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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?

Funerals Cost Too Much

Finance, Life

When my mother-in-law died, we weren’t prepared to pay for her funeral. We were three years into our debt repayment and were throwing every available cent at our last credit card. We had a couple of thousand dollars in savings, but that was earmarked for property taxes, braces, and a few other things that make money go away.

Then we found out we had a $1500 bill just to get her released and moved to the funeral home.

And catering for the funeral.

And programs.

And the grave, marker, and urn.

Scratch the last one. My mother-in-law prepaid for her grave site and had a funeral insurance policy to cover the marker, cremation, vault, and urn. She paid $800 and saved us nearly $1900 last spring.

By the end, we spent about $2500 for everything, including a reception at the funeral home.

I can’t describe how helpful that was. We couldn’t have covered it without debt, and the money we inherited was months away.

A little pre-planning on her part smoothed out the hardest time in our lives.

In 2009, the average cost for a funeral was $7,755. That’s a lot of cake for something that often catches you by surprise. In 2012, the average savings balance in the U.S. was $5,923.

Unexpected funeral expenses are a “wipe me out” expense. In a flash–a heart attack, a car accident–your life savings can get sucked into death expenses, leaving your family with nothing.

That reminds me, it’s time to buy a pair of grave plots.

Blacksmithing, or Quality Time With a Teenager

Parenting

For the past few months, I’ve been taking blacksmithing lessons with my 16 year old son.

Diagram of a coal forge. In the book:"Pra... — Diagram of a coal forge. In the book:”Practical Projects for the Blacksmith”, it was noted that a forge like this can be made based on a barbeque-pan. This, by adding a hole and inserting a T-junction with a hairdryer (the whole costing about 60 € new, or $5 for both items when obtained secondhand/from the junkyard) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite a while, but my schedule never lined up with the places that teach near me.

Then I forgot about it.

Last year, the History Channel started a new series called Forged In Fire, that made me think about it again. Better, the boy was interested, too.

If you don’t have a teenager, here’s some interesting information that’s almost universal: teenagers suck. You spend a dozen years of your life essentially doing everything for them. Then one day, they have their own interests and want nothing to do with their parents. I get it, it’s good for them to be independent and all, but it sucks for the parent who wants to spend time with the kid.

Enter blacksmithing. I’m interested, the boy’s interested, and I’ve dropped most of my side projects to have more time for my family and myself. Let’s do this.

Class number 1: 5 miles away, teaches Tuesday evenings at the height of rush hour. That’s a 45 minute 5 mile drive. It costs $350 each for an 8 session class, that I’d have to leave work early for and would cut into the kid’s homework.

Class number 2: 15 miles away, teaches full-day classes over eight consecutive Saturdays…for $120 each. That’s awesome. Except they book their entire year’s calendar of classes within 3 days of posting the schedule for the year. When they got my paper registration in the mail(seriously, paper? In 2015?), they called to tell me we were 6th on the waiting list.

Class number 3: 2 hours away. Full day classes on Saturdays. Held every Saturday, so we could come on our schedules. Cost $100, but $200 total for a class as we want them is way more affordable than the $700 up front for class #1. I’m sold.

Four classes into it, I find out that that’s the most classes I can pay for. I’m still welcome to use the facility, but now I have to supply my own charcoal. From here on out, it’s $50 for gas and $20 for charcoal to forge all day…and still get taught. If we pass some tests, we can officially join and sell our creations in the gift shop.

Totally sold.

So now, the boy and I are making the drive once a month. We talk during the drive, we work together on the forge. I love my kid, and I love spending time with him. I love making things, and I love sharing that love with my kids. In a few years, he’ll move out, but he’ll remember this for the rest of his life. It’s worth every cent.

6 Ways to Stretch a Meal

Finance, Recipe

: Image via Wikipedia

You eat.

Right?

Sometimes, we have more money than month and wonder how we’re going to avoid going hungry at the end of the month. When the grocery budget has run out and the cupboards are almost bare, how do you keep the kids fed?

The secret is to keep some staple stocked all the time. If you have these ingredients, you can stretch $1 of beef into a meal for 10 people. Almost.

Rice

We buy rice 20 pounds at a time. I try to keep a bowl of cooked rice on hand at all times. When we cook a soup, stew, or hotdish, we add a cup or two of rice to the dish. If we’re running late for dinner(a painful situation with a 2-year-old, a 4-year-old, and an 11-year-old who’s about to hit 5′ 7″), we’ll dump a can of soup over the top of a bowl of rice. A quick trip through the microwave, and we’ve got a reasonably healthy meal in 2 minutes. Another trick is to add some to ground beef, whether it’s a meatloaf or sloppy joes.

Beans

This is another ingredient I try to keep on hand, cooked, and in the fridge. We use it like we use the rice. We add a cup to soup, or almost anything else. Throw some barbecue sauce on them, and you’ve got pseudo-baked beans for cheaper than you can buy a can. Mash them with taco seasoning and you have refried beans. Add a cup to scrambled eggs for a filling breakfast.

