Zetta's Striving to Get Rich Slow

When I had my son, I quit my job as a software engineer. I considered it a sabbatical rather than a career change to permanent SAHM, and knew I would eventually go back to work. When DS was 20 months, I found a contracting company that enables me to work at home 20 hr/wk. I thought this contest entry might be useful to people who have a real choice about working or staying home, and realize that not everyone can afford to do so.

1. It's worth taking some time off.
I thoroughly enjoyed the two years completely focused on my boy and would recommend it to anyone. It's a short enough time to not completely set your career back to ground zero, but gives you time to watch and enjoy the day by day changes that your child goes through in the years when they're changing the fastest. I like to think of it this way -- if someone offered you a once in a lifetime chance to quit your job and travel around the world for a year, would you do it?

2. Join a playgroup ASAP.
I waited until my son was 3 months old before joining a playgroup. If I'd known what a lifesaver it is, I would've forced myself to get out there sooner. Just having the chance to get out of the house and chat with other moms is a lifesaver when you are a SAHM.


3. You can keep the cleaning lady.
Before I decided to stay home, my biggest dread was the drudgery of housework. I had this notion that a SAHM was REQUIRED to do the cooking and cleaning. It was the least appealing thing about the job description. I planned to keep our cleaning lady for the first 3 months and then take over these duties. As the deadline approached, it occurred to me that if I could find room elsewhere in the budget, it was really my choice as to whether to spend the money on cleaning or on other things. Don't let preconceived notions of what you "should" do box you into a corner.

4. Have faith in your ability to restart your career.
The scare-mongerers out there like to make a big deal about the number of elderly women in poverty, and what happens if you get divorced. I truly believe that if you keep your time out to just 2 or 3 years at a stretch, it's not such a big deal to find work again.

5. Network, Network, Network
The best thing I did was to continue to go out to lunch with old coworkers. It directly led me to the part-time job I now enjoy. (My mother was available to babysit, but if necessary, find another mom to trade time with.)

6. There will be regrets.
Another woman at my old job became pregnant a few months after I left. She decided to continue working, and is now director of software. There are days that I think with regret that that could've been me, and I doubt I will be the one to break any glass ceilings in the future. For every decision there is a trade-off -- something lost, something gained. Make peace with that beforehand.

7. Try harder for part-time or a job share before you leave. Now that I know how much I like working part time, I wish I'd pushed harder for staying at my last job, in a part-time capacity. I'll never know what would have happened if I'd found a job-share partner and really made a case for how it would work. On the other hand, I really loved having no other pull on my attention during the first year, so I guess what I really wanted was a LONG maternity leave and then a job share!

8. 30 months is ideal developmentally. I started working when my son was about 22 months, but if I had to do it over, I'd wait until he was 30 months old. I just see such a difference in his interaction with other kids and lessening of separation anxiety at this stage that I would recommend it as a better age.

9. Nannies come from Craig's List. If you work part-time, a nanny that comes to your home costs about the same as part-time daycare and offers you a lot more flexibility. Craig's List is THE place for nannies/babysitters and families needing childcare to meet each other. You can post to find someone whose schedule suits yours. You can find college students, a SAHM who wants to care for a second child, or a nanny who works part-time for another family and wants to pick up more hours.

10. Working 5 half-days is better than 3 full days I work 5 half-days, where a coworker with two preschoolers works 3 full days. We put in the same number of hours each week(usually between 18-22), but it seems that I'm able to respond to emails and meetings a lot easier than she is. I also feel fresher working a shorter stretch at a time. It seems easier on my son to have more a more consistent schedule day-to-day as well. Of course, it does make a difference to be working from home, as commuting is not a factor.

Broken Arrow expressed some concern about my 44% international exposure:

Yikes... perhaps you have higher tolerance than I have, but I feel like the international is actually... too high!

Everybody is going international... and well, yes, that's understandable.... However, what exactly is international anyway? Is fund diversification really going to spread out the risk enough for us to simply invest in it and feel safe?

I currently use a full-service broker and the vast majority of my money is in American Funds. I was a bit concerned the first time I saw how high the international was, but my broker explained that with Amerian, most of the "international" companies are really big multi-nationals, which includes companies that were founded in the US, but register overseas. If you look at the breakdown by nation the majority is in US, Europe, or Japan. He felt that the international component was about right.

I wouldn't say that I'm a savvy investor. I've got a big portfolio because I stashed 10-15% in my 401k the first 12 years that I worked as a software engineer, and because I made a $150k profit on a townhouse I bought, and decided to invest it instead of rolling it into our second house. I've basically followed the advice of my broker, and the townhouse profit has almost doubled in 6 years time, so he's done pretty well by me so far.

I had a big wake-up call when I read The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Rich, and realized that I'm entering a growth phase where how I manage my investments is becoming more important than how much I contribute each year. For instance, last year my dividends and capital gains were about $30k, where maxing out 401k and ROTH would only be about $23k.

So I'm trying to get to the point where I actually understand what is going on rather than passively following the broker's advice. At the same time, I'm reluctant to change anything (and potentially screw it up) before I feel I have a deeper understanding.

My dad, who was an investment broker for many years, believes that American is one of the best at protecting your money -- losing less in the down years than the other families. I'm in no position to judge.

Spud told me how to fix up the asset allocation in Quicken by manually entering the percentages. I figured them out the best I could from the morningstar datasheets, then looked at the result for our total portfolio:

Bonds: 5.5%
Large Cap: 29.6%
Small cap: 5.2%
International: 36.7%
Other: 3.5%
Cash 16.5%
No Asset Class: 2.7%

The international seemed low to me, so I gave in and typed all the fund names and balances into Morningstar's instant x-ray:
Cash 18.73
U.S. Stocks 30.78
Foreign Stocks 44.07
Bonds 5.73
Other 0.70
Not Classified 0.00

I guess it's not too much different, but it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy feeling, and I wouldn't want to be rebalancing based on the Quicken stats. I didn't realize until now that x-ray didn't give a breakdown between large and small caps.

Part of the cash position is our emergency fund. I'm considering increasing our bond position to 10%, based on what I learned from The Intelligent Asset Allocator. Given the size of our portfolio and the fact that we're still 20+ years away from retirement I don't feel the need to have any more than that in bonds. I'm also thinking about investing maybe 5-10% in a REIT after the banking mess is well and truly sorted out.

I started a new method for organizing my short-term financial paperwork (utility bills, bank statements, cc statements, medical and insurance statements, etc.) a year ago, and I must say that I've been quite pleased with the result. Although I pay most of my bills through my bank, I'm not keen to go completely paperless with these statements because you have to keep track of so many websites, usernames, and passwords.

I like using an accordian file for these short-term statements that you only need to keep for a year or so. At one point my DH convinced me to try hanging folders, but it was inconvenient having the file cabinet upstairs in the office so the filing always stacked up until it was a real chore. My accordian file sits on a side table in our dining area.

Anyway, back when I used to file things completely by catagory, I never seemed to have enough tabs and there was always a lot of digging to find a particular bill I needed.

Here's my little change in strategy that has made a big difference. Instead of having tabs for electricity, water, phone, etc., I have four tabs labelled, "Utilities Jan-Mar", "Utilities Apr-Jun", etc. When opening my mail, it's a lot quicker to open all the envelopes at once, throw out the junk, and put all the statements into the current slot at once. If I ever need to look for a past statement, I generally know which quarter I need to look in, and since the bills look different from each other, I can quickly find the month I'm looking for. I have a rolling year's worth of statements -- when April 2008 got here, I take all the old 2007 statements out of the old Apr-Jun slot and shred them.

