Owner: My Family's Money URL:http://myfamilysmoney.blogspot.com/ Join Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:53:14 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: A personal finance blog that traces an anonymous family's journey through the miry clay of money Site statistics:Click here
March Budget: Friends Steal Your Money 2008-04-02 18:40:46 As per our blogger/blog reader agreement, here are the numbers for our monthly spending:This would have been another month of stellar budgeting skills had it not been for a thieving friend and a case of pay-a-bill-twice-for-no-reason syndrome that snuck (or is it sneaked - you decide) up on me without warning. Our thieving friend is getting married and my wife simply had to throw one of those before-you-get-married-you-should-have-one-of-these parties that ended up accounting for $75 worth of expenses that landed in our Misc budget line. Add to that my thoughtless double payment on my wife's cellular policy we would have done even better this month than last, running about $140 under budget - which isn't too shabby if you ask me. The only good news here is that we were still under budge Read more:March
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Net Worth for March 2008 - I Am Legend Edition 2008-04-01 12:02:04 The doom and gloom that I predicted last month did not materialize in the month of March
, but it should have. Our net worth grew by 5% this month, or $1,126 according to my NetWorth
IQ profile. Of that $1,126, $1,040 came from our tax refunds that we received from the Golden State and Uncle Sam. If we had not received this refund our total growth would have been $86 or 0.38%. Instead of the graph that you see on the right hand side of your screen with the nice upward slope you would have seen something that would have looked like this:Like I predicted last month, this graph has a striking similarity to the negative parabola of doom seen here:Now our situation isn't really all that bad, it's just fun to draw a negative parabola of doom. But even if our financial future really does resem Read more:Legend
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My Intellectual Commitments: A Series Is Born 2008-03-27 16:04:02 You can learn a lot about an individual if you can listen to more than what is being said. Blogs are a great example of this. They are chalked full of hidden hints and subtle signs of an individuals deeper thoughts and core beliefs. Most people don't really talk about these things in their blogs explicitly, especially in blogs about personal finance, but I think that the way that one thinks is really important and affects all areas of that person's life. Therefore, I am going to spill my beans and unveil some of my intellectual commitments over some unspecified period of time, and I am going to relate them all to personal finance. Many of them may not seem like they have any bearing on money and its management, but I am going to do as much mental yoga as I possibly can to give all my Read more:Intellectual
, Commitments
Intellectual Pre-commitments: Hard Determinist 2008-03-27 14:28:55 This is the first installment of my intellectual commitments series. It's a doozy ...I am a hard determinist. I believe that everything that has ever happened happened because it had to and that everything that will happen in the future must happen the way that it will. Being a hard determinist means that I reject the common construction of free will that says I can act or believe however I wish at any moment. I think that it can feel like we are free from all internal and external constraints and that we can act against our nature and disposition if we so choose, but I think that in reality that feeling is simply an illusion, a trick our mind, will, and heart play on us. I do hold to a very qualified and limited notion of freedom, but now is not the time for me to talk about that. Y Read more:Intellectual
Hump Day Humor: Julie Andrews 2008-03-26 11:58:17 Today's laugh comes to us from the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie. In the following clip we find our country bumpkin (JulieAndrews
) plopped into the big city of New York. Faced with the fact that she is in the dreaded state of not being like everybody else *gasp* this opening number depicts to what extremes we will go to fit in. If you only know Julie Andrews as the nun from The Sound of Musicyou may find this clip a little risque. The really funny part comes near the end.That clip is the Bee's Knees. Sometimes I think the things that modern men and women do to make themselves to look "normal" is similarly stupid. As an example, I'm absolutely sick of effeminate men. Retrosexual 'til the day I die - word up. Now if only the hair on my head was curly I could transplant it onto Read more:Humor
, Hump Day
