A Friendly Reminder:

Please get your affairs in order.

My mom's younger brother died quite suddenly on July 30 at the age of 54. In addition to the not inconsiderable emotional stuff, the logistics and legal stuff are turning out to be quite challenging. There was a photocopy of a will, but we've yet to find an original. No one had any idea what bank he used until a statement arrived in the mail. We're still trying to get a handle on what he owes and where. Throw in a hefty helping of grief and the drama of my mom's somewhat argumentative family, and it's a mess.

I don't care if you only have $36 in your checking account and $5,000 in debt, make sure someone has the information. I don't have a will drawn up yet or the all-important living will and health care proxy, but it took less than half an hour to make a table of where all my assets are, the account numbers, and other pertinent information to give to my dad. It's simple and could make a challenging time a tiny bit easier.

Getting Back to the Financial Oversharing

I've been overspending badly the past few months, a fact that is making me more and more nervous, especially since there are major life/income changes coming up. (Long story short: I'm returning to college in the fall to take classes, do unpaid work in a lab, and get ready for grad school. Long story long to be posted later.)

So here's the brief overview of where I stand. Keep in mind the categories were all assigned back when I was still planning to teach for a third year so things may shift if/when I end up dipping into savings next year.

• Emergency fund (I Bonds, value takes into account penalty for cashing out early):$8,459
  
• Checking account at old hometown bank: $500
• House fund at old hometown bank (15 month c.d. with 2.27% apy that will mature in February): $9,000
  
• Checking account at USAA: $600
• Health Savings account: $1,000
• Roth IRA (VBINX, already maxed out for 2010): $14,600
  
• Car fund at FNBO Direct: $9,600
• House fund at FNBO Direct: $600

I've also made mandatory contributions of about $4,000 to the state teacher retirement system that I'll probably withdraw since I can roll them into an IRA. (Since I don't anticipate teaching in the state's public schools again and strongly suspect that over the coming decades protecting the contributions of someone who only taught in the state for two years won't be a high priority, I assume this is the best idea, but I'm open to advice.)

Making this list served as a nice reminder that I haven't torpedoed my financial future yet. Next year may be another story, however.

Hello world.

Is anybody still out there?

I never reached a point where I actively decided not to blog, it just happened, along with a newfound ability to sleep for sixteen hours a day, overwhelming anxiety, and some things I shouldn't write about because it would freak out my mother if she ever decides to see if I'm blogging again. I'm doing a lot better now, not magically all better, but able to function in my own life again.

There are meds involved. I'm still not sure how I feel about that. After decades of listening to my father discuss how we're all responsible for deciding to be optimistic and choosing to be happy, it was something of a revelation to discover that an SSRI made it possible to begin the work of shifting my mindsets. I'm not planning to tell my dad about the anti-depressant; I'm judgmental enough of myself for taking it. However, I do prefer not struggling to convince myself that it's a good idea to continue living, so for now I'll take the meds.

I promise the next post will go back to our regularly scheduled programming, where the only oversharing will be about finances.

The day my job finally drove me to drink.

After the homecoming game, one of my former ninth grade physical science students was shot in the back of the head. He died in a hospital in Memphis a few days later. Recently, a sixteen-year-old from my town was charged with capital murder in an unrelated incident, and today I learned through the grapevine that it's another student from that same period. Oh, and last night there were four shootings. One of the victims was one of my seniors last year. I heard from his cousin that so far he's stable.

So, yeah, I had a bourbon and soda and am now ready to have a good long cry, get some sleep, and get up and grade tests.

Gah.

I've done no Christmas shopping. None. It doesn't help that I've been up to my eyeballs in student papers thanks to the finals grading crunch and the nearest shopping is an hour and a half away, but there's no excuse for not at least ordering the one thing I've already picked out online. I'm also wearing increasingly unflattering outfits as the supply of clean laundry dwindles (Fortunately, today's diversionary tactic of wearing lipstick to distract from my admittedly ugly slacks somewhat worked, and I got about one compliment for every three insults.), and dinners lately tend to consist of balanced and delicious meals like a bagel with cream cheese and some carrot sticks. I stink at life.

Profligate.

I've been overspending since school started. It hasn't been the result of any buying binges; I'm still happiest in a pair of hand-me down jeans from my little brother, and my $10 Tracfone is probably currently out of juice in the bottom of the laundry hamper. This is actually bad news: it would be much easier to correct the problem if I could point to one area of my life where I'm messing up, chastise myself, and get back on course. Instead I'm experiencing the far more insidious lifestyle inflation.