It's worked so well for utilities that I'm now going to extend it to bank and credit card statements. So my 13 tabs will now be:

Util Jan-Mar
Util Apr-Jun
Util Jul-Sep
Util Oct-Dec
Bank/CC Jan-Mar
Bank/CC Apr-Jun
Bank/CC Jul-Sep
Bank/CC Oct-Dec
Insurance
Medical
Paystubs
Taxes (for goodwill receipts, property tax statements, etc.)

For receipts, I throw the receipt for any big ticket item (say over $200) in a photo box. Not sure what I'll do when it gets full. I don't keep minor receipts from eating out, groceries, Target, etc., unless there is a big likelihood of needing to return something.

I've decided to start a second accordian file for paper statements for my investments. So far it's only got four tabs, and I'm not sure what else will go in there:
Trade Confirm
Brokerage 1
529
Social Security

Also a third file for business:
Receipts for deductable expenses
Business license, etc
Business checking statements

So I sat down to take a stab at doing my quarterly investment review, and quickly realized I didn't know what to look at and analyze! So I decided to start with asset allocation. I was expecting to see something similar to Morningstar's x-ray, but instead the pie chart shows the following:

4% Domestic bonds
22% Large Cap stocks
3% Small Cap stocks
24% International stocks
33% Other asset classes
9% Cash
4% No asset class

What the heck is this "other asset classes"? I drilled down to see the 6 mutual funds listed under this catagory, and of these, my largest holding is American Capital Income Builder (CAIBX). According to Morningstar, this fund is currently 65% stock, 20% bond, 13% cash, and only 1% other. So unless they're counting "giant" market capitalization as different from "large" cap stock, I don't know where Quicken is coming from. American Funds SmallCap World (SMCWX) lists very little "giant" but a lot of "medium" -- is this also counted in "other"?

Not very useful at all.

Great news! DH's company does semi-annual reviews, and he just got a 2% raise and an $8k bonus! Bonuses usually get 50% of the tax taken out upfront for some reason, and many companies then also take out 401k and ESPP contributions as well, so we'll probably only see about $3k of it immediately.

We originally started talking about what we should spend the bonus on, but then I suggested we just put it into DH's stock investing fund. Somehow it's not as satisfying as a splurge, but DH went along with the idea.

Then I suggested he increase his 401k by 2%. I think this will put him at a rate to max the 401k. We need the tax deduction, and his company matches all the way to $15,500, so it's a really good use of the money.

I sent off our estimated tax payments last week, and checked my YTD earnings. I was pleased to see that I've been projecting I'll make $60k this year, and for the first quarter I grossed $15,155, right on track.

I resolved this year to take a look at how our investments are doing quarterly, so since it's April 15, it's time to fire up Quicken and see where things stand.

I've been doing software contracting since last August, 20 hours a week, for a small firm that in turn gets contracts from larger engineering companies in the area. I've been thinking about whether I should regard this as a job, a career, or a business.

Currently, I'd say it's really just a job. I've been on a single project the whole time, and it looks like it will last another 3-4 months. The company has 3 active contracts currently, and the president keeps us up to date on other possibilities that come and go. Hopefully when this project is done there will be another one they can use me on, but there are no guarantees.

I'm hoping to get pregnant and take a year or two off with our second child, but mother nature is taking her sweet time, so I'm kind of in a holding pattern. It makes it difficult to plan much beyond the immediate future.

Could I turn this job into a career with this company? Possibly. I like working from home and setting my own hours, and I can see this would be a good situation when the kid(s) are in elementary school. The downside is that the work itself isn't the most interesting -- mostly telecommunications and defense. I'm currently adding a new extension to a 10 year old protocol, on a piece of legacy equipment that is getting a new board to extend its life. Not exactly cutting-edge stuff.

For this to truly be my own business, I'd need to be like the president of the company -- going out and finding the contracts. He's been in the industry here for probably 20 or 25 years, and seems to know a lot of people. My contacts are more limited -- I can count maybe 7 or 8 companies where my old coworkers have landed. Perhaps once I got a couple of contracts I could make a name for myself and widen that circle, but it does seem that might be difficult to do on a part-time basis.

If I were to go back to full-time work a few years from now, I don't think I'd be happy to stay a programmer. I was pretty sick of coding before, and was trying to figure out how to become a project manager, a software group manager, or a software architect. (I actually did land a job as a project lead/software manager a month before I became pregnant the first time, but chose to become a SAHM because the software director said that doing it part-time was not an option. I decided I'd rather not work than do coding part time or have the stress of a 50 hr/wk job while caring for a newborn.) It's still a puzzle to me how to make that transition happen -- and an even greater difficulty (perhaps impossible) to do it while working on a part-time basis.

Sometimes I toy with the idea of going back for a PhD, just to get into more interesting work, but I am reluctant to ask my DH to support me for 4-6 years of school when I could be bringing a substantial income into the family. (A PhD in software would be unlikely to boost my earning capacity much beyond current levels.) Perhaps the answer is to find a job or contract with a company making a product I find more appealing. It would be cool to work on assistive devices for the handicapped, for instance.

It's a bit frustrating, having these long-range thoughts, but watching time ticking away as I wait for shorter-term plans to come to fruition. The time I want to devote to my children definitely has priority for me.

I'm happy to report another item checked off the TO DO list! DH has invested his IRA rollover money!

Between us, DH and I have worked for 9 different companies in the last 5 years -- that's a lot even considering the high-tech field we're in! I've been pretty good about making sure our 401k's were rolled over into IRA's but not so good about investing the money afterward. Part of the problem was that for a long time DH and I couldn't seem to talk about investing strategy without getting into an argument.

Finally I came to my senses and proposed to DH that he invest his IRA as he saw fit. With the stock market tanking the last few months it seemed a really good time to move money out of cash and into some mutual funds. Things got rolling when I proposed we sit down side by side one Saturday afternoon, separately researching mutual funds on our individual laptops.

I was mainly going through the exercise of using Morningstar to analyze and actually pick a fund on my own. (I think I detailed what a miserable failure that was in an earlier post.) DH, on the other hand, successfully managed to pick out 5 funds he wanted to invest in. He had about $75k to work with, and put about $15k into each.

He's gone a lot more aggressive and international than I would have -- Vanguard International Value, T. Rowe Price funds for Latin American, Southeast Asia, and Africa & Middle East, and Fidelity Southeast Asia. It's a lot of foreign exposure, but should be balanced out by the large amount of American large-cap and balanced funds that I hold in my accounts. Although my portfolio is 50% international, I've been told it's primarily made up of multi-national companies that are really American in nature.

We still have about $15k in my accounts that need investing. I'm considering waiting for the subprime mess to be straightened out, then buying a REIT that specializes in commercial property. I like the idea of having a stake in another asset class. The downside is that I don't know much about REIT's and so will need to get some education on them.

I also gave DH the green light to invest $10k in a stock he thought was a good buy. The purchase was made from his taxable stock account, which has been doubling as our emergency fund. He sold it a couple of weeks later and made a $1k profit. He also sold his employee stock-purchase shares for another $1k profit.

So all in all we're making good progress.

I finally puchased Quicken Home & Business, with the plan of using it to analyze my investments. I won't track budget and spending in it, for that I use YNAB. I was debating about spending the extra $20 to get Home & Business instead of Premier, then realized that if I use it to track invoices I can writeoff the cost of the software as a business expense.

Anyway, I've got all our brokerage accounts set up, and entered "placeholder" values for the basis information -- there's no way I'm going to go back and enter 25 years worth of transactions! (My dad started my first mutual fund when I was 12, and I've still got it today!) I was disappointed that I had to enter that manually -- probably some deficiency in what the brokerage provides to Quicken, as they do show my basis in my statements.

