And so it begins. The truth is that the only way I am going to get myself out of debt is to stop fucking shopping. Just stop. Completely, at least for a while. And as the season of Lent is upon us (though I am starting a day early), the next 40 days seems as good a time as any. So that's the goal--no shopping for 40 days (aside from grocery shopping). And that makes today Day 1.
Day 2 of not shopping is going fine. I'm at work. I spent lunchtime at Ash Wednesday services at the campus Episcopalian church, and I think the service really helped to center me and get me thinking in the right direction about why it is so important for me to stop this reckless shopping. The bit from Matthew that is included in the Ash Wednesday service, warning against accumulating goods that can be moth-eaten or rust, but instead accumulating treasure in your heart, spoke to me today. It has before, I know, but given that I am starting this particular journey, it was especially loud today.
So it's the beginning of Lent. I am committed to not shopping until Easter. I am around $8,000 in debt and it is time for things to change.
The good news is that the weather has taken a turn for the beautiful. It is supposed to be 80 degrees today.
The bad news is that I have very close to no clothes that fit and absolutely no acceptable shoes for warm weather. I've gained 30ish lbs since this time last year, and threw out a bunch of old summer shoes at the end of last summer. But, until after Easter, I'm just going to have to live with what I've got.
This is not going to be easy.
One common thread among the debt-buster bloggers I've started to read is that they come clean on their blogs not just about being in debt, but about exactly how much debt they are in, when they make what payments, etc. I've thought a bit about whether I wanted to do that here, and felt very uncomfortable with the idea. Thinking about it further, I realized that the reason I felt so uncomfortable about it was (a) because I am embarrassed by my financial picture and have been lying about it to myself and others for a long time and (b) because I was brought up, like most people in this country, to think that talking about money was crass, particularly if you actually use numbers.
Well, fuck both those reasons. This is about accountability and changing my behavior, and the first step is definitely coming clean. As far as it being crass to talk about money, that seems almost laughable given the level of conspicuous consumption surrounding me and perpetuated by me every day. So I'm going to publish the numbers.
As of today, my financial picture is as follows:
Total credit card debt: $8,093.16
Total student loan debt: $33,674.75
Total savings: $163.77
Checking account balance: $11.69
My current post-tax income is approximately $2,868.97 per month, but should be going up slightly in the near future. I contribute $1,700 to our joint account each month. My personal monthly bills are as follows:
Audible subscription: $22.95
Cell phone bill: $48.57
Student loan payment: $257.03
That leave me with approximately $840 per month that is currently unaccounted for. That money has to go towards that ridiculous credit card debt and low savings balance. My plan, as I conceptualize it today, is to put $600 per month towards these goals--$500 to the credit card, $100 to the savings account (after I build up a month of extra money in my checking account from my no-spending Lent so that my checking account balance will stop going down to near zero every month). That will leave me with about $240 per month to spend. Part of this will certainly go to non-regular but necessary expenses, such as prescriptions and doctor's visits. The rest will be my spending money.
Finally, I am expecting a tax refund of about $1,800 in mid-March. That money will go to pay down the credit cards, period. No taking some out for fun money--I've already had too much fun. Also, if/when I get my expected raise, any difference between my current salary and my future one will go directly to the credit card debt.
'So that's what I'm working with. It feels good to have written it out, for some reason. More manageable. I've always been a person who has to write things down in order for them to be true, so I guess that's not surprising. I have a lot of work ahead of me.
I had really hoped I'd get more than four days into not shopping before I started a list of stuff I want to buy, but I am who I am, and so the list begins. It will probably get long.
Things I'd buy if I weren't not shopping:
1. Obama merch. My favorites are this sticker, this one, and this one. But I have to admit there is some small part of me that would love to display this one somewhere on my person.
2. Spring shoes. I really, really want spring shoes. Something cute and flat. And some sandals. I'm digging the Earth Echelon and Allure, the Dunham Juniper Mary Jane, and these incredibly cute New Balance yoga shoes (think I could pull those off with skirts?). I also really like these Red Wing Cosmos flats. For sandals, I'm tempted by a number of the Clarks styles, especially the Twill, but what I want more than anything is just some really nice, comfy flip flops, like these by Columbia or these by Simple.
I'd also love to get some boots for next year when they go on sale...
3. The Windowshoppist is giving me all sorts of stuff lust. In particular, I am nutso about the retro print laptop covers by Nanda (particularly the Stella green) and the truly fabulous Broken Plate Pendant Company jewelry. I'd have a hard time choosing just one, but right this moment I am lusting over the Peacock Broken Plate Pendant.
I am not going to bore you with the various and sundry ways in which I sucked this weekend, nor with beating myself up about it. I shopped, I didn't go to church, Mark and I fought, it was bad. However, it is back to being not bad now, and so forward we will go.
On a happy note, both Oliver and Edie are now on trial adoptions with their new families, who seem in both cases to be well-suited for them and happy to have them. This is great for them, and good for us, as well, as we need a little bit of less stressful non-fostering down time to get our collective shit together.
Dear Dumbass,
When you don't pay any attention to your checking account balance, you overdraw. Duh. Get on it.
Love,
Yourself
Several times, I have been advised that the way one is happiest in one's job is to try to make money doing something you love to do anyway. I've steadily ignored this advice, since the one time I tried to make money doing what I loved (writing for a newspaper, in this case), it was disastrous. I ended up not loving it anymore, and it hasn't been worth it to me to try again, since I'm not willing to lose anymore passions.
Until now.
Another piece of advice I've gotten more than once is that I should become a personal shopper, since I love to shop, especially for other people, and can often find good deals on things and spot cool things other people miss. This advice has also been met with resistance, as I've said that anyone who can afford to employ a personal shopper is going to want to shop for things that are beyond my interest and shop at stores I'm not comfortable setting foot in. Nobody, I've said numerous times, wants a personal thrift shopper.
Except maybe they do, because that is what a lot of Ebay is--personal thrift shoppers. People who buy things at thrift stores and garage sales and resell them for a profit on Ebay. I knew this before, of course, but never did it myself, because I could never figure out how buying something for $5 at the Goodwill and selling it for $7 on Ebay would be worth the time.
And then last week I discovered the Goodwill bins, where all items of clothing are $1.25. Buy something for $1.25 and sell it for $7 and there might just be enough profit in it to make it worthwhile. And so I set out, for only the second time, trying to make a profit doing something I love...
I've opened an Ebay store, Your Personal Thrift Shopper. Right now, it's very heavy on clothes for babies and toddlers, because that's what I've had the best luck with finding at the bins, and because I've gotten a lot of wonderful advice on what brands, etc. are good for resale in that department. However, I'm keeping statistics of how much I put into things and what they sell for, and I'll be trying to tailor my thrifting (and therefore inventory) to meet whatever is in demand. That being said, if you have a size or item you'd like me to keep my eye out for, just drop me an email.
I'm sure, given discussions I've had here and elsewhere before, that there is going to be some flak headed my way for trying to profit off thrift shopping. It has been suggested to me that someone in my income bracket is somehow "cheating" by even shopping at thrift stores, much less buying low there with the intention of selling high(er). I've got to tell you, though, I've given it a lot of thought, and I see nothing to feel bad about. The stores in my area are stocked to the gills--there is no shortage of stuff to thrift. And the bins is the last stop pre-dumpster for most of this stuff, so buying it, even to resell, is keeping it out of a landfill, which I'm all for. Also, if it doesn't sell, and some of it surely won't, I'll either give it away or give it back to the Goodwill, so it's not like now that I'm selling things I'm going to stop giving. When someone buys something off Ebay that they could have thrifted themselves, what they are paying for is the time and effort it took the person who found, listed, and sold that item to do so. And I think that's a skill worth paying for. My time has value, and if this can draw that value out of the time I spend thrifting, then I don't think that hurts anybody. Much--even most--of what we pay others to do is stuff we could do ourselves, or could learn to do ourselves, and I don't see how this is any different. Just like anything else, thrifting can be a service.
So, if you are in the market for thrifted stuff, without having to dig through the piles yourself, keep an eye on my store. The stock should change often, as I thrift often, and as I said before, I'm happy to do what I can to fill special requests, just let me know.
Well, I'm a week in, and my first bunch of auctions have ended. Results thus far have been semi-disappointing. It's doable, I can make money at it, but it's a lot of effort for a little bit of cash so far. However, I know at least ten times as much about what will sell and how to sell it than I did at this time last week, so I'm guessing my next bunch of auctions will do better. And even if the profit margin is smaller than I'd like, it seems pretty clear that I can consistently make SOME money at it. And in the credit card pay off race, every little bit helps.
Which brings me to my other update.
On February 22, I posted the following:
Total credit card debt: $8,093.16
Total student loan debt: $33,674.75
Total savings: $163.77
Checking account balance: $11.69
Right now, I'm here:
Total credit card debt: $6,130.13 (though $600 is Mark's and will be paid from him ASAP)
Total student loan debt: $33,517.92
Total savings: $100.00
Checking account balance: $200.24
The other change is that my raise went through, so my monthly take home has moved from about $2,868.97 to $2,969.04. So...progress, albeit not quite as much as I'd hoped.
So last month these were the numbers:
Total credit card debt: $6,130.13
Total student loan debt: $33,517.92
Total savings: $100.00
Checking account balance: $200.24
And this month?
Total credit card debt: $7,111.47
Total student loan debt: $33,341.29
Total savings: $200.00
Checking account balance: $138.46
You'll see I headed in the wrong direction. I know--major suck. All I have to say for myself is that I bought two plane tickets and a pass for BlogHer. And it was a bad month (I also overdrew my checking account...). But I'm back on track and things will be better next month.
So I am trying (with limited success, but trying) not to spend unnecessary money this month. Getting out of CC debt and all that blah blah blah. Which means, of course, that I keep seeing things that I just. have. to. have. So once again I'm gonna make a list of them rather than buying them. My birthday is August 28, if anybody was wondering.
1. Hathor Legacy tank. Love the site, love the shirt, would love to build collection of shirts from my favorite blogs (to go with my Fussy t-shirt).
2. Pearl River Melamine Lunch Box. It's so cute! With so many nice compartments! And not plastic! And I am trying so hard to bring my lunch to work more often! I need it, clearly.
