05.20.10
Posted in Homestay students, Job, Money at 12:01 am by kyrias
There was a short discussion with my parents today about my job and where I think I’m going with it.
I told them that unless I got weekends, then there was no way they could pay me enough to keep the job. I hope that this ultimatum sticks, because I’m more than ready to walk otherwise. My brother claims that he’s interested in taking over the home-stay business when he graduates from college — so in five years. I’m going to make it very, very clear to him that if he wants something to come back to, then he needs to keep me happy. If he can’t, then he and my parents can just start over from scratch any time they feel like it. I don’t think it’d be that hard, assuming my father is still enticing kids from China to come over, he can just settle some of them in our house as opposed to shunting them off to other prospective host parents in the area. So this threat may mean nothing to him. Matters little to me what he does. I need my weekends, gosh-darn-it. I can tolerate living and working away from my social circle and my boyfriend but I will not do it for ten months straight for the pay I’m getting.
My parents are still upset that I have no ambition to do more. They’re now quoting Korean royal soap drama at me: “Why are your dreams so meager?” Isn’t that cute? I have no good response to that and I quickly derailed that conversation because fuck it, we’ve had that same conversation endless times before and the answer is not going to change. They’re thinking about the time when they can rent out an entire building and have a dorm full of home-stay students. I look at that and the amount of work that would entail and say “fuck no”. I guess I’ll wait until they actually manage that before breaking the news though, since I get that wouldn’t go over too brilliantly. Oh well.
We’re going to have two girls coming in next year, so I’ll again have my base salary of 1.2k/month. I’m hoping that S will continue living with us, so I’ll have $1.8k/month. Also, we’re going to start pimping me out as an English tutor and I’d get to keep all proceeds. We’re thinking $20/hour. My brother’s English tutor charges 60/hour and will only consent to doing two-hour segments. I’m sure there’s a market and a demand but let’s see if I can fill said market and demand.
Amazing, with that time-frame, I can have a 5-year plan going on. Aww, that makes me feel all warm, fuzzy, and commie like.
Plans:
- Pay off the credit card debt before the end of this year. We have 5.4 k left, so let’s just call it 6k. I think 6k over the next slightly-more-than six months will be doable, even if it is a stretch because I won’t be getting paid my normal salary for the summer vacation months. We’re also moving and possibly into a bigger/more expensive place so that might trash our plans or at the very least throw a huge monkey wrench into the whole business.
- Budget so we can max out our Roth IRAs for this year and then put all extra money, if any, towards establishing an emergency fund. Since we have until April of 2011 to sock away money in the Roths, I think this might be difficult, but still within the realm of possibility. I’m going to need to crunch some numbers once we’re in the new place to see what our new monthly living costs will be. I want at least three months if not half a year of living costs for both of us in the emergency fund. This will all be in cash or CDs.
- After we’ve established our emergency fund, I’m going to look into putting away money into a mutual fund or long term CDs for a deposit for buying a house in the future. Caesura and I would both like to be able to pay cash outright for our house, or our portion of the house that we’d be buying with other people, but depending on when we plan to do it, that might not be feasible, but at the very least we need to start saving now or we’ll be looking at a fugly mortgage. I aim to save at least 100k before we hit 35 years old. Since we paid off 5k in CC debt in half a year, I’m going to project and assume that we can save 10k a year. If we can’t, then I figure we can stretch a bit to make it happen.
I anticipate working the job I have for the next 5 years as a sort of worst-case scenario. After that, we’ll see. My brother might decide to take over this house, or we might decide to turn the other house nearby into another house for home-stay purposes, or that dorm-building dream of my parents might come true. Who knows? Depending on how things change, I might decide to stay on and continue doing this for the money if there are no better options.
If, after five years, we still decide to live together as a group of friends and they have need of a housekeeper, then I’ll jump to doing that. If they decide that they need one before that and are willing to pay me for it, there’s a very good chance I’ll take them up on it.
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05.17.10
Posted in Money tagged financial overview, net worth at 8:50 am by kyrias
So alright, it’s not quite June yet, and so it’s not quite mid-year. Not the point though.
Caesura got a raise earlier this year, which was nice. He’s also now paying for his healthcare, not quite so nice since that eats a goodly portion of his raise, but oh well.
As of today:
Credit card debt : - 5400.00
Student loans : - 19095.36
Roth IRA : 8078.76
__________________________
– 16416.6
Not amazing, but not too shabby at all. We paid off almost 5k in credit card debt and the value of my IRA nearly tripled. If we keep this up, we should be credit card debt free by the end of this year, or if not, then at least we’re well on track to being credit card debt free by May 2011. The student loans — now, I’m really not too sure how well that’s going. Probably some number crunching will have to be done, but it seems like we’re not doing so hot on that front. Granted, the credit card debt is more important right now because of the higher interest rates, but I really would have liked to have seen more progress. Right now most of our payment goes straight to interest, which really isn’t helping matters. I can’t wait until we’re done with the credit cards and we can put all our extra money towards the student loans.
