Not My Mother

I’ve just discovered that since I turned off comments moderation, wordpress has stopped telling me when I have comments. I’m sorry! I don’t mean to ignore anyone and I’m really grateful for you taking the time to comment.

I’m sick of my theme and need to find a new one. (That tiny writing! Argh!) I think the ability to reply to comments definitely needs to be on the list of features.

As you were :-)

That can’t be right, can it?

I’ve been trying to work out what’s changed and really our use of water is no different. (It will be, soon, when I go on maternity leave. Eek!) But, this house is about 20 years old while the last one was only about 6 and built with different standards and with newer, more efficient appliances. I think a lot of it can come down to that:

• the toilets in the last house were water efficient, while these ones… aren’t. They do at least have a half-flush option, but it seriously uses more water than the previous toilets’ full flush.
• evaporative cooling: 18 months ago we installed a system in the last house which only used 10 litres of water per session and didn’t dump it until an hour after you turned it off, in case you changed your mind. Old systems are much less efficient and also dump the water regularly while running. I’m not sure how old the system is in this house, but it’s not new, and it’s been a hot summer.
• we have an automatic watering system that comes on at midnight for 15 minutes, twice a week. This is new to us and might need to go.

Other than that, we’re using the washing machine, dishwasher and showers the same as we used to. So can all of this really add up to an extra 200 litres usage per day? It’s hard to believe. So I guess that also leaves leaks in the system, and errors in the bill. We have just been given a new water meter, maybe something went wrong there. It’s all stuff to investigate.

We do have the option of making changes like installing newer toilets and hooking the automatic sprinklers to the water tank. There are companies around that can come and do an assessment of your home and suggest ways you can improve the energy efficiency, for example by changing insulation or windows, or installing solar hot water systems or panels. A friend recently had this done and it’s something I’ve been meaning to do. The Australian government also has a Green Loans program where you can borrow up to $10,000 interest free over four years to help fund the changes. We should qualify for that, assuming it doesn’t run out of money soon.

Ah, the joys of owning a slightly older home. On top of this I want to get an electrician in to do an inspection and a few odd jobs, as it turns out we don’t have a trip switch on the fuse box and the spa may not be connected properly. Plus we’ve got some vines heading into the roof space, with possibly some damage there. These are all just little nagging maintenance issues that are annoying and I don’t know how much they’ll cost to sort out, which is a bit stressful right about now.

I suppose this is where some people would start the argument for renting instead of owning, but I wouldn’t want to go back to renting. Right now we’re in a home that we love, where we can change anything we want and are not at the mercy of shonky landlords. No one cares if we put up a shelf or paint a room or let the garden go. We can fix our wireless internet problems (the house is very long, and the wireless range doesn’t cover the whole of it) by wiring everything up instead. All of this adds up to a lot of freedom. Besides, I like nesting and making a home, and I like the idea of being able to change things we don’t like and improve them. We can see ourselves being happy in this house for 10 years or more, so the idea that we can make it just the home we want is pretty exciting. Is it the absolute best frugal financial decision? Probably not, but it makes us happy and it matters to us. We can be extra frugal in other areas instead.

Anyway, if we were renting this house we’d still have to pay the water bill, and we wouldn’t be able to do anything about it :-) I guess I’ve just got another fun home project on my list now. You know, in all my upcoming spare time.

I’ve been thinking about it though, and I’ve decided to pause the “emergency fund” at $15k for now. This is mostly a mental thing. Bytta at 151 Days Off recently wrote about whether you should have a cash reserve or an emergency fund. She says labelling it an “emergency fund” would “plant in your mind how 1001 disastrous events could unfold in your life, hence unwittingly or subconsciously attracting them”. Instead she suggests calling it a “cash reserve” as it has business connotations of a fund to cover expenses beyond the usual expenses, and is also open to being used for new opportunities.

