Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

My cousin has in-laws in the DC area. She sent me a text message out of the blue on Monday asking if I was free this week for dinner. Turns out I was! I left work pretty late, but picked her and her husband up and went for a quick bite/drink in Old Town Alexandria, not far from where they were staying.

I love my cousin. She’s really cool. She had a lot of family gossip to catch me up on. Some of it was good and some of it was bad. But at the very least, it was really great to see her and her husband. They’re two of my favorite people.

What’s funny though is that her husband spilled over a glass of red wine onto a little purse of mine. I got the purse as a casual present from a relative. I’m not particularly attached to it. It’s Coach bag and it’s rather small. It hardly holds the things I need to make it through the day. However, my cousin’s husband profusely apologized and said he’d buy me a new one if it was ruined. I told him not to worry about it at all. The bag was a gift from a family member who buys too much stuff.

I was intrigued that:
1. He would offer on the spot to buy me a new one.
2. I was really casual about it since I didn’t pay for it.

The poor guy has no idea these things are close to $150. There’s no way I’d make him replace it. I’m the dork who left it on the table to be spilled on. Plus, I don’t love it so it wouldn’t kill me to lose it. While I love the giver of the purse, she gave it to me rather casually because it was an extra she had in the closet which she never used. While it suits me and is very cute, in a way, I do love it, but I’m really not that attached to it and I don’t quite know why. Perhaps because it is functionally a huge disappointment that I feel this way. Who cares that it’s a real Coach bag? It still doesn’t carry everything that I need and I end up cramming stuff into it all the time. I guess that’s just me though. I shouldn’t look that gift horse in the mouth, right?

My cousin and her husband were very nice to pick up the check for my chili dinner and soda and I was extremely glad to spend time with them. I love driving to his mom’s house near Mount Vernon. They always insist it’s so far and out of the way, but they don’t know that one of life’s pure pleasures is the dark wooded drive there. It’s lush, mature canopy that epitomizes why I love the east coast over California (where they live now).

The moon was full that night and looked like a huge pearl in the sky with a bright reflection on the Potomac. That to me was priceless. (As well has his mom’s clean bill of health post-chemo. I never would have guessed she was sick this past year. She looked fabulous.) (FWIW, my Chinese co-worker reminds me that it’s the Autumn Moon Festival now and I should have moon cake as a treat. But I want green Korean rice cakes with yellow acorn filling. Yum!)

Digging one out of the draft archives for your entertainment. I am busy busy so I have nothing new for you guys. So enjoy. The Moby DJ set was late last September. (OMG I was out of my head with the old songs too. Really some DJ’s can make you cry with their awesomeness.)

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Now, I know that most frugal types probably aren’t partying the night away at nightclubs much anymore. And I have definitely slowed down in the past 2 years. But when I go, I like to throw down. Since my last serious club experience was at Nation in DC, on one of its final nights, I hadn’t been to any of the new warehouse-sized clubs downtown, until Moby a few weeks ago. I have been avoiding them for a reason. I’m not a “see and be seen”-person. I like going to clubs for the music and to get groovy. While I care that I am stylishly dressed, I really don’t give a sh*t what other people think or if they are looking at me. A nightclub is the last place I want to meet someone while they are drunk or high or both.

The last few times I’ve gone out with friends, the company has been the draw more than anything. I’m used to warehouse clubs in shady parts of town with very rough interiors and cheap $7 covers. Ambiance is nice, but I can get that from a cool and foggy rooftop and stars with some grilled cheese action rather than a $100K light show for which I’ve just paid $20 bucks at the door.

So, on to my rant… (quite a prelude, eh?)
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Go read this article by Anya Kamenetz to understand the source of my ire.

I already know not to cash out my 401k. I but I had to do it anyway because of the stupid way the plan was set up not to transfer shares from one institution to another (which I would have done with my S&P and International funds, i.e. 75% of my account). Therefore I HAD to cash out if I wanted control of my own money. I was not going to open a rollover IRA with an institution that I hated with a crappy website and overall lousy service. (They only send you your full account number once so you never see it again if you lose that sheet of paper. Thus making Quicken set up impossible.)