Quicken does show a pie chart for my current asset allocation, which is good. However, I'm thinking I would like to invest maybe 5-10% in REIT's after the lending crisis settles down, and I don't see a way to list a REIT as a separate asset class. (My thinking is that REIT's represent an asset class that may not have close correlation with stocks.)

I also noticed that although the stock purchased through my husband's ESPP was deposited into its own account at Etrade, I can't seem to access that account from Quicken. So there's $8k of stock that isn't showing up.

The other area where I'm disappointed is the performance analysis. The "Average Annual Return" list for my mutual funds appears to be my personal return since I downloaded everything in Feb -- and everything shows N/A* (*Placeholder entries used for missing transactions.) I can't seem to get it to look up and display the published 3,5, and 10 year stats for all the funds I own. I wanted to be able to pull all those and look at them in a single table.

I've tried to set up a portfolio view on Morningstar's site, and use x-ray on it, but I can't seem to save it and end up having to reenter everything every time. My hope was that Quicken would solve this for me.

So far I don't really see how Quicken is going to be of any help in monitoring my investments.

As I was tracking our budget in YNAB, I grew concerned that we seemed to be spending all of the $2,000 net that I'm bringing in each month. We hope to have another child, and I plan to stay home full time again for a year or two, so it's important to me that the extra money goes to things that can be cut out later.

It was really bothering me -- why wasn't there a big surplus in the budget -- until I realized that because my income looked pretty steady we decided to increase my husband's 401k contribution from 6% to 10%, and to contibute another 10% to the employee stock purchase plan (which if you sell the shares immediately is a guaranteed 15% return.)

So about $1600 is really going to savings, and the other $400+ is funding vacations, trips to visit family overseas, and the ever-present Misc line of the budget.

Since my husband and I are both in a highly-paid profession (engineering), when we are both working we get hit at taxtime by the marriage penalty and the phaseout rules. I took some time off to be a SAHM during 2006 and half of 2007, then started doing contracting for 20 hours a week. I thought it would be really interesting to see the impact that the second income had on our taxes this year, so I saved a "what if" file in TurboTax and deleted all my business income.

I worked for 6 months, and earned $23,735. I can shelter $4363 of this in a SEP-IRA.

Our AGI increased by $17,477, our deductions decreased by $240, our federal tax increased by $7,877, and our state tax increased by $1625. This makes the marginal tax rate on my income 41%. The other big impact is that we are no longer eligible to contribute to the ROTH IRA.

I paid $1963 to a babysitter for 3 months at 10 hr/wk. (I increased her hours to 20 hr/wk in January).

So altogether our net income from my working was $12,030 -- an extra $2,000 per month. Let me tell you, an extra $2k makes the budget feel a lot looser!

Thought this post of mine on the investing forum would be interesting to keep around in my blog. Sorry if you've been following the thread and this is a repeat.

I'm a mutual fund gal, buy and hold (to a fault), very long-term (>10 years) focused. (I say "to a fault" because when I first started working, I bought about $6k of AT&T stock through an ESPP, and held on to it while it divested into Lucent, Comcast, and a few other stocks. At one time my Lucent stock was worth over $40k, and I held it all the way up and all the way down and finally sold at a loss a few years later. If that's not buy and hold to a fault, I don't know what is! I concluded that until I'm willing to pay more attention, I should not own individual stocks!)


My DH feels I've been holding him back from investing in individual stocks. At times he has mentioned he wants to put $10k or $50k into a single stock, and by the time I've gotten over the shock of the dollar amount he says the buying opportunity has passed. The argument we have is entirely predictable -- he says $10k, I ask how about $2k, I ask if he's timing the market, he tells me how he lost money by holding a certain stock too long because I kept talking about buy and hold. He doesn't end up buying the stock (even though I would've been ok with investing a smaller amount) and we're both frustrated.

The answer, I think, is to have an account that is dedicated to stock trading, and to agree that he can invest it any way he wants. Would $20k be a reasonable starting amount for such an account? Our overall picture is $395k in retirement accounts, $375 in taxable mutual funds, $9k in ESPP stock, $17k in money market, and $20k in checking/savings. We're 37 years old. I estimate the emergency fund needs to be in the range of $13k to $26k, and we contribute 12% to 401k. We've agreed in principal to each manage our own retirement funds, although we're trying to consult each other before making any major moves.

This is so frustrating. I'm an engineer. I've always been good at math. For my degree, I had to take two semesters of calculus, differential equations, and a real bear of a class called Engineering Mathematics (Bessel polynomials, anyone?). I got A's in the first three and a B+ in the last one. So I am not math-phobic by any means.

But I just can't get my head around the process of analyzing the numbers associated with mutual funds. This is not math, folks, it's business, and I hate it. I sit there and look at total returns and expense ratio and loads and my attention just seems to slide off the screen.

DH and I sat down today to look at mutual funds. Both our IRA's have some cash that needs to be invested -- about $70k in his (from rollovers), and about $15k in mine. We've had a lot of difficulty in the past whenever we talk about investing, so it was real progress just to be sitting side by side, not really talking, but each looking at mutual funds on our separate laptops.

So I pull up the Etrade Mutual Fund Screener and start entering criteria. I decide to try to look for a no-load domestic mid-cap fund with an expense ratio under 1%. (Why do I choose this? Because a year ago my full-service broker mentioned that I don't really have much mid-cap in my portfolio, and that would be one area I could consider adding.) This narrows the field down to 25 funds. But how do I know that this selection will give me the best quality? Maybe it would be better to limit the search by capitalization instead? I see some companies I've heard of, like Fidelity, and other I haven't, like FPA.

I click on the Performace tab. Look at Fidelity Value (FDVLX), just to pick one. The manager's been there 12 years, which I like and the name isn't as specialized as something like Fidelity Select Chemicals. Etrade has tagged it "all-star", but Morningstar only gives it 3 stars.

Returns are:
1yr 3yr 5yr 10yr inception
-6.41% +8.80% +16.41% +9.51% +13.75%

So if I believe Bogle that funds generally "return to the mean", is this fund on its way up or down? Beats me. The 3yr is under 10%, the 5yr is over, and the 10yr is close. The negative 1yr return doesn't bother me -- stocks have been down lately, maybe it's bargain time?

Expense ratio is 0.70% for both gross and net. Some on the page are as low as 0.50%, others as high as 0.90%. Is this significant, or is anything under 1.00% good? Is 1.00% the magic number, or is it 1.50% or 2.00%? I don't know.

I click on the risk tab. 4 more columns of numbers. I can't remember the difference between the different risk measures, and whether higher or lower numbers are better. I don't feel like looking it up again. Even if I knew what the numbers meant, I don't know the range of numbers for a given parameter that would be acceptable to me.

I click on the link to look at the fund's page. Top 5 holdings are Owen's-Illinois, Xerox, Avon, Agilent, and Eastman Kodak. I know Agilent was spun off from HP, or was it Motorola, and Kodak isn't a player in the digital camera realm, but are they good companies to invest in? Who knows? I'm buying mutual funds because I don't want to analyze stocks!

Let's look at the chart comparing it to a benchmark. From 1998 to 2005 it essentially tracked "Mid-Cap Value" (I need to look up what that is again to confirm that it is a mid-cap benchmark as the name implies), and then in the last 3 years it's been maybe $2k higher. I vaguely try to remember whether it's Fidelity or Vanguard that is the king of index funds. The arguements I've heard (was it from sweeps?) for managed funds have swayed me toward them over index funds, although I couldn't for the life of me tell you what they were.

