Investing Basics

Stocks To Pick Admist This Financial Mess

2008-10-10T10:47:00.000-07:00

Knowing what stocks to pick during this financial mess we are in can be really difficult. There is a lot of uncertainty on Wall Street right now and even the professional stock traders are having trouble with picking the right stocks at the right time. If even the 'professionals' are having trouble right now, how is a beginner to make sense of the stock market.

For a long time now I have been wanting to get into the stock market and invest, but to be honest I am worse than a beginner when it comes to trading stocks. As an example of just how hopeless I am, lets look at some of what I would have considered my top prospects 12 months ago on the stock market - WM and TRAMX.

If you have been following the news at all you know that WaMu was seized by the FDIC and then sold off to JP Morgan Chase. The stock price is now at $0.0720. When I wanted to buy the prices were around $12. My entire investment, around $2500 would have been completely whipped out and I would have nothing left - suffer a total loss. Let's just say that when you think about stock market for beginners, you have to realize that it can be a very dangerous place to put your money if you don't know what you are doing.

The other investment that I was looking at was TRAMX, a Middle East focused fund that I was hoping would capitalize on rising oil prices. The fund opened at $10 a share and rose as high as $13. Now it is below $8. This would have been another major loss for me on the stock market.

What I am really trying to say here is that the stock market is no place for beginners who have no knowledge about what is going on and how to read financial statements. If you really want to invest money in the market then you need to spend a lot of time getting educated about it first. There is simply nothing that can compare to quality education.

The object of this education will be to understanding the stock market. With this type of education, making money on the stock market is going to be an elusive dream for you and your family. You will spend your days earning your wages to come home to your family spent. Day after day, year after year you will perform this 8-10 hour ritual with no hope of getting past it. This is where understanding the stock market comes into play. You see, getting the right information about how to analyze stocks, or knowing when prices are too high or too low, or feeling market sentiment so you can capitalize on it is one very important step to becoming financially independent and free. Don't you want to know how to pick good stocks and get a better understanding of the market?

Calculating a Paycheck for a Raise

2008-05-01T07:01:00.000-07:00

Getting a raise is always welcome, especially when finances are tight and every little bit that comes in helps you pay your bills, put food on the table, and empowers you to provide for the basic needs of your family. But how much is that raise going to affect your income? There are two ways to find out:

Wait until your paycheck comes
Do the math (a.k.a. build a spreadsheet)

I love building spreadsheets and can't stand the suspense of not knowing, so I would certainly choose the second option. Let the spreadsheet fun begin!

Getting Started
Calculating how your raise will affect your paycheck depends largely on how you get paid and how often. If you are a salaried employee or an hourly employee who gets paid the same amount each pay period,* you have it extremely easy. One simple step will help you calculate how much your raise will affect your pay to within 1% of how much your pay will change once your raise goes into effect.

* Most hourly employees who work a set amount of hours each week and get paid on a weekly or biweekly basis fall into this category.

If you are an hourly employee who gets paid semi-monthly or monthly, or you work a different amount of hours per week depending on what is available, then chances are your pay varies and you will have to take a slightly longer but still simple path to calculating your raise's impact on your take home pay.

The Easy Way
For those who qualify for calculating the impact of their raise the the easy way all you need to get started is to find the the amount of your last regular paycheck and the percent increase that your raise represents. If your employer didn't tell you your raise in terms of a percentage but instead told you that you got a raise of $0.50 or that you now make $13.50 and hour here is what you do calculate your percent increase:

Determine the change from your old wage to your new wage
Divide the change by your old wage

These steps are summed up by this equation with some example numbers found below:
Once you have determined the percentage of increase all you do add 1 to it and then multiply that by what you used to take home after each pay period.
The numbers in the image above are numbers from my normal paycheck, the percent raise I recently received, and my subsequent prediction of how much my new take home pay would be. As it turned out, my actual new take home pay was $937.43. My prediction was $1.50 or 0.16% over the mark - not too bad if you ask me! This method is so easy you might not even have to use a spreadsheet, but it might be a good idea anyway.

The Slightly Longer Easy Way
If you don't get paid the same amount each paycheck then calculating how much a raise will increase your take home pay will take a little more time and require some more work on your part, but it is still fairly simple. To get rolling:

Open up your favorite spreadsheet program (I use OpenOffice, an open source and free office application suite)
Separate all that was ~~stolen~~ taken from your paycheck into two categories: pre-tax deductions and taxes & post-tax deductions- below is an example of how this can work, but you can do it any way you want
Use an equation to calculate your old wage - Even though you know what your gross pay is from your old pay check, us the following equation to calculate your wage - Hourly Wage x Hours Worked - which should look like this inside the cell - "=B5*C5". I recommend doing it this way because you will eventually have to insert this equation into your spreadsheet and you might as well do it now when you can check the product against your paycheck. If the number generated by your equation equals what is on your paycheck then you know you are doing right.
Determine what your taxable pay and net pay are - you figure your taxable pay by subtracting all your pre-tax deductions from your gross pay. You figure your net pay by subtracting all your taxes and post tax deductions from your taxable pay. Entering your deductions and tax information as negative numbers allows you to use the sum function on Excel and OpenOffice, which can save you some time (and it looks something like this "=sum(D3:D6)" - with "D3" being the first cell you want to add and "D6" being the last).
Find the percentage taken from your paycheck for your 401(k) contributions and taxes paid - You find the percentage sent to your 401(k) by dividing the amount that you contribute by your gross pay. In the post tax deduction section you divide each of the amounts deducted from your paycheck from the taxable pay section. We will assume that your tax rates will stay relatively stable despite your raise (even thought they will rise a little)
Make a copy of your entire spreadsheet - paste all that you copied into a new tab. Next, copy and paste the percentage information by using the 'paste special' option. You can do this by right clicking on the cell where you want to paste it and choose the 'paste special' option. From there, pick the 'values' button and you should have all the values that you need for the next step.
Determine your what your new gross pay will be - if your employer has already told you what your wage will be than simply put this into the wage cell. If they told you the percent increase that you will be receiving than use this equation to determine your new hourly rate:

Insert the following equation into your taxes, post-tax deduction, and 401(k) cells - % * taxable income. This will end up looking something like "=D13*G7". My finished product looked like this (the equations are color coded):

This should return the approximate amount that you get paid in with your raise. It won't be exact (I was 0.42% off using this method) because your taxes will increase slightly with your pay increase, but it will still return a result within one percentage point of your future take home pay. That is still pretty good if you ask me.