Although, at this point in our lives, we would probably focus on maxing out our IRAs, then putting some money towards down payment for a house, and then throw the rest at the student loans. At its current interest rate, we’d be better off thinking about retirement and houses first. Caesura, for one, still needs to open a Roth of his own. The 3k initial outlay is kind of daunting though, since it’s hard to come up with that much change at one time.
Anyways. Not too shabby at all and here’s hoping that the rest of the year will go as well as it has been so far. Of course, if there’s another raise in the works, that wouldn’t go amiss either.
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02.26.10
Posted in Environment, Frugality, Money tagged heating, Little Sister at 10:40 pm by kyrias
One of my many faults is that I absolutely can’t stand it when people are stupid about temperature.
The first time my little sister and I went out, I had told her that we were going to be walking up and down Mass Ave between Central Square and Harvard Square. When I picked her up, she had a poufy jacket on over a low-cut shirt, jeans, and ballet flats with no socks.
Brilliant person that I am, I actually didn’t notice her lack of proper attire until she started complaining of cold about 10 minutes in. So, in an effort to remedy my mistake, I bought her a cheap pair of gloves and a scarf at the dollar store. When I dropped her off at her grandmother’s house I told her that she needed to have gloves, a scarf, and more than just a t-shirt under her coat.
The second time we met, I picked her up at her house instead of her grandmother’s and so I was able to “remind” her to put on a sweater over the t-shirt.
Third time we met, I picked her up at the Saturday program she goes to. As I recall, it was 19 degrees out that day. She was dressed pretty much as she was the first time. We were fine on the walk from the program place to the Central Square bus stop, but once we stopped to wait for the bus, it started getting really cold. I had on tights and long underwear under my skirt, a thick fuzzy jacket under my winter coat and I was feeling a bit nippy. I had debated calling a taxi because it was really just that cold. Then I looked at my little sister, and decided that she really needed to learn how to dress herself properly. We sat at the bus stop for nearly 20 minutes until the bus came.
I’m not exactly proud of this, but I really thought it was necessary at the time. I felt it would have been encouraging her bad behaviour to call a taxi because she wasn’t dressed for the cold. I will admit to feeling a peculiar sense of vindication as we sat there in the cold, teeth chattering and feet tapping to keep circulation going.
Lately, since I moved to Framingham for the month, I noticed that the K-kids were strolling around in short sleeves and shorts.
The thermostat in this house is usually set to 70 degrees while people are in the house and 65 when people are out for the day.
I decided that we really didn’t need to be spending that much money on heating the house when the K-kids were walking around as if it were the height of summer.
So — I turned the thermostat downstairs down to 50 degrees and turned the thermostat upstairs down to 60 degrees. In my self-defense, it doesn’t really drop to 50 degrees, ever. The coldest the downstairs has been was 59 degrees and since my brother, the traitor, keeps turning the thermostat up, the upstairs rarely drops below 65 these days.
I spend most of my time in the kitchen, which is arguably the warmest room in the house because of how much cooking goes on in there. I suspect that having the fridge, rice cooker, and hot water pot in here also helps a bit.
The kids, including my brother, immediately started whining about how cold it was. One of them even came downstairs to dinner wrapped in a blanket once. I will admit to feeling extreme glee at seeing that.
However, they still haven’t managed to come up with long sleeves, or socks. I’m really glad that I don’t see the shorts out as much though.
Now, I just need to turn the thermostat down after my brother turns it up again.
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02.18.10
Posted in Money tagged credit card drama, credit cards, credit companies at 2:42 am by kyrias
A while ago, because I went $3.66 over my credit limit on my Chase Freedom card, Chase slapped me with a $40 fine.
I sent them an irate letter and they reversed the fee.
Today, I found that because I had gone $16 over my credit limit on my Amazon card, they slapped me with yet another $40 fee.
This time, because I didn’t feel that they’d pay attention to yet another irate email asking them to reverse the fee, I just emailed them to ask for them to block the charges if the charge is going to put me over the limit. On top of that, I’m going to call them later on today to see if they’ll reverse the charges, because I honestly feel like this is poor business practice on their part.
The reason I say this is not simply because I’m a spoiled brat who can’t keep track of her money.
It used to be that small balances that went over the line would get ignored by Chase — I didn’t get any fees slammed on me for anything less than, say, $30. In retrospect, that spoiled me so I don’t tend to keep track of my spending down to every penny and dime. However, I will say that with two people using the same card, things can get pretty confused very, very fast.
