My son is midway through college.
We send him to a liberal arts college in the Chicago area where he majors in music and plays jazz trumpet.
As part of an American liberal arts education, he is constantly barraged with political correctness from all angles. Although a huge percentage of the male students there are beer swilling, pot smoking would-be date rapists who major in business, join fraternities, and are set to join the banking, investing, sales and “other” types of business world, an almost equal percentage are hell bent in pushing their ultra liberal agenda.
As part of the expensive education that we are paying for, one of the required general education courses that he took spent a semester trying to convince the white heterosexual males in the course that they are very privileged. Those in the class who were not white heterosexual males needed no convincing.
Wait! Don’t click off here.
You may scoff at these words because, it is true, many if not most of the white heterosexual males in the course do enjoy some level of privilege in its various forms. You could argue that both I have enjoyed many benefits of privilege, as do my son and daughter. I would not deny it, but I could point to many privileges that we did not and do not have that many other people who I know did and do have. Quite a few. But it is always easier to lament what you do not have than appreciate what you do. I am just now learning to better appreciate what my family and I do have and enjoy rather than spending half my waking hours bitter about what we do not and strategizing on how to attain them.
One of the hundreds of dollars’ worth of books that we purchased on our son’s behalf during his second semester of college (January through May 2017) is Privilege by Michael Kimmel and Abby Ferber.
Knowing my interest in class issues, financial issues, money and the like, my son gave me the book rather than selling it to someone else for five bucks or less or putting it on a shelf forever.
So here in late July of 2018, as a busy economic development professional who just spent a challenging work week trying to catch up after having the audacity to take three vacation days to take my family on vacation, I spent the last week reading a book that made me realize the privilege that I do have.
Since my blog more often addresses money, hence the name, more than sociological issues, I thought quite a bit about how my family and I enjoy privilege as I also focused on the impressive amount of bills that I must pay this week in addition to Paying Ourselves First.
About my reference to the “impressive stack of bills.” I read a lot of bloggers, all the way from guys like the Money Commando and A Millionaire Next Door who are multimillionaires to frugal rural mommy bloggers who grow their own food, make their own clothes and live on a thousand dollars per month while stashing away the same amount or more.
Thus, when I write about an impressive stack of bills that I will be paying around in the range of seven grand over the course of the next week, I mean that it is a lot for me and my family. With a combined income just over one hundred grand, the amount leaving our account in the next week makes up a significant percentage, well over two percent of our income, which would be the year divided by fifty-two.
Years ago, prior to this blog, I would get pretty stressed out about this. I would hate going from thirteen grand in our checking account to about five or six grand in one week. It takes me every six months to get the checking account back into five figures, and that when we do not spend anything besides our regular spending, making repairs and replacing what gets broken. The long list of needed home improvements never get done.
It is not as if it does not bother me now or that I do not mind the rapid depletion of our account. It is more that I have come to view money as a form of energy exchange that comes and goes. Sometimes a lot comes in while little goes out. Sometimes it is the other way around. Since I have expertise in one area (economic development) but not in others, like auto repair, appliances, teaching music or dance and I also despise yard work, I appreciate being able to pay for things that would cost me time, energy and expertise that I do not have in abundance.
Therefore, after learning to appreciate the privileges that I grew up with a little more and that my family and I currently enjoy, I became grateful that I have the ability to shell out the seven grand or so in the next week while nobody in my family really has to miss a beat. I know that there are many single mothers out there and working class families that would not be able to pay these bills and investments in the next week, therefore I feel privileged to pay.
After picking my son up from a rehearsal for the musical that he is playing in the orchestra pit for this week (we are going to see the musical tonight), he saw the book on the seat and asked me what I thought. Without beating the subject to death, I told him that I was reading about how privileged I am and that he is to be a white middle class heterosexual male.
He reminded me “Don’t forget about cisgendered,” although that is just a word that I learned last year. It is true that both my son and I were born with outdoor plumbing and continue to consider ourselves people who have it.
So what am I so privileged to pay between now and next weekend?
Privileged to Pay $100
I hate to mow. We have lived in our house on a one-third acre corner lot since just before 9/11 seventeen years ago.
For the first five or six years, I spent hours every week diligently pushing cheap mowers around the yard. After getting my current job, I inquired to the lawn service that our next door neighbor uses how much they would charge and then paid them for about seven years.
I do not know what happened to our lawn service, but I never heard back from him about three years ago and then purchased a mower and mowed, myself, for about three years.
Last fall, a friend of ours gave a name of a local guy who mows and I inquired about his services.