Related posts:
Calculate a paycheck for a new pay schedule

If you have any questions about this process, feel free to contact me here.

Free $10, RFID, and the Invasion of Privacy

2008-04-28T07:23:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I got a notice in the mail from Chase Card Services notifying me that from now until June 6, 2008 I will get $10 back if I make 3 purchases using their 'blink' transaction feature. A 'blink' transaction is one where all you do is hold your card up to a little pad and it automatically performs the transaction. It utilizes a RFID chip inside your credit card that emits a radio signal to the little pad that acts just like swiping your card, except you don't have to swipe it. It works just like a Speedpass does for gas stations, or a FasTrak , or the I.D. badges that communist party officials have to wear in China so that Big Brother can keep tabs on them. It's the same exact thing.

I love free money (and so does my credit card compay) so I am planning on taking full advantage of this opportunity to rack up the rewards and to have my personal purchase information used to generate personal adds that will one day greet me as I enter my local 7-11. "Hello, Mr. Lucre," a bright, yet hologram 6 year old boy will say, buy me last pape'? I'm a sucker for little coughing kids.

The terms of the deal are as follows:

Shop at participating a shoppe
Wave your card in front of the potentially privacy stealing device
Get paid $10 for your trouble

The participating locations in my area are Arbys, 7-11, CVS, and Office Depot. The only place we really shop at is the CVS, but we haven't gone in several weeks. I don't want to go out and buy some random piece of crap just because I want $10 free bucks so it may turn out that we end up buying three packs of gum in three different transactions during the same visit to CVS on June 5th. A more likely scenario is that we don't make the three purchases but instead buy two pieces of crap that we don't really need and miss out the deal of the century. Go figure.

RFID related articles:
RFID Journal - first independent media company that solely covers RFID devices
Researchers See Privacy Pitfalls in No-Swipe Credit Cards - NYT, October 2006
Credit cards with radio tags speed purchases but track customers, too - Boston Globe, August 2006
A Hacker's Guide To RFID - Forbes, July 2004
RFID Chips Are Here - Security Focus, June 2003

Simplify Your Savings in 5 Simple Steps

2008-04-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

Could your savings use a lift? Is your wallet a little thin? Could you stand to pad your bank accounts? The equation for doing so is pretty simple. It looks something like this:

Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved Money

You see, the mechanism for saving money is simple. All it takes is making more money than you spend and spending less money than you earn. Its simple, but not easy. Many of our savings resemble a poor, underfed pig rather than the fat, succulent creatures that put bacon on the table. In fact, 43% of Americans make a habit of spending more than they make (Source: How does your debt compare?) That is a lot of people! For these their saved money equation is all out of whack and resembles something like this:

Spent Money = Earned Money + Saved Money (Borrowed Money)

That is a scary. When this is us, our ship is getting battered by the waves of life or our consumerism has taken over, possessing us with Legion like ferocity. Instead we all want our equation to look something like this:

Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved Money

Nice fat earnings, small spending, and large savings. We may want to save lots of money for different reasons, but we all want to save. Here are five simple (though not always easy) steps to make that equation a reality.

Determine what you really need - this is by far the most important step to increasing the amount of money that you can save. Most stuff you simply don't need. iPods? Nope. Cell phones? Nope. Cheesy crunchy gorditas? Well ... maybe ... oh well, I guess not. You see, if you can wrap your mind around the notion that you really don't need all that much to live, be happy, and make an impact on the world around you then you are jet set on becoming a multi-millionaire when you don't even make that much money. Your power to save increases dramatically when you realize what your real needs are.
Set up a budget - I have already talked about how budgets are wise and help keep you sane, but they also help you save - a lot. Budgets can be extremely simple, especially if you have already pared down your life to the necessities. All you need to know is how much you need to get by on, then pad it a little, and let this number become your spending limit. Let's just say that you make $1800 a month and need to spend $1300 on food, shelter, and necessary transportation for the month. You might pad this number up to $1400 to cover unexpected or irregular expenses. This is all the money that will be spent for the rest of the month. If you are not disciplined with the use of credit cards, you might want to withdraw that money from the bank at the beginning of the month and keep it stashed at your house somewhere. You cannot go to the bank again (obviously you will in a real emergency) and you cannot use any credit cards. Simple, right? It might be hard psychologically, but it is simple. Your time period could be the time between paychecks, a week, or a day, it really doesn't matter. It just needs to be concrete, achievable, and helpful for increasing the amount of money that you can save.
Transfer all remaining money into your savings accounts - whatever time period you choose for your budget, set up automatic transfers from you checking account to your savings for the amount you expect to have left over. By automating the process you don't have to remember to do the transfers yourself and you only have to revisit it when you get a raise or a new source of income or category of expense pops into your life. By precommitting your money in this way it may deter you from spending more than you need to.
Find ways to make money -another equally important part of saving more money is to find things that you like to do that earn you more money. Work smarter at your place of employment, pick up a profitable hobby, start a side business, or even work the kinchin lay. All will make you money with some varying degree of success. Don't kill yourself with work, but be useful for goodness sake.
Kill temptations -especially if they are your friends and then take the money that they have in their wallets. The cops will never suspect you! Coffee, computers, Cubs tickets, trips to Circus Circus, Carnival Cruises, and chillin' like a villain all have their place in your life, but sometimes they are just there to tempt you away from things that you really want. Sometimes it's just time to show those temptations whose boss by scaring them away with your creepy Suze Orman paraphernalia. Conversely, you can conjure up all the hopes and dreams you have for your future and compare that to the transient pleasure that you will derive from a drug laden beverage that "helps you wake up in the morning." Your dreams will win if they are worth anything.

Simple, but not easy.

Image: Nieve44/La Luz

I'm Pregnant!

2008-04-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

If all goes according to plan, by early November 2008 my wife and I will be the proud parents of a strapping young lad, like me. My wife thinks it is going to be a girl, but I know better - boy all the way baby!

