Intellectual Commitments: Hard Determinist

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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

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

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 ...

1. Hard Determinist
   
2. Coming soon!

Carnivals - The super late link back

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

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

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

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:

1. 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.
   
2. 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.
   
3. 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.
   
4. 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.
   
5. 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?

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

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 Champagne 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!

Carnivals Are Here

The Festival of Frugality and the Carnival of Personal Finance are up over at beingfrugal and I've Paid For This Twice Already ... respectively. I have to admit that I have not read a single article from these carnivals, but that is mostly because St. Patrick's day marks the moment of my marriage and I simply had to party with my partner. I'll probably get around to reading through these right after you do.

Hump Day Humor

Here are The Kinks performing the title track from their 1979 Low Budget album. The singing doesn't start until 1:30 into it, but the lyrics are great. It just goes to show you that even cool rock stars are forced to cut back during an economic slowdown. Who would've thought that cheap was the old black?



If being cheap is cool than I'm Miles Davis.

Save to Buy ... If You Buy At All

Sterling Silver Monkey Studs by knitsteel

Wouldn't you find a woman wearing these precious earrings simply irresistible? I know I would. But like most things that make someone absolutely irresistible, these earing cost some dough. I'm not exactly sure how much, but anything with that type of sex appeal is worth at least 100x what any comparable set of earrings would cost. That means these little puppies would run me anywhere between $599 and $999 - I simply don't have that in our clothing budget. So, in light of my family's commitment to live debt free, we either have to save up to buy these masterpieces of femininity or pass the opportunity by.

Some outspoken husband might say, "You crazy dolt, how could you give up this chance to woo such a beautiful and lovely woman as your wife with these magnificent pieces of art? If you wait too long someone might swoop in a buy them first! Buy them now." I can completely understand this husband's line of thinking. But here are a few good reasons to wait to buy big ticket items in general:

1. ... to think about your purchase - not every big ticket item you purchase will add as much quality to your life as a nice pair of monkey earrings. Time becomes important in helping you evaluate the level of your actual need for the item in question. Waiting a month, or two, or three, will Abre los ojos and help you see just how (un)well you can live life without the item in question. Potential Savings: entire purchase price
   
2. ... to research the best products - not every widget is made equal. Some manufacturers actually make better items than their competitors while charging comparable prices, but you won't know that unless you research and researching takes time. Potential Savings: prevents having to buy another crappy product next year
   
3. ... to shop around for the best deal - not every retailer thinks a product is worth the same amount. While you find out what product is best you can also spend time looking for which retailer has got the best item for the cheapest. There are some good resources out there that watch out for great deals (slickdeals) so you don't have to. Take advantage of the shopping around that others have done and save yourself some bucks. Potential Savings: tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars
   
4. ... to earn money on your purchase - interest rates can finally work in your favor. Saving $200 a month for a $1000 laptop would have you racking in a grand total of $9.87 over a 5 month period with an APY of 4%. While that may not be that much in the grand scheme of things, it does represent a 1% discount on the item that you purchased. That is just like using a cash back credit card that gives 1% cash back. Potential Savings: dollars to hundreds of dollars
   

Embrace your inner tightwad and save up to buy your big purchases. The potential for reducing the cost of your item while increasing its quality is significant and if you want to turn those savings into a better life for a child living in a refugee camp in Uganda, kudos to you!

Emergency Funds Are the Coolest

Bad planning does not constitute an emergency plan.

Anonymous

As per my family's commitment to live debt free for the purpose of changing the world we have set up an emergency fund. This fund currently contains just about three months of our household expenses, including the amount that we save each month for our irregular expenses. It sits in neat piles of $20 bills in our bank which we can access over this thing that I heard about from a friend called the Internet. If you haven't heard about it yet you really need to get a clue. Its the next big thing. Right now this little fund earns us $264 a year in interest at the current rate of 4% APY from the troubled and plummeting Washington Mutual (WM). If the Fed keeps cutting rates then this number is going to drop, but I don't have an emergency fund to make money. I have an emergency fund to handle emergencies.

I have only been alive for 25 short years but already I am old enough to know that emergencies happen. Cars break down, kids break arms, jobs get lost, plumbing leaks, houses need repairing, parents need taking care of ... the list of possible circumstances that can generate massive expenses or totally kill your earning power is potentially endless. An emergency fund will give you breathing room to handle the ups and down of life without having to go into debt or liquidate your portfolio. Both can really eat into your earning power and we want to avoid that at all costs:

There are differing suggestions from people that know that they are talking about for the size of a family's emergency fund. I don't know what might be best for somebody else, but these are the things that influenced our decision to choose to have a fund worth 6 months of our expenses:

• We are naturally conservative people - both my wife and I like to know that if something serious were to happen that the last thing we would have to think about would be money. In fact, we want to feel good in those moments of extreme stress, knowing that we already have this expense covered. We can focus on fixing the crisis at hand without worrying about how it will affect our bottom line.
  
