The Current Picture

In my last update, I closed with a hope that I'd provide a snapshot of our current financial picture. I've read a couple financial blogs lately, and I'm amazed at how many personal details people give out about their finances. I tend to be somewhat suspicous by nature and have decided it would run against my grain to provide too many details regarding our financial picture.

I think it will be a fair compromise if I use percentages to describe everything. We'll see how that works out and then adjust later on if necessary.

Before I provide even that level of detail, I will tell you a dog peed on my leg while I was waiting with my children at their school bus stop this morning.

It reminds me that unexpected things do happen. Sometimes they are bad and sometimes they are good. Perhaps this bad thing happened at the bus stop so as to balance out the good thing that happened this weekend when Tina and I had our weekly financial meeting. She finally came to the realization that we have a bad cash-flow problem. She came to this conclusion after arriving to the meeting equipped with a list of budget categories and associated numbers.

I have been asking for this for two months! I'm learning again and again that Tina and I have different perspectives on the whole timeline portion of this exercise. We are going to have to get past that in order to be successful.

In anycase, it was a very good thing she came at long last prepared to our meeting and walked away informed of our cash-flow situation.

Here's the snapshot:

But before I do, one other side note:

My daughter found a tarantula the other day. Tina bought an aquarium and some crickets (non-budgeted expenditures) . She put the spider and the crickets in there and the hideous creature went about the good work of eating all but one of them. This last little die-hard cricket has been chirping his ass of for the last 2 nights. I imagine the spider is wishing he was hungry enough to eat the last cricket. I know I wish he were.

If he doesn't eat it soon, I will.

Okay... here it is...

1. We have a list of short, medium and long term financial goals. (To be shared later)
2. A list of comittments (To be shared later)
3. A plan for the short term
4. A budget for the rest of the year (in the works)
5. A budget for 2006 (in the works)
6. Weekly meetings to discuss and adjust. We use these to review the week's spending and to plan our spending for the coming week.
7. Our tools include Quicken 2006, Excel spreadsheets, Quicken Bill Pay and Quicken Web Entry

That's it for now. Please stay tuned for more. Once I've plugged the numbers in, I'll provide a percentage-based view of our spending relative to the spending itself and to our income.

That last part may or may not mean anything intelligent.

I'll have to see after I do the math.

Change of Direction

Well, after about 5 minutes of careful thought, and a heavy measure of impulsivity, I've decided to change the direction of this blog. I'm going to keep the look and feel and just move it on over to a different focus.

Previously, I limited my writing to those times when I thought I had something funny, outrageous, obnoxious or otherwise sensational to say. I've found those times to be limited, in large part by my mood. It's difficult to write anything funny when you feel homicidal.

Some of the reason I feel homicidal is because our family finances have been very undisciplined. Neither Tina nor myself grew up with any concept of how to manage money, and though we've stumbled on the "how to do it" of personal finance management for years, we've never put any of it into practice for any length of time.

Now we are back at it, and it has not been easy. We are starting with a budget, a list of goals (short term, medium term, long term) and a list of comittments. We try to have weekly meetings where we go over the spending and make adjustments to our plans.

Thus far, the going has been tough. Lot's of fighting and heavy duty emotion. It's not easy to change the habits of a lifetime. In anycase, nobody is dead yet and so we continue.

I will be changing the focus of this blog to document our efforts to get our finances under control. One of my less desireable character traits is my lack of 'sticktoitedness'. I hope updating this blog with details of the endeavors will keep me interested long enough to instill the changes we make as habits.

Stand by for more. In my next post, I hope to give a snapshot of the current picture and to provide some information regarding our next steps...

First Ticket on the Bike!!!

I was right! If only I had re-read yesterday's entry before venturing forth today...

But even though I didn't read yesterday's entry, I should have known it was gonna happen when I opened the day's mail and found an offer from "Municipal Services Bureau" imploring me to take care of that "FT USE SB" and "EXP LIC PLATES" ticket from back in May of '04.

That's the way my life works. I get a letter telling me I need to pay my fines. For most people, this would probably mean they just need to pay the fines. For me it means not only do I gotta pay the fine, but I'd better be on the lookout for the next one because Johnny Law is almost certainly sitting there waiting for me, right around the corner from 80 mph.

Sure, it's true... I'd been nursing a fantasy that I'd never get a ticket on the bike. This, despite the fact that I've probably aquired somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 or 30 tickets in the short 21 years that I've been driving on Texas highways. My stellar record notwithstanding, I basically had it in my head that I had developed enough self-control to keep the speed under wraps when on the bike.

To his credit, the officer was very polite and addressed me with only the utmost respect as he enquired as to my expeditious velocity. He seemed very much relieved as I assured, and then re-assured him that, "No, no officer, there is no emergency... I'm merely a victim of this recent colusion of dry pavement, 800cc's and new tires and but forgot myself, if only for a moment!"

Unfortunately, his peace-of-mind did not translate into goodwill and I was soon to find that my lack of restraint on F.M. 2244 was to be matched - nay surpassed by his own exuberance with pen and paper!

So much for self-control! Now I'm looking at an "81 in a 45" (303 dollars) and "No MoCyl Endors" which I believe equates to driving w/o a valid drivers license (125 dollars). If we add these numbers together, we come up with 428 dollars, and this does not include the cost of a driver safety course or deferred ajudication.

I figured I'd put it here rather than tell Tina about it. I've been giving her a lot of shit about money lately and somehow I don't think this is gonna lend any credibility to my cause.