I am simply overjoyed with the thought of being a dad. There will be so much life to share with our little one, I simply can't wait until he is born and ready for interaction. I hear that most of the pregnancy and very early infancy is mostly mother-baby bonding time, but I'm still pretty excited to see my wife's belly grow and to hold a squirming, messy baby as it enters the world. I want to see his eyes and think that one day this child of mine will spread love in the world and shine brightly for all to see. I'll get to learn his thoughts and know his heart. I am sure there will be struggles - sleepless nights, financial stresses, and serious parenting errors - but I know that it is going to be worth it.

I think that you can expect to see more baby related posts in the future as I prepare our finances for the onslaught of baby. I have numbers to crunch, diapers to evaluate, money to earn, last chance vacations to make, and countless other decisions to make over the next several months that I am sure some of my research and thinking will leak onto my keyboard and into your brain.

Does anyone know of some good baby cost projection stuff? I am really interested in how much baby will add to our monthly budget in food (after breast feeding), diapers, wipes, etc during the first year or two. I absolutely *need* these numbers for my planning purposes.

Simplify Your Savings

2008-04-21T03:01:00.000-07:00

Photo by: helmet13

There are a million and one ways to increase your savings. But for people like me, simplicity is essential to maintaining a long term involvement in managing money. If you make things complicated for yourself than you are never going to stick with it, because chances are you would much rather be doing something else. Using gimmicks and little tricks may provide some psychological benefit, but in the end I find that they add unnecessary clutter to savings goals and prove difficult to track - thus adding inefficiencies, frustration, and confusion into an otherwise simple equation:

Earned Money - Spent Money = Saved Money

The goal is always to save more money. Some people choose to do this by earning more, others by saving more (some even do both, hurray for frugal capitalists). Most people don't really have a hard time over complicating the idea of earning more. That's probably because most people have one job that they can easily track their income from because their employer writes them a check every few weeks and deposits it in the bank for them. Simple enough. It might get more complicated when a person is self-employed or when they have many different income sources that are constantly coming in, but this is naturally complicated. They didn't artificially complicate it. Oh how I long for this type of complication!

Then there is spending less. Everyone and their mother seems to have a magic money saving dance that somehow taps into the power of powerless ancestral spirits, thereby transporting large sums of money into Magic School Buses that shrink everything and deposit them in your inner ear. Unfortunately, most people destroy this money carelessly with a Q-tip during their morning ritual rather than do the hard core Rumpelstiltskin and rip themselves in half, thus magically transform the small money into regular size money (that is what the fairy tale left out). Don't worry the Magic School Bus will come back and sew you up.

Now most people really don't do magical dances, but it sure seems like they do sometimes. Instead they come up with little tricks, like putting all your spare change into your savings account. Spare change? Are you going to get rich by putting that $0.72 into your savings account because you bought a 20 oz. soda from the supermarket for $1.28? Is that really saving? Investing your spare change that you created through buying stuff, though technically classifying as saving more in that you do put more money in the bank, is not really saving. It is like taxing yourself for making purchases that you probably should not have.

I say abandon these gimmicky approaches and simplifying your savings. Increasing your savings should be about:

... keeping more of the money you earn - this means that you need to actually spend less in order to keep more. Increases in spending are like a plague that eats away at future earning potentials by turning your current store of cash into someone else's store of cash. This is good for their savings, but not for yours. Really reduce spending by sticking to the necessities. Buy stuff when you need it, go without it when you don't.
... your long term objectives, not your short term realities -sometimes we just can't help focusing on what is happening right now, but it really does help us when we step back and get the big picture. Your current want may be hindering your future want, so be careful what you give in to. Remember to keep a balance though, there are a lot of things that are more important than money.
... changing the world - you ultimately want to have a lot of money so that you can help a lot of people, right? Good, because I can't think of a better reason to have lots of money than to do lots and lots of real good with it. Financial independence may be what some people want, but not me. I want lots of money so that I can increase the quality of life of thousands upon thousands of people.

Ideally, one day I will be able to generate massive amounts of income while spending such a small amount of it that I create this self-perpetuating world improvement fund that grows and grows while it helps change the world. I'm not sure if I will make, but I know that I'm going to try.

Why do you want to save more? What's keeping you back from saving? Leave a comment here or feel free to send me your thoughts on my comment form.

Save Money On Big Vacations With A Cabin Rental

2008-04-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

I was browsing the internet recently and came across an idea that I had already known for sometime. It is that it is better to rent a cabin, house, or condo on vacation than it is to get a hotel. The website I was looking at was Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals and it had some good information in a post titled Gatlinburg Cabin Rentals Save Money. This particular individual was able to cut down costs to $25 per night for a group of 15 people to comfortably stay in one three bedroom cabin in Gatlinburg Tennessee. That is amazing. All that saved money could be used for more productive things, like:

Providing for the physical needs of a child less fortunate
Help improve the quality of life for someone with a terminal illness
Help one dyings child wish come true
Save it for you grandkids
Feed a homeless person

This is a great thing to do with all that extra income. What do you think?

Hump Day Humor: Cheap Admission

2008-04-16T07:01:00.000-07:00

Having money is great. Saving money to have more when you need it is always a good idea and it always pays off. But there is a conspiracy out there to separate me from my money. Whenever I want to use some service or to obtain some type of good, may it be in the form of some type of edible treat or skin warming fabric, people want to charge me money for it. I can't stand being charged for things that I need to survive, so when I stumbled upon a nice little scheme to get me 50% off the price of admission to various places of necessity I was shocked and awed by its subtle elegance. You see, with a little guile, a small amount of assembly skills, and an extremely flexible (or smallish) companion, you will never have to pay the full price for admission ever again.

Here is how it works:

You and a buddy (spouse, teenage child, friend, grandparent, total stranger, or pooka) decided what you want to pay half price to go see - it could be a movie, sporting event, or fair
Together you requisition a child transportation device (CTD) made popular by various celebrities because if you are going to save a few bucks you might as well do it style
Make sure one of you can fit in it - adjust the CTD accordingly if one of you cannot
Reinforce said CTD to support the weight of a grown man - you never know whne you might need it
Go to your location
One of you get inside CTD - be sure to cover it so that the people think that there is a baby inside the CTD
Pay for one (1) admission
Enter venue
Wait till lights dim(or enter restroom ) and escape the CTD
Subterfuge completed

In case you think that his is just a little too far fetched, check out this video that proves that this will work 100% of the time - no questions asked:

Find more how to and instructional Tricks videos on 5min.com

Since this obviously works, let us to turn our attention towards where we might be able to go in order to take full advantage of the massive money saving potential that these kind hearted individuals opened our eyes to. In San Diego and its environs this scheme could pay off big at:

Petco Park (San Diego Padres) - a $5 and up value
San Diego Museum of Art - a $10 value
Monday Morning Mommy Movies* at Pacific Theatres - a $10ish value
San Diego County Fair - a $12 value
World Famous San Diego Zoo - a $34 value
Disneyland - a $56 value

*All genders welcome. You don't even have to be the "child's" parent. Score!