• Six months offers a lot of flexibility - having such a large sum of cash ($13,200 at current spending levels) readily available will allow us to take advantage of certain financial opportunities that would have other wise been unavailable to us. A good investment, a rock bottom deal on an item that we just started saving for, or an opportunity to pick up and move to a better job and cheaper housing could pop up at unexpected times, leaving us unprepared to take advantage of these opportunities. Having the emergency fund lets us make decisions on our terms rather than letting money dictate our circumstances.
  
• The economy is turning, increasing potential for layoffs - who knows how much longer I will be gainfully employed? There is no guarantee that anyone's job will be there tomorrow so it really is a good idea to ensure that your family will eat, will have a place to sleep, and that you will be able to spend time searching for a good job without the added worry that if you don't find one soon you will be forced to work the graveyard shift at a 24 hour Starbucks.
  
• We've got to move sometime - rent in our 1 bedroom San Diego apartment currently represents about 40% of what we spend each month. While it only accounts for about 25% of our take home pay, I would love to kick this number down a couple notches and enable us to get some more money into savings and other investments. It may even be nice to turn our rent payment into a mortgage payment, but that may be a little while down the road still. That is where the emergency fund will shine for us. It could help cover unforeseen costs associated with buying a home or even help us handle our first big home repair if it comes quickly on the heels of our purchase. That way we won't be saddled with our mortgage payment and a credit card payment to boot.
• $13,200 seems like it can cover a lot of different catastrophes and even two or three catastrophes at the same time - sometimes a lot of bad things can happen at the exact same time. If our emergency fund were not able to handle multiple predicaments simultaneously we could be hurtin' for certain.
  

An emergency fund is an essential part to a healthy and robust financial plan. Without one you run the risk of being the victim of circumstance and poor planning. While an emergency fund does not in any way guarantee security or financial health, it can go a long way in helping you avoid debt and let you focus on handling the human crisis without having to worry about how you are going to pay for it.

Rounding Out My Reading

This weekly round-up is being brought to you exclusively from my feed reader. I found each of these posts particularly useful or interesting and worth sharing:

Clever Dude wrote another article about snagging a laptop on the cheap through one of those internet laptop giveaway sites that pop up on random places, like weather.com. It would be good to check out his first post for the skinny on how to best manage the system so that you don't end up forking out hundreds of dollars for a laptop you really wanted for free. He cautions that going this route may not be for everyone, mentioning that even he won't be taking advantage of this promotion in particular. But it is good information to lock away if one day you decide that you are going to take the "free laptop" internet promotion plunge. It even has a cool spreadsheet- *drool*.

Lily at The Honest Dollar wrote a really interesting post on price discrimination and why coupons exist. Since my wife is a minority and a coupon user, I wanted to make sure that she wasn't gettin' no short end of no stuff buying stick from "the man." Lily did a great job of explaining that the discrimination is actually against non-coupon users. Silly people who pay full price for stuff, there getting it stuck to them by "the man. " I recommend we all stop buying gas until they start making coupons for it. Come on, you know those one day boycotts work - we just got to get this coordinated and we can finally turn the tables on the king of Antarctica.

The CVS police are after My Good Cents. Apparently she was infringing on some intellectual property rights that CVS was really proud of and didn't want anyones else to know about or share on the internet. I think that means no more CVS coupon links on her sight or else CVS will unleash their intellectual property rights dogs to brutally and expeditiously send emails. The good times are over!

Gather Little by Little wrote a post about why he thinks peer-to-peer lending is a bad idea. It might have been a little inconsistent but really funny if he had included an affiliate link with his article since one of his main points is that the generous affiliate program these sites offer may be a significant factor in the ubiquity of P2P lending articles. I slightly toyed with the idea of dabbling in P2P lending, especially after hearing how it helped out Amanda from Me vs Debt. But in the end I think I decided that I just couldn't do it. The thought of charging people interest just doesn't seem to jive with me even though I might be helping them out.

SVB from the Digerati Life posted a good article about why new toys suck and old toys are the best. Science has finally proven what secret mountain training camps have known for centuries. She didn't mention anything about how old toys help your child to actualize their inner ninja, but I think that was the subliminal message encoded into the cute images. I suddenly feel the urge to flip out and kill some bad guys ...

