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MacHeadache

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Well, I’m off the air.

Apple has decided to decommission Mac.com, a service for which I was “automatically” charged another $100 a month ago, and migrate all the data on those servers to a new service, adorably called “MobileMe.

Yech! Steve: spare us the cutesiness.

And spare us the hassle. The reason I bought a Mac specifically was to get around the endless updates and security panics and virus-checker gum-ups and ever-shifting anti-malware programs served up to us daily by Microsoft. For naught: the Mac has been downloading software updates-to Safari, iTunes, and Intel security-for almost two hours and still has a ways to go.

But today’s supreme annoyance is this elaborate migration, which has taken down my Website and may have brought an end to my blog. Turns out you must have the Leopard operating system to operate the new Mac.com, and I only have the Panther system. (ohhh aren’t those names cu-u-u-u-u-t-e?) So how do I get access to the $100 service I just paid for? Shell out some more cash for a new OS.

When I expressed my rage about this to one of Apple’s service folks, she arranged to get me a free upgrade to Leopard (something that thrills me not, since I’m told it gums up the works just as surely as will loading an upgrade from XP to Vista into a PC). She also arranged an appointment with an “Apple Genius” to get the upgrade done and to try to get my blog back online.

That will be next Sunday. I’m told this process will take upwards of an hour and a half. Remains to be seen whether it works.

Not that I don’t appreciate the “free” upgrade, you understand. But today is Thursday. Sunday is the 13th, three days hence. On the 15th—a workday!—I’ve committed to do the Carnival of Money Stories. How, really, am I gunna do that in two days, both of which I’m supposed to spend at a paying job?
Well, if I can access the submissions, I obviously can write them in Word, do some but not all of the formatting in Word, paste into iWeb, and then finish the job after the weekend. We are talking hassle here, major hassle.

This may be even more infuriating than the BS I’ve been through with Microsoft over the years. Maybe. Possibly not, but it’s very, very close. I will say the newer versions of Office are enough to inspire plots of terrorist attacks on Microsoft HQ. But Mac’s versions of Word and Quicken are already so aggravating that if you haven’t blown up MS or Intuit over those, you probably never will.

And how can I describe the love-hate relationship with iWeb?

It is, in short, software for tyros. Blogware for hobbyists. Playware, not real software. It’s fine for displaying a few photos to your extended family, but very weak for daily blogging. SEO? What is that? “Senior Executive Officer”? The iWeb program is hopeless for search-engine optimizing, because unless you are techie to the extreme, you can’t break into the code to add the HTML snippets needed to get yourself registered with outfits like Technorati and Google.

The program does allow you to enter snippets to make buttons, but about 90% of the time they don’t work. I can’t, for example, create a StumbleUpon button. Well, I can, but it looks pretty bizarre, and “functional” is not a term I’d grope for to describe the result. I can’t move the PF Buzz button to a place on the page next to the list of tags—if I do, it stops working. I can’t put an RSS feed button on every page-it resides on the index page and only on the index page. But if you select one of iWeb’s photo templates, on those there’s an RSS feed on every page. Gee, thanks, Steve. And I dare not-oh, I do mean dare not!-subscribe to Feedburner. God only knows what that would do.

I am so angry at being made to jump through these hoops—and with such perfect timing!—I could bite! This is stupid, unnecessary, and a GD nuisance. And I’m disappointed to the stage of fury at the cheesiness of programs billed to be superior to Microsoft programs. They’re not. Not by a long shot.

The next computer is gunna be an $800 PC.

1 Comment left on iWeb site
Pete

It does seem supremely lame that Apple migrated you to MobileMe without being sure you had a system that was compatible. I don’t know if .Mac is (was) technically aware on an ongoing basis what version of Mac OS you use, but it stands to reason, and they could have been smart enough not to migrate anyone who would break without warning. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, but they could at least have given you a chance to migrate elsewhere if you needed to.

