Tag: life

The Dickerson Family Thanksgiving Feast in our new home:

In my reading and podcast listening I've come across lots of information about family finance.  Sadly, one of the most common factors cited in divorce cases is arguments about money.  APM's Marketplace radio show often discusses how couples / families handle their finances and there are lots of ways to do it.  Presumably, or hopefully, the end goal of any arrangement is to minimize arguments about money.

A lot of discussions revolve around merging finances when both partners earn an income.  I think some of these methods are bad arrangements that fail at the main goal of minimize disagreements.  For example: each person keeps their own money, but contributes into a joint account for joint expenses.  This just seems like a obvious way to set up a power struggle within the relationship when one person makes a meaningful amount more than the other.  That person has more disposable income than the other.  And in some respects that's "fair," but it makes the marriage seem more like a roommate agreement.

We only have a single income.  Some arrangements for single incomes are equally terrible to the above dual-income arrangement.  I've seen some suggestions where the income earner pays the bills and then gives the non-earner an allowance.  This seems terribly patronizing and unequal.  Both this and the above method cling to the idea that the money belongs to the earner which, in turn, sets up the scenario where the money is more important than the relationship.

We really like the solution we came up with when we got married, which would work just as well for dual-income families:

Mindset

First is the mindset.  I go to work and the paycheck has my name on it; but it's not my money.  It's our money.  It belongs to the family and will be used for the family's needs and wants first.  (I think this is a major stumbling block for a lot of people.)  By letting go of the ownership of the money you let go of the potential of feeling personally attacked when the money is spent on something about which you don't care.

Second is the actual handling of the money.  The paycheck itself is handled via direct deposit as follows:

Retirement Savings

My job offers 401K matching (up to a certain amount) so the first thing is to put enough money into retirement savings to fully utilize the free money being offered in the match.

Savings

Next we slice off as much as we want to put into general savings.  This is where we're accumulating a down-payment for a house.  And this acts as an emergency fund for unexpected large expenses.  Doing this first has a nice advantage which I'll discuss below in "Everything Else."

Personal Luxury

We each have personal checking accounts and we each get a little money each paycheck which is ours and ours alone.  This is the best part of our arrangement.  "Luxury" within the context of our personal versus joint expenses is kind of a fluid concept and open to interpretation.  But it's working well.

For example, when I came home the other day Jess was telling me about the candles she ordered from Yankee Candle.  Since she was buying them with her luxury money I didn't end up thinking "You spent how much money on candles?!"  Likewise, when I wanted to buy an external flash for our camera, I just bought it with my luxury funds.  No need to have a discussion with Jess about whether this was a good use of our money or whether we should do something else with it instead.

If our monthly expenses are running a little high, but one of us really wants to eat take-out then we can do that using luxury money.  If there's a luxury we both want, we can split the cost out of luxury funds.

I really like that when one of us gets excited about buying something, the other can be excited too instead of doing an internal calculation about what it's going to cost.

Being able to spend a little money without worry or guilt is really freeing.  It takes away much of the stress that builds in the tension between general frugality and occasionally just wanting a treat.  We can be frugal with our general spending, but still buy things we want every so often.

The amount of money we give ourselves in this form changes over time.  But it's nice to have the discussion about what amount should be luxury spending only occasionally instead of rehashing it over every purchase.

Everything Else

At this point, everything left over goes into our general fund.  This is the account we use for regular spending: groceries, rent, utilities, gas, car maintenance, student loans, etc.  I like this part too.  Since savings has already been taken care of, whatever is in this account can be spent.  If we want to save more money, we take it off the top and adjust our monthly spending to match the change to this account.

--

All together this means there is no "budget."  I hate the idea of a budget.  It's tiring, stressful, and time-consuming.  Instead, we just watch the status of the general fund and try to keep a consistent "burn rate."

This approach works best once you've accumulated a cushion that allows you to absorb fluctuations (things were a bit more structured when we first got married and had absolutely no money and more bills).  Fluctuations in spending are natural and one of the reasons I hate the idea of a budget.  If, this week, we need to buy flour and sugar and there's a sale on cereal (so we stock up) and we also need more chicken then it's going to be a much higher bill than surrounding weeks.  The burn-rate approach with a cushion handles this great--breaking a budget can cause stress and frustration even when you know it will balance out in the long run.

