baselle's Financial Diary

Again, insanely busy, which is normal ... my January is like all my other Januarys in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 blah blah blah.

Lately though I've been excited (yay) and then there's one little hitch so I have to "rut roh" and eat a crow drumstick. This menopause thing is getting to me; I used to have a mind like a steel trap. Now it seems to work like a Venus fly trap.

A couple days ago I found a dollar bill, yesterday a wheat penny.

Tax paperwork is trickling in - I have to double check, but I seem to only be missing a couple of Div 1099s. Get those, and I can see what the lay of the land is.

But another yay this evening. DH and I have plans to go to Argentina in September. At least that is the plan. Several other couples are involved - the plan is to rent a house in Buenos Aires and use it as a launch pad. Fingers crossed that it works out.

Hard to believe that grey is such a sweet, sweet color around here. We still have a little bit of snow and plenty of icy water on the lawn and in the driveway, but everywhere else, it was muddy snow, wet roads and downtown, dry sidewalks.

Errand day today: delivered the now-clean gym clothes to the office, did a 3.5 mile walk (first long-ish one since last Sunday), bought bras at Fred Meyer which is now also doing a clearance sale preparing for them to close for renovations, picked up some trash around the house. (We had our recycling bin blow over in the windstorm last night). Cancelled the grout fest scheduled for today - maybe next week when it might be a true fest because I'll have two pieces to grout rather than just one.

Found 17 cents "around" a penny or a nickel at a time.

Oh, yes, several people had Etta James; a couple of people have Joe Paterno. This year, with more players and the players themselves seem to have done better research ... the game is already interesting right off the bat.

Luckily, the office was not as nutty as they have been previously - the office has been closed and I'm on my second snow day. DH's office (IRS) tried opening but they closed at noon.

Walking is okay - still have my Yaktrax and they are the best 20$ I ever spent. The neighborhood businesses tend to be open when their employees are living nearby. I thanked the Safeway for being open. Saw two little girls looking under the Coinstar machine - one pulled out a quarter. Heh heh - good to see the habit being passed on.

Other than that, the usual soul searching - are we weenies in the snow, why are we weenies in the snow, could this be handled better, could this have been predicted better? Once upon a time I would have been among them. Now - yep I'm a weenie. I hated snow and ice when I lived in the midwest, and came to Seattle because I wouldn't get much of it. While I would prefer that Seattle wouldn't shut down in the snow, it does, and you can either b!tch about it or deal with it.

In other words, "go on board, dammit!"

So in that spirit - this is what I'm doing this afternoon...

Yeah, this time I'm one of those Seattle snow weenies. I left work early, caught the bus, got home before the sun set. In my salad days I would have been out there snickering, but these days ... I'm not going to be the problem.

If I wake up to a couple of inches and more snow, doesn't matter whether the office is open or not, I'm staying home. I've got plenty of PTO and I can't imagine that any "fire" at work couldn't wait a day or two.

Of course, nobody had better die tomorrow. Wikipedia is going dark that day due to a protest on SOPA. Also get any lolcat craving out of the way today, they will be dark also.

I thought about putting Paula Deen on my list. Even tasting that cooking will get you in trouble (you have to taste quite a bit and the often-ness of it probably keeps you craving that stuff), and keeping it secret for 3 years just says denial to me.

Spent $14 getting enough food to last a couple of days,

It turns out that the twilight zone moment was a practical joke pushed too far by a Customer Service rep. I mentioned it to the Customer Service rep's supervisor to chat with him a bit. The way to have played it was, "yes it was a joke, isn't it funny?" and left it at that. Comedy is a fine line ... and that line is very fluid. When things ease up a bit, he could have played it further but as it is ... show a little restraint.

(Yes, restraint is mighty rich when you are MCing a death bet, but there it is.)

Got home and opened an offer from Chase. If you start a checking account (no doubt with direct deposit), Chase will give you a 200$ gift card. Yippee! Yeah, no.

Collected two more forms for my taxes. W4 and a 1099 from ING.

