There weren’t too many since I didn’t have time much to read this week.

CNN/Money on clashing money styles for couples. Interesting article. Couples and money. Gee. I’d love to get to that state one day…

Madame X on valuing your real estate for your net worth calculation.

Because Simplicity in Kansas was the inspiration for Madame X’s post, I clicked through and found this article. Very interesting comments by the SIA economist. While reading the article I had a thought. I don’t have a lot saved for retirement, but I do sock away quite a bit more than I used to. However, I don’t pay down my mortgage very fast either. I think I would like to get to an equilibrium point soon where my retirement account and my home equity are roughly equal. I’m not sure how close I am to that now, but that seems like a good short-term goal to have. I’m going to bet that today my retirement isn’t as much as my equity. Something to ponder.

Free Money Finance on when to quit your job. There’s some good advice here. I’d also include if your job makes you cry every day, ask yourself why and compare your answers to this list. I had a job that made me cry every day because I hated it so much. I quit and realized how stressed out I had become working there. Quitting was the best thing I ever did.

LA Money Guy on ways your personal life can hurt your professional life. A good reminder. And if are wondering about Dooce.com, the site I mention in the comments, the pertinent articles is here. Read some of the stuff she writes before and after. She definitely advises people not to blog about work. Don’t get DOOCED!

Jonathan gets a CLUE. Remember when I wrote about CLUE while buying car insurance? Well Jonathan writes about how to check your CLUE report and getting it for free!

As a follow up to the free gas card I mention in the car insurance post, I did receive it! I carried it in my wallet for a few months without using it. Then when I got really, really, really sick last week, I gave it to my friend as a thank you for chauffeuring me to the doctor, the pharmacist and being all around nice to me while I was feeling crappy. He was headed out on a long road trip and I figured he’d actually use the card, since clearly I wasn’t going to use it.

Lesson here is self-explanatory. Um. At least I hope it is…

Great article on elder care/abuse and financial issues! I really worry about this sort of thing with my parents. I used to worry that I didn’t speak enough Korean and they would stop understanding English in their senility. I worry less about that now since my language skills are better and my folks have lived here long enough they use English all the time. Found through Feed the Drones

From Business Week

Bah! Just go read PFblogs.org! I’m not knocking the BW list, but y’all can go visit the aggregator and visit a wider variety of blogs, and not just for the young. But if you want to visit blogs for the Under 30 crowd, try the Festival of Under 30 Finances! I’m over 30, so you won’t find me there. Therefore, you know this endorsement rings true. Good luck to all of you out there still in those first 7 years of student loan repayment. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I promise, it’s not the headlight of the oncoming train.

Yes. I have two commenting systems. I put on Haloscan without understanding it well because I wanted to trackback. However, I don’t really get tracking back and doing the pings. (I don’t have time for all this. I just like to write!)

So yeah. Your friend Mapgirl. Heh. Dork.

Ask me about my WordPress conversion. HA!

Ah, so I did it. I picked up the bike, insurance, and title this weekend. Next weekend, a trip to the DMV to complete the transfer. After that, getting the permit. Somewhere in there I have to pick up one more piece of gear (overpants), because I already own my own gear. I’ll try to put together a tally after I get the pants figured out. But this definitely will go on my August net worth calculations as an asset! Oh boy, I cannot wait!

It’s a really clean bike. The guy who owned it treated it really well. His wife no longer wants to ride it anymore so she’s making him sell it. I think she was actually shorter than me. It’s a 2002 MZ RT125. It’s a very small cc bike, but it could really move when we opened up the throttle with about 285 lbs. on it.

The beauty of this bike is that it doesn’t make a small person feel like they have to have a lot of strength to manhandle it. The problem with the Honda Rebel 250, which is recommended for most short stature riders as a starter bike, is that it weighs about 350 dry, and feels super heavy when you sit down on it. I always felt like I had to start going to the gym to ride it. This bike is so light, I don’t have that issue at all. Dry weight per the manual is about 290! WOW! That’s crazy light.

MZ, being finely designed and crafted by Germans (East), did a great job stripping this bike to well-placed essentials. My friend is jealous that I have a real dipstick on my oil tank and not just a little window like his SV650. HA! Even so, it’s the small things like the placement of the switches and how far you have to move them to engage or disengage them. Doing small repairs on this bike myself will be pretty easy. Chain maintenance, oil tank/filter access, etc is all very reasonable. The valves could be replaced at home too, but I don’t ever think I’ll get that ambitious. I’m just happy to have matched spanners to adjust my own shocks.

This bike is a rarity, so I hope that it will retain some of its value. A lot of starter bikes hold their value since they can be sold to the next beginner, often for what was paid for it, less any maintenance or repairs done. (I love that it takes mostly stock Yamaha parts.)

Whee!

ps- If you want to leave an instantly appearing comment, use the comment link to the left. I moderate comments from link on the right, and today is a day I have to keep the nose to the grindstone.

I was inspired to ask this question by Tricia, but I’m my own victim of this. And I don’t have a husband to blame it on! (Exaggerating for comedic effect here, no offense meant to Tricia’s husband.)

