Coffee heat rising

Carnival of Money Stories

What’s a story?

Journalists call any article a “story,” and so in newspapers and magazines you’ll see how-to pieces and 10-tips-for-catching-a-man lists described as stories. But these are not, strictly speaking, stories in the sense that the Carnival of Money stories intends.

A story describes something that happened, an action. The action may be internal — a psychological event, for example — or it may be external, something that goes on between two or more people, or between one or more people and a force of nature. It usually involves some sort of conflict, which likewise may be psychological or physical. These principles apply to nonfiction as well as fiction stories.

One effective way to talk about story is to conceive it as a journey. Christopher Vogler described this line of thought in The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters. Taking a Jungian tack, he explains how the most lasting and successful stories in every human culture can be seen in terms of journeys: from one place to another, from one social status to another, from predicament to resolution, from one state of mind to another. The story is probably our most powerful form of communication. Story allows us to transmit cultural values and personal truths in ways that engage and that are remembered. It leads each of us to think through those values and consider how they apply to our own lives and times.

Personal Finance Stories

Personal finance concepts and facts can be told in story form, too, with great profit. That’s why a story such as Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” still speaks to us. A story need not be a piece of fiction: the structure of story also applies in nonfiction. What we’re looking for here is not a list or a how-to or a pointer to some handy new PF tool. It’s the tale, the struggle, the path to enlightenment-all classic elements of each individual’s personal finance journey.

Many submissions to this week’s carnival, though very good, were reports, how-to’s, pointers, or opinion pieces rather than stories in the desired sense. Below are the posts that actually fell under the heading of story. Editor’s Picks are marked with a red asterisk.

The Financial Journey

Dividends4Life
Dividends4Life
Progress Update: June 2008

* Benjamin
Trees Full of Money
The Story of My Day Trading Addiction

Nadeg
Fabulous Finances
The Actions I Took that Created My Financial Peak

* Silicon Valley Blogger
The Digerati Life
Making Money through Day Trading: The Secret Lives of Stay-at-Home Mommy Speculators

The Debt Defier
The Happy Rock
How Did This Happen? The Path Back into Financial Trouble

GBlogger
Can I Get Rich on a Salary?
Success Stories: Retired at Age 43 with nearly $2,000,000

Heather Allen
The Debt-Free Playbook Blog
Life’s More Than Debt

Todd
Harvesting Dollar
The Benefits of Working at a Fast-Food Restaurant

Passive Income Investor
Living off Dividends and Passive Income
Monthly Passive Income Finally Breaks the $3,000 Barrier!

Earning It

Mrs. Accountability
Out of Debt Again
Is It the Law of Attraction? Or Just Wishful Thinking?

Wanda Grindstaff
Creating Abundant Lifestyles
Retirement or Lifestyle-It Is Your Choice

* Amanda Milne
Value for Your Life
When Career Plans Change

Tiffanie
We Like Money
IRA’s: What’s the Deal

Spending It

* Jim
Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
Test-Drove the Toyota Prius

Dorian Wales
The Personal Financier
How Shopping for Groceries Online Can Save You Money As Well As Time

Kyle
Amateur Asset Allocator
My Personal Finance Confession

Single Guy Money
Single Guy Money
My Health Plan Costs Are About to Increase

The Way Things Are

FMF
Free Money Finance
The Other America

vh
Funny about Money
Good Ole’ Boys

Be This Way
Are You Going to Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You?
What You Can Expect from the New à la Carte Airlines

Ain’t It the Truth Department

* Finance Girl
Finance Gets Personal
For Me, Spending Leads to More Spending

Ray
Money Blue Book
My Not-So-Stimulating Economic Stimulus Payment Has Finally Arrived

Broke Grad Student
Broke Grad Student
6 Reasons Why I Hate Cash

Funny about Money has never regained the functionality lost in Apple’s much-ballyhooed migration from Mac.com to MobileMe. Consequently you can’t leave comments on this or any other post. I hope you enjoy the many excellent entries in this week’s carnival, and thank you all for participating.

An open letter to Steve Jobs

Okay, Apple has just about won. I’m in tears and I’m ready to give up. Why on earth would you do this to your customers?

When you made your great migration from Mac.com to MobileMe, you trashed my blog, which is something I write to every day and which gets about 1000 hits a month. Some posts get four times that many hits in a day. Not that it’s the end of the world, of course, I mean it’s not an earthquake in China, so I guess we have to keep this in perspective, but it’s still making me cry.