I now have a retired guy who I think may even be a millionaire yet mows yards for a reasonable price as a hobby and for spending cash. He takes cash only.
He mowed our yard yesterday, put a handwritten bill in our door for $100, and I walked my baby to his house today and handed him five twenties while also chatting about his collectible cars, collectible motorcycle, the remodeling of his house that he is currently doing and his plans to move out of Illinois in four years when his wife retires. He told me that he is sixty-three and has been retired for three years and his wife is sixty-two and is going to retire at sixty-six.
Either way, I think that the hundred dollars that I handed him today may be the best money that I spent all month, although my daughter took offense to that when I said it.
She asked about our recent trip to the Dells and asked if one of the hundreds spent there would count. I admitted that it would, but that our three-and-a-half day jaunt there cost us about fifteen hundred dollars.
Anyway, I felt no qualms about handing this guy a hundred dollars cash for the third month this summer, figuring that he will mow for about two or three more. It is money well spent.
Privileged to Pay $1,919
My wife’s Visa bill is $1,919 this month. It may sound like a high number or that she went on a shopping spree, but neither would be true.
Perhaps a topic for a future post, her Visa card was hacked badly to the tune of over ten thousand dollars’ worth of bogus charges at Airbnb this past June. Even after she reported the breach, had the charges waived and got a new card, the new card was hacked as well. When she called Bank of America the second time, she learned that the hacker even set up a bogus email account and gave a different phone number for the account and, of course, had the answers to the secret questions that only my wife and I would know like her mother’s maiden name, the make of her first car and her childhood best friend’s name.
Also, $1,200 of the $1,900 balance is due to her charging a new flugelhorn for our son, who purchased it online after we agreed to chip in $400 for it. So as I pay the $1,919 early next week, I will also be transferring $800 from our son’s savings account.
So, really, my wife charged a total of about $700 to her card throughout the last month, $200 of which were fees charged by our daughter’s high school for the upcoming year, another $200 or so for food charged for a mini birthday party that we threw for her and another few hundred for gifts and other items that we ordered from Amazon.
The four of us also all use pay-as-you-go phones via TracFone and she added minutes and data to our phones for another $100 or so.
So, No, we did not charge five nights at a luxury resort with lavish meals out. The $1,900 was a new flugelhorn from Dillon Music, school-related fees, some pizzas, some items from Amazon and minutes and data for four phones.
I feel privileged to pay off my wife’s credit card in the beginning of August.
Privileged to Pay $2,200
I always say that I would not mind owning an escrow company so I could collect interest from other people who store money in one for property taxes and insurance, but damned if I am going to use one.
Like wealthier folks and older folks, I waived escrow when I was thirty years old and closed on our house in September of 2001. We had an escrow account for the previous three years when we “owned” a condominium in Evanston. The company screwed up the amount twice, sending us letters that we owed a thousand dollars extra for whatever reason or they miscalculated something. This is not as uncommon as you may think, and you may have even encountered a screw up with your escrow company, yourself.
Thus, I receive our Crook County property tax bill in the mail twice per year and then must pay it so our property does not go to the tax sale with over fifty thousand others.
In Illinois, homeowners pay fifty-five percent of last year’s tax bill in the first installment, typically due around April 1st, with the remainder due after the final rates for the taxing districts are calculated, typically due August 1st.
My wife appealed our tax bill earlier this year, at which time it was decreased from the $100 per week that we have paid for the privilege of living in our home for the past several years, or $5,200 per year, to a slightly less $5,100.
Since I made a payment of $2,878.92 back on February 26th, I am now honored and privileged to have made a $2,221.54 payment earlier today to continue living in our home the next six months assuming that I continue making our mortgage payments.
I made the property tax payment online through the Crook County Treasurer's office for the first time which, like every other electronic payment made, is far more convenient than paying it at a local Chase bank branch like I have been doing for many years.
Privileged to Pay $718
Speaking of mortgage payments, our lender, Citizens One, will automatically withdraw $718.27 from our checking account on August 1st, as it does every month.
My wife and I took out a five year ARM in fall of 2010, which has already adjusted higher twice and is set to rise from 4% to 5% in two months. This is finally enough of a jump in rates to compel me to refinance our mortgage once again.
By the way, I effing hate having a mortgage.
While the Recession with the capital R was in full effect from 2008 through 2010, we watched home after home go into foreclosure in our neighborhood. There were some months where I took my baby, whom we adopted (I cannot admit to having purchased her at a puppy mill pet store) in 2009, for walks around the block when we knew of eight to ten houses in foreclosure at any given time.