But the rest of this stuff? Having a computer is just about the opposite of simplicity and frugality. In fact, to achieve anything resembling computing peace of mind, simplicity and frugality need to go right out the window. Here are a couple of examples:

Broadband would make those system updates download in a reasonable amount of time. Windows wouldn’t be any better in this respect. For that matter, neither would Linux. All the major operating systems are pushing big updates out to the installed base on a regular basis.

Panther is two major versions of the operating system behind. I realize you’re not the sort who gets jollies from a computer for its own sake, and that’s fine, but in general you would experience fewer crises of this magnitude if you were to keep up with the Joneses. Running Panther today is like running Windows 2000.

As far as iWeb goes, well, given that you’re aware of its limitations, I’m not sure why you torture yourself with it when there are so many free blog publishing solutions out there on the web

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 – 12:49 AM

Live and Learn

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Little Dog and the Human have been under the weather the past few days. Cassie has given her sore leg a hot spot by licking it. I’ve been sick at my stomach for upwards of a week; starting to wonder if I got into some of that salmonella the press has been dramatizing.

The vet and I collaborated to make things worse for the dog by giving her a couple of doses of an overpriced prescription NSAID called Metacam, which knocked her for a doggy loop. She’s refused to eat for two days, and all day today she could barely wriggle.

Now that the drug is wearing off, though, she’s returning to normal. Just got back from a very zippy doggy-walk.

Personal finance hook

I dreamed up a frugal way to bandage a hot spot on a dog’s leg, by way of discouraging the licking that gives rise to such wounds. Having no gauze or tape in the house, last night I stuck a Bandaid over the sore. To my amazement, she not only didn’t rip it off instantly, by this morning the bandage was still in place. After a while, though, she figured out that she could lick around and under it. With a queasy belly and a ton of work to do this morning, I just didn’t feel like driving through the heat in search of still more stuff to buy.

Stashed in a drawer, what should I find but an athletic bandage made of a slightly tacky, stretchy material-instead of securing it with Velcro or little metal hooks, you just press it together and it sticks to itself. But unlike surgical tape, it doesn’t stick to your skin and pull out your hair-or fur. Perfect.

A bit of a clean cotton ball with a dab antibiotic ointment placed over the sore spot, and then I wrapped the dog’s leg with the sticky athletic bandage. And voilà! After a moment’s annoyance and a small adjustment, she didn’t seem bothered by it. Kept it on all day without trying to chew it off. This evening the limp is about gone and the hot spot looks much better.

Personal finance hook no. 2

If you wouldn’t put it in your mouth, don’t put it in your pet’s. Would I have taken a prescription drug for a minor ache? N-O-O-O-O! So what possessed me to give it to the dog? Especially after a baby aspirin did the job with no problem the other day, for a tiny fraction of the cost. This Metacam stuff can kill the dog’s appetite; cause nausea, diarrhea, and lethargy; and damage the liver. Charming.

Well, we got the appetite loss and the lethargy. Hope that’s all.

It was another bad buy from Big Pharma. If your ailment (or your dog’s) is neither life-threatening nor excruciating, try a nondrug treatment first; then move to an over-the-counter nostrum before rolling out the heavy pharmaceutical armament. Probably the dog needed no painkiller at all, just rest. But if she did need a pill, an inexpensive baby aspirin would have sufficed

Moving for your financial health

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Writing for Wisebread, blogger Linsey Knerl suggests that one effective way to save money is to move a good long way from the Joneses, the better to delete the temptation to keep up with high-flying neighbors and peers. The gist of the conversation has to do with pressures to stay expensively in style, with Linsey arguing that moving to a rural environment, as she has done happily, insulates you from the social forces that urge you to waste money on status symbols.

Whether or not you really need to move away from the “Joneses” to protect your self-esteem and curb your spending impulses, for some of us there may be a very good financial reason to take up residence in a rural town. Just this weekend I ran across people living in this circumstance and, thanks to their setting, living pretty well. It goes like this:

If you are poor and you know you will never be anything other than poor, you may be able to make a better life for yourself and your family in a very small town. Housing and schools may be better and safer, and the overall environment may be a great deal more pleasant than anything you could afford in a city.

