- Up at 5 two days in a row. Sleepy. #
- May your…year be filled w/ magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you…kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful. @neilhimself #
- Woo! First all-cash grocery trip ever. Felt neat. #
- I accidentally took a 3 hour nap yesterday, so I had a hard time sleeping. 5am is difficult. #
- Wee! Got included in the Carnival of Personal Finance, again. http://su.pr/2AKnDB #
- Son’s wrestling season starts in two days. My next 3 months just got hectic. #
- RT @Moneymonk: A real emergency is something that threatens your survival, not just your desire to be comfortable -David Bach # [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-09
Snip!
News flash!
Incubating my third half-clone was my major motivation to get out of debt. I wasn’t sure how we were going to be able afford her without pawning one of her kidneys.
We managed, though. She’s intact.
The idea of squeezing a fourth little monster into our budget scared me right out of the gene pool. I got a vasectomy.
Interesting fact: When the doctor says “I’m going to cut your vas deferens, now. It’s going to feel like you got kicked in the crotch, but don’t move”, he’s right. It does. And you shouldn’t. My doctor complimented me on my ability to not flinch. I reminded him that he had my fun bits in one hand and a scalpel in the other. That’s a sure way to have both my attention and my obedience.
It costs money to have a baby, particularly if you do so in a hospital. Our cheapest birth cost us $250 out-of-pocket, but that was because my wife was covered by two health insurance plans. Adding her to my plan for a couple of months cost us a few hundred in premiums. We’ll call it $500 to get the baby into the world.
My vasectomy cost $125 out-of-pocket. That’s easy math.
What if you don’t have insurance, or are covered by a lousy plan? Baby #2 fit that category. We got a bill for $8500. After begging the charity department of the hospital for help, our actual out-of-pocket was about $2500.
The bill cost of my vasectomy was $1500. Again, easy math.
Clearly, getting snipped is cheaper than having a baby, even without considering food, diapers, crib, nanny-dog, toys, padded cardboard boxes for those rare date-nights, and everything else that you have to spend with a baby.
But wait, what about condoms?
While I find it odd that you can buy condoms online, I will use Amazon’s numbers.
You can buy a pack of 72 condoms for about $18, $15 if you use Subscribe-And-Save. That brings the price down to 21 cents per condom. According to Amazon, the most popular subscription option is one delivery every five months, which comes out to one condom every other day.
If that’s you, then yay!
At $15 per delivery, it would take 9 deliveries to make up the cost of an insurance-covered vasectomy. According to Amazon, that would take 45 months, or almost 4 years.
Without insurance, it would take 41 years to make up the difference.
Condoms are cheaper.
On the other hand, a vasectomy is pretty well guaranteed. I went to the best I could find. No back-alley doctor with a hedge-clipper for me. He guaranteed his work, provided I came in for two follow-up visits to check his work.
Now, I have no risk of expanding the budget for another ankle-biter and I don’t have to worry about random 3AM trips to the pharmacy.
Automatic Everything
In an effort to simplify my finances, I’ve automated every bill I have. For years, I resisted, fearing a lack of control over my money. A few months ago, I re-examined the bill paying options on my bank’s website and changed my mind. This is one thing that USBank has done right.
The first thing I did was set a budget. Without a budget, it’s not possible to let your money take care of itself. I did this months before I decided to automate.
All of the bills that offer a budget plan–a plan that averages your payments to avoid fluctuation–went on the plan. It means I do overpay some months, but it also means I get to underpay some months. Most important, I always know what will be due. These bills were scheduled in the bank’s online bill paying system as is, along with the rest of the bills that do not fluctuate.
All of the bills that do fluctuate went in to the bill paying system at their highest level. For example, I don’t pay for text messaging on my cell phone. Some months, I send and receive text messages. I pay my cell phone bill assuming that there will be a few messages. This is slowly building a credit on my account. If I don’t use all of the credit, I will get to skip a month of payments sometime next year.
I keep track of all of this using Quicken. Every one of these bill is in the calendar. They are all scheduled to be entered into the register on the first of the month, to post of the actual day of payment. This lets me see, at a glance, my cash flow for the entire month.
