Harmony September 18, 2009

I’m not a very new-agey person, but I’ve noticed over the past few weeks that I find a certain harmony and wholeness in focusing on going to the gym, eating healthy, and managing my money wisely–all at the same time. I’ve always read that you should never try to break or start more than one habit at a time if you want to succeed, but I’ve noticed that the opposite is true for me. Each good habit fuels the others in a circular way. Lack of time and money (created by going to the gym and simultaneously cutting back on expenses) foster good habits and keep me away from bad habits.

Here are a few further thoughts on why this works for me:

• When I go the gym I feel so good that afterward I want to eat healthy, light foods that will refuel my body. I also drink a lot more water during the day because when I don’t I can feel that my body doesn’t perform as well when I work out. So while it’s hard to get home late from the gym and then have to cook dinner, I don’t actually have the desire to just grab something quick and unhealthy on the way home.
• Since I’m also trying to watch our finances more closely, we plan our meals a week at a time and have all needed groceries on hand. When I do get home late from the gym late and need to cook, I know what we’re cooking that night and know that everything we need is thawed out and ready to go. I have also been trying to plan easier meals on nights I’ll get home late, and even cook larger amounts on other nights and have leftovers.
• Since we tightened our budget, I have less available funds to spend on going out to eat, going to movies or other entertainment, so I actually have more time to go to the gym even though it’s time consuming. I’ve been going Tuesdays and Thursdays when I get off of work, and don’t get home until close to 8pm.
• When I eat better, I feel better and have more energy, so it’s easier to generate the energy and motivation to go to the gym–which makes me feel even better. When I eat poorly, I feel sluggish and even sort of sickly so I certainly won’t go to the gym even if it would make me feel better–instead I’ll get home, crash, snack, and sit around on the couch all night.
• This new routine also affects how much alcohol I buy and drink. I really don’t drink very often, but when I do drink, it’s usually social and it’s not just usually one drink. But wine and beer is expensive, and full of calories, so by not wanting to spend an extra $10-$15 on a bottle of wine at the grocery store, and not wanting to consume an extra 500 calories or so when I’m trying to eat better, I don’t really buy or drink much alcohol.

It’s only been a few weeks since I’ve started this new routine of being all around healthy and awesome, so I can easily back slide (to use the lingo of my southern religious roots), but I keep reminding myself how good I feel when I go to the gym, how much better I will feel about myself if I get in better shape and lose weight, and now nice it will be to increase our savings and have more money for the future.

I’ll close with a somewhat embarrassing and self-effacing story from last Friday. I had my gym back packed and in the car but felt tired and cranky and worn out after work–I even ended up staying almost an hour late to finish up some things. When I left I really didn’t want to go to the gym. I called PL and said, “I either need you to talk me into going to the gym or tell me it’s ok to come home. I want to go home and drink and eat pizza and sit on the couch.” She knew I was in a classic foul mood, and would be even worse all evening. While I was whining about going to the gym I still drove that way instead of towards home, I turned onto the road and even pulled into the parking deck while still on the phone with her being in a bad mood. I was so grouchy I even pulled back out of the parking lot and decided to head home instead–I didn’t want her to be right that I’d be in a better mood if I went to the gym, so I’ll go home and be a pill all evening–that will show her! But I didn’t want to be in a bad mood, and I didn’t want to be cranky with her all evening when she did nothing wrong. I also had just told a co-worker that I was going to the gym after work, so I exited the parking deck, drove back around the block, pulled back into the parking deck and walked to the gym. I didn’t have a great workout, I hadn’t had enough water that day so I felt sluggish, but I went and then felt a 100% better and less grumpy and managed to have a good Friday night instead of starting a fight.

Credit Card Rewards September 17, 2009

Rachel asked me about my thoughts on Credit Card Rewards programs, and my comment in response got increasingly longer, so it made more sense to make it even longer still and turn it into an actual blog post.


Why I Use a Credit Card for Daily Expenses
I will never advocate that anyone carry credit card debt, and I can see that for some people the benefit of rewards from a credit card can justify or excuse excessive spending. Even the best rewards cards don’t pay much more than 2% back to you, so that’s the first perspective to start with. For me, it’s easier to pay with a credit card for most daily expenses (don’t you just get angry at those little old ladies who try to pay with checks at the grocery store?). I prefer an actual credit card to my debit card which are equally convenient but the balance has to be watched even more closely since sometimes deposits and withdrawals can easily cross paths and be poorly timed. That’s a nice way of saying I’ve had deposits not clear even though they should have, while payments cleared way sooner than they should have and bounced a virtual check and got hit with a fee, even though I wasn’t actually overspending. I know that cash based budgets or even keeping a closer eye on actual spending via a debit card can be very useful budgeting tools, but I just find it easier to use plastic at a store. I’m actually not a very wise spender of cash, I also lose it sometimes, and I don’t feel comfortable carrying lots of cash. I also don’t carry a purse, just a metal card case wallet which I then rubber band cash to when I have it (except for now, as PL noticed last night, my rubber band broke a few weeks ago and I can’t remember to find a new one, so cash is just hanging out loose in the non-closed up pocket of my work bag waiting to get pulled out and lost by accident), so those are more personal reasons why I like prefer credit cards for daily spending.

