The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny Sorry, folks. Something must have corrupted when I upgraded (belatedly) WordPress. Just spent three hours trying to get a post online, and I can’t do it.
Soon as I can find someone techie enough to help figure out the problem, Funny will be back. Meanwhile, I’ve gotta get back to work!
Every time I get an offer from some feckless freelance writer trying to “give” me a “free” article plugging her customer, yet another debt consolidation service, I’m quietly amused. Well…no. I’m amazed: obviously some PF bloggers are publishing articles on debt consolidation that don’t give the whole story.
Debt consolidators negotiate with your creditors so that you make a single monthly payment to the consolidator, which then disburses small amounts and skims off a nice finance charge for itself. This may be useful for those who truly do not have the self-discipline to pay their bills and to snowflake them down with every small windfall that comes along. But for most people, it’s an expensive way to go. The FDIC notes that even though a consolidator may lower your monthly payments, the resulting plan will take longer to pay off your debts, and that the use of debt counseling is likely to show up on your credit report.
Some of these outfits are very smarmy. The Consumerist reports, for example, on the case of a “debt relief law firm” that collected $450 a month from a mark’s checking account, supposedly to pay down $23,000 worth of credit card debt. Not until the victim applied to rent an apartment did he discover the “debt relief” was actually theft, and that nary a dime had been paid toward his cards.
Some debt consolidators or alleged law firms charge excessive fees, often collected up front. These lead consumers even deeper into debt, failing to relieve their problems and even landing them in bankruptcy court. Although most debt consolidation companies claim to be nonprofits, they make a great deal of money at customers’ expense.
A number of years ago, while I was teaching at the Great Desert University’s westside campus and wishing I could earn more for less work, I applied for a job at a so-called nonprofit debt advising company. Starting pay for a job that required me to write lessons and conduct training in budgeting and personal finance was about $90,000—a phenomenal amount in a right-to-work state like Arizona. Various bonuses and perks were also promised. Companies don’t pay low-level executives that kind of money unless they’re making plenty of it.
Debt consolidation companies profit from their customers’ woes in a number of ways. One is simply to deduct a percentage of the payments passed along to creditors. Another is to engross one or two entire payments for “administrative costs,” dealing a blow to the borrower’s credit report when no part of the payment ever reaches the creditors.
You don’t need a third party to settle your bills. Whatever these outfits do, you can do for yourself, and then some—at no extra cost.
• First, call your creditors and try to negotiate a better interest rate or payment plan. They don’t want you to default, because that costs them money. Many will work with you to pay down your debt.
If you’re behind on your payments because of a documented personal disaster, such as a health crisis or loss of a job, lenders will sometimes negotiate a reduced balance. This is far preferable for them than having you declare bankruptcy and pay them nothing.
• Next, always pay more than the minimum due. A minimum payment applies only about one or two percent toward the balance; your goal is to pay down the principal.
Most car loans and mortgages allow you to pay extra specifically toward principal. You may have to go in to the bank in person to accomplish this, but it’s worth the trip. The more of your money that goes toward the principal, the faster you pay down the debt.
• Establish a budget and stick to it. This budget should be designed to keep you from running up more debt. Stop charging stuff. Easier said than done, but that’s why you make a plan and stay with it.
• Create a sidestream income and pay all of the net proceeds toward the debt. If this means delivering pizzas after work in the evenings and on weekends, so be it. A side job is one of the most effective tools for paying down debt and building savings.
• Pay every extra penny that comes your way toward the debt. Got a rebate? Tax refund? A few bucks from a yard sale? Pay it straight into the debt, no matter how tiny it is. Every little bit helps. It’s surprising how quickly you can whittle down debt this way.
• Decide which works best for you psychologically: to attack the largest debt first or to go after the one with the largest interest rate. From a practical point of view, it’s usually best to get rid of high-interest debt first, since that costs you the most money over the long term. Some people, however, feel most oppressed by larger debts, even if the interest is low relative to a smaller debt.
By “larger,” I don’t mean your mortgage. This should be the last debt you decide to pay off. Get rid of revolving debt first. The small tax advantage given to mortgage holders defrays the actual cost of interest on these loans, and so the most urgent debt is represented by credit card and automobile loans.
