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The future of residential real estate

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Several weeks ago, one of the longtime choir members passed away. A widower, he lived in the neighborhood, in a very nice 1950s home just one lot away from the park. He probably was the original owner.

At least three adult children were at the memorial service. The house has not gone up for sale. Sometimes you see lights in the place at night. So it’s possible that one of the kids is living in it. Or it’s possible that the heirs are still trying to straighten out the estate and so aren’t selling the place until they reach some agreement on the distribution of the proceeds.

If I had several children and were affluent enough to live in that area, I’d probably will the house to the one who most needed a nice place to live and then distribute the rest of the estate fairly to the rest of them.

Just now I know of at least four houses in the neighborhood where people have died or gone off to the nursing home and family have moved in. One couple with a baby had moved into her parents’ home and assumed the mortgage some time before the crash. In the ensuing deprecession, they both lost their jobs. She started baking incredibly rich cookies and peddling them through farmer’s markets and gourmet grocery stores; although the enterprise took off and has now gone national through the Internet, it still doesn’t match what they earned when they both had full-time jobs. She said they managed to get by because the mortgage payments were very low, compared to what they would have been paying had they bought a newer place.

Another couple moved into her mother’s house with their two kids. That house was paid off, a true windfall for the young family. And a friend of La Maya and La Bethulia’s, now withering away in Hospice, had “sold” her long paid-off home to her daughter; to keep it legal, she was making “rent” payments to the daughter. The daughter and her husband, who live in Alaska, plan to keep the house to use as a winter home.

In all three cases, owners had bought the houses so long ago that even at today’s depressed prices the places would have sold at a considerable profit. All three houses are in neighborhoods where prices are not especially depressed, anyway. If any amount remained on the mortgage, the payments were ludicrously low compared to what you’d pay to buy the house.

I suspect this is going to develop into a pattern. Real estate, despite the drop in prices, is out of sight and unaffordable for many young people. Policy-makers are beginning to talk about encouraging people to rent rather than to try to buy property, and after the late, great housing crash, many people in their 20s and 20s see little sense in throwing money into residential property. Still, most Americans would still rather own a house than rent an apartment, and talk notwithstanding, some see evidence that over time, owning works better financially.

It makes sense, then, that if a parent’s home is in a livable neighborhood—reasonably safe with access to an adequate public or even private school—the heirs would want to keep the house in the family. If it’s paid off, with the savings you could put your child in a private or parochial school, rendering the quality the local public schools moot.

So, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more younger families moving into deceased parents’ homes. As the baby boomers start to pass, this could become a trend.

Drummers

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Often at night, when Cassie the Corgi and I are strolling, we can hear someone in the park banging a drum. The sound is steady, fast, monotone, and it reverberates through the neighborhood: boomboomboomboomboomboom.

Since I don’t go in or even near the park after sundown, I’ve thought it was some New Age nut case drumming up the Earth Mother or resonating to herb-induced vibrations. From several blocks away, the sound is eerie and vaguely spooky.

Ah, but no! Yesterday afternoon we went over to the park shortly before sunset. It was a gorgeous evening, a near-full moon already high in the turquoise east as the sun prepared to bed down in the magenta west. And a steady thrumming called.

As we approached the grassy meadow, what we found was not one drummer but four: a drum circle! In the shade of a spreading elm, four American Indians—a man, a very gravid woman, a boy about eight, and a younger man about sixteen—sat on the ground. The older man was pounding the deep-voiced drum that rumbles through the surrounding streets. The boy played a smaller drum, and the teenager accompanied them with a pair of gourd rattles. The man was chanting, just loud enough to be heard in one corner of the park.

Wonder! What a find!

It’s why I love my neighborhood. You’d never hear that in an HOA. You’d never hear it in Sun City. In these beleaguered parts, HOA’s have taken to suing people whose homes have been foreclosed, trying to suck continuing payments out of them for vacant properties. Give me Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum any day…and along with him, I’ll take the Indian drum circle, thank you.

Solar and rocket stoves: Survival Gear…Frugal Extreme…or Just Going Green?

