Coffee heat rising

Month: March 2011

I Ain’t Workin’ Saturday!

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Well…yes, I am. Gotta check off a passel of student exercises and get back to work on the OB-gyn book. Oh, well. By way of procrastination, let’s go a-lollygagging in the meadows of Blogland.

OMG! Have you seen what Tom Drake at Canadian Finance Blog is up to? He’s built an entire series around his jaundiced view of some very suspect insurance products. His most recent target: Identity Theft Insurance.  Mwa ha hah! This is great stuff. Don’t miss any of the entries in this excellent set of posts.

At BrokeProfessionals.com, 101 Centavos sweetly describes an awesome anniversary evening and makes a good case for the occasional splurge.

Frugal Scholar ruminates on product lifecycles, the state of frugality, and the art of using things up.

Bargain Babe wonders how much gasoline has to cost before you start to change your driving habits.

Here’s a useful post from Evan at My Journey to Millions: What to bring to your accountant. This year I tried to simplify and clarify the pile of paper that needed to be forked over. The less time your tax pro has to spend plowing through your paper or electronic debris, the less the job will cost you!

Money Crush experiences that sinking feeling after having lost track of the days…including the day the mortgage bill got automatically paid. Yipes!

Mrs. Accountability is a past master of food caching. Take a look at the incredible produce she scored: 60 pounds of it! And check out her strategies for preserving and storing it.

At The Digerati Life, SVB contemplates what life would be like in a tiny house. This post is replete with photos, highly entertaining. LOL! Have you noticed that these micro-castles amount to the ultimate escape fantasy for frugalists? The things are fascinating. Check out the stories from her readers in the comments section.

At Ultimate Money Blog, Mrs. Money suggests a passel of ways to use up eggs. This is always a mystification for me: I don’t eat eggs (they make me sick unless mixed with other foods) but occasionally need one or two to make biscuits and the like. Since an unadulterated egg makes the dog throw up, too, this leaves me with anywhere from five to eleven eggs to get rid of…they usually end up going in the trash, weeks and weeks later.

Nicole and Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured describe in detail what goes on during those wonderful three-month “vacations” people think university and K-12 faculty get to enjoy. Heeeee! You, too, can become a teacher and learn to work for free.

Uh oh…looks like the handyman is just pulling up to the house. Gotta go!

Security Doors…Probably Not

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i kid you not...

So I trot over to Home Depot last weekend, there to peruse that august box’s limited selection of security doors. As expected, every single one of them looks like prison bars, except for the pressed-metal kitsch with the cut-out silhouettes of hummingbirds, coyotes, and sombreroed campesinos snoozing against saguaros. Good god.

Moving on, this afternoon it was over to Lowe’s on the way home from the credit union. The nearest Lowe’s is out by the West campus, where the nearest branch of the credit union resides, placing both of these institutions in a locale that cannot be called, with a straight face, “near.”

Situation at Lowe’s: even more ridiculous. The only door they had that didn’t look like prison bars with a slot through which the guard passes your plate of slop is a Titan: twelve hundred bucks!

Give me a proverbial BREAK!

At least the cheaper doors at the Depot come with insect screen. You can’t get that with the low-end models at Lowe’s. The hideous metal mesh, which lets mosquitoes in, is sorta OK in front, because the random door-to-door nuisance can’t see you through it and so can’t easily tell you’re alone. But in back, where one would like to gaze out upon one’s expensively appointed landscaping, steel mesh is just not gonna make it.

Sooo… It looks like it’s prison bars with insect screen and a double-cylinder deadbolt or nothing. Just now  I’m leaning toward a .38 special.

Ohhhh well. While at Lowe’s, I did pick up a replacement for the impossible motion-sensitive spotlight in back, the one to which you have to take a screwdriver powered by male muscle to change the light bulb. When you get it  open, you find it takes an exotic size and shape bulb that requires a special trip to HD or the electric supplier to track it down. Really. I wish to be able to change my light bulbs all by my pretty little self, thank you!

Also got a rather nice, not very pricey motion-sensitive coach light, which will go on the back porch. The little cheapie I installed when I moved in is looking pretty ragged already—it really was junk of the best you-get-what-you-pay-for variety. This looks sturdier, and I’ve come to really love the motion-sensitive coach lights I installed last year in front. They’re reasonably attractive, and what a luxury, to have them pop on when you walk up to them!

I tend to wander off and leave that back porch light on. Then when I go out there by daylight, I’m peeved to see it was burning all night and half the morning. This thing will come on when Cassie goes out to pee during the pre-dawn hours but not burn kilowatts when it’s forgotten.

One sterling quality of the motion-sensitive light is that it clues you if someone’s outside in the yard. Or…if a moth flew by or the wind is blowing…

New sliding or French doors to replace the three rather sketchy sliders (like…maybe one that has an actual latch on it?) also appear to be prohibitively expensive.

Really, though: unclear whether functional doors are really necessary. After all, the door squealer and the stick in the slider’s track worked: the guy ran off without getting inside. The whole point was to alert me if someone tried to get in the house while I was here, and that was exactly what happened. Probably newer doors wouldn’t be a whole lot more secure than what I’ve got. They might save a few pennies on power, but how many years will it take to recover the costs from the power bills?

AMEX Windfall…Disappointing and Not Disappointing

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The annual rebate from Costco’s American Express arrived late last week. It was only $157, the lowest kickback I’ve ever received from that august credit card company. Compare with last year’s refund of $337, and the $210 they sent in 2009. Pretty pathetic.

Of course, what it says is that in 2010 I cut spending way, way back. The only major purchase I made was for M’hijito’s dryer—since he pays for everything in cash, we charged it on my card and he reimbursed me so I could get the kickback. If it hadn’t been for that purchase, the rebate would have been even less.

In one respect the small check is not so disappointing: it means I succeeded in cutting my budget to unheard-of low levels. Of course, that happened because I had to cut back: I had no money.

Like everyone else, evidently. Spending dropped drastically across the country as more and more Americans fell victim to layoffs, forced “retirements,” furloughs, and pay cuts.  Reports tell us we’ve seen a recent  uptick in consumer spending, with an increase of 4.4 percent in fourth-quarter 2010. That’s good for the economy, I guess. One could speculate about pent-up need, though: at some point along the line people simply have replace cars that crap out and household infrastructure items that break—such as M’hijito’s clothes dryer. As experience tells us, all these things are engineered to break at once. Will people keep on buying after they’ve replaced the things they can’t do without?

Oh well. I could’ve used a larger kickback. On the other hand, a couple of other windfalls blew in: the RASL payment and a couple of new jobs from new and old clients. So, what the heck. I’ve learned to limit spending, and don’t expect to increase it for the sheer joy of seeing a few extra pennies in the annual AMEX rebate.

How about you? Now that you’ve tightened your belt, do you intend to loosen spending if and when times get better, or will you continue to cultivate your new frugal habits?