done...now I can relax

My day started at 7:00am when a triple axle big rig showed up at my house (1 hour early, by the way) to deliver a massive load of shredded cedar bark/mulch. I planted the remaining 14 plants, now 30 total. My buddy Bill came over and engineered a cool water energy dissipator so all of the tile drain water from my backyard now filters through a subsurface gravel area rather than pouring over the top of my bark and putting muddy water on the sidewalk. The whole area was covered in bark and my yardage calculations came out exactly as hoped--I had enough leftover bark to fill every planter box in my front and backyards.

It doesn't look like much now--the plants are are horribly small but most of them grow to around 1-2 feet in height and 2-3 feet in diameter. I finished today right as the rain started, a perfect ending to a long, tiring project. Best of all, no more mowing that ridiculous slope!



I still have some work to do around the utility box in the foreground. Contrary to any photos you may have seen in the past, the grass that used to be in this location really didn't look very good--there was lots of clover, crabgrass and spotted spurge. If things go to plan then I will likely apply for this program again next year to convert the remainder of the sideyard grass to native vegetation.

There's no going back now...

I jumped both feet first into a huge project. As of last Friday I am participating in the City of Roseville's "Cash for Grass" program where I agreed to rip out 340 square feet of lawn and replace it with low water use native vegetation. I sort of forgot how many weekend commitments I have through the rest of October and November, thus I decided to take this week off work to get a jump on the project before we are hit with six days of rain starting this Saturday.


Last Friday I met with City staff at my home and they took measurements, photos and gave me a run-down of what they would like to see done. They pay $1 for each square foot of grass removed, so I expect I will be able to do this project for a minimal investment. I already had a pretty good idea what I wanted to do but the City staff were very helpful in providing ideas and left me some schwag like some native landscaping books, a really nice plant selection DVD, an adjustable hose nozzle/gun thingy and a soil moisture probe. I've had such pleasant dealings with the City and this experience was no exception.


My home is on a corner lot so I have a lot of grass to mow. There's a strip 10 feet wide and 120-feet long on the outside of my fence that is a real pain to mow. The slope raises six feet in height over 8 feet of horizontal distance, so you can imagine how high the suckage factor is for mowing. I like the slope though, it puts my house well above street level and gives a nice level of privacy in my backyard. The goal is to remove the grass so I don't have to mow it, fertilize and water it and ultimately I hope the native vegetation offers lower maintenance and a nice visual appearance.


I basically chose all UC Davis Arboretum "All Star" plants. These are 100 plants selected by people that know a whole lot more about plants than I will ever know and these plants are either native to California or grow like natives--in other words, they are selected for their hardiness, resistance to our high summer temperatures and our poor soils. I figure my chances of actually keeping these suckers alive for any length of time are much better if I go the All-Stars route. My Aunt is in town from Seattle and she accompanied me on Saturday to pick up a truckload of plants at the UCD Arboretum native plant sale. I had pre-selected the plants and drew up a proposed planting map so the decisions were made prior to the plant sale.


I am sitting here on the computer because a full day of tearing out grass really wore me out. It took two days to remove the old grass and I lined the bottom of the slope with about a half a ton of large river rock boulders. I am having to dig up the old sprinklers and separate irrigation zones and am converting a portion of the system to drip. This part is going slowly. I changed my plans and will start planting tomorrow and will deal with the irrigation later. The plants need to go in the ground now before we are hit with a week of rain.


So here's how it looked when I was half-done.

Tomorrow will be another hard day of digging and planting. Hopefully I'll have good news to share at the end of the week. If you get bored and feel like helping drop plants in the ground, you know where to find me!

The economy and managing finances

I have always enjoyed managing money by moving savings around to the highest yield accounts and purchasing my own stocks and deciding where to invest extra income for retirement. The ‘extra income’ part of the equation isn’t what it used to be, partly due the costs of home ownership and my interest in trying to furnish, landscape and upgrade my first home, and partly because the governor’s office is still playing around with the state’s furlough program. And each time I feel like I am doing a pretty good job of managing it all I meet with my financial planner and my world is turned upside down. Tonight was one of those nights.

A good financial planner will look at all aspects of your financial life. They should evaluate your insurance policies for life, auto and home and make sure you are adequately covered. After all, how much sense does it make for a financial planner to make you money, only to lose it because you had inadequate insurance to cover some sort of accident? He made significant changes to all of my policies a couple of years ago, so no insurance changes this time-around. He is requiring that I photograph or video my possessions and store that media content somewhere other my own home. Three years ago when my home in East Sacramento was robbed, I struggled to determine what I owned and what might (or might not) have been taken. Photos would help jog your memory for filing insurance claims.

Apparently this combination of furlough pay, a full year’s worth of mortgage interest on my home and my contributions to tax-sheltered retirement programs means that by August of this year I had already completely paid my 2010 state and federal income tax obligations. He changed my withholdings to ‘Married’ with 15(!!) dependents and even with that I will still have a sizeable tax return this year. That’s cool, as long as I don’t have to produce 15 dependents. This will increase the size of my monthly income, balance my budget and allow more money to be invested each month. And he’s pretty dead-set on not letting the government collect interest on my tax money each year.

Retirement planning is where the largest and most surprising changes are being made. I have been contributing pretty heavy to a 401(k) since I was 24 years old and he is now recommending I cut that to 1/3 of my current contribution. Not only that but he has changed the deferrals to different asset classes (like a combination of international stocks, small/mid/large cap stocks, etc.) and moved entire balances from one fund to another. I tend to get lazy and let my retirement deferrals stay where they are while he evaluates the performance of each fund for current and future predicted performance and makes changes accordingly. (For you fellow state employees, he says our CalPERS retirement programs is “one of the best run pension programs on the planet.” And we get 2% at age 55 compared to the federal govt that pays only 1% at age 62!) He calculated that I am over-investing in tax-deferred retirement and I need to increase my contribution to post-tax retirement, as well as non-retirement investments.

Earlier this year my planner directed me write a really big check that I didn’t want to write for a Roth IRA and now he set up my account to auto-pay into this Roth each month. At least now I don’t have to write that ugly check each year. Finally, tonight he opened four new non-retirement mutual fund portfolios for me. Each one had a $1,000 minimum opening deposit (x4, OUCH, another big check I had to write!!!) and is allocating money I used to put into 401(k) into these non-retirement portfolios via automatic withdrawal from my checking account. These are all big changes for me. At first I wasn’t sure what to think as we sat down, opened new accounts and money starting pouring out of my savings like blood from a headwound, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. In the middle of 2008 I was making over $100 per month in bank interest alone. At today’s bank interest rate I make less than 1/10th that amount. It makes more sense to invest money at economic times like this (and buy many shares cheaply) than it does to make 0.4% interest in the bank. And unlike my retirement accounts, if a disaster occurred and I had already exhausted my savings account I can still cash-out non-retirement portfolios without penalties, unlike retirement accounts. I am excited about these new changes.

As I thought this all through, I realized this weird economy may have actually helped me. Sure, my income is reduced but it made me evaluate what I truly need and made me purge monthly expenditures that were unnecessary. It allowed me to accumulate retirement and stock shares at a very low price. But most of all it made me realize that I don’t need a large income to be happy. That said, I am certainly hopeful that the economy makes a turn for the better…I have cut everything left to cut and salary increases will be necessary to plan for my future. It’s difficult to justify paying for a financial planner at a time like this, however this might be the time when financial planning is most important.