Families were evicted with all their stuff set to the curb. People hugged neighbors tearfully when they moved from a house in a middle class neighborhood to an apartment in a working class one. People left the state. People snuck out. People stole the fixtures from the homes. Thieves stole pipes from the vacant homes. Wealthy investors in Hummers and Porsches drove through our neighborhood observing the area and snapping photos of the homes with iPhones.
The very low point was in about 2011 when I observed a bus of investors parking in front of an abandoned home in our neighborhood (where two bizarre brothers in their forties, neither of whom ever worked, lived together as the home deteriorated) in the morning while I walked my baby. I suppose that seeing a decently dressed white heterosexual male walking a Morkie in the morning probably made them feel better about the potential investment than seeing a group of minority kids in baggy pants standing on the corner.
Anyway, had I started this blog back then, I would have written how I was doubting the wisdom of paying our mortgage every month come Hell or high water while other Gen Xers in our neighborhood who had purchased homes before or during the Recession were all getting foreclosed on.
When homes that had sold for $270,000 were selling to investors for half that amount and being converted to rentals, I did feel stupid for paying our mortgage some months.
Alas, I have made a mortgage payment every month since spring of 1998, with the exception of a few months when we refinanced our loans and were not compelled to make payments.
This Wednesday, August 1st, Citizens One will withdraw about seven hundred from our account, as they have for the past ten months after withdrawing smaller amounts for the past seven years.
And I will feel privileged to have paid it.
Privileged to Pay $425
I feel a little extra privileged on this one.
That is because without a little attention to detail I would be writing about the privilege of paying $562 for half of our annual homeowner’s insurance premium.
Because we closed on our home on the Friday before Labor Day in 2001, and because I switched from an insurance agent that my parents used and that we did in Evanston to one more local to us about ten years ago just before our premium was due, our second big insurance payment always comes due at the same time that our property taxes are.
I prefer to think of it as rubbing some salt in my wound. The same day I pay over two grand in taxes, I usually pay another five hundred towards insurance.
This year, I noticed that our home was valued at $293,500 and I will write and tell you the same thing that I told our insurance agent this past week.
If you want to cut me a check for $293,500 or even $243,500, I’ll start packing in five minutes and will hand you the keys in a few days.
After describing our home in great detail once again to the assistant at our State Farm office, she valued our home at just about $200,000 even which, truth be told, I would not consider selling my house for. We paid just under that amount in 2001 for , and have improved it quite a bit.
What resulted was that our annual premium was decreased from $1,119 to a more palatable $851, reducing our semi-annual payment by nearly $140.
I inquired if our children’s growing collection of musical instruments was covered and was advised to purchase a rider to cover them, so our premium will go up again but just by a little.
Should any of their instruments get stolen or rendered unusable, I would consider ourselves privileged to have them insured, just as I feel privileged to pay the $425.50 this week.
Privileged to Pay $900
Speaking of instruments, we just purchased a new trombone for our daughter.
She is one of the better musicians at her high school and has been playing a used trombone that I bought for her about three years ago for about $600. I cannot recall the exact amount.
As she has progressed in the high school jazz program, the band directors and her private instructor have become more insistent in us getting her a new and better trombone.
Worthy of a post on its own, we have spent the months of May, June and July pursuing the purchase of a hand-made custom trombone by a very well renowned trumpet maker who has made entry into the trombone market. As a matter of fact, the trombone that we just purchased is inscribed with #002 on it, meaning that she is purchasing the second one made by this person. One other student at her high school beat us to the punch in purchasing one.
If this was a post about making money flipping instruments, I would be proud to write that we could most definitely flip this trombone for five grand with ease. This maker only makes one per week and is known to make custom trumpets for the top professionals in the field. Our son covets a trumpet made by this guy and is getting ready to shell out over four thousand for one.
We could, indeed, afford to shell out the $2,700 that we agreed to pay this guy for the trombone, since we considered it used even though it was only used by our own daughter for two months, but I asked him to put us on a payment plan. This because I was ready to purchase a trombone for her in the traditional way, at a store where they offer free financing for eighteen months. The Conn trombone that I wanted her to purchase also happened to be an even $2,700 after a number of incentives were applied (20% off to anyone and then an additional 10% off that the salesperson emailed to me to offer), which I was going to pay off the super-easy way of eighteen consecutive monthly payments of $150.
