Everybody Loves Your Money

Another week, another free breakfast.  IHOP is giving away a short stack of pancakes today from 7 am to 10 pm.  There probably won’t be quite the lines that there were for the Denny’s giveaway, but you don’t get as much food either.

http://www.ihoppancakeday.com/pancake-day-details.html

My wife, Kate, was born in England and moved here when she was five with her parents.  She became a US citizen many years later and now has dual citizenship in the US and in the UK.  It never occurred to me that there could be any benefit to having citizenship in two countries until Kate flew to England a few years ago to visit her family.  I was back at home working when I got the call from England.  Kate was having stomach cramps and she was planning on going to the doctor.  My first thought was, “Oh no.  I hope she’s okay” and then, “Oh crap, this is going to be an insurance nightmare!”.

After a couple hours of worrying about Kate, she called to say that she was back from the doctor and everything was okay.  The doctor had prescribed some medicine for her and she had already taken the first ones and was starting to feel better.  As I let out a sigh of relief Kate said, “Oh and the best part is that there is no charge!”.  I said, “What??  How can that be?”  It never occurred to me that, in England’s eyes, she is a citizen and is eligible for government health care.  I can’t tell you how relieved I was that Kate was okay and that there would be no 2 hour phone calls arguing about how my health care provider in the states should help cover the cost of the care.

A few years later we became parents to a wonderful little girl.  When she turned 6 I happened to wonder whether she had any rights to citizenship in the UK since she was born to a UK citizen (even though we live here in the US).  After a couple hours of Googling and reading way more than I cared to, it became clear that, indeed our daughter IS a UK citizen.  They consider her a “UK citizen by descent”.  This means that she is a UK citizen but that if she was to have children when she’s older they wouldn’t have automatic rights to UK citizenship (unless of course she was living in England at the time).

We are now in the process of gathering birth certificates, marriage licenses and passports so that we can get our daughter officially registered as a UK citizen.  While it isn’t necessary for us to do this right now, by doing it now, we will save her the grief of trying to find these documents if she ever decided to move to England and had to prove her citizenship.

So, what’s the big deal of getting our daughter documented as a UK citizen?  Well, the first one that comes to mind is it gives her the freedom to move to England if she chooses to later in life and will give her unrestricted access to employment there.  The second reason is that she would always have England as backup healthcare if we were to ever lose our coverage in the states.  Believe me, if my daughter was to get sick enough to require significant care and we didn’t have health insurance, I’d be more than happy to fly her over the pond to England for treatment.  While this isn’t very likely, it’s just one more option for her.

So, those are a couple of the reasons that we are following through with getting her registered as a British citizen.  Are you aware of any others?

If you are craving a burger and fries from Denny’s (Not sure if that’s possible), you can get a free burger and fries if you are one of the first 500,000 people to sign up for their Rewards program.  You’ll also be entered for a chance to win 52 free Grand Slams.

From what I hear, the lines at Denny’s were crazy today.  I know Lazy Man went by but didn’t stop when he saw the line stretching around the block.  Did you stand in line to get a free breakfast?

Follow ELYM on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/elym

I finally blocked out a bit of time to take an early look at our taxes now that all of our W2’s and 1099’s have arrived. I haven’t bought the 2009 Turbotax software yet so I decided to just quickly punch all the numbers in to the Turbotax website with bogus personal information. With both my wife and I working and online income, it has pushed us up in to a higher tax bracket. As I entered just my income information, Turbotax was showing we’d be getting over $5K back with std deductions. Once I added my wife’s income and online income in, we went in to the negative territory. Luckily we both increased our withholding through the year to cover the online income that we have to report. We could have made the estimated tax payments every quarter but, frankly, I hate doing that so I opted to just crank up our withholding. In the end it appears to have worked out. After throwing in all of our mortgage interest deductions, property taxes, sales taxes etc, we are now looking at an estimated $400-600 refund. That’s the first year in a few that we’ll actually be getting money back. Of course it’s best to try to zero out on your taxes so that the government isn’t getting an interest free loan, but based on the amount of taxes we paid this year, I’d say a $600 margin of error was pretty good!

Of course, I won’t know for sure what the real number is until I shell out the cash for the latest Turbotax version. I won’t do that until I see a screaming deal on it!

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season and a Happy New Year. It’s been quite a year on the economic front. I hope you have weathered the storms! If you haven’t, may 2010 bring you new prosperity and great opportunities!

Merry Christmas!!!

On a separate but related note. I just checked outside and, unfortunately, Santa did not leave a new BMW or Lexus in the driveway with a large bow on it. Oh well. Who gets those????

I have to admit I’m a bit of a Facebook junkie after signing up a couple months ago. I received an email today from a friend on Facebook that looked legit and told me to click on a link:

Here is what the email said:

Julie sent you a message.

