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Why Hiring Movers Makes Financial Sense

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Moving is a process that is complicated, expensive, and very stressful. As a means of alleviating the expense, many people choose to improvise on the process of actually packing, loading, hauling, unloading, and unpacking their goods. They feel like that it’s one small way they can save money in the midst of all the other expenses swirling about.

Unfortunately, this decision can backfire. Professional movers such as North American have been successful for decades for a good reason: It pays to hire professional movers.

It’s best to make this decision early on so that you have lots of time to review prices and to schedule the successful bidder. So if a move is somewhere in the near future for you, for any reason, consider these points so that you can get started sooner.

Road Efficiency

Few people have access to large box trucks or 18-wheelers for a move. Getting them requires the arduous process of getting a rental truck, which may or may not be available on your moving day. You may also have to operate a vehicle that you aren’t comfortable driving.

Plan B is to borrow pickup trucks. Lots of them. This brings about all kinds of potential disasters, such as wrong turns, dumped loads (we’ll discuss more on that in a moment), and damaged vehicles.

A professional company will come to you with vehicles designed for exactly what you are doing. They’ll know how to drive them safely, and the vehicles will have enough capacity that you don’t spend the whole day loading and unloading tiny loads and making dozens of trips.

Property Preservation

Movers are professionals. They know how to package, load, secure, carry, and place your valuables inside the trucks and inside your new home. They will bring enough personnel to handle the job effectively and safely.

Doing the move yourself can sound good in direct costs, and it truly is cheaper up front. You call in a few favors, provide some pizza, and get everything done within a reasonable time frame.

But the hidden costs show up after your plan is put into motion. One friend wrenches his back unloading the truck. A mirror breaks during transit. A bulky dresser gouges a hole in the wall as it’s carried inside. You get the idea.

Using professional movers will prevent most of these problems, and if the mover is properly insured, that will take care of the rest.

Knowledge Base

Getting settled into your new place will require lots of input. Movers may not seem like they’d be that good at interior design, but many of them have been in a lot of homes. They’ve seen countless ways to arrange furniture and other contents in a way that maximizes space, optimizes traffic flow, and otherwise makes the home more livable.

As professionals, they’ll take the time to discuss these things with you. They only want to move that heavy piano once, so they’re going to help you think it over. Your friends and family will be content just to get it in the door and put it down.

There are some things you can’t help about moving. It will be stressful. It will be scary at times. It will be complicated. And yes, it will be expensive, even though you can deduct certain costs. But saving money on the big picture isn’t nearly as important as executing your move in a way that will not only be financially better but will also prove to be less stressful, scary, and complicated, too. A professional mover is the ideal method for getting from one home to another with the least possible fuss–and cost.

Taking a Break from the First-World Problems…

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And now for a cuppa coffee (or two) out in the Leafy Bower, courtesy of some very balmy weather. It rained a little yesterday, out of a warm sky. Today is gorgeous, a few high mares-tailish clouds keeping the glare down, perfect for yard-loafing.

Yes, it’s absolutely true, you’re right: I should not make up another pot of coffee, not at the absurd prices I’m paying. If I indulge myself with a third & fourth mug of the perfect elixir (one French press pot holds two mugsful), it doesn’t take too long to go through a pound of beans.

First-World problem.

In that vein, I happened to notice, as I was entering this week’s receipts into the budget spreadsheet, that the last time I bought a pound of the same dark-roast coffee, the charge was two dollars less. So, either The Little Guy (the shop’s proprietor) has jacked up the price by 12% or our friend the tip-begging counter clerk quietly inflated the bill. So I think we’ll be buying coffee somewhere else after this.

First-World problem.

Do you own a Cuisinart food processor? Did you know that  in some models the ultra-sharp blade has been recalled? Mine, which I use once every eight or ten days to concoct dog food, is one of the affected models. Since these things are known to fall apart and install ultra-sharp, mouth-slashing metal shards in the food, you might want to check your model number.