The instrument maker, not being a retail business with financing options, agreed to create and send me invoices for $900 each of the next three months. I have not received it yet, but will email to him tonight to remind him because I hate to have a $2,700 debt to this guy hanging over my head. After paying it off, I will ask him to send me a receipt because the insurance lady told me that I would need to provide them to insure our children’s instruments.
Instead of stressing out about it, I will feel gratitude and privilege as I mail a check for $900 to a famous instrument maker in Indiana. After all, I am exchanging my own energy for his and I certainly do not know how to make a kick ass trombone.
Privileged to Pay $106
Speaking of energy, our family used twenty-four kilowatts of it this past month, resulting in an electric bill for $105.97. Of course that is higher than it has been in the past few months as the temperatures in our area have been in the eighties and higher most days.
Last fall, one of our family’s unexpected expenses, and a large one at that, was when we purchased a new central air conditioning unit during a very hot stretch of days. That set us back $2,700, but was worth every dollar.
Paying a hundred bucks for electric, another hundred for water, thirty or forty for natural gas, fourteen for garbage collection, $170-something for Comcast cable, TV and Internet and all that other stuff adds up, too, but I consider those regular monthly expenses and nothing out of the ordinary.
But although having electric, water, natural gas, Internet, cable, phones and having our garbage hauled away are considered routine middle class expenses these days, I am still privileged to pay them.
Privileged to Pay Another $250
Our lovely and talented daughter is taking two dance classes and a tumbling class at a private dance school in a nicer community than ours this summer.
As anyone who has a daughter, or a son for that matter, who attends private dance schools, you know that $25 per hour is fairly par for the course.
Because her three classes do not run for the entire month of August, and her school year starts soon, we will “only” be paying about $250 for ten more hours’ worth of classes the next two weeks or so.
I’m pretty sure that my wife charges those classes to her Visa card.
Privileged to Pay a Few More Hundred
I purchased new Asics at Kohl’s this past week, adding to my wife’s debt to that department store.
As a thoroughly middle class family, we purchase nearly every strand of clothing that we wear at Kohl’s. Our daughter, being more fashionable, buys a lot of clothes at trendier stores at the mall.
I’ll probably pay off the $186 balance on my wife's Kohl’s card this week.
...And $200 More
Being the great father that I am, I bought my daughter a new Micke, a Billy, a Nymo, a Rodd and a Ledare today. Of course, the Ledare was only two bucks.
For those of you who are well versed in Ikea-ese, that means that I bought a new desk, book case and lamp for her. The Ledare is a fancy light bulb.
Let me tell you - I effing hate this place and have not gone there for at least five years despite being a quick drive from our house. After waiting in line after line today and being encroached upon by thousands of crazed shoppers, I gained a greater appreciation for that giant shopping center hovering above us in the clouds.
The seven articles purchased ran us $186.64 but it will help make our daughter's room a bit nicer, thus I feel privileged to have paid for the Micke, Billy, Nymo and Rodd.
We spent about twenty bucks going to lunch together afterwards.
…And a Few Hundred More
Even though I am paying property taxes, our mortgage, our homeowner’s insurance, a $900 check to an instrument maker, a few hundred in utilites, my wife’s Visa card and her Kohl’s card in the next week, that does not mean that our family will not keep eating food, purchasing gasoline and going out and doing things, such as attending a musical tonight.
We spend more than the typical $50 per week per person on groceries. More like $70 per week per person, resulting in about $280 per week in grocery bills for our family. This week is no different, as my wife will be spending $150-plus at Mariano’s this week getting a little bit of everything.
Likewise, both her 2018 Subaru Outback and my 2006 Chrysler Town & Country run on fossil fuel.
Both cost about $50 to fill up.
We also eat out quite a bit and there is no reason to think that will slow down this week, the next one or even the one after that.
It’s a good thing that they will be paying me again this coming Friday.
Privileged to Pay Ourselves $1,100
I nearly forgot the main thing that I feel honored and privileged to pay.
On the first of every month for the last fifteen years, I have contributed to one or both of my children's college accounts. With our son midway through college, I no longer contribute to his college accounts, but do contribute out of our regular cash flow.
In a typical month, I transfer $2,000 or so from one of his 529 accounts, and then make a $2,500 payment to his college. Because he will be moving into a college-sanctioned apartment next month to start his junior year, his housing cost is going to increase by about a grand per semester, thus I will be making monthly payments in the range of $2,700 for the next ten months.
I am privileged to pay it, and he is privileged that I do so, but that payment will not be in the next week. I will pay it around the tenth of the month.
