Money can’t buy me love

But it sure can make our lives easier!

Remember what, 13 years ago?

We were about to move to a new city (well, technically we were about to drive to Canada, but in a few weeks it would be a new city).  We had about 4K total to our name, much of it saved up from my work-study jobs in college.  When we got to the city, we slept on the floor of a friend from college at night and searched for housing during the day.  We ended up in a tiny 10×10 apartment.  We had to borrow money from my parents to put down a deposit.  We walked everywhere because we couldn’t afford the 70 cents to take the subway until school started and we got our subway passes along with our stipends.  We bought used kitchen equipment for $20 and a terrible desk for $10 from some people who were leaving, and a new futon for $120 and a paste-board dresser for $80.  As the pastor who married us suggested, we ate a lot of macaroni and cheese.

We bought an overpriced bed with that first stipend (after paying my parents back), and a Le Crueset pot.  I remember calling my dad before making the purchase because he’s the most skin-flinty person I know.  He argued that we spend more time on the mattress than any other place and it’s important to get a good night’s sleep.  Also Le Crueset pots last forever.  In retrospect, we should have tried to bargain the guy down on the mattresses, but it did last 10 years without problem (although the salesman swore it would be good for 15).  We had to put that purchase on three different credit cards because we didn’t have enough of a line of credit to put it on one.  The guys at the shop said they broke up purchases like that all the time.

We ate mostly vegetarian and lots of cheap starches.  We’d go to the open air market once a week and stock up on veggies, and then we’d rush home to process them before they went bad.  Soon after school started, we got an offer to move to student housing– a two room 10×30 apartment for the same price.  We jumped at the chance and broke our lease.  We didn’t lose all of our deposit though because our old place filled up very soon after we left.  After a year we had enough saved to pay for car insurance, and we retrieved my car from my sister, complete with shiny new dents.  (That a lot of random people in the city wanted us to know they could fix whenever they saw us in a parking lot.)

After two years there, we moved to be RAs.  Our apartment was still two rooms, but smaller, and we shared a kitchen with the students.  Saving 20K/year on rent, we were able to save quite a bit of money.  We bought a video projector which we still have.  I can’t believe we just had to get a new bulb for it.  We’re growing older, my beautiful love.

After two years of that, we realized we’d need more time to finish our dissertations, and left the students.  We had a hard time deciding between a smaller apartment and greater savings or a bigger apartment and finally having some space to ourselves, maybe getting a cat.  One of your labmates told us her apartment building had two openings, and we visited, and we picked a large apartment.  It was expensive and falling apart, but oh, in such a lovely neighborhood.  And the kitchen was tiny and awful, so we had a granite-top bureau made to extend the kitchen space to our dining room.  We also impulse-bought an expensive butcher block that we don’t need and has been a pain to move, and a lovely dining room table.  Our dining room here looks a lot like our dining room there, though we no longer use the butcher block except to hold our knives.  We traveled out to the suburbs and bought a living room set and felt a little bit like grown-ups.

Before we even moved in, we drove out to a no-kill shelter and got our kitties.  The baby who had had babies, so tiny and yellow who became my best friend when I gave her chicken and who cleaned up to a lovely lively white and black cutie within a few days of not being surrounded by scary big cats.  The big kitty who loved on you just the right amount at the shelter and has the same heart condition as your grandma.   They’re currently reminding you of their presence through generous gifts of cat-hair, just as they have every summer.

An increase in income and change in location meant we could upscale our food choices.  Whole foods, Trader Joe’s… but we still walked to the local grocery too.  The walk to WF was nicer.  Heck, our entire neighborhood was lovely.  What a change from our first 4 years.  The radiator may not always have worked correctly and might have been prone to flooding, and the water from the pipes might sometimes have been dangerous, but we still loved that apartment.

And then with one thing and another we got jobs and with the money we’d saved we had a housing down-payment equivalent to what we’d need if we were paying on mortgage what we’d paid on rent.  Silly us, we thought we’d need a house this big.  But it’s a lovely house.  And somehow right at the top of our price range… the most expensive place we looked at.

When we first got here, after the downpayment and expected and unexpected fees and emergency expenses, we couldn’t afford to buy a w/d, or rather, we could get cheap ones, but we wanted nice ones.  So you took our laundry to the local laundromat/pub.  (Why don’t more towns have that combination?)  We were about to get new furniture when our planned second car purchase got pushed up by an F150′s sudden stop.  And then suddenly we had a baby and money and no time to get more furniture.  But we didn’t need it– toys from your parents and children’s books from mine ended up filling every available space.

