This has nothing to do with personal finance, other than that Star Wars is really an allegory about American spurning the gold standard. But it is really cute …
I found this little gem doing some research over at Twenty Sided for a future series I am planning. Stay tuned.
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Well, thats not exactly true - I just love getting a refund! This weekend I did my Federal and State Income Tax Return and my wife and I will be getting over $1,000 back of our hard earned cash back. That is going to be a nice little boost to our $10,000 savings goal. Which made me realize that I didn’t post anything about how much progress we made last month on meeting any of our goals. I didn’t even do any tracking of them! Luckily this can easily be be remedied. Expect the usual update on our financial health as well as some new information on the progress toward our goals sometime around the beginning of next month.
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Posted in Frugality ~ No Comments
This weekend my wife and I made our way over to my father’s house to help him out with some yard work. On our way there we saw a sign for an open house on a foreclosure. Drunk with HGTV madness we decided that we would stop by and check out the property - you never know how low the price could be. So after doing some work around his house we made a short walk up the street and around the corner to this 3 bedroom, 2 bath home. Parked outside was a beat-up, white Astro van with no rear windows. There was a heavy layer of cigarette ash which dusting the pavement just below the drivers window. The inside of the van contained the littered fragments of a life spent drinking beverages from a 7-11 and eating food fit for a Rat King.
Now my dad lives in a fairly nice part of town so seeing an Astro van in that condition sent my mind athinking. I haven’t seen an Astro van in the neighborhood since my next door neighbor got one when minivans were becoming all the rage with suburban families. They hadn’t come up with the Soccer-Mom moniker yet, but my mom and her friends were the proto Soccer-Moms. They even had this neighborhood watch which had them prowling the streets to stop all that crime that went down on our street. But they didn’t catch me put stickers on every houses doorbell and peephole on the last night of summer before 5th grade started. Take that Prairie Dog Prowlers!
Back on point, the Astro van tipped me off that the house was probably the domicile version of the jalopy that so gracefully sat parked out front. Upon entering the house initially surprise by the wide entry hallway, the nice hardwood-like flooring, and the spacious family room. It kind of looked nice. But then my eyes began to focus and the warm greeting from the agent who greeted us at the door began to wear off. The house was a mess. Every wall had a major hole in it about the size of a human head. The only thing that made all the holes (there were like seven million) inside the house look small was the massive whole in the back yard that was filled with a pleasantly drinkable brown sludge. The carpets in the bedrooms were in disrepair, light fixtures were missing, so was the water heater, so was the closet in the master bedroom, and so was the entire master bathroom. It looked like someone went ballistic on the house once they realized that the bank was coming to take it all away. Poor chap.
Before we got the house I told my wife that we’d buy the house if it was around $100,000. It wasn’t even in the ball park. The bank was asking a modest $440,000 for this 1,200 square foot gem. ‘Rageous, simply ‘rageous.
While this little venture didn’t net us a house, it did get us talking about houses and our future. Living in San Diego right now given my massive salary and our deep desire to have children just doesn’t seem possible in the long term. So we have set the ball rolling in our minds for getting out of Dodge. It probably won’t happen in the next year, but it could in the next two to three. I think I’d want to get some real job skills before we go and some more money in the savings, but overall I think we have a good shot at making a big move work well. We may have a tyke sucklin’ by then, but it still seems doable to me. Maybe we could even move somewhere where our rent/mortgage wouldn’t be 43% of our income. I do believe in fairies, I do, I do …
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Posted in Frugality ~ 2 Comments
The past few weeks have been slow blogging for me as well as a slow reading - so this weeks edition of what I’ve been reading doesn’t have that many links to it. So here we go:
Deamiter over at handling finances posted and good article on why I (meaning me, Steward) am so stupid. Deamiter didn’t have it out for me per se, but he sure nailed me on just about every failure that he mentions in this article about why our brains fail us. I am poor at evaluating probability and risk (just look at my Centsports bets), I live for the now, and I am always jumping to things. That is why I need to build spreadsheets, numbers can’t lie to me.
And finally, I liked this post over My Two Dollars because it reminded me of Fight Club. My Two Dollars writes,
You are not your stuff. You are not what you own, how much money you have, the size of your house, your flat screen TV or your new car.
I’m not sure why, but it vividly brought back memories of people
stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. [They were wearing] leather clothes that will last [them] the rest of [their] lives. [Others were climbing] the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower … And when [I looked around, I saw] tiny figures pounding corn, [and] laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.
Just remember,
You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your … khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
Carnivals and News:
Thanks to The Financial Blogger who hosted the Carnival of Personal Finance that included my article about calculating a paycheck for a new pay schedule. This article actually has been getting me some search engine traffic thanks to people like The Digerati Life and Monroe on a Budget who linked to the article as well. Can you say awesome?
More Quotes Inspired By Bloggers:
The Great Money Challenge reminded me about this quote with her post on courage. If you are the first to guess what it’s from I’ll write you a haiku or a really, really short story about you. Here it is:
Girl: Your majesty, if you were king, you wouldn’t be afraid of anything?
King: Not nobody. Not nohow.
Squeaky Man: Not even a rhinoceros?
King: Imposerous!
Girl: How about a hippopotamus?
King: Why, I’d thrash him from top to bottomus.
Girl: Supposing you met an elephant?
King: I’d knot him up in cellophant.
Dork: What if it were a brontosaurus?
King: I’d show him who was king of the forest.
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Posted in Money Misc. ~ 2 Comments
Life is all about maximizing happiness. My Family's Money is about exploring how money fits in to making the world a happier place through humor, financial transparency, wartime living, and looking at life's major events through the money lens. There is so much more to life than money, so it’s high time we made money work for us so we can really get down to living instead of working.
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