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Okay, so Armageddon is here and the power has gone out…permanently. Your shiny glass-topped stove doesn’t work, neither does the oven, and you have to cook all those pizzas in the freezer before they spoil! What’re you gonna do?

That’s easy: whip out the tinfoil and a couple of cardboard boxes, and build yourself a solar oven! Alternatively, you could build an oven that uses sticks of scrap wood for fuel.

This morning a reader commenting on the Weather! post remarked that it’s very easy to construct a solar oven. So of course I had to check that out. A quick Google search brought up this amazing site. By golly, you can build a solar stove that looks like a nun’s headgear turned upside down. You can make one out of an old innertube. You can make a portable stove out of an umbrella. You can make them out of cardboard boxes. You can even use a pizza box. And if you really want to get fancy, you can hook your stove to a kind of battery-run equatorial mount so it will track the sun all day!

Would one of these contraptions save us cheapskates money? It might, if you have an electric stove. The stove and oven are big energy hogs, especially if you cook indoors all the time. My power bill was $57 last month, and I didn’t turn on the heater or an electric space heater once. I rarely leave the lights burning in unattended rooms, and I only do a couple of loads of laundry a week. My stovetop is gas, but the wall oven runs on electricity. So most of the power had to have been used by the oven, the refrigerator, and the computer. Let’s say four appliances consume the lion’s share of the power (this is just a guess!): $57 ÷ 4 = $14.25.

So. You could stand to save as much as $14 a month by cooking everything bakeable in a solar stove.

Green? Well, except for the mining, manufacture, and hauling of aluminum foil and the wood-pulping, manufacture, and distribution entailed in making cardboard boxes, I suppose it’s green. It would be that much less coal mined or oil drilled. I suppose. Though the energy to make those products has got to come from somewhere.

Hey! Every little bit helps! Eh?

So, what could you cook in such a device? A little cruising shows that cooking is plain and time-consuming. Apparently a solar oven is the (relatively) green equivalent of the slow cooker. Cooking times depend on the kind of cooker you’ve built and, of course, the weather. Roasting a single acorn squash will take you four to six hours. Chicken is said to take anywhere from one to three hours. A pan of lasagne takes three hours, but rice (we’re told) can be cooked in half an hour or so—after the water comes to a boil. One enthusiast cooks beans (all day long) and beer bread in his solar oven.

So if you have some food laying around, come Armageddon, you should be OK, assuming you’ve also laid in enough tinfoil.

Scrolling down at the site of our original discovery, we come across something called a rocket stove. This gadget, built of old cans, barrels, bricks or whatnot, is designed to burn small pieces of wood, such as twigs, scraps, or other small pieces of combustible material. These things can be fairly large—here’s one used to cure tobacco—and certainly could be designed, with care, into a nice backyard bread oven.

From what these authors say, apparently a rocket stove can generate some pretty intense heat. A solar oven? Maybe not so much.

On the other hand, given a 118-degree day a solar cooker might get up some pretty fair heat. It’s already in the 90s here. Maybe later this summer I’ll give one of these gadgets a try.

Has anybody built a solar oven or a rocket stove? How did it work for you?

Head-banging in the corporate bureaucracy

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Godlmighty! Yesterday I realized that Fidelity never sent my April 403(b) drawdown. So now on Monday I have to try AGAIN to get those people off the dime.

What torture! I just hate bureaucratic runarounds. I hate them even more when the bureaucracy is private instead of governmental. At least with the government the employees are usually trying to accommodate you.

I have talked to CSR after CSR after CSR—every time you call, you get a different person, and you never can get through to Person 1 who told you X or Person 2 who told you Y. I have asked and been assured now three times by three different people that the drawdown required by the State of Arizona would be made correctly and would be direct-deposited in my checking account. The result is that since last December I’ve gotten two checks sent in the mail. And this month I’ve received nothing.

