Not Living on Ramen

First, the good news.

2009-07-12T11:46:00.003-05:00

Things on the employment front are going swimmingly. My district mailed me a contract so I have official confirmation that I have a job. Naturally, it arrived at my parents' the day after I headed down to the Delta to take care of a few things so I haven't gotten it turned back in yet, but I'll get it signed and sent in tomorrow. I'll be paid the princely sum of $35,811 next year.

The boy got a dollar an hour raise. This has no impact on my finances whatsoever, but it still makes me happy. He's planning to rework his budget to take this into account. The fact that he has a budget makes me even more happy.

It's nice to get paid.

2009-07-01T17:48:00.003-05:00

Last week the second of my June paychecks arrived. On the same day, a $250 stipend also showed up in the mailbox. The first of the June paychecks is still AWOL, but it still felt pretty darn good to have some money flowing in to counterbalance the steady gush of money out. Even though I had plenty to get me through the entire summer if need be, I was inching toward the point where I would have had to "borrow" money from my designated long term savings account at FNBO to pay my bills, and I found that somewhat disquieting.

Today an envelope containing my pay for all of July and August arrived. I have this secret worry that that means they've decided to fire me, but that's probably just my irrational fears taking over. In any case it meant I now have enough to live on until September (barring any big unexpected expenses, of course) and transfer another $3K into savings. I feel rich. Those of you who make much more than I do may now commence laughing at me.

Once this deposit posts, I'll have over $20,000 in my savings account, a new milestone. Throw in my savings bonds, my Roth from 2008, the contents of two other checking accounts and another much smaller savings account, and my stash of emergency cash in case I ever need to go on the lam, and I think I'm doing ok, not great, way too much frivolous spending in the past year to be anywhere close to great, but ok. However, note that that list does not include contributing to a Roth in 2009.

I've been setting the money aside; it's all there in that nice big savings account. I'm just being indecisive about what to do with it. It might make sense to keep contributing to the same index fund I used last year, but I'm finding the current losses a bit harder to stomach than I'd imagined.

FNBO has been promoting the option to set up multiple accounts, probably in an effort to compete with ING, and I've been toying with the idea of setting up one account for eventual Roth contributions, one for my car fund, one for graduate school application costs once I get my next stipend check to use as seed money, and perhaps later one for the costs of transitioning to graduate school. It might help me focus more on specific goals and keep me from coasting on the idea that I've got this big chunk of money so I can quit worrying so much. On the other hand, I'd still have the bulk of the money sitting there with no particular purpose at the moment, maybe a house fund for ten years from now, but nothing tangible so it might not help with that as much as it might otherwise.

Vacation

2009-06-30T15:53:00.003-05:00

My father is on a mandatory two week unpaid vacation. In other words, they're closing the plant down and doing temporary layoffs. It isn't the cheeriest of news.

I'm not sure what he did for his first day because I ran away to the library, where I had to pay $1 to replace the card that's floating somewhere amongst the flotsam of my life back in the Delta. In the future, I shall judge all possible places to live by the quality of their libraries, I think. Bustling libraries bursting with books suggest that a community actually cares about being part of civilization. I had no idea how nice the area where I grew up is until I went away.

2009-06-24T21:22:00.003-05:00

I have a handful of half-finished posts started in the past few days, but tonight I don't feel like completing any of them.

This morning I took my grandmother to the nursing home for a conference to discuss my grandfather. They do these every so often, and the news is always the same. He's stable for an eighty nine year old who has suffered two strokes leaving him with a significant degree of aphasia and little use of his right arm, had had breathing problems and been on supplemental oxygen since a bad case of double pneumonia in December of '99, and has been unable to walk ever since he was bedridden due to minor surgery in the summer of '06. They tweaked the dosage of one of his meds, but his condition is basically unchanged. There isn't really any hope that things will get better.

Afterward, I met up with my mother at the movies. We watched Up. I wept repeatedly.

Only the truly cheap

2009-06-23T20:00:00.004-05:00

My boyfriend has a new kitten. She's pretty rambunctious so she's going to need some toys to keep her occupied, although, like most cats, she seems to prefer a crinkly ball of paper, a ballpoint pen that fell under the table, and some stray dice to her spandy new store-bought playthings. However, I do wish she'd find someplace to sharpen her claws besides my flesh.

I offered to buy a nice catnip-infused corrugated cardboard scratching contraption for the little darling, and a discussion of whether it mightn't be more cost effective to just let her shred the sofa ensued. Given that the couch in question is a very threadbare and somewhat uncomfortable blue reclining monstrosity for which my boyfriend proudly paid the princely sum of ten entire dollars this spring, I can see his point, but I still oppose letting kitties wantonly destroy living room furniture. Finally, I came up with an argument to support my gut instinct: what if ten years from now he gets a couch that costs, say $200, which I know from furniture shopping with my mother would buy a much nicer used couch but not a new one, and then she destroys it because she's developed bad habits. He countered that he can't imagine ever having furniture that costs that much.

