Lenten thanks, Day 14
Well, I sure am glad the workers at Fukushima seem to be getting their fractured reactors back under control. That’s something, anyway.
Uncategorized
Using Net Worth as a Personal Finance Benchmark
This is a post by Miranda Marquit, who serendipitously appeared just as the present nasty virus was making me think I would die if I had to write a single word today. I think you’ll enjoy the article that she kindly wrote for us. Thank you, Miranda—you couldn’t have come along at a better time!
Miranda publishes her own (very engaging) blog at This Time It’s Personal.
When it comes to your journey to financial freedom, it helps to have milestones along the path. One of the personal finance benchmarks you can use is net worth. Your net worth offers you a picture of where you are at now. You can use it to chart progress toward financial goals.
Net Worth: A Financial Moment in Time
Your net worth represents a financial moment in time. It is a snapshot of your current money situation. You figure your net worth by subtracting your liabilities from your assets. Once you have that number, you have a place to start.
The first step is to add up your assets. This includes the market value of your home, as well as the value of your investments, your checking account, your savings account, and any other items of significant value. Next, you add up your liabilities. Your liabilities include what you owe on your mortgage, any debts you have and other obligations that you have incurred.
Here is a basic example of how you can do a net worth calculation:
Assets:
- Market value of home: $180,000
- Savings: $10,000
- Checking: $3,000
- Investment account values (including retirement accounts): $35,000
Total: $228,000
Liabilities:
- Mortgage balance: $165,000
- Car loan: $9,000
- Credit card debt: $4,500
- Medical bills: $2,000
Total: $180,500
Net worth: $228,000 – $180,500 = $47,500
As you can see, the net worth in this case is $47,500. To increase your net worth, you will need to either pay down debt or increase your assets. Your assets can be improved by increasing your income, or by making investments that appreciate in value.
Measuring Your Progress
Once you know where you stand right now, you can begin making plans to improve your situation. Take stock at regular intervals. Decide whether you want to measure your progress every month, every quarter, every six months, or every year. Many people find that tracking their net worth monthly or quarterly helps to keep them motivated.
It is important to realize, though, that there are some things that you won’t have complete control over. If you are engaged in long-term investing, such as the investing you do through a retirement account, your net worth might fluctuate in the short term with the market. Many people experienced a lower net worth during the recession, as their retirement accounts dropped. (However, those who weathered the down market are now seeing a sharp rebound in net worth.)
Remember that your net worth is a picture of your current situation. Try to figure your net worth on the same day of the period, such as the first day of the month, or the last day of the quarter. This way, you will be more likely to be comparing apples to apples when it comes to your pay schedule, and the bills you pay.
Create an overview of your financial situation by tracking your net worth over a period of years. As you work on a debt repayment plan, as you pay down your mortgage, and as you look for ways to increase your assets, you will find that your net worth trends higher—leading you toward a more secure future.
Miranda writes for a variety of personal finance web sites, including the AllBusiness Personal Finance Corner, and Credit Cards Canada, a site specializing in the best Canadian credit cards.
Ash Wednesday: Forty thankful posts for Lent
Father Poulson, our pastor down at the church where they let me sing along with the choir, made a gracious suggestion for a Lenten devotion: for each day of Lent, find something to be thankful for. I like this idea. So, for each of the next forty days, Funny will lead off with a short moment of thanks for something of great value. For Day 1, then, read on.
Image: Carl Spitzweg, Ash Wednesday. Public Domain.
Egypt
Live coverage of the scene on the ground in Egypt: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/
Dateline Arizona: Various News of the Day
Amid all the sorrow in Tucson, where a nine-year-old child was buried today, miracles are happening. Gabrielle Giffords is opening her eyes of her own accord, apparently recognizing those around her, responding to directions by moving her arms and legs, and even sitting up and dangling her feet off the side of her hospital bed. Her doctors, who profess their astonishment, are being greeted like conquering heroes.
So, it looks like what began as a submicroscopic hope that the wounded Congresswoman might recover is growing into a credible possibility, maybe even a probability.
Sadly, the demented wretch who wrought all this misery will never recover, nor presumably will his parents, whose lives have been destroyed by their only child’s mental illness as surely as his has.
Meanwhile, lunatics are climbing out of the woodwork and cockroaches crawling from beneath refrigerators all across the land. Three local Republican stalwarts resigned their elected posts, alarmed by the irrational violence and fed up with the nastiness that pervades Arizona politics, even within the party. You don’t have to be a Democrat here to become a target of flying vitriol.
Sarah Palin, she of the infamous crosshairs, has found herself the target of threats from dangerous-sounding fruitcakes—how many and of what nature, we don’t know, but we’re willing to believe her alarm. The poor ill-educated soul created another flap in trying to defend herself, in her ignorance choosing an amazingly inappropriate term to describe the criticism aimed at her over the misbegotten crosshair map publicity tool. It’s a terrifying situation. Much as some of us wish she would feel inspired to run for the Anchorage City Dogcatcher’s office, no sane person wants any harm to come to her. Let’s all hope and pray she stays safe.
Hope and pray we all stay safe: these are the times that bring the crazies into the daylight. Whenever some madman or child lets loose with a fusillade, he seems to be followed by a host of imitators. You can hardly blame Legislative District 20 Chairman Anthony Miller for knowing when to fold ’em, as his wife worries that the local right-wing activists will take pot-shots at their home. But as immediate threats, the vocal extremists can’t hold a candle to the silent sickos, known only to a few around them and isolated from psychiatric care by a dysfunctional healthcare system.
All things pass, they say. Let’s hope the present disaster passes soon, and without further incident.
