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A New Car
Yesterday, we bought a car. As recently as Monday afternoon, we had no intention of getting another car. That means we went from no intention of getting a car to driving off the lot in about 48 hours. To make it worse, we bought a new car, not a new to us car, but a new car, with 59 miles on the odometer (roughly 20 of which we put on doing our test drive). We purchased a couple of the add-ons, and we financed it all – $0 down, even. If you follow the standard personal finance advice, you may be having a bit of a heart attack right now,…
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How has the Pandemic Changed our Spending?
I am fascinated by the ways in which spending in our household changes over time, and especially now with the pandemic. I am not a $0 based budgeter, but in normal times the cushion is a few hundred “extra” dollars in the checking account at the end of the month (unless there is a specific plan for those dollars). For the last few months, it has been a few thousand extra dollars. (Which I have been sending to savings/investments as I’ve gotten confident they really are extra dollars and I am not missing something.) I decided to take a moment to sit down and look at how our spending has…
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In Defense of a Liberal Arts Education
I was recently in a Twitter conversation with someone who claimed that no way would his kids be going to college for some generic arts & sciences or business degree. That college just was not worth it. He would rather spend the money just setting them up in a business and let them learn that way. Now, I do not know this person, though I have the impression that his kids are not even school age yet, let alone anywhere near going to college, so there is a lot of time for his opinion to change regarding the value of a college education (based on either his experience as a…
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Sparklers: Ham Sandwiches
We have a chest freezer. We put lots of things in the chest freezer. At one point, we put some homemade broth in the freezer, and it leaked before it froze. So now, we need to defrost the chest freezer and clean it out. This means that we’ve been working on eating out of the freezer for the last few weeks to get our stockpile of food down enough to fit only in the refrigerator freezer. We will be defrosting it this weekend. This means that this last week we have been eating a lot of things that had been bought who knows when. One of those things was a…
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Why I Love our Timeshare
People love to hate on timeshares. I would say especially in the personal finance community, but I honestly do not think it happens more there than in the world at large. There are 10 minute long commercials on how to get rid of your timeshare on YouTube. But I am here to tell you that if you have a timeshare and you LOVE it, or even just like it, that is okay. Remember that all those companies that are helping people get rid of their timeshares are selling them to someone else. I love our timeshare. Is it a good investment? No. Was it a smart thing to buy? Certainly…
