What a month! 3 exams, a couple of teeth and a brand new baby boy. If you got kids, you’ll understand, right?

So if you ever end up having to plan something like this (not that you can always consciously time it so well) then i have a a tip for you…

Make sure you got a loving, enduring and patient wife backing you up and supporting you all the way. It makes it seem so easy. Thanks, Lolly! You simply rock! Your honorary degree is almost there

Seriously. Jack was due just after the first exam, Macro Economics. So we figured it’d be alright ‘cos we’d have two weeks before starting to prep for the next two to settle in. Then Jack decided… “Neh. Too warm and cosy in here, thanks. Think i’ll stay a little while longer.”

8 days later (over due), little Jack says: “Hello, world!” That was one week before my last two exams: Financial Modeling and my major: Applied Mathematics. Oops = MC^2?

Needless to say, we -and i do mean “we”- decided to forge on and today, on my last exam, as soon as the invigilator said: “Pens down. Your time is up.” a chorus of angels hauled out the trumpets and started singing “Hallelujah!”. Shew!

Until next year…

If you’re servicing a mortgage at the moment, and you happen to come into some money, the “best” advice you’re probably going to get is: “put it in your bond”. Not bad advice, i guess, but i’m not so sure it’s the “best”.

**DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor; am not pretending to be one; and certainly not qualified to be one. But i can kinda do the numbers, so this looking at it purely from a mathematical perspective.

When it’s not really the “best” advice is when you are servicing other debt, at higher interest rates. Then the numbers say: kill that debt first, and _then_ look at the mortgage. So if you’re servicing a credit card, overdraft or vehicle finance (which can typically be higher than prime) and your mortgage is sub-prime, service the higher first.

But more personally, i recently faced the opportunity of trading in my vehicle for a newer one (which would have been nice) and i was figuring out what to do with the trade-in amount and work out where it would best pay dividends. On an aside, i’m of the opinion that buying a vehicle is NOT a financially smart move at all- no matter how you try slice the numbers. You will always lose (and i’m not referring to collectors’ classics). So look after your car- treat it nice, drive nice, service it regularly so you can leave it in your will. After all, it’s __just__ a car, right

So down to the maths… Note: the numbers have been changed slightly to protect the prudent.
New car: R150k at 15.5% APR over 60 months.
Existing debt: R640k mortgage (±30 months into the schedule) at 14% APR over 20 years.
Trade in on car: R50k. What to do with the R50k? A) Plough it into the bond. B) Use 100% of it as a down payment on new car. A or B, what do you do? The “best” advice i received was plough into the bond and save thousands in interest on the bond! Uhuh. That’s half the truth.

As a down payment on the new car, I reduce the repayments from R3.6K to R2.4K, and end up saving, in effect, R44k in interest over the term. Not bad, not great.
In the bond, i reduce the interest _over the same term_ by R33K. Worse. But not a surprise. And that’s the important part here: the same term. 60 months. You see, over the remainder term of the mortgage, that advance payment will save you A LOT! But now you’re comparing a value of money of two different terms: 60 months versus N years on the mortgage, so don’t be too surprised if you draw bogus conclusions. Afterall, once you’ve finished paying off the car, you’re R3.6k deeper in the pocket which you can then plough into the mortgage anyway.

So, on face value, it’s more favourable, over the same term, to service the vehicle as quick as possible and then see to the lower interest obligations. But there are better options… which is the other half of the truth: discipline.

Add in some fiscal discipline into the mix, and suddenly your options are wild. For example…

Put down the down payment on the car, saving an extra R1.2k in repayments each month on the car, but then put the saving into the mortgage over the same term. Suddenly you start to save R64K in interest. Mmmm… Or…

And then there’s this. Which really was the best option (Thanks, A)…

Take your old car for a shmancy valet at about R200, pretend it’s new and “pay for it” anyway at R3.6k per month. Now you’re saving close to double your previous best!

The bottom line is; if you’re in the market for a car and can afford X, but you’re servicing other debt, service that debt first- forget about the car*. Unless it’s an absolutely necessity (and looking better than the Jones’ is not a necessity- i checked) you probably don’t need it.

*Forgetting about the car, probably anywhere in the world, is really hard to do though. In South Africa, households spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on vehicle financing, which says a lot about how we feel about our cars. Somehow, cars have so (too) much appeal. So much so that having 4 reliable wheels is just never enough. There’s always going to be something really “cool” about a car that makes you just wanna have it. And the price tag is just irritating. Can you say X-Trail… or Fortuner?

