The music wasn’t all that kept me busy last week. A couple of the days last week, I kinda took over as the primary teacher in the house. Normally, Edi does most of the actual teaching of our kids. But there are some things she’d prefer for me to teach, and I enjoy teaching them. I’ve been starting to systematically teach them world geography.
I had planned to pick that up last Monday but Edi had another idea. Tuesday morning, we agreed to watch Scott and his wife’s two children so he could go to another doctor’s appointment. Their ages bracket Edison and Erin’s ages and they’re also homeschooled. Edi thought it’d be fun if I did the geography less with all four of them.
For Monday, Edi suggested that I go over counting money, including making change, on Monday, so I did. That took considerably longer than I expected it to. They did well, though. After going over the basics, we played ‘shop’ and would take turns buying things from each other. We used real coins, and made up bills in denominations up to $50. By the end of the day, they could, though sometimes slowly, count out exact change to pay, and give change for larger bills when being the shopkeeper. While I wouldn’t say they’re ready for McDonald’s quite yet, they may well be ahead of a significant percentage of fast food employees at this point. We didn’t yet get to the idea of making change for ‘odd’ payments ($20.02 for a $17.52 purchase, for example), but we’ll get back to that one of these days.
Tuesday, we did South American geography with the four kids. I found a website that, it turns out, my sister-in-law (who also homeschools) thinks is fabulous called Enchanted Learning. They’ve got all kinds of printable learning activities, including an extensive geography section. I found them by looking for basic printable maps with country outlines. Turns out they have pre-made activities (color in the countries, for example), and tests already made up. That saves me lots of work and is exactly what I’m looking for. Between those printouts, our giant wall maps, and our interactive globe, the kids have everything they need to get them on their way to national geography bee champs. Well, almost 😉 Turns out they need a good teacher, too. I’ll spare a certain other teacher of theirs the embarrassment of telling the whole story of Buenos Aires… 😉
Anyway, by the end of the day, all four kids were able to find all 13 South American countries on their own with a blank map. The other two had to go before I gave them the test. After they left, I gave Edison and Erin the test, which requires them to write the names of all the countries (there is a list at the bottom), plus a few other features (Pacific Ocean, Equator, etc.) in the correct places on the map. They both got 100%.
For most of the rest of the week, I continued working on my “what should I do when I grow up” project. Financial planning took up most of the week and I decided to embark on an enormous methodological transition from what I’ve done for many years.
Once upon a time, I wrote a piece of software to keep track of my finances. It was actually pretty spiffy at the time. At that time, there wasn’t a piece of software available that fit my needs. Now, there’s Quicken, Money, and so on. Those, also, don’t really thrill me. Since I started internet banking (nearly 10 years ago now), I have relied on the various banks I do business with, along with spreadsheets for analysis. That has worked out okay, but it’s getting to be tedious, and I thought maybe there might be some software out there that could automate some of the tasks I do periodically (balance sheets, etc.). I decided to fire up GnuCash (again) and see if it has developed to that point.
After playing with GnuCash for a while, I decided to load up as much data as I could and see if it could provide results anywhere near what I was used to using. I won’t know for about 2 more months (plus however long it takes me to do the rest of the analysis), but I think I’m going to wind up switching to using GnuCash v.s. the spreadsheets I’ve been using. The ability to import transactions from financial institutions is what put me over the edge. In some cases, you can download the files and import them (and sometimes it even matches categories correctly). In other cases, it can actually retrieve the data within the software itself. It was, however, quite a complicated process to set up. GnuCash doesn’t ship with the kind of database(s) that Money or Quicken does when it comes to retrieval of online data. But I was able to figure it out and I now have far more data to work with for planning purposes.
All that was to start working on more detailed plans for kids college, retirement, and so on. That required me to revisit the dismal state of airline pilot pay, examine inflation rates, attempt to forecast investment returns, and so on. I came to the conclusion that if I worked really hard until I’m 120 years old, I might be able to frugally retire by the time I’m 80. For some reason, I’ve been wrongly accused of doing the math wrong.
After coming up with the retirement plan, I made a budget. We’ve formally budgeted before, but lately have been budgeting more informally. I presented the budget to Edi and explained that, because of the gas prices, she has to walk everywhere and now we have to eat plain rice until the kids are out of college (mainly due to college costs rising at roughly double the rate of inflation). After that, we might have enough money to switch back to spaghetti with sauce along with the rest of the billionaires.
There is a silver lining to this dark cloud, though. Because I don’t currently have millions upon millions of dollars to loan out, I don’t have to worry about losing it all in the process of competing for under-qualified borrowers who would pay me absurdly low interest rates only to have my principle wiped out by inflation. Yeah for me!
V-