We finished furnishing the house right before going on sabbatical.  Pardon, Faculty Development Leave.  We don’t have sabbaticals.  People suggested putting pictures on the wall so the place didn’t seem so bare.  So we did, from one of those cheap home furnishings places.  I’m not sure if it helped.  We split that living room set across the two living rooms.  Eventually we rented the place out, even though it was furnished.

We’d saved a year’s spending to go on that faculty development leave, and we enjoyed it to the fullest extent.  I wonder if we’ll have another year like that again.  In the end, we still had money leftover and made a pretty big dent in our mortgage when we got back.  You tried out the self-employment lifestyle that year and liked it, even though your company didn’t bring in very much.  But we didn’t mind.  Your business partners though, their wives didn’t make quite as much as yours, and they didn’t like each other as much as they both liked you.  And so the experiment ended and we went home to our regular jobs.

Back at home you toyed with keeping your job, maybe going into administration.  But your heart wasn’t in it.  So we started thinking about what we could do to make you happy with your career.  And we unexpectedly needed to start DC1 in private school.  And DC2 came along.  And now you’ve been self-employed for a month or so.

And here we are today.  Still working things out.  Happy that we saved so much so that we can have the freedom to try new things.  That we can spend on what’s important.  That we can not worry so much about so many things that aren’t important when you have money but are terrifying when you don’t.

I love you so much.  I hope that we have decades and decades more of saving and spending and living and loving together.  Life without you would be nowhere near as rich.

Related:  A year ago today.

How do you refer to someone’s romantic partner?

If they’re married, you can say husband or wife.  If they’re engaged, there’s various spellings of fiance.

What about all those other situations?

Boyfriend and Girlfriend sound a bit adolescent.  As do “young gentleman” and “young lady.”

We use partner a lot, but we’ve heard people complain that it often signals a non-heterosexual relationship or a couple that does not believe in marriage, and so it’s too focused to be used more generally.  (We use it anyway, just not with people who complain about it.)

#1 is a big fan of significant other, or SO for short.  She picked that up from her mom.  But Debbie M suggests that she has many others in her life who play significant roles, “Highly significant other–in a good way”–isn’t quite right either, though.

Sometimes I’ll say, “your guy” if I can’t remember the guy’s name.  (Shhh.)  But it doesn’t seem to work so well in my mind if the significant other in question is female.

We don’t say, “your old man” or “your old lady” anymore.  And with good reason!  My grandma used to say beau.  Does anybody say swain anymore?

Soulmate seems a bit personal.  I figure people can make that determination about their own partners but probably not about other couples.

Mi mama sometimes says inamorato(a).  What can I say, we’re a family of romantics.  (Though with exes, it is always “former flame”.  What can I say, we adore alliteration.)

Some other suggestions:  helpmeet? life partner? partner in Romance?  Most significant other?  Best beloved?

How do you refer to someone’s romantic partner?

Ask the grumpies: A two-body problem solution?

Tenured rock star in the humanities (we picked this name for her) asks:

Here’s my advice question. It’s a big one but you guys seem smart about thinking through decisions rationally and I think you and your readership might have some valuable thoughts. My husband and I are trying to decide whether to move.  I am a recently-tenured assoc prof in a humanities discipline at a fancy private R1 university. I get paid well (for a humanities prof) and have modest research funds and a sweet teaching load.

My husband is the trailing spouse. He has been working as academic staff here in a job he does not like. His humanities field is insanely competitive (200+ applicants for every job; he has been a finalist 4 times). Meanwhile he has published a book with an extremely reputable academic press, published some articles, and started working in the field of digital humanities — doing his own new research project this way, teaching a class in it, and starting up a DH working group on campus. All of this on top of his fulltime academic staff job and with zero support from the school.

This year he was successful on the job market and got a TT offer from a second-tier, but very solid, public university in a neighboring state. It is too far to commute and this school is willing to bring me in with tenure as a spousal hire. We both like where we currently live [ed:  A major city] and my brother and sister-in-law live in the same town. Second-tier but solid school is in a less-cool but still entirely serviceable and incredibly affordable large city (apartment here — with 2 kids — and big house there, etc.). We will still have our yuppie necessities: whole foods, trader joes, farmer’s markets, CSAs, bike paths, a bunch of cultural institutions, etc.

