Mapgirl’s Fiscal Challenge

The tuition reimbursement came in last week. Very exciting stuff. I would turn it around to pay the credit card down, but there’s funky stuff going on with my dental bills. I’m holding on to most of it in savings for the moment, but using a chunk of it to pay off a dental expense that my insurance refuses to cover.

Due to some weird billing with the insurance, the very expensive surgery I had in March may not be fully covered. I have an appointment this week and I will be querying the surgeon’s office about it. The last time they looked, they said that they hadn’t attempted to get paid by the dental insurer.

Since my ‘emergency fund’ is down to the very last of the CD’s I’ve been holding, I socked away about $2K to build it back up. I will actually end up using that money to pay for the permanent crowns which are about $900 a piece, but at least I’ll make some interest in the mean time. They won’t go in for a few more months yet. (And I KNEW I would burn through my emergency fund if I didn’t lock some of it up in CD’s!)

I have to remember that I’m not suffering. I’m doing ok. Really. I am.

At least August is a three paycheck month. I’ll be able to throw some more money at my credit cards then. I hope.

1) I found the missing iPod Nano. It was in a purse I use only during the summer. I wanted to take that a barbecue yesterday and found the Nano in it. Dead battery though. I won’t sell it since I think I might be riding the bus more frequently now that I know a couple of useful routes to ride.

2) I am the blogger for whom Clever Dude moved a motorcycle. The unexpected nature of the transfer is costing me quite a bit, but in the end, it’s better to do it. I’m still in the process of moving it officially, so I will eventually put a tally out there of the interstate transfer expenses, but not for a while yet. (She is a cute little bike, isn’t she?) The title is clean and I visit the DMV this week to take the written exam for my permit.

3) I got the papers for tuition reimbursement and the official word that it will be part of my next paycheck disbursement in two weeks. THANK GOD. That’s nearly $3K I can shave off my credit card balances very quickly!

4) Medical FSA. I think this is going to need a separate post, but I got drama going on with that one too. I’ll know better in a week how it’s going to play out, but I thought I’d mention it now so I wouldn’t forget about it later.

There’s a new graph available now.

A small improvement. I thought I had adjusted my car asset down last month, but I see that I didn’t so I did that this month. My car is depreciating so I knocked it down a bit. I don’t actually think I could get $5K for it on the open market, but it’s moves. I’m still struggling with keeping it. My boss got a vintage Alfa Romeo recently. It’s red and zippy. The engine still has a carburetor on it so it’s got a really throaty purr and an actual throttle. There is something fun about an Italian convertible on a sunny day. We make a point of taking it to lunch when the weather is nice.

But I digress.

The 401k milestone posts are all after the May month closed, so that position is much better than what you see on the graph notes. I like seeing that my retirement accounts have risen about $10K in 5 months. Regular automated savings is the key right there. I think I only put in an additional $900.00 to my IRA account, so all of the rise is from my 401k contribution and good performance.

The credit card balances are kind of thrown off due to funky things I did pulling in the payment to my credit card account. It’ll all settle out by the end of the month. The good news on that is that I did get a notification about my Oracle DBA course which will allow me to get reimbursed finally. I hope that money goes through by the end of the month.

I think that I should do something to split out my cash position. There is a difference in savings vs liquid cash. I’m not doing very well saving on the side. Oops. I think that my Save-O-Meter actually needs changing again in a downward movement. I withdrew a lot of cash to cover the overdraft in my checking account. meh.

I broke $20K on my 401k balance this week. However, there is a small footnote to it. That is the full balance of all contributions, for which I am not fully vested. I am only 20% vested right now. When I hit the two year mark, I’ll be 60% vested. But either way, it’s still nice to see that number. Warms the cockles of my cold, cold heart. I’m about $1000.00 shy of having all my retirement account balances total up to $25,000.00.

I took a look a few weeks ago at some goals I have for my net worth and if I am work hard at paying down debt and saving, I could break $60K this year. But I have to be very diligent.

Now where is that course certification for tuition reimbursement? That sucker hasn’t arrived yet. It’s worth $3K to me.

I have been holding back a recap because I was waiting for my NCN Network graph to go up. And I actually think I’m sort of repeating myself with this post. But the skinny on my March entry is this, I got a huge bonus at work.

