The Weight of Money

The partner and I got an unexpected date night last night since the daughter wanted to hang out at a free movie event at our local library. We stopped at a local yarn store and chatted with the owner and some of the other ladies before heading over to a yummy dinner of thai food. Even though we took our time at each stop, we were still early in picking up the daughter from her event and ended up parking in library lot waiting for her to get out.

This was the perfect opportunity to talk about anything and everything without losing sleep – usually these discussions take place as we’re both drifting off to sleep. The partner reveal another upcoming change with his company’s 401K program. It sounds like his company continues to struggle financially and is still cutting corners here, there, and everywhere to stay afloat. The partner is expecting that the newest announcement, only alluded to at this point, will address the account fees associated with the 401K accounts. He expects that the company, in addition to dropping their matching program and tacking on a lengthly vestment clause for previously contributed dollars, will also stop covering the fees charged by the 401K company and will be passing those charges on to participating members. To me, this is just another kick in the shins from the company at this point.

The partner is currently on is 3rd years with this small start up company. The past year has been full of lay offs, cut backs, scaling down of options, and other negative financial steps (negative from the employee’s perspective at least). What was a nice company to work with has really drained away to just some job this past year. The other draw back is that this company doesn’t pay that well to start with, so the few perks (most of which were not financial) it offered, made a big difference in employee satisfaction. All of that has been stripped away this past year or so. I’m sad to see this change since it was a very family-focused company that seemed to go out of it’s way to support it’s staff in recognition that it’s financial support wasn’t the greatest. At the same time, I’ve hoped that these changes would prompt the partner to look elsewhere for employment, and while there have been days that he’s lost all patience with the company, he’s still pretty loyal to sticking around longer.

During our parking lot discussion, the partner mentioned just stopping all retirement contributions. This would put a few more dollars in our pockets each month, but would it be worth it? I don’t think so. Retirement is something that is going to happen – having a couple more dollars more a month might ease our financial stress a little bit, but not to the point to put future retirement in jeopardy. Since we’re already not seeing that money, I support continuing with contributions, even if we’re paying all the fees to make it happen.

This past year of making no financial progress is taking it’s toll on the partner as well – he wants to see debt going down, savings increasing, or equity growing. I understand the feeling, I want to see those things happening too – but we’re just not there yet. In fact, I’ve been anxiously waiting to hear what his raise is going to be and am starting to worry that one won’t be happening at all since his company has been struggling so much and we’re already entering the third week of July and there has been no word about this year’s raises (they usually go in effect July 1). I also struggle with the fact that the he chooses to stay with a company that limits his earning potential. In my mind, if he really wants to see progress in those areas, he’d be making the effort to apply for other positions that are available to him at this point and would come with a decent pay increase as well. But that’s not a fun argument to make and is one area that I’ve finally learned to not push too hard – but it’s difficult to not push when I see that as one of the only positive steps to reducing our financial struggles.

Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the things you want. Sometimes, your brain plays tricks and makes you think that getting what you want is a good idea even when it isn’t — especially when it comes down to money. We’ve made and need to make several purchases for our house and garden this month. Thinking about our current purchasing needs, the partner started wondering if he could get a good deal on a few items purchased in bulk – specifically some EMT. We need some for the vertical garden support, but suddenly he was asking me about how many poles we’d need if we finally got a shade structure we’d been considering for a couple years.

The shade structure idea wasn’t an out-of-the-blue thought. We’ve been discussing getting a good structure for several years and somehow manage to talk ourselves out of it each time. We have a big party coming up in a couple weeks where we could certainly use a nice sized structure – but is that reason enough to get one? He almost had me convinced and those lovely little “Buy It Now” buttons on ebay can be awfully tempting sometimes. But, before clicking that button, my mind started to wonder about some of the details.

I’m a bargain hunter – I hate to pay extra for anything I think I can get for less somewhere else. Considering shipping costs, I’ve began wondering if we couldn’t get some of the structure elements cheaper, closer to home. This threw a kink in the whirlwind of activity – not so much because I was questioning the savings, but because I was taking longer look at the situation. What started out as a conversation about getting a bulk discount on EMT had turned into definite plans to buy the kit and the EMT without even knowing if a discount was possible. Having the shade structure for the party would be great, but having the cash to pay for everything would be even better and thats where the problem comes in.

I can justify needed expenses that are necessary. We have to get vertical supports up for the crops (now!) and I don’t mind forking over cash to make that happen. However, we don’t *need* a new shade structure for the party – no matter how nice it’d be to have. Also, we’re currently looking at options for buying another vehicle – one with 4-doors and a/c – and now is not the time for buying frivolous items. Once I started adding up the shelter details, all I could see was that adding up to the 6-month or 12-month increase in auto insurance we’ll be paying for a 4th vehicle.

