marriage.matthewthornton.info

I read finance blogs on a periodic basis and this afternoon I saw an entry asking about advice on buying an engagement ring and I thought this may be pertinent to some that may read this site, so I decided to post my comments:

Go to Blue Nile. I loved the experience with them. My fiancee had an *idea* of what she wanted it to look like and armed with that and a little bit of research into what to look for in a diamond, (Cut, clarity, color, carat) I went to the website. They let you pick the specifications you want for the diamond and they’ll put it on the ring that you want. (That’d be my only problem with Blue Nile–their selection of ring types is somewhat limited but they have plenty of diamonds to go on them!) The ring is delivered via FedEx and it arrives in a pretty little polished wood box.
My suggestion would be to buy something between 1/3 karat and a 1/2 carat but make it as close to the best diamond you can find in that size range (Ideal cut, no inclusions, clear color). My wife’s hand *still* sparkles with all of the reflection coming off that small diamond and everyone that looks at it says that it looks like a 1/2 to 3/4 karat diamond. I was a grad student when I proposed and my budget was roughly what yours is and I got her a ring that she still comments on.
One extra bit of advice–talk with your insurance company about getting the ring insured (my company calls it a personal articles policy). It’s about 20 bucks/year (and they added it onto my car payment so I barely even notice it) and, at least through my company, it covers loss, theft, or even just loss of the diamond if it falls out of the arms that hold the diamond snap off.
Hope this helps and good luck!

mtthornton Matt

After only just 5 months of marriage and over 3 years of knowing each other, Jess and I have developed a lot of inside jokes and habits that most people would find just plain odd.  I’ve decided to do a translation for those who will be near us in the future:

• If you see one of us pat the other kind of forcefully on the shoulder 3 times, this is our quiet way of say “love you”.  It comes from a Family Guy episode:
• If you hear something like a kiss and are wondering where it’s coming from, Jess and I tend to do the kissing sound from across the room and it’s the other’s job to reciprocate.  Don’t know where this began but it’s stuck.
• If you’re in the car with us, and I go off center, Jess will normally say, or I’ll beat her to it and preemptively say, “road”.  This came from when we were dating and I’d look at her on our way to Christiansburg and Jess would react and say, “Road!” if I started shifting at all.  Now that she is more comfortable with me as a driver, she just says it in a “whatever”-like tone.
• “The Blue One”:  About a year ago there was a commercial of a husband and his wife.  Every time she asks him, he answers and she does the exact opposite.  It was a verizon commercial and the husband wants the blue phone.  When the wife asks “Which color do you think is me?”  The husband thinks for a second and goes “…the blue one.”  She obviously takes the red one and he gets the phone he wants.  Whenever Jess asks me my opinion and immediately does the opposite, I always say “The Blue One.”

That’s all I can think of at the moment, but if I can think of any more in the next couple of days, I’ll add them.

mtthornton Matt

On all of these social network sites there are these quizzes for what people are doing, thinking, and what their favorites are.  I was always curious as to why there wasn’t a similar quiz for married couples because while couples are still individuals, there are still some things you can learn about them as a couple:

Do you sleep on the same side of the bed every night?
Yes, but we’ve switched recently.

Have you ever had a fight where one of you had to leave the house?
Nope.

How often do you say “I love you” to each other?
10+ Times/ day.

Do you wear each other’s clothes?
Jess has been known to wear some of my sweatshirts and sweaters.  I tend to wear her t-shirts once in a while.

What music do you have in common?
We listen to a lot of the same music all the time.

Do you share the same political views?
We agree on the severity of the problems, but we never agree on the solutions.

What are you doing right now?
Watching “Almost Famous” w/ Jess while I write this blog and work on straightening up the Living Room.

What was the last couple you had dinner with?
Lee and Rach

How often do you text each other?
About twice a day.

What is the latest that you’ve stayed up together?
Around 3:30am.

What’s your favorite dinner together?
Spaghetti

Where’s your favorite restaurant?
Ceritano’s in Blacksburg…Best.Pizza.Ever.

What was something that we did that was the “first time” for both of us?
We went to a baseball game together.  (We’re the National’s good luck charm.)

What’s something you both hate to do.
Laundry

What’s your average bedtime?
10 for Jess, 12am for me.

What’s your favorite movie when you just want something “on”?
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

mtthornton Jess, Matt

The Puerto Rico pictures I have are now on the web.  I’ll add more once I get Jess’ phone.  Have a good evening.

mtthornton Matt

Jess and I rent from Netflix.  We try to alternate back and forth so that we each get something we’re interested in watching in each shipment.  I had heard out in the ether that the movie Pi was a really cool, interesting movie.  It was on a subject that interested me.  (Number Theory has always interested me, don’t ask me why.)  I had convinced Jess that it sounded like a good movie, that was kinda like The DaVinci Code, and that we ought to take a look.  The premise of the movie was cool; trying to find patterns in nature and, particularly in the stock market and this mathematician’s personal journey with schizophrenia, and the various conspiracy theories that emerge as a result of his work.

The movie sucked.

The movie sucked big time.

So at the end, Jess and I were sitting there and I asked her what she thought.  She said “It was…ok…I can see why people have liked it so much.”  I said something along the same lines and we headed to the kitchen to make a snack.  There was…something…in the air.  Not tension, but just something unresolved.  I broke the ice a little and said that the movie wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be and Jess kinda agreed.  The next step was some additional critique of the movie that Jess sort of followed along and agreed with and then at one point (I don’t remember who.) one of us just point blank said “I hated that movie!” and the other person said almost relieved “So did I!!!”

