Category Archives: Uncategorized

Stop Waiting For Magical Moments To Happen

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When I was younger, I use to watch movies and television shows where there was a recurring plot.  The “Plot” was that the nice guy (the underdog) typically suddenly has something horrible wrong happen to him/her, then later, things magically turn out to work for them.  This plot is a very risky move in real life, but I see it happen all the time with some of my friends’ behaviors.  Luckily, I broke myself of that kind of thinking early in college. 

Don't go for broke

The problem is I still know people who still uses this kind of thinking around their finances.  They believe that they can spend money they don’t have accumulating massive level of debt because they know that their personal life movie will end successfully with them being a megamillionaire (move over Buffett and Gates!)

Sometimes it may be possible, but most of the time, it doesn’t work out that way.  The people I know don’t become total failures, but they now live a harder life.  If they lived responsibly earlier and presently, they would be much further along financially then they are today.

Another similar problem is when friends make a financial decision (say to buy a stock) and then put the risk in Divine Intervention’s hands.  I had a work colleague that said he invested his money in the company stock and when it halved he said he would reply on Divine Intervention and that it would be okay  Well, surprise, it’s still down by more than 60% of what it was at the high, and when he said that it was 12 years ago.  Divine Intervention didn’t tell him to put money in that stock, why does he think Divine Intervention would tell him when to pull out of it?  Don’t do this, please!  You are making your own financial decisions, and religion doesn’t have a place in picking stocks!

Do you know of people like my work colleague and did it work out for them?

-D

Living With Money Tightness From Year to Year

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We don’t live Paycheck to Paycheck except for this time of the year.  I got my checking account balance, and it’s dropped below $3,000… YIKES!!!

What happened???

Year end and new Year expenses puts us in bit of a financial bind every year.  Oh, we have the money in the stock market if we need it, but I hate to cash out stocks to pay for domestic expenses…

The Year end problem is Christmas and 2 December birthdays in my family.  And we have 2 cousins with birthdays at the beginning of January.  This hits us a bit hard, but then there is the new Year expense of car insurance and we the fact that we pre-pay our cable bill.  So the credit card bills for Dec and Jan are usually over an extra $1,000 each!

This is why I’m always excited to do my taxes, I claim zero allowances!  So we get a decent chunk of tax money back, and usually my work bonus hits shortly after.  I may have to do my kids taxes this year too, for something called “Kiddie Tax”.

How can I prevent this?

The best way to prevent this would be to:

  • Pay off the house (Feb!!!)
  • Change my tax allowances so I get more during the year.
  • Change the way my insurance bill is billed to me.
  • Purchase Christmas and December Birthday gifts earlier in the year.

If all goes well, this should be the last year of Year end tightness that we experience.

Bought My First and Last Lottery Ticket

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Yep, it’s true!  I bought a lottery ticket, the value of the potential prize was multimillions of dollars.  This is not a frugal way to get money!  In fact, it’s very wasteful.

So why did I do it?

Well, last night I went out to eat and to see a movie (Sherlock Holmes) with both friends from The Three Little Pig post.  They were doing well, Pig 1 has been on a few interviews since I last spoke to him.

As we arrived at the theater parking lot, I noticed that both my friends were still in Pig 2’s car on cell phones.  Eventually, they came out…  Apparently, both friends were calling their significant others to go out and buy a lottery ticket.  I found this quite amusing! 🙂  Instantly, I thought of the three little pig story again…

So we bought our movie ticket to get into the movie, but we had 20 minutes until the movie started.  Instead of waiting, we decided to go buy their lottery tickets.  We went to a gas station, and both friends bought their tickets.  This is when I decided, why not…  So, this is when I bought my first and last lottery ticket (that’s not a scratch off one…)  I knew it was wasted money, but this was a rare occasion, and I wanted to fit in with the camaraderie!

So, did I win? 

Nope, I just check online and it was a waste of money as expected.  Next time I won’t buy one, but it was good to be part of the lottery ticket buying club for a few minutes.  We talked about what we would do with the money if we won…  It was a good little distraction.

-D

The Three Little Pigs, Pig #3

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Initially, I was going to portray myself as Pig #3, but now I realize that I’m more like Pig #2.5.  I’m still building my house of bricks…

The third little pig

My definition of the traits of Pig #3:  (It’s hard to try to be as objective as possible with a made-up character :))

  1. Consistent and persistent attention to goals (in other words, organization)
  2. Smart investor (house of bricks vs twigs or straw, tools instead of playthings)
  3. Hard worker
  4. Frugal lifestyle (versus going out and partying all the time, special occasions are okay, but not every night)
  5. Can-do attitude
  6. Follow-through (finishing tasks that are completable)
  7. Pride in work

My shortcomings:

Of the 7 items, I mentioned above,

  • I don’t have great organization skills.
  • I don’t consistently have a “Can do attitude”
  • I don’t have a “Follow through” mentality (I get something over 80% done and then stall, sometimes)

Yep, I’m Pig # 2.5, my boss at work is more of a Pig #3 than I am.

My boss does all the 7 tasks listed above.  He has also been buying real estate as rental properties.  He’s a consistent investor in diversified investments while living a more frugal lifestyle than I live.

So how can I become more of a Pig #3 type?

My weakness is organization skills, this is my most important area to work on.  If you don’t have organization, it’s difficult to work on your other weaknesses effectively.  Organization skills are the key to maximizing all of the other 6 items identified above.  “Can do attitude” and “Follow through” are related to confidence in your work.  This is something that with time you can build too, I no longer have problems with confidence in my work, or at least not as much (thanks google).

So the question is how do you define yourself?  When I started writing this series, I thought I epitomized Pig #3, but now I realize that I’m not quite there yet.