Author: Maxsons Import_User

I went for a walk a few days ago.  I walked over the dam and up a footpath towards Ovcar and Kablar (Овчар или Овћар…незнам шта је тачно…и Каблар).  I walked a little ways and found this other footpath that veered off to the left towards the river.  I walked out it and kept walking…that is where I came across this table someone had made.  Here are two pictures.  First the table and second a panorama:

These cars are all over the place here.  They are 4 wheel drive (at least they have a sticker on the car that says so).  They look like they could climb a tree just sitting there.  I’d like one.  They have about 1.5-2 feet of ground clearance too!

[Update 09-20-2008 08:19:28] These cars are brand name LADA and come from the former Soviet Union/Russia.  Here is the wikipedia article.  Here is a link to a lada club in Serbia.

[Update 09-20-2008 08:37:20] Here is a new article about Ladas with some neat videos in it.

I haven’t written too awfuly (how do you spell that….awful + ly…awfuly…who knows.  If you know, leave me a comment) much about life overseas recently, so I decided today that I would write about something that is very prevalent…at least here in Serbia.  That is the dress (or lack there of).

I don’t really know how to explain this to people in the states.  People here wear clothes (no, we aren’t in the bush in Africa).  They wear clothes very similar to what people wear in the US.  It’s just different.  I can’t explain it.  Here are a few examples:

If you want some more examples, you can go here.  No, it isn’t like everyone runs around in their clubbin’ clothes all the time.  And it isn’t that they don’t wear clothes.  They are just…well…different (for some more on that, check out this article on close but not exactly).  No, I can’t really explain it.  Just know that it is different.  By the way, the girl on the bottom is wearing traditional Serbian Dress.  I haven’t seen anyone walking around in that.  I’d say it is kinda like German Leaderhosen.

Also porn is readily available.  Either in the many shops (that are on every street corner) has it just laid out with the other “normal” magazines, or the video store has it, or it is even on the TV after midnight.  It is simply amazing.  Not to mention the internet (which as we all know is a huge problem anywhere you are).

So, if you are living overseas (or thinking about it) something you may want to think about is how will you react when different  things are presented.  How will you react? As a Christian, how will you set yourself apart?

As someone living in the US, how can you support those living overseas?  How can you pray for them?

Oh, one of the easy steps you can take on your computer is to sign up for OpenDNS.  it is very easy to use and rather fool-proof.  it also works with multiple computers.  And it is free.  If you want some more information, drop me a line and I’ll let you know what I know.

I thought I would write this post to be of help to others who are thinking of moving overseas or who have moved overseas.  Managing money is very different over here.

First off, you need to figure out how can spend money.  I don’t know about you, but in the US, we used our credit card for everything.  Go to the store, pay with plastic.  Go get gas, pay with plastic.  Go get McDonald’s, pay with plastic.  Get a pop from the pop machine, bum a buck from a coworker because you don’t have cash.  Here, we can’t use plastic as readily as we could in the US.  At some of the larger stores, we can (and do), but most of the time we cannot.  This means we need a way to get money.

Our company pays us into a US bank account.  When we use our plastic to pay for things, it comes right out of the account (it is actually a debit card).  But, how can we get cash?  Well, ATMs are all over the place here.  We can use our card just as an ATM to get cash.  Our bank absorbs the first 10 ATM charges (after that, we have to pay); however, we still have to pay Visa’s 1% exchange fee.

That’s something else to look for.  If you decide to go this route, where will you get the best exchange rate?  For us, it doesn’t matter alot for the amounts of money we are talking about.  If I were to get out 2 or 3 thousand dollars, I’d make sure to look.  But, I won’t be doing that so it doesn’t really matter.

But then, once you have your cash, how are you going to spend it?  How are you going to do your budget?  You do budget right?  If not, go make one of those up.  Here are some basic amounts from our budget:

Utilities:  $200/month (electric, water, mobile, phone, etc….)
Internet:  $30/month
Food:  $400/month (includes eating out) 
Supplies:  $100 (diapers, wipes, cleaning supplies, etc….)

As always, YMMV (your mileage may vary).  You’ll have to work out some amounts for yourself.  But, once you have it, how do you track it?  That question plagued us for about 2-3 months.  We think we have a handle on it and that is the main point of this post.

We use MS Money (I know, I could–and should–use the free GNU Cash, but Cyndi is doing the computer side of this and is happy with money).  In the US, we just entered transactions as they happened, split them, and categorized them.  But here, we have 1 withdrawl every week or so…then we spend that cash.

Well, I set up a cash account in money.  When we get paid, the paycheck goes into the right account categorized like it needs to be.  When we withdraw money, we take it out of a generic Cash category.  We deposit the amount of the transaction into the cash account.  As we spend cash, we write that in a notebook we carry with us.  Every day, we write down what we spent.  Every week, we enter the amounts into the cash account in money.  We categorize them there.  We can then run the budget reports for several account (our checking, saving, and cash account) and see where we are across accounts (we transfer our extra utility money to savings every month to have for the winter).  That will let us see how we are doing.