Bloom Where You Are Planted

So I got my 3 estimates, and I took copies next door to my neighbor. No one would answer the door, even though I am pretty sure they were at home. So I wrote a note and left it along with the estimates inside their security door but outside of their front door. It has been about a month, but no response from them.

So one day BF saw the neighbor's son in front of his house, BF asked him what he thought about the estimates. The neighbor's son denied ever having seen any estimates.

Two weeks ago, a fence board from another section of the fence fell into the neighbor's yard. I did not know this, and let the dogs into the backyard one evening. When I let them back in, there were only two dogs. I went into the back and observed the fallen board. I went into the house and reported this to BF, we walked over to the neighbor's front door and knocked. The neighbor's son came to the closed door and yelled "who is it?" BF yelled back "your neighbor". The son yelled "I can't open the door." So I yelled through the door "there is a board down. I think you have a dog in your back yard." He yelled back "no, I don't". I yelled "I think you do. Do you want to check?" he yelled "OK". BF and I waited. And waited. And then we waited. He never came back to the door to say anything at all. Eventually BF and I realized he had no intention of coming back, so we went back to my house and got a strong light and looked into the neighbor's back yard. The dog was gone. I think the neighbor let my dog out.

An hour or so later, I got a phone call from a woman living several blocks away, she had the dog (he has a tag on his collar with my cell number). We went and got him so it turned out fine.

We upended my picnic table to block the gap in the fence from the fallen board and braced it. The next morning we went to the hardware store and got another sheet of plywood to nail up. Now we have two. The fence is so ugly with the two sheets of plywood nailed up, but it does keep the dogs from escaping.

So, I think this is a tactic to get me to pay for the fence myself.

Yesterday I used my county assessor's website to look up her parcel and name. I didn't know her name, but now I do. I made more copies of the estimates, I printed out a copy of California Civil Code Section 841 which states that property owners are equally responsible for maintaining fences, and I wrote her a letter. I am going to send it certified mail with a return receipt on Monday.

In the letter, I state that I would like to know when she will be able to afford her half. I tell her my opinion on the estimates and ask for hers. I refer to the law and state that we are equally responsible. I state that while the plywood is ok for now, it is not an acceptable long-term solution. I tell her she is welcome to come to my house, write me, call me, or email me.

I think she is going to be very surprised that I found out her name. I think she is ignoring me and refusing to communicate on purpose, thinking I will just go away.

If she does not respond, then I will know my options are to forget about her paying her half or sue her. If I sue her and she still does not pay, I can put a lien on her house.

They are such yucky people! Bleah.

Since I am feeling blue about not making the financial progress I would like to be making, I pulled out my last checkstub and guesstimated my 2011 income tax returns. It looks as though I will be refunded a bit over 2k. That made me feel better! What to do with it? Easy! At the moment, I have contributed $2,950 to my Roth for 2011. Another $1,050 will be a nice little boost, and then 1k to traditional.

This will be nice, because it will be 1k more than planned to each, improving my chances of hitting my targets. Yay!

Well, here I am yet again with more expenses than cash on hand (in checking) to cover them. So far this month, I have been sticking carefully to my budget. Poor consolation after last month!

At the moment, I have $593.06 in checking. I have paid my mortgage and deducted my gym membership for the month. Still to receive in this month are two $1,512.41 net paychecks and two $226 child support checks. Still to pay out this month are utilities, my $1,326 Chase Visa bill, and my Citi MC debt payment. I put some of my charges on Citi MC, which I had resolved not to do, but there they are. So I am looking at increasing my revolving debt. I will have to increase my minimum payment to Citi as well, as I still intend to keep my Dec 2012 payoff date.

At first blush, it looks as though I can cover everything. But wait, I can't draw checking down to nothing as I will pay December's mortgage payment with my second paycheck of November. I need to leave a cushion.

What to do? Well, I will transfer some money from vacation savings and pay it back with my approaching Christmas bonus. I hate relying on a bonus to cover my overspending. I would much rather have the whole thing to save/invest. But this is the pickle I put myself into.

