Educating the Wheelers

Free Money Finance has a post today about using a shopping list at the grocery store.  I was going to comment there but realized I actually had a fair amount to say on the matter.  You wouldn’t think there was that much to say but like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes.

 I keep a notepad by the computer in the kitchen all week long, and as I think of things or as we start to run out of items, I add them to the list.  My brain just won’t keep that sort of thing in memory for very long anymore, I have to write it down right away or it’s gone.  Then the night before I go shopping, I select a menu for the week either based on what’s on sale wherever I’m going to do my primary shopping, or what’s in the freezer, or what we have to use up.  I have almost all of the recipes I use on a regular basis on the computer, so if I’ve got sour cream that’s going to go bad, I can just search on "sour cream" or whatnot and find a selection of recipes to choose from.

 I used to jot everything down that I needed to buy and then rearrange the list by where it is in the store, but that was a pain and only marginally useful because my lists are usually so small.  [Every week is pantry/freezer challenge week at our house!]  Now what I do is bunch things together by recipe and mark a line between bunches.  This way if I get to the store and they don’t have one of the items for that recipe, or if the quality of an item is particularly subpar, I can easily tell which other items to not buy.

The most important thing that I do to make shopping easier, though, is keep our toddler at home with my husband while I shop.  I used to always bring her with and get it done during the week, but, man, it’s so much easier to do it alone.  I tend to go early in the morning on a weekend before it gets crowded, but even if I go when it’s mobbed, it’s still my only child-free time for the week so it feels like a vacation nonetheless.

Our house sits about 100 feet back from the street, and has a sort of circular driveway.  A driveway that has seen better days.  We’ve known since we bought the place that it needed work, but we finally bit the bullet and started getting estimates.

The driveway is 3380 square feet.  [Yes, it’s that big.]  And it has tree roots busting out from underneath it in spots so it can’t just be resealed.  It needs a whole new overlay.

Our first estimate came in yesterday, and let’s just say it’s $1.10 per square foot and let the math hang out there in the ether so I don’t actually have to type the big, scary number.  I’m grateful that we have an emergency fund to cover just such things instead of having to put something like that on a credit card.

Everything from Blogspot appears to have transferred over just fine.  Take a look around, let me know if I accidentally dropped your link off the blogroll on the side.  Marvel at the cuteness of my child on the Flickr stream, and tut-tut over how much weight I’ve gained during this pregnancy.

A huge thanks to my awesome husband Andrew for putting this site together as a present for me!  It’s like getting a new car.  But without the expense.

Mapgirl has another interesting post lately about HOAs. [She’s had a lot of interesting things lately. Check her out.]

When we were planning on buying here in Austin, we knew where Andrew was going to be working, so one of our big criteria was short commute times. In the areas fairly nearby his office, it’s hard to find a house that doesn’t have a neighborhood HOA. Heck, not too many years ago, our area was the total boondocks, so it’s hard to find a house over 10 years old, even.

I am very much a “don’t tell me what to do” hands-off kind of person, so as you can imagine, I hold most HOA stuff in contempt. It took quite a bit of looking, but we managed to find a house that we loved in a older neighborhood that was a conglomeration of multiple [like, 7 or 8] pre-existing HOAs. There are so many grandfathered provisions and other assorted goofiness because of this that the HOA here is voluntary dues, and has no teeth whatsoever.

So, when we painted our house and fence and added the multilevel deck in the back, etc, we didn’t have to submit plans to an HOA for approval. We don’t get any “helpful tips from the committee” postcards dropped in our mailbox. I know some people really like their HOAs and “keeps the house values up” and all that jazz, but I prefer our freedom. [And our housing value is doing just fine.]

Does it mean that one of my neighbors could start raising 100 fighting roosters in their backyard? Well, possibly. But you’d be amazed how people tend to not do those sorts of things, even without the Threat of HOA hanging over their heads.

This morning, I talked to both my garbage company again and my bank. My garbage company claims to have not changed any of their PO Boxes or anything that should affect receiving their payment checks, so who knows what happens to the last two checks that my bank cut for them. [My bank does report that they have not been presented for cashing.] I’m not 100% sure how I want to pay the next bill with them. I might send a regular paper check via there payment envelope and see if that gets there OK. I sure don’t want to have to call in a credit card payment every time.

On a happier note, I called Chase [our brick and mortar, day to day finances bank] and not only were they friendly and super helpful, they stopped payments on the outstanding checks without a fee, and will credit our accounts within 3-5 business days. [When you online bill pay through them, they debit the amount immediately from your account.]

The last time I had to stop a check was when I was a customer of Bank of America. My landlord got my check in the mail, held onto it for a few weeks, and then misplaced it. Could I please send her another? Grrr. BoA charged 25 dollars for the privilege of stopping that check, and said it would only be in effect for one year. [Perhaps the difference is because they are online Billpay checks instead of paper checks? I do not know.]

I know every bank has screwed somebody over, but I gotta say — the service we have received from Chase has outshone BoA on just about every front.

As part of my ongoing budget slash-and-burns, I’m always trying to stop purchasing more and more convenience foods. Some items make sense to purchase [too much time to duplicate for the money saved], and some do not.

Andrew and I both went to college, so we have two institutions that call us for alumni donations. Andrew received a nice sized grant from his college, so we give to them on occasion. [Though I can tell I’ve really become a parent now. The last time I got a call I said, “If you continue to call us more than once a year, you will get nothing.”]

My college? Not so much. I have given to them only twice in the almost ten years since I graduated, and the person in whose name I always gave — my mentor when I was there — no longer works there. I am a little ambivalent these days about the value of my education I had while I was there. I can’t say it’s the institution’s fault, but it does make me less eager to pony up money to them. [Note: I never received any grants or financial aid of any sort, but I did work as the assistant manager in the dedicated computer lab for math and science students. The manager of that lab was the aforementioned mentor. What I learned from her during that time is the knowledge I used once I graduated.]

