When I was your age...

So finally had the talk with my grandparents about the great debt repayment venture. I expected them to be proud of my current efforts. But the response was mixed. It started with "Why on earth did you ever use a credit card in the first place?" and ended with tales of life in the Great Depression. My grandmother's father was a pastor and she was one of three brought up on a preacher's meager salary. She said she couldn't believe that after three years of teacher she brought home more money than her father for 25 years of preaching. There are valuable lessons from the experience of our grandparents. I don't honestly know how anyone who was not working for the government survived the Great Depression.

The question: How did I get into this mess? is pretty easy explain. I needed to get started, I don't have wealthy parents and I don't have a trust fund.

Everything including a functioning car, furniture and all my work suits is because I have a credit card. I have a job because I sold my car back to the bank to live off of it. From my education to my position in my office to my ability to speak Spanish fluently (and therefore make some money tutoring) all comes from debt. Some of it is so called "good debt" like my college loans, some of it is "bad debt" on my credit cards. I will say that there were some dumb buys on my credit cards, but I can't consider all that debt bad. It's helped me get good things not least of which is the job that helps me pay it off.

And I am learning the lesson that my grandparents want me to know. If you don't have it don't spend it. I can see now that there are times in the past where my lifestyle should have looked a little bit more like it does now, low-key and frugal. But at least I am there now.

This sort of thing does not come naturally to America's young people. Very few of us have "the talk" about the power of credit cards and just how long that type of loan with interest takes to pay off. Too many of us figure it out the hard way. At least my debt was under $6, 000 when I finally had the wake up call.

The wisdom I take away from listening to tales from the Great Depression is that in hard times you do hard things. This is a hard time and I am doing the hard things I need to do to put me on more solid financial footing. I have a second and occasional third job. I am putting $200 a month toward debt more consistently than I ever have before. My parents did hard things to make sure I went to college and that I had that care as the one thing of value I owned. Our grandparents did hard things to support their families.

And now it is our turn to do hard things.

Restrait in the face of seasonal lattes

I have settled for a new way to restrain my spending on my absolute favorite comfort food. Whereas in the past I was attracted like a moth to the green siren whenever the impulse struck me or I "just had a bad day" I am now restricting my latte consumption to one each pay day and whenever someone else is paying. Thus far this month I have allowed myself to visit Starbucks only twice on aforementioned pay days. Today was my one Pumpkin Spice Latte until October 5. Be proud of me. This was a major budgetary step.

Here's an prayer on payday:

Oh Lord, source of all my true income, thank you for this payday.

Thank you for the means to pay my bills and my rent. Help me to realize this independence is really a dependence on you for everything.

Thank you for my job and my colleagues. Thank you for every opportunity to earn a living, like the workers in the vineyard. Thank you for everyone who helps me along the way.

Teach me to be generous with the gifts you give me. Help me to think of the needs of others and know that you are taking care of mine. May I value the simple treasures you give us that cost nothing.

May every payday be a chance to praise and thank you and do what you ask:

To do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with you.

Amen.

The sick recessionista and the tale of the bald tires

Just when I was starting to get all confident in my ability to budget and save money I got sick. Really sick.

If I didn't have FlexSpending money put away from every paycheck this illness would have set me back well over $100. I don't have $100 worth of flexibility any month. I saw the Urgent Care doc which was $20. I bought all the herbal supplements he recommended- $70. I saw my primary care doctor for a copay of $10. I bought all the medicine he recommended- $35. Luckily I have good health insurance at an HMO which does everything in-house, so all my lab test to check for serious illness didn't cost me anything.

Three thing set me ahead of other people who live paycheck to paycheck: good health insurance from my federal government job, decent credit, and FlexSpending. I seriously think that had I not set aside money for my health I can't honestly say if I would chose to spend it. I know right away that the herbal supplements would be out.