3. Title 9 Universal Shorts. I am making do with the shorts I have for the gym, but they are all men's shorts and not the best fitting things in the world. It would be so lovely to have some that were actually made for the body I have.
4. Superhero Necklace. In truth, I already have a Superhero Necklace--the "Grass and Sky" one. And I wear it at least once a week and probably more. And I am greedy and want another one. Preferably the "Earth" one or the "Joy" one.
5. Red Wing Olivia shoes. Again, I already have some of these, in "Sunglow," but I love them so much I want some black ones as well.
I could go on and on. But I won't. Glad I have that out of my system.
Or...not. I'm just going to keep adding to this thread. It will make me feel better. More stuff I want:
6. Burning River Roller Girls tank top. My best friend is a member of this roller league (go Eva Lucien!), and I have one of their t-shirts, but I'd really love a tank.
I will attempt a real post-vacation entry tomorrow, when my head is on more straight, but today I'm just doing the financial update thing because I am doing my bills. I'm unthrilled. I don't want to talk about it.
Last month's numbers:
Total credit card debt: $7,111.47
Total student loan debt: $33,341.29
Total savings: $200.00
Checking account balance: $138.46
And today:
Total credit card debt: $7,244.00
Total student loan debt: $33,188.70
Total savings: $400.00
Checking account balance: $364.80
Back on track!
Last month:
Total credit card debt: $7,244.00
Total student loan debt: $33,188.70
Total savings: $400.00
Checking account balance: $364.80
Today:
Total credit card debt: $6,677.41
Total student loan debt: $33,022.93
Total savings: $500.00
Checking account balance: $403.36
I had a conversation (a couple of them, actually) at BlogHer about my comfort with blogging about my finances, and why I think it's important. In the course of this topic, it was pointed out to me that although I blog about my savings/debt, I have never given my income on the blog. I thought this had to be mistaken--after all, why wouldn't I have? But I just went and looked around, and apparently I haven't.
So, without further ado:
I currently make $49,920/year. I started in my current position at $48,000 and got a 3% raise about six months ago. As of September 1, I get an 8% raise, which will put me at $53,914/year. I have been at my job for 15 months. Salary.com puts the base salary range for my job title in my zip code at $49,039 at the 25th percentile and $71,312 at the 75th, so I'd say that with my current level of experience, I'm doing just about right.
Last month:
Total credit card debt: $6,677.41
Total student loan debt: $33,022.93
Total savings: $500.00
Checking account balance: $403.36
Today:
Total credit card debt: $6,078.91
Total student loan debt: $33,022.93
Total savings: $600.00
Checking account balance: $203.74
So everything is moving in the right direction. I now need to contribute several hundred dollars a month more than I was previously to our joint budget, so my debt repayment is going to be slowed a bit, but I'm also going to start seeing bigger paychecks starting October 1, so I think it will all work itself out OK.
Last month:
Total credit card debt: $6,078.91
Total student loan debt: $33,022.93
Total savings: $600.00
Checking account balance: $203.74
Today:
Total credit card debt: $6,389.75
Total student loan debt: $33,159.21
Total savings:$700.00
Checking account balance: $467.60
Looks bad, I know, but I'm contributing more to the joint now, plus I had to resume my student loan payments this month, plus I had to buy a plane ticket. And yes, those are pretty much excuses. My raise kicks in next month, so hopefully I'll be back on track then.
Gonna have to try harder...
Last month:
Total credit card debt: $6,389.75
Total student loan debt: $33,159.21
Total savings:$700.00
Checking account balance: $467.60
This month:
Total credit card debt: $6,495.21
Total student loan debt: $32,990.42
Total savings:$650.00
Checking account balance: $361.62
On a higher note, my CC debt is down almost $1,600 from when I started last February. I was certainly hoping for more progress than that, but I've had some setbacks and if I get back on track I think I can still make my goal to be completely CC debt free by the time we leave Austin.
So for several months now, I've been posting a financial update every month like a good little girl, noting my successes and (more often) failures.
But I haven't really been trying. See, the card(s) were still in my wallet, and I was still actively using one of them. I was still buying more than I had cash for, not sticking to any sort of budget, etc. And that, more than any of the catastrophes I've been looking at recently, was why the numbers weren't going down.
Which is why October's numbers will show lower savings and higher debt than September's did, once again, even though I got a raise.
And it's gotta stop, or I am never going to get out of debt or reach any of my goals.
So.
I got another new 0% interest card and initiated transfers from the two cards I have with balances. Once those go through, I'll cancel the old cards. Then I will have exactly two credit cards--the one with the big balance being paid off, and the one connected to my bank accounts for overdraft protection. They'll both not be in my wallet, and neither one of them will have a number that is already pre-programmed into everywhere I like to shop. And then I pay, and I buy only what I can afford with the cash that is actually in my checking account each month. And I try in earnest to be a responsible financial citizen.
It's so long past time. This is so embarrassing, not just to not have a handle on it, but to have been pretending to really try and to have a handle on it for these past months. I can be such a spoiled baby.
Oh, and another financial thing I need to do in order to get myself back into a healthy place is to resume my monthly giving campaign on the blog. I suspended it several months ago, and I can't even quite remember why now, and I have been resenting myself for it ever since. So, for the month of October, I'm giving to Basic Rights Oregon. Basic Rights Oregon is a group dedicated to "ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in Oregon," and right now they are fighting for a comprehensive domestic partnership law in Oregon.
That's them on the right, if your giving dollars are still burning a hole in your pocket this month.
Last month:
Total credit card debt: $6,495.21
Total student loan debt: $32,990.42
Total savings:$650.00
Checking account balance: $361.62
Total: -$38,474.01
This month:
Total credit card debt: $6,710.72
Total student loan debt: $$32,831.73
Total savings: $358.78
Checking account balance: $522.97
Total: -$38,660.70
So basically, I suck. But I'm turning over a new leaf--I swear. I'm not paying much on the CC this month, because of Christmas travel and how expensive that's all going to be, but I'm not spending, either.
One step forward, two steps back...
OK, so a list of Cyber Monday sales. I know there are people doing this all over the Internet, but I thought I'd get my $.02 in anyway.
So I'm not posting a financial update for November. Or December. And here's why:
I love Christmas. And one of the things I love the most about it is buying gifts for people. I honest-to-God prefer giving to receiving. Christmas shopping (which I spent a good deal of the day at today) is fun for me.
But when I'm trying to count pennies and worry about my debt-payoff goals, it's not fun. It's a depressing chore.
So I'm suspending the whole deal until January 1. After January 1, I know I'm going to have to dedicate myself much more seriously to paying down that debt. But until then, I am not going to worry about it, and I'm not going to keep track of it, any more than enough to not overdraw my checking account.
Before anyone says anything, I know that this is an irresponsible, privileged, and not very wise position for me to take. I know it's going to set be back. I know I'll be crying about it in January. And you can go ahead and post all of those things if it will make you feel good. But it won't likely change anything. I'm young, have fairly few fiscal responsibilities (i.e. no kids), and am going to enjoy my Christmas gift giving as much as I can for as long as I can. If that makes me a worse or weaker person, so be it.
I know I am posting far too much recently about Allie and her blogs Wardrobe Oxygen and My Wardrobe Today, but she's got another great post up that I have to point you towards. At Wardrobe Oxygen, she takes up the question of what the style-conscious should do with their magic economy-stimulating tax rebates, suggesting debt pay-off, charitable contributions, or environmentally friendly upgrades, rather than new purses or shoes. She's a recovered shopaholic, she says, and points out:
It’s amazing what reduced or no debt can do for a woman – her skin is radiant from a good night’s sleep, she has better posture, a beautiful engaging smile for all. She cheerily answers her phone on the first ring instead of checking Caller ID for collectors, and she looks forward to the mail every day because it may bring a favorite periodical or card from a friend, not a Second Notice or Past Due statement.
I love Allie for writing this. God bless her for being someone who writes mostly about clothes and cosmetics but is still both willing and able to practice and advocate fiscal responsibility. Since both climbing out of debt/learning to live within my means and bettering my style are goals for me this year, she is definitely a good influence.
And for what it's worth, my tax rebate is going towards my credit cards.
I've been meaning to post about this:
I am making a concerted effort to bring my lunch to work and not buy lunch when I'm here, and I've been doing really well. One thing that helps is to have an emergency stash of canned soup for days when I forget. However, I hate most canned soup, as it is salty and nasty. But Amy's Kitchen makes some pretty good lentil soup, so I usually use that.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Amy's soup was on sale at the co-op and I picked up some more varieties to have around. One of these was potato leek. I like potato leek soup a lot, so I was jazzed to see it. Then, on a Friday, with the rest of my at-work soup supply gone, I popped open the potato leek.
It was so incredibly gross. It both looked and tasted like paste. It was gray, lumpy, and completely inedible. So I wrote an email to Amy's, telling them how bad it was and how disappointed I was, particularly since I usually enjoy their products.
Someone wrote me back. Not in three to six weeks, or even three to six day, but in a couple of hours. She said that they are aware of the problem with the potato leek soup (it doesn't hold up once it is in the cans) and are pulling it from the market. She also asked for my mailing address to send me some coupons for my trouble.
So I expected that I'd receive coupons for a couple of free cans of soup in several weeks.
Well, once again, they surprised me. By the following Wednesday (bad soup was on Friday) there was an envelope in my mailbox that contained EIGHT coupons, each for a free Amy's product. Any Amy's product. Not just soup, which I buy at the co-op for less than $2 per can, but frozen pizzas (which cost $6 or more each) or anything else. So, basically, the sent me $48 worth of coupons.
That is customer service about which I cannot complain. My complaint was addressed quickly, I was treated very courteously, and the company made it right. I will definitely remain a supporter of Amy's, and thought it only right to share the experience with you as well.
Like most people, I'd expect, I have a lot of plans for my stimulus check. I may think giving them out is a crappy idea, but since I'm going to get one, I have lots of ideas on how to spend it. Clearly, what I should do with it is not even consider other options and just pay debt. But I need new shoes! And something off my Etsy favorites! And some summer clothes!
Or, I could give it away.