However, I will automatically make a $400 to our daughter's Illinois Bright Start savings account on the first of the month, as I have for the past three years or so. Prior to that, I automatically contributed $500 to each of our children's accounts for a good ten years or so.
Because I will be getting paid this coming Friday, I will make a $100 payment to each of the two funds that comprise my Roth IRA, as I have been doing every payday for a few years.
I have written an old-fashioned check to Vanguard and will be mailing it tomorrow morning, thus paying my wife $500 around the start of the month via her Roth IRA.
Despite the whopping amount of bills and expenses that I am paying this last week of July/first week of August, I would not forgo Paying Ourselves First.
Another $200 to myself, another $400 toward our daughter's education and another $500 to my wife are eleven hundred more bucks that you know how I feel about.
I feel privileged.
We send him to a liberal arts college in the Chicago area where he majors in music and plays jazz trumpet.
As part of an American liberal arts education, he is constantly barraged with political correctness from all angles. Although a huge percentage of the male students there are beer swilling, pot smoking would-be date rapists who major in business, join fraternities, and are set to join the banking, investing, sales and “other” types of business world, an almost equal percentage are hell bent in pushing their ultra liberal agenda.
As part of the expensive education that we are paying for, one of the required general education courses that he took spent a semester trying to convince the white heterosexual males in the course that they are very privileged. Those in the class who were not white heterosexual males needed no convincing.
Wait! Don’t click off here.
You may scoff at these words because, it is true, many if not most of the white heterosexual males in the course do enjoy some level of privilege in its various forms. You could argue that both I have enjoyed many benefits of privilege, as do my son and daughter. I would not deny it, but I could point to many privileges that we did not and do not have that many other people who I know did and do have. Quite a few. But it is always easier to lament what you do not have than appreciate what you do. I am just now learning to better appreciate what my family and I do have and enjoy rather than spending half my waking hours bitter about what we do not and strategizing on how to attain them.
Knowing my interest in class issues, financial issues, money and the like, my son gave me the book rather than selling it to someone else for five bucks or less or putting it on a shelf forever.
So here in late July of 2018, as a busy economic development professional who just spent a challenging work week trying to catch up after having the audacity to take three vacation days to take my family on vacation, I spent the last week reading a book that made me realize the privilege that I do have.
Since my blog more often addresses money, hence the name, more than sociological issues, I thought quite a bit about how my family and I enjoy privilege as I also focused on the impressive amount of bills that I must pay this week in addition to Paying Ourselves First.
About my reference to the “impressive stack of bills.” I read a lot of bloggers, all the way from guys like the Money Commando and A Millionaire Next Door who are multimillionaires to frugal rural mommy bloggers who grow their own food, make their own clothes and live on a thousand dollars per month while stashing away the same amount or more.
Thus, when I write about an impressive stack of bills that I will be paying around in the range of seven grand over the course of the next week, I mean that it is a lot for me and my family. With a combined income just over one hundred grand, the amount leaving our account in the next week makes up a significant percentage, well over two percent of our income, which would be the year divided by fifty-two.
Years ago, prior to this blog, I would get pretty stressed out about this. I would hate going from thirteen grand in our checking account to about five or six grand in one week. It takes me every six months to get the checking account back into five figures, and that when we do not spend anything besides our regular spending, making repairs and replacing what gets broken. The long list of needed home improvements never get done.
It is not as if it does not bother me now or that I do not mind the rapid depletion of our account. It is more that I have come to view money as a form of energy exchange that comes and goes. Sometimes a lot comes in while little goes out. Sometimes it is the other way around. Since I have expertise in one area (economic development) but not in others, like auto repair, appliances, teaching music or dance and I also despise yard work, I appreciate being able to pay for things that would cost me time, energy and expertise that I do not have in abundance.
Therefore, after learning to appreciate the privileges that I grew up with a little more and that my family and I currently enjoy, I became grateful that I have the ability to shell out the seven grand or so in the next week while nobody in my family really has to miss a beat. I know that there are many single mothers out there and working class families that would not be able to pay these bills and investments in the next week, therefore I feel privileged to pay.
After picking my son up from a rehearsal for the musical that he is playing in the orchestra pit for this week (we are going to see the musical tonight), he saw the book on the seat and asked me what I thought. Without beating the subject to death, I told him that I was reading about how privileged I am and that he is to be a white middle class heterosexual male.
He reminded me “Don’t forget about cisgendered,” although that is just a word that I learned last year. It is true that both my son and I were born with outdoor plumbing and continue to consider ourselves people who have it.
So what am I so privileged to pay between now and next weekend?