After spending the ENTIRE FLICKING DAY dorking around at the Apple store yesterday, buying an OS upgrade that I didn’t need or want, and waiting OVER EIGHT HOURS for the seven required downloads to happen, I STILL can’t publish through iWeb. Every time I hit publish, I get the “error in publishing” message. It publishes the post I’m trying to put up, but it won’t let anyone post comments. When you click “add a comment,” you get that GD “Welcome to Mobile ME” screen. So my readers get an ad for your new service, not an opportunity to comment on my posts. Thank you so very, very much.

More recent posts don’t even show the “add comment” link.

The internal links are corrupted, especially in the “Archives” section.

I have been run around Robin Hood’s barn by your people. The staff at the Biltmore don’t even bother to answer the phone. I got through to someone at Chandler-it would consume half a tank of $4.30/gallon gasoline for me to drive to Chandler!!!!!!!-and she made an appointment for me at the Biltmore, dropping me into a madhouse of frenzied consumers who feel they can’t live without your latest toy and who must have it right this minute. She also erred in saying that since I wanted my money back for the mac.com subscription I now can’t use (it won’t accept my Quicken backups, either) Apple would upgrade my computer for free. Ohhh nooooo! Not at all! So I got a good gouge at a moment when I am so broke I can barely afford to buy groceries. Your manager gave me a 50% discount, but 50% of “I can’t afford it” is still “I can’t afford it.” Thank you thank you thank you.

You have lots of instructions on your MobileMe site. Most of them are incomprehensible — I haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about. After pondering through several pages, I realized that nothing there seemed to apply to the problem. I was told that after I finished jumping through yesterday’s endless flaming hoops, my system would work. Period. “Plug and Play.”

Can you fix my iWeb? If you can’t, will you please be truthful about it? If this can’t be fixed and I have to close my site, I want a refund of the hundred bucks you “automatically” charged to my credit card for Mac.com a month ago.

While my computer will still publish (barely), I’m posting this complaint on my blog. May 7,000 people read it and copy it to their blogs! May StumbleUpon, De.lici.ous, and Digg all pick it up at once!

Kindly tell me, in words that I can understand, what I need to do to get iWeb to publish in your user-unfriendly new environment and how I can get my Quicken to back up to your unreachable new servers.
* * *

To my readers–

Well, my friends, it’s beginning to look very unlikely that my computer will ever regain enough functionality for me to continue this blog. Tomorrow I will try to post the Carnival of Money Stories, and I guess after that it’s good-bye.

It was fun while it lasted. Best wishes to you all!

And real-life headaches…

Virtual headache

Apple’s MacHeadache hit the New York Times this morning: the roll-out of the new iPhone hit a pothole or two, one of which was the complicated switchover to new servers. It’s this very pothole that Funny has fallen into-I have no idea whether today’s post will publish or not. Desperately confused, iWeb claims nothing is posted. But the published site itself displays everything I’ve written since July 9. If you don’t get the Times’s edition printed on ground-up trees, check out these entertaining pieces online.

Paper headache

Speaking of headaches, avert your eyes from your investment fund statements unless you enjoy migraines. When last seen, mine reported a $23,000 loss-that was before the market crashed through the 11,000 floor yesterday. Any ideas I might have had about retiring before the age of 70 just went <<POOF>>

Thank heaven we have a 30-year fixed mortgage on the Investment House, and my own mortgage is paid off. That notwithstanding, with the market plummeting like a meteor and the probability that we’ll have to hold the house for a good ten years, I can’t afford to keep rolling money out of my IRA into real estate. I’ll need to come up with a new way to generate $12,000 a year to cover my part of the mortgage payments.

Matter of fact, I happen to have one in the wings. Watch this space for more on that

And real-life headache

Meanwhile, in the stress department (one of this blog’s co-topics), I woke with a real, biological headache-no metaphor here-from once again kicking the Killer Caffeine. Dang!

The month-long spate of indigestion has three likely sources (that is, if you quietly overlook cancer, which we will do): caffeine, booze, or salmonella.

Any of these is possible. The epizootic started the day after a friend and I visited a popular New Mexican-style restaurant, where we did have a nice jalapeño-laced salsa. Some startlingly unpleasant manifestations occupied the next week or ten days. Our defanged federal regulators are now speculating that the source of the salmonella plague we’re now witnessing may have been jalapeños or cilantro. However, my friend didn’t get sick, so I kinda doubt this is the cause of my present ailment.

Noooo. Ever so much likely is one (or both?) of my favorite potables.