Say no more… Cape Town is the officially the new South Pole. Ohmygollygoodnessgraciousnessme!

And yes, i am aware that it gets colder than this in other parts of the world… but trust. For us beach addicts here, where the sun fun never sets… the 3 months of winter we have to endure, every year, this IS cold. Brrrrrr….

While i was having my foot scratched and scraped clean by the on-duty doctor at the hospital, a colleague of his walks by and a quick “hallway discussion” ensues. What i overheard could have easily been mistaken for a geek conversation. More TLAs, FLAs and AIGs bubbled along than i could follow.

We geeks have nothing on doctors and surgeons. We’re just poser wannabes

Goodbye, SuperLoo. You are sadly missed

We often jest (or at least i do) with scenarios that, technically, can be considered lies. For example (really arb):
My wife wants to know where the car keys are, and i’m hiding them in my jeans pocket.

Wife: “Have you seen the keys?”
Me: “Keys? Car keys? Nope. Haven’t seen them.” (Sneaky smile optional depending on how far i want to take the “joke”

Technically, i lied. But, yet, in context, i didn’t. The tricky bit is, how do you teach a child the difference?
‘Cos i can see that being quite confusing. And they catch on sooner or later and play the same game right back at ya, but then there’s lieing.

It’s almost like you don’t need to worry about it, they learn, but… is teaching that “lieing” is ok as long as it’s a game, ok?
Or do you call it something else, but then what’s the difference between a lie and not telling the truth for the sake of a prank?

Jessie turned 6 months today. In the bigger scheme of things, it might not be all that significant; for “new-born parents” it’s quite a milestone!

But beyond reaching milestones, without actually even reaching/trying, it occurred to me today that there’s nothing we can do to recapture/relive these last 6 months. They’re gone. Whatever joys and discoveries we shared these last 6 months, they’ve come and gone and making way for new ones. Freaky awesome

Yet i can’t help but reflect that time passed, is, well, time passed and it only lives on in memory, yet at the same time, just how absolutely precious this time gone by has been. And then i got to thinking about our own rat race. When 6 months go by we don’t even blink or bat an eyelid. Maybe at the end of the year we spare a moment, pause as it were. Even then, we’re too busy planning 2008, 9 and 10 to really indulge the road travelled…

Yip, we plan ahead (and we need to) but not at the sacrifice of today.

there’s nothing common about “common” sense…

We use similes and metaphors quite frequently, particularly in software. Everything is so figurative and you spend all day coming up with names for things that are “like” real world objects. Of course, that’s not counting those things which are not like anything else other than what they are in software. This is not about them. And this figurative language we carry over into customer engagements too, explaining to our dear customer why the original quote does not hold since they subsequently added the kitchen sink and “tinted windows” Not to mention explaining why that takes an extra ‘x’ weeks.
During one such session, it suddenly dawned on me halfway through the metaphor, that the client started extending the metaphor and the proceeded to re-apply it back to the software project, taking it too literally, and ended up explaining to me how software works based on the metaphor at hand. Doh! And all i was trying to do was help educate and understand…

I think IT, in general, has come under heavy pressure to talk the language of the client- and indeed, we are encouraged to keep getting better at this. Make it more accessible so that they understand… Why?

I don’t understand that thing my dentist uses to fill a tooth; nor do i care about the gadget the plumber used to seal the pipes with; and yay for the structural engineer who … well, i really don’t know what he did. But i still use and pay for their services. Did they go to great lengths to explain the intricacies of their tasks? Nope. Did it matter. Not really. I engaged them- they told me how much and how long- i paid, they did it. Moving right along.

I think the more we “passively force” non-programmers to understand what we’re doing, the more confusion we sow. Particularly when the metaphor we use is so accessible, we have no idea how their experiences, assumptions and understandings will impact on the point we’re trying to convey.

As programmers, we owe it to ourselves to forge the language (jargon) we have created, not with the purposes of creating a divide, but so that we can just get on with the job, efficiently. Without the extra fluff. Of course, that’s not to say don’t make an effort to help a client understand, if they want to understand on technical terms. Dumbing it down doesn’t really help, except maybe in polite social discussions