Back in the day when I lived in San Francisco, there was a curious chocolate shop that had amazing sculptures in the window. A Transamerica building in white chocolate, A Golden Gate Bridge. Wildly colored tulips made of red, green, and pink colored chocolate. Specialty holiday windows like tons of Easter bunnies!

I read the story in SFGate and started to cry. Joseph Schmidt’s is closing. It’s right next to a high school and a few blocks away from Church Street station on the Muni. The first time I had one of their chocolates I was in college and saw them at Charlotte’s Florists in Fairfax. I was thrilled that my new apartment in San Francisco was within blocks of the place!

Sadly, they were purchased by one chocolate company and then a larger one. Corporate takeovers kill the places we love. If we are lucky it will be swift and quick instead of a soulless dilution of personality, destroying memories of all the things we love about our local product. Thank God you can still get See’s Candies (SF) or Mary Sue Eggs (Baltimore). But Frank’s soda (PA) is long gone. Even Yuengling (beer) doesn’t taste quite the same anymore.

Yes, I will be dragging boyfriend there during our March visit. I know he likes chocolate so it won’t be too hard to make him walk over there, then hop on to get some violet fudge at another candy shop in the Castro. And also some quality dim sum.

Neighborhood Chocolate Store Goes Bye Bye is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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!)

Unexpected Visitors is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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.)

*************

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?)

The last few times I’ve been out, it’s like I’m in freakin’ Korea. What the heck is going on with this RESERVED TABLE bull-hockey? It’s really bizarre. In the past year that Nation’s shut down, it’s like I’ve moved to Koreatown in LA and everything is about table service. I’m not cripple. I can get my own damned drink thanks. I do occasionally like to sit though, so why can’t I sit *over* *there*?

Let me explain the strange cultural phenomenon of the Korean nightclub. You get tables and they serve you anju (finger foods like nuts, pretzels, chicken wings, fish cake, potato dishes, etc. They do it up.) and bottles of liquor. This is not cheap liquor, but very nice stuff like cognac and Johnny Walker Blue. They bring you glasses, ice, mixers and charge you stupidly expensive prices for it. But at Korean nightclubs, they will also ‘book’ and ‘hunt’ for you. This stems from their Confucian society where children after the age of 7 are no longer allowed to sit in mixed gender groups. Boys on one side, girls on the other. This segregation of the sexes leads to stunted emotional growth where men have no clue how to talk to women, which then leads to the peculiar practice of “booking.” Booking is where a guy asks his waiter to help him find some company for the evening. This means the waiter will go and find girls to bring to the table for him to meet. The reverse of this is “hunting”, where women do the same to meet boys. It’s ridiculous, but mildly entertaining when you’re not involved, especially when a girl is unwilling to go to the table and the waiters have to tug her across the dance floor. Hilarity ensues.

I’ve only been an observer of this since I’ve only been to Korean clubs with family and/or my boyfriend, hence no hunting and no booking for me.

I mention all this because for $150 bottles of Remy Martin VSOP, at least you get the value-add of a dating service. I can assure you these places in DC don’t do that, else it’s likely to be an entree into prostitution with your server. Speculation on my part, but I would not be scandalized to find out it’s true.

So what the heck is with this trend for table service? Every time I’ve been someplace that has it, no one is using it. Especially not the candy raver/techno-libertarian types who dig Moby. When is FUR going to learn that their new Friday night clientele is dirt-poor and suck down Red Bulls and vodka *before* they hit the club because $11 is too much at the bar?

Wait a sec. Now I think I understand what HIM was complaining about when his friends went out a few months ago. Those were table service prices. Hm. I wonder if he was with folks at an Asian bar?

Why? Why has this horrible service invaded DC like the Plague? Just spin me some good tunes, add some good lights, a $10 cover and some early bird drink specials. Make the bathrooms have toilet paper and running water. I’ll deal with all the rest. I’ll deal with the E-tards, the Narcs, the annoyingly creepy men who stare. I’ll deal with the aggro drunk guy who needs to be thrown out, the drunk girls throwing up in the stalls, anything. Just ditch the table service fer Pete’s sake.

ps- Time for a really funny true story. A close friend is Korean-German. He goes to Korea and is out clubbing. In his adopted uptight Teutonic fashion, he decides that he cannot drink Remy Martin out of a regular glass. His cousin and host, explains to the waiter that his cousin is visiting from Germany and is very *European*. He needs to have an actual brandy snifter. This causes quite a stir because my friend can be a little b*tch in his fastidiousness. As he explained to me, there was no way he was going to drink a fine cognac in the wrong glass. LOL. I love him.

Insidious Nightclub Changes in DC is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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?

Sometimes You Have to Cash Out is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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.

DC Internship Housing: A Brief Guide is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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!