More Days of Our Lives
Busy past few days! Haven’t had time to write much, so much has been going on.
The minute I sat down to the computer this morning, Gerardo showed up. His “8:00 a.m.” usually means “10:00 a.m.,” so I’d imagined plenty of time to get a few things done before I started to prune the roses, a chore I’ve put off now for three or four weeks. Today was my chance: get him to haul the clawed debris from the man-eating plants, instead of me having to chuff it into the garbage bins in back.
But nooooo…. Before I could even bolt down breakfast, he was on the phone, on the way casa mia. So while he and his sidekick did battle with the rest of the yard, I cut back eight roses. Then for reasons unknown he decided nothing would do but I had to meet him at M’hijito’s house (why??), so here I am, in front of a strange computer.
Probably was a wise thing. I see the lime and lemon trees were hard-hit by the frost. The lime was OK where I was able to pin sheets around it, but I’m just not big enough to sling frost covering over the top of it, so about a third of its canopy is frizzled. The lemon tree, too, oddly enough, suffered some serious frost damage. Usually lemons and grapefruit are the toughest of the citrus. Anyway, I’ll have to ask Gerardo to trim back the limbs that are obviously dead.
Yesterday I became so engaged in a client’s project I utterly forgot the evening Bach concert for which I had tickets. Recalled it about 4:00 this morning. {sigh}
A choir member gave away three tickets to Bach Festival performances. I was thrilled to get all three of them, and really looked forward to going. So was mightily disappointed when I realized that, once again, because it wasn’t written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror I lost track of it. Old age is the pits.
Sunday, though, was a full day of glorious music. We sang, of course, in the morning, which is always fun, but much more to the point, the chamber choir, which is mostly composed of music professionals and graduate students, put on THE most incredible performance. One of the pieces was just ethereal, it was so beautiful. As his finale, choir director Scott Youngs, a superb organist, played an astonishingly complex piece, the kind of thing that leaves you in awe of what the human mind and body can do. In the afternoon was the Bach concert, four sonatas played by violinist Stephen Redfield and harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh. It was very fine. From there it was back to All Saints to join the chant choir for evensong, and that was very pleasant. At the end of the evening, Scott performed yet another amazing piece, dark, complex and noumenal. Did you know an organ can make a delicate sound like chimes? I had no idea… It can. And the effect, in a piece of music that already evoked the the other-worldly, was spine-tingling.
Monday I made a conscious decision to stay away from the computer and clean my filthy house. Actually, I intended to get to the roses that day also, but the housekeeping expanded to consume the entire day. I’ve never been fond of cleaning. It’s such an exercise in futility: the minute you finish, it needs to be done again. Didn’t do the greatest job yesterday, but at least I finally, very belatedly cleaned and oiled the kitchen cabinets and scrubbed the dirt off the floors.
The magazine article writing course is not making, and so I asked the chair for another comp course. He said he would try to arrange that, but so far no word on what will come down. Whatever, you can be sure he’ll hand it to me at the very last minute. If it’s anything other than a 16-week Eng. 102 section or a 5-week 101 section, I won’t be prepared. So I determined that I need to at least draft course outlines for a 16-week 101, a new 8-week 101, and a new 8-week 102, each incorporating my latest pedagogical strategy. Writing any of those will take two or three full days. Setting up three of them so they’re ready to go at a moment’s notice represents about a week of unrelenting work. Ugh.
Of course, I should have done this over the winter break. But really, I wasn’t kidding when I said I needed a real, extended break from the 7-day-a-week, 14-hour-a-day work schedule. Nor was I kidding about bringing a halt to the unpaid labor. It’s taken almost the entire month to unwind and get back to feeling more or less normal. I could do with another two to four weeks away from the grind, to tell the truth. Next summer, maybe.
So, nothing much of import here, except for the ongoing buzz over the Tucson shootings
Turns out the deranged perpetrator had been arrested for drug use, apparently had contact with the police more than once, evinced symptoms of madness at not one but two institutions of our fine education system…and still he could freely walk into Sportsman’s Warehouse and buy a 9-mm semiautomatic pistol. Nothing like your handy-dandy Glock for picking off doves, eh?
And of course, since Arizona has done away with all concealed-carry regulation, he could have walked through the Safeway with the thing tucked into his belt. Because in Arizona it’s perfectly legal to carry a concealed weapon in your vehicle, after he was stopped for running a red light on the day of the shooting, he just went on about his murderous business.
What a place!
A new set of crazies is set to descend on us, and they are SO wacked that the viciousness has even penetrated our thick-skulled legislators’ notice. A bunch of nut cases from Kansas’s Westboro Baptist Church (“church”!) announced their plan to raise hell at the funeral of the nine-year-old girl who was assassinated. They’ve already circulated hate material to the effect that Catholicism is not a real religion, that the ceremony is devil-worship, and on and on, and they’ve made known their intention to yell this hateful garbage at the grieving family and friends burying their child. The legislature promptly passed a measure blocking protesters from approaching funerals any closer than 300 feet. But 300 feet is within yelling distance. At any rate, it was a positive sign, to see Arizona’s legislators make a move in the direction of common decency.
Let’s hope they hold that thought.
Images:
Frost on a Nettle (Netherlands). Vincent van Zeijst. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Johann Sebastian Bach im Alter von 61 Jahren. Elias Gottlob Haussmann. Public domain.
Broom, Sponge, and Towel. Chuck Marean. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Compact Glock 19 in 9x19mm Parabellum. Vladimir Dudak. Released under the GNU Free Documentation license.
Førde kyrkje ein kald vinterdag, 2000. Roy Henning Helle. Public Domain