We are all waiting for snow apparently this weekend. French toast hankerings have begun.

So far, healthy as a horse, so I'm working like a horse at work. You might remember that book pledges/work data at a non-profit that rhymes with "you don't say". I had a MOMENT tho at the end of the day.

It started off from the generic Customer Service inbox email asking both a co worker and I we should book a 2.8M gift, read below. 2.8M, huh? Okay ...

Then you read the email. We've been trying to contact you, yadda yadda yadda, and we will give 2.8M if you give us $145. And full of typos.

Is this a joke? I wrote.

Received an email back: I called them (yikes, you can't be serious! I counted the digits and it was an INTERNATIONAL number), the money was to resolve an issue that we had in the past, and I talked with accounting and they were wondering how to book it.

Oh boy ...

Co worker, who was with me on this, told the emailer to take it to the COO.

Emailer: fine, but I'm planning how to spend my raise.

Of course we got word from the Customer Service supervisor that it was a scam, but man, I don't know where to begin. I'm fairly certain, although not 100% sure, that it is a practical joke. (the other option is complete idiocy) Its just that this is NOT the time of year to toy with us. Its just not appreciated!

Friday night was the deadline to the dead pool. I now have 13 players - which is so fantastically symbolic that I'm closing it to new players. Just got CB's payment, and with her, Mjrube, Mjrube's friend, and Paulette participating, its tempting to consider this the $20 challenge by other means. Good luck to all.

Tax time this year - I've pulled out my green (again fantastically symbolic) folder and am out "collecting". Its different this year - most places really, really want you to sign up for e-delivery to keep you paperless, or to impoverish the USPS even more. I haven't made any exotic moves, the drip re-investments are about 1K, and I haven't made much interest, I can't imagine that I'm going to pay a ton of tax. Only thing is that one of my drip companies got bought out by another drip company (which I like even more), so not only is it one more 1099, I can't write off the stock loss.

Today I did a bit of walking, but I checked out grout colors at Home Depot and Lowe's ... still might go with the gray that I have, and I slipped into Ross and picked up a Cal King bed sheet set. We have a couple of sets that we rotate, but it would be nice to refresh them a bit. Also bought a bit of food from the Greenwood Market, another grocery store that's going away. I'm still bummed. With them going away, the Fred Meyer down until October, and one of our main arterials being ripped up, 2012 is ... 2012.

Read this interesting article about weight loss last Sunday. Since weight loss and saving money are aligned a bit, hear me out because this blog post has a lot to do about money.

The article was particularly interesting to me because I appear to be one of those rare persons who has managed to keep the weight I've lost, um lost. Although I can't seem to lose lots of weight in one smooth movement, I seem to lose the 10lbs, then plateau, then wait for some change to lose 10lbs, ...rinse and repeat several times. I'm right now at 166.6 (40 lbs down since November 2005) and have managed to survive this year's holiday carb-fest.

Anyway, much of the article described what it takes for others (and me, frankly) to sustain the weight loss. Basically near constant monitoring, food and exercise diary, treating yourself as a data point. In a sense, the weight loss maintenance takes on its own place in the calendar. Its really become a hobby, something that requires energy, attention, thought, discussion.

Thinking about that, I had my first epiphany: most people think of eating as a hobby, and exercise as a chore . Most of us vary our eating, can tell you where good restaurants are, and hate cooking themselves because that's a chore. The weightloss sustainers inverted this - they essentially try to make eating as much a chore as possible. They cook at home, they try eat as consistently as possible and measure it. On the other hand, they try to exercise as much as possible - walk, garden, gym, bike and try to mix it up. Vary it, talk about it, measure it and journal it. They try to turn it into a hobby.

My second epiphany came when I thought about saving and spending because they parallel weight loss. Most Americans spend as a hobby, save as a chore. I mean when we blog about others buying that 50K countertop, well what are they doing? Spending as a hobby. They save (or try to) as a chore. Pay yourself first - try to make it automatic ... which works mechanically, but boy not very much fun.