I dug out a purse from my purse bin and transferred my stuff into it from my summer purse. Guess what I found? A $50 Visa gift card from last Christmas. I remember Ex-H gave it to me (from J) and I wasn't able to figure out how to use it. I called and got it set up, and will use it the next time I buy gas. That will help me in December when it is time to pay for November's charges. J is turning 16 tomorrow! I plan to tell Ex-H that I think we can stop giving each other gifts from J now. This will make life simpler for both of us.

Every day after school, J walks to a friend's house. I pick him up there after school. I also swing by in the mornings and give that friend a ride to school. I think tomorrow I will take a long lunch and pick up some bakery cookies or other treat and swing by the friend's house, so that the treat is waiting as a surprise when J gets there after school. I will speak to the friend's dad tonight about it.

J has been having some acne problems, so I ordered him some Proactive (my cousin suggested it). It was worth every cent, it is really working. But that is another recurring expense for me to cough up.

I have been Googling for Cyber Monday deals. I have found an HP notebook for $399 from Amazon. I think it might be a great substitute for an iPad. I would want a cover for the iPad (more money) as J would be carting it around. I think a notebook would make more sense as it snaps closed. It is still lighter and smaller than a laptop. I think I will take J to look before we decide, but I will buy online to get a better price.

If I am approved for the Chase Southwest card, I will use my bonus points for giftcards and buy the notebook. Ex-H plans to contribute $150 to J's present, so I could use his cash elsewhere since the giftcards would cover the entire cost. I might not be approved, though. Chase might be tired of giving rewards away to me.

Speaking of, I hadn't received my 2,500 rewards points for opening a stamps.com account. I messaged a rep yesterday and today the points are in my account. I was able to cancel stamps.com without incident as well, so I feel the effort was worth $25.

It's very ugly. In addition to the items I mentioned in an earlier post (Blue Man Group tickets, Alcatraz excursion, replacing carpet padding, repairing & cleaning carpet, new winter clothes), I also had a big tune-up for my car (75k miles).

I am expecting a large Visa bill this month. I will not be able to pay in full unless I dig into savings, which I do not plan to do.

Well, what do you know? Remember when I said I had opened a Chase checking account to get $150? Well, apparently when you have a Chase checking account, you earn extra rewards points on your Chase Freedom card. Instead of earning 1% on everything, you earn 1.1%, plus 10 extra pts on every purchase. I had no idea! They have really been adding up. Just cashed in another 3,000 pts for $30.

I am very frustrated with my BF. He has so many wonderful qualities, BUT (you knew there was a "but", didn't you?) he is very unorganized and he has a habit of ignoring problems in the hope that they will just go away. We decided early last year that he would move in with me in June of last year. He has moved in most of his clothes, some of his kitchen stuff, and a few pieces of furniture. In 16 months. The bulk of his belongings are still at his house. He will stay at my house for 2 - 3 weeks, then go home for a few days. I told him about 6 weeks ago that I am tired of waiting. He has made one trip to move stuff since then. Just one. He did have a matter come up recently which required his attention, and he was gone for 2 weeks tending to that. The matter is not settled, but he did put in work on it. I don't want to say too much about his finances because they are his and not really my business, but it concerns me that he isn't terribly motivated to tend to them. He told me over a year ago he has some pressing things he must do, but he has yet to do them. Meanwhile, he has a lot of free time. He has a small business which he is trying to grow, and he does book a job from time to time, but I wouldn't even call it "part-time", it is more like "sometimes". He could be 100% moved if he wanted to. He could take care of his business matters if he wanted to. He would rather wait for the good fairy to come along and wave her wand and magically do it all for him.

He did release my cell phone numbers so that I could put my lines into my name. (One is mine, one is my son's, one is my mom's.) So now I will be paying $133 per month for that. That was the only bill of mine BF was paying. He does buy groceries sometimes. We had agreed he would pay me $500 per month towards expenses once he has moved in, but doesn't have it now because he is still paying for everything at his house. The same house he told me when we first met 2.5 years ago that he needs to sell. The same house which is full of stuff and not even ready to list.

