Shift of Tow

We want to find a financial adviser to help us get everything in order and start aggressively planning for retirement.  How do we go about finding a good one?  I know what questions to ask potential advisers, and I know what to look for and expect, but I can’t even FIND one!  Citysearch and Google are no help; I’ve called two that I found from those resources and no one bothered to call me back.  I’m happy to pay a fee for service, but don’t even know where to look.  Help?

Start by looking into the plans you have available to you at work, if you haven’t already. You don’t necessarily have to use them (though, if they match what you save, absolutely use that plan up to the point where they stop matching, at least), but the various agencies they use to manage their 401(k) or 403(b) or what-have-you retirement plans will have a representative assigned to your workplace. Set up an appointment with one of them, or more than one, and talk with them to see what they have to say about retirement planning.

If that route doesn’t appeal, or if you’re already all set with your workplace’s plan and are looking for something more, look for companies rather than specific advisers. See if, say, Fidelity or Merrill-Lynch has an office in your area, and set up an appointment with one of their representatives. You should shop around.

You should also ask around amongst coworkers and friends and see what kind of financial management they have in place, and you could even try emailing a neighborhood listserv or two to see if there’s anybody independent out there that’s getting used.

You probably know this already, but you should also read and read and read about money management. I recommend the book Your Money or Your Life, to start, and I’m a big fan of Get Rich Slowly when it comes to finance blogs. There are tons of others out there, though. I recommend this for two reasons: You should know what you’re doing with your money, and most financial “advisers” aren’t going to be purely out to help you. They want to make money, and the way they make money is off of the fees you pay when they do anything with your money. It’s important to know when you need a broker and when you don’t.

I hope that helps!

If you’re in a relationship where the spark has gone, there’s no physical intimacy and you annoy the heck out of each other most of the time, but neither of you has the desire to go out and find “someone else” and you still care for each other, what else would trigger a break-up? Just “I can’t be truly happy around you” doesn’t seem a strong enough reason to go through the disentangling of two enmeshed lives. Opinion?

Oh, honey. I’m sorry that it’s like that. “I can’t be truly happy around you” is definitely a powerful enough reason to leave someone in the right context, but there are a lot of other factors, too. I’m not going to say whether you should stay or go because 1) you didn’t tell me much about the relationship and 2) it’s something you have to decide for yourself. I went through something similar a while back, though, and here are some useful things to think about while you’re making your decision:

Are you staying because you’re afraid to be alone? Because you’re afraid that your departure will destroy your partner? If those are your best reasons, it might be time to leave. The first is unhealthy for you, and the second shows a huge lack of respect for the person you’re with. It is condescending and cruddy to your partner to think that they won’t be able to live without you; what you really mean is that you can’t imagine their life without you in it.

Are you staying because you love your partner, but it’s not working? Get therapy. Work on it. Set a deadline after which you must either be okay with staying, or you’re going to leave, because you should only invest so much of your life in trying to make a failing relationship work.

Are you staying because you have children together? Young children should be your first concern, because they’re still so malleable. Are they going to benefit if y’all split? I think that sometimes it’s going to be better for the kids if the parents split, but sometimes it won’t.

Are you staying because you made a vow to stay? If you don’t want to break your promise I can get behind that, but you’ve got to find a way to be happy within the relationship. Or you need to leave and not get married again until you’re sure you can keep a vow to stay. Lord, we get married too lightly in this country, and I say that as someone with a divorce in her past.

How long have you been thinking about leaving? Is this something you think about once a year, or once a month? When you think about it, does it cause a big downward spiral, or are you just irritated? How much of your emotional life is spent worrying about this relationship?

What do you want from a relationship, and how does it differ from what you’re getting? Make lists.

In the end, there is rarely a perfect, crystalline emotion that tells you to end or begin or stay in a relationship, though I do think that there are sometimes pivotal moments that clue you in to your right answer.

Also, if you’re not happy, get therapy for yourself along with any couples therapy you do. It’s easy to blame your relationship or your partner when you’re unhappy, and while sometimes you may have it right, that might only be a small part of your story.

Good luck, and may you find a way to joy no matter which choice you make.

