http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/16/pf/nasd_military.reut/index.htm

This article reminds me of a funny story or sad story, depending on your world view. I have a close friend who did ROTC at an Ivy League school. He used to regale me with the amazing stupidity of some of the soldiers he’d encounter. (’Oh please sir, may I shoot at the deer with my M-16? How cool would that be?’ ‘No soldier you may not. That is a direct order.’) One of my favorites is a passing comment my friend made about having to take away soldiers’ credit cards and check books from them. When I asked why, it was because these guys had no idea how to handle their finances and didn’t know how to manage their money.

So this campaign and the suggested legislation are probably good things.

I ran some work last night, so I’m posting real time this morning.

All too often people avoid their finances out of fear. Out of the many finance books I’ve read. The one that struck the deepest chord with my fears was the 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, by Suze Orman. Unlike other personal finance gurus she really points out that each person has a relationship with money that affects their financial decision making.

As you read each chapter you read about a person and a story about their relationship with money. If you are familiar with different treatments of clinical depression you may know what Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is. One of its foundations is the idea of cognitive distortion and how a person’s mental thoughts reinforce their depression. As I read these anecdotal stories I realized that a lot of these people had cognitive distortions that affect their financial decisions. Let me make one up for you now that I’m sure you’ve heard coming out of the mouths of babes. “I’m so young that it doesn’t matter what I spend now. I can worry about that later.” If you ask me, that’s a classic avoidance statement and it demonstrates Minimization. My response is that there are many benefits to starting today, compounding interest being the first and greatest one.

How about another one? “I played the stock market once and I lost my entire investment. If I play the stock market I’ll just lose my shirt again, so I’m never going to invest in stocks again.” This one is a combination of two, Jumping to Conclusions/Fortune-telling and Magnification/Catastrophizing. My response to this is to say that education can help you make better investment decisions. There are stock-based mutual funds where the need to pick individual stocks is removed, therefore you can put your trust into a professional stock fund manager, diversify your portfolio and give stock investment another try. (Caveat here being that you do some research into the fund and its manager, etc. Don’t just throw a dart at a page and put 100% of your portfolio there.)

I watched a member of my family go through a pretty emotionally painful divorce and I cannot say that the subject of money wasn’t involved. My family member and their spouse had different attitudes and relationships with money and they just didn’t mix. How many couples fight about money because they weren’t on the same financial page? I know my boyfriend and I struggle our attitudes about money. We’re not at loggerheads but we aren’t quite moving in parallel either. Knowing your own personal attitude towards money and investment can help you overcome some of your fears and make better financial decisions. I was out shopping today and one of my friends commented that she spends less now that her boyfriend is changing her attitude. They’re about to get engaged and it sounds to me like they are actively discussing when and how to spend money. They’ve identified the spender and the saver and are comfortable with their roles.

Even if you don’t read Suze Orman, I encourage you to think about money, what it means to you, how you relate to having it/not enough of it, what its purpose is to your happiness, etc. It can help you turn the tide of your spending and saving by helping you see where you can change your attitudes to reach your financial goals.

Young And Broke has a great post about it. I can’t say it any better.

Malls are bad and I avoid them. Though I used to eat at a mall food court 3-4x a week at my last job, I rarely wandered the rest of the mall to walk off the calories. That’s just asking for trouble. Thank god my taste dictates Forever 21 and H&M off limits. Sometimes I see really cute stuff, but I fight the urge.

Cure your boredom! Best advice given. I read and knit a lot. I do spend a lot on yarn, but I buy yarn in lieu of beer, meals on the town, travel to far off lands, TV, DVD, MP3’s, makeup, shoes, jewelry. I am not bored. If I am, I know I can usually find a knitting group meeting somewhere in the DC metro area on any given night of the week. In fact, I’m usually double or triple booked for Wednesday nights.

I can break out my spinning wheel and turn on public radio for a few hours. (Old broadcasts of The Diane Rehm Showare my favorite to turn on.) I blog. I blog all night sometimes! Sometimes when I’m bored and see what a mess my apartment is, I clean it. Yes, I clean it because I am bored.