Happy Birthday to Me! is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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.

Zucchini! is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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.

Dad’s friend encouraged him to try this … his wife owns two of those businesses and would be willing to take the supplies off his hands.

Rule #1, get that promise in writing if your dad goes through with it. Once his friend has to put his money where his mouth is, he may back out and then it doesn’t look so good. In fact, I would say that your dad should ask his friend for the seed capital rather than you. After all if this friend is so confident the venture will succeed, then he should be confident he will see the money again from your parents. (My parents have borrowed serious cash from friends and paid them back. Let’s just say it was more than a lot of people could borrow on credit cards. How nice of their friends to do this, but the risk to their friends was low if they could just wait for the cash to starting flowing in from the business.)

Should you do it? Me personally? At first blush, I’d say no. Despite what I write about, I don’t track too closely the stuff my parents do as entrepreneurs. Some of it took place when I was very young and unaware. Some of it I heard about once and never heard about again. Until I was asked to actively help manage one of their businesses, I told my parents what I thought when invited, and then stayed out of it. They were going to do what they liked with or without me and it is quite literally, their business, not mine. I’ve been totally freaked out that my parents didn’t have a handle on their retirement, but sticking my neck out that far is a lot to ask.

I feel like I can supplement Social Security with the help of my sibling, but to fork over a wad of cash for a new business, is a non-starter in my head. My folks should be taking care of their sh*t and if they can’t, they need to fix why they can’t. Sounds tough, but my parents raised me this way, which is why I’d have no problem telling them tough cookies, don’t do it. (Heh. Now that I think about it, I HAVE had that conversation telling them it’s a bad frickin’ idea, don’t do it. More than once! But they don’t listen to me after they ask me what I think.) My parents have messed up more than once. They’ve done ok more than once too. Before my dad’s stroke, I looked upon them as pretty capable and competent people and I know that my mom still is. She’s doing alright even though my dad isn’t what he used to be. My mom can be very strong minded and we are on the same page about the financial stability of our entire family.

I guess these are the other questions you should ask yourself:
Did your parents ask you for the money? Or are you thinking of volunteering the money?
Do you want to protect your investment?
Do *you* think it’s risky?
Have you and your folks done the due diligence and talked to other owners besides their friend and his wife? (I’d get some more information about this opportunity. Check with the BBB, etc. It sounds like your dad is going to take some more time to consider this chance, and I think there’s nothing wrong with that idea. If it’s that hot, it’ll stay hot enough for him to do his research.)
Do you want a say in how the money is used and when it’s paid back?
Do you think your parents are going to fritter away the money on this business? If they did that, how would you feel? What would you think?
Are you ok with never seeing the money again? Are you counting on it in some fashion?
What if he needed double the estimated amount? Thrice? Do you have a limit to your help?

This is a really tough decision. When I frame it in terms of mortgaging my house so that my parents could save their business, I would have to say that I have my limits, which is probably equal the gift they gave me to buy my house in the first place. I have to have a limit, or I’d slowly be eroded like a stone tumbled in water. But my parents are in a business that everyone needs so I think it’s low risk that I’d lose it all or never see it again. It would definitely return to me in financial stability for my parents through a thriving business. For a new venture, I wouldn’t do it. I got in on the ground level of one of my dad’s hare-brained ideas (Pop was born in the Year of the Rabbit!) and I told him not to do it and why. But it was too late, the die was cast and I just rolled along with him and sure enough, it failed for the reason I forecast as a serious risk to investment in the business plan. I hated being right.

I am older than Ms. MiniDucky by close to a decade (I am guessing) and from what I’ve read, I feel very differently about my financial position than she does about hers. For the first time in my 3+ decades on earth, I feel comfortable where I am and I don’t feel like financial ruin is just around the corner for me, but I definitely read that in her posts.

In my early 20’s, I never would have done it. I couldn’t have done it with all my student loan debt. In my late 20’s, maybe I could have done it, but I’d be crying about it a lot. In my early 30’s, I would consider it carefully and put a limit to my help. Beyond that, I don’t know. It would depend on the tide of fortune.

I hope that helps. It probably complicated things, touched a nerve here and there. But this is never easy is it?

Love and Money: Parental Unit Editon is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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.

Cohousing for Retirement is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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 Lost the Love of My Life Due to Money is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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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.

During my senior year of college there was a shooting on campus where one student who recently graduated had shot another. It was very sad. The irony was that the only student I did not know was the victim himself. I knew his girlfriend, the shooter, and almost all the witnesses. Somehow, this incident brings back that spring very clearly for me. The weather conditions yesterday and today are very similar to the same dreariness giving way to clouds and sun. It was pretty much the same week and April as well if my memory serves me right. (Which it does. God bless the Internet for forever preserving his memory.)

