(Technically, the statement is really: men and women act differently about money.)

Our running joke has always been that PiC’s always wanted a sugar mama, hardyhar.

Some of his professional friends have responded the same way: “why the heck wouldn’t I want her to? More money is more money is more good!”

To which I say: Duh. But so far, that couple hasn’t faced that reality.

Well, it’s becoming quite real for us, now. Because as it turns out, “doing something about it” (it being our wage gap between the genders) means that this year, I am pulling even with my husband and have solid plans to outpace him. We are some years apart and he made a healthy salary coming into the workforce, multiples of my entry to the workplace salary close to the same time as he had more education.

Slightly rankled with myself at the time (see: competitiveness in previous post), I made a resolution to fix that. I am making more at my age than he did at the same age. And this after 12 yrs of working not-for-my-parents, and several years after college but without the higher graduate school.

I love my husband with the warmth of Endor’s sun but this tastes sweet.

Now I have to up my game and steamroll a couple of my best friends. I know they’re making more than me. I don’t compare apples to apples, unless we’re talking medical professions, I’m going to play to win anyway.

Perhaps it doesn’t yet affect our attitudes towards each other or feel real because we’re combining accounts at a snail’s pace, and it’s also offset by the fact that I still lose a significant portion of income to supporting my dad each month. But I’m on track to continue to make more through annual and/or negotiated raises and we are well aware that I simply have higher earning potential. In part because of the choices I made, the conscious pushes for more by strategic choices and negotiations, and in part because of his choices.

Without significant change in career paths like going into management or further education, he won’t be in a position to compete with me. He does great work where he is but the room to grow is strictly structured. So while there’s no doubt he’s immensely proud of me, the question comes up: how does he feel about it?

So far, I don’t see any negative impact. If anything, perhaps because I’m a little less wound tightly, perhaps because with more income from me, our Bay household expenses feel less constrictive, we’ve been a lot more at ease generally. Not unstressed but we’re not snapping at each other over stupid little things. And it probably helps that we simply don’t discuss money with anyone (my rule).

He is perfectly comfortable discussing money with his family but I long ago put the kibosh on sharing our money and particularly my salary with them or anyone else we haven’t agreed on together. I talk about quite a lot in principle and theory freely but I don’t let those particulars out into the wild for a lot of reasons.

More so now than ever. I hate to say it but I suspect that, given the reactions of all his family and friends to recent events, they’re traditional and patriarchal and would likely have far more to say than I care to hear on the subject of who outearns who.

Thus far, our personal experience has been basically fine.

In your experience or opinion, how would you feel about a wage gap if your male or female partner made more than you did?

The Editor’s Picks:

Financial Highway: Common Interview Questions and Answers

Boomer & Echo: Pitfalls Of Chasing The Highest Dividend Yield

Bible Money Matters: How to Setup a Custodial Account for a Minor to Help Them Save or Invest

Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured: How to wash dishes: Beyond Frugality

Prairie Eco Thrifter: Start Small; Dream Big: Achieving Financial Security from Small Beginnings

Thanks to SB for hosting and participants for submitting!

Next week, we have Graduating With a Surplus scheduled to take the helm.

Her Editor’s Picks:

Free Money Finance: Financial Rules that Work and Don’t Work

Watson Inc: Why Do The Rich Get Richer?

Wealthcare For Women: 3 Characteristics Of A True Wealth Manager.

Thanks to everyone for participating and be sure to link back to your favorite posts!

Next week, One Cent at a Time will be our host.

His Editor’s Picks:

Can I Retire Yet?: Is the 4% Safe Withdrawal Rate Obsolete?

One Smart Dollar: What is the Best Day to Buy Specific Items

Family Money Values: Parents As Resources for Adult Children

Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance: Why I Don’t Invest in Individual Stocks Anymore

Bible Money Matters: Paying Down Debt with Gazelle Intensity? How Much of an Emergency Fund Do You Need?

Thanks to all the participants – be sure to link back if you’re included and share your favorite posts.

Tune in next week when Money Talks Coaching hosts!

• Have you ever heard someone complain that jobs just aren’t out there?

Or submit resumes stuffed full of buzzwords, slang, and assertions that they have experience in particular skill sets earned from having been around people performing that job?

