Category Archives: Uncategorized

Lifestyle Inflation Creeping Into My Life

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Okay, I confess, now that I’m debt free “Lifestyle Inflation” is creeping into my life!

Summer isn’t helping!  There are so many fun things to do in the summer!  Lifestyle inflation is where you do the same things, but more of them or you upgrade to a better version of them.  An example would be when you take your old 32 inch CRT TV (don’t laugh, I still have one) and replace it with a new 60 inch LED HD TV!  Another example would be instead of just going out to eat at your favorite restaurant (Olive Garden for my wife, Wasabi Japanese Steak House for me) once a week, you would go out more often, perhaps 2 or 3 times a week.

It’s especially easy to spend money on your children.  This is the current hurdle that I’ve been facing.  I need to buy a new battery for our ride on car so my daughter can enjoy the car too (like my son did).  The cursed battery cost over $50!!!

I guess I could stick to a strict spending budget, at least for the summer!  Then once winter comes back,  I can roll out of the spending budget since I naturally spend less…

What ways do you fight the urge to increase your “Lifestyle Inflation“?  Or do you succumb to it, but with balance?

-MR

Dr. Phil Drops the Ball on Bad Kids in School

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Right now, I’m watching Dr. Phil, and he’s defending a nicely dressed, pretty young girl (age 12) that wrote on a desk with her marker.  I guess that the school, expelled the girl, and call the police on her.  The police then arrested her and handcupped her.  Then she stayed handcupped in the police station for 2 hours.

This is the kind of sensationalize that I despise in the media.  Here is my list of issues that I had with this show:

  1. Nothing was mentioned of her prior history.  Just this particular incident.
  2. Neither the school’s principal, teacher, nor the police officers were there to tell their side of the story.
  3. The girl was coached on how to answer the questions Dr. Phil asked her, or… if she wasn’t coached, then she should have been smart enough not to deface the schools property.
  4. She claimed that she’s now afraid of teachers and police officers…  But she really wasn’t harmed in any physical way.

My problem with this is that the girl is fine, she wasn’t hurt and she would have learned a lesson, except that her mom is now suing the state and school.

There were other stories too, but all were one sided like the one above.

To present a story like these without the details, is kind of like Chuck Liddell (Chuck Norris was busy) picking a fight with an 80 year old blind man.  Way too one-sided!

The last story was the fault of a teacher that restrained a boy that wouldn’t listen.  The boy died, because the teacher sat on him!  To me this sounds like a single person making a bad decision.  Instead of going after that person, the foster mom is going after the state and school.

The thing what Dr. Phil forgets is that the teachers aren’t there to babysit or deal with drama, they are there to teach.  If a child is being disruptive, the child needs to be removed from the class or disciplined in some way, maybe even being expelled.  I’m sure that girl above is a fireball, and probably ruined the entire class for that class session, many times in the past.  Sometimes, it’s the small things after mountain of infractions that breaks the camel’s back… 

This is why I dislike media, especially talk shows soooo much!  People believe this stuff, and jump on the bandwagon, but if they were in the same situation… well, then that would be different!

In this time, where kids shoot other kids and teachers, I think classes should be orderly and respectful.  If you have a bad influence, get them out of that the public school! 

Dr. Phil’s panel of so called experts were lawyers representing the so called “victims”.  The legal show panel of experts recommended talking to the bad kids, and such things as sitting beside them for the class duration.  But I remember when I was a school, and a kid goes bad (especially teenagers, including 12 year olds), trying to talk them out of being bad was a waste of time, everybody in the class loses when that much time is wasted on one child while the rest are there to learn.

You may ask, why do I care about this?  Well, when the so called “victims” go after the schools and state, they are really attacking us, the taxpayers.  That money comes from you and me.  So here is yet another way that people rip us off!!!  I wonder how many of them are fradulant?

I suppose soon the schools and state will need insurance policies to protect them from being sued by partent (especially those where their kids were even injured)…  Perhaps we wouldn’t need such high taxes if the state and school systems weren’t getting sued for issues!

