January Re-Cap

We learn from our pasts. The more recent past, the more quickly we can learn. This is the value of analyzing "last month". Or "last week". Or "yesterday". Or "this morning".

I get impulses to buy something. I decided this year, to delay those impulses. Not to stop them, but delay them. Almost a year ago, work conditions led me to purchase a laptop computer. I didn't have to buy it, but it made my work life oh, so much more tolerable. I do some pretty serious analysis work, requiring a very powerful computer, which can never be had in laptop form. So, I am issued a "workstation" by my employer. But they have a rule, only one computer per employee. At the start of last year, work began to assign me to some teams that required a lot of work away from my desk. I brought a tape recorder that I already owned, I took notes in my poor sloppy handwriting, I tried lots of ways to capture what happened at meetings. Being an 80 wpm typist, the clear solution was "anything that used a keyboard". I looked at tablet computers - I was unable to type fast enough on those touch screens. Voice-recognition tablets? Nope, they simply do not operate at 80 wpm, and they miss most technical words. So, I was back into an old-fashioned solution: a laptop computer. Work would not purchase it, so I did. ****GULP**** almost $500, a LOT of money!!!! I use it only for work, so it fit under the "Section 179" exclusions and I deducted the expense on 2012 taxes. I take it home at night, and do work at home maybe one out of three nights. I take it back to work. Sometimes I leave the charger at work - or at home. Since it's a consumer-grade laptop, its battery doesn't hold a charge long.

Thus the desire - a second charger for the laptop. However, instead of acting on the impulse, I just put it on my "want" list. And emailed the want list to myself. I called it an "Amazon" list since most of what I'd probably want could come from there. As I thought about things, I added them to the "want list" aka "Amazon list" and re-emailed it to myself, pre-pending a larger number each time, e.g. "(4) Amazon list".

Each time I looked at the list, I realized that the need for some things had evaporated, or I'd found other solutions. I moved those to "no longer needed" at the bottom.

I just placed my Amazon order. Throughout January, I had compiled a list of $490 worth of "Amazon" purchases...and today, I ordered $48 total. Last year, had I acted on impulse, I'd have spent that $490! I saved 90% simply by waiting and thinking.

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Other January successes:
- I joined an amateur band. That's one night per week I go to someone's house and we play music badly. That's one night I don't have time to go out to eat, and don't drink. Money ahead.
- I gave a dealer an ultimatum: either respond to my last email about how you plan to catch up on customer service emails, or I will drop you as a distributor. They're my only distributor, so they figured I would not drop them. But I did. And am now setting myself up as my own distributor.
- I realized that my "go to" fast food joint was bad. Subway. They're no better than McDonald's, being chock-full of excess fat and high-fructose corn syrup. There's a "sushi to order" place in the same shopping center as one my my local Subways. For less than a footlong Subway sandwich, I can get a plate of seared Salmon, a bowl of miso soup and hot green tea. And it's quick. Better for my health, better on the wallet.
- Despite the above, I went out to eat only once in January.

=== Not specifically Frugal items ===

To my chagrin, my normally delightful spouse condemned me to a life of DIY remodeling and renovation 12 years ago. Now, back then, we needed to DIY for income reasons. That was, after all, the whole genesis of the "West Coast Broke" concept. My employer had moved me from the midwest to California, with a meager 6% raise, which didn't even cover the increase in state income taxes. So, we did the reasonable thing, we purchased a fixer-upper home and proceeded to fix and up. After a few years, we were fairly burnt out: we are not fixer-uppers. So, when the nature of my profession improved to the point where I could change to an employer who paid better and offered jobs in a less-costly state, we jumped. But, habits are hard to change, and we once again found ourselves in the agony of a DIY remodel. It was three years ago that I clearly saw my otherwise-diligent spouse throw in the towel. I persevered and between me and minimal hired contractors, we finally completely what was, essentially, a very minor remodel. Yay. The bulk of the work was done in August of 2012....my spouse had not quite "gotten the message yet" and started another phase - an interior re-paint - that we were not really equipped to do. I protested, but it began anyway. I claimed that while my spouse predicted it would require but two weeks, my observations suggested more like two months. It has been, in fact, six months, and it is as yet incomplete!!! My work has added more time, and my spouse, frankly, has done but little on the tasks assigned. This has been a moral victory for me: I now have a promise that no more projects will be started against my protestations. It is up to me to finish this one, as it has always been.

And this weekend saw success. By properly defining the sub-goal small enough (sand and finish one window's trim) I was able to "make progress". There are but two more sub-goals to accomplish, but one cannot be done until warmer weather.

Still, it is a breakthrough.

I want to spend time improving our retirement business. I can't do that if my time is spent painting walls! Spouse agrees, more income is good, but struggles to get away from the DIY mentality.

But I think we made progress.

I won't do monthly updates...I probably won't have monthly breakthroughs. But hopefully, 2013, will be a year of more breakthroughs than 2012 was.

Wishing you the most sensibly frugal 2013, WestCoastBroke