It's paralysis by analysis. I know enough to know that I don't have an intuitive feel for what I'm looking at. If I were to pick this fund, so far the real reason for my choice seems to be that I recognize the company (Fidelity), they chose a simple name (Value), the manager has been there 12 years, and the returns since inception are good. Is this rational?

By this time my eyes are glazing over, and I've only looked at one fund!

I think this is why so many people default to picking index funds or ones Etrade or Morningstar has tagged as "all-star". It's certainly why I've stuck with a full service broker so far. Maybe I could've gotten a better return picking my own no-load funds, but maybe my paralysis would've made me too conservative, who knows?

DH wants to use Etrade and pick his own funds in his retirement accounts. I'd like to understand enough to have an intelligent conversation with him about the funds he picks. And I'd like to be able to have an intelligent conversation with my full-service broker about the funds he recommends.

I'd like to feel confident enough to make a decision about how to invest my money.

After over a year of having this list in my summary, I've finally checked off one item!

Financial To Do
[ ] update wills
[ ] invest IRA rollover money
[x] stock basis into Quicken
[ ] annual review with broker
[ ] review life and disability insurance
[ ] earthquake/disaster box
[ ] move $40k to 529 plan

I finally bought the latest Quicken, downloaded all our investment info, and manually plugged in the basis for my mutual funds. Not sure why the basis didn't download as I was setting it up, but no matter. Now at least going forward I can try and use Quicken's analysis tools to look at the portfolio. (I tried using the Morningstar x-ray tools, but couldn't get it to save properly.) My goal is to review it quarterly, using the estimated tax deadline as a prompt.

Currently we have 10 different mutual funds, all American Funds, in 3 accounts with a full-service broker (taxable, my IRA, and my ROTH), and then 3 more accounds with a lot of cash in Etrade (taxable, DH's IRA, DH's ROTH), DH's current 401k, and I'll soon open a SEP-IRA.

Then we have 5 bank accounts -- checking, savings, and business with Wells Fargo, and checking and savings with Etrade. It's too much, really. I moved most of our checking/savings money to Etrade last summer, but haven't finished the process of cleaning up the old accounts.

I've decided to manage our budget and checking/savings accounts exclusively with YNAB, and only keep investment info in Quicken. I've been using YNAB for about 6 months now and am very pleased with it.

DH did a bunch of 401k rollovers into his IRA, but hasn't invested the money yet. Hopefully we can find the time to make some decisions on that money soon! It would be nice if that were the next box to get checked off...

Good news after our first pass through TurboTax. I had feared we were in big trouble after under-withholding CA state tax, and did what I could by sending in a big check for estimated state taxes on Jan 17. Right now it looks like we will owe about $1000 in federal taxes, and will get a rebate from the state for about $1200. The penality was only $36.

I've got some stock basis to figure out, and also need to open a SEP-IRA, so the news may get better yet.

It was kind of interesting to do a what-if to see what would've happened if I hadn't started consulting. We would've had very large refunds -- $6,600 federal and $3,300 state.

Aaaargh! As the self-nominated family CFO (chief financial officer), I handle all the bills, do the taxes, keep an eye on investments, and create and monitor the budget. I don't mind the work of these things, as I like to know where everything stands. But I've made a couple big slip-ups in the last few months that have me very aggravated with myself.

I normally use the billpay feature on the BofA website to pay our credit card in full from our checking account. Somehow in December I missed the bill notice and got hit with a $39 late fee. Luckily I happened to download transactions that week and caught it just two days late. Not sure if there will be a finance charge since the bill was paid in full.

Now this month, I set up the bill to be paid on time, but it came out of the wrong checking account (I switched from Wells Fargo to Etrade a few months ago, and have just a nominal sum in the old accounts.) It's been resubmitted twice, for a total of $46 in fees so far. Got to call and straighten that out tomorrow.

The fees won't cause us any hardship, but I hate paying money for nothing.

The big one, of course, is not catching that the state withholdings coming out of my husband's paycheck weren't large enough. Then I missed the deadline for sending the 4th quarter estimate tax payment. So we're going to have some sort of penalty to pay. Aaargh.

My husband would be willing to help more with the bill paying, etc., but I suspect there would just be more confusion over who had done what.

Fiancial Goals for 2008

Overall Goals
[ ] Needs/Wants/Savings at 50/30/20%
[ ] Target Portfolio Goal $4.3 million
[ ] Target Annual Savings $13,200

These targets come from the books All Your Worth and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting Rich.

Investing:
[ ] DH's 401k at 10% (12% stretch goal)
[ ] Max out IRAs ($10k)
[ ] Non-retirement contribution $3k
[ ] Net worth increase by $40k
[ ] Portfolio return of 12%

We've recently increased DH's 401k from 6% to 10%. Once that's comfortable we'll try for 12%. His employer has a match all the way up to the max contribution ($15,500)!

Short-Term Goals:
[ ] Taxes due ($10k)
[ ] Will and Trust ($2000)
[ ] Overseas airfare to visit family ($4500)

(So far I have $9500 set aside for the taxes, and $1500 for the wills.)

To Do List:
[ ] update W-4 (federal and state)
[ ] update wills and trust
[ ] invest IRA rollover money
[ ] review life and disability insurance
[ ] earthquake/disaster box
[ ] move $40k from taxable account to 529 plan

Notes
To set up the Target Portfolio Goal, I used this calculator: http://www.hughchou.org/calc/retire.cgi. The assumptions I put in are an annual income of $150k, retire at age 60, live for 40 years, 3% inflation, and 10% portfolio return.

To calculate the Target Annual Savings, I used the PMT function in excel, with rate=10%, nper=23 (num years), pv= -364,000 (present retirement accounts), fv=4,300,000 (portfolio goal). Note you need to set the PV to a negative number and the FV to a positive value. The result will be a negative number, which is how much you need to contribute ($13,200 in my case.)

It's getting close to the end of the year, so I'm inclined to look at what I've done vs what I planned to do at the beginning of the year.

Here's the to-do list that I put in my profile:
[ ] update wills
[ ] invest IRA rollover money
[ ] stock basis into Quicken
[X] annual review with broker
[ ] review life and disability insurance
[X] review phone & cell phone plans
[ ] earthquake/disaster box
[X] replace Mvelopes software

As you can see, I have made very little progress on some very important items. I did review the phone and cell phone plans, and replaced Mvelopes with YNAB, but these items were arguably the least important on the list. I had the annual review with the broker in March, but didn't act on his suggestions. (I wanted to go over them privately with DH first, but life got busy...) We still need to update the wills, invest over $80k of money that is sitting in cash within our IRA's, and add life insurance on me.

Our home value has dropped between $25-$50k, according to www.zillow.com, putting it about $675 with the remodelling.

The biggest change this year is that I started working part-time in July. My gross for the six months was $24k, and I spent about $2k on the babysitter. It will be interesting to see what the effective tax rate (given the second-earner penalty) turns out to be on this money. Regardless, it's worth it to keep my skills current and preserve my future earning potential. It's amazing how much breathing room $2k a month gives to the budget (I've been setting aside 40% for the taxman.) At one point I was lying awake at night debating how to best squeeze $150 out of the budget, now I can make that in a few hours work. It's easier to fund vacations and the occasional splurge. We've increased DH's 401k contribution to 10% (his company gives a match!), and should also be able to fully fund our IRA's in 2008. (We probably won't qualify for ROTH IRA's anymore.) I just ran some numbers, and our new "All Your Worth" balance of needs/wants/savings should be about 49/33/18, which I'm pleased about. (I'm also enjoying the mental break. Caring for a toddler means you never get to concentrate for more that 5-10 minutes at a stretch!)

