Live Real, Now

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

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Meditation

Life

Life is crazy.

 “Really, Jason, that’s news?”
I spend so much time going in so many different directions.
Cleaning out our inherited hoarding house, managing the remodel, work, side hustles, kids, friends, family, relationships, maintaining our house, maintaining a relationship with my wife, garage sales, school starting, junior high football season, insurance policies, probate, rush hour, insomnia.
Some days, I feel insanely scattered.  I can’t focus.  I have a hard time making decisions.  I waste time.
Those days, I need to clear my head.
That’s where meditation comes in.
I don’t do the money hum. (Om mone padme, Om)
Instead, I have three activities that demand a total focus.  They drive out any scattered thoughts or unimportant concerns.
They have to because, quite frankly, they can be dangerous if I don’t concentrate.
1. I shave.  I use a double-edged safety razor, so bleeding for the throat is a real concern.   For 10 minutes, nothing else in the world matters.   It has only recently struck me how valuable this is.  That value makes me want to start shaving every day, with a straight razor.  More focus, more often.
2.  I ride.  For the past couple of years, it’s been hard to find time get my motorcycle out.   Small children seem to want attention every day.   It got to the point where I was ready to sell my bike.   This spring, it was seriously misbehaving.  Finally, at the end of the summer, a friend got it running better than it ever has.   I took it out for a couple of hours and came back feeling more clearheaded than I have in a long time.  I won’t be selling my bike until I have its replacement.
3.  I shoot.  Shooting involves a series of simple actions that require concentration to do well. Load the gun, line up the sights, which eye is dominant, breathe, don’t breathe, squeeze the trigger, hole in the paper.   Again, it’s not an activity that’s conducive to worrying about the bills or work.  It’s a way to shut out the world for a few minutes.
For me, a few moments or a few hours of shutting down everything except one thing is the way to stay sane and focused.
How do you deal with it when the world comes crashing in from every direction?
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Christmas for the Destitute

Finance, Parenting

First, my disclaimer:  I’m not destitute.

However, I’m trying to spend Christmas acting like I am a pauper.

Why, with small children and beautiful-and-more-than-deserving wife, would I want to deprive my family of a bountiful holiday?

Before we get into the reasons for being a horrible grinch bent on depriving my children of their god-given right to rampant consumerism, let’s look at the Philosophy of Destitution.

The primary reason to pull back and tone it down is basic frugality.  Excessive anything is not frugal. I am training my children–and for that matter, my wife and my self–in the finer arts of personal responsibility and frugality.   Accumulating debt for a fleeting holiday is insane.  If we can’t afford to buy it, we certainly can’t afford to give it.   Anything else would be setting a bad example and children learn best by example.

Another piece of the Philosophy of Destitution(when I read this word, I hear a deep, booming voice in my head, like a 30s radio superhero voiceover)  is “green”.    I consider myself a conservationalist rather than an environmentalist, so don’t read too much into that color.  I try to be responsible, instead of destructive and I try to avoid being wasteful.  Toys that won’t be played with are wasteful. A garbage can full of packaging for those same toys costs money.  It is much cheaper to avoid the landfill here.

Back to “Why”. Why would I be willing to deprive my family?

[Read more…] about Christmas for the Destitute

A Budget Isn’t Enough

Finance

Pre-war Bayer heroin bottle, originally contai...
Image via Wikipedia

You know exactly how much you make, to the penny.   You’ve listed all of your bills in a spreadsheet, including the annual payment for your membership to Save the  Combat-Wombat.   You know exactly how much is coming in and how much has to go out each month.   Your income is more than your expenses, yet somehow,  you still have more month than money.

What’s going on?

The short answer is that a budget is not enough.

A budget is not…

…a checkbook register. Do you track everything you spend?  Are you busting your budget on $10 lattes or DVDs every few days?  Is the take-out you have for lunch every day adding up to 3 times your food budget?  Are you sure?   If you don’t track what you spend, how do you know what you’ve actually spent?  You have to keep track of what you are spending.   Luckily there are ways to do this that don’t involve complex calculation, laborious systems or even proper math.   The easy options include using cash for all of your discretionary spending(no money, no spendy!), rounding your spending up so you always have more money than you think you do, or even keeping your discretionary money is a separate debit account.  That will let you keep your necessary expenses covered.  You’ll just have to check your discretionary account’s balance often and always remember that sometimes, things take a few days to hit your bank.

…a debt repayment plan. You may know how much you have available, but if you aren’t exercising the discipline to pay down your debt and avoid using more debt, you not only won’t make progress, but you’ll continue to dig a deeper hole.   Without properly managing the money going out, watching the money coming in is pointless.

