Just sent a free Evite to our family and friends for our son’s second birthday.  We debated not doing anything at all other than cake at home with just mom, dad, Grandma and Grandpa.  We decided on a birthday party at a free public park with free entertainment in the form of playscapes and learning centers. Scheduling it mid-afternoon, right after nap time, means: no expensive food to buy. A bonus to the public location? No one will bat an eye at the absence of beer. The kids will run around in the fresh air and adults will gossip or take pictures.  No muss, no fuss, no reservation fees or security deposits.  No mediocre-tasting Chucky-Cheese pizza to buy or kid-friendly spread to prepare.  Just cake and ice cream in the park with friends.

We didn’t have the money candy this year so we locked up the house early and trick-or-treated with our toddler in a different neighborhood. This little niche of suburbia really went all out – people openly admitting to spending $200 plus on candy only to have it gone in two hours. Two different houses had their garages tricked out to be haunted houses and one place had rented a bounce house for their front yard! Normally I might feel a tad guilty for getting without giving, but our toddler doesn’t yet understand the trick or treating concept. We could only get him to walk up to 3 front doors and the rest of the time he just kept staring and pointing in excitement at things like a giant Spiderman. (worn by some other kid’s dad of course)

In other news, our recent trip to Ukraine followed by significant water damage to our cabinets and floors has put our family finances severely into the red. We are just starting to make a plan that will get us back to normal. It involves attempting to do enough of the work ourselves that we don’t burn through ALL the insurance money. You know you’re living paycheck to paycheck when you contemplate putting the deductible on credit.

Ugh, I’m frustrated.  I am starting to understand why people ‘hate technology’.

For the longest time I’ve had a Dell XPS laptop sitting under my Panasonic TV, happily playing all my digital content.  We mostly use Hulu Plus, YouTube, Pandora, and whatever I rip to my local home network.  Then I decided to sell it and grab a smaller, dedicated player — lots of companies are coming out with these neat little boxes that supposedly ‘play everything’.

No, no they fucking don’t.

1. PlayOn on Nintendo Wii — a horrible, cruel joke.  The interface sucks, there’s a million menus and sub-menus, you need a computer to stream from, and the quality sucks.  Avoid.

2. Roku — got it to work only on wired LAN, wireless is slow and unreliable.  Patched it, updated it, did everything I could –wifi is intermittent and slow.  Plays Hulu well, but no YouTube channel, and no way to play files off your home network.

3. WD TV Live Player — plays local files, YouTube, and even YouPorn.  No Hulu Plus.  Really?

4. Boxee — trying this thing next.

The Roku is going back to Fry’s.

I still feel that insurance coverage is a weird paid extra, but that’s only because my Eastern European heritage is making me feel that way. Growing up in a post-Soviet clusterf*ck, if something went wrong, you’re on your own … tovarisch. Upon moving to the USA, I had a policy for everything — from vehicles to rentals to dryers and air conditioning units.

Now I treat it as a part of normal living, after all, if your A/C units goes TU, who’s got $8k sitting around waiting to be spent on a new unit? Or if a van drives into the side of your 1978 Eldorado, who’s going to pay for the telephone pole you smashed into?

That’s why in Texas I got with Amica Insurance. They are not paying me to write this, I swear. They got recommended by a friend for having the best customer service of all time. Since I was tired of being routed through automated queues, I wanted a real person, and I got her. Yes, it’s a girl — I get my own insurance agent with a direct line.

However, if I still lived up north (Michigan/Ontario area), I’d give these guys a try – Complete Insurance.  They are an aggregator, and will forward your quote to top companies in Canada.  It’s insurance the Canadian way, with pastys and steamed moose flank … eh?

Worrying about what other people think can be a serious barrier to saving money.  My wife and I have many discussions about this, as she was raised in a small, gossipy town in a family of two teachers who had to be very mindful of what the community (and specifically the parents of their students) thought of them.  It was the type of town where being seen in the grocery store with any of the following in your cart would definitely start rumors:

Condoms

Cigarettes

Any liquor

Any more than a six pack of beer or one bottle of wine

Looking at this list of “vices” from the perpective of saving money, I’d say condoms are the one thing that a true cheapskate should be able to justify, since having an unwanted pregnancy/child is just about the most expensive mistake a person can make in their lifetime. Why do people cower in fear at the thought of others seeing their contraception purchases?  Back to my original point . . .

People often buy boats, hot tubs, power tools, a “nicer” car, designer clothing, etc. because of how they want to be perceived to others.  The wife started a new job and immediately asked me to buy some new clothes even though the job doesn’t require nicer clothing than what she wears every day.  Do you buy things to create an impression?  Does your tricked-out garage make you the go-to guy for any tool?  Are you the girl with a designer purse for every season?  Are you the “it” couple in your neighborhood because of your giant deck, hot tub and fully stocked beer fridge?  On a smaller scale, why are you paying for that very “in style” but second winter coat you’ll wear maybe twice?  If you can afford all of it and it makes you happy, awesome.  Go for it. I still believe most of us should take an extra moment before buying anything and ask ourselves, “Am I buying this because I truly need it or because I want others to like and admire me?”

We recently hosted friends and grilled burgers for dinner.  We provided the burgers and toppings, they brought two side dishes.   Yet, before they arrived, we felt the need to buy two moderately priced bottles of wine (one white one red) and two different six packs of beer, one of them being a “sampler” of three different kinds of beer from the same brand.  We wanted to be “good hosts” and thought we needed to provide not only alcohol (which we normally reserve as a treat for ourselves) but such a quantity/variety.  I realize that to folks possessing a perpetually stocked liquor cabinet, this amount of booze doesn’t seem like much.  (look, there I go, imagining what people think)  For our family, it was more than double what we normally spend since our typical payday Friday fare is a six pack of the cheapest beer we can stand to drink ice cold and a $5 bottle of wine.

Our guests consumed a total of three beers.  The husband had two and the wife had one, all from the sampler pack.  I’m pretty sure I picked up on the wife “not being much of a drinker”.   Would they have enjoyed Miller Light just as much?  Almost definitely.  We spent money we didn’t need to spend on the idea that our guests (who really just wanted to hang out and have some laughs) would have an opinion about us if we didn’t offer them alcohol.  Now, it is four days later and we have zero beers and 3/4 of one bottle of wine.  On Sunday we talked briefly about saving the wine and making loaves of beer bread each week but with work more stressful than normal I haven’t been able to resist.

We won’t stop having friends over any time soon, so when they ask what to bring, now we’ll tell them: “Whatever you want to drink”.