Cash Flo Rida

I am high on the thrill of having created a cash-flow report for T's & my finances. Somebody please pour me a drink.

Look, it's snowing outside and I am still wearing my Grinch pajama pants. I have been coughing pretty much non-stop (though I *do* feel a trillion times better than I did earlier). There's not much else to do, except study Corporations or work on cover letters.

But the fact is that I am thrilled to be able to create a spreadsheet to track our finances, not just because I'm stir-crazy and delirious, but because I have been waging a one-woman lobbying campaign to have this capability for at least the last month. That's right. We've been engaged in a dirty war over money. Money, the dreaded m-word that is supposedly at the root of many marital dissolutions, has been causing me woes.

Here's the thing: T makes it all. I spend a bunch of it. But I don't make any. None. (Unless you count the $99 I earned doing mechanical turks in 2009.) And even though we are married now, we haven't done much to change our financial arrangement. Which is fine, because we've always had a pretty easy-going policy of what's mine is yours, etc. We don't keep track of who pays for what, or any of that stuff, because we realized long ago that it didn't really matter. We have a joint account for some of our expenses, but that stems mostly from the early days of our co-habitation, when we each had something to contribute. Back then, all our bills were paid out of said account, including groceries and date nights. And the rest of the money was each of ours to do what we wished with it.

Back in the day, I worked full-time and made a banked a good chunk of change. I put a lot of it in savings, which has allowed me to not panic for the first half of law school, as financial aid has been perpetually late in coughing up loan money and supposed grants for public interest students never materialized. It was a nice cushion while it lasted. Alas, the cushion has dwindled down to the dregs of my student loan money. In the meantime, T pays our bills, groceries, etc. I contribute my half to rent, pay my transportation costs, provide my own lunch money and generally spend out of my loan balance. But for the big, household stuff, it's all T.

I am so grateful for that. That cannot be overstated, and perhaps I should spend more time thinking of how awesome it is that I have a guy who is willing to bust his behind to make it rain up in this firetrap. Not only does he make sure the bills get paid (on time! something I never managed to do) but he also banked us a good refund for our taxes this year. T works full-time and he actually likes his job, when it's not totally stressing him out, so we're a lot luckier than many young folks these days. And even still, it often feels like we're hurting for cash. There's always the nagging voice in the back of our heads, saying we're not bringing in enough, or we aren't doing it right.

I never have a good sense of exactly how lucky, or how responsible, we are because I don't really pay attention. Most of the blame is on me for not asking. I don't worry about the bills because T pays them. I don't worry about savings (too much) because we long ago negotiated how much we were going to put into it each month. I don't worry about credit cards because we both stopped using them and we're paying off our respective debts. But I do worry if we're doing enough and we're doing it right. Call it my control-freakishness. Or call it me playing the part of a responsible young woman who wants to be prepared in the event of an emergency. I can see that they're two sides of the same coin.

So for a while now, I've been lobbying T to give me access to his accounts, so that I can track our spending. He has been reluctant to do so, for reasons I completely understand. I have a tendency to micromanage. I have a tendency to second-guess his decisions and insist that my way is the Right Way. We don't see eye to eye on all things related to financial-planning (who does?). But at the same time, both he & I recognize that I am good at some things.... like sorting things into boxes and making pretty little spreadsheets and crunching data. I like that stuff! And with the right data, I can create the right reports, which can help us to both see where exactly our money is going and what we can do about it.

After much haggling and "discussion", T and I came to a compromise. Instead of fully implementing a budget that we sketched out a while back, which would involve shifting a whole bunch of cash into our joint account and basically upheaving our current system, I am going to be able to track expenses through online access to all our accounts. Then I can match up what we ARE spending with what we MIGHT HAVE BUDGETED to spend. And with my cash-flow report (which I stole from my old job when I was stuck doing the CFR every day after they fired the Director of Finances), we can actually see how much money we really have... today, next week, next month!

Exciting!!!!