I don’t know what she could have told a person like me. I was stuck with my money in a crappy institution or else cash it out and move it rather than leave it to languish in a 401k plan I disliked.

So what exactly was the point of her advice? All I got out of it was “do not blow your savings.”

When I was in my 20’s and stuck in Silicon Valley with no job, no money and no life, I cashed out my 401k and used it to move back to the east coast as an economic refugee of the dot-com bust. I have no regrets on that whatsoever. That money was my ticket to a new life in a new line of work. While I might have more money in my retirement accounts had I kept that $4k in the bank, I now make double or triple what I would be making back in San Francisco. If I hadn’t moved, I probably would have sank deep into credit card debt while working as a barista. That would have been a bigger hole to climb out of than trying to build my savings back up.

(Side note: SAVE YOUR MONEY. It could save your whole life.)

Generic advice like this article really annoys me. It’s good for folks who have no clue, but it lacks depth. It’s positively shallow and a message you can get from anywhere. I’m not slamming Ms. Kamenetz herself. I’ve read her other articles and find her advice useful, but I guess I’m out of her target demographic anyway.

You can’t write to a financial expert every time you need to sneeze or experience a hiccup, but I really wish they would review various realistic scenarios for people. In this age of infinitely customizable products, why is their product (advice) positively bland?

Ah… Internships. All of DC runs on the nefarious slave-practice of the unpaid internship. It sucks. Personally, I’ve never done it. I’ve always taken paid work, but being a grad from a local school, I have plenty of pie-eyed friends whose idealism for public policy, civics and government work ended up in DC working for free.

Don’t get me wrong, I lived in ‘intern housing’ myself. I took a language class in DC one summer through my university and when I wasn’t in school, I was working at Express on Pennsylvania Ave, across from the now infamous “Client 9 hotel”, The Mayflower. If my cousin and his best friend, who was my boyfriend, didn’t subsidize my living with food, drinks and entertainment, and my folks weren’t covering my rent, I would have been screwed financially. Heck, I still was since my parents didn’t cover tuition that summer in an attempt to financially blackmail me to come home that summer. Can you say ‘credit card tuition payment’? But I digress.

My own experience for housing was a DC insider secret. I lived at a George Washington University fraternity house with a girl with green hair and a lot of tattoos. It was relatively cheap. I spent about $250 a month for 3 months back in the 1990’s. Of course, it was originally $300 a month, but they refunded a little money because they didn’t have a working kitchen all summer due to renovations. The link above is for a GW (Say ‘G-Dub”) housing website. It looks like a much more formal program than before. But the housing looks much nicer too. I think I heard about it through word of mouth originally.

GW also has dormitory housing for interns. But I find it to be ridiculously expensive. It’s got all kinds of requirements and rules, but a friend of mine used it about 5 years ago and the rooms were decent quality for sight-unseen housing. She was from Texas and it was the most convenient way of getting reliable housing without knowing anything about DC.

Try also the off-campus housing offices, or summer housing offices of other major universities in the area like:
Georgetown (No metro, but a shuttle bus to metro)
American (Red line metro)
Catholic (Red line metro)
Howard (Green/Yello line metro)
George Mason (Commuter school, in Northern VA)
U DC (Commuter school)
Marymount (Orange line metro, in Northern VA)
Gallaudet (Red line metro, deaf community. Might not be an option if you can’t deal with deaf roommates.)

Now, for more creative options:
Craigslist sublets - I think these are expensive, but they are more flexible than the dorms and you can live nearly anywhere in the city. This is probably the most popular way of finding housing if you are from out of town, but try the regular roommate search section as well. If you are willing to pay slightly more than they are asking to compensate for the second search they need to do after you leave, it could work out well for both of you since they can take longer to find the perfect roommate and still have rent coming in.

Ask your family and friends for help - You might be able to live for free in the spare room of someone you know. Of course this could mean that you need a car if you aren’t near public transport. Because traffic in DC sucks and gas is slightly more exspensive than in other east coast cities, that might negate any fun or savings you might have with this option. (Gas is exspensive here because a lot of people are exspensing it to their companies/contractors. But certainly cheaper than in California.)