I haven't done a detailed analysis of our investments yet, but our net worth is still hovering around $1.05 M, despite the decline in home value.

I've just run some numbers through a tax forecaster spreadsheet that comes with YNAB Pro. Our federal withholding will hit 115% of last year's tax (as planned), but something got messed up with the state withholding and it's only 50% of last year's. I'll have to make an estimated payment in January and hope to minimize any penalities. Right now we expect to owe $10k. I've got $8k set aside, and so will devote my first few paychecks to the remainder. Obviously I haven't been tracking this as closely as I should -- it may be time to consider hiring an accountant. I've been trying to avoid paying quarterly estimated taxes by setting up the withholdings correctly, but it might be a good thing to do them to force me to review our investments and tax situation regularly.

My biggest disappointment for the year is that I don't feel any more able to look at a list of funds in Morningstar and decide which one to invest in. My self-education campaign ran out of steam around March or April. I'm getting to the point where it's at least as important to maximize my investments as it is to keep my spending in check.

And it's now me! (See my previous post about the prevalent attitude that "there's no such thing as a part-time engineer".)

I've been away from the SavingAdvice site for awhile, and don't expect to have much time to post in the near future, but wanted to share my good news all the same.

A couple of months after I started contemplating looking for part-time work, one of my former employers (I left the company in 2001) shut down the R&D group and laid off a bunch of people. There were a bunch of emails about getting together for lunch on a regular basis, and in one of these a former coworker with preschool-aged children mentioned that she had found a part-time position with a consulting firm. She'd been working part-time at the old company for about a year, so I asked her if she'd be willing to get together for lunch or a playdate and talk about what working part-time was really like.

It turned out the consulting firm was looking for more people, and she offered to forward my resume. I landed an interview and a job! It's a small firm, with 3 full-time people and 3 part-time. Having the part-time people helps them balance out the workload. No benefits -- I'm technically a subcontractor.

I've been working 10-15 hr/wk, from home on my laptop while my son naps, and go in to the office one evening a week for a group meeting. I've just been given the go-ahead to increase to 20-25 hr/wk, and am interviewing for someone to babysit 2 hr/day while I work upstairs.

In 2 months I've made $5k. I set aside 40% for taxes and FICA, and the rest will give a nice boost to our travel fund. More importantly, I'm keeping my resume and skills fresh, which will help preserve my future earning potential. I can see this job evolving over the years so that I can be home when my son gets home from school in the afternoons.

My last blog entry about my career was a long one -- I need to learn to edit my writing to a more blog-friendly length! Anyway, one of the things I have been surfing a lot lately are a few sites where people are trying to get a mother's movement started. It's trying to take up where the last wave of feminism left off -- changing society to better support the needs of all mothers, whether SAHM or working part or full time, and their children.

The site www.momsrising.org has a lot of interesting content and some good blogs, but the forum is non-functional which leaves me to wonder whether there's really much momentum there yet.

Sometimes I think about getting involved in the movement, if there really is one. It would be pretty easy to start a "playgroup" to find other women in my city who are interested in becoming active (there is a great organization here that facilitates the formation of playgroups that I could tap into) but I don't know that I am really up for being the leader. If I'm able to start a consulting career like I hope then I won't have as much free time to devote to being politically active. I've also considered starting a playgroup for scientists and engineers to network. We've got 2 scientists in my current playgroup who tried to return work after their babies were born but quit because their managers were just too unaccomodating.

So is anyone here involved in the mother's movement? What organization(s) or web forums would you recommend that I check out?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about my career, and what to do next.

The first 12 years of my career, I worked as an embedded software engineer in small-ish companines (50-150 people). ("Embedded" in my case means programming in non-Windows, non-PC applications. Over the years, I've worked on the specialized kinds of equipment that provide DSL, cable-phones, and voice-over-IP. More recently, I've had experience with video from UAV aircraft and a consumer video capture and playback product.) I've always gravitated toward the non-technical aspects of getting a product designed and built -- being a team leader, creating and tracking schedules, prioritizing bugs, reporting status to upper management, interviewing for open positions and getting new people up to speed, etc. I'm also really good at systems-level design, where you understand the product as a whole, and you define how to break it into smaller pieces that individuals will work on. To be honest I'm bored with the mechanics of writing and debugging programs and if I never had to write another line of code I wouldn't mind a bit.

I've been promoted to first-level manager twice -- the first time I quit after six months and took a non-management job in another company. I was frustrated that after finally becoming a manager I wasn't given any real power to improve the way we developed products, and I had also come to the conclusion that the marketing and sales groups weren't working and the CEO wasn't going to be able to fix them. That was a big mistake -- I should've gotten more time under my belt and then looked for a management job at another company. The second time, four years later, a management job landed in my lap via a headhunter. I didn't officially have the manager title, but the actual work was a combination of system architect and first-level software manager. It came pretty close to being my dream job. Three weeks after starting, I got pregnant. I had to laugh at the timing -- we had a very difficult time getting pregnant, and while surgery to fix the root cause had been done, we were told there was only a 50% success rate of becoming pregnant on our own within 18 months. Mentally, I was expecting to spend another year doing infertility treatments and then a couple of years trying to adopt.

I had nine months to decide what to do once the baby came. The choices I saw open to me were: 1) juggle 50-hour to 60-hour weeks and a newborn in daycare, 2) negotiate a part-time position but go back to being a non-management software engineer (basically doing coding and debugging), 3) quit and become a SAHM. I asked my director if there were any way he would agree to my being a part-time manager, and he said no. I suppose I could've looked harder for someone to join me in a job-share, but frankly I didn't know where to find a partner, and it would be a tough sell given that I was so new to the company.

Choice #1, while best for my career, basically sucked. I didn't want the double-dose of stress associated with an intense project and a new baby. I wasn't keen on full-time day care (although I don't have a problem with part-time daycare), and wanted to have enough time and energy to enjoy my baby.

Choice #2 sounds like a good compromise in theory -- keep your skills up but with less stress. If I wasn't so sick of programming itself I might've gone this route. However, in the past I've observed that the part timers get the bottom of the barrel in terms of assignments. Engineering companies tend to push and push their salaried engineers for more and more hours, so the part-timer is the one who ends up working 40 hours instead of 60. It seems to be hard for many managers to divy up projects in a way that makes sense for using a part-time person, and my husband reports that he often hears people joke that, "there's no such thing as a part-time engineer." It's ironic, because every time I tell someone I'm a software engineer, they immediately say how great that I'll be able to do that from home, but in reality it's difficult to find an employer who is willing to let you work that way. Generally part-time work is mainly available by working full-time, becoming very valued, handing in your resignation, and then being persuaded to stay on part-time by a manager who doesn't want to let you go. You can't go on monster.com and find a job listing that specifies 20 hours per week from home!

So I chose door #3 and quit. I've been at home for 22 months now. I've really enjoyed the time with my son, hanging out with the other moms at playgroup, going on mom hikes with our baby backpacks and jogging strollers, but I'm starting to get restless. I find myself spending too much time surfing the web during naptime, pulling weeds while my son plays outside, and doing more cleaning and organizing than is really necessary when he plays inside. (I do play with him part of the time as well, but I believe it's important for children to be able to amuse themselves instead of being dependent on Mom for entertainment.) I'm also very aware of the reality that every year that I stay home makes it much more difficult for me to get rehired as a software engineer, and makes my future re-starting salary lower and lower. If I'm out more than 2-3 years, I will have to spend thousands of dollars taking courses for technology certifications or a masters degree to convince hiring managers that I'm serious about working and my skills are fresh.