Now that is a lot of savings! If you are a truly ambitious individual you could forgo the friend and just try and get some random stranger to claim you as their child as they wheel you into a movie theater for free - for free! All they would have to do is park you inside the restroom of your choice and you could enjoy an unlimited number of free admissions to all sorts of destinations.

Greedy-people-who-want-to-take-my-money-for-their-goods-or-services: 0
Steward and Family/Friends/Random internet strangers: 1

Random Website Metrics and the Carnivals

2008-04-15T18:01:00.000-07:00

The Carnivals
Both the Carnival of Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality are up and running. The Carnival of Personal Finance #148 is up at Gather Little by Little. My post on outsourcing to your kids was included as an editors pick. In Glblguy's comments on my article he made a good point that when we outsource tasks to our children it is important that they have a voice in the proceedings. Otherwise it turns into a masked form of slavery, and nobody wants that!

Kyle from Rather be Shopping was also kind enough to include my article about money poetry in the massive Festival of Frugality #121. Thanks!

Website Metrics
Now on to my random website metrics. Today I was playing around with Google Analytics and fell quickly in love with their Map Overlay feature. It tells me how many people have accessed my site from different countries around the world (19 from Germany - w00t!) which can then be broken down further into states and then cities. I decided I wanted to take a look at my U.S. stats since January 1, 2008. I noticed that I have had visitors from every state in the Union. Some states brought me way more traffic than others and this got me thinking, "I wonder if the number of people who have come to my site is equally distributed across the United States given that different states have different population levels?" It was spreadsheet time.

Here is the fruit of my 6 minutes of labor in all its glory:
The far right column is the hits to population rating. A value of 1 in this field would be a completely proportional number of hits for the number of people estimated to live in a given state. The average rating for my data is 0.95, which tells me that on average I have have a fairly disbursed reading public. The median number is .79, indicating that I may have some states that supply me with more visitors per population than other states.

I'm not really sure what this information does for me (very little I think), but it sure seems interesting. I may try do this again someday, but right now I'm just content to save it and store it away somewhere in magical computer information land.

Credit Card Woes and Weird

2008-04-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

First the woes - I got hit with a $39 late fee yesterday because my due date was on a Sunday (why?) and when I made the payment on its due date it wouldn't except it until Monday, a day late. Talk about a bummer. I will try and call my credit card company and see if all the advice I've read about calling and asking them to waive a late fee for a loyal payer will work. Time will only tell. What makes it even a bigger bummer is that on Friday I knew that this type of thing was going to happen so I reminded myself on the bus to remember to do it once I got home. I think reading Oliver Twist on the ride home was not the proper step to take to ensure that I would remember. I think from now on I will pay the credit card as soon as I get the statement. Its may cost me a few pennies in interest, but it will save me $39. If I can't get the fee waved then it is really going to cut into the free $100 I am getting from them for making my purchases with their card. Stupid 39% stupid tax.

The other weird thing that happened with my credit card is that our limit mysteriously jumped by 40%. That is kind of good since the amount of available credit that you use is a factor in determining your credit score. I don't imagine that our spending will increase with this new limit so that will hopefully improve our credit score some over the next few months.

Lesson learned: Pay your credit card bill on time

Money Poetry - How I Lost Hundreds By Being a Scaredy Cat

2008-04-11T13:28:00.000-07:00

I like poetry. It's fun to read and even more fun to write. I enjoy the rhythm that well crafted words can have as they sit on a page - their hidden accents crying out to be given voice. Most of the poetry I have read in my life has not had much to do with money. It's mostly about love, or beauty, or love, or the violence inherent in the system, or love. Mostly it is just about love. My favorite poet is probably William Blake - he has this craziness about him that I find appealing and interesting. He didn't really write about money either, so that is what makes this little bit that I found the other day all that more interesting.

Let wealth come in by comely thrift,
And not by any sordid shift:
'Tis haste
Makes waste;
Extreames [sic] have still their fault;
The softest Fire makes the sweetest Mault.
Who gripes too hard the dry and slip'rie sand,
Holds none at all, or little in his hand.

Robert Herrick, from Hesperides and His Noble Numbers

This snippet is from a poem that comes to us from a work published in 1648. I think, though, that its wisdom is timeless. Except for the part about the Fire and Mault, which probably meant something 360 years ago but means absolutely nothing to me now, this stuff makes a lot of sense. It teaches me to:

Be honest about how I make my money - read comely thrift > sordid shift. Look mom, it rhymes too.
Avoid get rich quick schemes and wasteful choices - they only lead to you looking like an idiot and losing money (and maybe turning some form of cold, sweet, and delicious treat into a pool of hot, saccharine, disgusting liquid because it gets exposed to fire)
Holding on to money too tightly is a surefire way to lose some of it.

That last one is pretty deep and it reminds me a lot of Princess Leia, who is only 16/17 as wise as Yoda so she is still pretty wise. It particularly reminds me of how when I was still in high school I entered into a reasonable sum of money due to some deaths in my immediate and extended family. At its peak I probably has close to $15,000 in the bank. Unfortunately, that is exactly where it stayed - earning me practically nothing. I had a brother who recommended I invest it in a mutual fund or a CD, but I was too scared to lose some of it investing and was deeply concerned that a CD just wasn't liquid enough for me and the ripe old age of 17. I mean I could have needed $15,000 at any minute! I held onto my money way too tightly, didn't take any risks, and ended up paying for it in terms of never realized gains. Money is a tool, so use it like one.

Outsource To Your Kids Already!

2008-04-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Modern society has lost its ability to successfully employ its children. Don't worry, I am not about to advocate we abandon child labor laws or that we continue to exploit the world's poor through sweatshops and wage slavery. What I am about to do is argue that we can successfully employ our children to do things that promote the health of our family, teach our kids the way that markets work, and save us a dollar or two in the process.

