If you weren’t aware, Ridinkuloids, 1,500 Days interviewed our corporate overload, Gygax! I normally don’t like to talk about what goes on behind the scenes here, but long story short, we are part of an intergalactic blog network ruled by a ruthless, but effective, demigod and his trained wolf.

Gygax really spills the beans in the interview… Not that I’m complaining! Gygax is a benevolent and kind leader, and also all-knowing.

If you’re new, here are some of our Very Important Posts.

The Hottest Cell Phone You Need To Own RIGHT NOW! The Nokia 2600 is the hottest cell phone on the market. Find out why!
For The Love Of God, Don’t Max Out Your 401(k) Contributing as much as possible to your retirement seems like a great idea, unless, well… click to find out!
How Much Did Our Trip to Peru Cost? Is Peru a cheap or expensive place to visit? You will never know unless you click on that link!
B-B-B-Bats! Question: What animal did we spend over $1,000 to eradicate from our home? Clicking that link will bring you closer to the answer!
Comfort, Style, Luxury – The Ultimate In Transportation If you demand only the finest in transportation, boy have we got an option for you. Click on the link to find the secret answer!
Camping! A Frugal Friend’s Favorite Vacation Question: What sleeping arrangement costs $25 a night and lets you sleep under the stars? You get ten guesses, and if you don’t figure it out, then you’re allowed to click that link!

The post Greetings, 1,500 Daysers! appeared first on RidinKulous.

People find Ridinkulous all different types of ways. Maybe you’ve clicked through while reading interviews with our dog Maeby or our corporate overlord demigod Gygax on other, more popular blogs. Maybe you’ve clicked through while reading one of the comments I leave scattered like little poops across the internet. Or maybe you’re my favorite type of reader, and you found us by using a search engine.

As an aside, Marge and I are fascinated by search terms. Do you remember when AOL… I was going to say “leaked,” but they just straight up uploaded billions of search terms people had used with the idea that someone could use it for academic studies? Their users’ names had been scrubbed, but other than that, they left all the search terms as-is, meaning you could figure out who a person was if they were giving away enough personal information in their searches.

It was a serious violation of privacy, but also a really intimate view of someone’s life.   Take a look at User 711391’s search history here to see how voyeuristically thrilling it is! Marge and I played these for comedy on a podcast we used to produce in 2006 (the golden age of podcasting). We would dramatically read people’s search terms as if it was their inadvertent autobiography.

We were contacted by a couple of Dutch filmmakers to be in some movie about the AOL search term debacle, specifically that very user 711391 who had seemed to put her whole life in search terms. Well, they never filmed us, but it looks like they ended up making the movie, called I Love Alaska. It’s more of an art project than a documentary.

Aaanyway, I just figured out how to use Google’s Webmaster Tools to show all of the search results that lead people to find Ridinkulous.net. There is some interesting stuff in there! Today we’re going to see how people get here, and I will try to answer the questions these searchers seem to asking

Ridinkulous Search Terms

Charles Osgood sick

I’ve written about our love for Charles Osgood and CBS Sunday Morning before, so I’m happy to tell you that, no, he’s not sick.

norm seinfeld

Aside from one instance when an actress accidentally referred to Newman as “Norman,” there was no character named Norm on Seinfeld. Of course, you might’ve been searching for our hit podcast Seinopsis and just couldn’t remember the name.

Bats flying around my house

We get a lot of visits from people either looking for information or commiseration on the bats in their house. We have had plenty of bats over the years, and this summer we finally dealt with them and banished them for good.

Ocean state job lot tarps

I’ve mentioned before that my favorite Black Friday ad was a flyer from Ocean State Job Lot advertising discounted tarps. I guess I’m not the only one in love with those tarps!  I’m glad you and I could be united, person searching for tarps. Coincidentally, I noticed mine has a rip in it, so I might soon be in the market for a new Ocean State Job Lot tarp!

max out 401k

Sometimes we even get search terms related to finances! Imagine that! Obviously this person landed on my epic 401(k) fee rant For The Love Of God, Don’t Max Out Your 401(k)! I hope they heeded my advice.

use a serving of poutine to find and defeat

Poutine is a delicious food, but this search make it sound it could double as a heat-seeking missile! Just wait until those bad guys get a face full of hot gravy! This is a deadly weapon sure to defeat any opponent.

spot the cat

Got me. I don’t know what the hell that means. Maybe it’s a game?

in part 1 of steve’s video, which shop does he visit that sells both shoes and coffee?