• Pay off debts in an organized, systematic way. Establish a monthly amount you can disburse toward existing debts. Devote the largest part of it toward the account you decide to liquidate first, while paying something more than the minimum toward other debts. When that account is paid off, move your largest payment to the next account, and so on until, one after another, all the debts are settled.
None of it is rocket science. You don’t have to fork over any of your money to someone else to do these things. You can do them for yourself—for free!
If you still feel the need to talk with someone about your debt problems, the National Foundation for Credit Counseling can refer you to free or low-cost counseling and offers a number of consumer tools on its website.
Okay, so I was going to write a nice, solid PF piece with a fine political spin, but…it’s 110+ out there, I’ve run all over town, now have a couple of margaritas under my belt, and about all I’m up for is editing a detective novel (if that) and nattering on here. And hereabouts, about the best I can come up with is a few handy household hints.
Get gunk off wooden surfaces with mineral oil
The cheapest mineral oil in the world is to be had at Ikea. They call it Skydd; I call it Skkwsh.
Mineral oil (or baby oil, which is the same thing, but don’t put either of them on your baby) works miracles on soiled wood. Some people use it to polish furniture with oil finish; I personally don’t care much for that use, because it leaves an ever-so-slightly tacky film. However, it is the business for cleaning sticky stuff off utilitarian pieces of furniture and kitchen grease off the ledges and crannies of your kitchen cabinets.
This noon I made a run on Costco (’nother hint: never do that on Saturday!), where I finally brought myself to buy a folding table to hold the semi-permanent garage junk that has needed a home for a long time. Among other things, since time immemorial the shredder and the crockpot have each been perched on separate vintage cheap-wooden folding TV tables. Many’s the time I’ve thought that if I just had one of those large, cheapo work tables churches and schools always seem to have on hand, it could hold those two items plus a great deal of other in-the-way junk, and even more in-the-way junk could be stowed beneath it.
Bringing this object—the folding utility table—into the garage liberated the two ancient TV tables. I brought them into the kitchen to clean them, it being way too hot in the garage for anything resembling physical work. They each had some sort of black greasy gunk, presumably well-aged drips from the crockpot seasoned with dust-storm residue. Wiping them off with a wet paper towel did nothing to dislodge the black greasy spots.
But: rubbing a little mineral oil into the top of the table, letting it sit for a minute, and then wiping it vigorously off removed the stuff without a whimper. Cut about 15 years off the crotchety old tables’ apparent age, too. Sure would be nice if the gunk would have the same effect on the aged human face.
Don’t even think of trying that. It’s toxic.
Moving on…
Store household cleaners in plastic tubs…and be smart about it!
Said garage is lined with storage cabinets, and one of the shelves of said storage cabinets holds my various lifetime supplies of household chemicals. Among those chemicals one could find a couple of bottles of ammonia, which I use to make a DIY version of Windex glass cleaner.
I keep these things, for convenience, in small plastic bins, the sort of things that used to be sold as dishwashing pans. They make it possible to slide out a whole slew of bottles and cans, rather than having to stick my head into the cabinet and shuffle through a bunch of containers in the dark
Welp, turns out this habit has another benefit: if one of those containers leaks, the plastic bin collects and contains the liquid, keeping it from creating a gawdawful mess all over your cabinetry!
Yesterday afternoon preparatory to washing the Arcadia doors, I pulled out a bottle of ammonia, therewith to whip up some more glass & tile cleaner…only to have it splash on my bare feet! The damn plastic bottle had developed a leak!
Pulled out the plastic bin, hauled out and rinsed its contents. Godlmighty but in there were not one but two unopened bottles of Clorox toilet cleaner, a substance liberally laced with chlorine bleach. As we know,
ammonia + chlorine bleach = death.
Mercifully, the toilet-cleaner plastic bottles were not breached. I carried them into the backyard anyway.And the particleboard shelves were unruined—they would have been trashed if ammonia had been quietly dripping onto them for God only knows how long. So:
Item: Storing bottles of household chemicals in plastic bins is a good idea. But…
Item: Do not store products that contain bleach in the same plastic bin with products that contain ammonia!