…an alternative to responsible spending. Your budget may say you have $500 to spare every month, but does that mean you should blow it on smack instead of setting up an emergency fund?   I realize most heroin addicts probably aren’t reading this, but dropping $500 at the bar or racetrack is just as wasteful if you don’t have your other finances in order.   Take care of your future needs before you spend all of your money on present(and fleeting) pleasures.

A budget is a starting point for keeping your financial life organized and measuring a positive cash flow.  By itself, it can’t help you.   You need to follow it up with responsible planning and spending.

Ignore Your Budget

Finance

IMG_1144
Image by Boz Bros via Flickr

For the first year of our journey out of debt, we had a strict budget, with all of our discretionary money spent out of an envelope system.  We had an envelope for groceries, one for discretionary spending, one for clothes and one for baby crap.   At the beginning of the month, we’d divide the money into the envelopes according to our budget spreadsheet.  If we used a card for anything, we’d take a matching about of money out of the appropriate envelope and put it in a box to get reconciled the next month.

Ugh. Almost 2 years later, it has turned into too much work and too much nagging about everything either of us put on a card.

We decided to simplify the system a few months ago.   Now, we still have a budget.  It’s even a zero-based budget, but we ignore it.  We only look at it if something changes for the worse.  If something changes for the better, the extra money just gets automatically rolled into our debt snowball, so there’s no need to worry about updating the spreadsheet.

Instead of envelopes, we kind of eyeball it.   We budget $450 per month for groceries, so we aim to spend $100 on our weekly grocery run.  That leaves some room for losing track of how much we are putting in the cart, or a last minute addition to the list.  It also leaves room for our secondary grocery trip to buy bread and milk later in the week.  We do go through a lot of milk at my house.  We budget $55 per month for diapers, but the deal we are currently getting with Amazon Mom is only costing us $30.79 for 6 weeks of diapers.  We ignore the difference.

This—and our heavily automated bill pay and savings—lets us keep our finances on track, without stressing over every dollar or fighting over every little thing that comes home unplanned.   I used to fire up Quicken and balance the checkbook every week.  Now, that happens at the beginning of the month, usually.  If I forget, it doesn’t matter.  At the beginning of February, I balanced the checkbook for the first time in almost two months and we never came close to exercising our overdraft protection account.  In fact, we had some extra, so that got sent directly to our debt.

Overall, it’s been good to test out a new system.  We have almost no financial stress and managing our money takes about a couple of hours per month instead of per week.  It’s all win.

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Keep Your Friends Out of Debt

Finance

Local Brick
Image via Wikipedia

If you’re like me, you get a bit evangelical about getting out of debt.  I try to convert spendthrifts and irritate my fellow debtors.   I’m probably pretty annoying at times.   What I’ve learned–or at least pretend to have learned–is the direct approach rarely works.   Hitting someone over the head with a brick won’t convince them of anything, even if it’s a very frugal brick.  Try it sometime.  You may convince them to buy a bigger brick to return the favor, but you won’t convince them to save money.

What can you do?  Your friends want to spend money they don’t have and worse, they want you to come with to spend money you either don’t have or don’t want to spend on bad music and overpriced beer.  Suggest less expensive activities.

If your friends want to catch a movie, suggest a matinee or hitting redbox for a night in.   It may even be worth investing in a projector and screen if movie night becomes a habit.   My couch is certainly more comfortable than the theater seats and my soda is cheaper.

When you are invited to dinner, suggest a potluck or have a barbecue. It’s almost always cheaper to eat in, and cooking together can be a wonderful social activity.   If that’s not practical, use coupons.  Restaurant.com has some amazing deals, but don’t use them without an coupon.  Their default price is a $25 gift certificate for $10.  With a coupon (currently DAD), you can get that same certificate for $3.   That usually means a minimum tab of $35 and mandatory tip of 18%, but it’s still a good savings.  Your $35 meal will cost $19.30 when all is said and done.

[ad name=”inlineleft”]Don’t compete for the coolest gadgets. “I just got an iPod for $300″ should be countered with a receipt for a $20 mp3 player, not an ad for an iPad.   Race to zero, not zeros.

Don’t be ashamed of your frugality.   “I they are laughing you don’t need ’em, cuz they’re not good friends.”   My habits aren’t secret. If I say something isn’t in the budget, my friends know I won’t be doing it.  It’s not up for debate.

Above all, I try to be proactive. I try to suggest cheaper alternatives before the expensive options are on the table.   Having a beer on my deck and watching a movie in my living room is so much cheaper than drinks at a club before a concert.

Update:  This post has been included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.