It just makes me so angry. We originally had the option to invest with Vanguard in its 403(b) plan. As soon as that became possible, I moved most of my 403(b) funds over there, because all my nondeferred savings were at Vanguard, whose fees are low, whose profits are handsome, and whose customer service is excellent. That lasted all of a year—I guess Vanguard must have been too competent to work with Arizona State University.

If I weren’t afraid the state would deny me the rest of my RASL, I’d roll the money over into my big IRA now. In fact, my financial advisor and I hatched a plan to have them roll a portion of the drawdown over to the IRA, but I hadn’t gotten around to doing battle with the bureaucrats about that, mostly because I wanted to see how I would get by in the summer before cutting the drawdown from $500 to $100.

Presumably, though, that wouldn’t have happened, either. The only way I’m going to get the money where it belongs is going to be to roll the entire amount over. And I’m really afraid that’s going to get me in trouble, since the woman who administers the RASL program insists that to be eligible you have to be drawing what she calls a “pension”—i.e., a monthly drawdown from the state’s 403(b) plan.

I’ve concocted a new plan, though. To wit: leave enough cash in the 403(b) fund to cover the time between now and the date the last RASL check is issued, but roll the rest of it over. There are only 22 months remaining, and so the most I’d have to leave in there—assuming I continue the drawdown I’m currently making, which I’d actually like to cut—is $11,000.

Whatever I decide to do, though, next week I’m going to have to bang my head against the bureaucratic wall again. I’m royally sick of that!

Only a slightly nightmarish day…

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, proprietor Revanche features a very beautiful chicken soup, comfort food she cooked up after an extraordinarily rough week.  Meanwhile, Frugal Scholar, feeling a little anxious after links to her site in Funny’s recently gone-viral post pulled traffic upward there, too, also covets comfort food, in her case a lush-sounding broccoli soup with an egg-parmesan swirl-in…glorioski!

Cassie and I could use a little comfort food ourselves, and as a matter of fact we have some chicken that I could cook up into a lovely soup. What a wacky day!

I’m sitting here in the counting house along about 2:30 this afternoon, trying to figure out how to finesse payment for the mountain of clothes I bought this week, when all of a sudden I smell…mothballs. Really, really strong stink of mothballs.

Mothballs? What? That would be 1,4-dichlorobenzene these days, a slightly less toxic product than the stuff that used to grace this common household insecticide, naphthalene, replaced because of its flammability. The newer ingredient is known to be carcinogenic, and god only knows what it does to 25-pound dogs.

No mothballs reside in my house, and the strong stench is fast getting stronger. I get up to see what the heck, wondering if there’s some sort of fire in the attic or something that’s releasing fumes. The closer I get to the center of the house, the stronger the stink is.

I’ve left all front, side, and back doors open because it’s a spectacular day and, after the recent cool snap, probably the last comfortable day before summer sets in. Outdoors I either can’t smell it or the odor is much fainter than inside the house, where the fumes are so strong they make my eyes water.

Leash up the dog and get outside. It occurs to me that maybe the workmen at Biker Boob’s former abode are using some sort of chemicals, so I go over and ask—nope, they’re not doing anything with any chemicals, not even Dap or paint. Walk back toward the alley behind the house, where the stench is now very powerful. I again wonder if it’s originating inside my house.

The young mom across the street is hauling soccer balls out of her SUV. She also smells the odor and wonders what it is. After some speculation, we decide to call the fire department.

Fire dudes show up in due course. They explore the alley. At first they think it’s coming from the big garbage bin between my house and Sally’s–possibly illegal dumping. Proceeding up the alley, they find oily stuff on the ground. Now they’re thinking maybe it’s dioxin. (Firemen must love these little adventures!) 🙄

By now Sally has come out, and Manny across the street from her has joined the party. Fire dudes ask Sally if she’s sprayed or used any chemicals. She says not. But the guy two houses up the street is installing a swimming pool…could there be any industrial chemicals involved in that?

The firemen proceed up the road and interrogate the suspect homeowner.

