Another MobileMe Credit! 60 more days free!

So in addition to the 30 Day MobileMe credit from a month ago, they are giving another 60 days of free MobileMe credit.

My problems have not been too bad during this transition (I don't use their mail) so I'm getting 90 days total!! Plus they've doubled my space (back during the transition) which makes it 20 times the storage what it was a year ago.

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Universal Buy-In - The Michigan School Retirement System

So the school system in the State of Michigan has an option as part of it's retirement plan. You can actually "purchase" up to five years of work (called Universal Buy-In) and then then when you have twenty-five years of work into the system it actually counts as thirty so you can retire five years early. Now it's a convoluted formula based on your age, your maximum salary and how many years you have in the system; so the younger you are and the least you make they cheaper it is. Plus, they'll take the money out of your check pre-tax dollars so you can get into this deal for as about $35 less every two-weeks (that's $50 pre-tax). When I got in on the deal the plan was better, now they charge you interest on what you owe, so now you're better off paying it off fast, before you had to spread it out. (Warning: if you're bored now, the post really doesn't get much more interesting. The part in bold near the bottom is the slightly/semi-interesting part that caused me to write this post.)

I recommend this plan* to people who are in the Michigan retirement system and I always mention it to the new teachers at school. The younger you are when you start the cheaper this will be; I don't want to hear you say you can't afford it, you can start this at about $17 a week, that's not that much and it should really pay off in the long run.

In my case, I didn't hear about it until I had been in the system for a few years so it wasn't cheap but since I knew I'd get five extra years of retirement payments so it seemed like a deal to me. I had it spread out evenly over the years I had left so it's been getting paid down slowly.

More details: If you leave the system (aren't employed for a while by this system) they credit the years you've paid for and if you come back they'll redo the above calculation with you being older, making more, having more years in system and factor in interest. This didn't sound like such a good deal to me. Also, If you don't actually work the 25 years, you have to wait until you're sixty years old and it just increases your payment (or I think you can roll it in to some other kind of retirement).

So late last year I decided I wanted this paid off work was way too stressful late last year and I felt as if I could quit at any time, so I increased my contribution quit a bit. It wasn't going very fast so I stopped contributing to my other IRA/403b retirement-type things and put almost all of my check into paying this off (I lived off of savings in the meantime) and eight paychecks later I was done. Hopefully, putting that much in pre-tax doesn't goof up my exemptions come tax time.

This allowed me a few different things:

Touring the Nicoya Peninsula

Normally when I travel I like to stay put for a few days (at least a few days) and not keep repacking and moving to another place. I personally don't find that very relaxing and that's generally the point of vacationing, IMHO.

This past spring when we went to Costa Rica we (my friend Mark was with me) didn't sit still. We moved hotels almost every night and probably saw an additional town or two each day while we traveled. Not exactly my preferred way to travel but that's because we had a mission for this trip...

I love the small town Montezuma, located at the south end of the Nicoya Peninsula (just above Cabuya on the map to the right), but the mission was to find some other towns that I might like. I wanted someday to spend a few months in Costa Rica, my concern was that I'd rent a place for a few months and then realize that I liked the next town over since I hadn't done much exploring from that perspective.

So we drove around like cRaZy checking out towns and staying different places and checking out different areas to see if there was anything I liked better. Montezuma was still my favorite but it's definitely more isolated than some of the other towns. Tamarindo was a large town but a lot busier than I was hoping for but it pretty much had everything you need. Samara was a medium to small town that I didn't get to explore enough. But comparatively Montezuma was a tiny town, but for some reason seems to fit me just right...