One Size Fits All

Ok. All January I tracked as much as I could. I think I tracked everything, but its in various places. So here is the first installment. Its on google spreadsheets. It tracks my public transit use because I wanted to see how much gasoline I used in public transit every year. I work four 10 hour days, so that is why there are many "no work" days. And yes, its quite tiring. I spend most Fridays catching up on sleep. I also tracked all the times I ate out. I didn’t track all non-local food purchases used in cooking, because that would be a bit much and I didn’t think to do it until half way through the month. I will do it in February. You’ll notice I take all sorts of public transit. This is how I spice up my life. I usually walk to the subway station except on days when it is really, really cold and my face or toes hurt. Then I catch the bus to get to the subway. There are half a dozen ways to get to work so depending on my mood I try them all out. I also live far from work (1 hour away - one way) and the subway in Philly is not extensive. All my "didn’t go anywhere" entries mean I didn’t use public transit.

I spent alot of time at home because I was either sick/and or it was too cold to go anywhere. I didn’t track where my husband went and what he ate and where he ate it. But since he quit his job, he has been busy cleaning and scrubbing our place and turning into a domestic diva while making sure he spends no money (which includes sitting in a cold house with the heat turned off). He turned the heat on about twice this month because the temperature really dipped and with out single paned windows our rooms are quite chilly.

I will post the other micromaneged things later today or over the weekend.  

Sorry about all that template updating yesterday. I wanted to try out a new theme, but blogsome is somewhat limiting in what themes are available, so I was hand coding everything trying to make the page pretty and compliant. But I think I sent out a million updates. So…sorry to the 2 of you that read this blog.

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I will be getting a $900 check from my university. One of the many reasons I quit my FT old job in 2006 was because I wanted to be elligible for grants to help me with my tuition (I am too dumb to get scholarships and after writing about 50 essays in 2005 and not getting anything I was a bit frustrated). I wanted to make less money. The job was also stressful and I was dealing with annoying and unethical people, but that’s a different story. I began working part time for 6 months in 2006 so when I completed my FAFSA form in 2007 for aid in 2007, I was elligible for more aid than I was in previous years which was none.

I got 2 grants (free money). One from PHEAA (Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency) and one from my university. However in 2007, my husband and I were making even less money. So in March of 2007 I filed an amended form (I forget what it was called) and sent it to PHEAA saying in a nutshell: I am even poorer please give me more money. I used our paystubs and bank statements as documentation. One of the reasons I wanted grants was because I wanted to limit the amount of loans I took out. In October last year, PHEAA sent me a letter asking me to verify that I was still making the amount I claimed in March. Since my husband had begun a new job, I sent a letter stating that our projected income was going to be higher than was previously stated. I sent in pay stubs and a spreadsheet with our salary projections as documentation and worried that I was going to get fined or somehow punished.

However, last week I got an email from my university saying that I had been approved for more money by PHEAA and that they were giving me an additional $900 to be applied to last semester’s tuition. But I am not in school so this would result in a refund check. I am so happy. I am going to put the entire check into my student loan payment (the unsubsidized part).  

I will be having some posts about money for awhile as its been on my mind more than usual.

While waiting for my husband to show up for a cheap date (a meditation class) at a local B&N a few nights back, I picked up Jeff Yeager’s book, The Ultimate Cheapskate and began reading it. I almost never buy books. So I am waiting for The Ultimate Cheapskate to show up at the library. I believe one of the first chapters asks the reader:

What’s your earliest childhood memory of money?

My first childhood memory of money comes from an incident which occured when I was about eight years old. My mother gave me five bucks to go to the local store to pick up something. Somewhere along the way I lost the money. I searched everywhere for it with no luck. Came back home and as was (and still is) common with me and my honesty, confessed. Got a good beating, cried. The end.

But it was not the end. About a week later, our maid servant was given twenty bucks to go to the store and get some stuff. She lost the money. Came home and admitted the loss to my mother. And my mother said it was okay and not to worry.

This incident gives a bit of an insight into my relationship with my mother. And my tightwad behaviour. I am very careful with everything I own. I almost never lose anything including the little stuff like pencils, hair clips, etc, etc.  I never misplace anything. Maybe this incident will save me money in the long run. Who knows? But the incident is one of many financial incidents that eventually determined my current relationship with my family.

People have been singing the praises of catalog choice as it supposedly removes all the unwanted catalogs from one’s mail box - I have yet to see any results. However, now catalog choice has a very nice database of my past consumer habits and what I don’t want. Will they sell that handy dandy database to a very shrewd marketing company that can better tailor their spam to me?