This is a little disturbing. When I zoom out I see that I already cut spending on food. I cut it on health care by not dedicating the mere $20 it would take to joint the company gym. I would further cut on health care if I didn't have Flex. What less essential things can I cut? Maybe I have to drop my cell phone plan. Maybe I sit down and do a hard analysis of the cost of gas versus the bus. By the end of the month I will have eaten out twice. Maybe that's got to go to zero.

I am not going to expound on the need for health care reform. This isn't a political blog. But I am getting a taste of what it is like to think about health and nutrition as someone who is poor. If there's not money for it I don't get it. If I do need it, I have to go into more debt to get it.

Which leads me to...bald tires. I was pleased with myself for having the connections to get my tires rotated, my brakes checked, my bike rack removed, and my clutch adjusted by a friend of a friend for a nice bottle of tequila. I thought this sort of cleverness was a very recessionista thing to do. I was even more pleased when, upon checking the brakes, the keeper of the Cuervo discovered they do not need to have the pads replaced. Also I was glad when he said I could get a chip in my windshield replaced and paid for by car insurance. Saving yours truly about $70.- $100.

Unfortunately the mechanic/acquaintance is a decent, upstanding and Subaru-savvy guy and he told me I would need 4 new tires before winter or the car would be too dangerous to drive. Fab. Also in 25,000 miles (not as far as it sounds) I need to do 100,000 mile maintenance which my good friend with the wrench assured me will cost around $2,000.

Recessionista reality check: $2,000 is the total debt I am painstakingly trying to pay off by next July. It was accumulated all over a period of years' worth of thoughtless spending and immature budgeting abilities. Not all in one day at a single auto shop.

I am wracking my brains trying to think of what I can sell in order to keep my car. What job can I do that will make me $2,000 before the end of the year? I don't even know how I am going to buy tires without going into more debt so this 100K maintenance is staring me down like a fire breathing dragon.

And my throat still hurts making me feel like a fire breathing dragon...guess that's another $20 visit to urgent care.

What's a recessionista to do?

Shout-out

A big ole shout out to M is for Money . This blog really has a lot of practical advice and no nonsense self awareness. The best part is that by the looks of the ad on both sides, this blog is monetized.

If you think I am in intense, be sure to check out M.

Clip that goodness!

So I didn't have a change to brag about my awesome shopping trip this Saturday.

I went to safeway.com and checked out their coupons. They use coupon partner services. I signed up for all three but only was able to use two of them. My two favorites were P&G eSAVER and Shortcuts both of which allow you to upload the available coupons right onto your Safeway Club card. Coupons.com has a special program you have to download in order to print the coupons. I couldn't get it to actually print them. This could be because I have a Mac or because midway through the downloading process for the print program I forgot my administrative password and interrupted the thing. If you can get the printer program to download go for it, because they had a slighlt wider selection of coupons, including one I really wanted for contact solution, but alas I could not print. The whole process of checking out and uploading coupons online took about 30 minutes and it was totally worth it. Now my card is registered and I can upload coupons every time I go shopping.

I followed recessionista rule again writing down everything I picked up. I saved a record amount between my Club Card and the coupons just over $18. My goal for the next shopping trip is to save $20. I am working on going through all the fresh food first so I don't waste anything this pay period. My total grocery expenditure was about $85. I spent about $26 of that at Whole Foods, which is more expensive but carries gluten-free bread, which is nice to have. Whole Foods is also the only place I will buy meat because I can garantee nothing strange has happened to it. After making fajitas with my roommate yesterday I have decided that if I am going to buy beef, I have to buy much more expensive cuts than the ones I have been getting, cooked down the cheaper round or flank steaks are almost too tough to eat. So I have to plan ahead to get good beef.

And while we are on the subject of food, on Monday I went to Zatinya in Chinatown. It is probably the most delicious meal I will have all month. It's a place to eat delicately seasoned meats and well paired vegetables. The portion sizes are not North American-sized, but five tapas-sized orders were perfect for two people. There were only Greek wines on the menu, but this had the pleasant effect of causing me to branch out beyond my South American predispositions.