Tricky! Steve has visited many shoe/coffee shops. It could be either Soleful Brew, Beans & Toes, or Lacey Joe’s.  I do remember that Steve bought a pair of New Balance trainers and a large fair trade dark Columbian roast.

early retirement ideas

Travel more. Work on your music career. Build miniature houses for animals. Wear a mask and protest outside the Scientology building all day long. Read more books on your list. Learn how to make cheese. Walk all the way to Nunavut. Stare at a hotel concierge until they make you leave. That’s the great thing about early retirement. It’s Your Thing!

charles osgood retirement

No, he didn’t retire yet. So you check that off now as two good things. Charles Osgood is not sick nor did he retire.

how much did a house cost in 1900

One goat.

2600 tracfone

You might’ve been looking for more information on the cell phone that was the subject of my love song, The Hottest Cell Phone You Need To Own Right Now.

dude let’s hang out

Cool, man. Where do you want to go?

obscene food

Well, we have a series about food called Cost Per Serving, but I wouldn’t call any of it obscene. What were you trying to search for?

how much did napoleon dynamite cost to make?

That’s the weird thing. Napoleon Dynamite cost $215 million dollars to make, which is as much as Transformers: Age of Extinction. Idaho is the most expensive place in the world to film, Llamas eat $2,000 worth of food a day, and Jon Heder’s hair took 7 hours to style every day.

i went on vacation

So what? What are you, bragging?

chocolate babka seinfeld

I’ll admit, Seinfeld is the reason I started baking chocolate babkas. No shame in that.

did charles osgood retire

No! Someone else already asked me that! He’s not sick! He didn’t retire! Just…. Jesus!

how much does an 8000 btu air conditioner cost to run

Wow! Lucky for you, I have calculated that exact cost you are looking for. For us, it would cost $2.62 to run the air conditioner all day.

crustier

I don’t even want to know. Never visit my website again, freak.

cost of taxi from lima airport to miraflores

We get tons of searches for the price of traveling in Peru. This taxi ride in particular cost us $15.91.

day bare for deg

So that is the Norwegian translation of a romance novel written by Sylvia Day. So obviously, they ended up here….

What’s the weirdest way someone has found your website? What’s the weirdest thing in your search history?

The post Search Terms: Your Questions Answered! appeared first on RidinKulous.

And it will be totally worth it.

We moved into our house basically on New Years Day 2009, a year before our house’s 150th birthday. Though about half of the house had been totally remodeled and beautiful, there were rooms that needed a lot of work. Mostly it was the upstairs bathroom. The sink wasn’t hooked up, the floor tile was in pieces, there was a wall missing, ceiling bowed out.

It was a bare room without lights. Fine to use during the day, but creepy to use at night. Most disturbingly was the one night when Marge went to the bathroom and heard a chirping in the top corner of the room. It was dark, only lit by moonlight, but she could tell that there was an animal in there that wasn’t happy with her presence. She was pretty sure it was a bat.

Well, we fixed up the bathroom and put in a new wall and fixtures. All nice and new!  And all goes quiet for a while. A year, in fact. Then in the middle of the night, we are woken up by Maeby pacing around the bedroom.  Luckily, she woke us up. In the dark we could make out…

there was a bat flying around the bedroom!

We covered ourselves with blankets and scrambled out of the room! But Maeby was still in there! I opened the door and yelled for Maeby to “Get out! Get out of there!” as the bat continued to fly around.

Did you hear something?

We slammed the door, but now the bat was stuck in our bedroom. Eventually, I worked up the courage to cover myself with a blanket, crawl on the floor as if under enemy fire and open the window screen so the bat could fly out.  I think I even felt the bat’s wing flick against the blanket at one point. EWW!

The next day, I actually left work early so I could work around the house sealing holes. After reading that once bats are in your house, they’re in there, I did not want a re-occurrence of the night before! At that point, we didn’t know how it got into the house. Upstairs? Downstairs? So I went into every room, caulking and foaming up every spot I could find. Bats can get in through holes as small as ¼”, don’tcha know.

That seemed to work for a while, but oh was I wrong. Here’s the horrifying run-down of some subsequent bat run-ins:

The 2010 Vancouver Olympics: Marge and I were sat down to watch the Olympics (hopefully curling!) when suddenly a bat came flying down the stairs and around the dining room! It was terrifying! We panicked and tried to crawl under the bat’s flight pattern to the back door, which we then left open for the bat to fly out.