We feel like, given the humanities job market, we may never again have the chance at two TT jobs (we have, after all, been trying for 6 years), so this is a huge opportunity. But I can’t quite decide how important it is to be at an R1 and have that status, versus having both of us welcomed and supported at this other less-prestigious place.  My husband’s current job is not only totally unenjoyable but is a career dead-end. We are trying to negotiate something better for him at R1, but it will not be and will never be a TT job b/c they just don’t play that way.

I’m currently grief-stricken because of health stuff going on with my Mom and I’m finding it incredibly hard to think clearly and to separate out reasonable fear of change/moving from that grief from trust-your-gut messages about what’s really right here.

Any thoughts from you and your readers?

This is a really tough decision, especially when you’re worried about family health matters.  Our sympathies with you and your mother.

Our first thought is that when top women in our fields (and it’s almost always women) make these moves, they generally get their top institution to allow them to try it out for a year first.  Your husband would then accept his job and you would essentially keep both jobs for a year.  Technically you would be on unpaid leave from the hot-shot job.  In a year you have a better idea of the differences between the two institutions and your own preferences.  This doesn’t always fly, but it seems to be how most of the academic couples we’ve seen changing institutions make the move.  It is very hard to give up tenure at a top school.  (Websites like Sabbaticalhomes.com can help you find temporary housing, often furnished so you don’t have to move your stuff.)

Let’s say that trying it out for a year isn’t in the cards.  From your email, we’re assuming that staying together is important, so we won’t discuss options that include living apart. For other couples, that might be a solution.  (And we’ve seen this work out too, eventually.)

The main worry leaving your awesome school is that you will get to the less good school and find out that one or both of you is miserable, or your DH doesn’t get tenure and there are fewer opportunities for him in the new town than there were in your old city.

If that happens, all is not lost, assuming that you are still awesome. Because awesome people can move again.

So you need to make sure that if you move, your new position allows you to remain awesome.

What does that mean? Well, what is the teaching load like? (Include things like number of classes, number of preps, size of classes, grading support etc.) How much sharing of ideas etc. can you do with your new department compared to what you did with your old department? What kind of resources are they giving you in terms of travel bursary, research support, etc. compared to what you had before? How are the salaries different? (And is your current department countering with a better salary for you?) The new place doesn’t have to be as amazing as the old place, but it does need to allow you to continue to be a productive and happy researcher. Get things in writing. Negotiate. Don’t just be grateful to be a spousal hire– they’re very lucky to be getting you and you need to protect yourself. You’re a tenured professor at a top school– keep that in mind!  (And no, you don’t have to be a jerk about it– you just have to politely explain why you need these things.)

One of us is at a school that has better resources than its ranking– she still has a higher teaching load than she would at a top school, but the other benefits keep her more productive than she would be at a less resource-rich school at the same rank (and it helps that the resource rich environment is attracting more colleagues in her specific field area). The other one of us is in a resource-poor environment and it’s difficult to even get travel funds. These things are important.  Teaching loads are very important.  If the new school is resource-rich, then you can mostly ignore the prestige question, but if the resources are less than abundant, then your career may be strongly negatively impacted.

I know several women who have made this kind of a move, and they’re all pretty happy. Of course, they’re also making huge salaries at the less-good universities and they have other kinds of sweetheart deals (running a center, being allowed to make new hires, etc.).  You can’t just look a the question in terms of :  one Tenured job at a fancy school vs. one Tenured/one TT job at a not as good school.  You have to look at the whole package.  (And given that you’re moving to a Public university, I am sure you’ve looked at the salary scale of people in the department that wants to hire you…)

If you do decide to stay put… I’m sure your DH knows this, but given that you live in a major city with several universities, he should be networking with folks in those departments… if they like him enough they might be convinced to write a job description for him one of these years.  You can also go on the market yourself to places that have good spousal hiring policies, though it sounds like you’ve been doing so.

Good luck with your decision and best wishes to your family!