Review Day Is Approaching

In a few weeks I will be subjected to my very first annual review. I have absolutely no idea what to expect and this fact is generating no small amount of nervousness and excitement. I can't wait to get more responsibility and more money from my employer, but I also have no clue how to go about it in a professional way. I mean I don't really want to play hardball with my boss - that just isn't me - and my impact on the company has been relatively small given the nature of my role in the company. I would much rather have my merit and service to my employer speak for me, but I may have to supplement my performance with some persuasive speech.

Here are some reasons why I want my review to go well:

1. A productive review will give me an opportunity to clearly define my goals for the next year, giving me focus and making work much more enjoyable on the whole.
2. Understanding where I am going in the short term might open up education opportunities that would make me more useful to my employer in the long term. I think that this might make me feel less like a clog in a great machine and more like a real boy.
3. The money from a raise would be nice, enabling my wife and I to save more and meet our financial goals.
4. I like the people I work with and I want things to go smoothly for their sake. I certainly don't want to cause any awkwardness.

I will probably be scouring the internet soon to see what others have said on this topic. I'm sure somebody has had something useful to say that can help me out, I just haven't looked yet.

Why We Are Committed to Living Debt Free

Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses? - Ebenezer Scrooge

Being in debt is simply no good - and if you lived in the 19th century it meant you went to live in a very unpleasant place where you were forced to stay (and pay rent!) until your family could pay off your debts for you. Today, debt simply sucks. Back then debt killed, literally - well maybe not literally, it was probably the dysentery or the tuberculosis that actually killed you, but it was debt 's fault for putting you in the stinky death hole of a debtors prison so it deserves some of the responsibility in my book.

In light of debt's uncanny power to give a person the bloody flux or consumption, my wife and I have decided that we never, ever, ever want to live a life that will put us into debt (except to buy a house). We have committed to:

• Embrace an attitude that values people more than things (frugal living to the max!)
• Develop an emergency fund for 6 months of our living expenses
• Save up to buy all our big ticket items before we purchase them
  
• Use a budget that balances for everyday and regular expenses
  
• Live a healthy and active lifestyle to reduce medical bills and future debilitating illnesses

The main goals of our debt free lifestyle are as follows:

• Impact as many lives as we can in a positive way
• Secure a stable and safe future for our children
• Be happy

We avoid debt because we want to make this world a better place, and it seems funny to me that something as simple as avoiding debt can be such an important part of that equation. But when you consider all the money that you need to earn more of to pay off your debts, and all the time that you need to spend doing so, and all the growth that money could have been doing in a high interest savings account or in the stock market, which might have allowed you to retire earlier, thus giving you more time, it really adds up to opportunities lost to impact the world for the better. There is no bigger time suck and money drain than paying a person for the ability to pay another person for something you want but don't need and can't afford.

For those that started off on the wrong foot, there are tons of resources on the internet about how to get out of debt. For the most part this information can be summarized as follows:

• Start spending less than you earn
• Put all that extra cash toward reducing your debt - interest payments slowly drain your life
• Consolidate your debt at a lower interest rate so that you can pay less interest rates
• Continue until your debt is gone

If you had the unfortunate experience of taking on debt as a student because you wanted to obtain a student signature loan then I am deeply sorry for you. But you don't have to live in that debt forever! Get out of it as soon as you can so that your money can start working for you instead of for someone else.

Hump Day Humor - The Gary Coleman Effect

I just couldn't pass this one up after stumbling upon it writing my Pro vs Joe articles (here and here). If you don't find Gary Coleman acting like a macho man funny then this might not be for you, but if you do ...



Oh the things we do for money! I wonder how much the WWE pays a person to act like they are punching a grown man in the goods from behind and then have your face bashed in by a fake guitar? If its more than $10 count me in.

Check it out: The Finwikian

Rather than write more quality content for this site, today during my lunch break I went out and created my very first wiki article ever. It is up over at the Finwikian, a Personal Finance wiki page created by Mrs. Micah. It is a fun idea, and could probably be built out very quickly with some liberal use of the copy-and-paste technique. I hear Wikipedia has got some pretty good content.

I liked the article I stumbled upon about My Family's Money. Whoever wrote that is a genius. If you have any similarly genius ideas about stuff to add to the article about my site, be sure to sign up to be able to edit stuff (do it here) and add away. I may have to do some editing if you get my life story wrong, but thats okay - I will still love you in the platonic, universal sense of the word.

Pros vs Joes: What Advice Do Their Professionals Give?