And the Recessionist was lucky enough to enjoy this meal in the company of a gentleman so in a rare occurance for this blog, she does not know what it cost.

Only you can prevent wildfires

Woke up this morning to an email from eHarmony letting my know that they went ahead an renewed my dating-experiment-for-the -summer subscription to the tune of $30. I of course did not budget $30 for any such thing this month and it will be causing some fiscal pain. In further unfortunate news, it is a holiday. So I can't call my bank to have them stop payment, eHarmony doesn't even have a phone number you can call them on, and there is apparently no function on online banking that lets me stop a charge that I did not authorize. In the words of T-Pain "you've officially be chopped and screwed."

Which leads me to today's painful lesson-- only you can prevent wildfires. Only you can protect yourself and your accounts. Everyone else wants to make, take, or steal your money and only you can keep it from happening. Maybe that sounds a little dramatic but since I started this blog $30 has a whole new significance and the loss of such a sum IS dramatic, especially since I have lost it to something which does not benefit me in the slightest (yeah, the summer experiment went that well.) I will have to make it up. Right now I am considering canceling my haircut, looking for a baby sitting job, and cutting out my second paycheck grocery budget. 

It also leads me to bigger questions. What if this really were fraud and not just a really underhanded move from eHarmony? There is apparently nothing I can do about it today. I would have to wait until tomorrow while someone could be out there using my debit card and completely draining my account. There's no back up. There's no insurance for that. If my account gets drained and I can't pay my bills, that's it. I would have to put everything on the credit card for a few months and borrow money from other people to pay the credit card bill. My efforts from the last two months would be completely negated. I would be even more in the hole than before. 

This shakes my faith in ANYTHING online from memberships to bill pay. Be warned that eHarmony might be a good idea for dating (it certainly wasn't for me, but that's a separate issue), but they automatically renew your subscription without any prior notification. This is a shallow move for a company that claims to have both integrity and your best interests in mind. The Recessionista will be boycotting eHarmony and any of its affiliates. 

So when I do get ahold of the bank tomorrow we are going to have a long talk about security. And if they can't give me some reasonable assurances about fraudulent charges and protections I will be switching banks the same day. I got into this whole thing to control my money and today I failed in that mission. Money went somewhere without my explicit permission.  I can't afford to lose even $30, I can't imagine what would happen if I lost my account balance. 

The Recissionista is fired up. 

Write that down!

So today is payday. I am going to try to keep track of every dollar I spend from now until the next payday. So far I have sent $244 worth of reimbursements to the Bank of America Visa. I also spent $1 on cream cheese at the cafe in the Capitol. Yes, I am planning on being that fanatical. No, I won't blog every purchase. Just the trends.

I also have some lessons learned from the last two weeks.

- If you buy fresh food you have to eat it all in the first week or so for it to be a good investment. It will go bad if you try to save it/ ration it out. Threw away kale, milk, broccoli and squash because they went bad before I could use them. This observation leads me to wonder if my dining choices come in cycles where the first and third weeks of the month are full of healthy food and the other two weeks I pop open cans and eat more processed goods. Perhaps I will spread out the shopping this cycle get more diversity of fresh ingredients.

- I have for a very long time, had a bad habit of using reimbursement checks from work or FlexSpending as cash on hand. I use the Visa for reimbursable health care and work expenses and the debt was piling up because I wasn't actually reimbursing myself. So this time around I kept tabs on the reimbursement checks and sent the exact amount to Visa on payday. We won't be going back to that habit again.

- I had $27 dollars left the day before payday. So my budget is close to accurate, but I still need to be saving more. Those last few days were definitely in the trenches. I even thought about leaving my wallet at home, but it turns out that just the knowledge that there's only $27 bucks in there is enough to keep you from opening it.

- I spent close to $50 in gas and didn't fill up all the way either time. So gas costs more than the $60 I budgeted for it.


