Every so often the question comes up. Do you pick up change from the street?

And the pros and cons come up…which boil down to this. Pro: the money’s risk free; con: my time is precious, and by G*d, I’m not the type of person who picks up pennies from the street. In case you couldn’t tell by the subject line, I’m a pro change picker upper. I know I won’t convert a con change picker upper people but I do want to provide a little food for thought.

First of all, you have to be in the right position to even pick up change from the street. If you are already in the right position, you’re already un-American. You can’t be in a car. You have to be on a sidewalk or in a lobby, walking. You can’t be on a cellphone – you’ll be pacing and staring off into middle distance, listening. You have to be on a sidewalk, & basically unproductive - not doing deals, not selling something, not ordering someone around. If you’re just walking, so much for your time being precious; might just as well train your eye searching for little metal circles.

Second of all, do you pick up change in other aspects of your life? Change that collects in the bottom of the washer/dryer when it fell out of your pants? You pick that up. Change on the carpet of your car that you tossed in your hurry pulling out of the drive thru? You’ll pick that up, sure, especially if there’s a toll involved. Change that you sucked up in the vacuum bag? Nasty, but you’d rescue it. Change between the couch cushions? You’d pick that up. Matter of fact, isn’t that the first place you look for pizza and laundry money?

Here’s a news flash. Picking up change from any of those sources, some even nastier than the sidewalk, doesn’t change your net worth one iota. Its money you already have that you’ve moved into your pants pocket from an alternate pocket. Sidewalk change is new money.

Lastly, there’s the I-make x-dollars-per-second-its-not-worth-it argument. That only works if your pay is docked when you pick up change. Otherwise, if you find change at night or on the weekend, your pay that hour is $0. Picking up the coin means your pay is $0 plus coin. If you find the coin during lunch and you are making a salary, you pay that hour is $salary plus coin. Think of it as a tip for being alert.

I don’t have any reason to convert a non-change picker upper into a change picker upper. Why make competition? Change that you pick up means change I won’t. All I ask of you is this: if you see sidewalk money, point it out to me. I’ll pick it up.

Saving log - $7 tip box
Spending log - $1.19 coffee + $9 lunch

And rant week continues. Coffee in the bathroom, wide loads on the bus, finding out offically from the IRS that I'll get my fiscal package stimulated. I'd better check the calendar ... yeah, "its" a bit late, so I'm the throes. Actually its not a bad rant, its karmically kinda funny when you think about it.

It all started after lunch at my hideout in the Pike Place Market. I bought a large apple in one of the high market produce stalls, a strategy to keep me from hitting the candy bars during afternoon snack time. The apple came to .95. I gave the seller a buck and told him to keep the change. "Sure wish it was 5 bucks," he said, a little wistfully.

So 5 cents down

I walked along back to work and in the middle of a block found 2 pennies on the sidewalk. I walked to the corner and saw a homeless guy with a cardboard sign. Hey, the only change I had was the 2 pennies, so I gave them to him. At least I tried. He gave them back and started to rant at me! Yeah, I know, 2 "crummy" pennies and I while I do joke about coin rescue..I mean really, I thought you needed money, bud! You didn't even have to pick them up.

So 2 cents up

Tonight I managed to pull out my cloth bag in the Safeway in time to replace a plastic one for a bag credit.

3 cents up, and karmically even.

Saving log - $3 tip box
Spending log - $1.19 coffee, milk + $9 lunch

Payday. Yippie. I depressed myself by playing around with Inflation Master program on my PDA. My first job out of college in 1985 I made the princely sum of 22K. In 2007 22K had inflated to 42K, just a bit less than what I make now. Economists talk about the stuff anybody at any income level can buy (straight or with credit) and how you can get so much better stuff nowadays versus olden times, but I feel like the Red Queen - running in place to keep in same spot.

I know the saying "be careful what you wish for, you might just get it", but man, a deflation spiral looks really good right now. It does really cause an economy to fall apart - why buy something now when you can get it cheaper later? And you can wait and wait and wait far longer than a business that needs money to provide a good or a service can wait for you to spend. Would be nice not to run, for a few months at least.

Saving log - $4 tip box
Spending log - $1.19 coffee, milk + $18 lunch

Lots of changes happening to our lunch group. Finnish friend and his partner are moving to Memphis, screenwriter friend is changing jobs - he'll be working across the street from lawyer friend and I. We had the dim sum lunch for Finnish friend and paid for it.

After lunch, I watched as lawyer friend checked the money in his ancient, broken down, falling-apart, held-together-by-the -cloth in the pocket, brown wallet. "You know, when I was in the Paris Flea Market I was very tempted to buy you a new wallet," I said.

And I was, but I thought better of it. I didn't even buy wallets for my DH, or rather, I have in the past, but I knew that unless the guy bought it, he wasn't going to use it. Even if it was the perfect size, perfect color, had the perfect number and type of pocket...even if it was exactly the same as the old wallet, except that it was new...probably wouldn't be used. The guy has to buy his own wallet, and it has to be a situation where any wallet is better than the old one.

