The Rage Diaries

Let's hear it for lunch

In keeping with this month's theme of how we adjust our budgets, I bring you the WSJ's "Bagging Lunch: the Inflation Effect." The lede:

A few months ago Jessie Snider, 23, began to feel the pinch of the rising cost of gasoline, food and, well, everything. Then she realized the $75 to $80 she was spending each week on lunch was really cutting into her paycheck. So in March she traded sit-down lunches of elaborate caprese salads and angel-hair pasta for brown-bag lunches of leftover stir-fry and turkey sandwiches.

A billion years ago, when I worked at Hotwired, the articles about the place almost invariably reported on the "personal chef" we had who cooked meals. Let me tell you a few things. First, Phil Ferrato is a genius; I still dream of his pasta dishes. Second, the meals were subsidized to the point where all you had to do was pay $3-4 per day for a good hot lunch with salad and a sweet. And third, those meals were usually my main meal of the day; I relied on them to stretch my budget.

So I'm sympathetic to the idea of a lunch outlay. But holy cats, I am a little boggled by the idea of spending $15-16 on lunch daily. For those of you who don't brown-bag -- is this the norm? What do you pay when you go out to lunch?

Fiscal fitness -- July's theme ...

... will be coming after the jump. See if you can guess based on the articles below.

"At $100 for a Tank of Gas, Some Choke on 'Fill It,' " NYT, July 6, 08
"Fifty Things Being Blamed on Rising Gas Prices," WSJ, July 3, 08
"SUV Drivers Burned Twice: At the Pump, At the Car Lot," WaPo, July 2, 08
"10 Things You Can Like About $4 Gas," Time, July 2, 08
"Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in Far Suburbs," NYT, June 25, 08
"Americans Enter New Cycle as Tough Times Alter Spending Habits," Marketwatch, June 23, 08
"Sticker Shock at the Supermarket," CSM, June 11, 08
"Downscaling in the Downturn," Knight Ridder/Tribune, May 24, 08
"Consumers Are Dining In More -- At the Supermarket," BrandWeek, May 11, 08
"Driven by Desperation, More People Selling Heirlooms Online," Seattle P-I, April 30, 08

Fiscal fitness -- here's what happened after the divorce

It's one thing to get financial advice from articles, but first-person experience is equally valuable. I asked frequent commenter and longtime friend Molly about the financial challenges she faced during and after her divorce. The Q&A is after the jump.

Fiscal fitness -- are you cheating on your budget?

Marketplace has a hair-raising story about people who have racked up crazy debt -- in some cases, as much as $300,000 -- without telling their spouses. Credit counselors call this secret debt "financial infidelity." The June 27 story is here.

Of note: using "infidelity" in a financial context, as opposed to an emotional or sexual one. It makes sense -- doesn't infidelity always have a deceptive aspect? However, I am intrigued by borrowing a word from the emotional or social-contract part of marriage and bringing it into the financial arena.

Anyone here ever been a victim of financial infidelity? Or who will cop to occasionally committing a little financial fling on the side?

Fiscal fitness: What you should talk about when you talk about money

Money magazine's most recent issue has two articles that fit our June theme on partnerships and money -- "What's in Your Spouse's Wallet?" and "Get a Financial Life in 7 Weeks." The premise behind the first article: Your marriage can only improve if there are no unpleasant surprises or disconnects regarding the financial picture. The premise behind the second article: Do one simple thing a week and your household finances will more or less run themselves after two months.

What I find interesting about both articles is the implicit assumption that married people merge their financial futures, period. The second thing that piqued my attention: the premise that you run your personal finances like you run any financial portfolio -- with an eye toward reducing operating costs and boosting the bottom line. It is the refreshing opposite to Lori Gottlieb's contention that "Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business."

The third thing the two articles share: the unshakable conviction that married people need to set aside a dedicated period of time to talk about money, because doing so is vital to the partnership's longevity.

I only wish that one of the articles had included a sidebar on how to have these conversations, because I suspect that for many couples, the biggest impediment to discussing finances isn't a lack of time, but missing a vocabulary that doesn't set off emotional bombs. Money's archives aren't much help, what with the experts assuming that it's the menfolk who are more interested and advising them to "lay off the jargon and speak English" when discussing finances with the wife. I don't see why we can't compile our own tips on cultivating healthy financial dialogue.

