I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Goals, Balance, and Insight - All For The Price of Soccer Camp

This week my 5 year old son has been attending soccer camp in the mornings, so every day we all get up, get dressed, eat some breakfast and head out to the soccer fields for a few hours.  My 2 year old daughter, not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination, is not amused.  She spends the first half hour or so huddled on my shoulder trying to pretend to still be asleep, and then gets a burst of energy and runs around like crazy trying to get into as much mischief as possible until camp is done and we head home.

The soccer field is part of a much larger park, which is good because it gives my daughter a lot of room to run around in, but at the same time, she can’t just do anything she wants, because there are service roads, other fields, and other obstacles she needs to be aware of and avoid.  At 2, she doesn’t always recognize her limits, and this being a new place, she doesn’t always know what she is supposed to do.

What works the best for her (and for me) is finding a balance between letting her roam free and setting very clear limits on what her freedom entails.  She cannot enter the parking lots.  She cannot climb on top of the picnic tables.  She can run all the way to the end of the unused field next to my son’s, but not across the road at the end.  Things of this nature, that keep her safe but let her have some freedom to make choices as well.  Too many rules and she can’t remember them all and doesn’t bother to even try to follow any of them.  Too few, and she could end up hurt, or worse, because she’s not yet equipped to make judgments about the consequences of some of her actions.

Does that mean she doesn’t test those limits?  No, of course not.  I’ve stopped her many a time this past week as she looks at me and carefully steps one foot over the line into the soccer field my son is playing in, or puts her knee up onto the top of a table.   She is two, after all.

All this has reminded me a lot of the process of finding a balance between working towards one’s long term goals and enjoying life here in the present.  Every individual, couple or family’s balance will be different, but the process of finding that balance is strangely similar to keeping my two year old from hurting herself or becoming a disruption.  Too many restrictions (focusing exclusively on the future and not on the present) can make one rebel and try to break every rule.  Too much leniency (or no control over what happens in the here and now) and an emergency could be a never-ending disaster.

Our balance has changed over time, sometimes more focused on getting to the point of debt free, sometimes more focused on preparing for emergencies, and sometimes a little more focused on enjoying life in the here and now, but when we aren’t working on a balance, and focus too much on one aspect, we tend to lose sight of the big picture.   And a few times of stepping over the line, so to speak, testing those limits and backsliding at times as well, serves to reinforce why those limits are there, and can be turned into a positive and a renewed commitment.

Where is your balance?  What are you working toward?  What helps you to keep on track?

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Tell All Tuesday - Happy Birthday and Debt Milestones

Today is my son’s fifth birthday.  To celebrate my mom came to visit from the east coast, and we had cake, a few presents, and fun with family.  My son said it was the best day ever.  I hope that he continues to enjoy the simple things in life for years to come.  And I kept my house from being overwhelmed with a huge crop of new toys, selecting things that matter and will last over a lot of little trinkets.  A win-win for me!

For newer readers of the blog, Tell All Tuesday is where I recap what’s changed as far as our debt situation since the last update.  I used to do it every Tuesday, or close to it, but once I got down to the student loan, I can only make payments to it once a month without them advancing my due dates, and I want everything that possibly can be applied directly to principal, so I only make a payment once a month.  So Tell All Tuesday has become more of a monthly affair.  But, hey, today is still Tuesday.

Since last month, we got an unexpected refund of part of our escrow account because our property taxes have gone down.  That added to the budgeted amount we pay monthly to the student loan was almost $1500, so I rounded up to make it even.  When looking at my actual amount owed on the loan, I wanted to bump it up even more to cross another thousand milestone, but we weren’t able to do that this month, so we still owe just over $7000, to be exact, $7097.86.  That payment put us at having paid off 80.53% of the total non-mortgage debt amount we owed (credit card, 2 student loans and car loan)  two years ago, when I started this blog in June of 2007.  Less than 20% to go!

