Since the ceiling needs repair, I figure I should do the entire bathroom. I thought maybe it would cost $5K, but after talking with a few people, I need to budget closer to $7K. I suppose this is a very salient lesson that everyone needs an emergency fund. Say 3-6 months of take home pay, which of course would cover the repairs. Unfortunately, my emergency fund has only about $1.5K in it.

In desperation for cash, I looked at all my options here. I have credit available on my HELOC and on my credit cards. I have a few CD’s expiring, which I was going to liquidate anyway to pay down debt. But since there is an emergency here and now, I’m going to use them to fund the repair.

With construction, you usually have to pay a deposit of some sort to get the work started. In my case, the earliest construction can start is in another week. The work will take approximately 10 days, taking me to early May.

In looking at my cash flow and available credit, I decided, rather sadly that I cannot attend my friend’s wedding in Boston this month. There’s just no way I can find a hotel room under $200 a night anywhere near the festivities or near the hotel where my best friend and her husband are staying. I’m looking at $1000 for just hotel and rental car alone at a time where I need the $1000 for something else.

I have balance transfer checks coming to my house all the time for a promotional rate less than 2% APR. Unfortunately, these BT’s have a fee. A friend asked me if that fee was capped out but reading the fine print, I couldn’t find any mention of a cap. I called the customer service line and asked about a cap. However the representative said he couldn’t change the BT fee. Instead he offered to change the rate from 1.9% to 1% APR after looking at my sterling payment record. It’s the best he could do, but I’ll take it.

Now the trick here is that I’m sitting on $5K borrowed for 1% APR. Do I pay off my 11.99% APR credit card balance of $4K only to ring them up further as the construction work progresses, or do I hold onto this wad of cash and wait to pay it out to the contractor? (It’s going into an account that doesn’t bear interest so there’s no arbitrage going on here and there isn’t enough time to move it around and take advantage of that sort of thing unless I’m paying off the credit card.)

The last $2K I need, I figure can come from liquidating all of my savings accounts and my next two paychecks. The problem now is that I’ve shot my 2008 debt reduction goals to pieces.

I’ve been sighing a lot this week. Life. It’s what happens to you. Dealing with it can suck, but I look forward to having a shiny new bathroom with better lighting in the shower and for the mirror when I put on make up.

Luckily for you, this week, several PF bloggers have Emergency Fund posts.
Five Cent Nickel: On building an emergency fund
Get Rich Slowly: Learning to love his emergency fund
Plonkee: On why they’re no fun

This cute little restaurant has charming original artwork decor, granite tabletops, and little jade plants in white pots sitting on each table. The menu is gourmet, but not inaccessible. The service was friendly and nice. Though this place specializes in wines and holds wine tastings on Wednesday nights, we went for Sunday brunch. We walked in last-minute at 1:30, though they stop brunch at 2pm. The place was empty save for a family of 5 at one table that was clearly enjoying themselves with a little champagne and dessert.

I was in the mood for a chicken sandwich with a nice mustard, but the mushroom-asparagus-goat cheese omelette caught my eye. I had it with a side of bacon. The asapargus was sliced on the bias and very tender. The mushrooms were a mix of button and I think cremini and/or shitake, very meaty with just the right tang of goat cheese. The home fries served with it were a little crisp/crunchy on the outside, but nice and moist on the inside served with ketchup. I found myself picking at them till the waiter took my plate away because they were so yummy. I think the only thing missing might have been a little onion or garlic on either the omelette or the potatoes. Perhaps they were lightly seasoned so as not to compete with a glass of wine?

Actually we skipped wine. We had been out the night before for a birthday party and alcohol was off the menu for us. Though the wine list was great ranging from $6 wine by the glass to a $100 bottle from Italy (A Barolo I think). It has a lot of appealing wines by the glass, and despite the name, not all the wines featured were from California. I was really pleased though that they had Domaine Chandon champagnes. They’re some of my favorites, and the happy family’s mother asked for hers with a strawberry and they poured a glass of it for her garnished with a strawberry.