Privileged to Pay $100
I hate to mow. We have lived in our house on a one-third acre corner lot since just before 9/11 seventeen years ago.
For the first five or six years, I spent hours every week diligently pushing cheap mowers around the yard. After getting my current job, I inquired to the lawn service that our next door neighbor uses how much they would charge and then paid them for about seven years.
I do not know what happened to our lawn service, but I never heard back from him about three years ago and then purchased a mower and mowed, myself, for about three years.
Last fall, a friend of ours gave a name of a local guy who mows and I inquired about his services.
I now have a retired guy who I think may even be a millionaire yet mows yards for a reasonable price as a hobby and for spending cash. He takes cash only.
He mowed our yard yesterday, put a handwritten bill in our door for $100, and I walked my baby to his house today and handed him five twenties while also chatting about his collectible cars, collectible motorcycle, the remodeling of his house that he is currently doing and his plans to move out of Illinois in four years when his wife retires. He told me that he is sixty-three and has been retired for three years and his wife is sixty-two and is going to retire at sixty-six.
Either way, I think that the hundred dollars that I handed him today may be the best money that I spent all month, although my daughter took offense to that when I said it.
She asked about our recent trip to the Dells and asked if one of the hundreds spent there would count. I admitted that it would, but that our three-and-a-half day jaunt there cost us about fifteen hundred dollars.
Anyway, I felt no qualms about handing this guy a hundred dollars cash for the third month this summer, figuring that he will mow for about two or three more. It is money well spent.
Privileged to Pay $1,919
My wife’s Visa bill is $1,919 this month. It may sound like a high number or that she went on a shopping spree, but neither would be true.
Perhaps a topic for a future post, her Visa card was hacked badly to the tune of over ten thousand dollars’ worth of bogus charges at Airbnb this past June. Even after she reported the breach, had the charges waived and got a new card, the new card was hacked as well. When she called Bank of America the second time, she learned that the hacker even set up a bogus email account and gave a different phone number for the account and, of course, had the answers to the secret questions that only my wife and I would know like her mother’s maiden name, the make of her first car and her childhood best friend’s name.
So, really, my wife charged a total of about $700 to her card throughout the last month, $200 of which were fees charged by our daughter’s high school for the upcoming year, another $200 or so for food charged for a mini birthday party that we threw for her and another few hundred for gifts and other items that we ordered from Amazon.
The four of us also all use pay-as-you-go phones via TracFone and she added minutes and data to our phones for another $100 or so.
So, No, we did not charge five nights at a luxury resort with lavish meals out. The $1,900 was a new flugelhorn from Dillon Music, school-related fees, some pizzas, some items from Amazon and minutes and data for four phones.
I feel privileged to pay off my wife’s credit card in the beginning of August.
Privileged to Pay $2,200
I always say that I would not mind owning an escrow company so I could collect interest from other people who store money in one for property taxes and insurance, but damned if I am going to use one.
Like wealthier folks and older folks, I waived escrow when I was thirty years old and closed on our house in September of 2001. We had an escrow account for the previous three years when we “owned” a condominium in Evanston. The company screwed up the amount twice, sending us letters that we owed a thousand dollars extra for whatever reason or they miscalculated something. This is not as uncommon as you may think, and you may have even encountered a screw up with your escrow company, yourself.
Thus, I receive our Crook County property tax bill in the mail twice per year and then must pay it so our property does not go to the tax sale with over fifty thousand others.
In Illinois, homeowners pay fifty-five percent of last year’s tax bill in the first installment, typically due around April 1st, with the remainder due after the final rates for the taxing districts are calculated, typically due August 1st.
My wife appealed our tax bill earlier this year, at which time it was decreased from the $100 per week that we have paid for the privilege of living in our home for the past several years, or $5,200 per year, to a slightly less $5,100.
Since I made a payment of $2,878.92 back on February 26th, I am now honored and privileged to have made a $2,221.54 payment earlier today to continue living in our home the next six months assuming that I continue making our mortgage payments.
I made the property tax payment online through the Crook County Treasurer's office for the first time which, like every other electronic payment made, is far more convenient than paying it at a local Chase bank branch like I have been doing for many years.
Privileged to Pay $718
Speaking of mortgage payments, our lender, Citizens One, will automatically withdraw $718.27 from our checking account on August 1st, as it does every month.
My wife and I took out a five year ARM in fall of 2010, which has already adjusted higher twice and is set to rise from 4% to 5% in two months. This is finally enough of a jump in rates to compel me to refinance our mortgage once again.