Good grief! I like frugal finds, but I plan not to base all of my home furnishing decisions on what I can score cheapest at the thrift store when I'm in my thirties. I guess I'm hoping for a little lifestyle inflation.

It sure would be nice to get paid.

2009-06-21T14:08:00.002-05:00

Normally, I get a paycheck on the fourth and nineteenth of every month. The school had said they'd mail the summer paychecks since our salary is divided into twenty four increments. Then the day before the end of the year, word came down that they had decided not to mail the first of the June checks and to come pick them up instead. This presented no minor difficulty since I planned on being five hours away. My assistant principal called down to the central office to see if there was any way I could pick it up before I left, but no dice. Then one of our wonderful secretaries volunteered to send it on if I'd bring her a self-addressed stamped envelope, which I did. My June fourth paycheck has yet to arrive.

Thus, I guess I'm going to have to call on Monday and try to figure out what happened. I'm also not betting on my other paychecks actually making it parents' house either. I went to central office three times to try to change my address for the summer, and all three times the one person in the entire school district capable of inputting the information into the computer was out of the office. On the third try, I think one of the other ladies took pity on me; she told me to write down my new information and she'd be sure the correct person took care of it. At least if those paychecks get mailed to the wrong place, my roommate will let me know.

On the bright side, although it is somewhat frustrating and will probably be a hassle if the checks got lost in the mail, it's nice to have enough in savings that even waiting until August to get paid would be just a blip on my radar. I can't imagine how stressful this would be if I needed the money to make bill payments on time. Maybe I will go to direct deposit next year, but given my school's record for messing stuff up, I'm not all that keen on letting them have access to my bank account.

Your Tax Dollars at Work, Part 2

2009-06-15T23:50:00.002-05:00

Someday, I'm going to have to sit down and calculate how much extra money the government has devoted to me, above and beyond the normal things like public schooling and my salary as a teacher. I suspect the total will be staggering.

There were a couple of nice summer programs in junior high and high school, science and literature camps funded entirely by the state. Things got a bit crazier when I hit college. In addition the standard state subsidy for my university, I got a sizable scholarship from the state. They were willing to throw $40,000 at me to try to keep me around after graduation, and I accepted $30,000 of their money. I guess it worked; the feeling of moral indebtedness played at least a small role in my decision to ask to be assigned to teach in my home state when Teach For America asked about my geographic preferences.

Then there's the research funding. My first summer research internship was partially funded by a private foundation, but the second was funded entirely by the NSF and paid handsomely. Throw in the funding for lab supplies and a dorm room, and that was an expensive summer. Then my great state decided to give me a grant to pay myself to shoot lasers at proteins, pay my advisor a pittance for his help, and buy still more lab supplies. That struck me as a spectacularly inefficient use of state funds, especially given that I was going to do the work for my thesis anyway and could requisition funds for supplies from one of my fellowships.

I probably don't want to know how much has been invested in turning me into a TFA corps member. I'm sure paying all of the people involved in my training has not been cheap, and later this summer I'll be getting a Americorps funding of $4,700-something to use for graduate school. If they renew the funding, I'll be getting a similar award next year.

Now I'm up to my eyeballs in "professional development". By the end of the week I should have 82 hours, all from classes that are not only free, they come with stipends. I wasn't aware that this program came with a stipend since the packet of materials they sent me went missing in the mail, and I have no idea how much they're paying, but last week I got $250. This program also registered me for a dorm room even though I told them I could commute from my parents' so I'm typing this from a two bedroom, four bed, private bath suite that the luck of the draw has me occupying alone. I've got another week in July down where I went last week; that one pays $625 and provides a dorm room. The programs also provide some supplies to take back to the classroom that are worth hundreds of dollars.

I can't help but think there's been some mistake. Huge amounts of money were invested in developing one individual believed to be valuable human capital, but I'm not sure what the return on that investment will be. My undergraduate research was a lot of fun for me, but I suspect it could have been done better, faster, and cheaper. I'm gradually getting better at teaching, and I suspect this week in particular is going to have a positive impact on how I approach ninth grade physical science, but I would have been equally happy commuting and not getting paid. I can't help but feeling that somehow, someday, I need to do something to justify all of this expense.

Grrr...

2009-06-09T21:36:00.003-05:00

Today at lunch the other teachers were debating whether attending this training is worth the $250. It sounded so good, but the best thing about day one was that one of the presenters looks like a Muppet and occasionally talks about Star Trek. In other words, I haven't learned much. However, I had a delightful evening in the motel pool so the trip thus far has not been a total waste.

Living in the lap of luxury

2009-06-08T22:48:00.004-05:00

That's right: I'm in a Motel 6.

There are a couple of days of teacher workshops on weather and soil at a university in my state. They didn't have enough teachers to fill the slots and were practically begging people to come help them spend their grant money. In exchange for attending, I'll be getting a $250 stipend and a weather station worth $200 which I assume science club will put to good use. The only downside is that it's for teachers in the region where I teach, not where I'm spending the summer.

