The Simple Wealth

1 pound linguine
3 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
½ pounds peeled or shell on, deveined shrimps
½ red onion, thinly sliced
3 gloves of garlic, finely minced
A handful of baby spinach
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
¼ cup grated Parmesan

For parsley oil:
½ cup extra virgin oil
¼ cup chopped parsley
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
2 gloves of garlic

Bring a big pot of salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until tender, about 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Puree all the ingredients for parsley oil in a blender or a small food processor, and set aside.

Meanwhile, heat a large sauté pan, add the extra virgin olive oil. Add the shrimps, spread them evenly in one layer. Sprinkle salt and black pepper over the shrimps. Cook the shrimps 2 minutes on one side and 1 minute on the other side, then take them out of the pan. Add the garlic and pasta, and sauté for a few minutes, turn off the heat, and add the parsley oil, spinach, red onion, shrimps and Parmesan cheese. Then it’s ready to serve.

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1.They perform unnecessary procedures to cover their asses from possible lawsuits if they fail to discover hidden problems. More procedures mean more money for them as well, and higher bills for you.
2.You can’t just nurse your baby as you wish. They rather starve your baby for slight chance that they may need to perform some procedures that prefer a empty stomach.
3.Different doctors and nurses do the same exams over and over and disturb your baby over and over. And they don’t trust their physical exams, they still prefer electronic exams.
4.They perform unnecessary routines and cause your baby to suffer.
5. Once you get in there, you can not just leave with your baby as you wish. It’s sort of like you submit yourself to the prison.
6.An injured or sick baby needs good rest, and hospital is the worst place for it.

I only learned these lessons after my own rushing my injured baby to emergency room last Saturday. On that dramatic morning, Michael was holding Maiya against his shoulder walking down the stairs, and he unexpectedly stepped on our cat lying on one of the steps, he was so shocked that he dropped our baby down the stairs. I was horrified to see what happened in front of my eyes. I ran and took her into my arms. She was crying with her eyelids squeezing shut and her mouth open and her jaws misaligned. Then when I saw one spot of her head dented, we flew to the emergency room at Kaiser.

It was a short drive, but still Michael ran a few red lights. By the time we got there, Maiya looked better already, and her jaws were fine. They physically examined her, besides a big swollen area on her head, she looked fine. They did a CAT scan of her head. The doctor said that there were two fractures on her skull but bones were not shifted and no evidence of dangerous excessive bleeding, and that it’s good news in general but there is small chance that more bleeding may occur later so he arranged Maiya to be transferred by ambulance to the Intensive Care Unit at Children’s Hospital-because Kaiser did not have space- to be observed over night. I was worried about ambulance charge so I asked him if we could take her there instead, he said yes and “but”. Another voice in my head teased myself that ambulance fee is insignificant compared to hospitalization fees, so I didn’t insist. I was concerned if there would be more tests to be done there, the doctor assured me that they just need to observe her.

I was worried and weeping. Katrina looked at me and told me that Maiya is ok. I wish I had listened to her, my 4-year-old daughter, and refused to go to ICU. In the silence of waiting, I just wondered myself why Michael dropped Maiya like that? The same situation happened to me before, I was holding Maiya walking down the stairs and stepping on the cat, but I held her tighter instead, I did not drop her to use both hands to regain my balance. Why is such a difference between mother and father? I talked to him about it later after things had settled down, he said that in that split second he actually did not remember he got the baby in his arms until he saw her hitting the stairs. This memory thing, like one story on the news last year, a father forgot his baby in the car and found his baby dead after he got off from work.
The doctor said that they need to give Maiya IV. I said that’s going to hurt. He said no, it won’t. A nurse came to do it, Maiya started to scream. She bruised her one arm, then she tried her other arm. I walked away. I couldn’t bear to watch this. It was going on and on. I came back. Another nurse was trying. It was hard to find a tiny vein underneath the baby fat tissue. She tried tapping the back of her palm. I walked away again. It seemed like a good 30 minutes it took when it’s done finally. I had to calm down the crying baby again on my shoulder.