Call your internship and ask for help - I admit I am now going to give you the most unusual arrangement that I know of. Usually places that have interns keep some resources on hand to give their interns so that housing isn’t a deal breaker. If those resources don’t work out, you could try doing what one of my friends did. She lived with someone from the office. I think she lived for free in a spare bedroom. In exchange my friend was a house/baby sitter for her hosts. The host family had two kids, one was about 12 and the other about 5. There was a maid/cook who came in daily, but wasn’t really a babysitter or au pair. The family left for a month on a European style vacation (diplomatic corps types so they had way more vacation than us Americans) and she had the house to herself for a month. Of course, my friend had to suffer with a metro that was really far away and had no car, but she commuted in the morning with the mom and was allowed to use the car while the family was away. My friend walked a lot that summer.

Later this arrangement worked out for her as she lived there an additional summer or two even when she wasn’t working with the mom at the original internship office. She got great recommendations for future jobs and strong friendships. I know this is really unusual, but be open to a creative solution like this. It could have serious upsides.

Try your local alumni club - Many people have done the intern track and are sympathetic. You might find a local alum who is willing to host you just because you go to their alma mater.

The thing is to broaden your reach here and be clear about what you can or cannot afford. Budgeting is crucial when you’re unpaid or on a stupidly small stipend. Most interns work during the day, and again at night/weekends as waitstaff or retail.

Be safe and vet your hosts/roommates. Get your own phone if you don’t already have a cell phone. Living in a group housing situation in DC can be a lot of fun. I met a lot of really nice kids at the house in GW and later when I lived in Georgetown as a working adult. You want to stay on their good side and in contact if you eventually need a security clearance. (One of my old G’town roommates is a drinking buddy and reference.) My friend in the weird housing situation lived in Georgetown another year in a sublet and those roommates were at her wedding. So it can be a rewarding experience. (Trust me though, yes, it can be crappy, as in having no kitchen. There are downsides, just be aware of them.)

Some other advice:
Do not ignore the cost of food and transport when making your budget. Again, THE METRO IS NOT CHEAP. Let me put it in terms that college kids can understand.

One round trip during rush hour = Cost of one beer

Food is also very expensive here due to the dining tax of 9+%. DC’s tax base is driven by consumption taxes like the dining tax, so keep that in mind if you want to dine out. It is not cheap.

Bring a bicycle if you can. It makes for cheap transport and entertainment. The metro is expensive here. Plus you can ride all over town on the C&O Canal, the Tidal Basin and Rock Creek Park for fun.

One great thing though is that there is a plethora of free entertainment all summer long on the Mall. There are summer film festivals that are screened for free. (Try Screen on the Green) Smithsonian’s folk life festival, the 4th of July, free Kennedy Center concerts, etc.

ps- This post was inspired by a reader at Madame X’s blog.

EDIT: Contest update. I forgot a deadline. As I am super busy, you have until Saturday, 1/12/2008, 6pm EST to enter by leaving a comment.

Today, January 7, 2008, Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge turns 2 years old.

What a long strange trip it’s been. Some of it good. Some of it bad. But always interesting.

What’s happened?
- I went from Blogger, to my own domain with the help of Flexo.
- This blog has grown from a few of my friends reading it to over 140 daily subscribers, many of whom are strangers. (Or just plain old strange for wanting to read about me. Take your pick.)
- I got Dugg a few times. I’ve been Stumbled Upon, scraped, copycatted, and otherwise flattered by the Interwebs.
- I saved up $8,000 over two years to fix my teeth, costing me about $12,000 total. I have one more permanent crown to put in, and that will cost me $1,000, which I hope to pay in cash.
- I am saving $5,000 for laser eye surgery, which I hope will happen later this month.
- I got serious about saving money in my 401k plan and socked away about $25K in two years.
- I got serious about saving money in an emergency fund and still have some money left in it. (A high of $4k, a current low of $1.6K)
- I paid cash for a motorcycle, my newest hobby.
- I’ve made a ton of friends through blogging.
- I made a decent chunk of change through blogging, but recognize that it’s still only a labor of love and will likely never replace my day job.
- I helped my parents buy new windows for their home.
- My dad had a stroke and retired from work.
- I negotiated a crazy raise for myself last year.
- I have learned to carry more cash on me.
- I don’t feel crushed by my debts, but positively focused on what I can do to change my situation.
- My net worth has tripled, but my consumer debt has quadrupled.
- Last, but not least, I start a new job today with a major international consulting firm.

