Posted by Forest on May 31, 2008
There were a few one-time situations that made May stand out as a unique month financially.
The Good:
- 3 Paycheck Month
- Economic Stimulus
- Birthday Money
- Random Income
The Bad:
- Car Repairs
- Property Taxes
- Gas Prices
After all was said and done, I ended up saving 53% of my net income in May! As I’ve never really calculated this before, it’s hard to compare that to anything, but I believe it’s setting the bar incredibly high and I probably won’t be able to match that in the coming months…but one never knows.
Posted by Forest on May 30, 2008
Yesterday I told you about how I left my first apartment and moved back in with my parents to save money for a house downpayment. Here’s how I went from there to where I am today:
I was going to write a nice long post about what happened between moving home for the second time and me buying a house. But I decided it’s too long of a story and too much story to cover in one post. I’ll give you the Cliffs Notes version, sorry, but here we go:
- 1/07 - I moved home with my parents to save money.
- 3/07 - I met with a mortgage guy and he told me I could barely afford a really crappy house.
- 5/07 - Knowing that I had to save for longer than I thought, I decided to move out on my own again.
- 5/07 - My old roommate had moved in with someone else, so I began to look for rental houses with a different group of guys. During the search we talked about buying a house together. I didn’t think it was a great idea but it was the only way any of us could afford a house. Eventually, we ruled this option out and found a rental house.
- 6/07 - We were close to signing a lease when a few things happened: One guy got a new job and another one decided to get married. The third guy (C) found an incredible deal on a house for sale, but couldn’t afford it on his own, either.
- 7/07 - Knowing I was taking a risk, we bought the house together*
- 9/07 - We didn’t do roommates as well as we did friends.
- 10/07 - I convince my old roommate to move in and balance out the situation.
- 3/08 - C and I both got new jobs farther away from the house. Not far enough that we are forced to move, but far enough that I think about moving every single day during my commute.
- 5/08 - We decide to try to sell the house.
There, now I feel a lot better that you are all caught up on my housing situation and you will have a better understanding as I move forward. The house should be listed at the end of next week.
*Look for a future post on buying a house with a friend. This seems to be a topic that people have strong feelings about. During the process, I heard from a lot of people on both sides, some saying it was fine and others saying it was a terrible idea. I’ve since established my own opinion and will share it with you in the near future.
Posted by Forest on
While prepping the house for sale last weekend, I ran out of boxes and knew that we had plenty of empty ones in the “book room” at my business partner’s house. So I drove over there to get some boxes and we ended up having an impromptu meeting where we basically talked over the future of the business and I essentially quit. As much as I love the book business, there are just more important things that are taking up my time these days.
We hashed out a quick plan on what the split was going to look like and we both left satisfied. I’m getting a payout and he’s going to continue on with the business with his wife taking over my spot. There were no hard feelings and it’s all good — we’re still great friends.
While it only lasted a little over a year for me and it didn’t make me rich (financially), I really treasure the experience I gained. In college, I was an English major which is close to the furthest away from a Business major (maybe Art is a tad further) that you can be. So I’ve learned a lot about “business” over the last year and whether you like it or not, it seems the world runs on Business and not literature. Sad, but true.
Still, I’m looking forward to taking all the knowledge I gained over the last year and applying it to my next venture, whatever that may be.
Posted by Forest on May 29, 2008
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that every now and then I find random ways to earn some extra money. Well, one of these opportunities came up this month and now I have a crisp 100 dollar bill in my pocket.
I have a friend whose parents are quite wealthy. They have a cabin in Wisconsin and twice a year, they hire their son and his friends to spend a day working at the cabin. We do things like yard work, dock work, and other miscellaneous tasks. Basically, in the spring we prepare the cabin for summer use and in the fall we winterize it.
It can be hard work (in the physical labor sense), but here’s the catch: It’s just a bunch of guys who are all friends and have the ability to have a great time doing anything, so it never feels like work at all! It’s the best 100 bucks I make twice a year.
This is how Cabin Clean-Up day went two weeks ago: All the guys met at a local donut shop and everyone got donuts and coffee on the dad’s tab. Then we all drove up in the parent’s mini-RV which has a Playstation in it. It’s about an hour and half drive out there and then we stopped at the cheese store (it is Wisconsin after all) for award-winning string cheese.
When we arrived at the cabin, my friend’s mom greeted us with a homemade treat — so we’d eaten three times already and hadn’t done any work yet. At last, we began to do some work. It wasn’t too hard, just hauling stuff from the garage to the boathouse or vice versa. Some guys worked on yard duty; raking leaves and picking up sticks that had fallen over the winter. Other guys did random tasks like cleaning the hot tub or setting up hammocks, etc.
Then we had a delicious lunch cooked by his mom. After lunch we worked on putting the dock in. This is always the hardest task, but it can be fun, especially if someone falls in the water…then it’s hilarious. This year, putting in the dock was interrupted by the appearance of water snakes. So work came to a halt as we splashed around trying to catch the snakes. Which we did.
