- I tried to avoid it. I really did, but I’m still getting a much bigger refund than anticipated. #
- Did 100 pushups this morning–in 1 set. New goal: Perfect form by the end of the month. #
- RT @BudgetsAreSexy: Carnival of Personal Finance is live 🙂 DOLLAR DOODLE theme: http://tinyurl.com/ykldt7q (haha…) #
- Hosting my first carnival tomorrow. Up too late tonight. #
- Woot! My boy won his wreslting match! Proud daddy. #
- The Get Home Card is a prepaid emergency transportation card. http://su.pr/329U6L #
- Real hourly wage calculator. http://su.pr/1jV4W6 #
- Took my envelope budget out in cash, including a stack of $2s. That shouldn’t fluster the bank teller. #
Calendaring Life
I’m incredibly absent-minded. I get involved in something and forget about almost everything else. While that makes me productive at work and helps the time pass, it means I forget to do a lot of things. On the days I am supposed to pick up my son, I have to set reminders so I don’t get wrapped up in a project at work and forget to leave on time.
My solution has been to put everything into Google Calendar. I use 10 different calendars, five of which are mine. I have one for regular scheduling of appointments, one I use to take notes for 30 Day Projects, and one that is copied from the school calendar so I don’t forget late-start days and school vacations. I also use calendars to track the wrestling team’s schedule, family birthdays, and upcoming holidays. I’ve got all of these calendars synced to my phone, I get reminders a week in advance, and I get a daily agenda at 5AM, every day. I don’t forget much anymore.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on a new project–a new calendar. I’ve been reviewing seasonal home-maintenance checklists, medical checkup recommendations, car maintenance lists, and more. All of this has been added to a new Google Calendar, the Home and Life Maintenance Calendar.
This calendar is designed to remind its users to do the things we all need to do, from biannual physicals to replacing your furnace filters, checking your tire pressure to cancer self-exams. The seasonal chores happen in the right seasons, and the monthly reminders happen monthly. It is a work-in-progress and I welcome any recommendations for the things I’ve missed.
So, here it is. Use it, set up reminders, smack me for missing something obvious and enjoy.
[google-calendar-events id=”1″ type=”ajax”]
Update: This post has been included in the Festival of Frugality.
Multiracial Skinhead Love Triangle
“Honey, here on national television, in front of a live studio audience, I’ve got a secret I’d like to share. You’re not our child’s mother. I’ve been sleeping with the milkman. And the goat. Your mom is the star of my new adult website. With the goat. And the milkman. I’ve got three other families, in three other cities. I lost the house to my gambling addiction. Those sores? Herpesyphiligonoritis. I got it from the foreign exchange student we hosted before I moved her to Dubuque and married her. The goat gave her away. The milkman cried. Oh, and I wore your panties to the Illinois Nazi reunion. I know how much you hate Illinois Nazis. But I still love you. And your sister. Especially your sister. She does that thing with her tongue….”
Why would anyone go on national television to share things like that?
More interesting: why would anybody stay on stage after hearing that?
Stay tuned.
I have this friend. He bought a couple of cars. He’s got some issues with money, partially revolving around a need to keep his assets below a certain threshold. So he put the cars in his girlfriend’s name. I know, it’s slightly crooked, but that makes the story more fun.
They broke up.
Recently, she called him to say she was suing him for the cars. She wanted them. She wanted to hurt him. She was mean. Somehow that turned into them agreeing to settle the case on Judge Joe Brown, on national television.
My friend spoke with the show’s producer, then last week, he was flown to California and put up in a hotel for a couple of days. When he arrived at the TV studio, he was informed that it wasn’t Judge Joe Brown, but a new show that will start airing in the fall called, The Test. According to CBS, The Test “is a one-hour conflict resolution talk show that will use lie detector and DNA tests to settle relationship and paternity disputes among the guests.” Coincidentally, CBS also owns Judge Joe Brown.
My friend got on stage with Dr. Phil’s son, Jay McGraw, and was accused of cheating on his girlfriend and stealing her identity. Lie detectors. Yelling. Accusations.
Why did he stay?
He wasn’t given his return plane ticket until they were done filming.
When he was done, they handed him a voucher for cab fare and the itinerary for his return flight. Until then, he had no other way to get home.
That’s why people stay on stage. It’s probably also why none of those shows ever have people with money of their own; they can find their own way home in a pinch.
Interesting side note: The show paid $200 and booked the cheapest possible return flight, with a 6 hour layover.
Bonding Relationships
People can’t be happy in a vacuum. We are social creatures. Even the most anti-social among us needs some human contact. How can you make that contact happen in a meaningful way? How can you connect with other people beyond some superficial meaningless chatter?
According to Keith Ferrazzi in his book, Who’s got your back, there are four mindsets necessary to build lifelong relationships.
1. Generosity. This is your promise to help others succeed. If have a skill that can help someone you know, why not give them a hand? when you help others, you are building social capital, which is a currency that cannot be bought. Since our lives are not ledger books, you can’t do favors with repayment in mind, but it is reasonable to assume that the people ou help will want to help you some day.
An often overlooked generosity strategy is to give away 90% of everything. I’m not suggesting you give away 90% of your wealth or possessions. I’m suggesting you give away 90% of your personal product. Plan to give away 9 times more than your receive. This will not only keep your from being disappointed, but it will also leave you feeling very fulfilled.