Since the Pros are just like Joes when it comes to the problems they have with managing their money, maybe some of the things that their investment professionals suggest for them are the same types of things that will work for people like you and me. Here are three things that I've inferred from comments made by members of Horizon Wealth Management that seem to work for them in managing the portfolios of professional athletes:

Frontload wealth building – the average professional athlete is in sports for about 5 years so wealth preservation is a very important thing if athletes want to create lifelong financial security (source). Conservative investments that minimize risk while generating only modest returns can have the athlete earning thousands upon thousands of dollars a year. Simply earning a 2.75% return on investments will have an athlete who stashed away their signing bonus of $1.675 million earning over $50,000 a year in interest after 5 years. A 5% return would have them earning $100,000 a year over the same time period. That is a pretty significant amount considering that this is without adding any more money to the pot.

To the average person windfalls aren't that common, but when they do come it is important that these funds be turned into income preservation rather than a new ORV with bullet holes the size of motza balls on the back hatch. A $15,000 windfall would turn into over $100,000 during the course of a 40-year work life if invested at the very beginning and returning 5% per year. Add to that number your normal retirement savings and retirement could come a lot sooner than you had expected. At that point it becomes a simple matter of discipline and forward thinking. (See My Dollar Plan "Reverse Strategy" for a better understanding of what front loading your retirement investing can do for you. And check out this post on how to plan for retirement).

Think about finance in a way that makes sense to you. According to an American Way article the people over at Horizon think that educating their clients on basic investment terminology is important - duh! So important, in fact, they are willing to forgo the almost impenetrable financial jargon for communicating information in a way that is easily accessible to their clients. For many, that means drawing analogies between the world of finances and their sport. The difference between a three-pointer and a free throw might be the backdrop for a discussion about the strengths and weaknesses between investing in emerging market stocks and US government bonds. They might explain the difference by saying, "Emerging market stocks are like three pointers, they have a low chance of scoring but when they do they can worth a lot. Free throws, on the other hand, are more like a US government bonds, they both have a good chance of making it but they don't return nearly as much." It is almost always easier to think of things in a way that makes sense to you, so do it with your finances.

Keep goals front and center. You have to have clear goals to force yourself to save some money when it seems like you have a limitless supply. If I made millions of dollars a year I could totally imagine myself saying something like, "I should totally buy that island this year. I'll just be sure to make up for it next year with my Gatorade contract." Oh the sweet temptation of owning a tropical paradise! It may be even harder to keep goals and to save money when every penny counts though. It is hard to save when companies sell so many fine widgets that you simply must have or your child keeps begging for more food. Help yourself out by setting real goals and sticking to them. Push yourself, but know the balance between feeding your family now and feeding them later.

See, you probably have exactly what it takes to be just like a professional athlete when it come to managing money. Now if only you shoot like one ...

Investment Strategy Update - Two Months

The past month has not been that great for the stock market in general, nor has it been even remotely good for the one U.S. stock I had chosen in my original investment strategy post. As always, lets take a look numbers and cool graphs:

Washington Mutual (WM)
Buy Date: 1/9/2008
Buy Price: $12.34 Shares: 185.74
High: $21.92 Low: $9.91
Closing: $18.06
Growth: -13.21%


Washington Mutual (WM) has been getting hammered in trading, losing 25% of its value in the past 5 days. The worst part is that I haven't even been noticing. I pretty much no longer keep tabs on my stock and didn't even notice the slide into negative territory. Now the stock may still have some significant long term potential, but it stings to think that I held a stock that went from growing 76% through the beginning of February to over 10% of its value. Though I only have this holding in my imagination, it is hard to see that I "lost" $2,250 on an investment of $2,500 from neglect. Hindsight, though, is 20/20.

It just seems to reiterate the idea that I had after last months update. It really seems like a good idea to set buy and sell numbers on individual stocks that you want to invest in, especially when they are highly volatile and risky like WAMU is proving to be. I would definitely prefer to lock in a 50% return on a stock than to hold onto a volatile stock for too long and break even or lose money. I could live with potentially being out of a stock that could, in very ideal conditions, end up returning 400% over a 4 year period for the peace of knowing that I just earned 50% on my money in one month. With WAMU in particular, I could simply buy in again if I thought the stock was heading up again since now it has dropped below my initial buy price. That would significantly increase my earning potential from the holding if it were to recover from the recent loss.

T. Rowe Price Africa & Middle East Fund (TRAMX)
Buy Date: 1/9/2008
Buy Price: $13.46 Shares: 202.59
Month High: $13.58 Month Low: $11.18
Growth: -0.30%


TRAMX has essentially recovered from its freak decline from last month. The growth has been slow and steady with most of the changes to the NAV coming in cents rather than dollars. In fact, all changes to this stock have been under 2% per day. I have been very impressed with the relative stability of this fund in comparison to Washington Mutual (WM), especially since when I started I supposed that both were relatively risky investments.