Of course when you get a new wallet, you have to configure it - figure out which pocket gets what card, whether you fold the money and receipts, what order the money goes in. And since the new wallet is going to be a lot stiffer than the old one, the pockets are hard to use. I think that's the real hassle of the new wallet - new wallet, new configuration, lots of tinkering to get the maximal ease of use.

Took a look at the flyer on this house:



I admit, it is not the best picture of the place, but I was shocked at the price -
$499,950. Here's why...

Classic rule of thumb #1: Mortgages should be in the range of 2 - 2.5X yearly income with a 20% down payment. Even with a 100K down payment, leaving 400K to mortgage, would you know of anyone who has 100K in a savings account and a salary of 150K who would want this place? Especially since even a decent lick of paint on the fence would cost about 50$...putting you at exactly 500K.

Okay, okay, you say...the flyer said that it would be a decent rental property. 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, on a very busy arterial. It leads me to --

Classic rule of thumb #2: Price shouldn't exceed 100x the monthly rent. To make money on this property if you paid 500K, it would mean you would have to charge 5K/month to break even. You could rent out all the bedrooms each for $1.67K/month. Know of three people stable enough, dumb enough, and willing enough to each rent a room for 1.67K/month?

I'll be the first to admit that I've taken a none-too-flattering picture and know nothing about the inside of the place. Any bets that the inside would be the Taj Mahal? But applying some misty dusty rules nothing pencils in.

I first started my blog to journal my experiences with inheritance and probate (defined here as the process by which the will is discharged) after my dad’s death in July 2005. It seems as good a time as any to use this as a nice little summary of the whole shebang and of my blog in general, especially in 2005 and 2006. Enjoy the walk down memory lane!

1. Someone died because of it. Sounds like a smart-ass thing to say, but it’s true. Someone who you’d much prefer to be alive has died, you’re grieving, and now you have to make decisions and sort out many relationships that now will never change. Yeah, like that will be easy! Be thankful for thing 3.

2. Have an updated will. Sister found the will in a file cabinet in the attic after a few hours of searching. We were grateful that dad had one. However, it was 40 years old! Sister and I were mentioned at the end, basically saying at the end of a long list: if everyone else dies, they get it. Well everybody else did die because a lot happens in 40 years. We also knew that we didn’t do always what dad would have wanted, but for that we needed an updated will. The Ouija board just didn’t cut it.

Oh yes, keep the will and other paper assets organized, together, and in a safe place. Sister and I sorted important papers from dreck for a week, sister even longer, and we moved them from a one padlock- secured farmhouse to sister’s house. The lawyer winced a bit when he heard that because you aren’t supposed to move anything, but let’s face it, all it would have taken is a meth addict with a match so we did what we had to do.

3. It takes a long time. Sister and I finally got through it in June 2007, after one extension, for a total of 23 months or nearly two years. In a sense, we were grateful, both because of thing 1, thing 7, thing 9 and because we had plenty of complicated decisions to make. If you spent your inheritance ahead of time through your credit card, beware.

4. You will say to yourself: WTF? Often. Toothless old guys telling us that dad was sitting on fabulous riches – “that land is zoned commercial”, supposed adults driving farm equipment away for “safekeeping”, property lines 10 feet from where they were supposed to be, finding grandpa’s tax returns from 1970 to his death in 1999, sister having a completely different childhood in the same house than I did, finding out that the estate had insurance for vandalism.

5. The executor’s job is that of a switchboard - to collect assets, taxes and debts, then to discharge all in the most efficient way possible. Really don’t have any good story about this point. Just that if the executor is a family member and is part of the emotional mix that no good can come of it. It was the one advantage of the 40 year old will – all of the family members picked to be executors were unable to do it.

6. Debts first, then assets. One of the first things that the executor did was put in a call for creditors on the estate in the local newspaper. The deadline depends on the state; in ours (Wisconsin) the deceased’s creditors have 90 days to come out of the woodwork. 91 days, tough. Creditors are paid from the estate’s assets, what’s left is what you inherit. Your children or your inheritors don’t inherit debt, with one exception: co-signers. If you need another reason why co-signing a loan is awful, here it is.

7. Probate might be resolving more than one estate or relationship. We also resolved mom’s insurance assets, gave items to dad’s sisters, found residual savings bonds that grandpa gave to us, paid off Nut (a hired hand of dad’s from the 1980s) some back wages that he claimed he had, and I got closer to my sister. Frankly, I’m glad there was only the two of us.

8. Both emotion and analysis have their place. Sister was close to the action, and far more emotional. I was 3000 miles away and had to be dispassionate and analytical. Or was that really the case? When it came to all the assets, I would have sold them to the highest bidder because I attached negative emotions to them, while sister saw the usefulness in picking and choosing the buyer and keeping at least the old homestead. We could keep the homestead, pay for it, and improve it, so why not? In the end, I was glad that her analysis and emotion ruled the day.

