Really it’s been only a week and a half since I wrote about cutting the cable? I guess we actually did it a bit before I wrote the post, but time really does go by quickly. I’ve been pretty busy at work for the last couple of weeks so it has been pretty easy to not miss watching TV anyway. When I was watching TV, it was the Olympics for the last few weeks. Now, that wasn’t too bad – I prefer watching any of the winter events other than figure skating. Unfortunately, with only receiving NBC and none of the other sister stations, that’s most of what I was able to see. Give me bobsled, skeleton, speed skating, random flippy skiing event – anything but figure skating.
It really hit home to me a little bit last night what to do without cable. I was on dad-duty alone and was playing with the boy child no problem. While I was sitting on the floor with him, I realized I didn’t like what was on – whatever came on after whatever other show I wasn’t paying attention to. I hit the guide on the TiVo and flipped through what was on.
My life had been a series of goals. There were some obvious ones to start with like graduate high school and college – done and done. Sometime during college, I took the Construction Documents Technologist exam offered by the Construction Specifications Institute – passed and got some letters behind my name: CDT. At the time, I thought some letters after my name would help my resume to stand out.
Before graduating college, I took the first of my professional exams: the FE exam. I passed and got even more letters behind my name: EI.
After working for 4 years I was eligible for the Professional Engineering exam. My version of the PE exam would be the Structural I. When I took it, the pass rates were hovering around 35% for first time takers and around 17% for repeat takers. OUCH! I studied for 2 pretty solid months before my son was born and failed enjoyed the studying and exam itself so much I took it a second time. I passed it the second time and got to switch out some of my post-nominal letters: I dropped the EI in favor of PE.
And that’s about it. I grew up and decided I wanted to be a structural engineer. Now I am. Now what?
Finally enough talking about it, we finally did it — we cancelled our cable TV. As I wrote about before, it was strangely painful for me. My wife? No so much. She was ready for it to be gone. Really we didn’t watch much on the HD-Expanded-Basic-Digital-blah-blah-blah that we were paying an absurd amount for each month. We were afraid we’d miss Psych on USA and the NHL games on Versus. Well, we can catch Psych on Hulu and, well, I just miss hockey.When we have told our friends we were going to do this, it seemed like the guys were generally shocked and wondering what we would do for TV — the women were happy for us. It really was a strange dichotomy of results.
We have our home computer hooked into the TV now — in fact, that’s where I’m writing this post (and it’s a little hard on the eyes). Eventually I will want to get a “nettop” to replace the ginormous desktop computer sitting next to the TV, but it will take a while for the finances to allow it.
This would be a good photo for some Heath Ledger Joker makeup...
I don’t understand the true hostility for Dave Ramsey. Check out almost any of his youtube videos and you’ll see comments that are really just confusing to me. Maybe they don’t like that he’s a Christian (even though he doesn’t “throw it in anyone’s face”).
Disclosure: He’s really the only financial counselor we have paid attention to so maybe I’m biased. (I mentioned in my last post that we’ve gone through Ramsey’s Financial Peace class before and that we are starting the class again. ) I’ve tried to listen to the others: Suze Orman seems to be too condesending to her callers, Jim Cramer is just out of his damn mind.
I think part of the criticism against Ramsey is that his advice is so simple. At least, that’s what Wikipedia says. I agree, to a point. Like he says, he ’sells’ crock-pots not microwaves. There’s no get-rich-quick scheme, no sure-fire investments. He simply arms the average Joe with the basic financial knowledge that we should have gotten through school. Debt is dumb, check. Use cash to curtail spending, check. Save for large purchases, check. Keep an emergency fund, check. All these are obvious — so why weren’t we doing this on our own?
Back in 2004, we started Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Class. After a bit more than 2 years of skrimping and saving and cutting back, we paid off all of our debt. We were debt freeeeeee. We even called Dave’s radio show and screamed. We kept working on his baby steps and didn’t even get all the way through the next one before we “fell off the wagon.” The plan was supposed to work like this: we take all the money we had been putting towards our debts and save up 3 to 6 months of expenses.
