A Fictional Conversation?

“Daddy called that man in the car a bonehead.”

“Does that mean he has a bone in his head, or a bone for a head?”

“You’re a bonehead.”

“Am not!”

“Bonehead! Bonehead! Bonehead!”

[Hilarity ensues]

Spencer has started throwing consonants in with the vowels. We’re still at monosyllables, but in several months he’ll start associating those sounds with words, at which point he’ll soak up everything I say. (I’m not flattering myself here; I’m a laggard #2 in terms of folks that might influence his vocabulary in the near term, and it’s a short list.) At the point he starts picking up my words of wisdom, it may be best if I stop talking for a little while.

I’m not talking about salty language here, but the old “family-friendly” standbys I’ve employed over the years. (My sister Kate recently went through this with her son and the innocuous “stupid”, which goes to show that it’s just not the words but the way they’re employed that we need to watch.) As our adoption of Spencer neared, Karla began politely calling my attention to the variety of names I used in my observations of the poor driving habits of others. The fictional dialog at the top of this post came out of a conversation we had several months ago, doubtless after another driver cut me off by driving around me on the shoulder of the road. “Do you really want your children calling each other boneheads? Or calling us names?”

Kids are going to pick up words wherever they find them, and as parents we need to weed out the bad ones, just like any bad habit, but that can’t be done while advocating a double standard. Toddlers simply don’t understand “do as I say, not as I do.” (Nor for that matter do older kids, who seem to take great satisfaction in spotting parental hypocrisy.)

So I am now working to contain my use of scathing epithets. It’s an interesting exercise; I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d become on this mental shorthand to describe my perception of the behavior of others. After a recent slug-fest conference call with a particularly adversarial colleague from another department, I resisted the urge to announce to my team, “That man is a complete idiot” and instead replaced it with the less inflammatory “He’s misinformed.” It’s rough going, because, as we all know, people around us present almost irresistible targets for ridicule. Being in the great and spacious building sure is fun! (Until it’s not.) At least I’ve got a few months to hone this before it dawns on the kid that all those sounds actually mean something.

Is this a fool’s errand? Check back with me when Spencer’s got a vocabulary and we’ll see.

The Land of Made-up Words

I have to confess not being much into the social networking website scene. Not out of Luddite fears of the interface or (as it turns out, justified) privacy fears regarding who sees the data these sites collect and how long it is stored. Rather, I just simply am not interested. I have plenty of friends in the “real world”, and my interactions at work, home and church are more than enough to keep me happy. (Besides, my lifestyle doesn't really lend itself to this sort of thing; no drinking, no clubbing, no beach parties... a Myspace page featuring me would be snoozeville for sure.)

My one concession to online networking is the professional website, LinkedIn. I signed up about 3 years ago when a Silicon Valley exec was guest-lecturing one of my graduate school courses. It has been interesting to reconnect and stay in touch with former colleagues, but I don’t use it aggressively. Over the past few months, though, I’ve noticed an uptick in emails from folks in my LinkedIn network inviting me to connect with them on other networking sites. The invitation goes something like this:

“Hello Dave! I noticed we’re connected on LinkedIn. I have recently been using [new-fangled website] to keep track of my colleagues and clients. If you sign up today, they’ll send you a free stuffed iguana. Anyway, see you around!”

To add insult to injury, some clever script-kiddie came up with the concept of re-sending invitations that are ignored, over the course of several weeks. (I still haven’t figured out the time to live of some of these; they just. won’t. die.) As Cousin Eddie would say, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year long.

This begs several questions. How many professional networking websites do you need in your life? (At this point, my answer seems to be anything less than one.) If you’re soliciting connections from people on an existing service, aren’t you implying that there is some sort of defect with that service? It’s like calling someone up and insisting they switch to your cell network so your minutes are free.

But the biggest puzzle to me about all these additional networking sites is how they possibly hope to gain any credibility and marketshare with such ridiculous names. Yorz? Xing? Naymz? I suppose we have Google to thank for such absurdity, but to me this falls flat. As a five year-old I recall my father (who has graduate degrees in mathematics and engineering) keeping me occupied by having me write out a “1” with a hundred zeros after it, and explaining that this was a googol. Hence when Google arrived I made the connection immediately. I realize that many people did not have the same geek-formative experience, so Google as a word was meaningless to them before it became a verb and top-ranked brand. But here’s the thing: it really did have significance before its rise to fame, as opposed to the random consonant-vowel knock-offs that are clogging my inbox. To me they sound like a pre-teen attempt to subvert the phonemes of the alphabet (“Z is so much cooler than S!”), which is hardly a way to influence professionals to use your site.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write a Gmail filter to auto-disintegrate yet another site’s spam…

Top 5 Personal Finance Strategies

It’s been nearly a year since we put our house on the market. In the interim, we’ve completed an international adoption, and, once our corporate relocation subsidy expired, paid several months of rent for our apartment in addition to the mortgage on our home. Needless to say, this hasn’t been the healthiest year for us financially.

