If you have not see the Strongbad “Trogdor” video, here it is.  I know its weird, but since Homestar Runner and Strongbad tend to be internet icons, I’ll let you decide if the internet is weird before the video, or after the video.  You see: my wife’s relative had her house burn down on Monday last week.  Burninated.  Most everything is gone or destroyed.  It is pretty tough since that sort of event is so life altering.  She’s still waiting on more information about insurance and hasn’t begun (to my knowledge) the process of discovering the costs of rebuilding.

As you can imagine, this post is a reminder to back up documents off-site, or to keep them in a safe-deposit box at a bank/secure location.  I need to do this, too.  Some of the documents that she had are gone forever, some can be had for a fee (reproduction and shipping and handling costs), and some are going to be sorely missed.  Things like children’s first moments, photos, some computer data, and of course various valuables that are destroyed when flames hit them.

Consider her fire as a great lesson for us to learn from.  Consider her blessing in not being home for the fire (and therefore unscathed).  Make sure you have life-important things like wills covered in duplicate.  Make sure you have considered a location to store offsite data (external hard drives or sites that offer low-cost data hosting for such cases are a good idea).  Make sure that you tell your loved ones they’re loved - you never know what might strike, but you do know it won’t be Trogdor.

Note: This post is a tiny bit light hearted because the relative is actually doing pretty well emotionally.  I’m actually feeling kind of sick, but such is life.  Gotta travel tomorrow, so we’ll see how that goes. 

If you’ve seen the television show ‘House’ then you’ve probably heard the lines about everyone lying.  In each episode something goes wrong with some patient and they have to find out what is causing the ailment.  Often the problem has to be ‘dug’ into and they have to find out who is lying about information so that they can get to the truth of the problem.  They don’t take ‘no’ from anyone.

If you have tried to get a lower interest rate from a credit card company and they’ve said no to lowering your rate and you’re paying anything like 18%: they’re lying.  Don’t take no for an answer.  Dig deeper.  Go up the chain of command until you’re speaking to Warren Buffet’s cousin.  Get to the person who can and will say yes.  Don’t put it off, don’t delay, call now.  Get a lower rate and save yourself some big cash!

Excuses that drones at the card companies will use include:

• Your rate is the best we can do - that is not possible
• Your account has been locked for rate reductions because of late payments - this is a totally bogus issue that is policy.  Policy that can be over-ridden by a higher up manager
• Your card offers you rewards, those rewards are funded by your interest rate - bull pucky.  Those rewards are paid for by any number of things - but the interest rate doesn’t fix things.  If you have to switch card companies now may be the time to do it

Kick the credit card interest rates in the butt.  We got our interest rates dropped twice and each time they dropped the rate we saved $50.o0 in interest per month!  Of course we’ve got enough debt that we’re paying a lot anyway.  However, getting the lower rate will help us pay it off faster.

My wife and sister came up with the idea of the Pantry Survivor competition wherein they would attempt to go to the store once in an entire week (at the beginning of the ’stunt’) and then combine that with whatever was already stashed in the pantry to create meals for the family for as long as possible.  The super-challenge in all of this is that it is four adults and two children (plus one on the way - no, not us, my sister).  As previously stated somewhere my sister and her husband are staying with us until they can move into a new condo they’re buying.  So the food needs to feed the whole family and last as long as possible until they just have to go to the store.  The competition stands to see what they can create, what they can make stretch, and what they can concoct out of substitutes as needed.

The first step was to organize the pantry and make sure that there was an inventory.  My sister handled this, which was good because we had a pretty crazy pantry.  I unfortunately only have pictures of the post-organizing results.  My sister, whom I will refer to as ‘Preggers’, had a pad of paper and listed item-by-item what was in the pantry and fridge so that when she and my wife went to the store they could only buy what was needed for some basic meal preparation.  Preggers is actually a great cook, as is my wife, so this isn’t a huge challenge because they have a lot of ideas between the two of them.  The challenge is that they had to have enough of a plan to have bought enough food at the store to complement what we already had to make up enough meals to last a targeted ten days with one meal having company of another family of three.

Day One:  Smoked Pork ‘Que
Alton Brown of the food network enticed me to put together my own frugal smoker last year and so we smoke meat every couple months.  This last week we smoked some Pork Butt and it has been a cheap way to add protein to salads, sandwiches, and in this case, a barbecue pork sandwich.  I have directions and recipes for those who are interested - just shoot me an email to randy@watchmymoneymaker.com.