The family: I can’t even remember how we came upon this situation, but we went upstairs, and there were three bats flying around! Trust me, if you saw this, your eyes would be popping out of your head and you’d be stuttering “Buh-buh-buh-baaats!”

B-B-Bats!

We felt bad because one was obviously larger than the other two, meaning it was probably a mother with two babies.  We ran outside and opened the back door. It was twilight, and we could definitely tell that two left, but couldn’t be sure if all three were out. We didn’t see any more flying around indoors, so we went back upstairs to bed…

The leftover: I still had a funny feeling the next day that there was another bat inside, even though we didn’t see it all day. So the next night we went outside again, opened the back door and waited. Lo and behold, at dusk, the last bat flew out the back door. It had been living in there all day.

The sleepy one: Whenever a bat shows up at night and we leave the door open for it, it can be difficult to tell when or if it’s left. You have to stand outside and constantly  keep your eye on the door. Look away for a second and you could miss it. In this instance, we didn’t see it fly out, but we also didn’t see it flying around inside the house anymore. So we went inside to sleep. The next morning, Marge found the bat sleeping on top of the window sill!

A bat sleeping in my house? I give it my mad dog face.

“It’s kind of cute,” she said, which I doubted. We had to get it out of there, so we came up with a very inventive procedure that involved both of us wearing gloves, putting a piece of Tupperware over the bat and slipping a piece of cardboard behind it. It worked okay, but the bat semi-woke up and hissed at us!!

It bared its sharp little teeth and Marge agreed that, at that moment, it wasn’t cute anymore. It was pretty much terrifying. But we closed him into the box where he continued to sleep and we left him in the grass outside. I don’t know, what are you supposed to do with a sleeping bat?

Nighttime scares: We had a run of a few times where Margie would wake up in the middle of the night, go to the bathroom, and then I’d hear screaming as she encounters a bat along the way. Commence the run outside in pajamas (or less) door opening and waiting for it to fly out.

Aside from the fact that they’re terrifying, it’s dangerous to have a bat flying around in the house. We keep reading that, if you find a bat in a room with a sleeping person, that person should be checked for rabies. Reason being that they could’ve been bitten by the bat. Not sure how that could happen without the sleeping person WAKING UP, but I suppose it does.

The Last Straw:
Usually, we don’t have to be worried about bats until July. At that point, we start creating the BFZ, the Bat-Free Zone upstairs. By selectively closing off rooms, we can manage to keep any bats that enter the house contained to the bathroom, hallway and library, since they always enter somehow in one of those rooms.

We had a very early hot streak here in upstate NY. In mid-May, it nearly hit 90 and tied some records. Since it was May, we hadn’t set up the BFZ yet, and while I was sitting in bed using Screeny the Tablet, once again a bat came flying into the bedroom! Just like the first time, we ran downstairs, opened the back door and waited.

At that moment I decided this was going to be the last time.

The next day, it turned out that the bat never even left the house that night. Because look what we found the next morning hanging from the crown moulding in the library:

Bat sleeping in the library

Each one of these incidents ends up with me struggling to figure out where the bats are entering the interior of our home. Most likely it’s the space behind the cast iron radiator that is impossible to reach. So I am basically at a loss for sealing up the home from the inside, unless we move the radiator to fix the wall. That’s not happening, and there’s no assurance it would work. It’s not good to have bats living in the walls anyway. The only thing to do now is seal up the outside of the house which means…

Calling in the Bat Man

Yes, we hired a guy. If I decided to tackle the bat eradification on my own, I just know it’d be the same thing all over again. First, I’d need a much bigger ladder, since our house is two stories tall with a flat roof. Then I’d try to seal up all the gaps without really knowing what I’m looking at. And then we’d probably still end up with bats in the house.

Hiring an expert means it finally gets done. He’s seen everything, so he knows what to look for. The day this post goes up is the day he should be coming back to seal all the holes and install the one-way bat boxes that let the critters fly out, but not back in. He also gives a three year warrantee.

We had to wait two weeks before he had a spot on his schedule, and in the meantime, it’s happened again and again. Look what was waiting in our bathroom one morning!

Bat sleeping in the bathroom

I have to say, it’s basically a quality of life issue at this point. Each year, the first bat incident usually marks the beginning of our bat scare season, where we are hesitant to walk upstairs to the bedroom at night if the lights aren’t on since we basically expect a bat to be flying around. Even though it only happens a few times a year, we shouldn’t have to walk around our house at night scared that a bat will hit one of us in the face or bite our dog. If I think about that $1,200 and what it will do for my life at this point, it seems like money well spent.