#2 would like to add that I support everything above and those are great points.  Given everything you’ve said, I think you should definitely go for it, just do itte, as CPP would say (keeping in mind the options above about trying to take a year of leave, negotiating for more resources, etc.).  I think whatever you decide can work out well for you and your family.  hang in there.  #1 is more ambivalent… the resources available at the new place are important, as is the counter-offer given by the current place.  #2  adds:  time for lots and lots of negotiation with BOTH schools.  Play them against each other.  If DH can get a lectureship, then stay!  #1 says:  Yes, tenure isn’t everything, but being productive is.  Letterhead is also nice.

Grumpy Nation:  TRS needs your help!  What advice do you have for her?  What should she be thinking about in making her decision?

In praise of our partners

We’re at the age where we’ve had friends divorce, but generally the question with them has been why it took so long.  We’ve been through transitions and tragedies.  One set of us is still going strong at the 19 year mark.

Bottom line:  neither of our partners is a flake with self-destructive tendencies.

I do not think either of our partners will have a mid-life crisis in a bad way.  Sure, maybe a mid-life crisis, but not the stereotypical kind where the guy sheds the wife and tries to find himself, in the end either finding nothing or a much younger wife.  I imagine our partners will instead find a new hobby or a new piece of electronic equipment, possibly a new career or a new start-up.  It is unlikely that they’ll turn into internationally traveling bums like one of our former classmates.

Our guys keep busy.  If they were idle rich they’d probably tool around with inventions.  And gaming.  And books.  And not feel like they were missing something in life.  They know how to entertain themselves so they don’t end up like a lost character in Emma who wouldn’t get into trouble if she just kept busy.  Idle hands and all.

Even though #2′s partner isn’t my physical type (let’s just say our preferences on body hair are orthogonal), I used to sit next to him in various classes in high school and I like him a lot.  He’s a really nice guy.  Grounded.  He’s already done his pudgy nerd to athletic stud thing and somehow seems to have survived without it causing him to question who he really is.  (Same thing with figuring out his finances and you know, growing up.)  Honestly he’s the first guy that #2 ever dated that I approved of.  Not sure where she used to find those jerks but her partner is totally a keeper.

My partner, of course, is practically perfect in every way.  The definition of keeper (or, you know, Mary Poppins… but he’s way sexier than Mary Poppins).

Maybe it’s our Midwestern pragmatism.  But I think we and our partners have a good sense of who we ARE, even if we don’t always know what we want to DO.  That who am I question just seems irrelevant.  There are yummy foods to be eaten, wonderful books to be read.  (In partners’ case add also:  games to be played.)  Navel gazing takes away from that.  Sure there are professional goals and so on, but that’s either to get more money or because we’re aware that we’re playing a game and you progress in that game by hitting those goals.  That and our research actually has some meaning– the questions are interesting and the answers are somewhat relevant.  Some day we might decide we want to play new or different games, but that isn’t going to spark some sort of existential crisis, even during the search.  My partner searches for a new hobby every 1-3 months.  Careers take a bit longer, but it’s the same idea, just more lucrative.

I strongly recommend dating an engineer.  Someone who spends more time with reality and less time navel gazing.  Someone who appreciates what he has and builds on it rather than jumping on whatever the latest fad or far-out conference presentation is.  Someone that you would trust to foster kittens in your house if he wanted to.

And this is why one should marry an engineer (or computer scientist).

(Really hoping this post doesn’t jinx anything…)

Unnatural Mother

The title is what a famous single academic called another famous academic after hearing that the latter spent her post-delivery hours in the hospital (no doubt while her newborn napped) working on a revise and resubmit.

I, too, am an unnatural mother.  (Though with my first, I did catch up on the Harry Potter series in the hospital– there was a 3 day regression running at home, so giving birth came at a good time.)

I don’t identify with the standard tropes.  And I think I only introspect on motherhood when I read one of these tropes and find I don’t identify with it.  Since I no longer read the NYTimes and am off forums, that happens a lot less frequently these days, and I suspect I’m happier for it.

Grad school changed my entire sense of self in the way that bootcamp tears someone down before building them up again.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy changed me to become closer to the person I wanted to be.  Motherhood, not so much.

I don’t feel that motherhood has changed my life in ways I never would have dreamed.  It’s been pretty much what I expected.

I did think I would still love my cats as much as my babies, but it turns out that they actually did become second-class citizens.  Loved and cosseted, but no longer the most important creatures in the house.