Finally getting around to posting this one. Budget is next (sniff).

Have you heard the latest news from HARP? On 10/24/11, it was announced they are eliminating the 125% LTV cap. That was the one requirement which disqualified me from doing a refi under HARP. More details are to follow on 11/14/11. I am anxiously awaiting those details!

I already know that my lender is participating, that Freddie Mac owns my mortgage, that I have no late payments in the last 12 months, and that I have sufficient income. What I don't know is...will being upside down mean I will have to pay a premium rate? I only want the refi if I can snap up a nice 4% fixed rate loan. Otherwise, I will stick with what I have. I will have to wait and see.

I have been doing two things lately: neglecting my blog and spending money. Is there a direct correlation? I think so.

I bought both J (my son) and myself some new winter clothes. I spent about $250.

I spent $97 getting the carpet in J's room cleaned. It stunk to high heaven after my daughter and son-in-law left. After cleaning, it stunk less, but still was too stinky. I spent another $274 buying new padding, having it installed, and having one corner of the carpet repaired (I had a strip from last year when it was installed).

The Blue Man Group is coming to town. We wanted to see them last November when we went to Vegas, but the timing didn't work. I spent $192 buying tickets for J, BF, and myself to see them.

Last weekend, I went out to with some former co-workers to a nice dinner and drinks. We had a lovely time. Spent too much on the evening, though. They wanted to order Dom Perignon. I don't even like champagne, but they ordered a bottle and we split the tab. Yikes!

Tonight we (J, BF, my Mom, and myself) are driving "over the hill" to my cousin's house, she lives just a bit south of San Francisco. We will spend the night then go to Alcatraz in the morning. My cousin has a friend who is a docent at Alcatraz and we are getting a private tour. My cousin's daughter and her two teens are down visiting from Oregon, my cousin's son and his wife and daughter will be joining us too. We will be a motley crew. The tickets I bought were $102.50, my Mom will reimburse me for hers.

My cell phone was shut off on Oct 4th. On Oct 5th, I paid $345 to get it turned back on. Here is the scoop on that: My BF is about half moved in with me. He pays no rent. He buys groceries sometimes and he added my cell phone line, J's line, and my Mom's line on his account and has been paying the bill. When I had no phone service, I discovered that he hasn't paid in several months. We have very different approaches to money managment. I do not enjoy having my cell phone shut off. So I asked the phone company to put my 3 lines in my name. They won't until BF "releases the numbers" to me. He says he will do that. I reminded him yesterday and am still waiting. He frustrates me.

Ex-h and I had been planning to buy an iPad2 for our son for Christmas (splitting the cost). But now that the Kindle Fire is out, at a price $300 less than the iPad2, we are giving that a look.

Any tablet owners out there with an opinion?

EDIT: My son does not have his own laptop. So he borrows mine or BF's or his Dad's (when he is there). He loves to play games, and would also surf. Possibly, he might even do some homework. (Yeah, it could happen.) For word processing, he would just use my laptop.

Tonight the BF and I are heading south for a concert. Journey, Foreigner and Night Ranger. My third time to see Journey, but have never seen the other two. Really, at this point, Journey and Foreigner are tribute bands in my opinion. Even so, should be fun!

What has this to do with my finances? Um, nothing.

Update: The concert was great! We had a rocking good time.

Payment #358 is gone baby, gone.

I got very close to breaking 181k.

September was a good month for mortgage chips.

Blech! (How is that for commentary?)

I cut back as much as I could to accommodate my HUGE electric bill.

In savings, although I did contribute $125, I also pulled out $482.79. I hope October is better.

The extra Roth contribution was from the bonus I received for opening a checking account with Chase. You don't see that extra income in September, because I received it in August.

In October, I am not going to mortgage chip. I am not going to contribute to my Roth (gulp). Instead, I am going to save for my new fence. My goal is to contribute a minimum of 3k to my Roth each and every year. I am at $2,950 for the year, so only have $50 to go. I will manage that, but first, the fence.

