Not My Mother

So yesterday we had to fill up the car, as you do. We had a Coles shopping voucher so we went to the local Shell station (my research has shown that their discounted unleaded price is generally cheaper than elsewhere nearby). When I went in to pay the guy told me that in addition to the usual 4 cents per litre discount for the voucher, I could get a further 2 cents per litre off just by spending $2 instore. And he helpfully pointed out the chocolates and chewing gum as candidates for me to buy.

Look, it was the end of the day and I wasn’t up to spontaneous mental arithmetic. But I wasn’t sure it was a good deal and I certainly didn’t need any chocolate so I said no. I’d rather miss out on a bargain than agree to something that wasn’t one and be ripped off. Makes me feel less stupid, somehow.

Anyway, when I got back to the car I did the sums. We bought 45 litres of petrol, so the discount would have saved me a massive 90 cents. But to get the discount I had to spend $2 instore, so I’d end up $1.10 out of pocket. So, um, no thanks. I’d have to buy 100 litres of petrol to break even; are there any cars apart from the larger 4WDs that have tanks that large?

Obviously, if there was something I was going to buy anyway, then that would have been okay. But I rarely buy things at petrol stations unless it’s something I know has a fixed price like bags of ice or magazines, so they can’t mark it up.

I’m sure there are many people who aren’t bothered about paying an extra dollar or so for a bottle of milk for convenience of not having to stop again (but then why would they get excited about saving such a small amount?). But it made me wonder,  how many other people jump at the chance to buy stuff, just because they see “2 cent discount”, without thinking about it? It wasn’t so long ago I probably would have been one of them.

Would you buy something for the discount?

Ah, New Year’s Eve 1999. You whippersnappers are too young to remember the Y2K bug but we thought it was a big deal. I worked in IT for a bank and we were all rostered on to work overnight and through the next day, just in case. The people who worked from 10pm to 6am got $6000 for their efforts. I only had to work from 6am to 2pm on January 1, so I just got $4500. I used it to put air conditioning in my old house. It was good.

(The guys who had to work overnight had it better as everything was laid on for them and they had a prime spot on the floor to watch all the fireworks. One of them told me that at about 5 minutes to midnight there was a power surge in the city and all the lights went out. “We thought, oh crap, we’re in for a long night.” Heh, heh, heh.)

Anyway, I was also on call just in case there was a problem, so I had to stay home (I don’t know why, we theoretically could log in from home but it was on shitty 56K dialup and anyway how would that work if everything had turned to shit?), so me and my then-husband Andrew stayed home, ordered pizza, and watched videos. Yeah, partying like it’s 1999 is really quite lame. At 10pm we turned over to watch midnight celebrations in Wellington, New Zealand. I always thought they really missed a great joke by not turning off all their lights on the stroke of 12. Seriously, how funny would that have been? The first major place to tick over and it all goes black. Hee!

So eventually it got to midnight and I poured a naughty half glass of wine (I wasn’t supposed to drink on call) and we went out into the backyard to watch the fireworks. I was overcome with emotion, and the booze (this was also before I discovered wine; now it takes a full glass to get me drunk). Here we were, the clocks were all ticking over to zeroes, it was a brand new start. I love new beginnings. I was going to be a better person from now on, nicer, kinder, everything good. I could just tell this was it.

“Happy new millennium, world,” I whispered to the night sky.

“Happy new millennium,” Andrew replied. “… Of course, it’s not really the new millennium yet…”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, will you JUST LET IT GO?” I snarled. And thus ended the shortest resolution attempt ever.

We split up a year and a half later, are you surprised?

*

And now here we are, ten years later. I’m back in the same city, married again, once again not doing anything for New Year’s Eve. And yet in the meantime I’ve been all around the world, fallen in debt, fallen in love, got out of debt, got married, got pregnant. I’ve travelled so far. It might look like I’m in the same sort of place I was that night, but really I’m a completely different person.

I wonder where I’ll be ten years from now?

I’ve been thinking a bit about Dog’s situation over at Dog Ate My Finances. She lives in a crappy rental property that she hates, but she can’t afford the kind of house she wants, and she doesn’t want to buy a “generic townhouse” that she’d have to sell in a few years time. And she seems to have a mental block on upgrading to a different rental property – I think she sees it as dead money. So she’s talked herself back into staying where they are, even though the apartment is old and doesn’t fit her needs, and her cars keep getting broken into. She doesn’t see any other option — or more accurately, she’s written them all off.