Get gunk off tile grout
Satan and Proserpine, previous owners of the Funny Farm, laid a bunch of tiles down in the living room, hall, kitchen, and dining room, all by their little selves. My tile dude said they did a good job of it, but like moi was mystified at the reason for their having slathered the grout with off-white “sealer” that really is nothing more than a type of latex paint.
Now…what happens to white grout over time?
Yeah. It collects dirt and turns…well, dirt-colored.
Same thing happens to fake white grout created by painting real grout with latex “sealer”: over time, the joints in S & P’s tiles (hm. Hadn’t thought of that confluence. Was the latest market crash and rape of the Baby Boom’s savings caused by Satan and Proserpine themselves?) …Yes, the joints in the tiles had become grody, to put it kindly. Yesterday with Pup out of my hair and all of next semester’s courses designed and posted online, I took it upon myself to do some serious cleaning.
What should I find when I emptied out the plastic bin into which a bottle of ammonia had slowly been leaking but a box of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser wall cleaner knockoffs from Target!
Recalling that these strange chemical sponges do a great job of cleaning the grout between Mexican tiles on the countertop, I decided to try them on the fake grout paint stuff on the floor.
Amazing!
It made a huge difference: so huge that where I accidentally missed a line of grout, it jumps right out at me. The tiles look almost as bright and clean as they did when I moved in here, shortly after those two painted the stuff on all the grout in the house.
The box contained four pieces of the stuff, which dissolves annoyingly as you scrub with it. These cleaned the kitchen, dining room, and the endless hall floors. Next weekend I’ll have to buy another box of the stuff from Tar-Zhay and do the living room. Very, very effective.
Make magnetic fridge notepad and pencil
You’ve seen those cutesie magnetized notepads with stick-to-the-fridge coordinating pencils and ballpoints? Of course, being a little funny about money yourself, you’re too cheap to spend the stupid amounts of money these pieces of kitsch cost, even though you can imagine the handiness of having a pad of paper hanging from the refrigerator, there to post stuff you’ve run out of.
Well, cheap yourself out of these things no longer!
First, get yourself an old-fashioned yellow pencil, the kind that’s milled with six flat sides. Cut off a two-inch-long (or so) strip of rubbery stuff the width of one of these sides. Remove the protective backing and stick it onto the pencil, just below the eraser.
Voilà! Now you have a pencil that will stick on the fridge. And I suppose you see the rest of this coming, eh?
Now get yourself a small yellow pad, 5 x 8 inches. These are available in lifetime supplies at my favorite purveyor of middle-class goods, Costco.
At any good craft store (such as Michael’s or even…yes! Home Depot) you can find magnetized sheets of bendy rubbery stuff, which you can cut with scissors.
The rubbery stuff has a stick-on backing, which is and is not sufficient for our purposes.
Cut off several more fairly large pieces of rubberized stuff, so that you can glue at least a couple on the cardboard backside of the yellow pad. It will probably take more than one. Depending on the brand of magnetic rubbery stuff, I’ve had it take two or three pieces to hold up a mini-yellow pad.
Do not buy a lifetime supply of magnetic rubbery stuff! It’s ridiculously easy to reuse this stuff. When you run out of paper, or when you’ve sharpened your pencil down to where its magnetic holder resides, simply pull off the rubbery stuff and glue it, using some Elmer’s or carpenter’s glue, onto a new pencil or pad. It lasts forever.
And there you are: A kewl yellow pad and pencil, hanging at your disposal on the fridge at all times!
Out and About on the Web
And if you’ve done all these things and still find yourself at loose ends, pass some time at a few friends’ websites:
Okay, this is one you have to follow. First, Mrs. Accountability flies into a tit when she discovers Wells Fargo is about to start gouging her for the privilege of using her money to make a profit. Like any sane PF consumer, she decides it’s time to find someplace else to do her banking. Then she realizes what’s involved in this venture and makes an executive decision.