I had never made or even tried pot pie before, but Poor Melissa saw this recipe when we were flipping through the Foster’s Market cookbook and said “oooh,” so I thought I’d try to make it. I was more pleased by the squash I fried to go along with it than I was with the pot pie itself, as you can tell from this picture:

It’s not that the pot pie was bad, really. It’s just that, for one thing, I bought the cheapest vegetable broth I could find and didn’t realize until I was in the middle of cooking that the stuff had high fructose corn syrup in it. That pretty thoroughly grossed me out. It’s broth, why are you going to add stuff to it? Doesn’t that make it cost more to make? What in hell are you hiding, adding extra sweetness? Plus, I was ashamed of the fact that I bought pastry to put on top of the pot pie rather than making my own biscuits (like the recipe suggested). Third, I think that it really needed more gravy, in the end. I wonder if the cheap pastry I bought sucked it all up, or if I cooked it too long since I halved it.

In case you want to give it a try, and do it better than I did, here are the ingredients (mostly as written in the book. The Foster’s Market cookbook recipes usually make enough to feed eight to ten people, though):

• One 4 pound chicken (I used fake chicken; we’re vegetarian at home. You could probably just use any kind of chicken pieces without bones.)
• About a dozen biscuits formed but not baked—the recipe the book calls for is herbed biscuits
• 6 tbsp butter
• 4 carrots, peeled and chopped
• 4 ribs celery, chopped
• 8 oz. button mushrooms (I used crimini—I usually do when a recipe calls for button, because crimini has more flavor)
• ¼ c. all purpose flour
• 5 c. broth (I used veggie with HFCS; I recommend you do differently)
• 2 c. green peas, frozen or fresh
• 1 tbsp fresh or 1 tsp dried sage
• Egg wash (1 egg beaten with 2 tbsp milk)

Like I said, I didn’t use the biscuits, I didn’t use chicken, and I didn’t use egg wash. If you top yours with biscuits, just brush them with the egg wash before you bake it.

Here’s how to make it:

Preheat the oven to 375F.

Melt the butter over medium high and add the carrots, celery, and mushrooms. Cook those until they’re light brown.

Add the flour and cook, stirring frequently, 3 or 4 minutes longer. Slowly add the broth and whisk constantly while bringing it to a boil.

My whisk is problematic and kept getting bits of vegetables stuck in it:

Add the peas and sage, and season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 10 to 15 minutes.

Add the chicken, or “chicken,” and stir it in.

Transfer the mess into a baking dish (9×13 if you’re following these directions and don’t halve it), then top it with whatever you’re topping it with—uncooked biscuits, pastry, puff pastry, or even phyllo.

Bake it for 25 to 30 minutes, then take it out and eat it.

It was pretty alright. Poor Melissa liked it more than I did, I think—I’m not willing to eat it as leftovers, and she is. Then again, Poor Melissa will eat just about anything set in front of her and is not picky like I am.

The squash was pretty sexy, in any case, and the meal was a nice variation from our quesadilla-stir fry-beans and rice routine. This was the first time I’d breaded and fried a vegetable in my new cast iron frying pan, and it was so easy to get perfect squash. Soon I am going to make fried green tomatoes, oh yes.

I know I should exercise more, that it’s good for me and blah, blah, blah… how do I motivate myself to actually do it? I mean, any exercise at all.

I’ve struggled with this, too, for as long as I can remember. I go through periods when I’m exercising every day, or at least pretty often, and then I’ll go the same amount of time without exercising much at all. During this years-long battle, here are some ideas I’ve put to good use:

