sofa king

So I took two days off from running this weekend, sort of accidentally--I just didn't have time! I went to a friend's impromptu birthday party, which was full of margaritas and whiffle ball(excellent combination, by the way, though it did end with getting the whiffle ball somehow stuck in a tree), and then the next day got talked into going to my sister's best friend from college's baby shower(no margaritas but there was that punch with the sherbet floating in it? and a tour of their new house, which was mega super cool--a really well kept 1880s farm house they've inherited). All of this would have been no problem if these people were not spread out over several hours of driving in different directions. But it was fun anyway! In between (on the way down to my friend's birthday party, and then on the way up to my sister's friend's baby shower) I picked up the last few things that I needed for my trip, so that now I should be all set (well, I still need new running shoes) to just pack and go on Wednesday.
The upshot of this was that yesterday's seven miler felt amazing. It was like my body was having a sort of revelation, saying "damn! I missed this!" and feeling really well rested --the end of last week I definitely felt like I was proceeding more slowly than usual, but I felt speedy as they come yesterday! Downside is I've sort of broken my streak, and I have this wish to keep my mileage above 20 for the week, which translates into a couple of long "insurance" runs before I leave--I have a tendency to run short (and slow) when I don't know an area well. I like to look at houses.
Financially, the next couple of weeks are going to be a bit of a stretch. I've been keeping the spending pretty tightly in check, most weeks getting by without spending too much more than $100 (pretty much gas+ food) and this week is going to be different, to say the least. I've got a "fun fund" to tap into for this, but you know how it goes--you have some money sitting in a fund and it becomes a sort of comforting cushion--I've been looking at that $500 as my sort of "pre-emergency emergency fund" and now I am really hesitant about spending it. This is of course ridiculous and entirely a psychological problem of my own, but that doesn't make it easier to get around.

caveat

Okay, so re-reading the posts I linked to yesterday, I feel I should say. Ultra-ready I am not. I am most likely much too laid back to ever actually commit to that sort of distance (though I have trained for marathons and run them in the past). Ultra is different. I have a feeling it would shred my hip joints.

Anyway.
I'm going away for a weekend, to visit a friend from grad school. Its pretty exciting (to me)--I haven't been doing much in the way of traveling lately. I've been a crazy little saver lately instead, which makes me nervous about this trip: for awhile after I bought the plane ticket I was regretting having spent the money ($158 round trip) --it could have gone so many other places! But I've never been to North Carolina (where my friend is currently living) and I haven't seen her since I finished up my program (I got a job pretty quick and was living too far away to go back for graduation).
I've already committed to going to a wedding in California in April, it will be an expensive (and tight) couple of months. I am waiting to hear back from a friend who might come out to California with me--it would be great to have someone to split the hotel room with, but I am not sure if she is about to bail on me (I called her yesterday to say I was ready to buy the tickets and book the hotel room and she asked me to wait until today...dun-dun-duhhn). She just had a baby, and as far as I know it doesn't have any sort of job at the moment, so I can understand her reasons if she decides she can't go. (yeah, we're supposed to take the baby too--traveling with a 6 month old will be a new experience for me).
Its a hard thing: I have all of these savings goals and a massive percentage of my income (I think I'm at about 55% ? its not a huge amount of money, sadly, but it is kind of cool--totally only do-able because my living costs are so low right now--having 4 roommates has a definite upside!) being direct deposited into various accounts and holdings, and I don't want to stop any of it--which I can (conceivably) get away with if most all of my discretionary money gets put toward travel expenses...which will be hard given the price of gas and necessity of food. But I have been saying I wanted to loose some weight...Not that starvation for budgetary reasons is really a good diet plan to follow. I just get nervous when it looks like the numbers are going to be close--if I have any sort of snafu like my double-deposit nightmare I could be in some trouble real quick.