Lessons Learned
Over the past month the Dow (.DJI), the NASDAQ (.IXIC), and the S&P 500 (.INX) have seen losses between 3% an 6%. Washington Mutual has far outpaced the market, raking up a loss 41% over the exact same period. Risky stocks seem to have the power to wildly outpace the market performance over short periods of time. Just last month WAMU grew by 50% while all these three indexes all saw similar loses.

Then there is TRAMX. It has remained relatively even keeled over the past two months. With only slight dips and the anomalous drop on January 22, 2008 it has seen steady growth while the US has seen steady decline. Diversifying your investments across different continents seems to be just as important as investing them in different economic sectors. Washington Mutual is a bank and TRAMX invests mainly in banks in the Arab world. While one investment is tanking, the other is seeing steady and consistent growth. One is getting hammered by the sub-prime lending mess that mainly affect US banks where the loan originated while the other reaps the benefits of surging oil prices. World investing is here to stay.

Pros vs Joes: Are Professional Athletes Better Than You With Money?

Photo found at Library of Congress

In our sports obsessed culture, we often think of professional athletes as set apart from the general public. Their ability to do something way better than everyone else creates this strange aura about them that somehow adds value to their scribbles and compels us to purchase the products that they pedal. They earn millions upon millions of dollars for doing things that parents in America pay big bucks for their children to participate in each year. An eighteen year old good at hitting a baseball can see more money come his way for signing a piece of paper than most Americans can make in their entire lifetime (source). But are athletes good at managing money of that magnitude? Can they cope with copious amounts of capital? Should they shutter when success sends them seductive spoils?

I was reading that perennial powerhouse of a publication that is the American Way, the American Airlines in-flight magazine, on some recent travels to the frozen tundra of Indiana that gave me some insight into these questions. The article followed the financial choices of one Aaron Hill, the second baseman for the Toronto Bluejays who was drafted in 2003 to the tune of a $1.675 million signing bonus. Have mercy! The article then outlined some of the major financial hurdles that professional athletes face when considering what to do with their cash, and you know what, it sounded awfully familiar. Athletes ...

1. ... have trouble deciding where to put their funds. Large brokerage firms, banks, and even specialized for-athlete investment companies are all competing to get professional athletes to stash their cash in their accounts. They hire ex-players in an attempt to establish immediate trust and personal connection with the the athlete because they know that these types of things are important to the pro. It seems to me that the general public seems to operate in a similar way. We are always interested to know where people we know and trust put their money, and more times than not we follow suit. We want to know what we're getting into and that almost always has us going to another person, whether it is on the Internet or face to face.
2. ... have stories of horrible financial failures. What do Gary Coleman, Joe Louis, and Michael Jackson have in common? They all earned lots of money and lost it. They may not have killed their paychecks with Starbucks and eating out, but the temptation to over consume or risk too much has left these men doing Cash Call commercials, working as a “greeter” in Vegas, and leaving the whimsical land of Neverland. The average Joe may not be forced to leave an estate with a ferris wheel ... a FERRIS WHEEL ... but he might be kicked out of his home for failure to pay his mortgage or work a part-time job at a fast food restaurant to pay off some bad debts. Work is the only thing that will change your financial situation, no matter how good you are at dunking a basketball.
   
3. ... are risk takers at heart. I would absolutely love to turn $4,000 into $50,000 in one year of investing. It would be pretty risky, but boy would it be nice. I don't because I keep convincing myself that that $4,000 is better left in our bank account because we are going to need to use it soon. I can easily imagine how I would act if $4,000 meant nothing to me because I made $1.7 million in a single year. I'd probably have $4,000 burning a whole in my pocket every week. I would be trying all types of doodads and flimflams to get more. Good thing I don't make that much money ... yet.
4. ... have really bad memories. Professional sports players are notorious for bragging. They seem to easily forget when they get creamed by a stupid investment but shout it out on the highest roof top when they make a smoking deal. I don't know anybody like that. I've never heard anyone talk about the killing they made with this investment or the profits that they turned on that flip. I mean, that isn't the type of thing that makes it on TV shows or anything.
5. ... can try and keep up with the Jones'. Since the braggers can be so vocal even though they are so misguided, it can be hard for a pro in the club house to totally tune them out and stick to their asset allocation that they have meticulously formulated with their trained professional. All the “yougottas” out there aren't only for the poor suckers, they are for the rich suckers too.
6. ... suffer from being too busy (or just really dumb). Professional athletes really do work very hard at their sport. Most days the last thing I want to do when I get home from a long day at work is try and research stocks. I want to sleep, eat, or be entertained. I doubt someone who throws a football for a living is really that much different, except that he could have a massive pastry from which a little person jumps out delivered to his house everyday if he really wanted to. I'm not sure how fun it would be, but Peter the Great seemed to get a kick out of it.

