We have completed the initial steps in our financial plan. The old cars have been traded-in, and the new (to us anyway) car is in our possession. Our trip to the mortgage company went smoothly and we are on schedule for a closing in another 4 weeks. Finally, over the weekend we completed the paperwork for our offer in compromise to the IRS, and I mailed that package on Monday.
Now we have to sit back and wait. Wait for the mortgage company, and wait for the IRS response. This is the time when self-doubt and fear starts to creep in to my thoughts. Did I fill out the compromise form properly? Will they accept it for review, and once past that hurdle, will they grant it? We should know if they will consider it within a week or so. But it could be months before they grant or reject it.
I feel better for having been proactive and taken steps to clear up our finances. And even the hurry up and wait phase we are in now is better than the gloom and doom place we were before. Still I wish it was all resolved and we could close this chapter of our lives and move on to the next.
My employment continues to be dicey, and we still don’t know for certain if we’ll be staying here or moving on in October. I have had a series of interviews with a small company in Milwaukee that have gone extremely well. I think I will have a job offer from them soon after a still to be scheduled face-to-face meeting. That will be a tough decision to make; do I take a job offer to insure a better long term income forecast? Or do I avoid the whole trauma of having to move and stick it out here hoping that saner minds will prevail and I’ll get a new contract.
I just don’t know.
As mentioned previously more than once we have been working towards restructuring our debt.
On Monday evening we traded in our two cars for one very good used one. We lowered our monthly car payment by some 25% and dropped the annual vehicle cost by over $4500. Nice.
Yesterday we visited our favorite local mortgage company and started the process to refinance the house, and borrow against its equity to pay off our tax bill. It was very difficult to have to discuss with the banker our situation and ask for their help in addressing it. She was able to present us with some numbers that more than satisfy. Our monthly housing cost should drop by about 18%, and, we’ll have the funds available to pay off Uncle Sam.
Michele and I firmly believe that complete freedom is only possible if you take complete responsibility for your actions. We created this situation and we are addressing it. We faced the pain of admitting our situation required outside intervention. A few minutes of embarrassment and chagrin have resulted in our being on a path towards being in control of our lives again.
By owning our stuff, emotional, spiritual, and otherwise; we also get to own our lives. It’s all good.
In order to take care of myself with my parents I have always been selective in what information I shared with them, and how I shared that information. Whether I tell myself that I am taking care of me, or taking care of them really isn’t the point. The point is that I have fallen into the habit of putting “spin” on my information sharing with them. Because they are people I love, I associate careful information sharing with love. I suspect that could I travel back in time and observe, that I’d see myself learning at a very early age what to tell my parents and how to tell them, so as to keep what I felt was judgmental love coming.
When my taxes started getting out of control I didn’t want to share it with Michele because little Mark was afraid that the love he felt from her would be revoked. In order to keep that love I put spin on what was happening. Somewhere in my childhood I built a rather confused model of the world that included the idea that if you share bad information people will be angry with you, and that anger means they don’t love you anymore.
But not addressing the immature and obviously incorrect view of the world I continually leave myself open to situations where I want to tell the truth but I am afraid of the reaction I’ll get. Only by being totally honest and taking care of myself emotionally can I be free from the fear of rejection. I need to focus on my little inner child and comfort him when I need to express information that may cause an emotional reaction. I need to let my inner self learn and grow past the childish idea that emotional responses to my actions aren’t negative, they aren’t my fault, and that those emotions really aren’t about me at all.
I need to live my life in my emotional center for a time, and learn how to cope with my emotions and the emotions of others. Trying to manufacture emotional responses in others through the information I present is only hurting me, because in the end the truth will come out and I’ll have not only the original emotion to deal with but the reaction to my lie to deal with too.
Total honesty equals total freedom. No more spin. No more shielding others to manipulate the emotional feedback I want. I will give myself the emotional feedback I need, and I will take care of myself rather then hoping for someone else to take care of me.
Welcome to a (scary) brave new world.
Over the past few days Michele and I have worked very hard to find the best path out of our present financial situation. We developed a three-part plan. First get rid of the Audi TT and its damnable lease. As an option we were willing to trade the Lexus too. Second refinance the house and pool, reducing that monthly expense. Third, get a loan to pay off our taxes.
The first two reduce our monthly obligations considerably, while the third restructures the debt to make it manageable.
As of 5:30 today we will have accomplished step 1. We are trading our 2000 Lexus ES 300 and 2001 Audi TT in for a used 2001 Lexus LS 430; thus reducing our monthly car payment by over 24%. We’ll also see and annual savings in our car insurance payments that approaches 50%.