I can remember the spot exactly, roped off, just beyond the little rise near the library into the math building. How I dreaded taking prospective students past it the following weekend for student recruitment, and the bombardment of questions. Having to explain that I had met the perpetrator and how he gave me the willies. Having to explain the entire situation and saying that it was an anomaly and precipitated by the relationship of the victim and killer.

One of the witnesses was friends with both parties and a friend of mine from our freshman year and from the on-campus Catholic community. That friend turned into a gun control advocate as part of his later work. I am so proud of him for turning this defining moment into a powerful motivator for positive change.

I hope Virginia Tech will survive this with its reputation intact. I hope for everyone on campus that they can heal without too much scarring. It surprises me that a decade or so later, I can still think of the incident and get weepy.

Day of Mourning is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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Cap, of Stop Buying Crap, was interviwed this month at Mint’s blog.

Cap is one of the first PF bloggers I met online and he’s pretty interesting. He tells it like it is with his blog title.

He’s had a few thought provoking posts lately including asking us when did we start caring about personal finance and a follow up called Finding That Special Reason to Care about Your Finances.

Really good posts they are. Go check them out.

As for me, I started to care when I was 12 and applied for a scholarship at private school. Such are the burdens of immigrant children. It’s your job to grow up fast and learn how to navigate the system for your parents. It’s a long, slow, ice cold bath you take through out the financial aid process when you realize that a nice middle class income isn’t enough and you’re too green to know that the family accountant deliberately is making you look poor to the IRS. It’s very hard to swallow. Yes, I have a chip on my shoulder, but I’m proud of it. Now I make almost twice as much as was the reported income on that first tax return I saw. It gave me a life-long motivation to be successful. (Call it insecurity if you like, I don’t care. I’m really happy doing my job and making good money.)

Blogger Interview at My Mint is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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I screwed up my WordPress migration so I don’t have any archives by month like other good bloggers do. Instead, I’ve been trying to tag my articles with categories so you can read them topically.

I’m not finished yet, but some old, but I tagged some good articles. I don’t know when I’ll get around to tagging what’s left. I have about 6 more months to tag and then I have to backfill all the other articles that weren’t easy to categorize.

Please enjoy the Books category for book reviews. (A new one will be posted soon!)
Articles I Like: for articles I have plucked from other sites and bloggers, but mostly other bloggers.
Personal Memory: if you want to get to know me better.
DIY: you are inclined to make things. Plus it’s one of my favorite categories.
Emergency Fund: if you want to see my Save-O-Meter progress and thoughts on the subject.
Emergency Preparedness: if you want to know what to do in an emergency or how to protect yourself.
Frozen Dinners: for Frozen Dinner Reviews (or search my blog for ‘FDR’, because not all were tagged yet)
Jobs or Employment: These include some of my best posts like Mapgirl, Inc.

Also remember that a category only appears if there is a post with that tag. So every single category has something. You won’t be clicking nothing if you click them.

Category vs Archives is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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Last year I wrote about what a lousy Catholic I am, but I do keep Lent. I’ve been really busy this year due to Daylight Savings Time changes this year. I’ve had a lot of upgrades scheduled midweek at odd hours, etc. It’s why I never posted yesterday. (BTW, you guys in the PF Blog world do know about this right? Your computers are all fixed?)

Bear with me here. I promise this post really is about personal finance, but you have to get through some of my personal history with Lent to get to the good stuff.

Anyhow, traditionally, I give up soda and pretty much all bubbly effervescent drinks including and not limited to, champagne, beer, sparkling water and Guinness. This is especially a bummer since my birthday is during Lent and I’ve never celebrated it with champagne. It’s vodka shots all the way because tonic is bubbly. This year, to save money, I’ve put a case of Coca-Cola in my file cabinets instead of buying tasty coffee, or drinking the yucky free stuff at work. I really enjoy canned Coke. It just doesn’t taste the same out of a bottle.

Right now I am torn. I’ve done the soda sacrifice for so long, it’s not really a sacrifice. I started the new year avoiding french fries. I’ve done pretty well with that. I think I’ve had french fries once when I ordered fish & chips at an Irish bar a few weeks ago. It’s actually not that difficult as long as I remember to cover up the abandoned fries on other people’s plates with a napkin. Otherwise I will eat them till they are gone. It’s a very bad habit of mine, but one I’ve found rather easy to control recently.

I cuss like a sailor, but I’ve tried giving that up before and I’ve failed too many times that I’m not interested in failing at it again this year.

I could save money like last year in the Chinese food container piggy bank. But I am saving regularly enough that I don’t see it as much of a sacrifice. At $5 a day, I could just put away $200 upfront for the 40 days of Lent and be done with it. The point is to do something daily to remind yourself of Jesus’ 40 days and nights in the wilderness with nothing but the devil to keep him company. (Or delusions from starvation, but I digress, and do not wish to discuss that here, so don’t you dare do it in the comments.)

