Quality and Personal Finance

Almost three weeks ago I started a new role with my company, I'm responsible for the Quality Control and Assurance for the construction of a 5 star hotel and condo. I spend most of my day in the field performing inspections and overseeing the work being installed. Anyway this got me to thinking about how much money is being wasted on the project by subcontractors for taking a few extra minutes to install work correctly the first time. I don't think it for lack of caring that they don't take the few extra minutes because most everyone takes pride in their work, but we are almost 5 months over schedule and every hour, heck every second, on the job is precious especially since in the coming months we'll be going to three shifts and working 24 hours a day.

By not taking the extra few minutes upfront to make sure that the work is by the most recently issued blue print and is aligned etc everyone is having to go back and repair work that's already been installed and often times the repair takes longer than the initial install since most of the time the task must be started over from scratch after removing the first attempt. Plus the added time and cost of the subcontractor's management having to look at the problem I notify them of and then filter it back down to the workers.

Taking the extra time to make sure its right the first time applies to personal finance as well. If we took a few extra minutes to first determine what we really need/want so that we can ensure we're not overbuying or under buying either would led to more expenses. (Under buying because you'd have to re-buy to get what you really need.) After determining what is really needed or wanted we should all take a little extra time to research specifications, reliability, etc before larger purchases. Last put not least if we take a few extra minutes to comparison shop, even as little as calculating unit prices in the grocery store we can all save a few extra pennies.

I try and do all of those to save money. After watching all the money being wasted on the project for not doing everything right the first time I'm further motivated to make sure I don't waste money by not taking the time upfront.

Benifits of Renting vs. Owning

Recently I've been thinking about why I'm glad I am currently a renter and not a home owner.

My main reason is money. I'm not going to go through the analysis to try and prove that one can rent the same house for less money than owning the house or anything else along those lines - mainly because I don't think its always true instead I'm going to look at why renting is better for me at this point in my life.

1. Location of renting is better --- I currently live in a fantastic location (and am loving it!). Regardless of the quality of the home from a "handyman special" to a "McMansion" there is not a house or condo with in a 10 block area of my current location that I could buy with a mortgage and HOA's that would be even close to my current rent.
2. By renting I'm more willing to settle for less space, amenities, and upgrades --- Because I'm only committed to living in my apartment for a short period of time I know that I can always upgrade if needed or wanted so I'm much more willing to rent something that works for right now rather than hunting for room to grow. I'm also okay with lesser quality than I'd want in a home.
3. Renting allows for easier roommates situations --- By renting both my roommate and I are held to the same contract with our apartment complex so if either of us were to break the lease the apartment complex gets to be the bad guy. If I were a home owner I'd want to make sure I could afford the mortgage on my own with out needing to rely on a roommate but even if I had a roommate I'd have to forced into the position of landlord.
4. No maintenance costs --- No maintenance costs is what got me thinking about why I'm glad to be a renter. Sunday afternoon our A/C stopped working, I checked it out and it wasn't any of the obvious fixes so Fashionista and I called our apartment's maintenance answering service, about twenty minutes later they called us back and tried to walk us through the basics for repairing (which I'd already done) since none of that worked and A/C problems are considered emergencies by our apartment complex a maintenance repairman arrived about an hour after we called and discovered it was the compressor. It then took him a little over 6 hours for the new compressor to be installed and the pipes welded in place. As Steve, the repair guy, was working on this I couldn't help be think of the expense, compressors usually cost between $1,500 and $3,000 not to mention the overtime/off hours time that having a repairman at your home on a Sunday probably costs. After this repair it made me extra happy to be a renter and the bill be sent to my complex and not to me.

At least for right now I'm very happy that I'm currently renting. I know in the future I will become a home owner and will hopefully be just as happy.

Are you a renter or a home owner? What's benefits do you have?

Monthly Net Worth Update -- May 2008

As discussed a few times on this blog, I’m a very conservative person so I tend to under estimate. In my last net worth update I predicted that I would reach the $100,000 net worth mark in Mid-June...well...it seems that I'm not a very good predictor (which is a good thing). I actually reached the $100,000 mark about a month and a half earlier since this month my net worth is now officially over $100,000! Yeah!

	Updated 4/29/08	Change from Previous Update	Updated 4/3/08
Total Net Worth	$100,076.32	$3,597.77	$96,478.55
Net Worth Comprised of
Retirement Savings:	$27,831.53	$2,345.74	$25,485.79
401k	$22,223.68	$1,812.04	$20,411.64
Roth IRA	$5,607.85	$533.70	$5,074.15
House Down Payment/CD's:	$57,081.13	$168.65	$56,912.48
Future Car Savings	$200.27	$0.00	$200.27
Emergency Fund/Money Market:	$14,945.65	$2,682.51	$12,263.14
"Cash"/Checking:	$17.74	-$1,599.13	$1,616.87

Analyzing the table I thought I’d take a moment to explain a few irregularities.