Tomorrow we are off to the mortgage company to refinance the house.
Several years ago, just after we were married, Michele and I tackled our revolving debt by using Consumer Credit Counseling Service. It was emotionally painful to realize that our debt was controlling us rather than us controlling our debt. In less than 3 years we had completely eliminated all of our credit card debt. To this day, we haven’t acquired a new credit card and that feels very good.
We went into business for ourselves full time in October of 2000. Like many small businesses we have struggled and suffered some setbacks. We weren’t prepared for our tax debt and have had to negotiate a payment agreement with the IRS. This has been a bitter pill to swallow, especially after getting our personal finances in such good order. For the past couple of months we have been struggling with how best to lighten our load and address our responsibilities.
Oddly enough the best answer involves getting a different car. One of our two current cars is leased, and neither of us is happy with or likes that car anymore. The lease is draconian in its exit terms and we feel trapped by it every time we see it. Our other car is fine, but we’ve had the same model vehicle for over 10 years now and we want something different. By trading in our two cars for one very good used one we can save money each month, and halve our annual insurance bill. We are also going to refinance our home for a longer term, again reducing our monthly outgo and eliminating a junior mortgage. With the reduction in our monthly debt we’ll be able to get a new junior mortgage to pay off the tax debt immediately. We’ll still have to pay the money back, but on our terms (and at a better rate) instead of the IRS’s.
Financially these changes will save us money over time. The initial cost of these transactions is a little more than we would like, but we’ll make that up in short order as our monthly expenses will be less. Neither of us is comfortable with scrutiny by strangers these kinds of financial transactions bring, but the result is very worthwhile to us.
We eliminate a car neither of us is happy with, and get out of the usury lease that ties us to it. We reduce our monthly car and house payments. We complete our obligation to the IRS ahead of time and for far less money. We will still have debt but it will be structured to our liking, which takes very good care of us. And we will have a car that is pleasing to both of us, emotional icing on our financial cake.
Best of all, we are taking control of our lives again. Because we are human we allowed the negative feelings that occurred when our business suffered to control how we approached our finances for a time. Instead of dealing with the pain of change we have suffered a lingering malaise that threatens to impact our lives emotionally and financially for a long time. In taking these steps we reaffirm our control over our lives. We stand up and take responsibility for past decisions, positive and negative, and in taking that responsibility we gain freedom. We regain a positive outlook on our situation, and with that outlook and new sense of energy and spirit that will positively impact our lives for years to come.
I finally got around to deleting my accumulated spam from the month of July. Last month I did this on the 1st, and a few more pieces dated in June trickled in after the purge.
I received 5,924 pieces of mail I consider to be spam in July. That’s an average of 191 spams a day. At this rate I’ll get on the order of 69,750 spams for the year.
My current total for the year is 37,785 spams. If I only had a nickel for everyone…
My wife uses Camino as her browser of choice. She likes to use the sidebar and the way Camino’s works is pleasing to her.
Last night she tried to visit the Thomas Kinkade web site (http://www.thomaskinkade.com) and her browser crashed as a result. This was the first browser crash I had seen with Camino, and I was pleased to see they have a talkback feature that collects information about the crash and sends it off to the developers so they can identify and address the issue.
I suggested that she click through the process and send them a note. I didn’t know that she had already seen this feature and ignored it in the past by clicking cancel. I should have listened to her.
The talkback process worked fine, but after it ran we were unable to relaunch Camino. The splash screen would appear and then the process would freeze. We tried downloading a new copy of version 0.7 and installing it only to get the same freeze.
After reading the Camino web site I discovered that there is a known problem with talkback preventing Camino from launching. D’oh! The error reporting software itself has errors, and they are major enough to basically destroy your application.
Sigh.
We did download the latest nightly build as the site indicated the talkback error had been addressed since the 0.7 release was made. And yes, the nightly build ran, but every so slowly. Far too slowly to be of any use as a daily use browser.
And, they’ve taken away the sidebar and made it a page overlay much like Safari. She wasn’t happy with the speed or the lack of sidebar. We did use the nightly build to export her bookmarks.
So we loaded Mozilla Firebird for her to use. Once the bookmarks were imported she was all set again.
All of this took about 90 minutes to accomplish. All she wanted to do was visit the Kinkade site to see information about 3 of his prints we have framed and hanging in the living room. Because that site is very poorly coded her browser crashed, the error reporting software then trashed the application itself, and she is now forced to use a completely different browser. It just shouldn’t be this hard.
Life has been going rather smoothly on the surface lately. We’ve been enjoying the pool, and cooking at home. Michele said the other day that we’ve finally gotten over the last move and are starting to feel really at home here. I agree with her. Even though it will be three years this October since we moved, I think we are just now starting to hit our own pace here.
