The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.
Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.
A couple of months ago, more or less on a whim, I started sinking $50 a week into Bitcoin.
Yeah, I know. Stay with me here.
You are not reading that incorrectly.
That is up nearly five percent today, nearly twelve percent this week, and nearly fifty percent in a month. Those are fucking insane numbers. Ridiculous numbers. Stupid numbers. “That can’t be right” numbers.
I have actually invested $342.16. My personal actual rate of return over the last seven weeks or so is 40.9%. I assume there would be some transaction fees or something and taxes to set aside once I sell, but that’s ludicrous.
I am seriously and genuinely considering getting a zero-APR advance from one of my credit cards to sink into Bitcoin for a month, at which point I’ll sell off whatever the advance was, pay it off, and let the profits coast for a little longer. I’m not talking about an enormous amount of money, relatively speaking; nothing that would bankrupt me or even put me into real trouble if the market crashes, and one way or another I probably want out of this (or do I?) before Trump takes office and wrecks the economy. But 40% of, say, $5000 is two thousand dollars in a month. Even if the rate of return drops by half that’s still a thousand dollars for doing nothing. When I started thinking about this a week or so ago, the one-month number was around thirty percent.
There’s got to be a correction of some sort coming soon, right? Nothing stays on this high of a trajectory for long, and Bitcoin is proof positive that money (and the investment market) is nearly entirely fake anyway. But … shit.
Am I gonna end up $2,000,000 in debt in two years, and this is the post that led to my downfall?
Somebody tell my wife about this post so she can forbid me to invest in this stupid, imaginary product, please.
I went out after work and made some bad decisions, so if anyone wants to recommend a part-time job I can do from home over the summer, it would be appreciated. 🙂
Okay, let’s put this right out there for everybody: I’m about to gripe about getting handed a whole pile of money, and we’re all just going to have to figure out how to live with that, okay? This is probably a pretty good stroke of fortune, but I’m still less than completely happy about it. Just prepare yourself, I guess.
Last week we had to fire a permanent substitute for several of our Social Studies classes. We never found a full-time teacher for that class, but this guy was showing up to work every day so he may as well have been the “real” teacher. I am not privy to the reasons for the firing, although I have reason to believe that they were of the “you aren’t very good at this” variety and possibly also the “you are not getting along with the other adults, who are better at their jobs than you” variety, but not anything more nefarious than that. At any rate, since I’m certified to teach middle school social studies, I spent some time thinking about whether I wanted to volunteer to pick up one of this guy’s sections and ended up deciding against it. The group he had during my prep period seemed like a pretty decent group of kids, but it would mean a whole lot of extra prep time for just one extra section of kids, and, well, it would eat my one prep period. That would mean teaching from 8:15 to 3:20 every day with nothing but a half hour break for lunch. I didn’t exactly turn it down, because it wasn’t offered to me, but I did decide I wasn’t going to put my name forward for it.
So naturally today one of our math teachers resigned, and while I could still turn down an overload, it feels a lot sketchier to refuse to teach an extra section of the course I’m already teaching, and I’ve covered her class before and it’s a reasonably easy group of kids. But it means, again, no preps ever, and less time for a bathroom break– and you’d best believe my bowels have gotten used to being evacuated promptly at 10:08 every morning when I send second hour away– and I can’t run out for lunch any longer.
My biggest complaint, though, is the notion that I have to bring my lunch every day for the rest of the year. The thought is crushing. I mean, I can order Jimmy John’s once in a while, and I can probably afford to Doordash every now and again, but that shit adds up quick and I don’t want to spend money on food all the Goddamn time, especially since if the delivery person is even a little late I’m racing through my lunch even faster than usual, which is deeply fucking annoying.
On the other hand, depending on exactly how they run the numbers I’m going to make somewhere between eight and eleven thousand dollars extra for covering the class. I get my hourly rate, so basically 3/4 of an extra 1/6 of my salary over the course of the year, although that sixth may be a little smaller than that because I’m not sure if Advisory counts as instructional time or they just divide my day into six classes or what.
One way or another, it’s a whole Goddamn lot of money. I have this plan going right now where other than the house I’m going to be completely out of debt by the end of this school year. Completely out. An extra nine grand– the most likely figure is roughly $8900 if you want specificity– over the course of the rest of the school year would move that timetable up pretty considerably. How much can I really gripe about doing a little bit more of something I was already doing when it has that level of compensation attached to it? But the fucking lunch thing has me all twisted up about it for some reason.
My brain makes no damn sense at all sometimes.
If you have been around a while, you might remember me buying this car. At the time I took a 72-month loan on it, which I’ve been told is an unwise decision under nearly all circumstances, but whatever. 72 months from the purchase of the car would have been July of 2023.
It is currently March of 2022 and as of today my car is paid off. $237 a month back in my pocket. Awesome.
I am still waiting for my student loans to go away, which is likely to take a bit longer, but will still probably be done by the end of the school year. That’s another $545 a month. After that I pretty much just have the house and a personal loan to take care of (and “take care of” is a bit of an understatement, if I’m being honest, as they’re both pretty sizable amounts) but once those two are dealt with I will be debt-free, and getting rid of the car and the student loans will make an enormous difference, especially since I’ve been channeling every spare dime into paying for the car for the last six months or so and don’t have to do that any longer.
God help me, but that almost feels like cause for optimism. Time for the entire frame to fall off my car!
…and then ruin them by relating them to Dungeons and Dragons.
