Spring has sprung in these parts. The weather—never bad this winter, really—has been spectacular for the past several weeks. Everything is in blossom. At this time of year, the citrus perfumes the air like frangipani in the South Pacific islands. It reminds us that our strange, abstract human constructs of “wealth” are so silly as to be meaningless. Does losing a quarter million bucks in real estate and the stock market really matter when far more believable riches surround us?
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Wonderful as flowers are, I’m planting a lot more vegetables in the garden. That chard borders the pool, and probably will grow there through the summer. Soon its neighbors, the beets and carrots, will be ready to harvest. Meanwhile, yesterday in a part of the yard that gets more sun I put in some cantaloupe and some butternut squash, which I hope will grow from grocery-scavenged seeds.As times grow even harder, food is going to be more expensive; possibly even scarce. So, the flowers will have to make way for things that can be eaten.
The yard already has plenty of that: I’ve been scarfing tree-ripened oranges for the past two and a half months, and now the oranges, lemon, and lime are all covered with new blossoms. Next winter will see another bumper crop of citrus, I think.
Those oranges are sweet as candy. Eat your heart out, Warren Buffett!
Are there bills that you refuse to pay electronically, or am I the only maverick running loose across the range?
These days, I pay all monthly bills by EFTs, except the phone bill. I never trusted Qwest, which in the past was prone to sending incorrect statements full of phantom charges. But because they had been OK for several years and because I no longer make many long-distance calls, I opted to let them engross money from my checking account. That was a mistake—it added even more aggravation to the late, great Qwest saga. So, when I switched to Cox, which after all is just another giant squid of a telecom corporation, I decided to keep its tentacles out of my bank accounts.
Cox’s statement hasn’t arrived this month. It’s usually here by now: last month I wrote a check on the 6th, meaning the bill would have been sitting around the house for several days by then. The bill actually isn’t due for another couple of weeks, but they claim you need to get the payment to them ten days before the announced due date, to ensure it posts on time. So I had to call them on the phone, navigate the infuriating punch-a-button system (is there any question why so many Americans have high blood pressure?), then find out what’s owing and what their mailing address is.
Snail-mail is so passé that the employees don’t even know what the company’s address is. It took the human I finally reached two tries to find what she thinks is the correct accounts receivable P.O. box.
There are some corporations, IMHO, that can’t be trusted. The phone company is one of those: I want to see the bill before there’s even any possibility of money being released. Ditto that for credit cards. I never pay credit-card bills electronically: I do not want Visa or American Express to have any access of any sort to my bank accounts, other than through a check. I want to be able to see and confirm each charge in each billing cycle before sending money.
A credit-union rep once remarked that it’s not a good idea to pay insurance companies electronically, either. I do: long-term care and life insurance premiums are EFTed to the relevant companies. But I don’t pay the annual homeowner’s and auto insurance that way. Too squirrelly: you never know when they’re going to run amok with the premiums, so I want to minimize potential hassle if I decide to switch insurers.
What bills, if any, do you pay the old-fashioned way?
Okay, so this morning an HR rep called from the Great Desert University in response to my rant about Chase’s declining the debit card that came from the Unemployment Insurance folks. As you’ll recall, Chase was unable to disgorge the $48 the supposedly valid card supposedly contains.
You know, every time you think Big Bureaucracy gets as ridiculous as it is possible for the human animal to get, some bureaucracy outdoes itself.
My whine was the first complaint our HR rep had heard about this, but apparently it’s not going to be the last. In the course of discussion, she said the problem no doubt is that the card contains no payment, even though we’re past the week-long waiting period and past the second furlough pay period and so I am now eligible to start receiving Unemployment Insurance payments. This is because the university so far has not received the forms from UI that it must fill out and return to make the payments start happening.
Furthermore, she said, she was horrified to discover that the Department of Economic Security (DES), the state office that administers Unemployment Insurance here, is not online. When she was asked to send required information on all of ASU’s furloughed employees, she offered to send an electronic file.
No, she was told: they have no way of receiving electronic files. They have to enter all the information the old-fashioned way: legions of data-entry clerks punch in every number and character, copied off of hard-copy documents. They made her FAX 199 pages of data! Those FAXes contained employees’ names, Social Security numbers, earnings, and other private information.