I’ve given Lent about 2 days of thought. The best I can really do is think about how I can save money in my daily choices. I figure I can try to save $3-5 a day in the choices I make, or else have as many Buy Nothing Days as I possibly can. The reason is that I frequently don’t spend anything on the weekends since I have no reason to leave my home and buy anything. I’m a bit of a hermit and can easily drive home on Friday night and only leave again when I have to go to work on Monday morning.

The first part about making a daily choice to save money when I buy things is key. I’ve been minding my spending by writing things down in my Moleskine. Now that I’m in the habit of doing it for about 3 weeks, I feel I can start making deliberate choices about when to stop spending money much more easily than before. For instance, last night at Mardi Gras I was out with friends at a bar for dinner and my last beers before Lent. At one point of the night one of my friends is fishing for a drink. I’m contemplating another beer myself, but I’m not sure I want a whole pint of Guinness. It would be my third and that’s a lot of liquid. Instead I ask my friend if she’ll drink half of a shot for me. She says yes and we split a shot of Jamesons. But really, I could have skipped that last drink and saved myself about $7 from my bar tab.

Even lunch earlier in the same day shows a small deliberate choice you can make to spend less. I had a late lunch from the cafe at work. My boss and I haven’t had lunch together in a week because of the bad weather and usually we use lunch as an impromptu meeting a couple times a week. So I follow him downstairs though I know I am full from juice and a breakfast sandwich. If I don’t go with him, I won’t eat lunch at all and end up going hungry till work ends. While looking at my options, I decide to pass on the hot food and just get a little cold pasta salad. Not much, just a few ounces, with no protein. I know it’s just a snack so I’m not starving to death before my evening Mardi Gras jaunt. Usually lunch costs me $5-8 at the cafeteria where they charge you by the pound. This time lunch was $3.11 on top of breakfast at $5.32. I still ended up spending $8.43, but I easily could have spent much more had I not actively chosen to dish myself a small portion of salad.

So I think this year for Lent I’m going to do three things:
1) Give up soda like I always do.
2) Try to save money by making one conscious choice to spend less when faced with a buying opportunity.
3) Try to have as many Buy Nothing Days as I can for the next 40 days.

I will try to keep a tally and report the results here, or at least some of the results. I don’t think you need a daily play-by-play.

Lenten Sacrifice 2007 is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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2Million has it the newest Carnival of Personal Finance available now.

I must say that I love the new hosts of carnivals and festivals. Participating is so important because I can’t visit everything and I count on hosts to spotlight what’s worthwhile reading. Plus if you are a new blogger and you never host one, then I may never get around to visiting you. Please participate as a host!

Cameron at Beating the Joneses on using an envelope system for budgeting. A lot of the comments are about using envelopes over Quicken to do your budgeting. I may have something to say about this soon since I’ve been doing the Mandatory Cash Option.

Kay at one of my favorite PF blogs, Don’t Mess with Taxes tells us that some companies allow you to use up your Medical FSA from the previous year until March 15th! WOO! My company doesn’t do this. I have the standard December 31 cut off date, but if you have Medical FSA funds, you may wish to look into this option. Kay’s got more specifics and points to another article I’ll be reading about lowering your income by increasing your medical expense deductions!

I’d never thought I’d say this, but I want a copy of the 2007 Ernst & Young Tax Guide. George at Fat Pitch Financials pulls out some tidbits that you might find useful. If anyone local wants to share a copy with me, leave me a comment. My taxes are going to be a little complicated this time.

Five Cent Nickel on 10 Things You Should Do to Cover Your Assets. I can’t stress that enough. After last year’s stressful time reading about durable medical power of attorney at a time when my dad was being wheeled into surgery, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE everyone to think about this now before it literally becomes a life and death moment. Please, also take the time to find out what ‘extraordinary measures’ are and whether or not you want them. It’s not like what you see on ER or any medical TV show. There are further realities than the 3 minute scene you see on TV. The good people who take care of us in hospitals think that trying to save your life is worth more than 3 minutes of their time, ok? So don’t think you know everything about an end of life scenario because you watch that infernal box called a TV set.

Ok, after writing that last paragraph, I’m extremely verklempt. I can’t write any further. I really stress for anybody reading this that you take a moment and think about what you want done with your life, body, children and finances should something dire occur to you. I’m talking about organ donation, burial or cremation, etc. Think about it now while you are healthy and not when you are sick. Talk to your family about it now while you are not in need of these things. Like I said before, the time to plan is when there is no emergency. Same thing here.

Carnival of Personal Finance #87 is Up! is a post from: Mapgirl's Fiscal Challenge

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