I’m sorry I have written sooner about my job change, but I’ve been holding onto that last little tidbit for over a month and it’s a major consideration with my goals for this year. I didn’t want to share the news till the time was right.

I really want to thank each and every one of you that reads this blog. I feel a lot of encouragement through your comments and the traffic you send this way. I know I’m bratty, spoiled, bitchy, quirky, boring, but somehow y’all still find it interesting enough to stick around and I appreciate it a lot.

In honor of the day, I’d like to have a little blog contest to give away a copy of Debt is Slavery.

To enter, all you have to do is leave a comment. I’ll try to select randomly from the entries but I can tell you now that the Money Blog Network guys are not eligible to win. Sorry guys! All your traffics are belong to us!

YUM!

Frugal Upstate, a blog I don’t read enough, has a post with suggestions on what to do with extra zucchini. Check it out. I added a comment with a zucchini soup a friend made for me. Very simple very easy stuff. Great if you have a garden full of them!

I love vegetables from the garden. My mom grew them a lot when I was a little girl, but it comes and goes. It’s hard work, but it can be very gratifying. My mom no longer has a formal garden. In fact, she’s a crappy gardener. The flower beds are always a mess and there is no central design principle. She plants what she likes. This includes her veggies.

My mom got it into her head a few years ago that she liked the look of squash blossoms, so she planted some in the side yard. Now she has monster Korean squashes. They’re pale green in color, a web-like pattern of white and green on the skin, with a mild flesh, just like zucchini. I like them, but they are monstrous. Like eggplant-sized. I cut them into disks and basically fry them like a green tomato. Dredge in some flour and egg and fry in oil till tender. Then I dip in soy/sesame/vinegar dipping sauce. (Sorry, the Korean word for it is ‘yang-yum’, but that’s also the word for seasoning, flavoring, or marinade. Not helpful, I know.)

Other stuff my mom likes are tomatoes. I personally HATE raw tomato. They’re a weird texture, so I only eat them if they are grape-sized, or else in some other stuff, cut up small, etc. My parents eat them like apples by dipping them in sugar. One year we went to Korea right during the time they needed staking. OOPS. Big mistake. When we got back from our trip, we harvested all the stuff just laying on the ground and quickly cooked it all into bolognese sauce. I froze my share of it and had it on hand for months in college. We still laugh about it. Funny thing is that my mom made pretty good sauce, though she rarely eats Italian food.

Gardening is a great way to save money on produce. One of my friends was trying to get her husband to try the South Beach Diet, but it was a time when they were both out of work. (Recent birth and a layoff.) She told me that it was hard to do the diet because produce was expensive. I agree. It can really bust your budget to buy produce and then throw it out a few days later. It’s why I almost never have veggies in the fridge unless I go to the market and make them the same day.

Some ideas for home gardening:

1) An herb garden. Why pay $2.00 for an enormous bunch of something, when you only need a snip of it here and there? These do well in window boxes. Basil is my favorite, but chives and cilantro work nicely too. I like lavender for the smells.

2) Tomatoes in planters. Move them with the sun if you have to, but they do ok being root-bound in a container. Means you don’t have to prepare an enormous bed for them. If you are in the suburbs, doing this means you can also keep them on your deck, away from deer. Deer will eat them. Yes, they will.

3) Lettuce. The bunnies will eat them though. They say marigolds around them will keep the bunnies out, but they lie. That never worked for us.

4) DON’T plant mint. Seriously. It will take over. Keep it in a pot on a windowsill.

5) Peppers! Often you can grow hot peppers year-round in the house in a pot. There are many kinds, so do some research. Good for garnish and for gifts.

6) Corn. Just for hanging up a scarecrow.

7) Cucumbers. Make your own pickles! Especially with #5. Hot sweet pickles! Yum. My mom gets a finger-sized Korean pickle with which she makes a special kimchee. I miss those. Cutting slits in them and stuffing with red pepper and radish mixtures.

