Observations

It's a good thing I'm not the depressed type by nature.  If I were, I'd weigh a lot more...Yep, I'm totally a depressed stress eater. 

The reason for my depression:  medical bills.  It's a combination of the amount  and the fact that I have to talk to people.  On the phone.  If the amount was just half of what it is, I would have gladly paid it without complaint, but no.  Now I have to wade through the medical system and barter (which I hate doing), in order to pay something that my insurance should rightfully be paying since it's not like I WANTED to have surgery.  Quite the opposite.  But what is one to do when the doctor says "the tumor has doubled in size in 6 months; it needs to come out even though it is benign."?

Boo.  Hate.  Now, where's my Pillsbury crescent rolls?

Mint

As discussed eons ago, I read the "It's your money or your life" book and started doing step 3...or whatever it was. And I honestly haven't done anything since. But, that's not the point. The point is that Shawn has been teasing me since about March that I use Open Office Spreadsheets to keep track of everything when I could just use the open source equivalent of Quicken to do the same thing, only better. I however found it cathartic to actually go through and type up everything at the end of the day. Then, instead of typing everything every day, I started only checking stuff on Sundays. And then it went to 2 times a month, until finally it was checking everything on the last day of the month when it just became a hassle to typing in everything just to get the end numbers so I could put it in my graph. The graph that shows how much I spent/earned over the month, how much is in my Roth account and how much I have in my account from which I make donations.

[aside] funny thing about the donations account. I started it so that during our combined charities drive at work, I could make donations and shawn couldn't complain because I'd budgeted to donate that money (basically counting it as money I've already spent so when I donate it, I don't actually use any money we need). However, since starting this account with ING, I haven't EVER transferred money out of it to donate and instead just donate directly from my paycheck. Which is how we ran into that overdrafting of my account debacle. [\aside]

At the beginning of the new year, Shawn decided to broach the subject of using an online tracker for our expenses instead. Now then, I don't trust the internet. When Shawn started using ING back in 2004, I only signed up for it so he could get the $10 "refer a friend" thing and then only kept like $50 in the account for a year. So basically until I was pretty sure that ING wasn't a scam that was going to take my money. Sadly, ING actually has better security protocols than a lot of banks. Shawn's new baby: Mint.com

When you sign up for Mint it asks for all the other log on information for your other accounts (bank, credit card, 401k, etc.) and then tallys up your net worth every time you sign in. Plus it has nifty features such as showing you where you spent the most money in the last month, proposes budgets for you, and you can set it up to text you whenever there's odd activity.

Now then, as I said, I don't trust the internet. So of course my biggest fear is that someone hacks into the servers at Mint.com and steals all of the money out of all our accounts (which I realize the irony since I do all of my banking online. But! if they hacked into the Wells Fargo servers, they could only take my Wells Fargo money, and my other money would be safe). Shawn tells me that this wouldn't happen because who would be stupid enough to steal a bunch of money out of one person's Mint account? Wouldn't it be smarter to either take a little bit out of everyone's accounts so that no one notices (how many people would notice a penny missing)? Or wouldn't it still be smarter to only take money out of accounts from the same bank? If you take all the money out of all the accounts, it's pretty obvious that it happened because of Mint, and it would get shut down; whereas if you only took money out of one brand of bank account, then it would look to be that specific bank's problem and it would take much longer for Mint to be shut down.

Yeah, sometimes he scares me too, people.

Checking

I did something I've never ever done in my life on Monday. I overdrew my checking account. GASP!!!

Every year in October, work gives us a list of like 1000 charities that we can opt to donate to. This charity drive ends November 1. And because I like to get simple things checked off my to-do list, I always do the combined charities almost as soon as they hand it out. I took care of this like October 12. Would you like to guess what overdrew my checking account? That's right. A check I wrote donating money to charity a month ago.

I don't necessarily know if it's ironic...but it's definitely a fucked up life lesson.

1981

Every year the insurance people send me a birthday card about how things were in 1981. Things like which movie won Best Picture, which song was on the top of the charts, etc.

One of things is "averages." This is the part that I am going to be sharing today:

Average Income 1981: $25, 065
Average Income 2009: $50, 986

Average New Home 1981: $68,900
Average New Home 2009: $218, 400

No wonder more people are broke today--their salaries only doubled while their house prices tripled.

The downside of Steps 6 and 7

I keep wanting to spend money. It's almost like instead of the goal being to write down a big fat ZERO for the day, I start all freaking out about not having written anything.

Sigh.

Steps 6 and 7

So, I kept track of every penny that came in and every penny that went out for the entire month of February. And then I organized what I spent into categories (Groceries, Eating out at work, Eating out with Shawn, Bills, Investing, clothes, gifts, Random fun stuff, entertainment, etc.)