Ennui… Isn’t that why Madame Bovary had an affair in the first place? The girl should have stuck to her knitting instead.

I just noticed that although I posted about it, I never added it to my blogroll. I already had Consumerism Commentary and Free Money Finance. I noticed today how much I was drawn to All Things Financial a lot lately and felt I should add it it to my list. Well if I was going to do that, I should add the rest too. I do visit Blueprint for Financial Prosperity and Five Cent Nickel, but I don’t visit them quite as much. I find that their aggregated blog helps me visit their sites more often.

I have noticed that I am starting to going to PFBlogs.org as a first stop because I am getting a lot of different blogs at once and that’s definitely enhancing my enjoyment of what’s out there, and driving up traffic for folks. I haven’t noticed a perceptible bump in my own traffic, but I also don’t think about it a whole either.

As always, I remain dedicated to trying to be helpful to the average reader with my biased approach and constant struggle to manage debt and to build my net worth. Putting myself out there makes me more accountable to myself. I am using the sins of pride and vanity to enhance the virtues of frugality and prosperity. Go figure. I’ve outed my blog at work to my team and one or two others. It’s the personal interaction and openness that helps me on a daily basis. It reminds me that my blog isn’t just out there anonymously. I like the reinforcement that comes from my friend saying, ‘I saw that on your blog and thought it was useful.’

I can only hope that I stay useful and relevant and that my writing improves. Due to the nature of blogging mostly at night when I’m really tired, I think I ramble a lot.

I printed out my 1040 today and I just got a really funny feeling overwhelming me to check the math one more time. I prepare all my numbers on a spreadsheet before I key them into Adobe on my form. I was all set to staple everything together and place it into an envelope tonight when I decided to sit down once more and re-calculate everything I entered onto the form.

Good thing too. I caught an arithmetic error and went back to my spreadsheet and discovered my mistake. I had underreported my income by $1000.00 due to an errant minus sign. So even though this mistake reduces my refund by $200.00 or so, at least my form is accurate now and my refund shouldn’t be delayed for having an error.

Whew!

When that voice in your head tells you to check the numbers one more time, you should do it. For more evidence, read this article from BankRate.com.

I must have missed out a bit on the controversy surrounding the PFBlogs.org vs PFBlogs.com. However I will be endorsing PFBlogs.org here because they have listed my personal monument to my net worth, whereas my new-ish blog does not rate a listing at the *.com one. Besides, I don’t want my content taken for you to view Google ads through another site, I’d like you to visit me here. Your eyeballs are important to me and I appreciate all of my readers, especially because I know so many of you in real life and consider you my friends.

PFBlogs.org also has a more extensive feed list which includes many of my favorites. I tend to be selective about who goes in my blogroll because I want to make sure they are sites I am personally interested in visiting and not just a blogosphere mutual admiration society list. I do like trading links, but I’m kind of shy about asking other bloggers to place me on their blogrolls. I can only hope that these aggregators will actually generate traffic for me. I believe they will since I posted something about 30 minutes ago and I’ve already had 17 views. Not too shabby.

Sometimes late at night I will postdate a post because I don’t want to login early in the morning, to be fair, PFBlogs.org will tack on 2 hours to the posting time so that postdaters aren’t always jumping the queue. Please note that is my modus operandi which allows me to provide you fresh content on a close to daily basis and still avoid being a morning person.

Please choose to subscribe directly to my feed, or read me through PFBlogs.org!

ps - I’ve added Budgeting Babe to my blogroll today as well.

I mailed out the form today. It helps not to misplace it before you go on vacation.

Filling out your Federal tax forms at home works better if you have a printer with which to print them out. But I’ve gone this long without one, I’m not going to buy one now. I think I will do what I did in September and visit my neighbors and borrow theirs.

Last night I spent $9.01 on dinner. And I distinctly remember not liking the sandwich I ate as part of my dinner. I must remember to buy some bagels and keep them at work. That way I can snack on one before going out to my Wednesday night group and spend less on dinner while I’m at the cafe where we meet.