Guess I’m not the only one who loved (or at least got excited about) this post from Nicole and Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured on passing judgment about other people based on their personal pastimes. It’s a great post, and the comments come up to the same standard. Hm. You know, I think this may be one of the truly great personal blogs out there, right up there with Donna Freedman’s Surviving and Thriving.
Speaking of the which, I don’t know how that woman manages to say so much in so few words.
Frugal Scholar’s post on the counterproductiveness of saving is well said.
In the earning, planning, and saving department, Evan has a few well-placed observations over at My Journey to Millions.
And along those lines, FMF offers some really startling insights at Free Money Finance. This is quite a piece of writing. If you’re still in your earning years, you need to read it. If you’re not but have children or friends who are, pass it along.
But in the same department, SVB over at Silicon Valley Blog brings up an entirely new set of questions about planning for lifetime savings and retirement.
Money Beagle contemplates the value of an insurance agent.
Afford Anything remarks on the spreading tendency to install valet parking…everywhere!
Onward!
Image (other than Funny’s): “All is Vanity” by C. Allan Gilbert. Life, death, and meaning of existence are intertwined. (Woman gazing into boudoir mirror forms shape of skull.) Public Domain.
So the 7:00 a.m. English 102 class ended on Thursday. Because I’d asked them to turn their last, horrendous 2,500-word essays in on Monday, I managed to post semester grades Thursday afternoon.
Friday was largely occupied with cleaning up the 102 website, writing a complicated addendum to the syllabus to handle the changes inflicted at the last minute when the library announced, two working days before fall classes begin, that it’s canceling in-class literacy instruction, and arranging to get still more pieces of paper printed. So by about 7:00 p.m. last night, I thought the summer courses were finally shoveled off my desk.
Not quite: just noticed I failed to delete drafts and peer reviews from the site. So now the computer grinds away, trying to delete 350 items one “page” at a time. Ugh.
Oh hell. For some reason, WordPress just deleted everything I wrote in this post. Having spent an hour writing all that stuff, I am NOT gonna write it again. Gotta get to cleaning this filthy house: last week’s dust storm again covered the floor with grit, and a week of doggy day care didn’t help things.
Back on Monday!
Fat, bloated raindrops are thumping down out of a strange sky.
The weather is just strange this evening. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.
An hour or two ago I noticed the sky was turning a funny color, sort of yellowy green…like when it hailed last fall. Yipe! That’s all we need: another monster hailstorm.
Anyway, about then I remembered I hadn’t added the chlorine tabs I was supposed to have fed to the pool yesterday, so I went out to get those and found this…like fog!
Very, very hot fog.
It was dust, of course. But what made it weird was that no wind was blowing. It was almost perfectly still out there. Dust was just hanging the air, seemingly of its own dusty volition. For a minute, I thought maybe it was smoke. But you can recognize the smell of smoke. This was just thick air, so thick it felt hard to breathe.
I chased the Cassowary back in the house—dogs are even more susceptible to valley fever than humans, and it makes them a lot sicker—and retreated to the kitchen, there to fry up a satisfyingly greasy dinner.
* * *
The dinner having cooked itself and been consumed, I just stuck my head back out there. Temp is down to a chilly 88. Air is muggy. The wind is scented with the perfume of creosotebush, a beautiful smell like…rain. We’ve had some restive thunder—the Cassie hates that. And now I’m about to clean up the kitchen and go see if anything’s on the TV at 8:00 of a Thursday night. Probably not, but nothing ventured….
* * *
Phone rings. SDXB is back in town, having left New Girlfriend in Colorado so he can come back to ungodly uptown Arizona for the late-summer dove hunt. She has a house in the Boulder area, where they hung out for a fair amount of the summer. Then they decamped to his sister and brother-in-law’s house at the Hood River, traveling by roundabout way of Canada.
SDXB craves to buy a motorcycle.
When he was a young man, mere observation of the homicidal tendencies of Arizona drivers was enough to get him to let loose of the bike he had in those days (he being a fairly bright young man). But now that he’s old, he’s let loose, all right: of his marbles. Says he, he wants to get one of those fat balloony things the old buzzards ride around on, something he can feel comfortable riding at about 70 mph.
