I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘musings’ Category

My spouse’s employer now offers short term disability insurance as part of his elective benefits package.  I’ve heard people say that you are much more likely to be disabled (at least for a short time) in your working career than die, and yet more people have life insurance than disability insurance.  Which at least, in our case, is true - we both have life insurance but we don’t have disability insurance.

I looked into the policy and basically, we’d pay $19 a pay period (he gets paid every two weeks) for coverage that if we used it, would provide $500 a week for 26 weeks.  So for a little under $500 a year, we’d have 26 weeks of $500 coverage, or $13000 total.  Which doesn’t seem too bad, but I started thinking more about it, and realized that we could really provide our own version of short term disability insurance by having $13000 saved on our own.

Which, is a lot, and not very realistic right at this moment.  But our long term goal (say, 5 years out from now) is to have about $18000 in our emergency fund.  At that point, we’d basically be insuring ourselves as far as short term disability went.   Which also leas me to consider if I’ve factored enough different things into the total we decided on for our emergency fund, and I will have to revisit that sometime in the near future.  But for now, I’ll keep the $18000 figure, which would more than cover the short term disability potential payout.

But again, that isn’t going to be realistic for at least a couple years, and if my mini medical saga the past four months has taught me nothing else, it has shown me that things can potentially change in a very short time, or even an instant, as far as ability to work is concerned.  My spouse’s election period for this coverage is this month, and we’ve decided to elect coverage for him for the next year.  Yes, there are many other things I’d like to do with that $500 but at the same time, it is not a lot to pay for a bit of peace of mind.  As we save a substantial emergency fund, we’ll revisit the issue of short term disability coverage and at some point drop it.

Which begs the question of long term disability coverage (something my spouse’s employer does not currently offer) - I have a bit of research on that front to do and options to weigh, for I have a feeling that’s something we should seriously consider as well.

It seems this summer is turning out to be the summer I figure out how expensive it is to be a responsible grown up parent.  How exciting. 

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I’ve talked in the past about how I needed to write a will, and how, in fact, I went so far as to write one on the back of a piece of scrap paper in a panic in the waiting room for a medical procedure.  Clearly, that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind as far as wills go.  I know that I need a will - if for nothing else, because I have children and if both my spouse and I were to die at the same time, I need a guardian appointed for my children.

So why haven’t I written a will?  Largely, for two reasons - the money and the effort.  It might seem contradictory that I haven’t written a document to dispose of my money because of the money it will cost, but there it is.  I’m just intimidated by finding a lawyer and paying them a large amount (to me) of money to write my will.  Which leads to the effort factor.  As I said, I’m intimidated.  Once I do it, I’ll have done it and I’ll feel more comfortable about the whole process, but right now the whole thing just feels overwhelming.

So, like many things that feel overwhelming to me, I’ve broken it into small tasks.  First was to look into online software that can construct a will for me.  This isn’t necessarily the most specific type of will to construct, and for someone with a complicated estate it certainly wouldn’t do.  But I do not have a complicated estate, and I believe that some sort of will is better than none, so it was what I wanted to try first.  This cut out both of the factors that were giving me pause - online do-it-yourself solutions are certainly much less expensive than an attorney, and since I can do research and ease into it, it cuts out the intimidation aspect.  My ultimate goal is still to go to an attorney and have a will constructed for my spouse and I, but for now, I am happy with easing into it with the online alternative.

I had researched several different alternatives, all costing less than $100, and was still comparing between four or five and deciding which I wanted to commit to, when I read a post on My Money Blog over the weekend with a code to get Suze Orman’s Will and Trust program free of charge.  Well, since that was one of the ones I was looking into, and the cost had just been reduced to zero - that became the clear winner for this segment of my creating a will journey.  So I went to the site, used the code, and was on my way to creating my first true will.

The process of creating a will with this program was very straightforward, and all told took me about 30 minutes to complete - from login to final document.  My life is not that complicated and I’m not making any special provisions beyond designating beneficiaries and guardians for my children, so it wasn’t that involved.  The program simply asked me a series of questions and then turned my answers into legalese and spit out a pretty generic but straightforward document.

My spouse has gone through the program and done one for himself as well.  I printed out two copies of my final document, and one I signed right away and put into my important papers file.  But in my state (maybe in every state, I have no clue) for the will to be actually valid, the program said I need to sign it in front of two witnesses who are not named in the will and a notary, and have it notarized.  Since I don’t have a notary just hanging around my house, that will have to happen on another day.  So I left the second copy unsigned and hopefully will get myself to cross the notary hurdle very soon.

So now I have a will.  The next step - find a notary and some witnesses.  And then, I’ll move on to the next step in my original list - start researching actual attorneys.  No one I know offline here that I have asked actually has a will and an attorney to recommend, so I’m going to have to figure it out on my own.

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On Monday I had a colonoscopy.  And absolutely nothing was wrong - my colon is so normal it’s boring.  So basically I am fine.  Which is good, and I am very happy to be assured that nothing major is amiss.