Outsource When You're Too Lazy To Do It Yourself
Many times the best time to outsource to the fruit of your loins is when you're simply too lazy to do whatever it is that needs to get done yourself. Let's use supplying lunch at work as our case study. Everybody needs to eat. Buying lunch at work can be expensive while packing a lunch can be time consuming. When faced with taking 10 minutes to pack a lunch or spending $7 bucks to buy some food many people choose to go ahead and pony up the cash. I certainly don't make $42 an hour (~$87,000 annually) so paying that much for someone to supply me lunch is absolutely insane. I'd rather skip the meal than live so wildly outside my means. But what if I am chronically lazy and genuinely can't overcome the gravitational pull of my couch (or am honestly "too busy")? What can a brother do? Pay your kids to to do it on the cheap.

If you are going to outsource your lunch making anyway you might as well keep that money in the family. A Third Grader should be able to pack some left overs into a container for you to take with you to work. Heck, they might even be able to put an apple in a bag, make you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich ala Clever Dude, and throw in a bag of chips. It could take them all of twenty minutes and you could pay a 7-9 year old a dollar for their time. That way you eat the food that you already bought and get to be lazy - at the same time. How sweet is that?

There are other benefits to outsourcing your lunch preparation to your children as well:

It forces you to teach your child at an early age the nutritional content of food so they don't stuff your bag full of 100 calorie Snack Bags or poop friendly yogurt. You may like the taste of these products but they will only lead to lots of time on the john and that can hurt your productivity at work. But at least your digestive system will be regulated.
It will help teach your child to think about others. Since they are providing a service to a customer/parent they will need to know what you like and how you like it. It also gives them a great opportunity to leave you cool little notes or draw you neat pictures of how one day a sea creature came to your house and ate the dog, but that is okay because your child crawled in the creatures mouth, saved the dog, and found enough treasure to rule 10 islands in 2nd Life with a fist as hard as iron and a touch as soft as satin.
Because your employee is a child, it will force both of you to learn to communicate with each other. Anything that fosters communication between you and your child has to be a plus since the strains of the day can easily creep in and steal precious parent-child moments. Now you can always start a conversation with you child by saying, "So about my lunch tomorrow ...." Isn't that precious?
It can replace the inefficient "allowance." Those things suck and leave kids feeling like their parents owe them money or stuff when parents don't owe them anything. Now you would be able to get your kids to do real work if they want to get real money.
Any good work teaches the value of a dollar, and if you treat your child with respect and dignity as you employ them in the service of your appetite then they just might learn how much one of the multicolored things that pass as greenbacks these days is worth.
With some luck, your careful parenting and outsourcing (because you are lazy) might get your child to work hard for the rest of their life. Instilling a good work ethic is a great gift a parent can give a child as it will help them until they one day have children of their own to let them be lazy.

So what are you waiting for? If you have kids whip out a contract and have them sign it in blood. If they fail to meet its draconian requirements send them to bed without any supper. That'll show them for being so trusting and incompetent at the same time!

But seriously, think about if your child would be ready for this type of responsibility. Would it be a good vehicle to teach them a little something about you, their parent, as well as a little something about money? You could couple it with lessons on saving money, investing, teaching them what it takes to run and own their own business (a lunch making business is still a business), or how to work and have fun doing it. When it comes down to it, outsourcing work to your child (if they are young) may actually take more of your time than doing it yourself, but the benefits for your child are probably worth the effort on your part. So this can be a classic win-win-win if everything goes according to plan.

P.S. I expect a 10% commission on money saved by my brilliant idea. That's why there are three wins in the above paragraph. You win by being a good parent, your child wins by learning life skills, and I win because you will make me rich for my expert* advice. Checks can be sent to the follow address:

Santa Clause
North Pole

Me and him are tight from our summers of hunting for tadpoles and playing Jail Break on our street. He will be sure to forward all the cash along to me.

*I am not an actual expert, but my advice is.

Free Jamba Juice

2008-04-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

If you have a Jamba Juice near where you live or work then be sure to head there on April 8th (tomorrow) before 10 AM for a free smoothie! I won't be able to take advantage of it because of my commute - but my wife will.

Bike Commuting: Is it for me?

2008-04-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

I am currently in the serious consideration phase of becoming a bike commuter. The weather is starting to get really nice here in San Diego and I would love to spend a few hours each day enjoying the open skies and brown (but temporarily green) countryside. Here is a quick little list of some of the pros and cons of that I have thought of that are currently influencing my thought process.

The Pros

Good exercise - the extent of my current exercise regimen is 3 miles of walking per work day coupled with some light calisthenics thrown in to keep me alert as I sit at my desk. If I switched to biking my total mileage traveled under my own power would increase 633% per week and I would be spending 1400% more time exercising. That's a lot of nuts.
Same approximate commute time - right now taking the bus gets me from door to door in about an hour and 10 minutes each way. In order to duplicate that with a bike commute I would only have to average 10 mph, which seems doable to me even though I haven't commuted on a bike ever. Who knows, I may get faster once I start doing it regularly and beat the bus to work.
I wouldn't have to buy a bus pass - $64 saved each month. Well probably not saved, just shifted towards bike maintenance - but by maintaining my own bike each month I will gain some skills that I could one day sell to others. That way that $64 will go to making me more useful to myself and to others instead of going to "the man" who runs the San Diego public transit system.
I wouldn't have to worry about a car - I really don't worry about a car for me right now anyway since we only have one car that my wife uses, but I could continue in this state of abnormality for longer still. No insurance premiums, no maintenance costs, no gasoline, no car washing - talk about money saving. I haven't crunched all those numbers yet, but I probably will soon as I weigh out this idea in more detail.