The home stretch has taken longer in some ways than some of the middle steps did - it seemed we ran into a streak of good luck for a while and were able to make a lot of progress, and then hit some harder times where our progress has somewhat stalled.  But it is still moving forward, even with the adjustments we’ve made to saving a bit more preemptively against needing a new-to-us car or any financial setbacks on the work front.  And although $7000 still seems like a whole lot to me, paying off 80% of the original ~$36000 in two years makes the final 20% seem more than achievable.  Our current amount paid off is now $29353.85, and my goal is to not only knock the student loan under $7000 next month (which would happen with even our minimum payment), but to knock that paid off number up to over $30000.  Our budgeted amount (due to the change in our mortgage payment) is $543.66, so I’ll only have to snowflake at a minimum about another $150.  We can tighten our belts more than we have been, and we can make this happen.  And from there it seems all downhill… that works for me. 

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And Something I Do Like - The Brother MFC-5890CN

Last week when I wrote about the Verizon debacle I promised I’d write about something I actually do like, and I am.  I meant to faster than I did - last Friday was 6 months since my Dad unexpecteddly passed away, and coupled with Father’s Day this past weekend, I wasn’t in the best of places to write anything coherent.  But it’s a new day, a new week, and I do have something I’ve been meaning to write about - not directly financially related although in our case, it is a money saving device.

I was contacted a few months ago by a representative for Brother, asking me if I’d like to review one of their all in one printer/fax/scanner/copier machines, the Brother MFC-5890CN.  I get a number of offers to review things and I usually don’t accept because I’m not all that into writing reviews, but in this case, I think my spouse would have cried if I didn’t say yes.  We have to fax a number of documents each month for our Flexible Spending Account, and usually that means I have to go to our local copy shop and pay them to fax them for me.  It isn’t a huge expense, but it is a recurring one that’s nice to eliminate.  In the spirit of full disclosure, in exchange for writing an honest review of the all-in-one printer (not positive or negative, just what I honestly think), I get to keep it.  Yahoo! 

And honestly, I think it is pretty cool.   I’ve only ever had a printer before, so I didn’t know what I would think.  Some background information about the all-in-one printer:  as I said before, it prints, faxes, copies, and scans, as well as direct photo capture from a memory card.  It prints up to 11″x17″ paper for both photos and documents, and there is an auto feeded on top that feeds up to 50 sheets for scanning, copying or faxing.

Some of the things I just love about it:  scanning.  Oh, the scanning.  I can scan documents into PDFs, I can scan pictures into JPGs, and it does it pretty fast.    I also really like that where the paper comes out is basically right under the machine, so it doesn’t shoot out into the room, and takes up no more extra horizontal space.  The machine is sort of large to begin with, so this feature really helps save space on my desk.  The quality of pictures, both scanned and printed, has been very good for me.  And I am happy with the ease and speed that it both prints and copies, especially color.  The black and white does seem a tad slow to me, but the color more than makes up for that.  And it is pretty simple to use - there are big buttons on the front to change functions, which is good for me since I am not a big doirection-reader. 

A few things I am not as fond of:  the pages when I print come out in the order printed, meaning that my documents are in reverse order.  There may be a setting to reverse that, but I couldn’t find it. Also, setting up the fax was a bit complicated and tim-consuming.  We did get it to work, and there is even a place you can fax to verify it is working, but it took my spouse a few tries to get things right.  Lucky for me, my spouse sets things up.  :)  These are small things in thebig picture, but things that annoyed me.

All in all, I’m pleased by the device, and I am excited to never have to pay for faxing again.  Compared to our previous inkjet printer, this one is pretty slick, and the cartridges are much less expensive.  It does have 4 cartridges though, not two, so I am sure that factors in somewhere, depending on how fast they run out.  But if you want a printer that scans, faxes, copies, and does it all quietly and efficiently, look into this one in your search.  It is pretty nifty.  And now I am going to play with it some more, I have copying to do!

