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A Couple of Things I Can Afford to Do Without…

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1. New(er) Car

Toyota_Sienna_LEThe other day I picked up the Dog Chariot from Chuck, the Paragon of Mechanics. He charged me $300+ for a brake job and several other small details. I said I was thinking about replacing the tank with a Honda CR-V or a Toyota RAV-4. He and all the guys at the shop argued that the Chariot should run to 200,000 miles without major problems.

It only has 118,000 miles on it now. (“Only” 118,000 miles! Who would ever have thunk an American car owner would utter a phrase like that?)

Normally, I drive about 10,000 to 12,000 miles a year. Without the commute to various college campuses, the mileage is likelier to run on the low side than on the high side. So…if the Men of Chuck’s are right, the thing should last another 10 years!

Every day that car runs, it puts money in my pocket in the form of low insurance bills and negligible registration fees. If it actually survived another eight or ten years, a great deal of money could stay invested, rather than being engrossed by the various parasites who want to take it away from me.

I’d like to drive to the high country during the summers. But I’m not comfortable driving the aging Sienna up the rim, which is a steep climb, nor do I relish being stuck by the side of the road way to hell and gone out in the desert. But duh! It would cost a lot less than Arizona’s $420 registration fee to rent a car and drive it to Jerome or Flagstaff. What the heck? I could rent a Mercedes convertible for less than it costs to register a $25,000 car in Arizona! And not have to pay 25 grand for the privilege.

Yesterday morning I took the little tank by the annoying car wash (at Chuck’s behest: “Take it to the car wash!!!!!”) and paid their demand for an extra $4 to dust the interior. Therein lies the key: give them some vigorish and they do a decent job.

The clunk came out looking almost like a brand-new chariot! Very nice.

So I decided to touch up the paint on the two spots where the white enamel chipped off, one where either a rock or a BB hit the tailgate and another where I broke the tail-light and chipped off a little paint around the assembly. The trick (I learned after I left the tailgate open while backing into the garage and whacked it on the garage door) is to squirt a couple of light coats of white enamel spray paint over the nekkid metal ding. It worked, more or less…good enough for government work, anyway.

custom_paint_jobContemplating another eight or ten years of living with this contraption, it occurred to me to wonder if it would be worth having the clunk repainted.

I’ve always wanted a candy-apple red car. How cool would a candy-apple red Sienna be, anyway? Maybe with some nice yellow and orange flames along the sides?

2) Overcomplicated Decomplication Strategy

Several readers remarked, in puzzled tones, that my scheme to cut the number of credit-card charges to keep track of, month in and month out, was effectively self-defeating. They noted, for example, that buying a cash card for a grocery store would not be regarded as a charge for groceries but rather as a charge for a piece of plastic, counterproductive when the Costco AMEX kicks back 6% on charges for food, 3% on gasoline purchases, and 1% on everything else. Presumably a piece of plastic would come under the rubric of “everything else.”

Much more obvious strategy: cut the number of trips to the usual suspects among retailers. Where is it written that I have to jet off to the Safeway every time I notice that one or two small items have run out? Can one not make do for a few days?

Why not simply cut the number of trips to Costco to two a month (max)? And the trips to Safeway to four a month? Every Thursday morning, I drive right past the favored Safeway on the way home from the weekly networking meeting. Stopping for groceries then would serve two purposes: a) save gasoline by combining trips and b) reduce the number of visits to the supermarket.

Two Costco charges + four Safeway charges + three Costco gas fillups ≠ 98 gerjillion annoying little charges. Actually, they = nine charges.

What if I took out about $200 or $300 in cash each month, and paid any bills under $20 to $30 with actual dollars? Here in this stack of charge slips I see a $4.16 charge to Safeway, a $10.73 charge to a restaurant, a $12.39 charge to Trader Joe’s, a $19.05 charge to the propane dealer, and on and on.

If only Costco gas bills and bills over $30 were charged, last month’s number of transactions would drop from twenty-eight to to twelve. If the threshold were $50, then the number of charges made last month would have been seven. And if I limited Safeway trips to once a week and Costco expeditions to twice a month, the number might drop even further.

So. The new Decomplication Strategy: Use cash for purchases under $50; limit routine shopping junkets to specific days of the month.

Money Happens

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Lordie, money not only happens, it seems to materialize out of the air.

You can’t even imagine how little I am working, here in my dotage. But that notwithstanding, money keeps on happening.