There was a piece on Marketplace on Friday about why it might be best to consider giving all or part of your stimulus check to charity. You can listen to it below, but basically the upshot is that charitable organizations are suffering right now just like everyone else, and there are those (myself included) who believe that the money these checks represent may well have been better spent bolstering social services. So, if you think like that too, maybe we should both put our money where our mouth is and give some of our stimulus checks to charity?
The question then becomes, of course, which charity? The piece on NPR mentions food banks in specific, and that makes sense. I have a couple of weeks until my deposit is supposed to show up, so I'll be thinking about it.
I am going to do math on my blog today. This will likely never happen again, so feel special.
Everybody knows gas is expensive, and that driving in general is often not the cheapest means of transport. There is a great blog post here, though, that tells you how to figure out just how expensive driving is for you. It's an exercise worth going through, so I'm going to do it here.
As the linked post mentions, I am only going to count gas, maintenance, tires, and depreciation in my calculation of per-mile costs, considering insurance, taxes, license and registration, and finance charges as costs of owning a vehicle, whether I drive it or not. I'm doing it this way on the assumption that having a car is necessary, but a lot of trips I make in it aren't.
My beginning numbers:
Our car is a 2006 Honda Element. It gets about 20 mpg in the city, where most of our driving takes place. We put about 7,000 miles a year on it. Current Blue Book Value is $17,225.
Step 1: Calculate depreciation.
$17,225 (current value) - $16,530 (estimated value with 7,000 more miles) / 7,000 (annula mileage = $.10/mile depreciation
Step 2: Calculate gas cost.
Gas here is currently an average of $3.79/gallon. We get about 20 mpg. That means gas costs for us are about $0.19/mile.
Step 3: Calculate maintenance and tires.
Here I am using AAA estimates of 4.67 cents per mile for maintenance and and .85 cents per mile for tires.
Step 4: Add it up.
$0.10/mile depreciation + $0.19/mile gas + $0.05 mile/maintenance + $0.01/mile tires = $0.35/mile total cost of driving.
So what does that mean? How much does it cost me to make non-necessary trips? Here are some examples:
Commute: Our daily commute is 7.2 miles each way, or 14.4 miles round trip (not including parking garage time). That's $5.04 a day commuting cost, or $25.20/week.
Target: If I go to the nearby Target from my house, it's 1.8 miles each way, 3.24 round trip. That's a $1.13 trip.
Goodwill: If I go the the bins from my house, it's 6.5 miles each way, or 13 miles total. $4.55 each trip. If I go to the other location from work, it's 4.7 miles each way (again not including parking garage), 9.4 total, for a $3.29 trip.
Well. That was an eye-opener.
I'm actually not really going to become a debt reduction blogger, any more than I am going to become a dog blogger or a thrift blogger or a craft blogger. I don't want multiple blogs (aside from Heroine Content, obviously), so this blog just has to be all things to all people. Or all things to me, anyway. I actually have a couple of long term projects I am thinking through rolling out here in the future, though, so you may be seeing a bit more method to my madness.
In the meantime, though, I am focusing, personally, on debt reduction. So you're going to hear about that. It's amazing, once you start looking, how many great frugality and simplicity and debt reduction blogs you can find. The ones that have made to my Google reader so far are:
Honestly, that's just a very small sampling of what is out there. The blogrolls of nearly any of those blogs will lead you to several more good ones--and I'm going to be filling out my reading list that way over the next few weeks.
Now, I actually have my first frugality tip! Coming from me, frugality tips are bound to be very elementary. I am an elementary frugalist. But we all have to start somewhere, right? So here's one of the things I've started with lately:
Use what you have. Seem simple, right? But I think a lot of us have a category of products we just really like to buy, and we tend to "stock up" on those. For me, it's bath stuff. I don't wear makeup or expensive perfume or hair care products, but I love handmade and natural soaps, lotions, etc. And over the years, I've bought a lot of them. I'd say currently there are no fewer than 15 bars of artisan soap at my house, and at least a half dozen tubs or bottles of lotion. And that's just the full-sized stuff, I also have tons of samples. So my pledge now is to use up all of what I have before I buy any more of these things. Not much, but it's a start, right?
It's Sunday, and we're going to talk about money. Specifically, mine. Specifically, at least today, debt.
Have you noticed that little (badly done, Mark says) line graph over in the sidebar? That's my 2008 debt pay down. Here's a bigger version, updated just this morning:
What that tells you is that as of January 1 of this year, I was a total of $11,351 in debt. Credit card debt, that is. I also have a student loan, a car loan, and a home loan. But this is just about that really bad nothing-to-show-for-it debt. Anyway, at the beginning of this year, I was pretty far in. Farther than I've ever been in before, even through student and post-student brokeness. And even though I was pretty successful at juggling it from 0% interest card to 0% interest card and making payments and never really paying much to owe, it still weighed on me. So I started actually trying to pay it down. The chart shows my progess. As of today, my credit card debt load is $4,437. This means I've paid $6,914 in 11 months, or an average of about $629/month.
That's not bad, it's really not. But it's not as good as I'd hoped. In January, my goal was to have the debt gone in 2008. Given my income constraints, that would have been really difficult, but I'm still not quite as far as I'd hoped I'd be at this point. Still, I've been making steady progress, and I have the debt nearly 2/3 paid, and down to a number that doesn't give me cold sweats, so I'm not complaining too much.
For the last few months, I've been slacking a bit. I've been making payments, but not to the degree I should be, and I've been doing something really bad--charging things to another credit card when I run out of money towards the end of the month (I make my debt payments at the first of the month). Though I have thus far paid that card off every month and not added to my debt, I know it's a dangerous and not particularly smart path, so I want it to stop. That's my #1 goal this month--no credit card charges. And that means living with a budget.
Let me pause to tell you, in case you are new here and haven't read my rantings on this subject before, I am very, very open about money. I use real numbers. I think the social phobia we have about discussing our incomes, expenses, etc. in real terms is stupid and counter-productive. However, I recognize that some people feel very differently, and that's fine. Nobody is asking you to share your digits here, and if you are uncomfortable knowing what my take-home pay is, you should probably stop reading this post. In fact, you should likely just skip Mondays.
OK, disclaimer in place, the budget for November:
Take home pay: $3,297
Fixed expenses:
Joint: $2,000 (this is the amount I contribute monthly to our joint checking account)
Student loan: $227
Credit cards: $700
Savings: $100
Gym membership: $11
Total: $3,038
Variable expenses:
Prescriptions: $75
Spend money/cash: $150
Total: $225
Pretty simple, isn't it? I just keep telling myself, all I have to do is come back to it and make sure I am following it, and everything will be fine. That shouldn't be difficult, should it?
If you are like me and having trouble keeping a handle on your money, I really recommend blogging about it. It may not make for fantastic reading material for your readers, but it provides a level of accountability that I haven't been able to get anywhere else.
It's Sunday again, and that means we talk about my finances.
Last week I gave an overview of where I am and where I've been in the last year. I got a lot of very supportive and positive comments regarding the progress I've made in paying down my debt, which I very much appreciate. I'm afraid, though, that's I've made it seem easier than it is. It's hard. Every day. The truth is that I hate to think about money. I love to shop. While I know being thrifty and frugal are good things, they aren't things I enjoy in any way. I'd much rather not worry about it.
I think this is something that sets me apart from a lot of the thriftiness/frugality/debt pay down bloggers I am reading lately. A lot of them actually seem to be enjoying the challenge of living on less. From what I can tell, this is the big difference between those bloggers and myself. I see it as a challenge, for sure, but not a fun one. It's not a game I at all like to play, and I haven't lost of my taste for shopping in the least. I wonder, sometimes, if I'll ever really be effective at living simply and frugally without developing the aversion to buying and collecting stuff that some of the bloggers who inspire me seem to have.
Christine at 10Notes is one of my favorite simple/frugal living bloggers. She's recently written about the thrill of bargaining. Her post, while fascinating, was completely alien to me. Asking someone to charge you less than the posted price for something? Really? Wouldn't even occur to me. Ms. A at Living Without Money posts nearly daily about the ways in which she avoids spending. It is clear that it's not just a necessity for her, but a challenge she relishes. While I can and do put some of her tips into practice, I just can't imagine feeling the elation doing things on the cheap seems to give her.
So here's what I wonder: is there something innate that makes some of us enjoy the challenge of living on less and some of us just slog through it? If it's not innate, how can I learn it? I try to look at not spending as a game, seeing how many days I can go without parting with money or how little I can get a given item for, but I don't find it fun. In fact, if anything, I find it depressing. How can I change that?
What are your thoughts? If you are belt-tightening recently, or have been dedicated to living simply and frugally for years, how do you feel about it? Does it thrill you? Did it always? Guide me, wise readers!
Mid-month statistics:
My goals this month were to have 16 days with no spending at all and not to spend more than $150 total on flexible items. Up until yesterday, I was doing fine. Between the first and the fourteenth, I had 9 no-spend days, and I spent a total of:
$44 at the Goodwill
$32 on bath product supplies
$19 on food/drink
$10 on postage
$5 on new headphones
I also earned $19 online, so my spending minus my earnings totaled $91.
Then, on the 15th (yesterday), it all went pear-shaped. Not counting what I spent at the art show (which I think Mark and I will probably split and which I decided was going to have to be an exception already), I put out another $56, which brings my monthly total to $147. Out of my $150 goal. Halfway through the month.
Drat.
There is no way I will make that $150 budget this month. Just the postage I am going to owe on things that have to go out in the next week will be at least $20.
So I'm just going to have to do what I can to stay as close to budget as I can. And, to be fair, even if I spend $200 or $250 this month, that is going to be a great improvement over the past few months, especially since I am slowly gathering Christmas gifts.
Someone remind me that this is a marathon, not sprint?
One of the other participants in NaBloPoMo whom I have been following very closely is Rachel at Crunchy Turtle. In particular, I've been interested in her journaling tips on Mondays. Today, she talked about clustering, something I've done before, but not for years. Actually, it's been years since I've done any sort of writing exercise, much to my chagrin. So I thought I'd give it a try. I did it just the way Rachel describes, without stopping for three minutes, writing down whatever came to mind. This is my cluster:
Not sure where to go from here, but hopefully Rachel will tell me!