Or give an interested recruiter/hiring manager a laundry list of reasons why they can’t take phone calls at this time or that date?

• Have you ever heard someone state unequivocally that they’d never work for less than $XX,XXX?

• Have you ever heard someone refuse to take an interview after complaining about the job market?

Or accept and not show up at all without cancelling?

• Have you ever heard someone ask for two days to consider a job offer?

I’ve been on the job hunt many times. During the boom economy, it wasn’t terrible, and during the recession, it kind of was. I’ve crafted and recrafted my cover letters and resumes a thousand times and submitted them into the endless maws of applications. I’ve had uncomfortable job interviews where it was clear that we weren’t a good fit for each other and at least one where I was eager for the end. I’ve had great interviews where it felt like we were a great fit and yet the result wasn’t what I had expected.

I’ve had the dubious learning experience of watching really bad managers hire for largely HR-contradicted (read: illegal) reasons and manage poorly.

In these past few years, I’ve been seated on the other side of the table making these hiring decisions myself. I walked into it seeing an incredible responsibility to myself as a future manager of these hires and to the applicants to conduct a fair and robust process.

It was sobering.

I’m still convinced that there are a lot of good people looking for work, just as I think there are good employers out there.

But on this side of the curtain, I didn’t believe some of the behaviors and decision making I was seeing that made me ask: why am I working harder to try to give you a job than you are to get it?

There’s a lot of great standard advice out there for jobseekers to, as much as possible, demystify a largely hit or miss matchmaking operation and a lot of it is good for every applicant to use and refine from there. Not everyone is born star level status in their field so start with a solid foundation.

: Exercise good judgment. If not your own, borrow someone else’s. You know who they are.

: Don’t Lie. Don’t stretch the truth. Don’t overreach with the facts.

: Have someone proofread your work. Twice.

Focus on what matters: the impression you’re making

I actually don’t care about who the cover letter is addressed to: Sir or Madam, To Whom it May Concern. Generics are fine; if you go to the trouble of researching who the hiring manager is, then make sure you have the right person. 99% of applicants address their cover letter to the wrong person. That doesn’t matter.

It’s the person who decides to go the extra mile (of absurdity) that stands out: in a bad way.

From a few years ago: “I would happily fetch your coffee and [your preferred reading material].”  Cute. Funny when you get the person you meant it for, but not actually professional or funny when that quickly conveyed a lack of understanding of the role.

Think about what your words and actions say about your judgment and decision-making abilities to the person in charge. That’s what matters.

Game playing and real content

Another common trend I see is applicants trying to make themselves appear to be hot commodities using tricks and by playing hard to get.

Using buzzwords to answer a question when I’ve asked for a specific example is not an answer; if you realize you lack the experience that I’m asking for then address that directly with real reasons why I should not be worried. Show me you have a brain and that you can solve problems. Because when I work harder than a candidate in the interview, I will move on. This should be very nearly a partnership: I didn’t play games when I dated, I don’t play games when I manage, I will not play games when I hire.

Whatever the shape of the economy, people are not only unemployed but underemployed. I personally believe in offering a fair interviewing process, and so do a lot of HR people and recruiters that I know and work with.  It’d be decent to meet them (us) halfway.

Beginner or moderate level notwithstanding, everyone, applicant and hiring manager alike, deserves respect in what’s already generally a nerve-wracking and (levels vary) stressful situation for the former and time-consuming and high-stakes job for the latter.
—————
Continue Career Week Reading at A Gai Shan Life
Career Life: Securing the battlements for a promotion
Career Life: Taking the Castle, Part 2

Her Editor’s Picks:

Nicole and Maggie: Should kids have to take a minimum wage job when they’re teens?

The Financial Blogger: 12 tactics to build up a money-making blog,

Narrow Bridge Finance: Why I hate people who give bad tips.

Boomer & Echo: 10 Fees that are actually worth it

Weakonomics: The six kinds of employees

Thanks to everyone for hosting and participating; remember to submit your best posts for next week when My Personal Finance Journey is our host.

