Your Money or Your Life: stumbling on step 1.

I'm beginning to realise why I failed to complete the 9 step program in Your Money or Your Life the first time I started reading it. Here's step 1, Making Peace with the Past:

Part A: Find out how much money you have earned in your lifetime - the sum total of your gross income, from the first penny you ever earned to your most recent paycheck.

WTF? My entire life? Er yes, apparently.

Dig our your copies of old income tax returns. Adjust the figures to reflect any cheating you did - tips you didn't report, jobs that paid you under the table, informal consulting, gambling winnings, gifts from relatives that went unreported [I'm supposed to report financial gifts? Oops], any money you've stolen [what the...?], cash prizes you've won...
...summer jobs you had during high school and college...
... what odd jobs did you have and how much did you earn picking apples, house-sitting, watering the neighbours plants...

Holy baboon-pants! Do I have to mention pocket money as a kid, or the pennies I earned picking gooseberries and red currants in my parents' garden or shelling peas? I had a few babysitting jobs but I'll be darned if I can remember my hourly rate or how many hours I worked. I can't even remember how many months I worked at Vision Express or the various bar jobs I had. This is some serious digging I have to do. And it makes it a bit harder that half of my earning life was in a different country. And that's where all my paperwork is. So I think I'll just start with the last 8 years in Australia for now.

But wait! That's only Part A. There's more.

Part B: What have you got to show for it? For the years you have been working for wages, a certain amount of money (which you just calculated) has entered your life. The amount that is left in your life now is your net worth.

Well that can't be that hard, can it? Not quite sure how I manage the fact that most things are joint owned with Toby. Do I need to include all the income he's ever earned too? But as for figuring out the worth of what I own, surely it's not that hard. I mean, I've got no money and I owe shit-loads on the house. But I own one and a half cars. Well, half of two really as I made Toby get rid of his. But wait! What's this?

Creating a Personal Balance Sheet simply means going through your material universe and listing everything you own (assets) and everything you owe (liabilities).

Simply? Everything? Really? Yes, start with liquid assets then move onto fixed assets and after listing the big stuff (house, car),

Go through your attic, basement, garage and storage shed. Itemize everything, without subjective evaluations like "That's worthless."...

...Go through every room of your house and inventory everything. Look up at those decorative light fixtures. Look down at that rug. How about...

Stop! Enough already. I get the picture. You really did mean everything.

Oh my god! I'm having heart palpitations. I'm rubbish enough at doing this for insurance estimates but absolutely everything I own with "an approximate current cash value"? I'm not to "ignore anything"?

Even the stuff in my mam and dad's loft? Don't answer that.

Okay this is really hard and it's going to take a really long time. Already this has highlighted for me just how much clutter we have. The book talks about clutter as being all the extra stuff you have beyond "enough"; "enough" being what you need for survival, plus comfort plus a few luxuries. Every time you add stuff to your life the benefit (or level of fulfillment) goes down in relation to the amount of money spent. I can see the value in knowing your net worth but I have to ask myself whether the effort is really worth the potential result for me right now. But I've committed to this. I have to do it. However, this is a long term thing. Clearly I need a short term financial plan to reach my goal of $20,000-$30,000 by Feb 2013. It's going to be an interesting walk down memory lane and I wonder what I'm going to rake up in doing it. When I was applying for permanent residency I had to write a CV of everything I'd ever worked on. It took me ages but the things I remembered whilst I was doing it were amazing. Things I thought I'd forgotten that seemed to bear no relevance to work. Songs, friends, nights, moments. So, you know, every cloud...

Things That Make Me Smile No. 4: Going to the toy zoo.

We're a bit housebound at the moment because the Wee Bairn sleeps so much and often his and Miss Chief's sleeps overlap. So I've been challenged to come up with different ways to keep Miss Chief amused and prevent me from going insane. Yesterday we built a zoo in the front room and then took a Barbie doll and her cat and dog on a visit. We parked the car under the coffee table and then wandered around taking in rabbits, monkeys, giraffes, tigers, crocodiles, a pond with a frog, a platypus, ducks and a hippo, elephants, a panda, a brown bear (or was it a grizzly?), birds, a kangaroo and a meerkat. It was all fun and games until the crocodiles escaped and started eating people.

Someone left a baby in the tiger enclosure.

Visiting the giraffe enclosure.

Those crazy crocodiles.

Things That Make Me Smile No. 3: Miss Chief Having Fun With Her Big Cousins

We sent Miss Chief offsite today while we dealt with her unwell brother. She spent the day having a great time with her older cousins and even had a 2 hour nap. That's impressive babysitting. Uncle Awesome sent this photo of her enjoying a slushy.

Does glamour = boring?

Do you ever look at someone totally glammed up and think, "if they have time to do all that they must have a really boring life"?

I do. It makes me feel better about myself.

Family Financials

Isn't it funny how life has this strange way of throwing things at you just when you need them? Actually I have a theory about that. We have so much information coming our way that we can't possibly effectively process it all. And so we filter out the totally irrelevant stuff and ignore it. Then there's the vaguely interesting but still practically irrelevant stuff that we glance at, maybe read but then forget (e.g. Rare Moon Mineral Found In Western Australia). And then every now and again a little nugget shines through the detritus and shouts out "Look at me! Look at me! I'm really relevant." And you think, "wow, it's almost as if that was put there just for me."