Today, my focus turns away from my personal finances and on to the household's finances. This is probably something the more financially savvy among you have been doing forever, so it's not news, but Mark and I have been keeping track for the last 9 months (since February, but, for the most part, excluding August, when I got lazy about tracking) of how much we're spending in each category. We've mostly been tracking, rather than budgeting, though we do refer to this document as our budget. This morning, I took a look at the record of our spending in a few of our more flexible (and more problematic) categories, to see how far we've come and what our averages are.
I am not pleased.
But first, the good news:
The first thing I looked at was our spending on gasoline, because we really did make an effort to cut back on our driving when the prices started to spike. What I saw was a bit puzzling--months of one-tank spending ($44 in September?) followed by months of three tank spending ($140 in October). We didn't go anywhere in particular in October...Then I realized that more than reflecting our driving, this reflects the dates on which the bills came in and were paid. Our average spending over these months for gas was about $108/month, which, given the prices gas has been at, seems reasonable to me. Not a lot of concern here.
The category I was the next most pleased with was groceries. Though we hit an embarrassing spike of over $500 in June, we've been progressing since then, and we went amazingly low in October. Our average grocery spending was about $339/month, which is not great, but not terrible. That's about $11 a day, or $5.50 a day each. Can't complain a whole lot about that.
Except when I see where we made up for it...
Yes, we spent an average of $277/month eating out. There is no excuse for that. And, while we did a bit better over the summer months, we were up to a ridiculous high of $415 last month. And it's not even like we're going out to nice meals--these high numbers are mostly due to ridiculous numbers of pizza orders and coffee shop stops. We have to work harder on that.
People are often asking me how much our menagerie of pets costs. Well, here you go. They cost an average of $219/month over the past nine months. That's for food, vet care, litter, etc. Everything except for Leo and Ata's pet insurance, which is a separate budget category and adds about $35/month to the total. That $461 spike in April was when a bunch of pets needed to have their annual check-ups and vaccinations at the same time. We're going to have a similar spike this month, as both Leo and Illy went to the vet on Friday, for a total of about $325.
This category just kind of is what it is. We don't spend extravagantly on our pets. We buy them very high quality food and get them quality preventative vet care, but the cats use generic litter, I make the dogs' treats, and their beds and toys come from the bins. Having as many pets as we have is just expensive, no matter how you slice it.
This last category bothers me the most, because it's the most ambiguous. Misc. I might as well have called it "Target," because that is most of what it is. Everything we buy collectively that is not food or pet care. And it is wildly divergent, with monthly bounces. I suppose that's because a lot of what we buy in this category is needed every other month? I don't know. I do know that an average monthly spending of $272 on stuff I can't quite put my finger on is too damn much. The only thing I know that goes into that category every month is $6.95 in online bill pay charges. Can we really be spending $265 in an average month on toilet paper and deodorant? The mind boggles.
And so, there you have it. An eye-opening exercise, and one I suggest you do if you haven't. Before I did it, I thought pets were a bigger problem than they are, gas was more expensive than it has been, and we were doing better with regards to eating out than we have for months. These things are very good to know moving forward.
NaBloPoMo is over, and I did it! It's actually gotten not too difficult after three years. I'm going to try to continue posting daily, though not with my schedule of days. I like the discipline of it. I'm toying with doing themes each month, so I post at least 1-2 times per week on a theme. We'll see.
In the meantime, I need to take a look at how I did in November money-wise. Mint.com will tell me!
I spent:
$700 towards credit cards
$226 towards student loan
$100 towards savings
$146 on "Hobbies" (bath product stuff)
$100 on "Clothing" (there are some non-clothing GW purchases here too...)
$69 on "Shipping" (swaps and bath product sales)
$47 cash & ATM fees
$41 on eating out
$32 on gifts
$30 on doctor's co-pay
$15 on CDs
$11 on gym membership
$5 on "Electronics & software" (new headphones)
Total flexible spending: $496
Clearly, I am not happy with that total. I don't have $500 month to blow. The major areas I need to cut are my bath product supply spending (which I knew) and my general thrifting spending. I'll focus there this month.
OK. So we're officially in a recession. As far as I can tell, this is news to exactly nobody. I personally am very lucky to have been very insulated so far--my focus on frugality of late is based on my own stupid debt, not on any reduction in my salary or job-related hardship (though, of course, higher prices do change things a bit for me, just like anyone). However, even I am aware of an increase in hardship around me.
However, I saw something today that really drove it home. According to a survey done by the American Research Group, the average American family plans to spend $431 on gifts this Christmas. That's a 50% reduction from last year, when the average was $859. And even last year's average was a reduction from the years before that, as every year from 1998-2006 averaged over $900 and as much as $1,052 in 2001.
What does this mean, besides fewer gifts and disappointed retailers? What it implies to me is folks either not having or not being willing to use consumer credit. Most of those middle class big spenders in years past had to have been putting some of that grand they spent in December on plastic, right? I mean, it's not like saving for Christmas gifts is the American way. So why not just do that again this year? Could it be that people are still paying interest on the $859 from last year? It's hard for me to believe that we've really collectively seen the error of our ways, so there has to be a more basic reason.
Since I've started using mint.com (and a huge thank you to whomever recommended it to me in the comments here--I love it), one thing I've been really interested in is the feature that compares Mark's and my spending to the "average" American family's spending. Surprisingly, in most categories, we're below average. Our mortgage, car payment, fuel, utilities, and entertainment spending are all well below average. Our food spending is slightly higher than average, but not substantially. The only place where we spend substantially more than the average family is, unsurprisingly, pets.
Our collective income is not substantially below average. And we feel like we're barely able to keep up with our bills. So how are all of those people who spend more than we do and make less doing it? And with added child care costs we don't have? The answer has to be credit, right?
So where does it end? How much is this trend towards frugality (and even new "hipness" of frugality) really making a difference? Are those who are making inroads towards spending within their means still a fringe group? I think it's too early to tell, but knowing that people are planning on a 50% reduction in their Christmas spending certainly implies that's the case.
As I implied in that last post, and probably have previously, I ended up a bit over my head with this bath product making business. The problem, as is often my problem, is that I didn't think things through completely before I started. Mostly, this was because I didn't really expect to sell anything. So, even though I didn't sell that much, I ended up overwhelmed. I was short on supplies, so ended up paying a premium for those; I didn't manage my time well, so orders went out late; and I didn't think about packaging and shipping very thoroughly before starting. All of this has added up to a stressful learning experience that ended up costing well more than I earned for the Christmas season.
Why past tense? Because as of today my shop is closed until after the new year. If I am going to do this, I need to do it correctly, with some forethought. So I'm giving myself the next few weeks to put that necessary thought into it, with the plan of opening back up in January with a supply of products ready to be sold, a plan for packing and shipping, better photographs, and a generally more professional outlook.
But where to begin? I think I need a business plan. I can't figure out why it is that I am perfectly capable of thinking and writing one of those out for someone else, but for myself, I just fly by the seat of my pants.
For now, these are the things on which I think I need to focus:
That seems like a lot to think about right there, without even getting into the longer list of issues I have. I'm sure I'll be thinking and writing about this some more in the next few weeks. In the meantime, your advice and comments are very, very appreciated.
I've been asked before if Costco is cost-effective for a two-person household. Though my impression is that it definitely is, I've never done the math before. Given the current emphasis on saving money, I thought I'd do that exercise now.
Today, I went to Costco. I bought most of the staples we buy there regularly, as we hadn't been in months. This is what I came home with:
Here you see:
Was my trip cost-effective? Well, if I'm comparing it to not buying convenience items at all, probably not. But frankly, we're gonna eat some convenience foods. So let's compare some of those:
The cheapest I've seen Amy's spinach pizzas is about $6 at Target, and they are much more than that at our regular co-op. 3 for $13.99 makes them less than $5 each.
Costco's pesto is marvelously cheap for the quality. I've paid that much or close to it for 1/4 that much or less before, and Costco's quality is better. Same thing with hummus. Sabra is my favorite brand, and it costs about 1/2 what that giant tub costs to get 1/4 that much in a regular grocery store.
The prices on basics are pretty good, too. Cheapest vinegar and baking soda I've found, and definitely the cheapest-for-the-quality cat food.
Yep. My two-person household gets their money's worth at Costco. What about you?
I love a good bargain. This if, of couse, one of the reasons why I thrift shop (though at this point it's not the most important one). Coupons thrill me. I love clearance racks.
And I love, love, love Ross. More recently, my Ross love has expanded to include Marshall's, as well. I still don't quite get T.J. Maxx.
Anyway, I've been cleaning up at Ross and Marshall's lately, so I thought I'd share with you a few of the discoveries I've made therein.
Abba Pure Basic Shampoo and Conditioner
I bought an 8 oz bottle each of Abba Pure Basic Shampoo and Conditioner at Marshall's a while back for I think $6.99 each. The drugstore.com price on it is $14/bottle for the shampoo and $15 for the conditioner. And I LOVE this stuff. It leaves my hair soft and clean and it smells herbal and nice. Once I'd used it enough to know I loved it, I was delighed to see the same stuff in big liter bottles at Ross for $12.99 (they are regularly about $30). So I've stocked up. Which is good, since apparently Abba is discontinuing this formula.
Seven7 Jeans
My quest for perfect jeans is nearly endless, but I've lately found a pair that is pretty damn close. They are the Seven7 brand dark wash flare jeans. Retail on them is about $60, mine were $19.99 at Marshall's.
EO French Lavender products
The French Lavender line from EO is one of my favorite commercially available body products. I love the subtle scent, and the quality is very good. I've recently bought a anti-stress room spray for $3.99 at Marshall's (regular price $8 or so) and one of these cute "Spa Box" sets for $4.99 at Ross (regular price $19.99). I used the massage candle to figure out how to make my own, and have very much enjoyed the shower gel and bath salts as well.
Ann Taylor lotion
My most exciting recent bath and body care was Ann Taylor body lotions for $3.99 each at Marshall's. It looks as if these have also been discontinued, at least in the two scents I got--Peach Honey Sheer Musk and Orange Nectar Honeysuckle--but when they were being sold I believe they were about $16 each.