Then the ambulance came with another doctor. They did a couple X-rays. Then they buckled her up in the bed to be transferred. She looked at me crying, upset about being away from my shoulder.

It was heavy traffic on the road. We got there. They examined her again. She was crying about it. Another doctor came to examine her. She was all irritated and crying. So the doctor said that she needs to have a CAT scan of her belly to make sure her internal organs were not hurt by the fall since the baby was crying at her touch. We said that her belly was fine, and she was just irritated by the new place and more people doing something to her. Of course the doctor did not go for that. Maiya got another CAT scan. The nurse gave her some medicine to make her sleepy through IV in order to do the scan. The result of the CAT scan was fine.

It was a long day, plenty of waiting around. I asked one doctor if I could nurse my baby. She said no. Another doctor who demanded the abdominal CAT scan came in the room, I asked her the same question. She said yes. The nurse came in and saw me nursing. He was very surprised but he went to verify with that doctor.

Finally they sent us to ICU. Maiya got a crib bed in the room with four other kids. It was quite noisy for quite a while.

The next day morning, a nurse came in the room to draw blood from all the patients in the room. Maiya screamed again. She poked a needle underneath her skin and moved around a bit to find a vein. At least she was much better at doing this. It only took her a few minutes. Maiya was still crying quite a while afterwards.

Then Michael came. Maiya started to smile at people again. Nothing much was going on. The trauma surgeon came and told us that Maiya didn’t need anything from their department and her files had been transferred to the neo surgeon. Basically we just need to wait for the neo surgeon to talk to us and give us blessing and we can leave. We were waiting. Michael asked our nurse, she said that the neo surgeon usually came to work at 11 am on Sundays. Finally he came to talk to every body in the room. He said that he had not looked at the scans yet but he would go to take a look and came right back to tell us. So he came back and said that the bones will heal by itself and we can go home anytime. It took another two, three hours before they let us leave.

We came home. I was puzzled what exactly we stayed in Intensive Care Unit for? What all these extra scan and x-rays and tests for? It seems that all it needs at the most is a CAT scan of the skull and a neo surgeon to look at it. Did we stay over night in another hospital simply because there was no neo surgeon on duty then? Why did she need IV?

I took The Baby Book from the bookshelf, and read the section on head injuries:

“The great majority of falls involve injuries to the scalp only, which bleeds profusely if cut or forms a large swelling from broken blood vessels beneath the skin. They go down quickly with ice packs and pressure…..
If baby is alert and conscious, ….apply ice packs on the cut or bump for twenty minutes, and begin a period of observation before you call your doctor….
After a period of observation, depending on your baby’s condition, you may or may not want to call the doctor. Besides any when-to-call-the-doctor list, there is an overriding inner voice treasured by mothers. I have learned to trust this monitoring system as much as the most sophisticated electronics.” by William Sears, M.D., and Martha Sears, R.N.

I wish I had read this first before we flew to emergency room. Maiya didn’t have any signs of brain injury mentioned in the book, such as increasing paleness, disorientation, unusual breathing while sleeping, crossed eyes, persistent vomiting, convulsions. If we had stayed home just a little longer, Maiya looked much better already, and I would not be so alarmed. Her recovery is amazing. The first day she cried a lot, mostly because of all the things the doctors and nurses did to her. The second day she looked pretty good. She didn’t seem to be in pain a lot. They only gave her Tylenol a couple of times. Really what she needed was just her Mommy.

It hurts a mother’s heart to see her baby suffer from examinations and tests and needle poking, and well again when the bills come. It’s kind of strange here in the states, a lot of people don’t have medical insurance, for people who do have through their employer the benefits are shrinking each year. As if this is not bad enough, medical staff in hospitals do unnecessary procedures and cost patients even more money.

