Comments on: Nickels and Dimes (part 1)

By: Spacemom

Spacemom — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:52:07 +0000

I got the book “Investing for dummies”, yeah yeah yeah it did teach me some things. I used to be afraid of investiments too. Now I am not.

By: LawyerChick

LawyerChick — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:00:50 +0000

oh boy. Reading this worries me too. We’re in roughly the same boat but without kids, and that’s scary enough. And this month we had a little scare because I have to pay estimated taxes quarterly, and we didn’t leave enough $ in the account to pay them without overdrawing the account a bit. Oops.

By: Martha-Lynn

Martha-Lynn — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:12:23 +0000

Reading this makes my palms sweat. Your “where we are now” is where I so desperately want us to be, but we’re not making enough to establish the kind of security we need. Hopefully, when Mr. Milkweed gets another job, we’ll be able to slowly make inroads into starting all the parts and pieces. As it is, right now we’re treading water…we have no debt other than student loans, and are keeping it that way…but I still feel like I’m living the life of a college student when I think about our lack of financial “roots.”

By: lisa

lisa — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:25:37 +0000

Yeah-adoption feeds on cash savings. Same scenario here. Retirement is handled and debt is minimal, but no emergency fund.
And I had the moving out of state and owning two houses for 15 months thing too, forcing me into a bad mortgage which I had to refinance to get out of once the old house was sold. Trying to forget how much money I lost in that process.
And I agree about the class thing. In the midwest, my friends and I talked about money all the time. My parents were always uncomfortable talking to their friends about money, because they had more than many of their friends. ~lmc

By: Kendra

Kendra — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:54:14 +0000

I think it’s fine to talk in general terms about finances. I think it’s when a person starts talking about HOW MUCH they spend or have invested that people get uncomfortable. It’s the difference between, “Oh, we got our house at a very reasonable price” and “We paid XXX for our house.” And it just depends on the circumstances and who the other people are, too.

I found this entry really interesting. We have pretty much the same problem — no cash savings. We can dip into the Roths if we have to, but we’re trying to avoid doing that, and thus the adoption expenses keep wiping out anything we save up. And I think we will probably adopt a second time, too, so it’s going to be a while before we have any savings. We also owe A LOT on the house, because we had to sell our old one unexpectedly and move state to state. We lost money in that process (plus had to pay a mortgage and rent for a while) and ended up having to do a no down payment mortgage when we found this house, so the house is kind of draining us…