But there have been some definite pluses. Aside from the very real non-financial reasons we moved to Texas, we have also taken advantage of some tangible financial benefits in the past year. For instance, all of my income, and part of Karla’s income, is now exempt from state taxes because the states concerned do not have any income tax. And, despite all the expenses, the arrival of our son resulted in some tax benefits as well.

Aside from those definite credits to the income statement, we have really honed our personal finance skills. We’ve always considered ourselves fairly good in this category, paying cash for things like graduate school and basement remodeling. And we were already doing the textbook things when it comes to personal finance: budgeting, tax-advantaged retirement accounts, avoiding consumer debt, etc. However, I’ve found a few simple things very helpful as we have hunkered down to weather the slow housing market:

5. Online Bill Pay

We signed up for bill pay in 2005 after the apartment we were living in mistakenly tried to transfer $90,000 (instead of 1% of that amount) from our checking account as part of our monthly auto-draft program, resulting in a fee that took months to sort out. We’ve never looked back. We’ve found a number of benefits. First, as our apartment experience shows, it is more secure, since nobody has their fingers in your account; all transactions are initiated by your bank, not the payee. The second benefit for me personally is more involvement in our finances. Several bills such as utilities and telecommunications fluctuate from month to month, so it’s not possible to set them to “auto pay” without risking underpaying. This gives me a chance to review the trend each month, but without having to manually fill out the bill. Finally, we have used bill pay for personal debts as well, sending small amounts to friends or family very conveniently (no writing checks, no stamps).

4. Rewards Credit Cards

This is a new one for me, but Karla has been enjoying rebate checks from her card vendor for many years. My historical criterion for selecting a credit card was the interest rate, which is pointless now since we never carry a balance month-to-month and hence pay no interest. Following Karla’s lead, I switched to a rewards card in 2007, and we’ve earned a modest amount of cash back as we’ve put every purchase we can on our reward cards. There are added benefits for shifting the bulk of our purchasing to credit cards. First, it is more secure than using a debit or ATM card since credit cards are protected from identity theft, whereas a thief has fewer obstacles if he obtains your debit card. There is also consumer protection from overcharges or other merchant practices if the product or service is unsatisfactory. Nearly everyplace from fast food places to gas stations accepts credit cards. Now if we can just get Costco on board…

3. Spending Thresholds

This strategy is really a matter of individual family style and approach to handling finances. It works for us, but every family is different. In our case, we have agreed that any discretionary purchase (e.g., aside from routine items like groceries, auto maintenance, etc) in excess of $100 should be discussed in joint session. Perhaps the limit for different families could be $20, or $2000… But we have found that having the threshold helps keep us both in the loop, and also empowered, if we want, to tap our (ever dwindling, it seems) pile of spare change after all the bills are paid.

2. Leftover Lunches

Prior to getting married to one of the world’s great cooks, I routinely ate out—sometimes twice a day. Lunch was an especially glaring example of a poor return on investment; the time around lunch is one of my most productive, and I rarely want to break away for a leisurely meal, which meant lots of fast food (and indigestion). Then there was the sales “steakhouse power lunch” phase of my career, where I had to strive mightily to fend off the threats to my cholesterol, if not my wallet (subsidized as I was by the all-powerful expense account). Now that I am again behind a desk for 45 or more hours a week, I find leftovers of Karla’s meals are wonderful, both to the taste and the pocketbook. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, leftovers have saved us about $100 each month since June. Not too shabby.

1. Tithes and Offerings

To Latter-day Saints this one should come as no surprise, but I reiterate how we’ve been blessed by paying our tithing and offerings first. If we take them off the top, we don’t miss the money, but we would certainly miss the blessings. Life could always be easier, but it could also be much, much more difficult, and we’re grateful to have been so blessed, and we know in part that is due to our payment of tithes.