The thing that gets me about the bloggers at saving advice is that we all try to think of saving as a hobby - play games, try different things, journal and discuss what we do or what we've discovered. We also try, at least, to put some aspects of chore into spending. Spend on needs first, then wants .... and not just any wants, needed wants if that makes any sense.

And then investing. You are turning the spending hobby on its head by saving, but buying money.

Now the chore piece ... I don't really want to discount it, make it sound awful because its really not. Chores are important they are necessary and they can even be semi-fun. Just not as fun as a hobby.

As mentioned by Paulette, she is playing with us, along with mjrube, and CB. I have almost as many bloggers playing as F2F contacts. Since not everybody likes to read this sort of stuff - it requires that you are secure in your karma - I've put my list in the comments that you can read or ignore.

Also bought stamps so that I can mail mjrube her winnings for 2011.

Let me give you a tour of my tiny portfolio:

Monkey mama linked to my first project, done in class. I loved it, but I don't think of it as sellable and the grout is now starting to crack on it. I learned two lessons - 1. don't get fancy with the edge (fancy edges have to be babied), and 2. grout has to "cure" slower than 3-4 days ... I wrap my pieces with a bathtowel I hate, spritz the towel to dampen it and wrap that in a plastic kitchen garbage bag and leave it alone for a full 7 days.

This is the finished garden tray. I found a wire tray at the thrift store and fit the piece to the bottom. Wearing like iron!


This is the piece I gave to the Duvall friends. Its a homage to their 1-winged rooster, State & Main. 1 wing but he produces "swimmers" (their comment, not mine). His first rooster son, First & State, got sold to neighbors.


I asked a coffeeshop (Green Bean) to hold their chipped and broken mugs, plates, and other ceramic stuff. I used a fair amount of black coffee mug for the rooster tail above. I made this piece for them. Word has it that they will be hanging it soon. I'll let you all know if that comes to pass!


I still have to grout this for lawyer friend and partner. They love poker and throwing dinner parties. What should happen (fingers crossed) is that the clear glass should protect the card face underneath from the grout. I learned also that a much better source for interesting ceramics is not the thrift store, but a high end ceramics shop because the high end shop can only sell the chipped and cracked pieces to me for a quarter or fifty cents. (a Vernon plate provided the curtain-y middle top).

I was doing very well as of June 2011, even broke above $600K even throughout much of July. Then August happened and I dropped quite a bit. I say that to get perspective - that I'm only 5K down is just fine. This year has been so flat and meh. The increase between December 2010 and December 2011 is literally based on the contributions I put in. (5K in the Roth, 16.5K in the 403B)

$235,596 IRA/403B
$182,365 Vanguard taxable
$35,536 stock
$13,565 I-bonds
$25,000 CDs
$98,563 ING
$1,538 immediate cash
$592,163 total

December 2011 ($592,163 total, $356,567 in taxable accounts)
June 2011 ($596,791 total, $376,359)
December 2010 ($575,346 total, $356,542)
June 2010 ($553,023 total, $369,589)
December 2009 ($551,300 total, $385,771)
June 2009 ($512,054 total, $379,475)
Dec 2008 ($498,148 total, $386,021)
June 2008 ($524,261 total, $387,481)
Dec 2007 ($328,688 total, $192,747)
June 2007 ($176,422 total, $48,205)
Dec 2006 ($132,062 total, $40,329)
June 2006 ($120,261 total, $65,148)
Dec 2005 ($67,778 total, $23,740)
June 2005 ($46,115 total, $11,293)
Dec 2004 ($38,338 total, $7,558)
June 2004 ($29,050 total, $4,533)

I say that because here in Seattle (and in Hollywood) we still have 2 hrs left of 2011. I take my death bet MCing seriously. If someone slides off this mortal coil from Pacific Standard Time zone, I am ready.

Right now I have 7 players for 2012, and that's not even counting several from work, whom I've given next week. My workmates all know the rules and that I'm going to check their picks. It's possible that we can have up to 12-13 players, which makes the winnings very nice.

Best of everything in 2012 to all SA bloggers! The only resolution that I believe in making is to resolve that Jan 1 is just another date. If you need to make a change, no time like the present. Any of the other 364 days will do.