It reminded me of our situation when we moved back to Australia. We were looking to return in December 2007, just in time for Christmas. At the time the rental market in Melbourne was going crazy; there were news reports that for any property that came up you’d have 50 couples swarming the place and there were rental auctions going on. It was mad. We had friends looking at the time and they said it was true.

Now, as it happened, my work moved me to London, so they were organising moving me back, and as part of that we’d get 4 weeks’ accommodation in a serviced apartment when we arrived. But what we didn’t get was any assistance to find a place to live (unlike when I arrived in London; I guess you’re expected to know your home town yourself). It was all down to us. How would we manage to find a place that was available within those 4 weeks? Also, we wanted to buy a house, but that would mean trying to line up the end of leases with the purchase – and with the market as it was, no one needed to take on a short term lease.

So it made sense to buy before we got back. The only thing was, the kind of property that we wanted was a larger house maybe 30-40 years old, which needed some work. And it’s really hard to judge that over the internet. We tried sending family round to look at a few places, but it didn’t work. They didn’t understand what we were looking for, so they’d come back and say “Oh my god no, there is bright red shagpile carpet everywhere, run!” Well, I don’t know about you, but I like bright red shagpile, and maybe the rest of the house was okay. But the point was, buying a house you’d be happy to live in is a completely subjective matter. It depends too much on gut feel and instinct, you can’t trust it to other people, and they don’t want you to either, in case they get it wrong and you end up hating them as well as the house.

But you know what is easier? Buying an investment property. Then it comes down to cold facts: is it close to transport? Does it have a garage? Is it low maintenance inside and out, with enough bedrooms and bathrooms for your target market? We decided that we wanted an investment property eventually, so why not buy it first? We wouldn’t have to LOVE it, it just had to be good enough for us to live in for maybe a year while we looked for the house we really wanted.

So we looked, and within a couple of weeks had found something that met our needs exactly. Better yet, it was in a largish development of similar properties so we could see what they’d been going for. So we bought it. Settlement was in December, a week before we got back in the country. Perfect.

As it happened we loved the house, which was good because it soon became clear that we’d been a little unrealistic about being able to buy a second house within a year. (It took us TWO years to get to that position.) Now, we live in the second house and rent out the first one. And we love the second house.

So this is what I think Dog should do – stop thinking about it in terms of a Mansion or Nothing. Buy the generic townhouse, but with an eye to it being a good investment down the track. It’s a reasonable compromise, if you do the research and are smart about what you get. And the mortgage would be a lot less than the mansion’s, and it wouldn’t be the dead money renting something else would be.

Disclaimer: I don’t live in the US, so I’m not completely familiar with the ins and outs of purchasing properties there. But Dog’s already been approved for a modest sized mortgage, and people are still buying properties. It doesn’t matter what she intends to do with the property a few years down the track, she’s planning to live in it now.

A lot of my blogs have been setting their goals for next year, so I’ve been trying to come up with mine. It’s hard because I have no idea how next year will go. I could say that about every one of the last 6 years, but this one will definitely be different. I’ll become a mother. I’ll be moving to a part-time salary, and although I’ve worked out a tentative budget that shows we can do things quite comfortably, I have no idea how out of pocket we’ll end up with the birth, or how much the baby will cost (although Mum’s gone a bit mad buying stuff and friends have been very generous, so that helps out.) Hell, I have no idea at all what being a mother will do to me or my life, so it really is all up in the air right now.

I’ve not really tried setting goals before. Resolutions, sure, I make a billion of those, and promptly forget them. One year I had 13. How many did I achieve? Your guess is as good as mine. So for the last few years I’ve not bothered making them. Best to avoid the sense of failure. But I can see the point of setting goals, especially financial ones, otherwise you drip through the year with no focus. But how to do it? Goals should be achievable and measurable and everything else that makes them SMART. Also, I don’t want to have a goal for each aspect of my life (too much to focus on), but neither do I want just one financial one (an area that IS measurable) that I’ll get obsessive about, I’m obsessive enough about that already. So what to do?

I was talking to Dave about it and he gently pointed out that I am a knucklehead and next year WILL have one main focus, and it won’t be finances. We are becoming parents, everything is going to change. Thus, 2010’s goal should be to adjust to parenthood.

Spend the first three months preparing for the baby, then recover from the birth and adjust to being a mother. Look, I have no idea how I’ll go with that, other than it will change everything for ever (thanks, friends with helpful comments). I’ll probably be overwhelmed by it all and I’ll likely get postnatal depression. So he says I need to forget everything else and concentrate on that, get settled into being mum, get healthy and well, get our routines going and so on. And he’s right. I know he’s right. It’s really important and it doesn’t come at all naturally to me, I need to give it all my focus.

