« Archives in April, 2010

Hey, I Had a Wedding, That Must Mean I’m an Expert on Yours, Right? Part 3

April 25, 2010 / posted in Adult Problems, Otherwise Uncategorized, Uncategorized / Comments Off

Having invited your guests and secured your venue, you’ve now… got an empty place that will soon be filled with people expecting to be entertained by a demonstration of your love. Between the DJ and the photographer and the flowers and the cake, this can be a very, very expensive part of your wedding. Now, you can’t cut back everywhere, so you need to focus on the things that you want the most, and really cut the rest down to the bone.

Whatever your future in-laws say to you, this day is really about you. What matters to you in the memories that you’ll have? Some people want the best cake, others the most beautiful photographs, so spend your money on those.

A great example is the flowers at our wedding: we spent under $20 total for a red rose for the bride and the maid of honor, and for rose petals to scatter about the table:

It didn’t just turn out lovely: it turned out good enough. What are your low-priority items? How can you cut them back and make them just good enough?








In Which My Toddler Learns a New Word

April 20, 2010 / posted in Junior, Uncategorized / Comments Off

Birds, in case you were wondering, are kind of like two-year-olds: they get obsessed with the new words they learn, and they should probably be wearing diapers. Junior has learned a new word, and it’s threatening to tear our household apart.

When birds learn words, the typically practice those words for months or longer, to get it just perfect. Junior learned “good-bye” two and a half years ago, and used it just once, and perfectly, until a month or two ago, when he began to use it every day.

In retrospect, we should’ve been expecting more trouble from this new word. That one time he said good-bye? It was when DJ L’il Bit disciplined Junior for the first time. He acted out, she put him in his cage, and, clear as day, he said “good-bye!” and then turned away. He was angry and he knew just what he wanted to happen next.

Now he uses it all the time. Sometimes it’s appropriate — if you put on a coat or your shoes, he’ll say “good-bye!” If he gets a little excited, he’ll take it a little too far, and say “good-bye!” to anyone who turns their back. And he’ll play peek-a-boo all day while I’m working in my office, stepping away to where we can’t see each other and then saying “good-bye”

But the problem is that he knows the word not just as a descriptive term, but as a command. And that’s where the dog comes in.

Because you haven’t had enough context so far: the dog has stairs.  In the bedroom. The bed’s higher than he’s long, so it’s just an orthopedic requirement to keep his back healthy and limber. Like the good boy he is, he always climbs up the stairs and ususally climbs down too.

Because you haven’t had enough context yet, when I’m getting dressed, I put the bird on the bed; he stomps around and keeps me company while I pick out an outfit. Ususally the dog joins us and sits on the bed, although he hates the bird and is somtimes driven away in annoyance. On Monday, Jake climbed up the stairs and… at the top was the bird, blocking his way onto the bed. Junior looked right at the dog and said: “bye-bye!” It was a command.

Worse, it worked. With nowhere to climb, the dog backed down. Later in the day, I interrupted Junior as he was happily hanging out with his favorite person, his mother, DJ L’il Bit. And that’s when Junior told me “bye-bye.”

Nothing good will come of this.








Can You Check My Math On This?

April 18, 2010 / posted in Adult Problems / Comments Off

OK, now that I’m an adult — or, at least pretending to be one — I have to start making adult finance decisions. The inaugural post-marriage decision here seems to be: what car to get DJ L’il Bit.

So the background is this: we both have the same philosophy in cars, that is, buy a nice used car and drive it until it dies, sputtering, by the side of the road. This is why DJ L’il Bit has been driving around in her 1995 VW Golf and me in my 1996 Lexus for a few years now. The Golf had been clearly nearing the end of its life around the time we got married, and, in fact, died sputtering by the side of the road a couple of times. That got to be too much, so now we’re in the replacement car market.

Our first reflex was to buy another used car in reasonably good shape and drive it into the ground. DJ L’il Bit has long wanted a convertible, and, since we live in sunny SoCal, this seems a reasonable desire to fulfill. However, there’s a catch: based on our Life Plan, there’ll be kids on the way in something between 2-4 years. A cute 2-seat convertible won’t be too practical when we have to fit a baby seat. Plus, a 4-to-5-year-old cute convertible with 40,000 miles will be 7-9 years old with 100,000 miles when the baby comes around and we’re not sure we’d want to drive a new baby around in any car that old. So that probably means: new car ‘round baby time.

Then, if we sell the cute convertible 2-4 years + many thousands of miles, well, we’re not going to make a lot back, probably.

If we’re only keeping the car a few years, all of a sudden the ROI on a cash outlay to own the thing doesn’t seem very high. And that makes us think of something we’d never considered before: leasing. We’ve found a lease on a cute, brand new Mini convertible that seems to be about 3/4 the price of buying a used one with low mileage. We’d probably have to pay a penalty to get out of the lease early, but that still adds up to about the same as the cost of the used car, and that doesn’t even factor in the cost of the expected difference in reliability between the two cars.