DH says that he never would have noticed how many curse words and how many panty-shots there were in Goonies before having kids.  He also still feels just as much himself before and after kids… and he is pretty much just as I’d imagined he’d be.  (Wonderful, of course.)

Loss of autonomy… no, that’s what work is for.  Also, as my grandmother always said, hire good help.

Overwhelmed… well, sometimes, but not usually.  DH is really great with children and once we got DC1′s food issues figured out (green peppers) it wasn’t so bad.  There was a semester of awfulness in which the three of us were constantly sick, but that’s not entirely DC1′s fault– it was a bad flu year for everybody.  We did wait to have a second child until the first was able to entertain hirself and could help us out, which helps.

It is true that my kids are amazing.  (And I hope all parents think their kids are amazing.)  They get more amazing every day.  I don’t want them to stay babies– I love seeing them grow into responsible small adults.  (And with that evidence, how can I feel guilt?)

Would I be different without children?  Well, yes.  All my life I’ve been tackling difficult goals and usually I figure out what it takes to get where I want to go and decide whether or not the effort is worth it.  That year-and-some of infertility with the miscarriage was the first time that I ever thought that maybe no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much I wanted something, no matter what I put myself through, I might not be able to get what I wanted more than anything.  Because my body was failing me.  But then I unexpectedly got pregnant in the end and that lesson remained unlearned.  So DC1 brought me back to the me who tackles challenges, and that lesson will have to wait another day.

So I may be an unnatural mother, following in a long line of pragmatic career women with perfect children, but I am a happy self-confident mother.

Are you an unnatural mother?  What tropes do you or do you not identify with?  Whether or not you have children, what has changed your life (if anything)?

Thoughts on in-laws and Christmas presents for the kids

I’ve mentioned before that we don’t buy Christmas presents for our children other than stocking stuffers.  This year is no exception– I still need to buy candy and I picked up some fun smaller items to stick in the stocking, but other than that we’re done with shopping for the children.

Why don’t we buy Christmas presents?  Because my in-laws are insanely generous and they seem to be able to pick out stuff that DC1, at least, loves.  (DC2 hasn’t been around long enough to know how ze feels about the in-laws’ taste.)  They buy tons and tons of presents and if we added more it would be even more overwhelming.

Some people get upset at grandparent generosity.  They resent the buying etc.  I mentioned my in-laws’ habit the other day on a blog and someone said they had the same first-world problem and it made her angry.

It doesn’t make me angry, because the in-laws are getting joy out of picking presents and they live far enough away that we don’t actually have to show them the gifts. And some of the gifts are pretty spectacular– the kinds of things I dreamed of growing up (train sets, a giant wooden castle, a bicycle, a real microscope, a wii, etc.). But some portion of the presents end up unopened in our gift closet for other kids’ birthday parties because there’s only so much space and only so much a child can play with over the course of a year.

It’s weird because they give more to my kids each Christmas than I got from my entire extended family and Santa combined growing up. My own grandma would give one really nice present to each of us (like a porcelain doll) at Christmas when we were kids.

My FIL is stuck in a job he hates where he has to work a lot of unpaid overtime. I can’t help but think that if they were a little less generous with the grandkids, that they would have more financial freedom now. But it isn’t my place to say anything, and if they cut back it would also affect the other grandkids whose families have different values about Christmas and presents.  They are scrupulously fair about these things and each grandkid gets exactly the same dollar amount.

So we make up for it by not doing any Christmas gifts ourselves. Except the stockings.  We save what we would have spent and it will be there in the future should the in-laws need it.  (Though they probably won’t given that they’re in the last generation of generous pensions.)

Did you get a lot of stuff for Christmas as a kid?  Are things different today?

September Mortgage Update: Changing Plans (Help?)

Last month (August):

Balance: $100,747.56
Years left: 8.5
P = $803.97, I =$410.44, Escrow = 621.66

This month (September):

Balance: $99,268.01
Years left: 8.25
P = $809.78, I =$404.63, Escrow = 621.66

One month’s savings from prepayment:  $2.62

This month I was going to talk about being under 100K and playing with the amortization spreadsheet, explaining exactly how mortgage loans are different than student loans or credit card loans, and go into the details of how student loans and CC loans basically recast automatically, but you have to pay money to recast a mortgage loan.  Instead a modified version of that post will be next month.

