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So, news has come in confirming that the IRS is going to offer a tax rebate on new cars purchased between now and January 1, 2010. Here are the details:
- You can deduct state and local sales and excise taxes on the purchase of a new car;
- Limited to $49,500 of the purchase price for a new car, “light truck,” or motor home or motorcycle;
- Your modified adjusted gross income must be below $125,000 for individual filers and $250,000 for joint filers; and
- Deductions must be taken on 2009 return.
Via IRS
I haven’t really been on my personal financial game of late. Oh sure, we’re still using our household budget, and I’ve even been cooking dinner with my new menu plan that I totally ripped off from Simple Mom (nope, not ready to link her yet, still in denial). But there’s a little leeway in our budget at present, in the form of my monthly “pocket money,” and I’ve been finding that I get lazy about using this money. The amount I get from month to month stays the same unless we have a really bad month, so I’m not increasing the overall expenditures by using this pocket money in full. But if I cut back on the smaller, “incidental” purchases that I make with this pocket money, I could bank it and either 1) leave a little more room for snowflaking in the next month; or 2) bank it and save up for something I really want for the house (like a new armchair for our bedroom).
So why do I keep failing at this? I don’t know. I guess it’s mostly laziness, or the feeling of getting a treat now and then. I’ve decided to list the things that I squander this money on–kind of an after-the-fact financial forensics lab. Maybe if I pinpoint exactly where and when this money is flying out of my pocket, I can put a stop to it.
- Gum, candy, etc. at the gas station. Do I really need this? I certainly don’t need the calories.
- Diet coke at Target. Why not just wait until I get home? Or, better yet, grab a can out of the eighty five million 12-packs I just bought? Dunno.
- Videos for Mini. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with getting videos for Mini on occasion, but I tend to buy him so many when I could use our Roku thingy more often if I would just think of it.
- Other crap and toys for Mini. Basically, I’m always buying this kid stuff. New clothes, shoes, the odd toy here or there. It always seems like a better deal to buy him stuff, since he can get a cool shirt for so much less than I can.
- Water and sports drinks at the gym. This is just awful. I forget a bottle of water when I leave the house, and I end up paying $3 or $4 for it at the gym–highway robbery. I need to buy a case of water and put it in my car to avoid this.
- Bean burritos at Taco Bell. I’ve been going through a phase where I eat a Taco Bell burrito and a diet coke for lunch. I could just go home and make a bean burrito with the tortillas, beans, and cheese we have at home. Oh, and pop a diet coke. But for some reason, I get in my car to go to Taco Bell.
- Gas to get to Taco Bell to get a burrito. Please see above.
- Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks.
What do you spend money on that you wish you didn’t?
The time period spanning from early 1998 through late 1999 was easily the worst just-over-a-year of my life for a variety of reasons, not all of them financial. I was working as a teacher for a small private school in San Diego, and was grossly underpaid for what was easily the most difficult job I have ever tried: “teaching” 6th graders. I use scare quotes because, in my experience, teaching comprises an extremely small portion of what you do whilst dealing with 6th graders: mostly, it is wrangling, breaking-up-of-fights, consoling, hand-wringing, hair-pulling-out, why-me-God asking. But that is a story for another day.
In exchange for performing this horrific job, I was paid just a little over a thousand dollars a month, which is a small salary anywhere, I believe, even in 1998-1999, even for a teacher, but especially in California. I was paying an insane portion of my “salary” in rent (somewhere near 50%), and had a part time job to make up the difference, more or less, in my expenditures. This was long before I started using a zero-based budget or had heard of Dave Ramsey. The only saving grace for the situation was that my credit limit was very low: I had only one card, and it had a $500 limit on it, so even if it was maxed out (as it usually was), I could not get myself into much more hot water with debt.
Or could I?
That whole year, I would inevitably find myself with bills to pay a week before the next paycheck was coming. I had no emergency fund, I had no plan whatsoever to deal with any aspect of my life (more on that some other time), but I have never been a late bill-payer (something about always needing to please, I think). Luckily (?) for me, Wells Fargo had just introduced its cash advance program for its customers who used direct deposit. Using this program, I could use $500 of my soon-to-be paycheck ahead of time for a small fee. Awesome! All I had to do was agree to paying $20 for every $100 I advanced, which seemed like a lot even at the time, but hey–I wasn’t running up a balance, and everything would be paid off next week. It wasn’t like real debt, right? It wouldn’t follow me around for years to come.
So I used the cash advance feature. A lot. Like, pretty much all the time. In effect, I borrowed money for what is equivalent to 240% APR for over a year, more or less every month, just so I could pay my stupid bills on time. Now, I could have taken a few extra hours and saved up a slush fund, or an emergency fund, to cover this overdraft issue. Or, I could have talked to my creditors and asked that the bill payments be due after my paycheck came in (yes, you can do that!), but instead, I did what many people do and borrowed money at usurous rates rather than looking at my finances head-on and looking for other alternatives.
Most people have a general idea that those check-cashing/cash advance places are a rip-off. And maybe this keeps some people from using them. But not everyone is as suspicious when the lending predator is somebody like Wells Fargo. So, I beg of you, don’t do this–don’t engage in behavior that will keep you poor even longer–never take a cash advance, and always be on the lookout for alternatives to debt, regardless of the form in which it presents itself.
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