The last time I visited China, the tour guides tried to tell me that that I am fat with a phrase that roughly translates to “as round as pearls and as shiny as oil”, which is meant to be complimentary to the beauties of ancient dynasties. When we visited the Stone Forest attraction in Kunming, the tourguide related a story of a Chinese American couple who couldn’t fit through the spaces between the stone pillars, and could not enjoy walking through the natural wonder. In America I am considered petite, being only size 2, but in China I couldn’t even zip up the extra large pants. That experience is what led me to research fat in America, and it’s alarming how much we spend on obesity-related issues. This is not a post meant to belittle overweight people, but simply a small compilation of facts and figures about the cost of our collective fat.

Fat Healthcare Costs — You may be amongst the 40% of Americans who are not overweight, but you are probably still paying a percentage of your taxes towards treating the obesity of others. According to the , the approximate cost of obesity-related healthcare is an incredible 78.5 billion dollars in 1998, of which 37.6 billion were paid by Medicaid or Medicare. Adjusting the total cost for inflation using the CPI calculator, it’s about 100,000,000,000 dollars in 2007, and the actual cost is possibly even larger since healthcare costs have risen much more than the average inflation in recent years. The put this in perspective, our fat-related health costs beat

Fat Insurance Costs — The above healthcare costs only account for the money spent for healthcare and not the insurance. Obesity is considered a payout risk to insurance companies and health insurance could be a lot pricier for an obese person.

Fat Fuel Costs – It makes sense that it takes more energy to move more weight. An article last year states that Americans are consuming each year compared to 1960 due to the extra weight. Similarly, airplanes are also using more fuel because people are getting heavier on average.

Fat Death Costs– This may seem morbid, but those extra pounds of the deceased can increase the funeral expenditures of those left behind. The BBC reported that larger coffins is becoming more prevalent and some crematoria actually .

cheap viagra online prescription

Mandated Exercise — I remember that in school I always had PE classes where I had to exercise approximately one hour a day. After I graduated college and started a job where I sit all day and type, I gained approximately fifteen pounds. It also didn’t help that there were tons of free snacks and sodas in the office kitchen. If the government or work place has some kind of mandated exercise, then perhaps a lot of extra love handles can be shed.

Eat More Healthy Food — High calorie and fat foods generally appear cheaper, but considering the long term health, energy, and social costs of being overweight, it’s probably more financially prudent to eat fresh and healthy food.

Diet Together — My mom used to be very overweight, but she has lost a lot of flab because my dad loves to go outdoors and takes her hiking. At first, she said she hated hiking, but the more she hiked the more she enjoyed it. It’s much easier to diet with friends and family since you’ll often eat the same food and participate in the same activities.

I will not address the emotional costs of being overweight in this post because those are beyond financial. Some people are really overweight because of medical problems and no matter how hard they try, they can’t lose weight. For the rest of us, losing that extra bit of weight can save all of us a lot of money and stress in the long run.

I have had many long talks with my friends and family about attending graduate school and argued about the pros and cons. This article summarizes what I have gathered from our collective experiences.

cheap viagra online prescription

• The most common reason for my friends to attend graduate school is that they don’t exactly know what they want in life yet. So they try to delay entering into the “real world” by going to graduate school. In graduate school they have a flexible schedule to think about what they want to do while working on possibly cutting edge projects.
• Then there are a massive group of immigrants who absolutely need to use graduate school just to get into in America. For some of them, graduate school is their livelihood. A lot of my coworkers went to graduate school in the United States in order to have a job here in the US and create a better life for their families. My parents, for example, came to the US through graduate school.
• Next there are those who are practically forced into graduate school, either by their parents, a weak job market, or by the realization that the fun and interesting major they studied in school is not in demand in the job market. Additionally, some professions such as doctor or lawyer require graduate school so it is merely a continuation of education and training for the college graduates pursuing those careers.
• Also, there is a group of people who already have great jobs but want to either advance in their careers or change professions completely. Several of my former classmates turned to medicine or law after working as software or mechanical engineers.
• Finally, there are those idealists who are actually truly passionate about their field, and want to be professors and researchers and possibly change the world with their studies. I know several PhD candidates who are in this category.

cheap viagra online prescription

• One big reason is that I am a woman that wants kids. Going to graduate school would delay the creation of a family. My personal take on kids is that if you want to have them it’s probably better to have them earlier rather than later. Since with inflation, the cost of raising a child heightens as years go by.
• Since I am a woman in engineering, academia is not a very friendly place. One of my best friends said that she felt true sexism for the first time in her first year of her PhD program at MIT . One of her professors pretty much implied that she was slow and didn’t bother to answer her question at office hours, and when a male classmate asked almost the same question, the professor began a very detailed explanation of the problem. As a woman, becoming an engineering professor is also extremely difficult since tenure is decided by an old boys club in most universities. Anyway, I never ever wanted to be a professor in my life.
• Since I don’t want to do a PhD program, what’s left is a masters program. Most master programs  are self-funded, so the return on investment isn’t very attractive. At least in computer science, masters program graduates earn a comparable salary as those with a bachelor’s degree and two to three years of experience. The difference is that the person with the bachelor’s degree would have savings instead of debt.
• I don’t really want to change careers now because I have a great job with a lot of responsibilities and very good benefits.