But of course, if you hadn't been at the stage you were at it would just fade away with the rest of the irrelevant or vaguely interesting stuff.

Today on Facebook I read a reference to an app called EEBA (Easy Envelope Budgeting Aid) and I thought "wow! That's really relevant. It's almost as if that was put there just for me." Because yes, the time has finally come, after years of putting it off or making half-baked or over-ambitious attempts, to finally get our household budget underway.

Really, we've left it too late. We've already had to sell shares to pay our credit card bill. This single income malarky ain't all it's cracked up to be. But one thing it definitely is, is a challenge. And I love a challenge.

Before Christmas I joined my old colleagues on a workshop. The theme of the workshop was Life Balance and one of our tasks was to set a goal using the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) criteria. Typically I don't give finances much thought. So long as there is more money coming in than going out I'm happy. I am beginning to realise this is not a very balanced approach and that money, whether I like it or not, is a big part of my life and needs just as much attention as family, work, fitness and all those other things I give priority to, such as perfecting the foam on my coffee and making soft toys and ribbon blankets. If I don't start actively planning my finances I will not be able to achieve some of the things that are important to me, such as visiting my family in the UK and retiring comfortably. Not to mention the fact that children don't get any cheaper as they get older.

So, with this in mind, my goal is to have between $20,000 and $30,000 in our offset account by the end of January 2013. I'm not sure whether this is achievable or realistic so I have some work to do to figure that out. I was originally inspired by reading Planning With Kids by Nicole Avery (see Nicole's great planning blog, and online resources). Next I dug out an old book that I never finished reading called Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin. (Check out Vicki's blog of the same name.) I'm enjoying reading this book again as it reminded me of some of my core values that I seem to have forgotten lately. They're all about simplification and reducing excess and clutter; sustainability, environmentalism and consumer awareness; and active prioritisation of needs and wants rather than impulse buying. Sometimes these values feel at odds with the world I live in and I don't always feel happy living them. But I definitely feel restless when I ignore them, as I have been doing and bringing them to mind makes me feel excited and hopeful about what I can achieve when I put my mind to it.

I started putting some of this into action anyway a few months ago when I began to declutter some of my clothes. It felt so good to drop off bags and boxes of unused items to the charity shop. I still have a long way to go with that, but it's an ongoing thing as my body changes post-baby and I decide what I still want to wear. And naturally Other Half and I started to think a bit more about what we spend our money on: going out for coffee less, temporarily cancelling our organic produce delivery, buying on special and being more aware of what we're eating. OH in particular has an "if it's there, eat it (and don't stop until it's gone)" attitude to food. I am still fighting with him to adopt a menu plan system. I much prefer to know what I'm cooking, have a shopping list, stick to it and then know that we will cook and eat everything we've bought. He, on the other hand, has decided to only buy things that are less than $3 a kilo. And as I'm currently doing most of the cooking, some nights it's a bit like Ready Steady Cook.

I loaded the EEBA app onto my iPhone today with the intention of using this as one of my budgeting tools. From what I've seen so far EEBA allows you to virtually stick cash into envelopes, log your spending from a particular envelope and then stop when the money runs out. This is exactly how my financial mind works and in fact, pooling all of our resources into one offset account, rather than having separate savings accounts, has been a real challenge for me and is one of the reasons I've budgeted so poorly in recent years. I've already started to implement a sort of envelope budgeting system by paying in cash at the supermarket. No, really I have actually been doing this. For most groceries Aldi is cheaper and of equivalent quality but they charge for using a credit card. In the past I've ignored this charge as it really is minimal. But then I realised that if I only want to spend $30 on groceries, then why not just take $30 and calculate the total as I go around the shop? It sounds like an effort but really, even with Phoebe in tow it wasn't that hard at all.

So follow me on this journey. I'll make regular updates as to how I'm doing and what steps I've taken and maybe you'll learn some new tricks that might help you too.

I like boys

I just stumbled across this unpublished post from a few months ago and thought it deserved publishing.

The other day when we were driving home from daycare I asked Miss Chief what she'd been doing that day.

"Dinosaurs. And Dress Ups."
"Who did you play dinosaurs with?" I asked.
"Thomas. And Liam."
"And who did you play dress ups with?"
"Nate."
"Kate?"
"No."
"Who?"
"Nate."
"Oh Nate."
"Yes. And Sai."
"Sai?"
"Yes."
"There's a boy called Sai at daycare is there?"
"Yes."
"So you played with Thomas, Liam, Nate and Sai? All boys? Did you play with any girls today?"
"No."
"Just boys?"
"Yes."
"Boys are fun, aren't they?"
"Yes."
And after a pause she added, "I like boys."
"Me too."

Things That Make Me Smile No. 9: Floating Algae

This is one of those times that I wished
a) that I had a polarising filter on my camera; and
b) that I'd had my camera with me.

But I did have my phone so this will have to do. Although I would like to make it known that I couldn't actually see what I was taking a photo of so it's a bit of a point, click and hope job.

Okay so it doesn't look like much but here's the story. I took Ash for a walk around the lake and noticed these bits of weedy algae, or whatever they are. The way the light was shining on the water, and the clarity of the first few centimetres of water made it look like they were suspended in air. At least that's how it looked through my polarising sunglasses. You'll have to just bear with me here and take my word for it.