<p>…and not a dislocated head! :eek:</p>
<p>In an attempt to try and get non-saver S to change his spendy ways, H called and offered to match whatever earning S put in IRA from work this summer, up to $2500.</p>
<p>S: “So, if you do that, how soon can I get that money out?”</p>
<p>(H bangs head on table…) sigh.</p>
<p>Gotta admit, your S is always thinking! ;)</p>
<p>You mean, ya’ gotta come up with a vesting schedule??</p>
<p>OK, I’ll bite, what is a vesting schedule?</p>
<p>HI, it’s how many years you have to be in a pension plan in order to collect earnings.</p>
<p>For example, Company X might say: if you retire after age 60 with 10 years in the company, you get 50% of your pension. With 15 years you’d get 75% and with 20 years of service you’d get 100%. That would be their vesting schedule.</p>
<p>Some companies will match your 401K contributions, but if you leave before a certain number of years they take their contributions back. Once you’ve worked for them long enough, you get to keep their contributions when you leave - that means you’re “vested.”</p>
<p>OK, yes, I am familiar with vesting in the context of retirement & benefits, just didn’t understand it in the context of this thread. Thanks for the clarification. I don’t get benefits but H & S do from their employers. He’s decades with the company have vested him with room to spare.</p>
<p>Newest one:
Facebook post of a shiny Japanese motorcycle with camping gear attached on back.
Sigh, once they are over 25, we can only pray and hope they have fun…</p>
<p>Not a phone call that I’ve received from DS, but one I’d LIKE to receive from DS. His damn Droid – the expensive one I gave him for Christmas – has “gone missing.” I’m sooooooo p***ed at his losing yet another phone. He called from his girlfriend’s phone earlier today when I was out and said he’d call back in an hour. That was three hours ago. Grrr. :mad:</p>
<p>You can let DS buy his own replacement phone (online or at the store or wherever). We were able to scrounge one up from BIL on our same plan & give it to her so she could last until mid-Aug. She lost her phone & we have never found it again. If he or you know anyone with the same cell plan, they may have an old one you could get from them. D was 2 weeks w/o any phone or means of contact last time she lost her phone. 
They HAVE a landline as part of the price of their housing but never plug a phone into it and even when S did, no one ever answered it & they rarely even knew what the phone # was! S conveniently “lost” his landline phone at some point and it was neve replaced; never bothered buying one for D.</p>
<p>DD (one week before finals): My laptop won’t turn on, it’s at the Apple store, they don’t think they can fix it before Tuesday at the earliest, all my class notes are on it.</p>
<p>Me: Well, you have everything saved on those flash drives I bought for you, right?</p>
<p>DD: Um, I only put my iTunes stuff on the flash drives because the songs cost a lot.</p>
<p>Me: [Silence, except for thudding sound of head hitting table.]</p>
<p>Moral of the story: Sign up for Mozy or similar service for your doofus kid.</p>
<p>Our D was w/o her computer for an entire semester last year. We told her we wanted to work on it over Christmas break but she kept putting us off & it crashed as soon as she got to campus. Nothing had been backed up & we sent it for evaluation & then even sent the disk to “DataHounds” but nothing was salvagable. We were able to get a full refund but everything that had been on her computer was totally toasted, literally fried! The AmEx warranty folks ever paid for the postage and evaluation of the laptop charge. DataHounds did not charge anything as they agreed nothing could be recovered.</p>
<p>Not sure if D has learned to back things up now, a year later. She did have a friend who loaned her his old MacBook for the semester, so she was very fortunate to have something to use (tho she was mostly used to PCs).</p>
<p>Slightly off original topic, but on the “back it up” topic: I have encouraged my kids to e-mail their papers and school work to themselves. That way it is backed up in cyber space, and it is accessible to them wherever they can find a computer. That seems to get through to them better than having a thmb drive to keep track of.</p>
<p>MDMom: when my daughter was working on her thesis, I got an evening email every single day with the current draft of the thesis attached to it. She also emailed it to herself.</p>
<p>Me, I use Carbonite. My husband’s computer crashed about a year ago… and Carbonite got it all back, as if it never happened.</p>
<p>As for phone calls you don’t want to receive, this was last week’s from DS: “I have a shredded flat tire on I-84.” (He got it resolved safely, thankfully. All I could think was: I told you to replace your tires.)</p>
<p>VeryHappy - when my son’s phone died, he bought a Droid off Craigslist for $125. Got it activated to Verizon and he was all set. Lost all his contacts, of course.</p>
<p>D “lost” her phone at a party - when it was found the next day, it was non-functioning (I think it had been repeatedly stepped on, possibly in a beer puddle). Luckily a friend on her floor had an old phone she “loaned” D. Good thing, because I wasn’t about to pay for a new phone. D said she’d pay for one from her own $$ but she’s not eligible for any sort of discount on a new phone until this summer. (I forgot D had a previous phone that worked except that the vibrate feature had died - she could have used it except she “loaned” it to someone else a few months ago…)</p>
<p>Follow-up:The Apple store was unable to fix DD’s laptop, but was able to download the contents of her hard drive to an external hard drive she picked up at Best Buy (for half the price the Apple store quoted), so now she can access her notes at the college computer lab. She has Applecare, so the laptop will be sent off to Apple Galactic Repair HQ or wherever and fixed for free (including some long-time dings to the body and a long-time problem with a streak on the screen, neither of which she had wanted to bother getting fixed). DS thinks they may just give her an entirely new one. That would be a happy ending! Mozy or Carbonite is definitely in her future–she needs a safety mechanism that won’t require her to actually DO anything like download to an external drive or email to herself (you not only have to love the kid on the couch, you also have to accept her limitations, no matter how irritating).</p>
<p>She’s VERY lucky that they were able to do the download so quickly! It literally can be quite far that they ship her computer to (my GF said she is pretty sure her D’s was sent off to India several times for repair). They shipped it two or three times before they FINALLY got it right!</p>
<p>Based on a recommendation from toneranger, I’m an avid user of ClickFree. It does require an action – plugging the device into the computer every week or so – but when my desktop got fried, it was a lifesaver. Just downloaded all to the new computer, and life went on.</p>
<p>I’ve gotten calls from strangers from my son’s cell phone. They all start the conversation with, "I found this cell phone…: I’ve told DS that the phone is not Flat Stanley from elementary school. The last time this happened a very sweet voice with an Oklahoma accent was the caller. Sounded like a really nice girl. DS was playing in a match at OU, and she did get the phone back to him. I asked if a cute girl gave him his phone back and got a text message telling me that a big, hairy coach from NM gave him the phone and he didn’t know what the heck I was burbling about some sweet cute girl.</p>
<p>if they have apple phones or ipads…if you sign up for mobileme…it has a find my phone feature (or find my ipad) so it will locate your device for you…you can also then lock the device so no one can run up any charges, use it, or steal your info</p>