Anyway. Because I'm fond of you, my readers, I've broken out all the useful information in the articles. Check after the jump.

Fiscal fitness -- download today or lose it forever

Quamut.com is one of those "How to do [X]" sites, and their revenue model is predicated on the idea that eventually, you'll get tired of clicking through page after page of "How to do [Y]" and just pay to download a PDF. One of the things the site does is to offer a free PDF of the day -- sort of a "First one's free" thing, eh?

Anyway, today's free PDF is on prenuptial agreements. That seems like a useful freebie for anyone who's been following along with the love-and-money theme this month.

Fiscal fitness -- June's theme ...

... is directly inspired by Megan's comment in this post about my girl Michelle Singletary:

I hate her opinions on marriage

 For the unintiated, Singletary's stance is that married people pool finances, period. It's an absolutist position. And there are some people who thrive financially without ever having merged their money. Megan got me to thinking: one of the biggest financial landmines out there is your love life, and one of the biggest relationship landmines out there is money. So in honor of the wedding season, let's talk love and money.

SmartMoney's got "The Six Financial Mistakes Couples Make" and if you can get past the  Goofus-and-Gallant approach they're using to illustrate those "mistakes," it's a helpful explication of the biggest bones of contention -- whether or not to merge accounts, what to do when one partner comes into the relationship with a lot of debt, how to understand each other's spending styles, how to plan for emergencies, how to invest, and whether or not you should keep financial secrets from your spouse.

(This last one fascinates me, as the Internet is rife with reports on women's "secret savings.")

So! Love and money. Let's start small: did you merge finances with your significant other? Why or why not? What factors informed your decision? I'll answer in the comments below.

Post once, get 25 cents off!

Brandcaster is doing something pretty interesting: it's taking the Google AdSense model and using it to try and place coupon offers in contextually-appropriate places. The idea is that rather than head to a typical coupon hub, people who are surfing different sites will see coupons for items that are related to the site and, presumably, their interests.

It's an interesting reversal of the coupon-clippers-seek-out-their-booty model, and it could be a lucrative one. Less than one percent of an estimated 285 billion coupons are redeemed annually. Find a way to shove those coupons in people's faces -- say, my next post on Method's O-mop happens to include a coupon for $1 off the starter kit -- and you're looking at a way to charge those coupon issuers an estimated $400-500 mil in annual revenue.

More details here: "Firm Helps Advertisers Take Aim with Online Coupons," Boston Globe, June 2, 08

My question to all y'all: if coupons were more ubiquitous on the sites you frequented, would you print them out and use them more? Would you do like I do and keep an eye out for those unintentionally amusing juxtapositions between ad placements and site contents?

Fiscal fitness -- what price groceries?

I've been carrying around my receipts for the last two weeks, and apparently showing you all that I have completely missed the point to "regular" and "timely" updates. BUT ...

Food costs for the week of May 17 to May 24, 08 were:
$38.50 at the farmer's market
$64.77 at the grocery store

Phil tried to talk me down in the parking lot by pointing out that we did some righteous stocking up -- $5.89 for four packs of the good semi-sweet chocolate chips, $8.75 for a 12-pack of It's-Its, $12 for a 12-pack of Moosehead. But oh, I was not happy. Only the icy-cool sweetness of an It's-It made me feel better about spending $103.27 that week.

Food costs for the week of May 24 to May 31, 08 were:

$43 at the farmer's market
$57.10 at the grocery store

Man, the stone fruits at the farmer's market just about killed me last week. But the pluots -- so sweet and so cold. And speaking of sweet and cold, can you believe we only have two It's-Its left? I thought we were stocking up!

So how is your grocery spending this month? What were your smart buys? What were the splurges you are absolutely unrepentant about? Where are you cutting back?

What if I don't want to be what I eat?

I like to read two or more books at a time, and the two I just finished reading  seem weirdly complimentary: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. Once I got past the situational amusement of the book by the non-chef including recipes while the book by the chef most decidedly did not, I realized that the two are united by a common belief that beats beneath each chapter: what we choose to eat, how we choose to prepare it and why we made these choices all reflect who we are.