If you choose to stick with the music store, the price is 650 + $19 for each month you rented (19 is half of the rental price that you will never recover).

If you rent for a little while and then buy an instrument from someone else, the cost will be 400 + 37 for each month you rent.

If you rent for x months, you can set it up as an algebra equation to see when the break-even point is:
650+19x=400+37x

If you solve, you’ll break even in about 10 months. Before 10 months of renting, buying the $400 instrument is cheaper. After 10 months, it’s cheaper to buy it from the rental store.

If you want to know your total cost, plug the amount of months you’ve rented before you decide to pull the trigger in for x in each of the above formulas. You’ll be able to figure out how much time you can afford to figure out if the cello is right for you.

Such a waitress would also likely tell you that a two penny tip is a sure sign of an unsatisfied customer! I left such a tip in an all-night diner where I was treated like dirt. As I walked to my car, I heard the “plink, plink” of pennies hitting the window of the diner never turned to see where it came from.

Personally, if my bill was $30 and I only had $30.50 in my pocket, I’d call the waitress over and tell her so, and promise to make it up to her on a subsequent visit.

I agree on the mortgage advice too, just rent cheap, save your money and at least get a good emergency fund established. The transaction costs alone on a home are so expensive. Not to mention once you get in the home you’ll start noticing things you NEED to change.

One of the best houses we got dirt cheap because of the pre-marriage “divorce.”

Unless there is a marriage certificate, just say “no” to a mortgage!

I know next to nothing about this.

Digging around on the IRS site it seems that the answer might depend on the situation. Traditionally employees report their tips to their employer and then the employer files that. However it seems like there are now newer systems called the Tip Rate Determination Agreement (TRDA) and the Tip Reporting Alternative Commitment (TRAC). For these the employer may be reporting a minimum tip level. One doc from the IRS says : “The employer, as a participant in the TRDA, has agreed with the IRS to a tip rate for the employer’s establishment. To stay a participating employee, you must report tips at or above the tip rate determined by the agreement.”

If you read that last part it says you must report tips at or above the tip rate. So if the restaurant in question is in this agreement with the IRS then they require the staff to report a minimum tip level. That minimum level is probably the 10% number that other commenters mention.

The program is relatively new since it was first introduced in 1993 and as of 2004 the IRS site says they had 47,000 individual establishmnts in the system. I’m sure theres many more restaurants than that in the USA. One site I found cites a number over 700k.

So some people may be required to report a minimum tip % and some people may be left to the pure honor system of the employee reporting everything. Least this is how it looks to me.

“If the employer reports tips on the W2 then that is reported to the IRS as income and you can’t really change it on your income tax return.”

Not true. If you keep a Daily Tip Report, as the IRS recommends, then, no, your W2 allocated tip number is not used, the number you claim to have gotten in tips is used. The irs website explains this quite well, if you want to research more.

I don’t have kids but i have a nephew who is doing the Chinese daycare thing and it’s fun to hear him speak little words in Chinese. Good luck!

what if you insure your husband for what you feel you would need- income and expense wise, and your husband insures you for what he feels he would need to pay off the house?

then you don’t have to come to an agreement, but you both get what you need?

i think the premiums might even be similar this way- usually it costs less to insure the wife, but if he’s insuring you for a higher amount than you’re insuring him, the premiums might be almost even.

and i like it that you two agree you need life insurance. my husband insists he’s not going to die anytime soon. he drives me nuts.

Actually.. I think I am wrong about that come to think of it. If the employer reports tips on the W2 then that is reported to the IRS as income and you can’t really change it on your income tax return.

However if employers report assumed 10% and average tips are 15-20% then they’re already under reporting tip income to the IRS.

For the people claiming that a low tip means they lose money then they are wrong. You claim your tip income on your taxes so what you have withheld from your paycheck is not the end amount you actually pay on. Plus its almost a given that wait staff do not accurately claim all their cash based tips. I’m sure there are some super honest people out there who claim every unaccountable cent they get in cash but I haven’ met one yet.