His Editor’s Picks:

Well Heeled Blog: My Confession: Cheap Wedding Band

Prairie Eco Thrifter: Why Being Rich Is Overrated

Frugal Follies: What the 1940 census taught me about saving money

Penny Thots: You Think Personal Finance Is Simple? Think Again

Bargaineering: How to Generate One Time Use Disposable Credit Card Numbers

Thanks for hosting, David, and thanks to all our participants!

Next week, eemusings of Musings of an Abstract Aucklander will be hosting so be sure to submit your best posts for consideration!

They’re still my deeply beloved cause but of course these intervening years from childhood through to independent adulthood had to shift my financial focus to more urgent, immediate, needs in supporting my family. And since becoming financially stable enough to reconsider more than personal needs and wants, as we all do, I’ve also become inundated with the myriad needs and causes for which organizations, foundations, grassroots and corporate alike, clamor for attention and donations.

The difficult issues which our world is facing, globally, domestically, socially and developmentally are complex and become absolutely dizzying when I contemplate how to make the slightest difference.

But I’ve remembered the sage advice from watching Sports Night during my college years: you’ve just got to get in the game.

It’s our turn

As I develop our annual budget and plan for upcoming years, it’s a priority to build in a new dedicated line item meant for these issues whether it is intended to be a direct donation or money that means PiC and I will have the ability to give our time or some other sort of thing that is appropriate to the causes that mean the most to us.

After designating the actual budget, we’ll have to talk about what causes and specifically to whom we might be sending our money.

My charity tends to be a little closer to home, generally speaking, so I don’t think of it as charity so much as putting my money (time, expertise, or other efforts) where my heart is. That always informs my choices as much as any other factor of decision-making.

Historically, I’ve given money to organizations and people I know personally. Animal shelters that I’ve done volunteer work for, family in need, to fund the building of other charitable organizations that would go on to do good works in the community. Lovedrop, recently the brainchild of our PF blogger community’s own J. Money of Budgets are Sexy & his partner Nate St. Pierre that gave to the community, funded by the community.

And of course, I’m always on the lookout for ways to incorporate giving into everyday life.

One such find: A non profit organization called the I Do Foundation gives couples a way to create registries that are linked through the umbrella of the I Do Foundation. When guests purchase gifts online from the list, your charity of choice receives a certain percentage of that purchase in cash back. This is applicable to a limited number of stores and to online purchases unfortunately, but it’s still a neat option for those purchases that would occur online anyway.

How can you get in the game?

When looking into new charities, my recommendation would be to make your first stop at Charity Navigator to check that they use donation money wisely. That means that they’re not spending a vast amounts or percentages of donated money on overhead costs like extraordinary and expensive fundraising campaigns and other extraneous expenses rather than the use it was originally intended for: the cause itself.

Whether it’s feeding the hungry, providing shelter for the homeless or tending to medical needs, those aims have to be the primary beneficiary of any donations. A well-managed charity does have to constantly generate new funds to survive and thrive, and should eventually be able to make investments on its own behalf at a certain stage of life, so some overhead is always necessary but it ought to be a reasonable amount in comparison to the whole. Charity Navigator does a good job of guiding you in making the determination of how well the charity carries out their mission and you can make your decision from that point.

Do you have favorite charities or causes that you support?

Her Editor’s Picks:

Bargaineering.com: Netspend & Receiving Cards You Didn’t Apply For

Free Snatcher: 5 Tips to Help You Become Debt Free

One Cent At A Time: Live Like in Early 19th Century to Become Debt Free

Life [Comma] Etc: Unemployment Tips

The College Investor: How You Can Use SWOT Analysis for Investments

Planting Money Seeds: Being Social Online Can Help You Find Freelance Gigs

Balance Junkie: Are You Ready for a Change?

One Money Design: Natural Foods Cost More: Are They Worth It?

Free From Broke: What Do Your Property Taxes Pay For?

Next week will be hosted by Start Talking Cents; be sure to submit your best posts by Sunday afternoon.

His Editor’s Picks:

• Sustainable Personal Finance: Nobody Cares what You Think


• See Debt Run: Ain’t Too Proud to Use a Big Bird Spoon


• Nicole and Maggie: Grumpy Rumblings: Fie on the residents of [state]


• Retire Happy Blog: Active investing or passive investing – Which is better?

Tune in next week when The Money Drain is our host – and be sure to submit your best posts for consideration!

