The Hustle of Sistah Ant

I am not pleased with the Fed’s rate cut today, and here’s why:  I want my savings to grow as fast as it can.  I don’t want inflation to affect my income and expenses.  This rate cut will affect how much interest I get for my savings, and it may also make what money I do have worth less than it’s worth now.  Since I’m trying to save for a down payment for a house in the coming year, none of that is good news.

So even though it’s nice for people with variable rate debt, it’s not nice for savers.  I’m very close to not being one of these people with variable rate debt that’s affected.  My old credit card debt will paid off soon, and my only other variable rate debt is a small student loan that is tied to LIBOR, not the Fed’s rate.

The only good news I can see coming out of this for me is that if this holds, I may be able to get a cheaper mortgage down the line, and perhaps, if the market goes up, my 401K will perform better than it otherwise would have. 

I’m not an economist.  So maybe my dissatisfaction with the Fed’s decision to cut its rate is misplaced.  They do this for a living for the whole economy.  My interests lie completely within the parameters of my personal goals.  Perhaps they’re right, and we need to be more concerned with recession risks than with lower-yielding savings and inflation.  But hey, I can economize my behind off - of course I’m not worried about a recession, ‘cause I can eat rice and beans until it’s over, and I have the discipline to save either way.  No wonder all I can think about is myself.

Not the birds and the bees talk, the "Baby, how are we going to handle our money?" talk.  Now that my honey and I are living in the same apartment so that we can save more easily for our future, we had to decide how we were going to pay expenses fairly.  Those of you who have ever bought property may be familiar with a HUD-1 settlement sheet, which is the form that helps sellers and buyers of real estate to account for expenses at closing.  That form was the inspiration for the spreadsheet I created. Click it to see a sample in full detail.

This sheet first itemizes what we each have paid in the course of a month for each of the expenses we are jointly responsible for.  The second part of the worksheet takes the total amount paid for each expense and splits it according to how we’ve agreed to split the expenses - for example, we’ve agreed that my honey will pay only a quarter of the storage fees, since most of the stuff in our storage space is mine, and I’ll pay for most of the gas, since the car is mine.  After the spreadsheet formulas calculate how much we should have paid, then we can actually see who has paid their fair share and who has not at the bottom of the sheet.  In this sample worksheet, I have paid $21.25 more than my fair share of the expenses.  This means that at the end of the month, my honey would give me $21.25 to make it all even.   We’ve both reviewed the sheet and approve of the splits and this method of keeping things straight.

I personally think that money is the last thing a couple should be fighting over.  It should be simple.  Since I am more anal about money than my honey, he is gladly giving responsibility for stuff like making spreadsheets to me.  However, I make sure he sees, understands, and approves of decisions I make.  He likes that, and he trusts me.  Perhaps this spreadsheet is more complicated than what some other couples may go through every month, but it works for us.  The work is already done - the formulas do all the math, and all we have to do is plug in the numbers once a month.  (After reading this paragraph to him, my honey has asked me to add, "And we’re a technologically savvy couple."  Bless his heart.  LOL!)