Boyfriend had what was by far the best French toast we’ve ever had in our lives. Though I cannot eat strawberries, he cut me a little piece that had a dab of strawberry sauce on it. It was divine. Thick 2″ slices of French bread, soaked in egg custard (that’s what Alton Brown calls it), fried, then arranged on a plate with sliced strawberries with strawberry sauce and fresh chantilly cream. No extra icky confectioner’s sugar, just pure freshness for spring. Delicious. My mouth still waters remembering it.

BTW, he got a side of sausage and I got a side of bacon. Mine was nicely crisp, just the way I like it, but I’ll be honest. I prefer single slices that aren’t stuck together. That makes for a bummer because then you end up crunching it up with your fork to get a bite size piece and it makes a mess. Stupid, but honestly, they can’t cook single slices of bacon? It’s not like their kitchen was super busy. Of course, this is nitpickery and never a dealbreaker.

What is a deal breaker is the pricing. Part of why we skipped on their appealing menu of wines by the glass was the cost of our entrees. In the neighborhood they are located, they are definitely on the higher side. Boyfriend and I agreed that we couldn’t eat brunch here every week because of the price, but that we would gladly be be regulars if it wasn’t quite so expensive. We’ll probably still go there once a month for a nice treat if we can get there before 2pm. (We’re late risers.) The manager asked us how our meal was and we raved about the French toast. He invited us to come back around sometime for dinner, which I think we definitely will do. I know I will try to make it out on a Wednesday night for a wine tasting. And the service throughout the meal was good, except at the end when boyfriend ran out of water and no one came around to refill his glass. That’s ok. I just let him drink mine, but if the day had been warm and I had been thirsty, that oversight would have been much more noticeable.

Total for brunch, two vegetarian entrees, two side orders of breakfast meat and tip was $37.00 and change. This does not include any beverages other than water.

Last night we met at Fado in DC. It’s an Irish bar down near the Verizon Center aka The Phone Booth. I was reluctant to wear a hat so people could recognize me, but James from DINKS Finance convinced me that a hat was essential so I wore my Washington Capitals camouflage hat. CleverDude just calls me anyway and then inadvertently plays hide and seek with me at the metro station. It was kind of funny to the casual observer. We were wandering around a huge pillar keeping ourselves just out of view of the other person.

Debt Hater picked the bar and I actually liked it a lot! It was a bit loud, but we were able to get a large table for all of us and their mini-burgers came with fries and tasty mustard. I walked out of there $22 lighter for a light dinner and 2 Boddington’s pints, but it was well worth it. Yesterday, I REALLY needed a drink.

I hadn’t seen Mrs Micah since Plonkee’s visit last year. Nor have I seen HC from One Big Mortar Board or Donna Jean from The Weight of Money in months. We also had some new faces appear, which is always nice. J from Budgets are Sexy and Jaylin from You Are Not Your Wallet joined us. I won’t tell you who had the faux hawk ala Capitals’ defenseman Mike Green, but it was pretty awesome.

If you are in the DC area, email me and I’ll add you to the happy hour list. They’re fairly impromptu and they don’t always have beer. (HC mentioned fancy hot chocolate somewhere instead. YUM!)

As of Monday, the leak in the wall was found and repaired. The plumbing company my HOA uses sent two different plumbers onsite to fix the drainage pipe from the kitchen of a unit two floors up and one unit over. Absolutely nothing was going down the drainpipe and all of it was going out the hole and down the walls for 4 floors. EEK.

What does this mean? This means my HOA’s insurance policy for the entire building can pony up the entire cost of the problem, or else split it with the unit directly above mine. And they can cover the moisture abatement problem that I can tell is an issue from the yucky smell in my apartment.

I have decided that someone is going to pay me the $1450 claim amount written up by my claims adjuster. Either way, the damage to my ceiling is the worst of any unit that I have heard so far.

All I am waiting for now is a full written estimate from the contractor I would like to use. I did ask the handyman belonging to the landlady upstairs who came in and also did a repair estimate. He gave me a ballpark $6-7K for the entire job and a repair cost close to that of my claims adjuster, but I got a shady feeling from him for two reasons. 1. He didn’t really want to commit himself to a paper estimate of any kind. BAD. 2. He was pretty reticent. I wasn’t sure if he was really listening to what I was saying about my desire to balance value with decor. This is my permanent home and I would like it to be nicer than your basic cut-rate rental unit. But maybe one day, I will rent it out.