So the question is:

How much of a balance do you leave on your checking account/s?

I have two checking accounts. I allow one to draw down to $50 because I rarely purchase transactions more than that off this account. It’s my discretionary spending account and it’s for lunches and gas mostly. The other account has my fixed expenses and the checks I draw are much larger, so I leave about $150. Anything over gets swept to ING.

Are you a sweeper? Non-sweeper?

NCN has today’s question of the day. I really liked this one, partly because I can’t remember the first thing because I’m so old! But the real reason I like this question is that the last thing I bought on credit was my recent surgery. I started to rack my brain for other things and realized that for the most part, I pay for stuff with my debit card now.

That’s a huge change for me. A year ago, I wasn’t paying for my life with my checking account. I was paying for it all on credit. Slowly, with little paycheck challenges and some automated savings, I’ve gradually shifted over to putting less on my credit cards.

Yes, you can make a change in your life! It may be slow and very subtle, but change does happen!

Who’da thunk it? I am slowly weaning myself off credit cards and paying more and more stuff with cash in the bank. I shock myself!

Jonathan ,
Jim, and Claire are reporting the demise of the Citibank Divident Platinum Rewards card. Bummer. I have this card too. The cash back was rather nice. My official notice came in the mail last night.

Is it time to move to Discover or the Citi Driver’s Edge card? Not sure yet. All I know is that I have a new Target card, and perhaps it’s the Sign of the Times…

After my first follow up with the oral surgeon, we planned out the second surgery. I asked if we could push it off till after the new year starts. And he said yes. YAY! That means more time to save! I can sink some more money in medical FSA next year now that I have a good idea of the cost. (His office assistant gives you a worksheet of all the costs laid out. It’s very clear and within about $200 of what you actually have to pay. How many doctors do that?)

Oh, and the follow up visit was FREE!

I’m looking at Jim’s article on Lasik, and following the Yahoo Finance link, you’ll see I was wrong about the medical deduction. You can only deduct the portion of medical expenses OVER the first 7.5% of your income, not the whole amount. So if you spent 9% of your income, you can only take 1.5% of it as a deductible amount. You have to eat the first 7.5%. This is why delaying the second surgery is worthwile for me.

Hooray! More time to save!

Kira asks, ‘What are you vices?’

Journey to Financial Freedom has yesterday’s, ‘Do you have any side income?’

Friday night I promised a girlfriend to help her shop for new clothes for work. We both work in IT so we get cut a lot of slack about our wardrobes. However, I’m at corporate HQ now, and so I actually still have to break out a suit on occaision. She gets to wear jeans and t-shirts if her laundry isn’t done. I am green with jealousy. That’s one way to be frugal about clothing.

While we shop we end up at Sears because I really want her to try the Lands’ End no-iron dress shirts there. She doesn’t like making a fuss over ironing and neither do I. I am determined to get her into a collared shirt out of sheer malice and avarice over her workplace dress code which allows her to wear a T-SHIRT. But these shirts are truly fantastic. There’s a coating on them which makes them a little stiff and wear very well, and require NO IRONING. I’ve left them in the dryer for an hour and still had no wrinkles in them. They say they last for 50 washes, and it’s easily more than that. I’ve had one for about 3 years now and the only finishing it needs is a bending down of the collar tips since it doesn’t have collar stays. (And why are brass ones unavailable these days? I had to go high and low and finally end up at a Nordstrom’s to get some for my dad for Father’s Day one year. Wretched!)

But I digress. We landed at Sears after about 2 hours in the rest of the mall. This trip was not to be for me. But while there, I see jeans on clearance and for some reason I get it into my head that I ought to try a pair or two to see if there are any cuts that I like. My last experience buying denim made me very, very angry, a la the Hulk. I do not think the slutty Britney-cut on jeans flatters me even I am apparently the right size for it.

I pick out two pairs and try them both on. They both fit nicely, but differently. One is relaxed fit and the other is a slimmer cut. I could buy either, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t supposed to be buying anything! I was just here to help my friend! I swear! Well, I look at the prices and my friend convinces me that $15 for one pair and $25 for the other is pretty good since they’re originally far more than that. $40 bucks for 2 pairs of nice fitting jeans is not bad. I see her point and agree that it’s still a good deal.

Meanwhile, she’s got 3 types of shirts and we select various colors since they’re going to be $10-14 each for nice Pima cotton t-shirts. We trot over to the checkout and the nice man behind the register scans the first pair of jeans for me. I see on the read out that the $15 pair is now $9! WHOA. GET OUT. He scans the second pair. $11 bucks! NO WAY. I’m getting two pairs of jeans for $21.00 including taxes. NICE.

My friend and her armful of shirts? We think she’s going to spend about $130 on all of it. Nope. Because she’s buying multiples of the same shirt, some of them go as low as $7.50 after the third shirt is rung up. Her purchase of 10 shirts? $88.00.

I tell the guy at the checkout that I usually just shop the catalog and he says that it’s actually better to come into the stores first since that’s where the clearance stuff ends up, even from the catalog. I don’t know how true that is, but I am definitely going to start going to Sears more often so I can get my good deals on Lands’ End clothes without paying for shipping!