The inability to count

People I know...  I'm not naming names...

They don't seem to be able to count.  Simple math kind of count.  The electricity or water gets cut off every other month.  Some sort of crisis is always happening in that household.  And the funny thing... several years ago, I thought they were doing awesome. 

I know it's strange.  But 6 years ago, I knew several families like that.  All of them seemed to be going somewhere.  Everything was just awesome, and the world was rocking along great.  It was 2010, and the world was wonderful. 

Now, we're entering 2017 and I wonder what happened to those families.  I know what I did.  I started making a budget and following the thing.  It doesn't help if you make a budget and don't follow it.  I got my wife on board, and we look at the budget regularly.  We adjust as needed.  She tells me she needs things and I try to fit it into the budget.  We discuss everything.  The budget makes that possible. 

The other families?  They lurch from chaos to chaos, barely surviving what are normal and expected rocks of the ship.  See, emergencies happen.  So they aren't really emergencies.  Those "catastrophes" are normal occurrences.  You just have to plan for them.  And a stack of cash helps.  It's not a lot of cash.  Just $1000.  But that's a life changer.  It's just enough cushion to keep the big bad from beating down the from door.

But the people I know... they get payday loans. 

Six months ago, they said "payday loans are the devil". 

I guess that's the biggest trick of the devil.  He convinced the world he doesn't exist.

But then there is another side of the coin.  The part I don't understand.  I don't have to.  I just have to believe.  And I do.

See, I started going to church six years ago.  And it was a church that preached the new testament, and told me what the Bible said.  It wasn't about what someone thought.  You had to argue against the Bible.  Not against some random person.  Not against the thoughts of the world.  Against the word of God.  And there's a lot of parts in there that don't make a bit of sense to me.  But those parts are the ones that are the most important. 

As I heard someone say once... If you hear someone say "It doesn't make any sense" then that person has an invalid perspective of the world.  The world always makes sense.  It's not the world that doesn't make sense.  It's our view of the world. 

Now, the average person would tell me that the budget made all the difference.  But I know going to church and doing what the Bible said had an effect.  "Have faith and believe" it said.  I did.  That's all that was asked for. 

See, you really need to read the new testament.  It's a hard book to read.  Not for the words.  The words.  The words are easy.  They concepts are hard.  It's filled with a lot of differing and complicated stuff.  I don't pretend to be the greatest scholar of the Bible in the world.  What I do know is the main portion is so stupidly simple it's hard.  "Have faith in the living God and his son Jesus.".  That's the main thing.  

Because a lot of what people teach is flat out wrong.  Or at least contradicted by other parts of the new testament.  And if we're getting into a Paul vs Jesus interpretation, I'm taking Jesus any day of the week.  I think Paul is the problem with a lot of Christianity.  But that's an argument for another time.

I guess the biggest thing I want to leave with is this: Jesus is knowable.  I'm not saying you are going to understand it all.  But he is knowable.  And it's worth knowing him.

Logical fallacies

I keep seeing posts wander through the Internet about a husband that wants to pay his wife to stay home with their child.  In the end, he’s mad because he can’t pay her his perceived salary of close to $100,000 per year and still pay the bills.  

Let me say this up front: my wife is a stay at home mom of three kids, not one.  She has a very hard job in taking care of the household.

The value my wife adds to my life is incapable of being counted.  If I lost my wife, my life would be devastated from the loss of her.  Not from the loss of what she does.  I love her to death.

But it’s not a $100,000 a year job on the open market. 

It’s a horrible argument that is used to trump up the job of stay at home moms.  It’s an argument made by people who don’t know business.  It’s an argument made by people who want money for breathing.  If any one of these people really forked out the kind of money they talk about, they would quickly change their standards. 

But let’s get to the real problem with the argument.  The original writer of the argument assumes that everything a stay at home mom does should get charged at a different rate.  That’s just crazy.  Let’s make an adequate comparison.  I have an office.  I keep it relatively clean most of the time.  I don’t get paid a dime to clean my office.  I clean it because I’m not a slob, and because I’m an adult.  I clean it because it’s part of presenting a professional appearance.  But I don’t get paid a separate rate to clean my office.  I don’t work for a union that says I can only do one single job.  I do it all because that is what I was hired to do.  I have to do my job, plus all sorts of other little things that seemingly have nothing to do with my job.  Clerical?  Tied in with the package.  Negotiation?  With the package.  Data entry?  Part of the job.