I like reading articles about tightwads. I find it very inspiring. I found an article about a House Rep’s tightwaddiness. via a search on NYT. An excerpt:

In addition to the $103 he invested on a futon that he rolls out at the end of every day and stashes behind the sofa each morning, Sanford tries to limit his spending in the capital to the following: about $10 every two weeks on toiletries that he uses when he showers in the House gym, $1.90 every day on breakfast — orange juice and yogurt — in the House cafeteria and $7.50 on the members’ all-you-can-eat salad buffet. Sanford spends $1 per shirt for laundering back in Charleston, but he gets his money’s worth. ‘’If I go up to Washington on a Monday and stay through Thursday,'’ he says, ‘’one clean shirt will last me through the week.'’

 

This is a long one.  

I am reading articles about the middle class squeeze on msn. I am not sure if I am middle class. I don’t think I am. But I do recognize that I make more money than probably half the planet and have a living standard that provides me with many comforts and non-essential goods.

I made $14,811 last year (husband made a little over $11,000). I was in school full time and working part time. I paid about $3,600 toward tuition. I also paid bills and my share of the rent for most of the year (stopped in the fall when I reduced my work hours even more). In all the years I’ve been with my husband, we lived mostly in one room structures (room in a house or a studio) and lived in a one bedroom for just two years before we downsized so I could go to school full time and finish up. We’ve also lived in poorer neighborhoods (ghettos) for most of our lives together. People in the article talk about having lower cost cable, but there is no TV in our house. Cost is partly the reason, but neither my husband nor I want to be exposed to ads and the brain washing that passes for television entertainment or "news". There is talk of cars in the article, I can’t imagine owning a car. There is talk of vacation. Our proper vacation we last had was in 2003. We paid for air fare and stayed with friends for a week. Before that I had 2 vacation trips in 2001. I stayed in a student hostel for one and with friends for another. We usually take day trips (by bus or train) to other cities as we live near so many of them.

Before we decided that we wanted to  be child free, I  couldn’t think about having kids because we couldn’t afford them. I remember I did a very rough calculation to see how much a kid would cost (from birth to college) and the figure I wound up with was $250,000. I looked at that number and thought, "I could retire on that amount!" 

Many of my values have come about because of a lack of money and I always wonder much my thinking has been shaped by that fact. Would I be as much of a bike nut and anti car, if I had more money? I admit that I love driving. I happen to find driving very relaxing and a very luxurious activity, but I dislike how cars turn regular humans into these angry people who flip out if someone takes 2 seconds longer to cross a street or drive past a stop sign. Then there is also the pollution bit. But…I don’t mean to go off on a tangent…just putting my thoughts down that have been percolating for awhile. I wonder if I would travel more if I had more money. And thus increase that ecological footprint. I love visiting new  places and trying new foods, but I haven’t done much of it as I don’t have money. And now I ride a high horse saying I am an environmentalist and refuse to fly, but I can’t afford it either.

In the MSN article and the subsequent discussion on the boards there was talk of how the official inflation rate isn’t reflective of real prices and there was a lot of finger pointing on who or what is to blame. I didn’t see anyone mention the excessive fucking (as in sex and then babies) is really the cause. I am an immigrant and its dawned on me that USA as the "land of opportunity" is code for "place where there aren’t as many people per square mile." I come from a very populated country.

I recently read "What is the What" by Dave Eggers and while the novel is a work of creative nonfiction, one recurring theme that really bothered me was the fact that people were having babies in refugee camps. Refugee camps! That is just cruel. And everyone wanted a piece of this ever shrinking pie. What sort of life did they aspire toward? The refugees that do come here and make it this middle class, do they find themselves lucky? Or do they wish for more? Of course you can’t quantify a group of people and their thinking, but I do wonder. I also think about what I want. And why do I want it. Right now I would like just a little bit more money. I will be getting a raise in a few months, so that extra padding will make me a bit less stressed. I also would like to own property. This desire was shaped after I read "The Good Earth" and recognized that once a person owned land, there was the possibility of some amount of security not possible as a renter - such as being able to grow some food and not worry too much about rising housing prices or having to move frequently. I also do have this goal of retiring early, and I still don’t know if I can manage it in the time frame I want. I am voluntarily forgoing alot of career routes and have quit jobs because of the ethical and moral values I hold. I don’t know if those decisions will hurt me in the long term, they have hurt me in the short term financially. Overall I am fairly satisfied. I am happy actually. I need very little (both tangible and intangible) to make me content. So I don’t feel squeezed. I like the view that says I made my own bed and should thus, lie on it. I am comfortable with all the decisions I have made to date, and I wish that more people were.

