Tag: money

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.

On setting my money on fire

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching3 Comments

Witness my latest addition to my classroom, a “boneless loveseat,” that shipped compressed into a very tiny rectangular solid and expanded rapidly into that once I took it out of the packaging. It can supposedly support 600 pounds of humanity; I can say that when I sat on it the back did not feel especially comfortable but the seat held me up just fine and I didn’t have trouble getting out of it. I’m considering a matching chair to go with it. Supposedly this thing needs 48 hours in order to completely decompress and it was almost unsettling to look at it after the first batch of expansion was done; the damn thing always looked like it was moving, but in this weirdly imperceptible way. I’m going to take another picture of it tomorrow from as close to the same angle as I can and see if it looks bigger.

This is, as you all well know, my greatest hypocrisy; I genuinely think that teachers should not spend money on their classrooms and yet I lavish hundreds of dollars on mine for fun new shit every year even before we get to the school supplies. Remember, I already bought myself a new Goddamn desk chair. That loveseat was pretty cheap as such things go, but still.

(Donated supplies have begun arriving, by the way; my deepest thanks to those of you who have contributed. The link is here if you haven’t yet and want to; if you don’t, that’s absolutely fine.)

In accordance with prophecy, our new textbooks have not arrived yet; at this point I’m fully expecting to not see them before October. I hope I’m wrong. We should’ve had the damned things before school let out so that we could familiarize ourselves with them over the summer. I wouldn’t have done it, mind you, but at least I’d have spent the summer feeling guilty like I should have and not waiting for the opportunity to feel guilty.

Anyway, I got my desk beaten into shape; tomorrow we’ll look at starting to get things up on the walls. I also got a bunch of clothes shopping done today, so I can stop stressing about that for a while. Whee!

Also, here’s what the loveseat looked like before I opened it up. Note the bankers’ box next to it, for scale.

And I’m putting this at the bottom because I’m hoping no one notices it. I’m also considering this, because I’m an idiot:

I’m not even sure where I would put it. I’m running out of floor and wall space at this point.

Thoughts and questions

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video games5 Comments

I’ve got a few things rattling around in my brain, none enough for a whole post, so let’s just toss all three of them together. Why not, right?

FIRST: That game up there? Was crafted deep in the bowels of Hell, on the lower foothills of Mount Sonofabitch. I just beat the game’s third major boss tonight, after, no shit, probably five or six hours of attempts and farming over the last few days. The recommended level for his area? Seventeen. My level when I finally took him down about half an hour ago? Forty-five. And the next area promptly beat the shit out of me again.

SECOND: You may have heard the godawful fucking story about the people Trump effectively sold as slaves to El Salvador, including a number of them who were accused of no crime at all other than being brown. Now, before I ask this, I want to be crystal fucking clear that this is horrible and the people responsible should rot in Hell. Okay? We’ve got that? Everybody understand? Good. Because while I’m having some trouble untangling the court cases, what with not being a lawyer and all, it looks like a judge ordered the government to produce one of the men involved by midnight tonight? And there may or may not be a temporary stay on that order, or maybe SCOTUS just overturned it, I dunno, it looks like things changed while I was playing video games. But here’s my question: Does the court, any court, have the ability to order other entities to do literally impossible things? Because part of the whole point of selling these men to El Salvador was to put them beyond the reach of US courts. Short of invasion, which Trump obviously isn’t going to do, we don’t really have a way to compel El Salvador to return any of these people, and certainly not to do so in the next three hours and eighteen minutes. The judge has no jurisdiction. Again, yes, I recognize that there’s something horrible about taking the situation these human beings are in and reducing it to a legal hypothetical, which is part of why I’m doing it on my blog and not, say, BlueSky– but does anyone actually have any authority to compel this to happen right now? The courts can order the government to do shit all they want. What happens if they just … can’t?

THIRD: I don’t remember the goddamn third thing. Fuck. I’ve had this post in the back of my head all day and now that it’s time to write it Thing Three is gone.

…

Right, shit, the economy went to hell today too. So I, personally, with very modest investments in, until yesterday, the low (very low) five figures, have lost about a thousand bucks in the last few days. I do not expect things to get better anytime soon, for obvious reasons. I have been contributing a couple hundred a month to an account managed through MetLife that I deliberately rarely look at, and $100 a week to an Acorns account that I monitor perhaps more carefully than I ought to. Yesterday I reset a bunch of stuff on Acorns so that now that $100 a week goes directly to my savings account and is not invested in anything. My understanding of how this works is even if the value of individual shares of a given stock are falling, buying more of them means a faster theoretical recovery later on, since I’ll own more stock, assuming that the companies I’m investing in don’t go under, in which case that money is just gone. But if I think it might be years before the market recovers– and I do– isn’t there more value in socking that money away into a savings account, where it’s not going to just vanish? Or at least is much less likely? The interest rate is going to be a lot lower but at least it’ll be positive.

Help me out if you know anything about investments. I’m sure there are better ideas than the binary I’ve set up here, but if you’re going to give advice at least tell me which of those two is a better idea right now before telling me about your third thing, okay? Thanks.

In which I make a decision

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

…so, apparently I like my job?

I had a Moment this weekend, or perhaps a series of Moments, where a math job opened up at the boy’s school and I jumped on it faster than I’ve ever jumped on a job opportunity in my life. And then, once the cover letter was written and the resume was updated and everything was filled out and sent off, I immediately regretted it.