“Well,” I said, “Now we know where we can get jobs after we’re laid off!”
“Yeah,” she said, “if you want to be a data-entry clerk at DES!”
By the time we finished laughing about that, the implication of what she had said soaked in.
“They are typing all that stuff to disk? That’s going to take weeks!”
“You’d think so. I mentioned that to them,” she said. “They assured me it was no problem. Why, they said, they had just finished entering the data for a casino that laid off its employees, and that was 800 people.”
“Uhhmmm….”
“Yeah. I pointed out that GDU is not a casino…that we have 10,000 employees who are signing up for Shared Work.”
“My god.”
“She said not to worry, they would hire new people to do the work.”
“But the state is laying people off in every department!”
“That’s right.”
Anyway, she concluded that Chase must have declined the card because there’s no way it could have any money on it. She was amazed to learn that the teller could not access the account to see how much (if anything) it contained. But because there is no way DES could possibly have entered data for 10,000 of our employees yet, the most likely explanation is that they sent an empty debit card.
And chances are, none of us will see any of this money until after our furloughs are over and we’re receiving our full pay again.
We all live in a yellow submarine Monty Python Show.
As Cassie and I were walking home from an early evening stroll last night, a neighbor stopped me to report that a stray pit bull has been running loose in the neighborhood for the past week or so, and that he had just seen it go into my yard. The animal was gone by the time he and I talked, but it was a mildly disturbing exchange.
Dog fighting—which mostly involves “pit bull” type animals of indeterminate breed related to the Staffordshire terrier—has become a serious problem in Arizona. A common entertainment of toughs and hardened criminals, this lucrative gambling racket thrives on breeding aggressive dogs and abusing them to the point where they are truly dangerous. The problem is not so much in the dogs as in their sociopathic owners. Pit bulls have found favor among street gangs, who use them to protect their drug operations and intimidate citizens as well as in organized dog fighting. In fact, the pit bull has become emblematic of the Bloods, a widespread violent street gang. The interest in pit bulls among celebrity thugs like football star Michael Vick and rapper DMX does not help matters.
The dog shelter where I rescued Cassie was, like most shelters in Arizona, overrun with pit bull-type dogs. It is located in an area infested by gangs, and so the predominance of pit bulls there is not surprising. What is surprising is that I managed to retrieve her before she was “adopted” to be used as bait in training vicious fighting animals, a common practice among dog-fighting breeders and trainers.
The Centers for Disease Control caused quite a flap a few years ago when it released a report saying pit bulls are responsible for about a third of U.S. dog-bite deaths. Groups advocating bans on specific breeds succeeded in getting legislation passed in several states and cities. In fact, though, the CDC did not say the problem lies solely with pit-bull type dogs but that—given enough provocation—any breed will bite, and the study explicitly said the group does not support breed-specific controls. During the study’s period, Rottweilers were the most commonly reported breed in fatal dog attacks. Together, pit bulls and Rottweilers are responsible for more than half the fatalities from dog bites in the U.S.
The sociopaths who breed pit bulls for dog fights use savagely brutal “training” techniques, and they will shoot dogs that lose or back down during a fight. The result, of course, is a dangerously mean-tempered animal, and over time, a breed that has been selected for aggression and viciousness. Anyone who thinks such an animal is not potentially dangerous is fooling himself. Fighting dogs that are not killed are often simply abandoned after a lifetime of horrendous abuse that inclines them to attack anything that comes their way—there’s a chance that’s how our visitor got here.
So, I wasn’t pleased. A street pit bull, which will not back down when confronted by a human and is usually impervious to pepper spray and blows from a well-aimed kick or stick, poses far more risk to Cassie than do our urban coyotes, which are fairly easy for an adult human to scare off.
And more to the personal finance point: I wasn’t pleased because this is yet another indicator of the encroaching slums.