In it for the T-shirt

I keep reading on various PF (personal finance--I love these!!) blogs about connections between running and PF/ frugality, and similarities between running and professional careers(okay, both of those are talking running as in Ultra running--which I have yet to catapult into. I've done my 26.2 and at the moment I will probably be staying well away from any Ultra events--I've only just gotten my hip to stop screaming at me on a daily basis!). Its interesting to me because I am/ have been a runner for awhile, and I am sort of paranoid about money if not totally frugal.
I don't run much with groups--I am thinking that that might change, there is a local track club that has a meeting once a week about a quarter mile from my house, I would be an idiot to not take advantage of that, but for the time being, I usually just run by myself, occasionally with one or two other people (my little sister and I have been known to buddy up for training runs: where she kicks my ass, and sometimes she will stick with me through the beginning of a race). For me, running isn't necessarily a social activity, but I wonder if I would do it more if it were?
I'm not really uber-social, I like a good book or long weekend totally to myself every now and again, but sometimes having people around can be good(like at the end of that long weekend where you find yourself talking to your cats).
Running appeals to me because it is something you can do alone, and because it is something you can do with very little equipment (sneakers, and if you're a girl, a good bra) and very little training (really, once you learn to walk you're on your way). So the initial costs are very low. Sure, you can buy some really spiffy stuff (that ipod that has the shoe attachment and tells you your mileage) but you really don't need it. So I think that might go a ways toward explaining the PF-running connection, but the professions? The two I've seen mentioned were teaching and programming. Anecdotally, when I was helping with course clean up after my last race, I was doing it with an electrical engineer and a programmer (I'm in education myself). So I guess that could be a pretty true-to-life equation. But I have family members who are runners and belong to other professions (and doing a poll of my extended family the largest running group are those in the medical professions) I think it is maybe a little closer to the truth to say that people who tend to be overachievers/perfectionists/totally and ridiculously passionately involved in their careers are more likely to find running appealing. My youngest sister (@med school currently) has said it best I think: "there is nothing else that makes you feel like you're working quite as hard". Its all about the push I think.
And on that note: I'm hoping to do a timed 5k on my own tonight in preparation for a race I'm running with work folks next week. I want to kick some ass at that one.

cradle and the cookie jar

I get a little fixated sometimes, on the finance thing. I begin to obsess about numbers and they way they impact my life today and will impact the future course of my life. My sister and I have been having arguments lately about how warm our apartment should be at night and during the day, because I am interested in keeping costs as low as possible (within my measly budget) and she is sort of oblivious to costs, rising costs and the stupidity of heating a building that no one is in.
Its a hard thing about this time of year; the budget--It seems like there are suddenly a lot of things that require a small gift or item--holiday parties and Yankee Swaps and I have fifteen coworkers in my department who all send each other Christmas cards. I've been trying to keep things on the low end of the scales by home-making as much as possible--the cards for example--and toffee for party gifts and for the people I actually share an office with. I like to think that, on top of being cheaper it also is more personal. But even if other people don't see it that way, it is at least a little cheaper. I like getting to go to these little parties and being included in holiday gatherings and traditions, but I want to try and do it in a way that doesn't compromise me financially.
The heat thing, the continually skyrocketing cost of oil has me worried. I don't want to get myself into a situation where I have to abandon my savings plan to just make ends meet. My sister isn't on any sort of plan--though she is a student with a fairly small fixed income, she has that feeling common to students (at least in my experience) that things will work themselves out and time spent in school isn't time to worry about money. I'm a little frustrated with the attitude myself, but that might just be because I am a perpetual worrier, and financially fixated besides.
On the upside, Christmas is within striking distance! So it is almost over, thank goodness. I've got most everyone done--my mother is the last person I need to buy for at this point I think, and I stayed pretty well within budget for everyone except possibly her (I'm doing her stocking this year, so I've kind of gone overboard on the small-but-expensive items, like makeup and fancy beads, that I would want in my stocking, because thats the way I want to do it, I'm not going to cheap out on my mom, thats just not cool). But it is sort of troubling, you know, the massive commercialization of Christmas--really of holidays in general and the huge emphasis on gift giving . I don't have any children, but I have friends with small children, and its becoming apparent that this may be the last year I get away without buying toys--or books, I suppose, but boy could that get expensive fast!! I read an article or blog entry (and I don't remember quite where, so no link) about some people who made a conscious effort not just to not have children, but to not make friends with people with children so as to avoid the costly outlay for various holidays. I do think that is a little extreme, but at the same time I wonder if there may not be some sort of drift, over time, where people who have children and people who do not may begin to have less and less in common and a certain amount of annoyance for one-way cost cropping up on the child-free side of the line.
Not that I'm opting out of ever having children, just with circumstances the way they currently are, I'm pretty sure its not in the 3-year-plan anyway.

