funny | Funny about Money

Are Your Name, Address, Phone Number, Income, and Credit Rating Being Broadcast to the Universe?

May 29, 2010May 29, 2010 by funny

Holy God! Take a look at what Fabulously Broke found! Do not pass go before you click here and enter your own name.

When I went there, I discovered they’ve published my street address—with a map to my house!—telephone number; approximate age; credit rating; wealth level; value of my home; gender; marital status; length of time I’ve resided in my home; socioeconomic status of my neighborhood; type of structure I occupy and and the year it was built; its alleged value; whether it has a fireplace, central heating, central air, or a pool; how many kids I have; my educational level; my hobbies; my occupation; my interests; and my zodiac sign.

To be fair, some of these are left blank. Some are wrong—hilariously, they think my house is worth in excess of a million bucks. I wish!!! Some of the data clearly came from Facebook: I recognize the disinformation I entered there.

However… Spokeo also has another me in its bowels: Some woman by the same name is still living with my former husband at my former address. Interestingly, this woman’s information happens to match my own real-life personal data.

Folks. I divorced before there was such a thing as social media. The Internet barely existed when I ran away to the Alaskan outback. So…wherever these SOBs are aggregating their data from, it’s not all coming from the Internet.

If you go to their contact link and send them an e-mail demanding that they take your personal data down, you’re forced to enter their choice of subject lines. Select “business matter” instead of “privacy” to reach a human being. Select “privacy” and instead of sending the dear-sir-you-cur you’ve scorched into their contact form, you get instructions for a hoop-jump and the advice that the only way to get your information off their site is to remove yourself from all the social media sites you use.

In other words, if you don’t want these bustards publishing your current address and phone number to your abusive ex- who threatened to cut off your head, pee down the hole, and flee with your children to East Zambia, you may not participate in any social media of any kind. Either that, or you must leave a trail of lies wherever you go.

I wonder if Spokeo’s management can spell “class action suit.”

Postscript: Go here for an excellent video taking you through FaceBook’s new privacy settings, step-by-step.

DIY Veterinary: The dog-proof hot-spot bandage

May 29, 2010 by funny

Come the warm weather, dog-shedding season is upon us. Whenever Cassie blows her coat, she starts licking her favorite hot-spot site on her foreleg. After various veterinary consultations for various licking dogs, I’ve learned that the best way to deal with this problem is to cover the irritated spot until whatever it is that compels the dog to lick—whether it’s habit, instinct, or itch—passes.

If you’ve ever tried to bandage a dog, you know it’s easier said than done. No creature on this earth can unwrap a wound dressing faster than a dog can. This is a challenge that requires great persistence and ingenuity on the part of the human.

Recently I made a little discovery: the stretchy stick-to-itself bandaging, sold at Walgreen’s as Tender Tape and available online in various permutations, will hold a Bandaid or a piece of gauze in place without sticking to the dog’s hair. You’ll still need to secure it with a little sticky tape, but with this strategy, you can minimize the amount of hard-to-remove, hair-pulling gummed tape needed to keep the dog from pulling off the bandage.

The scheme proceeds along these lines…

You need:

• a roll of gauze (a gauze patch or even a Bandaid can be substituted)
• a roll of stretchy tape
• a roll of waterproof bandage tape
• a gentle cleanser to clean the hot spot
• optional: antibiotic ointment or cortisone cream

To start out, here are a few important caveats:

1. Until you know for sure that the dog can’t get this off, do not apply topical cortisone or antibiotics. Your dog should not be eating that stuff! Try the bandaging scheme first; when you confirm that the pooch can’t remove it for a day or more, then you can try a little medical goop.

2. Be very careful not to get the bandage on too tight! Apply the stretch bandage gently so that it lays on the dog’s leg about like a smooth-fitting cotton sock. Do not pull it tight! If it’s too tight, this stuff can cut off circulation, and since the animal can’t tell you how it feels, you must take care not to wrap the limb tightly.