One of the tasks of the day was to call the number on the page at that link (the supposed form you can fill out is nonexistent). So after more hours, starting at 7 a.m., than I wish to reckon laboring over Chicana/Latina postmodern feminist theory, along about 10:30 I finally got around to that.

First-World problem.

This morning I read and tried to render more or less literate an essay by a junior-level tenure-track type who argued…  oh, God, it defies belief. This woman dragged a fussy baby to an academic conference. When the poor little infant made, as unhappy infants tend to do, a distracting racket, she was asked to take the baby out of the meeting room. She interpreted this outrage as clear and present evidence of White (always capitalized) privilege and anti-feminist, anti-Latina hegemonic discrimination.

It’s all about me, hm? Never seems to have occurred to her that maybe the woman giving the speech would have liked to be heard. Or that maybe, just maybe some people at the meeting would have liked to be able to hear the speaker.

First-World problem. With a vengeance.

Meanwhile, the lead author on the latest Chinese magnum opus e-mailed asking if I would please re-issue my statement with just her name and institution on it, since it’s her grant that’s funding the research and Nanyang Tech has to pay just her, not her and her co-author. No problem.

Does China have First-World problems? Hmmm… If you’re at Nanyang Tech, no doubt. It’s in Singapore, not China. As for her young co-author, recently escaped from that august institution with a Ph.D. in hand, now ensconced at what sounds very much like the equivalent of Yankton State College? Maybe not so much.

First-World problem. Qualified.

Yesterday I actually succeeded in getting through another 10,000 words of the client’s 89,000-word F&SF novel. Finished along about 8:30 or 9:00 p.m., in spite of not getting started before about 1:30 or 2:00 — thanks to church & grocery-store run.

It’s Monday, so I needed to deposit the (very nice!) check said client had mailed me, which didn’t arrive until Friday evening. In knee-jerk fashion, I put “drive to credit union, deposit check” on the to-do list. Finishing the Latina feminist rant and the very cheering and interesting artist’s statement for the Latina feminist journal (some people really are outstandingly wonderful…), there was nothing more for it but to haul myself to my feet and get dressed and drive to the credit union and…ugh.

I…do…not…want…to…drive…to…the…credit union. So much so that one delaying tactic entailed cleaning the bathroom and scrubbing the toilet. That’s how much I didn’t want to drive to the credit union.

But it was a useful delaying tactic, because while I was applying Clorox toilet bowl cleaner to the john in the middle bathroom, it occurred to me that I could avoid driving to the credit union by…yes…by electronically depositing the check. There’s a unique idea…

As usual, scanning the thing correctly was a bit of a hassle. But the CU has hugely upgraded its magical-digital-deposit function, so once a check is scanned, it takes all of about 30 seconds to deposit it.

First-World problem, on steroids.

This left me with having to actually sit down and…you know…work for that check the guy sent. I’d like to get through another 10,000 words today — unlikely, since it’s 2:30 now and my enthusiasm for work isn’t any better than it was an hour or two ago, when I sat down to this little squib.

Emptied the dishwasher, reloaded the dishwasher, cleaned the kitchen, scrubbed the tile countertops, put a load of laundry in the washer.

First-World Problem.

Cleaned up the back yard; hauled the dog shit and trash out to the garbage.

World-Wide problem.

Sprayed the weeds in the alley. Pissed because the young pups who moved into Sally’s house won’t do that, which means that by mid-summer yet another fire hazard will be piled up along their alley fence. Is there some part of “Fourth of July fireworks will set fire to that damn grass” that they can’t understand? Realized the rubber-tree plant is dying and will soon have to be replaced with something. Would like to haul the potted palm around to the west side but can’t budge it; need Mexican laborer to cart it over and put it in place. Hope to God Gerardo is here legally. Think he is. Better be.

World-Wide problem.

And, in the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted, every morning we awake to find we still have a grandstanding, egotistical, clown for a president… Every. single. day, some new antic!

World-Wide problem

Preparing for the Trump Recession?

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Ghost riders in the wind?