Simple Carousel Plaid Slip-on
One of my favorite things about Ross is that they sometimes carry shoes in my size. They carried these plaid Simple slip-ons in my size, and I love them for that. The shoes are from Simple's Eco line, made with recycled bottles and tired and organic cotton, and they are super cute. My Ross version were $12.99. Amazon has them for $49.99.
Now if I could just find a bag I like...
On an online forum I frequent, someone recently asked if the members thought it was OK for someone whose family receives food stamps to spend money to get a facial. Berefit of things to blog about recently, I thought I'd bring that question, and my thoughts on it, here.
First, yes, I absolutely think it's OK for someone who is receiving food stamps to get a facial. I believe that those who qualify for government assistance should receive it, and taking it doesn't make them any more in need of my (or anyone else's) monitoring their spending than not taking it would. So whether or not you get food stamps makes absolutely no difference, to me, in whether or not you should get a facial. You are in charge of your money and how you spend it.
The response to that from the right (and much of what passes for the left, honestly) is that if someone has money for facials, then they should leave the food stamps for someone who "really needs them." I call b.s. on that. The truth is that nearly everyone in the U.S., even those who are constantly preaching and bragging about their frugality, has luxuries. Our standards for receiving assistance are plenty low enough without trying to cut out anyone who spends any money on anything that we don't consider necessary, especially when that consideration is so subjective. For example, that facial money could be spent on cable, or zoo admission, or cigarettes, or books. All of these things would be serving some of the same purposes the facial does--relaxation, a feeling of brief luxury, entertainment. Would they all be subject to scorn? Is it really possible that we believe that someone whose income is low enough to qualify them for government aid deserves none of these things, ever?
Speaking of "deserve," I think that's part of what this debate is about. The idea that that the poor deserve only subsistence. I reject that notion. Everyone deserves more than subsistence. And given the extreme luxury in which the majority of this country (myself included) lives, it is extremely hypocritical for us to spout about other people's wastefulness. Chances are very high that we ourselves are wasteful, but we have much more trouble identifying our own wasteful natures than those we see, especially when we see ourselves as somehow subsidizing other people's spending, as we do in the case of recipients of government dollars.
Clearly, I think I deserve luxuries. I spend a stupidly huge portion of my income on them. Why, then, would I think anybody else doesn't? How small and miserly would I have to be to begrudge other people the things I think are nice and fun and pampering just because they have less disposable income than I do?
This is kind of an addendum to my last post, but I found I had so much I wanted to say to the commenters on that post that I should probably just add a whole new topic. (Please note that I adore both of these commenters, I just happen to take issue with them on this topic.)
Christine said:
I believe a large group of people in trouble are where they are because they can't separate needs and wants very well.
Crystal said:
We've lived with minimal "stuff", many handmedowns, and no vacations for years, because paying off our debt (and not accumulating MORE) was our priority, as I think it should be for anyone with a debt.
I have a problem with both of these statements. It's not that I don't think there are people in trouble because they spend unwisely (been there and done that and still paying the bill), but I'm bothered by the assumption that we can judge for other people what a need versus a want is, and whether paying debt should be a priority. I am increasingly bothered by the overtones of morality in fiscal conversations like this one. Not having debt does not make you a better person. Have a frugal lifestyle and not spending frivolously isn't going to get you into heaven.
The older I get, the more I believe that our financial system is a game of random luck. Working harder doesn't get you more, being in the right place at the right time does. Sure, stringent habits can keep you afloat, but so can not getting sick or losing your job. Given that, what is the use of attaching morality to who dies with the biggest savings account balance?
Obviously it has become important to me over the course of the past year or so to pay down my consumer debt. I've worked at it, and I'm almost finished. I'll have paid something like $11,000 in 18 months--not pocket change. But I bristle at the idea that whether or not to try to do that is a decision I can make for anyone else (and at the idea of being judged myself for running up the debt in the first place and for not being more frugal and paying it down faster). Lenders sought me out and lent me money. There is absolutely no shame in my having taken it, nor, as long as I meet with whatever interest conditions are agreed upon (most of which are, in my opinion, ridiculous) in taking my sweet time to pay it back. Deciding I didn't want it in my life and paying it back was my decision, and it's one I'm happy with, but it doesn't make me a better person.
Similarly, deciding that I don't need to buy X, Y, or Z doesn't make me a better person, at least not for fiscal reasons. Supporting small businesses and fair labor practices and environmentally friendly products, and forgoing those I know to be made with slave labor and of environmentally damaging materials, might imply moral growth, but just spending less doesn't. A large majority of what I spend my money on may well be considered luxuries by many people, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't be doing it. The important part, to my mind, is that you use your resources--time, money, whatever--in ways that make you happy. Letting someone else judge what those should be makes absolutely no sense.
I understand that it's natural and even necessary for people to get more frugal in a recession. And I roll my eyes at a lot of big spending, too. But why can't all of our discussions about how to do things inexpensively come without the heavy layer of self-righteousness? What does a discussion about frugality look like without the moral underpinning?
The last couple of posts have garnered more comments than just about anything I've ever posted here! Figures that would happen just as I'm too busy to give it the attention it deserves. If I haven't responded to your comment, please know that I have read it and am thinking about it (and am not mad at anyone). I just don't have the time I'd like to have to reply to everyone individually right now.
That being said, I do want to say a couple more things to clarify my position. To begin, I absolutely do think that there is morality in consumption. The ways in which we make and spend money are full of moral choices. I just don't think that, removed of all other factors, saving is a more moral choice than spending. Is saving a more moral choice than spending in environmentally destructive ways? Yes. Is saving a more moral choice than spending in ways that profit off other people's labor in unfair ways? Yes. But is saving, in a vacuum, more moral than spending? I don't think so.
There are a lot of ways to be immorally frugal. Buying whatever is the lowest cost, regardless of how and of what it was produced, when you have other options, just so you can have more money in the bank, is, to my mind, immoral. And I have a far bigger problem with that than I do with someone who has consumer debt but doesn't buy plastic shit made by slaves in sweatshops.
Personally, I am by no means a perfect consumer. I haven't ever quite broken my Target addiction (though it is much moderated these days). I strive to comprise most of my wardrobe of secondhand clothes, but as I've admitted here before, I'm definitely not above getting fed up and buying from a mainstream (read: sweatshop produced) store. I am more and more committed to supporting small businesses, and I do pretty well, but it's certainly not 100%. I'm not above my own moral reproach here.
But, as someone who is fairly suddenly and not very comfortably (upper?) middle class, I think my responsibility to spend well is far greater than my responsibility to spend less. It is important to me, and I hope increasingly important to the rest of my new class, to support my local economy with my dollars, to support independent artists and craftspeople and farmers, and to make a concerted effort not to line the pockets of the Walton family and their ilk. If I spend in ways that are helpful to my community and further my personal and political objectives, I think that spending is good. Better, in fact, than not spending at all. If I don't spend at all, the only person that helps is the me of the future.
I understand, or at least am beginning to understand, the importance of saving. Saving for the future, for emergencies, etc. I'm not saying that I think I or anyone else has a moral obligation to spend every dime, or to go into debt, in order to buy more local fair trade junk. But much of the frugality stuff I'm hearing and reading seems to me to just be miserliness by another name. Super for you if you can pay off your mortgage in four years and have a twelve month cushion in your savings account and never have a credit card, but what's the cost? To the economy you didn't support, and to yourself? If that way you were able to do all that super special saving was to only eat clearance food from Wal-Mart and never do anything fun, then sorry, you aren't going to get kudos from me. And if that journey has turned you into someone who thinks it is a waste of money to buy art, or to support charities, or to give gifts, or even to treat yourself to an occasional luxury, whatever your luxury of choice may be, then honestly, I don't think it did you a whole lot of good.
Obviously my thoughts on this subject aren't set in stone. I spend a lot of time thinking about money, both in the direct sense (i.e. how to do I save and spend my personal income?) and in a global sense. I don't have a lot of answers, at least not firm ones. But I am beginning to get more assured about speaking up when something makes me uncomfortable. The idea that salaries are secrets makes me uncomfortable. The myth that people are rich or poor based on how hard they have worked, rather than to whom they were born, makes me uncomfortable. And, most recently, the idea that you are a better person if you are far into the black makes me uncomfortable. I'm truly sorry if any WINOW readers find that offensive--it's not meant to be. But, as always, I'm glad to have this forum in which to work my thoughts out, and to hear yours in return.
This is a funny post to be writing in light of my last series of posts, but I can't not share this with you all.
Look down at my sidebar. Scroll down, I'll wait. See that debt reduction bar that's been there for months? See how it says 0 now?
Yep. I'm out! I made my last payment this morning and my credit card debt is now 0.
For those who haven't been playing along for months, I started my debt reduction campaign in January 2008, with nearly $12,000 in debt. That debt had been accumulating since July of 2005 when Chance died and I put my half of his $6,000 vet bill on my credit card. From there it grew.
Since January 08, my progress has been up and down. Some months I did great, other months my debt actually grew. But I've been able to hit it hard with my new job and freelance work this past month or so, and today I finally finished paying it off.
I can't tell you how I thrilled I am, both not to have it over my head anymore and to have finally achieved a financial goal I'd set for myself.
I'm still not a financial rock star by any means. I have a student loan, a car loan, and a mortgage. I have no retirement and next to no savings. But now, with this hurdle out of the way, I can begin to tackle those ones.
Truly, this is a great feeling.
I was listening to this story on the Obama Administration's new standards for credit card companies on NPR, and got to thinking about this whole credit card mess I just got myself out of.
What have I learned?
First, I still don't think credit cards are an inherent evil that should be avoided. While I do plan to close the 0% account I'd opened and transferred my debt to most recently to avoid paying interest on it, I will still have two open credit card accounts, which I plan to keep and use. Credit cards are a financial tool. I misused this tool. But I don't think cutting myself off from it is the way to keep that from happening again. I used credit cards responsibly for years before I got into this debt, and I plan to go back to that pattern.