I live to drink coffee. No mere coffee, mind you, but the highest of the high-test. I use fresh-ground espresso beans-because espresso demands a better variety of coffee-to fill a ten-cup French press every morning. And do I drink all that, all by my little buzzing self? You bet! Whatever is left over in the morning gets consumed as iced coffee later in the day.

Well, in a body that dates from the Cretaceous period, the effect is cumulative. As you age (memorize this, you young pups), your metabolism slows, and so it takes a lot longer than it used to for drugs, prescription and non-, to clear out of your system. During my misspent youth, coffee had little noticeable effect on me. These days, though, guzzling enough of it before noon will keep me awake at night; especially after a couple months of drinking it daily.

Then there’s my other favorite swiggle: the daily boozie-poo. Because the lime tree is dropping beautiful, juicy, delicious ripe key limes, I (naturally!) had to have some Coronas. Matter of fact, I’ve been forced to take advantage of Costco’s incredible price on 24-bottle cases of Coronas. Neither limes nor beers have gone to waste: typically I drink two bottles around dinnertime.

Lately, though, I’ve also had a bourbon & water…or two…later in the afternoon. On a 112-degree day few things call out to you more appealingly than an ice-cold bourbon and water on the rocks. The other day I realized I’d swiggled two beers with cheese & crackers after coming home from work and then poured myself two Maker’s Marks a few hours later, with a late dinner. Uh oh!

So, it’s off the sauce and off the coffee.

I have no problem kicking the beer and bourbon-iced tea, V-8 juice, or fruit juice all substitute handsomely.

Kicking caffeine, though, is a whole ‘nother matter. Caffeine deficiency anemia causes a screaming real-life headache that can last a full week. I’ve learned, though, that a couple cups of caffeinated tea will take the edge off. It doesn’t contain enough of the drug to keep you awake at night, but it does stop your head from hurting. After a week, you can eliminate the tea, and voilà: caffeine-free existence.

The laundry remains to be laundered, the ironing to be ironed, the house to be cleaned, the plants to be watered, the pool gadget to be repaired, the garbage to be hauled, the dog to be tended to, a novel to be proofread, a new business to be launched… And so, my friends, to work.

Dog Hilarity: The wacky things people do for their pets

OK, OK, I know: it’s not nice to laugh at other people’s foibles, especially when you have your own foibles. But oh, it’s hard to resist.

The weather having cooled into the 80s at dawn, I settled into the backyard lawn chair with tea and the Times Sunday magazine, a cherished weekend ritual. My dog, having developed a limp, milked it for all it was worth while chasing after me to make sure I did not escape her eyesight. What should greet me but a cover story titled “Pet Pharm.” You think I overspend on my dogs? As nothing. Collectively, Americans are forking over millions of dollars on psychoactive drugs for their pets.

We make the animals nuts by forcing them into distinctly noncanine, nonfeline, nonavian living quarters and behaviors, and then we medicate them because they’re nuts.

Dog and Human Nuttiness

Here’s a guy whose German shepherd has developed a neurotic fixation on him: it has an “overpowering need to be near people, especially Allan. If they put Max outside, he quickly relieved himself and then rushed back indoors; he raced into rooms that Allan was about to occupy; he rested his head against the bathroom door during his master’s ablutions.”

Sounds familiar. Little does Allan know that if he adopted Max out, Max would instantly develop a similar fixation on the next human, much as one Cassie the Corgi has done. Hm. Maybe Cassie needs a few doses of Eli Lilly’s chewable Prozac that tastes like beef. Max goes a little further than Cassie does, though: he throws a fit if Allan hugs his wife, and he chases his tail obsessively, hour after hour. To address these neuroses, Max is being put on a tricyclic antidepressant commonly used in human psychiatric care.

Some of the nonsense humans will put up with defies belief: “Doug noticed that his cat would attack if he smelled strange, so he would take a shower after coming home and then change into his khaki pants lined with ballistic nylon.

Doug, Doug, Doug. Can you spell “put to sleep”?

Follow the Money Trail…

This amazing behavior—on the humans’ part, that is—redounds hugely to Big Pharma’s benefit. The rich get richer and the adoring pet owners get poorer. According to the Times, surveys by a pet products manufacturing group show that 77% of dog owners and 52% of cat owners gave their animals some sort of medication in 2006, both up about 25 percentage points from 2004—that’s a 25% jump in just two years! (My late Ger-shep may have accounted for most of that.) Eli Lilly has created a special “companion animal” division, and Pfizer’s Animal Health has seen its revenues grow 57% since 2003, to nearly a billion dollars. In 2005, according to marketing research firm Ipsos, in 2005 Americans spent at least $15 million on behavior modification drugs for their pets.