9. Stuff is harder to deal with than money. Old farm equipment, furniture, dishes, vinyl records, books, clippings from the newspaper, farm cats, and clothing from the 60s: all went for pennies on the dollar. And while real estate is where the value of the estate was, it was the hardest of all to deal with. Are you sure that you want to collect that much stuff? Who are you storing it for? When you think about it, we are all renters, marking our place on this earth. Enjoy what is yours now and enjoy it completely: you can’t take it with you.

10. It’s now your asset. That’s what I think the whole point of probate is. Because it takes forever, it gives you time to chase away the emotion and the ghosts, and gives you the ability to get comfortable with whatever you are inheriting. At the end, you want it to end.

Tuesday
Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $3 coffee

Wednesday
Saving log - $0 tip box
Spending log - $0

Attended a workplace all staff retreat with breakfast coffee and lunch provided, so I managed to have a no spend day today. Yesterday I brought a lunch and I knew that I would have a no spend day the next day so I splurged and had the delicious $3 drip coffee. Averaged out over two days, its just a bit more than my usual.

The retreat was interesting as these things went. I had a minor epiphany during the retreat with the concept that relationships usually succeed or fail gradually, then suddenly. It came from a Hemmingway character, when asked how he became bankrupt, said, "gradually, then suddenly."

The speaker at the retreat generalized it to all relationships, but since this is a financial blog, I much prefer to keep it in its original setting. How many of us got into serious debt gradually (through denial), then suddenly?

For the bloggers here wrestling with their debts, please remember that denial is a powerful, long lasting emotion. It makes the gradualness of your financial situation so easy to take ... much easier to take than facing the sharp shock of reality. And who among us remembers exactly all of the items we got into debt over? Wonderful or necessary, it doesn't matter - only the denial remains.

All of us savers, though, saved our money gradually, then suddenly. Compound interest is the classic gradually, then suddenly situation. Our 401Ks didn't just magically get big, it took time for most of us to start our 401Ks, decide on the amounts, increase the amounts over time.

Several of the new bloggers here talked about the courage it took us more established bloggers to blog about the mundane. Money management itself is all about the gradual, then the sudden, all about all the little mundane choices to save small amounts consistently over long periods of time, the fact that putting $44 into savings while taking out $40 from the ATM is somehow different, and better than just saving $4.

Right now its all about you all out there discovering the same thing. Try it. Saving will be gradual for a long while, but when it turns sudden, it becomes amazing.

Ten years ago, I had about $15000 worth of credit card debt, and about $10000 worth of student loan debt. Still, while I was frugal, and I was slooowly paying off my debts, I realized that I was missing one ingredient - my routine.

Oh I had one. I'd drive to work, maybe drive to a lunch spot, visit a couple of friends, come back and work, then decompress by driving to the Barnes & Noble and read and have a decaf and a sweet. Yikes! I had a routine, but that routine involved leaking cash.

Routines are one of the most powerful tools that the saver has while non-stop novelties KILL saving. Sure, we all like: fun surprises; dinners out; new things to read, eat, think about; the chance to meet new people and have new experiences. Every once in awhile these things add spice to our lives. But those surprise vacations are often are white elephants when the plane ticket, gas, meals, incidentals are figured in; extra tasty calories allow you to gain weight and trash your credit at the same time; books and media are great to experience, but if you use them only once, well, what do you have? The memory of what your floor used to look like.

A routine is a powerful tool because: (1) you hone your budget to it, (2) you pursue in your routine only the things that are meaningful to you, (3) in assessing your routine you know why those things are important to you, and (4) you've put a price on those things. When the price of some of the elements of your routine goes up, then instead of cursing it, you either find a way to cheapen that element to compensate, or you drop the element entirely.

The first step in developing a routine with an eye toward saving is to write it down. This goes in tandem with you writing down everything you spend. Well, where did you spend your $ and what were you doing? And don't forget the weekends because that's where most of your frivolous spending occurs.

Now that you have your daily and weekend routine. For each of those tasks, what makes it something that you like or you have to do? Work, of course, is a big part of your routine during the week day. You probably have to do it to earn money, so you might like your job or not, but you know why you are doing it.

Another example, a classic in the frugal literature. Maybe you like a cup of coffee on the way to work or the first thing as you get in. How do you feel about this task in your routine? Do you think its a waste? What elements do you like about it?

Now that you have your feelings about your tasks in your routine. How can I maximize a particular task's value?

Take the coffee example. It could be that you love coffee and caffeine. Buy a decent cup of coffee, the cheapest size that you can drink, or if you find that making coffee has value to you, make coffee to take in. It could be that you have coffee with the boss or coffee has value to you because its a way to socialize with spouse or co workers. Time to think about a token order of something cheap(er) so you minimize the cost, but maximize the info you get from spouse or co worker coffee time. Do you finish your coffee? If you don't - time to definitely think about getting the smaller size!

The next step. Are there tasks in your routine that no matter how much you've thought and tried to maximize their value but you find you can't? Drop those completely. Don't spend a dime on those!

The final step. Are there tasks in your routine that even maximized, you can replace with something cheaper? We'll switch examples here with cable, the other great frugal example. Why do you have cable? Like a specific show or sporting event? Afraid that network TV doesn't have enough choices? You can get TV shows from Netflix, Amazon or the public library. You can go a sports bar or a friend's house for the sporting event.