I have gotten estimates from two companies now, and I asked them to quote me 6' and 7', cedar and redwood. The lowest thus far is $1301.30 (6' cedar), which is $650.65 each. I hope my neighbor does not balk at the price, but I suspect she will. I will get a new gate at the same time which will be an additional $302.80.

Yesterday I received my "incentive" for particpating in the survey Vanguard emailed to me, a check for $25! Cha-ching!

I would like for it to be mortgage chip money, BUT, as I will spending money on my fence soon, I decided to add it to CurveBall instead.

There is not enough money in CurveBall for the fence (no surprise there since CurveBall is nearly bankrupt), so I think I will "borrow" the money from vacation savings when it is time to pay. Meanwhile, I am going to scrape every dollar into CurveBall that I possibly can. My October budget will reflect this.

My mortgage will still be there when my fence is paid for.

It was a few days premature, but since I was at my bank for a client today anyway, I emptied all but $7.00 out of my wallet, and chipped an additional $16.28 to my mortgage.


On Sunday evening, I had a very unpleasant encounter with my next door neighbor. The homeowner is an older woman (70s). Her adult son (40s) also lives in the house. They are not nice people and have a reputation in our neighborhood of being hot-headed and unreasonable. We share a common fence which needs to be replaced. I am willing, she says no. It is wood, nearly 20 years old, and full of rot.

Anyhow, on Sunday evening she came over and knocked on the door. My nephew's dog was in her backyard. It seems a fence board had fallen off and the dog had gone visiting. She claimed the dog was viciously lunging at her, which I do not believe. I do believe that she was frightened to have a strange dog in her backyard. At any rate, the dog does not belong in her yard.

So I went into my backyard to examine the fence and BF came along. The neighbor and her son were already in their backyard. Meanwhile, my nephew's dog had come home. I put two of the 3 dogs in the house, but one of my son's dogs had also decided to go visit. I called to him but he continued to stroll around sniffing in their yard.

Back story: In California, a fence along a property line is the responsibility of both parties. Last fall, my nephew inserted some 2 x 4s in the fence along the beams already there, so that we could nail fence boards to it. (The support beams running horizontally along the bottom and top of the fence are the most rotten.) It was not attractive, but it did make the fence more sturdy. This apparently was not to their liking, as they ripped the 2 x 4s out and threw the 2 x 4s into our yard. I have pictures of this.

So while we are talking to each other through the empty space in the fence, she says that I need to take better care of the fence. I state that my nephew attempted to make the fence more sturdy, but that they saw fit to rip out the 2 x 4s. They both immediately begin to smirk and say they don't know what I am talking about. Even though they don't know what I mean, the son said my nephew used screws instead of nails and he shouldn't have. Then he goes on to state that my nephew is "trashy" and he does not care for my nephew. I suppose his intent was to make me angry, but in truth I do not value his opinion.

I said that I think we should get a new fence. The mother says, quote, "This fence is just fine!" I said if it is just fine, then what are we all doing here? She says the only problem is my nephew's dog jumped on it. If the dog wouldn't jump on the fence, there would be no problem. I need to make the dog not jump on the fence. Furthermore, she is on Social Security and cannot afford a new fence. I said "Well, it's the law."

She begins to scream at me that I need to GET MY D--- DOG NOW!! (I had been calling him, but he would not come.) My BF asks if they will let him in to come and get the dog. The son says yes, so BF leaves to go to their front door, the son does too. As soon as we are alone, she begins to point her finger at me and say "F--- you! This is all your fault! You fix it NOW!!" She is lovely. Doesn't she sound lovely? I am definately putting her on my Christmas Card List.