There weren’t a lot of women doing Computer Science while I was there, so for my first few years out, I would get the occasional invitation to come back and speak on a panel to the current crop of CS students to let them know “what it’s like” on the outside, and how what I learned at our fine institution helped. It was an odd experience, because I graduated in 1996 — the reality of the situation at the time was that I could have fallen off the back of a turnip truck and been employed in the high tech industry in Seattle during those years.

I realize this is completely incoherent. Sorry. Heh.

My first townhouse purchase [and sale].

This one is a no brainer. I don’t even know where to start listing all the things I did wrong.

I had just gotten my first really BIG raise, the kind of money that someone who is paying 325/month in rent to split an apartment and doesn’t have a car or debt or school loans or pets or anything would even know what to do with.

Well, thank god one of my best friends was a realtor! She set me straight on that one.

“You know what you should do, you should buy a house!”

[Readers should now be wincing then shouting, “Don’t go in there, that’s where the monster is!” and throwing popcorn at the screen. You know what’s coming.]

Where to begin? I had only recently realized that maybe I should try to do something with my money, so I did have some money in a mutual fund [the specifics of which were probably Worst Financial Mistake #3 or #4, but we’ll get to that another day], but not enough for a real down payment. But I did have a father who would be proud that his young daughter was starting to get ahead in life, so he would help. And be paid back over the course of years later.

If you are imagining a printout of MLS listings with one really awesome place at the highest tippy top of my “affordability” and everything else on the list really crappy, you know where this is going.

If you are imagining that I had no idea that the number at the bottom of the good faith estimate was NOT what I’d actually cut a check for every month [Hello, taxes, insurance and association fees!], you know where this is going.

If you are imagining that I was now paying over SIX TIMES my former housing cost per month, you know where this is going.

If you are imagining that I let a now-former friend move into the downstairs bedroom for a couple hundred dollars a month to now make ends meet, and it was the one of the most horrible experience dealing with another human being in close quarters I’ve ever had [Helpful tip from the committee: don’t rent to unemployed jazz musicians. You have been warned], you know where this is going.

If you are imagining that this is in Seattle, and the dotcom bubble is about to burst and I was going to have to sell after owning it for less than two years so I could keep my job while my company merged with one in San Francisco [one of only a small handful out of a company of about 100, I was a lucky one], you know where this is going.

If you are imagining that my good friend massively overpriced my house to sell it, perhaps as a good samaritan because she knew I was in a bad financial way by this point, and then incrementally dropped the price a little here, a little there over the weeks [or was it months?] until it sold, you know where this is going.

If you are imagining me making payments on my house while it’s not selling while I’m paying an insane amount of rent in SF, you know where this is going.

If you are imagining that sitting down to sign the closing papers and seeing what was “leftover” after the sale was a surprise because of a numbers snafu, you know where this is going.

And yet, there’s an upside to this whole big mess. When I got married and it came time for Andrew and I to buy a house, things went very, very differently. I hadn’t yet discovered Searchlight Crusade [and if you’re going to buy a house, you need to spend some time there], but this transaction was a 180 degree turnaround from the first one, that’s for sure.

UPDATE: I want to add that I don’t really blame my friend for much of this debacle, save for treating it like a trip to Macy’s to buy jewelry rather than The Most Important Financial Transaction Of My Life. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I got the expensive lesson that I deserved. But in case you haven’t already learned: do not ever, EVER do business with a friend. The stakes are too high on both fronts. In this case, our friendship survived, but only sort of.

Got a call bright and early this morning from our garbage collection company saying that haven’t received a payment … since November. *boggle*

OK, they only bill once every three months, so that’s only two missing payments. But, yow! What’s going on? I’ve paid the bills online [via Chase], and they’re debiting the money from my account. [And I’ve been paying them without a problem this way for 3 years.] The payment history makes it look as if everything is fine. The only difference I can see, and I’m not even sure what it means yet, is that on all other payments that have gone out, they have links next to them that say “See” and “Send Inquiry” — and on the garbage bills, they just say “See.”

Hmm. Well, I’ve got a call out. Let’s see what happens.

Mapgirl had a post recently about surging electricity costs, and why they are likely to get even worse in the near future.

I mentioned in a comment that I have been on a slash and burn mission to reduce our electricity bill here, so even while the rates are going up, our bill has been going down. Only slightly compared to all of the cuts I’ve made, though, as I mentioned, it’s still better than a poke in the eye.

What have I done?

First: we don’t use the dryer anymore. Maybe once a month, but I can’t even remember the last time I’ve used it, so it’s now even less than that. Andrew put up three retractable clotheslines for me on the deck, under the awning, so I don’t have to worry about rain. If it’s too humid outside, I use those folding accordion-style drying racks in the house. In fact, during the winter when the heat is on, I use those up in the bedroom at night to help raise the humidity while we’re sleeping without having to power a humidifier.

Second: Minimizing heat and AC usage. I’m making judicious use of shades, windows, fans, turning the lights off, not using the oven as often [or using it first thing in the morning while it’s still cool], and dressing appropriately. And shaving the dogs when it gets hot.

Third: I’ve become a light and appliance nazi. I used to keep lights on all over the house because I am skittish and paranoid and don’t like walking into dark areas. And I like brightly lit rooms. But I’ve been slowly acclimating myself away from that. I’ve also been getting better at unplugging things that are not being used rather than keeping them in standby mode, but I could be better at this.

That’s all the low hanging fruit, but so far it’s really paid off for us. If the rates keep rising, I’ll have to start doing the slightly more difficult stuff.