<$Thursday, April 24, 2008$>
Calculators
| What I need is a backwards mortgage calculator. Not one that tells you how much you can allegedly afford based on your salary, which is all I seem to be finding, but one where I can enter how much I want my total monthly payment to be, including taxes and insurance, and it will tell me how much to borrow based on that. Because what I can comfortably afford to pay in a reality wherein we still having money to, y'know, do stuff occasionally, is a lot different from what these calculators are telling me I can afford. Unless we decide we want a house but no life. Then we're solid! Labels: house-hunt, loans |
Clear!
| There's a defibrillator on the wall at my office, near the restrooms and water fountain. I've always found it a little morbidly humorous whenever I pass it, and co-workers and I have joked about busting it out on each other. Choking on water that went down the wrong pipe? Here, let me defib you! Everybody stand back! Clear! I just read a scary statistic, though -- that about 900 people die of heart attacks daily. Difibbing jokes aside, heart disease really is something Husband and I both take very seriously. It killed both of our dads, and we're both considered medium-to-high risk for it ourselves. It's one reason we both try so hard to take good care of ourselves and are willing to shell out extra money for healthy foods. We could both do a lot better, though. You can find out your own level of risk at Inside Cardiac Arrest, a new program from St. Jude. I hope you do so. I mean, wow. 900 people a day. I think I'll look at that defibrillator in the hallway with a little more appreciation from now on. Labels: healthy living |
<$Wednesday, April 23, 2008$>
Pre-qualified!!!
| Our mortgage app is approved! Yay! Whee! Yay! We're pre-qualified for the ballpark figure I asked for, and he said we could easily go higher if necessary! Because I have good credit! For reals! ME! GOOD CREDIT! This wouldn't have happened a year ago! I can't stop speaking in exclamations! HOUSE! Labels: house-hunt |
<$Wednesday, April 16, 2008$>
Is Lifelock worth it?
| I don't tend to worry too much about identity theft. It's possible that I don't worry enough. I take all the reasonable precautions--I shred everything with my personal or financial info on it before throwing it out, my passwords all contain numbers AND capitals AND lowercase and are sufficiently obscure terms that would be tough to crack even without the number/caps jiggety, I protect my PINpad during transactions like a straight-A student protects her test answers, I don't carry my social security card around with me--and so far, I've never had my identity stolen. So it would seem that what I'm doing works. But with all of the scary statistics and the alarmist media constantly carrying on about this problem, I sometimes wonder if, so far, we've just been lucky? I've also been hearing a lot lately about lifelock, which sounds like a good idea if, like me, you are an unpleasant combination of busy/hurried/tired/lazy/ADD and are perfectly happy to pay experts to do complicated things for you. $10 a month seems a pretty reasonable fee to set this and forget it and let other people worry about it for you. On the other hand, if you are (also like me) frugal and (SO not like me) have time on your hands, I don't think they do anything that you couldn't do yourself for free. My finances being what they are, I tend to opt for the latter; but really, I think it's a relief to know that, had I the funds, I would never have to take on this headache by myself. Labels: credit cards, financial planning, money management, organizing, product love, tools |
<$Tuesday, April 15, 2008$>
Prioritizing opportunities for joy
| Last night I gleefully handed over $70 so that Husband and I can attend this. I was going to blog today about how I didn't flinch away from it or regret it for an instant because this is something that belongs in the "Totally Worth It" file. And then this morning I dropped $500 on car repairs. Sigh. I still don't regret buying the tickets, and I doubt knowing I'd need costly emergency car repairs beforehand would have made a difference. Some things, generally things that aren't STUFF, that aren't tangible and don't take up space in your home, but experiences that thrill you -- and yes, meeting my favorite author-slash-mentor-slash literary hero is pretty dang thrilling to me -- and fill up your memories with good times. This is why I don't regret having maxed out my Discover card to help pay for our honeymoon, even though I'm still paying for it a year and a half later. Some things really are Totally Worth It. Worth scaling back in other areas for a while, worth extra hours at the office, worth shelling out the money without even batting an eye. It's easy to forget that in the quest to be frugal and debt-free. Of course, routine car maintenance is also Totally Worth It, if it keeps you from having to plunder your emergency fund for emergency repairs (actually, we have been keeping up with car maintenance pretty well, and this fanbelt wackiness isn't something we could have prevented. I'm just sayin'). But this is exactly the sort of thing emergency funds are for, so I'll try not to fret too much about it. Labels: emergency fund, spending |
<$Monday, April 14, 2008$>
Mother's Day Flower Coupons
| The count down is on: only 26 more shopping days till Mother's Day. If you're shopping the Internet for ways to show your mother you love and appreciate her (do we really need a special holiday for that?), that leaves plenty of time to get your orders in. At the Bauhaushold we tend to opt for a semi-frugal mother’s day by spending the most precious thing we have to give: our time. Our mom's tend to love that. Go figure. We're not total cheapskates, though, so our time usually comes with treating them to a nice restaurant and the requisite card and flowers. 1-800-Flowers is making the latter part a little easier and a little more cost-effective this year. In addition to some already discounted sale items, they're also offering the following coupon codes for early bird shoppers:
