My Daily Domestic Diigolet 03/08/2008

The debt snowball is the fastest way we know of to get yourself out of debt.  Your minimum payments get bigger (snowball) as you progress.  Let’s take a look:
1. List all of your debts smallest to largest (ignore interest rate).
2. Pay the minimums on all of your cards except the smallest.
3. Pay as much money as you can each month (budget surplus + extra income + selling stuff, etc), plus the minimum payment, to the smallest debt.
4. When the smallest debt is paid off, add it’s minimum payment to the minimum payment of the next card in line.  Pay the combined minimum plus your extra amount to the new card.
5. Continue to repeat these steps until you are debt free.
The average family is completely debt free in 18 months.  The key is to attack the debt with a vengeance.  Get fired up and use your budget to free up as much money as possible each month.  Get a second job.  Sell so much stuff the kid’s think their next.  It’s all about focused intensity.

One of the biggest reasons people find themselves living paycheck to paycheck is they are poor money managers.

“Normal” people think car payments are acceptable.  The average car payment in America is somewhere around $450 per month.  To put that in perspective, that’s a month’s worth of groceries for many families. And for what?

It would also be a good idea to agree to never finance a car again.

This is a huge one.  Much like car payments, everyone believes that credit card debt is normal and perfectly fine.  They make their minimum payments that can range anywhere from $300 to $1000+ a month and then complain about not having any money for food or clothes.

Cut up the cards, close the accounts, and pay off the debt using the debt snowball method.

As a disclaimer, living paycheck to paycheck usually has nothing to do with your income.  In this day and age, the situation is mostly created with expenses; people overextend themselves.
If you make $30,000 a year, you can’t live on a $35,000 per year lifestyle.  If you make $75,000 per year you can’t live on a $90,000 per year lifestyle.  But people do it every day and that’s why they’re living paycheck to paycheck regardless of their income.

Short Term: Get a second job.  You can make an extra $1000 -$1500 per month delivering pizzas at night.  That kind of money can do a lot for your debt snowball.
Also, make sure you’re bringing home the right amount of money from your work.  If you receive a big tax refund at the end of the year, you need to change your W4 and take home that money during the month instead of loaning it to the government all year at zero interest.

All of the teens you see in the time-intensive San Francisco Ballet are home-schooled. Many many kids are home-schooled for reasons other than religion.

And getting a credential will require that the parents go back to school too. Maybe at home. University of Phoenix, anyone?

This ruling is to keep more parents from taking their children out of the failed California public schools. It is intended to keep federal dollars coming in, regardless of what’s best for a child.

And totalitarianism creeps ever closer. The state now has a greater claim to your child-rearing than you do. Jefferson et al. would be ashamed of us.

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution.

The ruling arose from a child welfare dispute between the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and Philip and Mary Long of Lynwood, who have been homeschooling their eight children. Mary Long is their teacher, but holds no teaching credential.
The parents said they also enrolled their children in Sunland Christian School, a private religious academy in Sylmar (Los Angeles County), which considers the Long children part of its independent study program and visits the home about four times a year.
The Second District Court of Appeal ruled that California law requires parents to send their children to full-time public or private schools or have them taught by credentialed tutors at home.

Yet the appeals court said state law has been clear since at least 1953, when another appellate court rejected a challenge by homeschooling parents to California’s compulsory education statutes. Those statutes require children ages 6 to 18 to attend a full-time day school, either public or private, or to be instructed by a tutor who holds a state credential for the child’s grade level.
“California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. “Parents have a legal duty to see to their children’s schooling under the provisions of these laws.”
Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.
“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare,” the judge wrote, quoting from a 1961 case on a similar issue.

The Long family legal battle didn’t start out as a test case on the validity of homeschooling. It was a child welfare case.
A juvenile court judge looking into one child’s complaint of mistreatment by Philip Long found that the children were being poorly educated but refused to order two of the children, ages 7 and 9, to be enrolled in a full-time school. He said parents in California have a right to educate their children at home.
The appeals court told the juvenile court judge to require the parents to comply with the law by enrolling their children in a school, but excluded the Sunland Christian School from enrolling the children because that institution “was willing to participate in the deprivation of the children’s right to a legal education.”

Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said the ruling would effectively ban homeschooling in the stat

“California is now on the path to being the only state to deny the vast majority of homeschooling parents their fundamental right to teach their own children at home,” he said in a statemen

Heimov said her organization’s chief concern was not the quality of the children’s education, but their “being in a place daily where they would be observed by people who had a duty to ensure their ongoing safety.”

1. Shake
a leg. Lack of blood flow is a common reason for lack of concentration.
If you’ve been sitting in one place for awhile, bounce one of your legs
for a minute or two. It gets your blood flowing and sharpens both concentration
and recall.

6. Sleep
on it. Dr. Maxwell Maltz wrote about in his book Psycho-Cybernetics
about a man who was was paid good money to come up with ideas. He would
lock his office door, close the blinds, turn off the lights. He’d focus
on the problem at hand, then take a short nap on a couch. When he awoke,
he usually had the problem solved

11. Do walking meditation. If you’re taking a hike (#25), go one
step further and learn walking meditation as a way to tap into your inner
resources and your strengthen your ability to focus. Just make sure you’re
not walking inadvertently into traffic.

29. Write,
don’t type. While typing your notes into the computer is great for
posterity, writing by hand stimulates ideas. The simple act of holding
and using a pen or pencil massages acupuncture points in the hand, which
in turn stimulates ideas.

30. Carry a quality notebook at all times. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
dreamed the words of the poem “In Xanadu (did Kubla Khan)…”.
Upon awakening, he wrote down what he could recall, but was distracted
by a visitor and promptly forgot the rest of the poem. Forever. If you’ve
been doing “walking meditation” or any kind of meditation or
productive napping, ideas may suddenly come to you. Record them immediately.

32. Organize. Use sticky colored tabs to divide up a notebook or
journal. They are a great way to partition ideas for easy referral.

33. Use post-it notes. Post-it notes provide a helpful way to record
your thoughts about passages in books without defacing them with ink or
pencil marks.

46. Learn how to learn. Management Help has a resource page, as
does SIAST (Virtual Campus), which links to articles about learning methods.
They are geared towards online learning, but no doubt you gain something
from them for any type of learning. If you are serious about optimum learning,
read Headrush’s Crash course in learning theory.

47. Learn what you know and what you don’t. Many people might say,
“I’m dumb,” or “I don’t know anything about that.”
The fact is, many people are wholly unaware of what they already know
about a topic. If you want to learn about a topic, you need to determine
what you already know, figure out what you don’t know, and then learn
the latter.