What Card(s) Do I Use?
For the past year or so we’ve used the Kroger Rewards Mastercard for most daily expenses. So probably $500-$600 a month spent on groceries, gas, random shopping etc… that we then pay off. That’s been my only experience with reward cards up to now.

This card has a $1500 limit so it’s great for daily expenses without worrying about reaching that limit, but if there is an occasion where we’d have to travel unexpectedly or otherwise need to quickly access more money than we have on hand in an emergency fund quickly, a credit card is the easiest thing to use in that case and we could easily go over the limit on this card. For situations like that, and for times where we had a big purchase like a freezer or washer and dryer, it was easier to use a credit card we have with a much higher limit at the store and pay the full amount later-knowing that we could afford the purchase we were making, of course. That high limit card has been nice for times like that, but it had no rewards at all.

For that reason, when I recently learned about the new Invest First Credit Card with Charles Schwab which rewards you with an unlimited 2% cash back deposited in your brokerage account, I signed up. I already had a Charles Schwab brokerage account, and find them great to work with. For instance, when I was 21 I inherited some money and needed to open an investment account to put it in. I had a great deal of trouble getting anyone at Fidelity to help me and explain things to me since I knew nothing about investing, but the very first person I talked to at Charles Schwab invited me to come in and talk through my options and get some good investing advice for the future (it didn’t matter to them how little or how much money I had, or how young or old I was). When we decided to buy a house, we went first to Charles Schwab, asked for a gay friendly staffer, and we sat down with him (in person!) and he was wonderful in walking us through applying for our first mortgage, and gave us some good general financial advice as well without any fees for doing so. I think the timing of the introduction of this new card is good since while Americans certainly don’t need any more credit cards, there is a renewed interest in savings and investing money and a brokerage account potentially gets you greater return that sticking the money in a savings account.

What’s the Reward?

From the Kroger rewards card, we seem to receive $20 off every quarter (in the form of check-like coupons that you just hand to the cashier and cash in easily). They claim you get $5 off for each 1000 points you earn, and you get a point for each dollar spent anywhere, 2 points for each dollar at Kroger and 3 points on Kroger brand products. That’s really only $80 a year cash back, which is nice but doesn’t drastically make a difference in our budget.

The real reason I like this reward credit card though is accumulating points for gasoline discounts (and the Kroger gas station is conveniently located not too far from home at the store we prefer). With a regular Kroger shopper card you get 3 cents off a gallon, and 10 cents off for every $100 you spend. With the credit card we get 15 cents off with that $100, and prescriptions also add to the benefit of getting the 15 cents. (I believe for every 2 prescriptions you fill there you get the 10 cent, or in our case 15 cent, gas discount…and PL has 3-4 prescriptions a month to fill). Because of this, we have found that we always end up with the 15 cents benefit which, if my very quick math is right, is probably about $150 saved per year on gas at the rate we fill up. If you’re Kroger isn’t nice, or if it’s not convenient, it’s certainly not worth going out of your way just for these rewards.

With the new Charles Schwab card, I expect that we’ll shift some expenses to that, while right now planning to keep Kroger-based spending on the Kroger card since the gas benefit does seem to help out. Confusing, no? This new card is also a Visa Signature card, which according to their commercials anyway, has some other perks that I need to check out. So, my best guess for now is that with regular spending we’ll get $100-$200 cash back this year just from daily spending deposited in the brokerage account, maybe more if we take any trips. That’s still not a ton of money (and again, not at all something you can justify spending more to get) but it’s a competitive credit card reward rate and it goes straight into an investment account where it can earn more over time through wise investing and compound interest.

How?

I own some shares of a mutual fund (SWPPX) that consists of the same stocks as the S&P 500, so I’ll use that as an example. That fund currently costs $16.76 a share (it used to cost more than that, but this has been a rough year), so with $200 (which I didn’t do anything to earn other than buy the things I was going to buy anyway), I can buy almost 12 shares of that mutual fund. So if I bought those 12 shares yesterday, today that fund went up .25 a share. That’s $3 I earned today while sitting on my butt blogging at work. Not bad. That fund also pays a .39 dividend (a way the company shares the profits) per share annually, so that would be another $4.68 I didn’t do anything to earn. I reinvest all of my stock/mutual fund dividends right now, so that’s even more shares that I can buy, and then when the prices goes up or dividends are calculated, I’m starting with more shares than before. This is off topic from reward credit cards, but does explain why I think the reward from the Invest First Charles Schwab card is worth it.

