Even in Kyoto

Hey, it's June. How did we get here? I certainly don't know, but I have a feeling that the whole summer is going to fly by and it will be August before I know it. I am both excited and nervous about August. I'll head to Portland for the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America. From there, I'll go up to Seattle to spend about a week with my family, and from there I'll go to South Korea for the International Congress of Entomology. I'm toying with the idea of taking an indirect return route from there, flying back to Seattle and then maybe heading over towards Minnesota on the train. Minnesota, I owe you a visit, bigtime. I suspect if I do so, I'll be very tempted to jump off the train in Montana and stay there. Montana is a glorious place to be in the summer. We shall see about these plans.

August plans are tied to a consideration of my finances. Funding for academic work can be a tricky beast, sometimes. While my expenses are covered for the trip to South Korea, I'm not really in a position to get financial assistance to cover the conference in Portland because I'll be presenting work from my dissertation. However, this conference is a really important one from a career standpoint; I haven't attended any ecological meetings in the past, but enough of my work is ecological that I'd like to get feedback from an ecological audience. Plus, given that the meeting is in Portland, I'm hoping that there will be a larger contingent of colleagues from the Pacific Northwest with whom I can network.

So that expense is going to come out of my own pocket. It's not the first time, and probably not the last time, something like this will happen. Getting to be an academic is quite the privilege, eh?

My student loan repayments are also due at the beginning of each month. Today, while looking over the numbers, I discovered that I'm close to the one-third mark for paying back both my parents and Sallie Mae for my undergraduate education. I started to work on paying things back about five years ago, while still enrolled full-time in grad school, and have been trying to accelerate repayment ever since then. I cannot complain as vociferously about my student loans as current students are entitled to complain, as some of my loans were subsidized while I was in school, I was able to consolidate them at a fairly reasonable interest rate, and some loans were interest-free from my parents. Still, talk about pushing a boulder up a hill. It's hard to feel free while still in debt.

These days, I'm reading a book called Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, by Kim Todd. One of the faculty members from ASU gave me a copy of the book. I find the narrative style somewhat annoying, but the fascinating qualities of the story shine through well. Merian was a painter and natural historian in the 1600's who documented caterpillar metamorphosis in Europe and in Surinam. One of the more unusual elements of her story is that she was a divorcee; her distaste for her ex-husband was strong enough to drive her into a religious sect, and caused her to flee from Germany to Amsterdam. A divorce in that era was financially catastrophic for a woman, and so it's pretty amazing that she was able to hang on and make a living while continuing to do the things she loved, studying insect natural history. So, a worthwhile book to read, overall. It's also making me itch to draw more, especially as I still owe my little sister some cricket drawings. So many projects, so little time...

In further reference to yesterday's post, it looks like I am going to continue to see a pay reduction for the course of the fall semester. This wasn't a complete surprise, given that my program only guarantees funding for five years and we're looking at year eight for me. But it's still cause for concern, given that I'll be paying for health care and tuition out-of-pocket. Time to explore some financial aid options.

Whenever I reach this state with my finances (see last summer as another example), I inevitably think back to my first summer living in an apartment, before my junior year of college. My summer internship didn't pay me until the middle of the internship, so I quickly went broke right after the move, and had only ten dollars to my name for about 2 weeks. (I'm ignoring the student loan debt in that case, and in the current case).

This time around, well. Step one is to create a budget, based on my knowns: income through August (after that, ????), rent, utilities (pricey in the summer in AZ), cell phone bill (overpriced), general expense categories (food, animal care, "play money," etc.). Then it's time to get creative: where can I slim down? Well, I can't sleep if the thermostat is set above 87 degrees, so there won't be many changes to utilities - electricity is the most expensive part. Groceries, well, it's time to start checking prices much more carefully than before, to do more comparison shopping. I'll have to let go of my organic standards. Fewer fancy items, more basic staples. Animal care, well, there's not much I can do there. About the only other thing I can do is stop spending money on is coffeeshop expeditions and any miscellaneous item that I can live without.