Some people have warm, supportive, loving family members. Other people have husbands that will wake up at 5:30 in the morning to roll out tortillas and make a fish taco to satisfy his wife’s craving.

Although I stopped tracking my expenses in 2007 when I got stressed (which happened several times), I thought I’d try to reconstruct my expenses from other methods. I tried to use my debit or credit card whenever possible so it makes it a bit easier to reconstruct.

Between my husband and I, we held a total of 4 jobs in 2007. I had a part time job which I quit in January of 2007 and I think I made about $200 gross, I am waiting for that w2 to arrive. My husband began his newest job (which he quit last week) in October 2007 and that is the 2nd w2 I am waiting for. My husband made about $5,000 gross (I think) in 2007 at the new job. So far minus the two w2s I am waiting for, we made a grand total of $26,477 (gross). So our gross income in 2007 is hovering at around $30,000. Not poverty level, but I am actually shocked at how little we made.

As for expenses, my credit union sold its credit card service to FIA (also called MBNA) in around March 2007. This is my oldest credit card which I used for all purchases before I switched to using HSBC which gives me 1% cash back on all purchases. I don’t have my credit card statements with me right now, so I can’t figure out how much I paid for textbooks in the spring semester for 2007. But here are my expenses for the most part:

Rent: $7,626 (we had a roommate for about 5 months last year with whom we split bills and rent)

Utilities: $2,539 (includes water, electricity, gas, cell phone - we don’t have a landline, DSL (naked which doesn’t require landline)

Tuition and books: $8,101 (doesn’t include cost of books from Spring semester, but I would guess it was about $300. Includes cost of RN exam which husband took + study materials of $99. Includes student loan payments)

Insurance + Medical: 546.36 (this was for my birth control pills and insurance for my husband when he was working part time. It was a high deductible insurance plan)

Roth IRA: $600 (This is for husband. I opened the account in around October 2007)

Food: $2,280 (includes restaurant dining. This is the number that is most off about at least $1,000 or more because many of our grocery and dining purchases were paid with cash. I can’t reconstruct all the amounts because I don’t have my account books with me) . Another significant factor about our food is that until about June we ate organic food about 50% of the time. After I found out about the riot for austerity project and read about the food industry we switch to eating organic food 90% of the time, and around October or so we switch to eating local, organic food 80 - 90% of the time. I am basing the percentages on credit card statements that show where I went shopping for food. The non local items have been flour and coffee for the most part. This is one of the reasons I wanted to micromanage our consumption this year, because I wanted to see exactly how expensive it was to eat locally and eat well.

Misc.:$4,730 (This includes household purchases, book purchases, entertainment, an acting class my husband took, charity which was about $60, cost of mailing things, other piddly stuff that I didn’t feel like categorizing)

Other stuff: $200. This was what I paid in interest on either my line of credit (used to pay tuition) or credit card when we had a rough month early in 2007 (moving unexpectedly). I’ve made about $50 in the HSBC cash back program, and plan on not paying a single cent in interest this year.

When plugging in the numbers into turbo tax, so far our refund is $47. Ideally it should be $0 because I adjusted our withholdings last year to include our student loan payments. However anything that we do get in a refund will be divided into student loan payments and our emergency fund.  

U.S. Paying Down Debt

With the advent of surpluses, the United States has begun to make real progress in paying down its debt. During 1998–2000, debt held by the public fell from $3.8 trillion to $3.4 trillion—a $363 billion drop. By the end of this year, more than $200 billion in additional reduction is due to be achieved.

The President’s plan will accelerate this trend to record rates by retiring an historic $2 trillion in debt over the next 10 years. Under the President’s budget, the national debt will be only seven percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2011, its lowest share in more than 80 years.

One of my many goals is to be a gracious, delightful dinner party hostess. I’ve hosted small parties before, but its usually very stressful to do so. I have friends with idiotic (yes, idiotic) allergies, food preferences, and so on. So its a pain in the ass to cook something that everyone will like. But I want to host more parties partly to save money, and partly to become a gracious, delightful host. So I am hosting a slightly larger one than I am used to. But I have dilemmas. For one, I am getting sick and tired of eating locally. I am just not that excited about eating root vegetables and I badly want cilantro and lemonade and orange juice. Not necessarily in the same meal, but that is my current craving.