1. Do it first thing, even if that means getting up earlier. The times I’ve exercised most consistently for the longest are the times when I’ve made it a part of my morning routine (something else I recommend). Right now, I get up, have breakfast and coffee, make myself half presentable, and then I go walking. I thrive when I have a solid morning routine, though; if your mornings can go any old way and you don’t care but you’ve got all kinds of evening rituals, it might be easier to add exercise there. Other reasons morning exercise is nice are: You don’t get a chance to talk yourself out of it, nobody’s going to invite you to drinks at 7 AM to interrupt your workout time, you weren’t going to run errands in the morning anyway, and you hopefully won’t wake up too tired to exercise.
2. Find something you like, or at least can tolerate. I’m always up for a walk, so long walks are always something I can get myself to do without too much angst. I’m also a big fan of video games that bring the exercise, like DDR or Wii Fit. It’s foolishness to try to get yourself to go do things that you really hate doing, so don’t decide to do aerobics/join the gym/take up weight training when you know you’ll hate it, just because you feel like you ought. It won’t work. What you’re trying to do, here, is find something that’s sustainable over a long time, and that’s far more important than getting the best workout. Other fun exercise ideas: Go throw a Frisbee, a football, or a softball around in a park. Explore all the parks in your city. Hike. Kayak or canoe. Turn your music on really loud and dance for a while each day. Go to museums and walk around a lot. Take a dance class. Take a martial art. You can often find cheap classes through community centers or community colleges.
3. Make it easy. The more obstacles you put between yourself and the exercise you’re going to do, the harder it’s going to be to get yourself to do it. So, store your bike where it’s easy to get out, don’t join a gym that’s far away (or at all, I say, if you can help it), and have a good pile of clothes you can wear to work out. You can buy some weights and work out at home, you can go for a run in your neighborhood or drive somewhere close by where there’s a lot of parking (like a mall, which are great untapped walking locations unless you’re over sixty). You don’t have to get fancy about working out, and I think that sometimes we put up these obstacles as excuses to avoid it.
4. Unless, of course, you want to get fancy about working out. This doesn’t work that well for me, but I read a tip a long time ago that money you spend now on exercise equipment that you’ll use is money you won’t spend on hospital bills later. There’s some truth there, so I say if you like shopping, can afford it, and like to have neat gear, go get yourself a nice pair of walking shoes, a cool new bike, or some clothes specifically made for exercise. Having the use of new things to look forward to can help with motivation.
5. Commute by walking or biking. When I lived close to where I worked, I was guaranteed to get at least a half hour of walking in most days. More, if I didn’t catch the campus bus.
6. Set goals. Decide you want to be able to run a mile—or a 5k, if you already can. Decide you want to be able to do 100 push-ups. Figure out how to get to there from here. This has given me mixed results, but sometimes it works.
7. Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day, just make sure you do it the next day.
8. Always exercise on Monday. That suggestion comes straight from The Happiness Project, but what she says makes sense. If you start out well, it’s easier to continue well.

There you go. These ideas have all helped me get off my ass to one degree or another.

Y’all should feel free to comment and let us know how you convince yourself to work out.

Poor Melissa and I have been in a bit of a rut when it comes to food, which is bad enough when you find yourself eating stir fry for the third night in a row, but really a problem when you realize you’ve had Cook Out more times in the past week than you’ve had food you cooked yourself, often with milkshakes. In the past we’ve solved this problem by implementing Project Recipe-A-Week*, which means cracking open some cookbooks, looking for an unfamiliar recipe that sounds good, and then making it. The last time we did this, we ended up adding black bean soup to our repertoire. Given the fact that I’m at home these days and Project Recipe-A-Week sounded like a great blog topic, we’re giving it another shot. This means you, dear reader, are going to get pictures and a recipe each week until we tire of it.

This week we settled on corn chowder, and looked through the Foster’s Market cookbook (one of my favorites) and another book I have called 1001 Lowfat Vegetarian Recipes. The Foster’s corn chowder recipe has roasted red pepper, which I do not love, so we used the one we found in 1001 LVR—a book that I’ve used a few times with middling (pasta salad with mozzarella) to excellent (portabella bruschetta!) results. We chose corn chowder because there’s a lot of sweet corn and potatoes right now at the farmer’s market, but much to my shame I ended up using store bought vegetables (and one homegrown herb) to make the entire thing. I couldn’t even use my farm share onion, because it had a rotten spot right in the middle. The ingredients are:

2 cups fresh (or frozen, thawed) whole kernel corn (I used fresh)
1 medium onion, diced
Vegetable oil
2 c. stock (I used vegetable stock)
2 c. cubed potatoes
½ c. sliced celery (what an odd measurement! I used two stalks)
½ tsp dried thyme (I used about a teaspoon of fresh)
2 c. milk (or half and half) (we used skim milk and it was great)
Salt and pepper, and parsley or chives to garnish (I didn’t use garnish)

Here’s a picture of the meez, as a friend calls it:

You can see the fresh thyme from the garden on top of the celery and potatoes.

Here’s how you make it:

1. Sauté corn and onion in a bit of vegetable oil in a large saucepan until the onion is tender.



2. Process half of the corn and onion in a food processor along with all of the stock, and then return it to the saucepan.



3. Add potatoes, celery, and thyme and heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer until the potatoes are tender (about 15-20 minutes). Add some salt and pepper, if you want it.



4. Add the milk and cook until it’s hot.

I served it with some smoked mozzarella and tomato salad (mix smoked mozzarella, some tomatoes, salt, pepper, a tiny bit of olive oil, a little wine vinegar, and maybe some basil). We both loved it.

*Poor Melissa absolutely does not think of it this way. I, on the other hand, cannot think of a solution to any problem without sticking a “Project” in front of it and capitalizing the rest of the words. Hyphens give it that extra project punch.