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.

More after the jump

There was nothing on. All the various crime shows or reality shows didn’t interest me. The thought went through my head, “Well, whatever that first show was, it wasn’t too bad.” Then it hit me. Turn. It. Off. And I did exactly that. It is really sort of strange to be home without something flickering at me on that screen. I didn’t go completely quiet though. I left the radio on some AM station talk program. I should have just turned it off though because I (still) wasn’t paying attention and it was full of static.

It is a bit strange still sometime to sit down and have nothing to watch on TV. The weekends are really odd. It used to be that I would just turn on whatever random sports were on and just let it go in the background. Never paid attention to it, just had it on. Now, with only local channels, there is nothing worthwhile to have on just as background noise any more!

One pleasant surprise when we cut out cable was finding a channel of 24 hour brain rot Qubo shows. We had Nick Jr before cutting out cable and had lots of stuff saved off of the TiVo, but there is something to be said for ‘immediate’ gratification. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think some veg-out time is OK for the kiddo. Sometimes, seriously, the boy just needs to chill the heck out and watch a program. He usually gets probably 30 minutes a day (with probably some at school/mother’s day out also) and that isn’t too bad really. These shows along with the PBS shows we let him watch are really not that bad. Sure, they’re full of flashy lights and general goofiness, but they try hard to fit a bit of learnin’ in there – some get it much better than others. There are commercials on this channel though and my son actually turned to me the other day and said “Order it Daddy!”.

The other thing I wasn’t expecting with no cable is the expense. Hunh? Expense? Well, yeah a bit. We already had one digital antenna and 2 TVs so we had to buy another. And that first one didn’t work so we bought another (and still haven’t taken the first back — I need to do that!). The ‘master plan’ is to buy a large antenna to put in the attic but those aren’t exactly cheap – probably $70 for the antenna and the coax to drop down the walls. Really – that is probably right at what we paid for  1 month of cable so we would realize our savings almost instantly. I’ve sent a question about what I really would need to the supposed best online seller of antennas, an nobody has ever gotten back with me. If I ever do hear back and buy one, then I can have something to do on at least one Saturday morning instead of watching soccer on the Spanish channels. GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL!!!

1st Photo:http://www.flickr.com/photos/benleto/ / CC BY 2.0

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?

More after the jump

Does this mean I have to figure this life stuff out on my own? Well, it seems the easiest thing is to find more letters to put behind my name or at least change out some of the one I already have. (Sounds like they are stale or something like that.) Currently I’ve registered for another exam with the Constructions Specifications Institute – the Certified Construction Specifier exam – the CDT is a prerequisite. Passing this would “demonstrate [my] excellence in specifications and contract document preparation” according to CSI’s website. It would say that I would have the book-knowledge behind preparing a good set of building specifications and Contract Documents (the “blue prints” – and as an even further aside, nobody makes true ‘blue’ prints anymore). The usefulness of such a certification is a bit vague to me, but I “enjoy” specs so this seemed like a logical step.

There’s another test I could take that would have almost immediate benefit – the Structural II exam. While this isn’t the Big Daddy of all Structural exams (there is an SE III, but, just wow) it is the Pretty Darn Big Daddy. The SE I exam consists of an 8 hour/80 question horse race covering all topics of structural engineering (masonry, timber, steel, concrete, bridges, etc) while the SE II exam would be an 8 hour/4 question migraine inducer. Two questions in the morning for 4 hours and two in the afternoon for 4 hours. I wouldn’t necessarily be “more of an engineer” than I am now, it would, however, greatly improve any future opportunities I might have. This is because they are changing the rules next year.

Instead of a single 8 hour exam (SE I), the test will be a single 16 hour exam over 2 days that would basically combine the SE I and the SE II. So, now I only have an 8 hour test under my belt, after this change, all the young ‘uns that would be getting licensed would have as 16 hour certification. I think that this could present a problem to me if I ever changed jobs or needed to get licensed in another state. Right now, I could get licensed in most states with the certification I currently have. My company won’t pay for further licenses right now though since there are others in the office that currently have them.

Other than having to put myself and my family through that much effort of studying again, the test will cost upwards of $700 – not counting Oklahoma’s fees! Sure as passing score = reimbursement, but that’s a lot to put on the line!

There are other exams and certifications out there, but I think my plate is currently full…

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.

So why did we really cut out the cable?

(More after the jump)

Well, it’s been way too long since the Mrs. and I have spent time together not glued to the TV, mindlessly flipping around looking for something to entertain us. Well, really – to entertain me. The Mrs. was usually reading a book. Now, since we’ve cut the cord, we haven’t had any family game nights or anything like that, but I do plan on it. Truthfully, we’ve both gotten a bit behind at work and haven’t had time. I get home late enough to put the boy-child to bed and then the Mrs. needs to work most of the rest of the evening. Once this slows down for both of us a bit, this should really be good for us.

Another big reason for getting rid of the cable is to add to our debt snowball. I hate this feeling of having a payment hanging over us. It is worth it to me to take this “drastic” step just to get a little closer to that goal.

