Snow finally strikes and budget/retirement continues

It was only a matter of time until winter finally struck central Illinois, we were definitely living on borrowed time. We have had some bitter cold, windy days, but had been fortunately to avoid any accumulating snow falls.  Until yesterday.  We ended up with 5-6" of snow, which wouldn't be bad, except the wind was howling all day so the snow is drifting.  Some places only have an inch of snow, others 1-2 feet.  Here is a shot from my slow drive home last night:

Other than the weather, we've had a pretty uneventful week.  We're going to have to spice things up a bit so I have some stuff to write about! 

I did want to submit a quick follow up regarding my divergence into savings and early retirement in my last post.  I've been doing some more reading and research and I ran into some interesting numbers regarding saving and retiring. I pulled this info off of one of the money blogs, it is a "formula" for living on a certain percentage of your salary and then investing the rest and how that percentage relates to when you can retire.  Of course, the less you live on now the quicker you could potentially retire. I haven’t fully researched how reasonable this really is, but for entertainment purposes here it is:


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Ask yourself this question: If I live off of X% of my salary and invest the rest, how many years will it take to retire?

Assuming the following:

a.  2% inflation

b.  8% return on investments

c.  living off of 4% of your investments (that leaves a 2% buffer for taxes, etc.)

d.  You have $0 in retirement today

Live on this percentage now=years until you can retire if you save the remaining amount

90% = 50 years  (Yikes!)
80% = 36 years
70% = 28 years
60% = 22 years
50% = 17 years
40% = 13 years
30% = 9 years
20% = 6 years
10% = 3 years
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I’m going to go ahead and rule out living on 10%-30% of your income, because unless you make a ton of money or already own your home outright, there is no way that you can do it. (I could be wrong on that, but I don't think so) Also remember that this doesn’t take into consideration any potential retirement income from social security (I doubt it will still be around for me) or retirement/pension from your employment. I will be the first to admit that it sounds pretty good in theory, but can it really be done? I think the 8% gains that they are using are a little optimistic, but maybe my current retirement investments are going into the wrong funds and 8% is entirely possible! Can you see yourself being able to do this?

Personally, I don’t see a single person being able to pull this off, unless they make a good bit of money or own their home. However, I do think that a couple with reasonable incomes could probably pull it off. With a joint income family, it definitely could be possible to live off of half of  your combined income; according to this theory you could retire in 17 years.

Lets look at this for a moment: 17 more years of working would put me at 53 years old.  I will admit that, on paper, this is worth digging into further. Heck, even retiring in 20 years sounds good.  After pondering it over a couple lunch breaks, I do have a couple questions that need answers:

1.  What about taxes? There is no way you can accrue large quantities of interest, which you would if you are investing 40-50% of your income each year, without taxes becoming an issue.  As we all know, our high spending government will want their share of the interest that you earn, fair or not. How can you do this and minimize the taxes?

2.  Where/How do you invest the money to try go get good returns without losing sleep every night that it is all going to disappear?  Putting it into traditional retirement accounts (401k or Roth IRA) will limit your access to it until you are older, so I know that is out...  Although I guess you could put some there...

Get on Budget

Last night, while watching the BCS Championship game, I was playing around with the spreadsheet that I use to track our checking account. Yes, I actually keep track of that stuff manually, even in this age of online banking. Can you say detail oriented? After taking a quick over view of last year’s total expenditures, all I can say is, “Holy crap, where did all that money go?” Yes, we went on a nice vacation and we don’t eat ramen noodles for dinner every night, but good grief! I guess it all just adds up: digital cable (not even HD AND we don’t have a DVR either) and internet, one smart phone, one reasonable car payment, and…



Could we do without cable? Sure, we would continue to live without it (and Karen suggests getting rid of it occasionally), but I like watching some TV at night. Is that so wrong? I have certain shows that I like, some I even consider “educational” (anything on discovery or history channel counts as educational, even American Pickers and Pawn Stars) and some that are just for entertainment. I would rather not eliminate that routine, unless times get really tough and it comes down to cable versus eating the before mentioned ramen noodles every night for dinner. Then I would seriously consider it.