Getting Our Heads Together 2008-03-24 10:55:06 I am the person who handles the finances in our family. I track our spending habits and make sure our accounts look like they are supposed to. I regularly head on over to the websites of our banking and credit institutions to check to see what purchases were recently made and enter them into our tracking spreadsheets (I used to do this using receipts but it ended up being more convenient to use the bank for this). These spreadsheets make prefect sense to me, but as I mentioned before they are still a work in progress and only look like a jumble of numbers to my wife. In fact, she considers them unreadable - and it is one of my new challenge-ified goals to make the information contained in these spreadsheets not only readable but also usable by my wife.At the end of this month I am plan Read more:Heads
Why We Are Commited to Living Debt Free 2008-03-23 19:26:09 Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? - Ebenezer ScroogeBeing in debt is simply no good - and if you lived in the 19th century it meant you went to live in a very unpleasant place where you were forced to stay (and pay rent!) until your family could pay off your debts for you. Today, debt simply sucks. Back then debt killed, literally - well maybe not literally, it was probably the dysentery or the tuberculosis that actually killed you, but it was debt 's fault for putting you in the stinky death hole of a debtors prison so it deserves some of the responsibility in my book.In light of debt's uncanny power to give a person the bloody flux or consumption, my wife and I have decided that we never, ever, ever want to live a life that will put us into debt (except to buy a house). Read more:Living
Welcome Gather Little By Little Readers 2008-03-22 09:16:56 If you aren't a reader of Gather Little By Little I wrote a guest post for glblguy that he put up today. Feel free to head over to his blog and check out my article Why be frugal?If you are new to my blog, please consider subscribing to my feed and checking out some of my articles. I am currently in a series discussing why my family is committed to live debt free. I've also written about monkeys, ninjas, and what you can do with pennies. I enjoy tracking my spending and have some realistic but ambitious goals for 2008. Feel free to stay as long as you like. And remember - always be good, always stay clean, and always have fun.
Read more:Welcome
Budgeting: A Guide to Sanity and Wisdom 2008-03-21 15:30:57 My wife and I budget. Well, that is not technically true. I build spreadsheets and crunch numbers and think of areas where we can shave off a few dollars here or there, but my wife is actually the one in the trenches making our budget work. If it wasn't for her we would probably be eating Top Ramen every day instead of the nutritious and flavorful meals we currently eat. Our house would be drab and spartan, instead it is warm and welcoming. My clothes would be torn and tattered, but she keeps them clean and neat. If it wasn't for my wife applying what we plan, all my tinkering would get us nowhere.But if my wife is the soldier in the trenches, then I am like the Captain on the field. I can see where the tide of expenses is encroaching on our precious financial independence and devis Read more:Budgeting
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Save to Buy ... If You Buy At All 2008-03-21 11:17:14 Sterling Silver Monkey Studs by knitsteelWouldn't you find a woman wearing these precious earrings simply irresistible? I know I would. But like most things that make someone absolutely irresistible, these earing cost some dough. I'm not exactly sure how much, but anything with that type of sex appeal is worth at least 100x what any comparable set of earrings would cost. That means these little puppies would run me anywhere between $599 and $999 - I simply don't have that in our clothing budget. So, in light of my family's commitment to live debt free, we either have to save up to buy these masterpieces of femininity or pass the opportunity by.Some outspoken husband might say, "You crazy dolt, how could you give up this chance to woo such a beautiful and lovely woman as your wife with
Where's Your Tax Refund? 2008-03-20 21:28:08 For everyone who was smart enough to already have their taxes completed and filled out you are probably waiting by your mail box like Elvis in Return to Sender. Fear not, the IRS is not a hoochie momma who will let your romantic, Elvis-esque hip gyrations and tax return go unnoticed. They just like to play hard to get. But if you are in serious earnest to find out when you will be getting your money back, you can go to the IRS website and check it our for yourself. All you have to do is enter your SSN, how you filed, and the exact amount of your return (sorry to all those work readers who didn't have the wherewithal to carry a spare copy of their tax return with them for just such a purpose). I checked it out a few weeks ago and it told me that I could expect to get my refund by April Read more:Refund
