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The Wages of Comparison Shopping

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Well, this gets more and more interesting.

The outfit to whom I sent the sliding door measurements returned a bid yesterday. And they revealed something that none of the other contractors, Home Depot included, bothered to mention:

Starting in 2008, the government began requiring window installers to test any house built before 1978 for lead. My house, of course, was built in ’71. If they find lead paint, they have to jump through an elaborate set of hoops to “contain” lead dust during their installation, which can involve draping all the shrubs and trees with plastic (you realize how tall a mature tree gets???), setting out orange cones and taping off your home (wait’ll the neighbors see that), keeping the homeowners out of the dwelling until the work is done and cleaned up, and on and on. Penalty for evading this hassle is $32,400 per violation, with potential jail time.

All these shenanigans add to the cost of an already expensive procedure. Changing out a window is not cheap to begin with, and the contractor in question adds $150 to the cost of the job if your house tests positive.

Not one of the three other people I’ve spoken with even mentioned this in passing.

And of course, if your house tests positive for lead—which mine certainly could, this being the Wild West where people don’t give a damn about safe anything, especially if warnings come from the hated government—then you’re required to disclose that when you go to sell. If you have to tell a buyer that your house has a coat of lead paint under all those pretty latex colors, then you’re going to be SOL when it comes to unloading the place.

A house built in 1971 has a 24 percent chance of testing positive.

So. It may be better to leave bad enough alone. Obviously, you don’t have to disclose what you don’t know.

Another option would be to tell them to go ahead and do the lead containment procedure without testing. In that event, you still don’t know one way or another…but it costs you an additional $50 per window. Or more.

About the cost of the proposed new sliding doors, yesterday’s conversation added more to that complicated discovery process:

If the house does not test positive, and if by way of cutting corners I opt the windows and get the attractive wide rails on only two of the three needed sliding doors, then comparing apples to apples, Freelite comes in $800 higher than this new outfit, K&J, for Milgard windows.

Home Depot and Home Depot Direct did not give me estimates for the wide-rail style, despite my having told them specifically that’s what I wanted. K&J’s estimate for two wide-rail and one narrow-rail Milgard is about $600 higher than Home Depot’s bid for three narrow-rail Milgards.

K&J also can install Simonton doors and windows, which apparently are better regarded by builders than other brands in this price range. Here, the only other direct comparison is with HD Direct, which bid only for narrow-rail Simontons. With two wide-rail doors and one narrow-rail, K&J comes in only $256 more than HD Direct.

If the house tests positive for lead, you can add $150 to K&J’s bid. But even then, K&J comes in significantly below Freelite’s bid for Milgard, a more expensive door with a lesser warranty than Simonton.

It’s entirely possible that HD, HD Direct, and Freelite simply include the cost of testing and lead abatement in their figures. But it seems kind of odd that none of them mentioned it. On the one hand, if you don’t know the results, it means you don’t have to say anything to potential home buyers. But on the other…one wonders if the federal law doesn’t require disclosure to the homeowner.

LOL! Speaking of dissembling, the contractor for Costco got back on the phone yesterday and asked if he could come over, eyeball the windows, and give me a bid. I agreed to let him do that…and then remarked that HD wanted to sell me Simonton for the windows and Milgard for the doors.

He now says—get this!—that Home Depot owns Simonton. This is why, he says, they have a vested interest in getting you to buy Simonton windows.

That, as it develops, is not true. Simonton is owned by Simonton. The particular line HD Direct sells, called VantagePointe, is manufactured exclusively for Home Depot, but that does not mean Home Depot owns the entire company.

So I canceled that guy. Let’s hope he doesn’t show up anyway.

Well, we’re now at the start of a three-day weekend, so presumably I won’t hear anything from any of these bozos before Tuesday. Entertaining, isn’t it? Gets better and better.

The Workman Waltz

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Ugh. How I hate dealing with contractors and workmen and vendors. Over the past week, I’ve checked around with various Milgard vendors and discovered the following:

 1) Home Depot has a deal with Milgard—HD staff thinks their beloved employer is Milgard’s exclusive big-box vendor in Arizona. They’re wrong.

2) Costco is selling the same model of Milgard (Tuscany 8621T) and underpricing Home Depot.