The tenure committee voted 7-1 against tenure for DH.  He’s teaching 4 days a week, with a 3/3 load not counting the capstones he is advising, no graders or TAs, and they just switched out his elective with the second introductory course.  (He’s already teaching the 101.  Now he has 101 and a new prep for 102.)  The department is dysfunctional, the students are terrible (though the worst ones flunk out by the time they get to the 300-level courses!).  As a spousal hire, he makes about 20K less than the other folks hired the same year.  And quite a bit less than someone with his degrees and experience and productivity should be making.  I do *like* having his salary, but today we decided we needed his time and happiness more than we needed two years of salary.

So he’s going to withdraw his tenure packet on Monday and leave the university in August 2013.  We don’t know what he’s going to do next.

I still don’t want to go on the market this year– I’d still like to stick around another 2 years.  I have an interdisciplinary project that I would really like to finish and it is a 2 year project.   Though going on the market would be worth a raise of at least one month’s worth of summer salary equivalent, so maybe that’s not reason enough.

So this weekend we sat down with our credit card statements and bank accounts and calculated how much we actually spend each year.  It’s a lot.  (Where does our money go?  Childcare, mortgage, private school, insurance, food, limited but overpriced travel to such exotic places as the rural midwest, medical, auto upkeep.)  Then I added projected childcare expenses for DC2.  Then I calculated my projected take-home pay with projected additional benefits with DH on my plan.

If, once DH leaves his job, we stop prepaying the mortgage and stop putting extra away for retirement, and stop the 529 payments, then our spending is about equal to my take-home pay.  There’s not a lot of wiggle room.  We can recast the mortgage (from 8.25 years back to ~18 years) and that will bring our required monthly expenses down about $530/month (0r ~$6300/year) given our current pre-payment so far.  We also already have a nice emergency fund saved, so it might not be horrible if we didn’t have extra to add to that immediately.

I did a few thought exercises… if we spend $200/week at the grocery store, we would have to stop shopping for almost an entire year to save $10K.  If we assume $100 of eating out per week (I don’t think we actually spend that much), not eating at all would take 33 weeks to save $10K.  We already went through and negotiated on things like insurance and cell phone bills and so on.  It makes more sense to try to make additional money.

My interdisciplinary project has been funded for one year with promise of a second should this year work out.  One of my colleagues who wants me to stay has also added me to a two year grant to replace a colleague who just left for greener pastures.  If these work out then I’ll have two months of summer money for two summers.  I have an additional two grants awaiting word from the government, one of which may actually get funded, though only for a year.  Pubs are light this year, but grant applications were heavy!

DH is also worth a lot more than what he’s been paid.  But I want him to be happy more than I want him to be a wage slave.  He’s a scanner (in Barbara Sher’s terminology) and contract work may be a better fit for him than working locally (unless locally means moving to Northern California), but contract work takes some time to build up into real income.  So I don’t think we can count on him bringing in regular income, at least not right away.

So that leaves us with the question of what to do with DH’s salary this year.

With the two-year plan, we were going to put his additional salary towards the mortgage rather than towards the 457 plan he’d been funding this year.  Then in the second year we were going to put the extra money towards cash in case we have to move.

Now we’re on a one-year plan.  I’m not sure what to do.

(Note:  We’re required to put 12% of our income into a 403(b), the retirement savings I talk about below is on top of that saving.)

DH is going to stop contributing to his 457 plan.  That frees up ~15K.  Some of that money is going to be going to mother’s helpers who are more expensive than daycare will be the following year.

Maybe we should cut off my extra 403b payment as well and/or DH’s, for an additional 16.5K in cash (each), though we’d have to pay some of the retirement money in taxes come tax time.  And what would we do with that cash?  Another year and a half from the mortgage is still more than 5 years remaining (and still only cuts another $50 off a recast monthly payment).  If DH starts making income sooner rather than later, or if I get nice grants, we might regret the decision not to put money away while DH still has access to these tax advantaged funds (though presumably we could figure out a SEP if he did contract work).

The mortgage may not be the best place to put the money.  15K would cut 1.5 years off the mortgage as it currently stands, and after a recast an additional 15K would only cut $50 off each mortgage payment, or $600/year.  Since we have 8.25 years remaining and are going to have to stop any pre-payment to keep up with expenses in August, we can’t pay the mortgage down enough to make a real difference in our monthly payments.