On Sunday, to prepare for the colonoscopy, I wasn’t allowed to eat anything.  I could drink clear fluids, but no solid food.  And I made an interesting realization about my eating habits - I am often an absentminded eater.  Meaning, when I’m making food for my kids or my spouse, I’ll often eat a bit here or there in the preparation, or I’ll be walking through the kitchen and just absentmindedly grab something from the counter and eat it.  I didn’t, on Sunday, but I caught myself almost doing it more than a dozen times.

Which led me to think about the parallels for me with eating and spending.   Once upon a time I was an absentminded spender just as much as I am now an absentminded eater.  I didn’t spend piles of money, but I spent a little here and a little there and never really gave it a whole lot of thought.  When I was at the store buying something, I’d add in a few other things without fully thinking them through.  I’d pick up a few extra items here or there, or I would make a few extra stops while out and about, and not really fully consider the effect those multiple small purchases were having on my finances.

One of the biggest positive things I have done in the past year to improve my financial future is to stop making impulsive, not thought out decisions in regards to spending, and really keeping track of every penny I spend versus just the ones I planned for.  Even if I make a spur of the moment purchase, I don’t do it absentmindedly and without thinking.  I keep track of all my spending now, so I know what effect that purchase has on my finances and am making a conscious decision, not an absentminded one.

Do you make purchases without much thought?  If you did in the past and don’t any longer, what helped you turn it around?

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I use my debit card for practically everything.  I am one of those people who if I have cash, I will spend it.  Not huge amounts of cash, but if I have ten dollars left over from something, somehow it gets frittered away on little things that I wouldn’t buy if I was using my debit card.  I find it hard to use my debit card to buy small things, which helps on the frittering front.

Recently I’ve been thinking more and more about the methods I use to spend my money, because as my son gets older, he is starting to understand more and more that we buy things and we shop and all sorts of consumer-type behaviors. I don’t like credit cards, and I don’t want my son to think that we have a magic plastic card that we can just swipe and make anything happen.  But then I realized, that really, cash is just a symbol too.

Dollars and change represent something.  They in themselves as paper and metal really don’t have much value, but they have been given value in our society and are the go-between for the work we do and what we can get for it.   So, really, explaining my debit card to my son has a lot of similarities to explaining money in general to him - the money that the card has access to represents what his father and I have earned by doing work or providing services.

So what I’ve come to realize is that what form my buying takes isn’t the important part, as long as I model good behavior with it and explain what I am doing and why.  We live in an age of electronic transactions and I feel it would almost be a disservice to isolate my kids from that aspect of society.  But the talking is the key - cash or debit or check or credit, whatever I choose to use to buy with, understanding what it means is what will hopefully encourage him (and my daughter) to not make the same mistakes we have.

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While catching up on my long-neglected feed reader this morning I came across this post from Antishay Ventenne about perseverance. And it resonated with me, for I may be very short on patience, but I do have more than my fair share of perseverance. When I was a child, I was called “stubborn” and “strong-willed” and two more true things may never have been said. But really, those are all just words for the trait of perseverance.

I’ve talked a lot in the past about how I don’t have a whole lot of patience - waiting is not something I am good at, in fact it makes me incredibly antsy and uncomfortable. I like to consider myself a thinker but when it really comes down to it, I’m a doer - I’d rather just jump in with both feet and then figure things out along the way. I’m a planner, but to me that is part of the act of doing, because you are making a plan which is, for me, doing something. I tend to plan while I go though, and constantly tweak and re-evaluate as I come up with more aspects I might not have considered. Not the most efficient method, by far, but as I said, I’m not long on patience.

Without patience, debt reduction may seem doomed to fail. For in the vast majority of cases, debt reduction is a long term commitment and if you aren’t patient, you may give up. But that is where perseverance comes into play. it may seem counter-intuitive, but even though I am not very patient, I am very good at sticking to something until its completion and not giving up, even in the face of obstacles and setbacks. To me, it is a whole different part of my personality - I might not be very good at waiting, but I can continue to make things happen and implement tweak after tweak to get to my end goal, even if it takes a long time. As long as I feel like I am doing something, it doesn’t feel like waiting as much as it feels like a long journey with an endpoint I am constantly aiming for. And that is all the difference.

When I left the first taekwondo school I trained at because my spouse took a job in another state, the instructors at the school gave me a parting gift - a framed inspirational poster on perseverance. Under the word perseverance and the picture of a bubbling stream, it has these words:

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins… not through strength, but through persistence.

It is meant to hang in my first studio someday, although for now it hangs in my house. And it really does sum up my philosophy on life - I don’t give up. My debt may try to evade me, but I’ll get rid of it all someday. Because I know how to persevere.

So if you are short on patience like I am, don’t despair! Start looking at the big picture with a new eye - be too stubborn to give up even when the road seems long. And remember that small victories along the way are still victories. Use those to find motivation when your patience seems to have all but worn thin. The endpoint isn’t the only milestone you can celebrate. My motivation lies in remembering all of the little things I’ve accomplished along the way and the obstacles I’ve overcome, even when the destination still seems far off. And keeping on even when the going seems tough is the essence of perseverance.

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