Meanwhile, when BF got to the front door, the son refused to let him in, but said go to the gate leading to the backyard. BF walked over to the gate, the son reappeared in the backyard. BF waited then called, saying "Are you going to let me in?" The son said to me "That gate is locked". So I called to BF "He isn't going to let you in." I asked the son how he would like for us to get the dog. He suggested I remove a fence board. So, I did. It was easy, I just pulled a little with my bare hands and it popped right off. I went into their back yard, took the dog by the collar, and led him out.

The mother went back in the house when I began to enter their yard, the son remained. When I got back on my side, he says to me "So you would rather just pay for a new fence than put that board back up?" I said of course I would nail the board back but that I would like to have a good, sturdy fence, and wouldn't he? I could tell he was thinking that over, so I added "Wood fences only last so long. This fence is almost 20 years old."

So as BF and I set about reattaching fence boards, the neighbor's son comes back out and says that I should go ahead and get some estimates.

So that is where I am right now. I have one company coming tonight for an estimate and am awaiting return phone calls from 2 other companies.

This week I have chipped $0.81 from Lending Club and $8.00 from Beezag. I have received a total of $32.00 from Beezag this year, just for watching their short little video ads. I think fondly of Laura every single time I cash out.

Go away, mortgage.

Gravity certainly DOES take its toll on my bank accounts.

I have dipped into CurveBall to pay my Chase Visa balance in full this month. I went back and forth on that, then finally decided that it would be silly to not pay in full. So CurveBall is poor now. Poor, poor CurveBall.

As of this moment, I have $635.73 in checking and will deposit $226.00 tomorrow. I have paid all of my bills for the month except Citi MC which has yet to arrive. I will pay them $124 towards my debt. That leaves me $737.73 for the rest of the month. I shouldn't need more than $100 of that for groceries, so that leaves $637.73 towards my early October bills. Tight, but doable.

So far this month, I am on track with spending. So that is my silver lining. Next month's Visa bill will not be so steep, and thanks to balanced bill pay, my electric bills won't be either.

In other news, my daughter and son-in-law will be moving out of my house and into their new place on Oct 1st.

Yesterday I received a reminder email from Credit Karma. It had been a while since I had updated my score. So I went ahead and did that and their estimate of my score rose to 775. That was nice.

One thing which hurts my score is my length of accounts. They say my oldest account is 105 months, and my average age is 90 months. When I divorced, I closed all of my joint credit accounts. Two of my very oldest individual accounts were Mervyn's (1987) and Gottschalk's (1992). Since both retailers have declared bankruptcy in the past couple of years, those accounts are now closed.

The other thing which hurts my score is they insist I have a credit utilization ratio of 30%. This is not true, I have available credit of 60k or so. However, some of my cards don't report a limit, so they assume my limit is equal to the highest balance ever on the card.

Even with those little dings, I don't have any trouble obtaining credit when I want it.

Tomorrow is payday. I have just counted the contents of my wallet, and I see that I have $6.37 which will go to the bank to be swept into my mortgage.

Someday, all of these little chips should add up.

Well, I did it. I signed up for balance bill payment plans for both PG & E (gas) and my local utility (electric). With PG & E, I got to enroll right on their website, and they already told me that my bill will be $54 per month. With the local electric company, I have to mail in the paperwork and wait for them to get back to me. My last twelve bills average $193.05 (counting the last two, which are the HUGEST electric bills I have ever had in my entire life). So as long as I am in the neighborhood of $200, that will be fine.

Cash flow planning friendly, but I have resisted all of these years. I suppose I like seeing my conservation efforts rewarded in the form of a lower bill. Lately, my utility usage is out of control. Every morning when I get up and every evening when I come home, I find:

1. televisions and/or gaming systems left on, no one using
2. lights left on in empty rooms
3. the a/c turned WAAAAY up

No amount of pointing this out has any impact at all, as NO ONE does these things. Go on, ask everyone. Did you leave this on? Nope, not me. Can you please turn things off when you are done with them? I do. I always do. I NEVER leave anything on, someone else must have done it. Apparently, there is a malovelent villain breaking into my house, turning things on, and leaving, all in an attempt to run up my utility bills. It is very frustrating. I do wish the villain would GO AWAY.

