The 100 by 30 project

I suppose this is nothing compared to college tuition.

Raises were good to my husband and me this year -- A received a 7% raise and I received a 20% raise on my graduate stipend. Because we already save $1500/month (non-retirement), we were looking forward to pumping all the money into additional retirement contributions (which would bring us to about $1300/month in retirement savings).

It took us about a week to realize that we'll have two new family members come January! Our increased health care costs alone will eat up most of my raise. Not that I'm complaining -- we'll be paying $400/month for astonishingly good medical, dental, and vision coverage for four people. Rather than tie up all of A's raise in retirement, we'll probably just hold onto it as a cash reserve until we settle on a new postpartum budget.

For all the obsessing we've done about eventual daycare costs, we hadn't thought too carefully about these additional costs. In our defense, we still have six months to go. And apart from diapers and daycare, newborns don't sound especially expensive... obviously, our planning is going to have to get a little more sophisticated than that!

Twins A and B: the most welcome bill we will ever receive

Job interview DON'Ts

A few days ago, we had a young (26 or so) grad student giving a job talk. In academia, a job talk is what it sounds like -- a talk faculty job candidates give about their current research.

So the speaker is giving his introduction and emphasizes that his work looks for genes related to aging.

"So you can see this is an important issue, especially for the ladies."

The funniest part is this wasn't an offhand, foot-in-the-mouth comment: it had the stiffness of a rehearsed joke!

Do you pay for over-priced registry items?

Well, do you?

I was assembling a gift off of a registry for a June wedding, and noticed that the registry contained a $120 mattress pad (!) and $80 salt and pepper shakers (!!).

I declined to buy these. Not because I object, although if someone were spending $120 on me, a mattress pad is among the last things I'd want them to purchase.

No, it's because I worry that the couple will forget how much the item cost! Perhaps they were giddily circling Macy's or Target or Crate and Barrel with the shooter gun, and adding whatever caught their eye. Maybe they paid attention to the price at the time, but will forget 4 months later; maybe they never paid attention.

Either way, I don't want to be seen incorrectly as the cheap couple who only bought a mattress pad and some seasoning receptacles!

Petty of me? Maybe. But I've seen so much snickering lately by newlyweds about people not "covering their plate", a concept I hadn't even heard of until recently. I don't want to spend $200 and still have people snickering about what cheap wedding guests we are!

Talk about a happy May Day!

Out of the blue, our department chair just sent an email saying stipends will increase by 12.5% next year. That follows a 6% increase this year. I assume that our top rivals increased stipends significantly, and this is in response.

Sure, we still make less than the grad students in CS, but today I'm too pleased to care!

I've been throttled.

After years of being a Netflix member who rented what I'd estimate to be one DVD every two months, I recently started becoming a more active member. For the past three months or so, I'd been pushing my two-DVDs-at-a-time plan to the limit, probably cycling through 1.5 DVDs per week (my husband and I are catching up on the brilliant but not a little bit sexist "Rescue Me").

When I first started cranking out the rentals, I was astonished at how quickly they came. It was essentially a two-day turnaround: one day to get back to their facility, they shipped out my next flick that day, it arrived the day after.

After awhile, though, the pace slowed. It would take two or even three days to get a confirmation email that they'd received my returned disk, and the new one often wouldn't arrive the day after the email.

At first I thought I was imaging it. Had I just been misremembering the speed of my earlier rentals? But some poking around revealed that this slowing down is an intentional practice by Netflix that critics have labeled "throttling".  Essentially,  Netflix  bumps frequent users to the back of the queue when it helps them to more quickly service infrequent customers; because those infrequent customers cost Netflix very little but pay their monthly fees anyway, it's important to Netflix to keep them happy.

I actually don't have a problem with this. It's not entirely a clear line: I'd raise holy hell if someone tried to rearrange customers waiting in line at, say, Panera, and I was strongly opposed to the proposal to allow people to buy their way into faster TSA lines at the airport, but for some reason this doesn't disturb me at all. Although if the service gets even slower, I might just cancel.

What he said!

See, somebody agrees with me. And he has a PhD in econ and everything...

Post-nups

This is an interesting article on post-nuptial agreements, which are, as you'd expect, contracts about the assets made once a couple is already married.

Luckily A. and I are as close in financial outlooks as people can be, but if we weren't, I'd consider this in a heartbeat.

Is this the worst possible housing bill possible?

I would love to see a housing bailout bill that refinanced loans for primary homeowners who are in homes at high-rate ARMs that they could actually afford with a 30-year-fixed at, say, 5-6%. Cuts down on foreclosures, but doesn't waste money on hopeless cases or reward speculation.

But the Senate just stripped that out of their "housing relief package"! Luckily, "forty percent of the cost of the bill will fund a business tax break expected to help homebuilders." Yay! Anything in the name of preserving jobs.

Unbelievable.

Advice for people who contact my department looking for tutors:

I can't speak for the other professors in the department, but my advisor bills out his consulting time at the rate of $2500/day. And we grad students are actually paid well enough that we don't see a lot of benefit to doing tutoring on the side, once you factor in the logistical hassle and the inflated expectations of tutorees.

So when you send an email to our department looking for a tutor for $20/hour and no one responds, leave it be. Don't follow it up with an angry email about how you can't believe no one is willing to earn "good money". We're all already taking financial hits in the interest of advancing our field and educating people in it: it's called "being a professor/grad student instead of being in industry". We don't owe you anything, although maybe we'd feel some obligation if you were actually an undergrad in our department -- or even taking a class in our department -- as opposed to being a grad student in a BS professional masters program who is only required to take an exceptionally watered-down class to begin with.