It worked for a little while. We got our savings up over 5 digits! But, it got too easy to start sniping off some money from the monthly savings. Grab some of it here, throw some there. Then we started using our credit card a bit again. We had this money available in the budget for this and just paid off the credit card each month. The expenses were not planned each month. They weren’t necessarily impulse buys, but just not planned.
These were shown to me and are too funny to not pass on. (To whom exactly, I’m not too sure.) I can’t come up with a better intro than Puck Daddy over at Yahoo, so I’ll swipe his a bit:
Moller and Dan Le Batard, who hosts a sports-talk show on 790 The Ticket, conspired on a little experiment this season: Callers to Le Batard’s show would suggest pop culture references for Moller, and he would then use them during his goal-calls for Panthers games. The following video put together by Le Barard’s producers shows just how far this experiment has gone, and how hilarious its results have been:
Let’s go ahead and stick with the home buying theme here. I mean, the first one wasn’t really a “panic” when we bought it.
After we lived in the townhouse for a year or so, we decided to start looking for a rental house again. But this time we finally found one from a nice husband and wife. It was a nice place with a giant backyard – deck, big trees, on a cul-du-sac, quiet – you get the point.
We had been in this place for probably 3 years when we had a knock on our door one morning just before Thanksgiving. We usually didn’t get anyone knocking on our door so it was incredibly unusual let alone at 7:30 AM. I was getting ready for work and wasn’t dressed at the time, so my wife hands me the baby and I stand around the corner while she answers the door. It was the wife of the couple we were renting from and she was visibly upset when the door opens. Read More »
Welcome to Volume two of STID – Stupid Things I’ve Done.
It seems like we have never been able to make a large purchase without having to do it in a panic, be it real or imagined. “Never” actually might not be the appropriate word, but let me explain. I’ll describe the purchase itself and what led up to it and then what the consequences were for our family – either positive, negative, or neutral.
It started with the house we bought in Wichita after college. This “panic” was self induced and not real. We were married right out of college and decided to move away from our home/parents to get started off on our own two feet. We started off renting an apartment on a short-term lease of 6 months. And after living below an apparent herd of elephants for those 6 months, we decided it was time to move. “Rent a house, that’s the way to go” we thought and we were right, but that’s not what we ended up doing. After looking for a rental for a while didn’t really come up with anything we liked so we made the mistake of walking into a realtor’s office and asking if they managed any rental houses. “Oh, why would you rent when you could buy?” the realtor asked.
OK – so we are in the first month of working on our new debt and re-looking at our overall financial situation. Well, we started out with a bang. We knew we were getting into the ring with a formidable opponent that we had created. Our poor spending decisions, laziness, and vacations fed this beast. And he was looking to take out his pound of flesh with around an 8% interest rate. And really, in the world of credit cards, that definitely isn’t a usurious rate, but it’s still sucking money away from us.
So, while we’re putting our first opponent through boot camp, we were getting fat and living the high life.
Here at The Door, we need to get out financial house in a little better order. We’ve gone through a lot of ups and down, paying attention and not, spending and scroogery when it comes to our finances. We’ve even gotten to the point were we could call the Dave Ramsey Show and scream WEEEEEEEEEE’REEEEEE DEEEEEEBT FREEEEEEE! After kicking it for a while and starting to save up a pretty good nest egg, we had our first child and got complacent. Now we find ourselves in credit card debt and having car payments. This is just really unacceptable and we are starting to get re-focused so we can try to get to some of our goals and maybe send our child to college in 16 years! Here’s what we are going to do.
Really it’s been only a week and a half since I wrote about cutting the cable? I guess we actually did it a bit before I wrote the post, but time really does go by quickly. I’ve been pretty busy at work for the last couple of weeks so it has been pretty easy to not miss watching TV anyway. When I was watching TV, it was the Olympics for the last few weeks. Now, that wasn’t too bad – I prefer watching any of the winter events other than figure skating. Unfortunately, with only receiving NBC and none of the other sister stations, that’s most of what I was able to see. Give me bobsled, skeleton, speed skating, random flippy skiing event – anything but figure skating.