I've Been Married For a Year 2008-03-20 16:12:56 Yeah, that's me. In Afghanistan and Pakistan men take really cool photos like these and they are considered manly. Since I am a manly man and I like to bow to all sorts of cultural norms foreign to my native country, I decided that while I was out celebrating my first wedding anniversary that I would pose for this picture to inspire my wife to love me more. It worked.On St. Patrick's day my wife and I celebrated the beauty of our marriage the following ways (with the following costs):Breakfast at Champagne Bakery - $18.91Afternoon at the Flower Fields - $9.00 with couponDinner at Carvers Steaks & Chops - $87.95Dessert at home - $5.38Everything was absolutely fantastic. Champagne Bakery makes really good pastries. We love the Jesuite - "A crisp triangle shaped puff past
Carnivals Are Here 2008-03-19 14:08:57 The Festival of Frugality and the Carnival of Personal Finance are up over at beingfrugal and I've Paid For This Twice Already ... respectively. I have to admit that I have not read a single article from these carnivals, but that is mostly because St. Patrick's day marks the moment of my marriage and I simply had to party with my partner. I'll probably get around to reading through these right after you do.
Read more:Carnivals
Hump Day Humor 2008-03-19 13:41:23 Here are The Kinks performing the title track from their 1979 Low Budget album. The singing doesn't start until 1:30 into it, but the lyrics are great. It just goes to show you that even cool rock stars are forced to cut back during an economic slowdown. Who would've thought that cheap was the old black? If being cheap is cool than I'm Miles Davis.
Read more:Humor
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Emergency Funds Are the Coolest 2008-03-17 08:37:33 Bad planning does not constitute an emergency plan.AnonymousAs per my family's commitment to live debt free for the purpose of changing the world we have set up an emergency fund. This fund currently contains just about three months of our household expenses, including the amount that we save each month for our irregular expenses. It sits in neat piles of $20 bills in our bank which we can access over this thing that I heard about from a friend called the Internet. If you haven't heard about it yet you really need to get a clue. Its the next big thing. Right now this little fund earns us $264 a year in interest at the current rate of 4% APY from the troubled and plummeting Washington Mutual (WM). If the Fed keeps cutting rates then this number is going to drop, but I don't have an e Read more:Emergency
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Rounding Out My Reading 2008-03-13 14:08:32 This weekly round-up is being brought to you exclusively from my feed reader. I found each of these posts particularly useful or interesting and worth sharing:Clever Dude wrote another article about snagging a laptop on the cheap through one of those internet laptop giveaway sites that pop up on random places, like weather.com. It would be good to check out his first post for the skinny on how to best manage the system so that you don't end up forking out hundreds of dollars for a laptop you really wanted for free. He cautions that going this route may not be for everyone, mentioning that even he won't be taking advantage of this promotion in particular. But it is good information to lock away if one day you decide that you are going to take the "free laptop" internet promotion plunge. Read more:Reading
Review Day Is Approaching 2008-03-13 10:38:06 In a few weeks I will be subjected to my very first annual review. I have absolutely no idea what to expect and this fact is generating no small amount of nervousness and excitement. I can't wait to get more responsibility and more money from my employer, but I also have no clue how to go about it in a professional way. I mean I don't really want to play hardball with my boss - that just isn't me - and my impact on the company has been relatively small given the nature of my role in the company. I would much rather have my merit and service to my employer speak for me, but I may have to supplement my performance with some persuasive speech.Here are some reasons why I want my review to go well:A productive review will give me an opportunity to clearly define my goals for the next year, Read more:Approaching
Hump Day Humor - The Gary Coleman Effect 2008-03-12 10:26:41 I just couldn't pass this one up after stumbling upon it writing my Pro vs Joe articles (here and here). If you don't find Gary Coleman
acting like a macho man funny then this might not be for you, but if you do ...Oh the things we do for money! I wonder how much the WWE pays a person to act like they are punching a grown man in the goods from behind and then have your face bashed in by a fake guitar? If its more than $10 count me in.