For 2012, I plan to do more mosaics and sell some this year. I've created three with a fourth on the way and given them as gifts to the delight of the recipients. Time to see if the world needs another mosaic artist.

Calming down from Christmas - these five days are usually some of my favorites. So quiet, so peaceful, so... not part of the rest of the year or part of any year. These 5 days gave the Romans fits, too. After all, 360 is so ....round.

Any way - I filled out the increase in my 403B contributions. I put in for 17K, and for another 1K of catchup. We'll see for the next three months how it goes.

Cashed in a couple of checks - the Chase credit card cashback, and some Christmas money. With the proceeds, I've bought another round of Target stock. $500, so about 9 shares.

Got my list of celebs for 2012, and it looks like there are going to be 8 or 9 participants this year. Mjrube, where are you? You are ahead for 2011!

Merry Christmas today and tomorrow - happy holidays in the next few days.

I've been off for a couple of days, and have proceeded to spend more than usual. But I plan on buying some more Target stock - got it going with 9 shares. I also ate more than usual - am holding between 167- 165.

This is the neighborhood good fiscal deed that Seattle is talking about. Hopefully your neighborhood has a little something like this!

Had a late lunch el desko and decided after to run an errand - get a little bit of money from the downtown branch of the CU.

Quite the line, even at 2pm on a Tuesday.

That's kind of the way its going. The neighborhood branch in the Safeway has now gone - they did leave one ATM which now routinely has a big line in front of it. And now the checkouts also run short on twenties.

The things we do to avoid big banks. Adjustments have to be made.

2 players had Christopher Hitchens
3 players had Kim Jong-Il

Am looking at increasing my withholding for my 403B this upcoming year. Since I turn 50 this year, I qualify for catch-up. And I will be catching up. My task for this weekend is to figure out whether I can play catchup for both my 403B and for my Roth.

At the risk of sounding and getting a ton of hits and disappointing the pervs out there, I'm talking about the cashless, frictionless spending.

Frugality is all about the friction.

Seems like all of society is out there telling you "make it easy" and get with it, while are all here to say "stop for just a second" and "don't be a spending sheep" and "do you really, really need or want it, upon a few seconds of further consideration?"

Contrast cashless buying with layaway. Primitive, but that less than instant consumerism can give you a different way to demonstrate gratitude and compassion.

Been away for about a week - except for Christmas spending, not much happening. I got the most difficult gift (to MIL) shipped this afternoon, so phwhew. Had to wait on sending it until today, when I got paid. Felt the frugal burn - I had $20 in checking the night before.

Sister is being sent her fish - she probably got it tonight. The fish is a bit pricey, but if you are going to spend for the next day shipping, might just as well make it pay. She got salmon, lox, crab, trout, and a bit of ling cod. Got a letter from sister and my missing ORCA card. Hah! I knew she had it. (and she was the one who told me not to lose stuff during the trip) I bought another card so now I have two spares. If sister and her partner come out, I'm ready.

The credit card bill will hurt this month, but I don't expect any charges next month, so it will balance out. Cashed in my credit card rewards points $127 or so.

Had an interesting Christmas story from this afternoon. I was in Safeway, perusing the Christmas cards when a guy asked whether there were some funny ones. I pointed out one that was funny and rude. Turns out that the guy was giving the card to a guy in prison - the card I showed him was perfectly rude.

I've just started a Drp - Target, aka Tarzhay, stock ticker TGT.I had an interest, and since I have two other stocks with the same transfer agent, it was now a cinch to start it up directly from the transfer agent. Much, much easier and cheaper than using Temper of the Times. The only thing about this Drp is the $5 fee - I'll have save up and put in $500/ a pop to keep the fee at 1%. That's the thing that gets me with Sharebuilder - $4/trade seems like a good deal, but not if you are trading a few shares.

Made a wild Christmas candy bark recipe - base of chocolate, layer of crispy bits of bacon, chopped nuts (the original recipe called for peanuts, but I substituted walnuts and pecans), topped with caramel and on top of that, a little bit of salt. Tasty, but if you have bridge work, dangerous.

