A miracle! In spite of the $200 charge to drain and refill the pool, in spite of paying the hair stylist the tip I forgot to give him the last time, and in spite of running amok at Ikea the other day, as the monthly billing cycle ends I’m under budget by $83!
That improves on last month’s under-run of $42.
Yah, I know: microscopic!Click on the image to zoom it to full size.
One explanation for this little success is that I haven’t been driving my car. Without the 44-mile round trips to lovely downtown Tempe and with no trips to the community college, I’ve only had to buy one tankful of gas this month. Also, I’ve stayed out of Costco, thereby spending only a little more than half the food & household budget.
Classes begin this week, though, and since I have a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule I’ll be burning a lot of gas—probably more than I used to drive to Tempe, since I had pretty much stopped going out there more than once or twice a week. And I’m almost completely out of food and staples: on Thursday, when next month’s budget cycle resumes, I’ll have to make a major Costco run. That certainly will consume the full $300 for Costco in the January-February cycle.
So, I expect that next month I’ll run over budget. And there’ll be no frolics in the aisles of Ikea!
Hey, Senior Choir!I made a mistake in telling you that Funny’s “Truth” post would be up at Free Money Finance’s March Madness competititon yesterday.
Apparently only a couple of dyads go up at a time, thereby drawing out the event over time. That’s different from what I interpreted FMF’s description of the contest to say—I thought all of them went up at once and then went through a winnowing process.
If you want me to signal you when I spot the post in the contest, then on Wednesday let me know that it’s OK to e-mail you with reminders. Another strategy would be to subscribe to Funny about Money by clicking on one of the links in the upper right of the home page. There’s a link to subscribe in an RSS feeder, if you have one, or simply to have Funny’s daily posts e-mailed to you. I will be reminding my readers about this each time a new March Madness post appears at FMF’s site, and so subscribing will put you among the first to know about it.
Just finished shoveling bushels of paper out of my file drawers, reorganizing the file system, and incinerating bank statements, credit card statements, health insurance claim statements, investment records, correspondence, and related junk that dates back to the early 1990s.
Before I started, a four-drawer file cabinet in the garage was chuckablock full of old records, and the five file drawers in my office stuffed to capacity.
Now, after a good six hoursof feeding paper into the fireplace, after the liberation of 73 manila file folders and 33 hanging files (not counting the ones I reused on the fly), the garage file cabinet is again chuckablock full, mostly with different records. The firebox is filled with ashes. But at least there’s now a little open filing space in the office.
They say you should keep tax-related documents for seven years and tax returns forever. Highly problematic:
a) If you have a side income from self-employment, where the heck are you supposed to find room in your house to store years’ worth of related paper?
b) Once you’ve stuffed seven years worth of trash in a file cabinet, you tend to forget it. Hence, paper dating back to the Pleistocene, fossilizing in the garage.
Some of this stuff should’ve been donated to a local historic archive, not reduced to ashes in the fireplace.
But some of it… ???
You know, some things could come back to bite, even after the magical seven years have passed.
For example, late in the 20th century, a man whose last name (allegedly) was the same as mine somehow convinced my bank and a bunch of his creditors that I was responsible for his debts. I’d never heard of the guy.
It was difficult to get out from under that. You can easily prove that you did something, but you’ll play hob trying to show that you did not do something. The ensuing battle dragged on for week after week after week.
Should I throw out all the correspondence, all the paper trail, all the records of how I went about arguing that I was not a deadbeat? Or at least not that deadbeat?
Then there was the time I made a job offer, with the dean’s written permission, to the Southwest’s pre-eminent graphic designer of publications. She, desiring to do the kind of work our office did, turned down a far better-paying job that would have had her doing advertisements and brochures. Then, after she had passed up the other, far superior opportunity, the College reneged! On a written job offer that she had accepted! In writing!
Well, she hasn’t sued yet, though she certainly should have. But I still have all the documentation. What’s the statute of limitations on civil suits, anyway?
Then there was the endless, incrementally bitter slow-motion war with My Bartleby. My ass is covered there by a 200-page daily journal, written at the behest of the College’s HR representative. This monster fills two hanging file folders and a CD-ROM. Should I keep all that drivel?