Other Reward Cards

While these are the only reward cards I’ve personally had experience with, reward cards with airlines or hotels are much more common. Many of these programs charge an annual fee to join, and I simply don’t spend enough money, and in particular, don’t spend enough money on plane tickets or hotels to recover that fee each year through the benefits received. We’ve probably all heard about the Capital One no hassle rewards,card, and I looked that card up and it has no annual fee, and gives you 1 frequent flyer mile for every $1 spent up to $1000 spent per month, and 2 miles $2 after that. It takes 25,000 or so Delta frequent flyer miles for a free ticket, so that doesn’t seem very rewarding to me…at least not at the rate I spend money. For cash back cards, I see 1-2% as the average at http://www.creditcards.com/ and some Discover cards pay up to 5% for certain types of purchases, but many places do not take Discover.

So I would conclude that it can be beneficial to use a rewards card, but to find one that will get you a reward you can actually obtain and use. The main thing though is remembering that you aren’t really making enough back to justify greater spending. The credit card companies wouldn’t offer reward cards if they didn’t earn more from it than they give to their customers.

Mid-Month Budgeting September 17, 2009

This week is the middle of the first month with our new budget and spending goals, so I sat down and looked at our budget and monthly expenses more closely to see how we are doing so far. As of the 15th of the month, we’re on track to not run out of money by the time I get paid next week on the 25th, and that’s the point, so we’re doing ok.

The new budget consisted of:

1. Cash only for eating out ($120 a month total)
2. A customized monthly budget for each month, linked to an overall yearly and monthly average budget
3. A new Charles Schwab invest first credit card (for rewards of cash for the brokerage account)
4. Not using Mint (which was just bought by Intuit, perhaps making it appear more secure, but I hear terrible things about the unreliability of Intuit so I’m glad I’m done)

Here’s how we’re doing:

Cash only for eating out–I think we’re almost out of cash, maybe $12 left, from our $120 total restaurant cash plus our $20 each for incidentals. PL’s extra cash seems to have gone towards our restaurant budget too, while I did need $12 cash one day and had it. Technically our month for restaurant cash starts over when I get paid on the 25th since that’s when we took it out last month, and of course immediately started spending it. I might try to see if we can tough it out and wait until October 1st to start the cash again so it tracks more easily month by month. But with knowing we have a limited amount of cash, when we have gone out we were mindful of prices, but also mindful that we were choosing to spend that money and should enjoy it knowing we could afford it. This is much better than feeling guilty about eating out, or also mindlessly grabbing something on the way home since we didn’t feel like cooking.

A customized monthly budget–I knew going into this that the budget would need some work over time, but so far it’s working out ok. I really like this customized monthly budget, and in particular it’s helpful to predict the actual amount we’ll spend on an irregular expense in the month it will occur, rather than some random $10 or so every month. It’s certainly not a perfect system but we made sure to have some backup padding in our budget and savings, so we have a little flexibility to try this out as a way to better predict those expenses.

The budget has categories of fixed monthly expenses (mortgage, car insurance, cell phone, etc…that occur every month and are the same amount every month), variable monthly expenses with a same goal amount each month (groceries, gas, electricity, lawn/garden) and then the tricky category–irregular expenses (gifts, magazine subscriptions, gym membership, vet bills and those other things that don’t get paid every month and often aren’t even the same amount).

Here’s a snapshot at some of our progress:

Groceries: $160 spent out of a $400 budget. We’ve had really small grocery lists lately, partly since we usually buy large amounts of meat when it’s on sale and then freeze it and also by using some pantry staples like lentils and freezer staples like peas. That budget amount still seems pretty high for just 2 people–is it? It’s based on what we had historically spent on groceries, even though buy very little pre-packaged food, except for lots of cereal (even that is store brand, healthy grown up cereal, and on sale).

Gas: $125.8 out of a $130 budget. So maybe this budget category needs to be adjusted. We did drive 6 hours to and from Durham, NC during Labor Day in the SUV so that took a lot of gas-$69 at some stations not at home, plus the filling up before and after. Luckily, we will still be able to afford to buy more gas this month, but we can reduce our gas expenses a lot I think by driving the Ford Escort more than we drive the Mariner when we make trips around town.

Now for those pesky irregular expenses:

My birthday is next month, and I got my early birthday present from the County in the form of a $178 car registration bill and had to get a mandatory emissions test. I did learn that while $25 is the recommended price for emissions tests, companies are free to charge whatever, so we got it for $17. The point is that I knew this expense would be coming this month, and knew it was going to be roughly $200 so I was prepared and counted that money in the budget.

We also had a birthday party and then a wedding shower to go to, which I hadn’t planned for in the budget for this month. It was accounted for in a more traditional average yearly and monthly expense way though after I estimated birthdays, weddings and holidays.