Of course, there’s also an un-frugal way of dealing with bats. Our bat man told us that he does a lot of bat removals from people’s houses. That is, there’s a bat in the house! Call someone to get rid of it! He has people who call him repeatedly to remove the bats. He tries to tell them that this problem could be solved by paying for the full bat exclusion, but they don’t listen to him. This is dumb for two reasons:

1. You can deal with the bat yourself. Yes, it’s scary, but you can open a window or a door, right? Do that, leave the area, and hopefully, it will fly out on its own. Don’t call up poor bat man at midnight and make him drive out there to deal with it.
2. If it’s repeatedly a problem, this comes down to the old Repeat Expense Vs. One-Time Expense conundrum. If it just happens once, okay. But if the bats keep getting in, and you are so short-sighted that you don’t see the repeated expenses of having the bat professionally removed each time totaling up, you will end up spending way more money than if you had just done the bat exclusion and done away with the problem for good.

What expensive thing have you decided to buy to improve your quality of life?

The post B-B-B-Bats! appeared first on RidinKulous.

Fancy Japanese hotel!

It’s been a ridinkulous year here at Ridinkulous Headquarters. We bought a rental property in order to hasten our early retirement goals. We spent almost three weeks on vacations in Peru and Japan. And we DIY built a stone patio, wood fence, and an 8’x10′ shed in the backyard.

Surely all of this fancy living will show in our expenses, right? Wrong! Because while compiling our expenses for the entire year, I found we spent less this year than ever before! Well, as long as you eliminate money spent on that rental property… I count that as a separate business and its own income statement is forthcoming.

In the next few weeks, I’ll compare this year to past years and see exactly how we made 2015 our most frugal year ever. But today, let’s just look at the numbers.

2015 Total Expenses: $54,038.23Avg Per Month: $4,503.19

Excluding Debt Payments Total Expenses: $35,373.10

Avg Per Month: $2,947.76

The Necessary Evils :

Pretty self explanatory. For more details on those loans, check out our Debt Progress page.
Property Taxes – People in the blogosphere are often astounded at how little we paid for our house and rental property in upstate NY. The flipside of our low housing prices is our high property taxes. And as any debt paydown aficionado will tell you, you can pay off your mortgage, but those property taxes will follow you to the grave.
Medical – Much of this is our hepatitus A shots for visiting Peru.

DIY all the way

Home Maintenance and Improvements

Contractors – This is the cost to eradicate bats from our house, and also the cost of re-wiring the electrical to our house after the neighbor’s tree fell in our yard.
DIY – The DIY cost is basically the entire cost of our backyard patio and shed project. We paved our backyard with real granite stones and built a 8’x10′ shed with plans found on the internet. You can see the work in progress above. It’s all done now, and photos are forthcoming

Food:

This is our lowest total food expense since 2007! Incredible. I chalk it up to making lots of big batches of food for lunches and dinners, and nearly eliminating Takeout Fridays.
Dining & Takeout Food – Despite restricting our eating out expenses, we still had many amazing meals. Not a dollar was wasted. The only things I eat outside the house are things I just can’t get or make at home. See the fresh maguro bowl at Tuskiji fish market or the ceviche or the chocolate con churros in Lima. The key to not spending a lot dining out is to never go to a chain or a place that makes everyday food. (I lift this rule for the occasional breakfast diner, a guilty pleasure)

Transportation:

Auto Maintenance & Other – Includes the obvious, along with registrations, EZ Pass tolls, and the charge to take a defensive driving course which lowers our insurance.
Gas – Speaking of lowest totals ever, this is our lowest gas expense since merging bank accounts over ten years ago! And seeing as how I only put about 2,000 miles on my car this year, it might be time to sell it.
Car Insurance – We just switched companies, which should take $400 off our annual bill next year. Even more if I sell my car.
Bus Tickets – I commuted to work mostly on the bus this year, but the cost was still less than maintaining a parking spot at work. I continue to keep that parking spot because it comes in really handy when heading to NYC for a flight.