I could have driven five hours to my delta town today, then risen at the crack of dawn to drive another two and a half hours to the training site. Instead I chose to drive directly to the university town, a trip that also happens to take five hours, and get a room for the night. Frivolous? Heck yes! Worth it? Absolutely! Even with two nights in the motel, gasoline, and food, I'm going to come out ahead financially in addition to learning new things and getting twelve hours of professional development credit. If I had to do all of the extra driving, I would have been tempted to stay home.

Plus, I'm counting this as my vacation trip for the summer. It didn't involve traveling until the wee hours of the morning crammed into the backseat of a car with my little brother while my parents either bicker or seethe up front , I have an entire queen size bed to myself instead of sleeping on some relative's floor, and I get to eat out wherever I want instead of living on sandwiches from an ice chest for days on end. It's everything I dreamed of as a kid.

Self doubt and selfishness.

2009-06-07T10:44:00.005-05:00

It's time to get serious about the rest of my life. I need to register for tests and start studying in earnest, blocking out the hours a day to devote to binging on esoteric vocabulary words and learning to speed solve tricky physics problems. Once I get going in earnest, maybe this queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach will disappear.

I'll be without a stout safety net for the first time in my life. Before I even sent in my application, my state university offered me a substantial scholarship so I knew that even if they found me unworthy of a bigger, more prestigious fellowship and the other schools rejected me, I was going to be able to go to college. When I was worrying over my Teach For America application, I was reasonably certain that the graduate education program at my university would be happy to have me, even though I did let self doubt get the better of me at times. However, I've watched a decent physics student set his sights too high and get rejected by every school he applied to, plus a couple of others get a long list of rejections and ultimately land somewhere thanks primarily to faculty members talking to friends in other departments in the hopes of securing a slot in an unexpected opening.

Plus, the competition has grown more fierce since the recession makes jobs in industry much harder to come by. The top physics student in this year's graduating class initially got rejected by a school my professors considered a good fit for me last year, back before I let my physics skills atrophy, and he's a much stronger candidate than I could have been. The school in question has gone to a points based system for evaluating candidates where they look mostly at grades and scores. Somehow I don't think they give points for accomplishments like helping a fourteen year old finally master adding fractions or writing grant proposals to get a bunch of impoverished high school students ACT prep materials. And they probably shouldn't: it doesn't demonstrate physics skills.

There's always going to be a thought lurking in the back of my mind that I'm not good enough. I'm not that brilliant; I'll never be Feynman, Maxwell, Bohr, or Newton. I get by by the skin of my teeth, with plenty of difficulty and with support from wonderful mentors. My chief virtue isn't in being innately gifted, it's in continuing to plod along even though I'm not. I still worry that someday soon I'll reach material that I simply won't be able to master, no matter how hard I try, that the math will throw a brick wall in my path and it will turn out that I'm not an unstoppable object after all.

Then there's the other problem with becoming a scientist: I dreamt of my kids last night. After this last year, they are my kids. I may not have done much good, but the problem of educational inequity is now my problem in a way it wasn't when I joined this crazy organization. Trust me, if you'd spent a year in one of these schools, you'd be mad as hell too. Spending another year in the classroom may help a few kids, and that's worth doing, but it doesn't begin to touch our country's deeper educational and cultural problems. I might do a little more to help if I were more like my friends, considering careers in educational administration, counseling, or non-profit administration, like my cousin's girlfriend the social worker, like my boyfriend's mother the attorney ad litem for kids in foster care.

Yet I'd rather study science. I don't think I'd be good at any of those noble professions. I like teaching, but liked teaching college students as well, and I miss the lab. I'll probably never cure a dreaded disease or solve our energy problems, but that's okay, that isn't why I want to do this.

I don't think I'm romanticizing the job of being a researcher. Doing science often isn't glorious. There aren't a ton of eureka moments. You spend a lot of time writing grant proposals that might not get funded, plotting eighteen billion graphs to make meaning of those strings of raw data, waiting for the repair guy to get the immunofluorescent microscope in working order, aligning the optics so your laser beam hits at precisely the right angle, or analyzing why your filters have exploded and spewed your painstakingly prepared sample all over the floor again. Often, though, you do get to investigate neat things, and even the question of why the gosh darned filters are exploding (or whatever the similar problem in your lab happens to be) is an interesting puzzle when looked at in the right light. Ultimately, I can't think of anything more exciting than getting paid to be curious.

I hope I have a job.

2009-06-03T17:35:00.003-05:00

My district has, at long last, hired a new high school principal and superintendent. I heard about the new principal immediately after the school board voted thanks to a text message from somebody actually at the meeting, and a cheer went up at the table of TFAs having dinner at a Mexican restaurant, mainly because they hired someone from outside the district. That's about all we know about the guy at this point, but given the current state of our administration, that alone is cause for a little renewed optimism.

