I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘musings’ Category

My father passed away a week ago, and my life will never be the same.

I’ve spent the past week on the east coast, helping sort out things to a manageable level for my mother, and grieving the loss of my father.  My dad was the one who managed their money - he paid the bills, he made the financial decisions, and frankly he earned most of the money.  My mom is capable of handling things, but it is a lot to take over all at once when you haven’t done it at all in almost 40 years of marriage.  There are several things that my dad did before his death that helped us muddle through it all, though.  These are things he always did - he died very unexpectedly but he was a stickler for organization and order.  But for me, it was a wake up call to what I need to do to help my spouse if I was to pass away first.

1.  Have a list of monthly bills or an easy to understand budget.  My dad made a list every month in a notepad that included a snapshot of their entire financial picture - what was going out, what was coming in, what they owed money on.  It only took me a few minutes of doublechecking to be up to speed on what bills they have and how much money went in and out in a typical month.

2.  If you use the computer, have a list of logins and passwords.  Literally, this saved us eons of aggravation.  My dad had a list of every website he did business on, every login, and every password.  So all the bills my dad paid online, my mom can too right now.  I could log in to his email and check on things, I could login to all his payment sites - and I’ll be able to do so long distance as well if my mom needs more help.

3.  Pay your bills well before the due date.  My dad always had everything paid as soon as the bill came in.   For example, he passed away on the 19th.  If it was me, my mortgage would have to be paid by February 1st.  Not my dad.  He’d paid the February mortgage already.  Their next due date is March 1st.  All his bills were like that, and it gives my mom a lot of wiggle room to figure out what she’s doing.  Nothing is due until at least mid-February.

4.  Have your records up to date.  Even my dad’s visit to the pet store for cat food the night before he died was in his checkbook ledger.  His balances matched the ones at the bank exactly to the penny.  I didn’t have to worry there were things looming out there we didn’t know about - everything from automatic debits for insurance to every debit transaction was neatly noted in the checkbook.

5.  Keep important papers organized, and your current records too.  I found easily everything I needed to sort of their finances because my dad kept everything neatly organized in two filing cabinets.  From last year’s taxes (so I can help mom with this years), to records of the bills he paid by check, insurance policies, and anything else I could think to need, it all was there.

6.  I hate the stock market.  My dad’s 401K is worth literally half of what it was a year or so ago.  And we need to roll it over into an IRA for my mom.  It feels like I am going to lock in all those losses and it makes me literally cry.  I am going to talk to the HR department at my dad’s work and try and figure out what to do.  Of all the financial aspects, this one literally depresses me.   I still have a lot to figure out about what should be done here.

7.  Have more life insurance than you expect to need.  My dad did have some life insurance, not a whole lot - but at least some.  Life insurance is not taxable income according to the IRS (something I learned this week) so my mom will be okay for a little while.  She doesn’t want to keep the same life they were living together, but she also wants to have time to decide what she wants for the future.   And the life insurance will let her do that.

I’ll be back in the groove of posting soon, but it may be a bit sporadic this week.  I’ve had a lot to process and a lot of figure out.  My mom is ready to be in charge of the bills and she has some money to do so.  Which gives us all more time to grieve.

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My father passed away unexpectedly last night.  He was 58.  He passed peacefully in his sleep of what appears at the moment to be a heart attack.  He leaves his wife (my mom), and three children, of whom I am the eldest.

As I talk about at Christmas, my parents live a considerable distance from us, and I will be traveling there soon and I am not sure when exactly I am coming back.  The blog will be quiet this week.  I have a lot of things to say, but not really motivated to commit them to typeface at the moment.

Thank you for your understanding.

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On the third try at diagnosing what the problem with the Saturn was, the dealership finally got it right.   The part at fault was the crank position sensor, which would fail when the car started to warm up.  Hence the sudden death on the highway and subsequent failure to restart.

The crank position sensor does not give a code to the check engine light when it fails.  Nice design idea there.  Especially since in my research about crank position sensors yesterday, I found out this is yet another known issue with the Saturn L-300 (and L series in general).

I need a comprehensive list of Saturn L-Series issues so that the next time the car dies I can give it to the mechanic and tell them to pick which it is. 

The Saturn is now safely in my garage, and I will be driving it to demo team practice in a few minutes, so it had better behave.    And we’re back on the plan I outlined in yesterday’s goal post.  Save $10000 for a new to us car, most of it in the first 6 months of the year.   Then pay off remaining debt.  On to the next thing!

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It all began with the ice storm.

This past week has been full of challenges.  Right now, I can only relay them and ponder the insanity of it all.  Tomorrow I’ll start trying to sort things out and figure out the extent of the financial fallout.  Because there still is some to come.  That whole living ahead of our paycheck thing is just going to have to wait.

The ice storm took out our power for several days and knocked a bunch of tree branches down.  I thought that might be the end of all the craziness, but I was wrong.  The ice storm happened Friday, and we closed up the house as best we could (mostly, emptied the pipes and turned off the water, and shut off anything we remembered being on) and after an unplanned boarding of our cats for the week, went to visit relatives.  As I said already, our car died on the way there.  We were about 200 miles from our destination, and the car wouldn’t start after we filled it with gas.  I swear that car knows we just paid it off and isn’t impressed.   We tried, and tried again, then we waited a little while and tried a few more times and I did finally get the thing to start.  So we arrived at my parents house without further incident.