It’s easy to get pulled along by ideas, but sometimes you still need to hit the breaks and really look at the situation. We may end up with a shade shelter, but it’ll get a lot more consideration than the 2 hours of talk we gave it last night. Also, before we make that decision, we’ll need to finally decide if we’re going to get another older car for the cash we can spare, or it we’re going to add a car payment to our already tight budget. I’m already leaning toward the first option, but am not sure the partner is on board with that idea just yet so we gotta talk it out a bit more first.

Every time I run the budget numbers, I have to face the reality that I’m making poor choices. You’d think a month or two of doing this would prompt me to change habits, but it hasn’t. It’s all about food, actually, and eating out far more than I should. 75% of our dining out budget it my fault and its often just the daughter and I. We’re talking about $300/month that could be saved just by staying home and eating at home — we could really use an extra $300/month.

I need to do some serious personal reflection to figure out where this constant eating out obsession is coming from. It is basically a daily occurrence, usually between the hours from noon – 4:00 p.m. This month it could be contributed to the fact that a $50/month for groceries is a pathetic attempt at saving money — if I don’t feel like there is any food in the house, I go out to eat. The most likely reason is that I’ve been moderately depressed the past few months and haven’t been taking care of kitchen duties – like keeping the kitchen clean enough to cook in and grocery shopping.

Its time to get food spending back on track and also own up to the fact that I’m really hurting our family’s finances. Steps to fix this, off the top of my head, include:

1. Tell the partner about my eating-out spending — he knows that I eat out a lot, though I still try to obscure the fact and will give vauge answers about whether we’ve eaten or not. Also, because I manage the budget numbers, he usually doesn’t really see just how much I’ve spent eating out or doesn’t realize how it impacts our budget. This isn’t a good pattern to be in and it certainly doesn’t lend to a trusting, honest relationship that we try to maintain. And it adds to the guilt I feel about eating out in the first place.

2. Make a food plan for the week — I do this about once every other month. It really helps us keep spending in check and the house stocked with food for a week or two. However, I always dread this task, even though it can be so simple. So each week, by grocery shopping day, I must make a plan for that week. If I don’t have one, I need to just pick a week from my Saving Dinner cookbook and use that.

3. Make a grocery list and go shopping — This may sound silly, but the grocery store is the most stressful place in the world to me. For many years I avoided it altogether (difficult to do as a single parent). The past several years, I’ve mostly gotten over it, but I still drag my feet when it comes time to go shopping. Also, when were short on funds, it’s very difficult for me to go and spend money on food when I feel like we don’t really have it. Of course, not doing that just means I’ll send twice as much, or more, eating out when the cupboards are bare.

4. Make sure there are easy lunch and snack items available – I’m home all day, most days, so I need to be sure that I don’t just buy food for dinner. If I can’t instantly find lunch in the kitchen, I’ll run out and get something. The majority of my spending is on lunch or pre-dinner meals (around 3pm).

5. Find a way to hold myself accountable — I’m still not sure about how to do this. Perhaps I’ll just post a weekly report on how often we’ve eaten out (including how much was spent) and whether is was a family meal or just me avoiding the kitchen.

6. Keep snacks in the car at all times — I just bought several snack items that I can keep in my car for the moments that I’m suddenly starving. Rarely are my trips away from the house that a snack won’t tide me over until we get home. The partner has always been good at this and it’s time I follow his lead.

I expect to see positive progress in April that will encourage me to make even more progress in the following months. I also expect to see a slight increase in our grocery spending as I’ll probably buy extra convenience foods that will make eating at home easier until it’s a settled pattern.

Today’s not been a very good money conversation day — seems to be one of those days where one little thing turns to another, another, another until everyone is rattling out all the millions of things that could be wrong. Guess it’s just a little crack of financial stress and it isn’t all the surprising, though I found some of the comments so.

The partner and I were discussing the “sacrifices” that have been made the past two or so years to help us get our house and eventually our financial house in order. Lots of financial progress is on hold as we mostly tread water, which doesn’t make for feelings of comfort and joy at this time of year. Seems that the partner is struggling with how his life has changed and how he can’t just throw a wad of cash in his pocket every weekend and spend it however he wants. Burning a couple hundred dollars on a lark just isn’t in our budget and even a couple hundred dollar for needed items is a hard sell right now. But with this argument, I can’t help pointing out that nothing has changed between now and his previous spending other than he’s now looking at reality and taking responsibility for it.