And that was … kinda weird? You’re telling me, brain, that I offer you a job with small class sizes and damn near universally kids who want to learn and whose parents are invested in their education and you … don’t want it? You’re supposed to kill people to get that job. I’ve been in the trenches for over two decades at this point! I deserve a job that no one would ever refer to using the word “trenches,” God damn it!

Now, because it’s my kid’s school, it’s kind of a weird situation, because in the “who do you know who works here” section on the application, I had to write “basically everyone,” because dude has been at this school since he was larval and that’s kind of what happens. And I emailed one person at the school and gave him a heads-up that I’d put in the application, because technically I used to be his boss and I thought it was at least a little possible that someone might go ask him about that if they put together that we were at the same school at the same time. And I very specifically did not tell two of the three people I put down as references, because no one ever calls references first and if I’m not taking the job I don’t need the drama at work about whether I’m leaving.

Anyway, yeah, several days in the row of anxiety, and do I really want this, and reminding myself that I really haven’t had a lot to complain about this year, and then the person I sent all the documentation in to emailed me back and she asked “are you sure about this,” because, in her words, their pay was “woefully” lower than what I’m currently making.

So, of course, I emailed her back and asked how woeful is woeful, because that word doesn’t really suggest a number to me if I’m being honest, and Glassdoor was being really unhelpful, and she got back to me.

Twenty five thousand dollar pay cut.

So, uh, yeah, I’m staying at my current school next year. That was a fun few days, though.

In which I have a disease

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

…both in the literal and metaphorical sense. The wonderful news is that my ear abruptly partially cleared on the way home from work today, as I was actually on my way to urgent care to have it looked at again. It’s not 100% yet; there’s still some tinnitus and a little bit of pressure, but it’s not remotely as bad as it was yesterday and the transition from one phase to the other took all of thirty seconds. Hopefully it’ll continue to improve over the next day or two; I have about five doses of my antibiotic left.

The metaphorical sense? Do I need to explain, since you presumably have eyes and can see the image at the top of this post? Because God damn if I didn’t involuntarily start to reach for my wallet the second this image appeared on my phone, only to realize that the presale doesn’t start until the end of March so I have plenty of time to talk myself into buying four books that I didn’t like by an author who I genuinely dislike just because holy shit they’re pretty.

(They actually come with two dust covers each, those above and another set that is a slightly upscaled version of the original covers. I already have all four of these damn things with the original covers, so it’ll be these.)

Don’t ask the price. The set will cost roughly $texas; Broken Binding editions are expensive. They appreciate like motherfuckers, so I could pretend that I was going to hold on to them for a year and then sell them, I suppose, but I’ve got to buy them first. Nonetheless! Daddy can do this, all day, every day, no problem. But when is it going to stop?

I know I’ve said this before– hell, I’m a million and a half words deep into this site, I’ve said everything before– but I really never thought I was going to be the person I’ve become, where the more discretionary income I have, the more shit I find to buy. This obsession with special editions of books even if I don’t like the books is just the latest Goddamn symptom.

Some snippets

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek2 Comments

Got a new book from Amazon today, and the damned thing was mis-bound, with the cover a good quarter inch or more off from where it was supposed to be. Ultimately it’s no big deal, because I can just exchange it, but I’ve never seen this in a new book before. (Entirely possible that this is because Amazon specifically has never sent me one; no brick and mortar bookstore would even let these make it out to the floor; they’d have been damaged out immediately once they came out of the box.)

I survived my first day back, although I do mean “survived” in the most specific meaning of the term, certainly not one that implies any teaching took place. I foolishly neglected to take any drugs before leaving the house other than my antibiotics, which meant that the first thing I did when I left work was go to a drugstore and buy the methy kind of Sudafed, the one you have to ask for and have your ID scanned. I do actually have an ear infection, according to my school nurse, but she says the antibiotics I’m already on will take care of it. We’ll see!

Let’s see, what else? Spent the evening fighting off the urge to buy another fountain pen or two. My rapid cycling through obsessions and hobbies is fucking breathtaking, y’all. I need to become obsessed with saving money for a while. The world economy is about to tank (mental note: save $1,000 as quickly as possible, withdraw it in cash, and keep it in the house) and even if that wasn’t the case (or if I wasn’t already first against the wall as an atheist, outspokenly liberal teacher running the gay kids’ club in a rural area of a red state) my kid is gonna be driving in a couple of years. You’d think I’d at least be able to sock money away for a car.

Alternatively, we’ll be scrounging the wastelands for food in a couple of years, so why not buy fountain pens now while they’re still being manufactured?

Shit.

Okay FINE I won’t

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

Dan Ford may have slightly too much influence over my life decisions for someone I’ve never met, but those five words more or less talked me out of Adventures with Bitcoin, and realizing that this weekend is a Lego Insiders weekend and that they have a model of the HMS Endurance coming at the end of the month sealed the deal; I’m not destroying the environment and I get (sorta) free Legos? Yeah, fuck money get Legos.

I think that’s the phrase, at least.

MEANWHILE! Kendrick Lamar has a new album out! He didn’t tell anyone it was coming before he released it. I’m listening to it right now and it might be his best album yet. I never really vibed with Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, so it’s good to see a return to form.

Let’s see. What else? I feel like something happened at work today that I really want to talk about, but hell if I can remember what it is. I decided today that I have what I’m calling a Shitty White Boy problem with my sixth hour, but that’s not the story.

… Goddammit, it’s gone. I’m gonna go play Veilguard and if I remember what the hell I wanted to talk about I’ll come back.

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.