Utilities:

Cable – We brought our cable expense from $75.12 down to $34.99 a month by first switching out Time Warner’s rental modem for one we purchased, cancelling our basic cable, and getting a frustration discount for having to deal with Time Warner customer service reps.
Gas – Incredible! Our heating bill has never been lower. This is partly because natural gas prices are lower than ever, and because we bought an electric blanket to keep us warm at night. Consequently, we keep our thermostats between 59 and 64, or 66 if we’re feeling radical. For those interested, that is the heating bill for a 2,000 square foot house.
Electric – Our electric bill has also never been lower! Although I couldn’t tell you why this is. Possibly just because of the lower prices.
Telephone – We are almost five years into using Ooma as our home phone, and it still costs under $4.00 a month. I also bought an Ooma Linx for $40.00 so we can finally have a phone on the 2nd floor of our gigantic house. We also paid $64.95 for my annual cell phone bill. So yup, that’s $12/month for all the phones.

Fun Stuff:

Entertainment – $462 of that was spent on concerts and shows like They Might Be Giants, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, and Hamilton on Broadway. There’s $248 on movies in the theater, and $324 on in-home entertainment like Netflix and Hulu. Overall, this was an average year.
Recreation – This was mostly Marge getting a flute part fixed for $178, and some sights around Peru and Japan. Hiking doesn’t cost anything, even popular hikes like Breakneck Ridge in Cold Spring, NY, as seen above!
Travel – Obviously was a big expense, what with two trips to Peru and Japan. Mostly this is transportation expense ($1,301.21) and hotels ($1,768.02). We actually only spent $161 on flights this year. Thanks, frequent flyer miles!

Pets:

Maeby the greyhound and the two bunnies continue to generate a ton of expense. Mostly this is due to Maeby getting her teeth cleaned this year, and having to board her during those long trips.

Miscellaneous:

Charity – When I started my first job out of college, I started donating to charities through our payroll deduction program. I promised myself I would raise the amount every year, and I have. This coming year, the lucky charities are Doctors Without Borders, Water For People, our local community center, a pet fostering group, and our local Planned Parenthood.
Clothing – See below!
Computer / Web – This includes our used Asus tablet, a used iPod Touch for me, a used 5th gen iPod Nano for Marge, and our web hosting. So that’s a lot of computer fun for $315!
Gifts Given -We save a lot of money on Christmas gifts by making them, like these cans of apple butter last year, and homemade soap this year!
Home Furnishings -This is mostly our incredible heated blanket, so handy for lowering heating bills in the winter, and some odds and ends like ice cube trays and kitchen stuff. It also includes our real Christmas tree.
Home Supplies – Toilet paper, paper towels, sponges, light bulbs, garbage bags… you get the picture.
Personal Care – This is mostly Marge’s 18-month gym membership at $468, and other odds and ends the Marge buys that I don’t know what it is.
Postage – Mostly from selling stuff on eBay and sending Christmas gifts and cards.

Back in January, I made up some goals for the year on the fly. Here’s how we did.

Yearly Goals Progress:

Gas: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $875.31

Lowest gas expense ever!

Dining Out: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $913.80

Phew! I was worried about this one. With every dinner out with friends, I could see the numbers adding up. We managed to keep this down by not going out to eat by ourselves at all except while on vacation.

Takeout Food: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
  
• Spent: $693.42

We came in way under the $1,000 here. Like I said, this is simply due to us hardly ever getting Friday takeouts now.

Clothing: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $853.01

Personally, I spent a grand total of $161.54 on clothes this year.  A chunk of that was at the Banana Republic outlet, where I also spent a large gift card, and another $41 was on a new pair of fancy brown shoes since the last ones got holes in ’em.  The remaining $691.47 is Marge.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average expenses of $4,503.19 and our investable assets, we have…

3.67 years of savings

But if you take out the all of the debt expenses and consider only what we would have been paying had all of the loans been paid off (as we’re planning in retirement), $2,947.76, then we have….

5.6 years of savings.

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

32.93

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

How do your expenses for the year measure up? Show ’em if you got ’em!

The post The Ridinkulous 2015 Annual Expense Report appeared first on RidinKulous.

We only do quarterly expense reports, not monthly, in order to eliminate all the noise, noise, noise.

Total Expenses: $14,578.19
Avg Per Month: $4,859.40

Excluding Debt Payments Total Expenses: $9,336.37

Avg Per Month: $3,122.12

Previous Quarters:
2015, January-March
2015, April-June

The Necessary Evils :

We put enough into our car loan to almost pay it off this quarter. There’s less than $1,000 left. Other than that, we only made the regular debt payments. On that note, check out our new Debt Progress page!