3. Remove and replace the bandage every 24 to 36 hours.

4. Remove it immediately and replace if it gets wet.

Okay. First step is to wrestle the dog into position, on the ground or, if the critter is small enough, on a bed or table. If you have the dog up on a piece of furniture, you should have someone help to hold the animal so it does not fall off.

Saturate a cotton ball with a wound cleanser and gently wipe the inflamed area. I’ve been using Band-Aid Hurt-Free Antiseptic Wash. I’ve also tried hot spot itch relief spray but found it less than satisfactory: it doesn’t seem to ease the dog’s discomfort, and when you’re squirting it on a foreleg, it’s way too easy to accidentally get it in the dog’s face. That’s highly undesirable.

Remember: it’s not clear that hot spots actually itch. No one knows why dogs lick themselves raw—it may be a nervous tic or just a bad habit. For that reason, the fewer meds applied, the better.

Now that you’ve given the spot a token cleansing, apply some topical antibiotic or cortisone if you’re sure the dog can’t get the bandage off for a number of hours. Then cover this with a length of gauze bandage, gently and neatly wrapped around the dog’s leg. Hold onto the dog so it can’t squirm away while you grab the stretch bandage.

Wrap a length of stretch bandage neatly over the gauze, so that no gauze is sticking out. A two-inch wide bandage works easiest for this purpose, unless your dog is tiny. Remember not to wrap stretch bandaging too tight!

Take a small strip of waterproof tape and secure the seam closed. Now take another strip of waterproof tape and wrap it around your bandage along the top edge, so that a narrow strip of it attaches to the dog’s fur. This does not have to be very wide—for most dogs a fairly modest band will hold the bandage down. Depending on your dog’s determination, you may or may not have to run another strip around the bottom edge. For a really dogged dog, you may have to apply a sturdier glue-on strip by circling the leg several times with the waterproof tape.

Once I had a German shepherd who enjoyed licking holes in the pads of her feet. She was very skilled at removing barriers to this activity. In her case, I would build a little bootie out of waterproof first-aid tape over a gauze layer, wrapping and wrapping and WRAPPING until she couldn’t get through it and she couldn’t pull it off her foot. This worked pretty well—but sometimes it takes some real persistence to win out over a stubborn pooch.

Cassie gives up easily, thank goodness. So she doesn’t need to have some sort of iron maiden applied to her leg. I’ve found that if you can keep a hot spot covered for a week or so, it usually will heal up enough that the dog will quit licking it. For a while.

While you’re waiting for recovery, give the dog some salmon. It’s full of omega-3 fatty acids, said to ease hot spots.

Glasses: You get what you pay for!

March 23, 2011May 28, 2010 by funny

OMG!!! Just got back from picking up the $720 glasses of late, great fame. I can’t believe it… They don’t just work, they work with a flourish. I can see better through these than I’ve been able to see in years. In the car, I can see the road and all the signs around with crystal clarity, and see the dashboard perfectly. Hee! I haven’t been able to read the digital clock since I bought that vehicle…who knew it wasn’t Toyota’s fault?

On the way home I stopped by the Walgreen’s to pick up some dog-bandaging gear (more about which, soon), and mirabilis! I could actually read the fine print on the packaging!

It gets better. Back here at the Funny Farm, I experimented with the laptop computer, expecting exactly…not much. But lo! The little monitor is clear as a bell! The Mac defaults to show a fairly small image, so I’m often command-plussing to enlarge it. Noooo problem reading it. That’s not surprising, though, because it sits down fairly low when you’re loafing on the sofa while computing. Still…I couldn’t even begin to read the MacBook through the Costco progressives.

And I just discovered that I can even read the iMac’s monitor, if I jack up the desk chair as high as it’ll go. Since a little footrest resides under the desk, the fact that my feet barely reach the floor is moot. The footrest holds my feet & legs at a very comfortable angle.

You realize what this means?

Holy mackerel. It means GOODBYE TO THE VISION SYSTEM!!!!!