At the end of 2012, I followed the accountant’s advice and withdrew from the S-corp what we calculated the S-corp should disburse to me plus repayment of the money I used to capitalize the business, which has been carried on the books as a loan. That amounted to enough to cover the business’s contribution to my upkeep for the first three quarters of 2013.

Just reconciled the February and March statements (you can see with what enthusiasm I approach these tasks…). Lo! I’ll only have to earn another $2,000 all year long to bring the balance back up to what it was before that drawdown. That is just amazing.

Just now no business is on the horizon — I do need to get off my aching duff and hustle up some work. But this is a feast & famine business. Before long something else will come in, and then it will be like popcorn in a cooker. While it’s quiet, I need to finish the e-book that’s almost done and then put together a couple of others from the bottomless pit of copy that is Funny about Money.

Decomplicate Me!

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Ohhhhhh gawd one more piece of paper to have to figure out, act on, and file is gonna break my achin’ back! Yesterday afternoon I was trying to figure out how to organize the usual complicated mess before handing it over to The Accountant from Nirvana, who offers to take on the migrainish bookkeeping. Obviously, the less mess for her to have to plow through, the fewer hours it will take her to beat it back. Hence: decomplication.

So much paper comes pouring into my house that often I just can’t keep up with it. It piles up like dust on the Plains until finally I’m forced to deal with it, and that dealing can take the better part of an entire day. Yesterday, I thought if only i could find a way to cut the number of transactions and the number of pieces of paper i have to screw with, maybe it wouldn’t take half my lifetime to keep this shit under control…

One spring that feeds the flood of papers is the charge cards. Specifically, the AMEX card. Costco’s American Express card is one of America’s premier kick-back cards: almost every charge racks up a few pennies or a few dollars toward the annual “rebate,” which in my case goes directly into savings. Because I charge everything on the AMEX card and then pay it off at the end of each month, some years that kickback has amounted to three or four hundred dollars. To make that happen, though, entails snowflurries of charge slips, each of which has to be entered in Quickbooks.

Most of these small charges, some as small as a couple of bucks, occur at a limited number of retailers: Costco, Safeway, Costco gas, AJ’s (a local purveyor of fancy groceries and the best coffee beans in town).

What if…? What if I were to buy cash cards at the places where most of my charges take place? You can buy cash cards at Costco with which to purchase gasoline and groceries. Ditto Safeway: give yourself a gift card. Same at the local upscale AJ’s. A person could pay for these things with the richly endowed AMEX card, thereby preserving the coveted kickback.

Wouldn’t it make sense to buy gift cards or cash cards to cover purchases at the most-frequented retailers, thereby consolidating 87 gerjillion receipts into three or four?

If said person then paid for purchases under about $50 with cash, wouldn’t that also get rid of a lot of ditzy little receipts to keep track of?

Then how much would be left to charge on credit cards, track, and organize monthly payments for?

Hm.

Averaging charges in various categories over seven months, I discovered that typically I’ve been spending about $55 a month at AJ’s, $300 at Costco on groceries and household goods, $95 on Costco gasoline, $120 at Safeway, and around $160 on small sundries. On average, large planned or unplanned bills can come to as much as $370 in any given month.

What if the only things that went on the charge card were gift or cash cards and large bills? And all the little stuff were paid in cash?

This would hugely change the budgeting scheme. Instead of $1100 a month to be charged on the card and paid off at the end of each month, things would look like this:

CashBudget

Biggest drawback: it would require me to traipse to the credit union once a month and get actual cash, of all things…

On the first day of each budget cycle:

1. Drive to the credit union; withdraw $160
2. Drive to Costco: Buy $395 Costco cash card ($95 for gasoline; $300 for in-store purchases).
3. Drive to Safeway, get $120 Safeway cash card.
4. Drive to AJ’s, get $55 AJ’s card.

Manage funds accordingly.

This would consolidate all the charges for groceries, cleaning goods, personal care products, and household stuff into three charges — Costco, Safeway, and AJ’s. Gasoline and some clothing would also be comprised in the Costco card. There would be no reason to itemize every single stupid little charge in these categories; instead, all that would be noted is the cost of an estimated month’s worth of charges, to be paid with a cash card.   Same would be true of the ditzy little bills, 50 bucks and under, that would be paid for in cash.

The only bills requiring serious itemization would be bigger-ticket items such as major car repair bills, gifts, dental visits, and the like.

Right there, dozens of scraps of paper, direct to the trash! Or at least not stashed in a file folder or envelope to be inflicted on the (expensive!) accountant.