3) Home Depot Direct, a branch of HD that tries to upsell customers by coming to the home and delivering a pitch, is peddling windows by Simonton that have various blandishments built-in, some of which appear to improve on the Milgard product. In 2009, Simonton Windows were rated #1 in a JD Powers study, but builders themselves seem ambivalent—some commenters on an National Association of Home Builders site seem to think they’re just OK; others say they have the best warranty and customer service. Milgard has racked up a ton of consumer complaints around the Web, but at the NAHB site, contractors in general like Milgard but warn that the company does not warranty glass breakage and the rollers are not very good. Home Depot is almost universally reviled, and some commenters urge purchasing Simonton from other, local dealers.

 On the doors alone, Home Depot is underbidding the excellent and beloved Freelite (for example: for the net 71.5″ x 79.5″ slider, Freelite’s price is $1132 and HD’s is $983), and Costco is underbidding Home Depot ($966 for the same door). Home Depot charges $399 for installation, but if you’re buying more than one unit, they drop the cost to $218 for the subsequent installations (made in one purchase, that is)—so they’re trouncing Freelite, with its $450 installation/unit figure.

However, often one gets what one pays for.

Costco’s installer came across as a raving flake, and so I’m afraid I didn’t get so far as to ask about installation cost—I was too busy running in the other direction.

HD’s in-store salesman gave me bids (not including installation, which I had to find out about and calculate on my own, with who knows how much accuracy) for the sliding doors, but told me that to get the windows I’d have to have a guy come to my home and give me a pitch. This turned out to be a visit from Home Depot Direct, whose rep occupied over an hour of my time trying to sell me the Simonton doors. The (approximate) results:

It appears that Simonton windows are similar in quality to Milgard’s, but Simonton has a uniquely amazing warranty. On the other hand, I’ve had no complaints about the Milgard windows that Freelite installed in the house back in the day when I had an actual income. Au contraire: in response to what seemed to me to be a minor issue, Freelite’s guys descended on the offending window, removed it from the frame, and reinstalled it to meet their exacting standards. No problem of any sort has ever ensued. They did an excellent job not only on installing the windows, but also in installing four skylights. Real skylights, not those tube things.

So as you can imagine, I’m inclined to go with Freelite. Only problem is…I can’t afford Freelite.

The Simonton windows may be slightly better than the Milgard that Freelite sells. However, there is NO chance I’m buying them from Home Depot. Why?

a) I do not like being upsold, nor do I appreciate being put in a position where some guy comes to my house and hustles me to buy something that is different from what I specifically said I want to buy; and

b) Home Depot contracts out installation. You have no choice about who shows up at your house to put this stuff in. It is, in a word, a pig in a poke. In my experience, HD’s service is mixed—sometimes just fine, sometimes not altogether fine. So if I can find a company that sells the same product but is an actual vendor and installer unto itself, well, then…if they’ve been in business more than ten days and twenty minutes, I incline to give them a chance.

I really want the wide (“French”) rails at least on the two doors in the family/dining room. To cut corners, I could get away with the standard tract-house “narrow” rails for the door in the bedroom.

This afternoon it was over to Angie’s List, where I found one outfit not far from my house—they’re to send an estimate whenever they get around it, based on Freelite’s measurements. Then it was on to the enthusiastically reviewed Wholesale Window and Doors, not far from here at-tall. Get them on the phone: “Can I call you back. We’re in the process of moving our office and…” If you’ve ever moved an office, you know what this poor soul is going through. She: to call me back tomorrow. Angie’s list customers adore, worship, and sanctify Wholesale Window and Doors. Wholesale carries Milgard. So…let’s see what, if anything, they can do.

The Workman Waltz goes on…

Big Job…

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MIA for a few days because we picked up a nice contract job from the community college district, editing an application for a large and prestigious award. As with any document written by committee (don’t know why that always happens), we started with the deadline practically on top of us. It was about 25 or 30 pages long, and our job was to edit it, turn the bureaucratese into English, and make it sound like it was written by one person.

IMHO, it turned out pretty well. If it goes over exceptionally well, the college where I teach will win a grant of about a million dollars.

That would require some serious exceptional. The school was invited to apply for this award, along with about 115 other colleges. I think they have a shot of at least being recognized for the excellence of several of their programs. Given the difficulties community colleges face under the best of circumstances—serving an absurdly diverse constituency whose motives are so various and many of whom are unprepared for college-level work, while funding is precarious and a perverse legislature labors to undermine education across the state—this particular school does an amazing job of keeping young people in school, delivering vocational programs that at least have a shot of getting them into decently paying work, and funneling a fair number of them into four-year colleges.

