Tag Archives: personal finance

The end off the cuff budgeting…

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I’ve never been much of a budgeter. That’s not to say I don’t keep an eye on cash flow and know more or less what’s coming in and what’s going out. However, sitting down and putting together a real pen and ink budget has all the appeal of a back alley root canal.

Having said that, I couldn’t help but notice that the spate of vet bills coming through these last four months has put more than a little bit of strain on my mental accounting. In fact, keeping the accounts balanced put me in a highly unusual (and disagreeable) position of either needing to sell assets or take on debt to float the bills until inflow caught up with outflow.

I’m a collector by nature, so the process of acquiring things has always come easy. I’m less comfortable when the time comes to sell some of those things off – even if I picked them up originally with a vague plan that someday I may need to convert them to cash if I ever found myself pinched. I know many people enjoy that side of the process as much as they do acquiring things in the first place. Not me. I tend to acquire and then hold on grimly.

With the current, almost punitive rate of interest on consumer borrowing, though, letting a few things go was the lesser of two evils. Maybe it’s only lesser because I know full well I’ll end up buying them back whenever the opportunity presents itself in the future.

The point of all that is to say I’m finally coming around to the idea of putting a bit more academic rigor into my household budgeting process. The personal finance gurus would probably disagree, but step one is funding a much more robust “self-insurance” account for future veterinary expenses – the one thing I can find that consistently blasts gaping holes in my operating budget. After that, everything else just sort of takes care of itself… or at least that’s what the numbers seem to be telling me.

Take it where you find it…

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After ten months of watching interest rates plummet through previously unimaginable record lows, I’ve finally stuck out my hand in an effort to catch the falling knife. Almost six years ago, I was thrilled to lock in 4.25% for 30 years. I’d taken 7.5% back in 2001when I bought my St. Mary’s County condo. At the time, that was a steal – especially for a 23-year-old with no significant credit history. I refinanced that one a few times over the years and the shopped around for financing for the Tennessee house in 2007. I closed on that one about three months before the bottom fell out of the housing market in 2008. Good timing, that.

I’d gotten used to being able to move through the mortgage process pretty effortlessly. I have every conceivable piece of electronic paperwork the underwriters may need at my fingertips – often sending it off before the call asking for it even ended. I’m still good for that, but the mortgage business itself is having a bit of a struggle at the moment. Just getting a broker to call me back proved to be more of a challenge than you might think. I suppose it’s a case of having an embarrassment of riches as everyone is racing to their favorite banker to take advantage of the unprecedentedly low rates. I was warned that getting through to closing, usually a 30-day affair, could take up to 90 days because of how much of a backlog they already have in the pipeline. The rate is locked in, with an option to go lower if they should continue to fall, but now that I’ve started the process, I’m impatient to start getting my monthly savings.

Plague, famine, sedition are all loose upon the world. Maybe we’re all going to hell in a handbag. It’s important to take your happiness where you can find it in strange times, so damned if I’m not going to appreciate a blisteringly low interest rate with no points on the way to the collapse of civilization.