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Related Post:

•File complaint with Kaiser

•Hospital bills from the incident of my baby’s fall

A sad story of foreclosure

I just heard a sad story of a friend of mine from her neighbor that their house went into foreclosure and she went back to South America with her little girl. Her husband was making a lot of money in mortgage business when the housing market was hot. First they bought a duplex for about $700,000, then they purchased a new single family house close to 1 million dollars. Soon after they bought the new house, his income dropped sharply. I visited her in her new house a couple of times, they didn’t have many furniture to fill that huge house. It felt kind of empty. They moved back to their duplex after a few months. I was wondering what happened to their new house. She told me they rent it out. Now she is gone. Her neighbor, our mutual friend, told me their duplex got foreclosed. She learned that from someone putting a foreclosure notice on the window. Apparently they lost both houses to foreclosure.

It is so easy for us to feel rich when we are making big bucks. They made that mistake. So did I. Financial freedom is having more than enough of passive income from investments to pay one’s fixed expenses. It doesn’t matter how much money we are making right now, before we achieve financial freedom, we are not truly rich. That’s the first misconception we need to change about wealth–high income doesn’t mean high wealth.

The housing market is in big trouble. And it’s not just on news, happening somewhere else. It’s here and everywhere.

Here comes tax rebate to rescue the economy

I read the news article on yahoo news, Rebates could stave off long recession:

“The tax relief is intended to jump-start the economy. Politicians, worried about a recession in an election year, put aside their normal bickering to speed the proposal through Congress.

Nonetheless, there is debate over how effective it will be. Critics say debt-burdened consumers will use the money to pay bills rather than spending the checks and spurring growth.” By Martin Crutsinger

And another article from the Times, Tax rebate could be President Bush’s best legacy:

” Mr Bush’s plan is remarkably similar to the one he launched in 2001 within days of taking office, when the economy was struggling with the burden of the collapse of the dot-com boom.” by Gerard Bake

This sounds very strange to me, and I couldn’t comprehend this. The government borrow money to send us a check in the hope that we would spend it to boost the economy. What are you going to do with the tax rebate?

1. Save it

2. Spend it

3. Pay down some debts

We can all spend it to help the economy temporarily, but is it good for our personal finances? We have been conditioned to consume, and strangely the more we consume, the better the US economy is. I’m happy to have an unexpected check coming my way, since I’m planning to start my Jars system, once we receive our check, the money could go into different jars. I’ll be totally happy to blow 10% of that money away. Only 10%.

How big is the tax rebate check?

Raymond’s post, breaking down the details of the 2008 economic stimulus plan and your tax rebate check, has a chart illustrating the amount of rebate you could get based upon your AGI.

I was watching news on TV a couple days ago, and saw the news that AT&T is increasing their price steeply on their phone services:

“The price for popular services like call waiting, call waiting ID, three-way calling, call forwarding and repeat dialing will rise Jan. 21 from $3.23 per feature to $3.99 — a nearly 24 percent increase.

The price of caller ID will jump from $6.17 to $7.99 (an almost 30 percent increase). Busy and delayed call forwarding climbs from $2.75 to $3.99 (45 percent), and anonymous call rejection ascends from $1.90 to $2.99 (57 percent).”–San Francisco Chronicle

Since this news is related to my recent post on saving money on home phone bill, I think it’s a good idea to make the news known to you, be aware of the price hike. I took a good look again at the 40 features included in all plans of Joiphone for free, they are really cool:

• Follow Me Anywhere-allows incoming calls to reach you at a different number.

• Call Blasting–allows incoming calls to find you at multiple numbers.

• Voicemail via phone-If you want to check your voicemail using a non-Joiphone, call 1-954-375-2220. When you hear the Dial tone you enter your telephone number with a 1 in the beginning, then press #. When you hear the tone you now enter your voicemail passcode and then press #. You can check your voicemail, change your greetings and make any changes associated with your voicemail. If you use your Joiphone, pick up the phone and when you hear the dial tone, dial *98 , then enter your JoiPhone telephone number with a 1 in the beginning and press #. When you hear the tone you now enter your voicemail passcode and then press #.