Which brings me to my question: I know that, most of the time, the smartest thing to do financially is to buy a used car and run it into the ground. But, in this case, it seems smarter to take the lease. Or, am I missing something? I know the friends I have who read this are skilled in the math department and maybe even know a few things about the world. What am I missing here?








All I know is, that iPhone had better snap-to with the hanging up, if it knows what’s good

April 11, 2010 / posted in Uncategorized / Comments Off

All I know is, that iPhone had better snap-to with the hanging up, if it knows what’s good for it!








Things I Thought Would Be Simple By Now Include Personal Finance Programs

April 10, 2010 / posted in Mac, Reviews, Uncategorized / Comments Off

I need a personal finance program. You know, to track money on hand and budgets and stuff. I figured it’d be pretty easy, what with it being a major product category for something like a decade and a half now. Not so much; apparently I’m a demanding customer. Said demands — not letters-cut-out-of-magazines-pasted-into-message-sent-anonymously-style demands, just plain old consumer expectation-style demands — included:

  • I can enter transactions (you know, rather than just having them auto-downloaded for me)
  • Auto-reconcile download transactions from multiple banks and credit cards
  • Multiple separate budgets (you know, so that I can have one for me and one for the family)
  • View budgets on iPhone app
  • Enter transactions on iPhone app and sync to desktop
  • Runs on Mac

That’s all! That doesn’t seem like much to me. However, it’s been harder than I’d expected; nothing out there so far has made the grade. I’ve tried:

What about Quicken?

Quicken is the obvious answer, unfortunately there’s no matching iPhone app. From experience, I know that, if I don’t enter the transaction shortly after I make it, I’ll just end up with a pile of receipts and an out-of-date budget. Similarly, Moneydance and Moneywell both have iPhone apps coming but… not yet.

What about Mint?

I was happily using Mint for a few years, but it just didn’t match my life anymore. It didn’t have multiple budgets, which was an annoyance. But the killer is that I can’t enter transactions in it. We pay our rent with a check, since our landlord is just some lady who owns a few houses, and there are a few other people we pay with checks every month too; none of these fine people deposits checks promptly, so cash in our bank account can exceed cash actually available by thousands of dollars for a couple of weeks every month. This makes Mint’s picture of our finances pretty unenlightening.

So I tried the rest:

iBank

iBank has a great desktop program. It’s easy-to-use, good-looking, and is one of the few that lets you budget by more than just category. Unfortunately, the iPhone version doesn’t have budgets, and is designed in such a way as to suggest that they don’t really mean to include budgets. That’s a killer for me. However, if you want direct download from your bank, like Quicken offers, iBank is one of the few with this feature.

Cha-Ching

Cha-Ching actually does everything mentioned here! Feature-wise, it’s a clear winner. Otherwise, it doesn’t appear to be under active development anymore and so I just didn’t feel comfortable committing to it. It’s hard to put all your financial data in a program that won’t be updated to match future changes.

Money

Money was the early leader here, with all of the features… except it’s not very smart about auto-reconciling. If the transaction date in the download doesn’t match the date you entered it, Money doesn’t know to match it and Money offers no way to manually match downloaded transactions to existing ones. This is more frustrating than it seems, at least to me, since my bank and credit cards provide the posting date, rather than the date the transaction occurred, in downloads. The posting date is sometime between the same day and up to 5 or 6 days later, depending on the practices of the place you buy, I believe. Naturally, I entered transactions on the date they occurred. Having dozens of duplicated transactions because of this date disagreement was a killer to me. However, if that’s not a problem for you, then the budgeting here was as good as iBank.

Squirrel

Squirrel is almost perfect. The desktop version is actually rather lovely, although you’re limited to budgeting by category. But the iPhone version crashes every time I look at my budget. So there goes the whole budget thing.

iCompta

Same date problem as Money. Also, weird and French.

I’m not sure what’s next. Do I abandon the requirement for a budget on my iPhone and either accept Squirrel, with the promise of maybe future budget bug busting, or iBank, with no budget but the only support for Direct Download à la Quicken? Do I choose Quicken and give up on having “an app for that”? Do I wait to see if Moneywell and Moneydance have good iPhone apps? What do you think?








Mountaineer

April 6, 2010 / posted in True Life Stories, Uncategorized / Comments Off

When I was in junior high, we got a little vacation place in West Virginia, near Hedgesville. We’d go on three-day weekends, sometimes on regular weekends, if my parents needed a break. There was nothing out there but rolling hills, country diners, and tall, thin, dense pine trees over gray ground. And quiet. The next cabin over must’ve been only 150 feet away but you couldn’t even see it or hear it through those trees. If you looked sharp you could see the deer go through the gully: spot the white salt lick first, then the dun deer, then the fawns behind it.