Day Two: Chicken Pot Pie a la ‘Preggers’
My sister made a tasty variation on chicken pot pie, but instead of making an actual pie, she made a chicken soup type dish and some tasty, tasty crust rounds with a cookie cutter. You placed the soup in the bowl and garnished them with the crust ‘cookies’ (not sweet, but oh, so tasty. Have you noticed I think they’re tasty?).  Preggers did a great job with this dish, but since she made it up I have no recipe.  It did contain white pearl onions which are one of my favorite soup ingredients.

By the time anyone reads this we’ll be on day three with a week left to go.  I don’t know what we’ll run out of, but I’ll post the results as we go through the experience.  I challenge you to try the same and see if you can clear out any old ’stuff’ that you have in your pantry to keep your budget frugal, and your frugal budget interesting in the kitchen.

Next week my wife and my sister are going to play ‘Pantry Survivor!”  It won’t be as funny as Lost-Vivor, but it will be educational.  The goal is to buy a very minimal amount of produce and staple type items and empty our pantry of some of the junk that it has in it.  Their goal is to feed my family and my sister and brother-in-law (who are temporarily staying with us until their condo purchase goes through) for the week on about $75.00.  I don’t think it will be hard, but it will be amusing to see what happens.  I plan on posting pictures throughout the week of meals created and guesstimating their cost.

OK, that’s not so shocking. What is cool though is that there are sites like opensecrets.org that share things like campaign finance information - even if it is from past years. For example you can keep up on folks like Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, Obama, and of course Mitt Romney, who is apparently quite wealthy on his own. You can check out the whole running crew, too.

As a voter, assuming you are one, this is a great way to look at the financial state of a campaign and make some conclusions about different organizations that donate funds. For example the list of top donors that includes AT&T (thanks for making communication so expensive, but turning that expense into political contributions, guys), the NRA, and various unions. You can also see what political party they favored here.

Name: American Public Marketplace
Host(s): Kai Ryssdal
Podcast file type(s): MP3
Average File Size(s): 13.3MB
Average Length: 28 minutes
Format (single concept, multiple concepts, multi-format): Multiple concepts: introduction summary, news summary, news segments
Production Quality (excellent, good, acceptable, bad): Excellent
Type of Content (practical content, philosophical content): This is a radio show being re-used as a podcast
Site URL: http://www.marketplace.org
Feed URL(s): http://marketplace.publicradio.org/tools/rss/rundown.php?show_id=14
Subjective Review:

This podcast/radio show is only partially oriented towards personal finance. The subject matter tends to vary between business news, personal finance influencing news, and world market news. Its not a podcast for the person looking for very practical day-to-day information, but instead is good for the person trying to keep a big picture view on world financial news. I don’t really enjoy this sort of news program on a personal level because some of the recorded story bits included audio clips and sound bites with no context. It made the credibility of the assertions a little lower to me.

The audio clips between the different segments had some nice music, but that’s probably not the best reason to listen to a financially oriented podcast. A few of the audio segments carried some political persuasion and I would caution various listeners to be discerning if they subscribe.

Context: I listened to the following dated shows: 01/25/2008, 01/24/2008, 01/23/2008, 01/22/2008 in one day.

There’s a reason why money is taboo: its often very, very, very personal.  This weekend as I was taking a walk down my in-law’s neighbor’s dirt road I saw this sign: Private, Dead End.  I didn’t actually trespass in case anyone was worried that I saw the sign, took a picture and kept walking.  What I was thinking about as I took this picture is that personal finance is private on one level or another.  At some point in time you are more than likely going to draw the line between what is acceptable to communicate to others, and what is not public knowledge.

Where do you draw the line?  I personal don’t speak of my income to various people I work with, but some family members know that information.  I have been timid to share the actual amount of debt we have or how much I pay in taxes on this blog and pretty much everywhere else I’m speaking about personal finances - again, a few family members know.  One thing I’ve been able to perceive about this - private or not - is that as a personal finance blogger I don’t feel comfortable dumping out everything I’m thinking or doing just to be open.  I would much rather present principles that are useful than numbers which may help you gauge where I’m at, but not communicate the concepts which matter.

My personal financial state isn’t where I’d like it to be - and I’m assuming that unless you’re a billionaire, you, too, are working on improving your financial state.  I’m reducing debt, preparing to understand more about investment opportunities and generally trying to be wise with my family’s finances.  I tend to be a very open person, in the past it has gotten me into a discussion with my wife about being too open, but when it comes to personal finance I’m not concerned about your numbers.  I don’t want to know them.  I do want to know what your operating principles are, though, so let me know where you draw the line with sharing personal finance information.