Now if only they'd get around to hiring some teachers. For a while, I quit worrying because my official observation and evaluation went pretty well. My assistant principal had a lot of praise for how much he thinks I've improved over the course of the year. He offered a couple of constructive suggestions as well, reiterated his desire to be supportive, and seemed genuinely surprised when I asked whether he intended to recommend me for contract renewal. Funny that he wouldn't understand why I was concerned when he was one of the administrators who told the entire faculty that we needed to "get it together or find other professions" (not quite as bad as when the superintendent/acting principal threatened to fire everyone, but still). The second years assured us all that the previous year nobody had gotten new contracts until the very end of the school year.

The end of the school year has come and gone, and there still aren't any contracts. Older teachers have said that sometimes the school mails contracts out during the summer and that there was one year when they didn't actually get around to hiring anyone until a couple of weeks after the new school year started. Apparently, they expect everyone to show up whether we formally have jobs or not. Somehow I do not find this particularly reassuring.

Do you know the episode of the X Files with the poor guy who was in the wrong place during a secret government experiment and had to keep moving west?

2009-06-02T09:01:00.000-05:00

Where the guy was willing to carjack Mulder to keep going, but met his untimely demise when they reached the coast and his head popped in a shower of blood before Scully could rupture his eardrum with an icepick to relieve the pressure? That's about how I feel right now.

My ear started hurting Thursday night. It wasn't so bad then, as much a sensation of pressure as actual pain, accompanied by a bit of hearing loss. Friday it continued to be a source of irritation, but it wasn't worth missing school. Saturday morning the pain was a bit worse, but I still hoped my body's defenses could handle it. I'd read that most ear infections resolve themselves on their own just as quickly without antibiotics, and, besides, I needed to hit the road and the only place I could have obtained treatment before heading out would have been the emergency room. I figured I could wait it out. I tried to dull the pain with ibuprofen and keep going.

Sunday night my ear hurt badly enough that I couldn't sleep and it was oozing pus. I try to avoid doctors and had only been once in the past five years for anything besides a routine checkup, but I reluctantly concluded that I needed to get medical attention. First thing Monday morning, I was dressed, fed, and ready to head to a walk in clinic and wait outside for it to open. Then my mom woke up and insisted on spending forever looking online to see if the clinic was in my insurance network (It wasn't, but with a $1,500 annual deductible that's almost irrelevant), trying to talk me into letting her call various doctors for an appointment, half of whom weren't in my network either, and ultimately driving me to the clinic.

24 hours, a $90 doctor visit and $30.88 worth of azithromyocin tablets and benzocaine ear drops, several doses of OTC analgesics, and countless warm compresses later and my ear still hurts about as much. As expected, I have a nice case of otis media, plus probably a bout of strep throat that the doctor didn't bother to test for since she was prescribing antibiotics anyway. All those pamphlets I read as a little kid waiting at the doctor's that promised that as I matured the angle of my Eustachian tubes would get better and I wouldn't have to deal with this anymore were lies, lies I tell you! I'm feeling a bit whiny and self pitying as I hope that the combination of antibiotics and my own white blood cells works its magic soon.

2009-05-29T22:12:00.001-05:00

I'm done with my first year of teaching. Oh, and I've been spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave, with more big spending coming up in the next few months. Details to follow once I regain a bit of sanity.

A confession

2009-05-23T23:04:00.002-05:00

I caved and used my debit card and am now $1.82 over budget for the week. I spent a few bucks more than I'd planned on groceries on Sunday, bought one fast food lunch (I know, I know, bad E.C. !), and then my parents came to visit so I needed more food for them. My budget would have withstood the stress if I hadn't needed batteries for my camera for graduation as well. My dad offered to buy the food I got for dinner when we went to the store together, but I couldn't allow that.

I'm still tweaking my weekly cash allowance. $100 was a very comfortable amount, but the past couple of weeks I've been trying to do $80 instead, which works reasonably well on the weeks when I don't try to go out and do anything that costs money but is fairly tight the rest of the time. Twenty bucks a week doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's a lot over the course of a year. Thoughts?

The end is near.

2009-05-21T16:04:00.002-05:00

By this time next week, I'll be finished with my last day with my students. Friday will be teacher in-service, and then I'm officially done with my first year.

Now on to trying to relearn all of the physics I've forgotten so the Physics GRE doesn't kill me next fall.

I miss the Scirocco.

2009-05-16T21:34:00.005-05:00

My odometer hit 122,222 the other day, a number of no particular significance other than that it looked neat. I paused for a moment to admire it and quietly will my car to reach 222,222 miles before I finally have to replace it. Each day, I remain somewhat astonished that I not only have a car that has never left me stranded by the side of the road, but have the funds to replace it when it does become unreliable. This seems to me to be a violation of the natural order of things.

Growing up, I got used to being stranded from time to time. Cars broke down. It was a fact of life, probably an even more annoying one for someone traveling with small children in those days before cellphones became ubiquitous. My favorite of those cars was the Scirocco.