It’s weird. Financial goals, no matter how outrageous, always seem achievable. Even if they are vastly out of reach, they aren’t ever daunting. But health goals are no longer that easy for me. They actually even make me a little insecure.

Knowing that, I’ve eased into the pool, a few toes a time. Picking a few areas where slack habits that were ingrained for a (bad) reason, I gave myself a new reason and new license to like the new habit.

1. New Habit: “Missing the bus”.

In an effort to maintain work-life balance, I tried to stick to a schedule of leaving work at a certain time. This was partly because my public transit option was fairly rigid. If I missed a specific bus, every other bus behind that magic one was unreliable, late, or might not show up at all.

Triggered: Stress over the transit, grouchiness about getting home really late, double stress if PiC had to come pick me up because we’d both be extra late.

Conclusion: My work-life balance “solution” was actually not always workable, it was exhausting when extenuating circumstances arose as they will in my position and the extra stress is unhealthy.

Solution: I found an alternate transit solution that required a mile walk. Now, if something really needs just a few extra minutes, or an hour, and it’s important, I don’t need to stress myself out over the choice between not getting it done or running for the bus. I get it done, and take a nice long decompression walk.

Now, I actually plan to “miss” the bus more than once a week when the weather’s fine because it’s good for me. That removes all guilt-related stress from the equation. PiC knows that it’s semi-planned that it will be at least one to three times per week, I let him know as soon as bus-time nears, and he doesn’t feel pressured to rush around to accommodate an unexpected late day.  He knows that on those late days, he’ll just go to Plan B and everything goes more smoothly.

2. Spend Money. On purpose.

Mostly I’m frugal but there are days, and weeks, when I’m an absolute cheapskate because “I just don’t feel like spending.” And being disinclined to shop just doesn’t help matters at all. Say, when it comes to necessities.

My feet take a pounding because I run around at work all day. Plus I’ve added the above walking regimen. You would think I’d be willing to get the necessary things to be well shod and comfortable. But it costs money and takes time to find such things, it requires dedicated shopping and I haven’t got the patience so I just won’t do it.

Triggered: Pain!

Conclusion: That’s just silly. I have smart, fashion forward friends who can make good recommendations and I can order online if I refuse to shop in-store. I’ve been walking around with blisters for nearly a month because my shoes have failed me. Now, where’s my sign?

Solution: I asked for shoe recommendations from friends who travel and walk like I do: in flats and a LOT.

I also remembered that Nordstrom has a really good return policy so I can actually try shoes for real, not just a few steps on carpet which isn’t at all a stress test of how they will feel when you have to commute in them. I ordered a STACK to try on and will keep the ones that hold up to real trial.

3. Chunking

Weekends are often saved for all those chores and errands that seem impossible to squeeze in during the week after a long day, at the end of a night: Laundry, grocery shopping, dry cleaning, car maintenance, cleaning of every sort.

Triggered: Exhaustion and a sad weekend when it’s all work and no play.

Conclusion: Trying to preserve the weekday and weekend divide between work and home just creates a lump sum of misery on either side of the wall.

Solution: I’ve been breaking off little chunks of errands like filling up the car with gas, or vacuuming just one part of one room, or clearing off a table top and fitting it into my day if I can squeeze in fifteen or thirty minutes. This still leaves the big stuff for the weekend but if there are only two or three big things for each day, that’s only a few hours’ worth of work and a lot of free hours left!

These three items are my focus right now. I’m taking it slow and steady to let the habits become natural before I heap any more on my plate.

::: What would you target in a quest for better health and happiness?

::: How would you make it sustainable for your life?

Her Editor’s Picks:

Control Your Cash: IPOs for Beginners

Diva In Debt:  Investing Fundamentals for Women – Business & Financial Acumen

Credit, Eh: Paying Down Debt: One of the Best Investments in Your Future

Frugal Cool: Be good to the future you

Free From Broke: What is Mortgage Amortization and How Does it Work?

Thanks to our host and contributors for making this week’s carnival!
Next week will be hosted by THE Canadian Personal Finance Site.

Her Editor’s Picks:

Yes, I Am Cheap: Where Can You Get A Loan in Tough Times?