And you know how you have certain months out of the year in which we you just KNOW that you're going to spend more than you make? For most people this is in December/January because of Christmas. For me, it tends to be February. And it's been like this over the past couple of years--probably because February is about the time that I start getting to the point where I'm like "God! why isn't there any food at work for breakfast?!" and so I go out and buy breakfast for all my coworkers (~$40). Plus, and this always happens, I tend to buy too much stuff for birthdays...And there were 2 birthday parties (~$90).

So, the grand total was that I spent $155.53 more than I earned for the month. And I spent about $300 more than I normally would have--at least one full pay check goes towards just investments (though with the stock market where it is, I'd rather put that into ING or put it towards principle on the house). And most of my second pay check goes toward food and water/trash/car payments. That, of course, isn't to say that I couldn't cut down on the amount of money spent on food--I spent about $165 on groceries and then about $190 eating out. And we obviously don't have to eat out as much as we do--heck, we could choose to never eat out, but where's the fun in that?

Now then, I only have to do this for the rest of my life...woowee.

Step 2

I have decided that I shall attempt to become an FIer. Financially intelligent, Financially intregrous (is that even a word? oh well, it is now!) and Financially independent. This is as per the book Your Money or Your Life. There are nine steps in the book. Nine simple steps that I have broken down into 23 steps. Yes. I have made extra steps. Actually I didn't, I just decided instead of having Step 1A and 1B, I'd just call them Step 1 and Step 2, respectively.

So. I will bypass Step 1 until I get my social security earnings statement from the feds in April or so. On to Step 2 then.

Step 2: Determine how much you have today. Include Savings/Checking/Stocks/Mutual Funds/Retirement accounts, etc. Include House/Car/other items that can be sold for money. Include all little items in your house that can be sold for money--If you needed to make money fast, what would you sell, and for how much?

The side effect of step 2? it gets you to throw away all the crap you have sitting around your house that isn't worth anything to you (you're not going to use it), and if you don't want to sell it, donate it. Spring Cleaning. Here I come.

I will start with my closet--I already looked at the clothes and decided I'll keep the stuff hanging--I've worn everything in there at least once over the last year except for the suit. But I only have one of those. Ah, but look at that top shelf. The top shelf that has every backpack I've used since high school. Yeah...I don't know why I kept every backpack either. And what's with this computer just sitting on the floor in the study? Or the one that's gathering dust in the kitchen that doesn't work anymore? Or the other one that's sitting in the other corner of this room. Just think about how much space we would save if we could put this computer on the other desk and then got rid of this desk!

So I guess I will be working on getting our house de-cluttered. I'll probably leave it up to Shawn on whether he wants to post anything on Craigslist or if it would be better to just donate everything (or Freecycle it).

Your Life or Your Money

So, I'm reading this book about finances. It's a good book and I decided to read it after reading 2 MSNMoney articles about people who read the book and then retired about 10 years later. You can read the articles here and here.

The steps to Financial Independence (a key phrase in the book), as outlined in the book, are solid. Though a couple of the steps seem odd--like the "Calculate, to the best of your ability, the amount of money you've made in your entire life" You are supposed to include all monetary gifts and jobs you were paid for that weren't reported on a W2 (like all those babysitting jobs you did in high school). It almost seems odd that you should calculate everything you've made up until this point, but the purpose is to prove to you that you ARE worth something (and it's just very likely you have happened to spend it all). This is probably done to shut up those people who always whine that there's no way they'd ever make a million dollars, the people may have not made a million dollars, but they've probably made way more than they think they did.

Other steps are perfectly normal--Keep track of every cent that comes to you and keep track of every cent that leaves your possesion. Oh sure the book gives you ideas on how to cut spending, but it seems (and I'm not done with the book yet, but up until this point) that the authors are much more of the mentality of once you start keeping track of what you're buying and how much you're making on a daily and monthly basis, you start to notice ares that you're wasting money on things you don't need--some people always have to buy a candy bar at the checkout line, some people always need to buy a shirt when they go out window shopping, etc.

There is a chapter about how to save money (or cut expenses), but most of them are the ones we already know about--pay off your credit cards as fast as possible, pay with cash as much as possible, make extra payments on your house, try to use your car less, etc.

If anything the book is getting me motivated to clean out the closets and get rid of stuff we don't need nor want. Because really, we've got more than enough.

Resolutionary*

* Blatantly stolen from Amalah's blog title.

Also stolen from someone else's blog? This video. Which I equally love, find hysterical, and depressing because this was made in March 2006 and yet it still applies.


My resolution for the year?

[aside] I actually had 3 other resolutions, but they've already gone to pot, so there you go... [/aside]

Buying stuff I need, not the stuff I want. yep. true story. That's not to say that I have to buy the cheapest thing I can find, just that I can't go and buy things that I don't actually need.

Besides, I figure Shawn will like this because it means I'll be buying less clothes and shoes.