the cookie in the cookie jar

When I was in graduate school I got kind of obsessed with personal finance literature. I don't know exactly why--I know the first book I read on the topic was some Suze Ormond thing and it left me with more questions than I had started with, so I went looking for another book, and after that one another, and then once I found out they existed, for blogs on the subject(and there are lots of them, very good ones) and web pages and the like. I am fascinated by it, and possibly if I had discovered it earlier I might have ended up with a degree in economics or in the field of financial planning.
Occasionally I look at academic programs and think about going back, but from this vantage point it doesn't make that much sense--I already like what I do, and it would cost me a fair amount of money and time take that path and see if it was really as interesting as it seems at first glance.
So instead, I keep reading, and doing my little "run numbers" sheets (occasionally also referred to as "bistro math" or "Cait's ridiculous percentage obsession") and trying to figure out what I should be doing with what I've got. It changes a lot. Every time I read something new I want to integrate it into my planning and also I don't want to be totally in the thrall of minute finance at every waking moment. I like the idea of simplicity and automation where it comes to financial things (I read about that someplace early on, of course).
For my first two years out of school I focused solely on getting rid of my credit card debt, I got rid of it for good (fingers crossed) early last year. Then I started on the current quest: a 60-40 split of income; where I live on roughly 60% of my take home pay and save the other 40% of it in various vehicles (high-interest savings, CDs, and Index funds predominantly). Incidentally this doesn't count my pre-tax 403b plan: into that I had been putting 8% of my gross income (with an employer match for the first 7%) . So I've been doing alright. Generally I'm pretty proud of myself. But then I read something new; for instance the fact that the limit for pre-tax account contributions this year is $15,500, and my measly 8% of my measly income doesn't even come to half of that. Also, I'm not debt free by any measure: I had to take out some considerable loans to complete graduate school, and during my debt-repayment phase I was sending double payments every month to the folks that hold those loans. But this fall I had a talk with my uncle, who was outraged that I was paying double (and in June was technically all paid up for the current year) on a loan that was only earning 2.65% interest. He said I was doing myself a disservice by not saving or using that money for myself, and education debt being considered "good debt" it was the kind to have around. I thought about it for awhile, and then I reached my 36th on-time payment and qualified for a 1% interest rate reduction and decided that I could make minimum payments on a loan earning 1.65% interest, let it live forever and be okay with it. So now I am, and I'm taking that money and hopefully offsetting an increase in my pre-tax 403b, from 8% up to 15%. Well, I say that but I think at the same time I may also have put that extra money into an index fund...I rebalanced my 40% savings scheme and set it up so that an estimated 25% of it is going into index funds (and of course the stock market is tanking...so thats not the smartest thing ever I suppose, but over the long term it should give me a decent return, again, fingers crossed) and the rest is sort of unevenly distributed between savings for a new car in about two years and a house in about five and a "fun" fund (about $25 a month) for the misc good time stuff that I will likely never buy.
Does any of this make sense? Its hard to say. I am not necessarily very good at keeping track of this stuff: I am not 100% sure how the increase in pre-tax savings is going to affect the size of my next paycheck, but I want to at least try to get a little closer to the maximum next year, because there is hope that I am young enough to have compounding interest working in my favor and helping me into early retirement. Which is, at least sometimes, a goal of mine.