The big bonus means that my company will take a chunk for retirement, which is why I have a crazy large retirement bump for March. I believe, due to 401K contributions coming out of our bonus is why my company has a True-Up policy. That makes sense for the higher pay grades that will get front-loaded with the bonus contribution.

I also pulled money out of the emergency fund. You’ll see that the amount of cash I’m holding as an asset has gone down by close to the same amount my credit card debt has gone down on the liabilities side. It’s been a while and I’m still getting used to my savings account showing me a lot less money than before. It’s ok, but it definitely was an adjustment for me. I have decided to turn back an automatic savings deposit with each paycheck to build it back up slowly. I figure when there is another $1000.00 in it, I will drain it out again and pay another chunk of debt off.

There’s not much else to say since the credit card debt will be going on a little roller coaster ride this spring with work tuition reimbursement. I only hope all the paperwork will complete so I can pay it back before my 0% BT expires and really starts being a problem for me.

Things are going great for me at my job. I got a raise earlier this year. (Per Frank, it’s a compression raise.) I got a bonus for last year’s good work and overall company performance. To cap it off, I got another raise of sorts.

I asked my boss last year if I could take an Oracle course and he agreed it would be a good idea since we’re getting a new server soon. Since our company wants to keep us brownies interested in work, our entire team was approved to take more coursework. The education benefit at work is for $3000.00 per person per year. That’s not too bad. It’s about going rate for most companies in the area. That’s the cost of one week-long Oracle course at most places that offer fancy Oracle classes. (However, it falls exceedingly short of a top-flight MBA program at Georgetown.)

So I have just effectively given myself a $3000.00 raise this month. I am mucho excited about this class. I am excited that my company is opening the valves and letting some money flow to the places we need it. This is going to be a great year for my team. It’s part of why I’ve been so busy lately with work.

I’m sorry, this is the real reason why I want to be rich. Forget that scholarship stuff.

Though this article did not meet the 84th Carnival of Personal Finances’ two-week requirement, I still liked it. The Digerati Life on how living in a rich neighborhood can be dangerous for the poor Yet another reason why inequity can be dangerous. (no second link for you for being a bad submitter!)

George at Fat Pitch Financials reports that Macy’s is asking for your Social Security Number. Don’t give your social security number unless you are applying for an in-store credit card. (which you shouldn’t do anyway!) Someone possibly faking as a Macy’s rep left a comment, so stay tuned to find out what happens.

Frugal Duchess wrote a great post about what teaching has taught her about money. I think her brief lessons are true. I was a better student when I had more discipline imposed on me in life. (Straight A’s in high school, till I was accepted to college, and then 4.5 years of slacking off mightily. Sorry Mom & Dad!)

Frugal Duchess again on John Travolta’s frugal money lessons. I love it. DIY projects with dad make for life long memories. Mom shopping thrift for good looking quality clothes. Good stuff. Did you know that disco was nearly dead till Saturday Night Fever revived it? That white suit? I read somewhere that the wardrobe people found it on sale in a store and it became the indelible image of disco.

Trent says Change your routines to change your financial habits. Absolutely. They say that it takes 21 or 27 days to create a new habit. Just think about your daily financial wastes. Can you break yourselves of those wasteful habits?

HC at One Big Mortar Board tells it like it is when it comes to helping your kids pay for college and why. She wrote something pretty compelling. The quote I liked best? In contrast, while I’m immensely proud of getting a master’s degree from Big 10 U., the fact that I paid for all of it out of my own savings, work-study, and lots of loans doesn’t make the accomplishment any more meaningful to me. I spent a lot more time being worried about money than being proud that I was paying my own way.

Make Love Not Debt tells us to hit White Castle for a frugal, yet romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. There’s something about those little sackfuls of burgers. But now that I’m in DC, I prefer Julia’s Empanadas as my late night post-nightclubbing snack. SOOO GOOOD… SOOOO CHEAP…. SOOO TASTY…. Even the next day. I ignore the first reviewer in the link because I don’t eat fruit so her review does not apply. I go straight for the meat ones and they are amazingly tasty.

Washington Post has an article on college costs. (This link may require registration. Try Bugmenot for a login. But FWIW, the WaPo does not spam you. I’ve been registered for years and received nothing.)

