Tag: Money

Dreaming big

General

Bought a lottery ticket tonight. My usual, an Oregon Megabucks Quick-Pick, plus Kicker, for two dollars. I don’t have specific numbers I play, I just let the random machine pick the numbers for me, just like the random machine is going to pick the winning numbers. Adding the Kicker for a dollar more means that the ticket will win on 3 or more matching numbers, and if I get 4 or 5 winning numbers, the prize amount is more.

Screenshot of that annoying guy in Fallout New Vegas that yells about winning the lottery. Dark hair, glasses, punchable face, tattered clothing. The caption reads "Yeah! Who won the lottery? I did!" but the caption does not do justice to just how annoying this guy sounds yelling it, especially because it's outside Nipton which is on fire and devastated by Caesar's Legion. Everyone hates this guy.
Don’t be this guy. No one likes this guy.

I’ve written about buying lottery tickets before. If you do a search in the search thingy over to the left, you’ll find a lot of posts with the word “lottery” in them, and many of them are about buying a ticket. I almost never win, and by “almost never” I mean I’ve won a small amount (under a couple of hundred dollars) maybe 4 or 5 times in the decades I’ve been buying tickets. But I still play, because the idea of winning is enjoyable all by itself.

I buy the tickets and then I don’t check them, because I have a story that I play out in my head. The story goes, I forget about the ticket for weeks, and build up a stack of them, and then decide to work through the stack and see if any have won. And in the story, one of them does come back as a big winner. The whole enchilada. Millions of dollars with very little effort. And in the story, my delight at knowing that this battered piece of paper, that’s been sitting on my desk or in my glove compartment or tucked into my wallet, has been worth so much money this whole time.

I know it’s a strange story but somehow, the idea that I could have ignored it for a long time until the ticket expires and it’s no longer redeemable, but that I didn’t, I didn’t forget about it, is delicious to me. That imaginary satisfaction feels greater than the idea of actually having millions of dollars without having to trade thousands of hours of labor for it.

If I won

But then the next stage of the story kicks in. What would I do with that money? What do I really really want, if money was no object? Friends, lean in close, because when I dream, I dream big.

I want a roof over my head, a comfy bed to sleep in. I want to be warm in the winter, and cool in the summer. I want healthcare whenever I need it, without having to worry about how I will pay for it, without worrying about the United State’s innovation known as “medical bankruptcy.” I want clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and delicious food that won’t kill me faster than the healthy rate of dying. That’s it. That’s what I want.

Once I have that, I want to make sure that my family and close friends have all that, too, if I have any money left over.

If I have any money left over after that, I want to put that money into steering society in the direction of everyone having all those things. If I have to do it the hard way, one person at a time, that will have to do, but depending on how much money I have left over, I’d like to put systems in place to do that on as big a scale as possible. Neighborhood, city, state, nation. I would at least have time and energy to make a plan and work towards it, maybe get others to work with me. Assuming I had left over money.

If I’m doing that, and there’s any money left over at all, I want to see as much of this beautiful world as I can before my life comes to it’s end, but mostly I want to see a baseball game in every major league park. I want to drive on Blue Highways, listening to pleasant music, and at the end of my drive I want to eat local food, talk to local people, and listen to local bands. But that’s a lower priority.

What would you do if you won the jackpot? I’d love to hear it.

The Poverty Tires

Cars

My car is old and slowly wearing out. I do a little maintenance now and then, but I can’t afford any big repairs or overhauls. Not gonna rebuild the engine or transmission, not gonna repaint it, not gonna beef up the suspension. I’m just driving it until I can afford something better.

There’s a mindset into which I fall. It’s a reaction to stress and not having enough safety or resources. A poverty mindset. I accept that this is all I can afford, and then I justify and rationalize that this is the only option. For some reason this mindset is easier to get into with regard to a car, although I know I’ve felt this way about my living spaces, as well. Adequate housing is a human right but if I’m depressed, the level of adequate for me and me alone gets lower and lower, y’know?

I know I’ve written about this before, but another reminder has come up, and again, it’s about my car. Specifically the tires.

When I first got the car, the tires were already a bit worn, and I was making less than poverty wages, so I put zero money into replacing them. I’d just top up the air once in a while, and as the tires wore further, I’d have to top them up more and more.

Until one day, one of the tires failed in an interesting but terrifying way: the pressure caused a big bubble to pop out, but the tire itself didn’t leak. It just bulged. As you can imagine, trying to drive that way caused the steering wheel to shake, and a tremendous noise. I was already stressed about my job at the time, which required a long commute. I feared the worst, as I often do, and thought that the suspension was damaged somehow.

A friend helped me out by correctly diagnosing the issue, and paying for four replacement tires, a cost of about $200 for OK-ish used tires. That was a cost I didn’t think I could afford, but I was wrong. I definitely couldn’t have afforded replacing the whole car, or the costs of an accident involving another car… or another person. I did have insurance but it was the bare legal minimum. I was lucky in not having anything worse happen.