Closing the loop. As you start streamlining your routine, honing your tasks by maximizing all their values, and eliminating spending tasks you don't like, your spending should smooth out.

Start saving!

Piling on from observations written by mom-from-missouri and Dollars for Dough Nuts.

Ever notice that we are called "consumers" rather than "citizens"? Fairly soon we will all be "borrowers" or perhaps "sheep".

Now to straighten out the last weird thing about the farmette (at least for now). Last Saturday, sister gave me a paper grocery bag of envelopes, proclaiming, "I am my father's daughter."

Yikes.

That night, I went through the bag, shucking envelopes like oysters. Many were closed, which was depressing. It turns out that about 40% of it was hers but had nothing to do with the farmette.

I sorted into four piles: statements from our farmette bank account, bills that are clearly farmette, incidental letters and info clearly farmette, sister's items.

I then made an excel workbook with three spreadsheets: costs, deposits, summary statement that linked the total costs and total deposits - the number is black if we are in the black, red if we have more bill than deposit. There were two transactions that I had to correlate with sister's checkbook.

This took me all of 45 minutes. We were in the black, the big assumption being that she put everything in the checkbook and the grocery bag.

"Could you at least get one of those file boxes with the handle? At least its swankier than the grocery bag." I chided.

I extracted a promise that sister would send me the spreadsheet, then tell me the totals of the bills so I update. It'll force her to open the mail. (Drat, I should have saved the spreadsheet on my flash drive.)

Man, that bugs me. Sister's not an accountant, doesn't 10-key, and doesn't do audits, but at least open the mail and tally your bills up with a calculator. I'm trying to figure out what sister's so afraid of. I'm worried that I contributed to it a bit by threatening to cut her off. But if you treat your bills like they are going down a rathole, then I have to assume that my money is going down the same rathole.

Money's complicated, but if you tackle it one thing at a time, its not bad. I was afraid, once, when I had more commitments than money. The first step is being able to face the bad news.

Friday
Saving log - 3$ tip box
Spending log - 1.84$ coffee, milk + 7$ curry

I put $3 in my tip box for a later deposit, and deposited the $95,000 check in the bank. The $3 transaction was more satisfying to me as the $95,000 one. The 3$ transaction was all due to me, the $95,000 was the result of a long road. The proceeds of dad's estate are still unreal to me, as is now my new net worth. What to do with all that money? It would seem that I have an amount to do something good with, but definitely not enough to do nothing with. My ship has come in, all right, but its green sails are still powered by the winds of doubt.

Sister and her partner seem to have a plan for some of sister's share - they are interested in fixing up the farmette and using it as a weekend getaway. I was surprised to find out that sister's partner was especially happy with that, telling me that she found that she can really relax at the farmette. Sister's partner especially surprised me in telling me that sister is the frugal one, the one who trying to curb things, saying "we can't afford that" to projects, and not do everything at once.

But as for me, I'm not so interested in starting a business, have no kids to put through college, no strong desire to pursue holidays, toys, or hobbies. Retirement awaits, sure, but should everything have a 25 year time horizon? And if you don't have a habit for spending, you'll probably save and save and save even when you get into your 60s, all to create even more money for non-existant heirs.

So I think that I'm doing well if I pick up a few dollars worth of quarters or in the case of a Milwaukee parking lot last Sunday, I picked up a stylus for DH's PDA (he loses that hardware a lot).

I'm hopelessly outclassed by sister's partner (DSP). Here's the story.

Sister and I were working on sister's laptop when DSP came by and asked if we would join her in walking the dogs. We said no and continued on with her laptop. FYI - it now starts a lot faster.

Thirty minutes later she comes back and says, "You should have come, it would have paid. Look what I found three steps from the porch."

She unfurled a $50 bill, which we later used at West End Pizza.

And last week she found three twenties and a couple of ones.

I run a coin rescue, DSP runs a bill rescue.

Needed a haircut, a couple of grocery items, and I had to write a check to copay the chiropractor, so I broke down and transferred $100 from the brick and mortar bank savings account - a little buffer against an overdraft fee.

Got a letter from Capital One. They're going to shift my billing cycle backward a few days back to the 16th. No matter, I now don't have any recurring charges on it anyway. I moved the newspaper subscription to the new, WaMu credit card. Sweet justice. I would have had to write a .35 check, but I bought a spare set of bedsheets from Overstock.com. The bill turned into a semi-respectable 50.34$, which I'll pay next week when the paycheck comes in.

Last week I talked with lawyer friend about 403Bs. It turns out that we made similar money moves with our 403B, but for different reasons. I trimmed my stock portfolio a bit and went for cash and bonds because I wanted a bit of safety. 90% stocks is pretty aggressive even during the best of times. I believe that a recession is on its way and I want a bit of ballast for awhile.

Lawyer friend nearly took all of his stocks and put them in the cash money market fund for a different reason. His favorite fund in the 403B, an international one, was eliminated in favor of a different one, which he hated, because of the fee structure. Yeah, so what about that 1.5% fee, lawyer friend ranted, my favorite posted great returns!