Subject: Hello

“Visit http://www.facebook.com/l/0a60b;http://fbactin.net/”

I removed the “O” from the url so that no one gets hit. It’s amazing how fast this thing is spreading. Anyway, just a heads up that you should avoid this message if you are a Facebook user. The site that it loads looks exactly like Facebook but if you look at the address bar in your browser you’ll notice you aren’t at Facebook.com any more. I did a “whois” check on the domain name and was surprised it looks like the record was created TODAY and is already spreading like wildfire.

The domain to avoid at this point is: fbaction . net. I’m guessing that domain will change as it’s pretty easy to alter as many viruses do. If the domain was just registered today, it’s likely this domain will change as the phishing attempt evolves.

I didn’t mention it in January, but this marks the fourth year that I’ve been blogging on Everybody Loves Your Money. It’s amazing how far the personal finance blogging world has come since I started. I remember back when there was a much smaller number of personal finance blogs. Now, I have trouble keeping up with all of them.

While I haven’t been as active a blogger as many of my peers, I have enjoyed writing and hope that there have been a few stories or posts that people have connected with. I think this blog has been therapeutic for me as I work through the daily grind of managing our finances as well as life in general.

For all of you that have been reading ELYM over the last four years, I just want to say thank you. Thanks for your comments and thanks for your time!

Today was one of those days that you remember for the rest of your life and I didn’t spend a nickel all day.  Up here in the Pacific Northwest the weather has been a little abnormal.  By that I mean that it snowed.  It has been cold for a week and we even saw temperatures in the single digits overnight in a couple areas.  With all this cold it was only a matter of time before we got a decent snow storm.  Today was the day.  School was canceled for our daughter (in kindergarten) so she spent a few hours at a friends of ours while we worked.  I took off early today to help my wife get home from work (it continued to snow and driving was getting challenging).

To say that people freak out here when it snows is putting it very mildly.  You’d think it was nuclear fallout the way the news was covering it.  One of the local channels preempted all programming all day to cover the “Winter Blast”.  It’s always humorous to see how everyone responds to snow here.

Anyway, I went and picked up my daughter from our friends, came home and after we warmed up, we headed over to her elementary school where they have some nice big hills on the playground.  That ends up being the best place in the whole area to go sledding so we weren’t alone.  There were probably about 30 other kids there but there was plenty of room for everyone.  My daughter and I had a BLAST screaming down the hill over and over. She’s 5 and this was her first year of really getting crazy on a sled.  She’s fearless.  I was wiped out (tired) long before she was so I spent time talking to various other parents that were there.  All the while the snow kept coming down.  It was really amazing.  The time I spent with her today was priceless (no Mastercard required).  Just seeing her playing like a kid should, without a fear in the world, was something that you can’t even put a price on.

I was also fortunate to talk to a couple friends that have the same financial point of view as me.  The concepts of “living within your means” and “investing for your future” were the central themes of our conversations.  I can tell that we’ll have some great conversations in the future.

A bit about them:

I’d guess they’ve been married for about ten years

3 kids

1400 square foot house

Mid 90’s Dodge Caravan

86 Honda Accord

Stay at home mom who watches kids before and after school for extra income

He’s an engineer at a large company

Absolutely no debt and they live well within their means.

As Jim and I were talking the subject drifted towards the current economic events.  We both discussed the overall state of things and both agreed that it isn’t the stock market that is causing the economic crisis but rather it’s the fear that everyone feels from seeing the events of the stock market and real estate market unfold (and not being very well prepared for it).  The reality is that people are scared and they aren’t spending like they were.  We both lamented about the fact that as people started saving some of their money instead of spending it, they were pulling us long term savers down with them.  Sarcastically we came to the conclusion that rather than try to get people to save their money like we both had done for years we now needed to tell everyone to treat themselves.  It’s time to tell everyone to go back to living beyond their means.  Maybe if they all get back to that state of denial, us long term savers can finally start seeing some improvements all around us.  </sarcasm>

Here’s a picture of our daughter playing in the snow:

Now that our daughter is in kindergarten we’ve discovered a whole new society.  Before we had a child that was in school, we never really saw the elementary school society that has been active all around us.  We haven’t really met a ton of people yet (mostly just chit chat), but the school and the PTA have all kinds of activities for us to attend.

Last night we attended a movie night in the gym.  The cost to attend the movie was $1 per person and they were also selling popcorn, candy and water.  Popcorn and candy was .50 each and the water was a dollar.  For a fun night (at least for our daughter) the total cost was $3 for the movie and $1.50 for refreshments.

Before being involved in the school, we would have gone to a movie and spent 5-10 times that amount.  Our daughter much preferred going to the school to watch the movie because she got to sit with her new friends and run around a bit.

So, as we try to spend less money, we’ll definitely be involved in most of the school activities.  The best part is that the money they raise goes directly to the classrooms to support further activities.  It really ends up being a “win/win” situation.

Don’t forget to VOTE!