Words From The Wealthy

I was walking around the university campus yesterday afternoon, and I figured I'd drop by and say hi to some of my former professors. Sadly, nobody was in. Granted, I can't really say I blame them; it was actually quite nice out yesterday afternoon.

I wandered up and down the halls, looking to see who was still there and who had moved on. Some profs had old assignments sitting in baskets outside their doors, others had comics taped to theirs. I ended up coming across one door posting that really summed things up for me right now.

It was called: Bill Gate's Rules for Life.

I have absolutely no idea if he actually said these things, or if it's just an urban legend. Either way, whoever said them is right. So, here they are:

Rule 1: Life is not fair -- get used to it!

Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping -- they called it opportunity.

Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

As much as I'm a supporter of developing good self-esteem (I've known first hand what it's like to have very low self-esteem), I understand and fully accept that sometimes tough love is the best learning experience out there.

Having someone else take the bull by the horns is like having someone else do your workout for you; you don't get anything out of it in the end.

How Big Is Your Footprint?

I give up blogger. You win. You can make this section all caps if you want, just leave the rest of my post alone. Okay? Thanks. Bye.

In my semi-mindless twitter reading tonight I checked out a link that Anna over at And Then She Saved posted. The website calculated your approximate environmental footprint based on aspects of your lifestyle such as climate, housing size, purchasing preferences, diet, spending habits, etc... 

I'm quite interested in that sort of thing, so I bit, and I ran my figures:

If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need:

 

= 4.51 Earths

Ouch.

I knew I needed to make some changes, but 4.51 Earths? Yikes. 

That hurts.

I'm sorry Earth.

I tried running it again based on making some fairly substantial changes while still living in my house. ie: no car, giving up meat, adding solar panels to the house, buying all organic, etc...

If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need:

 

= 1.03 Earths

Better. Not good, but better. 

That 0.03 of an Earth means that I am still living the high life. Their housing selections change in 500 sqft increments, and my place is at the low end of my category. Maybe that would make up the 0.03? I can hope.

Then I got thinking again (I really gotta stop doing that)

What do my former colleague's footprints look like? I know some guys who live pretty high on the hog, and couldn't care less about the environment. I plugged in some values to approximate their living arrangements, just to see:

If everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need:

 

= 15.24 Earths

*cough*

*STARE*

*cough cough*

I don't even know what to say about that.

Anyway, while I doubt I'll be able to convince a bunch of construction and oil field workers to give up their trucks, move into shoebox sized apartments and take on a vegan lifestyle, what I can do is focus on my own consumption habits and lead by example. I can be more mindful of what I use, what I purchase, and making what I have last longer.

It's like frugality all wrapped up in a nice little save the environment bow.

Pretty.

I can start by going to sleep on time. Less time awake at night means less time the lights are on. That and I can put my computer to sleep and unplug it rather than just closing the lid. 

Little steps add up the same way big ones do. One at a time.

How many Earths do you use?

Banging My Head On A Table

I made what is quite possibly the most bone headed move I've made in QUITE a while.

I was late on a credit card payment.

Actually, scrap that, I was early on a credit card payment.

I made a payment thinking it would be going towards my March bill, but I didn't pay attention to the date on my billing cycle. The payment actually got posted onto my February bill, leaving my second March payment short of what I actually owed.

I'm kicking myself so hard right now, you have no idea. I've never done this before. Short of racking up my credit card balance, this is the stupidest thing I've ever done with it.

The only reason I noticed anything was wrong was the fact that my minimum payment jumped. It had been below $100 a month for a little while now, and my balance had been steadily decreasing, so when it jumped to $120 I looked at it with my head tilted to the side thinking wtf?

Then I saw the little note at the bottom:

Your account is one payment past due, which may result in account suspension. Please contact the account management centre at 1 888 XXX-XXXX to make payment arrangements.

You want to see my eyes bug out? That did it. I checked my bank records. I checked the credit card's payment history. Sure enough, it was all there, just not where I thought it would be.

I am absolutely livid with myself. This was nothing short of bone headed.

Let this be a lesson for everyone in knowing your payment due dates. Learn from me so you don't have to learn for yourself.

*head desk*

*slide*

And now, for last month's slips. Needless to say, it was a little rough for me this month, especially around the middle. I'm not going to beat around this one, I slipped into an old, very bad, habit this month. I used shopping to beat stress.