New credit card–So far I’ve been happy with the new Charles Schwab credit card. We haven’t gotten any cash rewards yet, but I got the ebill and online bill pay set up. It doesn’t really affect our daily spending, it’s just the way we’re paying for some of it now instead of on a card with no rewards back to us.

Finances Schminances September 1, 2009

I’ve either mentioned this to you in person, or just via the blog perhaps, but with my new job comes just one paycheck a month. Even though it’s a bigger paycheck, the first month was rough, to put it mildly. I believe we had about $20 left in the checking account when my paycheck came around again. What ended up happening is that when I got my first paycheck I paid many of our bills for the month and then paid off the credit card bills that contained the rest of our daily expenses–but that was really paying for the previous month not our current spending. We also had some unexpected and irregular expenses (which really shouldn’t be unexpected or irregular if my budget worked): replacing a dead weed whacker, new glasses, expensive prescriptions because of a gap in PL’s health insurance since she can’t be on my new plan and the school plan hadn’t started yet. We were able to make it through the month and lucky enough to be able to bail ourselves out with savings to avoid carrying over balances to this month, and we started fresh on September 1st with no outstanding balances. But, it was a bit of a wake up call that we need a better way of planning our spending and keeping an eye on things.

So, here’s the new system that starts today:


1. No more Mint or Bank of America “My Portfolio” for keeping up with our budget goals

I’ve written about both of these free online budgeting services before, and I played around with then both a good bit but neither works the way I want it to. Plenty of other bloggers have listed the pros and cons to the many online budgeting programs, so I won’t detail that here. Simply put, both programs have some big pros and some smaller cons, but clearly I had a breakdown in their usefulness since I ran out of money

2. Continuing to use Bank of America’s portfolio for frequent monitoring of expenses but not budget planning

One thing I do enjoy about these budgeting programs is being able to link multiple accounts–checking, savings, credit cards–all in one place to see all transactions and their categories. I need to do better at splitting transactions though–something that’s easy in the program if you hang onto a receipt. For example, if we go to Sam’s club we typically don’t leave without spending $100+ on things like detergent, kitty litter, razor blades and trash bags plus some grocery items, but I should split that transaction into groceries and household items so that long term I will have enough data to see a) whether Sam’s actually saves us money b) which items we should buy there and c) to better predict how often we’ll need to budget for those big trips. Mint is a little slower on the uptake of processing your transactions but BoA is pretty good. So, I want to just keep an eye on things during the month by logging in and seeing where we stand budget wise, but won’t use this service for more than simple monitoring and adjusting our spending as needed.


3. My own budget spreadsheet


Taking some helpful advice from Rachel on her budget, I sat down and figured out which categories of our expenses were the same every month, which things happen every month but are different amounts, and which things occur without a monthly pattern. I made a master monthly and yearly budget column for everything, averaging out even those irregular patterns into a monthly amount–I had done this before but it’s that monthly average part that frustrated me. To help solve that problem I decided to then add a column for every single month as well–treating each month differently since their actual expenses are different. I looked back at our power and gas bill history (something that was quick and easy to do using our bank’s online system), putting the monthly bill amount from last year as our goal for the corresponding month this year. Our gas and power bills vary wildly depending on the season, and while I was right on with my monthly and yearly estimates in the master budget, it was frustrating to try to account for these swings in a static budget. So those budget goals for the month are already filled in going forward, and then in months that I know things like car registrations are due, I also filled in that amount in that month’s budget as well. So the overall amount for the year and the monthly average is included in the master budget which is balanced, I might add, but that random $8 for magazine subscriptions doesn’t show up every month, just the total amount in the month when it gets paid. I think that if each month’s unique budget comes in under the master monthly budget, we’ll have the money in the account for those other months when we need it. Will that actually work out mathematically? I hate accounting, but I think it will work out, but hope someone with a better head for this than I have will let me know if I estimated that wrong before I find out the hard way that it won’t work that way.



4. Cash only for eating out

When I got paid, I took out $120 in cash for our monthly budgeted restaurant excursions, and another $20 each for those random things that you just need cash on hand for occasionally. When it’s gone it’s gone. I know a cash system works well for many people for paying for gas and groceries too, but for now we are confident we can manage those expenses so we’re just sticking with cash for restaurants.

5. A new credit card

After reading a great New York Times article on some of the recent happenings in the credit card world–seriously, go read it– I reevaluated the Bank of America credit card account (formerly MBNA) that I’ve had since 2001 and then added PL to in 2004 or 2005 when we co-mingled our lives and finances. The limit continues to shrink, without warning, even though we’re terrific customers–I think they hate me since I don’t carry a balance. That’s really happening everywhere right now, and I totally get why since so many of us are up to our ears in credit card debt and then not able to pay it off. But, my card’s limit was cut in half and then cut by another 30% (without notice except for me seeing it on the account). This card also has no rewards back to us for using it either, so we’ve rarely been using it lately (only for big things like airline tickets that might normally put us over the limit on our other card). While I’m certain we really could and should get by without a high credit limit, is sure is nice to have. I guess this has less to do with our daily money management, but I found it helpful for thinking about the big picture of our finances as well.