Secondly, I don't feel like I was abused or misled by credit card companies. I have no doubt that people are, but I wasn't. I knew what I was doing when I ran up my debt, and I was very lucky to have been able to move it from 0% card to 0% card while I was paying it off to minimize the amount that having it cost me. (Note that I did pay a transfer fee every time I transferred it, so it wasn't free, but it was much cheaper than it would have been at 18% or whatever.) During this process, I've dealt with several major credit card companies and a couple of minor ones, and while none of them made any effort to help me, none of them sabotaged me either. I feel that I was treated fairly as someone who had entered into a contract and was holding up my end of that bargain.
However, I think my situation is somewhat different than a lot of people's. I ran up my debt by spending stupidly, not due to any catastrophe (beyond the initial vet bills for Chance, but that ended up being less than 1/4 of my total debt). I was employed at a decent salary the whole time. Making mimimum payments was always within my capabilities, and making more than mimimum payments was usually possible. I have no idea how the credit card companies' treatment of me would have changed had that not been the case, but I can't imagine the change would have been positive.
Someone asked me recently what this experience has done to my credit score. The answer, as far as I know, is not much. My credit score right now is 867 on TransUnion's 925 scale, which is considered excellent (freecreditreport.com). That doesn't yet reflect the last two payments I've made, either. I can only assume my continued good score is due to making all of my payments on time. My credit report shows one 30 days past due charge in the last 24 months, from when I missed a gasoline bill and carried a $37 balance for 2 months. That's it. Everything else is gold star paid on time. So, apparently, you can carry at least some debt without hurting your credit. I was worried that the number of new cards I'd opened in the last 18 months to keep transferring my balance would hurt my score, but it doesn't seem to have. Still, in the interest of keeping it up or boosting it further, I plan to close all but my two oldest cards (one of which has been open since 1997) and use them for small expenses and pay them off each month. I also plan to call and ask to have my credit limit on those cards lowered.
Basically, then, for me, the reprecussions of my stupidity seem to have been pretty mild. The only major one was spending the last 16 months feeling like a complete moron for having gotten into this situation for no good reason. And it is that I want to avoid in the future. Unfortunately for me, since I had to do both of these things, that means budgeting and saving.
In my previous post about what I've learned from paying off my credit cards, Kasia asked how I managed to transfer it around to keep the interest low/non-existant. Since that's likely a question a lot of people I have, I thought I'd answer it here. Please keep in mind that this won't work for everyone, as the credit situation is changing all the time, and the cards and limits you can be approved for depend on your particular situation.
Also know I am doing this from memory, so the details may not be exactly right.
So, at the time I decided to get serious about paying down my debt, in January 2008, I had about $11,300 total. It was divided onto two cards, a Visa with my bank that has I think a 12% interest rate, and a Discover card with an introductory 0% rate that I got through a mail offer. The 0% card was maxed at I think $9,000, leaving about $2,300 on my bank card.
The first thing I wanted to do was transfer the debt that was on my bank card to a 0% card. So I went here and searched for cards with 0% interest on balance transfers. I found a card that had 0% for balance transfers for a year, and applied for it (I think it was this one). I was approved with I believe a $4,000 credit limit, so I transferred the whole $2,300 immediately. I was charged a fee for the balance transfer, but I honestly can't remember how much it was--I am thinking $60-$80. Since that $60-$80 works out to only 2.6% to 3.5% of the balance, I was ahead.
Next, I paid at least the minimums faithfully every month on both cards. This is very important with 0% balance transfer cards, as even one payment one day late gives them the right to jack your entire balance up to whatever interest rate they say (in the case of these cards, I think one would have been 18% and one 22% or something like that). The other thing to make sure of is NOT to use the cards, since that 0% is only for balance transfers and new charges accrue regular interest. This is especially important when you realize that the new charges don't start being paid on until ALL of the old ones are paid off, so you'll be accruing interest on them until the card is completely paid down.
Then I waited until the end of the 0% period, putting me sometime last fall/early winter. About a month before the end of the 0% period, I called both cards and asked if that 0% could be extended. I did this to save myself transferring the balances again if I didn' thave to. Both cards declined my request, so I went back out and searched for a new 0% card.
At that point, due to either a change in my credit rate or in the greater economy, it was a little bit harder to get a 0% balance transfer card. I was denied for the first one for which I applied, and the second one only gave me 6 months at 0% and a very low maximum (I think $3,000). Since I still had more debt than that, I applied for another card that was similar and got it as well. I then transferred what was left of my balance onto those two cards, paying another $60-$80 each in transfer fees.
Once again, I paid faithfully (using direct withdrawl to make sure I didn't miss a payment) and didn't charge anything new on those cards.
About a month ago, that six months was up. I still had about $3K left to pay off, so I applied again for a new 0% card and got one for 6 months with a maximum of $4,000. I transferred what was left from the other cards onto that one, paid another $60-$80 transfer fee, and have since been paying that one off.
At this point, I have three open credit cards. These are the original two (the Visa from my bank and the first Discover card I had) and the last 0% card that I just paid off. I will be closing the newest one and keeping the two older cards, as I have been advised that older accounts are better for the sake of your credit rating, and the Discover card does provide cash back incentives. Neither of these cards has a particularly good interest rate now, but as I don't plan to carry debt, that should not matter.
So how much did it cost me to pay this debt down? If I assume each transfer fee was $80, it cost $320 in transfer fees. I made no interest payments. The current average consumer credit card interest rate is 14.7%. If I assume interest at this rate, it would have cost $1,060.98 in interest to pay down the same amount of debt in the same amount of time (you can calculate that here). For that kind of difference, the juggling and opening and closing accounts was definitely worthwhile. I was concerned that it would mess up my credit rating to have opened and closed so many in a short time, but it doesn't seem to have done so.
So who here guessed that I would go on a big buying spree to celebrate being out of credit card debt? How bad did you think it was going to be?
Well, I did (or I am?). While it's plenty bad, it's not going to put me back where I was. By the grace of extra freelance income, it's not. But it is still embarassing. Embarrassing enough that in the first draft of this post, I refused to follow all the "be open about your finances!" advice I am always giving myself and wouldn't tell you just how much I've spent.
But in this version, because I think I need to come clean with myself, I will.
I paid my last CC off on April 22. In the two weeks since then, I've spent a grand total of $1,467.18. True, about $325 of that was on my eye exam and new glasses, which were necessary, but the rest of of it was pretty much frivolity. Over $500 per week of completely unnecessary spending.
That, my friends, is just plain stupid. Nobody needs $500 a week of misc. And I can't afford $500 a week of misc, particularly when I very much need to be saving for our upcoming move and possible time off work or between jobs. It is just extremely irresponsible.
So that's where I'm at.
This weekend, I visited my first brick and mortar Sephora store. I have been ordering from them online for several months, so I was happy to check out the real deal.
Disappointing!
In one way, it was fun--I got to see things and browse in a way that you can't really do online. But it ended up being more expensive than it would have been had I bought it online, or at least I got less for the same amount of money. Observe:
At the store, I purchased the following:
Benefit Silky-Finish Lipstick in Dessert First, $18
Urban Decay 24/7 Glide-On Eye Pencil in 1999, $16
LORAC Eye Shadow/Liner in Midnight Sparkle, $16
Smashbox Photo Finish Light Foundation Primer, $36
Smashbox Bionic Mascara in Jet Black, $19
Subtotal: $105
Tax: $8.66
Total: $113.66
The cashier added one sample to my bag, a small vial of j'adore by Dior fragrance.
Now, what if I had made this same order online?
The subtotal would be the same: $105. There would have been no shipping cost, as shipping is free for orders greater than $50. Then I could have picked three samples from among the ones being offered right now, which include the j'adore I got, but also fragrance samples from Donna Karan, DKNY Men, Yves Saint Laurent, Sean John, Lolita Lempicka, Escada, and Ralph Lauren; as well as a tinted moisturizer sample from Stila, a brow powder sample from Anastasia, a sample of Laura Geller Spackle, and a sample of Kinerase Extreme Face-Lift.
Then I could have used a coupon code. The ones available currently aren't that great (no percentages off), but even right now I could have gotten a DuWop Prime Venom sample; Sephora Brand Birthday Vanilla Cupcake Bath & Shower Bubbles; a sample of Bare Escentuals Buxom Lash Mascara; a travel sized Smashbox Photo Finish Primer; or a DiorShow mini mascara.
I also could have gotten 4% cash back from my purchase via eBates. And added the $100 I spent to my Beauty Points account, which I believe is accumulating to get some kind of free treats.
So...I would have ended up spending 4% less ($100.80 rather than $105), gotten two more small samples of my choice besides the j'adore, and gotten a nice large sample like Dior mascara.
Yep. Going with online from now on.
I was reading one of my favorite debt-reduction blogs, I've Paid For This Twice Already... today, and paidtwice mentioned The Prioritizer. The Prioritizer is a tool created by CNN Money to help folks focus on their financial goals.
It works very simply--you enter up to 15 goals in the boxes (long-term or short-term), and the Prioritizer pits them against each other in various ways, with you having to choose not between all of them, but just between two of them at a time. Once you've made all your choices, it spits out a ranking of which goals you have indicated are most important to you.
Seems like something we shouldn't need a tool to help us with, right? For me at least, not really. It's very difficult to look at a list of things, all of which I want, and rank them. Much easier to pick between two things. So I decided to try it.
First, I listed some goals. I went back to my 43 Things list to remember some of them.
The 12 goals I came up with were:
After going through the exercise, the tool told me my priorities lined up like this:
There are definitely some surprises here. The first two are what I expected, with moving back to Oregon being my #1 long-term priority and traveling in general being the most important way to spend money I can think of right now (though my actions don't necessarily line up with those priorities). The rest, though, is interesting. I had no idea that getting a Ph.D. would rank so low, or that build a retirement fund is more important to me right now than donating more to charity or starting a dog rescue. And publishing writing might as well just drop from the list completely, since I rank it behind everything else.
I don't know how much this list will change the way I spend money, but it certainly gives me a new way to thinking about some things. So what about you? Try it and see if you are as surprised as I am.
First, a question: how far back to you have to trace something for the sake of blog etiquette? For example, the thing I am about to post was made known to me when it was Google Reader shared by my friend Jenny, who shared this post from ennui will rock you (best blog name ever!), who in turn picked it up from this post on Humble Cuisine. I can't tell where they got it, because their site isn't working correctly on my browser. Now, did I need to tell you all that? If not, should I have stopped with Jenny? With ennui will rock you?
