Jesse at You Need a Budget is hosting the 163rd Carnival of Personal finance. It’s vast! And it’s filled with interesting posts. That’s why I was especially flattered to see Funny’s rant on usury, the credit card industry, and the need for some sensible regulation (with teeth!) selected as an editor’s pick. If I didn’t have to go to work, I’d spend the entire day reading posts…starting with another editor’s pick, “I Quit!” That’s right: Madison at My Dollar Plan will soon have plenty of time to read a whole CoPF, because she listed all the priorities in her life and found her job fell off the bottom. Speaking of jobs, Andy at Saving to Invest offers 21 signs that you’re losing interest in your job (is obsessive playing of Spider Solitaire one of them?). Since I need to get ready to go to work just now, you’ll need to visit the Carnival and read on!
funny
New Year’s Resolutions: Where are those goals now?
Converting iWeb posts into WordPress occupied a fair amount of this weekend. In the course of opening old entries, I came across a New Year’s list of goals, which I’d promised to revisit off and on during the year. Well, of course the instant I posted that I promptly forgot the follow-up part. Better late than never: here are the 2008 goals I came up with, along with what’s become of them.
Three days a week, add bicycling or mountain park hiking to exercise routine
nope. never did find the time or energy. it’s hotter than a bigod out there now, and so you’ll not be seeing me on the mountain or the canal bike path till temps drop below 95.
Lose five to ten pounds by
a) staying off the sauce,
b) increasing exercise as above, and
c) continuing to eat lots of whole foods and less sugar & refined grain
sorta. lost about three pounds. off the sauce, less sugary foods. exercise: no change.
Bring food to the office instead of ponying up $8 for the miserable restaurant fodder that passes as lunch
n/a. quit eating lunch altogether while on campus.
Drink tea, not coffee, and less of it
yup, and yup
Learn to put widgets on iWeb pages
learned how; works spottily. some widgets don’t work at all; others get corrupted.
Join four social networking sites
nope x 4
Aim for two no-purchase days a week
yup. probably getting more than that in now, since the price of gas prohibits bucketing around town on a whim.
Snowflake the Renovation Loan principal down by $1,000 (that’s $83.30 a month)
yup. did that. Renovation Loan down from $25,000 to $22,200. also set aside something over $11,000 in the Renovation Loan Payoff fund. Had $13,000, but raided it to build a wall at the Investment House.
Invest $250 a month in an interest-bearing account to build liquid savings and to provide the option of paying off Renovation Loan within five years
sorta. with the teaching income gone, the most i can swing is $204 a month.
Invest net income from side job (approx. $3500 a semester) in the same interest-bearing account
yup. no longer teaching, but investing income from editing, income tax rebates, federal & state tax refunds, cash-back from the American Express card.
Wear better clothes to the office, using the wardrobe now expanded by after-Christmas clothing purchases
nope.
Try to wangle a Power Mac from the university
arghhh! hafta think that one through again!
Build cross-campus collaboration by trying to land another research assistantship to be staffed by grad students in the publishing program
done! increased my staff to 5; new Ph.D. on his way to join us as i scribble.
Build new ways to mentor graduate students and reinforce editorial training
yup. brilliantly…i amaze me. this one will get me another 4.5 on next year’s evaluation!
Make new friends
a) through Meetup.com
b) rejoin the choir
a) nope
b) sorta. joined the Unitarian choir. nice people, but a little too exuberantly friendly for my style. also really missed Anglican music.
So. Does articulating your goals and writing them down increase the chances that you’ll actually do them?
I dunno. I suspect the things I got done were things I would have done anyway. The goals I didn’t make were things that I should have done but just don’t want to.
Meetup.com: I’d rather spend time playing with the dog than trying to build new relationships with strangers. Biking & hiking: requires me to find a good two hours out of the day to devote to these sweaty activities; besides, I’d rather read a book. Clothing & personal appearance: I guess style is just not my thing!