My parents acquired it sometime before I started school. It was a hand me down from my aunt, who herself had received it from her sister, costing us nothing but the bus fare to travel halfway across the country to go get it. My father rigged a system of webbing to secure children's car seats to bus seats and off we went. I recall the bus terminals as bustling places full of people who seemed terribly interesting to a preschooler.

The Scirocco was a valuable addition to our stable, an improvement over the car my mother had previously used to schlep us around, a 1955 Chevy in which my ever prudent father had thoughtfully installed lap belts and a roll bar. My father, a mechanical engineer and car nut, found the Scirocco fun to drive. It served well for many years, but my mother gradually became more and more dissatisfied with it, even though by that point she rarely drove it.

Over the years, she gradually got better and better cars, first a giant brown Oldsmobile in which my brother and I once spent the night at a gas station in Little Rock on the homeward stretch of a family vacation. The water pump had failed, but my father had packed a replacement part because that was the only repair he could envision dealing with on the road that hadn't already been necessary in the preceding months. It took him most of the night, with my mother holding a flashlight and lending a hand. Sometime after that, she got a very nice Suburban that still runs well thanks to an engine transplant. (Not a repair my father handled himself.) That was the vehicle she was driving when she began nagging my father about his car in earnest.

Ok, so traveling was a little less fun after my father removed the radio and air conditioner in the course of a repair and never replaced them, but we could do without those luxuries. When the fan for the heater died, coats and mittens became imperative in winter. The front seats were padded with a granular black substance that eventually all leaked out the bottom of the seats, leaving the driver and passenger sitting on the metal seat frames. After the red upholstery wore through, my dad got brown furry seat covers. They eventually bleached blond in the sunlight and then themselves wore through. The windshield gaskets were bad, resulting in an inch or two of water in the back floorboards after each heavy rainfall. My father eventually rigged a switch to turn on the fuel pump when starting the car after the system that was supposed to do that went kaput. In its last years, the car idled rough, sometimes dying at stop signs, not always, just often enough to make things interesting.

My mother thought the Scirocco was an embarrassment. I disagreed vehemently. It had its flaws, as do all things in life, but I couldn't understand caring what other people thought as long as my dad liked it and it generally got us from point a to point b. I took a certain perverse pride in getting picked up from a junior high dance in a slightly rusty twenty year old Volkswagen that got washed perhaps once a year.

Eventually, my father did get a brand new car. By that point, my parents had paid the house off. They had enough breathing room to easily afford a nice, reliable little econobox for my father's commute. His Mazda was a great car until it met its untimely demise by the side of the interstate on an icy night last Thanksgiving weekend.

I can see now why they bought it, but at the time I was outraged. I felt like my father was caving to my mother, and I understood even less why they would finance a car when they could have paid cash without even having a significant impact on their savings. Taking the zero percent interest financing on top of the discount my father got for working for an OEM supplier for Mazda was mathematically a good deal, but my upbringing instilled in me a horror of consumer debt that at that point in my life would have rivaled that of the most devout Dave Ramsey acolyte. (Or perhaps I was just at a phase where I was inclined to be deeply pissed off by anything my parents did.) Now that I'm a wee bit more mature, I understand their decisions much better, but I'm still a little sad that they got rid of the Scirocco. I suspect that my father could still have it running today if he'd absolutely had to, especially in light of the spare engine he salvaged from a dead Rabbit and kept in the garage, just in case.

Great news: I'm not qualified for a job I don't want!

2009-05-15T18:37:00.003-05:00

It turns out the folks manning the literacy lab this summer have to be certified English teachers. Maybe that isn't the greatest news on the financial front, but it'll do wonders for my sanity. It's going to create problems for our poor English department head since she's got to figure out staffing when her department is losing somewhere between 1/2 and 5/6 of its teachers. (Two TFA teachers and one non-trad licensee have done their two years and are heading out, and there's one elderly teacher who is still waffling about whether to retire this year and one teacher who is considering making her first year in the district her last.) Again, a sad situation, but ultimately not my problem.

I may be adding one more summer activity to my calendar, however. My department head suggested a week long summer program that sounds highly relevant to my classroom practice, offers a smidge of graduate credit, and would provide a few nifty tech toys to use when I go back to school in the fall. Best of all, they offer full funding for the course and a $650 stipend to everyone they accept. Fingers crossed.

I'm going to go spend my very last dime on a bean burrito and some cheese enchiladas.

2009-05-13T17:29:00.003-05:00

I realized long ago that it's a wee bit dangerous to allow myself to realize I have money. When I notice I have actually socked away a semi-substantial sum, I'm more inclined to spend. It doesn't usually lead to a flood of wild extravagances, but a trickle of repeated little treats that put me over budget is just as bad in the long run.

Developing strategies to combat this has been vital to maintaining my savings momentum. During my senior year of college when almost all of my income for a semester came in a lump sum, a very strict budget kept me on track, but I found myself obsessing about the numbers a bit more than was healthy. Now I'm striving for a bit more flexibility.