Yes, I didn’t “need” the iPhone that I got this year, but my old phone was falling apart and I have wanted an iPhone ever since they came out several years ago.  I will say that it is very nice to have all that power right there in your hand. I would also argue that it has already paid for itself several times over since we got it. For example, when we were out of town and we needed directions or needed to find out what restaurants were around, the answers were right there in my hand. I also use it to check gas prices to make sure that we go to the cheapest station in the area. See, it is paying for itself, even if it is two to five cents per gallon at a time.  Even better, we use it all the time to reserve redbox movies when we are out running errands or out for dinner (another expenditure!). No need to stand there and browse at the box, just swipe your card and out comes your movie. Nothing is worse than having to go to two or more box locations to find that movie that you wanted to see, reserving online takes out all the guess work.
 Looking back at the “hope and possibility” (tacky political reference) that I remember having when I graduated from college over 12 years ago, I don’t think that I imagined that my mid-thirties (soon to be late thirties, gulp) would be like this. Sure, I knew that I probably wasn’t going to be a BMW driving high roller bringing in a big salary, but I did imagine that things would be easier by now. Now don’t get me wrong, it isn’t like we are broke or anything like that. If you look at it that way, we are doing OK compared to what others are going through right now.  But I think it could be even better.


So, where am I going with this? Who knows, sometimes I just start typing stuff like this and then I later decide if I am going to post it on the blog or just delete it after venting. I never imagined that writing could be a way of stress relief, but in some ways I think it is. It may not make for the most enjoyable blog posts to read, but oh well.  Short of thinking up the next great idea (post it notes, super glue, facebook, etc), we're going to have to work with what we've got.


The fact is, we both like to travel and, in my opinion, one trip per year just isn’t enough. There are so many places that I want to visit and I’m not getting any younger. In order to do more travelling, there has to be money (and time) do it. I can’t do anything about the tiny bit of vacation time that I get each year, but we can do something about the money.


I don’t think that I’ve ever tried to stick to a budget before, I always just estimate it in my head and hope that I come out on the positive side at the end of the month. There was a time, before marriage, that I lived beyond my means and didn’t always come out on the positive side at the end of the month. However, I have learned from that mistake and won’t be doing that again. I’m seriously considering the idea of trying to hold us to a budget and see how it goes. Do any of you try to stick to a monthly budget?


I have been following a few blogs online and a couple of them are what I refer to as “money blogs.” Several of them are focused on retiring as early as possible and they cut out a lot of stuff in order to meet that goal. One of them, specifically, made what I consider a big salary at his (and his wife's) job, so it was probably pretty easy to squirrel away half or more of their income and still live comfortably. I fully plan on working another 25-30 years (as bad as it sounds), so I guess we need to find an appropriate balance between cutting for the future and enjoying ourselves now. What fun is having a bunch of dough in your 60’s-70’s if you tortured yourself  getting to that point?


Some of the money bloggers say that you should only have one car in a household… We have 3 when you count the convertible toy and I don’t see us getting rid of it or one of our “daily drivers.” Teacher and 8-5 employee schedules don’t exactly mesh together well for car sharing.  I’ve considered returning to riding my bicycle to work (I did it in when we lived in GA), but there isn’t a shower at the office where I work. I might give it a try and do the “baby wipe” clean up when I get to work, but I’m not sure how well that will really work. The other issue with that plan is that I can’t get myself to try riding in sub-freezing weather. Getting soft in my old age, I guess.  That eliminates 4+ months out of the year.


We already do a lot of the other things that the money blogs recommend to cut costs: I already bring my lunch to work most days and typically try to fix our cars myself instead of taking them to the shop. We don’t rush into big purchases and try to drive the wheels off our cars. Of course, we did buy a new car in 2007, which is frowned upon.  However, since we are going to keep it for many years, I'm not sure that is such a bad thing.  Yes, a slightly used vehicle would save some money, but after working at a dealership, I am not sure I will ever fully trust a preowned car again. 

We’ll see if this budget idea goes anywhere or not.  Consider this a warning:  Don't blame me if you get bored this weekend and decide to run some quick numbers on what you spent last year. You might be very surprised with what you see.

Happy New Year!

