February 2010

Low-key and DIY burglar repellents

February 9, 2010

Last weekend my now-former research assistant, who bought a house in the neighborhood shortly before Her Deanship announced the university would close our office and can us all, reported that the house was burgled while she and the kids were at church. The burglars missed her laptop, which was recharging in an out-of-the-way spot in [...]

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Tracking down an insurance policy

February 8, 2010

Now that Medicare is coming up, I have to find an insurer from whom to buy a Medigap policy. Yesterday I found an unexpected and valuable resource for insurance consumers, which I’ll describe below. First, by way of background for those who have not yet enjoyed the privilege of trying to navigate the astonishing maze [...]

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A couple of small household hints

February 7, 2010

This week two interesting articles in the Make It from Scratch carnival caught my attention: Tammy at Simply Beck’s Bounty ruminates on the practicality of cloth napkins relative to paper, and Beth at Fake Plastic Fish explains how to make ice packs and heating pads without benefit of plastic. Tammy points out that you can [...]

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Moments of Fame

February 6, 2010

This post crashed last week when FaM went down, just as I was almost done writing it. Today I haven’t much time…so this will have to be ultrashort. Three carnival masters kindly included Funny this week: Patrick at Cash Money Life hosted the Carnival of Personal Finance (Should You Pay Off Your Mortgage?). If you [...]

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Here come the new taxes…

February 5, 2010

The City of Phoenix, strapped to the point of having to lay off firefighters and police officers, has decided to institute a sales tax on food sold in grocery stores, which we’ve never had before. The new bite will be 2 percent, added on top of the existing 8.3 percent tax we pay on every [...]

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Odd$ and End$

February 4, 2010

First crack out of the box this morning, it was off to the credit union at the (relatively) nearby West campus, there to hand-deliver 15 pages of paperwork. Well over a month ago, M’Hijito and I had asked to negotiate a loan modification of the downtown house’s mortgage. They asked for evidence of every deep [...]

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