She hasn’t tried to make any trouble yet and probably won’t. On the other hand, Bartleby is even crazier than I am. And I’m capable of anything.
In the crazy old lady department, I undoubtedly go way overboard with this business of saving documents. It’s a habit acquired from ex-DH, who, as a lawyer, advised me that we should save every scrap of paper that had anything to do with anything. He wasn’t kidding. At the time I left, he had a collection of canceled checks that dated back to before the start of our 25-year-long marriage. I figured he must know something, he being a fancy lawyer, and so I went forth and did likewise.
And I do have to allow, it was mighty gratifying to be able to produce my original pay stub that time ASU tried to claim I had been working there only fifteen years when actually I’d been there sixteen.
Still…how many times does something like that happen?
I suppose it only has to happen once.
Ah, well. It’s back to work. A stack of incoming paper sits on my desk, waiting to be handled, acted upon, and filed.
Am I alone with this conundrum? How much paper do you keep, and for how long?
Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Money Stories! I wish all our contributors and all our readers could be here in Arizona just now, where the weather is in the 70s, birds are singing in ecstasy, flowering plants are shivering with joy, and there’s not a snowdrift to shovel as far as you can see.
What Matters: Where the Spiritual Journey Meets the Financial Journey
Fred
Bible Money Matters Practical Steps to Becoming a Cheerful Giver
In a guest post, Fred describes his evolution from a young man reluctant to give to an adult married man who shares his wealth willingly.
J. Money
Budgets Are Sexy The 11th Reason Credit Unions Kick Ass
Chiming in on the move-your-money discussion, J. Money adds a little-known feature to Jim at Bargaineering’s 10 reasons to move to a credit union.
A Whole Lot of Stories and Reflections on Money, the Economy, and Life
Wenchypoo
Wisdom from Wenchypoo’s Mental Wastebasket D-I-Y Economic Reform—Starving the Evil Piggies
Well said, Wenchy! And I’ll bet a lot of Americans will agree you’ve got something there.
Matthew Paulson
American Banking News Horizon Bank of Washington Is First Bank Failure of 2010
Matt reports that some 200 banks are expected to fail this year. That’s all the more alarming when you read what the first failure cost the FDIC.
Greg McFarlane
Control Your Cash Man of the Year
Funny story, good thoughts
MDP
My Dollar Plan 35 Best Personal Finance Books
The list is compiled from readers’ favorites and includes remarks by recommenders.
SuperSaver
My Wealth Builder College 529 Plan Accounts Are Now Breakeven
With some help with dollar cost averaging, SuperSaver’s college savings funds have about recovered from the market collapse.
Jeff Rose
Good Financial Cents The New Reward Credit Cards
Good discussion of the current and coming changes in reward cards
Allan Inocente
Rich Money Habits My Financial Goals for 2010: Get Into the Money Game
Hanging on in the Philippines, the Inocentes have made it through the Great Recession in pretty good shape and are now ready to start building wealth.
Big Cajun Man
Canadian Personal Finance Blog Birthday Things to Remember
A basketful of things consider and steps to take on your birthday
Bucksome
Buck$ome Boomer’s Journey to Retirement Smaller Isn’t Always Cheaper
Bucksome discovers a little secret about fast-food drink pricing.
Evolution of Wealth Diversifying Your Income Streams
EofW notices something in a pitch from an insurance company and segues into an interesting and insightful rumination.
The Smarter Wallet
How to Save Money on Groceries: A Simple Four-step Plan
Wallet decides to live on an amazing $80/month grocery budget! Wait till you see the combined cost of shave gel, toothpaste, a toothbrush, and shampoo…
Nicole
Rainy-Day Saver Don’t Stress: Get Prepared for Tax Time!
A fistful of tax credits and deductions will make their returns complicated this year, so the Rainy-Day Savers are getting ready now.
Lean Life Coach
Eliminate the Muda Budgeting Review = Red Flags!
The Coaches find themselves over budget after the dog ate a…well, you have to read it to believe it!
The Carnival of Money Stories comes our way tomorrow morning! I have some amazing stories to share with you from bloggers all over the world. Be sure to visit and check them out.