Happy new year everyone! As the year begins, I am crossing my fingers that 2012 will be a little more calm for us, I’m not sure we can handle another crazy year. We spent Christmas 2011 with Karen’s family in Virginia. Karen flew up the Monday before Christmas and I flew up on Friday after work. It is not fair that she has so much time off!!!  Thankfully, the weather was great for travelling and all of our flights were on time. It is definitely different travelling by plane for the holidays, we had to be a little more mindful when buying gifts for everyone one, with an eye towards being able to pack or ship the gifts.



While we were  in VA, Karen had planned a full schedule of visiting friends and relatives, however I managed to throw a wrench in that as I started feeling progressively more sick during the visit. By Tuesday, I was feeling bad enough that it was decided that I should go to the doctor. Like most people, I have to be feeling pretty bad to be willing to go to a doctor, especially when we are out of town. I was diagnosed with Bronchitis and prescribed antibiotics and a strong, knock you on your a$$ cough medicine. As of today, I am still not feeling 100%, I’m still battling congestion and a cough. I am ready for this to go away.


We received a lot of great gifts for Christmas, everyone was way too generous. In fact, our carry on luggage could not handle all of the gifts that we acquired in VA, so we left a majority of them at her parents’ house. (They will bring them with them the next time that they come to visit) Some of my gifts were new tools, which I would have liked to bring home with me so I can put them to use. However, I wasn’t sure that TSA would approve of me carrying on a collection of new screw drivers and a big, heavy ½” ratchet wrench with a swivel head (enter your Tim Allen grunt here), so I decided against trying to pack them. With my luck, they would have confiscated them at the security checkpoint.


I worked last Thursday and Friday and then was off for a 3 day weekend over the New Year weekend. We didn’t do too much over the weekend, as I was fighting the sleepy side effects of the prescription cough medicine. We did, unfortunately, suffer through watching UVA getting beat by Auburn in the Chick Fila bowl and then Georgia’s embarrassing triple overtime loss to Michigan State in the Outback bowl. Ugh, not the way I wanted either team’s season to end. The good news is that since the SEC added two new schools to the conference (Texas A&M and Missouri), they had to rework the 2012 football schedule. That resulted in Georgia playing at Missouri in September, which is only a little over four hours away from us. We will definitely be trying to get tickets to that game; it is the closest away game to us.


What does 2012 have in store for us? I’m not really sure, but as I said earlier, hopefully it will be a bit less uneventful. Since both of us have gotten a little more settled into our jobs, we are going to try to do some more travelling. In addition to that, I am doing another session of curling; it starts in the middle of January. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am going to attempt to do the weekly photo topic to help improve my photography skills. This week's theme is “the best of your 2011 photos,” I’ll have to go through my pictures and see which one I like best. If all goes as planned, Karen and I will pick up where the golf lessons ended last October and start trying to play some golf once the spring warm up comes. I am also hoping to make some more progress on the landscape in our yard. I still have a lot of ground to cover, I just need to get the CFO to authorize some funds for plants. Based on that quick list, it looks like 2012 could be a fun year.

As for the travelling, we’ve been in Illinois for over a year and really haven’t explored the surrounding areas. I would like to spend some more time wandering around Chicago and head down to St. Louis for a weekend. We have scheduled a trip to Denver this spring, Karen will be presenting at a conference and I will be tagging along to sight see. I have only been to Colorado once for a ski trip and I am looking forward to exploring Denver while Karen is busy at the conference.  I will try to cover the historical stuff that she doesn't like while she is at the conference. In May, I will make a trip into neighboring Indiana for my first Indy 500.  We are also talking about taking another cruise, who knows if that will actually happen or not. We had such a good time on the one we did over Thanksgiving 2011 that we are itching to do it again.


This looks like a lot of travelling and it doesn't include trips to visit family for the holidays. Hopefully this all works out and we have a great year. What do you all have planned for 2012? 

Merry Christmas

We hope that you all have a Merry Christmas!