Today, speaking of major bills, I have to leave my car at the shop for a brake job, so I won’t be driving around buying cash cards and extracting cash from the credit union. But tomorrow…

 

MacJunketing

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Yesterday KJG invited me to join her in a quest to buy a new computer. Or, more to the point, a Mac.

She’s had an iPhone for a while, likes it, and in the course of using it has grown accustomed to some of the Macinoid ways of doing things. Her laptop PC having arrived at its last legs (or whatever PCs have), she had pretty much decided she wanted to at least seriously consider a Mac.

So we presented ourselves at the Arrowhead Mall Apple store at 10:00 a.m., the moment it opened to the general public.

That was when we met the most amazing man. His name is Stan, and he and his yellow lab are employed full-time as sales reps for Apple computers. What a remarkable guy! He’s stone blind. Using Apple’s voice function plus an amazing tactile memory and about the quickest mind any of us have ever had the privilege to meet, he had no problem demonstrating how the various choices of products work, how they compare, and what the various choices (for example, of memory) mean in the context of the two businesses KJG and Mr. KJG operate.

The hound had recently had surgery and so spent most of his time resting. No matter. Stan had no problem navigating the store and all its products on his own, all the while operating as an engaging salesman.

He sold me a cool little Bluetooth keyboard tricked out as a cover for the iPad. It works like one of those expensive and useless little fold-up covers you can buy, in that it will put the iPad to sleep when you “close” it. But it gives you a small keyboard with actual keys that actually work, unlike the endlessly annoying virtual keyboard that pops up whenever you need to type something into an e-mail or a web page. This infuses enough usability into the iPad to make the gadget a practical device, something that I haven’t found to be true since I bought the thing.

And I learned that Pages, which only costs a few bucks and which now will manipulate Word documents, can be downloaded into an iPad as a fully functional app. So can Numbers, a spreadsheet with power comparable to Excel’s.

Hot dang!

I’ve wanted a spreadsheet app that would allow me to enter, say, a budgeted amount for Costco, so that I could carry the iPad into a store with me and keep a running tab of what I’ve spent. This would simplify life considerably. But the spreadsheet apps I’ve found so far leave a lot to be desired…like, say, usability.

The new keyboard gadget, Numbers, and Pages will hugely improve the iPad’s functionality. Too bad the thing doesn’t come already loaded with these things — it’s only taken, what? two years to figure this out.

KJG wanted some time to think about all she’d learned before deciding on a purchase, so from there we wandered to a shoe store — decided that the new Mephistos are surprisingly uncomfortable — and through several wonderful stores for teenyboppers and twenty-somethings (imagine! once we could wear stuff like that), and into a Coldwater Creek (this is what we have to wear now????), and over to the food court, and finally back to the Apple store.

Finally she decided on a 13-inch MacBook with a mid-range of memory. The staff there walked her through setting it up, and when last heard from, she was e-mailing messages from the little guy. 🙂

So that was fun. And productive, too.

My Achin’ Back Roundup!

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Sooo I’m really not getting the posts up here, baaaad basselope! The tardiness is partly a dead laziness issue and partly the result of discovering that the stubborn pain in the right hip and tailbone probably has something to do with my unconscious habit, which no amount of deliberation seems to break, of sitting cattywampus on the desk chair with the left foot hooked under the right thigh, hour after hour after UNCOUNTABLE hour.

Saturday it was out of the sack by 5:00 a.m. and straight across the hall to the office. Spent two hours grading student papers; then read news online and made a couple of comments on other blogs and played a little fake mah-jongg and responded to e-mails and coped with a student query that required 45 minutes of figuring out & explaining and paid Tina for subcontracting work. By the time I got up from the computer to fix breakfast, it was 10:00.

I still hadn’t written a FaM post, still hadn’t entered the last two or three weeks’ of credit-card charges in Quickbooks, still hadn’t scanned and deposited three checks from clients, still hadn’t sent the clients receipts, still hadn’t paid the AMEX and Mastercharge bills, still hadn’t figured out how much to transfer and from where to cover third-quarter 2013 living expenses.

And I had already been parked in front of the computer for five hours! No wonder my back hurts…

This incredible lasagne soup recipe popped up on Stumbleupon.

Donna Freedman wonders how to address the issue of people yakking through a musical performance, the next time it happens to her (which it certainly will). I don’t know whether people are simply so enamored of their own voices that they can’t imagine anyone else wouldn’t want to listen to them, or whether they just don’t give a damn what anyone else thinks. But there sure are a lot of obnoxious folks out there.