Have you ever encountered a show, where the presenation is so one sided that you know it’s bogus?  What do you think? 

Good thing these kids were not in other countries…  I wonder how Russia, China or other countries handle such issues?

-MR

Saving By Paying Attention – Over-Analyzers, Part 2 of 4

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House elements

While house hunting, we trotted through plenty of previously owned homes and new developer houses.  We encountered fascinating rooms that were all pink, all red, or some other strange 60s, 70, or 80s fade…  The ultimate fade was when we looked at one house and the bathroom was decorated in hot pink with a pitch black commode and bathtub.  Groovy baby!    

Of course I had to check out the demographics for each house we looked at!  Is the school ranked high, what is the crime rate, what is the composite of the types of crimes, what are the county and city tax rates, how do the utilities compare to surrounding cities, are the houses in the area appreciating more than surrounding counties… etc.  The list was extensive!   

Yep, all told, it took us over 6 months before we decided on a house and community.  My poor wife, she started saying yes to any house we looked at after about 4 months into the process.  She was tired (sorry honey)!   

So was it worth all the extra time and analysis?  Maybe, that’s debatable!  Initially it was perfect, but things have changed in the community since then that makes it a bit different.   

So what does this have to do with my title “Saving by Paying Attention – Over-Analyzers“?  Everything!  We wasted gallons of gas, driving from house to house, not to mention all of the personal time wasted checking out house after house.    

Who was to blame for all of this extra house analysis?    

That Over-Analyzer was me!  I’m the one that took way to long looking at houses, waiting for that magic moment when I would exclaim EUREKA, this house is the ONE!   

The Over-Analyzer‘s biggest waste is personal time and gasoline driving from deal to deal, or in my case, house to house looking for the best, smartest deal!   

How can this weakness be combated?

Planning and time spend measuring twice and cutting once.  By this carpenter’s saying I mean “take the time the do the research before doing the footwork”.  Today especially, you can use google, yahoo, or bing to do the information gathering for you.  Heck, there are some sites now that take you thru a  virtual tour of some of the places you might be interested in!
    

I’m the same way at Christmas, when it comes time to pick out the Christmas Tree that we chop down (really saw down 😉 ) for the house.   

Are you or do you know someone like this?  If so, please do tell!  This isn’t as bad as the Implusers I talked about yesterday… but hey it adds up!  

-D

Grade Your Work To Help Secure Your Job

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One of my goals this year is to “Maximize Who I am“, which basically means I’m going to improve myself in all areas that I think I need to improve upon.

Grade your work performance

So with respect to my employment, I decided to grade my work.  The belief is that the higher my perceived grade is, the more secure my job would be at work.

So I decided to go with a weighted average to derive my “Working Grade”.  I decided to have 5 areas that I would grade myself on then I would calculate my overall working grade.  I decided the 5 areas would be skill (Tech), organizational, communication, social networking, work ethic.

I’m IT (Information Technology) services, so for my job the following weighting for each topic would apply (note you topic may have a different weighting):

        Weighted
Weight     Score Scores
4   Skills (Tech) B 3.5 14
3   Organization C 2.5 7.5
3   Communication C 2.5 7.5
2   Work Ethic B 3.5 7
1   Social Networking D 1.5 1.5
13       37.5
        2.88

 

So based on my calculations using weighted averages, my total score is 2.88. so it’s a little bit higher than average “middle of the road C”, so let’s say I got a “C+”.  What I really need and want is for that score up to a solid “B” or “B+”.   After all how wants to be average!

I weighted my skills as being more important , because I work with and on computers.  Next, I ranked Communication and Organization as important but not as much as skills.  Having the idea is important, but communicating the idea in a logical and easily understood manner is also very important.

How do you rate (or grade)  in your self-assessment?

 

Update:

I plan on using the grading technique I mention above to help improve my work presence.  The idea is at week end, to calculate a grade for each of the 5 areas that were identified above.  Over time, while the grade in itself may be worthless at face value,  the focus and attempt at improving the grade should provide me with great benefit.