My mom loaned us her car so we could visit my inlaws while my car was being checked out by a local mechanic.  My car, of course, behaved beautifully for them.  Started right up, no signs of problems under the hood, they took it for several extensive test drives throughout the day, and nothing.  They are friends of my dad so they did all this for free, which was very nice of them.  I went and picked up the car, and we drove it around the rest of the week with no incident.

Then we tried to come home to the midwest yesterday.  About 2 hours into that trip, the car stopped working while I was driving.  Just totally gave up in the middle of a highway.   I managed to pull over to the side, and the car would not restart.  I called the state police to get towed (we were on a state highway) and we were actually towed to somewhere open.  On a Sunday.  I was relieved, for that.

But the problem was, they couldn’t definitively figure out what was wrong with it.  I’m not going to try and poorly repeat the technical jargon here, but basically, it could be the computer malfunctioning, or it could just be the connections to the computer that were dirty and misfiring.  The car worked just fine for them.  They cleaned all the connections, took it on a test drive, and basically said I could try driving it, or I could get the computer replaced, which wouldn’t happen until at least tomorrow.  I debated, I thought, I pondered - and we decided to try and drive.

Big mistake.  Ten miles in, the car had had enough.  We got another tow to the same service station and there my car sits.

I rented a car, an Outback in fact, and packed up my spouse and my kids and left.  Well, almost.  I did do that, but first I went to pick up the Outback and they had locked the keys in the car while cleaning it and were waiting for a locksmith to open it.  Honestly, at that point, I just started laughing hysterically.  Of course.  Of course you did.  That was just how my day was.  But I did get the car a little bit later and went off to pick up my family.

In an interesting development, I could fit more stuff into my Saturn than I could the Outback, and had to leave some stuff behind in the trunk of the Saturn.  That car sits, broken, 600 miles away.  Hopefully it is actually the computer.  I guess.  I mean, I just want the thing fixed so I can get it back home so I can decide what to do with it.  This mystery ailment is not really exciting to me.  Especially with 600 miles between it and us.

I’ll call later today and find out what they say.  They weren’t sure how long it would take them to get the correct computer.  My spouse is going to bring the rental car back later this week, stay in a hotel or with relatives overnight (he has some relatives that are about 100 miles away from where it is) and then drive the fixed car home the next day.  When it’s fixed, of course.

I was really scared we’d come home to find some kind of lasting damage to the house from the power outage.  Other than having to dump everything in the fridge and freezer (sigh) so far, so good.  Except I’m typing this on my spouse’s computer because my computer monitor won’t acknowledge my computer is on.  When my spouse wakes up (we didn’t get in til almost 3am) I’ll hook up a different monitor and hope I’ve just killed another monitor and not the computer itself.

There’s always some fun afoot here, it seems.

Fun times here.   It isn’t all bleak - my family is safe.  We are home.  Everything else will sort itself out.  I’m just not really positive on the future of my debt eliminating right this second.  But that is for me to ponder more after some sleep.  Oh, and a call to some tree people to take care of the branches still broken in our tree.

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There is a lot of buzz in the financial news lately about mortgage rates. Supposedly they are, as of me writing this, the lowest they have been in 50 years (according to the headlines we saw on newspapers while traveling this weekend, at least). Rates as low as 4.25% have been spotted for a 30-year mortgage, with rates around the 5% mark becoming commonplace.

Our mortgage is a 30 year fixed mortgage at 6.375%. We got it almost exactly 2 years ago. And we are effectively stuck with it for the time being, no matter how low rates go. Why? Because we 100% financed our house, and with the drop in home values over the past two years and us just paying our minimum payment, I’d be surprised if we don’t already owe more than the house is worth on the market. One of the popular sites for looking at house values, Zillow, tells me that our home’s value is about $10000 higher than we paid for it (and it was appraised at) two years ago, but I doubt that’s accurate - home values here in the midwest have been dropping just like everywhere else.

Most times, one can only refinance one’s home for these amazing rates with a loan for 80% or less of the home’s value, in my research about it at least. Although our home is a modest one with a small price tag, we are not even close to only owing 80% on it. Yes, we pay PMI. Yes, that is a goal of mine - to rid us of the PMI, which will happen once we owe less than 80% of our home’s value. And an added benefit would be we could take advantage of what life has to offer when interest rates are two whole percentage points lower than our current one.

But for now, we sit tight. I’m not upset by it - I’m mellow. We are slowly but surely improving our financial situation. And maybe next time, we’ll be able to take advantage of opportunities to improve it even more.

Note: I wrote this on Friday and scheduled it for today, because I knew we’d be traveling. Right after I finished writing it, the power in our house went out (and because of the ice, could be out until Christmas Eve), and a comedy of errors including having to board our cats so we could leave, winterizing the house for an extended power outage in the dark, the not-so-blessed Saturn dying on the 1000 mile trip out east, and various other random things have occurred I’ll write more fully about later this week. Hope your holidays are going more smoothly than ours!

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