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Am I really a Personal Finance Blogger?
Sometimes I wonder if I should remain active in the FinCon community or personal finance Twitter, or refer to myself as being a personal finance blogger. At one time, I was. At one time, I was also a pet blogger, and a mommy blogger, and a micro-blogger. Maybe I am a lifestyle blogger now? Even that title does not feel quite right. I am a blogger, in that I have this blog, and I post on it. And since this makes up most of the non-work writing I am doing right now, blogger is probably a more accurate title than writer. So I am a blogger. The odd part is,…
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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…
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Book Reaction: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
The thing is, I do not want to talk about race. I want to talk about culture and heritage. I want to learn about the people around me. I want to connect over little things like strict mothers and escaping into books and being obsessed with horses. I want to learn about different traditions and celebrations. I want my country, its people and institutions, to recognize the harm that was done to black people by slavery, to Native people by land grabs, to Japanese people in internment camps. I want us to admit this. I want us to own this, to teach it to our children in all its awfulness…
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Family Finances: 2008 vs 2020
Twelve and a half years – that is how long I have been writing about personal finance, or at least my personal finances. In January 2008, I started a friends-only LiveJournal specifically for sharing personal finance information and perhaps for generating conversations. I will be honest, I did not keep up on the LJ for very long, though I kept writing on my other LJ until October 2010. I started to write about personal finances on a blog I called Baking the Budget in April 2011. Around the start of 2012, I changed the name to The Dog Ate My Wallet. It was never a big blog, but it’s the…
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100 Word Book Review – The Abacus and the Cross by Nancy Marie Brown
Pope Sylvester II is my favorite Pope. (I am not Catholic.) My favorite book about Gerbert of Aurillac is Ars Magica by Judith Tarr, but it is a fantasy novel. The Abacus and the Cross is a non-fiction book that looks just as closely at the world around Gerbert as it does his life. It uses primary sources, including Gerber’s own letters, as much as possible. I found it incredibly relaxing to learn about making books in the 10th century or about Gerbert’s abacus. If you have any interest in the history of science, this is a book for you.
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Sparklers: Chasing Junebug
When we first brought Junebug home, she was only 6 months old and filled with puppy energy. We had to take a walk every day and still spend time playing with her. If we did not take a walk, it would take close to an hour of chase, fetch, and wrestling to wear her out. She has been our Baby Bug for 10 ½ years now. She is starting the Beagle fade. She spends more time sleeping than getting into mischief (though she still gets into plenty of mischief). Dogs slow down as they get older. It is a good thing as they grow out of the frenetic puppy stage…