My future car savings does not reflect any increase this month because my transfer into my emigrant direct savings earmarked for my future car is on the 1^st of each month so last month I updated my net worth on 4/3/08 so it was after the transfer and this month I’ve updated my net worth prior the 1^st of the month and the transfer.

My “cash”/checking looks very light because I have my bi-weekly paycheck deposited into my money market fund to take advantage of high interest rates and then once a month transfer my expenses from that account into my “cash”/checking account.

Monday's Money Funny - Tax Rebates

One of the regular features on my blog is "Monday's Money Funny" which are humorous (at least to me) articles/jokes/just about anything that I've discovered over the weekend when I catch up on all my on line reading that spark a need for knowledge. For example the previous Monday Money Funny was about the Asian Market Down turn.

Excitingly Bush announced this past week that the Tax Rebates would start being distributed a week earlier than expected so I thought it approapirate for this week's Monday Money Funny be about a "what if" scenario about Americans spending every penny of their tax rebate.

Here's the highlights from the article, check out MSN Money for the full article:

But what if every penny of that $100 billion were spent this summer, jolting the economy exactly as lawmakers intend?

Wide-screen televisions would fly off the shelves. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Walt Disney would think it was Christmas all over again. Tens of thousands of teenagers would get summer jobs. And for a few months, U.S. economic growth would surge to twice the rate expected. And then fall, possibly on its face.

As with all Monday's Money Funnies this article promoted me to research. Personally, I'm going to be bad and "help" the economy and use my tax rebate to fund my new LCD TV but for those of you who are going to be good I thought I'd share below some articles I found about how to put your tax rebate to good use.

MSN Money's The Best Ways to Spend a Tax Rebate

About.com's Smart Ways to Spend Your Tax Rebate

Stay tuned for next week's Monday's Money Funny. If you run across any Money Funnies please email them to me at future.millionaire.blog@gmail.com and if I use them I will give you credit and link to your blog.

Weekend Round-Up

Sunday has rolled around and tomorrow the work week starts back up again, I don't know where the weekend has gone.

Starting the new project has been crazy lately, I've been working all kinds of hours and sadly I don't see it lessening any time soon so I've been having to catch up on all my blog reading on the weekends since I barely have enough time to eat dinner and go to sleep before I have to start the work cycle all over again the next day.

Anway....Below are a few articles that caught my eye this weekend as I caught up:

Living Almost Large writes about having financial priorities and it is okay to splurge some times. I'm in full agreement wit LAL - I often write about financial "savy-ness" is all about smart money choice.

Mom at Wide Open Wallet shared about her friend was contemplating a second job instead of reducing luxury spending in her post I deserve it.

Penelope Pince from Our Fourpence Worth also discussed luxuries versus necessities and has a great break down on how to decide the difference. So often I hear people say they have to have xyz when in reality its a luxury.

All in all my thoughts are if you don't have the money stick to the necessities, if you have your necessities covered, are not in debt (other than a mortgage), have a healthy emergency fund, and are contributing to your retirement than you should be able to make wise money choices and fund some luxuries but keep in mind unless you have an endless money supply you can't have every luxury and so you have to pick and choose to stay within your budget.

No Debt Plan's Kevin answered a reader question regarding opening a Roth IRA and minimum investments. For anyone who hasn't already started a Roth IRA I highly recommend it - check out Kevin's Million Dollar Retirement plan using only a Roth IRA.

Kristy at Master Your Card posted about the additional costs associated with paying your federal taxes by credit card. Can't say I ever thought about paying them with credit card but now that I know the costs involved I most definitly will not be paying via credit card, I'll continue to whip out the good ole check book.

The Social Margin's Cinder helped remind me that you need to Treat Your Job like an Investment. I'm wondering with all of the blog posts and articles about leaving bad jobs are not a sign, but then again my job only got bad recently when I was transfered to the "problem project", but all food for thought. Thanks Cinder for posting about this.

I also enjoyed Seb's post at Pinching Copper about Is the Price of gas really that bad? The secretary at my old project would always complain about the rising cost of gas and how its almost so bad people can't afford to pay the gas to go to work anymore and according to her people are actually paying more gas each day than they make. I can't tell you how many times I tried to explain to her using all kinds of examples of how people make more than pay for gas to drive every day. Oh well some people like to focus in on one thing.