We could even stop the pre-payment on the mortgage we’re already doing.  That’s about $650/month or $7800 for the year.  But where would that go?  Cash?

Cash is still paying nothing, and we’re not sure when we’re going to need to tap into that money, or if we’ll need to tap into it.  I can’t get fired, so our first tier emergency fund generally sits at 2 months of regular expenses (plus whatever we’re saving for the unpaid summer).

I’ve already funded our 2012 IRAs (had to sell some taxable stock because a company was getting acquired), but we could put 10K towards the 2013 IRAs in 2013.  Roth IRAs can be used as emergency funds if you’re willing to take out principal.

We could buy taxable stocks with that money.  We could even undrip dividends in the future.  The risks would be that the stocks could lose rather than gain value before we have to sell in the near future rather than the far future.

Another thing we could do would be to convert taxable stocks we already own into tax-deferred savings.  But then we no longer have that secondary emergency fund.

We don’t know what we’re going to be doing in two years.  On top of that, the uni has messed with sabbaticals so in two years when I’m eligible again I may have to be able to commit to not getting paid even half a salary if I want to take time off.  The timing between applying for a sabbatical at the university (October) and applying for and getting an external fellowship or external teaching assignment (generally March) doesn’t mesh with the new competitive sabbatical process at the uni, so having money I can access would really help with planning, even if I don’t end up needing it in the end.  I suppose I could try to sabbatical at Berkeley or Stanford assuming that DH would get a real job to pay our bills.  Not so easy to get a real job if I sabbatical at say, Michigan.  (#2 is insanely jealous that #1 has already had a sabbatical, and has even the chance of going such awesome places as Stanford or even Michigan.  Sigh.  I am in the wrong field.  Whine over.)

So I don’t know what to do.  Keep money in tax-deferred savings we can’t access, move it to cash where it won’t be making any interest, buy taxable stocks, pre-pay the mortgage?  What we can’t do is get used to having it around and spending it.  I’m really going to miss having that income cushion– the knowledge that if I screw up with money one month I can untap DH’s hidden salary in the future to make up for it.  When your income and your outgo are really close, you don’t have that luxury anymore.  I really liked not having to worry about money and it is difficult to have one’s income cut rather than having it grow each year.  But more difficult having an unhappy DH who has no time to do anything other than teach and do service.

(#2 thinks DH needs to quit sooner rather than later.  Otherwise, I got nuthin’.  Help out, homies! #1 notes that DH is contracted through the year and wants to quit responsibly and we can use the transition time money-wise, so quitting any sooner isn’t really an option.  We did talk about quitting at the semester but he doesn’t want to.)

Any thoughts?

Update on personal sagas: DH’s relatives, DC’s school

DH’s Relatives

It turns out that if you are truly poor and have a zillion brothers and sisters (give or take), the Pell grant covers 100% of community college, including books.  So… so far we’re not paying for any of the relatives’ schooling.  Although they screwed up with the books and forgot to order them, despite multiple calls to the people.   Because the books are being bought via the grant, the school orders them for the students instead of the student being reimbursed… and they never actually checked to see that they were ordered when DH’s relative called, so the eldest daughter doesn’t have them.  She is borrowing from a friend until they come in.

She got a nursing home job (yay!) and spent the summer working and saved up to buy a clunker.  She will be working p/t to pay for her gas.

Already she says she likes community college classes a lot more than high school classes.  I hope she does well.  Right now she wants to transfer to a 4 year school (to major in architecture, but I’m hoping she’ll change her mind as there are very few job opportunities for architecture majors and it’s really hard to get into the architecture programs at the state 4-year schools).

DC1′s School

Right now they have 1 student fewer than what they need with normal fundraising and minimal services (down 20 students from last year).  The hope is to make up for it with extra fundraising.

The new head of school is professional and refreshingly not crazy.

Even better than that, the ineffective board president has been replaced by an extremely competent woman who is new to the board.  She’s getting things done.  She communicates professionally.  She’s a pleasure to deal with.  This was a new and unexpected pleasure.  We foresee a positive trajectory for the school if these two women remain in charge of things.

There are 10 kids in DC1′s 2nd grade class, down from the 15 that were in the first grade class (including DC and hir best friend who were technically in K, but spent half the day in first).  10 is still a good number for a private school class and doesn’t require an additional aide, although DC says they have a student teacher helping out.  The syllabus for the year that was sent home is intriguing.  They’ll be starting junior great books and doing book reports and science reports and all sorts of exciting and fun stuff.