Speaking of the car I am getting the oil changed on the car this weekend and the brake pads replaced next week. I will need to crunch the numbers and factor it in before I go grocery shopping. Additionally I gave my friend Anna $50 for lodging at her wedding and I sent another $50 check to a non-profit for an event in October. I have to count that $100 as gone starting right now or I will get a nasty shock when it is actually gone.

In fact looking at costs and bills I ALREADY know are coming I have a little over $500 for the rest of the month. This is why I have vowed to record where the heck that goes so I am not in the trenches until October 5th.

Whew! Reality bites.

Squirrels

That's right. Squirrels.

That's my topic today. Why? Because like boy scouts and mothers of toddlers they prepare.

As the air cools three or four degrees returning the District of Columbia to a tolerable state, I am reminded that I need to prepare for the winter so I don't get caught off guard by costs that happen that time of year. I'm not just talking about Christmas gifts and birthday gifts for my brothers (October and December), but also the fact that the gas bill will double and I will have to start wearing tights again. (Yes, I am one of those girls- Good tights = $$)

So here is my list of preparations I need to make for the winter and expenditures that I can spread out over September and October so that the combination of the gas bill and dry cleaning my overcoat don't break the bank around Thanksgiving.

1) Coats- I have a pea coat and and over coat. They both could stand a good dry cleaning. The overcoat needs all new buttons. I think I will do the dry cleaning in the burbs at one of those $1.25/ garment places. Suggestions? As for the buttons, I really do need to pay a professional. The reasons the coat needs new buttons again is because I did sloppy job replacing them the first time. These coats however are a huge source of recessionista pride. I bough both of them at a trunk sale at my old office for $100. Not $100 each. Two wool winter coats for $100. So they are worth the tailor's fee and a full set of buttons.

2) Cancel the cable- I have talked this over with the roommate. The landlord is providing free wireless Internet. We don't watch the actual TV, we mostly Hulu.com our shows. The 6-month promo rate is going to run out and we could use the $50 for heat. This is one of those things I have been putting off for no good reason. Just gotta do it.

3) Car maintenance- There are just certain things you've just got to do to winterize your car. My car has been through an awful lot in the last year and I want to make sure that my brakes are good to go and it has new fluids. Starting this weekend we'll get the oil changed and then next week I am taking it to a friend of a friend (no expensive garages here) to get the brake pads replaced. It is pretty painful to spend money on the car, but it beats huge repairs when you least expect them.

4) Clothes- This is going to be very hard. I need to do a very strategic assessment of the entire wardrobe and zero in on only the things I really need. I hereby vow to not put ANYTHING on the Macy's card because of what they did to me when I missed one payment. When that card is fully paid off --$77 to go!--it's getting sliced and diced. My balance on my Old Navy card, another piece of plastic I use for clothing, is pretty high too. So I am hoping to minimize usage on that, but I can't rule it out completely yet. This might be one of those times I actually put cash in a jar so that I can get one new sweater, one new suit, one pair of boots, one...ect. I will stick to the basics and...shop only TJ Maxx, Ross, and thrift stores.

5) Crock Pot Recipes- My roommate, fabulous woman that she is, just got a crock pot which is perfect for hearty winter food and for storing food away for quick microwave meals. We already cut down the cost of black beans by making them in the pot. There are way too many (even for me) to eat this week so I am going to freeze them for future meals. Wish I could can them, but I think that's more of a capital investment. Crock pot recipes last all week, cook while you are gone (or asleep) and you can freeze the chili, soup, sauce, casserole, etc for later. So please, please send me you favorite winter crock pot recipes, keeping in mind that the cost of ingredients should be worth what I will get out of it.

And finally my last point on squirrels is that foraging is not just for nuts. I was walking the dog (side job #2) up Massachusetts Ave the other day and I saw this table that had clearly been built to go over the radiator. Since radiators present a counter space problem for my roommate's plants I went up to the owner of the house where the table was sitting in the yard. I asked how much she was selling the table for. And she said "You can have it." Free-sales are awesome and now my roommate's plants have a home and I have the itch to find other free things I need.

Craigslist anyone?