Getting on to the subject at hand:
You in? I'm going to give this a try this weekend. I'm shooting for stores that aren't just in my city, but in my neighborhood. I'll report back.
I just got into an interesting discussion with someone who said, among other things, that she had no idea what percentage of her taxes paid for what services or programs. I was sort of shocked by this at first, but then got to thinking about it, and a lot of people probably don't know that (or they have major misconceptions about it). Due to the nature of my graduate degree and some of the jobs I've had, I actually have a pretty fair idea, and, more importantly, I know where/how to find that information, but I haven't really thought too much about it in recent years (being away from school and those jobs). So, I thought maybe it would make interesting blog fodder?
So, a tutorial. If you want to know how much you personally are paying to fund what, here is what you need to do.
Step 1: Determine your tax burden.
First, you need to know how much of your earnings you are paying to the federal government (for the sake of simplicity, we're going to keep this example all federal). You can find this on your tax return. I'll be the example:
As per my 2008 tax return, I paid $4,153 in federal income tax in 2008.
However, the federal government does have other sources of revenue. Personal income taxes only account for about half of total government income. The rest is made up of Social Security payments, payroll taxes, corporate income tax, excise tax, customs duties, estate taxes, etc. If you are like me, the only one of those that applies to you personally is Social Security, and you can get your paid in amount for that off your W-2.
As per my 2008 W-2, I paid $3,373.22 in Social Security withholding in 2008.
Finally, I also paid Medicare tax, which is separate from both income tax and Social Security. This is on the W-2 as well.
As per my 2008 W-2, I paid $788.90 in Medicare tax in 2008.
So, my total personal contribution to the 2008 federal government spending was $8,315.12. For the sake of whole numbers, we'll skip the $.12 and round to $8,315.
Step 2: Determine federal budget.
This is where things get trickier. Federal budgeting and federal spending are not the same thing, any more than your budget and you're spending are (or mine, anyway). A budget is what is planned to spend, not what is spent. That being said, if you are, like I am, looking at the last full year, you are likely to find more solid numbers for budgeting than for spending--it's easier to get your arms around. And, for the purposes a getting a general idea of where your money is going, it will work. So, we need to find the 2008 Federal Budget. The best place to do that, for my money, is the source itself--the GPO Access website. But, as you'd imagine, the federal budget is not exactly a simple document to navigate, and what we want is a simple breakdown. Luckily, someone has already provided that over at the lazy Internet sleuth's friend, Wikipedia.
(Pie chart courtesy of Skiddum, used with permission.)
Step 3: Do the math.
From here, it's simple math. Multiply the percentage of federal budget dollars spent in each category by the total you paid in. For me, it works out like this:
Social Security (21%): $1,746.15
Department of Defense (16.6%): $1,380.29
Medicare (13.3%): $1,105.90
Unemployment/welfare/other mandatory spending (11.2%): $931.28
Interest on the national debt (9%): $748.35
Medicaid and SCHIP (7.2%): $598.68
Global War on Terror (5%): $415.75
Health and Human Services (2.4%): $199.56
Department of Education (1.9%): $157.99
Other on-budget discretionary spending (1.8%): $149.67
Department of Veteran's Affairs (1.4%): $116.41
Other off-budget discretionary spending (1.3%): $108.10
Department of Housing and Urban Development (1.2%): $99.78
Department of Homeland Security (1.2%): $99.78
Energy (0.8%): $66.52
Department of Justice (0.7%): $58.21
Department of Agriculture (0.7%): $58.21
NASA (0.6%): $49.89
Department of Transportation (0.4%): $33.26
Department of Treasury (0.4%) $33.26
Department of the Interior (0.4%): $33.26
Department of Labor (0.4%): $33.26
Obviously, these numbers are only as helpful as you understand what each category represents. And there are some pretty big things left out. For example, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars aren't funded through the budget, they are funded through special appropriations. So the $1,380.29 I gave the DoD last year? That's without my contribution to those wars.
Government budgeting is an extraordinarily (and maybe unnecessarily) complicated process. These estimates are very, very rough. Given time and resources, I could come up with better ones, but those would be rough too. However, even given its flaws, I this is a worthwhile exercise to get an idea of how much of your personal money goes where. For example, I'm not surprised by the amounts going to DoD and Social Security and the "War on Terror," but I had no idea I was paying $750 a year towards national debt interest, or only $160 on education. However rough they may be, those are enlightening (and horrifying) numbers.
Back in college and just after, in my hippier and less materalistic days, I used to like this song by T.R. Kelley called "Downwardly Mobile" (aka Government Cheez)." I can't remember all the lyrics now, but one refrain was, "you gotta pay somebody money to do things you ain't got time to do because you are too busy earning money." It repeated several times over to reinforce the circular logic. The song was all about living a low budget life that focused on valuing time over money. Another lyric said that "time is the one thing you can't buy back." At the time, I found that to be wise advise--do something you love, take off as much time as possible, live low on the food chain, reduce, reuse, etc. I never romanticized poverty the way some of my peers did--I grew up in it, so I had a better idea of the realities than most people--but I never intended to be wealthy, either, and I certainly didn't intend to be a big consumer.
The me of ten years ago would definitely scoff at the today's me--her makeup, her fancy bath products, her mortgage and car loan, and especially her very straight desk job. This was not what my younger self had in mind for us, for sure. So what happened?
A lot of things, I'm sure, but the biggest single one? I started making money. Unexpectedly, mid-grad school, I got a job that paid twice as much as the highest paying job I'd ever had before. So we bought a house. And a new car. And my lifestyle, without me much noticing, changed to accomodate my income. I'd been on my way to a class change since college, based on my educatio, but when I actually started having the income to match, it was complete. I took my place, unwittingly, maybe, but fully, in the American middle class.
The extent to which this has happened has been driven home this week, as Mark and I have been deciding who to hire to work on our house. We aren't just hiring someone to do the work we aren't qualified to do, like some electrical repair and intalling carpet, but to do the work we are, like cleaning up the landscape and painting. We're not hiring expertise; we're hiring labor. We're paying someone else to do something we could do ourselves, and it is a better economic argument for us to do so, as our labor (mine, in particular) is worth far more per hour than the labor of our painters and landscapers.
Just typing that makes my heart hurt. Ladies and gentlemen, I have become The Man.
It is information I'm not quite sure what to do with. On one hand, I am glad I'm not painting and landscaping in 100+ heat. And I recognize that I have put quite a bit of time and money into developing the skill set that allows my labor to be worth enough that hiring someone to do those things for me is feasible. But I also recognize that my time and money aren't the only reasons I'm here and not painting or weeding--it also has to do with luck. The luck of being born white and an American citizen. The luck of being born into a supportive family. The luck of being born without physical or cognitive obstacles to overcome. None of those things have anything to do with my effort. None of those are things I "deserve," they are just things I got. Given that, how can it possibly be right for me to make more sitting at a desk than the men who are sweating at my house are making from me?
So I'm a fan of the Discover card. Yes, I know, I was in credit card debt not that long ago and some people probably believe I shouldn't use cards at all. I think those people are wrong. Credit cards are tools, and if you can use them responsibly (which I believe I now can), then they are a good thing. So, I put just about everything on my Discover card. Why? The cash back.
Given that, how did I not know until today about the Shop Discover program? It's basically the same deal as Ebates, but for your Discover Card, and with bigger cash back percentgaes. For example, I always buy from Sephora though Ebates, to get 4% cash back. If I had been using Shop Discover, I'd have been getting 10%. 10% at Beauty.com, too. And at Ulta. An excellent 15% at Petco. 20% at Restuarant.com. 20% at VistaPrint. And the list goes on.
Making things even better, Discover is having a promotion wherein people who blog about this deal (like I'm doing now), can get $50 gift cards! I'm guessing this post is too late for that, since it started in early June and they are only awarding the first 50 bloggers, but I thought I'd let you know anyway, since this seems like a particularly good deal to me. That whole "card that pays you back" thing may be for real.
The way I grew up, there were a long list of things considered self-indulgences. Not just things we didn't personally have money to buy, but things we wouldn't spend on even if we did. Things people shouldn't spend money on because it was weak, shallow, indulgent. Mostly, these things were not so much discussed as understood. And the list was long. Off the top of my head, it would include: paying people to things you could do yourself (including cleaners, having your car washed, lawn maintenance, painting, etc.); gym memberships; salon services (anything beyond a basic haircut at Supercuts, really); just about anything bought on credit; having multiple TVs or phones in the same household; paying full price for just about anything; name brands; and eating dessert or having an appetizer or drinks when dining out (and, to a point, dining out itself). Anything premium would also be included, from non-generic dog food to orange juice that came in a bottle rather than a concentrate can.
I remember, vividly, the small ways in which the inappropriateness of asking for or even wanting these things and others like them was instilled in me. People who spend money on things they can do themselves are lazy. Gym memberships are for people who are too stupid to find their own exercise. Salon services are for pampered princesses. People who have multiple TVs or phones at their house must just not like living together and being together. While it was clear we couldn't actually afford any of these things anyway, the more pressing issue, at least the way I interpreted it as a kid, was that wanting these things made you less of a person.
So now, clearly, things have changed. My parents, who do better financially now than they used to, have changes some. They buy orange juice in a bottle now and go out to dinner more than twice a year. Then even have a cordless phone. But the basic sense of not wasting money, no matter how much of it you have, is still healthy in them.
I, however, have become the kind of self-indulgent person I was steered away from as a child. This week, I bought an iPhone. I didn't need it--I had a perfectly good phone--but I wanted it, and I could afford it, so I bought it. And it's the latest in a long line of what would be considered unnecessary indulgences, including salon services (not just haircuts and colors, but manicures, pedicures, waxing, and massages); eating out often and well; buying premium items when I see a quality difference (like dog food); and yes, occasionally paying full price (though that one still bugs me). But these things don't come without guilt.
I have my fair amount of your typical middle class liberal guilt, i.e. "I shouldn't be buying this, I should be feeding the hungry/clothing the unclothed/sponsoring a child/insert your cause here." Beyond that, though, every time I buy something that is both expensive and unnecessary, I feel a little bit farther from my roots. It's not just that I've changed socioeconomic classes, and am now clearly in a different one than the one in which I grew up, but that I feel like I'm deliberately turning my back on the moral code under which I was raised.