The Cons

I don't already own a bike - that means I have to go out and buy a new product that I have no experience in. Buying stuff is not something I am good at. In fact, I suck at shopping - especially when it is something that is needed. So not only will I have to research something new, I will have to go to a store and ask questions and try things out and weigh different options, all the while hoping I am not going to waste hundreds of dollars on something that doesn't really meet my needs. Why does shopping have to have risks?
I have never cycled such a long distance before - 11 miles one way turns into 22 miles round trip. I would be logging 110 miles a week. That is a lot of miles. To mitigate the immediate impact on my body I would probably just bike one way until my legs can get adjusted to the strain, but that is still a lot of miles. Most people I have seen on this internet thingy say they ride about 12-15 miles for their whole commute. I would be doing twice as much. Is that doable?
I would have to use a very busy road that over one stretch has high speed traffic - here my inexperience coupled with an idiot driver could result in serious injury or death. Accidents are relatively rare, but they still do happen.
I would have to shower and change once I got to work (or stay stinky all day because I sweat like pig) - really, I sweat like a pig. When I was still wresting in college I would drink about 5 pounds of water during a practice and still loose 3 pounds of water weight by the end. That means I would seep about 1 gallon of liquid from my skin over the course of a 3 hour practice. Of course that was seriously rigorous physical activity, but I think it might be carried over to a bike commute.
I would need to carry my lunch and clothes on my back or bike - this could be awkward, dangerous, or both. I'd much rather have a nice warm breakfast and fresh change of clothes magically appear at work than have to lug it around. Genies are expensive so I don't expect on hiring one anytime soon.
I'd have to bike even if I didn't "feel" like it

I'm not sure which side will win, but I am hoping that the pros do. Bike commuting just sounds like it could be more fun than riding the bus and I like the idea of having a rock hard, functional body. I may even get my butt back! Hurrah for abnormally large butts!

This definitely needs a thorough financial analysis as well, but I just wanted to get some of my other considerations down since not everything is about money. I plan on going to a bike shop soon to see what type of bike I'd be looking for and just how much it might cost. I am not looking forward to it, but it must be done.

March Budget: Friends Steal Your Money

2008-04-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

As per our blogger/blog reader agreement, here are the numbers for our monthly spending:

This would have been another month of stellar budgeting skills had it not been for a thieving friend and a case of pay-a-bill-twice-for-no-reason syndrome that snuck (or is it sneaked - you decide) up on me without warning. Our thieving friend is getting married and my wife simply had to throw one of those before-you-get-married-you-should-have-one-of-these parties that ended up accounting for $75 worth of expenses that landed in our Misc budget line. Add to that my thoughtless double payment on my wife's cellular policy we would have done even better this month than last, running about $140 under budget - which isn't too shabby if you ask me. The only good news here is that we were still under budget and that I won't have to pay our cell phone bill next month - which may translate into a killer month next month, unless some other friend of ours decides to steal our money too. *shakes fist at air indiscriminately*

Our food budget crept up this month to $2.25 per person per day. I little while back I tried to live off less than a $1 a day for food for an entire week (it was fun, you should try it) and I am thinking of doing it again sometime soon for possibly as much as a month. I ate mostly beans and rice, spinach, and a few apples - so I may have to try and do some food diversification if I make a run for a whole month. It will be interesting to see to how my body handles the decrease in calorie consumption given that I now walk about 3 miles a day to get to work. If I end up doing it I will be sure to post all the info here as per our blogger/blog reader agreement. Agreements are agreements after all.

Net Worth for March 2008 - I Am Legend Edition

2008-04-01T10:01:00.000-07:00

The doom and gloom that I predicted last month did not materialize in the month of March, but it should have. Our net worth grew by 5% this month, or $1,126 according to my NetWorthIQ profile. Of that $1,126, $1,040 came from our tax refunds that we received from the Golden State and Uncle Sam. If we had not received this refund our total growth would have been $86 or 0.38%. Instead of the graph that you see on the right hand side of your screen with the nice upward slope you would have seen something that would have looked like this:Like I predicted last month, this graph has a striking similarity to the negative parabola of doom seen here:
Now our situation isn't really all that bad, it's just fun to draw a negative parabola of doom. But even if our financial future really does resemble this bleak one - I could always hope that a future cure for cancer morphs into a virus that wipes out 95% of humans, turns about 4% into freak of nature, zombie-esque mutants, and leaves less than 1% of humanity as we now know it. Then I could walk by piles of cash and not even think about picking up a penny of it - I wouldn't even have to check my bank account balances anymore. Talk about liberating. It might be a little lonely - with all those empty buildings and quiet streets - but there are always trade-offs for financial stability. Man-made apocalypse here I come! (I Am Legend)

Intellectual Commitments: Hard Determinist

2008-03-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

This is the first installment of my intellectual commitments series. It's a doozy ...

I am a hard determinist. I believe that everything that has ever happened happened because it had to and that everything that will happen in the future must happen the way that it will. Being a hard determinist means that I reject the common construction of free will that says I can act or believe however I wish at any moment. I think that it can feel like we are free from all internal and external constraints and that we can act against our nature and disposition if we so choose, but I think that in reality that feeling is simply an illusion, a trick our mind, will, and heart play on us. I do hold to a very qualified and limited notion of freedom, but now is not the time for me to talk about that. You see, its simply not determined to be ...

I am a hard determinist for one main reason divided into three parts. The main reason is that it seems to be the best representation of reality. Of my three parts I will only mention two because the third will probably be another post in and of itself:

History appears to demand it - if you think about the past you will realize that there are certain true facts about it. These true facts are the preconditions from which the world as we know it exists. Without these true facts there is no modern world as we know it. These true facts are a necessity and must have happened the way that they did for today to be both real and today. Since there will only be one real future that will one day be called today, it is easy to assume that there will have to be true facts that will be created today that will eventually lead to that one real and true future. Since the past is set in stone it appears that the future, to be real, must also be set in stone.
Science relies on it - there are tons of "laws" in science that say if this or that happens then blank will happen. If any object falls it will accelerate at 9.8 m/sec² in a vacuum. Objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by another force. Green eggs and ham taste really good. All these are scientific "facts" that indicate that given certain conditions certain outcomes result. These results then become conditions themselves with new results and so the chain goes on and on and on ....

Chances are you are wondering what pre-existing conditions somehow forced you to be reading this post. Was it that bagel you had for breakfast? Did brushing your teeth when you were five have something to do with it? Can you really rebroadcast MLB events on international waters with implied oral consent instead of the required express written consent? I simply answer yes. All of it matters and all of it has some type of bearing on you reading my post. Doesn't that blow your mind?