Financial Uproar: Dammit People, Enough With The Hard-on About Vacations

Narrow Bridge Finance: Eight Cheap Date Ideas That Don’t Break The Bank

Watson Inc: Is it Better To Be Frugal or Earn More?

DollarVersity: Stop With The Evil Credit Card Crap Already

Youngandthrifty: My Experience with Home Insurance

Squirrelers: Successfully Contesting a Vehicle Citation or Traffic Ticket

My Journey to Millions: Do You Know Your Monthly Nut?

Tie the Money Knot: 7 Tips on Disclosing Finances Before Marriage

I Am 1 Percent: You Are Already The 1 Percent

Next week, NerdWallet will be taking on hosting duties so be sure to submit your best posts for consideration!

Flights of fancy were fun but they also tended to trigger an obsessive need to do math. Money math, the kind that leads to speculation and planning and wondering: “can you actually pull this off if….”

I can (and did) run the numbers with just about any big dreamable purchase: a house, a horse, a car, a really big trip. After I’ve satisfied myself that I could have it if I really wanted, under X, Y, or Z conditions, I either filed it away to become part of the grand life/career plan and budget, or I just filed it.

Conventional wisdom typically suggests that housing should cost no more than approximately 40% of your gross take home pay and very few other significant purchases come with even that much of a cautionary tagline. I think 40% or even 30% of your gross is an overcommitment of resources when, and this describes many people, you’re not on a rapidly increasing income.  But I am rather fiscally conservative.

In a relatively stable economy people may earn moderate to good increases which range anywhere between 2-8% depending on the inflation rate, but there’s also an accompanying cost of living increase that has to be assumed.

On that basis, I keep in mind that when I explore housing expenses or do any sort of related math, I am both planning to keep the cost to what I consider a reasonable amount and looking at maximizing my wages to accommodate the new spending and the savings at that life stage. Rather than assuming simple lifestyle inflation, I assume overall growth over time to allow for That Thing.

The sequence of math goes something like this:

• How many times my salary is that?


• How many times my disposable income? (for a reality check)


• How many times my disposable income plus a portion of my savings rate? (for a gleam of whether it’d be possible)


• And then, how much would I need to make to live my current lifestyle and be able to save enough to buy that house?

But let’s say my salary was a respectable $50,000. That would still be many times my salary. $850K is 17x that gross salary. $850K is 20.5x the net salary assuming a 17% effective tax rate.

And if I saved at least 20% of my salary between pre-tax and net-check savings vehicles, that leaves about $33K. I wouldn’t stop this savings since one needs a cash cushion after buying property!

With presumed living expenses of $30000, that leaves $3000 of annual disposable income. That’d be used for things like gifts and travel that aren’t strictly necessary.  Clearly, $850K is many times my disposable income but if I were to substitute in my “current” housing expenses, that still wouldn’t begin to make a dent in that pile of cost, would it?

So, I would need to increase my income by at least 70% to create enough extra cash flow to even think about looking at something like this.

I’m making it really quite simplistic, of course.  A substantial enough down payment which would reduce the loan size would factor into the math, interest rates, details, etc., and so on, but this, as I said this is really just an exercise.

The real fun (Nerd Alert!?) was that it primed my imagination, and gave me concrete goals to aim toward for earnings and career stages every time I found another really cool Thing.

How do you satisfy that itch when you’ve ogled and perhaps cannot have, yet?

Her Editor’s Picks:

I Am 1 Percent: You Will Die: One Of The Few Things That Are A Certainty

Saving Advice: Recapturing Wasted Time

PT Money Personal Finance: The Cost of Living Off the Grid

Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured: Target Date Funds Primer

Money Cactus: Hyperbolic Discounting: Why your decisions are already made before you make them

Well Heeled Blog: What Losing Weight Taught Me About Saving Money

Bible Money Matters: Paying Down Debt Should Be Like Interval Training

Next week’s Carnival will be hosted by Thirty Six Months; be sure to submit your best posts by Sunday afternoon!

Editor’s Picks:

Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured: Thoughts on spouses and careers

Free From Broke: Marginal Tax Rate VS Effective Tax Rate – What are They and How do They Affect You?

