However you figure out the details, your part is 1/3. Not 1/2. Don't let guilt drive you. From what I understand you bought the house together. It's not like you're freeloading off them.
1/3!
However you figure out the details, your part is 1/3. Not 1/2. Don't let guilt drive you. From what I understand you bought the house together. It's not like you're freeloading off them.
1/3!
you're right- 1/3! we did buy it together so my views should be as valid as theirsOriginally Posted by Tammy
I say your father has enough on his plate, figuratively speaking, to wrangle with him about the grocery budget. I would just say "this is what I can afford," and leave it at that. It's clear that with his impulse shopping, he outspends you; he probably gets that.
I think you are right. Neither of us are paper and pen budgeters. I use my Discover card to buy absolutely everything to get rewards but also because they put everything into categories for me. I just checkin to make sure I am not overspending in a certain area. This has worked fine for me. He doesn't budget at all, he just lives below their means. So trying to do a budget neither of us want will be a waste of time and frustrating. Offering a set amount is a good idea.
Tomorrow I am bringing up the 1/3 thing, that that is the fairest way to go. I have a feeling I am going to get pushback. But I am prepared! I will point out that I only use 1/3 of the toilet paper so why am I paying for 1/2? I think I better come up with better reasons before the conversation, lol
I wrote down everything I spent in a month, many years ago. At the end of thirty days, I considered the spending categories and shrugged. I've never maintained a budget, or wanted to. I think it takes dedication and perhaps the soul of an accountant to stick with one, though it's much easier now with the appropriate software.
Oddly, I regularly record my food intake in a nutrition program, finding satisfaction in hitting my macros and seeing how close I come to meeting micronutrient needs.
As much as I like and find my house mate to be a great guy, he is here at the house almost 24/7 and it starting to wig me out!!!!!! I thought because he was a med student he would hardly be around, but he is doing some kind of specialized 5th year program of public health classes (many of which he can see on-line anyway, so he doesn't have to go up to campus). I feel a wee bit crowded out of my own place, even though he is pretty much in his room all the time studying. But then I have to remember the positives outweigh the negatives, and for my own sanity, I have to list them out:
Pros: he is paying the majority of my rent
he is pretty quiet
he is a genuinely kind and super-intelligent person
Cons: he is kind of a slob in the kitchen, meaning he does do his dishes but when he cooks anything, he leaves all sorts of crumbs, drips and splatters that he doesn't notice
he is here ALL THE TIME!
hasn't really cleaned the bathroom or bought the TP
And did I mention that he is here ALL THE TIME....
Sigh...it is totally worth putting up with the little annoyances because the extra money allows me to go on my summer trips. On the plus side, he just informed me he will be moving out at the end of April, so I think I will be housemate free for a few months again and then get somebody in for September at the start of the new school year. It can get hard for me as an introverted private person to have someone around all the time like that, is all...
Tammy put it far better than I did.
This post (and your subsequent admission that you're not a particular fan of budgets/accounting within them) is what led me to believe it would be difficult for you and your folks to come up with an equitable division of expenses. I'm sure you can do it, but there will be many non-monetary issues ready to jump in the way of doing it equitably.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
we're going to have a family meeting at the end of the month. IDK why I thought my dad would balk at 1/3 and not 1/2, my mother says, "of course you will pay 1/3." So that issue is settled. Even if in the beginning we only work on each paying our share of bills like the electric, the taxes, cable, etc, that will be a start. I'm not going to push on the groceries yet I don't think. Get up and running on the bills first.
I know it will never be perfect. All the driving and sitting in waiting rooms my dad has done and he won't let me pay him a penny (I take him out to lunch every few times). Down deep, we all love each other and want to help each other. We rarely ever really disagree on big stuff or have a real argument. They drive me nuts, I drive them nuts. I'm just gonna see how it all pans out.
My daily peeve is sock puppet posters on internet forums, and trolls who take over forums with through domination and snarkiness.
That and icicles, which I am battling on a daily basis.
I mentioned in the January Frugals thread how I was going to save a lot of money on infrastructure for my photography business this year. The reason was too long to put in that thread, but it still <PeterGriffin>really grinds my geahs</PeterGriffin> on how it came about, so I'm posting the reason in Rants.
I recently shot an imminent listing for a real estate agent I haven't worked with before. I sent the seller and the agent links to the image files on my cloud service. I like them. Seller loved them. Didn't hear from the agent; nothing new there.
Last week someone in the agent's office was assigned to get the images onto MLS for listing this weekend. Assistant quickly called the home seller claiming the image files were "all corrupted".The seller called me; neither of us had trouble reviewing the exact same files Assistant was using. Assistant never bothered contacting me about her "problem". Instead, Assistant decided to make the seller clean her house ASAP so she could retake all of the pictures with her cell phone camera and then upload them to MLS. Apparently that's the only way she knows how to do it.
Of course, the pictures look terrible but they will have to be the way people are introduced to an almost-$300,000 house. For the seller's sake, let's hope viewers can get past the squished weird-looking panoramas with their J-shaped walls and mismatched colors. Seller can't believe these are the pictures they're using. I should invoice the agent and see if I get paid (since he didn't use my images)...
One RE agent I know (who takes her own pictures) told me once most agents wouldn't recognize a good picture if it bit them in the backside. I chuckled when she said that but, dammit, it appears she's right. It has been very tough to sell into a market that seems quite satisfied with crummy pictures for all but the multi-million-dollar properties.
Anyway, it has been costing me several hundred dollars a year in insurance, gear, software updates, and more to sell very little. In three years I have yet to see repeat business or even stated referrals from the agents for whom I've shot listings, never mind the cold calls. The sellers I've worked with all love the pictures I've taken. Agents said I did really nice work, too. At the end of the day, though, really good pictures apparently aren't very valuable.
It's time to try something different. I've thought for some time about fine-art photography; I think it's time to give that a whirl. I never figured there would be as much money in that as in real-estate photography. But I won't have to make much to net more than I've made so far in real estate. Disappointing....
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
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