We started out our relationship, each with pretty sizable debt. Mine was tied to the degree I’m still not using in terms of student loans, his was all in unsecured credit card debt. So all these comments about how he was spending whatever, whenever had to be correlated to the sizable credit card debt that we’re still working down. So, are there sacrifices being made now, or is it just facing reality? Obviously, I’m much more in the facing reality camp, and I’m not looking for support one way or another — just commenting on the very different perception each of us has at the current situation.

I’m sure that this is an uncomfortable situation to be in, watching dimes and knowing that making ends meet takes real work, but to continue mourning a lifestyle that wasn’t financially responsible to begin with doesn’t win bonus points with me. As for the current financial stress, I’ve dealt with money issues my whole life and I can’t help seeing the fact that because we can pay our bills and have more than enough to eat – it isn’t all that much to get upset over. I’ll work on having more sympathy for the partner who doesn’t have the same life experience or outlook.

The partner and I are struggling with my near-constant push to leave my job and start a family. The major contention factor: we can’t afford either. I’ve had it with my job and want to leave, but we’ve not closed on the house so I need to wait until then. But what happens after we close on the house?

The partner thinks I need to wait much longer than just another week. At one point in today’s email exchanges, he commented on how we need to bring in as much as we can in the next few weeks and perhaps I should even reduce my 401K contributions. My response: perhaps I should double them instead.

The reality of the situation, to me, is not that we need to make more, it is that we need to function on less. However, as much as I hate it, he is right. I can’t replace my consistent income and we can’t do without it at the moment. But how long will this moment be? Another two weeks? Another four? The entire summer?

I want to run home, this instant, and run the numbers – but I know what they’ll say – tough it out for another day.

Got a call from another new sewing customer last night. Seems I’ll be helping her with her July wedding; we’re meeting tomorrow to talk shop. I was so excited that I called my ma and told her how awesome she is for suggesting that I take in sewing and for being such an amazing role model in handling customers and making things happen.

I’ve found that my customer service skills are modeled directly from her. When a new customer came over last Friday, I could hear her voice echoing mine as I greeted them and answered their questions. Everything I said was identical to what I’ve heard my mom say and I included all the social banter and good-hearted talk that my momma always brought to every transaction. Through out that visit, I couldn’t help smiling at the fact that all those years following her around to customer and client visits had a such an impact.

I’ve given little thought to all the transactions I witnessed over the years, but now it is an invaluable repository of information. I’m so proud of everything she did as a single mom to make ends meet and thankful that she was able to teach me so many things leading by example.

To top off the happy-gushy post, this weekend she gave me an amazing compliment: she called seeking some professional advice. She said that I always have valuable insight and suggestions and wanted to know what I thought about some of her recent plans and ideas. I’m honored that she feels my experience and insight is so valuable and glad to know that I can give back to her a fraction of what she has given me.

I feel like I’m in a whirlpool of financial directions, every thing has it’s own individual course and nothing is overlapping, just spiraling instead. With the purchase of the house comes many new options, needs, and priorities. Where, what, and how will we approach these, consolidate them, make them work.

Not everything is a real need, merely wants dressed up and vying for attention. Most of them are my own constructs and I’m not sure where the partner stands on these issues. It seems that the house has been our decision, but everything beyond that is just individual assumptions not communicated. It is as though all of our shared energy ends at the contract negotiations and we’re too drained to talk about what will happen afterwards.

The issues/wants/needs that I’ve been mulling over:

1. I stop working. When I decided to leave my full-time job and take a part-time position, I thought that it would be a temporary position. I figured that I’d work the part-time position until we moved into the new house and then just stop. What was I thinking?

   I was thinking that we’d buy less house and actually spend less per month on our mortgage than we’re paying in rent. Well, that isn’t happening and I’m okay with that, except quitting work isn’t as possible now.

2. Build a Workshop. I’ve mentioned that we need a workshop. Buying a house without a garage really puts us in a jam. There are two small sheds on the property, one is quite cute, but neither can hold the weight of the partners “stuff!”. I want to just get one built, but it’ll be some serious cash. I’ve pushed the partner to find out how much cash, but we’re both unsure of where to even start in looking up that stuff.
3. Expand the family. Having another child has been really pushing on my mind lately. It’s an on-again-off-again feeling of a couple of intense months wanting a kid and a few more refusing the thought of another kid. Since I’m on the upswing of desire, I want to add this to not working. But, babies cost money — or at least thats what some people want you to believe (another post on this another time).
4. Repairs/Updates/Furniture: The house will need a variety of repairs and many of them fall within the restoration range. We could go about doing restoration work on this house, but that does increase costs in some places. There are some tax incentives for doing restoration on an old house, but I’ve not read up on more recent laws and the book I’m currently reading only talks about restoration of commercial properties. Perhaps this only applies to commercial/income-producing properties still.

