Last night my wife and I went out to a movie for the first time in a long time.  We brought Grandma over to look over little Squeebles, and mom and dad went out on town.

We went to see The Blind Side, which I highly recommend.  The underlying story is of a well-off couple with two kids who take “Big Mike” (a teenage kid from the “other side of town” with only the clothes on his body) under their wing, buy him clothes, send them to school, and he ends up getting a scholarship to play football at Old Miss.

I’m not much of a movie critic, and the the previous paragraph doesn’t do the storyline justice.  I recommend seeing it for yourself.

A long time ago I wrote about how I paid good money (and a lot of it) for a bottle of water, when there was a water fountain right next to the concession counter.

Well, I failed in frugality once again.

Last night I paid $8 for a “large” bag of popcorn.  I admit it, guilty.

I can’t believe I did that, but popcorn sounded really good at the time, and I figured we’d split it, which we did.

There’s no way that bag of popcorn was worth $8.  But I paid for it anyway, and apparently by the looks of the line at the counter, other people did too.  I suppose a product is worth what people will pay for it, but for something as cheap and easy as popcorn, it strikes me that so many people are willing to pay for it.

I was only slightly vindicated by putting $4 worth of free fake butter and salt on the popcorn.  If I’m gonna overpay for popcorn, I’m gonna load it up with all the free stuff I can.  Arteries be damned.

Finance, Life frugality, popcorn, theater prices

Although I’ve achieved this goal a lot later in the program than I’d like, I managed to max out both my wife and I’s Roth IRA’s for 2009… in the nick of time.

With a kid romping around and daycare chewing up the extra cash, it will be much more difficult to fund all $10,000 for 2010, but I’m gonna try.

What bugs me now is that I’ve got money sitting on the sidelines.  It bugs me because I want it to be working for me, but I’m not sure where to put it to work.  I’m still overweight in a few stocks that I’m paring out of gradually, which is where a bulk of the idle money is coming from.

I’m still thinking interest rates are going to be on the rise, along with taxes…

Another subject I’d rather not think about now.

Investing, Saving Roth IRA, Saving

This is just the beginning I suspect.  The rate for emergency loans from the Fed went up to 0.75% today, up from 0.5%.  It’s really a trivial move, but it signals far much more than just a quarter point increase in rates.

This is the beginning.

Readers of this space know that I feel interest rates will go up.  They have to.

You can’t spend money like our Government has been printing it and expect any semblance of balance to be maintained.

If the economy were going great gangbusters right now it would be a different story.  In general, debt is not necessarily bad.  But like many households in the last several years, our Country can no longer service it’s debt without taking on even more debt…

So interest rates (and I’m certain, taxes too) are going up so we can get some cash out of the economy.

Finance