Turns out this moron has sprayed Ortho’s Groundclear all over his entire backyard and up and down the alley! He claims he’s mixed it according to the package instructions, but it seems highly unlikely that applying it according to the instructions would fill a distant neighbor’s home with choking fumes and stink up the air for four city lots in all directions. Though this stuff is supposed to be relatively benign, IMHO nothing that smells that foul can be good for you.

So I load the dog into the car and drive down to M’hijito’s house. Takes an hour for the nasty aftertaste to clear out of the throat and nose. Ugh!

We leave the dog in his house and make a Costco run. Now that I’ve decided to go back on Atkins to pare down about 10 pounds, I need a lot of lettuce and other low-carb veggies, plus a ton of meat. And meat for Cassie the Corgi. This occupies a couple of hours. We loaf around for a while. When it becomes clear that M’hijito wishes to go hang out with his friends, Cassie and I return to the war zone. By now the fumes have died down. A steady wind is blowing away from the house and has probably dried the oily liquid this clown has dumped all over a quarter-acre and 100 feet of alleyway.

Moving on: now it’s almost 7:00 p.m. I’m hungry; Cassie has no food prepared and neither do I. The bookkeeping isn’t done, the house is an even more incredible mess than it was last weekend when I hadn’t cleaned for four weeks.

M’hijito having fed me a bottle of ginger ale by way of clearing the vile taste, I guess I’m off Atkins today. That is, I expect, a good reason to serve up either the dregs of the wine or a bottle of beer. And so, to work…

Buyer Beware: A close look at the bill

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So this bill for $587 came in the mail from the air-conditioning company. This outfit is a small, locally owned company with whom I’ve done business for upwards of 12 years. To my knowledge, they’ve never cheated me. Or so I thought.

The company that used to service my AC would send a guy twice a year for a routine check-up and service job: once in the spring to work on the air-conditioner and once in the fall to work on the heater. Every single time their guy would go up on the roof, he would come down with some part in his hand claiming it needed to be replaced. This would turn a $40 bill into a $200 bill.

SDXB, who was living with me at the time, became suspicious. Our neighbor told me about Mast, and I discovered that for a single annual fee they’d do the semiannual service job…and not once did the serviceman ever claim anything up there needed to be fixed.

Well, time has passed. We have had a recession that has affected Arizona worse than any economic slowdown since the Great Depression. In addition to jacking up the price for the regular check-up, Mast has laid off many of its servicemen, and our guy—who I suspect is the only craftsman they have working for them—is working 50% time. He is not a happy camper.

When I told M’hijito about the six-hundred-dollar repair bill, he remarked that he could have bought a new swamp cooler for that price. Not quite—they cost about $2,200—but in fact, six hundred dollars would run his regular air conditioning through the summer. The whole idea of running a swamp cooler during the two or three hot months before the air gets too humid for the system to work is to save on air-conditioning bills.

Part of this bill is for a new 3/4 hp motor. Another part is apparently a renewal for the annual check-up.

I thought I’d bought a new motor for that unit. Also, because M’hijito bought a new central air conditioning unit last year, we paid for the annual check-up in the fall, so that his bill comes due in the fall and mine comes due in the spring.

Being a pathological saver of receipts, I happen to have all the receipts for all the work we’ve had done on the downtown house. And lo! Here’s one for Mast, dated 2007…

On March 15, 2007, Mast replaced the 3/4 hp motor in that unit. They charged $193 then; this time they billed $393. They replaced a belt for $10.50; this time they charged $20. They replaced three cooler pads for a total of $25.20 at $8.40 apiece; this time they charged $54 at $18 apiece.

Now, supposedly we’re in a period of zero inflation. We all know that’s not so, but we know prices haven’t gone up much in the past couple of years. If the cost of that unit went up 3 percent over the past three years, it should cost $211 today.

Get online and you find that yea, verily: swamp cooler motors range in price from about $60 to about $235.

So I guess we’ll be looking for a new air-conditioning contractor. How disappointing.

It’s easy to understand that when a company is struggling for survival it might raise prices to try to stay in business on the customer’s back. But it seems counter-productive: rip off the customers and pretty soon you don’t have customers.