Soooo, say I, are you planning to ride NG on this thing, or are you making her buy her own?
Not likely, says he.
Interesting, how women seem to hang onto their marbles longer than men do.
But maybe you’ll ride on it with me.
LOL! I can picture how much NG will love that! So you think I’ll do something that NG is too smart to do? What are you trying to say to me?
SDXB’s cell phone mercifully runs out of gas.
* * *
Bitch of a day!
It should have been a lovely, relaxing day. Today marked the last meeting of the class that meets at 7:00 a.m. Feelings about it are mixed:
• This bunch is one of the two best classes I’ve ever taught. Just loved them all: great, great group of people.
• But god, how I hate hitting the ground with my feet running! Rolling out at 5:00 a.m. (or more often at 3:00 a.m., with no time to grab an extra hour’s sleep after two hours of insomnia) is just flicking painful. So, so glad to have that go away.
So I’d thought I’d have the afternoon to myself. In fact, since all I was doing on this last day was giving them a Mickey-Mouse quiz that would give me a pile of handwriltten, dated evidence that yes, as required, we were all there on the final exam day, I figured to get out the door a little before 8:00 a.m.
But nay.
Just as I was shutting down the computer preparatory to exiting stage left, who should stumble in, swathed in a sleepy fog, but on of my favorite (perennially late) students. Nothing would do but what he had to respond to the stupid questions I’d dreamed up. This, while yakking up a storm.
So it was after 9 before we wandered out of there, me feeling a little irked.
As nothing, in the irkitude department.
Backstory: the college has the most incredible staff of librarians. Or at least it did This summer one of the excellent staff members took it upon herself to retire. This would be depressing enough for the rest of us, but was it enough? Ohhh no! Another very fine librarian forthwith gave notice. Rather short notice, apparently.
So the staff is down by two heavy-duty members, and meanwhile our idiot Tea-Party legislators have been strangling the state’s colleges and universities, cutting to the point of hemorrhage. There’s not enough money left in the budget to replace these women.
One of the many amazing things they would do is come into our classes and provide customized library literacy training: what’s in a library, how to find it, and how to use the vast banks of challenging databases.
Lest you think this ought not to be necessary: no, it ought not. Couple semesters ago a young man told me he hadn’t been in a library for seven years; the last one he’d visited was in his junior high school. He, alas, is not atypical.
So these librarians present some very crucial information, and because of their familiarity with the college’s and the district’s resources, they do it one helluva lot better than I can.
Welp, yesterday—after anyone (like me) who has her act together has had her syllabus, calendar, and 70-page course packet all planned out, put together, and printed (at the expense of many, many hours of unpaid labor)—yesterday they inform us that because what remains of the staff can’t deal with the work, they’re canceling the classroom lectures and replacing them with scheduled workshops. Students can come in and take them at what passes for their convenience.
Of course, given a student body most of whom work full-time or at least part-time, the late-afternoon hours when these events are mostly scheduled are going to be effectively unattainable for my students. That notwithstanding, little choice remains but to require one of these workshops (25 points), which requires something else: a revision of my flicking syllabus!
Well, I couldn’t very well throw out 100 pounds of paper and print new packets, so I had to come up with corrigenda for not one, not two, but three sections. Type that stuff up. Arrange to get it printed. Beg the copy center to get it done by midday Monday.
Complicating matters, we’re told that we can’t just bring a class into the library to work ad lib: we have to arrange ahead of time. I had a half-dozen trips to the library planned, each of which now had to be time-consumingly scheduled.
And the days when librarians are not going to show up to eddycate my students? I had to figure out something to do with them, which largely entailed having to make appointments to drag them to the computer lab so as to get them working on the databases: another endlessly time-consuming chore.
Meanwhile, the puppy yaps, the puppy finds the paperwork for the mortgage on the downtown house and decides to eat it, the puppy pees on the floor, the puppy grabs Cassie and gets walloped, the puppy does dances to puppy joy, the puppy evinces starvation every 30 minutes and has to be fed, the puppy digs a hole under a citrus tree, the puppy grabs Cassie’s Angry Bird out of her mouth and bounces away with it, the puppy has a gay old time. During this celebrating, I have to make my way through a Chase Bank phone maze to find out why they’re charging me a $132 redemption fee because I canceled their damn card. The puppy eats the mortgage documents while I’m on the phone to one Hrothgar or whatever the hell his fake name is. Hrothgar opines that the “redemption fee” is really money they owe me, and that they’re going to send it along to me. Any day now.