This week I read an article at Boston Gal’s blog. I really don’t want to be seen as a miser. I’m not extreme about my frugality, but I do wonder if I could live on 20% of my salary annually and save all the rest.

I found the link regarding how E-filing could trigger an audit. Find it here.

It’s not very scientific or definitive, but it does make a bit of sense if there’s a selection algorithm run upon electronic filings. Of course, IIRC the 1040-EZ is a form that the IRS scans and turns into an electronic file. I remember this because they tell you how to form your numbers and I draw a line through my 7, a loopy on my 2, and two circles stacked for an 8, which are hard for the optical readers. The 1040 and its related Schedule forms don’t look like obviously scannable forms, but they could be.

Either way, it’s a ritual for me to print and mail. Hopefully I can get this all done soon. I drive past two post offices on the right side of the road on the way to work. (Ok, one of them is directly across a busy 4 lane street, but I’m game for Frogger.)

My Money Blog also has a fantastic post called The Reverse Carnival of Money Mistakes. It’s excellent. PFBloggers are not paragons of financial virtue. We only aspire to it and hopefully we’ve learned from our mistakes.

This post stems from FMF’s post on bottled water. It started as a comment, but got really long so I posted it here instead.

Bottled water is also bad for your kids’ teeth. It’s not fluoridated like tap water is.

If you can’t stand the chlorine flavor of your tap water, let it sit for a few hours like you would for preparing a fish tank. The chlorine will volatilize out of it.

Also, BRITA/PUR filters help with the taste and with lead. I should know. I lived in DC at a time when lead was found in the water all over the city, even in the nicest part of town where I lived (Georgetown, of the million dollar homes). The City handed out BRITA pitchers to the effected homes (luckily mine was not).

I did a taste test for filtered tap water from my house to the reverse osmosis tap lines at work. I found that the cold tap reverse osmosis water tasted best. The hot tap from the same filter was the worst, and filtered tap from home was in the middle. I figured the heating element on the reverse osmosis machine made the hot water taste funny.

For the most part, I find that tap is safe and palatable in most places. If it’s not, make it colder, your taste buds have a harder time perceiving the flavors.

A great post by Jane Dough! I totally agree. With 5 years of serious emotional turmoil behind me, I know that I found a lot of piece of mind with living alone in my own apartment. I know I sound very paranoid in my blog about personal safety, but I actually live in a very safe neighborhood.

Let me take you back to 2003-2004. I was living in a group house in a posh section of DC, north of Georgetown. It was a gorgeous Tudor-style home next to the University Medical Center. One of my roommates was a medical student and there were a lot of other group homes in the neighborhood. (You could always spot the rentals by their unkempt yards.) While my roommates were really cool people, I actually really hated it because there were 5 of us and occaisionally I’d get shut out of the shower in the morning because there was only one for all of us.

The utilities were fairly cheap since there were so many of us splitting it up. But the general noise, the petty dramas of my roommates and the daily commute across the Key Bridge got on my nerves. I was actually going to stay there another year since the rent was sick cheap, but the landlord wanted to take away my closet in the hallway to expand the existing bathroom, and build a closet in my bedroom, thus taking away square footage and charging me more money.

I had always told myself that at the $700 price point, I’d consider getting a house and stop renting. And that’s what I did. I got myself a small condo that is well within my means on my new salary and a small stretch with my old one.

As I was negotiating my moving out date with my landlord, I told him what I was doing and he congratulated me. He said that out of all the things that he’d tried investing in, real estate was the best investment he’d made. He told me that I was absolutely doing the right thing by getting my own home. I look back and I am so glad that my landlord and my parents were so supportive of my purchase.

I can’t say I feel as though it’s a sign of making it or achieving some great thing in life because my downpayment was a generous gift from my family, but everyone agrees that having a place of my own has grounded me, settled me down and so many things in my life reflect that, the condo, my new job, my personal relationships. I think if I was still living with roommates, I’d be tearing my hair out and going out all the time. Now that I have a cozy home of my own, I’m so much happier.