I didn't submit a photo for it, but this weeks theme for the weekly photo challenge is Bokeh Lights - basically when you shoot an object in the foreground and the lights in the background go all blurry.  I played around with my camera some, but the lens that I have doesn't open up the aperture far enough for really good blurring of the background.  I think I hear an excuse to buy another lens for the camera!  Here is one shot that I did get it to work with my lens after some fooling around with the distance between the camera, the ornament and the Christmas tree in the background.

The F word

I seriously considered waiting a few days before writing this post, but then I realized that it might be more entertaining for the lucky few who follow this blog if I wrote it before all of this sank in and I came to terms with it.  I apologize in advance if you are offended by the F word, which I am using throughout this post to reflect my response to the day’s events.  If it really bothers you, just replace it with the word Fudge… 

What else can I say, the F word basically defines the day.  I had just settled into my chair at the office when my phone rang, it was Karen calling.  Strange, I just talked with her when I was driving to work, as she is currently out of town.  “Did you hear about what was going on at our house in Georgia?” she asked.  A bad feeling quickly settled into my stomach.    She continued, “Neighbor X said the police were at the house last night.” Then the day took a turn for the worse.  F…

I quickly went to the local paper’s website and… “You’ve got to be F’n kidding me” I said to myself.  Evidently, I didn’t say it to myself; instead, I said it loud enough for the entire office to hear.  I spent the next hour or two on the phone with neighbors, the local police and the insurance company.  Evidently our tenant was housing more than just herself and her two kids...  F… 

The local police thought that the other item that was being kept in the house was important enough to execute a “no knock” warrant on Monday night.  In case you were wondering, “No knock” means just what it says:  One swift application of force and a crew of armed officers swarmed into the house leaving a mangled door in their wake.  I don’t imagine they said “housekeeping” (use a high pitched voice) as they entered the house.  Who is responsible for repairing that damaged door you might wonder?  That would be us, the property owner.  Evidently, once a warrant is in hand, the police can do whatever they want.  F…

The big surprise that I found after all of my phone calls?  Our tenant was not arrested.  They have only arrested her boyfriend and his “business partner.”  A lot of their "merchandise" and other accessories were removed from our house and two other houses in town that were raided, but she is still there.  F…

Now we are left with a tenant that we don’t really want in our nice little house in it’s quiet little neighborhood.  What do we do now?  I read through the lease that the tenant signed and (fortunately) it does state that the tenant (or an acquaintances of the tenant) cannot use the property for illegal activities.  In our happy little peachy world, that is a rule that is pretty F’n easy to follow.  EVIDENTLY NOT. I am going to go out on a limb and say that if the police felt it was worth bashing in the front door for, then I can surely deem it as an illegal activity.  They don’t typically come knocking just to say “hello.”  Now we have justification for beginning the eviction process. F…

 Before I get into eviction, I just wanted to point out that eviction wasn’t something that we really thought we would have to deal with when we decided to rent the house.  “What are the odds that it would go so wrong that we would have to kick someone out?” we thought.   All we wanted was someone who wouldn’t trash the place and would give us enough money so that we could pay that mortgage each month.  It sounded simple enough, but evidently that house isn’t in Mayberry.  Now all I can say is F…

Since it is the holiday season, I am imagining the eviction process going something like this, “Merry F’n Christmas, now give me enough money to fix the door, gather all your $%&#  and get your sorry @$$ out of our house.”  However, that would be too easy and twistedly rewarding for me (FYI:  according to spell check, twistedly is a new, but I think appropriately used word).  Instead, eviction is a drawn out process that is definitely geared towards protecting the renter.  F…

I would say that this case is pretty straight forward:  You did something that was a clear violation of our lease agreement and the police damaged our house to gain access to it.  Therefore, you need to get the F out of our house.  Unfortunately, it isn’t that simple and now we have to start jumping through legal hoops so we don’t get sued.  That would just be our luck, getting sued for trying to throw out a single mom and her kids during Christmas time.  F…

Step one:  Ask the tenant to leave.  Problem A:  we live 12 hours away and she wouldn’t answer the phone calls, text messages or emails that I sent today.  I guess that I can’t say that I’m surprised that she isn’t answering.  Would you?  Perhaps she didn’t think that we would find out about the police knocking in the door?   We are 12 hours away, after all.  Now we get to do our part to try to keep the USPS afloat.  Hello certified mail; please let me know when she gets this letter. 

