Off the Beaten Plan

plan: to devise or project the realization or achievement of

Browsing the archives for the Financial category.

Freaking Out Over Water

I have a leak in my daughter’s room and now she refuses to sleep there because of the drip noise. I’m freaking out a bit because the rain isn’t due to stop until Thursday, and we don’t really have the money to get this fixed. I don’t want to hear that crap about “Oh, you’re a real homeowner now!”

I know, okay? Let me crab about my window and leave me alone. :)

But more seriously, I’m worried about the window. It could be a quick fix, but I doubt it. These things never are. And they certainly aren’t cheap. Never, ever.

Well, I can’t do anything but lay down towels for now.

Life is like that, sometimes. All you can do is do what you can and hope for the best.

At least the rest of my day went reasonably well.

Freaking Out Over Water was published on March 30th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Financial, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Cost Block

I’m sitting at IKEA waiting another 30 minutes or so to pick up my kids, and seriously contemplating this $20 desk for my son. I mean, come on. It’s a desk, and it’s only $20. What’s not to love? So I call my husband because we also have an old computer desk in our garage that we were going to give to my son this summer. It had some sharp edges before we moved, so I was further able to rationalize the $20 IKEA wonder as safer.

My husband says on the phone that he’s fixed the desk, and it no longer has sharp edges. He also points out that if we use the old desk, that we are saving that $20 for something else.

My knee-jerk response is, “But it’s only $20!!!”

The slightly more rational side of my brain says, “Dude, $20 will buy 4+ pairs of shorts for kids for the summer, or 3 wonderful lunches at Liu’s, or get us 20 more dollars out of debt.” And yet left to myself, I would still buy the damn desk.

Financially, I really want to be debt free. But it is also really hard for me to give up the shiny, new “bargain”. Shopping, buying new things (necessary or not), is fun. Cutting coupons and giving up trips to the movie theater so I can pay the utility bills and the mortgage and still buy groceries and keep the kids in daycare is not.

I need to remind myself that that’s the point that we are at.

Arg.

Cost Block was published on March 28th, 2010, with the tags , , under the Financial, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Budget Distress

There is nothing quite so eye-opening and sobering as doing one’s budget and facing the reality – again – that things aren’t as good as we hoped. It’s a necessary evil, though, and better to find out now than later.

I’m just spending some thought-provoking time sorting out what is really important, and where can our money do the most good.  It’s another two summers and one more school year of daycare before my youngest starts Kindergarten, and then alleviates a lot of the financial pressure.

It won’t be horrible, but it won’t be easy. As my son is currently quite fond of saying, “Life’s not fair!”

Budget Distress was published on March 22nd, 2010, with the tags , , under the Financial, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Money Can Buy…

They say that money can’t buy happiness. Well, I don’t have enough money to say whether that’s true or not. But I’ll tell you what – there are some non-material things that money can buy.

I received an envelope in the mail Monday from the federal government (along with the 2010 census). It looked an awful lot like the bonds that come for the kids around their birthdays, and since my son is having a birthday soon, I didn’t bother to open it.

On Sunday, I looked at our bills. I paid bills, and looked at what was coming due soon, and I felt The Pinch. The seriously it’s going to hurt soon Pinch. The savings is gone, there’s bills and mortgages coming due, and pretty soon, I’ll be robbing Peter to pay Paul Pinch.

It shouldn’t have worked out like that. I should have received a tax credit related to a home purchase about three months ago. I shouldn’t have had to replace my car so soon. We shouldn’t have had plumbing problems and car problems and all that other crap that creeps up.

But we did, and we dealt with it like a lot of other people do – credit cards, savings when we had to, etc.

So suddenly I’m trying to think of all the possible ways we can squeeze more money out of anything. Where can we earn more money? Where can we save money? What can I sell (without selling the house)?

Tonight I opened the mail a full six days earlier than usual, and along with the census I opened that envelope with the bond. I have never been so happy to not see a bond in my life – it was the tax credit money.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

What can money buy? Money can buy security. I’ve now got the funds to shore up our emergency fund.

Money can buy a clear mind. I don’t need to stay up late sweating over bills and how to pay them.

I’m calmer now, but I need to think a bit. I need to talk with my hubby and probably a couple other someones to get a really good idea of what goes where right now. I may wait to do anything until I see what’s what in terms of taxes.

I really, really need to get a decent budget. But it’s almost midnight, and I won’t get that done tonight. It’s a battle for another day. Wish me luck.

Money Can Buy… was published on March 16th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Financial, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Adjusting Expectations

I am home sick from work today. I slept until noon, ate a big lunch (obviously it’s not a stomach illness), and just finished watching The Amazing Race. Having caught up on my favorite feeds, I thought it would be a good time to blog. That subject just jumped into my head as I stretched, and I thought – why is that? But then it occurred to me there was a reason why I’d thought of it.

It’s a fact that some people don’t like, but things change. Families, work places, economies, weather, they’re all examples of things that do not stay the same. And while some things would be great if they always stayed the same and never changed, just the nature of the beast that is one way for several years is to suddenly up and switch the game.

So I should not be surprised that I am currently pondering some serious change coming my way.

It was a slow process. One that I was able to ignore for a while, but that is no longer the case. I have in front of me a situation and  a person. The situation has slowly moved from uncomfortable to one that I am no longer able to ignore. A person I once trusted, I now doubt.

And this is all based on my perceptions of the situation. I don’t know what the other person’s perception is – possibly they don’t realize what is really going on, or perhaps I don’t understand everything they know that causes things to be as they are.

But the fact remains that something needs to change. Either I change how I think, the situation changes, or something else will have to happen. Things cannot remain as they are.

Adjusting Expectations was published on March 16th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the Financial, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.