Don’t Quit Your Day Job… President Obama Is a Bigger Tax Cutter Than George Bush

PT Money Personal Finance: Should I Consolidate My Student Loans?

Shared Financial Success: Hot to be rich

Christian Personal Finance: How to use FreeCycle to Save Money And Reduce Clutter

Musings of an Abstract Aucklander: Tom and Lynette, you’re breaking my heart

Bible Money Matters: Would You Invest a Portion of Your Emergency Fund

Boomer & Echo: Finances From A To Z

Free Money Finance: Change the way you think

Grand Per Month: Should You Incorporate Your Side Income Stream

Sense to Save: How to choose retirement investments for your portfolio

My Dollar Plan: New Pension Plans and Changes to Current Retirement Plans

Financial Highway: How to Improve Credit Score

Weakonomics: The Math Behind Oil’s Hold On The Economy

Next week, Sense to Save will be hosting so be sure to submit your very best posts for consideration!

Follow the Prince’s journey as he proves to his father, the old King, that he’s ready to be included in the will and take on the responsibilities of a kingdom.

And tune in next week when Girls Just Wanna Have Funds hosts the 351st Carnival!

I complimented him on his weight loss to date, and asked after the details of his diet. “It’s not a diet, he’d said, it’s a project.” Spoken like a true techie.

He’s managing it through modifying his food intake against his calorie burn, and exercising more regularly.

Most importantly, he said, he’s telling people about it. It keeps him accountable. In fact, the key to his success thus far was making sure that people knew about his quest because it meant that he really couldn’t fail. He was trusting in the need to protect his ego and his ever loving friends to keep him in check.

The best piece of advice he’d received, he said, was to plaster your intentions across the front page of the Times, and shine the spotlight on your goals. With that many eyes on your waistline, or anything else you chose to make public, you really couldn’t afford the embarrassment of failure.

As blogging’s explosion across the internet has demonstrated in the last several years, people naturally gravitate to sharing and discussing their lives, hopes and aspirations in more public spaces, albeit, not necessarily with the intent of holding themselves up for ridicule. Many people are simply looking for validation or feedback, or keeping a public journal, in some way.

Whatever the motivation, this propensity to make once-private aspirations more public has given rise to companies like SmartyPig where users can also choose to share their savings goals with their family and friends, both incentivizing the savings behavior and the social aspect.

Research indicates that there are benefits to actually committing goals to paper, as it were, that the act of writing it down is a form of reinforcing the desire to achieve.

The additional public sharing of those goals gives you access to a supportive community around something that only you cared about before.

There’s a lot of truth in this and readers will see that in the personal finance blogging community. That’s why there is so much emphasis on the setting of concrete goals, S.M.A.R.T. goals. Socially and intellectually, blogging about money gives bloggers and non-blogging readers a forum to discuss the world of finance, learn about money, and talk about how other people are finding ways to solve similar problems. Built into that support network is knowledge sharing – both things that would help in the achievement of those goals.

Even though the same topics typically revolve around the ‘sphere, the voices of experience range across life stages and resonate uniquely across writers and readers to present a vibrant patchwork of resources.

And there are certainly ways to set goals in equally supportive communities offline as well, through mentorships, professional associations, friends of a similar mindset. Like my friend, relying on the good old fashioned peer pressure, redirected to work for him.

The Editor’s Picks:

Canadian Finance Blog: The Generation Gap

Your Life, Their Life: How much do you spend on food?

Narrow Bridge Finance: How to Build a Social Lending Snowball

Visit the Carnival to see the rest of the Editor’s Picks in all of the Categories.

Be sure to submit your best posts to next week’s Carnival when Well Heeled Blog hosts.

While on a regular road trip pilgrimage to their usual vacation haunt, the second of their two cars had serious trouble: transmission trouble. In fact, the transmission went kerplunk, entirely. Luckily, while it was incredibly inconvenient and costly, no one was hurt when it dramatically died. There was nothing to be done but to replace the transmission, they were told. That ran a good couple thousand dollars.

The second incident was not more than three months later, on the same road to the same destination!

This time they were taking separate cars and the husband pulled over with a flat tire halfway to their destination. The wife wasn’t worried because that car had run flat tires, and she was pretty sure that they should be able to re-inflate the tire enough to get to their destination where they’d deal with the actual problem. As it turned out, that wasn’t good enough.