Anyway, we got paid decently—not quite what we regard as our natural due, but we’re willing to come down on our hourly rate for nonprofit organizations. And we are so thrilled to work with someone who does not try to persuade us that the red rocks of Sedona were put there, coded with a secret message for humanity, by the same space aliens who built the pyramids.

We have another large, interesting job coming up the pike, a third materializing on the horizon (we hope), and an application for a fourth winging toward a business publication’s editorial board.

This is the sort of work we want to get. We are both royally tired of working for outfits that think we should provide professional-quality work for graduate-student pay, with trying to humor wannabe writers who think their self-published memoirs and amateur novels will inevitably be best-sellers, and with folks who commune with the dead and theorize about conspiracies.

We’re now officially registered contractors for the Maricopa County Community College District, one of the largest college districts in the country. This summer I hope we can engage a few strategies to keep us moving in the right direction:

• Join the Small Business Administration and start networking through that agency
• Learn, through the SBA, how to apply for federal contracts
• Look in to applying for state contracts
• Engage with the college district’s Small Business Center, which offers one-on-one consulting plus networking opportunities
• Join one of the chambers of commerce or start attending groups listed in Networking Phoenix

That ought to keep us busy this summer, especially given that I have a class to teach and Tina is transitioning from a paid employee of the Great Desert University to a contract employee for the Chinese government.

And speaking of busy, it’s after 6:00 a.m. Gotta run!

Money Unhappens, Money Rehappens

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Am I in the hole this month? Ohhhh no. That is what we call a “bottomless pit.”

Once again, I lulled myself into a false sense of confidence and, while bucketing around the tourist section of historic Glendale with friends, succumbed to the siren call of exotic clothing. Actually, quite a few sirens called. And the clothing is all made in the USA, meaning it cost about eight times what something comparable (if you could find it, which you can’t) would cost if it were made in Kuala Lumpur. Every time this happens, it’s invariably at the beginning of the budget cycle. And in theory, I have plenty of money in savings to cover the occasional indulgence—that’s what short-term savings are for, f’rhevvinsake.

So it seems. But, as usual, by making these purchases near the beginning of the month, I was thoughtlessly neglecting to think about the fact that my yard and garage would soon be invaded by a desperado and the police would soon haul me out of my house behind a bullet-proof barricade, and that I would soon be craving steel bars over the doors, ungodly locks, and fancy hard(er)-to-jimmy sliding doors.

How could I have been so careless?

Really. By now you’d think I’d know better. It never fails.

The combination of the clothing (which actually I thought I was charging on last month’s credit-card bill but which didn’t go through and so will come due in another few days) and the $500± for the security door and the locksets put me $1100 over budget. And since my budget is $1100…well. Not to say {gulp!}

So it was that Wonder-Accountant, who’s been trying to help me figure some of this stuff out, and I were surprised when the mail arrived with a missal from American Express:

Dear Funny:

We are writing to inform you that, due to an internal processing error (WONDER-ACCOUNTANT cringes visibly), the annual Costco reward coupon that you received in your February billing statement was incorrect. (WONDER-ACCOUNTANT and FUNNY: “Auuuughhhhhhh!”) We will issue a statement credit (← ←“Say what??”) on your next billing statement (“You mean, the one that’s supposed to come in at about $2200?”) for the remaining reward amount…

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused…

Sincerely,

American Express Customer Care

Please. Inconvenience me some more.

I’m sure the adjustment will be about $1.95, if that much. But hey. Every little bit helps.

Moments of Fame:

James Petzke: Graduating with a Surplus hosted this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and included Funny’s report on the reviving Phoenix-area real estate market.

Financial Success for Young Adults hosted the Yakezie Carnival, where What a Lender Is Thinking made the cut.

How to Fight the Stay-at-Home Parent Penalties

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Lest you hadn’t noticed, stay-at-home parents face a new punishment: if you’re an SAHP, a 2009 change in credit-card rules means that you now cannot get a credit card in your own name, because, after all, what you do is not work.

Yeah.

This is just another of several rules and attitudes that devalue a type of work still done mostly by women. Some of the penalties for raising children and caring for a home and spouse have severe long-term consequences. Most notable of these has to do with Social Security: if you’re not spending your days in an officially recognized “workplace” and so having FICA withheld from your salary, you’re not eligible for Social Security. Never mind that you work 24/7 at humanity’s most important work: bringing up the next generation. If you take time out of a career to care for children and spouse, you’re likely to find your Social Security benefit significantly reduced come retirement age. This certainly was true for me—even though I worked steadily as a freelance journalist while I was married, my income was small and it mostly served as a tax write-off, leaving me with $0.00 taxable income during those years.