I don't know how helpful any of this guilt is. It doesn't cause a change in my spending. I have been in the habit, for longer than I'd like to admit now, of buying pretty much whatever I want. I know it would be considered self-indulgent by the people who raised me, and honestly, I consider it self-indulgent myself, but I do it anyway. More and more, the pull from the way I was raised loses out to the pull of the hyper-consumer class in which I currently reside. In this class, these self-indulgences are normal. There are certainly people who don't visit salons or have gym memberships or buy expensive gadgets, but they are fewer and farther between all the time. And it's not so much that I feel the need to keep up with them (though that's likely part of it), but I can look to them as an example and think that this kind of spending must be OK.
This is one of the facets of growing up that nobody warns you about. Learning how to balance your identify as a consumer and as a worker is difficult in the best circumstances, but it is magnified when the consumption morals of your current class clash so dramatically with those of the class in which you were raised. The ways in which I spend embarrass me, and I do hide them from my family. I know that, even if they didn't say anything, my parents would judge the amount I spend on grooming, the number of times per month Mark and I eat out, and even the cost of the food our dogs eat. When they visited my house, I know that, consciously or not, they noted positively that we still only have one TV, and negatively that the TV is large and new. They notice those kinds of things for the same reason I do--it's how they were raised. How do they interpret them, though? Are they simply signs of my "affluence," of my being in a new class? Or are they signs of my weakness, laziness, and self-indulgent, thoughtless spending?
I know there are folks reading who have faced some of these issues as well. How do you deal with having not just different spending priorities, but different spending morals as either your family or the people around you? Is it uncomfortable? Perhaps most importantly, how do you arrive upon your own moral structure for these things, rather than just feeling like you are bucking those given to you without replacing them with anything else?
In one of my earlier posts about BlogHer, I mentioned that I was surprised and happy to see the breadth of the sponsors list for the conference. Now that the final sponsors list is up, I wanted to say a bit more about that.
First, here are the sponsors (this list is pulled directly from BlogHer's site):
Platinum Conference Sponsors
Gold Conference Sponsors
Premium Conference Sponsors
Exhibiting Conference Sponsors
Other Participating Sponsors
A couple of caveats:
First, some of these are companies with whom I strongly disagree on major issues. Some of them are even companies that I boycott. I'm not going to write about that here. I don't censor myself on those issues on this blog, and I may well write again about those companies, but that's not the purpose of this post and I don't want to get bogged down in it.
Secondly, I honestly and completely appreciate each of these companies being willing to sponsor BlogHer. I know they're doing it for business reasons--there is absolutely something in it for them--but I still appreciate it.
Now then:
I've been interested in advertising towards women for a long time, in particular since I wrote my thesis at Reed on Ms. magazine. One of the major problems with Ms. early on was that there both unable to entice advertisers who weren't "traditional women's labels" (cosmetic companies, appliances, etc.) and unable to appease their readership on the subject of morality of advertising "anti-feminist" products. This issue still exists today, obviously, and BlogHer is a great example of how it plays out.
When I last attended in 2007, one of the sponsors was Curves Cereal and Snacks. Some of the people to whom I spoke, particularly those on a panel about blogging and body image, took issue with that. It was a particular problem, I learned, because Weight Watchers had been a sponsor in 2006 and there had already been backlash about that. For my part, I was perhaps not thrilled with Curves' inclusion, but I was generally very happy to see so many companies that are not traditionally "women-focused" on the sponsorship list that year.
This year is even better. Yes, there are some sponsors who are definitely the same ones Ms. would have drawn ire from their readers for all those years ago: Mary Kay, Ann Taylor, eos, and Dove, which are obvious, as well as GreenWorks, Tide/Bounce, Ragu, all, etc., since advertisers still seem to think only women cook and clean. There are several more who are clearly there for the mommy bloggers: Playskool, Disney Consumer Products, Sprout, JumpStart, etc. But there are also a long list of sponsors Ms.'s advertising department would have given up their fringed ponchos for--honest to God gender neutral companies. Some of them are the non-surprising tech companies that go along with a blogging conference, gendered or not, like Microsoft Office/bing.com, Bill Me Later, Motorola, Brother, and T-Mobile. Others, though, I have trouble connecting in any obvious way with women or with blogging, and that makes me inordinately happy. The big one is Platinum Sponsor Chevrolet, but there are also Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project, public relations agency Ketchum, technical publisher Wiley, Elations (a glucosamine condroitin supplement company), Michelin, and PBS Frontline, among others.
What does it mean that these companies have chosen to put their support behind a fast-growing conference of blogging women? Dare I hope it's respect for women's buying power, not just as mothers, cleaners, or purchasers of clothes and cosmetics, but as full-share American consumers who buy cars and cameras and pork (yep, the National Pork Board is another sponsor) and make investments and watch Frontline? Could they really be seeing us for what we are?
Time will tell. I'll be sure to report back next week on how these sponsors conducted themselves and what impressions I got from them at the conference. In the meantime, again, thanks to our sponsors!
There is a ton of talk right now about belt-tightening and money saving and the altar of frugality. I follow quite a few blogs on those subjects. They are full of tips, from cutting out unnecessary expenses to re-using to cash-only budgeting. That's all good advice. I have nothing to add to it. And yet, I wanted to contribute something to the growing body of frugality knowledge. So, with that in mind, I give you my lists of what is worth extra money, and what is not.
Worth Extra Cash
OK To Cheap Out On
Clearly, I know that my lists don't apply to everyone. The real point is about knowing your priorities and spending in line with them. If you are anything like me, there are things you are currently spending extra money on that you aren't getting any extra value from, and there are also things you are spending on and feeling guilty about when they really are worth it to you. So, it's worth taking the time to think about your spending, cut the areas in which you aren't seeing value, and stop feeling guilty about the things that really are worth it.
I posted last week about the state of my relationship with Mark: we're partners. Since then, I've been thinking a bit more about marriage, and specifically about not being married. Why? Because it keeps coming up.
Not being married is costing me money. And if you're not married, it may well be costing you, too.
Mark's new job comes with really excellent insurance benefits. His employer not only pays 100% for employees, they pay 100% for spouses, same-sex domestic partners, and children of employees as well. So if we were married, I could get free insurance through Mark's job. If we were same-sex domestic partners, I could do the same. As opposite-sex domestic partners, though, this benefit is not available to me. It's not a huge tragedy, for us, since I have coverage through my job. However, that coverage costs me $300/month, or $3,600/year. That's what not being married is costing me.
Another area is taxes. You hear a lot about the "marriage penalty" when it comes to taxation. However, that only applies to folks who don't have a big discrepancy between their incomes. Mark and I do. Last year, our combined (single) tax burden was $8,280. Had we made the exact same money, but been married and filed jointly, it would have been $7,110. Not being married cost us $1,170.
Next, we come to the process we went through trying to find a house to rent. Applications fees on a couple of houses we looked at were $75 per individual or married couple. So, we had to pay $150. A $75 not-married penalty.
Then there's our annual co-op membership. If we were a "family," we'd pay $60. Since we're not, it's $45 each. $30 more for the unmarrieds.
I could go on, but I think I've made my point.
For me, this is an annoyance. It irritates me, and I don't think it's fair, but my life goes on. If it was a huge issue, I could give in and get married. Nobody would stand in my way. But what about people who couldn't just tie the knot? In this case, the largest part of the financial outlay (the health insurance) would be extended to same-sex domestic partners, but in many similar cases it wouldn't, and they'd have no recourse. I may not like the choices I have, but at least I have them.
And so it is a matter of deciding what to do with them. In dollars, what are my principles worth? Knowing that my not being married isn't actually helping anybody, and that the stand I am taking exists mainly in my own head, is it worth doing something I feel is wrong to save some money? How much money does it need to be to make it worth it?
How's this for a laugh? I have a post featured on this week's Festival of Frugality, hosted at It's Frugal Being Green. Pop over and check it out, and also check out the other helpful posts. My favorite tip is Don't Forget the Toiletries, But if You Do...by Alison at This Wasn't in the Plan. Simple, but a great idea.
While I have no desire to go and fight crowds at malls today, I do like to shop, and I like to shop sales. Being able to "partake" in Black Friday online, from my couch, in my calico cat pajamas, is just lovely. So, I thought I'd share some of my favorite Black Friday sales with you all (a la Mir).
First, Threadless t-shirts are all $9. I love these, and I particularly love buying them for Mark. This one is today only, so be sure not to put it off.
SmartBargains has fancy high thread count sheets and duvets for $34.99, any size. They've also got 30% off Vera Bradley stuff, if you're into that. Again, I believe these are today only.
6pm.com has a bunch of crazy good deals, but the one I like it the flip for $50. I can't quite justify buying one of those, but I'd really like to.
You likely already know about Old Navy's sales, as they're going on yesterday through tomorrow, but there are some good deals there: $15 adult jeans; $10 kids jeans; $15 sweaters; and lots more. Free shipping on $50+.
Smashbox Cosmetics is having 20% off everything until December 1. They are one of my favorite makeup companies.
If you've got a teen on your list Aeropostale has 50-70% off everything in the store. They've also got some online door busters that might be worth looking at, and free shipping on $75+.
Now, on to the stuff I really love--independent sellers having Black Friday sales!
Knitty Knitty Bang Bang is having a huge sale. Everything is 20% off, and orders of $15+ ship for free. That means hand-knitted wool/bamboo blend socks are going for $32. Nice.
Bathtub Bling has everything 50% off, which is really exciting for me. My eye is on the honey collection stuff. Bath bombs are only $1.50. They've also got free shipping on $50+.
Lue Cosmetics has BOGO on everything in the store! I really don't *need* mineral makeup, but I'm still tempted.
Indira Albert, who makes beautiful things, has free shipping on everything and 50% off selected items. I'm coveting her 2010 desk calendar.
Harriet's Haven has very cool printed towels and onesies and the like, all 20% off. I really love the flour sack towels, and a certain bike-loving baby in my life is definitely going to be getting this for Christmas.
That ought to get us started! I'll likely be back later with more.
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