The major invalid assumption of the argument is that each service is being purchased ala carte from an outside vendor.  That can be done, but hiring ala carte is about hiring a professional.  And hiring a professional means you get someone who works faster than the average person at their job. 

Let’s compare laundry.  If I was to hire ala carte for laundry, then I would bag my laundry up, and leave for work a few minutes early.   I would stop by a laundromat and drop off my laundry, and pay by the pound to get someone else to clean my laundry.   I would come back on my way home to find my laundry complete and ready for pickup.  Total amount of my time: 20 minutes.  And laundry goes for about $1 a pound.  Given an adequate clothes supply, laundry could be dropped off once or twice a week without real problems. 

Following that same line of reasoning, you could easily negotiate salary positions to handle every single household task.  And once the child becomes school age, then the amount of time hired to do those tasks drops dramatically due to the child being in school.  The average day would go from 10 hours to 5.  Half the time involved?  Half the pay involved.  Unless the nanny is hired at salary.  And that’s what the intelligent nanny is going to do to even out their paycheck.

Now, I'm excluding places where living expenses are out of control  Those places are just flat crazy.  And $100,000 in those local dollars is really not the same amount in comparison to other locations.  

Realistically, I've had to think about what would happen if my wife died.  And in that case, what would I do?   Really, I could replace my wife with a 15 year term life insurance policy for about $500,000.   In comparison, I need about $800,000 on me.  That's from the purely financial perspective.  

Due to getting out of debt, I don't have $800,000 on me.  I have $400,000.   So should I die, my wife is good for 5-6 years.  Should my die, I'm screwed as I don't have anything on her.  Kids each have a $10,000 burial stipend tied to my life insurance policy.  And term life is cheap.  I pay about $35 per month.  

Clarity, and plan-monkeys

I’ve talked about taking action and doing things, but I want to add a bit of clarity.   There’s a difference between smart action and dumb action.

Smart action involves small steps towards a goal.  Such as staying up late and writing a blog post or studying some new material.

Dumb action involves taking large steps towards a goal when you have no idea of the first step.  A good example of this would be to think you are going to make money blogging on day 1. 

Sure, go out and blog to make money.  But don’t jump ship on your day job until your blog is close to replacing your current income or replacing your current income.  Case in point: I still have an 8 to 6 or so day job.  Should the Android app I’m writing take off, I’m still going to have my day job.  Deciding when to quit the day job is more complex of an answer than I can give right now, because I haven’t quit my day job.  I’m still here. 

But, I’d have to say this: 12+ months of living off the income of the side job alone.  And by that, take your day job paycheck and plow it against any debt, emergency fund savings, or investing (in that order).  Personally, I wouldn’t quit my day job until the only debt I have is my house.  I don’t own a house, so that’s a ways to go. 

I guess I need to add more clarity to what I’ve muddled up quite a bit in this mess.  Smart action will often result in failure.  Dumb action will also result in failure.  The difference is in scale.  A smart action that fails and costs you $20 has been an interesting learning experience.  Continue to lose $20 here and there to learn at a small scale and with little hope of bankrupting yourself.  There’s a mental thing that happens when you lose $20 on a venture.  Because if you can’t make money on the small scale, you can’t make money on large scale.

If the only way to make money is invest at least $100,000, your plan sucks and you need a new plan.   Any plan that can make money for $20 invested can be scaled up to $50 invested.  From there, your plan out to feed itself.   If the plan isn’t cranking out at least the amount you’ve invested by $50, you should seriously think about shooting that plan. 

Somewhere in that last sentence, Dave Ramsey’s speech about employees carrying problem-monkeys came into my brain.  Maybe these are plan-monkeys.    Dave’s discussion was on decision making.  Essentially, every person that comes to you with a decision that needs to be made has a monkey on their shoulder.  When they tell the boss, the monkey goes from the person to the boss.  The goal of the boss is to make sure the monkey leaves with the person. 

So the goal with these plan-monkeys is feed them a bit in the form of money.  If they don’t start handing money back to you, you need to quit feeding them money.  Simple as that. 

Time invested is a different thing, though.  In creation of this blog I have invested zero dollars and a lot of hours.  And I’m okay feeding this monkey, because it doesn’t cost me any money.  It doesn’t make me any either, but it doesn’t cost me anything.

When do you shoot the non-cost plan monkey (like the blog)?   When you want to.   It’s not costing you anything, so you won’t suffer if it goes away.   If you need more time to do other things or if you feel you aren’t gaining any traction, then just shoot the monkey.  If people miss that monkey, they will let you know.

