Tag: debt

Account Ledger Book

/ Matt Talley / 2 Comments

I am by no stretch of anyone’s imagination a Luddite.  I love me some gadgets and gizmos.  New tools that make life easier or faster or better make me feel all fuzzy with want and excitement.  My miter-box-saw in the garage has a laser cutting guide, I waited for iPhone OS4 like a kid waiting for Santa, and I am currently in the throes of in internal struggle trying to decide what e-book reader is the best for my needs vs. which one is the shiniest…  By those standards one might perceive that I always turn to technology for everyday solutions…  Not so.  We are in the middle of divesting our budget and payment tracking from a super-over complicated spreadsheet (yes, I made it that way) and switching to an old fashioned 12-column ledger book.  We are taking a step back in time so that we can see every day where all the money goes.  It won’t be hidden in 1s and 0s inside a notebook computer or on a USB stick – it will be a tangible and easily consulted record when we want to see if there are funds for a new e-book, wheels for Matt’s road bike, the latest fiction must-have at B&N, or cash for Laurel’s shoe lust.  A ledger keeps all of the information RIGHT THERE and there is no clicking between screens or scrolling down, etc…

Manual record keeping has been around since man started making beer, selling crops and I am sure that a ledger was involved in the early days of the world’s oldest profession…   The new way isn’t always the better  way – GASP! (full disclosure: we will be taking hi-res pictures of the pages every month and including those images on our external hard drive for back-up purposes)

I found a 150 page, acid free paper version on Amazon that we are currently looking forward to filling with notes of bills paid, confirmation numbers, etc, etc…  It should last a good long while.  Many years from now our grand children with either lovingly peruse the yellowed pages after the last of us passes from this earth, wondering aloud how things could have been so cheap in 2010 and how cute it was that we had a “Book Budget.”  Well, either that or they will throw it away in their attempt to deal with the clutter and possessions from the years of our lives in the couple of days they have allotted to “deal” with our things.  I hope it is the former.

Buying a house/in debt FOREVER!

/ Matt Talley

After living in a1980’s Miami Vice-prefab over grown house in the endless suburbs for the last eight months we are done. We are trying to buy a place in the city, in an urban-ish area full of cute houses and green lawns, where we can walk to the grocery store, read a paper at a neighborhood coffee shop on Saturday morning, and would be within stumbling distance from a local pub. As an added bonus, it is about 500 yards from the first man-made rock-climbing wall in the US with views of the Puget Sound and Mt. Rainer at the end of the street. Just a few houses away is a branch of the King County Library – books, books, books! The place and location are great, but the buying process has been a nightmare!

The house is a rock solid 1928 craftsman and we made an offer about 6 weeks ago. It was accepted by the individual seller of the home, but still no official word from the mortgage holding bank or closing schedule. I have put something like 3-4 hours a day for the last 5 weeks (really!) getting paperwork ready, scheduling structural inspections, sewer line inspection, submitting paperwork, re-submitting the same paperwork, transferring funds, property surveys, title insurance, answering countless stupid questions and providing minute details of our lives in writing – I had to legally declare my middle name as an alias at one point before we could proceed. It is like having a second job as an air traffic controller that I pay for the privilege of going to after my real job everyday.

This is THE time to buy a house in the US: cheap prices, tax credits, lower property taxes, cheap materials for upgrades, carpenters and electricians with open schedules, etc… and we are having to BEG someone at to take our money and relieve them of bad debt. It is mind numbing and my cute little sweet gentle wife is ready to brain someone with a bat – really!