Personal Finance Application
Believe it or not, this commitment of mine has some implications on the way that I think about my finances. Because I am a hard determinist:

... I think that if I do certain things I will get certain outcomes. My future is directly related to how I respond to today, so I ought to respond with my future in mind. If I want to retire when I am 29 and live a life that changes lives rather than fattens my pocket book and feeds my family then there are certain steps that I need to take right now to see that happen. I'm not saying I know what those steps are (other than make a lot of money very quickly), and I am certainly not willing to say that the preconditions exists for it to be so (I'm certainly hoping it is), but I know that is a potential possibility that must rooted in a certain course of action. I also know that if I'm not taking the steps then I will not even be in the running.
... I think that small stuff matters. Things like turning off lights when they are not in use, using a rewards credit card, and brushing your teeth with less toothpaste may not be the most important steps to financial health, but they do matter. So I try to be wise with the things that I do or don't do. I attempt to make sure I am making the best us of my time and resources to create a future that I will be happy with.
... I think that when it comes down to it, there are some things that I have no power over - so I can stop crapping my pants. Fear and anxiety over things outside of my sphere of action will only cause me to miss out on opportunities to respond to negative financial circumstances in a way that can turn the negative into a positive. Am I worried about my (non-existent) stock portfolio give the current market conditions? Maybe I should consider buying up all the bargains that other people's fear and anxiety have created. Am I worried that home prices are going to continue to plummet? This could be the time to get my ducks in a row to purchase a rental property. Is credit card debt tanking my finances? Are you seeking to find debt relief? Now is the time to learn the financial wisdom and discipline it takes to be all grown up. It seems to me that if you are experiencing some type of fear or anxiety you are probably in danger of missing out on an opportunity to grow either emotionally/personally or financially - so stop being a pants crapper.

In the spirit of intellectual honesty I have to admit that a free-will-er might give the exact same advice and it would that makes perfect sense within their own world view (I just think their world view is wrong). Hard determinists don't have a monopoly on good advice!

What do you think about this whole free-will thing? Is it for the birds? Am I crazy? It's time to call out the color of the kettle.

Hump Day Humor: Julie Andrews

2008-03-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Today's laugh comes to us from the 1967 film Thoroughly Modern Millie. In the following clip we find our country bumpkin (Julie Andrews) plopped into the big city of New York. Faced with the fact that she is in the dreaded state of not being like everybody else *gasp* this opening number depicts to what extremes we will go to fit in. If you only know Julie Andrews as the nun from The Sound of Musicyou may find this clip a little risque. The really funny part comes near the end.

That clip is the Bee's Knees. Sometimes I think the things that modern men and women do to make themselves to look "normal" is similarly stupid. As an example, I'm absolutely sick of effeminate men. Retrosexual 'til the day I die - word up. Now if only the hair on my head was curly I could transplant it onto my back and really look sexy. You know it! Then I could go to public pools and show of my back of love, clogging up the pools drains and proving my manliness to the world. My wife is drooling as we speak ...

Are you Sodom and Gomorrah-able? Have you ever done anything Sodom and Gomorrah-able? Is that just nonsense that rhymes with adorable? Help!

P.S. In case mentioning Thoroughly Modern Millie is hurting my retrosexual cred you got to understand that I was doing push-ups while talking to the Most Interesting Man in the World on my bluetooth when my wife walks in and says I need to see something. I enjoy listening to my wife and trust her when she says I need to see something. She was right.

My Intellectual Commitments: A Series Is Born

2008-03-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

You can learn a lot about an individual if you can listen to more than what is being said. Blogs are a great example of this. They are chalked full of hidden hints and subtle signs of an individuals deeper thoughts and core beliefs. Most people don't really talk about these things in their blogs explicitly, especially in blogs about personal finance, but I think that the way that one thinks is really important and affects all areas of that person's life. Therefore, I am going to spill my beans and unveil some of my intellectual commitments over some unspecified period of time, and I am going to relate them all to personal finance. Many of them may not seem like they have any bearing on money and its management, but I am going to do as much mental yoga as I possibly can to give all my intellectual commitments a personal finance twist.

I hold a few views that may not be considered normal. I am not out to offend anyone, so if you take extreme umbrage with my views on things feel free to leave a comment and I will try to address your concerns. Or you can just call me stupid and leave it that. Either way I hope everyone has fun thinking about how our deepest thoughts affect every facet of our life.

I am a ...

Hard Determinist
Coming soon!

Carnivals - The super late link back

2008-03-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

The Carnival of Personal Finance is up over at Mortgage Quotes and the Festival of Frugality is up at My Dollar Plan. Better late than never I suppose.

Getting Our Heads Together

2008-03-24T08:55:00.000-07:00

I am the person who handles the finances in our family. I track our spending habits and make sure our accounts look like they are supposed to. I regularly head on over to the websites of our banking and credit institutions to check to see what purchases were recently made and enter them into our tracking spreadsheets (I used to do this using receipts but it ended up being more convenient to use the bank for this). These spreadsheets make prefect sense to me, but as I mentioned before they are still a work in progress and only look like a jumble of numbers to my wife. In fact, she considers them unreadable - and it is one of my new challenge-ified goals to make the information contained in these spreadsheets not only readable but also usable by my wife.

At the end of this month I am planning on taking the first step toward this goal. I will be putting together a presentation for my wife that will outline our financial situation. I have tried doing a similar thing before by just pulling my wife over to our computer and showing her the important information, but as I mentioned before these spreadsheets are unreadable to the outsider. I asked my wife the types of things that she would want to know about our finances and here is what she told me:

how to get into our financial accounts
where our money comes from
where our money goes
how we are progressing on our savings goals
it has to look pretty (ummm, my spreadsheets don't look pretty?)

All the suggestions are really good ones (especially the one about how to get into our accounts!) . So I am working on getting together a presentation that does all these things in a way that my spreadsheets simply can't do - a pretty way. I'm not sure how effective I will be at accomplishing this, but it never hurts to try. I am putting together a Power Point like slide show so that I am forced to stray a from putting things in spreadsheets. Hopefully this will give me some insight into how to make my system more readable for my wife and this knowledge will translate into fulfilled challenge-ified goals.

Welcome Gather Little By Little Readers

2008-03-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

If you aren't a reader of Gather Little By Little I wrote a guest post for glblguy that he put up today. Feel free to head over to his blog and check out my article Why be frugal?

If you are new to my blog, please consider subscribing to my feed and checking out some of my articles. I am currently in a series discussing why my family is committed to live debt free. I've also written about monkeys, ninjas, and what you can do with pennies. I enjoy tracking my spending and have some realistic but ambitious goals for 2008. Feel free to stay as long as you like. And remember - always be good, always stay clean, and always have fun.