I have a thing for reference books

I’m starting to wonder if I am going about things in the right way.

I did things pretty quick early on: I went straight from high school to college, straight from college to graduate school, mostly on the urgings of my parents--both of whom dropped out of college at least once and were concerned that if I didn’t get it all done quickly I would never finish even a single degree.

My four years of college were done at a state school fairly inexpensively--except for a semester exchange to England, which was expensive (but not something I’ll ever regret--I loved the traveling, learned a lot from it, and the study abroad was a great way to get out and do it). But my graduate degree (which I finished in 10 months because I was terrified of how much it would cost me to do in the recommended two years) cost about three times what my undergraduate degree did, and I am going to be paying back those loans for quite some time.

I think, if I had it do to over again I might not have jumped so quickly into a graduate program--with a little more looking around I probably could have found some way to not foot quite so much of the cost (I got a couple of small scholarships, but the rest of the money came in the form of loans).

When I finished my graduate program I had two months of being unemployed and worried about it during which I immediately refinanced my loans (and thank goodness I did--I managed to lock in a 2.6% interest rate for the lot of them, which dropped a full percentage point this year with my 36^th on-time payment). I went on three interviews and took the first job that was offered to me--making slightly less (before taxes even, gah) than I held in loans for the first year, and getting a 4% raise the year after to make about what I held in loans the second year.

When I got the job I had a pretty serious boyfriend who was a pretty serious waste of time. We had been together in college and somehow I never noticed that he didn’t have much of a work ethic or moral compass--we didn’t have many classes together and he was just so cute and different from me that I sort of glazed over the bad things for the first year we were together. When I went to graduate school he went to work at a private school, as a coach, and got himself fired just before the end of his first season. I was shocked and horrified, emotions that deepened when he went on to blame his behavior and sacking on everyone around him and take none of the blame for himself. We had fight after fight about petty little things that I’d never noticed before, but ultimately we managed to keep it together for the year we were apart.

Which turned out to be a mistake when I got a job and we moved in together.

We had lived together for our last year of college, so I knew what I was getting into, but I had hopes that things would be better--because we weren’t in college anymore, and I wanted to believe that we could be adults now, and clean up after ourselves among other things. Our apartment was decently sized--we got a cheap two bedroom and so had a whole room to use as “storage” --I wanted it to be an office eventually but it was really nice to just have a room to throw stuff in when I didn’t want to look at clutter. It was furnished with a combination of things we had had in college, thrift store finds and things my parents had given me. He never seemed to be able to close a cabinet door or actually throw away any of the packaging for things he ate--and he ate a lot of pre-packaged crap, all of a sudden. He would eat a bag of chips for lunch, or buy those gas station cinnamon buns and eat one for dinner and the other for dessert. I had no idea who he was. I was a vegetarian and pretty serious about health and health-conscious living--before, in college he had at least made an attempt, but now there was something seriously wrong.

While I was working my first professional post-graduate gig, he had gone back a step and gotten a job doing some seasonal work at a local ski hill. Although I wasn’t making much, he was making considerably less than I was, and he knew that his job had a definite expiration date. I started writing all the rent- and living- related checks so that he could build up a savings--only he didn’t, he just bought more crap: videogames, top shelf alcohol, pizza and other food that would be delivered, and several different controlled substances.

When I confronted him about the lack of savings--when he asked me to cover a couple of months bills it was so that he could save up and start looking at graduate school for himself--he raged at me that since I made so much more than he did (kind of an exaggeration, actually, but it was at least a steady pay check) I should be supporting him, it was only fair.

And then I kind of lost it. Even though he was still cute (though at this point a little pudgy), without the filter of college we didn’t really have all that much in common, and it occurred to me that this wasn’t really a relationship I had to be in, or wanted to be in.