Saturday a friend invited me to visit her relatives who are living in a small high-desert mining and ranch town. A few years ago this pleasantly funky wide spot in the road was discovered by a few affluent big-city residents-briefly. After a period of low-key vacation-home gentrification, it was pretty much forgotten except by a small population of ancient old-timers, a few retirees, some refugees from the big city, and a coterie of artists. Quiet and companionably eccentric, the place consists mostly of old miner’s shacks, prefab cabins, and trailers set among picturesque boulders and chaparral beneath a clean sapphire sky. The atmosphere is low-key, much of the economy is based on barter, and if anyone has money, they don’t show it off.

Among the several residents we met was a handsome 12-year-old girl, just on the verge of blossoming into womanhood, who had befriended the relatives’ little girl and had spent the Fourth of July with the family, visiting a nearby small city to watch fireworks. Expressing her pleasure at the trip, she remarked that it was the first time in her life she’d ever seen a fireworks display.

This elicited some quiet clucking from the Californian refugees, who observed that her own family, a single mother with three children, was very poor and lived in a trailer.

But… When I was 12 years old, I’d never seen fireworks. Somehow I didn’t feel deprived. And so they live in a trailer: so do a lot of people in this town. Probably a third of the structures started life as mobile homes. None of them are in trailer parks: every home occupies a lot, some as large as an acre or more, and each stands among granite boulders, flower gardens, and pleasant shady streets. Some houses have spectacular views of the surrounding hills and distant mountains. The kids attend a decent country school with small classes and no gang activity.

If you lived in a trailer in my city — and you were too young to qualify for one of the quiet senior citizens’ parks — your home would be located in the toughest part of town, where you would pay rent for a slot of ground to park your trailer practically on top of the neighbors. The garden spot to the right, for example, is just up the road from my house and a notorious hot spot for crime. Your kids would go to a gang-infested, drug-saturated and violent inner-city school. Your neighborhood would be a noisy, crime-ridden hardscape where trees and flowers are rarities and cop helicopter fly-overs routine.

The point here is that if you don’t have a lot of money and you have no prospects of ever earning anything other than poverty-level wages, life in a rural setting has a lot to recommend it. Not in some shallow sense where you move away from temptation that you don’t have the self-control or self-esteem to resist. But in the very real sense that in a small rural town, your dollars may buy you a better life.

4 Comments lef on iWeb site

!wanda

Won’t gas prices kill you if you live far away from everything?I guess being more self-sufficient and needing to make fewer trips mitigates that somewhat, but if you or someone in your family, say, gets sick and needs to go to the hospital a lot, it can be a long drive.

But, yeah, rural seems to be the way to go if you want space for cheap.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008 – 01:38 AM

Journeyer

This is so true.There are so many things that we now expect and take for granted that were “special” when we were kids – trips to the movies, going out for dinner, getting driven around to every after school activity possible.

@!wanda – living in the country often means you discover that you don’t need all the things you had in the city, so no need to travel.

Sunday, July 20, 2008 – 01:29 A

Funny about Money

Thanks for visiting, !Wanda and Journeyer.

@ Wanda: Within 30 minutes’ driving distance, there are two towns with decent infrastructures. One, reachable by a winding two-lane road, has the usual range of grocery stores, a Costco, and a respectable hospital. The other, on a safer road at the bottom of the hill, has a couple of grocery stores with inflated prices.

But if you’re willing to drive another 20 minutes — as our friends do — you reach the outskirts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, which has every urban shopping amenity you could desire: box stores, groceries, chain clothing and household stores, and even a few locally owned shops. People who live in the town own freezers. They drive to a larger town or the city once a month to stock up on household goods, staples, meat, and frozen vegetables. And most everyone has a garden. Because of the lovely climate, the produce defies belief: in our friends’ yard alone there’s a pear tree, an apple tree, two plum trees, a lime tree, and a fantastic vegetable garden. I came home laden with ruby lettuce, incredible little green onions with red bulblets, runner beans, carrots, and Swiss chard, all gifts from our hosts. The corn wasn’t ripe yet, but from a roadside produce stand we bought ears of corn so sweet you’d swear it just came off the plants and the best avocados I’ve ever had.