One credit card mentioned in the Times article was a card with Charles Schwab bank that will put cash back into a brokerage account. I already have a Brokerage account and IRA with Chuck, and they handle our mortgage as well, so I did some more research on this card. No annual fee. A higher APR than I’d like (13.4%), but we rarely carry a balance and sadly, that rate is actually pretty competitive right now. Unlimited 2% cash back on purchases, deposited directly into your brokerage account each month. I’ve been completely pleased with Charles Schwab in every bit of business I’ve ever done with them, so I decided to apply for this new card–it was super easy since I already have a brokerage account with them but if you don’t I think you just do both at once. The 2% will be nice, even if it’s not a huge amount, and putting it directly into the brokerage account contributes more to longer term investing goals than just giving us $20 in free groceries once a quarter like our Kroger card does now. We were approved and will now have a Charles Schwab Visa Signature Card (so Bank of America with their lousy platinum card can bite me), so the Visa Signature category also gets us some other discounts other places. I’ve researched reward cards before, typically airline ones, but they usually come with an annual fee and we really don’t fly enough or spend enough to rack up enough rewards to cover the fee.

So, that’s where we are today. It’s nice to start a new month with some nice goals and a clean slate going forward with better money management. We actually have a fair bit of income left over after our budgeted expenses are paid each month, unless I forgot some giant category, so I’m hoping to continue to save that and pay for our ever growing wedding expenses and any travel we might have time to do. Wish us luck.

Blueberry Cottage Weekend August 18, 2009

PL and I had a great weekend getaway with our friends Robert and Julia at Blueberry Cottage in North Carolina. They have known about Mountain Farm, where the cottage is located, for some time now and have stayed there a few times before. It’s a farm with organic dairy goats and lavender, and they also keep some llamas, rabbits and chickens around. Several months ago they suggested that we all go together as an end of the summer weekend away, but that seems forever ago now that we planned it and somehow it’s already the end of the summer. All of the pictures I took during the weekend are here.

We left Friday afternoon and got up to the cabin in the early evening. After letting the dogs run around a bit, they wandered off and we couldn’t find them. Some mild panic ensued followed by some howling by them and then us going in search of them. I stayed at the house in case they came back, and the rest of our gang (including Aggie the 9 pound pug who was smart enough to not get lost and her parents smart enough to keep her on a leash) went looking for the dogs. Oliver came back after a bit, panting harder than I’ve ever seen him. O’Malley was finally found and looked VERY relieved to see his mom–it seems like he was tracking us back to the house. After that scare no more dogs got to out without a leash in the dark–and they never went too far the rest of the weekend when we did let them roam free. With everyone home safe and sound, we sat down to a dinner of pesto pasta salad with grilled chicken, peas and potatoes that I made for the weekend and some potato chips and wine and beer.

Saturday morning we got up at the shockingly early for all of us time of 9am and had a breakfast casserole and cinnamon rolls. Then we drove to the nearest town of Burnsville to their Farmer’s Market and to look in some of the downtown shops a bit. It was a really nice market with lots of local produce. We came away with some blackberry vinegar, blackberries, green beans and black cherry jam. When we got back to the farm we went to the gift shop there and looked at the many varieties of lavender soaps and other lavender goodies–and left there with some fresh goat cheese and a giant organic heirloom tomato. Back at the cabin we ate our tomato and goat cheese along with some sandwiches. We spent some time reading (and I spent some time napping–not sure about anyone else) and then went out walking. Robert and Julia took Aggie down to the river and once I woke up, PL and I took O’Malley and Oliver over to the farm to see the goats and the labyrinth and then walked down to the river. We all met back up on the road on the way to the river and then stood around laughing at our dogs having a blast in the river. Oliver proved himself to be a fantastic swimmer, and O’Malley is less of a natural but had a blast anyway running around.

For dinner that night we had a lasagna brought up from the DeKalb Farmer’s market along with some tomatoes from our garden and the green beans we bought that morning. PL and I started a pretty great campfire and we all sat outside and drank wine and made smores (with the brilliant idea of mine to use dark chocolate). When the wine was gone and the fire starting to die town, we went inside and played a game of cards before we all went to sleep.

Sunday morning we made biscuits and sausage for breakfast and also scrambled eggs (with blue and brown shells) that the folks at the farm gave us from their chickens. Robert added some of the goat cheese and rosemary he bought into the eggs. We spent the rest of the morning before we had to leave just sitting around reading.

It was a really terrific and relaxing weekend!