Also, when I was going to go over the limit, Chase used to simply deny the charges.
Now that they’ve apparently changed their business practices in such a manner as to facilitate garnering more fees, I’m really quite displeased and I’m going to let them know it.
I don’t expect that this will happen frequently at all. In fact, this wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t need to use my credit cards to pay off my tuition bill, which was $3550. As one can clearly see, putting that much money on the cards definitely made it a lot harder to go about our normal business without tipping over the line.
Still, if Chase keeps this up, I’m going to have to start shopping around for another credit card company once we’ve paid off our Chase cards and I’ll be sure to let them know it.
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01.30.10
Posted in Money, Reviews at 11:45 pm by kyrias
I downloaded YNAB the other day to test it out at the suggestion of a financial blogger, I forget which one, and totally geeked out over it. Now I’m just having way too much fun slotting in numbers and watching the other corresponding numbers change.
What I really like about it isthat I can download my statements, import them into YNAB, and then be able to slot transactions into different categories with a few clicks of the mouse. After I verify and categorize the transactions, then the program automatically calculates for me how much money I’ve spent in each category, whether or not I’m under budget in each category, and if I’m over-budget for the month.
It’s true that I could do all this with my spreadsheets, and I have in the past — but honestly, this makes everything so much faster and easier. I have all of my accounts linked and all of the transactions in each account inter-linked so that I can see at a glance where exactly each transaction went and what it was for.
Caesura mentioned that he didn’t think that this was a good vehicle for tracking long term investments and so such, and I think he’s right. However, the beauty of this program is that it’s really simple to use, you don’t even really have to download the bank statements if you don’t want to — it’s ultimately just really useful budgeting software. Which is fine — it’s exactly what I need.
What I thought was unfortunate was that there is no way to sync between copies of YNAB on different computers — which means that if there’s only one person doing the finances in the house then everything’s fine, but if there’s two people trying to track things at the same time then there might be unfortunate discrepancies.
Anyways, our finances look pretty grim:
Student loans: $19419.04
Credit cards : $9176.29
ROTH IRA : $3677.66
+ various bank accounts
—————————————–
Net worth = - 21332.87
With my new job and Caesura’s overdue raise, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make significant inroads into the debt this year. If we stay within budget and our plans, then we’re due to pay off the credit card debt in May 2011 and the student loans in March 2013.
Of course, that’s worst case scenario — which I’m desperately hoping won’t happen. To think that we might not get either a raise or bonus in 24 months is kind of depressing.
Tally ho, onwards and all that.
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11.03.09
Posted in Cooking, Money tagged penny wise, pound foolish at 12:34 am by kyrias
I recently discovered a love for cream of wheat.
Really quick to cook, a whole grain, and something that can be gulped down in minutes… what’s not to love?
My only real problem is that it is kind of pricey. At $3.79 a box — I both wanted to find cheaper alternatives and wanted to know if I could make it at home.
The short answer is yes.
What really amused and frustrated me was the number of bloggers who were boasting of “Cream of wheat for just pennies!”
Yes. Assuming I can buy a pound of wheat berries at my food co-op for, say,$ 2.99.
My box of whole grain Cream of Wheat was $3.79 for 18 ounces — so to be entirely unscientific here and just assuming it’s a pound for easy math, that means I’d be saving $0.8 per pound.
Very nice. Not amazing, but pretty nice savings after a while, yes?
Except a Nutrimill costs upwards of $260 new. I’d have to eat 325 pounds of Cream of Wheat (CoW) before I’d make back my initial investment.
Being generous with my calculations and saying that we go through a pound of CoW in a week — I’d have to wait 6 years or so before I recoup my money.
…wonder if Caesura would be up for that idea.
Not that I’m deriving enjoyment from being snarky, really, but I think that it’s hardly fair to advertise something as a way to be frugal when the way to be frugal involves a rather pricey machine that the average household probably would not have.
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01.17.09
Posted in Frugality at 11:43 pm by kyrias
I read a rather interesting post by David G. Mitchell about how cell phones suck.
He brings up a couple of points, namely that cell phone usage may be connected to brain cancer, it makes driving more dangerous, it’s often used in rude manners, people don’t really need to be on-call 24/7 and that it’s a waste of money.
He even goes so far as to say that people who call him on cell phones will never get his business and that if you use a cell phone in front of him, he’ll automatically lose respect for you.
I can’t help but say, anyone who makes such sweeping statements as that automatically makes me lose a lot of respect for him.
That said, I wonder if he does have a point about cell phones.
Right now, I have a cell phone but no land line.
Considering that I live with four other people — it’d probably save me quite a lot of money if we had a landline and we split the cost of the land line five ways.