If these friends ever came to spend the day at my house, I could offer them no gift as handsome as the armsful of produce they sent me away with.

So, what about medical care? In an emergency you can be helicoptered to the nearest hospital or, in dire circumstances, to the major medical centers in Phoenix. Day to day? Well, you know…if you’re poor or even middle-class, you’re not going to have very good access to much medical care, anyway. So really, access to doctors and hospitals no longer is a consideration that should drive your choice of places to live

Sunday, July 20, 2008 – 10:18 AM

Linsey Knerl

What a very insightful post!Many of the things you mention are exactly why we love living rural (and Omaha is less than 40 minute drive from home.)Thanks so much for the mention

Wednesday, July 30, 2008 – 08:59 PM

Square Peg Revisited: Thanks to PK Sublime

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The other day after I held forth about my grand new scheme to force GDU’s dratted biweekly paychecks to fit into monthly bill-paying reality, a reader named PK Sublime commented.

What you do is save ALL your paychecks from month 1 and then pay ALL your bills on the 1st of month 2 that will/are [be] due in month 2. The concept of “living off last month’s income” is a great way to operate…

Uh huh, thought I, dismissively. Nice trick if you can do it.

But it was an idea that would not go away.

Is there, I wondered, a way to build a “pool” of funds from which you could pay your bills each month and that could be replenished every two weeks with your paychecks, independent of billing due dates? Could you pull off such a thing without risk of going broke?

It would take a lot of money, or so I thought: I guessed you’d need at least one month’s worth of pay to “grubstake” this fund. But…but the credit union has granted me check-bouncing protection in the amount of one month’s pay.

Doesn’t count, I continued: that’s debt, not a pool of real money.

But…my state tax refund is less than $200 short of one paycheck. I have plenty in savings to make up that $200. Could I fund such a pool with the amount of one biweekly paycheck, rather than with a whole month’s worth of pay?

An Experiment

I set up a mock account in Quicken and credited it with the amount of one paycheck: about $1500. Then, still in Quicken, I entered a debit to subtract enough from the real-life account from which all my EFTs are made (these pay utilities, the loan, and insurance premiums) to bring the balance down to $500, the emergency-fund “cushion” that resides there as my own first line of check-bouncing protection.

I just paid this month’s credit-card bills, and so the account that holds the money budgeted for credit-card purchases was already at its lowest possible ebb.

Then I “deposited” my July 2 paycheck in the “pool” fund, and immediately distributed the ENTIRE month’s budgets of $840 to the EFT fund and $1,500 to the credit-card fund. Then I entered the pending July 18 paycheck in the pool. No distributions had to come out of that check, because I’d already moved the amounts that would be owing in July to the accounts from which the money would be disbursed. On July 20, I deducted the estimated July utility and insurance payments from the EFT fund. On July 31, I transferred my regular set-asides to monthly savings ($200), to the tax/insurance/car registration “escrow” fund ($300 a month toward annual bills), and to the Renovation Loan Payoff fund ($204 a month)

No sign that any transaction would bounce, anywhere.

Deposit, distribute, disburse, transfer: repeat each month for the rest of 2008 and the first part of 2009. Watch bottom line.

The lowest the pool fund ever fell was to about $680, but it was replenished well before any new bills came due. By December, though, I had “caught up” with one of the so-called “extra” biweekly checks, and this funded the pool solidly enough to guarantee the amount in the collector fund will never fall below $1440.

Migawd! It worked.

The New System

So what we end up with is three credit union accounts that look like this.

How simple is this? It requires only two manual online transfers a month: $840 to the EFT fund and $1,500 to the credit-card fund.

In fact, it’s not quite that easy: at month-end I also have to transfer money to three different savings kitties (one of them at Vanguard). But as a practical matter, the amounts that have to be there to pay bills are now always there at the start of each month, and I don’t have to figure out how to get half the amount, from each bizarrely precessing paycheck, that will be owing into the appropriate place at the time the bills are due. The regular monthly bills pay themselves through EFTs. If I didn’t distrust credit card companies with every fiber of my fibrous little being, I could have those bills automatically paid, too.