I’ve been thinking about it and I think she’s right. Also, I have a mental block about using the emergency fund – it has to be a real emergency before I’d want to tap into it, and I’d hate to see that number go down. The thing is we’ve got a lot of unknown expenses possibly coming up this year, some of which include:

• we don’t really know how much the baby’s birth will cost. We’ll be out of pocket at least $800 for the hospital stay (that’s our excess/deductible), and it’s possible there’ll be some further bills related to the obstetrician that are not yet budgetted for.
• we need to switch cars soon, selling Dave’s beloved RX-8 and getting a used Volkswagon Passat wagon instead. From the prices on carsales.com.au we think we can pretty much do a direct switch but I’m prepared for a couple of thousand dollars extra needed there.
• I get maternity leave paid at 50% of my salary for 24 weeks and we can live quite comfortably in that, but that leaves at least 16 weeks where I’ll not be bringing in an income. (We’re hoping Dave can take paid parental leave for the last 12 weeks.) We need some cash reserves to cover that time.

See, none of those are emergencies, so I would have a really hard time paying for them out of the emergency fund, plus how not-fun will it be to see the numbers going down! So instead, our excess funds are now divided into 3 branches:

I could actually pay it directly off our mortgages and redraw it later if needed, but there are some Australian taxation issues which make this less than ideal, so instead it stays in our bank account which has a 100% offset against the mortgage. (This is quite interesting for Aussies, so I’ll talk more about this another day.)

I’ve been doing this since we settled on the mortgages at the end of October, and there’s about $2,600 in this fund already.

This is where the “unassigned” portion of our salary now goes, ie what’s left over at the end of the pay cycle when we’ve budgetted for everything and any unexpected expenditures have been paid. Currently we’ve got a healthy $1500 per fortnight unassigned but at the end of this month it’ll go down to more like $400 when my pay is halved for maternity leave.I’ve only just started this bucket since the emergency fund is complete so it’s not got anything in it yet. Actually, it’s at -$400 because we withdrew $1000 to open an investment account (which is something else Bytta talked about and again, I’ll say more about soon). This is maybe what other people call their emergency fund, and where all those unexpected expenses I listed above will come from. Hopefully we’ll have enough to cover our needs and the time when I’m not earning, plus we’re due a fairly good tax refund when we get around to filing, but if not then I have the option of cashing out some long service leave which will cover us fine.

(To be honest, the only reason this is separate from the extra mortgage repayments is that I like to see where each bit of money is coming from separately. It feels tidy, but they’re all there to be used if necessary.)

So that’s it. My cash buffer: Real Emergency Fund, Extra Mortgage Repayments, and then our Cash Reserves. I’m feeling really good about this, it’s only a few months since we bought our latest house on the spur of the moment and I had quite a bit of anxiety about how we’d manage with the baby, and yet so far it’s working out fine and I’m feeling comfortable about the rest of the year.

That doesn’t mean I’m letting Dave buy any more gadgets though!

We went home to visit my mother on the weekend. It did not go well. The same arguments, the same utter conviction that I am completely wrong. I can cope with us having different viewpoints on topics, even when the topic is our relationship. It’s inevitable, we’re coming from opposite sides, of course we see it differently. But I would like to discuss it, find out why she thinks one way and explain why I think another, and she won’t. I am just wrong. More, I am just bad, and everything that is wrong is down to me.

(And then the screaming starts.)

I spent years believing her. I still do, really. I think I’m bad and worthless and I can’t imagine why Dave wants to be with me. He’s a smart guy, right? Why is he still here? I must be fooling him somehow. Then he says, I’ve lived with you for the past five years and she barely knows you, who do you think is right? And I almost believe him. Almost.

It was so much easier when we lived overseas.

I’m feeling pretty sad right now. But I’ll be okay in a bit.

The last few weeks have been All Baby, All the Time. Now I’m 31 weeks and my feet are getting further away it’s getting hard to ignore that there will be an actual baby at the end of this. And not just as a hazy something that might happen in 2 years, like I’ve always thought, but in, like, two months. The way I procrastinate, that will be here next weekend.

So there’s been a fair amount of lying awake in the middle of the night fretting about things while someone does star jumps in my belly and tries to get her feet up over my ribs.

