See Plays and Concerts for Free-- Be an Usher!

A friend was telling me recently about some great plays and performances she's been seeing.  When I chimed in with my typical, "Yeah, I'd like to see more shows, but they're so expensive!" (well, some are not that expensive, really, but we've established I'm cheap).  "Oh," she said, "I'm not paying to see the shows.  I volunteer as an usher and then I can watch them for free."

"Really??!?!"  My eyes opened wide and I promptly grilled her for everything she knew.

It's actually one of the things I've been regretting lately: being in the heart of Chicago, with easy access to so much great theater, music, etc, and rarely taking advantage of it.  But since it's not really a high priority per se, just something that'd be nice to do more, I a) procrastinate and b) go into sticker shock, leading to more a).  Well, this won't cure the procrastination, but it sounds fantastic!  My friend says you  just get there a little early and stay a little late, but in between you can watch the show no problem.  And naturally I'm more willing to spend a little extra time rather than a little extra money!

My understanding is that at some of the more desirable theaters, the slots fill up very quickly.  My friend is actually a member of a group called the Saints, which has $55/year dues, informs members about dozens of ushering opportunities at once, and gets them preferential sign-ups.  But most of the theaters also take people who sign up with them directly for free; you just have to be more on top of things.  I think I'm going to pick a theater or three to start with and contact directly.  I'll update you on how it goes, but this was just too good an opportunity to keep quiet before testing it.   And I'd like to hear if anyone else has tried it!

From what I can tell, there are lots of these sorts of opportunities all over, from big cities to small cities to smaller towns.  Check out the website of your favorite theaters, or just Google volunteer usher free <your city/town> and things'll start popping up.  I stumbled across a couple links with lists to start you off:

Seattle: http://www.volunteerusher.com/
New York:  http://www.newyorkmetro.com/guides/cheap/ushering/
Chicago:  http://www.saintschicago.org/

Retirement Planning in Your 20s (& Beyond), Part 1: Estimating Annual Retirement Expenses

It seems like most advice for young people planning for retirement consists of "save as much as you can now, and figure out how much you'll actually need later." Your 20s is a great time to save and take advantage of the wonders of compounding interest-- and there are so many variables involved in predicting future retirement needs-- so this is quite good advice, if it satisfies you.

The problem is, it doesn't satisfy me! I really like having goals, targets, an idea of where I'm going and how well I'm doing. So as challenging as it seems, and even though it's probably an unnecessary step at my age, I still want to come up with "my number," even if it's one that gets revised many times in future years.

That's what this brief series of posts will be about: me stumbling towards an estimate of how much I need to accumulate for my retirement, and hopefully finding it a little simpler than those crazy calculators that always ask questions I don't know the answer to. Feel free to play along at home, but please note that I am not an expert, and in fact would absolutely love any suggestions or information from you to help me along in this process. (Also, these steps should work just as well for people in their 30s and beyond; it's just that it seems like you've all done this already!)

For starters, I want to try to estimate how much income I'll need in retirement. (All numbers will be in 2006 dollars for now, and we'll adjust for inflation later.) I see so many people talking about wanting six-figure retirement incomes: $100,000, $200,000, sometimes even more. When you run the numbers, the amount you need to save to produce those amounts seems astronomical and overwhelming. (Although doable for some people, I'm sure.)

But those don't feel right to me. One common suggestion to calculate your retirement expenses is 80% of current expenses. 80% of my current expenses (not counting student loan payments) would come out to about $12,000 a year. Which sounds really, really low. Maybe my current style of living is way off from what I'd want in retirement; even though I bet I'll continue to be frugal, there are probably some inconveniences I'll no longer be willing or able to put up with to save a buck or two.

Then I found this data from a study of older Americans. It finds that the average expenses of a married person over 65 was $14,762 in 2001. Maybe I'm not so far off! And even for couples in the top 20% of income, average expenses (per person) was $25,567, spending about 1/4 of that on entertainment and gifts. (There's all sort of interesting data in the report to help you think about what you might end up spending; all the tables in the appendix are a great place to start.)

Based on these numbers, I think I'm going to go ahead and use $25,000 as my yearly expenses/income-needed number (in 2006 dollars; I promise I'll adjust for inflation later!). If it's (almost) enough for the average person in the top 20% of income, it ought to be more than enough to cover a frugal-minded little old lady like me. And it's more like 160% of my current expenses, rather than 80%. I feel like my expenses might actually end up lower in reality, but I might as well play it on the safe side in these estimates.

For those of you who've done this step, would you be willing to share what you came up with as your annual retirement income, in dollars or as a percent of current income? Or maybe just talk about the process you used to come up with it? I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about a number in the ballpark of my $25K; is yours anywhere near it, or do you think I'm crazy? And for those of you reading who've never tried this-- play along at home! What do you come up with?

Spending money on friends and family (or, money can't buy me love?)

One thing that frustrates me is the association of being "cheap" with being stingy and un-generous with the people around you. For me personally-- and, as far as I can tell, for many or most of my fellow blogging frugalites-- those things certainly don't go together. When I'm treating a friend who's a student to dinner, paying for my younger sister's plane ticket to come visit me, or buying gifts for friends and family at the holidays, those are some of the only times that the little "frugal voice" in my head stays quiet. Treating people, giving gifts, lending money interest-free... sharing with people I care about makes me happy and is totally worth it to me.

I think it's definitely good that I'm not as cheap in relation to others as I am for myself. But I've been thinking that if I want to be frugal and responsible, I need to have some limits on what I spend on others, too. When my sister comes to visit on the plane ticket I bought her, do I pay for all her restaurant meals and museum tickets too? Should I give pricey holiday gifts to my parents every year or just every once in a while? Do I cover starving-student friends' dinner bills every time we eat out together?

