Did you know you can sell coupons—the kind of stuff that comes in junkmail—at online sites? Saturday’s PlayNooz reported on a New York postal carrier who was arrested for the sale of coupons he’d ripped off from residents’ mailboxes and peddled on eBay. A commenter observed that some coupons, such as the ones that come from Penny’s, are worth ten or fifteen bucks. Or more…one shoe store here routinely sends out 30%-off coupons, and all its stock is in the $100-plus range.
Turns out this enterprise is not very difficult. You simply collect coupons, organize them in some intelligible way (such as by category or by likely frequency of purchase), and advertise your stashes on eBay or Craigslist. You can even consider collecting coupons that are listed online. I have found that you can go here for Amazon coupons and a ton other top retailers. Apparently you can get as much as 50% to 75% of the coupons’ savings.
There’s actually a site that will let you resell coupons from sites like Groupon, Living Social, or Tippr. How exactly you’d make a profit on coupons you have to pay for is unclear, unless you could charge a premium the ones that sell out fast.
What a hoot! Talk about your passive income…just let that junk mail roll in!
Image: Ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola, ca. 1888; believed to be the first coupon ever. Scanned by uploader from Wired (Nov 2010), Vol. 18, No. 11, p. 104. Public Domain.
Jack the Handyman, literally a Jack of All Trades, came over yesterday to lighten my bank account considerably. Lordy! Three hundred and fifty dollah to repair a foundation crack aggravated by some previous owner’s half-baked DIY patch job and ingress by water, to sand and paint an exterior door that Satan had bought with a white primer and never actually painted, and to climb up on the roof and repaint three sun-blasted gables, along the way prizing out some badly applied filler that was shot and replacing it with a new, longer-lasting product. Though I’m low on cash at this time of month, I didn’t feel too bad about his fee: he worked from around 10:00 a.m. until after dark, mostly doing hard physical work that takes some skill and know-how.
The damage on the west side of the house was a little alarming, and kind of odd given that the yard there is so xeric almost no water is applied to the cacti and there. We figure either rainwater is backing up against the foundation or someone in the past had a garden that they watered copiously. Since the pitch is away from the house and too little rain falls to eat into the concrete, it’s probably the result of someone’s ill-advised flower garden. At any rate, it looks like he did a decent job of repairing it, this time with concrete patching compound, not stucco.
Southwesterners love stucco.
I loved a number of posts around the web this week. Check out some of these:
• At Canadian Finance Blog, you’ll find a hefty dose of common sense about the commonly accepted buy and hold strategy.
• Speaking of common sense, here’s another shot of it at Sustainable Life.
• At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche is discussing her wedding plans with the family, and wonders if it’s OK to be married in a “borrowed” wedding dress—actually an offering from a friend.
• Budgeting in the Fun Stuff got into Free Money Finance’s March Madness contest—FaM entered too late to make the cut (gotta stay alert to this thing next year!). So go on over to FMF and vote for BiFS!
• And if this round-up had an editor’s choice, it would definitely be Steve’s outstanding post at Brip-Blap, “Why We Need Immigrants.”
Yesterday SDXB and I hiked to the top of a hill in a desert preserve park on the west side of town. In the fine, clear weather, we could see for miles in all directions. And what could we see? Sprawl.
Mile on mile on mile on mile of sprawl, most of it cheaply built housing for people who don’t earn much (the median household income in Arizona is around $47,000—not great, when you figure for most households it represents two people’s salaries). In square miles, the city is now larger than Los Angeles, the avatar of ticky-tacky sprawl.
When you consider the sheer size of the population, it’s amazing that the cost of living here is relatively low. The reason for this much-ballyhooed low cost of living is low wages. The business interests that control the local government see to it that right-to-work laws keep wages down. Phoenix residents earn well below national medians. In Arizona, for example, educators and librarians earn about $5.20 an hour less than than the median national pay in their trades. In the legal profession, hourly pay is $14.23 below the national median for comparable work. Healthcare practitioners earn almost $6 an hour less than their counterparts elsewhere.