Hopefully, T will feel the same way. And hopefully, I can keep it up. Because if I do, I foresee an awesome wave of fiscal responsibility culminating in the greatest surf.....wait, that metaphor is going nowhere. Anyway, I feel smart and empowered and fiscally responsible today. Now where are my ladies Suze Orman and Michelle Singletary to pat me on the back?

growing up and down

just spent half an hour in bed bonding with my new husband. we had some loose leaf paper, a #2 pencil and a slew of bank accounts in list format. hawt, right? yeeeep. at 11:45 on a sunday night we decided to tackle the ol' albatross together. we now know who has what credit card balance, which of us has what investments where, and exactly how tall is the mountain of debt upon which my budding legal career is teetering.

other weekend fun included...
- watching a very drunk bachelorette lean on an unlocked door at a karaoke bar and collapse out onto the street, never to be seen again (her girlfriends re-surfaced later to dedicate a not-so-rousing rendition of "Another One Bites the Dust" to the passed out bride-to-be);
- wandering over to a law school party at nearly one in the morning, to find the whole place was wrecked, getting laughed out of a bar for not having my ID and then winding up at Best Woman's house to smoke and drink and watch the Golden Girls;
- falling asleep on the couch at 8 p.m. with 6 highlighters and a trust & estates casebook at my side, and bits of macaroni and cheese on my shirt.

sometimes i think i'm growing up. sometimes i think i'm growing down. i'm not sure there's a difference.

bobbly-head

doing my taxes feels like my recurring childhood nightmare of standing in the middle of a city street holding a giant parade float by a single string. at any minute, i could accidentally slip up and let go, and everything will fall apart. papers will fly everywhere, numbers will go in the wrong boxes, checks will never arrive and i will be left with the vague but unsettling feeling that i am not in compliance with the law. horrors.

seriously.

somehow, early on in our relationship, i explained this nightmare parade scenario to t, and we began calling it my "bobbly-head" dream.

(pause while i run through my Form 1040 checklist and try not to knock anything over.)

...and i can already see the problems. i only have one copy of my W-2 for one of my "employers." (same employer, different entity.) this is because they had my address wrong and the actual proper ADP direct-to-employee version never got to me, so all i have is a lousy photocopy. crap. attempt to do this all in one fell swoop has failed.

i am teetering on the edge here.

at least i'm supposed to get a damn good refund this year!

woo hoo!!

I gots a job-ah! I gots a job-ah!

*end song*

I had an interview with a local legal aid office that has a farmworker program yesterday. It seemed to go well. The interview ended earlier than I expected, which is usually either a very good sign or a very bad sign. In this case, I took away vibes that it had gone well. Went home, did very little reading and a lot of clipping from a stack of wedding magazines a classmate gave me, then decided to check my e-mail around ten at night, where I found... the offer!

So, I haven't even written them back yet, but I am going to. This is exactly the type of job that I came to school to do. It's a little weird in that they receive federal funding so are limited to the clientele they can serve (aka no undocumented people), but they are sensitive to that and partner with other organizations so as to not have to flat out turn people away. And I'll get to do safety and health stuff and work on bringing workplace rights to a vulnerable population of workers. I might even get to take a trip across this vast state to visit farms in parts of the country I've never visited before. With this news, how am I supposed to concentrate on the second half of my semester?

Oh, well. There are worse problems.

Life continues to move along. The hour that T and I spend together in the evenings before I get to work is usually consumed by board games, my favorite way to pass time. Last night we played Trivial Pursuit and I lost in a sudden-death pie-off at the end. We ate leftover beans for dinner, in a true homage to this recession and our meager "putting in our dues" income. Somehow, I managed to get T to say, indignantly, "Hey, I'm the one who gets to make Who Moved My Cheese? jokes." I don't even remember what that was supposed to mean.

Obviously, I am far too wired for 9:15, and it's going to be one of those days where I can hardly concentrate on getting work done. Oh well.