Also, don’t forget to go to Free Money Finance tomorrow for the March Madness kick-off! Funny is included in the competition this year, with Truth, the Highest Thing That Man May Keep. If FaM wins, I’ve asked that the prize be donated to All Saints Episcopal Church, which just now is taking up a collection for relief work in Haiti. This is on top of its wide charitable outreach to the homeless, the elderly, and the orphaned. Vote early and vote often, as March Madness proceeds through its merry rounds!
By now, I expect, you know there’s a movement afoot to get folks to transfer their cash out of the big banking institutions whose unregulated greed helped to bring on the Great Recession (if recession, not depression, is what it is). Armed with a powerfully emotional video, the Move Your Money advocates urge megabank customers to take their business elsewhere—to small community banks or to credit unions.
I moved my money to a credit union quite some time ago, and I’ve never regretted it. Service is infinitely better. Tellers, who are not locked in cages but seated behind open, bright counters, recognize me by name when I visit, and a telephone call reaches a live human being. With a credit union, there are no nicks, gouges, or zings entailed in going about your normal banking activities. Loans are cheaper: just now car loans with 100 percent financing can be had for 4.99 percent, and M’hijito and I nailed a 4.3 percent mortgage over a year ago. Because the credit union never involved itself in questionable lending practices, it remains eminently solvent.
Problem is, moving your money is a bit more complicated than waving a wand, hollering presto-changeo, and rapturing all your cash from Institution A to Institution B, especially if you’ve set up automatic payments for recurring bills. So, assuming you see Wells Fargo, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Citigroup as tentacles of the Great Satan, how do you get free without incurring a raft of unexpected bank charges, without bouncing a check, and without accidentally shorting one or more of your creditors?
In my experience, the easiest and safest way to get your money out of a given bank is through a two-pronged process: set up new accounts in the target institution and then ease your way out of the soon-to-be-former institution. This may take as long as a month.
Start at the time you ordinarily reconcile your bank accounts, so that you can easily identify transactions that have not yet cleared the first bank (let’s call it the First Avaricious Global Bank). Then follow these steps:
1. Cancel all automatic transactions. Check to be sure the cancellations actually go through. Pay any bills that are immediately pending with checks on your First Avaricious account.
2. Go to the new credit union or community bank (we’ll call it Benign Credit Union) and open a new account.
3. Arrange to stop any automatic deposits at First Avaricious and to have those deposits made at Benign Credit Union.
♦ It may take as long as a month for these changes to take place! Your employer may decide to issue a paper paycheck in the interim. This inconvenience will require you to stay alert to all transactions that occur at First Avaricious during the transition. Check your account online at least every other day.
4. Reconcile your accounts at First Avaricious and calculate the amount needed to cover uncleared transactions and the amount of money that will remain after all outstanding EFTs and checks have cleared. Write these numbers down. Let’s say this month you have $1,000 in outstanding transactions, and after those transactions have cleared, you’ll have $500 left.
5. Leave enough cash at First Avaricious to cover the outstanding transactions ($1,000) plus an additional amount to cover any little surprises—about $100 will probably suffice. So, you’re going to leave $1,100 at First Avaricious ($1,000 to cover uncleared transactions + $100) and move $400 to Benign.
♦ First Avaricious will find every way from Sunday to ding you as you draw down your account. Many banks charge customers for dropping below a certain balance. Leave enough cash in the account to cover these gouges; otherwise you will incur more gouges in the form of overdraft charges.
6. With your paycheck and any other regular deposits now going to Benign Credit Union, begin paying your bills from your Benign account. Do not close your First Avaricious account until all outstanding transactions have cleared.
7. As soon as the last outstanding transaction clears First Avaricious, close your account there. Again, check to be sure the closure actually happens.
8. Deposit whatever remains of the $100 you left at First Avaricious in your Benign account.
9. Now set up all your automatic deposits, payments, and funds transfers at Benign.
Voilà! You’re back in business. And business will move a lot more smoothly.
Image: First National Bank of the Republic, Salt Lake City, 1908. Public Domain
Yah, I know: microscopic! Click on the image to zoom it to full size.