Potatoes

There are so many ways to use potatoes to stretch a meal. Shred them to cook with eggs or slice them onto a hotdish. Cube them into soup or dice it as a thickener in stew.

Pasta

Yet another item that can go into almost anything. Before I met my wife, I’d make a dish that consisted of nothing more than whatever pasta I had on hand, with a can of soup, cooked until the pasta was done and most of the liquid was absorbed by the noodles. I learned how to wield spices like a crazy Neptunian ninja.

Soup

Whenever we cook, whatever we eat, we make enough for leftovers. When the leftovers are no longer enough to make a meal for anyone, they go in a bag in the freezer. When we have enough, we put them all in a slow-cooker with some water and a ton of seasonings. When we get home from work, we have a delicious soup waiting for us–free soup. If we want stew, we throw in some rice. By the end of the day, the rice has completely dissolved, transforming our delicious freaking soup into yummy dang stew. Everything we make tastes good, so combining a dozen dishes into one soup should also taste good, right? The exception: fish. Never, ever add fish to free soup. Trust me.

Bread

I don’t use bread to cook much, though it’s harder to get much cheaper than a grilled-cheese sandwich. I like to serve a slice of bread with dinner. It just makes the food feel more filling.

That’s how I make a meal for two stretch to feed my family of five, without sacrificing taste or nutrition. How do you make a meal stretch?

Credit Cards: My Failed Experiment

Finance

Back in April, we went off the cash plan.

In the two years prior to that, we paid down about $40,ooo in debt by completely forgoing credit cards. We went on a strict budget and all of our daily expenses–other than gas for the cars–was paid in cash. The only other exception was anything bought on the internet. Amazingly enough, Amazon doesn’t take cash. When that happened, the amount we spent online was taken out of the cash supply and set in a box until we could get it back in the bank.

No other exceptions.

In April, we decided that we had changed our relationship with money and could–judiciously–move back to credit card use, to take advantage of the rewards. We’d still use the same amount we had budgeted for groceries, clothes, and everything else. I set up an automatic payment for the budgeted amount, so we could use the card for our daily spending and the bank would automatically pay it off every month. What could go wrong?

Ugh.

We are not predisposed to be able to use credit cards well. It’s just not good for us. Credit cards just don’t feel like real money going out. When we were using cash for everything, we could see when money was running low, and we’d adjust our spending to stretch it out as needed. With plastic, it just became too easy to keep spending.

For the first couple of months, it was easy to overlook the problem. We paid my son’s vision therapy on the credit card, to get a discount on the therapy and cash in on the rewards program. That was around $4,000. Combined with the regular spending, it took us a couple of months to get it all paid off and current.

This month, we’ve managed to overshoot our monthly budget by $500. We’re only halfway through the month.

This weekend, we had a fairly unpleasant conversation about money. In the end, we decided to go back to cash-only. It works for us, in a way that credit cards don’t. Credit cards were a failed experiment. We’re going back to what works.

Have you ever had to switch from cash to credit cards and back? How did that work out?

Welcome to Unemployment

Finance

Last week, I was let go from my job. The reasons are unimportant.

http://gty.im/167334756

So now, I am unemployed right before Christmas.

And my renters are moving out at the end of the month.

Normally, this should be a time for panic, but strangely, it’s not.

It actually came with a feeling of relief. Again, the reasons are unimportant.

But still, my predictable income has suddenly become unpredictable.

It is times like this that I’m glad I’ve spent the last 5 years crushing my debt. I currently have about $1000 on a credit card from my monthly expenses and around $10,000 on my mortgage.

That’s it. There’s no soul-destroying credit card debt. No car payment.

Trimming down to the not-painful-but-not-barebones basics puts my monthly nut at $3300. Leaving a bit of comfort and savings in place, that jumps to $4000.

Our income from my wife’s job and the renter in our home comes to about $1600 per month. That’s $1700 per month that we’re off from the basics and $2400 we’re off from a comfortable level.

However, I expect to have our rental house rented by the end of the year. There are some repairs we have to make after the current tenants leave. That will bring in a minimum of $1200 per month, hopefully $1500. That closes the gap to $500-1200.

Now, aside from the biggest benefit of killing out debt(no monthly payments!), we’ve also been saving about 20% of our income outside of our retirement accounts. We have enough to bridge that gap for 25-60 months. Unemployment will also provide enough to cover the difference for about 6 months. That means without doing any side work…sitting on my butt playing video games…I could cover my bill comfortably for two and a half years. If I cut down to bare minimum expenses, I can stretch that to nearly 7 years.

That’s why I don’t drive a new car or wear expensive clothes. That’s why I don’t vacation on my credit cards. That’s why my kids don’t have the latest, greatest video game systems and we don’t have a big screen TV.

It’s because we chose to prioritize our financial security over pure luxuries. We chose to sacrifice optional things now so we wouldn’t have to sacrifice things like food if life took a surprise turn down a bad road.

Now, before anybody reads this and understands it as “Jason’s taking a decade off”, in the week I’ve been unemployed, I’ve had 2 phone interviews, and a request for another. One of those has turned into a tentative job offer already. I expect to remain unemployed for less than a month.