Folks, as of today, technically, and definitely as of Saturday when the payment will officially go through, I have no credit card debt. This has not been true at any point since I was in college– probably since my freshman year, in fact. Said credit card debt was at one point north of thirty thousand dollars and it is now gone. Now, I’m not free of debt itself by any means– there is a mortgage, and a car loan, and my student loans, and another installment loan at a very low APR that I used to make a large chunk of that credit card debt not credit card debt any more. But this is still a Goddamn milestone; I don’t owe any money to actual credit cards any longer, and every debt I have is on an installment plan where I can point at a date on a calendar and say “This is when that will be repaid.”
Except not really, because now that I’ve got the money I’ve been using to aggressively pay down credit card debt back in my pocket, I’m going to start working on the car. I think I can actually afford to make my car payment twice a month now and still come out ahead from what I was putting into credit cards. That’ll have that paid off in a little over a year, I think. After that, assuming I don’t lose my job or have some other shit life event, things are going to seriously change. I will be moving into Actual Discretionary Income territory, which … well, I know it probably seems like I already spend money whenever I want to, and yes, I’m saving up for a criminally expensive lightsaber as a Paid Off My Credit Cards award, but … this is still a big Goddamned deal, y’all.
I just gotta remember to spend the rest of my life not being stupid now.
… and, okay, ultimately I’m probably gonna listen to my wife on this more than y’all, but it’s not like I’m overflowing with other subjects to discuss today.
So like a lot of you (so many people are checking their bank balances online that the apps are crashing) we got our stimulus money today. Twelve hunnert for me, twelve hunnert for my wife, and another five hunnert for the boy. My wife and I mostly keep our finances separate; we divide up the bills, so, like, I pay the mortgage but she buys the groceries and pays for utilities, and any bills that are ours, like cars or student loans, are our own personal responsibility. The boy’s chunk of the money will probably end up going toward tuition.
We are not among the people who need this money. It’s nice; I’m never going to turn down cash, but we do not need it. We both have jobs that provide us with sufficient funds for our lifestyle and furthermore we are in a position where our jobs are at least less likely to go away because of the pandemic– she works in the health care sector, broadly speaking, and while disaster-related teacher layoffs are always a possibility I have enough seniority at this point that I’m highly unlikely to be affected by them, and they won’t happen until this fall at any rate. I may not like my job once everything shakes out, but there’s not a huge possibility of losing it.
(He said, casually knocking on wood afterward.)
So the question becomes what to do with it, and … well, like I said, I don’t have lots else to talk about at the moment. So:
So, whaddya think? How much should I be tilting toward paranoia and safety right now? Or, alternatively, what are you doing with your $1200?
12:56 PM, Wednesday April 15: 610,774 confirmed infections (and over two million worldwide); 26,119 Americans dead.
I done fucked up today, I think.
My current car is a 2001 Ford Escape with nearly a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it. The fabric on the driver’s side door is mostly peeled off, there are big patches of rust inside all the doors, and there’s a big crack in the rear bumper. The radio intermittently decides it needs to take a rest and won’t turn back on for anywhere from a few seconds to a day. It leaks oil from a leak so deep in the engine that repairing it is an absurdity. And its gas mileage… well, leaves something to be desired.
That said: it turns on when I need it to turn on and it gets me where I want to go, and while it’s loud as hell at speed it’s not an uncomfortable ride by any means. It’s just that at 170K it is only a matter of time until something breaks that will be pointless to repair. To get ahead of myself a bit, I was offered $1200 for it as a trade today and I think it was probably a pretty generous offer, all told.
The boy has named the car Joey Car Kristofferson. I will very much miss having a car named Joey Car Kristofferson, to the point where I will probably insist that its replacement be named Joey Car Kristofferson II. (My wife’s car, incidentally, is called Lisa Car James. Don’t ask where the boy got the names. No one knows.)
So anyway, I took that car up there for a test drive earlier today. It’s a 2016 Kia Soul in the + trim level, with 28,000 miles on it. It’s immaculately clean and seems to run beautifully. It’s small– trunk space, in particular, is kind of a joke– but it fits my main need in a vehicle, which is that it rides high enough that I climb into the seat and slide out, rather than the other way around. I refuse to struggle to get out of my car, which means I’ll never own a sedan again. I’ve started to seriously hate them. I test drove a brand-new Ford Escape a few months ago, and loved it, but financially I think it’s a better idea to go for a lightly used vehicle right now rather than a new one. Unless I lease, which I might choose to do but <insert every website and argument about leasing ever> and my brain isn’t set up for that right now.
It’s just under fifteen thousand bucks, that car, and with the financing I’d expect to get I’d probably be making payments of just over $200 a month. Which is in the neighborhood where I’m thinking Yeah, I can swing that rather than I can afford that. To my mind, that’s a real difference; you can swing a new purchase if you can come up with some ways to cut costs that would absorb a lot of the new bill and figure you’ll be okay. You can afford something if you don’t have to think at all about what you’ll do to pay for it. For example, I can afford to spend $25-50 pretty much whenever I want so long as I don’t, like, do it every day. But if I want to buy a new shirt or something? I don’t have to think about that. A car payment means I’m thinking things like well, I do eat out way too often anyway and I’m spending too much fucking money on comic books every week while I’m considering what it would do to my budget. And the down payment would have to come out of our mutual savings, which my wife will likely have something to say about. We did just drop three and a half grand on a new bed, after all.
I’m not sure I have a point here, and I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or just talking. I just need to decide how quickly I think I need a new car, and whether I should buy a new one before I need a new one.
Go buy some of my books and make this easier, dammit. 🙂
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