Read more:Humor
, Hump Day
Check it out: The Finwikian 2008-03-11 15:37:11 Rather than write more quality content for this site, today during my lunch break I went out and created my very first wiki article ever. It is up over at the Finwikian, a Personal Finance wiki page created by Mrs. Micah. It is a fun idea, and could probably be built out very quickly with some liberal use of the copy-and-paste technique. I hear Wikipedia has got some pretty good content.I liked the article I stumbled upon about My Family's Money. Whoever wrote that is a genius. If you have any similarly genius ideas about stuff to add to the article about my site, be sure to sign up to be able to edit stuff (do it here) and add away. I may have to do some editing if you get my life story wrong, but thats okay - I will still love you in the platonic, universal sense of the word.
Read more:Check
Pros vs Joes: What Advice Do Their Professionals Give? 2008-03-11 10:02:44 Since the Pros are just like Joes when it comes to the problems they have with managing their money, maybe some of the things that their investment professionals suggest for them are the same types of things that will work for people like you and me. Here are three things that I've inferred from comments made by members of Horizon Wealth Management that seem to work for them in managing the portfolios of professional athletes:Frontload wealth building – the average professional athlete is in sports for about 5 years so wealth preservation is a very important thing if athletes want to create lifelong financial security (source). Conservative investments that minimize risk while generating only modest returns can have the athlete earning thousands upon thousands of dollars a year. Si
Investment Strategy Update - Two Months 2008-03-10 15:15:49 The past month has not been that great for the stock market in general, nor has it been even remotely good for the one U.S. stock I had chosen in my original investment strategy post. As always, lets take a look numbers and cool graphs:Washington Mutual (WM)Buy Date: 1/9/2008Buy Price: $12.34 Shares: 185.74High: $21.92 Low: $9.91Closing: $18.06Growth: -13.21%Washington Mutual (WM) has been getting hammered in trading, losing 25% of its value in the past 5 days. The worst part is that I haven't even been noticing. I pretty much no longer keep tabs on my stock and didn't even notice the slide into negative territory. Now the stock may still have some significant long term potential, but it stings to think that I held a stock that went from growing 7 Read more:Strategy
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Pros vs Joes: Are Professional Athletes Better Than You With Money? 2008-03-10 10:07:37 Photo found at Library of CongressIn our sports obsessed culture, we often think of professional athletes as set apart from the general public. Their ability to do something way better than everyone else creates this strange aura about them that somehow adds value to their scribbles and compels us to purchase the products that they pedal. They earn millions upon millions of dollars for doing things that parents in America pay big bucks for their children to participate in each year. An eighteen year old good at hitting a baseball can see more money come his way for signing a piece of paper than most Americans can make in their entire lifetime (source). But are athletes good at managing money of that magnitude? Can they cope with copious amounts of capital? Should they shutter when s Read more:Money
Wowza: lolgraphs and the Consumerist 2008-03-06 18:37:10 My article on owning a pet monkey got picked up over at the Consumerist. As a result my traffic exploded yesterday, as this graph so elegantly and colorfully explains ...Now my article is getting links from places as varied as MSN's Money Blog "Smart Spending" to an MMORPG guild forum. My fifteen minutes of internet fame is in high gear! The article has also generated a surprising amount of comments over at the Consumerist. It was interesting to see how the "man on the street" is responding. Here are some of my favorite comments:Stuart is a retard who is not ready for the responsibility of pet ownership, much less exotic animal ownership. No, that's an insult to the developmentally challenged. Stuart makes them look like Einstein.I am sure the comment about his reasoning being sound
