waiting for the storm

The storm bearing down on us is gonna be huge they say. Mom's out shopping for gifts right now and Dad is sitting at the old computer, being too lazy to go upstairs and get the new one. Little man is adding daily to his list of climbable furniture (Video to follow).

We went out and got our tree on Friday. It was a nice day-one of the few in December where I did less than three hours of piano playing-and Evan was pleasant as we stopped on the way home at new Gimme! for legal stimulants. He's taken to eversoslightly overestimating the top speed at which he can safely toddle, so there was naturally an alligator tears moment as he failed to negotiate a step-up.

Last night he kept waking up. Not sure why.

I sent in my final grades for Wells on Thursday. I had to mail them to the registrar because I neglected to bring the necessary paperwork when I administered my finals and was actually on campus. After a full semester there I can truly say I love the job, the campus, the students, the colleagues, the performance opportunities...It's been a great career move.

(thanks for pushing me to apply, honey)

Tomorrow is juries at Ithaca College. A flurry around 4PM and then I'm done forever, I think. Lately I've realized that it's time to wind down my accompanying at IC. Not that I don't enjoy it-just that the price I pay and that I ask my family to pay is too high right now.

In other news, Sarah and I are going to try a new budgeting tactic. Currently we both just charge everything to the credit card and rely on good-faith purchase limiting to keep ourselves in budget. It works fine...we've always had enough to pay our bills, and we basically are able to do whatever we want.

But...there are a few things that we wish we could do differently. Like if one of us wants to save up for a large self-related purchase, there's no mechanism for it, since we both use the same accounts. And there's the communist effect--we're a little removed from the rewards of our "good behavior" (i.e. "not buying something") with the corollary that we don't feel we can reward ourselves.

For instance, if Sarah doesn't spend a dime on anything extra for three months while I nickel and dime us to death buying coffee and yummy breakfast wraps at Juna's, she should feel entitled to a little something extra and I should get a ruler on the wrist for being wasteful. But who's been naughty or nice? How can we figure out a balance between our differing priorities? Is a snap decision to get a nicer guitar equal to or less than a creeping Dunkin' Donuts habit? Or a laptop? If I buy used clothes, shouldn't I get a breakfast wrap for my itching?

Another is that the gifts we buy each other are basically just co-splurges, lacking much sense of having to sacrifice or plan ahead to do something special financially for the other.

So...we decided to open two new accounts with debit cards that we each will get a spending allowance. We're using "Electric Orange" from ING. Our "innovation" is that the allowances will be big. Not just $20 or $40 a week in petty cash, but enough to include anything that could be remotely classified as "discretionary". Eating out, clothes, electronics, gifts, memberships, magazines, donations, maybe even vacation and travel.

Our hope is that this will be more effectively incentivizing and meaningfulnessificating more of our financial decisioning (Hat tip to Tom: English is great because you can verbify any noun).