I've gotten sloppy. I'm putting money into savings every month, yes, but I've been doing an incredibly slipshod job of tracking my spending lately. I'm falling into some bad habits like buying lunch at least two or three times a week, and I'm hanging out a lot more with the rather spendy crowd of TFAs. I'm getting whatever I feel like eating when I'm at the grocery store instead of trying to plan frugal meals, and I'm just generally less cost conscious.

There are a million justifications for why this is ok. I'm young, have a stressful job, and should go have some fun. Unlike many of my friends here who have tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, I have no debt. I haven't been missing my targets by that much; although, that is in large part due to a small windfall when I learned I was getting paid for attending a follow-up meeting for some professional development. I'm still saving, just not as much.

Truly, I haven't been doing that bad. For September through November, I met my savings goals even though it was a lot tighter than it should have been.This month it just isn't going to happen. Maybe, just maybe, I could make it work if I didn't buy anyone any Christmas gifts, but I'm not willing to do that. Still, it hasn't been a terrible semester, especially because I threw a bonus I got right before Thanksgiving into the house fund, bringing the total over $9,500. I completed my goal of getting my car fund up to $10,000 right on schedule, too.

All of which contributes to that dangerous sense that all of this spending is somehow ok. Some of it is, much of it isn't, and I need to sort out which is which. My unbudget system of paying myself first and then living on what was left and meticulously tracking spending worked well for quite a while, so I wouldn't call the experiment a failure, but it isn't a good fit with how I'm managing my money right now. I need more structures in place to track whether I'm meeting my goals and spending an appropriate amount on both the necessities of life and frivolity. I need more carefully thought through prioritization.

In other words, I need a budget. On January 1st, I'm starting fresh with a new budget for the new year. I'm looking forward to it, actually. I always took a certain geeky pleasure in entering all of my purchases in the free spreadsheet-based version of PearBudget. It's a lot easier to spend without guilt when you know you've budgeted for whatever it is, no matter how silly your want. Plus setting meaningful goals and then achieving them is very fun and fulfilling.

November is the new October.

October is generally regarded as a lousy month to be a teacher. The novelty of the school year has definitely worn off by then, students start getting frustrated with the workload and then apathetic, and it is a long time until you or your students have any days off to look forward to. This year my October was pretty good, so good in fact, that it didn't even feel like October. Sure, there were bad days and frustrating students, but my classroom culture remained positive even though the hallways of the school certainly weren't.

Then November hit. Nothing really went wrong; I just got tired. There was a week where it felt like I was barely going through the motions. They were a lot of the right motions so kids mostly kept on learning, but it still wasn't a good feeling. Everyone I talked to agreed that it was just that point in the year and we'd all be better after resting up over Thanksgiving, enjoying a few days of seeing people who didn't think of us only as teachers, goofing off a bit, and ultimately returning to planning with renewed zest.

So I survived Tuesday, when I had the first really major discipline incident that took place in my room this year and had to discuss with the assistant principal whether I wanted them to pursue expelling the student. I'd initially planned on heading home that night, but after getting up a 3 a.m. to grade and then having that kind of day, I just wasn't up for a five hour drive at night. Instead I grabbed Mexican food with friends, ran into my TFA program director and her (boyfriend, partner, common-law husband? What's the best term for people who've been together since college and own a house together?), discussed whether the acts of wanton destruction in the hallways that day topped the previous year when the bathrooms were set afire (consensus: yes), laughed a lot and was reminded why I love my friends, and then passed out at home. Wednesday I packed up, made the drive, and then took the boy out for sushi. When I got home, there was no one there but the dogs so I headed to the bank to open a c.d. and take advantage of some nice rates.

My dad came out to meet me when I got back. That's often a harbinger of bad news, and Wednesday was no different. My grandfather had had a major hemorrhagic stroke and wasn't going to survive. He was unconscious and would remain so. The focus was on making sure he wasn't in pain.

He died late Thursday morning. It was, I think, a good death, mercifully quick after years of struggle, to slip away at ninety as your wife holds you and tells you how much she loves you and your daughters and granddaughter look on. I'm grateful for the hospital, the nurses especially, who always made time to talk with us, who scrambled to find cots for my grandmother and aunt, who showed compassion for my grandfather in his last hours. I'm grateful to the staff of the nursing home who made his last few years as pleasant as possible, who were never anything but completely warm and caring, especially the nurse's aid who adopted my grandparents as her own and was at the hospital the night before my grandfather died and at the funeral Monday.

So the next few days were a blur. We all knew this was coming eventually, but that didn't diminish the sadness. I was a shoulder to cry on, a hand to hold, a listener, a maker of tea, a mediator of disputes, quietly attempting to comfort my grandmother and keep my family from snapping, yelling at each other, and storming out as they are so prone to do.