2. Vulnerability. It is important to let down your guard and let the world see your humanity. It’s almost impossible to truly connect with someone who’s shields are always up: the guy who seems to be invulnerable and unapproachable. The people you spend time with know your flaw anyway. If you pretend they don’t exist, you are only fooling yourself. I have a lot of problem with this one. Letting down my guard is incredibly difficult, in almost every circumstance. It is far easier to be strong than to let myself be vulnerable.
3. Candor. Total honesty is vital to establishing–and maintaining– lifelong relationships. Even the white lies can destroy your connections. If you can lie about the little things, you are planting doubts on everything else you do and say. Who can trust you then? Lying is inappropriate in almost all conceivable cases. I was raised that a man’s word is his bond. Almost everything you have can be taken away from you, but not your honor. That can only be destroyed by you. Without it, what do you really have?
4. Accountability. You need to follow through on your promises. Be Mr. Reliable(or Mrs!). If you say you will do something, do it! Nothing builds resentment faster than disappointing the people who are counting on you. If you can’t meet a commitment, let the soon-to-be-let-down know as early as possible, so other plans can be made. If you have a hard time keeping promises, then make fewer of them.
If you embrace these principles, you will be well on your way to building–and keeping–strong, satisfying relationships that benefit everyone.
How do you build your relationships?
Living the XBox Life on an Atari Income
- Image via Wikipedia
At some point, everyone has “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” Over the last 25 years, we’ve even been peddled the “you can have it all” myth from every direction, including the media and the government.
The truth is simple: you cannot have it all. You can have anything, but you can’t have everything. In order to have one thing, you have to give up something else. It’s a law of nature. If you have $5, you can either get a burger or an overpriced cup of coffee, but not both.
“But wait!” you shout, rudely interrupting the narrator, “I have a credit card. I can have both!”
Wrong.
And stop interrupting me.
If you have $5 and borrow $5 to get some coffee to go with your burger, you will eventually have to pay that money back with interest. You will have to give up a future-burger AND a flavor shot in your overpriced coffee.
Everything you buy needs to be paid for, some day.
If you have an Atari income, but insist on living the XBox life, you will wake up one day, buried in bills, forced to live the Commodore-64 life out of sheer desperation.
There is a solution.
Don’t get all XBox-y until you are making XBox money. That way, you’ll never have to worry about going broke tomorrow paying for the fun you had yesterday.
Even when you have an XBox income, ideally you’ll restrict yourself to living a Gamecube life, so you’ll be able to put some money aside to support future-you instead of constantly having to worry about your next paycheck.
Mistakes Made
- Image by K. Sawyer via Flickr
My wife and I started dating when we were 19. We married shortly thereafter, and–at 31–we have 3 kids.
Now, most of a decade into my career, with a dozen years of experience as both a husband and an adult, I think we make decent decisions.
When we were younger, though, we were dumb. We didn’t think much past the “year” in “0% for a year”. Our long-term financial planning was non-existent. Heck, most of the time, our short-term financial planning usually consisted of a call to the bank to see if we had enough money to buy whatever we wanted at the moment or rushing to the bank to deposit the change we found in the couch, hoping to beat the last check we wrote.
We were never able to judge ourselves based on how happy we were. It was always a matter of how we were doing in relation to someone else. A relative–a close relative–is 10 years older than we are. That means, naturally, that she had a 10-year headstart on us. We saw the nice house, the nice cars, and the nice furniture and couldn’t help but compare it to our situation. Their stuff was always shiny and new, while we were making repairs and ignoring rust.
That comparison always made responsible spending difficult. We watched one friend upgrade her house twice in 2-3 years, while driving nice cars. Why couldn’t we do that, too?
Bad logic.
In one year, we put an addition on our house, got married, bought a brand-new pickup, and spent 10 days on a ship in the Caribbean. We did that with a gross household income of about $40,000. Before that summer, we didn’t have a mortgage. Since that summer, we have had a car payment, a credit card payment, and a mortgage payment.
I can still smell the scorched plastic peeling off the sides of our well-used credit cards. That year was when we figured out how everyone else affords all of the nice stuff: they bury themselves in debt.
The debt was never a big deal to us. Yes, money was tight. We always had more month than money, but we also had $50,000 in available credit on the cards and a $5000 credit line serving as our overdraft protection. Since we never missed a payment, we thought we were doing well. After all, you don’t have to be able to afford the debt, as long as you can afford the payment, right?
After that, we started putting the nice truck to work hauling home new furniture. Who can go wrong with 0% for a year? Surely, I’d have a raise by the time that comes due.
The same time we paid off the truck, I got a raise. It was a good raise. There we were, a wallet full full of balance-laden credit cards, a mortgage that we could have done without, furniture we were still paying for years later, a freshly paid-for truck, and a small stack of new money. That meant, of course, that we could “afford” a new car that came with a payment that was–coincidentally–equal to the raise. No problem.
Six weeks later, I got laid off.
Two weeks into the layoff, we found out that we were no longer “trying” to have another baby, we were just waiting for 9 months.
I wish(wish!) that would have been a wake-up call, but that moment of clarity was still 18 months away. The driving obsession to get out of debt was another 18 months away. Unemployed and expecting brat #2, I still wasn’t ready to take a rational look at my finances. That, however is a story for another day. Today, is my day to share my biggest financial blunders, not my successes.
What financial mistakes have you made?