I seriously deserve a beat down for this one.

After what was the hardest day I've had at work in well over a year, I went shopping. I didn't use cash. I did set myself a limit, I wasn't allowed to spend any more than 50% of my extra payments this month. That way by the end of the month I was still digging myself out, it was just slower than anticipated. Still, it's a habit I need to break.

After reading on Hi That's My Bike that the jeans I had been after were on sale at Anthropologie, I trotted down there and picked a pair up. Originally almost $220, they were marked down to $80.  While I was there I noticed the sweater I had been fawning over the weeks leading up to Christmas was marked down to $40 from $120, so I picked up the last one in my size as well. Tack on a couple small gifts for people, and a tube of mascara to replace mine (it was time), and I was done. Part of what limited the shopping (other than the fact that the mall was closing), wasn't so much the fact that it would mean my debt would take longer to pay off, but the fact that I'd have to write about it on here. Let's face it, admitting to this stuff is embarassing. So, thank you all.
Credit Card Damage: $184.64

I love music. I know what I should do here is delete my credit card information off iTunes, go out and buy an iTunes gift card with cash, and then use that. As of yet I haven't done it. Chalk this up to laziness, I'll buy one next time I'm out getting groceries.
Credit Card Damage: $3.57

As many of you probably saw earlier in the month, I signed up for the Ride to Conquer Cancer. Unfortunately there was a sizable registration cost associated with signing up for it.

That's right, I paid money to raise money for someone else.

I don't feel too bad about the cost of the registration because they feed us and provide us with a place to sleep that weekend. I'm basically paying for a weekend out now rather than in June. They only took either credit card or cheque for the registration costs, and I didn't have any cheques on me, so it ended up going on my credit card. That's the problem with having your card number memorized, its still usable even when it's frozen in a block of ice. My only saving grace on that is that while I have the loooooong number on the front memorized, the short one on the back I don't. That means I usually can't use it online. I put extra money on my card the following payday, but it would have been nice if that money went towards paying the balance down rather than just maintaining it.
Credit Card Damage: $75

That's $263.21 in non-cash spending during the month of February.

*facepalm*

That sucks.

Amazingly enough though I didn't use my debit card all month, other than to take money out of the bank machine every payday. I did however write down and track my spending all month, which was one of my other goals for February. I'll post the results of that tomorrow :)

*slip*

As some of you remember from my New Years resolution post, one of my goals for this year was to go cash only in my purchases. For the most part I've been quite successful. There were some slips in January however, and I feel that for the sake of keeping myself accountable, I should put them up here.

Our company had it's Christmas/New Years party the second weekend in January. I think they had started planning the party a little late and all of the good venues had filled up, so they moved it into the new year. We had an evening in the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel MacDonald. Absolutely gorgeous.

I love this hotel

I had a dress picked out that I planned to wear for the evening. We're not a super stuffy office at work, there's only a handful of guys that wear suits, and that's only if they have a client meeting that day. I figured it would be suitable. The day before the party I was talking to one of the ladies in the office, discussing what we were going to wear. I described the dress and her eyes got wide and she said "Oh no, that's not fancy enough. It's a semi-FORMAL cocktail party".

Well crap.

I went home and raided my closet only to discover that the dress I was planning to wear was the most formal thing I owned before it jumped to my all out formal graduation dress. So Saturday afternoon, the afternoon before the party, I was doing the mad dash power shopping in West Edmonton Mall. How bad could it be, all the New Year's dresses should be on sale, right? Wrong. Almost every store I hit had already cleared out their party gear, leaving me pretty hooped for well priced selection. I ended up scouring the racks in Winners, coming up with just 2 dresses in my size. I ended up settling on this silver silk Michael Kors cocktail dress. It was originally $225, marked down to $77. A bit more than I wanted to spend, but I was short on time. The picture doesn't do it justice, but lets face it, what more do you expect from dressing room lighting? Debit Card Damage: $80.85