Blogging from the wilderness August 10, 2009

I’ve been remarkably silent on the blog lately, but not because I haven’t been doing interesting things. Maybe because I’ve been doing so many interesting things I haven’t had time to blog. Anyway, here’s a quick update on some gigantic happenings:

1. New job
2. planning a wedding
3…Um, yeah. That’s it, but man is that time consuming.

Actually that’s not it at all, we ran the Peachtree Road Race, went to our friend’s lovely mountain cabin, I went to Dallas for work (it was hot and everything is big and Dallas BBQ is too sweet), we saw the awesome band Girlyman with a good friend, and we getting ready for our end of the summer weekend mountain trip that we planned so long ago. Our garden is also going strong–giving us some beautiful sunflowers to admire, delicious squash, tomatoes and cucumbers to eat and is beginning to churn out some marvelously strange ornamental squash. Yeah, I really should have taken a picture–now it just looks like it wants to take over the house. We also had 2 bouts with a broken AC, solved both times by my very handy and kind dad who came to our rescue.

I really regret not blogging some of the wedding stuff because it turns out we’re fairly good at planning a swanky and ever more expensive and ever-growing non-legal wedding. We’re also incredibly laid back about the whole thing, so it’s seemed stress-free and easy and there isn’t much to comment on (except for the fact that PL will need someone to go dress shopping with her, I can’t even pick out shampoo with her because it takes too long). Maybe I can pretend like we didn’t pre-screen caterers and florists online and then just met with one company and hired them and then blog about that. The same with bridesmaid dresses (they rock by the way). Also, I need to go cake tasting even though we have a cake already.

In other news, I really might start blogging again soon now that things start to feel a bit more settled and I’m used to my new schedule. One main reason to resume blogging is that something I like to write about is budgeting and personal finance and with my new job comes two things: more money and just one paycheck a month. Getting paid once a month really means I’ll need to watch our expenses more closely since once the money is gone, more isn’t going to come in until the next month (clearly I learned this the hard way this first month-when will the 25th be here?). It’s been really tough to keep up with everything since it seems like there’s lots of money in the account but in reality all of that money has to last the whole month and pay for the mortgage and groceries…and eye cream for the dog (stupid spaniel’s and their pink eye) and other expenses you don’t always plan for…

Nice, Except for How It’s Not the Least bit True July 13, 2009

While driving around the Atlanta suburbs this weekend, PL and I saw a church billboard that read “The Founding Fathers Were All Devout Christians.” I took a photo with my iPhone but it was too far away to read (when will iPhone cameras have some zoom?). That’s a nice sentiment I suppose for flag waving Christians for the time around Independence Day, except for the fact that it’s not true.

While documents like the Declaration of Independence do mention God, most of the Founding Fathers were Deists–meaning they believed in God as the creator but God is fairly cold and not concerned with our daily lives and does not communicate to us through revelation or scripture. They speak of God (or Nature) but this was not the God of the bible. They believed Jesus was a real person who had some good teachings, but he wasn’t divine. So, Jesus was a pretty cool dude who did some cool things, but God was a cold, heartless bastard who set everything in motion and left us to sort things out for ourselves. But somehow I think that’s not what was being preached at that church on Sunday–I bet they even had an American flag in the church (something that’s VERY high on my list of things churches should never do).

Las Vegas–Days Four and Five June 4, 2009

I’m finally getting around to writing up our last couple of days of vacation.

On Thursday, PL had made us reservations for a couple’s spa day at the MGM Grand. We showed up at the spa at the assigned time, got some really nice spa shoes and were given a tour and a locker. We got to change into incredibly soft bath robes and go hang out in the women’s spa area until they called us. They came pretty quickly and called me back, but didn’t call for PL at the same time, which was strange since it was a couple’s spa thing. When we got outside, the staff member walking with me said “they’re going to get your husband now.” Ha. Even though the receptionist knew we were two women, she didn’t communicate that very well to the staff it seems. The other staff member that was supposed to be picking up PL came out the men’s spa and was kind of confused about why she couldn’t find my husband. They all laughed about it though and she found PL and then we went onto our private spa room. PL had booked something with the bizarre name of The Dreaming Ritual (every kind of massage and spa package is called some kind of ritual).

We started with a nice herbal foot soak, and we each got to choose a scent we liked. Mine ended up being relaxation and PL’s was rejuvenation. They had some incense in our chosen smell and then an exfoliating foot scrub. Then we went to the massage room and got a full-body exfoliating scrub–which actually kind of stung. Then they put a mud body mask on us and wrapped us in plastic. It made the exfoliating stuff feel a lot better though, and now PL and can say we’ve been to a spa and been covered in mud and wrapped in plastic. While we were all cocooned up, they put some kind of really incredible smelling scalp treatment on us and rubbed it in. We both love having our heads rubbed, so this was lots of fun. We then got to wash all the mud off and then got massages after that.  Oh happy day.

The whole thing was about 2 hours and we left feeling very relaxed and having very soft skin. It was lots of fun, and I wish I could have stolen one of their bathrobes.