Appears to me that if what you have to do to meet a goal is in your nature, you’ll probably do it or something like it anyway. If it’s not something you’re naturally inclined to do, you need some other impetus than just “I really oughta do that.” For example, if I were seriously overweight and it were affecting my health, I would diet and would work more than the present hour a day of exercise into my routine. To accomplish things that you don’t really want to do or that clash with your normal habits, you really need external motivation.
Shopping: Saved from myself
A friend and I shopped the sales at an upscale Scottsdale mall last week. I was saved from spending much by the fact that in all those acres and acres and acres of women’s clothes, there wasn’t a darn thing worth buying.
I’ve never loved shopping. But now that I’m a grown woman and, as one over the age of 50, a stranger in a strange land, I hate, loathe, and despise shopping. Mass-produced clothing is not made for adult women.
Understand, I am not overweight. My weight and BMI are comfortably in the ideal range for a woman my height and age. But nevertheless, if I find something that’s not ugly or trampy-looking, it doesn’t fit. If it fits, it’s plug-hideous. If it fits and it’s not ghastly, then it has to be dry-cleaned.
We live in a place where temperatures range upwards of 100 degrees for five months a year; the rest of the time, the weather is comparable to what most people think of as spring and summer. I am not going to be made to dry-clean something that fits up beneath my underarms or that looks like you’ve slept in it the minute you strap yourself into a seat-belt. Nor, thank you, do I care to bathe myself in dry-cleaning chemicals even if an item doesn’t have to be cleaned every single time it’s worn. If an item can’t be washed, I don’t buy it.
So. During the winter, Talbot’s carries good-looking tailored clothing, much of it washable, that actually fits. In the summer…ah, the summer: Talbot’s buyers go stark raving mad. For the past three years, every summer outfit in that store has been freaking bizarre! Purple polka-dots, flounces, and silly-looking patterns that belong on an eight-year-old. One whose parents have no taste. They still have pants that fit, and my friend bought a couple pair. But I don’t need pants. I need a summer dress or skirt that’s easy to get into and easy to launder, and I need some shirts that will dress up the Costco jeans I habitually wear to work.
Neither of those resided at the Scottsdale Fashion Square Talbot’s.
Ann Taylor had some dresses in the style I coveted: all dry-clean only.
Bloomingdale’s had a perfect outfit from Eileen Fisher. The price would have consumed my entire clothing budget, and I needed more than one item.
Macy’s: an ocean of clothing, all of it hideous. Macy’s assaults you with loud, annoying Muzak that hurts your ears and distracts you from the job of sorting through rack after rack after endless rack of clothing in search of something that will fit and not make you look stupid. Salespeople are unhappy at best, unpleasant at worst. Not a place where one wants to spend much time.
We went into J. Jill’s. The J. Jill’s catalogue usually has several attractive outfits designed for grown women, but for some reason the store has next to nothing. I picked up a couple of long, swirly skirts. As I was standing there trying to get a saleslady’s attention to let me into a dressing room, another customer walked by, stared at the choices I had in hand, and pulled a horrified sour face.
That really made me feel like trying on clothes.
I did buy a shirt to go with the jeans there, though. It’s just O.K., nothing special.
At Banana Republic we found tons of cute clothes, all of them designed to fit anorexic 18-year-olds. But bought another shirt, not very different from the J. Jill shirt, except for the bracing price tag. Just O.K.
So I didn’t spend much money, which was just as well. But my wardrobe is still threadbare and dominated by twenty-dollar dungarees. Frustrating.
Foreclosure update from the deep Southwest: News is mixed
In June, more than 40% of the 7,840 home sales in the Phoenix area were purchases of foreclosures, says Arizona State University’s Morrison School of Management. Median price of the foreclosed properties was $169,890, compared to a median price of $218,000.
A year ago, the median price on foreclosures was $225,900; for traditionally marketed houses it was $265,000. Interestingly, foreclosed homes on average are significantly smaller than traditionally marketed houses: 1,665 square feet for foreclosures, vs. 1,865 for the others.
Signs of Activity
These drops in value are stimulating interest among investors and people who want to buy homes to live in them, especially in the downscale part of the market. According to the researchers, buyers expect that prices will rise over the next few years. Although the slump in home values is not good for many homeowners’ pocketbooks-especially in the outlying suburbs hardest hit by the decline-if the government’s efforts to rescue defaulting homeowners take hold, we may see the market start to turn around as demand for now relatively low-priced properties increases.