I asked a friend of mine about a bathroom remodel he did and the cost. He gave me a figure in line with with the handyman’s verbal quote. Too bad it’s all more than I want to spend. But alas, I don’t get a choice here. It means that I need to adjust my budget and expectations.

SIGH. Where to find $6-7K?

The ceiling caved in on my bathroom about a week ago. My friend had been staying there and she didn’t notice anything funny. I never got a call that there was something going on. Instead, on April 1st, I went to my apartment to do my taxes from home on my Quicken installed desktop. All was well when I left the house to go stay at my boyfriend’s house that evening.

Later that week, I come home and there is a note on the door dated April 2nd from the unit below mine. There’s water damage coming from my apartment and he wants to talk to my insurance company. Well I check the kitchen first since that was the source of some prior water problems when I first moved into my house 3+ years ago. Nope. Nothing. It’s dry as a bone.

Then I walk into the bathroom, and my jaw drops. I see the ceiling has caved in completely onto my toilet. Not good. I have a 2 foot square hole in the ceiling. There are about 3 layers of drywall and plaster fallen everywhere. I can tell that the floor has been soaked and dried up already because the bathmat has some staining on it and feels slightly damp, but isn’t wet.

Over the last week, I’ve been struggling to deal with it. I am now imposing myself on my boyfriend’s hospitality and it’s bugging the crap out of me. I really just want to be at my own house. I love my place, but this is a little too much for me. The landlady upstairs is taking care of the ceiling repair, but get this, there is another leak in the building that is still causing a problem!

Because of my asthma, I don’t clean up dusty stuff. I just avoid it and pay someone to do it. That’s always cheaper than an ER visit. My boyfriend did the clean up for me and while he was taking stuff to the dumpster, he left the toilet lid down and then I heard drips coming from the hole in the ceiling! YIKES! The leak was supposed to be fixed!

So now it’s being all referred back to the HOA to find the damage. It’s in multiple units and the origin is still not found.

At this point, I think the landlady upstairs will reimburse me for the ceiling repair for my unit, but I’m going to tear up the whole bathroom and remodel it just in case I want to rent it out. And if I’m going to do that, then I have some other things I’d like to do as well to the unit.

I’m going to have to stare at my cash flow for a while and figure some stuff out. UGH. Who needs this?

PS - I ran into Debt Hater this morning on the way to work!

Basically if you are a single person with student loans and no mortgage, taxes are a breeze. Heck add on an IRA and they are still pretty darned easy.

When you have a blog business and a mortgage and significant things to keep track of, they are still easy. When you have multiple streams of income, that’s when it starts to get annoying for me.

J. Savings of Budgets Are S.e.x.y asked me if I sought help for doing my taxes or if I used a program.

Honestly, as long as you are organized, you don’t need help doing your taxes. I have used Turbo Tax in the past because I am a Quicken user, but I really didn’t like it. I felt like I had to hand-correct or override a great many things with the program. For 2007 taxes, I went back to spreadsheets and Quicken reports for filling out my taxes.

Caveat here is that I make a living writing accounting reports. I am used to looking at the world in monthly and quarterly statements, so I get a kick out of pulling reports for my personal expenses. The main thing is really how you categorize them throughout the year. I pulled my expenses and found that I was really lazy in making categories for myself. I don’t really have ‘Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge’ taxable income and expense categories set up, therefore, I had to comb through some of my other categories to get the right numbers.

If you can read, you can do your own taxes. The biggest annoyance for me was having to figure out if I owed AMT. Just doing an additional worksheet was irritating, but the IRS designs the tax forms to be simple word problems a 5th grader could do. “If this, then that”. The challenge is your judgement during the process. Is your home office deductible? What about your dinner bill when you meet a bunch of PF bloggers and talk shop? But don’t fret, the IRS offers you much guidance with Publications about taxes. And if you still can’t figure it out, then go ask a professional. But most of it is pretty straightforward.