Share cuttings and seeds with friends and neighbors. If someone likes your bounty so much, give them a plant! My mom and our Korean neighbor got some plants this way from friends at church. How I remember picking tall stands of green leaves for my mom to pickle. (Don’t know the English name for them, ‘gge-nip’. Good for wrapping around rice and popping into the mouth. One place says it’s sesame leaf, but I’m not sure. Linguistically though that makes sense.)

What about you? Got a garden memory of fresh summertime food? Gardening a small plot with mom and dad? Heaving sacks of manure onto flowerbeds? (Oops, sorry. Not the bucolic imagery I was shooting for.)

Handy tip: My mom gets the Korean veggie seeds from the Korean market. I don’t know when this started, but that’s where the squash came from. Don’t know the first origin of the cucumbers she planted, but later, the seeds were also from the store.

Ms. MiniDucky called me out in her post about loaning her parents some money for a new business venture. This took some time and soul searching for me. I don’t usually respond to direct solicitations for advice. I’m not an expert on financial matters. I’m not professionally trained, but I think she’s asking me because this is about family relationships and the link between love and money. This scenario takes filial piety to a whole different level. I keep editing out stuff about me and my parents, telling all, and then scrubbing it. It’s so damned PERSONAL.

Basic outline, if you don’t want to click through (but you should to get more info), is that she’s considering loaning her father some money for a new business venture supplying other service companies vs direct to consumers. Complicating it are some past intrafamily loans she’s made and her feelings about those loans, as well as her feelings about her own financial stability as well as that of her family. I wrote a good chunk of this post directed at ‘you’ but I actually mean ‘her’, Ms. MiniDucky.

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In a small way, this article on co-housing makes sense, but it also seems silly to give a new name to an old idea.

For a while, when it looked like most of my generation was living in NorCal, our parents talked of getting a compound and living all together they way they used to in Korea. Everyone has their little house/area and sees family every day. I think a lot of people fear this, I do. But my folks and their siblings/cousins find it appealing.

That idea has fallen by the wayside as everyone is in different financial states and real estate in their ideal location is too expensive. But I still kind of hope that once my mean uncle dies, my mom and her sister will live together and take care of my pop. That would be kind of cool. They talk on the phone all the time anyway. I swear, the only reason we had long distance was so that my mom could talk to her sisters in CA.

My grandparents used to live in Section 8 housing in Philadelphia, where there happened to be a lot of other old Korean grandparents. The grandmother of one of my sibling’s high school buddies lived on the same floor. It was nice. They would shuffle down the halls to visit one another.

Anyway, yet another financial fantasy.

Nina has a thought-provoking post at Queercents about the Big Money Fight.

Many years ago when I was in college, I was dating my cousin’s best friend. He was Korean-American too and the second son of his family. He was double majoring in Finance and Electrical Engineering. ‘Round about graduation time, we had the talk about getting serious.

His parents weren’t very well off and they were asking him to co-sign their mortgage once he got a good consulting job. I knew he was financing almost all of his Ivy League education himself, about $30-50K in loans. He was never clear on the total with me. I had about $20K myself in loans after graduation, so we were looking at $50K to overcome right off the bat if we stayed together.

I was totally freaked out about his co-signing a mortgage. To me, that represented a huge obstacle to our future together and obtaining our own mortgage. I couldn’t get why his older brother couldn’t be the co-signer since culturally, it’s his responsibility. Oh boy was this fight a huge mess. All I saw was the amount of money. $50K for student loans, saving another $10-20K to get married, another $20-40K for a downpayment on a house. It was a completely crazy sum of money to me and honestly, it still is. But now I can see it more in manageable chunks, but back in the day, there was no way. In hindsight, I can only picture it as a surmountable goal because my own loans are gone now.

Of course, in the end, money wasn’t the only reason why we broke up, but I think if I had seen more of a light at the end of the tunnel for overcoming our student loans and financial goals, I think it might have worked out better than it did. I was ok with ending it because I pictured a lifetime of financial strain.

Anyhow. That’s my big money fight story. I have nothing to offer you but entertainment. Every couple is different. Every couple has issues.

I’m not a Virginia Tech grad, but several of my knitting friends are. They speak very fondly of their years in Blacksburg. In honor of the victims and their families, this will be my only post today and I will digress into a memory of another springtime college shooting.

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