Run, Steward! Run! 2008-03-06 15:54:59 Today I learned another one of the dangers of bus riding - early buses.My mornings are generally pretty straight forward. Get up early, eat breakfast, shower, dress, get food, play guitar, head off to the bus stop. I normally like to get out of the house between 6:20 AM and 6:24 AM to make sure I can make it to my stop before the bus arrives sometime after 6:30 AM. This morning I made it out of the house at 6:24 AM after sweetly singing Screeching Weasel's "I love you" into my wife's ear in my deepest most sexiest sexy voice - deep and low like the Barry White. Still high on life, I jaunted down the road to my stop no more than 0.4 miles away. As I approach a left turn that I take to get to my stop I see my bus pulling out to make a left turn and start driving away from me. A quick
Rounding Out My Reading - I Have Star Power Edition 2008-03-06 09:47:41 Things appear to be winding down after my run on the Consumerist that began sometime Tuesday evening. I am pretty sure my time in the sun is over and things should be getting back to normal over the next day or two. It was really fun while it lasted. I got such a kick out of reading things that people wrote in response to my article - it really makes the effort it takes to blog worthwhile. There is just something special in knowing that other people read and like stuff that you write. Here is some of the stuff that I liked reading on the web this week:Incidentally, The Baglady wrote an article about what makes a blog article popular a few weeks ago that pretty much sums up everything about how my post became popular. 1) It was controversial. Apparently, some people don't like the id Read more:Edition
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Carnivals - The super late link back 2008-04-05 10:06:39 The Carnival of Personal Finance is up over at Mortgage Quotes and the Festival of Frugality is up at My Dollar Plan. Better late than never I suppose.
Read more:Carnivals
Bike Commuting: Is it for me? 2008-04-04 15:59:39 I am currently in the serious consideration phase of becoming a bike commuter. The weather is starting to get really nice here in San Diego and I would love to spend a few hours each day enjoying the open skies and brown (but temporarily green) countryside. Here is a quick little list of some of the pros and cons of that I have thought of that are currently influencing my thought process.The ProsGood exercise - the extent of my current exercise regimen is 3 miles of walking per work day coupled with some light calisthenics thrown in to keep me alert as I sit at my desk. If I switched to biking my total mileage traveled under my own power would increase 633% per week and I would be spending 1400% more time exercising. That's a lot of nuts.Same approximate commute time - right now takin Read more:Commuting
Free Jamba Juice 2008-04-07 23:07:44 If you have a Jamba Juice
near where you live or work then be sure to head there on April 8th (tomorrow) before 10 AM for a free smoothie! I won't be able to take advantage of it because of my commute - but my wife will.
Outsource To Your Kids Already! 2008-04-10 09:51:15 Modern society has lost its ability to successfully employ its children. Don't worry, I am not about to advocate we abandon child labor laws or that we continue to exploit the world's poor through sweatshops and wage slavery. What I am about to do is argue that we can successfully employ our children to do things that promote the health of our family, teach our kids the way that markets work, and save us a dollar or two in the process.Outsource
When You're Too Lazy To Do It Yourself Many times the best time to outsource to the fruit of your loins is when you're simply too lazy to do whatever it is that needs to get done yourself. Let's use supplying lunch at work as our case study. Everybody needs to eat. Buying lunch at work can be expensive while packing a lunch can be time consuming.
Money Poetry - How I Lost Hundreds By Being a Scaredy Cat 2008-04-11 16:45:47 I like poetry. It's fun to read and even more fun to write. I enjoy the rhythm that well crafted words can have as they sit on a page - their hidden accents crying out to be given voice. Most of the poetry I have read in my life has not had much to do with money. It's mostly about love, or beauty, or love, or the violence inherent in the system, or love. Mostly it is just about love. My favorite poet is probably William Blake - he has this craziness about him that I find appealing and interesting. He didn't really write about money either, so that is what makes this little bit that I found the other day all that more interesting.Let wealth come in by comely thrift,And not by any sordid shift:'Tis hasteMakes waste;Extreames [sic] have still their fault;The softest Fire makes the sweetest Ma Read more:Money
, Poetry
, Hundreds
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