The partner and I need to talk about these things, but we are too tired to add more to our day. So much going on, not enough time to deal with it all.

I rattled this idea off to the partner, last night, as we were pulling the flannel sheets off the bed and putting on a cooler set. No, it wasn’t about saving money, it was about getting acclimated. We were pretty toasty before crawling in bed thanks to the upstairs always being so warm, the before bed walk, and an hour or so of yoga. Honestly, I was feeling the urge to close all the windows and turn on the easy solution, our a/c.

Last year, I was all paranoid about the costs of running the air conditioner. As summer faded into winter, I then panicked about using the heater – always too worried about how high the bill was going to be. It turns out that full time a/c or heat use doesn’t make a big difference in our well insulated townhouse.

However, the house we’re buying has no central air. It won’t have the awesome insulation being a middle townhouse unit offers, much less the double glass storm windows and insulation in the walls. I didn’t want to skip using the a/c to make our bills cheaper right now, I wanted to force ourselves to get used to not having that option.

The partner looked like I was insane. He refused such an idea as he hates to be hot. To him, a house without central air, sounds punishment appropriate for those (like us) who haven’t been fiscally savvy enough to have no debt and a sizable financial cushion. While he may think moving into the house in the heat of summer without air conditioning is an acceptable cruelty, he will not voluntarily sign up for personal persecution just to help us get used to the idea.

Maybe it was an odd idea, but it certainly makes sense to me. I’d rather make those transitions slowly instead of jumping off the deep end of the modern amenities pool and hating the fact that we’ll be literally swimming in our sweat equity.

The Weight of Money is approaching it’s one year anniversary. In preparation, I’m gathering our net worth data and look to compare where we stood a year ago to today. The timing is great because I’m currently sending copies of all our accounts and statements to the mortgage broker to verify income and cash on hand, so no additional scrounging for numbers will be needed.

I’m please to say that we have a total of $29,800 in cash assets, $6,900 of which in in our retirement accounts, leaving $22,900 in cash/savings. This really cheers me up since I’ve been feeling stressed in the money department. We hit a money snag in our relationship recently in discussing cash available for home purchase and this help relieves some of the tension, on my part at least. Hopefully I can get in more detail later this week (the post is half written, at least).

Between now and the end of May, I’m currently juggling multiple projects varying from musical rehearsal, finishing 3-D sculptures for an upcoming art show, nonprofit planning, professional sewing, house hunting, and an ever increasing workload. Needless to say, it’s been a challenge keeping up with all of these items and our finances.

I’ve yet to compile April’s budget and haven’t entered spending for March. It is moments like these that I love living on last month’s income. I don’t have to stress too much because I know that there is money in the bank, even if I haven’t had a chance to budget for it yet. If we were counting on each paycheck, it’d be a much more stressful position.

Sunday morning, after sleeping in too late, I obsessed over getting our taxes completed. The partner and I have been having lots of little talks about money and upcoming spending and needed to know if our tax fears were valid.

Within an hour of starting, I had completed both our state and federal taxes. However, in my zeal of following step-by-step instructions and filling out forms (I’ve got a thing for forms), I forgot to address the “what if” scenario with the partner. While I’d already figured out that any tax owed would come directly from savings, we hadn’t discussed the situation. However, what would we do with a refund? And, what difference, if any, would the amount of the refund make in deciding what to do with it?

So, after calculating our refunds, I asked the partner those exact questions. I didn’t reveal the numbers the forms already had because I wanted to pretend we were starting this conversation at the right time – before there was a real dollar amount to consider.

The partner responded that I probably wanted to put it all toward debt with a slight sneer to his voice. It seems that I’ve been pushing that debt reduction button pretty hard in his eyes, or maybe it was just throwing $5,000 at it the other month that still makes him a little uncomfortable.

He then threw out his standard argument of wanting to see the numerical comparison of putting it toward debt and, based on the monthly interest reduction, how long it would take to save up that amount. Tired of that argument, and feeling a little unsure of making those calculations, I just argued for a more immediate answer.

Next, he wanted to make some logical comparison of owing taxes versus getting a refund. What would we do if we owed taxes? Put it on credit or pull it from savings? Credit! No way, it’d come from savings. Since the credit card tax payment wasn’t an option that reasoning method was rejected as well.

Finally, we both agreed that we wanted to put it all into savings. Basically, the house needs to happen this year and it won’t happen without more cash. Also, if we put it toward debt, it would not reduce our payments enough to allow us to save up that amount by summer.

Now, I just need to decide if I’m going to file electronically or on paper – the paper form is already filled out, would just need to drop it in the mail.