After the dock was completed, his mom brought us treats from Dairy Queen. Then we put the boat in and finished up any remaining tasks that the dad told us to do. At the end of the day, my friend’s dad handed out $100 bills. Essentially, I get $100 to stuff myself silly with food while hanging out with some of my favorite people in the world and laughing the entire time. It really is one of my favorite days of the year. And then we get to do it all over again in the Fall.
Posted by Forest on
After landing my first full-time job, I started apartment hunting with a friend. He was my college roommate and we knew that we could live together without any problems. While we were in the process of apartment hunting, I landed a new job (during the day) as an editor at a large publisher. We eventually found a place that was about an equal distance from our workplaces and we signed lease.
Life in the apartment was great: we had a two-bed, two-bath place so we could stay out of each others hair when we needed to, but really enjoyed living there together. I actually kind of miss it these days.
However, I’m financially-minded and I always hated writing that rent check. It seemed like such a waste. Yes, they were providing a place for us to live, but at the end of the day, it seemed like throwing money down the drain.
After our first year was up, we talked over our options and decided to sign on for six more months. We both had been thinking of buying houses as we had been saving our money and the market was beginning to turn into the buyer’s favor.
After the next six months was up, I decided I wanted to save more aggressively for a house and I boomeranged back to my parent’s house, yet again.
Tune in tomorrow when I post how I left my parents house (for good (I think!)) and ended up where I am today, owning half of my own house.
Posted by Forest on May 28, 2008
When I graduated from college, I moved back home with my parents. I didn’t have a job lined up, I didn’t have any prospects, and I didn’t really have a clue of what I wanted to do. In fact, I thought what I wanted to do was go back to school for a completely different subject because my odds looked so slim with a Literature degree, and frankly, I didn’t want an Englishy job if they were giving them away. I was burned out, depressed, and moving back in with my parents wasn’t really going to help my state of mind. As my friends landed jobs and got their first places to live, I felt like a big loser. At the time, I didn’t know that I was part of a larger phenomenon that is still going on and has it’s own name:
The Boomerang Generation.
It turns out it wasn’t so bad living with my parents after college. I continued to live with them as I enrolled at a different university that fall to study biology. Then I dropped out after a week. Then I returned to my alma mater and studied biology there. That lasted almost two months. Then I took the LSAT. Then I almost joined the Navy. While all this was going on, I was cleaning office buildings at night, living with my parents, and sinking into a feeling that I would never know what I wanted to do with my life.
After considerable effort, I worked myself out of the funk I was in and started to look for a job in the English field. It took a while, but eventually I landed a job working the night shift as a caption editor, which basically consisted of watching a TV show and creating the closed captioning for deaf people to read. Not a terrible gig, but the hours were 3:30 pm to Midnight. Not ideal; especially Friday nights. Woof.
However, it was a full-time job and I began my search for a new place to live.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you about my first place.
Posted by Forest on
Thinking back over the weekend, I did more than just work on the house. Here’s a brief recap:
Friday Night: A friend of mine is a rockstar and his band recently got their first record deal. So Friday night we all went out to their cd release concert. The show was supposed to start at 9, but the first band didn’t begin to play until 10:30. By the time the second band began to play, I was getting sleepy. My friend’s band didn’t go on until 12:30 and by this time I was barely awake. One of the guys that rode with me needed to be at work at 7 the next morning and so we ended up only staying for three songs. Yeah, I know….but seriously, I was exhausted. I’m old!
Expenses: $5 cover charge, $5 for the band’s EP, $3 for photobooth photos with a friend.
Saturday: We met with the realtor Saturday morning and then spent most of the day cleaning the garage and moving stuff out there. We ordered pizza for lunch. Saturday night a friend came over to take me out to dinner for my birthday. We had some great Thai food and ended up renting a movie from the Redbox (I love it) and she made me cupcakes.
Expenses: $12 for pizza.
Sunday: More moving and cleaning. While cleaning the house, I heard my friend’s band on the radio. It was a surreal experience. I had leftover Thai for dinner.
Expenses: $0
Monday: Monday was my birthday and I woke up feeling even older than I did on Friday night — stiff and sore from moving stuff all weekend. Monday involved more cleaning (best birthday ever! j/k). You would think that my house was just an absolute pigsty, but that’s not the case. We had some demolition work to do (taking down a wall we built) and the resulting clean-up took a long time, not to mention all the other general cleaning that had to be done. That night I went out for birthday dinner with family and it was a lot of fun. As for gifts, I received some money from my parents along with a gas gift card* (very handy!) and a Chipotle gift card* (very tasty!). One brother got me a Cub Foods gift card* (this will help when I begin my old grocery routine) and the other brother got me a membership to the Sovereign Society (check it out, it’s weird!). This was actually a hilarious gift; it was totally back-handed because I know he wanted to join but didn’t have a good excuse to, so he got me a membership and told me to share my password with him. To be honest, I haven’t even had time to explore their website yet. After dinner, I stopped to fill up on gas (goodbye, gift card) and then stopped at Target and ended up buying a few groceries and decorations for staging the house.
Expenses: $64 at Target, $35 for gas
Income: $225 in birthday gifts!
All in all, it was a nice long weekend, I would have rather spent more of it outside, but you can’t always get what you want. Plus, with birthday money and free meals…I came out ahead.
*For accounting purposes, I treat gift cards as cash.
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