Also in the MGM Grand hotel is CBS television city. They have a small store with CBS show shirts and mugs, but also several studios where you can preview pilot episodes of new shows and rate them. Since CBS has a bad habit of taking shows we like off the air (The Class?!), we thought it would be fun to spend an hour watching a new show–plus it was free. We went into the studio and were seated at a computer with a handheld rating device.



We were very excited since we had seen the devices during the debates. After some instructions on how to use the device, our show started. It’s a new show called Three Rivers, a medical drama set in Pittsburgh. It’s about a team of transplant surgeons and the different people who need organs and those who might become donors because of different tragic situations. Katherine Moening (Shane on the L word) was in it, and so was Julia Ormond. Other than that, the show wasn’t very good, and not original at all…and it happened in Pittsburgh. I can’t imagine what they’d do week after week, so I gave it pretty bad rating except for giving Kate Moening high ratings. I recently heard that CBS picked it up for a few episodes, so they didn’t listen to us and our bad reviews of the show.

They gave us an envelope of coupons for participating in the tv studio thing, and one of them was a buy one get one free at Haagen Das, located in the food court of the same hotel.   We got milkshakes with one of our coupons and gave the other one to someone else standing on line.

A little while later once it got dark we finally went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower at our hotel.  It was pretty crowded but you can stay as long as you like so the crowd got smaller after a while.  We watched 2 of the Bellagio fountain shows from the Eiffel tower, and saw really great views of the strip.  I actually shot a pretty cool video with my phone of the fountain show, but can’t seem to get it to inbed in the blog–I might need to put it to you tube and inbed that, but clearly since it’s taken me this long just to finish this blog, I don’t have time for that.



On Friday, our flight left in the afternoon so we didn’t have a ton of time.  We did a repeat of our first breakfast in Vegas (chocolate bacon waffles and quiche Lorraine).  We lost a little more money gambling and then caught our shuttle to the airport.  The flight back to the east coast is about an hour shorter, and the movie this time was Last Chance Harvey.  I had that on my dvd rental list, and I enjoyed it–certainly a better choice for an in-flight movie than Hotel for Dogs. 

What a great trip!

Las Vegas-Day Three May 21, 2009

We slept until noon on our 3rd full day in Las Vegas, that’s 3pm Atlanta time if you are keeping count. It’s now becoming more clear to me now why I’ve been dragging in the mornings and having a hard time going to sleep at night now that I’m back on a regular schedule this week.

After that nice rest, our first adventure for the day was finding somewhere to eat. On our first trip to Vegas we didn’t eat at any of the hotel buffets, even though that’s sort of something the city is known for. Our hotel has one of the ones most often mentioned in tour guides, and the buffet is divided into the different regions of France with foods from that region. Overall, it was a pretty good meal and was cool to try some new things that we wouldn’t normally try if we would be stuck with a whole plate of it at a restaurant.

We then headed out to the pool for some reading and sun. It was really hot by the pool-that whole desert thing and all, so we swam a bit, and found the pool was freezing. Go figure. It was a really nice pool area with tons of chairs and a great view.



Even with our SPF 45 we were starting to burn really quickly, which is kind of sad and pathetic, but we know how pale we are so we went back inside.

Once inside, we both decided that we were thirsty and craving actual Coca Cola products. I’ve mostly talked about the things I like about Las Vegas, but I should mention something I hate about the city–almost every restaurant and hotel in the entire city has Pepsi and not Coke. This sad fact is right on the top of the list with the other things I hate about Vegas, too much cigarette smoke and people hired to stand on the street and hand out tons of cards trying to get you to get hookers and strippers.

Three days in a Pepsi-filled world might be even worse than solicitation of prostitution in my opinion, so luckily there is a giant Coca-Cola store on the Strip that even has a giant Coke Bottle shaped store front. We needed to make a pilgrimage since we were so far from home. They have a tasting menu of some of the drinks from around the world, like they do at the Coke museum here in Atlanta, and also on their menu is a tasting sampler of different ice cream floats. Luckily the floats are all made with Coke products like Fanta orange that you’d actually want to drink-unlike the tasting menu which does in fact have the school field trip favorite Beverly on it–for $7 or so (actually a great price in my opinion).

That night we had tickets to the 10:30 show of Jubilee–one of Las Vegas’ classic showgirl performances. We had a pre-show dinner at Samba, a Brazilian steakhouse. This was our first Brazilian steakhouse experience with rodizio, and it was a fun meal. The meal starts with salads (and a pitcher of Sangria for us too), and then you get several plates of side dishes for your table to share, including fried plantains which was pretty much the only side we ate since the main part of the meal is a wide variety of grilled meats. On the table is a little wooden salt-shaker like thing with a green end and a red end. If you flip it to green, the waiter continues to bring you different samples of the grilled meats. When you flip it to red they take a break until they see that you’ve flipped it back to green. There were 8 different meats on the menu and they bring them out in random order. We pretty much took one or two bites of each to try it, but even that was a ton of food.



