I have a housing dilemma. We learned in January that our long term (8 years) tenant in our out of state rental property will be moving. She’s been a fabulous tenant, and we are sad to see her go. While we have no problems being landlords, we don’t honestly want to be out of state landlords to a tenant we do not know, especially now that we do not have a built in property manager inread more…
From June 16 to July 31, we spent almost $9,500 dollars outside of our regular budget. I have been unemployed since January 10. C has not worked since May 2009. And I do not regret any of it. I will admit, my stomach dropped as I watched our savings account balance fall more in those six weeks than it had in the previous 5 months of unemployment combined. And yet, our balance remains at about halfread more…
In my two previous posts I talked about the costs of adopting our daughter. But those are one-time costs, we now have the full time costs of having a child, so our budget has to change. Now, you might argue, somewhat rightly, that these changes actually took place 6 months ago when our daughter was placed with us. That is both true and untrue, partly because of the nature of being a foster parent. At thatread more…
Back in March 2013, I wrote about the financial side of our decision to adopt. Now, almost 20 months later, I’m here to write about the financial side of our actual adoption and where we go from here. Our daughter has been with us for 6 months now, and we will be finalizing the adoption in November. We are very excited. We are adopting from foster care, having gone through an agency. If you read theread more…
Today’s post should have been my stock project update, but I haven’t had the time to do the analysis of it that I want to, so instead, you get to hear a little more about my lay off planning. I found out earlier this week that my current employer will be paying out bonuses related to 2012. Those of us whose positions have been selected for elimination will still be receiving that bonus. Through a bitread more…
I promised on Thursday that I’d write a post about the financial side of my layoff. Let’s start with the fact that while I did propose that my boss eliminate my position last September, I did not engineer my layoff. I am not going to “retire” early. Nor am I using this as an opportunity to start writing/blogging full time. Not that I couldn’t do those things. Well, I couldn’t retire early. No way do weread more…
Has it really been a year? It is time, once again, for Women’s Money Week. Let me be honest, everything I say in any of these posts applies to men as well as women, but I do think it is important to have events that focus on women and their relationships with money. Why? Because in a lot of ways, men are still seen as the bread winners and financial decision makers. It is less trueread more…
We are bad at saying “No” to good sales pitches. We just are. I know this. It is the reason we have a timeshare (and I still don’t regret it). Maybe that lack of regret played into my decision that we should attend a Direct Buy presentation when the offer was made. I know it had something to do with the $200 worth of restaurant.com gift cards they offered, as well as the two round tripread more…
We bought our current house in late March 2005. The price was $242k and the interest rate was 6% (which was considered a good interest rate at the time). We had not quite $7k down and our original mortgage was for $235,250. It was cheaper for us to have the single mortgage and pay PMI than it was to have an 80/20, which is what we had on our first house. At the time, cheaper mattered,read more…
I have mentioned that we are refinancing the house. In fact, it is one of my goals on my Sunday Evening Post. We were paying 6% interest. We are moving down to 4% interest. We are also extending the life of our loan by 8 years. Our monthly payments will go down about $500. This is a good thing. So why am I having a minor panic attack about the whole process? I think I willread more…