Home Maintenance and Improvements

Two big money spending time items this quarter. We paid the second half of our Batman bill. The summer is nearly over and we are still bat-free! And then we had to pay an electrical contractor to re-connect us to the power lines after this tree fell into our yard.

The DIY items have basically been all of the materials for our backyard shed. We rented a U-Haul pickup one day and brought home loads of lumber, plywood and siding. All of that will be written up as part of my Patio series at one point. Right now, the shed is nearing completion, but there will be a lot of finishing touches to put on.

Food:

Our grocery spending has been very even this year. It’s been coming out in the mid-$300s every month. Our dining and takeout expense were less than it has been in the previous two quarters.

Weirdly, these baklavas count as a Gift Expense because I made them for a friend’s wedding. There were 80 pieces and they pretty much disappeared!

Transportation:

The Other includes an oil change and tire rotation, a $53.50 annual registration and $25 in EZ Pass tolls. But overall, this was a very frugal three months in transportation, despite driving all over New York, first to visit the grandparents’ farm for Independence Day, and then to go camping.

Utilities:

Our latest Cable expense reflects our new bill. We cancelled our cable and got a discount on our internet, so it’s $34.95 a month! Our average electric bill was only $58.98, not bad considering how many record-breakingly hot days we’ve had here. Early September temperatures average around 75, and we were hitting 100 degrees, so the air conditioner was running a lot. But as I’ve analyzed before, running the air conditioner at night is worth it.

HORSIES!

Fun Stuff:

Another quarter, another thousand dollars of travel expenses! We paid for all of our train travel for our upcoming ten-day trip to Japan, which was $467 total. We’ll be going from Tokyo to Kyoto to Osaka to Takayama and back to Tokyo, so the JR Rail Pass was a good deal. Travel also includes our three night stay in a Kyoto AirB&B, plus some credit card fees we only pay to get the frequent flyer miles.

Recreation expense is negative! What!? It includes a good old-fashioned trip to the fair and some gambling at Saratoga Racetrack (See: Horsies), but is then offset by $230 refund from days we had reserved but cancelled in our Thousand Islands camping trip.

For Entertainment, Marge went to see a Broadway show about our first rapping president, Alexander Hamilton, and that wasn’t cheap. And we also got tickets to see the first ever stage adaptation of A Confederacy of Dunces in Boston, starring Nick Offerman, in December!

My personal Entertainment included a new album by Shopping, and the new Tame Impala which might be my favorite album of the year so far? I’m not sure.

Pets:

Maeby, why won’t you just let us brush your teeth!  This dog won’t let anyone touch her mouth, so she has to be anesthetized every two years to have her teeth cleaned. That was the cost driver this quarter. It was our biggest single expense, along with our bat eradication. So far, Maeby still has all her teeth. Lucky dog!

Miscellaneous:

Goals Progress

Back in January, I made up some goals for the year on the fly. Here’s how we’re doing 3/4 of the way into the year:

Gas: 

• Goal: Under $1,000
• Spent So Far: $734.21
• On track to spend: $978.95

We are right on track with gas spending this year. I don’t see any reason why we won’t stay under $1,000 for the year. I have been biking to work a lot this summer. I’m looking forward to doing a car vs. bike vs. bus commute mileage comparison at the end of the year.

Dining Out: 

• Goal: Under $1,000
• Spent: $611.31
• On track to spend: $815.08

This will be tougher than it looks! Our big trip to Japan is next week! We will be there for ten days, and I don’t think we are going to hold back on the sushi. And unlike our trip to Peru, our Japanese feasts will not come cheap.

Takeout Food: 

• Goal: Under $1,000
  
• Spent: $487.64
• On track to spend: $650.19

Excellent! We are on track to have our lowest takeout food expense since at least 2008!

Clothing: 

• Goal: Under $1,000
• Spent: $647.86
• On track to spend: $863.81

Unlike all you people on clothes shopping bans, I believe some clothing just has to be replaced. With the talk in Personal Finance Blog Land, you’d think everyone was wearing drawers from the Clinton administration. I bought a nice shirt for a wedding and Marge got a new J Crew dress for the same since we were in the wedding “Honor Circle” and needed to color coordinate. But we are still well on track.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this ones listed above.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average expenses and our investable assets, we have…

3.15 years of savings

But if you take out the all of the debt expenses and consider only what we would have been paying had all of the loans been paid off, we have….