Of course the Universe takes delight in challenging you when you start to get too comfortable. Now that we are hitting our own pace we may have to pack up and move again. I’ve largely given up trying to guess what the State will do about my contract. Currently I have about 280 billable hours left on my contract extension. Rumor has it the agency will extend some contractual people through next June. The most likely candidates for this are people associated with critical projects. Depending on who you ask, my project is critical.
I did run off the reservation a bit worrying about re-financing the house, sell a car, and trying to lower our monthly out go as much as possible. While these are all good ideas, I tried to do it all at once. The result was predictable, especially for someone moderately ADD. I couldn’t focus on anything long enough to make a difference, and, as a consequence, everything started to suffer. Thanks to a series of conversations with Michele I was finally able to break down and express the emotions that I had been ignoring in my vain attempt to solve everything simultaneously.
Together we were able to see that I had too much on my plate. We set aside the mortgage re-finance for now, and I have stopped worrying about reducing our monthly expenditures. When the time comes, if necessary, we’ll cross that bridge. I feel much better as a result. I can keep several balls in the air at once and be okay emotionally in the process. But when I take on too many tasks I stop taking care of my emotional self and trouble always follows.
My Powerbook, affectionately known as Eeyore developed a nasty problem with its CD-RW/DVD drive late last week. On Thursday I was burning a series of CD-RWs, transferring a Red Hat distribution I had downloaded to disk. The first 4 burns when perfectly. The fifth stopped about a third of the way into the burn with an error. At the time I thought it was just a bad CD-RW.
Over the weekend I tried several times to complete the task with no luck. In fact I discovered that I was unable to read any CD, much less burn a new one. Oddly enough, DVD reading still worked. I did some searching via Sherlock and found a couple of knowledge base entries about reseting the PRAM and NVRAM. I attempted the PRAM reset with no effect on the CD-RW portion of the drive.
On Tuesday I called Apple Care. My 90 day phone coverage had expired in April so I had to agree to pay $50 if the problem was software related. If the problem turned out to be hardware I wouldn’t be charged as it would be covered under the warranty.
Following their instructions over the phone I again reset the PRAM and this time used the Option-Apple-O-F keystroke boot option to boot into the open firmware page. Reseting the NVRAM and then rebooting didn’t help the drive at all. Next we tried booting into OS 9. Still no CD-RW. Apple arranged to send me a box to ship the unit to them for repairs. They also put me in touch with the local certified repair shop.
Calling them I was able to schedule an appointment to diagnose the machine and order the necessary part(s). They said the parts would be available Wednesday afternoon. I took Eeyore back about 2:30 in the afternoon and it was ready for me when I returned at 4:30.
Everything works perfectly now. Eeyore has a new tail.
Even though I was disappointed to have the drive fail after only 7 months of ownership, I was pleased at the speed Apple moved to fix my problem. I have had CD drives fail in the past, so I know hardware isn’t forever. All in all not a bad experience.
The bill, before the warranty kicked in, $504. Maybe I’ll spring for the extended Apple Care option and buy 2 1/2 more years of peace of mind.
On my site I use a PHP/MySQL tool to track incoming referers. The tool, called Refer 2.01 is very slick and it gives me a sense of where you all are coming from to get to my humble little web site.
Recently I have noticed a trend, well a phenomenon actually. Back in June I posted a story about the new Apple products from the WWDC held in San Francisco. This posting included the word “panther” oddly enough. Panther is the code name for the next release of Mac OS X, release 10.3. Since that posting I have seen a surge in refer hits from google in the form of a search string for “torrent” coupled with the string “panther”. 40 in the last week, similar numbers in the weeks prior to last.
Bit Torrent is a new peer-to-peer file sharing and download program. Obviously, people are searching for copies of the Panther beta to download and use, and they want to use Bit Torrent to accomplish this download. Somehow my referer log page has enough hits on it from google with the words “torrent” and “panther” that it is now the number 1 link from google for those search arguments.
While a part of me likes that my site is garnering all these hits, I realize that the people aren’t coming to see my content. They are just trying to find a copy of Apple’s latest OS to play with, and through the power of the Internet, they are getting my refer logs instead.
I’m either going to have to turn the refer logs off for a while, or figure out how to hide those pages from google (and other search engines as well) so that searchers find what they are looking for. Or hope that some percentage of visitors to my refer log will follow the link up top to my main page and actually see my content.
Of course in writing this posting I have used the magic words, torrent and panther, several times. Maybe now the search engines will point to this posting instead of my log page.