PS - The final tally on taxes was ~$1481.00, or about $100 bucks plus change every month. Still not enough for me to feel comfortable adjusting my withholdings. Hooray for procrastination and putting an emphasis on my day job! (There is something else major that got in the way, but I’ll write about that later this week.)

Ugh. I hate doing my taxes. It’s just gotten more complicated over the years since I started taking itemized deductions and deciding to run this blog as an actual business with income. At any rate, I finally started them so I can file them this this week.

Preliminary result? ~$999.00 refund.

I know many folks pooh-pooh getting a refund, but I figure for <$1000 refunds, it's not worth adjusting my witholdings for a measly extra $41.25 per paycheck. The enforced savings does me good, because we all know, I'd just go to dinner with that money in my hand. Start talking $3000 refunds at $125 per paycheck and then we'll talk.

As it is, I should have filed sooner since I could use the money to pay VA state taxes. I dread that I might owe some this year, but I haven't done them yet to find out. I'm lucky. VA has a tax filing deadline a few weeks after the Feds. That's because the VA state return is contingent upon what you report to the IRS. Yippee!

Why did I finally do it? Because I read Tired But Happy’s post about her taxes and saw that I had better file mine if I wanted it processed by April 15th to get the stimulus package. Oh well. $600 bucks slipped right out of my hands. Que sera sera. It would have gone to debt repayment anyway.

All season long, I’ve had hockey tickets I couldn’t use. Generally I liked to sell the tickets off in pairs at cost. I calculated that for my section, tickets were about $30 a pair, which is an excellent discount off face value. I’m not interested in gouging my friends, so I didn’t. However, this lucky wombat has NHL playoff tickets in her hot little hands. I’m completely gobsmacked about it, but I couldn’t shake the thought that my tickets are a saleable asset. Due to the time-value of tickets, I had to decide quickly if I wanted to sell a pair off.

Because Washington is ranked 3rd in the standings, we’re playing the #6 team and we get home ice for the first two games. Since we’re playing the Flyers and the teams are evenly matched, there is a high likelihood that the series will return to DC for a 3rd home game. I couldn’t shake the fact that I could sell a pair of my tickets and possibly pay for all my conference quarterfinal tickets AND still have enough to buy one of those spiffy new red Reebok hockey jerseys the Capitals got this season. (The old black jersery was ugly as sin.)

I agonized over this decision. I feel like financially, it would be stupid not to recoup some of ticket cost. But lifetime experience-wise, it could be another 10 years before the Capitals make it to the playoffs again. What is a girl to do?

I started cruising StubHub, an eBay owned website for ticket auctions, and looked at playoff ticket prices. I figured that I would price the starting price very high with a high reserve price. Then if they didn’t sell, I wouldn’t feel stupid and I could still go to the game myself. In doing so, I priced my tickets STUPIDLY HIGH. I would never have paid 4-5 times the face value. But in reading all the listings for tickets, I realized that the insanely high price I was setting could be justified.

1. My seats are in the 400-level, close to the aisle, concessions and bathrooms.
2. Most seats on sale are in the rear of the section, but mine are pretty close to the front of the section.
3. As a season ticket holder, my playoff tickets are spiffy red with a silver Stanley Cup to commemorate the occaision.

Most sellers put a stupid comment on their listing. It’s pathetic what they’re writing. “RD1 GM2″ Of course it’s Round 1, Game 2, that’s what the ticket link said in the first place. Why place redundant information? Instead, I put exactly why my tickets were freakin’ awesome. “Commemorative tickets close to aisle (2 seats away) Close to concessions and bathrooms” BADA-BING! I got $170 for a $37 ticket!

StubHub takes a 15% commission. I asked for a check to be mailed to me, instead of PayPal because I wasn’t sure if there was going to be an extra fee by PayPal, which also happens to be an eBay company. I wasn’t interested in a potential double dip, so I’ll wait a little for the money to reach me. It took some doing to find a FedEx envelope and drop off point since I don’t work at a place with a regular FedEx pickup, but boyfriend was able to take care of that for me and it was pretty simple.