Here in the Micromarket
In my neighborhood, which as you know is not the greatest but is centrally located, values are holding fairly high despite several foreclosures. Around the corner, there’s a house that was purchased and cherried out magnificently by a speculator during the Late, Great Bubble. The place was very handsome, with new everything, an emerald-green lawn, and an elegant fountain in front. The investor asked something over $400,000 when he sold at the height of the boom.
I don’t know whether the house was in foreclosure when it went back on the market, but it certainly looks like a foreclosure: the lawn is dead, the fountain was ripped out, its raw concrete pad left among the weeds, and the whole atmosphere suggests abandonment.
That house just sold for $340,000, a good price for a place in this aging neighborhood, a block away from a huge, noisy, dirty construction project just getting under way, which will rip out an entire row of homes along the main drag, bring endless chaos, and drag on for at least four years. It’s $108,000 more than I paid for my house, also cherried out and a reasonably safe distance from the pending railroad project.
Houses that are not in foreclosure are, predictably, doing even better: a recent sale on my street brought $395,000. Remember: this is a neighborhood adjoining two menacing slums, where you don’t put your kids in the public school unless they know how to use a knife or a club and you don’t care whether they ever learn to read.
And as for the Investment House…
Down at the M’hijito’s, a place a few doors away just sold for $35,000 more than we paid for our investment scheme. The houses there are all essentially identical, his being one of the area’s first true cookie-cutter neighborhoods.
Location, Location, Location
Evidently how a house’s value fares has to do with where the house stands, especially given the flap over gas prices. Even in less than upscale central-city areas, prices are holding fairly well, relative to what is happening in other parts of the Valley.
If you’re buying, stick to centrally located middle-class or gang-free working-class neighborhoods. Those areas will again boom when the real estate market recovers, especially if gas stays high and cities are forced to build decent public transport systems.
WordPress project, continued
Turns out there’s an easy way to strip code out of word-processed text before pasting it into a WordPress page. On the extended toolbar there are two icons: one with a little W and one with a little T. Little W is for pasting from Word; Little T is for pasting as plaintext. Click on either, and a box comes up, inviting you to Ctrl-V into the box. From there you can click “Insert” and WordPress automatically strips out the annoying code and pastes it into your post.
Very nice.
Inserting images from the Mac is a pain in the tuchus, though, because you have to navigate the high seas of iPhoto, a very clumsy process indeed. And you have to rename the photo so it has no underscores, unusual characters, or blank spaces. Since my camera saves photos with a strange numerical code that always includes an underscore, this means any photo to be posted has to be renamed and then, from inside WordPress, searched out in the horrible iPhoto, to whom “organize” has a meaning known only to alien beings. In iWeb, you can simply copy and paste into your post, a much simpler process. Infinitely simpler.
If I can copy and paste seven days’ worth of posts each evening, it will take me 28 days to move all the existing copy over. Not counting new posts. Argh!
Despite having waffled back in the stay-with-iWeb direction, at the moment I’m feeling peeved at Apple again. Discovered the reason all the cute little beeps and toots the Mac emits at various actions have stopped is that upgrading to OS X 5.x.x put the kaibosh on the sound function. It now will output only through the headphones. No option to output sound through the built-in speakers exists. There’s a way to fix this, from what I could tell online, but its too arcane for me. I had no idea what the guy was trying to say as he described the process on his site.
So I’m again figuring when this hard drive gives up the ghost, it’ll be back to the PC for moi. And if I wanna keep blogging, I’d better be in a Web-based program by then.
Dear Apple MobileMe team
An e-mail exchange, in the usual e-mail sequence:
Dear Jeremy–
Thank you for your response. I’m sure your entire team has been endlessly harassed! I appreciate the amount of work the Apple MobileMe team has had to do under stressful circumstances.