What are all these people doing here? Today, hard to tell: the most recent figures I can find are dated 2005. Since then, many residents have moved away, as jobs have disappeared and homes have been foreclosed.
But in 2004, about 8 percent of greater Phoenix metropolitan area workers were employed in construction. If you added in those who working in “financial activities” (presumably in banking and lending) and in trade, transportation and utilities, you come up with 617,000 people: that’s 36 percent of the workforce.
So when Arizona was booming, over a third of its population was employed in building and selling houses. In other words, what we were doing was employing people to build and sell houses for people who build and sell houses.
The data above don’t count people who work for construction suppliers like Home Depot, lumber yards, masonry suppliers, plumbing and electrical supply houses, and the like; it may not include groups such as Realtors, interior designers, landscape designers, and nurserymen; and it certainly doesn’t include government workers engaged in building inspection, environmental oversight (such as it is), transportation planning, and tax collection. In 2004 the largest employer was the state of Arizona, followed, as a distant second, by Walmart.
Well, obviously, if the proper study of Man is Man, then the proper economy of humankind is serving other humans. Still, something seems oddly circular here, not to say unduly limited. Our problem in this state is that we don’t produce much. Through much of the twentieth century, our economy was based on the Three C’s: Cotton, Cattle, and Copper. All of those activities made something. Generally the manufacture wasn’t what you’d call environmentally friendly, and in fact these enterprises tended to siphon resources out of the state to the moneybins of vastly wealthy men back East. However, something at least came of it all.
Tourism, which arose in the early part of the century, eventually expanded to join the Three C’s as a major economic engine. And then: Construction.
To accommodate this fourth C, our august leaders made a conscious decision to rid the state of agriculture, reroute water to the cities and suburbs, and pave over the fields with asphalt, concrete, and stucco. What all the sprawl-dwellers were going to eat was never explained…we needn’t worry our pretty little heads about that, eh?
Yesh. Allegedly responsible civic and state leaders quite deliberately decided to create the vast, overweening, and ultimately disastrous fungus upon the land that anyone can see from the top of any of the low hills in the valley. It was as though they studied Los Angeles, identified everything L.A. did wrong, and then chose to do that.
An economy that produces nothing and does nothing other than feed on itself is doomed. IMHO, we’re seeing that doom, here as in Las Vegas and in other Southwestern cities. Our leaders took us down this path; our citizens didn’t seem to have the sense to realize where we were going, and now…here we are.
Speaking of the downtown house, as we were in a comment to yesterday’s post, late last week M’hijito and I finally came to an agreement with the credit union over the renegotiated mortgage on the downtown house. Though it’s not what we feel would make sense, it’s better than we feared.
As some will recall, when the Great Desert University canned me and all of my staff, we wheedled a loan modification from the credit union, whose loan officers temporarily gave us a 40-year term at 4 percent. This brought our payments down into the more or less affordable range, but of course it meant that each monthly check paid pennies toward principal.
Not that it mattered, because the house is some $56,000 underwater. One would prefer not to pay $206,000 (the amount owing on the loan) toward a house whose value is now, at best, $150,000.
The loan modification was only good for a year. This month, it came time to renegotiate.
We asked, as we pictured a committee of loan and credit-union executives rolling on the floor in helpless laughter, for a principal reduction. We did not expect to get it. And of course, we didn’t.
What we got was a 40-year loan (39, actually, with a year now gone) at 4.75 percent, with the same old balloon payment that comes due now in 12 years. We were not pleased with the balloon. M’hijito used the Male Voice to try to persuade them to drop that clause. Didn’t work.
So, there we are: if values stay flat until 2023, we will be screwed, screwed, ge-screwed.
However…
This arrangement drops our payment by about $300, lowering my share by $200 and M’hijito’s by $100 a month (he owns 1/3 of the investment). For him, it means he gets to live in a nice house for about what rent on a box in a people warren would cost him. For me, it means my 2011 income will cover my share with so much to spare that I can run the air-conditioning at 71 degrees all next summer!
🙂
What more could a person ask?