Graduate school didn’t help: pay for teaching assistants is even more exploitive than adjunct pay, and when I was overseas doing research my income came from grants and fellowships; thus during that period there were a couple of years where no taxable income appeared on the books.

Besides the insulting implication that the work you do is essentially worthless, the new rule means that as a stay-at-home mom or dad, you can’t establish your own credit history and build your own credit score. This puts you at a huge disadvantage should you divorce or be widowed.

Clearly there are ways around this. Most of them are infantilizing or degrading: they involve your having to beg your spouse to cosign or make you an authorized user (good luck with that, if you’re married to an abuser!), or to prevaricate by filling in the blank for your income with what is really household income—i.e., your spouse’s income.

However, over at Daily Finance, which is reporting on a protest led by one Holly McCall, a commenter comes up with a freaking brilliant idea:

Sit down and discuss with your other half how much you want for being a stay-at-home mom (which in itself is basically considered a luxury by society.) Form an LLC, maybe Holly at Home. Have your other half cut you a check. Don’t forget to take out tax, in case you become unemployed, need SS, or a tax write-off.

—theycallmeroy3

Wow. Think of that. Wish  my ex and I had thought of it, thirty years ago. (And, btw, notice the attitude implicit in “basically considered a luxury”: bringing up your children in their home instead of warehousing them in daycare is a luxury).

I spent a fair amount of my time as a corporate wife and SAHM…during which I did not rack up a salary and did not pay into FICA. If my husband had been paying a household budget to me as “salary” or into an LLC as contractor’s pay for housekeeping, child care, and public relations and marketing, possibly I could’ve claimed unemployment when we divorced. But more to the point, I would have been paying into FICA, and when I suddenly found myself laid off at 64, too old to get another job, I would have had a significantly higher Social Security benefit.

When you’re married to a heavy-hitting lawyer, doctor, or corporate executive who can afford to keep you at  home, you’re doing a lot more than scrubbing floors and chasing kids. You’re helping to build and maintain his public image and community presence by engaging in volunteer activities (as high-profile as possible), serving on nonprofit boards, entertaining clients and colleagues, and hosting social events. Basically this is marketing and PR. And it has a significant market value: PR people earn a decent wage in our culture.

Housewives generally don’t. However, the cost of replacing a housewife, should a stay-at-home spouse die or leave, reflects what that work is worth. In 2006, nannies were earning between $15,600 and $52,000, plus benefits. In my part of the country, a cleaning lady—who takes no responsibility for raising the kiddies—typically earns between $80 and $100 a day: that would come to between $20,800 and $26,000 a year. So, in Arizona a SAHP who does not spend a significant portion of her or his time doing PR for the working spouse would be worth $36,400 to $78,000.

This assumes the conjugal duties are unpaid. Try hiring a call girl or keeping a mistress and tell us what that would cost. 😉

Clearly, then, the SAHP’s work has objective monetary value.

So, it should be reasonable to pay that person through an LLC or an S-corporation. The implications are huge.

• First, as the person draws money out of the entity as salary, she or he pays FICA on it. That means s/he gets credit toward Social Security for work done for the household and the children. And it means that should the SAHP be widowed or divorced, she or he would not have to rely on the spouse’s Social Security credits—or be shorted if she spent some time working after the kids were grown but not enough to rack up the best possible benefit.

• Of course, it would also mean the SAHP would be able to claim, without having to lie on a credit card application, an income. Credit-card issuers could not deny a card by asserting that the applicant does not “work.”

• The SAHP might be able to create her own IRA or 403(b) through her corporation, allowing the couple to salt away a larger amount of tax-deferred savings.

• And of course, tax advantages always accrue around corporations. If the SAHP’s business entails schlepping children around town, driving to grocery stores, and attending charitable events, obviously the car and gasoline become deductible. If she is paid to clean house and she supplies the cleaning supplies and tools out of her pay, then the Windex, the Simple Green, and the vacuum cleaner should be deductible. If her duty is to represent her husband in the community by maintaining a public profile, then the cost of entertaining clients, serving on boards, and belonging to organizations such as Junior League, the art museum guild, and the zoo auxiliary should also be deductible, assuming she pays those costs with her income.

• Should the couple divorce, as some 50% of American newlyweds do, the implications could be significant. If the “working” spouse is paying a salary or contractor’s fee based on the market value of the SAHP’s work, it could limit the amount a court would award for support; or, on the other hand, it could serve as a floor for the amount to be awarded. That is, it could represent either a minimum or a maximum amount of alimony, depending on how courts viewed the arrangement.