These could come in especially handy if you're having to celebrate Mother's Day long distance. Flowers are certainly no substitute for the loving presence of the fruit of her labor, but answering her door to a gorgeous bouquet will be a nice reminder that you're thinking of her and appreciating all that she put up with from you over the years. |
Another snowflake, and thinking about the future
| We got our state refund check this weekend. It was initially going to be almost exactly enough to reimburse us for our tax preparer fees, but then the state held out some back taxes that Husband owed from 2003. On the upside, at least that won't count against us anymore, and the check will still make a nice snowflake to add to our debt snowball. Those taxes he owed, by the way, were from the year before we met. Let this be a lesson to you young'uns that the financial decisions (and mistakes) you make now not only affect your own future, but also that of your future significant other. I had pretty much decided I would never get married back when I ran up all of my credit card debt. Yet here I am, years later, married and struggling not to let my debt have a negative impact on my marriage, and delaying having children until the credit cards are paid off. It's hard to think about these things when you're young and single, but they do bear some thinking about. [/lecture] Labels: credit cards, debt reduction |
<$Thursday, April 10, 2008$>
Food, revisited
| I picked up some Naan bread the last time I was at Whole Foods, and last night I had it on my mind as I did some mid-pay period grocery shopping. Knowing I had to eat it soon before it went moldy but not quite knowing what I wanted to do with it, inspiration struck in the organic frozen dinner section in the form of a frozen Chicken Tikka Masala. I snatched it up, took it home, nuked it while my Naan heated in the toaster oven, put it all together and, oh, wow. So good. I wish I could remember the brand of the Indian dinner -- it had the word "Ethnic" in it, that much I remember, and the box was dark red with gold writing -- because it was as good as any I've had at Indian restaurants. It was filling, too, which means I got to put half of it up for today's lunch, and I've been looking forward to eating it all morning. It was a bit of a splurge at $3.95, but cheaper than a restaurant visit, and I don't regret it one bit. Speaking of which, back on the subject of the food problem: we've pretty much "solved" it by agreeing to cut back in other areas so we could increase our food budget to keep up with our standards plus inflation. It's not a perfect solution, but I don't have the patience/attention span to consistently do the coupons & sale fliers thing, and good, healthy food is one area where we're not willing to compromise. I think part of being frugal is learning to pick your battles. Decide what's important to your ability to enjoy life, and allow yourself leeway to spend in those areas. Cut back and scale down in the areas that don't matter as much. For us, this means we both had to give up a portion of our personal spending allowances, which was only painful until we realized that we usually spent that money on food anyway. I still expect, though, that our food bill will decrease after we move and we have a real kitchen of our very own. While I think life without the occasional Tikka Masala is hardly a life worth living, I'm also pretty certain that buying the ingredients to cook it ourselves will be less expensive than buying it pre-made. And that goes for the vast majority of what we currently eat. Labels: budgeting, cooking, food problem, shopping |
<$Wednesday, April 9, 2008$>
One house, please, hold the murder
| Yesterday I sent in the last of the paperwork needed to finalize my mortgage application, go team me! And afterwards I was so excited I hopped on the Re/Max web site to look at the local listings and see what we can expect to afford. Not that I haven't been doing this periodically for a while now, but this time I was both more optimistic and realistic in my search. So, assuming we get pre-approved for the amount that we asked for, it seems we can either afford a nice condo in a decent neighborhood, or a decent house in an iffy neighborhood. Seeing as how we've both got our hearts set on a house, that's a little, well, disheartening. We're open to the idea of a condo, though. At least we'd still be building equity, and we could trade up to a house in five years or so, when we can afford to apply "nice" to both the house AND the neighborhood. Actually, I suppose it's possible to do that now if we hit up some government auctions. There's a really nice house in a pretty nice neighborhood currently up for auction with a starting bid of $25,000. We can't place a bid without our pre-qualification letter, though, and the auction closes soon. I'd be shocked if we managed to put in a winning bid, anyway, but if the timing were better it would be worth a shot. It's a much nicer house than we'd be able to afford otherwise. Oh, well. There are still a couple of houses out in West Tulsa that suit my style and sensibilities, but just when I was beginning to think that might be a relatively safe part of town, suddenly the news keeps reporting murders in that area. It's kind of a sad fact that we'll probably be hard-pressed to find a 100% murder-free neighborhood in Tulsa these days, but that doesn't mean we're not going to try. Labels: house-hunt |