As you can see, pros suffer from some of the same financial problems that we Joes deal with: lack of knowledge, stupid decisions, trying to keep up with the Jones', and the 24-hours-in-a-day syndrome. I guess being famous can't stop you from being human.

Major league Money, Major league Issues [American Way]

Run, Steward! Run!

Today I learned another one of the dangers of bus riding - early buses.

My mornings are generally pretty straight forward. Get up early, eat breakfast, shower, dress, get food, play guitar, head off to the bus stop. I normally like to get out of the house between 6:20 AM and 6:24 AM to make sure I can make it to my stop before the bus arrives sometime after 6:30 AM. This morning I made it out of the house at 6:24 AM after sweetly singing Screeching Weasel's "I love you" into my wife's ear in my deepest most sexiest sexy voice - deep and low like the Barry White. Still high on life, I jaunted down the road to my stop no more than 0.4 miles away. As I approach a left turn that I take to get to my stop I see my bus pulling out to make a left turn and start driving away from me. A quick glance down at my watch reads 6:28 AM. Gah!

Then I heard it - "Lieutenant Dan. Ice cream!" I knew what I had to do. Anything else would mean being late to work and having to stay late at work. That was not going to happen. So I just started running. I knew that the bus always waited at the last stop before it gets on the freeway if it got there before its scheduled departure time. I had to make it there before the bus left in about 13 minutes. I didn't know how far it was, but I knew I had to get there.

At first the cool morning air kept me refreshed and invigorated, but after the first 0.2 miles my lungs began to burn with the price of neglect and my legs ached. Then I hit the uphill. The burning in my lungs spread to my heart as it worked harder than it has since my annual Turkey game that leaves me bruised and my body slightly less aligned. I reach the crest of the hill spent, but I see my bus taunting me from its landing and running down hill is a lot easier. I have to cross the street so I jaywalk and trample underfoot some seriously cut back ground cover on the median. I can't complete the jay because the oncoming traffic would have killed me so I continue slowly down the faux cobbled median, stupid concrete bumps trying to kill me.

Before I know it I am across the street and flying down the sidewalk, taking off my hooded sweatshirt as I feel sweat begin to pool in my elbow pits. The last 0.2 miles of the trip seem easy until I hear what I think are start-up-and-pull-away noises from the bus. My pace picks up until I realize that the bus isn't going anywhere just yet.

The bus driver looks shocked to see me as I pull up to the door with my pass in hand. I make my way back to my sitting area and flop down exhausted. I realize just how hot the bus is after about 10 seconds of sitting there. I'm up at the front of the bus asking the driver if it is okay if I wait outside before the sweat makes me seriously stinky. He pulls himself away from his paper to let me know that I have about three minutes. I didn't look at my watch, but I am deducing that I made my journey in about 8 minutes given the bus time posted on the internet for my stop. Google tells me I traveled about 0.8 miles in that time span. I never want to do that again, but its nice to know that I can make if I have to. My legs are still achy.

Lesson learned: show up early to the bus or be in better shape, pick your poison

Rounding Out My Reading - I Have Star Power Edition

Things appear to be winding down after my run on the Consumerist that began sometime Tuesday evening. I am pretty sure my time in the sun is over and things should be getting back to normal over the next day or two. It was really fun while it lasted. I got such a kick out of reading things that people wrote in response to my article - it really makes the effort it takes to blog worthwhile. There is just something special in knowing that other people read and like stuff that you write. Here is some of the stuff that I liked reading on the web this week:

Incidentally, The Baglady wrote an article about what makes a blog article popular a few weeks ago that pretty much sums up everything about how my post became popular. 1) It was controversial. Apparently, some people don't like the idea of people owning a monkey as a pet. That was certainly news to me. 2) My article got linked by a big site. I'm not sure who to thank for that, but thank you Baglady! 3) It spoke to people's desperate survival need to know just how much it might cost to own a monkey. I mean, how could you go on living without know what a monkey might do to your bottom line. Once you saw that link and passed it by there is absolutely no telling how many nights you might cry yourself to sleep wishing you had clicked on that link. 4) I didn't really fulfill the requirement of the fourth item - a well written and original article - but I think the first three made up for it.