So by process of elimination, I concluded that I should not go to graduate school. If you are thinking about graduate school, it’s probably best to think about what you intend to do after you graduate. Do you want to be an academic or work in industry? Do you want a family? Do you want fame and glory? A PhD program takes up five to six years in science, and up to fifteen years in humanities. Those years of your life can never be recovered. A masters program is quick, but the knowledge you buy might not really be much more than your bachelor’s degree. Also, you’re most likely to take a hit in the pocketbook by pursuing a masters program. It’s probably best to do a personal cost and benefit assessment of your choice to go to graduate school. This is a quick summary of my analysis:

Cost of getting a masters degree in computer science: having children later and sacrificing two years of pay in industry and the masters program tuition.

Benefits: none currently.

Your assessment is probably very different from mine and it’s possible that your perceived benefits is much greater than your perceived costs. It’s possible that one day I will revisit the analysis again, and find that the benefits greatly outweigh the costs, then I will consider graduate school again.

After I graduated from college, I got a job as a software engineer paying around $60,000 per year. I thought that was a fairly good offer, except, I ended up living in San Mateo County, where . I must say, I do enjoy living here even though it is very expensive. For the past two years I shared a three bedroom condo with two other women and paid around $700 a month in rent. In other parts of the country, I am sure you can rent entire houses with that much money, but here it’s pretty much impossible to rent anything more than a studio or single room for that price. My parents have always encouraged me to buy a place of my own, because they do believe that renting is throwing away money. Now that I am forming a new household with my fiance, his parents also suggested that we should buy a place, and they even generously offered to help us with the downpayment.So I did some research on buying a house, and found some excellent housing bubble blogs, and some truly horrifying houses. I blogrolled Irvine Housing Bubble and Dr. Housing Bubble because I love their posts, but the scary homes they feature in the OC and the “Inland empire” really can not compare to the barf-inducing shacks and McMansions in San Mateo county. Here’s somewhat of a faceoff, SoCal housing bubble against NorCal housing bubble:

cheap viagra online prescription–
SoCal Home quick stats: A small 2 bedroom and 1 bath home measuring 816 sqft, age unknown, listing for $400,000, short sale, last sale price $500,000 on 8/31/2006. For all the rest of the gory details click on the link.

cheap viagra online prescription–

This house that looks like a matchbox supported by matchsticks is probably the only thing I can afford in this county. When you look at the price per square foot on this home, I might as well just pack up and move to Manhattan. For those of you unfamiliar with the cities in San Mateo County, let me give you an SAT style analogy Southern Californians can instantly understand: Compton: Los Angeles = East Palo Alto : San Mateo. The last sale price on this home was $350,000 on 04/19/2006. That means the seller stands to gain more than $80000 in a little more than a year. This is a gain of 22% in 16 months if it manages to sell. I send the future buyer my condolences. As a direct comparison to the Real Homes of Genius, this East Palo Alto beauty is much older, and costs approximately twice per sqft. It also makes potential buyers feel like San Mateo real estate is really not deflating.

Now onto the next round:

cheap viagra online prescription–

Lately IrvineRenter has been blogging about homes that are dropping in price back to the prices of yesteryears. So this home he featured is not a trainwreck at all. So the question is, are there any decent San Mateo homes in my favorite neighborhood that’s rolling back prices?

cheap viagra online prescription —

My search parameters on Redfin was: 1000-1250 sqft, 2 bedroom+ single family home located from Ralston in Belmont to Woodside Rd. in Redwood City west of El Camino Real. The search yielded 39 results, and the average price square foot is a whopping cheap viagra online prescription! The San Carlos home featured here is the closest thing to a “rollback”. The last sale price was $760,000 in February of 2006, and the current listing price is $779,900. Needless to say, I cannot afford a home like this. It really makes me wonder who is buying all of these homes since the . I am sincerely hoping that the rollbacks in Southern California and the surrounding counties will move into San Mateo, so people can buy their only little secret hideouts again. For now, my fubby and I are renting a great condo in Redwood City for less than half the mortgage required to buy a similar unit.

Today I arrived at the fubby’s place and he was on the phone with someone, and sounded reasonable upset. It turned out to be his car insurance company. He made a simple call to update his address, and the customer service representative increased his insurance rate by almost 100%, even after removing some coverage, the insurance rate still went up more than 50%. The reasoning was that now he drives longer to work. The fact is, we are moving less than 10 miles away from his old apartment, and he is actually closer to work now than he was before. The problem is that, he also changed jobs last year and did not feel like it needed to be reported to the insurance company. So from the perspective of the insurance company, fubby’s commute length changed from 5 miles to 20 miles, and more driving means more risk. From our perspective, my fubby just moved 10 miles closer to work. Honestly, we did not know that moving could affect the car insurance rate that much. So we proceeded to shop on the internet for cheaper insurance, and along the way, I learned a few things.