4.91 years of savings.

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

28.8

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

How’d you do with spending this summer?

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q3 2015 appeared first on RidinKulous.

Green numbers are lower than last quarter.
Red numbers are higher than last quarter.

Total Expenses: $10,668.08
Average Per Month: $3,556.03

Excluding Debt Payments Total Expenses: $7,443.60

Average Per Month: $2,481.20

The Necessary Evils :

Rental Property is a new expense this quarter. The $795 relates to our purchase of a rental property. Appraisal and inspection costs.
We made one $500 car payment, and paid nothing extra on the other loans this quarter. We were mostly saving up for the closing on the rental property.

The Patio: Beginnings

Home Maintenance and Improvements

For contractors, we told you about how we hired Batman. The $608 is the first half of eradicating bats from our house for good.
All of our DIY expense is related to the patio we’re building out back. There’s basically over $770 of materials, including $500 worth of cobblestones, some tools and a permit. I’ll tell you all about the patio in a future series.

DIY Doughnuts

Food:

We almost came in under $1,000 for the quarter on groceries! We have been making a lot of food at home, and I have even gotten into bread-making. And as you can tell from the picture above, doughnut-making!
That dining expense, though? That’s high. Most of that is due to our trip to Peru, where we ate out a lot and spent $273.35 on food in ten days!

Transportation:

Man, is car insurance ever expensive! We sipped gas for the quarter, though, averaging three fill-ups each month. That, five bus passes and my bike got me to work all this quarter. There’s also a NY state registration in there, and an online defensive driving course which should reduce our insurance expense.

Utilities:

We have been having some fantastic months in utilities. Our latest combined Gas & Electric bill for June was $90.56, our lowest bill ever in this house! That’s six years!
Cash-based accounting resulted in four Cable bills being paid this quarter. It’s normally $71, but as you’ll see in a future post, it’s about to get a lot lower.

Fun Stuff:

Again, we like to travel, so that expense came out large. There’s a few hotels from Peru in there, along with all our transportation around Peru, and an expensive crap hotel in Queens so we could get our early morning flight from JFK.
Recreation is basically also all having to do with Peru, between all the museums and Inca sites.
Entertainment includes Netflix, Hulu, PaperbackSwap fees, a few albums, a few movies in the theater like Mad Max and Roar,  a double feature at the drive-in theater (Jurassic World and Spy) and a few of my favorite podcasts and radios hows like The Sporkful, Radiolab, This American Life and WFMU’s Do or DIY and Busy Doing Nothing. Yes, I donate to podcasts. You have to support the things you like!
We spent $1,020 on Travel this quarter. Well, we did travel to Peru after all!

Pets:

What can I say? One greyhound and two rabbits can get expensive. Maeby’s annual checkup is included, and the cost of boarding her during our Peru trip. And fifty pounds of rabbit food!

Miscellaneous:

The computer expense is actually the balance I paid for a used 4th generation iPod Touch. My old one’s screen went bad, and I sold it for $40. I bought a new one for $73. So, net, the new-to-me iPod Touch cost about $32.
That outsized Personal Care includes Marge’s 18-month gym membership of $468. So it’s not, like, really expensive shampoo or something.
Clothing expense is all Marge’s, the most expensive being a new pair of Keen sandals for $55. I bought no clothes this quarter. I did buy a pair of shoes which will hit next quarter.

Back in January, I made up some goals for the year on the fly. Here’s how we’re doing so far.

Yearly Goals Progress, six months in:

Gas: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $457.91
• On track to spend: $915.82

Coming in well under $80 a month lately. We’re on a great track since our last three years’ gas expense totals have been $2,251, $2,574 and $1,422.

Dining Out: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $537.31
• On track to spend: $1,074.62

Uh oh. Last time I said it would be easy to come in under $1,000.  But after eating out a bunch in Peru, our total for the year so far is over $500.

Om nom nom

Takeout Food: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
  
• Spent: $370.78
• On track to spend: $741.56

We’ve done really well for the past quarter, hardly ordering out at all. Our past three years in this category have been $1,301, $1,627 and $1,208. So this is shaping up to be a good year.

Clothing: 

• Goal: Under $1,000.
• Spent: $477.13
• On track to spend: $954.26

Doing pretty well here. We’re on track to meet our clothing expenses for 2013 and 2014, which were under $1,000 each year.