But wait! What about the non-monthly payments, you ask? They are also in Quicken, broken into monthly line items. There’s a “Set aside for property taxes” item, a “Set aside for web host” item, and a few other items.
My time to maintain this has been reduced to comparing the bills to the bill-paying system every other week. At the same time, I consolidate all of the “set asides” so I don’t have 10 property tax entries when one will do.
I know this is an inefficient method of saving money, but my goal isn’t to save money, it’s automating money and removing one layer of stress from my life. It has transformed bill-paying from an hour or two per week to 20 minutes, twice per month and very little stress.
Shattering Taboos
ta·boo
-adjective
1. proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable: taboo words.
There is a societal prohibition against talking about money, especially actual money. Talking about a deal, or the hypothetical bundle you lost on the Super Bowl is ok, but discussing how much money you make, or how much you have saved for retirement is almost as bad as talking about sex. In many social circles, it’s far worse.
Money is one of the primary causes of divorce, second only to infidelity. It can cause myriad problems, including anxiety, depression, paranoia, impotence, impulse spending, gambling, social isolation, suicide, and murder. Yet even therapists hesitate to discuss finance with their patients.
Occasionally to the chagrin of my family and friends, I’ve almost completely destroyed that taboo in myself. After spending a year and a half writing about everything I do financially, I’ve found myself with very little hesitation to talk about my finances in real life. I don’t mind discussing my credit card debt, my projections on paying off my mortgage, or almost anything else, with the exception of my salary. I’ve never seen anything good come from coworkers comparing paystubs. Somebody always gets hurt feelings.
Aside from that one exception, I think it’s healthy to talk about money. How many kids launch into adulthood financially clueless because their parents wouldn’t talk about money? How many marriages could be saved if couples would talk about their financial problems before they became financial disasters?
How can you go about breaking down the mental barrier to talking about money? Starting a personal finance blog and writing three to four times per week for a couple of years isn’t a practical solution for everyone.
Start small.
Mention the fact that you have a credit card balance(assuming you do) when you are talking to a friend. Suggest a coworker appeal his property taxes, or offer a couple of tips to help your cousin negotiate her rent.
Most importantly, start having these conversations with your spouse/significant other/life partner. If you can plan to spend the rest of your life with someone, you can certainly plan to discuss one of the most important topics in your life with her. If you can’t, are you really a good fit?
Try it. Break down that taboo. Your life will be better for it.
Are you afraid to talk about money?
Christmas for the Destitute
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?
Make Yourself Accountable
Everybody knows the reputation New Year’s resolutions get for being abandoned in under a month. Following through with your saving and budget goals can be difficult. There are thousands of strategies for keeping your resolutions, but I’ve found that the best goal-keeping mechanism is to make yourself accountable. There are several ways to accomplish this.
Make Firm Goals. If your goals are open to interpretation, it’s easy to interpret them in a way that lets you off the hook. Make the goals concrete and immune to interpretation, and that can’t happen. “Get up earlier” may mean five minutes, which is technically meeting the goal, but not really. “Get up at 5am” is clear and concrete.
Get a “Goal Buddy”. When I am out shopping, if I’m struck by the impulse to buy something I probably don’t need, I call my wife. She’s more than happy to encourage me to put the movie or game back on the shelf. I have a friend who will call me up if he’s thinking about buying a new gadget so I can talk him down. Friends don’t let friends mortgage their futures.
Go Public. As you may have noticed, I’m being as open as possible with my goals for the year. I have laid out clear goals and I provide fairly frequent updates through both this site and twitter. If I fail, I fail in front of an audience. That’s strong encouragement to succeed. Tell your family, friends and coworkers. Announce your goals on the internet. Make it as difficult as possible to fail gracefully.
Punish Yourself. I have a line item in my budget called “In the hole“. If I go over budget one month, the overage is entered as an expense the following month. This serves the double purpose of getting the budget back on track and forcing me to sacrifice something the next month to make that happen. Another option may be to write out a check to a charity you hate, and drop it in the mail if you miss your goal. Anything unpleasant can work as your punishment.
How do you keep your goals?