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Verizon Family Plan Members - Be Aware

Since my father’s death in January, there have been a lot of things to deal with.  His passing was wholly unexpected, and although he was a stickler for order and detail, there were many loose ends to tie up and things to do.  One of those things that we didn’t deal with right away was my parents’ Verizon cell phone plan.  My parents had a family plan with my two younger brothers (with my Dad as the authorized accountholder) and they were in a contract until the end of May.  In February, my mom and youngest brother went to a Verizon store and after about an hour, left and gave up on getting just my dad’s phone cancelled before the end of the contract.  The ineptitude of the employees (who basically claimed they couldn’t do anything, even with a death certificate, unless my mom wanted to pay a huge early termination fee) made my mom decide that the effort was better saved for other things.

But as I said, their contract ended in May, so last week, my mom and brother made another trek to the Verizon store, this time to end their phone plan (that was no longer under contract, they thought) and sign up for a different plan that more suited their needs (my other brother is joining his fiancee’s plan instead of another family plan with my mom).  And that is where the fun begins.  I can only report it secondhand, for I live 1000+ miles away and wasn’t there, but in the 3.5 hours (yes, three and a half hours) that they were there, this is what basically happened.

When they tried to end their phone plan, they were told that if you have a contract, it automatically renews once it ends until the authorized account holder cancels it.  The authorized account holder is my dad.  And because my dad is dead, he can’t cancel it.  So it can’t be cancelled.  YES, the first set of employees point blank told my mother and brother that the contract (that had already run out) could not be cancelled by anyone other than my dad, and because he was dead no one could cancel it.  My mom had brought the death certificate with her, and the employees told her it didn’t matter, no one else was authorized without my dad giving them authorization, even though he had passed away.

So then my mom told them “Good luck getting William to pay it then beyond the grave” and the employees went to get first a manager, and then after the manager claimed they couldn’t do anything, a supervisor, and the supervisor finally, after consulting “headquarters” and having my mom and brother both refuse to accept they had to keep paying, changed the authorization to my mom and allowed her to cancel it.

This, as I said, took three and a half hours.

So, if you have a Verizon family plan, look into your authorized account holders and see if you can have more than one.  Because if the unthinkable happens, Verizon may try to collect from you forever.  Literally.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about something I like to balance this rant about things I definitely do not. 

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Using The Prioritizer To Analyze Your Dreams

A while back, I talked about The Prioritizer, a tool I first read about on The Simple Dollar used primarily for comparing different financial goals. The tool asks a series of comparison questions to determine the order of priority among a number of specified goals, and although it was designed as a financial tool, it can be used to compare any set of stated goals, financial or otherwise.I’ve received emails since from a readers discussing balancing divergent goals, such as debt reduction vs triathalon training, or saving for retirement vs starting a business, and asking for feedback about how to prioritize these unrelated but important to them activities, and I was instantly reminded of The Prioritizer and how I had used it to compare a number of my own goals in terms of my financial commitment to each of them. The goals were not necessarily all directly financially related, although each had a financial component and ramification to it.  So I thought I’d run through what The Prioritizer is, and how it can be used to understand what is deeply important to you and how to find balance.

Using The Prioritizer is pretty straightforward. You begin by entering up to fifteen goals by name, one per line. These are just simple descriptions of each goal, such as “Retiring at Forty” or “Vacationing in Rome”.  Once you’ve entered your goals, the Prioritizer gives you a list of pairings of your goals, and you rank one of each pair as the more important to you.  Think about each pairing before you choose - really decide which of those two things is more important in your life.  This is the key.  Comparing the goals two by two is much less overwhelming than trying to compare everything at once.

Once you’ve done that, the Prioritizer uses the data you’ve entered to rank your goals from most important to you to least important, with a percentage ranking next to each.  the higher the percentage, the more important to you.  The beauty is in the simplicity.  This isn’t anything you couldn’t do yourself with a number of pro/con lists, but it does it automatically for you and gives a simple list ranking your goals for you.  From this, you not only know how your priorities rank - but how much more (relatively) important one priority is than another.

Is it perfect?  Of course not.  It is a tool like any other - but it may give insight to you when you’re stuck trying to compare apples to oranges.  When I’ve been stuck looking at a number of different goals and not sure where my priorities truly lie, I’ve been able to use this tool to make things a bit more clear cut.  And readjust my financial focus (and otherwise) appropriately.

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