But I’ll need some sub-projects to keep me going, right? You know, for when it all that parenting gets too easy? So here are a few more I came up with.

Finance

1. Get emergency fund up to $20,000.My ultimate goal is $30,000 (6 months full expenses including mortgages for rental properties), but I’ll aim for $20,000 by the end of next year. It is currently sitting at $9,500, so we can comfortably make $20k by adding about $1000 a month.
2. Work out exact financial position. I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really know where we stand at the moment. I’ve lost track of how many shares we have (we get some as part of our end of year bonuses, usually held in trust for a year or more, and I’ve not kept the records of what’s vested and what’s not, up to date), and some of our old superannuation funds have old addresses so I haven’t got up to date statements from them. Plus, Dave tends to be a bit slack with some stuff like managing the account for paying one of the investment mortgages, which makes it hard for me to know how the budget’s going, so I’d rather just get it all under my control.

   This one also means making sure we’ve got everything covered that we should, like life insurance and wills, and to start getting educated on our superannuation options.

3. Grow net worth by $50,000. Again, I don’t know what the current year will bring so I don’t know how realistic I’m being, but if we include superannuation contributions (as we must) this should be easily achievable. It will be hard to definitely assess our success because a lot would depend on property valuations and I can’t see us paying for new ones again next year, but we’ll do what we can. For the record, I did some sums and I estimate our current net worth as being somewhere around the $490-500,000 mark, so $50k would be a nice round 10% increase. (See why I need the exact financial position? $500k would be such a nice milestone to hit and I don’t know if we’ve made it yet!)

Organisation – get home life in order

This one ties into the main goal of adjusting to parenthood, and just getting our lives working smoothly so things don’t fall apart when I go back to work. One of my most common freakouts is that I don’t feel like I’m coping now, so how will I manage when there’s a baby to wrangle as well? So this is all about setting up routines and systems, like meal plans and filling the freezer so we have food, and getting housework and admin down to a quick art. It bugs me that I always have a big list of things hanging over my head that should be done, so I want to make a concerted effort to work through them all and get them sorted out once and for all.

(And before you point and laugh at me for thinking I can do that with a baby around, she won’t be here for a few months yet and hopefully will sleep a lot at first. I could be kidding myself, but leave me my illusions for now, okay?)

Health and wellbeing

Dave says he wants to get down to 85kg (um, about 187lb) by the end of the year. He’s 6 feet tall with a chunky muscular build anda bit of a belly and probably weighs about 104kg (229lb) at the moment. I can’t imagine him that light but he thinks he can do it, and it will help with his cycling. I was 85.9kg (189lb) when we got married and am 94kg (207lb) right now, so I figure I’ll target that too. Ideally I’d like to get under 76kg (168lb) which would get me out of the obese range for my height, but I honestly don’t know how I’ll go. I’d rather have a modest goal I have a hope of achieving than something I don’t believe I can do.

Really though, I’d just like to finish the year feeling fitter and healthier, with better food and exercise habits and a body that doesn’t hurt. This will be part of establishing our new routines. Details still to be worked out.

So that’s it. Of course I’m most interested in the financial ones right now because I’m comfortable in that area. I’m actually quite excited about what next year will bring,

What do you think of these goals? What are your goals for the coming year?

So today I had my first experience of being picked as pregnant out in public. Well, apart from that time a few weeks ago when the train was crowded and an older woman offered me her seat, but that doesn’t count because I was wearing a skirt that has always made me look pregnant and holding a pregnancy book, so that was a bit of a giveaway. (I didn’t take the seat, by the way. She was older and I didn’t really need it, so I would have felt bad.)

But today counts! I was out buying lunch and out of nowhere the girl behind the counter said, “is it a boy?” It’s a good thing she also pointed at my stomach because otherwise I wouldn’t have had the faintest clue what she was talking about. I said, “A girl,” for Lo! It is so, and she had a little squee, and then she gave me my lentil soup and that was that.

It was pretty cool. I mean, also I think she was pretty brave, because I’m a bit on the lardy side anyway and to me I just look fatter than normal. I guess the flowy peasant top I’m wearing helped. There is a baby bump there, if I prod my abdomen it’s alarmingly tight and round, but it’s pushing out my existing belly fat so I still look wobbly rather than having that nice curve. I’m looking forward to it getting bigger and more obvious because I’m getting tired of catching sight of myself naked in the mirror and thinking holy feck, you’re getting fat! Then I remember, but I still have to go through it every time. It’s not good for my self-esteem.