From that point on, I did pay more attention to my tires. I kept them full. And I replaced them after normal wear, a year later. I had to use a credit card and pay it off over time, but I did it because I wanted to avoid that horrible out-of-control feeling that my car might kill me if I neglected it.

That next set of tires wore normally for a while, until the steering started to get a little wobbly and pull to the left, and then it started making noise again, and this time, I took it to a mechanic. The mechanic said I just needed to rotate the tires, which for the non-car person means to swap them around, left to right, basically (different cars have different rotation patterns.)

I drove them like that for a while, saving up for another new pair, and this time, I bought new tires from a tire company that offers a 10 year warranty. I did not buy the warrnaty. I didn’t think it was worth it. New tires was enough for my peace of mind. But at some point, I noticed one of the tires, the driver’s side front, had a slow leak.

Remember that poverty mindset I mentioned? I nursed that nagging slow leak for months, topping up the tire with a cheap air compressor I had, because I was again underemployed and afraid of spending money. I didn’t think I could afford to replace them.

And then the cheap air compressor broke. I didn’t have the means to bandage this problem anymore. I found the source of the slow leak: a nail stuck in the tread. That convinced me to bring the car back to the tire shop, where, to my amazement, they replaced the tire and it’s mate on the other side for a nominal fee.

The sales person explained that I could add on the warranty to cover all four tires for cheap; $10 per tire. They would then replace any tire for any flat or road damage for the next 10 years. It was finally worth it to me, after years of giving myself stress by trying to nurse along on the cheapest option.

That was a few months ago. I’ve been hypervigilant about tire pressure, since my cheap air compressor was broken and I was once again unemployed. Last night, though, after getting a good payday, I bought a new air compressor, and because it was a Prime Day special, got it overnight.

Just went out to the car to check the pressure and top up all the tires. I assumed after months of driving they’d be dangerously low. This is the point where my poverty mindset had fucked me up.

The tires were low but not dangerous. And I had the tool I needed to fix it, by spending a little money. I can afford basic maintence. I don’t have to live with broken and failing things.

Might be time to buy a newer car, Brian.

Personal Finance (is a pain in the ass)

General

I try to keep track of my money, and make sure that income equals or exceeds spending. I know that sounds like a basic adulting skill, but I have to tell you, the way my brain works, if I don’t track these things regularly and in as much detail as possible, I quickly get underwater and in dire trouble. There are surely as many ways of managing money as there are people on the planet. But I have to make, update, and adjust a list that shows what I’ve got now, what bills are upcoming and what income I can plan on, and a rolling prediction of how much money I’ll have left over.

Close up of a spiral-bound paper notebook. The pages are covered in a square grid of lines. A crumpled up page sits on top of the open notebook, and a pencil, its eraser worn and the end covered in bite marks, rest on the page.
I used to budget the old-fashioned way, on paper with a pencil.

Right now I keep a Google spreadsheet. It has one tab per calendar year, with seven columns, left to right: Date (of transaction); Income; Due; Current; Payee; Paid; and Notes. Every month I paste in that month’s bills and expected income; and I drag down the formula that takes the balance, adds the income for that date, subtracts the bill for that date, and shows what I have left over for that date.

I’ve tried other budgeting software. To me, most of them are focused on the past and the current. They don’t let me look foward. So I developed this approach. I was actually re-creating a web app known as Quicken Online. In 2007, it was great because it could pull in bank information so the users didn’t have to manually enter everything. We could add in ongoing and future payments. I loved it. Then it merged with Mint.com (not the current cell phone company, a budgeting web app) and all the features I loved went away. It was a sad day.

Having a web app was great because I could log in anywhere that had an internet connection and see the same data. You think that’s boring, but it was not a standard feature in 2006, let me tell you. And when I got an iPhone in 2007, I could carry that information around in my pocket. Transformative, for me, at least. So that’s why I love my Google spreadsheet; it’s available whereever I have an internet connection, which is 98% of my life.

Prior to that, I used a system that I had learned from a book that I read in the mid-1990s, “How to Get Out Of Debt, Stay Out Of Debt, and Live Prosperously“, a ponderous title for a self-help book. The author, Jerrold Mundis, basically applied the 12-step program to money and debt. I didn’t care for the philosophical elements but the practical elements of tracking spending worked very well for me, as long as I stuck with it. My master list of monthly expenses were kept in a notebook, and I carried a smaller notebook with me where I wrote down everything I bought, and then at the end of every day I added it all up. I began keeping receipts, shoving them in my wallet for later accounting. And I liked knowing what I had left, even if it was going to be negative.