We are going with some friends to Korean barbeque and to them, for the Christmas season, goes the candy bark.

I'm almost done with the deciding about who to give and what to get them for Xmas, and with the exception of one item, I am done with shopping for the hardest recipient: MIL. Since she now has a Nook, I aimed for a couple of BN gift cards hidden in a homemade cheese-based gift basket. Collection phase is over, wrapping, packing and shipping remains.

Noticed that two of my dividend stocks WEC and SYY are raising their dividend. WEC especially is nice - 6 cent per share increase. To cheer me up because stock prices are so volatile, I totaled the dividend payments I would get if I stopped now and decided not to re-invest. $260.

Last night I lost my ATM card at the grocery store. Today I appeared at the credit union, bright eyed and managed to get a new card in about 15 minutes. I'll miss that (the CU at the grocery store is leaving as of Monday). I rarely lose stuff, so it was fortunate I got it all over with. I mentioned their move and the guy who got me the new card told me that they will keep one of the two ATMs, but will remove it as soon as another bank or CU goes into that space.

Finished the first week w/o our boss, who is on maternity leave. One down, twenty five more to go.

Have to get it off my flat-ish chest. HR asked about comments to the performance evaluation ... which is already fraught. I mentioned that the math is kind of gooby on it. A column says %, and you have to put in a decimal. For example, if you wanted the 50% thingee, you don't put in 50%, you have to put it in as 0.5. Its small, but dammit either fix the math or fix the column so you're warned that you have to put in the decimal.

HR minion mentioned that others mentioned it. Fine. Then came the back-handed slap that the HR minion mentioned to the HR VP (who came in late and asked for a summary) that "some managers were challenged by it".

I am not challenged this at all. Repeat: I AM NOT CHALLENGED BY MATH. And I said so. Don't get me wrong, I love a good "challenge", but I was very insulted by the word as used. I was tempted to snark that this gooby math was HR's challenge, not mine. Instead, I mentioned that if you want to present data of any sort, all the units have to be comparable. Basic science. Its like having one column in dollars and another in pennies.

Yet another skirmish between HR and me.

First day of bosses' leave was a quiet one and I managed to get mostly caught up on the routine stuff ... a couple of the big projects remain.

Am up to 167, but not bad considering I ate sweet, delicious leftovers.

Put an ad in our company intranet to advertise 4 free chicks. Duvall couple found a couple of rebel chickens who nested in amongst the blackberry brambles. Not a bad idea - a predator will have to be darn hungry to make it through a thicket of blackberries. They managed to rescue several of the eggs, candled them and found that they were developing. Wyandottes.

Got a surprise looking through Wikipedia - the golden Wyandotte was developed in a farm around my home town, probably within a couple of miles from the farmette. I NEVER thought anything or anybody of note came out of my home town.

We hosted the Duvall couple for Thanksgiving. Two tablecloths that I got during the Greenwood yard sale made their appearance, we had the usual, and we had our own mini-version of Christmas. They got the mosaic rooster (the rooster was a likeness of the one they kept for breeding); we got goat milk, a couple of chickens, and the loan of a couple of paper books that I've wanted to read for forever. I don't have to buy them!

Don't know what it is, but this Thanksgiving it was mostly the old simple favorites: turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, sliced cranberry sauce from the can, stuffed squash, green beans, pie, whipped cream, and actual conversation.

Today, I walked off some of the dinner and did a little buying in the neighborhood. Not only am I not a Black Friday shopper, I usually think that most of the time its a scam and I'll get a better price a week or two later. If nothing else, my sleep is worth MUCH more.

Its been wet and rainy, so I'm getting fiscal, fiscal to take my mind off of sopping....everything.