One thing that helped has been keeping multiple bank accounts. Longer term savings get locked away in accounts I can admire from time to time when I transfer funds in but wouldn't dream of spending on day-to-day life unless I faced a dire emergency. Money goes in, but it doesn't go out, period. Keeping a "life happens fund" in a different savings account linked to my checking account for quick access and overdraft protection enables me to keep just a couple hundred dollars more than I plan to need in a month in my checking account itself. Thus, looking at my checking account balance usually makes me feel pretty nearly broke.

Still, spending creep happens. To combat my tendency to go just a little over budget every month, I'm trying a strategy I'd heard about for years but probably would never have tried if I hadn't seen how well it works for the boy: I'm going on a (nearly) cash only budget. Daily expenses that aren't bills or rent are to be paid for in cash. Each Sunday afternoon I get my allowance for the week, go do my grocery shopping, gas up my car, and then figure out how to live on what's left. If I know I have other big expenses coming up that week, I'm forced to plan ahead. It's easy to see where I stand by simply opening my wallet. My budget is low enough that if I do go over, it won't be a huge setback, but the thought of caving and going to the ATM a second time in one week makes me cringe.

This Sunday was an expensive one. A weekend day trip used quite a bit of gasoline, and I found myself running out of a lot of boring staples like pens, pencils, toilet paper, and laundry detergent. It was my week to buy the supplies for the science club lab, and I also decided to go wild with the grocery shopping this week in the hopes of alleviating my proclivity toward getting bored with everything in the house and deciding to grab fast food.

So I'm down to eight bucks and change, and I'm planning to blow all of it tomorrow night. I can afford it; I have 7/8 of a tank of gas, enough groceries that I could get through all of next week without shopping (but I probably won't), no weekend plans beyond a TFA event that'll include a very nice free dinner. It feels wildly extravagant to go into a restaurant planning to leave absolutely broke. It feels good.

Maybe I am a masochist after all.

2009-05-11T21:05:00.002-05:00

Today the teacher next door asked me if I'd consider working this summer. She was informed today that she needs to round up teachers to do literacy remediation for four hours each morning throughout June. It'd be easy work since the remediation is computer-based; basically the job is to supervise everyone, help kids when they get stuck, and make sure people don't cheat by logging in as their friends. In all honesty, it sounds pretty boring.

I know in this economy I'm lucky to have a job, never mind having the chance to make $35 an hour for very easy part-time work, but I still don't want to do it. I'd take it in a heartbeat if such a position were available in my home town. I want to escape the Delta for a bit, catch up with my family and friends, lock myself in the library and study for hours on end, read, watch movies, go for long walks, get ahead on lesson planning, and basically enjoy having some time I can call my own. There will be a bit of professional development in there, but overall the summer should be a much more relaxing time if I don't take the job. A few weeks of freedom was going to be the reward for a year of hard work and frugality

Naturally, I told her I'd do it if she absolutely can't find anyone else to take the position.

I know it was my money all along...

2009-05-10T10:46:00.002-05:00

but there's something kinda cool about logging into your bank account to deposit your latest paycheck and discovering you have an "extra" $1,258 floating around in there. I can see why people like getting their income tax refunds enough to make an interest-free loan to the government. (Not that I'm planning to do that again this year!)

My cell phone is dying a slow death.

2009-05-10T09:58:00.002-05:00

I have a decidedly uncool mobile phone. I never wanted one at all, but I caved to my mother's demands and got a Tracfone before I went to New York for an internship the summer before my junior year of college. It died less than a month into my time there, and I was just fine without it. I went ahead and sent it off for a replacement when I got home, and that Motorola c139 has served me just fine ever since. It allows me to make and receive telephone calls. If I really want to, I can send a text. Attempts at setting up voicemail have been unsuccessful, but that's ok with me. The little phone is sturdy, too; it has been dropped down a flight of cement stairs with no ill effect.

It's been a reasonably frugal option, at least as a supplement to a landline, which is how I've always used it. Because I paid extra for a double minutes card a couple of years ago, I can get minutes for around ten cents a piece if I shop the sales. Typically once a year, I buy a batch of minutes, and I'm set. Budgeting the minutes themselves is easy enough since the reserve is displayed right on the phone screen. (Although, this year, I've been traveling more and been less good about keeping conversations short. I'm down to 63.2 minutes that are supposed to last me until July 31.)

Alas the battery is now showing its age: a phone that used to go well over a week on standby can now go a mere three days. Even more annoying, I can head to school in the morning with two of the three battery bars showing, and the phone is sometimes dead by the end of the day. I can charge it more often, but I know that this is the beginning of the end.

My mother actually bought me a new phone a few months ago, nice Motorola flip phone that she picked up on sale when she went to buy a Tracfone of her own. It's nice I'm sure, but it's still in its packaging. It's too fancy, with bluetooth, a camera, a built-in FM radio, the option of buying weather reports, and a ton of other feature that will add complexity but no real functionality for a user like me. Plus I read somewhere, perhaps Consumer Reports, that flip phone are more prone to breaking than my candybar-style brick of phone because they can snap at the hinge.