At the service station they turned into they were informed that run flats can actually only run down to a certain level of flatness. This tire was too low. And only a dealership could repair the tire. It was the weekend, without an open dealer’s maintenance department in sight – and them without a spare.

In the end, our dear friends went through hell and back to get their tire taken care of, and were so exasperated with the process and the product that they ended up paying the dealership they’ve been using for twenty years that sold them the original run flats over $3000 to replace all four tires and wheels with regular tires.

When I related the story to PiC, I think he had a mini-aneurysm.

Overall, money is my thing, but cars are his niche.  Since then, I kept thinking
of the areas where their choices were not the same choices I would make, in general.  For starters, I would have reached out to My Car Guys* for better advice to deal with the situation.

What I’ve Learned Over the Years

*My Car Guys are a group of trusted friends and family: PiC and his friends who are either employed in the car industry with their own expertise or have direct connections to the same because they frequently use their services; a family friend who has been our mechanic for nearly twenty years, he can do any basic maintenance when he’s got time or give us general over the phone advice; my childhood friend who has done his own car maintenance and research over the past fifteen years.

I can trust them to guide me to the right resources when they can’t help me out directly (which isn’t always practical since we’re not longer just down the street from each other or just simply don’t have the time anymore). Which leads me to …

Do your own research. Make sure that you’re consulting reliable resources.

If you’re looking to buy? Start with Edmunds. Kelley Blue Book.

If you’re being quoted services? Know that mechanics actually use prescribed manuals that suggest the number of hours of labor each service should take. The actual cost per hour will vary, of course, but the multiple of hours they’re charging should be within reason. Mechanics use, among others, Alldata and Bentley’s, for reference.

If you’re replacing parts? Know the difference between OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and aftermarket parts before committing to buy. And some parts can be easily found on Craigslist, used and new. PiC buys and sells tires there and they’re easily checked for wear and tear.

Know the true lifespan of your parts.
Today’s modern cars aren’t built to withstand impact like the tanklike models we so fondly refer to but the component parts can last longer than the age-old truisms would have you believe. Most modern and newer cars really do not require an oil change every 3000 miles, if you do some research, you may find that the oil changes can really be done between 5000-7000 miles depending on the car usage.

Other parts should not be stretched past conventional wisdom – it may be tempting to leave it until later because “they’ll last another week/month/several months” and they might squeak by but it can really cause severe damage to other parts of the car. Timing belts, for example, may not obviously give out once past their recommended replacement date, and should be replaced regularly as it can affect the other parts that rely on them.

::What are your go-to resources when it comes to car repair and maintenance?

His Editor’s Picks:

Minting Nickels: What Plants vs. Zombies Taught Me About Paying Off Debt

Saving Advice: 50 Ways to Save Money on Food

The Happy Homeowner: How I Obtained a Masters Degree from Harvard for $500—without Scholarships

Enjoy this week’s collection of blog posts and join us again next week when Sustainable Personal Finance hosts!

Editor’s Picks:

Good Financial Cents: 7 Financial Advisors I would Like to Punch in the Face

Weaknomics: You Have Too Much Crap Because We Won The Cold War

Saving Advice: Money Lessons Learned from Traveling Well.

*****

Up Next Week: Money Q&A!

Submit your best posts for consideration by Sunday afternoon and participate in next week’s Carnival of Personal Finance!

Her Editor’s Picks:

Control Your Cash: Our Appearance on the Suze Orman Show!

Living Richly on a Budget: 7 Easy Menu Planning Ideas

Million Ways to Save: Five FREE Gifts for Valentine’s Day

Thanks to all the contributors who made a great Carnival and to the Jenny Pincher for hosting.

Submit your best posts to next week’s Carnival when One Cent at a Time hosts. -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd-> -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd-> -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd-> -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd-> -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd-> -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd-> -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd->

Editor’s Picks:

ChristianPF: Get Your Financial Life on One Page

Watson Inc: Do You Have the Courage to be Wealthy?

Thanks to all the contributors and to Matt for hosting!

Please submit your best posts to next week’s Carnival by Sunday afternoon when The Jenny Pincher hosts. -LinksStart-> -/LinksEnd->