Things are moving. The nursery has been painted and we’ve been researching and getting the list together of things we need. We did our hypnobirthing course over the last couple of weekends, and it was brilliant. Beforehand all I really knew was that I’d learn techniques to stay calm and relax during labour so the fear was removed, and Dave would learn things he could do to help me, and things he could say so he didn’t piss me off. But it was so much better. We learned what actually happens physically during labour, which helps to understand the sensations you are feeling, and also how fear and tension interrupt that process, and therefore why relaxation is so beneficial. And then we spent the rest of the time learning relaxation techniques and visualisations to help. And Dave is instrumental in the whole thing. Far from just learning how to pat my back in a way that won’t make me want to rip his head off, he learned how to put me in a state of deep relaxation very quickly, and how to keep me there with gentle massage and affirmations. Then we watched some videos of some hypnobirths, which just underscored how different the birth process is to what you get from media and people’s horror stories, and talked about the kind of things that are useful to put in our birth plans.

I think it’s really easy to be sceptical about this sort of thing. I still feel a bit embarrassed and hippyish talking about “hypnobirth” because it sounds all sorts of flakey. There’s another system called Calmbirth which comes from the same theory and is very similar, but with slightly different techniques. Our instructor is currently studying to become qualified and even she said she was looking forward to it because the name doesn’t have the same connotations of swinging watches and clucking like a chicken.

But it really does feel effective. And really “hypnotism” is really only putting your brain into a deeply relaxed state, like meditation. Anyway, I’m really glad we did it. It’s a really great technique for helping me relax, and like Dave told our instructor, “everything’s better when Nicky’s relaxed.” And if nothing else, the classes and our regular practise sessions are helping us get closer and for me to trust Dave. I don’t feel like birth is a great unknown thing I’ll be enduring on my own, I feel confident that I can do this, and probably very well. In fact, I’m almost excited about doing it, and about the baby that we’ll have afterwards.

*

Here’s something I’ve not told many people: I’ve been dreading being a mother. It’s not something I ever really yearned for. Well, maybe in my early 20s, but back then it was because that was sort of what everyone expected you to do, not necessarily what I wanted to do for myself. When I first married back in my mid 20s I’d have little fantasies about having a family, but I soon realised that the me I was picturing in those happy little fantasies wasn’t me at all. I was controlling, and unhappy, and prone to deep pits of depression. Plus all those times mum would spit, “you’re just like you’re father,” to end an argument, they stuck. How often do you need to hear that before you believe it? He was a horrible man. I still have nightmares. And my mum, well, she’s not exactly the best parent either. I’m bound to be like one or the other, so why the hell would I want to perpetuate that?

Then I got divorced and moved overseas, and then a few years later I met Dave. And I told him I didn’t want kids and he was fine about it. Then one day he said, “I think I’d make a good dad,” and I knew he was right. And then I realised that in my journey I’d changed. I was happy, I was at peace. I was in a situation where I could see myself being a good mother, and so I agreed in theory that having a family would be good. You know, in a couple of years.

And then I got pregnant, and it was really exciting, but it still seemed unreal that there’d be a baby. But like I said, suddenly it’s dawned on me that everything is changing and I suddenly thought, what the hell am I doing? I’m 38 years old. I love our life. What if I’m a shitty parent? What if I’m stressed and disorganised and everything is a struggle? What if all the sleep deprivation puts me back into depression, what if I do end up like my mother? What if every day is a financial struggle and we end up miserable? This is for years and years and years, it’s not like I can back out of it, everything is changing forever. What if we break what is good about us?

So yeah. It’s not been good. Not all the time, just occasionally, and it’s not something I’ve wanted to talk to Dave about because I don’t want him to feel like he’s pushed me into this. But enough that it’s been sitting at the back of my mind and taking any excitement away.

But now, I don’t know. After doing the hypnobirthing class, I feel calm inside. Serene. I feel like I can give birth, and that I will have a connection with this little one who is currently connecting vigorously with my kidney. If I think about having a toddler or a 7 year old or god help me a teenager I have palpitations again so now I just pull it right back to newborn, which I can pretty much cope with, and trust the rest of it to luck and positive visualisations.

Maybe it’s just because I’m doing affirmations and listening to my relaxation tracks, but hey. If that’s all they do for me, then I think they are a success.