The Quicken backup to MobileMe is now working, although I’m also backing up to a flash drive and, as soon as I can afford it, will get an external hard drive and start using the interesting Time Machine feature.
iWeb is also working as well as iWeb works.What would be REALLY nice is if iWeb 09 could gain some of the functionality inherent to programs such as WordPress. In particular:
- A decent hit-counting system would be really nice. Over the past four days I’ve had a surge in hits on the homepage; I assume someone must have Stumbled or otherwise flagged a post, but I have no way of identifying which post that might have been. It would be useful to know what content works effectively.
- It would be even more useful to be allowed to install Feedburner. I’ve been afraid to try, after the failures with Technorati, Google, and StumbleUpon.
- It would be nice if I could get the StumbleUpon widget onto posts and have it work correctly. Ditto all the other widgets out there that would help boost readership.
- For that matter, it would be good to be allowed to register with Technorati and Google.
- It would be excellent if “tags” and “category” features existed.
- It would be good if when you went to enter an internal link, the list of “My Pages” would appear with the most recent first, instead of making you scroll (forever and ever world without end, amen) all the way to the bottom.
- It would be good if navigation of the published blog resembled that of more standard blogs, so that readers would not complain about navigation issues.
- It would be mighty fine if the RSS feed button a) were larger and more obvious and b) could appear on every page.
- An easily accessible “preview” function in Inspector would be hugely appreciated…one that would show how the site will look online, not on PDF pages!!!!
- And it would be good if the blog did not lose functionality in some versions of Firefox on some platforms.
Can any of these issues be fixed?
–vh
https://www.funny-about-money.com
On Jul 24, 2008, at 6:33 AM, MobileMeSupport@apple.com wrote:
Dear vh,
I’m very sorry for the delay in our reply. As you can imagine, we have been quite busy since the launch of MobileMe in both email and chat support. I will be happy to address your concerns about your website and your Quicken backups.
We did experience some issues with website access and publishing during the transition to MobileMe. All of these should now be resolved. I’m glad to hear your site is functioning as expected again, and I see that you were able to publish the blog entries from July 17 when you wrote in last, and several others since then.
About the Quicken backups… I apologize if the information we provided previously was not entirely accurate. Quicken did backup to .Mac and should continue to backup to MobileMe. I understand you have performed successful backups since the transition.
You can verify that your information appears on the iDisk by visiting your MobileMe iDisk (http://www.me.com/idisk) and viewing the file in this location:
iDisk > Documents > Quicken > Backup Files > yourID.dmg
That disk image (.dmg) should be your Quicken backups.
The previous MobileMe support agent was correct in saying that MobileMe support does not provide assistance with errors related to the Quicken backup to MobileMe. Because it is a feature built into the Quicken software, you will need to contact Quicken if you receive any error messages in the course of backing up your Quicken data.
A quick way to isolate if the issue is with Quicken or something larger affecting your account is to attempt to access your iDisk directly in the Finder (Choose iDisk > My iDisk from the Finder Go menu). This will show if your computer is able to connect to your iDisk. If it can connect directly, the issue is occurring within Quicken.
I hope this information is helpful. Thank you for being a part of MobileMe. Have a great day.
Sincerely,
Jeremy
MobileMe Support
http://www.apple.com/support/mobileme/ww
http://www.me.com/help
2 Comments from iWeb site:
“I assume someone must have Stumbled or otherwise flagged a post, but I have no way of identifying which post that might have been.”
I stumbled your “Open letter to Steve Jobs” on July 14th (10 days ago).It was so sad and funny, I had flashbacks to a defrag debacle.I can’t find any way to search the Stumble database for your other entries. A six day lag before seeing volume seems unlikely to me
Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 06:18 P
Thanks so much, AMD!
It’s true a lag of that length seems unlikely. At StumbleUpon I could see that someone had stumbled the post about the layoffs at the Arizona Republic [can iWeb read HTML? we soon will see]…but that also was a while back, I think
Maybe it was Steve Jobs himself, and all his minions! An Apple executive actually called me and left word on my voicemail while I was at work this afternoon. This could get more entertaining yet! ;-
Thursday, July 24, 2008 – 09:48 P