So I had a chat with my financial advisor on Friday. Turns out I’m not the only one who suspects our gold-plated financial house of cards will not stand the test of time. He said quite a few of his clients had come in and asked to be positioned so that their assets will withstand a major recession, which they expect to occur…oh, some time in the next four years.

Interestingly, too, at Scottsdale Business Association, on Thursday our speaker was our member who’s a financial advisor. And interestingly, he spoke on instruments that will provide a (relatively) safe haven for your investments…and some that look like they will but are real or potential rip-offs. He warned against putting a substantial amount of assets in instruments that lock up your money so you can’t get it out without a penalty and that pay no more than or even less, over the long run, than equally conservative tools that keep you liquid.

So anyway, my guy is less pessimistic than I am, but still cautious. We’re invested about 40/60 in bond instruments that pay less but lose less in a crash and in stocks. Meanwhile, the investments we do have are going batshit. My investments have returned over 47% since I went with Stellar in 2000, despite the Bush catastrophe. If we hadn’t enjoyed the worst recession since the Great Depression, the return would presumably have been even higher, and today I would be able to pay for the car without worrying how I’m going to buy groceries.

Last month the big IRA returned 13 grand.

Still, I wonder. That fund is capable of losing twice as much in a month, and at times it has. The reason I survived the Bush Recession without too much long-term harm is that I bucked said advisor’s wishes and paid off  my house.

He felt I should  have kept the money in securities. I realized that once the alimony ran out, my salary would not cover the mortgage payment (at that time I had no other debt) and also my routine living expenses. As it turned out, if I hadn’t paid off the mortgage at that time, I certainly would have lost the house in the wake of the Great Recession.

So…there’s a point at which you have to think for yourself.

However, not knowing what to think as the country spins toward a colossal train wreck, I suppose the best thing is to stay the course.

It probably doesn’t matter. At this point, anything you do with your money, short of taking it all out of the market and burying it in tin cans under the roses, comes under the heading of moving deck chairs.

Image: Depositphotos, © rrraum

 

Gangbusters!

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The editing business really is going gangbusters! It’s a drought-and-deluge affair, and just now we’re in the middle of Noah’s Flood. Just moved two academic articles off my desk; we’re about to wrap up the current issue of CLS; another Chinese mathematician is in the wings; two indexes are in the offing; and I’m 10,000 words into an 89,000-word fantasy novel.

These bursts of incoming always get me all excited: if I could get this much work coming in all the time, I could make a living on this business!!!!!

But of course, as a practical matter, over the summer all the academics will go into estivation, not to be heard from until about two weeks before Christmas, at which time they’ll show up with a raft of arcane tomes all needing to be indexed by January 5. The Chinese mathematicians presumably spend the summer calculating, once they get their grad students out of their hair. The grad students flew into a frenzy along about April, pleading to get their dissertations in order by the first week of May.

In between times, nothin’ much is up. And of course, that means in-between times, I’m not earning much.

I’d like to get through 10,000 words a day for my current budding novelist. That would move his magnum opus off my desk in about 10 days, after all is said and done.

But lemme tellya, it ain’t easy. I had a slight head start this morning. It’s now 3:30 p.m., I’ve been working nonstop since 7:00 a.m., and I only just arrived at the 98,863rd word. After I finish lunch/dinner, I’ll easily make today’s goal. But…

If anything urgent comes up, this will have to go on the table till whatever new crisis is dealt with. And there breathes nary a Chinese mathematician who is not in a state of crisis….

But truth to tell, the hardest job is working with the wannabe Great Novelists of the Western World. Whereas reading their copy is infinitely more fun, and whereas (bless’em!) they never burden you with the terrors of APA, Chicago, CSE, AIM, or AMA documentation style, and whereas you do not have to ride herd on the batsh!t things they do with their references, NEVERTHELESS…

You do end up having to teach them how to write.