Why is this “A Case Study in Communication”?  Because it was a microcosm of communication in relationships.  It’s whether or not you liked a movie…straightforward, isn’t it?  The more we talked after we both came to the realization that we both hated the movie, we found out I was worried that she thought I was someone with really bad judgment and taste in movies and she was worried I thought she wasn’t educated or cultured enough to appreciate the movie.  That “something” in the air?  Imagine something far worse lasting for a lot longer than 10 minutes.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just dispel it right from the start?

mtthornton Matt

Sorry we haven’t been posting a lot recently.  Jess and I went on a long weekend trip to Puerto Rico.  We’re both a little more relaxed, a lot more tan, and looking forward to Spring.  I’ll post pics when I get the chance in the next few days.

Just as a quick review of Puerto Rico, Jess and I both highly recommend the trip!

mtthornton Matt

Oh, boy have Jess and I been bitten by the baby bug recently.  It seems that every time we see a cute baby, it turns into a 2 or 3-day period of reflection about whether or not we want babies or not.  Jess has been, I have to say, a bit more symptomatic in this case, but I still get it once in a while as well.  The other night, we were talking about how we’d teach kids responsibility and whether or not sending them to college is a privelege or a right for the kid.  I’m sure next week we’ll talk about what kinds of names we want for the kids.

We have a strategy.  Not a plan.  Plans when it comes to this fail miserably.  (You know, the whole God laughing thing.)  We’d like to enjoy being married for a while, travel a little here and there, and decide what we want to do when we grow up.  In the meantime, as you could see from my minipost before, you can look at pictures of our other babies.

mtthornton Matt

I’ve posted some pictures of the babies.  Have fun!

mtthornton Matt

Jess and I have started working out together and last night, we spent an hour or two cleaning for a friend that is visiting from out of town.

Jess: “We’re grownups.”

Matt: “Why do you say that?”

Jess: “We’re doing chores.”

Matt: “I don’t know about you but I’ve been doing chores since I was a kid.”

Jess: “Yeah, but you had to be told back then.”

I guess that’s the definition of being a grownup…doing chores without being told.

mtthornton Matt

Jess and I have for the most part merged our finances.  Jess hates dealing with money, so we sort of decided that I would be the CFO of the family.  Based on this post, one of my goals for this year was to get us paying off some of our debt (student loans, cars, etc.).  We also would like to buy a house in the future.  We’d also like to enjoy at least some of the “riches” that we deserve from 13 years of undergrad and graduate school combined without having to worry about whether or not we can “afford it this month”.  I came up with an initial plan but Jess didn’t like it because she wanted to be able to have an account I didn’t see…..”duhhhh duh duh duh.”  Nothing sinister about it.  She wanted to be able to buy birthday/Christmas presents without me seeing where things were coming from, which sounded reasonable.  With these requirements, I set about my task of coming up with a way of balancing everything and coming up with a way for doing all of this.  I thought I’d share the experience so that young couples like us would be able to maybe make use of a similar plan:

• Our plan is a very loose variant on the “stackbacks” system.  We have a family account that all of our direct deposits from work go into.  This is what is used to pay bills from.  Some of it is automated online through the payee, some of it, I do automatic bill pay through my bank.
• We added up our monthly bills and subtracted from what we earn a month.  The balance is what we have to live off of and pay off debt.  Jess and I agreed on an amount to live off of and an amount to pay off debt.
• The amount we’ve decided to live off of is the amount that we use for food, gas, and our “fun” money.  This money goes into one of our separate bank accounts that we have set up.  Jess uses a “brick and mortar” bank.  I use an online bank.  With that money, we need to split groceries and gas.  The leftover money is what we use for our “fun money”.  If I want to build my own PC, I save up the money and pay for it out of my account.  If Jess wants to buy beads, she takes the money from her account.  We will be responsible for having enough for groceries for the month, (This may be a sticking point…we’ll have to experiment to see how things go in the future, since it’s all so new.) but beyond that I don’t have to beg Jess and Jess doesn’t have to beg me for the “fun stuff” that we want.
• From the money we have left for paying off debt, we’re using a very perverted form of Dave Ramsey’s debt snowball.  The snowball is useful for people who are trying to pay off debt over years and years and need incentive to keep going.  Jess and I can pay off ours in a relatively short amount of time so we’re trying to maximize how quickly we can increase our monthly income.  (Based on the minimum payments for the debt.)  We arrayed the bills with this thought in mind.  What we follow of the “snowball” is that we pay the minimum on the rest and focus all of our payoff money on the first bill in the list.  All extra money that is saved from paying off a bill gets put towards paying off the remaining bills.  This plan actually resulted in us being able to increase our monthly living expenses while paying off our bills within the window that we wanted to pay it in.
• We have a small emergency fund to pay for expenses like doctor’s appointments (this is not too big of an issue because our insurance has a health savings account that the company contributes to, so we don’t have to worry about out of pocket expenses unless one of us gets really sick.)  If worst comes to worst, we have a credit card that we can use to pay expenses and then pay off with the money we’re using to pay off debt.  A catastrophic loss of income would impact us (both of us losing our jobs, getting sick, etc.) but we’re both working for companies that, while they aren’t recession proof (and are certainly sensitive to government spending), they are not retail/consumer industries or financial, so for at least the year, our jobs are probably safe…long enough to begin building savings.

This doesn’t answer every single detail of finances (We’re still trying to decide on how to save up for really large expenses for the both of us…large vacations to Hawaii, car downpayments, etc.) but this is where we’re starting.  Any ideas or feedback, please let us know.

mtthornton Matt