Interesting idea, isn’t it? What say you, readers? Would you take a job as a stay-at-home spouse? How much do you think your services would be worth, objectively?

Image: Stay-at-Home Dad. BCantrall. GNU Free Documentation License.

Life, Interrupted

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Ever have the feeling that every single time you sit down (or stand up) to do something, you get interrupted about every 30 seconds? It feels like that most of the time around here, which is weird, because there’s no one around to interrupt but a couple of dogs. Yesterday, when I was trying to get out from under the two- or three-day task of rewriting and posting this summer’s English 102 course, the phenomenon seemed to be working in full force.

Woke at four, as usual, which should’ve given me plenty of time to get my act together. Wrote blog posts, started back to work on the course, eventually got around to fixing breakfast. If it’s not dogs barking and mock-fighting, it’s phones ringing, e-mail notifications binging, timers going off, the teapot whistling, people showing up at the door, plants crying out for water as temps hit 100 degrees, the pool pump making a weird noise, pool cleaner stopping dead in the water… Even Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinaire surfaced, bearing a check I’d written a few days before. He’d left it in his pocket when he put his pants through the washer, and the ink washed off. Would I write him another?

Hateful HP scanner software made me rescan a check for deposit four times. It operates so slowly that I’ll get up while it’s dragging its way through a process and go do something else: self-interruption, as it were. Went off to make the bed. Came back, restarted the program. Went off to feed the dog. Came back, restarted. Went off to put a load of laundry in the washer. Came back, restarted. And so on to infinity.

The whole day went that way. Got a lot done, but it was all done in fits and starts. Gestalt is the pattern of my life.

Came down with a sore throat yesterday. Cringe! Surely not a relapse of that hideous disease that made me so sick…and with which La Maya is still sick after six weeks of it???

Had to go to choir, that notwithstanding. Dragged home, dropped a Zyrtec knockoff, hoping the throat was an allergy symptom. Climbed into the sack around 10:30. Fell asleep over detective-novel copy, due back to the publisher on the 23rd.

Awake again at 4 a.m. At that hour, dawn is just barely beginning to break. How does the body know when the sky is only just starting to grey out? Must be magnetic, like a bird’s brain. Oh well. At this time of year, that’s a fact of life: the alarm is set to go off at 4 in the morning.

It’s kind of nice, because it does provide time to approach the day at a leisurely pace.

Throat still hurt. Must not be an allergy: otherwise the Zyrtec would have fixed it overnight.

Out the door at 6:45, off to the weekly business group meeting. So, so, sooo tired I could barely drive. Almost fell asleep at the wheel while stopped at a light. Realized…uh-oh. Shouldn’t have been driving at all.

Still zombified by the time the Scottsdale meeting broke up around 9:30. Had to consciously fight falling asleep as I drove back across the city. WTF?

Got home. Crawled into the sack around 10:15 or 10:30, after a few minutes of doggy exuberance. Charley soon gave up trying to drag Cassie off the bed and settled down on the floor. Slept all the way through until two o’clock in the afternoon! Holy mackerel. I don’t usually sleep in the daytime at all, much less for four hours.

Woke up feeling refreshed, for the first time in weeks. And the sore throat was gone.

Googled Zyrtec. Decided the toxic drowziness was probably a side effect. When they say “24-hour,” they’re not kidding.

Started to write this post. Ignored Charley. He responded by depositing diarrhea all over the family room. Cleaned that up. Remembered the frying plants. Pavement too hot to walk on barefooted; went to get shoes; interrupted by discovery that Charley had already retrieved shoes (he is a retriever, after all) and was eating them. Retrieved shoes from retriever. Watered plants. Back to computer. New e-mail. Decided to check neglected college e-mail system. Important message from departmental secretary, nearly missed. Cope with that, after retrieving another stolen shoe from the retriever. And so on, again, to infinity.

Many, many, many interruptions later, came back to this post, which by then had managed to disappear. Rewrote the first part. M’hijito showed up an hour and a half late. Miserable day for him, no doubt: when he refrains from complaining, that’s when you know he’s beyond his endurance level. Played with dogs. Consumed whiskey. Saw son and dog out the door. Came back to finish this. “This” interrupts plan for dinner, which interrupts need to finish editing the detective novel, which once again will interrupt sleep tonight.

And so, to work….