My thoughts drifted a bit, and I'm a bit ashamed that I didn't have the heart to explain it to him. Fees are important, and can be in some cases and conditions even more important because fees are inexorable. That fund manager will charge that fee whether that fund has a good year or not. The fee is fine if you're making in the rare instance a 15-20% return (although it means you are making 13.5-18-5% return), not so fine if you are only making 7-8% because you are barely keeping up with inflation, and it just becomes worse and worse - most actively managed accounts don't do as well as an index fund, and you pay for that privilege. Imagine if you lost 20% of your 403B, which often happened right after the dot.com bust. You'd still be charged that fee with the excuse that "imagine if we weren't your manager - your returns would be even worse!"

Fees are so important that there is a story about them. An investor met with a stockbroker to perhaps give him his business. The stockbroker gave him the grand tour, showed the investor how properous the firm was, tried to impress the investor even to the point of going to the slip and showing off the stockbrokers' boats. The investor wondered, "where are the investors' boats?" Fees, of course.

Anyway, by that time lawyer friend concluded, "I wish we had more choices." It turns out that lawyer friend's partner could choose up to 650 funds. Hear, hear. At least for me - I figure I could handle it.

Saving log (Friday) - $5 tip box
Spending log (Friday) - 1.84$ coffee, milk + $5 curry lunch + 40$ ATM

I keep my paper financial files on the lean side, just enough to carry in a portable tote. I cleaned the old stuff out. The next step is to shred, but the house shredder is old, delicate, and cheap, only designed to do the casual 3 sheet shredding. I had a more than that, so I had to develop a strategy.

Looking at the papers carefully, I found that I only needed to shred the paper that had my name, address, and account number, and those only occurred on the top third of the paper that I wanted to shred. The rest, a couple of quick rips. It really saves the shredder from getting hot and making that strange grrrry sound when its unhappy.

I took a look at some of my old 403B files. Right now I have about $53K total, fully vested. But at the beginning of:
02, 3K and 20% vested
03, 7K and 40% vested
04, 14K and 60% vested
05, 22K and 80% vested
06, 29K and 80% vested (February 06 was when I got vested)
07, 41K and 100% vested

You never think you get anywhere financially until you look at where you've been.

That reminds me, time to download a few months worth of my monthly statements to my flash drive...

So we were at Denny's this morning, as usual. We mostly pay by cash, but rarely we pay by plastic. DH gave the server his debit card to cash out. When the server came back he specifically asked for his ID. DH gave him his Costco card. I asked DH what the heck happened. DH smiled and showed me the back of his card.

(instead of a signature, the words "CHECK I.D." appear.)

So a Q and A followed:

Q: Why?
A: I didn't want to give up my signature to just anybody. If I sign, the ID thief has your card and your signature, which means they can forge it well enough for a pimply-faced kid's glance.

Q: What other cards did you do this with?
A: Debit and credit card.

Q: How did you come up with this?
A: Found the tip on someone else's blog. (and now its on mine).

Q: What about the bank?
A: They don't care as long as its not blank. I wrote it in unerasable sharpie, see...?

Q: So what do you have that has your signature on it?
A: Nothing. (thinks for a minute). Oh yeah, my driver's license and my Costco card. Yeah, I guess you do have to have some ID with a signature on it. The DMV makes you sign the driver's license.

ed note: There is a problem with this. If you're worth the talents of a real identity thief, all said thief would have to do is create a fake secondary ID with your name and the thief's signature.

I finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It was about a commitment to eat off the garden or very, very locally for one year. Of course, such a thing is possible if you live on a bit more than a postage stamp lawn and in a state with well balanced agriculture.

I've also been reading and hearing about others making a commitment to eat food grown within 100 miles of one's locale. Local-voring, its called. I like the idea, but I've always had problems with such rigid rules. A bit expensive and a bit pretentious. At the very least, local-voring within the greater Seattle area will give you a massive caffeine withdrawl headache. (No coffee trees within 100 miles of Seattle). Bananas are good for you. Standing around the meat case tempting yourself with either the New Zealand or the Oregon beef means annoying other shoppers who just want to get in and get out. Nope, I want an easy rule to avoid total deprivation and at least not do the completely wrong thing. So I've come up with my own semi-local-frugal-vore rule, short and sweet.

Eat what and from where your great-grandpa would eat.

Now I know I have a definite advantage here. My great-grandpa on my mother's side was a grocer during the Great Depression. (FYI, great-grandpa was still alive when I left for college.) The grocers' kids ate okay, however they ate what wouldn't sell, a frugal but possibly disgusting and frightening prospect in the Depression.

Still, coffee was not unheard of, neither were bananas. Fruit and produce, however, were sold in season from either North or Central America. Fresh food coming from places much further was prohibitively expensive, so great-grandpa wouldn't eat it. Sugar was just granulated, and also expensive, so it was a once in awhile thing. He was also, as you might have guessed, darn frugal. He also ate home cooked meals, no junk food, and only in his much later years ate things with a lot of strange preservatives. Except he had that unfortunate taste for Spam.