Step two:  If she doesn’t move out on her own after that letter (everyone, please pray that she does), then we have to start submitting paper work to the Magistrate Court.  Just the thought of that makes me think one thought:  F…

Step three:  The court reviews that paperwork, hopefully agrees with us (Police activity = lease violation) and then issues a notice to the tenant. 

Step four:  We wait for a specified period of time for the tenant to respond.  If she doesn’t respond, then it goes to step 5.  If she responds and wants to try to stay in the house, then we go to court.  F…

Step five:  Pay the sheriff’s department to supervise a crew to remove all the tenant’s belongings from the house, placing them in a specified location in the front yard.  I’m sure that the neighbors will love that.  There has to be a specific number of people assigned to this task and it has to be completed in 2 hours or less.  The sheriff is basically there to keep the peace.  Sounds like fun, right?  I say F…

Step six:  Decide if we are going to A: try renting the house again (what are the odds of it going bad twice?!)  or B: put it back up for sale, no reasonable offer refused.  I am leaning towards plan B and, unfortunately, I am pretty sure Karen is leaning towards plan A.  F...

New year resolution?

I am one of those people who likes doing a lot of different things, but isn’t particularly great at any of them. Yes, I do pretty well in the kitchen, but I wouldn’t consider myself an excellent cook. Yes, I enjoy working on our cars, but I am in no way a mechanic. Add in my interests in photography, sports, the welding and golf classes that I just took and you start to get the idea. The good news is that having a variety of interests makes making a Christmas/Birthday list very easy (except for the fact that everything seems to be $$$). The bad news is that since I’m not 100% focused on one thing, I never actually excel at any of them or acquire all the "accessories" needed for that interest.

Even my profession, Landscape Architecture, is that way: I know plants, but I'm in no way a plant expert, go ask a horticulturist about that specific cultivar of hydrangea. I can design basic structures and understand the terminology/theories, but if you want a building go see an architect. I can design low retaining walls, but if you want anything bigger than 3-4 feet high, I am going to bring in a structural engineer. The list goes on and on. I think “Jack of all trades, master of none,” or more fittingly “knows enough to be dangerous” are both pretty accurate descriptors for me.

By now, you are probably wondering “where the heck are you going with this?” Well, I bought myself a nice digital SLR camera a couple years ago; however, I don’t feel like I have been able to use it to its potential so far. I took it with us on our cruise and got a few great photos out of it, but I think that was more a function of luck than skill. I think that I need to do something that will get me to spend more quality time with the camera, preferably not on the auto setting. I learn best by doing, so I need to do some more doing.

While I am not typically a big fan of “new year resolutions” (seems like a hooky way to try to get yourself to change [which I would argue people typically don’t change much]), I am considering the new year as a good jumping off point for signing up for a “weekly photo challenge” website. The basic theory behind it is that they give you a specific topic/subject/theme each week and you are supposed to go out and shoot a photo that goes with the topic and submit it. If the theme is dogs, then you shoot something with a dog in it...  After everyone has a chance to submit their photo, the “members” vote on the winning photos each week. There aren't any prizes, just bragging rights for the week.
If I do this, I will try to post the weekly theme and my photo for it here… I am hoping that being “accountable” to the few of you that might be reading this will keep me focused on actually doing it. If I slack off, you can post some “where the heck are your photo challenge pictures, slacker” comments.  If any of you are interested in doing this too, it would add to the motivation to know someone else was doing it too.  Let me know if you are interested.

Speaking of this blog, I have been trying to make a definite effort to post at least once a week, even when there isn’t much going on. Personally, I follow several blogs in google reader (it is a nice, easy way to keep track of blogs, news, etc. since it pulls them all into one central place for you) and compared to them, my  rambling (writing) is definitely a very random collection of topics. Sometimes I think that I should narrow my focus down to a more specific topic, but then I realize there is no way I could narrow it down to just one thing… so this will continue to be a running recount of what I (and to some extent, Karen) am up to. I guess that leaves a bit of mystery for you, since there is no telling what I am going to be getting into from one day to the next. I do think I might have over done it on the curling posts, but that is where the “action” has been lately.