I started writing lists; its what I do when I need to clear my mind and think seriously about a decision. He found one such list--I think he may have been poking through my stuff at the time, since most all of my writing was in a single notebook--and a couple of days later we had a huge fight followed by several days of tense silence and then his announcing that he was leaving me, had found a new apartment and would be gone by the end of the week.

I think he expected me to protest somehow, but I didn’t. it was a huge relief.

Then he asked if he could borrow $200 for the security deposit.

I loaned it to him--I should say gave it to him, since to date he still owes me somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 for covered rent, security deposit and a cell phone plan that included both of us.

It was quite a learning experience.

Anyhow, when I got that first job, our “plan” was that I would work at it for three years--long enough for that interest rate to drop, and for the two of us to save some money (I have a feeling he still hasn’t saved any money, but I haven’t talked to him in something more than two years at this point--mutual friends say he just had to drop out of graduate school because he owed the school too much money) and then I would quit, or take a leave of absence if they would let me, and we would travel for a year. Because I loved to travel, and he had never been out of the country. With our break up I decided I still wanted to stick to the plan--that I would work for three years, save as much as I could, and then take off for a year of well-deserved rest and travel.

But then I started actively hating my job. I didn’t really realize right off that I was being taken advantage of--I was working 6 days most weeks, sometimes until midnight or one in the morning, I was the office “snow policy” because when the breakup had happened I had left the 2 bedroom apartment behind for one that was ¼ of a mile from my job. After a couple of months of keeping this schedule I started to sort of look around and realize I’d put myself in a hell of a position. So I started using my late-night stints at work to look for new opportunities. I found one and applied for it, but when I did my second interview (the first was a phone interview, so I didn’t get to see the place until the second time around) I realized that the office culture was much like the place I was already working, so I decided to stick it out.

Then, as often happens, I met a guy. A good one this time: he was a vegetarian, health conscious, interested in a lot of the same things I was: organic agriculture, sustainability, zombie movies and post-apocalyptic fiction. And he was working in a similar field…two states away.

We started spending the weekends I wasn’t working together, and I started looking for jobs in the same state he was in.

I found one, and when I interviewed, mid-way through my second year at my first job, I discovered that it was perfect. So much more laid back, so much more time-flexible, so much better paid. I interviewed three times and then the manager called to tell me they had decided to go with someone else.

I was heartbroken. I called the boy and sobbed. He tried to consol me, wrote a very nice email about how he planned to be with me a long time--even though I was still two states away--and that he had started looking at jobs in my state as well.

It was so sweet and gave me renewed hope.

Then two days later the manager called again, to ask me if I might still be interested in the job. Something had happened with the first choice candidate, and she said if I didn’t take it they were going to re-open the search and get a new batch of applicants. I accepted on the spot.

I let my old manager know he was about to be my old manager and he took it really well and gave me a really decent time table for the transition.

I didn’t take any time off between jobs, I finished on a Friday, moved over the weekend and started the new one on Monday. And it was good. The people were nice, the pay was decent and the hours were fantastic.

It occurred to me at this point that I wasn’t going to be able to stick to my timetable: it would be almost impossible--I liked it and I had only just started. I couldn’t give it up after only a year, it just seemed unthinkable.

Plus it felt a little like things falling into place: a great guy, a great job, a great new apartment, though not with the guy--we had agreed that that was too far too fast--but everything was pointing toward our continuing to be serious, moving toward having a future together.

But then of course, nothing ever stays that way for long.

The boy in question has let me know he is planning on moving on--going to New Zealand for awhile, then traveling around a bit after that possibly. He’s not sure when he is coming back so he thinks we should break things off. He thinks we’re in different places right now: that I am settled and have a career, and that he just wants to travel for awhile.

I want to scream and shake him sometimes.

But part of it is right, I have sort of fallen into a career--and I’m wondering--am I going to feel like I’ve been trapped here? Am I going to regret not chucking it all and seeing the world while I’m still in my 20s and all my joints work properly?

Its just hard to know right now.