By the way, I effing hate having a mortgage.
While the Recession with the capital R was in full effect from 2008 through 2010, we watched home after home go into foreclosure in our neighborhood. There were some months where I took my baby, whom we adopted (I cannot admit to having purchased her at a puppy mill pet store) in 2009, for walks around the block when we knew of eight to ten houses in foreclosure at any given time.
Families were evicted with all their stuff set to the curb. People hugged neighbors tearfully when they moved from a house in a middle class neighborhood to an apartment in a working class one. People left the state. People snuck out. People stole the fixtures from the homes. Thieves stole pipes from the vacant homes. Wealthy investors in Hummers and Porsches drove through our neighborhood observing the area and snapping photos of the homes with iPhones.
The very low point was in about 2011 when I observed a bus of investors parking in front of an abandoned home in our neighborhood (where two bizarre brothers in their forties, neither of whom ever worked, lived together as the home deteriorated) in the morning while I walked my baby. I suppose that seeing a decently dressed white heterosexual male walking a Morkie in the morning probably made them feel better about the potential investment than seeing a group of minority kids in baggy pants standing on the corner.
Anyway, had I started this blog back then, I would have written how I was doubting the wisdom of paying our mortgage every month come Hell or high water while other Gen Xers in our neighborhood who had purchased homes before or during the Recession were all getting foreclosed on.
When homes that had sold for $270,000 were selling to investors for half that amount and being converted to rentals, I did feel stupid for paying our mortgage some months.
Alas, I have made a mortgage payment every month since spring of 1998, with the exception of a few months when we refinanced our loans and were not compelled to make payments.
This Wednesday, August 1st, Citizens One will withdraw about seven hundred from our account, as they have for the past ten months after withdrawing smaller amounts for the past seven years.
And I will feel privileged to have paid it.
Privileged to Pay $425
I feel a little extra privileged on this one.
That is because without a little attention to detail I would be writing about the privilege of paying $562 for half of our annual homeowner’s insurance premium.
Because we closed on our home on the Friday before Labor Day in 2001, and because I switched from an insurance agent that my parents used and that we did in Evanston to one more local to us about ten years ago just before our premium was due, our second big insurance payment always comes due at the same time that our property taxes are.
I prefer to think of it as rubbing some salt in my wound. The same day I pay over two grand in taxes, I usually pay another five hundred towards insurance.
This year, I noticed that our home was valued at $293,500 and I will write and tell you the same thing that I told our insurance agent this past week.
If you want to cut me a check for $293,500 or even $243,500, I’ll start packing in five minutes and will hand you the keys in a few days.
After describing our home in great detail once again to the assistant at our State Farm office, she valued our home at just about $200,000 even which, truth be told, I would not consider selling my house for. We paid just under that amount in 2001 for , and have improved it quite a bit.
What resulted was that our annual premium was decreased from $1,119 to a more palatable $851, reducing our semi-annual payment by nearly $140.
I inquired if our children’s growing collection of musical instruments was covered and was advised to purchase a rider to cover them, so our premium will go up again but just by a little.
Should any of their instruments get stolen or rendered unusable, I would consider ourselves privileged to have them insured, just as I feel privileged to pay the $425.50 this week.
Privileged to Pay $900
Speaking of instruments, we just purchased a new trombone for our daughter.
She is one of the better musicians at her high school and has been playing a used trombone that I bought for her about three years ago for about $600. I cannot recall the exact amount.
As she has progressed in the high school jazz program, the band directors and her private instructor have become more insistent in us getting her a new and better trombone.
Worthy of a post on its own, we have spent the months of May, June and July pursuing the purchase of a hand-made custom trombone by a very well renowned trumpet maker who has made entry into the trombone market. As a matter of fact, the trombone that we just purchased is inscribed with #002 on it, meaning that she is purchasing the second one made by this person. One other student at her high school beat us to the punch in purchasing one.
The instrument maker, not being a retail business with financing options, agreed to create and send me invoices for $900 each of the next three months. I have not received it yet, but will email to him tonight to remind him because I hate to have a $2,700 debt to this guy hanging over my head. After paying it off, I will ask him to send me a receipt because the insurance lady told me that I would need to provide them to insure our children’s instruments.
Instead of stressing out about it, I will feel gratitude and privilege as I mail a check for $900 to a famous instrument maker in Indiana. After all, I am exchanging my own energy for his and I certainly do not know how to make a kick ass trombone.
Privileged to Pay $106
Speaking of energy, our family used twenty-four kilowatts of it this past month, resulting in an electric bill for $105.97. Of course that is higher than it has been in the past few months as the temperatures in our area have been in the eighties and higher most days.