Crappy-ish

Today I lost my subway pass. Well... lost, or it was stolen. I'm convinced it was stolen, as I left it in my backpack at the gym and it was gone when I came back. On the other hand, my (broken) phone and my wallet were still in my backpack. However, the pass and my student ID were in a side pocket that was easily accessible. And I stupidly picked a locker without a lock.

I filed a police report. Blah-di-blah. I'm hoping the transportation people will hook me up tomorrow if I ask nicely. Otherwise, I'm out about $300. Damn!

Law school budget is starting to wear thin. I'm having a hard time adjusting from my former lifestyle of a regular, comfortable income with plenty of padding to one of transferring $350 (after rent) into my checking account each month. I had some extra cash in the checking when I started on this whole adventure, so I'm hoping that'll last me. But I'm not sure, given that my car insurance for my *garaged* car is $40/month, my phone will be about $70 and my health insurance will be about $80. Plus the money I contribute to our utilities, etc. Yeah. That's not much left over.

The way I'm living now, a public interest attorney salary will be a godsend if I survive these three years. Of course, that's not factoring in the student loan repayments. Whatever. It's late. I should be worrying about all the Torts I have to catch up on.

So what else? My other blog is thriving. I am having fun updating it each day. And I had a really nice evening blowing off school work and playing Boggle with T tonight. We also went over to a bar around the corner to watch the Eagles/Cowboys game with a friend who happened to be passing through town. It was a lively scene, complete with screaming, hooting and fist pumping. I love football season.

Gnu developments

On Saturday, I spent most of the day accounting for my money. Really, this is a poor start to a blog. To hear that I passed the better part of an afternoon crunching my banking data into expense report pie charts, one might think that I am fiscally intelligent and probably a nerd. The former is definitely not the case, the latter is debatable. Still. To quote my boss, "It is what it is."

Recently, I decided that I needed to contribute somehow to the financial management of our household. Given my knack for forgetting important deadlines, T pays all the joint bills. This leaves me feeling comforted (my credit score has gone up: thanks, T!) but also a bit imbecilic. So I decided recently that my job would be to enter all our spending data into a financial software program that we could track, and figure out how to save us some money.

Two weeks later, on Saturday, I finally finished that up, using an incredible program called Gnu Cash. It's an open-source software program that allows you to track all of your expenses, much like Quicken or Microsoft Money (I'm told), in different accounts and categories. Then, it shimmies up some reports for you, which is how I learned that all those coupons I've been religiously clipping on Sundays has brought down our average monthly grocery expense a whopping 15 dollars.

Having completed the task for our joint account, I ambitiously decided to tackle my personal checking account. Since I am always curious as to how my spending habits compare to those of my peers, I will gladly share a piece of the pie (charts) with you. Those precious dollar bills that remain after savings, rent, utilities, regular bills etc. can be roughly broken down into the following spending categories:

- Medical bills: 33% (!!!?!)
- Eating out: 25%
- Gas / Car repairs: 17%
- Big Brothers Big Sisters-related stuff: 6%
- Law School application stuff: 2%
- Miscellaneous crap: 17%

I need to stop getting sick because insurance clearly does not prevent one from spending hundreds, nay, thousands of dollars on medical expenses each year in copays, coinsurance, deductibles and prescription refills. Also, as one of these expensive doctors told me recently, I need to start paying more attention to what I eat, because those restaurant tabs add up to one big piece of pie.

On an entirely unrelated note, T and I took a Sunday drive today, in which we drove our street (Patterson Ave.) out of Richmond city limits, past Henrico, into Goochland, Fluvanna, Albemarle and (briefly) Cumberland Counties. Along the way, we passed through the town of Columbia, Virginia. It was a creepy little place with just a few rotting wooden buildings towering over the State Rte. 6 thoroughfare. We pulled off onto dusty roads that recalled both Deliverance and the dusty roads of Guatemala. The town, while desolate, was fascinating.