When we cancelled cable, we cut out the cable company internet and telephone as well. We are back with traditional AT&T telephone and DSL internet now. The transition hasn’t exactly been painless, but that is a story for another time.

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?

More after the jump

My dad first pointed Dave Ramsey’s radio show out to me when we were still in Wichita. Dad said that we should really listen to this guy and just see what he has to say. That was the first financial advice my dad ever gave me — at age 23. I listened a bit, but it was just more noise in the background. I thought I was doing pretty well on my own so I didn’t need it.

After getting laid off and having to move back to our “home city” (as I talked about in the link above) I realized what a financial crisis really is and that I would need some sort of help. As we went through FPU, there really wasn’t any earth shattering advice. It really was as simple as the critics say, but that’s OK. It was more direction than we had ever received. And I think that’s what really endears Ramsey to most people — he’s personable and actually teaches his plan very well.

I don’t really know how to sum this up. Do I think people hate to be told that they are responsible for the mess they are in? Yeah, that’s probably some of it. Do I think Dave is too simplified? Well, once you get past Baby Step 3, I think the quality of his advice peters out quite a bit. (I think his bread and butter is getting people out of debt.)

There are many methods to getting out of debt. This is one that worked for us but I will look for advice elsewhere for investing advice.

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.

More after the Jump

We ended up piddling away all this extra each month to eventually incorporating it into the budget and spending it. We then made the decision for the Mrs on the Door to stay home with our newborn. That would mean her income would be taken out of our pool o’ money and we would have to make it off my income. Well, it ended up that we were about $200-$300 short each month. That was quite a hit to my ego. It brought up all the “I can’t provide for my family” feelings and to make ends meet, we started pulling some cash out of savings each month.

Eventually, the Mrs on the Door decided that she would have to go back to work. This was hard for us. It was important to us for her to be home as much as possible with our child, and luckily she was able to get back with the same company she was with before, but in a different position that she was able to partly from home.

So now we had more income coming in, but still didn’t have the right mindset towards savings and, of course, life happened — a couple of times. So now we are restarting Financial Peace this weekend. It will be good to get a refresher course and get us back on the right path. We’ve already taken one fairly big (drastic?) step and hopefully it will keep us going in the right direction.

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:

More after the jump

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.

She’s there to hand us a letter and tells us that she is sorry but they will need to take the house back from us because they are getting divorced and she would need a place to live. Well, sure, that is of course understandable, but holy smokes! We’ve got to find a place to move in 30 days. Around the holidays. With a infant. Merry Christmas.

We had been starting to save for a down payment for a house but didn’t quite have the amount we wished we did, and we hadn’t even started looking for houses. So now the hunt was on to find a rental house. We look for some places closer to my office, in and near the neighborhood we were renting in, and everywhere in between. We finally find a pretty nice place we’d like to rent nearer to my office and get an application to take home and fill out – and to think it over a little bit. The previous tenants had just moved out (so it was just becoming available), the owners were there cleaning it up, and (most importantly to us at the time) would agree to a short-term lease so we could keep saving a little and buy a house in a couple of months.

We fill the application out that night and I fax it off the next morning. I wait an hour or two before calling to confirm they received it and am told that a lease agreement was signed the previous night. GREAT. So now what? We’ve spent probably 10 of our 30 days at this point and had absolutely no more leads. Well, one of our good friend’s mom is a realtor (you see where this is going? Not so fast…) – we had previously had her scoping out any  rentals that she could find. After a few leads that didn’t pan out on those rentals, we asked her to pull up a few houses in what we perceived our price range to be. We walk into one of the for-sale house and we both see IT. The payments for this house would be similar to the rent we are paying now and we did have some saved for a down payment. But at this point we had only 2 weeks or so left before we had to move out. Surely we couldn’t get all the inspections taken care of and the the house closed that quickly, could we?

We decided to give it a shot. If we get it and can’t close in time, we could come up with some short-term arrangements until we could actually move in. We put an offer down that was pretty much what the owner’s were asking (because we – the buyers – were the desperate party) and see what happens. Well, supposedly, the owners get another offer the same day as our and propose counter offers to both. That seemed really sketchy to us, but we had house fever at that point and, honestly, we needed a house! We agree to their counter offer and start the ball rolling on the closing process.

All said and done, we get the paperwork taken care of and are slated to close and move in before Christmas.  Everything is going along as best as it can with having to pack that fast, an infant in the house, and the holidays to take care of. Then, days before we are scheduled to close, one of the worse ice storms Oklahoma has seen hits the state. Electricity is intermittent. Because of packing, one side of the garage was full of boxes and my car was outside. It had 3/4” of ice on it. The big trees in the back yard of the rental? The giant maple lost 3 large branches. The Bradford pear was completely destroyed.

The roads were impassible for probably 2 days. Then we get the call from the mortgage company – they haven’t had electricity (like most of the state) and are unsure if they will get our paperwork finalized and over to the closing company.