So I've decided the time has come for me to attempt to create a part-time consulting career for myself. Here's my dream: start by taking on small projects that I can do at home, at a level of 10-15 hours per week. (I may have to increase this to 20 hours in order to get work.) I'll work when DS is napping, and probably also hire a babysitter to come to our house for 1-2 hours a day. My mom lives nearby and is available to babysit for the odd morning or afternoon that I need to go to an in-person meeting, but babysitting every day would be a bit too much to ask of her. Do this for anywhere from 9 to 18 months, until baby #2 comes along or DS is ready for preschool. (It's not too surprising that we're having difficulties again.) Quit working, and enjoy baby #2 full-time for 12-18 months. Resume consulting at 10-15 hours until #2 is in preschool, then increase to 20-25 hours. Once both kids are in elementary school, increase to 30-35 hours from home, so that I am home and free when they get home from school.

As for the content of my work, I'd dearly love to be able to use my system-level skills. The reality is that I will need to start with whatever programming work I can get, and as I make a name for myself I hope to be able to steer toward work that is more and more interesting.

So far, I have a lead on some work on equipment that is used for scientific research -- a friend was kind enough to post my resume at the academic institute where he works. I've talked with the manager of the project twice -- he said my embedded experience was hard to find, and didn't reject my 10-15 hour level out of hand, so I'm hopeful something will come of it. He said it will be at least another couple of weeks before they start planning the next project, so it may be awhile before I know for sure.

In the meantime, I need to start contacting old coworkers to let them know I'm available for contract work. I need to work on my sales pitch and on defining the types of services I can provide at the 10-15 hour level. I may also take some online classes to add marketable skills to my resume, and to test-drive the logistics of working from home.

Wish me luck!

Just got the bill from my ER visit. I was very curious how high it would be since I had both a cat scan and an ultrasound. Here's the breakdown:

CT scan: 4,199
urgent care: 780 (I'm guessing this is the ER doctor's fee)
imaging services: 1,302 (ultrasound)
laboratory: 580 (bloodwork)
pharmacy: 0.26
supplies/devices: 85
treatment/observation room: 60
Total: 6,934.26
Insurance payments: -3,368.89
Copay: $10
Patient responsiblity: $690.91

My health plan says I have to pay 10% of any emergency room visit or hospitalization -- very interesting to find out that this is 10% of the bill the hospital issues rather than 10% of the amount the insurance company has negotiated with the hospital. Looks like the insurance company has negotiated about a 50% discount.

Thank goodness I have insurance -- without it this would be a very major blow. Or what if I had a high-deductible plan with an HSA? This one visit could easily wipe out any savings I had built up. I'm trying to picture myself saying to the ER doctor, "A CT scan is really expensive, do we really have to check for appendicitis? Let's just do an ultrasound first to see if something else is causing the pain."

We've had a number of pet and medical emergencies in March and April that have depleted our smaller reserve funds (medical, dental, home repair, car repair, basic savings), as well as our clothing and free $$ catagories (which we normally let accrue from month to month), and may yet touch our emergency fund (see previous post).

We also spent about $200 more than our discretionary budget so far in April -- half on clothes and half on "Misc" -- could be as much as $250 if we're not careful the next few days. Normally it wouldn't be too big a deal but in light of all the other spending it's not good.

So our reserves are down quite a bit and will need to be built back up. DH's mother is coming from overseas for a 3 week visit around Memorial Day -- usually that entails a lot of eating out, shopping, and presents. It will be hard to stay on track.

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep due to thinking about all the red numbers in YNAB. For some reason the $200 discretionary overage bothers me a lot more than all the others. I can only imagine what people in serious debt must go through all the time.

And I'm not happy that there are a lot more big wants such as vacations this summer that we don't have money set aside for yet. We've done a poor job controlling the little wants each month so that we can afford more of the big wants. I was happy that we were able to purchase a laptop and an anniversary trip with money we set aside this year, but in hindsight wish we had budgeted for two more trips that we want to take this summer -- one to fly out to see the great-grandparents and the other an unspecified road trip. Then there are other big purchases such as updating the wills and our next big trip to visit DH's parents overseas that we need to be saving for. And the landscaping just isn't going to happen until we have two incomes again.

On the positive side, DH is starting a new job in two weeks. His commute drops from 25 minutes to 5, so fuel costs will be way down. Medical insurance costs drop from $200/mo to $0, and he gets 401k matching and a much better selection of funds.

Ideally, I'd like to be working 10-15 hours a week from home in my field (during naptime), to keep my skills sharp and resume up to date. The extra money would be a nice bonus but not the primary motivation. I'm planning on talking to someone I know that started his own consulting company whether this is really feasible -- I suspect it's more reasonable to think I would need to work 20-30 hours per week just to get jobs. That would require some sort of daycare or nanny-share, which I'm not sure I want to do quite yet (DS is 18 months). But we also want to have a 2nd child soon so this is kind of my window of opportunity to do something before I take time off again.

In a few years I would like to be working half-days while both kids are in pre-school, then 30-ish hours a week so that I can be home when they get home from elementary school. It would be really cool if I were my own boss, consulting for companies rather than being an employee. Not sure how to get from here to there, though...

March and April have been unusually expensive.

First, we were within $200 of the laptop saving goal, so when DH mentioned he really wanted to go ahead and get it, I said ok -- figuring we'd just take the extra $200 out of our "free" allowances ($100 each). So we ordered it and I was very happy that we'd made a savings goal and reached it.

Then one of my cats was run over -- he had a habit of walking just in front of the tire as I was slowly pulling into the garage. Neither DH nor I saw him. Since it was a Sunday, our regular vet was closed and we had to take him to an emergency animal hospital. They required a $500 pre-authorization just to attempt to stabilize him and take x-rays. It turned out his injuries were too severe and we had to put him to sleep. (Although they did give us the option of several days and thousands of dollars of ICU for "a chance" at recovery.) Total bill: $667. I really believe our regular vet would've reached the same conclusion for much less. I asked what were the low-cost options for taking care of his body, and was told that the cheapest was $85 (and that county wouldn't be any cheaper.) I grew suspicious when I read the details and discovered that this included scattering his ashes at sea! At this point I was considering burying him in the back yard, though I'm not sure it's legal. They said they would keep him for a few days at no charge until we were ready to make arrangements. I called my vet and found out they charged $37, then called the county and found out it was only $10! What a way to make money out of grieving pet owners! I was able to pull money out of our "basic savings", "clothing", and "free $$" catagories to cover it and so did not have to touch any of our reserve or emergency funds.

Then in early April I had to visit the ER to rule out appendicitis -- still no bill yet so I don't know how much my copay will be. I think it's either 10% or 20% for the visit and the procedures, up to a max of $2,000. There's $250 in the "medical" catagory, another $250 in "dental", and of course the emergency fund if the bill is really big.

The next day I realized my other cat had stopped eating. I took him to our vet, who wanted about $500 to do x-ray, blood work, urine test, and give fluids and appetite stimulants. Knowing that we weren't going to pay for any extreme measures such as chemotherapy, I really pressed the vet to ask how likely it was that the tests would reveal a treatable condition, as opposed to just going straight to pallative care. The vet hemmed and hawed, and finally said the minimum we should do was give fluids and take an x-ray for $270, then decide whether to do more tests. The x-ray revealed a massive abdominal tumor, so we went straight to pallative care (fluids and special food). The cat didn't seem to be in any pain, I think he enjoyed a few extra days sitting in the sun, so I'm glad we didn't put him to sleep immediately. About 5 days later he seemed to be distressed, so I was going to take him in to be put to sleep, but he died just before the vet opened. I tapped the "repair home" catagory (where we keep $500) for this, and will build it back up over the next couple of months.