Speaking of curling, the PHD’s lost in the semifinals on Monday, so we will be playing for 3rd place (second loser) this coming Monday. We will be going up against the #1 seeded team, who was upset on Monday. The good news is that we beat them during the "regular" season, however they have already said they are out for revenge.  Our team has signed up for the January - March league (I know you are thinking "yeah, more curling!"), although we are losing at least one of our members to family/work/schedule conflicts. We might have to rename ourselves when the team is no longer full of husbands of doctors (Phenomenal ones, of course).

I did get our new artistic acquisition hung this week.  Due to the materials, it was a pain to photograph.  Shiny metal, mirrors and glass are not very photo friendly.  You will just have to come visit to see it in person to get a better feel for it.  It is modern and somewhat funky, yet geometrical too.   

Xmas time is coming

On Saturday, I took a trip with some friends north about 1 hour to Waltham, IL. Waltham, IL is a very small town, they don't even have a traffic light.  It is basically a grain elevator (the main part of a majority of these small farm towns), a restaurant, a bar, a bank, and (surprise!) a curling club. The Waltham Curling Club was established in 1884 (yes, eighteen eighty four) and one of the guys in our league is a member of the club. He invited us to come up and play at their facility, an old building with an old vintage feel to it. Here is a picture from the viewing room:

The viewing room is heated, so you can watch the play in comfort. They also have TV monitors that show what is going on in the house on the far end of the ice.  On the other side of the viewing window, it was a brisk 35 degrees on the ice and we were out there for almost 5 hours.  After playing, we went to the restaurant for a nice meal and then headed home. 

On Sunday, Karen and I took a trip to Springfield, IL. We received a post card from an artist that Karen had met at a festival last summer saying that he was closing his gallery.  Closing the gallery would allow him to focus on travelling to art shows instead of trying to spend time at the gallery. All of the work in his gallery was on sale, so we thought it would be worth the 1 hour trip to go see what he had left.  Who doesn't like a sale?  We visited the gallery and ended up coming home with a piece - it is a combination of aluminum, stainless steel and glass. I'll post a picture once I get it hung on the wall.

When we got home from our thanksgiving trip, our entire neighborhood was decorated for Christmas.  We suddenly felt like we were way behind.  Since returning, we have decorated a tree (white pine) and the inside/outside of the house.  If there is one thing we do not have a shortage of, it would be Christmas decorations.  We could decorate a house twice as big as the one we have now.  That being said, we kept it pretty simple, especially outside.  We just put some wreaths on the lights by the garage doors and wrapped the columns with garland and lights.  Once the tree out front grows some, I will probably put lights in it, but it seems dumb to decorate a tiny tree.

Many of my neighbors went above and beyond with the decorations.These people definitely like to decorate, possibly a little too much.  I often wonder if they truly think that what they did looks nice, or if their kids directed the work and they are just doing it to keep the kids happy.  In some instances, I can only hope it is the latter.  This is going to sound a little bahumbug-ish, but when driving around town, I can't decide what I hate the most:

1.  The stupid inflatable stuff people put in their yards, the snow globe being my least favorite.  These things make me want to buy a BB gun  so that I can do the rest of us a favor by putting these things out of commission.
2.  Randomly flashing lights that have no sequence or reason - I'm cool with them if the run from one end of the house and then back or something that makes a little bit of sense.  I do not like the totally random on/off/on flashing of multiple strands. Some old person is going to have a seizure from this.
3.  Mixing colored and white light strands or incandescent and LED at the same time. This theory is so simple, yet it gets violated all the time.  Just pick one and go with it, you can always do something different next year. 
4.  Flat out poor choices/execution of light placement.  For example:  putting just a single strand of lights in a tree that is big enough to have 3 or 4.  Do it right or don't do it.  While I'm on tree annoyances, why do people wrap the trunk of trees with lights but only go up to the first branch and then stopping there?  Are they worried Rudolph is going to run into the tree trunk if Santa decides to land in their yard?

The last two are probably more a function of the designer in me coming out, but (like I already said) if you are going to do it, do it right.  If you have done one of the things listed above, consider this a warning..