Well that's it for this Sunday. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend.

Vacation Saving

Its starting to get warm outside and summer is just around the corner - time for all those summer vacations.

I thought I'd share how I plan and save for vacations, especially since this week I've been pushed to figure out my vacation plans since my new boss of two weeks told me I have to have my vacation request for the rest of the year to him no later than April 28th. (I've never had to turn in my vacation requests more than a few weeks in advance not 8 months in advance but thats neither here nor there).

I had to quickly plan a summer vacation if I wanted to have one this year, plus confirm plans for my cousin's wedding in September, Thanksgiving, and Christmas plans. At least those were slightly easier because there's less choices.

With the crazy hours I'm having to work on this new project by the time I get home each night I barely am able to find time to eat dinner and post here before I crash into bed to start the process all over again - I'm hopeful that this will eventually change but I don't see an end insight until we start the finishes in the building and move to 24 hour a day which will force us to have shifts so maybe I could work a normal amount of hours even if they are at odd times -- but I digress this post is about vacations. With the crazy hours I've been putting in, I didn't have the time to deal with trying to plan a vacation and with the rush to plan a summer vacation and not having the time to invest in researching my options, I could have easily over spent but I'm proud to say I haven't.

The way I plan for for irregular expenses like Vacation is by saving every month through out the year by utlizing a "dummy" transfer in my financial software even though it stays in my Money Market until needed. To come up with the amount to save each month for these irregular expenses is that I track my expenses from the previous year and then add 10%.

Last year my summer vacation was a 5-day weekend at Destin with Fashionista. I also took m 3 day weekend mini-vacations to Savannah, hiking, and Hilton Head. For the Destin Trip and my mini-vacations I spent $1020 excluding gas for driving (gas and maintence absorbed in my regular monthly budget).

So far I didn't have any plans for this year's vacation. Since Fashionista was going to Europe this summer and using up all of her vacation time then I knew our usual Destin trip would be out. I was talking to my mom and she brought up the two of us going on a cruise - we'd been talking about this for years but for one reason or another it just never worked out.

Niether one of us had ever been on a cruise and so thought it would be a fun adventure for us. My mom's not a planner so planning the cruise fell to me, I did a few quick google searches and found the options overwelming. I had no idea how to evaluate the options and which lines were the best. I ended up calling a family friend who's also a travel agent, told her what we were looking for in a cruise and with in a day she emailed me four options and the pros and cons of each cruise - plus two of them she'd actually sailed on herself.

My mom and I ended up choosing to go on a cruise to the Bahamas on a Royal Caribean for 5 nights. On top of the cruise we're going to go down two days early and stay at the beach. Total cost of this trip per person is $770. Yeah! Under budget and have seveal hundred dollars worth of spending money for the trip.

Moral of the story...when you're out of your league and short on time seek professional help. It can really pay off, by contacting a travel agent I saved both time and money.

How do you split Rent?

Last weekend Mr. Be-Mine, Car Enthusiast, Fashionist, Latest Beau one of my best friends who we’ll call The Councilor since she’s in grad school to be a career councilor plus a few other friends who will remain nameless since my creativity was used up after “The Councilor”, went to dinner and we were talking about Fashionist’s and mine apartment since we’d just moved in. They were curious to know how come Fashionist got the master bedroom and bathroom. I explained that Fashionist had requested it and offered to pay more based upon square footage.

Fashionist and I had already long since talked about how we were going to allocate bedrooms. In our previous apartment in the college ghetto the two bedrooms were nearly identical (her’s slightly larger but next to a neighbor and mine slightly smaller but surrounded by our apartment so noise was less) and shared a bathroom so we just split rent and we were both content with that.

This time we knew that the apartments we were going to be looking at would be different and have a master bedroom and a second bedroom. Fashionist, being the fashion diva that she is, requested to have the master but said she’s be willing to pay more for it based on square footage. The was fine by me, I’ve never had “master bed room” before so it was no big deal, plus I liked the idea of having a little less expensive rent, since the ½ way point for the rent of the apartments we were looking at was near the top end of what I wanted to pay. All and all we were both happy.

After explaining this Mr. Be-mine and Car Enthusiast had a field day making fun of us. Fashionist and I are both a little on the anal retentive side (probably why we are such good roommates together) so they couldn’t believe we’d gone thru the effort of calculating the square footage etc.

The Councilor, always being the peace maker said who care’s as long as the two of them are happy that’s all the matters – which I firmly believe. It makes both Fashionist and I happy – we have a planned method of how to share rent and it wasn’t based off a coin flip or anything so there’s no possibility of resentment. We do however split utilities 50/50 which I think is reasonable as well.

