Frugal in the Fruitlands

This lovely New England March has come in like a lion and out like… well, a feral kitty with sharp claws. It will still be several more weeks before the garden goes in, but I spent a good portion of my weekend at Home Depot, preparing seeds, pots, and all those goodies. I’ve also been working on a costume for the Festival of the LARPs this weekend, a weekend-long (free!) live-action roleplay convention at Brandeis University. I will be running my first LARP here, too, though it’s not one I’ve written. I’m prepared for adventure!

Here are some the best posts from March, in my not-so-humble opinion:

• No Kids, No Debt, No Problem
• The Mystery Cash Box and the Sunk Cost Fallacy
• The $20,000 Manicure Question

And here’s a little bit of link love for you, not all related to personal finance or frugality:

• An oldie (April 2007) but a goodie: Unclutterer’s Tough Questions for Your Things. My favorite one is not on this list: will I have to dust this?
• Write to Done’s Research Sources for Writers: A Guide to Backing Up Your Words. The availability of peer-reviewed journal articles to unaffiliated individuals is a major issue in making research relevant to the masses. This article helps you to seek out those resources that are free to everyone.
• H&R Block’s Tax Calculators. I like these better that the governments’ (and the last time I checked, the IRS’ withholding calculator was down!)
• Fancast: a free, legal repository of TV and movies, past and present - so you can, yanno, relive your childhood with Doogie Howser episodes.

Hoping to catch up on some of my health and fitness related goals, my April goal is to exercise every day for thirty minutes. I tried this last year at around this time and was only able to accomplish four days at a stretch before losing the habit. I’m just a Morlock by nature, alas. I also have absurdly high cholesterol by nature, too, so that’s nothing to be proud of.

No Comments »

My coworker buys a $12 manicure every week. You can do your own math to figure out how much that would cost over the next twenty years with 5% interest. Go on. It’s a lot - about $20,000, in fact.

Why is this relevant? My coworker is exquisitely well-groomed. She has perfect hair, fashionable clothes, and wears makeup every day. She’s also really good at listening, and even though we come from completely different backgrounds (she freely admits to spending most of high school reading fashion magazines), I like her a bunch. At work, I’d like to be like her - not just her looks, but her attitude.

One of the best blog series I’ve seen recently has been Trent’s Investing in Yourself. He argues in the Personal Appearance and Hygiene part of this series that “small efforts of personal appearance are tiny investments that do pay off.”

There are two facts about my job that tie into this:

1. After a (very) rough adjustment period, I’ve decided that I enjoy it enough to stay here for a while and try to “advance through the ranks.” In this, I’ve accepted that a job worth doing is worth doing well, to cite the old adage.
2. I don’t put as much effort into my appearance as half the women in my office. As long as I’m clean and my clothes match, I don’t much care how I look. I don’t wear makeup. I have a very limited wardrobe, and don’t follow fashion trends. I take a shower in the morning and arrive at work with messy, wet hair - which I haven’t had cut since August. I have never plucked my eyebrows, had a manicure or pedicure, or worried overly much about the condition of my skin.

Does any of this matter? I think it probably does in my workplace, which is largely populated by mainstream (read: non-geeky) women. My boss, for example, is female, and any promotion would come from her. I think investing in my appearance would show that I do, in fact, speak her language.

Just so I don’t lose my feminist cred, I do acknowledge the ridiculous beauty standards for women and the unfairness of the fact that women are practically required to put more money into keeping up appearances than men. But my workplace is not the place to be an activist. I won’t be getting plastic surgery or developing a sudden interest in fashion - we’re talking wearing makeup, getting regular haircuts, and blow-drying my hair before coming to work.

So where do I start - and how much do I spend? At what point will the initial investment exceed the expected payoff?

8 Comments »

In the shoujo anime series Hana Yori Dango (”Boys Over Flowers”), the heroine declares herself a “no-brand woman” when faced with the elitism of her wealthy high school.

I saw the beginning of HYD, fansubbed, over five years ago but I still remember that turn of phrase.

You may have noticed that I’m very anti-advertising. In brief, I begrudge the mindshare it seems to demand. Branding is one of the many tools advertisers have in their arsenal. It’s the process of creating a heuristic - a shortcut - for the product you’re selling. A brand is thus the series of emotions and associations you have when the name of a product is mentioned.

All of this may lead you to ask: “But Lise, don’t you work for a marketing firm?”

In fact, I do (and one that specializes in branding, to boot). I’m not sure if the fact that it’s educational marketing makes it better or worse, on a relative scale. On one hand, college is arguably a more useful thing than a pair of overpriced name-brand sneakers. On the other hand, it’s a bigger expense, and the stakes are higher. I’m just a data monkey, but are there students out there who have been convinced to spend more than they can really afford on college by some research I did? I’m honest in my statistical methods and my reports. I homogenize my variances and cross my t-tests! - but I can’t influence what the client will do with the data once we’ve handed them the report.

Interestingly, outside of the physical realities of my day job, there are also entities who prey on emotion - luckily, I have more control there. I’ve been contacted a few times in the past month or so with solicitations for guest posts, links, and advertisements/sponsored posts from what at first glance seem like fellow bloggers. With ten minutes of research, however, I discovered I was hearing from a corporate entity whose blog is there to generate advertising revenue. (I won’t mention who they are because that would be giving them the free publicity they so desperately want - but bloggers should do their research before hosting a guest post from an unknown).