Return to Quicken

I’ve been contemplating buying Quicken 2014 Deluxe.  My last version was Quicken 2011 Deluxe.  Intuit decided they needed a new paycheck to do the exact same thing they did previously, so I can no longer download my bank information and have it automatically entered.  All manual entry if I want to do that type of thing.  I really don’t.  I manage my account well, so I know how much I have and I review it several times a week.  Note the “managed” part of the account. 

So I guess I wonder if I should repurchase it.  I’ve been out of service with Quicken since the end of April, though I slowly quit using it prior to that because the darn thing wouldn’t do what I wanted it to do.  It didn’t seem to understand the term “monthly budget”.   Telling me I’m over budget because I’ve got rent scheduled for the next year and I don’t have the money to pay Decembers rent in February is kind of stupid to me.  But that is what Quicken does.  Maybe it thinks I’m trying to prepare for apocalypse. 

So stupid.  Have they fixed any of this?  I doubt it.  But some part of me thinks I should go get it just to see if it anything is better.  I do wonder if Quicken is the best because everything else sets the bar so low.  But I digress.  Could be I’m just complaining because I feel like it.  Seems like a good thing to do.

I think the other, and real, problem is a mental problem.  When my gas account gets up high, I think of things to go off and blow it on that don’t have anything to do with vehicle maintenance.  I need to go replace my front tires and all my shocks.  But that wouldn’t be “fun” or exciting.  Buying tires is kind of like having a root canal.  I haven’t had a root canal, but I have bought tires.  It was somewhere in the “supremely boring” category.  And did I mention expensive?  Yeah, that too. 

Going back to the budget I wonder if there is really anything useful for me in Quicken that I don’t already do.  Other than categorizing things and figuring out where money goes, I don’t know.  I do yearly budgets with an Excel spreadsheet and that works fine.  Seems to work a lot better than the over complexity of Quicken.  See, Quicken operates for casual budgeters.  I’m an “every dollar on paper on purpose” budgeter.  There is no “left over” money at the end of the month.  Because I spent every single bit of it before I ever got it.

Now, sometimes that money is spent in the “blow” category.  Sometimes it’s spent on rent.  But it’s all got a name and a purpose.  I know when the bills come due and I know the generally amounts.  I know electricity and gas swap being horrible based on the season.  I know when I’m going to put money into savings and when I’m going to be short.  I always know.  Because my life is balanced off a budget of me not working a single minute of overtime.  And I always work overtime.  There is always a degree of flexibility there that allow me to do whatever I need to do.   And if I truly am short, then I’ve got $1,000 in an emergency fund to make the problem go away.  Simple.

I guess the end of this is I don’t want Quicken.  I just thought I did.  There is nothing it can provide me that I don’t already do or have.  And that $55 (or $65 or $48, depending on where you look) can easily be spent paying off debit or buying tires.  

slowing through Quicken. And Excel.

I love Excel.  Really, I do.  Better than any budget software, it can easily validate thoughts and ideas, and give a long term road map to where you want to go.  Sitting down with that road map, you can plan for the future and dream like no tomorrow.

I use Quicken 2011 as well, but that doesn’t really give the frame work to plan or just throw stuff out.  Parts of Quicken are really good, and parts of it just suck.  But that’s okay.  I think the problem is there is an absolute depth to Quicken that is only discoverable through years and years of work, and there doesn’t seem to be any decent way to learn it all. 

I find it annoying when I run a program, and find a chart that is really, really good.  And I have no idea where I am or how to get back to that chart.  I don’t like the nags in the program, either.  I’ve never had any decent success with automatically syncing bank accounts.  The last time I tried, it randomly created a 2^nd bank account and ignored the one I had manually created.  So I quit trying to sync accounts.  But the program keeps harassing me and asking me to go back and “Why don’t you sync this account?” And I sometimes answer “Because that never works, you piece of junk.  Now quit asking me”.

I also dislike data entry on the thing.  I realize I spend a lot of time at convenience stores.  I work for one.  But Quicken should realize that a deposit from the company is NOT going to be an expense category.  But that happens every time.  The system constantly thinks net salary is groceries:snacks.  One is an expense, the other is income.  Come on, system.  Figure it out.  It’s not that hard. 

Also, on the planning section, only should the items that are due this month.  I may set something up to reoccur every month for the next six years, but that doesn’t need to show up in my monthly budget and cause me havoc.  The more I fight with the spending planner, the less I use it.  It’s much easier to use Excel because it is both more flexible and user friendly.