I think it does a really good job of truly minimizing potential arguments about money.  There will still need to be discussions about how money is spent at a macro level (how much do we put in each bucket) and when making large purchases out of the savings account (house, car, appliances, etc.); but on a day-to-day level there really is no reason to disagree.

Saturday birthdays are the best.  We got up in the morning and I played with Heather while Jess decorated the apartment.  We thought Heather would enjoy playing with a bit of streamer.  Little did we know that streamer dye runs very easily.  So Heather ended up with blue all over her tongue, hands, and mouth.  It was rather entertaining and it mostly washed off.

Once the apartment was decorated and after we had breakfast we decided it was time to open presents.  Other Dickerson children might consider this blasphemy, but Jess convinced me it was a good idea.  Since it was Saturday we could hang out in pajamas and open presents and then you have the whole day to play with things; it's like Christmas, but then there's cake.  It's really hard to argue against this logic.

Heather helped with presents for a little while, but then became much more interested in what Jess was doing.

Hey look!  I got my very own Galileo thermometer!

After opening and playing with presents for a while, it was time for Heather's nap.  So she slept while we prepared for the day.  And after her nap we went to California Pizza Kitchen for birthday-lunch.  Birthday-dinner is more traditional, but it's kind of hard to go anywhere for dinner when Heather goes to bed by 6 each night.

When we got home from lunch it was just about time for some friends to come over so we could have cake and hang out.

Jess was kind enough to do our usual Saturday grocery shopping on Friday so we were able to just relax and enjoy the day.  It was a good day.

So we took Jess' car back to the shop and they said they'd look at it again without charging us anything until/unless they identified a problem.

They did a load test on the battery and, surprise, it wasn't providing enough current. (Well duh, it was dead and we had to jump start the car to get it to the shop.) So they put it on a charger for a few hours and then tested it again and it was fine. So they let it sit for several hours and then tested it again and it was still fine. So we had them keep it over the weekend and they tested it again Monday morning and it was still fine.

So we picked it up and came back home and it's been sitting since then until this afternoon when Jess needed to go somewhere again. And it started fine. So the problem seems to be fixed and the issue was just that the battery hadn't be charged up again after being dead originally.

Which just makes me wonder: When a customer brings in a car with a completely dead battery and you replace the alternator, shouldn't standard procedure be to hook the battery up to a charger to get it back to a full charge before having the customer pick up the vehicle?

Well, apparently not. So unless they did something else without owning up to it the residual problem was just an under-charged battery. Regardless, we didn't have to pay any more than we already had, so I at least don't have to be grumpy about that.

End of story.

Grumble.

Jess' car's battery was completely dead when she went to use it last week.  Completely dead meaning no lights or anything.  I checked the voltage with my multimeter and found the battery could only provide a couple dozen millivolts, which I thought was unusual for most normal car battery problems (and the battery is only 4 months old).  My thought was something was leaving a load on the battery even when the car was off.  But since I know next to nothing about cars I didn't put much stock in the idea.

We jumped it and it ran fine and the alternator was providing a charge voltage (tested with my multimeter), though I don't have the ability to test how much current the alternator is providing.  A couple days later, Jess goes to drive somewhere and, again, the battery is completely dead.  So we jumped it and drove it to the shop.

I tell them what's up, along with my thought that something is leaving a load on the battery.  Their tests determine that the alternator is not performing correctly and replace it for somewhere north of $500 for parts and labor.

Yesterday, we pick up the car and it seems fine.

Today, Jess tries to drive it somewhere and it won't start and the battery is low.  It's down to 9 volts and, after some finagling to get the alarm to be quiet, I was able to determine that one of the circuits (meaning the circuit running through a specific fuse) is pulling a load off the battery of several hundred milliamps to almost a full amp (but I can't tell for sure how much since the battery is so low now).

I understand some load is normal (since you want things like your radio to keep its settings and your remote lock/unlock to work), but my reading suggests that up to maybe 50mA is acceptable.

So now I'm annoyed that I was probably right in my parasitic-load hypothesis and yet we paid for a new alternator.  It very well may have needed an alternator, but that clearly wasn't the _only_ problem, if it even was a problem, which I'm not convinced it was.

Would it be unreasonable to expect the shop to provide some kind of financial consideration when they fix the actual problem?