I think that it’s fine for kids to go to a community or local college to save money, but the flipside is that they have to do extremely well there to go onward to a presitigious university. Transferring into a good school can be difficult if you get crappy grades during your first two years. Trust me, it does matter if you go to a good school. JP Morgan does not recruit kids from second tier and third tier schools.

I’m an academic elitist. I always have been. But my family has a good track record of academic work and high academic achievement was always expected of us. My parents also recognized that the bonds you make at school last a lifetime. Social networking in college counts, which is why I’m not always thrilled by the suggestion of going to community college first. I think you lose out on the bonds made in dorm life your first two years. Two of the weddings I attended last year were for college friends. They lived in the dorm next door my freshman year. I hardly have friends from college that I made during my junior and senior years.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not always convinced that college is for everybody. I think I could have just as easily skipped college and still ended up where I am. There was only one or two jobs that cared where I went to school or that I went at all. Mostly they cared about what I could do and my prior work experiences. In fact, the programming skills I do have are from taking night classes at community college.

The better trick is to take lots of AP classes and try to get as much college credit for them as possible. However, I have to say that my university didn’t give me credit for any of mine. You’re more likely get credit for a science class than say, Greek.

The best advice in the article is to open a 529 for yourself and then transfer it to your future child later on. I suppose after that your child should transfer it to the next sibling if that’s possible. I’m thinking about this since I could always use the money for graduate school in the future.

How parents pay for private school, courtesy of Bankrate.com.

As I’ve mentioned before, I went to a private school. I had financial aid to attend. I was a ’scholarship’ student. I took out a small loan for my junior year of high school, which my mother, thankfully, paid behind my back sometime when I was in college. But most of my tuition was grant money direct from the school and out of my parents’ pocket, particularly because my folks were paying a college tuition for my older sibling at the same time.
The best quote of the whole article? The rule for financial aid: If you need it, ask.

It’s true. We didn’t even know there was an option for financial aid when I first applied and attended. I only found out about it from a friend who was a scholarship student. Boggles the mind how they scraped up $7K for that first year.

All kinds of schools have financial aid, and many elite private schools have endowments that rival small private colleges. During the charitable giving season this year, consider a donation to your alma mater so that they can offer financial aid to someone who deserves it.

Though still on hiatus, I still have a few posts lingering waiting to be published. Here’s the first one.

Last week, the WSJ had a Personal Journal article about the rising cost of tuition at private schools around the country. My K-12 school was featured. I attended it for 7 years, 6 on scholarship. It’s the kind of school where both parents are Ivy League grads, doctors married to lawyers type of thing. It’s been mentioned in Wealth Magazine as an Ivy League feeder school. It’s true. My closest friend went to Harvard. Her back up school was Yale. Ex-boyfriend? Brown, but Yale was his first choice.

The secret reason why I am so interested in my net worth is so that when I am gone and there’s stuff leftover, I want it to go to my school for scholarship money. The school has been around for a long time and I’m sure the endowment rivals that of some small colleges. In the almost 15 years since my graduation, tuition for grade 12 has more than doubled, to over $20K. It’s now out of range for some of those white collar parents who struggled to pay their own loans off for professional school.

I got so much from going to my school, wonderful mentoring, fantastic intellectual freedom and stimulation, a love of athletics I would not naturally have. I have a mandate from one of my teachers who did something very special and wonderful for me, ‘When you have the chance to do something like this for someone else, you will do it.’ When the person you adore most gives you a purpose in life, you can do nothing but be inspired and take it on as your mission to the world.

The other thing is that I learned at school was how to be rich. It sounds like a weird thing to say, but there were some really stinkin’ rich people that went there, but you’d never know it. They embodied the Millionaire Next Door mindset. Really classy rich people don’t spend tons of money dressing their kids in the latest fashions. They don’t give them flashy cars to drive (some did, but were *frowned* upon by the other kids as being stuck up). They spend their money wisely and put it towards things they really enjoy, sailing trips, second houses at the shore, etc. These parents didn’t dump us at the mall to entertain ourselves. They had expectations of us to do and be more, developing ourselves as human beings.

Upon graduation, a classmate of mine gave me Life’s Little Instruction Book as a present. There’s only one thing in there that really sticks out to me. Let me paraphrase “Buy the best house you can, not the best car.” That kind of immortalizes the things I learned from the upper-middle class to upper class people I mingled with at school.

Just some stuff to think about.