DC’s formal dress shirt for formal days still hasn’t come, so DH picked up a too-big used one that will do for hir while we wait.

So that’s our excitement.  I sure hope it is a good year!

And one more

Remember my cousin who didn’t have the Catholic wedding?  They’re expecting twins.  :)

Same names

I recently watched a terrible documentary on netflix about Alan Berliner, narcissist.  It was actually supposed to be about the science of naming.  (Related to work, though it turned out to be useless.)  Probably about 80% of the movie was Alan Berliner complaining that there were other people in the world also named Alan Berliner.  Or just him saying his name over and over again.  (The other 20% was mildly interesting, but not as in-depth as it could have been.)

I have three cousins with the same first name.  Two of them were named after the same great-aunt.  The other is a step-cousin, so it’s just coincidence (as much as fashions and trends can be coincidental).  In my family this is not a big deal.  We have a strong tradition of reusing family names, until very recently we’ve had sizable families, and we tend to live a long time.  It’s just natural that there’s going to be some overlap.  Since we’re spread out all over the country, even when there’s the same first and last name, it doesn’t generally cause much confusion.

My husband’s family feels quite differently on the subject.

I can’t remember if it was just before or just after she married into DH’s family, but my (then childless) sister-in-law gave me a lecture about how she hated it when her friends gave their babies names that she had already laid claim to.  She was genuinely angry about it, even though she no longer even lived in the same town as said high school friends.  She not so subtly told me two names that I must avoid.  I noted with silent irony that these two names just happened to be the top most popular baby names of that year, and if she wanted her future children to have unique names, maybe not the best way to go about it.

And time went on.  We had a child.  Both prospective boy’s names and girl’s names were family names, as in our tradition (on my side).  Presumably we chose ok because we didn’t get any hate-mail.

BIL and SIL had a child.  Oddly, they chose the non-traditional family name of my aunt/uncle (on my side, not DH’s!) that we were going to use if we had a second child of the same gender.  I have no idea where they got the idea, but because of my SIL’s warning, we had to jettison said name and ability to honor said relative from our potential name-box.

Then BIL and SIL had a second child.  Rather than using one of the names SIL had warned me against… they used the name that our DC would have been had ze been the opposite gender.  By that point, it seemed like everyone we knew who had had a baby in the past couple years had used the same name (it jumped way up in the naming charts the year DC was born), so we’d moved on (plus my MIL says she always hated that relative)… but how bizarre.  It’s not like we kept our potential names a secret or anything.

On my side of the family, these things wouldn’t be a big deal because nobody feels like they have property rights to any specific name.  You can name your child the same thing as a cousin, no problem.  But, in deference to family peace and tranquility we won’t be “stealing” any names from the in-laws and came up with a new set.

Update:  If you want to check out name popularity by year:  baby name voyager is fun.

Do you get upset when a friend or relative “steals” a name you’ve chosen?  What are your family naming traditions?

RBObaby

• DC1 and DC2 are very different in many ways, but they are equally perfect.
• I either had a 3+ week labor or an hour and a bit more labor, depending on when you start counting.
• Last time it stopped hurting when I started pushing.  This time it didn’t hurt until it was time to start pushing.
• This time there were more interventions (they broke my water, they moved aside the cervix lip).  Interventions are unpleasant.  They make me say, “Ow.”
• Last time the nurses were all talking the next day about what a trouper I was.  This time I was not so impressive.
• Only one stitch this time.
• My sister says DC2 looks like an Ann Geddes baby.  I think she’s right.
• All that extra movement in the womb (there was lots of amniotic fluid, so lots of room) did result in super-baby-strength.
• DC2 does not seem to mind being swaddled.  We must learn how to swaddle.
• With DC1, I wondered why anybody would leave the hospital early to go home.  With DC2, I understand– we wanted to go home to see DC1.
• DC2 has been nursing like a champ.  My breasts are also not just colostrum and there hasn’t been any problem with DC2 not getting enough.  In fact, DC2 did not lose any weight in the hospital, which is unusual.
• I don’t think I’ll ever be able to call DC1 “little” again.  Ze is so big now compared to DC2 (though DC1 was a pound smaller at birth).  They’re so amazing.