Activating the fancy new phone would probably be the most economical option since I already own the darn thing. Yet, I found myself pricing batteries for the c139. For mere $10, I could get a brand new OEM battery. At that price, I'm tempted to pick up a couple and try to keep this little phone going for several more years. It's totally illogical to throw money into maintenance of a such a cheap item that's pretty much designed to be disposable, but I've developed a bit of an emotional attachment to my phone and to being a person who uses an out-of-date phone that was super cheap when it was new, especially in classrooms where students can just look at its outline in my pocket as evidence that I deserve mockery. Am I letting conspicuous non-consumption trap me into spending more money?

Now my roommate is talking about buying a house! (Or, yes, I am still a judgmental jerk.)

2009-05-05T17:25:00.000-05:00

I'm still puzzled by the way my roommate thinks about money. At some level, she seems to want to be responsible, but the decisions she makes are baffling to me.

A bit of background: My roommate is, overall, none too fond of her job teaching elementary school music. It doesn't help that she's planning to become an academic focusing on music theory, but her school views her as a glorified babysitter. However, she needs an income until she either pays of a sizable chuck of her considerable college debt or actually completes her masters thesis, orals, and defense. Her big plans to get the thesis written this year and complete her oral exams during spring break have fallen by the wayside. (Being a first year teacher will do that.) She's hoping to write her thesis this summer, but she's also seeking a summer job to alleviate the cash crunch her credit card debt, student loans, and spending habits have wrought so there will be some competition for her time.

After her second year with TFA, she's planning to move to Memphis and teach there while working on another masters, this one in music education. She says will make her more marketable once she has a Ph.D. Plus, honestly, her deepening relationship with a guy who is a grad student in Memphis gives her a lot of incentive to stick around.

Today she informed me that she's hoping the housing market will stay down somewhat because they're considering buying a house once she moves to Memphis. She believes it might be a better deal financially because she's heard that it's better to buy if you're planning to stay someplace at least two years (!) and their graduate school plans would keep them in the area for three. I tried, gently, to ask what would happen if prices continue to decline during those years. She said that she hasn't heard anyone suggesting that we're entering a situation anything like the Great Depression and she's fairly confident that won't be a problem.

At that point I gave up. It would be rude to ask how she plans to save for a down payment when her current debts seem to be keeping her in a paycheck to paycheck life. Maybe her boyfriend is a secret millionaire who just happens to prefer renting a room in someone else's house right now.Maybe this is the motivation she needs to get her plans going and her budget in order. Or maybe she's just living in the dream world of the past few years where you didn't actually need money or any reliable means of obtaining money in order to buy a house and the tightening mortgage markets will save her from herself.

"You're halfway to being married," he guffawed.

2009-05-04T20:11:00.001-05:00

Note to my mother, who has just had a heart attack upon reading the title of this post: this does not in any way imply that I'm getting married. You'll see where I'm going with this in a minute. Relationships + money = weird.

When the boy and I started dating, he wanted to pay for everything. Naturally, this drove me crazy, especially because he'd been open enough that I not only knew that I made more money than he does, I knew exactly what percentage of his weekly discretionary budget (money allocated for groceries, household needs, gasoline, and miscellany as well as recreation) that first sushi lunch ate up. He was adamant about not going Dutch on dates so we squabbled quite a bit as we tried to work out a system that seemed fair. We're both stubborn people. We could quite possibly have spent several minutes at the end of each evening out for the rest of our lives bickering over who got to pick up the check.

Fortunately, his wonderful mother, of all people, proposed a solution. We now have an envelope for joint entertainment expenses and contribute equal amounts. I'm still not altogether sure why this is more acceptable to him, but it is, especially since he gets to be the keeper of the envelope. It's drama free. It's nice. It's also apparently hilarious.

A couple of weeks ago, we met up with a friend of the boy's for lunch. When it came time to pay, the boy took our share out of the envelope, and his friend was curious about why he carries his cash in a paper envelope. He found the explanation somewhat amusing. (See title.) I hardly think that joint custody of fifty dollars is the same thing as agreeing to merge our entire lives.

We haven't been slavish about using the envelope system. When the boy was unemployed, I worked hard to inveigle my way into paying for darn near everything, over his vociferous protests. This weekend at his parents', he asked to treat me to dinner. I agreed but figured we'd use the envelope for everything else. Then he forgot it in his duffel bag when we went gallivanting around town. I'm pretty sure he ended up paying for more than I did, but that's ok. Someday, I'll be the one to foot the bulk of the bills. We're gradually working out an ebb and flow with which were both comfortable, but I think that more diligent adherence to the envelope would do us good.