Though my immediate neighborhood and the district just to the south and east are nice enough, these centrally located enclaves are surrounded by blight. One of the reasons that for years I felt a nagging sense that I should move someplace else is that when I worked on the West campus, I had to drive home and into the neighborhood from the north. Coming in from the north and the west takes you through miles of working-class neighborhoods and downright slums, which get crummier and more menacing as you approach our neighborhood. The northern fringe of our neighborhood has been dragged down by the noise and crime from a seedy shopping center, now mostly vacant after its anchor, a Fry’s grocery store, finally closed. The departure of the Fry’s, however, did nothing to help improve that area, mostly because as the real estate market deflated there was no way for the home values to go up. Values in that section of the neighborhood were already depressed, and as they have fallen further, a worse element has moved in and the properties’ deterioration has accelerated.
Driving in from the south and the east, as I’ve been doing since I started working on the Tempe campus, carries me through the middle-class and high-income neighborhoods that line north Central Avenue. These are pleasant areas, and so one tends to forget that everything to the west and the north is a dangerous slum. Out of sight, out of mind.
You can’t keep it out of mind forever, though, when the denizens’ rejected pit bulls are wandering through your front yard and when your neighborhood is under siege from burglars and home invaders.
My problem with moving, besides the fact that my property values are as depressed as anyone else’s, is that I happen to like living in the city’s central core. I don’t want to move out to the suburbs. I dislike Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler and don’t want to live there, and I have exactly zero desire to move to the only affordable middle-class venue I can find, which is Sun City. Except for my specific six-square-block neighborhood, which because of its status as a buffer zone between the rich folks and the gang-ridden slums to the west has always been underpriced relative to similar houses a block or two to the east or south, there is no other desirable part of the central city where I can afford to live. A one-bedroom apartment closer to the center of the city costs more than my four-bedroom house on a quarter of an acre with a pool.
Last night I crawled the online real estate listings and found three short sales or foreclosures over in the “good” part of my area. One potentially attractive house that was completely gutted many months ago is still on the market—the bank is asking $175,000 and entertaining any offer. My guess is the fix-up job will require about $100,000. You’d still end up with a nice house for about $100,000 less than the (former) value of surrounding properties. But it’s not livable—no kitchen, no bathrooms, no flooring, no nothin’—and so you’d have to live somewhere else for the several months required to rebuild the place.
Another house, about as far north as mine but only a block from swanky Central Avenue, is on the market for $230,000. It’s a short sale. This, too, is priced well below the value of neighboring homes, but it’s on the upper end of my price range.
The backyard is nowhere near as nice as mine, and heaven only knows what’s inside.
Deep in the heart of North Central—must be just one or two houses in from the coveted tree-lined boulevard—is this little gem:
It appears to have a nice kitchen. Two fireplaces, one of them in the master bedroom. What look like real wood beams in the family room. They want $289,900 for this, as is. In that part of town, they’re practically giving it away.
But that’s still way more than I can afford. I’d be surprised if I could get $230,000 for my house today, and that’s before I fork over Realtor’s fees and closing costs. The truth is, I can’t sell my house for enough to get into any better area that is not on the far-flung fringes of the Valley or in Sun City.
So pleased am I with the scheme to hoard “pool” groceries (can you believe it? No trip to any food purveyor needed this weekend!) that I’m beginning to contemplate the possibility of engineering other kinds of “pooling” budget strategies.
Is there, for example, a way to “budget” or “pool” repair and maintenance bills that fall outside the bounds of ordinary monthly bills? You know, those annoying costs that don’t quite break the bank but may keep you from hitting a savings or loan paydown goal in any given month.
It strikes me that some of these sorts of expenses can be put off and some can’t. Obviously, if your car breaks down or your tooth starts to hurt, you’ve gotta get it fixed. But other things…maybe no.
For example: I know that the pool filter needs to be cleaned out, the air conditioner will soon need its summer-season service, the chimney should be professionally cleaned, and I need to get the Dog Chariot’s oil changed.
However:
• The pool will run for a long time without a cleanout. It’s the first of March. That could be put off until the first of May. • The air conditioning service could be done this month or next; putting it off until April wouldn’t do much harm. • The car would be much happier if its oil were changed one of these days. • The chimney? Are you kidding? We won’t see chestnut-roasting weather for another nine or ten months! On the other hand, the local chimney sweeps will be feeling mighty hungry along about July or August and probably will offer some midsummer deals.