I also set up my AT & T internet to bill my credit card directly. This should be good for a few reward points.

If you have a Chase Freedom or Sapphire, you can get 2500 bonus pts (worth $25) plus $5 of free stamps if you enroll in stamps.com. The first 4 weeks are free, then there is a monthly fee of $15.99.

So basically, you can have $30 at the price of calling an 800 number to cancel.

I read about this on My Money Blog.

If you are interested, log on to Chase and go to Ultimate Rewards, browse the vendors and select stamps.com.

Today is a child support check day. So when I went to the bank, I decided to "sweep" some cash from my wallet. I had $51.77 in my wallet (of my $60.00 cash allowance). I deposited $11.77 into Piddly and will transfer it to my mortgage. That leaves me $40.00 until the 15th. I will need $10.00 tonight to get my eyebrows threaded, and will hang on to as much as the remaining $30.00 as I can. I will do the wallet sweep again on the 15th.

I am off to wellsfargo.com!

Today I had an e-mail from Vanguard asking me to please take a short survey. I decided to take it. It was short, but based on my answers I was asked to take a longer survey and they dangled $25 in front of me. Yeah OK, that seems a fair trade. At the end I received a message that I will receive my "incentive" in approximately 4 - 6 weeks. So if you receive a similar e-mail from Vanguard, open that baby up.

I just redeemed some credit card rewards points for $30 cash.

Mortgage chips.

On Sunday, I took my mother to visit her sister, it is about a 2 hour drive. We got an early start and made a day of it. We had a great visit, I think everyone enjoyed it. My aunt's lifelong good friend and one of her granddaughters came by, we played cards and giggled all afternoon. On the way home in the car, Mom gave me $50 to help with my OOP nephew costs. It was so nice of her, I surely do appreciate it.

So far this month I have not bought anything unplanned.

None of my mortgage chips during August were large, but together they reduced payment #358 down to $37.85. Hopefully, payment #358 will die this month and I can start whittling away payment #357.

I really like my new strategy of applying chips as they come in, rather than waiting for the next payment. There is no chance of them getting lost in the shuffle. Part of why it works so well is that my checking account and mortgage are both at Wells Fargo; I don't know if it would work so well otherwise. This month the bank's interest number was $.06 lower than my number, the result of mid-month chips. (This is not the entire amount of interest my chips saved, it is only the amount saved during the month of August.)

Lately, I feel so up in the air. I like to have a plan I can work towards, and right now I just don't know where my life is going.

As I mentioned, my next electric bill has already arrived and it is $384.98. My entire utilities budget is $400, so there is no way I will stay under that.

I considered signing up for their balanced bill payment plan, but it won't help me this month because they have already billed. I could start it next month. I don't really see the benefit of doing that, I think I would rather just leave it as it is.

So I considered fiddling with my budget, but then I decided, nope, I'm not going to do that either. Instead, I'm going to try to come in under on other categories to compensate. It's a lofty goal, but I think if I really try hard, I can do it.

My son went to the eye doctor and he needs glasses. We have to pay $150, the insurance picked up the rest. My ex-husband has already paid, so I need to reimburse him $75. That's an "everything else" item.

My daughter's birthday is Sunday, so I plan to give her some cash. That is also an "everything else" item. EE is getting very tiny, and today is only Sept 2nd!!

So as you can see, I really have my work cut out for me. All right, September, let's dance.

Everything else this month includes my car insurance, flashcards I bought to help me study ($300 + shipping from Becker, found them on eBay for $169.50 including shipping), and son's back to school expenses.

I just squeaked by on groceries, but those utilities! Waaaaahhhh! (that is me squawling like a baby) That's not even the awful part. The awful part is my next electric bill was in my mailbox yesterday. It is even bigger than the last one.

Cash is up
Retirement accounts are down
Debt is down
Home value is up
Car value is down :/

Well here we are with one more day of August to go. I intend to have a no-spend day tomorrow.

