disappear.

For some reason, my wife hates that, especially when there are dishes to be done and laundry to be folded.

This has blown up on me a few time.

We’ve come upon a solution, in three parts.

1.  Timer.  When I get on the computer, I set an egg timer for 1 hour.  When the time’s up, I’m done.   The time limit helps me focus on finishing the task at hand.    If I know I need to get a post written in an hour, I’m less likely to catch up on the comics in my news reader.

2.  Communication.   If I’m working on something that I know will take more than an hour, I tell her.   I’ve had to do that for each installment of the Make Extra Money series.

3.  Nagging.   If #1 has failed and #2 doesn’t apply, I’ve given my wife explicit permission to remind me, as often as necessary.  Sometimes, I don’t register everything people say when I am “lost”, so now she knows to keep trying if I don’t respond, or respond with a spaced-out “Uh-huh, yes, dear.”  Before, she was worried about upsetting me by nagging, but I wouldn’t have noticed the first few times.  Thankfully, with #1 and #2, #3 has only been an issue one.

Time limits, communication, and persistent reminders.  That’s my plan to manage my time.   Getting off of the computer has helped me be more useful with household chores and it’s given me a chance to be closer to the woman I love most.   The time-limited focus has even helped me get a couple of projects rolling.

We all have the same 24 hours.  Are you using yours efficiently?

(P.S.  Happy anniversary, honey.   These have been the best years I could ask for.)

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Beat the Check

Finance

Wheel of fortune. Shot wide open using 50mm/f1...
Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever played a game of “Beat the Check”?  Your rent is due tomorrow, but you don’t get paid until Friday, so you write the check today an, on payday, you run to the bank to get your paycheck deposited before it has a chance to clear.  To stretch out the time, you write yourself a check from another account to cover the deficit, knowing that will take a few more days to clear. This is called “floating” a check.

Sound familiar?

I think most people who write checks have tried to rush a deposit in before a check clears.

In 2004, the Check 21 act went into effect, which turned the game on its head. This law gave check recipients an option to make a digital copy of a check, slashing processing time. Instead of boxes of checks being transported around the country, the check began getting scanned and instantly transferred, along with all of the encoding necessary to keep the digital checks organized. This dramatically cut the amount of time it took to clear a check. What was once a week was reduced to as little as 48 hours.

Now, as technology improves and banks update their infrastructure to match, the “float” time has been reduced even further. Many banks are using image control systems to instantly convert all incoming checks to digital format. Within a couple of hours, these images can be transmitted to the Federal Reserve, to be transmitted nearly instantly to the issuing bank. If both the issuing and the receiving banks are using modern image control systems, it is impossible to float a check. “Beat the Check” is a thing of the past. It’s like betting on purple at the roulette wheel.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the funds are instantly available. That would eliminate the banks being able make use of the funds during that time. Don’t expect the banks to make a habit of allowing you the use of your money before the federal regulations demand it.