I know appearances matter alot especially at dinner parties, so I bought some cloth napkins from etsy which are very, very pretty. I also have silverware and a tablecloth. But I still am not sure how to serve the meals. We don’t own many serving dishes or things like that since our way of eating meals is the stone age method, or straight from the cooking pan over the stove. I also am not sure what to serve. It will probably be primarily vegetarian, but I am open to ideas. I personally dislike pig products and most types of sea food. I am also not too crazy about chicken as of late. Local steak is expensive and would cancel out my idea of eating at home to save on our restaurant bill. Next time I will host a potluck, but not this time.

I’ve been reading Sunday Undies and got the idea to serve cheese straws. I was also thinking of an artichoke/spinach dip. We made some beer recently so that will be available, and I might make some other alcoholic drink…but not sure what. For the main course, I am not sure what to serve. Pasta? Steak? Some sort of rice dish? I am sick of pizzas, so that is out. What else can be served as a main dish. I don’t want something that is very cheesy (like lasagna), but if you have ideas, feel free to comment!

Uses for vinegar
via PTF

Its very cold here in Philadelphia. In fact, it has been so cold, I’ve done something I have never done before: day dream about living in Southern California. So I spent time over the weekend looking for jobs in Southern California.

I also turned on the heat because my entire body was cold. I even went out for a bike ride last night and came back feeling as cold as I did before I went out for the ride. I feel my resolve weakening and I have no motivation to do anything but curl up in bed. But since I am not wealthy nor stand to inherit wealth, I have to stick it out in this weather.

Today I made Autumn and Winter Soup. The recipe is from The Balanced Plate, by Renée Loux. The recipe is below: INGREDIENTS:

1 large yellow onion, diced

1 red onion, diced

4-6 shallots, peeled and chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

2 carrots, scrubbed or peeled and roughly chopped

2 parsnips or 2 to 3 turnips, scrubbed or peeled and roughly chopped

2 ribs celery, roughly chopped

1 medium sweet potato or yam, peeled and roughly chopped, or 1/2 winter squash (red kuri, kabocha, or butternut), peeled and seeded

4" sprig rosemary

2 tsp fresh thyme or 1 tsp dried

1/2 tsp chipolte pepper(optional)

4 cups Hearty Vegetable Stock (I used water)

4-6 tbsp olive oil

1-1.5 cup parsley leaves

2-3 tbsp fresh oregano

sea salt

freshly ground black pepper

In a medium large stockpot, place the yellow and red onions; shallots; garlic; carrots; parsnips or turnips; celery; sweet potato, yam, or squash; rosemary; thyme; and chipolte (if desired). Cover with stock by 1". Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for about 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft enough to easily pierce with a fork. Using a blender, blend until soup is smooth. Add the olive oil, parsley, oregano and salt and pepper. Adjust to taste.

Life and Debt. Available on netflix to watch instantly. From the documentary’s website:

Life & Debt is a woven tapestry of sequences focusing on the stories of individual Jamaicans whose strategies for survival and parameters of day-to-day existence are determined by the U.S. and other foreign economic agendas. By combining traditional documentary telling with a stylized narrative framework, the complexity of international lending, structural adjustment policies and free trade will be understood in the context of the day-to-day realities of the people whose lives they impact.

In one segment addressing the Free Trade Zones, we meet workers who sew five-six days a week for American corporations to earn the legal minimum wage of $30 U.S./week ($1200 - $1500Jamaican dollars/week). The port of Kingston is lined with high-security factories, made available to foreign garment companies at low rent. These factories are offered with the additional incentive of the foreign companies’ being allowed to bring in shiploads of material there tax-free, to have them sewn and assembled and then immediately transported out to foreign markets. Over 10,000 women currently work for foreign companies under sub-standard work conditions. The Jamaican government, in order to ensure the employment offered, has agreed to the stipulation that no unionization is permitted in the Free Trade Zones. Previously, when the women have spoken out and attempted to organize to improve their wages and working conditions, they have been fired and their names included on a blacklist ensuring that they never work again. Free Trade Zones are encouraged by the U.S. government, for example projects financed by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) have used over $34,960,000 in U.S. tax dollars to target, persuade and provide incentives to American companies to relocate offshore in Jamaica. Yet now due to NAFTA, these dismal yet precious jobs are being lost to Mexico, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

The documentary also addresses how the subsidized U.S. farm industry makes it difficult for Jamaican farmers to grow crops, how the banana industry cannot compete with the South American banana industry, how the U.S. dairy industry depressed dairy prices in Jamaica. And more. Worth checking out.

Yesterday I made tofu and seitan. The seitan I make uses the recipe from the cookbook, Vegan with a Vengence which is probably my most frequently used cookbook. I like my seitan more than the store bought version because its not squeaky. The store bought version squeaks when chewing. And of course, my tofu also taste much better than the store bought version and I don’t have to deal with any packaging.