On to the show… Bally’s Jubilee is probably what you think of when you think of Vegas showgirls. Topless, yes, but tasteful with those enormous headdresses and elaborate costumes with jewels and feathers. That part of the show is pretty much just the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes though, and it was very cool. The rest of the show though is much more like numbers from the Lawrence Welk show. There was a song and dance number about the Titanic (at one point I wanted to lean over to PL and say, “so does everyone’s top come off when the ship hits the iceberg but restrained myself).

In addition to showgirls, Jubilee also features a number of male singers and dancers (all clearly gay which was sort of funny since the girls are topless and they just could care less). They do a non-topless show once a week so families can go, but the topless parts were all much more about the costumes and not sexualized or trashy. There was a song/dance thing somewhere in the middle about the story of Samson and Delilah and it totally creeped us both out and was both bizarre and kind of dirty with S&M overtones. Some parts of the show are very out-dated, but parts of it like the fact that each enormously elaborate costume was different, were really cool. Our final verdict is that we were glad we went, but glad we didn’t pay full price for tickets and think the show’s days are numbered.

A Post Not About Vacation May 20, 2009

While I spend a large part of each day writing, it’s usually grants or things that aren’t really relavant to share on the blog (and also not something I care all that much about, which is a problem I’m aware of and working on). Recently though, I was asked to write up something about my experiences at the Georgia Tech Wesley Foundation (GTWF) that will supposedly be shared at the North and South Georgia United Methodist Church Annual Confernences by the Commision on Higher Education. Another GTWF friend and I both ended up at seminary after Georgia Tech (actually not as strange as it sounds, as many of you know, since the GTWF has averaged 1-2 seminary-bound students each year for the last 40 years). We were asked to share a little about our experience, and someone who will remain nameless dug up a couple of pictures of us as students and then they took one of us together a few weeks ago to include with our statements.

Just for fun, here’s a picture of me working for Habitat for Humanity in what they tell me was 2001:



Here’s what I wrote:

My local United Methodist Church sent me off to college as an 18-year old after nurturing me as I grew up and moved from the nursery, to Vacation Bible School, Sunday School, Confirmation Class and finally Youth Group. Despite this love and support that I felt in a local church, went I went to college, I decided I didn’t want to “do church” anymore. I had questions that were unanswered. Doubts that persisted. Plus, I was living on my own for the first time and could sleep as late as I wanted to on Sunday mornings. I suspect that most campus ministers know all of these things about college students—and this is precisely why they became campus ministers in the first place—but they can’t tell that to all of you in the local churches since they rely on you for financial support to keep the doors open to the young adults who used to go to your churches, but don’t want to anymore. This story of the wayward non-church going young adult ends well—I’m now once again active in a local United Methodist Church—and even went to seminary–so keep supporting Wesley Foundations.

During college orientation weekend, I was walking around my new home—the Georgia Tech campus—feeling lost, because I was lost, and also feeling a bit nervous and scared, because living away from home wasn’t quite as fun as I imagined it would be. As I walked, I saw the Wesley Foundation at Georgia Tech, and saw that the doors were open. Sometime before moving to campus that Fall, I had received a letter—as all United Methodist students entering Georgia Tech do—from the Wesley Foundation’s campus minister, inviting me to stop by sometime. I’m sure I didn’t keep the letter and bring it to school with me (wanting to go to church in college would look too uncool), and I’m sure I didn’t actually plan to go to the open house. But, as you might have guessed, I did go into the Wesley Foundation that day. And I kept going to the Wesley Foundation for the 4—ok 5—years it took to graduate from Georgia Tech.

If I had never walked in those red doors at the Wesley Foundation, I am almost certain that I wouldn’t be sharing with you today how at this most foundational and yes, scary, time in my life as a young adult, the Wesley Foundation gave to me the great gift of the development of an authentic, mature and lasting faith . It was the place where I could ask the questions I wanted and desperately needed to ask about my faith and explore my own beliefs and my own identity. Most importantly, it was the place where I learned about “vocation” and how to live out our calling in the world—whether that calling happens to be ministry, computer science or engineering. For me, and actually for several dozen other Wesley Foundation at Georgia Tech alums over the years, this journey to learn to authentically live out our calling led us from a world full of calculus and physics into seminary and ministry. I received a Masters of Theological Studies from Wesley Theological Seminary in 2006, and today, people often ask me if I regret going to Georgia Tech and suffering through all of those science and math classes just to get a degree in theology and ethics. And I tell them that no, I don’t regret it at all because I know that had I not ended up at Georgia Tech and had I not found a faith community at The Georgia Tech Wesley Foundation that nurtured and supported my calling and growth into adulthood, I probably would not have gone to seminary and quite possibly would not even still be going to church.