Years of Savings:

This magical calculation demonstrates how far we could get if we kept living every month like this quarter.  We take our investable assets and divide them by our monthly expenses above. The number to shoot for is 25, because at that level of savings, you could afford to live forever on your money stash. According to our monthly average expenses and our investable assets, we have…

4.63 years of savings

But if you take out the all of the debt expenses and consider only what we would have been spending had all of the loans been paid off, we have….

6.64 years of savings.

Retirement Location Possibility!

If we take that number of years of savings above, and divide by 25, we can figure out where in the world we could afford to retire right now by dividing another country’s cost of living  price index by our own cost of living. I used Rochester, NY, for our own cost of living since it is the closest city to us on Expatistan’s index and is very comparable price-wise.

Our International Retirement Cost of Living Number is….

39.02

According to Expatistan’s index, that means we can retire… nowhere!

The post Ridinkulous Quarterly Expenses: Q2 2015 appeared first on RidinKulous.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. It was a drop ceiling in the one room in the house that still has that. A leak sprung from our second floor bathtub’s drain pipe and started water soaking into the big drop ceiling tile. The tile got so saturated with water that it collapsed to the floor. Luckily, we have two bathrooms, so we can just use the other shower while we fix the drain pipe.  No buckets for water collection necessary!

I got up into the drop ceiling to see what was up, felt around pipes and found exactly where the leak was: Where a metal pipe fits into a PVC pipe. So I got out my wrench, gloves, and bottle of Blaster to try and and take apart the pipes.  (It turns out you’re not supposed to use Blaster on PVC anyway, kids!) After stinking up the place with Blaster and rubbing my fingers raw trying to get the pipes apart, I had a flashback…

The culprit

A few years ago, one of the toilets wouldn’t stop running. The water would keep running through the tank. The seal wasn’t tight anymore. So I attempted to fix it. But this toilet was so old that the style of flushing mechanism (technical term) wasn’t manufactured anymore, so I couldn’t buy a replacement part.  Instead, I had to take the whole thing apart, take out the whole flushing thing-a-majig, and put in a new one.

Each screw was excruciating to take off. The toilet probably hadn’t been taken apart in forty years, when it was made. The screws were rusted in place. I spent weeks trying to slowly get the thing apart. I eventually did it, but was a trying experience.

With this drain pipe in the ceiling, I could suddenly see the same thing happening. I saw myself spraying Blaster up there after work, night after night, and pathetically trying to yank the pipes around in their little enclosed area, then probably having to buy tools that I might or might not ever use again.

So instead, I decided it was time to call the professionals. Marge called a guy the next day, he came over a few houes later, and by 5PM, it was fixed. And our pockets were lighter by $149. Ouch!

Call it a Frugal Failure, but sometimes I think it’s worth it to go to the professionals. We paid up to get the bats permanently out of our house last year. Whenever a job takes specialty knowledge, expensive tools, or is obviously going to take us forever to get done, I consider them.

Other times I look to professionals instead of DIYing it

Certain types of food. I’ve never tried making my own beer or wine. I know people do it. And I imagine it tastes somewhere on the scale from “okay” to “something died in this.” But there are people who spend their lives dedicated to the alchemy of alcoholic drinks. I could try to learn some things and waste my time buying equipment and making my own barely palatable swill. Or, for the few times a year I buy beer or wine, I could just go to the experts who live and breath this stuff and buy something that has been tested and judged to be nummy by all.

Birthday Beers 2016

Likewise, there’s some foods I would order out but not make myself. Eggplant parmesan? That’s tough. The breading and everything, plus eggplant is temperamental. Get takeout.

We had real ramen in Japan, and I tried to re-create it at home. Well, it’s a two-day process and involves lots of specialty ingredients, and it still doesn’t taste as good. Nuh-uh. If I want a bowl of this particular soup, I’ll go to a place.

Baked goods? I’ll give it a try.

Car repair. I can do minor car things. I can replace a headlight. I can put in more oil and washer fluid. I can inflate tires and jump a battery. But basically, when it comes to getting dirty, I’ll let someone else handle it. I call AAA to replace a flat because if I did it, I have a fear the tire would fly off while driving down on the highway.

We achieve savings on maintenance by owning something that doesn’t require much work (Honda Civic and Toyota Corrolla) and by not driving much. We put about 10,000 miles a year on our two cars combined. Our annual maintenance costs are pretty low just because of that, so I don’t mind having someone else change the oil.

When do you look to the professionals?

The post Leaving It To The Professionals appeared first on RidinKulous.