Bottom line:
1. Market your tickets well. Give the buyer a reason to buy your tickets over someone else’s tickets. Of course, be truthful too because they will know if you lied once they get the tickets.
2. Price the tickets to sell, but don’t be dumb about it. StubHub made a suggested selling price based on other/historical selling prices in the system, sort of the way Priceline suggests a bid price based on other bid information. However, I ignored the suggestion because the current prices for playoff tickets were way higher. I used a selling option that lets you set a high price and have it knocked down a little bit each day till a reserve price is reached.
3. Get it done quickly. StubHub relies on FedEx for overnight delivery of tickets. Tickets themselves only have time-value. Sure prices fluctuate, but if there is a frenzy for tickets, you want to leverage that mania for your benefit.

I had a little discussion with friends about why ticket auctions like this are acceptable. Turns out, it’s a lot less illegal than it used to be to sell tickets higher than for face value. So I guess I have to claim this as income on my taxes next year, but I’m ok with that. Main thing is that I’m hoping the Capitals make it to the next round!

And no, I didn’t make a donation. I just cut it off and it got swept away.

For the last 6 months, I’ve wanted a haircut, but I didn’t know how I wanted it cut. So the best option was to do nothing. Then, like a bolt of lightning, I decided to bob my hair. Coincidentally, I think one of my former co-workers has the same haircut. Basically I haven’t had my hair this short since 8th grade. It looks great, but I think for $80, it could have been a better cut. I got it cut in Boston while I was killing time waiting for my girlfriends to check in before a bachelorette party. It was a good debut. But no, I didn’t donate it. I wasn’t going to carry a ponytail on the plane with me from Boston back to DC.

At any rate, yes, I do use a LOT LESS shampoo and conditioner. It’s funny. I actually use it in even amounts. Before, when my hair was long (past the elbows long), I used about 2x conditioner over shampoo. Not any more.

The only drawback to all this is the need to maintain the hair. I figure I am going to wear this short style through the muggy summers in DC. This wombat really can’t stand the humidity. As the colder weather returns in the fall, I’ll probably grow it back out into a blunt cut like I’ve always done.

Short hair isn’t really frugal if you are getting a good salon cut every 6 weeks, but for now, I’ll take it just to shake things up with my appearance.

I feel kind of bad. One of my friends is a mortgage broker and I told him I would give him a call after he got back from vacation about possibly refinancing.

That was a month ago. I feel like a jerk for dangling some business in front of him and then not calling.

But since that call I had dinner with another mortgage broker. We had a casual chat about refinancing and the current mortgage situation. Turns out this guy is doing about 1 mortgage or refi a month right now, whereas a year ago he was doing 5 or 6. Because of this, he’s going back into telecommunications on a short-term contract to bump up his income this year. I didn’t ask the other broker at dinner how he’s doing, but I am sure he’s also doing a lot less business as well this year.

I mentioned that I was going to call this friend of mine about a refinance, but the guy at dinner asked me about my current rates and stuff. He told me that my primary 7/1 ARM at 5.75% with a fixed 7.18% HELOC is still pretty good. He basically advised me that it’s not worth it to refi now since I would have appraisal, closing costs, and opportunity costs of my free time to do this. He told me to wait till rates fall another full percent before trying to refinance. Before I told him about how much equity I had, he told me the HELOC was quite high at current rates of 1% above prime. Then I told him I have less than 20% equity and he backed off that position.

Since I have 3 years left before my mortgage adjusts, I think I’ll just wait out the current situation. Per my earlier post about my goals and HELOC, while not upside down on my mortgage, I certainly do not have enough equity built up in this declining housing market to make up 20% equity in my condo. I’d still have to have a 2nd trust to avoid PMI. (And I’m one of the lucky ones. Because my condo shot up 25% at the peak of the Northern VA housing market, my valuation had room to fall. I’m still valued much higher than my purchase price.)

So for right now, unless Ben Bernanke makes a slew of cuts again with the FOMC in Q2 2008, I think I will hold steady and focus on paying back my credit cards for now.