That’s nice. The puppy is up to something unknown in the bathroom.
By the time I’ve finished revamping my courses again, the afternoon is over and I haven’t begun to get around to taking down the remains of the summer 102 course’s website and cleaning it up for the new bunch. Bunches, that is.
We have 25 students in the 101 section, 24 in the mid-day MWF 102 section, and only 14 in the Wednesday afternoon endless section. This is good, I guess. Only 14 students, I mean.
Five people have shown up in Buggy Whip Design 201, which means we have a fair shot at seeing the course make by the time it starts in October. I’ll be rich as…as Bilbo Baggins, I expect.
* * *
SDXB says a powerful storm dumped a flood of water out there in Sun City. Some school bus children were trapped under downed power lines. Hereabouts, in the rain shadow of the North Mountains, we got the dust fog, the spattering of fat rain drops, some vague lightning, and eventually a bit of wind.
Weird.
A weird ending to a difficult day. Strange.
Yesterday morning one of the livelier students asked if anyone else in the room liked fish for breakfast. After the group gave him some fishy looks, one classmate said well, sure, smoked salmon and scrambled eggs is great. And of course I had to chime in that lox & cream cheese on bagels can’t be beat.
So by the time the class broke up around 8:30, I was craving lox and cream cheese. Where to find it, here in the cultural Sahara? In these parts, a Jewish deli is rare as a fur coat on a Mexican hairless pooch.
There’s a Paradise Bakery more or less on the way home, so I dropped by there to order up a bagel with lox and cream cheese.
Amazingly: no luck!
No, indeed.
The Paradise Bakery does have bagels and cream cheese, the latter in several persuasions. But they have no lox.
Briefly I considered: would a bagel with chive cream cheese suffice?
Uh…no. Somehow I’d scrounge something out of the mostly bare cupboard, something (unknown what) that surely would satisfy my craving for salty stuff.
As I climbed into the car to go on my way, it occurred to me that the Safeway a block or two down the road would surely have lox, cream cheese, and bagels. From deep inside the freezer, the coffee beans called me home.
So it was into the Safeway parking lot, making a fast run on the deli.
God help us. The guy behind the deli counter did not know what lox is!
Didn’t believe me about the “cultural Sahara” bit, did you?
He speculated that maybe the meat department would know where to find it, if the store carried it.
Uh huh. The store’s open 24 hours, but the meat department doesn’t open till 9 or 10 ayem.
But luckily, a butcher’s factotum was out in front, filling up the counter’s compartments with fresh ice. She directed me to the cabinet where little plastic bags containing tiny overpriced servings of lox hung in cooled air.
Not ideal. But better than nothing.
Choice of cream cheese: Philadelphia or Safeway brand knock-off, probably manufactured by Philadelphia. What the hell: get the cheapest.
I’ve never been nuts about bagels, and you can be sure the bagels available in a Phoenix supermarket are even gummier and more redolent of library paste than the most average of East-Coast bagels. So in the bakery department I picked up a loaf of fake “artisan” bread: air bread shaped like a bloated baguette.
Sliced and toasted: not a bad imitation of one or the ’tother.
From the fridge, I retrieved half a Bermuda onion…just the thing! Sliced off a bit of it, very thin. In the same cache, what should I discover but a half-full jar of capers!
Hot diggety!
Thick rounds of fake artisan bread, toasted and slathered with industrial cream cheese, topped with onions, capers, and industrial lox: not bad!
Pot of coffee brewed in a French press out of espresso beans: Elysian!
For what it would’ve cost to buy one breakfast bagel and a cup of bad coffee, I got enough ersatz bread, cream cheese and lox to make three or four breakfasts or brunches!
Food, wonderful food! So much more wonderful when you do it yourself…
🙂