Most fiction writers, when they hire an “editor,” are really hiring a “developmental editor.” That would be something very like a writing coach. They want someone to show them how to write dialogue. How to build a character, how to wrangle point of view, how to set a scene. Oh hell…what a scene is, for hevvinsake! They are amateur writers, and they crave with all their lively being to become professional writers.

Academics, on the other hand, are professional writers, and about 90% of them are pretty good at what they do. They don’t need coaching on how to write. They need to have their documents regularized to fit their publishers’ endlessly complicated requirements. They need to have their references checked. If they’re native speakers of languages of the World at Large, they need to someone to make their golden words sound like English. Sometimes like American English, sometimes like the Queen’s English.

Writing coaching is more like teaching than like editing. Sort of like teaching graduate students, because generally your client will take the lesson and run with it. About a third of the time, the result is far better than anything you could do and better even than you hope your soaring student will accomplish.

But like teaching, it’s one bitch of a lot of work.

Explaining something that you know — that you know so well it’s second nature — is not easy.

I’m thinking I may give creative-writing clients a free copy of the new book, as a kind of lagniappe. It’s ready now in PDF format; it won’t take much to get it into PoD format. And in a few weeks, I expect Wonder-ebook-Builder will have it in Kindle and ePub format. Why not give it to clients as a kind of textbook?

😀

 

 

 

Live and Learn…

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Honestly, sometimes I think the longer I live, the less I learn! Especially in the editorial bidness. Wouldn’t you think by now I would know that whatever Word can do wrong, it will do wrong?

That’s why we call it Wyrd, the Old English cognate for weird.

So I’m about halfway through an abstruse academic paper. It’s actually a pretty interesting abstruse academic paper, reporting on a study of how multinational corporations revive their besmirched reputations after one hijink or another. In China, for example, Walmart got into the…uhm…dog house after it was found to be selling donkey meat as “pork.” Make that donkey meat enriched with fox meat.

Heeeeee! Well, of course all Hell broke loose when that gem of information got out. The flap that ensued was decidedly not good for business. The authors’ research agenda has to do with identifying and assessing the effectiveness of the strategies vast corporations use to cope with fiascos like this.

About the time I reach page 20 — out of 35 — in comes an email from the lead author. Stop the presses! We have a new version!

Holy sh!t.

Mercifully, there weren’t a lot of changes. But there were enough to require me to go through the entire document and manually enter the desired changes. This was time consuming, but one helluva lot less time-consuming than starting all over from the beginning. An academic paper written in Chinglish generates and unholy number of edits, comments, and queries. I’d already spent a day and a half on the thing.

A typical margin of a typical edited page looks like this…except of course the actual time stamps appear, rather than the time of day that this morning’s fiasco occurred. → → → 

Yes. The fiasco of the day:

Normally I enter changes in a clean file, just as though I were rewriting a piece of my own — in plain old Wyrd, not using Wyrd’s squirrely “track changes” function, a tool that will render your Word file wyrd faster than you can say CRASH! Then to make the edits appear, I use Track Changes > Compare Documents, which takes the one I’m working in, compares it with the original, and creates a third document showing all the changes. This I save to disk as “Edits,” and then I save the one I’ve worked on, which contains marginal comments and queries but does not highlight insertions & deletions, as “Clean” copy. Both clean and edited files then go to the client, who can see the mess in one file and the cleaned-up copy with questions and suggestions in the other.

But, with this new development — go back in and make changes in copy that is already changed and does not show edits — I can’t easily do that. So I take the authors’ edited file — fortunately they’ve highlighted their new changes — and manually enter the new stuff into my edited copy. But because in the file I’m working on I can’t see the changes I’ve already made and therefore have no idea WTF, I do this in a file that shows all my edits. In other words, I’m now using Track Changes > Highlight Changes; Show > insertions & deletions; Show > comments; Show > formatting.

The plan, then, is to complete the project in Track Changes, then save a second file, and “Accept All” edits so as to create the “clean” file.