Then there’s the other way of looking at it. Considering I live with five people, it’d be a real pain if one person tied up the phone line with hour-long calls and no one else could use the phone.
Also, I currently work for a temp agency. Whether or not I pick up the phone when they call me might mean the difference between my getting paid or not for the week. Having a cell phone allows me to go out and run errands without taking the chance of missing out on employment.
My mother calls me at all hours of the day, whether it’s to ask a recipe or to ask me if there’s something I want that she could pick up for me. I can’t possibly be at home all hours of the day to field these calls and I don’t really want to miss her calls.
There’s other petty stuff such as being able to call Caesura when he’s on his way home from work to pick something up from the grocery store, or being able to find someone else quickly when we’re both out and want to meet up, or any number of small incidents.
Sure, I could probably do without my cell phone once I got a real job and didn’t need to be on-call all day in case they wanted to give me a job — but 25 dollars a month for my plan isn’t bad. It’s 5 times what I’d be paying if we split a land line, but I’d say it is worth it, just the same.
What I feel is that he’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. Someone could very well use their cell phones intelligently; without spending enormous amounts of money on accessories or upgrades or the latest new shiny; without being rude or using it whilst driving — and the added cost could very well be worth the benefits.
So, I’ll keep my cell phone, thank you very much.
And David?
I won’t mention your insufferable smugness if you promise not to hold my addiction to my cell phone against me.
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01.15.09
Posted in Blog admin, Money tagged blog upgrading, tax, techie stuff at 5:19 pm by kyrias
I upgraded my wordpress version yesterday, giving me a shinier toy to play with.
I also went through themes like crazy, both downloading more and testing them out. It would have been funny to have had a slide show of all the different looks my blog went through before I finally stopped for the night. I managed to weed through the 100 or so Wordpress themes that I had uploaded in bundle form when I first started my blog. I’m going to go through the rest of the 50 pages of free themes and then call it done.
Oddly enough, I can’t get widgets to work properly. If I try to add a text widget so I can display my Technorati button, then it kills my meta, my calendar, my archives, and my pages for one tiny button. I’m not quite sure why it’s doing this, if anyone knows, that would be great. I don’t think it’s because my current theme isn’t properly widget-enabled because I DLed a theme that was and the same thing happened.
I just might have to learn how to make WP themes. Which involves php and some other terrifying stuff. I might not have a choice if I want my blog to look exactly the way I want it though. Any coders who actually like this sort of thing around?
Speaking of which, I finally claimed my blog on Technorati yesterday night.
Tax season is coming up, and I realized that I claimed too many exemptions. I thought that I got one for being single, head of the household, and one for myself. Unfortunately, I had misunderstood the form: I didn’t realize that I had to have a dependant. I somehow managed to come away from that form thinking that I was the head of the household so long as Iwas paying more than 50% of the costs of keeping my household.
Which means that I might owe the IRS money.
Oh well, that might be better than them owing me money. We’ll see.
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11.24.08
Posted in Frugality, Uncategorized at 11:23 pm by kyrias
I still do, on occasion, but I no longer seek it out the way I used to.
There’s a relatively old article on there about the idea of having a “spend nothing month”. This is when you don’t buy anything except for the absolute necessities each month and see how you do.
Frankly, I can see how it would be useful to those people who use shopping as a form of therapy, but for those of us who are barely scraping by on monthly utility payments — it’s not too useful.
Sure, it’s a cool idea, and I suppose if I really wanted to look at my finances, I could cut out the odd chocolate bar and save myself 2 dollars once every two weeks — but 2 dollars every two weeks is hardly going to break the bank. That isn’t exactly my “latte factor”.
It’s interesting, how retail therapy works. It doesn’t even seem like a particularly new concept, but I wonder when it went from buying the odd trinket to keep the missus happy to the addiction to the new and shiny.
Bah. I feel kind of like a grinch. After all, it’s not their fault I’m not their target audience. But it still rankles, it really does.
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11.19.08
Posted in Money tagged money management, money shenanigans at 1:22 am by kyrias
I recently made a rather large payment to my credit card and so they sent me credit card checks to entice me into spending further.
I now am the proud owner of two 0% interest checks and three 3.99% checks.
I have a balance of $1,800 on one credit card at 13.99% and 1,400 on another at 7.99%. What I’m thinking of doing is taking the checks, writing them out to myself in the amount of whatever remaining credit I have, and then paying off as much of the 13.99% debt I have.
True, there’s a 3% fee and the 0% only lasts for 9 billing cycles, aka 9 months — but I think the amount I’d save on the 13.99% interest would more than make up for it. I pay about $30 a month in interest and this would be a one time fee of $51.
Any thoughts on the matter?
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