Suppose you listed the pricey projects that need to be done, from the most to the least urgent. You might work things so that you could schedule and budget for them on the order of one a month. You also could plan to do them near the end of a billing or income cycle. If an emergency expense comes up before then, you use the budgeted money to cover (or help cover) that and put that month’s near-routine maintenance bill off for a while. For example, I could run the air-conditioner into May before having it serviced, without doing much harm. If I had the AC service scheduled for March 30 and my car crapped out on March 15, I could simply put off the air-conditioner company for another month.
Some months, you’re lucky enough to have no major maintenance or repair bills. During those miraculous periods, you could put aside whatever you’ve budgeted for mind-bending little exigencies, building…oh, yes!…a “pool” of funds to cover out-of-the-ordinary expenses! If several months went by without any surprise bills (as happened to me this winter), you could end up with plenty of cash to cover a run of emergency bills…and as we know, it never rains but it pours.
The strategy would look something like this:
1. List the upcoming maintenance and repair bills you can reasonably foresee. 2. Order them from most to least urgent. 3. Schedule them, over the next few weeks or months, near the end of your budget or pay cycle. 4. If an emergency surprise comes up during a given budget or pay cycle, put off the scheduled project until the next cycle. 5. If no untoward expenses arise, get the things done on time. If something more urgent comes up that makes the scheduled project unaffordable, put off the latter for a month or more. 6. And if nothing needs to be done, take the average amount you figure these things cost (in my part of the country, around $80 to per episode) and put it in savings, building yourself a pool for not-quite-ordinary expenses. Over time, this will provide you a fund so that you don’t have to pay for these things out of cash flow—and maybe you won’t have to put off semi-optional projects in favor of surprises…maybe you can afford them both.
Okay! First project that needs to be done: oil change, tire rotation, and general car check! Let’s put up Chuck’s Auto Service to doing that on March 30, and see if we make it till then without any other expenses.
A large, ditzy, difficult freelance project was still parked on my desk this morning, maybe a third finished, due March 2. Along about midmorning, I snapped out of my stupor and realized hey! March 2 is tomorrow!
So, the entire day was consumed with copyediting this thing—at 11:00 p.m., I just wrapped it up. I’d already put six pieces chicken to marinate, planning to grill them, have one piece for dinner, and freeze the rest. Wanted to cook up some of the lifetime supply of potatoes to go with it, but given the size and awesomely time-consuming nature of the paying work at hand, whatever was to be done with the potatoes had to be accomplished a) without a trip to the grocery store to buy milk or anything else, and b) as simply and as fast as possible.
Enter an ancient Sunset Magazine cookbook, dating back to 19 and aught-90. Inside said historic document, virtually an incunabulum, I found one of those late 20th-century recipes better called “throwing food together” than cooking. But it met the standards above, and it turned out to be pretty tasty.
Baked potatoes and yam
You need:
-about 2 pounds potatoes, cut into 1-inch chunks
-about 2 pounds sweet potatoes or yams, cut into 1-inch chunks
-1 yellow or white onion, cut into small strips or roughly diced
-6 or 8 garlic cloves, chopped
-1/4 cup melted butter
-1/4 cup olive oil
-1/2 cup hazelnuts (I substituted pecans)
Preheat the oven to 475 degrees. Toss the onions, garlic and cut-up tubers in a large baking dish (about 9 x 6 or larger, at least 2 inches deep) with the butter and olive oil.
Bake these in the oven for about 15 minutes. After this period, stir them gently, as they will start to brown around the edges of the pan. Continue baking another 15 minutes.
Then stir in the nuts and bake another 15 minutes. Total cooking time should be around 45 minutes; potatoes are done when they’re soft. Season to taste with salt & pepper.
Once I got this to the table, I found it lacked something. Adding a bit of honey seemed to give it just what was needed. Not a bad little side dish, and probably something that would be satisfying for breakfast or, with some leftover beef added, as the basis for a hash dinner. I think it will freeze nicely, too. 🙂