Well, so it goes.

Well, last night I found out that my grant application for composting-related projects was not funded. The committee wanted me to find a place on campus to do the whole thing. My point is that on-campus endeavours are going to fail because of poor oversight. So boo to that, although I can't say I'm all that surprised. I can just point at the program and label it as greenwashing. That program already funded a different composting project on-campus that failed. Instead, I will persevere with my current efforts and will thumb my nose at the university. I have enough other projects to tend to.

But! In other news, my funds for purchasing a replacement laptop for the one that was stolen last June are finally growing, albeit slowly. It took longer than expected to finish paying myself back for the trip to Australia, but by now I only owe myself $3.03. Hooray! It sure takes a lot of self-control to be deliberate about how I spend my money, and how I spend time with scrottie so as to not spend a lot of money, heh. I also finally wrote my annual check to my parents to pay them back for the funds they loaned me for my undergraduate education, and my annual check to the Giant Student Loan Corporation for those loans. They're deferred, yes, but some of them accrue interest, and I'd rather not have my interest accruing interest.

This year's sum was paltry relative to the last couple of years, but the balance was at least high enough to pay off more than just the interest on the Giant Student Loan Corporation loans. In percentages, it was about 0.6% of last year's total. I suspect this year's figures will be similar, because I will probably have to teach over the summer, and the associated summer pay is less than what I'm given during the school year. Ah well. Incentive to wrap things up here.

The best news of all comes from last Saturday: as I was riding my bicycle home from the farmer's market, I spotted some money that had been thrown in the road by somebody. I went back to collect it up, and came away with a whole $0.72! Not too bad for some free money, just lying in the road.

Well, one nice benefit of not spending much money is that it's much easier to keep track of what I have actually spent. My brother and sister learned this lesson really early on, back when our parents would make us keep track of our finances every month. They basically decided to not spend any money. Me, well, I just did a crappy job of keeping track at that point, and spent however much I earned or was given.

Anyway. I've been relatively diligent about monitoring these things since 2006, the year I resolved to keep better track of my finances so I could start paying off my undergraduate loans (deferred through grad school, yes, but accruing interest pretty quickly, to the tune of $330 per year). So there are lots of numbers to play with (I can't do a thorough job, though--ants beckon again already).

So altogether it turns out that I spent a grand total of $814.61 in June. That's mostly rent ($450) and groceries ($165.70). Utilities and my cell-o-phone make up another $100. It helps that I haven't had any of those semi-regular big expenses this month (ceramics, CSA subscription renewal, plane ticket purchases, bike ride registration). Those will return in July, I'm sure. But I figured many of you, my loyal readers, would be kind of interested in these figures so that you have a frame of reference for my spending habits, and maybe a frame of reference for your own spending habits. I just wish I'd kept better track as an undergraduate--now that would make for some interesting comparisons. My rent and utilities were pretty comparable then ($437 and $80/month, respectively, my senior year of college), but I can't remember how much I averaged on groceries (probably around $160, in fact).

For most of the remaining months for which I have readily available data (that's January 2009, and January, February, August, September, and October of 2008), that's about $400/month less than what I've been averaging. Spending on eating out is way down ($30, mostly spent on the mountain biking expedition up north, versus at least $150/month in most prior months), and groceries have been halved, probably because I stopped going to the farmer's market and stopped buying more expensive organic and pre-processed foods (crumpets, soy lunchmeat, avocados, etc.).

Anyhow. Ants.

Yesterday morning I took a few extra minutes to update my monthly financial records and assess my funding situation for the summer (since I finally got information about what I would be paid). In that whole process, I discovered to my dismay that across those pay periods I will be earning only 3/4 of the amount I usually earn during the school year. Goodbye, easy life. After scrutinizing my spending records, though, I think things will be okay in the long run.