Then we purchased airline tickets and reserved a room at a B&B -- a trip to celebrate our anniversary. My mother is keeping DS, so it will be our first big weekend alone in along time. Luckily we had budgeted and saved for this trip and so are still able go go. We don't have as much as I'd like in the catagory to cover dining out and other purchase while we're there, so we'll need to watch our other discretionary spending in May to stay on track.

Earlier this week DS stumbled and got a cut above his eye that required 3 stitches. Our pediatrician sent us to the Children's Hospital ER (she doesn't do stitches on the face in the office), so that will be another largish medical co-pay.

All in all a very expensive couple of months. We will have to work hard at building our reserves back up.

I've been wanting to make a list of vegetables and quick side-dishes featuring each that my husband will eat. With luck, 18-month old DS will eventually learn to eat most of them as well. It's not exactly financial, but why not keep it in my blog? This is definitely a work-in-progress, and I hope to come back and update it whenever I a new dish is a hit. I started with a list of vegetables from Wikipedia, and shortened it somewhat by deleting ones I didn't think I'd find in the local and ethnic grocery stores.

Western cabbage family
Broccoli -- steamed, add Lee Kum Kee stir fry sauce
Brussels sprout
Cabbage -- TBD, looking for a healthy cole slaw recipe
Cauliflower -- TBD, need something cheesy
Kale
Rapini (Broccoli Rabe) -- TBD, maybe wilted with oyster sauce
Red cabbage

Asian cabbage family
Kai-lan
Bok choy
Komatsuna
Mizuna greens
Oriental mustard

Leafy and salad vegetables
Arugula
Cress
Endive
Epazote
Iceplant -- It's all over the place as a groundcover in southern CA. I had no idea the fruits are edible!
Lettuce -- salad with balsalmic dressing
New Zealand Spinach
Orache (French Spinach)
Radicchio
Spinach
Swiss chard
Watercress
Water spinach


Fruiting and flowering vegetables
Armenian cucumber (Snake cucumber)
Eggplant
Avocado -- homemade guacomole
Bitter melon
Chayote (Choko)
Chile pepper
Cucumber
Globe Artichoke
Luffa (Chinese Okra)
Sweetcorn -- boiled corn-on-the-cob style
Sweet pepper (Bell pepper)
Summer squash -- see list below
Tomato -- bruschetta, homemade pasta sauce
Tomatillo
Winter melon (Fuzzy melon)
Winter squash -- see list below

Summer squashes
Button squash
Yellow crookneck squash
Zucchini -- Sesame Parmesean Zucchini (see recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Sesame-Parmesan-Zucchini/Detail...

Winter squashes
Acorn
Butternut -- soup
Delicata -- soup
Hubbard
Kobacha
Spaghetti squash -- microwave and serve with marinara sauce from TJ's
Pumpkin

Podded vegetables
Black-eyed pea
Black lentil (Urad bean)
Chickpea -- store-bought hummus
Fava bean
Green bean -- steamed in microwave and tossed with balsalmic vinegarette
Guar
Lentil
Lima bean
Moth bean
Mung dal
Navy bean
Okra
Pea
Peanut
Runner bean
Soybean
Yardlong bean (snake bean)

Bulb and stem vegetables
Asparagus -- steamed in microwave and tossed with balsalmic vinegarette
Celeriac
Celery
Florence fennel
Garlic
Leek -- soup
Onion
Rhubarb
Shallot
Wild leek

Root and tuberous vegetables
Bamboo shoot
Beetroot
Carrot
Cassava
Chinese artichoke
Daikon radish
Ginger
Jerusalem artichoke
Jícama
Parsnip
Radish
Rutabaga
Taro
Turnip
Water chestnut
Yacón
Yam (sweet potato) -- buy sliced "fries", bake, season with BBQ or cajun spice

I've been reading up on nutrition lately, and am working on improving my family's eating habits. This post is my attempt to get a plan down in writing.

Here are a couple of the books I've read and would recommend: What to Eat (excellent book by a nutritionist but LONG!), The Healtiest Kid in the Neighborhood (good info although a little preachy), and YOU: On a Diet (good background on how the body works, the actual chapter on the healthy diet is good for breakfast, lunch, and snacks, but flimsy on dinner).

I'd say our diet is currently better than average, but there's definitely room for improvement in regards to eating more fruits and vegetables. I eat a high-fiber, high-protein ceral with berries and fat free milk for breakfast. We make dinner at home most nights, usually using a lean meat (turkey, chicken, or pork), and cook with olive oil. We cut out most bread, pasta, rice, and chips during a stint on South Beach, although we still eat tortillas quite a bit. DH does eat lunch at a restaurant most days, while I do once or twice a week and have leftovers on other days.

Here are the areas I'm going to concentrate on:

1. Eating mostly from the "perimeter" of the grocery store -- fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy -- and minimizing packaged foods such as crackers and chips.
2. Read labels on all pre-packaged food. Avoid foods with "enriched flour", "high fructose corn syrup", "sugar" (and its synonyms), or "hydrogenated oil" in the first 5 ingredents. Avoid foods high in saturated fat or with any trans fat.
3. Eating more whole grains. When we do buy breads, cereals, etc., choose ones with "whole wheat" or "whole grain" as the first ingredient.
4. Concentrate on getting 5 servings a day of fruits and vegetables.
5. Eat fish at least once a week.
6. Eat more nuts, beans, and lentils.
7. Cut down on artificial sweeteners.
8. Enjoy a glass of red wine a few nights a week.

So far, the reading labels part is going pretty well. I wanted some bread to make toast for my toddler, and I was really disappointed to find that my favorite whole wheat bread contains high fructose corn syrup. It seems like it's in EVERYTHING! I finally found a loaf made by Miltons that I like ok. I'm not sure whether to make an exception for the BBQ and Asian sauces my husband likes to cook with -- they all seem to have corn syrup and sugar in them.

Eating more fruit, veggies, and beans/lentils seems to be the toughest change to make. My husband is actively resisting the veggie campaign, so I'm trying to come up with a list of sauces, etc., to make them more appealing.

For drinks, I'm planning to switch to homemade lemonade and sun tea. (Currently we drink a lot of diet soda.)

Here's my plan to eat 5 a day:
1. Banana or berries on my cereal.
2. Apple, pear, orange, or plum, etc with lunch.
3. Crunchy vegetable (carrot, bell pepper, or sugar snap peas) with dip (hummus or homemade guacomole) and a handful of nuts for my afternoon snack.
4. Salad with dinner.
5. Side vegetable with dinner.

I'd love to hear your suggestions on how to make specific vegetables taste good even to a veggie hater!

The good news was that my husband made an extra $15k in recruiting bonuses this year (it's quite common in our industry for the company to pay you a bonus if you convince your friends to take a job that open.) The bad news was that this extra income plus our stock profits and dividends pushed our income into the range where you can't contribute the full $4k to a ROTH. The good news is that we decided to put $2200 each into our ROTHs and the remaining $1800 each into our traditional IRAs. What I hadn't realized was that a spousal IRA is deductible -- the contribution lowered our tax bill from $2200 to $1600! Perhaps I should've put the full $4k into the traditional IRA to really reduce the bill, but on the other hand I want to contribute as much to the ROTH as possible now because we won't be eligible when I start working again in a couple of years.