These questions are really hard for me, because I really want to be generous, and I try to be extra-vigilant of my tendency to stinginess. It's like once I let things past my personal cheapie threshhold, they can just keep adding up indefinitely because I can't figure out where more reasonable boundaries lie. I feel like, well, none of these things are a significant burden on my well-being, I've got plenty of money in savings for my age, so it's selfish of me not to do things if I can. But on the other hand, I do sometimes look at how much I've spent on others (and the effects on my bank account) with regret and a sense that I have to reconsider my go-with-your-gut, whatever-feels-right approach.

The best way to navigate this that I've come up with is to try to find meaningful, appreciated things to give and share that don't cost money. Cooking dinner with or for my friends instead of going out to eat. Finding things to do with my sister in Chicago that are fun and also cheap or free. Investing a lot of time, thought, and creativity into gift-giving-- but not necessarily a lot of money. And the (maybe-not-so-) ironic part is that these sorts of things tend to turn out better than the kind of generosity that's measured in the dollars and cents I spend on people. Yet there's still a degree of reluctance, nevertheless-- while I take pride and satisfaction in spending less money on myself, I can't shake the feeling I'm a cheapskate when I hesitate to spend on others.

So am I crazy, or are other people like this too? Do you set any sort of guidelines or limits for yourself on gift-giving, treating, and other generosity towards your loved ones, or do you just have better instincts and/or habits than I do about this stuff?

Check out the Question of the Day Marathon!

If you haven't noticed, there's a Question of the Day marathon going on this August, organized by JLP at AllFinancialMatters.  I'm hosting on August 28th.  I need to catch up on answering the questions at the hosts' blogs (this work trip is taking up way more of my time than I expected, unfortunately), but in the meantime, here's a list of the questions so far.  Click through and see what dozens of bloggers' and commenters' answers were-- and if you haven't yet, go ahead and answer now!  (It'll make me feel better about answering so late!)  

• What is the weekly average cost per person for food in your household, including groceries, snacks, and dining out? at Caustic Musings
• What was the last thing that you splurged on that you didn't really need? at The Investimist
• How many credit cards do you have and what's their combined credit limit? at Experiments in Finance
• Which is more important to financial success: saving money (spending less than you earn through cost cutting) or making your income as high as possible (earning more money)? at Free Money Finance
• In terms of your annual gross salary, what percentage do you save? Are you happy with that amount or do you think you could do better? at Single Mom &
  Money
• If you had $10,000, one day, and one store to spend it in, what store would you choose? at Young and Broke
• If you had to pinpoint the one financial decision (good or bad) that put you on the path to where you are now, what would it be? If you could do it over, would you change your decision? at Savvy Saver

They're so interesting, diverse, and thought-provoking!  Many kudos to JLP for the idea and all the hosts for their great questions (and everyone who's participating in answering, of course)...

My (supposed-to-be) monthly financial update/net worth

I know it's not the most interesting topic, but I'm so overdue that I've got to do this before writing other posts.  So without further ado:

 

Savings: $21,351 (up $3,310 or 18.3% since June 1)
Retirement: $13,098 (up $987 or 8.1%)
Debt: $15,195 (down $100 or 0.1% )
Net worth: $19,254 (up $3,222 or 20.1%)

Year-to-date giving as percent of 2006 goal: 39%
 

A couple of notes: 

• I'm adding a new category to my (supposed-to-be) monthly updates: the percentage of my yearly giving goal reached so far.  I think this is a good idea for a few reasons.  First and foremost, hopefully it'll help keep me accountable to actually reach the goal by the end of the year.  (As you can see, I'm way behind, although I'm actually doing better than in past years.)  I also want to include it because it will help give a better picture of the changes from month to month; one month my savings may increase more and the giving total may increase less, and the next month vice versa.
• The reasons the increase in savings is bigger than the increase in net worth is because I got back the last $1,100 of my "accounts receivable," which boosts my cash on hand but is neutral in the net worth column.
• My savings increase is higher than usual while my debt decrease is lower, which is because about half of my debt is actually owed to my parents (by mutual agreement to help them pay back loans in their name they took out to pay for my college).  I've been paying them $250 a month, but back in May we decided that I'd give them a lump sum of $2,000 of it and then stop the monthly payments for a while.  So my only debt decrease has been my little $70 ($50 principal) monthly payments on my consolidated 2% interest student loan. 
• I think I'm on track for a $25,000 net worth by the end of the year!  Yay!

I've been podcasted!

I recently had the honor of being interviewed on the Money Blogger Podcast. Well, the interview with me is now up. I'm a little embarassed, since I don't interview well, but Scott did a terrific job of making me come off as reasonably presentable. Anyway, it's just another reminder of why I'm better off using the written word rather than the spoken word, and better off as a blogger than a podcaster!

Scott, on the other hand, is a wonderful podcaster, and he has a ton of great interviews up with all your favorite pfbloggers, so I highly recommend checking out the archives and keeping up with his new interviews. If you're a little technologically challenged, like me, you can just listen to them all straight from the website, but if you want you can subscribe.

Thanks again, so much, Scott!

I'm Back! What'd I Miss?

I've returned from my vacation... What did I miss? Have there been any great posts you enjoyed (or wrote!) in the last week or so that I should check out? Any memes going around? Controversies? I'll browse through the carnivals to help catch some good posts, but recommendations are great, too... there's so much that gets written, and so hard to fully catch up!

This was my second week-long vacation of the summer, and it was great. (I'm enjoying the bump from 10 to 15 vacation days after my two-year anniversary at my job!) I don't have much time to settle in at home, since I'm traveling for work this week, but I should have some internet time while on the road, so I won't just disappear again.