On occasions like this, I always like to think back to the summer before my junior year of college, when I had only $10 to my name for about a month before I was finally paid for my summer internship at the Joslin Diabetes Center. Now *that* was stressful--my first time living in an apartment, managing all of my expenses. This time, I should at least be able to afford rent, groceries, utilities, and cat ownership. The real issue will be my plans to go to Australia for the World Masters Games in October. I will still be able to afford that trip, provided I am more careful about my spending habits between now and then. If all else fails, I have been diligent enough about setting aside money for savings and undergraduate student loan repayment that I can borrow from myself in the short-term. But I'd rather not.

Instead, it will be time to get creative, and to practice even more fungality, as the Scrabble Society calls it--the art of enjoying oneself without spending money. Sadly, that is going to mean fewer visits to coffeeshops, no new garden gadgets, and probably cutting back on fancy foods. But I'll survive, and am still bound and determined to keep paying off those undergraduate loans. In the long run, I think I will enjoy the trip to Australia even more if I go with the knowledge that I had to do absolutely everything in my power to earn the trip.

Having less money always means that one must be more conscious and conscientious about where one's resources are spent. That's not always a bad thing. And that concludes this personal pep talk. Back to science.

I am seriously seriously tempted to just jettison part of my financial planning system in favor of getting laser surgery on my eyeballs here and now. I think I have many of my personal neuroses under wraps, but one thing that I have a difficult time dealing with is having poor vision. This was exacerbated by broken glasses this morning. My older glasses have a different prescription in them, and it's not the right one so it's making me feel neurotic. When I can't see clearly, I can't think clearly, either.

I could just stumble around without glasses, but without them I'm probably legally blind by now, so it wouldn't be very safe for me or for other people. And it would make it rather difficult to read things.

I have to consider the numbers. First, there's the expense of getting replacement glasses and frames, where I should really go through and have a new eye exam and all that jazz, too (which is the strategy I'm operating with at the moment, except it means waiting until Friday for the exam and then who-knows-how-long for new glasses, and at what sort of price). Eventually, they will also break, or in the very least the lenses will get scratched and they will wear out.

Next, there's my undergraduate loans to consider, as well as my feeble attempts to cobble together some sort of longer-term savings because, well, it just seems like a wise idea. I realize that $30k in undergraduate loans is a paltry sum compared to what many people face as a result of their poor housing decisions, but frankly I'd like to pay it back some day and enjoy some financial liberty. Especially because I owe a good chunk of that money to my parents, who could use it.

If things went well, this whole eye surgery business could end up costing around the same amount as the computer I'm typing this blog entry on, which I managed to pay for in relatively short order. But if it doesn't go welll, who knows what will happen next? I don't have a ton of resources to fall back on. That's the thing with grad school--they won't let you starve, but one still must be rather careful about one's financial decisions. Most of the time, I actually appreciate that fact because it keeps me from excessive spending or waste. But it makes a person feel a leetle bit vulnerable at times.

I think I just need to discuss options with some of the people around me whose opinions I trust with regards to such decisions. Le sigh.

Some of you may recall that at the end of 2005 and beginning of 2006, I made a New Year's Resolution to do a better job of managing my finances so that I could buy things that I wanted and also pay off some of my ponderously large undergraduate debt*.

My strategy was relatively straightforward: start to keep track of every penny that I spend**, and start to put money into my savings account. I do not use a budget because the process of budgeting stressed me out and led to noncompliance because it is too fussy, but I do categorize my spending and devote some time to thinking about whether my spending is in alignment with my values and means. Everything that I put into savings is quartered, with one quarter devoted to repaying my parents (they provided above-and-beyond financing for my expensive education), one quarter devoted to Ms. Sallie Mae, one quarter devoted to longer-term savings (currently a CD), and the final quarter devoted to petty materialistic desires that are 'spensive (this quarter is my incentive to myself to save).

Well, 2006 was pretty successful. There were some rough patches here and there, but I managed to more or less keep track of what I spent and get myself out of the cycle of spending everything that I earned. With the help of an additional tutoring job that first year, I also got into the habit of putting my extra income directly into savings. That allowed me to purchase my fancy-schmancy road bike last spring. And 2007 has gone reasonably well overall, too, though I haven't had any supplementary income and have much more expensive living arrangements (I just keep thinking--if my rent were $100/month less, that would be $1200 over a year!). In fact, the only major differences in my financial habits were an increase in the amount going to rent and a decrease in the amount going to savings.