Budgeting: A Guide to Sanity and Wisdom

2008-03-21T13:28:00.000-07:00

My wife and I budget. Well, that is not technically true. I build spreadsheets and crunch numbers and think of areas where we can shave off a few dollars here or there, but my wife is actually the one in the trenches making our budget work. If it wasn't for her we would probably be eating Top Ramen every day instead of the nutritious and flavorful meals we currently eat. Our house would be drab and spartan, instead it is warm and welcoming. My clothes would be torn and tattered, but she keeps them clean and neat. If it wasn't for my wife applying what we plan, all my tinkering would get us nowhere.

But if my wife is the soldier in the trenches, then I am like the Captain on the field. I can see where the tide of expenses is encroaching on our precious financial independence and devise the strategy to defeat our foe. I am there, ready to lend a hand where needed - but my primary responsibility to to stand back and get the big picture. I have to keep the good of my family, which includes the mental health of my wife, in my mind constantly as we face the day to day struggles of finances. If it wasn't for the plan, we would soon be overwhelmed by the smallness of our income and the greatness of our expenses.

You see, in a family it takes the commitment of all its members to live debt free for the sake of changing the world and there is no greater display of this than in budgeting. Budgeting is a tool that tests your fiscal tenacity, a way to control and maximize financial efficiencies. It takes careful planning as well as thoughtful execution. Without these two components any budget will either fail, be useless, or make no lasting change on the world.

Here are five quick reasons to budget:

It takes the guess work out of things - if you budget you know exactly how much you will be making and how much you will be spending. This will make saving for things like retire-from-earning-a-wage-but-still-working-to-help-people-in-need-ment a whole heck of a lot easier.
You know exactly what needs to change - since you will know exactly how much you make and how much you spend you will be able to see where you spend too much money or where you make to little. This knowledge is power.
You know exactly how to change - this is directly related to the above. Once you know the problem you can analyze the information and make the changes that you need to. Are you living a lifestyle that you cannot support? Is coffee, or clothes, or the place you live destroying your ability to stay out of debt and change the world? Then this is where you see the stark reality of your finances and shape up.
Law and order brings freedom - I love rules. I mean, without that law of gravity and the law of friction I would be going nowhere fast! Laws bring structure and function to our life and often times our financial life needs some structure so that it can function.
Chuck Norris would do it - you know the guy budgets. If it is good enough for the Chuck you know its good enough for you.

How you handle your personal finances is going to directly impact your ability to live a sane and giving life - so why not budget and make the world a better place?

*whispers* Save the budget, save the world.

Where's Your Tax Refund?

2008-03-20T19:30:00.000-07:00

For everyone who was smart enough to already have their taxes completed and filled out you are probably waiting by your mail box like Elvis in Return to Sender. Fear not, the IRS is not a hoochie momma who will let your romantic, Elvis-esque hip gyrations and tax return go unnoticed. They just like to play hard to get.

But if you are in serious earnest to find out when you will be getting your money back, you can go to the IRS website and check it our for yourself. All you have to do is enter your SSN, how you filed, and the exact amount of your return (sorry to all those work readers who didn't have the wherewithal to carry a spare copy of their tax return with them for just such a purpose). I checked it out a few weeks ago and it told me that I could expect to get my refund by April 1st. Well, I just checked again and I get my refund tomorrow. W00t.

If you are a California resident then you need to head over to the California state version of what appears to be an identical program. But it has never worked for me so I have no idea when I will get my state refund. I hope it works for you but apparently the state of California really does play hard to get. Stupid Sunshine State making me sit in the dark. Where's the sunshine? It doesn't say.

Thanks to Fabulous Financials for pointing me to the IRS site.

I've Been Married For a Year

2008-03-20T14:09:00.000-07:00

Yeah, that's me. In Afghanistan and Pakistan men take really cool photos like these and they are considered manly. Since I am a manly man and I like to bow to all sorts of cultural norms foreign to my native country, I decided that while I was out celebrating my first wedding anniversary that I would pose for this picture to inspire my wife to love me more. It worked.

On St. Patrick's day my wife and I celebrated the beauty of our marriage the following ways (with the following costs):

Breakfast at Champ agne Bakery - $18.91
Afternoon at the Flower Fields - $9.00 with coupon
Dinner at Carvers Steaks & Chops - $87.95
Dessert at home - $5.38

Everything was absolutely fantastic. Champagne Bakery makes really good pastries. We love the Jesuite - "A crisp triangle shaped puff pastry, filled with vanilla custard and topped a baked sugar glaze, slivered almonds and powdered sugar." It melts in your mouth and fills you with sweet goodness. After breakfast my wife had to jet to work her half day while I went and took care of some business. This was lame, but necessary.

After my wife returned from work we heading up the coast to the lovely town of Carlsbad. I could almost taste the sea on the air as it blew cool across my beardless face. There was a coupon in a local magazine for a discounted admission to the Flower Fields so we only spent half of what we would have otherwise - our only frugal move of the entire day. We got some really cool pictures and it was fun to walk and talk with the most beautiful woman in the world.

After the flower fields and tons of fun taking pictures and hanging out we went out to a fancy pants dinner. We both ate filet mignon and my was it tasty. I like mine medium-rare because it feels like the meat just melts in your mouth - you don't even have to chew! Over the course of dinner I gave my wife her two gifts, a poem for the day and a letter to be opened on our 25th wedding anniversary. I've asked my wife her permission to put the poem I wrote here so that others can see just how wonderful she is. She consented mainly because my manly flower photo really got to her (see photo above):

On a day like today ...
On a day like today
Not more than a year ago
Enduring love made haste to make strong its wishes
You became mine, and I yours
Each committed to love
A bond, lasting until this shadow fades into
Reality – glowing bright like the sun, but brighter still –
Together we make a love greater than us
On a day like today
Dawn brings fresh air and
Another chance to hear love sing
Yearning for you, I hunger deeply

All told we spent $121.24 on a day of fun and good food. All the money came out of our vacation fund so the day had absolutely no impact on our monthly budget, as our save-up-to-buy-big -purchase rule dictates. I took it out of our vacation fund because it was kind of like a vacation and our date fund would have collapsed if I tapped into it. All in all, it was very relaxing day and was a great way to celebrate the beauty of our marriage. I hope we both live long enough to celebrate at least 49 more!