Tag: finances

Same, Charles Darwin. Same.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It’s been a weird damn day. I’m definitely in Okay School Can Start Now mode, and as of right now I basically have two more weeks of break. I’m going to try to not live at work during the week before school starts like I usually do, and I’m going to try to not spend much, if any, money on my classroom in the next couple of weeks either. I’ve spent most of the day obsessing about money and trying to figure out the best way to get rid of lots of my possessions. I’ll spare you the details; bog-standard Anxiety Brain at work, and for no good reason. There’s nothing bad going on; I’m genuinely in the best financial shape of my life right now (knocks on wood) but I’m going through another one of those occasional phases where I’m obsessing about The Next Car, and I accidentally figured out yesterday that I can technically afford The Next Car right now, which is not part of the plan, and I’m sticking to the Goddamned plan, which is to wait until the boy gets his license, give him the Kia, and then either lease or buy myself a new car.(*) That’s a little over a year away. I have a target in mind for my down payment; I’m halfway there, and I don’t think pulling together the other half in the time I have will be difficult– and even if it doesn’t happen, it’s not like there’s a hard deadline for something like give my son my car.

Further complicating things: he’s commented more than once that he’s not sure he wants his drivers license, which is a startlingly common affliction for kids of his generation. God could not have stopped me from taking my driving test on the first day I was legally able to. Also a potential complication: I think my dad’s car is probably on its last legs. It might turn out to be more sensible to give him my car, but that’s not something that’s going to happen on my timetable.

Forgive me; I’m thinking out loud, obviously, but hopefully typing this out will calm my brain down a little bit. I got a few things done around the house, took a shower in the new shower finally (it works!) and read about a third of the thousand-page book I started yesterday with the parts of my day that weren’t dedicated to kvetching. Tomorrow I plan on fixing the toilet and a ceiling light in the other bathroom, and hopefully I can get that done without electrocuting myself (unlikely, as I know how to turn the power off to the bathroom) or breaking the shutoff valve for the toilet … which is a bit more of a concern. I’m perfectly capable of swapping out the guts of a slow toilet, but our shutoff valves are, by and large, Not Good, and replacing those is beyond my skill. So if that fucker snaps off in my hand we’re going to have to cut off the water to the whole house and call an emergency plumber.

Cross your fingers for me, will you?

(*) Spare me, for now, any opinions on which is a better idea, although keep them in your back pocket for the inevitable moment when I have to actually make that decision, because we all know I’m going to ask for advice. It’s kind of a pointless conversation until I know what loan rates are looking like when I actually get the car.

I am in so much trouble

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

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.

Talk me out of this

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

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.

Four more

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

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. 🙂

I’m wealthy and I don’t like it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

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.

Achievement unlocked

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

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!

In which I gain levels in Adult, Responsible and Financial Independence

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

…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.

In which I ask the interwebs for financial advice

On By Luther M. SilerIn life6 Comments

… 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:

  • OPTION ONE: SAVE IT. Probably the most obvious choice; the merits of saving money don’t even really need to be explained. Things are okay now; they may not stay that way, even if I think it’s probably likely that they will. Somebody could get sick; something could happen with one of the cars or the house, shit happens. Especially in the last couple of years.
  • OPTION TWO: PAY OFF CREDIT CARD. My overall credit card indebtedness has gone down enormously recently; I only have one card with a balance right now and $1200 would pay off a sizable fraction of it, but not finish it off. Yet. That said, the monthly bill for the card isn’t that high, and I’ve been paying twice that amount every month. It’s gonna go away (again, assuming no financial disasters) soon enough even if I don’t put this big chunk into it.
  • OPTION THREE: SAVE HALF, PAY OFF HALF. Probably the most reasonable option unless I decide to prioritize saving.
  • OPTION FOUR: BUY MORE BOOKS AND DICE. You can never have enough books and dice. This one is probably not the smartest idea, but would be the most fun.
  • OPTION FIVE: DONATE IT TO SOMEONE. The most socially responsible option since, again, I don’t need the money, but I think a certain amount of financial selfishness is warranted right now for the exact same reasons one might give to save the money. We’re not so well off that this money is nothing— it’s still definitely a good chunk of change– it’s just not immediately necessary for anything.

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.