It says something about the economy of West Virginia that a pretty reasonably middle-class family from Baltimore could afford a vacation place there — the only response I’ve ever gotten to revealing my hometown out there is “wow, that’s a rough place.” (And “is that your accent or are you mentally handicapped — ed.) So I could  understand how somebody working there would go down into a coal mine.

And coal mining really does permeate the state. Our backyard held the c-shaped trace of an old open pit mine, and every hike brought you past another half-dozen. Maybe it’s hard to understand for Westerners: mining out here means a scenic tunnel entrance in the side of a rugged hill; mining in West Virginia seems more often to mean a pit in the ground or, these days, the top of a mountain chopped clean off. I never saw one of those except from an airplane. All for coal for us and money for them.








One Milk Product to Rule Them All

April 4, 2010 / posted in Food, Uncategorized / Comments Off

First, let’s get one thing straight: I’m a bad Jew. I don’t know what holiday it is (It’s Passover – Ed.) and I’m unclear on what my legal obligations are at any given moment. This makes me feel free to also be a bad Catholic, by marriage. Thus it came to me as rather a surprise when I decided to join my wife in giving up cheese for Lent. But here we are, 40 days later, and there’s been no cheese. Well, until now. Today, I get cheese.

I went to the Cheese Store to get something worth celebrating with. Cheese, to me, is kind of like bacon to other people. Or maybe sausage to me is like bacon to other people, which would make cheese my… pancakes? Anyway, cheese is awesome, and good cheese is even better. Usually the Cheese Store is a great place to shop because you can try as many cheeses as you like before you buy, but this time I couldn’t try, because it wasn’t Easter yet. (For the non-Catholics out there, Lent is a 40-day-long period ending on Easter in which you give up stuff. There may be other important religious aspects, but I’ve exclusively had romantic relationships with Catholic women for seven or eight years now and have only ever heard about the giving up bit. On Easter you get to start back up on whatever you gave up. Lent, by the way, starts on Ash Wednesday, which is that odd day on which Catholics all look like they’ve escaped from a mildly burning building.)

Anyway, after having my parents try a bunch of cheeses, and communicating with the cheese store clerk as if by semaphore — I asked him for a cheese with a flavor and texture profile, my parents tried a couple, they gave me some feedback, I asked for something else — I ended up with a soft, grape leaf-wrapped Sheep’s milk and two Basque cheeses. We generally like the Basque cheeses around here. For a little variety, I matched them with a baguette, arugula salad, and a little bit of proscuitto.

Cheese!

Cheese: it’s everything it was knocked up to be.

The funny thing is, I really enjoyed the challenge of giving up cheese for 40 days. I’m actually excited about the idea of giving up something else soon, maybe soda or cookies or something else I could do without. It’s pretty awesome, and I’m glad I finally decided to catch Lent fever!

Also, dearest wife: I signed you up for the cheese e-newsletter. I figured you wouldn’t mind.








Hey, I Had a Wedding, That Must Mean I’m an Expert on Yours, Right? Part 2

April 1, 2010 / posted in Adult Problems, Otherwise Uncategorized, Uncategorized / Comments Off

OK, now that you invited everyone — actually, before you invited everyone, but, hey, it made more narrative sense this way — you’ve got to get a venue. (Seriously, get the venue first, folks.) Our experience was clear: get one place that can handle as much as possible for you, it’ll save money.

This actually came as quite the shock to both of us. I know I for one had expected to be shopping around town for the cheapest flatware and cheapest tablecloths and wondering how I was going to get the cheap tables and chairs delivered. Nope. All of those little details add up quickly; we actually got noticeably better prices by going with venues that could provide everything from the space to the tables to the food itself.

Make sure to actually go through all the details of what you need and confirm that you’re getting everything:

  • Flatware & silverware
  • Tablecloths & napkins
  • Any seating you need
  • Serving items
  • Salt & pepper
  • Any glasses you need
  • Specifics of whatever water, wine, etc. you’re pouring, especially at meals, where they’ll try to cheap out
  • A table to put your gifts on

It may help to draw out a picture of what your set-up should look like. Another advantage of going with a venue to provide everything is that, if you remember something at the last minute, they’re likely to have it for you, rather than you having to track it down the day of or the day before your wedding.

Also, make sure you’re clear about who will be providing things like:

  • Seating cards & charts
  • Signage to direct your guests
  • Menu cards, drink signage, etc.

Wherever you’re getting all your stuff, know how you get it in place on the day of. Will you need someone there to receive an item? When can items be delivered? Stuff will have to happen day of, don’t get surprised, and do rely on your closest friends and your wedding party to take care of it (no matter how late your ceremony is, you’ll be out of commission the whole day).

That’s an important point: think about the whole experience of your wedding. What you want most is the day itself to be worry-free, but don’t underestimate the number of things you’ll need to do during the days leading up to the event too. The more you can outsource, or otherwise have handled without too much commitment of your time, the better. You’ll appreciate it, your future spouse will appreciate it, and the family and friends who are excited to see you will appreciate it.