• Being single increases your insurance — since we’re getting married in less than a month, at first we input “married” as a marital status. Then we thought about it, and wondered if “single” is the correct status since he is technically not yet married. Well, it seems that married people are considered more safe, because the six months quote for “married” was around 21.5% cheaper than the “single” quote.
• Being young increases your insurance — Apparently 25 is the magic number for the auto insurance industry. The quote difference between a 24 year old and a 25 year old is approximately 10%. My fubby is 24.5, so he has the higher rate. Auto insurance is the main reason why many people under 25 have to pay a higher rate to rent a car.
• Even tickets negated by driving school can increase your insurance — on one of the quote forms we filled out, they actually asked for if we’ve gotten tickets that weren’t recorded because of driving school. What is the point of driving school if that information is collected by insurance companies? Not quite sure how much this increases your insurance exactly, but the mere fact that they asked for this information means that they use it somehow, otherwise, it would not fit into their business logic.
• Getting in accidents increases you insurance — I think everyone knows this one, but it seems that different companies assess this very differently, and the difference in quotes is sometimes thousands of dollars. It definitely pays to shop around.

So finally, we settled on Progressive Direct because their forms were the easiest to use and the rate was reasonable. The new policy actually covers more than fubby’s old policy, and once he gets married they said they will adjust his rate down 20%. Anyway, insurance companies all use some sort of proprietary formula to calculate how risky a person is, and some things they do are plain bizarre. I guess we all live and learn.

The motto of the Baglady Budget is: cheap viagra online prescription I consider the past to be the total debt you have accrued. Since you already spent money you did not have in the past, you need to pay it off in the present. The future is long term savings, a retirement fund for yourself or a college fund for a child all qualify as the future. The goal is basically to live every month with less debt and more savings.

So it actually works more like a savings plan or debt elimination system than a budget. First, you write down your total savings under “future” as a positive number, and then write down your total debt under “past” as a negative number or 0. Then, you can categorize your spending into three basic categories: cheap viagra online prescription, cheap viagra online prescription, and cheap viagra online prescription Needs include things like housing, food, automobile expenses, and healthcare. These are things you absolutely need to spend money on. Wants include all types of entertainment, including games, new clothes when your old clothes are fine, or a new car. These are things you don’t need to survive, but would like to have. Gifts include donations to charity, or gifts for special events such as birthdays and Christmas. The total of the needs, wants, and gifts categories should hopefully be less than your monthly income. If you spend more than you make, it is still helpful to see how much you are spending in each category, and you might change your lifestyle to accomodate your income.

Next, record your actual spending and saving at the end of the month. If you are under budget in the wants,needs, and gifts categories, the money saved can be rolled over to the next month in the same category, applied towards your future, or used to eliminate the debt of the past. If your debt has a higher interest rate than your investment accounts for your savings, generally you would want to pay the debt first. So eventually the absolute value of your past should get smaller and the absolutely value of your future will grow. Sometimes you do want to keep the categorical budget rolled over to the next month so you have a mini savings account for that category of expenses. For example, if you don’t give gifts every month, you can still budget 50 dollars for it every month, and at the end of the year you will have a nice Christmas fund.

So what happens if you overspend in any category? Your savings would be smaller or your debt grows, which may not hurt you at all in the short term, but in the long term, too much debt and too little savings could definitely kill you when you no longer have enough to satisfy your basic needs. I think of the Baglady Budget as a financial weight loss plan. Too much debt, just like too much weight, can crush you. Just like any diet, you need some personal discipline to stick to the system.

cheap viagra online prescription

This is our current budget breakdown without revealing our actual incomes. The percentages are in terms of gross income:

Needs: 28% including housing, food, automobiles, insurance, utilities
Wants: 2% includes entertainment, games, movies, gaming peripherals
Gifts: 10% donations & other gifts

Past: 0 We are currently debt free
Future: about the same as 1 year gross income so far, and contributing around 30 to 40% of gross income to it per month in various accounts like 401ks, 529s, bonds, money market, and individual investment accounts. The rest of the money goes to taxes.

My fiance is always responsible about his money and balances his accounts regularly and managed to pay off his car and school loan completely and buy an engagement ring. So I am very proud of him. Yet, he hates my budget because he feels it’s restrictive to his spending on games and other entertainment. In actuality, I think it gives him more purchasing freedom in the long run. So far we have recorded our combined entertainment spending for 5 months now, and we didn’t go over the budget once. The Baglady Budget allows roll over of unused funds in a liquid fund, so now we have enough in our “entertainment fund” for something bigger than just a single game or movie.The Baglady Budget basically creates guiltless spending because the money is already earmarked for entertainment. The Budget definitely changed my fiance’s purchasing decisions. He looks for things on sale instead of buying it at full price, and is more patient in his wants, though he still complains that I dampen the shopping experience for him.

For us, life events such as having a child or purchasing a home could change the budget dramatically, but at least we are saving as much as we can right now. I think people of any income can adapt this system to their situation.