The next one really was no more than lack of restraint. I should have gone home, grabbed the money, and come back. Instead, I shopped impulsively. I really need to work on that. Victoria's Secret was having a clearance sale: 10 pairs of underwear for $20. I don't remember when the last time I got underwear for $2 a pair was. Thankfully (and kinda sadly) their bras don't actually fit me, so the damage was somewhat curbed in that respect. I'd been meaning to get some underwear, so that was a plus. Right price, wrong method of payment. I accept responsibility for this one. Debit Card Damage: $21.00

This one was related to me being sick for a couple weeks. After a week of being sick, and nothing really helping to curb it, it occurred to me that what I was feeling felt more like a sinus infection than a cold. I checked online, and sure enough the symptoms were a direct match. Monday I went in to the doctor's office to be checked out. Sure enough, sinus infection. So, out came the prescription pad. Rather than going home and getting the cash out of my envelopes and picking up the drugs the next day, I bought them immediately after the doctor's appointment. I already had a raging sinus headache, and I was looking for relief. Debit Card Damage: $14.64

The last one was a case of me breaking down and buying some music on iTunes.
Credit Card Damage: $8.43

Total non-cash damage: $124.92. The rest of my spending for the month of January was done with cash: eating in, eating out, socializing, toiletries, you name it. Not good, but much better than it would have been otherwise if I wasn't trying to go cash-only. It's definitely making me rethink and plan my spending.  I'm hoping February goes a little better, because I really don't know what happened with my finances last month.

*Forgot a date. Spent $3.50 on hot chocolate. Total damage $128.42*

A Head Start On My Goals

I am jumping on the new years goal bandwagon early this year. I’m hoping it will give me a little adjustment time so that I don’t fall off the bandwagon by the beginning of February. 

I used to write and update goals on a regular basis. Back in Fall 2009 Lululemon was selling t-shirts and packaging up merchandise in reusable bags that gave you space to write your goals. They had space for the goal, and space for the date you planned to achieve it by. I was paying off my school debt at the time and dreaming of when I wouldn’t be a renter anymore, so I wrote that my goal was to buy a house by October 2011. I had to re-sharpie it a couple times because it was obviously a medium-long term goal, and it wore off a couple times. I carried my lunch to work in that bag, and could see the goal sitting on my desk every day at work. I reached the goal and officially became a home owner on November 27, 2010, almost a year in advance of the goal date.

I definitely believe in the power of writing down your goals.

So, in that spirit, I’m writing my goals for the New Year here in a public forum, free for the world to see, keeping me accountable.

1. I will budget using a cash in envelope type system for the entire year (more on that another day)
2. I will save enough spare change to make an additional mortgage payment by the end of the year.
3. I will rent out my spare bedroom by June.
4. I will sell my car, and pay off at least one of the 3 debts with the proceeds by July.
5. I will plant a garden that will produce at least 25 lbs of root vegetables for the winter.
6. I will fill at least 3 of the holes in my wardrobe without going into debt (See:http://diggingoutandup.blogspot.com/2010/11/still-under-budget.html)
7. I will run a 10k race.
8. I will produce a blog that nets at least $100 quarterly (basically to at least pay for the internet I need to write it)

Those are my goals for 2011. Note that I wrote “I will” rather than “I want to” or “I’ll try to”. I have a few longer term goals as well, so while I’m at it I may as well let you in on those:

9. I will pay off the CMHC insurance on my mortgage in extra payments before my mortgage is renewed in 2015.
10. I will obtain a net worth of $100,000 by the time I’m 30
11. I will obtain a net worth of $1,000,000 by the time I’m 40

Number 9 will be much easier to accomplish once I’ve paid off my debts, but I’m taking the first step in achieving it in goal number 2 above. Providing the housing market in Canada doesn’t completely implode, I’ve got a decent running start at number 10 too. I bought a house in foreclosure for $250k, which was assessed at $305k in its trashed state. I’m in the process of fixing it up, so hopefully it will eventually be worth the $325k that other similar homes in the area are selling for. Number 11 is more of a pipedream, but I figure I may as well shoot and miss rather than not shooting at all. Even getting half way on that one by 40 would be fantastic :)

What are your goals for the upcoming year?

Write It Down, Make It Happen: Knowing What You Want And Getting It

Your Money or Your Life: A Practical Guide to Managing and Improving Your Financial Life

Black & Decker The Complete Photo Guide to Home Repair: with 350 Projects and 2000 Photos (Black & Decker Complete Photo Guide)