The Frugal Panda gave some stellar advice on how to throw a sweet bar mitzvah on the cheap, but more importantly in my book, a sweet bar mitzvah that keeps first things first and doesn't turn the party into a status symbol. The principles behind the suggestions fit in any context from your child's first birthday party to a bridal shower to a 50th wedding anniversary so it is applicable even if you aren't Jewish. To boil it all into one terse statement: if the glove doesn't fit you must acquit. No that isn't it ... um ... keep the party about who the party is for already, not for you, the party thrower, but for the person who the party is for. I have been watching way too much of the my old E! News Michael Jackson Trial Reenactment tapes.

Mr. Cheap over at Quest for Four Pillars reminded my just how good of an investment it is for me to be taking public transportation these days in his "Life Without Wheels" article. You really do pay more for your car than you think once you add up gas, maintenance, registration, insurance, and all the miscellaneous costs that are associated with automobile ownership. Buck the automobile industry - make a time machine and go back to the 1950s and stop the automakers from buying all the trains and running them out of business. That'll show 'em.

I also like an article that Madison wrote over at My Dollar Plan about what I think she would call a "decreasing contribution strategy" for retirement savings. The plan essentially has an individual front loading for retirement and then reducing their retirement contributions as life requires. This plan is useful because it takes advantage of the principle of compounding interest in way that offers a lot of flexibility and disposable income when it is needed most. If you can put 50% of your earned income into retirement savings and be like Madison you should.

And finally, I liked Amanda's post from Me vs. Debt about food liberation and waste prevention - now doesn't that sound much more romantic than dumpster diving? I think it is totally a valid enterprise and it pains me to think of all those cheesy crunch chalupas being tossed out for no other reason than no home could be found for them. Shame on you, Mr. Taco Bell, shame on you.

Wowza: lolgraphs and the Consumerist

My article on owning a pet monkey got picked up over at the Consumerist. As a result my traffic exploded yesterday, as this graph so elegantly and colorfully explains ...
Now my article is getting links from places as varied as MSN's Money Blog "Smart Spending" to an MMORPG guild forum. My fifteen minutes of internet fame is in high gear! The article has also generated a surprising amount of comments over at the Consumerist. It was interesting to see how the "man on the street" is responding. Here are some of my favorite comments:

Stuart is a retard who is not ready for the responsibility of pet ownership, much less exotic animal ownership. No, that's an insult to the developmentally challenged. Stuart makes them look like Einstein.

I am sure the comment about his reasoning being sound is snarky, but in case it isn't, you're are retarded as he is.

I wouldn't trust Stuart to take care of a sea monkey, never mind a living, breathing, scratching, masturbating, biting and [poop] throwing monkey. Owning an animal because it would be awesome is a sure sign that you are not ready for the responsibility. If you adopt animals that you are not ready to take care of, you are effectively being cruel to the animal. There's no room for that.

Stuart should do what everyone in his tribe who wants a monkey to f with does. Find a woman and make kids. Same thing.

Notice the blatant misspelling of my pseudonym, I am totally offended by that.

This one tickled my fancy as well:

"The only reason you have a monkey as a pet is to train it to do cool things."

So, living things exist only for your amusement?

Well then... when We, the Alien Overlords, take over the Earth, I think I will buy you and teach you to do funny tricks.

I absolutely love the scene in Zoolander where Ben Stiller is jumping up and down with cymbals. It makes me want to own a monkey even more.

And this:

[Referring to the sweet Taco John commercial of Whiplash's timely delivery of burritos to the well dressed transients] If a monkey sped past me and then I saw that he had placed a burrito in my hand, I would probably not eat that burrito.

There are also a few good stories about some of the dangers and joys of owning a monkey. Feel free to check them out and leave a comment or two. There is some use of the language that is a little juvenile and crude, so I don't approve of every comment made. Overall though, the commenters there are a pretty clever bunch.

A special thanks needs to go out to Mr. Chris Walters for picking me up and to the whoever or however that got my article into his hands. I love you mom!

Hump Day Humor

I think my favorite line is "... you can keep your Marxists ways for its only just a phase ...." Ha!

Carnivals Are Up

Both the Carnival of Personal Finance and the Festival of Frugality are up and running over at The Baglady and Broke Grad Student respectively. It is good to see young whippersnappers putting together quality blog material and keeping it real.

Update: So is the Carnival of Money Stories over at Piggy Bank Blues.

2008 Goal Update: Challenge-ify or Die

I mentioned earlier that I had neglected to comment on our progress toward our goals for 2008 and now its time to make amends. Many of our goals need to be restated and a few have proven far to easy for me to complete - I need to challenge-ify them or I will stand guilty of *gulp* easy goalsim. That simply will not do.