So at this point I am 23 and a half weeks along and I can feel the baby move every now and then, but mostly I don’t. It does feel like bubbles, or weird gas, or sometimes it doesn’t really feel like anything but I’m aware. This is good; I was starting to freak out that I hadn’t felt anything, even though my obstetrician and my friends and Dr Google all said it would take longer, this being my first pregnancy and the placenta being on the front (and ahem, me being of portly disposition) and all. Plus right now I feel fine, I don’t feel pregnant at all, and I keep forgetting, which is why the mirror always comes as a shock.

It still feels so unreal. I’ve never been a maternal person, so having a baby wasn’t something  I’ve known I’ll do. I don’t feel qualified for it. I’m not exactly a crafty person; the handiest thing I’ve done lately is knit Dave one of these Daleks, but that had instructions and even then it came out a bit lumpy. How can I possibly be growing a human being right inside me? I have no idea how to do that; it shouldn’t be allowed. Yet here she is, growing away, doing all the right things exactly when she should be, and I have nothing at all to do with it. It’s very strange.

This is why I’m looking forward to getting bigger, even though it will be over a sweaty hot summer and I shall waddle and be uncomfortable, and for her to start kicking, because then it might start feeling like I’m not making it up. As it is right now I keep prodding my belly and turning all wide-eyed to Dave to say things like, “I’m pregnant! You knocked me up!” and I think he’s getting a bit sick of it. Or maybe he just doesn’t believe me yet.

Thing is, I’m noticing most of the ones I’m finding aren’t anywhere in the same place as me. In general the blogs I’m finding fit into three categories:

• dealing with paying off consumer debt (credit cards, student loans, etc), and therefore being frugal
• being frugal, either for the sake of it due to personal philosophy, or by necessity
• aggressively saving to fund retirement, and therefore being frugal

None of these really fit me:

• I don’t have consumer debt anymore; I did once, quite a lot, but that’s in the past. I do have debt, but it’s all real-estate related, and while I’d love to pay off my personal (non-tax effective) mortgage, I’m not interested in making it my sole focus (it would also take a bloody long time).
• I do like to be frugal, but mostly I prefer to be smart with money to cut costs so we can indulge in what’s important to us. I am quite frugal in many ways, but some people would disagree because we’re buying a PVR soon and spent $150 on a dinner with friends last week.
• And I shudder away from the “saving for retirement” goal. To me, “saving for retirement” has (probably unfair) connotations of having no life now so I will be safe at 65. Also, the bloggers are mostly American and concentrating on socking money away on Roth IRAs and 401(k)s. Our comparable thing in Australia is superannuation and while it’s good I don’t like the idea of locking money away where I can’t reach it for another 30 years. What if something bad happens and we need it? What if a really good investment oppurtunity comes along?

So I’d rather think of it as “wealth building”, which means learning more about investing in shares and property and the occasional fund, and gives a lot more flexibility. But finding blogs which match my situation is difficult and even when I do most of the commenters are in the other groups and I don’t relate to them, or their comments miss the point and are frustrating.

Here are some of my current favorite financial blogs:

Get Rich Slowly: JD is pretty much in the same position as me, what he calls the ‘third stage’ of personal finance but a lot of his readers are not, so his blog tends to be geared more towards them. Plus he’s American, so a lot of the advice he does give isn’t really relevant to me. Which is a shame, because he has a lot to share.

Dog Ate My Finances: Dog’s doing really well, and I like reading about her personal journey, simply because she talks about it, ups and downs and all. The comments are often frustrating though, a lot of her readers seem jealous that she’s doing so well when they’re not–or have been rubbed the wrong way by one of her comments–and therefore want her to fail, or are members of the ultra-frugal set and can’t relate to someone who has a higher tolerance for risk than they do.

Wealth is Good: Finally someone who writes about investing and wealth growing in a smart, non-conservative way (not that I am a major risk-taker). I love it.

Fru-gal: a recent find, and an Aussie living in London! So I can relate. I also like that she has a mix of topics, from iphone apps to specific savings tips to general musings on money and life and how to fit them together.

What I need is some more PF blogs that are in my same stage. No, what I really need is some Australian personal finance blogs, preferably with relevant advice for our situation, but if not then just some good personal stories that I can relate to. Hey I’ll take any blog if it’s got a good personal story, non-Australian, non-financial, whatever.

Have you got any for me?