The great-grandpa rule isn't perfect, but it has to be better than having to bring a mental GPS unit when going to the grocery store.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $15 chirashi lunch + $25 poker game

Paycheck came - yes, I am making $50 more/ paycheck, or $100 more a month. It justifies my raising my savings rate to $50/ each paycheck.

This evening, I played Texas Hold 'Em poker with lawyer friend, lawyer friend's partner (who works as IT support in a law firm), and 5 lawyers up on the 48th floor in downtown Seattle. Man that sounds like the setup for a punch line. I lost, of course. It was fun, but pricey, so it will be a once in awhile thing. Cracking the poker game and winning isn't cheap - $20 buy-in, $5 bounty (if you lose all your chips, you pay the person who dealt.)

And no, that is not the frugal dilemma, this is:

A couple of week's worth of Wall Street Journals, Investor Business Dailys., and a Barron or two. Stealing is not right, neither is littering...but recycling is a virtue. I was sorely tempted to take a Thursday or a Friday's paper. I didn't, but there it is...

It came to me this afternoon as I was walking to the bus.

Enjoy what you already have.

Very simple - since you already have it, why spend on the new, improved version. We all might not be the "use it up completely" types, but even if folks actually used everything they bought we would not waste and toss out perfectly useful items.

Saving log - $0
Spending log - $.10 coffee

Well, had my dime spending day today. I feel almost as virtuous as I would if it was a no spend day. Made $180 in interest last month.

Voted this morning in a special primary. Normally its in September; this year's several weeks early. I voted an electronic ballot - its very rare that electronic gadgets fail for me, but not for many other people. It won't matter soon because King County is heading toward an all mail-in ballot.

I prepare for voting the night before by looking at the voters guide and writing down how I'm going to vote. It was nice to have a friend running for school board because I usually decide eeny-meeny-miny on those. But despite the planning, there's always one item on the ballot that I didn't decide on. When I pick blind it never fails that I pick the nutball. Too bad; nutballs are easy to spot in the voter's guide. Here are my EZ rules:

1. No more than two fonts in the candidate's statement. Regular and italic or regular and bold. As soon as you start with the regular, bold, italic, ALL CAPS all on a 1/2 page, well...do you really think that way?

2. No underlining passages whole passages and paragraphs. C'mon, it looks kind of stupid when you underline whole chapters in a textbook. If you think all of this is that important than none of it is.

3. Not keeping the use of capital letters to the first word of a sentence and proper nouns. Just because You have a Word you like doesn't mean You can Capitalize It.

4. No third person POV. The main reason baselle didn't vote for Bob Dole ... well, okay other than the fact that baselle normally votes Democratic.

5. A first name that's not obviously made up. This year it was Goodspaceguy Nelson. (actually his entry was pretty funny - "to glorify King County, ask that governments make it easier to make movies here.")

I'm surprised this one hasn't come up, so I'll do it.

Pay yourself first. Put yourself in as a line item on your budget, and give yourself a raise/ cost of living adjustment (COLA) every so often, especially if you get one from your job.

Remember that if your electric bill or the price of gas goes up a certain percent, you grumble, but you shell it out and manage somehow. And that managing somehow means the end of the month gets thinner and thinner. Paying yourself first when your paycheck is plump means you will do it consistently.

Saving log - $20 tip box
Spending log - $3 cherries + $2.45 groceries

I nearly had my no spend day until about 1:00pm. I had my Starbucks coffee from the gift card ($1.60 left - so Monday it will be coffee for a dime), and the co worker took me to lunch, even paying for the tip. We went to my hideout in the Pike Market (2 doors past the first Starbucks) and managed to trip over only a few tourists celebrating its 100th anniversary.

Also, the place does a strictly cash business - not tourist friendly either - so it was a lot of Seattle regulars chewing away.

I got led away from the no-spend path coming back through the market heading toward 1st Avenue. We had to slalom past rings of tourists camcordering street musicians (noticed few coins and bills in the hats, fyi), veered around lots and lots of looky-loos listening so sincerely and intently to the speaker proclaiming some blather that the Pike Place Market will never die...

Well, it will if you don't buy stuff! Its a market, guys. Markets sell stuff. If they don't sell enough stuff, they go away. I see it right now - not nearly so many produce stands as there were even just five years ago.

So there were a ton of tourists standing there like logs in front of a produce stand. I couldn't stand it anymore. I very publically bought a bag of cherries. Good karma there.

Then an hour later I gave the cherries to my trainer and the gym - because of the picnic yesterday we rescheduled gym for today. Good karma again.

It blew my no-spend day but frankly good karma, leveraged on both ends, doesn't come any cheaper.

And yet it does. I had my day off today, but I did a favor for a coworker, which only took 90 minutes.

After that, it was at the tail end of lunch. I went to my favorite hideout place at the Pike Market. No debit, credit card or check - just cash, so I checked my wallet. Whoops - I needed cash. There was an ATM about 30 ft from the hideout, but was traditionally a US Bank ATM, which if I used would be a $1.75 surcharge. Sigh. But I wanted my meal so I was prepared to pay - grr.