Over the last month:
I've found about $7 in found money as I've walked.
BECU gave me about $2.50 in interest in my checking and savings accounts.
I put 45$ into savings, coming from my tip box at work (when I think about it, I put money in a little covered box in a drawer at work called my tip box)
ING gave me about $75 in interest coming from my savings.
I transfer $125 from checking into savings (1 paycheck), and I transfer $100 into ING (other paycheck)
I've made $375 in stock purchase ($75 is usual, $300 is a quarterly, once-in-awhile-buy)
I've put in $1200 into my 403B from work.

I'm having good luck playing all my savings games, from little to big - from the amounts that I find on the sidewalk, to the $1 or several dollars that I put into my tip box, to paying myself first, to making sure that my checking and savings accounts pay me instead of I pay them. I know that others can't or aren't interested in some of these games, but I find that the more of them I play, the more mindful I am to save and the more inspired I get. If anything, the big stuff is less inspiring to me because I overshoot a hair and it means that I take some out of savings.

What kind of savings' games do you play?

Yeah, we got those big banks on the run. Got it in the mail today. According to card, my banking slavery can, apparently, be bought for $150.

A little bit more about the 403B consolidation - HR misspoke about "termination", only that the two accounts will be merged into one. Supposed to save money for the company because both accounts need to be audited. The match (.50:$1 up to 8% of salary) is unaffected, as is the 1.5% just for being an employee. Word, though, is that if you don't participate in the 403B, why give you the 1.5%?

Sliced up some bread to dry and get stale for stuffing. We are hosting this time; DH finished with cleaning the carpet. What's on our list to get is: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, drinks. What's on their list is bread, sides, salad, pie, cheese.

This afternoon we got a missive from HR. Instead of having 2 accounts (retirement, 403B), all participants will have just 1 account (403B). I think that the retirement account is what our non-profit gives you, and the 403B is your contributions. It takes us 6 years to vest, and the vest appears only in retirement. We were assured that the monies will merge rather than the retirement disappears. We'll see. If its true, its a lot easier to asset allocate or rebalance only 1 account. Could well be a super sneaky way to alter matching, vesting, and its a way to hide when the non-profit places the money into the account.

Based on this link

Boy and man came into a store, sign blinking in bright neon. They trudged to the back smelling hardware and rubber and tired men in the midst buying things needed for tired men projects. Man was after bullets. Bullets were always sold in the back. Man was happiest buying anything in the back, nothing in the front was worth the time. Boy followed. He was a good son but he was of an age were he did not understand that the back sold reality, the front sold image.

But the man loved his son and after bullets were selected for the gun they needed to protect the cattle they had to trudge back to the front toward and through the candy colors and ringing coin to get back to the reality outside.

Boy spoke first. May we? He pointed to the brightest machine. Lottery $1.

Man paused. Stupid thing for a man to hope. Man filled ovals under the rimmed gaze of baleful blue eyeshadow.

Name? asked the woman.

Man shook the bag of bullets. LLC, said the man.

I got a note from my credit union yesterday. They are moving their neighborhood banking center and ATM from the Safeway. Now I normally don't care much about the banking center - I use direct deposit and another banking center downtown is what I use for snafus - but I'm not very happy about the ATMs going.

Oh, and every time I think "I should get a financial planner", well, karma delivers the reason why. Geez, I think I can screw up by myself and for free.

So a few observations and doings about:

Harvested about 15 pounds worth of green tomatoes. My early girls were decidedly very, very not. I've split them off into two items I'm making - a green tomato jam and green tomato mincemeat. The green tomato mincemeat is perking away as I type. I plan on making little tarts out of the mincemeat for Thanksgiving and have it with a bit of cheese - kind of a dessert/cheese course in one. So far, it smells absolutely wonderful: green tomatoes, quince (as a substitute for the apples .... quince is still in season), orange slices, orange peel, dried currents, golden raisins, sugar, brown sugar, a bit of apple cider vinegar, cinnamon sticks, ginger, a tiny bit of hot red pepper.

Saw a few people with BECU (credit union) forms today, leave your bank day. We got word though, that the little neighborhood BECU is moving from the grocery store. Bummer, but I hope they keep the ATM. Otherwise, grr, double bummer.

Somebody had Andy Rooney on their list.