No more jerking around between three pairs of glasses. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to use these glasses for choir. Just these glasses…no switching back and forth with ultra-strong readers. Would that or would that not be awesome?

There’s a lot of frosting on this cake: these glasses fit my face! The Costco pair looked like goggles. When I said I looked like Ma Makutsi from The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, I wasn’t kidding.

They’re so feather-light, it feels almost like there’s nothing hanging on my schnozz. It would be easy to fall asleep in these things, because you hardly even notice their presence.

And the marzipan roses on top of the cake? They actually look nice! In fact, they look amazing! The frame has this tiny, delicate temple piece of amethyst metal, and Tommy, the glasses dude par excellence, added a perfectly matching color around the lens edges. The effect is too, too kewl!

How to Buy Your Next Car in Cash

May 28, 2010 by funny

The other day while a friend and I were chatting, the subject of buying cars came up. When I mentioned that I pay for my cars in cash, he expressed some awe: the very idea of not having to make car payments was so far outside his ken it might as well have come from Mars.

“Who can pay for a car in cash?” he wondered.

You can. I can. Anyone can.

You may not be able to pay for your present car in cash, but you can pay cash for the next one. Here’s the strategy:

Take the term of your present loan and multiply the number of years by two. Let’s say you have a five-year loan. Five times two is ten years. That’s how long you’re going to keep the car you’re paying on. Fortunately, most cars are now built to last that long, if you take halfway decent care of them—so, plan to change the oil and stick to the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule.

OK. So you make your monthly car loan payments faithfully, as you agreed to do when you bought the chariot. In five years, the car is paid off.

Let’s say you’ve been paying $450 a month toward the loan.

You know… If you can afford to pay $450 a month to a lender, you can afford to pay yourself $450 a month. Right?

So for the next five years, the remainder of the time you’ve scheduled to drive your now paid-for clunk, what you’re going to do is arrange an automatic transfer of $450 a month into savings.

In five years, when your car is ten years old, you’ll have $27,000 sitting in your automobile purchase savings account. Your car will have some resale or trade-in value—my ten-year-old Sienna, for example, is worth about $5,000. Let’s say yours is comparable: you now have 32 grand with which to buy a new vehicle.

When you do buy the new car, even though you’re paying in cash, figure out what monthly payments would cost if you financed the thing. Take that amount—the new theoretical payment—and put that amount aside over the length of the theoretical loan. In three years or five years, once again you’ll have all you need to buy a new car. Now you can purchase new or new-to-you cars more often. If you decide to drive a car for its entire ten- to fifteen-year lifetime, you’ll have a period in which you need not deduct anything for the future vehicle from your pay.

And you’ll never be saddled with a car loan again.

What if you’re already a couple of years into a five-year loan? What does the math look like then?

It should be about the same: you’re going to keep the car for ten years. After the loan is paid off, you’ll just keep on making those payments, only to yourself instead of to some lender.

What if you pay off the loan early? Bully for you: you can either buy another car sooner, or you can keep the car until it falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay. The second strategy will give you a longer period either to save up more money for a fancier ride or to float without having to take the car payment money out of your income.

My first post-divorce car was bought on time. Being averse to loan payments, I paid off the loan as fast as I could. Because a substantial part of a car payment can be interest (less so these days, but when the economy was strong lenders soaked a fair amount of interest out of car buyers), paying toward principal accelerates the pay-off date. By paying a little extra toward principal each month and then taking every windfall (tax refunds, credit card rebates, yard sale proceeds, whatever comes your way) and throwing it into the principal, too, I paid off a five-year note in 18 months.

Then I started paying myself. I didn’t keep the money in my bank accounts, because it would be too easily accessible there—too tempting. Instead, I banked it in a Vanguard short-term corporate bond fund, which I was less likely to raid for indulgences or emergencies. This rather stodgy fund was safe enough, and it earned more than a bank savings account would have paid. Today, I’d put it in a money market fund instead, because a withdrawal from the money market is not a taxable event. If you know you’re going to withdraw $25,000 or $30,000 in one swell foop, it’s best to minimize taxes when that happens.