Last fall, one of our family’s unexpected expenses, and a large one at that, was when we purchased a new central air conditioning unit during a very hot stretch of days. That set us back $2,700, but was worth every dollar.
Paying a hundred bucks for electric, another hundred for water, thirty or forty for natural gas, fourteen for garbage collection, $170-something for Comcast cable, TV and Internet and all that other stuff adds up, too, but I consider those regular monthly expenses and nothing out of the ordinary.
But although having electric, water, natural gas, Internet, cable, phones and having our garbage hauled away are considered routine middle class expenses these days, I am still privileged to pay them.
Privileged to Pay Another $250
Our lovely and talented daughter is taking two dance classes and a tumbling class at a private dance school in a nicer community than ours this summer.
As anyone who has a daughter, or a son for that matter, who attends private dance schools, you know that $25 per hour is fairly par for the course.
Because her three classes do not run for the entire month of August, and her school year starts soon, we will “only” be paying about $250 for ten more hours’ worth of classes the next two weeks or so.
I’m pretty sure that my wife charges those classes to her Visa card.
Privileged to Pay a Few More Hundred
I purchased new Asics at Kohl’s this past week, adding to my wife’s debt to that department store.
As a thoroughly middle class family, we purchase nearly every strand of clothing that we wear at Kohl’s. Our daughter, being more fashionable, buys a lot of clothes at trendier stores at the mall.
I’ll probably pay off the $186 balance on my wife's Kohl’s card this week.
...And $200 More
Being the great father that I am, I bought my daughter a new Micke, a Billy, a Nymo, a Rodd and a Ledare today. Of course, the Ledare was only two bucks.
For those of you who are well versed in Ikea-ese, that means that I bought a new desk, book case and lamp for her. The Ledare is a fancy light bulb.
Let me tell you - I effing hate this place and have not gone there for at least five years despite being a quick drive from our house. After waiting in line after line today and being encroached upon by thousands of crazed shoppers, I gained a greater appreciation for that giant shopping center hovering above us in the clouds.
We spent about twenty bucks going to lunch together afterwards.
…And a Few Hundred More
Even though I am paying property taxes, our mortgage, our homeowner’s insurance, a $900 check to an instrument maker, a few hundred in utilites, my wife’s Visa card and her Kohl’s card in the next week, that does not mean that our family will not keep eating food, purchasing gasoline and going out and doing things, such as attending a musical tonight.
We spend more than the typical $50 per week per person on groceries. More like $70 per week per person, resulting in about $280 per week in grocery bills for our family. This week is no different, as my wife will be spending $150-plus at Mariano’s this week getting a little bit of everything.
Likewise, both her 2018 Subaru Outback and my 2006 Chrysler Town & Country run on fossil fuel.
Both cost about $50 to fill up.
We also eat out quite a bit and there is no reason to think that will slow down this week, the next one or even the one after that.
It’s a good thing that they will be paying me again this coming Friday.
Privileged to Pay Ourselves $1,100
I nearly forgot the main thing that I feel honored and privileged to pay.
Us!
On the first of every month for the last fifteen years, I have contributed to one or both of my children's college accounts. With our son midway through college, I no longer contribute to his college accounts, but do contribute out of our regular cash flow.
In a typical month, I transfer $2,000 or so from one of his 529 accounts, and then make a $2,500 payment to his college. Because he will be moving into a college-sanctioned apartment next month to start his junior year, his housing cost is going to increase by about a grand per semester, thus I will be making monthly payments in the range of $2,700 for the next ten months.
I am privileged to pay it, and he is privileged that I do so, but that payment will not be in the next week. I will pay it around the tenth of the month.
However, I will automatically make a $400 to our daughter's Illinois Bright Start savings account on the first of the month, as I have for the past three years or so. Prior to that, I automatically contributed $500 to each of our children's accounts for a good ten years or so.
Because I will be getting paid this coming Friday, I will make a $100 payment to each of the two funds that comprise my Roth IRA, as I have been doing every payday for a few years.
I have written an old-fashioned check to Vanguard and will be mailing it tomorrow morning, thus paying my wife $500 around the start of the month via her Roth IRA.
Despite the whopping amount of bills and expenses that I am paying this last week of July/first week of August, I would not forgo Paying Ourselves First.
Another $200 to myself, another $400 toward our daughter's education and another $500 to my wife are eleven hundred more bucks that you know how I feel about.
I feel privileged.
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