So where are we? Well, my electric bill this month was enough to make me cry. $374. Really looking forward to fewer people in the house. I'm also really, really tired of walking into an empty room or empty garage and all of the lights are on. Groceries aren't too bad this month because everyone pitched in. They certainly weren't cheap, but I think I am on budget there.

When my car insurance was due, I put it on my Visa in order to hang on to the cash a little longer. (I never get any rewards points for my insurance. Humph.) Chase will cut off my billing cycle in a week or so and send me a big fat bill, so I will be parting with the cash soon enough.

Everything is paid for August and I have $1,201.51 in checking. That is less than I would like to have, especially considering my Visa bill will be bigger than usual. Tomorrow is payday, and it is a 12 day pay instead of 11. So that will help some.

I have finally received the rest of summer camp money from my ex-h, so my checking account has recovered from that particular shortage.

I have not one red cent in my wallet. I cleared it out at the bank today. Tomorrow I will withdraw another $60 cash. My Piddly Fund broke $400, and I "swept" the excess to my mortgage. I think $400 is enough in Piddly. I intend to sweep all of my change into the mortgage from now on, the interest from Piddly too. Will that be an incentive for me to spend as little of my allowance as possible? I believe it will.

My EF is not budging as I am sweeping EF interest into CurveBall. I have been thinking about how much I want to keep in CurveBall. I am thinking once I have 2k in there, I will redirect that money towards IRAs if I have not hit 5k for the year. That happy dilemma is still in the future. At the moment, I am just hoping CurveBall doesn't go down in September. I hope I can swing everything in September without dipping into it. I may end up making my budgeted deposit only to pull some money right back out. We will see, though.

In the interest of racking up rewards points, how does one use a credit card to pay utility bills? I know that some people do it successfully, but how?

Looking at my particular utility companies, I see they will accept them but there is always a fee associated. Or you can use a third party processor, which is very expensive.

I just cannot see a way to do it without the fees outweighing the benefits.

Help?

I saw this blog post today and found it interesting. This particular blogger has a PhD in Economics from Princeton, so he knows a little bit about wherof he speaks.

http://wpfau.blogspot.com/2011/08/retirement-withdrawal-rate...

What do those pretty rainbow lines mean? Well, it may be safe to withdraw as much as 5% of your nest egg per year if you have a conservative stock allocation. That is great news for people like me, who expect to have a modest nest egg. (Especially since I sunk a lot of my capital into a house which promptly lost half of its value. But I whined about that yesterday, so I don't want to whine about it two days in a row.)

He ran monte carlo simulations for single men and same age couples, but I wish he had run them for single women too. And he used mortality rate tables, not a ballpark guess as to how long your retirement might last.

I have never seen this idea laid out quite this way. A 5% withdrawal rate is only slightly more risky than a 4% withdrawal rate! Yay. Still, I doubt I will start with more than 4%. If I am lucky enough to have good returns the first 2 or 3 years of retirement, I may seriously consider a bump up to 4.5% or 5%.

I can't help but notice that his simulation showed a 100% stock portfolio with a 8% annual withdrawal rate (the very scenario recommended by the very popular Dave Ramsey) has a 40% failure rate for men, 50% failure rate for couples. Failure being defined as completely exhausting your nest egg while you are still alive. This is precisely why I view his investment advice as so terrible. Being flat broke in my 80s is just not my goal. I wish he (Dave Ramsey) would just stick to what he is great at (motivating people to get out of debt and get their finances on track) and not give subpar investing advice.

Edit: I had originally written that DR recommends a 10% withdrawal rate. That was incorrect, he recommends an 8% withdrawal rate.

I saw this article this morning:

http://money.msn.com/home-loans/housing-horror-worse-than-yo...

This is the sort of article which makes me think I should strongly consider buying another house and let mine go into foreclosure.

If I were to buy another house worth 125k (roughly what mine is currently worth), put down 20% + closing and take a 15 year mortgage @ 3.75, my PI payments would be $727.22. Currently, I have PI payments of $1060.23 and have 26 years to go. That is a HUGE difference.