For all of you that split rent I thought I’d also give you a few links for tips about how to calculate rents:

Sylvia at About gives a formula for figuring rents

and Oh my apartment has these tips for splitting

Hope these help!

Right Move --- Wrong Time

I told you all almost a month ago about how my bedroom TV dieing about how I've really been wanting an LCD TV but couldn't justify the expense when I could borrow a TV. I eventually decided that I was going to go ahead and indulge myself with the luxury of a LCD TV but only after I had settled into my new apartment both physically and financially.

Well I'm almost physically settled (just a few more boxes to go) but financially I feel like I need to wait a few months for everything to balance back out BUT I've been handed a great deal on an LCD TV. A few days ago my mom was at Target and found a 26" Sony Bravia LCD TV on clearance marked down from $699 to $441. She went ahead and picked it up for me and showed up on my door step.

Before this TV fell into my lap I was planning to wait until June or July to buy a 19" TV (the same size screen as the one that died) and spending between $400 - $500 on an "average" brand TV.

Now I'm torn - do I take the bigger, better brand TV that's on clearance two-three months earlier than anticipated or do I return and wait for the right time and buy the more modest TV? Either way at least its the right price. I will say the longer the TV sits on my dresser waiting to be returned the more tempted I am to just go ahead and keep it.

Monday's Money Funny

One of the regular features on my blog is "Monday's Money Funny" which are humorous (at least to me) articles/jokes/just about anything that I've discovered over the weekend when I catch up on all my on line reading that spark a need for knowledge. For example the previous Monday Money Funny was about Cell Phones.

This week's Monday Money Funny is from The Onion, a satirical news letter. The article is a poetic satire about the Asian Market Down turn.

Here's the highlights from the article, check out The Onion for the full article:

TOKYO, HONG KONG, SEOUL—Asian stocks closed one of the worst and most mournfully reflective months on record last week, with the falling American dollar negatively impacting trade volume and causing the markets to drift, like the faded cherry petals of spring blossoms, downward towards the shadowed sea of burgeoning recession, Eastern market analysts warned Monday.

"Our worst monthly drop; rate cuts make investors flee—to commodities," Nikkei Index vice commissioner Fukako Mishima said, claiming job creation by Mitsubishi, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Sony failed to provide confidence in a market already as skittish as the aging husband of a teenage bride, forcing investors to shore up cash reserves with orders of durable goods and agricultural products. "Fading dollar's gleam, a feeble warning beacon: Seek bellies of pork."

Currency devaluation reflects silently on still and glassy water.

As with all Monday's Money Funnies this article promoted me to research. So here's some guides to coping with Market Down Turns, be it the Asian Market or the current American Housing Market.

The Market Oracle posted this guide of What to do Now shortly after the Asian Market. Also there's an older article but still good advice at rediff News called How to cope with Market Volatility.

Stay tuned for next week's Monday's Money Funny. If you run across any Money Funnies please email them to me at future.millionaire.blog@gmail.com and if I use them I will give you credit and link to your blog.

Weekend Round Up

Yay! I'm down to only three more boxes that need to be unpacked so I thought I'd take a break and share with you some of the highlights from this week in the PFBloggers World:

Jonathan over at Master Your Card has shared a three part series on Identity Theft. I'm glad he's shared - I hope none of us have to use the advice.

Kevin @ No Debt Needed shared his advice about Buying Clothing off Season. I ran errands this weekend and one of them was to the mall to buy Fashionista a B-day present and I have to stay I got the clothes shopping bug. I've been pretty good for the last six months or so - I can't remember the last new article of clothing I've bought so maybe its about time to add a few pieces to my wardrobe.

If you came into $1M...? Is the question that Living Almost Large asked of her readers this week. What would you do if you came into $1M? Make sure and share your thoughts in her comments.

Mom at Wide Open Wallet did the cost calculations on hybrid cars as a follow up to Girls Just Wanna have Fund's Ginger's post about hybrid suv's. I'm glad to know that hybrids are still more expensive - I can't help question my decision 4 years ago to forgo a hybrid Honda Civic instead of my "regular" Honda Civic, at the time it came down to money but now with gas prices I question my original decision.

Following along the car theme of this Round Up - I appreciated JB's frustration about needing to drive and pay the rising gas costs. I feel his pain.

And last but not least, I recommend reading Seb's guide to buying car tires online posted at Pincing Copper. Most helpful - I never would have thought of buying tires on line but its perfect timing as I've started noticing wear on my tires.

Don't forget to check out all the other blogs in the network. I've conveniently listed them all in the left hand column for your use.