I got there and the ATM had changed to a WaMu. My bank; no fee; yippee! Weird how I care so much about paying or not paying a $1.75. It does mean that I don't have to plan ahead so thoroughly.

Packed up all my canning supplies for the weekend. See ya!

So I taught lawyer friend about the rule of 72 a couple of days ago. (Look, he had lawyer training not math!) I'm sure I'm singing to the choir here about it, but as a rule of thumb it states that:

You can expect an investment to double when the percent of return x the number of years = 72.

Examples are -

If you are earning 8% on an investment, it will take 9 years for the investment to double.

If you have to double your return in 6 years, you have to earn a yearly return of 12%.

It'll take a lifetime for your checking account at 1% to double.

Exciting, when you first think about it! But the twist that I thought of last night was that the rule of 72 is double edged. It works, unfortunately, with anything with an interest rate on it.

So if the inflation rate is a consistent 3%, it will only take 24 years for your cost of living to double. It means that that 22K that I made when I first got out of college in 1984 and that 44K that I make now spend about the same. Depressing, isn't it?

It also means that if you owe 10K on a credit card at 10%, and you make the minimum payment at 2%, 9 years from now you should owe 20K, more if you actually charged something else. Assuming no fees, hah hah.

You've got to work hard to make the rule of 72 work for you - it works hard against you most of the time.

Pardon the expletive!

Saving log - $1 tip box
Spending log - $1.84 coffee, milk + $4.50 curry + $8 watch battery

The title of this entry is a fast criticism of the title of this article:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/200...

I know I shouldn't bother with reading these things on CNN, because the writing is so subtly anti-saver, and that makes sense because savers don't spend and therefore aren't worth advertising to. But still...

Note to CNN: All money is real money.

The young couple depicted in the article are already earning 90K, more than my DH and I. Just because they eventually will earn 200K doesn't mean that they are right now being paid in Monopoly money. They aren't earning hobby money.

But that isn't what really, really tears it. Its this: you learn just as much money management with the small amounts as with the large amounts. As a matter of fact, you had BETTER learn your money management with the small amounts. Its not a case that when you come into a large chunk of money that that somehow gives you the impetus to handle it better. Oh no, you better had practiced with your tens and hundreds before you get your tens of thousands.

Its dangerous to give that two-tiered emotion with your money - "real" vs. "fake". If you don't assume that the small sums are important and worth treating with respect, you probably will never give them the chance to grow to a "respectable, real" sum. Assume that your small sums are fake, then small sums they will remain...if don't immediately spend them.

Worse, if you do get a big sum of money, you either treat it like a small sum and spend it, or you treat it like a whole new animal with the seriousness it deserves. After all, it is a "real" sum of money.

And then you are stuck. How to handle it? After treating small sums miserably, you have no idea. Too conservative and it loses value to inflation, too wild and you turn it into a small sum and fritter it away.

Anyhow, grr. & Thanks for indulging me!

even in the "good old days".

An article I wanted to share. Once upon a time, being frugal was heroic and commonplace. Maybe it will be again.

http://alternet.org/environment/55925/

From the files of "come to think of it, they should have something like this", an article about price optimization software:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003684689_price28.html

The takeaway message that I get from this is that there is an art to pricing, based on psychology. There is a fair amount back and forth on other frugal sites. Some people, like me, swear by a price book, which is a list of prices, per unit, of items I normally buy, at the store I bought 'em at, and the full date (including year) when I encountered the price. Other people tell me that they have great memories, and they know for a fact that one store had consistently lower prices for stuff so why waste time and effort?

This article strengthens my suspicions that price optimization software really target how shoppers perceive price and value, especially for those shoppers who rely on their memory and impressions. In other words, those who fly by/buy the seat of their pants. A store will specifically target their loss leaders to give shoppers the impression that they have consistently lower prices, yet after a few months...not so much.

Besides, the store is using the most sophisticated calculations imaginable to determine their price. The willingness to maintain and use a price book (and if necessary, not buy) at least shows the shenanigans.

It was amazing to me learning my first week of pricebooking that Larry's Market, not known for cheap prices, beat out Costco's price for canned tuna...handily. And best of all, I could buy exactly the number of cans I had the budget for, not in packs of 12.

So you just never know ... unless you have a price book.

Changing the subject, I added another paragraph to the blog entry How To Store Grocery Produce. I think it's a good tip, making the entry worthy of revisiting.

Saving log - $4
Spending log - .65$ milk + 5.45 curry lunch

My busy season's winding down a bit. My boss is going to take me out to lunch Thursday, which was very appreciated - I'm at my last $60 from the previous paycheck.

Last night I started to move my small, monthly recurring charges (ISP, newspaper, Netflix - about $70) from my credit card to my debit card. Last night I moved my ISP bill. My goal is to just have the trainer on my credit card so I can better keep my deadbeat credit card status. 12% of 0$ is 0.

I also think that I need to have better control of those little charges. Its so easy to keep those little things "out of sight-out of mind" on the credit card where they somehow breed and turn into things that you'll want, can't always justify, and get pissy at someone if they suggest you get rid of them.