Goal - Master my own hodgepodge of spreadsheet madness
Status - Accomplished!
Response - Gah! Getting my spreadsheet to predict my income down to the penny was far to easy. I basically just had to add an extra column to my spending tracker and a few more columns to my overview spreadsheet and presto, magic spreadsheet predictor is born. I think I need to improve my sheets further by cutting down on the clutter and streamlining readability. I have this sinking feeling that if a stranger took a look at my spreadsheet system that they would have a hard time know what the heck was going on and why I had all those colors and columns everywhere. This will require me to simplify and condense some of my information into a much more user-other-than-me friendly. This will enable me to share my template with others succinctly while at he same time keeping my options open to track useless information like how much we currently spend on meals per person per day. I don't know why I like that, but I do.

Goal - Save $10,000
Status -20.88% complete
Response - This goal will probably get done this year, but I'm not willing to count on it just yet. With my wife's income stream dwindling and the potential that it may dry up over the coarse of the year as a strong possibility I am uncertain just how close this will be. We will be getting an extra $2,240 from Uncle Sam over the next several months which will add a nice little boost to our number. Overall, I am very happy with our progress on this item.

Goal - Stay within budget
Status - $0.93 under budget YTD
Response - January was a bad month for us because we lost the use of one of our cars and I was forced to ride the bus and buy a pass for February all in one month. That ended up pushing our spending above our budget by $123.47. For February were $124.38 under budget. I was not expecting us to make up so much of our deficit so soon, but with a long weekend spent with my wife's family we were able to skate through the month with limited gas and food usage. This may be another goal that I need to hard-ify if I am to not be a sissy, but I will wait a month or two before I make a final decision about this one. The past two months have just been too peculiar.

Goal - Earn $100 of additional income
Status - Umm, it depends on what I meant by additional income ...
Response - I was reading this post by Brip Blap awhile back and it reminded me that additional/alternate forms of income can come from many different avenues. If I were to include interest from my bank account, I would accomplish my goal when my next interest deposit makes into into my account. In fact, I might get anywhere from three to four times my goal in interest alone this year. I didn't even think of that when making this goal. There are other forms of alternate income that I regularly earn that would make my goal of $100 obsolete. Recycling, house sitting, cash back credit cards, surveys, and gifts are regular ways that I earn extra money - all of which have earned me to date more than $100. So I am forced to either restate my goal to accommodate these additional forms of alternate income, or I need to state my goal with the words that describe what I really meant. I really wanted to say that I wanted to earn $100 blogging this year. That is now my goal and I am sticking to it. So far I have racked in a whopping $1.61. I have a long way to go on this one.

Goal - Increase our net worth to $40,000
Status - $17,614 away
Response - If we reach this goal I will be completely amazed. It appears impossible given current and predicted future conditions. What was I thinking ...

Consider my goals challenge-ified. I can't wait to see what the next few months bring. Who knows, I may need to challenge-ify them some more.

February Budget: Keep On Keeping On

This was a stellar month for us in terms of our budget. Here are the numbers:


We ran under budget in every category save our entertainment category which saw an unexpected rise in the cost of our Napster subscription. Oh what I would give for the glory days of Napster when I could download songs for free with a clear conscious because I wasn't wise to the fact that it was probably stealing. Stupid stealing stuff posing as free stuff.

All told, we were 5.97% under budget this month. Riding the bus has kept our gas expense down even with the dramatic rise in gas prices in San Diego over the last few weeks. I need to keep riding the bus. I am seriously proud that once again my wife feed us on a falling $0.64 per meal per person. That is $0.13 less per meal that is was in January. I think that most of it was the massive deals she got on breakfast food and a convenient free trip to visit her family back east. We also undertook an entrance beautification project run by my wife, which accounts for the majority of our household spending. Flowers are nice and smell good too. Other than that, our spending was pretty basic. We got to keep this up.

Net Worth for February 2008: Growth is Slowing, the End is Near

The Numbers:
Net Worth - $22,386
Percent Increase - 4.18%

Just like the U.S. economy, growth is slowing in the Lucre household. My wife's change from working full-time to working part-time has started affecting her paychecks and our bottom line is obviously impacted. We grew by a total of $898 this month, down $228 from January. That brings our net worth up to $22,386, a growth of $2,024 on the year. March should see a similar drop in growth as the impact of the the "job" is expected to spread to other sectors of our economy. We expect consumer spending will decrease over the next quarter as we begin to feel the squeeze on our sources of equity, inhibiting returns on our cash back credit cards and forcing us to tighten up our budget. The outlook for the next several month is dim, with a projected write downs the savings-for-future-expenses market we could see a 25% or greater drop in value. Our net worth is on the verge of becoming a negative parabola. The end is near ...