For now, we just throw some money in the envelope when our entertainment fund runs dry, but we've talked about the possibility of trying to decide on some fixed amount to contribute weekly or monthly this summer when we'll be around each other a lot more. From there, it's just a short hop to trying to work together on budgeting our joint savings, talking through whether we want to go out to dinner tonight or buy groceries to eat in and save up for a splurge a couple of weeks down the road. Perhaps someday there will be real joint finances, with shared goals and struggles, but for now, the envelope seems like an interesting dry run.

Mark my words, I'm buying a GPS.

2009-04-29T08:02:00.005-05:00

This will involve two of my least favorite things: admitting I have limitations and spending a largish sum of money. I recognize that there are glitches in mental wiring like dyslexia and discalulia that make skills like reading or math far more challenging, but I've spent years trying to tell myself that my total lack of directional sense was something I just needed to figure out how to fix. At this point, I'm willing to give up and admit defeat.

I was reading some Heinlein a few months ago, and the aspect of the fantasy I found most fantastic wasn't outside the realm of the normal: the protagonist had an unerring sense of direction. Forget interstellar teleportation, dragons to slay, and a beautiful sorceress eager to marry me and just as eager to let me go bed others, I want that! Alas, I'm still perpetually lost.

I don't think it's a lack of spacial skills, not exactly, anyway. I managed to test above average on the portion of the junior high aptitude test that required mentally folding diagrams into their corresponding three-dimensional objects and rotating those objects in my mind. I just don't have the ability to orient myself in space. That annoying gap in my reasoning that makes finding my way back to the correct road once I'm off of it almost excruciatingly difficult. This eventually leads to panic as wrong turn after wrong turn takes me farther and farther from any remotely recognizable landmark.

Over the years, I've managed to cope. On foot or bicycle, it isn't that bad. You can slow down enough to really look around, and if worst comes to worst, people getting their mail or walking their dogs are pretty friendly when lost pedestrians finally break down to beg for directions. When driving, however, it's pretty nasty.

My mother firmly believes that this, like so many problems in my life, will be solved once some magical nagging quota has been reached and I finally decide to do what she's been telling me to do all along, in this case pay attention. Paying attention and repetition do help. I reached the point where I was able to navigate my hometown and certain sections of my college city fairly well, largely because I'd devoted enough hours to wandering them on foot and trying to memorize enough to put together a mental map. Mapquest, Google maps, and the like do offer some benefit when I have to get somewhere new, but when I manage to screw up by taking a wrong turn, or when the direction is missing some crucial component, like that the road will split and I need to be in the left lane when it does, and by the time I realize this (if I do) nobody will let me over, I'm doomed.

I had one of those little compasses with a suction cup to stick to my windshield, but I accidentally left it in my mother's car when I returned it, and it was of limited use anyway. If I knew I needed to be on highway Y north, I could confirm for myself eighty seven times in the course of my journey that I had in fact turned the correct way when I'd gotten onto the highway, but once I managed to get myself lost, knowing which way north was was generally not all that beneficial since I had no idea which way I was supposed to be going. Road atlases are okay for determining which interstates intersect in which cities, but they are darn near useless to me when I'm actually in those cities, whizzing along at sixty miles per hour, and have just missed my exit.

All this was hammered home to me last night when, after two rather unpleasant days of school in a row, I decided a brief escape would be good for my sanity. I headed to the bustling metropolis of Southhaven, Mississippi with no real plan in mind other than to go be somewhere that wasn't here. I thought perhaps I'd see a movie since I've had a free pass in my wallet for months, but everything I wanted to see didn't take passes so I treated myself to dinner at Chick-fil-a and did a bit of shopping without actually buying anything. That was all lovely, but the getting turned around umpteen times wasn't. I ended up accidentally in Memphis twice. The trip home became even less fun after I took a seemingly logical turn and found myself on a bumpy, poorly maintained little road leading to a tiny town in Mississippi, then managed to get even more turned around in my attempt to get back to the highway and instead found myself on an otherwise empty road in the middle of the night, hurtling toward nothing, surrounded by only empty fields as far as the eye could see. I turned around at the first opportunity, made my way back to the tiny town where I'd gone astray, located a sign telling me what town I was in, briefly pondered calling my boyfriend and/or mother and waking them up in the hopes that they could use Google to help me find my way back to civilization, or at least the highway, but I ultimately made it home on my own and fell into bed, utterly drained from my little adventure.

So I'll read some reviews, compare prices, and try to get a good deal on a global positioning system, but at this point, I really don't care what it costs.

I've got a brand new credit card.

2009-04-22T16:13:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not planning any wild spending sprees. USAA informed me that my data may have been compromised and sent me a new card. (It seems I'm not the only one dealing with this in recent weeks.) It has been a non-issue. Activating the new card took about a minute and a half. I immediately logged into my Neflix account to change the billing for my oh-so-extravagant one movie at a time plan to the new card number, and I spent a few more minutes on the phone with a nice lady from Doctors Without Borders to update the information for my monthly donation. Having so little of my life automated has its advantages.