• Voicemail via email–You first need to configure your voicemail through JoiPhone. Once you log in using your username and password, click on ‘Messages’, go to the top toolbar and click on ‘Properties’ and then UM Preferences. Then click on ‘External Email’ and verify the mail where you want your voicemail to be sent. Select ‘Copy’ from the drop down, and then click on ‘Save’ on the top left corner. Once you receive your email just open the attachment and listen to your message.

• Voicemail via web–Just login to your account on Joiphone website and check your voicemail.

Plus a lot of common popular features, like caller ID, call waiting. The reason that I copied the detail instruction for voicemail via phone and email is because you may not find it right away on their website. I actually didn’t know how to check my voicemail until I write this post. Because I use answering machine at home, so I don’t really need their voicemail service. But there were times when my answering machine was turned off accidentally or another call unanswered right away while the line was busy and went into Joiphone voicemail, so it’s good to know the instructions of how to check voicemail. If you don’t have answering machine, voicemail service is great. If you do have an answering machine, you can turn it off when you travel, since it’s much easier to use their ” follow me anywhere” or voicemail via phone or web or email features.

I’m glad that I have dropped AT&T services.

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I came across Stephen Martile’s post on his blog a few days ago and learned about T. Harv Eker’s Jars System, and then I found Achiever’s post on the same subject. When we went to book store and hang out there last weekend, I grabbed T.Harv Eker’s book, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth, and read the section he talked about the Jars system. The idea is every time you get a paycheck, put them into different jars( bank accounts) as follows:

Financial Freedom account (FFA) 10% –Money in this account is for investing only, make withdrawal after you retire, and even then only withdraw the “eggs”.

Long Term Saving for Spending (LLSS) 10% –Money in this account is for things like traveling, down payment for a house, car, children’s education, etc.

Education (EDU) 10%–Money in this account is for books, seminars, events for the purpose of educating oneself.

Necessity (NEC) 55%–Money in this account is for fixed expenses, like mortgage, rent, food, utilities, phone, gasoline, insurance, etc.

Play 10%–Money in this account is to nurture one’s inner spirit, to balance the responsible, saving part of oneself. The idea is to blow 10% away every month for fun things, like ordering the finest wine with your dinner, pampering yourself with massage. By balancing saving for the future with playful spending, you attract more into your life.–Wow, Michael will love this.

Give 5%–Money in this account is for giving to people in need, donation to charitable organizations, etc.–We can start from giving to our parents, and grow and expand our generosity to the world.

I like the idea very much. I have been doing the financial foundation work, tracking income and expenses and cutting expenses for several months now, and have been feeling that I need to do something else but not sure what. I have been feeling that I need to invest but at the same time I feel currently we don’t have money to do anything else besides paying bills. When I learned about the jars system, I know this is just what I need. I talked to Michael about it briefly and he also liked the idea very much. I was surprised. I haven’t even mentioned about play account to him yet. Usually it’s hard to get him excited on the subject of finances.

ING Direct has been sending Michael $25 bonus check if he opens an account with them. I have been considering to do it but never did because I felt too much trouble to have many accounts. But now I feel that it simplifies our life to have many accounts using the Jars system. It doesn’t matter how many accounts you have now, if you don’t assign a special purpose and give money a name, it’s a mess, money only means paying bills. It doesn’t matter if you are able to put in the suggested percentage of money into each account now. Just set it up, open a few (online) accounts, buy a few jars and line them up somewhere in the house, seeing the jars will help to form the habit to separate money as T. Harv Eker said. We need to learn to manage our money now, not later, not when we have more money. That day may never come if we don’t manage our money now. The better we are at managing our money, the more money we will have.

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