101 Centavos has a whole series of entertaining posts this week. Start with the tongue-in-cheek (I think!) ideas for potentially successful retail stores and then explore the rest of the week’s offerings.

Recently I ran across a site called Prawfsblawg, the product of a far-flung band of law professors. This bunch is all over the place, posting on a wide variety of issues. I enjoyed, for example, Rick Garnett’s “The Blogger as Public Intellectual.” But the whole site is well worth reading and revisiting.

Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche relates another episode in the family soap opera.

TB grouses about having to start over on the bottom rung at his new job. Therein lies the problem with the adage that people in their 20s and 30s now can expect to change careers several times during their working lives: that means several returns to entry level!

As I was posting about why I don’t need a gun (because every other nutcase in the city has one and so we all assume everybody we encounter is carrying heat), Crystal also posted about the nature of gun ownership in America.

And along the same lines, here’s an eye-roller from The Volokh Conspiracy about the outcome of a firearms safety class.

Money Beagle contemplates ten mystifications of life, to amusing effect.

One Cent at a Time hosted this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and kindly included Funny’s extended rant over the joys of dealing with Medigap insurers among the Editor’s Choices!

Since Once Cent at a Time is a new-to-me site, naturally I had to explore around, and found a nice post on REITs (real estate investment trusts). I expect if you’re going to invest in one of those instruments, now is the time to do it.

Academics love books. We can’t bring ourselves to get rid of the things, so we end up with gigantic, dusty libraries covering every available wall. Nicoleandmaggie ruminate interestingly on their fantasy library.

Evan at My Journey to Millions goggles in amazement at the repeated flurries of attention to CEOs who claim to draw down $1 in salary from their corporations.

At Planting our Pennies, Mrs. PoP uses a funny cat story to spin off a post on the wacky ease with which we can buy stuff these days.

At NZ Muse, eemusings and soon-to-be-DH plan a round-the-world trip. Maybe they’ll come to Arizona. 🙂

All of us buy clothing made in Asia — whether out of frugality or because we can’t find any practical alternatives anymore. Frugal Scholar observes that most of us overlook the real cost of those purchases. For enlightenment, check out the Robert Pinsky poem Frugal Scholar has reproduced.

 

 

 

Why I Don’t Need a Gun

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P1020137…Because everybody else and his little brother has a gun.

Yesterday I got up to the mountain park a bit  late — around 11 a.m., after meetings and a trip to My Sister’s Attic to consign a set of old Noritake china. The day was warm, and so barely a soul was to be seen on the trails across the flat valley between Shaw Butte and North Mountain.

That was good: I didn’t have to listen to people yakking their heads off at the top of their lungs — the air filled with birdsong and the wind’s whisper almost drowned out the grumble of traffic on the surrounding roads.

On the other hand, of course, if one fell and broke an ankle, one would be stuck out there in the heat until five or six o’clock before anyone else would come along. And, also of course, if there’s another person out there at mid-day, it’s just you and him.

About halfway between the Seventh Avenue & Peoria trailhead and the dam below Thunderbird Road, I passed a guy walking toward me. Nothing notable, except that there was no one else on the trails around noon on a 90-degree day.

After a bit, I realized that every time I turned around, here was this guy.

He wasn’t a big man — just a strange-looking little fellow with a glabrous, ageless face. Hard to tell his age, because his head and much of his face were covered by a big hat. He passed me twice coming in my direction, and then as I headed back toward the car I saw him walking ahead of me up the trail.

And I noticed that occasionally he glanced back in my direction.

Weird. Probably harmless. But weird.

Occasionally he would slow down enough that the distance between us kept narrowing.

I stopped in the shade of a paloverde and stepped into the shrubbery so that I couldn’t be seen, figuring to wait until this character moved on.

At one point he stopped and looked back. At another, he could have borne left or right at a Y in the trail. Naturally, he was going my way.

At the Y, I picked up a narrow, flat rock and put it into my pocket, which already bulged a little where it held my car keys. Oh…did I mention I had on a pair of short-shorts?  Yeah. Stupid.

About three inches of the rock stuck out of the pocket. I wrapped my hand around it so with the fingers laying against the outside of my cut-offs in sort of…oh, the position they might be in if they were resting on a trigger guard. The stone was not visible — only my hand obviously holding something that was hidden in my pocket.

😀

He did slow down enough that I caught up and passed him. I figured if he tried anything I’d brain him with the rock — only by serendipity had I picked up a piece of granite that fit in my pocket like a nice little lady’s Derringer.

We said “hello” again. I went on my way. Nothing happened.

Weird. Harmless, but weird.