From the Manager-Tools.com podcast:

“Our inefficiency during the day hurts our family and makes us ineffective because we waist time during the day that had we used that time wisely we would have been much for effective focusing on doing the right things.”
- Mark Horstmann

This quote hit home with me.  When I have an inefficient day (and today has started out as one), it effects not only my clients, but it effects my family and the focus I want to have in my life.  Good stuff.

Last weekend before I headed out on yet another business trip my two year old dropped a toy into the toy-let. I mean toilet. My wife was in the bathroom and attempted to reach into the toilet before the princess drowned, flushed and caused blockage that only mouse-produced royalty could cause. After washing her hands like she had an OCD disorder she came downstairs and alerted me to the problem at hand. I went to the hardware store later that evening and picked up an auger (also called a snake) but had no luck getting the princess to come out of her cave. Apparently the dragons had gotten to her and she was going to need a knight to rescue her. I was thinking a hired knight that charged $45.00 an hour or more.

It turns out that I’m cheap because after some searching on the interwebs I figured that I had a chance at disassembling my toilet/floor connection and getting the princess out myself. So I went to the hardware store and purchased a new wax ring to re-seal the toilet upon successfully removing it from the floor, some caulk (to reseal the grout that was attaching the toilet to the floor as well), and a large plastic drop cloth to put the toilet on so that extra water could be prevented from getting all over our tile floor. As it turned out the drop cloth was not as effective as it could have been but we’ll ignore that problem because this story is less concerned with my failure to contain all of the water.

I had the help of my brother-in-law who kindly used my utility knife to separate the grout from the toilet’s base and then helped me power-lift the toilet from the grout, caulk and wax ring that were underneath the already heavy toilet. The toilet came up, off onto the plastic, and I took an auger to the drain pipe in the floor hoping to retrieve the damsel in distress. No luck, the number-two ogres must have her trapped somewhere else. I rocked the toilet backwards and to my pleasant surprise the “princess of poop” was wedged sideways just inside the mouth of the toilet! I removed her from the ‘can’ and threw her away. I may be cheap, but my daughters don’t get a second chance with girls who hang out in such low class establishments.

I placed a new wax ring down on the floor making sure the sticky wax surface was facing upwards and the gasket was facing down into the floor pipe. I then lined up the bolts that hold the toilet to the collar in the floor so that they would be parallel with one another and hopefully lined up with the toilet’s holes. The most important next step was to take some scrap wood and place it on either end of the toilet’s home and give myself time to line up the bolts and toilet’s fastening holes before removing the wood (with the help of the brother-in-law again) and seating the toilet on the wax ring - you don’t want to mess that up or you could have biological gunk all over your bathroom floor or a waxy mess that you have to replace. We got the bolts and toilet lined up and then removed the wood slowly and positioned the toilet so that the grout matched up just right.

Mission accomplished! In about an hour the princess was saved (and then trashed) and the toilet was cleared - flushing like it was brand new. I had saved money, practiced something mechanical and out of my comfort zone, and got to feel the pride of having done something myself where before I was going to hire it out. There is nothing quite like taking care of your family to bring out an enjoyment of things as mundane as a toilet. Plus now I can tell stories and have G-rated potty humor.

My wife and I have a great marriage. I’m not going to lie: she’s awesome and I’m truly blessed to be married to her. She’s got patience, talent, intelligence and determination. I could list off a long series of qualities she has, but I’ll spare you the reading time because this blog isn’t about how much I love my wife. However, we do have disagreements at times about where our money should go. Not severe disagreements, but disagreements about how our priorities fall. I always find that the resolution doesn’t come from a technique that you can master to get what you want. The resolution that comes comes from a character trait that I have had to cultivate, one that is against every single strain in my pride, but critical to success: humility.

• Humility is a requirement for priorities because you have to admit it when you’re priority is selfish.
• Humility is a requirement for priorities because you have to love your spouse enough to think of your spouse first, or at least as a higher priority than finances!
• Humility is important because if you have children they need to see that a strong leader is humble and not harsh or dogmatic.
• Humility is a critical tool when it comes to dealing with conflict.  Own your mistakes.  Apologize for them and move on to resolution of priorities.

There are very few things that I can think of that have been more valuable (with the exception of my faith).  Humble priority setting will help keep your marriage focused on the things that matter, keep things growing, and keep your marriage hat like dynamite.