At the absolute last minute, they get the paperwork sent over and we actually close on time and get moved out and back in the next day. One of the first boxes of nonessentials we unpack is he Christmas Tree – with 8 days to spare. The house is the one we are still in today. This year will be the third Christmas we’ve had in the house.

So, now maybe next time we have to make a major purchase, we will be able to take our time and do it on our own pace, right? Well…

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.

We hadn’t thought about buying a house really at this point in our lives, but we let ourselves get talked into it and we ended up signing up for a pretty nice little place with 3 bedrooms, 1.75 bath (that’s what you call 2 bathrooms were one has a shower and the other has tub/shower, right?), and a full basement. Really nice little place. We bought that in February of 2003. We had been out of school/married for 8 months, at my new job for 7. We never really had enough furniture to fill the house – the basement stayed empty pretty much the whole time (which was a real shame), but we had great plans! That was until May ‘03.

Things had been slowing down at work for a while, but I never really thought too much of it. When I was hired they told me that there was a pretty good backlog of work and things would be fine. Well, this was Wichita. In 2003. Wichita is very dependent on the airline industry and after 9/11 the whole city had been and still was in bad financial shape. But I’m just out of college and the world is filled with hope and promise and rainbows and puppy dogs (and we got one of those too!).

Then I was let go. Fired. Laid off. Canned. Whatever you want to call it. The feeling of coming home and telling your wife of less than on year that I was no longer employed. That was really rough. After the tears were shed and the initial shock wore off, the job hunt was on. There were absolutely no structural engineering jobs in the Wichita area. I applied to all the firms located anywhere close to Wichita and landed only one interview. To top it off, on the day of that interview, I came down with my first of many migraine headaches. I went anyway and did the best I could do in the interview, but got the “Sorry, we just don’t have a place for you right now”.

So, now that I felt that I had exhausted all of my structural engineering possibilities in Wichita I started applying for drafting positions: overqualified. Secretarial position: overqualified. I was almost to the point of becoming a Whopper flopper. I mean, remember, I had a new wife, a new mortgage, and I was trying to prove to my parents and myself that I could go out and make it in the real world.

May passes. June passes. July passes. August I hear of a job back in Oklahoma City. It’s an engineering position at a really respected small firm. The problem was I was rooted in Wichita at this point. I go to the interview anyway and when I get back to Wichita and check my email, I have an offer sitting there. I take the offer, but now what? We call the realtor that conned us that we used to buy the house and put it back on the market 6 months after we bought it. We had no assets to name at this point and just wanted out from under the mortgage and to move on with our lives. To do this, we had to bump the price we paid by $4000-$5000 just to cover closing costs. I started my new job in OKC living with my parents (own two feet, remember) during the week and driving back to Wichita on the weekends.

August passes, September passes. In October, we found a townhouse to rent in OKC so we packed up all our worldly possessions and moved from a house into a townhouse. Our house in Wichita sits empty as we pay rent on the townhouse and the mortgage in Wichita.

November passes. December comes and we fire the realtor and find a new one that was recommended to us. January comes and we finally get a contract on our house. It sells in February for the price we ask almost one year to the day from when we bought it. Lesson learned, right? well, that’s a story for another time.

So, while we’re putting our first opponent through boot camp, we were getting fat and living the high life.

We have an ace up our sleeve though. Well, maybe not an ace, but quite a bit of baby step #3 socked away in an online savings account. It took some encouragement from an online forum, but after looking at our debt situation and what we had in the bank we decided that we would go ahead and pay off the CC. So, all said and done, it wasn’t much of a fight. It did take quite a chunk out of what we had saved up though and that just hurts.

Even though the only current debt we have is the car, my security gland is kicking in. This single debt isn’t necessarily giving me a feeling of impending doom, it just seems large and we’ve already gone through this once before. (And yes, I know I’m not talking about the mortgage anywhere.) I just really wish we were smarter when we got out of debt the first time…

We’ve started using my Debt Snowball Spreadsheet again. This is a spreadsheet I wrote when we were initially working to get out of debt and used it to track our snowball. Fortunately, this time we’ve only got 2 entries in the chart this time. It still extends over a period of over a year because of the car payment, but it seems better just because there’s only 2. The pile of snow we have available to us is smaller this time around as well. Once we had our child, the Woman on the Door stopped working for a while before finally deciding to return part time.

We’re taking a closer look at our budget right now too. We see a lot of areas that we can work on to try to save some money and the one that sticks out the most is the cable. I don’t know why it seems like it would be such a hardship, but I just can’t seem to make the call.  I know there are alternatives out there – namely Hulu and Boxee — I just haven’t tried any of them yet. Maybe I’ll move that up my priority list and get this cable cut and get some money back into our pockets.

We did just upgrade to iPhones and that first bill came recently. That hurt — expecially with the partial month payment we had to make up. Next month will be better I’m sure, but I really need to ask my bosses if they will cover my data plan. I guess I do still have a couple of days left to decide if I really want to keep it, but I’m pretty sure it’s mine at this point.

Info on the photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stuartpilbrow/ / CC BY-SA 2.0