The trend thrives on a cast of mind dubbed “humanization,” whereby pet-lovers come to see their animals as little furry four-legged people. The cat becomes a member of the family for whom we would do no less than we would do for our children. The pet industry, of which Big Pharma owns a substantial portion, exploits this sentimentality to separate humans from cash.

Is this good for pets? Maybe. Some of them get to live a little longer than they might have, had their tendencies to rip up the furniture and bite passers-by gone unchecked. They may live on in a drug-induced stupor; they may live on in neurotic or even psychotic misery. I’m not sure that’s good for a dog or a cat.

Is it good for the humans? I doubt it. Forgive my lack of empathy, but I do not believe that calculated exploitation of your emotions is good for you. Au contraire.

My take

Cassie the Corgi does have a few bats in her doggy belfry, no question of that. She never lets the human out of her sight. She sticks to me like a burr in a hound dog’s coat. She will not eat unless I stay nearby. She will not go outside to do her doggy business unless I accompany her and stand there until she’s done.

This could be a problem, come rain and frost. Just now, it’s OK, but I’m not very interested in standing in the rain or freezing my toes on a 30-degree night while I wait for a dog to decide to pee.

Unlike many dogs with separation anxiety, she doesn’t chew or rip up the furniture. But she is afraid of loud noises—the sound of distant July 4th fireworks nearly put her into a frenzy, and a passing thunderstorm alarmed her significantly. The other night a violent monsoon firehosed the house; the sound of heavy rainfall made her nervous, too.

This is not normal dog behavior. Whether it’s inbred or the result of something her previous humans did is irrelevant: a healthy dog does not behave this way.

Am I going to give her doggy Prozac or canine clomipramine? Not a chance! If she can’t adjust to normal life, she can’t adjust. Since she’s not aggressive or destructive, she’ll just be a wacky little dog.

But I can tell you for certain: anyone who goes around in bullet-proof long johns to protect himself from his demented cat is crazier than the cat is! Anyone who puts a dog on psychoactive meds instead of putting it down after it delivered a serious bite to its owner over a cheese plate (as one couple interviewed for the Times piece did) has got more holes in his head than an entire wheel of Swiss cheese.

A dog that is dangerous is a dog that is dangerous. Same is true of cats: although cats are smaller, they can do some serious harm. Dogs and cats are carnivores. Predators. They are built to inflict terminal damage—videlicet, the French woman who had her face ripped off by her pet dog.

No amount of mind-altering drugs will change that basic truth.

Back

It sez here I’m not published, but it sez there I am. Funny is up, though iWeb thinks it’s not. Whatever! This means the Carnival of Money Stories is still on, assuming that by the 15th I can still publish-but-not-publish through Apple’s new servers

Yes! Carnival of Money Stories, No. 68! July 15! Remember to get your stories in by July 14…I’m looking forward to reading them!

Moments of Fame

J.D. Roth kindly featured, on today’s Get Rich Slowly, one of my comments responding to his post on careers and jobs. That is quite an honor. Thanks, JD! Some of the reader responses to this post are awesome — well worth a trip to GRS just for their insights.

Kevin at No Debt Plan placed Funny’s suggestion that there really is no “crossover point” among the editor’s picks for the sixth Finance Fiesta! This round-up includes some very interesting articles, including an eye-opener from Ask the Tax Pro, who outlines a way to “bank” cash with the IRS at rates higher than you can get at your bank or credit union, and Daily Money Hack reminds us that we can deduct capital losses. Florida Realtor Joe Manausa has been tracking data that suggests Tallahassee real estate inventory may finally be dropping— a tiny point of light in the dark news we’ve heard over the past couple of days. Will someone please tell Wall street?

Pinyo has posted the 19th Money Hacks Carnival at the Money Hackers Network site. Thanks for including Funny’s report on outfits selling futures at the gas pump. Gasoline is on many frugal minds these days; in fact, one of the editor’s picks is Christian Personal Finance‘s highly entertaining survey of hypermiling techniques, complete with assessments ranging from “not worth it” to “worth it” (elaborated with comments). Some very interesting websites and techniques surface here, plus some hilarious ones. Over at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, Jim has discovered a way for nonmembers to buy Costco gas…a loophole that probably closed about three hours after he posted it! Cash Money Life also holds forth on ways to save on gas.