If the charges are on the debit card, which I watch like a hawk, then I really think about them each month.

I saw the documentary Maxed Out and here this afternoon. My only regret is that I didn't see it on Tuesday, when all times for the Varsity Seattle are $6, off from $9.25. So much for being frugal.

My all means every journal/blogger/reader of blogs here on this site should see this movie. If it doesn't make it to a movie theater near you, Netflix it or Blockbuster it, or rent it from the library (when it gets there) or h%ll, even buy it...with cash, of course. If we (as bloggers) cannot encourage you to tackle your debt then this documentary will. My head is still spinning and if this entry is disjointed, its because the filmmaker covers so much ground that every American should know about. The links I sent at the top will give you a nice taste on some of the bits.

Now for a few of my observations.

A lot of what had happened - people getting in over their heads in debt - happened to me, too. (I became debt-free in October 2004.) For an agnostic/atheist, I am blessed that:

1.) I got in over my head back when the credit card companies hadn't thought up most of their wicked ways - universal debt, 2 cycle billing.
2.) I remained in good health.
3.) I can still be content even when living a materially-poor lifestyle - no house, no car, no kids, Goodwill as a furniture store.
4.) DH - to my knowledge - does not practice financial infidelity.
5.) I treasure my privacy. Cash is anonymous.
6.) I always had a job, even if it was a temp job.
7.) Nothing financially big went wrong with either me, DH, or in our family circles. At least nothing bigger than my emergency fund.

There but for the grace of G*d go I. Sheer luck. I'm not going to say that I dug out of debt my way, heroically, by my bootstraps. I had a lot of luck that many folks don't.

And finding out that credit card companies will magically "lose" your check until a day or two after the due date. I'm happy that I don't play chicken with my credit card bill. I pay it a day or two after the 15th, before the bill comes. I'm tempted to send the bill registered mail!

I do have a divergence of opinion with Michelle Singletary (second link) when she thought that the tithing clip was a cheap shot. Au contraire. In the clip, Jerry Falwell told his flock that even those in under heavy debt stress should still tithe. I have no problems with tithing if goes to G*d. I have a problem with it going to Jerry Falwell, who clearly needs it far less. My cheap shot.

Anyway, continuing on. As a person who pays in full most months and is a great saver, how this debt load most affects me is on the investment level. If the US government is playing a shell game with its debt - does that make me a chump for investing in T-bills? (they are 4 wk T-bills, so probably not, but still...) How do you assess risk?

Debt is slavery, no good or bad. If you are in debt in America, you are not free, period. You are watched, you are hounded, you are sold. A FICO score only determines how much of each you are. And I would make that case even if you have a 30 fixed mortgage.

Finally, a word. My credit card, Capital One, is bumping my rate from 7.99% to 12%, even though I'm a credit "deadbeat" (pays every month). Apparently this is occurring to many in my situation. Since my revolving piece is about $100 or so every once in awhile, the interest that I would pay is still minimal, but I'm still going to go through my $60 or recurring debt - the newspaper, Netflix, etc and see what I can get transferred to my debit card. Last I checked, 12% of 0$ is 0$. Perhaps the card companies will figure out a clever technique to get money out of that situation.

Wednesday, March 7
Saving log - $2 tip box
Spending log - $1.67 coffee, milk + $7 lunch

Thursday, March 8
Saving log - $4 tip box + $16.00 T-bill interest + $40 DRP + $35 another DRP
Spending log - $1.67 coffee, milk + $16 lunch

Right now I have about 41 million dollars of electronic data to book. Don't get too excited - most of it is going to other places. It was easy for my boss to triage my time and get me out of several commitments to other people in other departments. It feels different than last year - calmer - because with time I know I can get everything done and the 41 million is a great reason to leave me to do my task. I just have to remember I will always have something like this this time of year.

We also have issues with daylight saving. This brands me as an old fart, but I remember when you got the word in the paper when and which way you changed the clock, you changed the clock by hand and you went on with your life. The Windoz-ation of everything hasn't made anything better... but it has given you a great three week excuse for being late.

Tomorrow is my assistant's last day, so today I took her out to lunch. Lunch was curry, and for dinner DH made ... curry.

Lost another 1/2 pound, 1/2 inch of my hips, and 1% of body fat.

Saving log - $2 tip box
Spending log - $1.50 coffee + $20 lunch + $9 mucinex

Woke up this morning almost, but not quite, normal and thinking that maybe, just maybe I might be well by the weekend.

Since it is the last day of the month, it was the last chance that I had to deposit my tip box drippings after work. So I did so at a freezing ATM at 6:30 tonight. I put in $44 from the tip box into savings and took out $40 from checking. Ridiculous when you think about it - why not short circuit the whole thing - deposit $4? Same thing, right?

But that's what savings looks like. Its important to save the $44, not the $4, now matter what it looks like. If you save the $4, you only have the 4 and the other 40 goes poof. If you save the $44, you have the full 44. Saver's alchemy to know that its not the same.