Off the Beaten Plan

plan: to devise or project the realization or achievement of

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.

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.

I Want, I Want, I Want!

We don’t have cable right now, and while I realize how much I really miss it just after I get back from doing laundry at my parents’ house, I’m so glad we don’t. Because when the kids come with me to do laundry, I hear one thing for the entire trip.

“Mommy, come here, quick! I want that!”

Commercials suck. They teach my kids to beg for things they don’t need. An overpriced robe you wear backwards? My son wants it. A machine that squeezes toothpaste out of the tube automatically because the user can’t figure out how to get the last drop out? My daughter needs it. A bunch of markers that change colors? The helicopter that floats around your living room? The latest TV show card game toy?

“I want it! I want it! I want it!”

I’m trying to get them to change their verbiage. “That’s neat! I like that! It looks like fun!” But with kids, it’s hard. I like to get stuff, too, so teaching my kids to not want everything they see is hard. Still, I feel like if I can steer them away from always saying they “want” something, or it’s something they have to “have”, that maybe I can adjust their attitudes a little.

There’s got to be a book out there to teach me what to do. All the advice that’s spread out on the Internet in all the great blogs that I read, all in one spot so I can read it all at once and reference it. Does anyone know where that link went?

Photo by Ivan Petrov

I Want, I Want, I Want! was published on February 21st, 2010, with the tags , , under the Editorial category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Brain Rot and the $100 Jello Challenge

I’ve been more interested lately in my Wii (Wii Fit Plus and Animal Crossing: City Folk) and my book (Girls of Riyadh) than I have been in making connections between life and interesting reading material to make a post here. I sort of feel like my frantic busyness at work is washing over to home. I feel unstructured. Like Jell-O without a mold.

I just decided to make a list of things I feel I must get done now. And you know, I could only thing of one thing.

I need to make more money.

That’s it, that’s all I could think of. I don’t need to clean the house – I can push that on the weekend for the worst areas. I don’t need to spend more time with the kids – I already spend as much time as I can, and I won’t take away from it. I don’t have to read more, tidy up, organize, or anything else. Right now, money is my priority.

“But money doesn’t buy happiness!” My mind threw that one out as I thought about what other people may be thinking right now, which is really what I’m probably thinking without wanting to admit it. Sure, money doesn’t buy happiness, but money does fix the leaky bathtub. Money does pay for the Internet, daycare, and saving up for an emergency. More incoming funds do those things, and allow me to stress less about where the money will come from.

I will earn $100 in February.

Right now I honestly don’t know how that’s going to happen. $100 is a lot. I’m not going to put any extra funds into this little adventure – I’m going to do online things that don’t cost anything. If I earn money and decide to spend that cash trying to earn more, I think that’s okay.

There’s a goal. It feels like a big goal. If I meet it early, I’ll raise the stakes.

The plan for tomorrow:

  • Squidoo – I wrote a list of ideas for lenses. I’m going to pull pictures and sketch modules for one tomorrow.
  • mTurk – I earned a whopping $11 over 3 months, then gave up. Maybe if I give it a half-hour a night, I could rack up $20.
  • I’m going to see if there’s anything that will fetch a price on eBay. I can get the buyer to pay for shipping, so it doesn’t really count as outgoing money.

Here we go.

Brain Rot and the $100 Jello Challenge was published on February 2nd, 2010, with the tags , , under the Business, Planning category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Would You Rather…

Would you rather always have exact change in your pocket for whatever you wanted to buy (large purchases like cars and houses included), or a large lump sum of money?

In all the years I’ve asked people this question, I’ve only ever had one person agree with my point of view, and that was my mother.

I would much rather have exact change in my pocket for whatever I wanted to buy. I could buy a round of drinks for a bunch of friends, or pull out a $20 for the homeless guy walking down the street, or buy a new car when I needed one. I could fix my house, I could adopt ten cats (yes, I’m going to be the crazy cat lady eventually), or I could buy a new iPad and all the apps I could ever dream of wanting.

I could pay off the national debt. I could fund the best political candidate. I could hire a housekeeper!

As opposed to having a set sum of money, $100 million, for instance. Your dreams are limited with limited funds.

Just sayin’…

Would You Rather… was published on January 28th, 2010, with the tags , , , under the What If? category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.