I look forward to maintaining the same sorts of habits in 2008, but the overall success of the 2006 resolution has made me wary of making other New Year's resolutions. This one was so well-defined, complete with concrete measures of my progress and well-thought-out systems, and so it's hard to make any other sort of tongue-in-cheek resolution.

*Well, it's not so large as many graduate debts for professional degree programs, but when you make as much as I do and expect to make about the same amount for a goodly number of years to come, it can be pretty overwhelming--at the present rate of repayment, I'll be working off these loans for the next 15 years--they totaled around $30k to begin with.

**Some of my friends make fun of me for this, but I know myself well--either I track everything, or I track nothing and spend everything, and so this seems the best solution.

I keep on forgetting to post about this.

I'm considering putting a sum of money in a CD--I won't need to touch it for anything anytime soon. Are any of you out there, o internets, familiar with the benefits and drawbacks of CDs?

For me, a big part of retaining good spending habits is reading inspirational articles on the matter. Here's a recent one that's pretty basic and straightforward (but then again, developing good spending habits is a remarkably basic and straightforward process!):

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0305/p13s02-wmgn.html

What I like about this article is its emphasis on the psychological aspect of spending decision-making. I have to say that, having worked hard to develop better spending/savings habits, I'm now quite reluctant to part with my hard-earned money in this hunt for a road bike...It's quite an interesting phenomenon.

Since today was the last of the month, I updated my expense records this morning. I'm pretty impressed with myself--knowing where every penny goes is pretty enlightening. E and I had a conversation the other day about the post I wrote a little while ago about Whole Foods, in which we talked about the challenges involved in making ethical food-buying decisions. She seemed a bit skeptical about how much of an impact her food purchases would really make on the food industry. I can now say that, out of my total income for the past three months, I have spent 13.5% of it on groceries and another 5.6% of it on eating out (for a total of 19% of my income). That's about the same amount as I spent on rent (21.6%)--that's huge! So every single one of my little food purchases--a cookie here, a latte there, a bag or two of groceries a week--really adds up to be a substantial part of my income.

I should point out that I consciously make it a point to buy food that is aligned with my values, and thus it is probably a *bit* more expensive than many individuals' food expenses. On the other hand, I recall reading somewhere that people today spend a significantly smaller fraction of their total income on food compared to times past. So I feel that it's still reasonable for me to pay more money for the food I eat, especially given that it supports my values.

So that was one interesting thing to be able to summarize (the statistician in me has just realized how much more fun I could have with all of this newly-collected data). Another summary that I *thought* I would get really excited about is the summary of how much money I have been stashing away in my savings account. As I look at those numbers, though, they have stopped meaning the same things that I initially thought they would mean. I started my savings strategy at the beginning of the year with the intent of using the saved money for four things: paying back my undergraduate loans to my parents and Sallie Mae (2 things), establishing long-term savings, and establishing savings to buy bigger-ticket items that I want. I included the fourth thing as an incentive to put money away for the other three things. That way, I figured, I would be able to reward myself for developing good saving habits.

Concurrently, I have been keeping a list of the things that I want to acquire (in my pocket squared Moleskine notebook--gotta love 'em). I should really start putting a date on items when I add them to the list. As I think I have pointed out before, the interesting thing about keeping these items on a list is that while I purchase many of them and then check them off, I also cross things off when I decide I don't want them after all. Again, it has given me a better perspective on my spending habits.

Anyway--long story short, what with saving money up, I am finding that my conscious urges to keep on saving money are beginning to overpower older, unconscious urges to spend it all away. If you're my father and you're reading this, you are probably pretty happy for me, because you have known me for the vast majority of my life as a spender. But it's really neat to feel like I can develop a better relationship with money, without feeling like I'm limiting aspects of my life that are important to me.