This plan really takes no more self-discipline than you have to muster to make your loan payments. It takes some time, but once you’ve got the loop going, you’ll never have to pony up a chunk of your paycheck to a car lender again.

How a Frugal Find Helped End a Friendship

May 27, 2010May 27, 2010 by funny

LOL! That decorative arrangement with the black and green square plates shown in my last post reminds me of the episode that probably marked the beginning of the end of a very close friendship.

The woman who dubbed me “Funny about Money” (not knowing I could overhear her speaking into La Maya’s telephone answering machine) had wildly expensive tastes. One day she and I were cruising a wildly upscale shopping center when we came across a tony interior decor store that was going out of business. We each grabbed a bunch of stuff that, at “discounted” prices, still cost a great deal more than it was worth. She was taken by those stone fruits and bought three of them at near full price. I spotted a few that were chipped or unnoticeably cracked and talked the salesman into giving them to me for next to nothing—in fact, one of them, he gave to me for free.

My friend then found two square plates, one black and one green. They bore some “artist’s” signature on the back. Arranging the fake fruit atop the plates created a nice effect, and so she bought the damn things for an astonishing price. As I recall, she paid over 100 bucks apiece. These she took home and arranged atop her dining-room buffet, to handsome effect.

Well, I wanted something to put my fake fruits on, too.

I studied those plates and thought…hmh. They looked mighty familiar.

A day later I betook myself to Cost Plus/World Market, where what should I find—on sale!—but those two square plates you see up there. I got them for under five bucks apiece.

Reader, those two plates are identical to the unholy expensive square plates my friend bought at the upscale design store. The only difference is that mine are not signed on the bottom by someone nobody ever heard of.

Heeee! Was she peeved!

I never told her what I paid for them, but she did know I got them at the low-brow Cost Plus, home of the world’s largest collection of $8 table wines. Our relationship cooled into the frosty zone after that, and within a couple of months she cut me off without explanation. I assume it was because of the $5 plates, which in her mind would have hugely devalued the “art” she imagined she was buying. That, and having embarrassed herself with the “funny about money” remark.

😆

Frugal Shopping at the Estate Sales

May 27, 2010May 27, 2010 by funny

Yesterday morning La Maya and I made a run on an estate sale in Troon, an upscale high-desert area of north north Scottsdale, where for $500,000 you get a stryofoam-and-stucco tract house nestled among the boulders in Commuter Hell. Houses in foreclosure out there go for upwards of four hundred grand.

It actually was a moving sale, and not a heckuva lot was left by the time the estate-sale organizer was hired—the real estate transaction closed yesterday, and the owner had moved almost everything out. But we found a few tschochkies.

The owner was given to buying crafty and ethnic items at galleries and upscale craft fairs. The sale offered a number of stoneware and art glass items that were kind of interesting. I snared three stoneware canisters, thinking they’d be nice on the kitchen counter, which right now is inhabited by an eclectic collection of various holders. I paid $15 for the three of them:

Once I got them home, I found the pea-green effect didn’t work at-tall in the kitchen. Casting about for someplace to put them, I realized the color would look just fine in the living room, whose walls are painted an Alexander Julian shade I think of as “swamp green.” I already had the pair of stacked square plates with the stone “fruits” on it. The canisters look like they were made to go with that arrangement. That little blue oval box also came from the moving sale.

It’s a little busier than I like. To pull this off, I got rid of the decorative gadget that has been sitting there for the past four years or so, a glass vase with a spray of twigs sticking out of it:

The glass vase actually looked better than the stoneware things. However, I’ve been getting mighty tired of it, and besides, those damn twigs threaten to poke me in the eye every time I sit down on the sofa. I’ve wanted to get rid of it for awhile. The stoneware things may not last there, but I don’t think the glass and twigs will be coming back.