Actually, for me it means that I not only get to have a life, I also may be able to save enough to buy a new (to me) car in about two years. Should our payment arrangement continue past the time when I can no longer work, the present monthly amount will not require me to draw down an excessive amount from retirement savings.
It also means, I believe, that when M’hijito finishes graduate school and wants to return to San Francisco, we will be able to rent the house for enough to cover the mortgage payments. He can leave at any time, and when we have renters in there, I won’t have to draw down anything pay the mortgage.
What will happen in 12 years, when the balloon comes due? Well, we’ll have to deal with that when it happens. I’m not very worried, though. By 2023, we will have paid the principal down to around $177,000.
If the worst happens and the most pessimistic prediction comes true, the house will lose another 16 percent this year. Assuming it begins to rise after that, at a rate of around 3 percent, in 2023 its value will be $174,400, a shortfall of about $3,000—not an unacceptable amount to have to bring to the table to get rid of it.
If real estate drops 16 percent this year, stays stagnant a year, and then starts to rise at a modest rate, then in 2023 the house will be worth around $169,000. That won’t be good, but even then, it’s less than a $10,000 difference—not an intolerable loss. Over a 12-year period, we could easily set aside that much to buy ourselves out of the place.
Personally, I don’t think values actually will drop that far in 2011. My crystal ball says central-city values will drop about 6 percent this year, stay stagnant in 2012, and then start to rise at about 3 percent a year. Three percent is a pretty modest rate; in normal times, real estate here has appreciated at around 3 to 5 percent per annum, over the long haul. Averaging the annual home appreciation rates between 1980 and 2000 gives you a figure of 3.66 percent.
It’s going to take a long time for Arizona’s economy to recover, because jobs are gone and, with our dunderheaded leaders doing all they can to shoot every one of us in the foot, it will be several decades before employment returns. However, eight in ten Arizonans still have jobs.
Those jobs are ill-paid and getting iller-paid. Meanwhile gasoline prices are soaring—some stations are already selling gas at over $3 a gallon, and we’re told to expect $4 a gallon by next summer.
Think of that. If you earn $10 an hour, a pretty typical wage around here, you will have to work an hour to buy 2½ gallons of gas. The drive from my house to lovely downtown Tempe, not a long commute compared to the drive from the ghost suburbs of Litchfield Park, Laveen, and Maricopa, is 36 miles round trip. My car gets 18 miles to the gallon, and no, on $10 an hour I most certainly could not afford to buy a new vehicle. That means it would cost me 8 bucks a day, $40 a week, just to drive to work—not counting junkets to grocery stores, clothing stores, the kids’ schools, Home Depot, Costco… For a $10-an-hour worker, half a day of every work week will be consumed by the cost of driving to work. And if you lived in one of those bankrupt new suburbs, you could easily double that commute cost.
The legislature has targeted the public school system for destruction. Thus it won’t matter where you live—the local schools out by the White Tanks will be no better than the ghetto schools in the central city.
Everyone who still has a job is gunna want to live closer to work, preferably near the light-rail…which passes within walking distance of the adorable little house. In the past, that impetus has pushed up values in the central city, and it will again in the future.
So, I feel fairly confident that if values drop 16 percent anywhere, it will happen in the outlying suburbs, which all along have absorbed the worst of the real estate losses.
The problem with our downtown house is that there are four foreclosures within a block of it. The house across the street appears to be vacant and also probably has been foreclosed. That’s what’s driving down prices there, compared to other North Central neighborhoods, which have lost value but on a much lesser scale. Because of the neighborhood’s central location, the presence of the new lightrail, the proximity of a very upscale area, and the extreme cuteness of the midcentury houses (which appeals to both straight and gay DINKs), buying there during the bubble was highly speculative. A lot of flippers bought houses with no intention of living in them, and most of those speculators had no real funding behind them.
A half-dozen forfeited properties have already been practically given away by the banks. My guess is there’s no more than another half-dozen to go. They’ll be off the market in a year or 18 months. Give things another year to settle down, and then values will start to float back to where they were before the bubble started to inflate. If the rate of increase is anemic compared to normal real estate growth rates, it’ll be around 3 percent.