This works, as it always worked before the day it dawned on me that the “Compare Documents” function is far superior to the “Track Changes” function. I create a clean file, review it, make a couple more changes, and save to disk. Then I go back to the edited version to enter those changes and discover…

goddamnit! ALL THE EDITS ARE DISAPPEARED. It’s as though I’ve hit “accept all changes” in this file, which I decidedly have not. Show > insertions & deletions, Show > comments, and Show > formatting are all turned on.

NOTHING that I do will recover the visible edits I’ve entered!!!!!!!!!

Holy sh!t. This is three days’ worth of work that God DAMNED Wyrd has disappeared for me!!!!!!!

After much thrashing around does nothing to rescue the hours and hours of work, I move to Plan B: Take the file with changes accepted and do a Compare Documents with the authors’ original original file.

Ultimately it worked. But not without a moment or three of utter despair.

Thank God for Wyrd’s “Compare Documents” function. Without it, I’d’ve been sh!t outta luck.

So now I have two more academic papers and a novel in house. The work has been pouring in the door. At least two and possibly three indexes are in the wings, so I’ve got to move forward at a fast clip to get through the stuff that’s already on my desk.

And naturally, every time I turn around here’s another interruption.

This afternoon I’m meeting with my financial manager to discuss what we can do to help crash-proof my savings. That will kill the entire damn afternoon.

He is, IMHO, altogether too blithe about the possibility — IMHO again, the near-certainty — of another major economic crash.

I believe we are going to see the Return of the Bush Recession on steroids, in the not-too-distant future. He feels his firm’s investment strategy will stand strong against another recession. I point out that the last crash resulted in my losing my job at a time when I was too old to get another job, in the loss of almost half my investments, and that if my house hadn’t been paid off, I would have lost my home, too.

And if I was too old to get a job then, nine years later I’m ALTOGETHER too effing old.

So we’re meeting this afternoon, so he can try to persuade me that all will be well while I try to persuade him that Armageddon is right around the corner.

Actually, Armageddon is here. We just haven’t seen what it will do when it comes through the front door. But we will.

How much of your time will you spend for a few bucks?

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How do I love thee…?

So on the way home from getting gasoline (because tomorrow I have to drive halfway to Timbuktu), I stop by the neighborhood Walmart grocery store and pick up five pounds of sugar and several packages of frozen veggies. At the bakery in that strip mall, I grab a couple of palmiers, a fattening treat of which I’m unduly fond.

When I get home, I realize the Walmart cashier has put those few little grocery items into not one but two plastic bags, which at Walmart they just leave on the bag dispenser for the hoi polloi to disconnect and carry off themselves. I’ve left a five-pound bag of sugar at the Walmart.

Which brings us to the Question of the Day: Would you jump back in your car, drive back to the Walmart, park, stand in line with your receipt in hand, haggle with the clerk, and try to get them to give you the abandoned sugar?

The sugar cost less than $2.00.

I have not one, not two, but three projects in hand today, paying between $4 and $10 a page. All the clients are in a ball-busting hurry to get done.

Ultimately, I decided to write off the cost of the sugar. It would, I think, cost more to drive back up there and beg for the sugar than to pay two bucks for air. There’s no guarantee that Walmart would agree to let me have a bag of sugar — for all they know, I’m running a scam. Something to do with drugs, no doubt.

But assuming they did, I’m earning something between $30 and $60 an hour just now, depending on which project I’m laboring over. Twenty minutes or half an hour of my time devoted to retrieving five pounds of sugar would mean that bag of sugar would cost between $10 and $20: most expensive sugar on the planet!

No.

Tomorrow’s trip back from Timbuktu will take me past a Trader Joe, a Sprout’s, and a Safeway. Each of them will charge considerably more than Walmart, of course. But even at, say, $3.50 for a bag of sugar, that’s still a bargain compared to the value of my time when I’m actually working.

How do you feel about that kind of trade-off? Spend a half-hour to run back to a Walmart and try to retrieve a forgotten two-dollar item? Or stay in front of the computer to earn five to ten times that much?

Image: DepositPhotos, © ajafoto