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?

So this morning I had to go to the pathology place to do a Glucose Challenge. That  sounds like an episode of Iron Chef (special ingredient Shu Ga), but it’s not as much fun. It’s a first check done at 28 weeks gestation which measures your levels of insulin to see if you’re at risk of developing gestational diabetes. If your results aren’t good you have to go in for the more formal Glucose Tolerance Test, which takes longer and needs more blood draws, and generally sounds unpleasant.

I wasn’t looking forward to this, partly because I kind of forgot about the test and have pretty much lived off mince pies and toblerone for the past week, and partly because my obstetrician made it sound so enticing.

“They’ll give you a drink that’s sickly sweet,” he said as he printed out the form. “It makes some people throw up. Do sweet drinks make you feel sick?”

“I don’t think so, I’m usually fine with sweet things,” I said, thinking of how I’m singlehandedly funding the social club at work through the chocolate cupboard.

“It will be like cordial,” he warned.

“Oh I love cordial.”

“Undiluted cordial?”

Well, who the hell can answer that question? I said something about thinking I’d be fine. Afterward Dave asked my I didn’t tell him I could eat a whole bag of jelly bellies in one sitting, but I didn’t think he needed to know stuff like that.

In the end it wasn’t so bad. The drink was lime fizzy, a bit like Gatorade. I’ve had worse cocktails. The only problem was having to skull such a large glass of it. Then I sat around in the waiting room for an hour or so. After about ten minutes the sugar rush hit; it was massive but again, no worse than some self-inflicted ones. It made me feel a bit weak and I wanted to lie down. By the time she called me to take blood I was pretty much back to normal. She warned me I’d feel tired afterwards but I actually feel pretty perky. Maybe I should have one of those drinks every day. Better than Berocca!

Anyway, I’m hoping the results will come back okay and I won’t have to do the glucose tolerance test. You have to fast for that one and it takes three hours, and those waiting room chairs aren’t comfortable enough to be doing that. Also, if I do develop gestational diabetes I’d have to give up pasta, and that’s just mean.

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.

Still, it’s a lovely surprise, even if my statement says I’ve got unpresented cheques (unlikely, since I’ve always had direct deposits done), and that Dave’s dividends are supposed to go to the account that he closed a couple of months ago. Oops.

*

Christmas was a great success. Everyone had a lovely time (or at least lied and said they did), and I got by with the minimum of screaming matches with my mum. We got some lovely pressies too. My favorite was the complete boxed set of Friends DVDs from Dave. When we lived in London Friends was on about 4 times a day on various channels, and during my 2004 Summer of Despair before I met him, I got in the habit of watching every single showing. So after that it was a joke that Friends was always on. But here, it isn’t! So he bought me the DVDs so I can watch them while nursing the baby, and I cried because really, he is the most thoughtful person. I got him a book on forbidden Lego models and half a Crumpler bag for work (the other half was his family Kris Kringle gift) and he was happy too.

Mum stayed with us from Christmas Eve through to Sunday when we drove her back to my home town, and it was mostly okay. Our relationship is… frustrating, is the best word I can come up with to describe it. Frustrating, for many different reasons and for faults on both our sides. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. It’s hard to explain without giving you the full story but the full story would probably take up the whole internet so it will have to wait. Anyway, we had a few issues on Christmas day, but afterwards we were mostly okay and Saturday was actually successful. And then she went home :-)

Yesterday (Monday) was Boxing Day holiday here and we went to see Avatar in 3D, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, and then we went to Myer and bought a Dyson handheld vacuum cleaner. I have been lusting after one of these for ages, we really need one because of the budgie and the new baby and I just don’t want to have to haul the big vacuum out every day. It has a power head! Myer only had it 15% off, but we also had a bunch of reward gift cards that have been hanging around for months, so we ended up getting it for $200 instead of $349. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant as well.

And then Dave’s sister and her boyfriend came over and we had a BBQ and played a couple of games of Ticket to Ride until midnight, and now I’m exhausted and I don’t want to see a single other person for a week at least.

I hope your weekend was as successful!