JoeTaxpayer

Let’s hope the Carter days remain a distant memory and don’t return. Remember the WIN (Whip Inflation Now) pins we wore?

Let’s start this week with JD Roth’s wife Kris’ How I Made My Peace with Hiring a Housekeeper. Her sentiments echo my own when it comes to outsourcing, that there’s little difference in having someone come in and clean your home or cooking and waiting on you at a restaurant. There are so many things we take for granted as ‘normal’ yet a stigma remains on having help come in.

There are times I can see and understand someone’s view and while disagreeing, still respect it. Kyle at Amateur Asset Allocator offered An Argument For Switching To Cash-Only, the title explaining the article well enough. And I do appreciate the main points, credit card perks are fading, the rules are crazy, and, in theory, people tend to spend more when using cards than when using cash. The approach Kyle advocates may very well benefit many, if not most people. I’ll stick with the 2% cash back, added warranty coverage, and convenience of the one or two monthly bills where I can see my spending at a glance.

Craig at Money Help For Christians gave a good overview of the Roth IRA and Traditional IRA Tax Implications in Plain English. This is a topic that, despite all the press, people remain confused about. So I’ll continue to give a thumbs up to anyone who helps others to understand this important financial account.

My friend Jeff at Deliver Away Debt explained How to Adjust Tax Withholdings in an excellent Taxes 101 style article. Simply put, if you owe too much in April, you’re going to owe a penalty as well. Not good. But if you get a refund, you’ve lent money to Uncle Sam interest free, and perhaps could have used than money to pay down high interest debt. An understanding of the withholding process is the first step in getting the numbers right for tax time.

Susan Tiner who writes at Brain Dead Simple! Financial Organizing guest posted this week at The Oblivious Investor. Her article Using Probability to Set the Size of An Emergency Fund offers a unique approach to calculating your ideal EF amount. Anyone who can start assigning variables to dollar decisions and end up with an understandable conclusion has my admiration. Then again, I am a numbers geek and love this stuff.

The last article I’ll look at this week is Why Inflation Doesn’t Bother Me by The Weakonomist. He makes an interesting case for why inflation doesn’t negatively impact the S&P. I’m not 100% in his camp on this, I need to gather my own data and do some more analysis. Interesting read, though.

Last, my prayers and thoughts go to our fellow people in Chile, the quake that hit them was orders of magnitude stronger that that which hit Haiti.

Joe

I watched some of the Toyota hearings and was a bit embarrassed by how rude the people asking the questions were. They went from one question to the next, too busy to wait for an answer without interrupting. They grilled Mr Toyoda as to why more wasn’t done with the first complaint. Do your congressmen respond to every constituent’s complaint immediately? Can any manufacturer troubleshoot a technical issue based on one failure?

Disclaimer – I own a Toyota and had my car serviced for the recall. My car was made in a US based factory, as compared to my last car, a Ford Taurus which was made in a Canadian Factory. Yet, my Toyota is called a “Foreign” car.

Joe

Last week, I started the discussion about outsourcing starting with a bit of how businesses do it, and then segueing into the opportunities for outsourcing in our personal lives. Erica’s Outsourcing Life post discussed a mix of things she outsourced, video editing, bookkeeping, cooking, to a mixed set of emotional responses from readers.

Today I’d like to look at the things my wife and I have outsourced, first, cleaning the house. This is one chore my wife and I agreed we didn’t want to do ourselves. We both work, and are busy most weekends with various functions with our daughter, and chose to buy back the time we’d have to spend cleaning.

photo credit: zen

I’m not so big on gardening, so the grass gets cut and I save the time every Saturday along with the maintenance of yet another piece of equipment that will need replacing. Snow plowing falls into the same category. The guy that plows for us has a truck with a full sized plow blade and can do in 10 minutes for $25 what it would take me a few hours to do with a snow thrower.

For some people, paying others to doing anything they can do themselves is to be avoided. Some feel it’s a waste of money, some are just uncomfortable hiring anyone to do any type of labor for them. The question for me is where do they draw the line? Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to have no issue going out to restaurants yet be critical of people who hire a personal chef ? Would the personal chef be better off unemployed? For me, the cooking isn’t something I’d wish to outsource. Give me enough money and I’d be taking cooking classes and have the time to cook more, not less. Give me even more money, and I’d outsource driving. I’d put all that windshield time to better use.

If money weren’t the issue, what would you outsource?

Joe