I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I do not accept guest posts, links, or advertisements from corporate entities. If I go to your blog and there’s not an about page with your profile - if there’s more ad space than content - if a Google search of your website’s name brings up only press releases and sponsored posts/reviews… you’re not worth my readers’ mindshare.

I blog because I love it. This blog is about my own financial journey, as crooked a path as it sometimes is. It’s also about my fiscal ethics, not coincidentally; and that does not include letting other businesses dictate what my blog is promoting.

No Comments »

Every budget has a “mystery” category. For us, that box is called “Cash.”

For the most part, my husband and I pay for everything with a credit card and pay the balance off in full every month. But sometimes we come across something that we can’t pay for with credit - or even a check or debit. We need cash: for a co-pay. For entrance to a board-gaming event. To get snacks out of a vending machine.

Inevitably what happens is that we take $20, or $40, or $60 out. That money gets dutifully recorded in our budget software - under the heading of “Cash.” At the end of the month, I look at the Cash category and realize that $200 or $300 has flowed through our hands, basically unaccounted for.

Some personal finance gurus advocate a cash-only lifestyle as a way to get out of debt and find financial freedom. Cash in hand, they argue, is more tangible, and thus we are more aware of it slipping through our fingers every time we buy a latte.

I would argue, however, that cash in hand is prey for the the sunk cost fallacy.

What is the sunk-cost fallacy? Let Wikipedia answer the question! Many people have strong misgivings about “wasting” resources. This is called “loss aversion”. In the above example involving a non-refundable movie ticket, many people, for example, would feel obligated to go to the movie despite not really wanting to, because doing otherwise would be wasting the ticket price; they feel they passed the point of no return. This is sometimes called the sunk cost fallacy. Economists would label this behavior “irrational”: It is inefficient because it misallocates resources by depending on information that is irrelevant to the decision being made. Colloquially, this is known as “throwing good money after bad”

I’m not alone in this behavior, either. Shuchong discusses this, too, in “Cash to Burn: Why a Credit-Only Lifestyle Works for Me.”

I had very good intentions. I took out $40, because I went to the thrift store, and they only take cash. I spent $19 at the thrift store. What I should have done was re-deposit the extra $20 when I passed the ATM on the way home. What I did do was spend about $3 on pizza, because I forgot to pack lunch one day this week. And then $3.25 on a video rental (My roommate had never seen a James Bond movie before. I had to rectify this glaring gap in her cultural education, poor deprived child, and the library was closed for the evening. It was an emergency AND money well spent.) Another $3 for vitamins at CVS. And I must have spent another $6.00 somewhere, because I only have $5.75 left.

Here are some of my suggestions-to-self (and to you) about stopping this gap:

• Instead of taking out $20 every time I need to pay a co-pay for a lunchtime doctor’s appointment, I should make it a point to take the checkbook with me that day instead.
• The post office accepts credit cards. No, really.
• The dining hall at Brandeis accepts credit cards. No, really.
• Pre-registering for conventions means you won’t be coughing up $60 cash at the door.
• The next time the clerk at High Farms Variety - the only place to get the coveted town garbage bags - tells me they can’t accept my credit (or debit!) card for purchases under $20, I’ll remind them that they’re breaking their service agreement with the credit card company by doing so. I can’t guarantee that telling them this will help, but notifying the credit card company might.

What about you? Does money flow throw your hands faster with a credit card, or with cash?

8 Comments »

I’ve been chatting with Sydney of Retirement: A Full Time Job about her path to retirement. Sydney is a great inspiration to me because her retirement at 44 was due to having a well-paying job she loved, socking away any funds that came her way, and… making a conscious decision not to have children.

No Kids = Greater Financial Freedom

I’ve written before about my childfree status. Early in our relationship, my husband and I idly discussed the possibility of children, but at some point we just turned to each other and said, “Really, are we ever going to be ready to give up our financial freedom for kids?” As a result, our financial future is clearer and our path to retirement is shorter. Every time I see a finance article talk about starting a college savings plan, I cross my fingers and give thanks that I never have to worry about that. I know that when the house is paid off, I can pretty much retire. Hell, I can predict when the house is going to be paid off. I don’t have to worry about outgrowing this one. It’s a real joy to know that I don’t owe anything to a little being, no matter how adorable they may be.

Continue Reading »

12 Comments »

Bankrate.com presents Market History: Learning What to Do From Past Recessions. Everything old is new again, as Bankrate discusses the history of oil prices, real estate bubbles, gold, and foreign investments. I wish they had brought up what Money mentioned last month: that over the past 100 years, stocks have consistently outperformed gold. That’s advice that some people I know desperately need right now.

Delayed, but good: Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, writes about The Real Recession Problem: Consumers Are At the End of Their Ropes (h/t to Brian). We’re finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth, he writes, acknowledging that there is more to this financial situation than just “HOMG yuppies bought bigger houses than they could afford!” This makes him rare among American finance writers I’ve encountered, who seem to ignore the social inequalities in how sub-prime mortgages were sold to minority and immigrant families by shady lenders. (The BBC’s The U.S. Subprime Crisis in Graphics in another good resource).

On a lighter note, I’ve discovered the new-ish Retirement: A Full-Time Job blog. I, too, aspire to be a “young retired bitch.”

Leo writes about The Magical Power of Focus and reminds me that- ooh, shiny!

1 Comment »