By the way at least 7 states pay 100% minimum wage for wait staff including the biggest state California and Oregon and Washingon which all have minimums >$8. So its not a given that wait staff makes only $2.13, sometimes they make $8 or more plus your tips.

Everything I’ve read suggests basing the amount of the policy on your income and expenses, both monthly and funeral-related. My husband, however, wants to purchase a policy in the amount of the mortgage on our house, so that the surviving spouse can pay off the mortgage right away and have no worries about keeping the house. As we live in a HCOL area, this is quite a sum. If we just purchased what we need to pay expenses individually, we could probably get a policy for half as much that would last either one of us a good decade or more.

What do you think about the value of paying off the house outright after the death of a spouse (a house we dearly love, that will meet our needs for possibly decades to come) compared to the cost of a policy double the size?

My husband is first generation American and speaks conversational Greek (native heritage). I am American and understand some basic Greek. We don’t speak Greek at home. My inlaws watched the kids and speak some Greek but they speak a lot of English, too. I pushed to have the kids learn Greek (my husband remembers how he hated going). We go to a Greek Orthodox church and are relatively involved in all things Greek. This year is the first year of Greek school for the kids. I think it’s great for them but it’s a huge commitment. We leave every Friday immediately after school and get home at bedtime. The kids (ages 5 and 7)complain about going even when it’s at our church with kids they know from Sunday school. Once they are there though they are OK. They are really learning alot. The program goes for 8 years. This is a big commitment that I believe in but I wonder how long we’re going to be able to do this and how much the kids will learn/retain if we only speak English at home. The kids have to miss out on other group things as well as parties because of Greek school. I am thankful that there are various cultural venues for my kids to learn about their heritage: large family, greek church and greek language classes at their church. Non the less it is a huge commitment and I’m not sure what they will get from it ultimately. We are going to Greece this summer for the first time with the kids. We’ll see how that goes.

All of the following is based on several years of restaurant experience at several different restaurants, mostly in the Toronto area so there may be a few differences to your local area. One big difference from the American’s commenting is the rate of pay, when I last served we made a whopping $5.85/hr which is ridiculous but a darn shade better than $2. To my knowledge there is no obligation for the restaurant to top off your pay to the regular minimum wage if you don’t earn it in tips. I may be wrong about that but if such an obligation exists I never heard of anyone honouring it.

Any question of taxes aside, most restaurants require the server to “tip out” to any or all of the kitchen, the bussers, the hostesses, the bar and the expiditer (not sure about that spelling).

Yes, they have to tip the kitchen even if you didn’t order food and yes, they have to tip the bar even if you didn’t order drinks.

It’s usually calculated as a percentage of their sales for the shift. At my last serving job before I got out of that business we had to pay 1% of sales to the kitchen and 1% to the bar. We were also expected to give something to the hostess and the expo if they were booked for that shift (slow shifts they weren’t booked) but that was informal and not a specific percentage. So if I sold $1,000 I was expected to give the bartender $10 before I left and management collected $10 for the kitchen as well. These tip outs are generally expected regardless of what you make in tips for the evening even in the unlikely event that you made nothing.

If I made less than $20 in tips for that shift I would be paying cash out of my own pocket to the other staff.

If you were a $100 table and left me nothing I would owe $2 out of my own pocket for the privilige of having served you.

All of that said, I still don’t think the waitresses behaved appropriately I just wanted to show that yes, as a server you can theoretically work a shift and walk out poorer than when you walked in.

The Case-Shiller home price index for the DC area is 179.71. That means, as I understand it, that a house that sold for $100,000 in January 2000 would have sold for $179,710 in October 2009 (the most recent month for which they have data). Those numbers are not inflation-adjusted, but the total inflation over those ten years has not been anywhere near 80%.

Now, has the DC area become a dramatically more attractive place to live – in a way that *no* other city has – so that homes here today really are worth 80% more than they were worth ten years ago? I didn’t live here ten years ago, so I don’t know for sure, but it seems unlikely to me. (Certainly, there were government jobs here ten years ago too.) And if fundamental values *haven’t* increased that much, then (unless houses were *under*valued in 2000 for some reason), it seems to me that prices are likely to fall.