After finishing a long walk pushing the jogging stroller a week ago Monday I had sudden sharp pain on the right side of my abdomen. My first thought was ectopic pregnancy, my second was ovarian cyst, and my third was appendicitis. Then I thought, no, it's probably just cramps because I was on my period, so I decided to wait and see instead of going to the doctor. The pain was fairly intense, about a 5 or 6 on this scale: http://shsskip.swan.ac.uk/Information/Mankoski%20Pain%20Scal..., and made me want to double over when I walked across the room. I don't usually get cramps so I called my mom to ask how bad they should be.

On Tuesday the pain was less, maybe a 4, but radiating across my abdomen. Still no other symptoms, so I decided it was probably constipation. My mother saw me double over when I got up from a chair and gently suggested maybe I really should go see a doctor. Tuesday night I noticed that if I pushed on just the right spot, there was a tender spot about the size of my fingertip that was the focus of the pain. I decided I would get it looked at on Wednesday.

So then the internal debate was whether to go see my OB/GYN since my gut feeling told me it was in that area, my primary care doctor because he's a generalist, or urgent care because it could be appendicitis. (An internet search revealed that 50% of the time there are no other symptoms than abdominal pain.) My insurance is PPO and the copay is the same for all three. I finally settled on the primary care doctor.

Wednesday morning I called my primary care, but he was completely booked until late Thursday afternoon. The nurse on the phone was too rushed to give me any advice on whether to wait or not. The pain was down to about a 2, so I was hesitant to go to urgent care. But this was the 3rd day and I'd ruled out the simple explanations. At this point my husband and mother were both urging me to go get this checked out ASAP. My mother said, "you have good insurance that covers this, so just go."

I pulled up my insurance website, and the most convenient urgent care in their network was located at a nearby hospital. When I got there, it turned out that the urgent care and ER were basically the same department -- I wouldn't have gone there if I'd known it was an ER, because I don't want to be one of those people who clog up the ER unnecessarily. There was only one other person in the waiting area, though, so I decided to stay. I only waited about 15 minutes to see the triage nurse, and maybe another 15 to see a doctor. I told him I felt a little silly being there given the level of pain, and that I'd come because I couldn't get into the primary care doc that day. The doctor said the primary care doc would've sent me to urgent care anyway to check for appendicitis, so I had done the right thing.

It turns out that the current standard of care for even a possibility of appendicitis is an abdominal cat scan, so that was the next order of business. Appearantly due to the cat scans they are now catching it so early that the surgeons have a hard time deciding whether or not to operate, or to give antibiotics a try. The cat scan would also check for ovarian cysts and kidney stones -- 3 diagnosis for the price of one, so to speak. The doctor also performed a pelvic exam, and I had a pregnancy test just to triple confirm I wasn't pregnant before the cat scan.

The cat scan ruled out appendicitis, but showed an ovarian cyst, so I was then sent for an ultrasound. The final diagnosis was a hemorragic (ie bleeding) ovarian cyst. It appeared to be in the process of healing itself, so I was told to go for a followup with my OB/GYN in two weeks.

I received excellent care throughout, but am curious to find out what the final bill will be, both what is billed to the insurance and what will be my out-of-pocket. We pay $200/month for insurance through my husband's employer. I think it is an 80/20 plan, with maximum out of pocket either $3,000 or $5,000. It's a lot of money but our emergency fund will cover it with no problem.

As a health care consumer, it really shows some of the difficulties with how to contain health care spending costs. I'm an educated person who enjoys reading about medical stuff, but couldn't easily determine whether I should be going to urgent care or not. Once there, I have to rely on the doctor to tell me whether I really need a cat scan, or an ultrasound, or whether just a physical examination will do. The doctor and hospital have to worry about malpractice, and so will tend to do more tests rather than less. There's no way to shop around and compare the quality and cost of different doctors, urgent care centers, or cat scan facilities. Because insurance is obtained through an employer who offers limited options, the insurance company won't lose me as a customer if I'm not happy with their handling of my claims. If I were in a HSA plan, who's to say I wouldn't drain it with this visit and then get in a car accident before I'd had time to build the savings back up?

Anyone who has been following my posts about envelope budget software knows that I've had issues with my Bank of America credit card.

I'm happy to report that there is a tool out there that solves my problem -- MT2OFX. It's available here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~csmale/mt2ofx/en/

This tool will convert between many formats, but my primary use is to take in a csv (comma separated value) file and convert it to OFX, which is what YNAB takes. It comes with scripts for a number of (mostly European) banks, unfortunately none of them worked out of the box for my csv. It took me about 3-4 hours of playing with the script, but in the end I was able to create a script that does the conversion that I need. I'd be happy to share my script and some pointers with anyone who wants it -- just PM me.

The good news is that this frees me up to use any software that takes QIF or OFX imports.

I did my end-of-month wrapup with YNAB last night. I still find the idea of changing my budget to match my actuals at the end of the month (in order to move money from underspent catagories to overspent catagories so that the month is in the black overall) to be counter-intuitive.

I've been playing around some more with YNAB, partly to help me write my review, and partly still considering if I would want to switch to it if I can get over the transaction import hurdle.

The budget paradigm takes the classic envelope system and turns it a bit sideways. In a classic system (I'm mainly comparing with Mvelopes here), the flow is as follows:
1. Create your budget based on your monthly income.
2. Put money in the envelopes at the start of the month
3. As money is spent, the envelope balance goes down.
4. If an envelope gets to 0, either don't spend any more for that catagory that month or move some money from one envelope to another.
5. At the end of the month, decide whether to let your envelope keep its balance for the next month, or to "sweep" the extra funds into another envelope.

In YNAB, the flow is very similar, but there are a few twists:
1 & 2. For the budget, you start with an "Available" amount of money shown at the top of the screen. As you assign budget amounts to catagories, the Available number goes down. Instead of predicting how much you will receive in income, the "Available" amount comes from the previous month's paychecks. For many people it is a big challenge to save up enough of a buffer to do this month-ahead funding of their budget.
3. As money is spent, the balance for the catagory goes down.
4. If the balance for a catagory gets to 0, either don't spend any more in that catagory that month, or change the budget for that month to match your spending. This may make your Available balance go red (negative). You can choose to fix this by changing the budget in other catagories (in effect moving money between catagories) or else the tool will subtract the negative amount from the next month's Available balance, leaving you with less money to allocate in the next month.
5. At the end of the month, positive catagory balances roll over to the next month, while negative catagory balances get subtracted from the next month's Available. There is no provision to sweep extra funds, instead you just reduce the budget for that catagory and assign the money somewhere else.
6. When you go to budget the next month, a right-click pop-up gives you the choice of budgeting the same as last month, the amount spent last month, or the average spent in recent months.

So the big difference I see is that in Mvelopes, you set your budget once and then manipulate the envelope balances, while in YNAB you are mainly manipulating the budget. I can't decide if I like this shift in thinking or not. It seems to me that with YNAB your budget will eventually converge with what you are actually spending rather than with what your best intentions to spend are. In either case the discipline comes in deciding what to do when a balance reaches 0 -- do you stop spending or move the money from elsewhere?

One of the big downsides to YNAB is that they don't have an account view, so you (intentionally) can't use it to track your current account balance. This can make it difficult to determine if you've missed a transaction. The author of the software is working on how an account view would fit with his budget philosophy so I'd expect to see something added within the next year.

YNAB is definitely the way to go if you work on commission and your income varies a great deal from month to month. I'd definitely recommend it over Quicken for budgeting purposes. It's good software for the price ($40), but at the momemnt I'm not completely convinced to switch away from Mvelopes ($120/yr).