That’s an important point: I track my spending even when I know it’s going to result in a negative balance. Sure, sometimes I get anxiety and feel like I don’t want to know. That urge to ignore it was stronger in the past than it is now. I view it as what it is: a number without any inherent meaning beyond a cash balance. It doesn’t define me as a person. It’s a resource that sometimes I have more or less of. I don’t always find it easy to do the addition and subtraction necessary to get that number, but I do it, and I do it often enough that I can use it to adjust things.

Or to ask for help if I need it. Learning that was also a hard lesson but it is habit now. My friends and family want to help if they can. Hey, maybe I did learn the philosophical parts of that book, after all?

Community Tales

Community

Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I got up one morning, went dowstairs to get some coffee and wake up. Dad, since he’s been staying here, normally gets up before me (at least he did before I started working again) and makes a pot of coffee. Dad was sitting at the desk where we put his iMac and he was scrolling through Yahoo! news or Facebook or something.

A cherry turnover on a plate next to a coffee mug in the shape of BB-8 from Star Wars. Both are sitting on a computer desk. In the background on the desk are a pair of computer speakers, the arms for a computer monitor, a USB hub with cables coming out of it, and a stack of Oregon Megabucks lottery tickets.
A perfectly normal breakfast: cherry turnover and coffee in the shape of BB-8.

I made my coffee drink. I take my 20 oz. BB-8 coffee mug and add about 2 ounces of half-and-half, 2 ounces of chai concentrate, and two tablespoons of chocolate syrup then fill the rest of it with brewed coffee. I call it, “coffee”. Then I walked over to where dad was sitting and scrolling. Took a look outside, saw grey but no rain.

“Another gray day,” I said.

“Yeah, where’s our sun at?” dad said. He shifted in his seat a bit. “Had to go out front for a smoke.” My apartment, a townhouse, has a back patio where he normally goes to smoke, but if it’s raining, he goes out front because the overhang usually protects him from the rain better.

“Oh? But it’s not raining.”

“I just wanted to see if Glasses [nicknamed for her privacy] was out there.” Dad is, despite his age, an incorrigible flirt, and he’s been talking to the woman who lives next door. Just small talk, I’m sure, but he’s more extroverted than I am, so he likes talking to people, especially women. He made a sound halfway between a grunt and a chuckle that indicated to me, embarassment. “She’s got an eviction notice on her door.”

My stomach sank. I’ve been there. I’ve had to deal with no money and rising debts. I was kinda going through that now, actually; if it wasn’t for dad’s help, I would be a month or two behind in rent myself. This story is before I landed my job, when I was still hunting. My empathy for my neighbor kicked in, hard. I carefully opened my front door, saw no one was out there, cracked open the screen, looked to my right. Sure enough, a large legal paper was taped to her door.

She’s a single mom, with a teenage-ish daughter who may or may not work. I think Glasses works, not sure. I am also well aware that just having a job does not mean someone can pay the bills, especially the rent. I went back inside.

“That sucks,” I said. Dad grunted again in agreement. I wondered what he was thinking. I didn’t think he would be inclined to help her out, though he certainly could if he wanted to. I wouldn’t judge. He’s been helping me and I appreciate it immensely. I’m also quite aware that when I was much younger, he would have probably been against providing me with any kind of financial help. But people change over the years.

When I was a kid, for various reasons related to my probable neurodivergence as well as incuriosity about the world and general distaste for doing irrational things like labor, I did not like or want to work at all. Now, while I still hate doing irrational things for irrational people, I also know that I need to do a certain amount of it so I can continue to live indoors and eat food I didn’t pick out of the trash. Fucking capitalism. And maybe dad feels better about helping me when he knows I’m doing my best to helpl myself?

Glasses, though. Regardless of her circumstances, I wouldn’t wish the anxiety of possible eviction on anyone. If the sheriffs’ deputies come, I pledged to stand in their way.

Me, Grocery Shopping

General

There are two grocery stores in my neighborhood, in walking distance of my apartment. I don’t own a car. One store is closer but generally more expensive; the farther one, while still expensive, is a longer walk.

I almost always buy bacon. I just do. It’s part of my favorite breakfast. I’ve been buying the same kind of bacon for a long time. Both of the stores carry it, and their prices (and sale prices) are generally in sync. If it’s on sale at the close store, it’s probably also on sale at the farther store, and at a lower price.

Last weekend, being out of bacon, I went to the close store to get some things, and saw that bacon was on sale. I didn’t buy any, because I wanted to get it at the best price. Today I had some time to shop, so I headed out for the farther store. A nice walk in the warm summer sun.

The bacon was also on sale… at a higher price than the closer store, by about 50¢.

That bacon was my main reason for going out of my way. Do I pick up the other things on my list and the bacon and call it good?

No. No, I do not.

I only picked up the items that are cheaper. Looks like I’ll be making another trip back to the first store.

Hope that that sale price is still good and wasn’t a weekend special. Sigh.

If only there was an app for these things.