Educating the Wheelers

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.

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.

I finally set up a Treasury Direct account for purchasing I Bonds and the like for a little more diversity in our savings. As an apocalyptically pessimistic person, this doesn’t quite qualify as “SHTF” stash, but it’s closer to that end of the spectrum than our stocks and mutual funds. Heh. [And I’m always a little nervous when I start wondering under what circumstances I wouldn’t be able to access, or would have delay accessing our Emigrant Direct funds. Or our regular neighborhood brick and mortar bank, for that matter. Or these I Bonds.] I do feel strongly that I need to have some sort of plan in place for an economy-in-the-tank, extended-unemployment situation.

I’m not going to be investing much to start with, 50 dollars a month moved automagically over. But it’s a start while I get used to it.

Andrew and I pay off our credit card balance in full every month. We use it often just for convenience and instead of our debit card for various buyer’s protections in case of fraud.

But we just have a plain old vanilla card with our bank, so we’re not getting any perks off of it. And I think we’re about ready to change that situation.

We’ve kicked around a couple of ideas — first, staying with our bank’s card, but switching to a cashback version. [It is nice to see our purchase history and statements on the same online banking page as our checking account.] Second, Citibank [I believe] has a card with “disposable” one-time numbers for online use, but I’ve been waiting to see if some other PF blogger would get one and report back first. Heh. And third, maybe an Amazon card because I love free stuff from Amazon. [Speaking of, in case anyone has any money burning a hole in their pocket, there’s always my Amazon wish list!]

Does anyone have any experience with any of these cards? Or any other ideas?

I’m not sure why I’m the least bit surprised anymore when I find that some statistic that gets bandied around turns out to be, at best, misleading, and at worst, total junk.

Today’s example of this is the new much-fretted-about statistic that the U.S. savings rate has gone negative. And, yes, that’s bad. But less widely mentioned is the caveat that this statistic includes the ever burgeoning group of retirees, who report a savings draw down of about 12-14% a year. So, for working Americans, the rate is actually more like 6%.

Six percent is no great shakes, but it’s not the raining cats and dogs, fire and brimstone negative percentage that everyone is freaking out about.

I look forward to the total panic that comes when the savings rate drops even “lower” because more and more people are retiring.

I love to log into our Emigrant Direct account and see our interest for the last month posted. This month, we scored $97.67, which means next month with the new 4.25% interest rate and a slightly higher balance on our part, we should hit over $100 dollars interest a month in that account.

I’m only putting $200 every 2 weeks into that account, so with the interest so high, it almost feels like we’re getting a 25% match from Emigrant, as if it were a 401k.

My parents never talked to us about money when we were growing up. In fact, the only thing I can recall is that when we got our checking accounts in out teens, they would be on the lookout for the telltale “overdraw” notices from the bank in the mail, and laugh at us when they inevitably came. Responsibility by humiliation, I guess. Heh.

I started college at 16 and remember vividly my prof in my College Algebra course walking in one day and announcing that we would spend the day talking about compound interest, because he wished that someone had explained it to him at our age. It left a powerful impact on me — one of the few lectures I remember vividly from that year. [I also recall my philosphy professor exclaiming “God is dead!” re: Nietzsche and getting mad that no one was riled up. Hey, lady, we’re 3.5 hours into a Monday 6-10 evening class. You’re going to have to do better than that…]

Of course, I didn’t immediately apply those lessons to my life, because I was an idiot. But he was the first one to get the seed planted.

Andrew and I will be homeschooling our children, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to start talking to them about money earlier on. Some things are obvious — raise them in a frugal environment! But then there is the issue of allowance and deciding how much to let them know about the family finances. As I mentioned above, my own family kept all of that opaque and I didn’t know anything about anything until, well, my 20s after I’d been on my own for awhile and made huge financial mistakes. I honor my parents’ decision on that matter, but I don’t think I want to go down that route with my own kids.

We got our first direct deposit of the year, and I was in a for a minor panic. It was about 30% less than I was expecting. I knew that the new benefits enrollment kicked in on this paycheck, so I went to log in to the site and see what was up. I mean, I didn’t recall things being that different…

The benefits site was not exactly intuitive to figure things out. In fact, it gave the impression that we had unenrolled from 401k! Well, if that was the case … wouldn’t we have more money coming in than less?

One crazy-pregnant-lady-panicked phone call to my husband later and with some work, he was able to dig out the details. [I miss getting paper statements. They were straightforward.]

As it turns out, last year our new ESPP deduction kicked in at exactly the same time as our 401k maxxed out, and they are for very similar amounts. And starting this paycheck, they were both in effect for the new year.

Mystery solved.

Though I’m beginning to wonder if we’re now being way too aggressive on our savings. I just did the calculation, and our actual take-home into-the-checking account amount is less than 28% of our pre-tax salary. So, taxes, 401k, ESPP, benefits, % that goes directly to Vanguard and % that goes directly to Emigrant now account for a little over 72% of our income. That doesn’t include extra for paying down mortgage. Hmm. Now, I can squeeze blood out of a rock, but can I squeeze that much blood out of our rock? I’m not sure yet. That’s my task for this weekend, to see if we can live on this, or if we’re going to have to scale back.