Any cash left over in the EFT and the Credit Card accounts (normally one to three hundred dollars remains) can be used to snowflake down the Renovation Loan principal or stashed in savings.

w00t! Thanks, PK Sublime!

Independence Day link love

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A Happy Fourth of July to everyone!
And while we’re partying and parading, let us not forget the men and women who have volunteered to serve in our armed forces to protect the principles of the Declaration we will celebrate tomorrow.

Funny is taking a day off for the celebration, the 112-degree heat having done something to the energy level around here. Saturday it’s off to the high country for a short break from the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun. So, I hope you’ll visit as many other PF bloggers as you can over the next couple of days. Here are a few that I’ve enjoyed this week.

Trent at the Simple Dollar weighs the pro’s and cons of banking your debt snowballs rather than using them directly to pay down outstanding debt; I’m gratified to see he comes down on my side of the question.

At Wisebread, Margaret Garcia-Couoh speaks eloquently in favor of the dear-sir-you-cur letter as a more effective way to get redress for complaints than telephone calls or e-mails. Roger that, sister!

Five-Cent Nickel posts a good rule of thumb and some thoughtful reflections on what a purchase really costs.

Money Smart Life has started a discussion about how much detail to put on your résumé, a good question indeed, especially for those who would tip their hand about their age if they listed all their experience.

At Queercents, Paula urges us to buy local produce and offers several avenues to do so.

Doughroller warns that the Roth 401k is not for everyone…indeed, not for most folks who earn less than $1 million a year. This interesting post contains several links to other articles on the subject of Roth 401k plans.

Speaking of Roth IRAs, Brip Blap offers a dark vision of evil future politicians reneging on the promise of tax-free Roth proceeds (can we spell “man the barricades?” how about “Boston Tea Party”?).

Moolanomy has a fresh take on the question of whether we’re better or worse off financially than our parents: what he calls “financial distractions.” This is a good insight that’s hard to argue with.

Be This Way brings up a topic I recently heard discussed on NPR: the practice of gathering information about your lifestyle based on your purchasing habits, and then using it to determine your credit card rates. Whatever you do, don’t buy a retread, get a massage, or visit a marriage counselor-or if you must, for heaven’s sake pay in cash, under the radar.

Mrs. Micah has opened a conversation on things to consider before taking on a mortgage, which has generated some good comments.

Paid Twice is discussing disability insurance. Today she focuses on long-term disability; a few days ago she had a post on short-term disability insurance, both important issues to understand.

Outa here! Have a happy Fourth.

How higher gas prices save money

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Here I am thinking that four-&-a-half-dollar gasoline is driving me to the poorhouse…but WAIT!

Wai-wai-wai-wait! Not so! Whereas ’tis all too true that more of the Budget is going to support my driving addiction, something odd has happened: because of the changes in driving and buying strategies forced by the run-up in gas prices, I’m buying a lot smarter in other ways. Groceries, normally my biggest indulgence, have dropped by 50%; spending on yard items is an eighth of what it has been.

In fact, over the past month I’ve saved way more on these items than the extra amount I’ve had to spend on gas.

What is going on?

When the cost of gas headed for the stratosphere, I decided to shop for necessities only at stores that are on my way to and from the Great Desert University. No extra trips would be allowed: whatever I needed would have to come from someplace along the commute.

This cut out Home Depot, the scene of many an impulse-buy frenzy.

All my other regular stops in fact are along the route from here to GDU. However, the “no extra trip” rule eliminated an amazing number of junkets. Using Quicken’s transaction detail shortcut report feature (right-click on the category!), I compared June 2007 spending with June 2008’s in several areas. Here’s what happened.

Groceries

Here’s the biggy for me, since I don’t eat out and I very much relish food. I don’t hold the horses in the grocery store: this is my only indulgence, and I do indulge. I’m given to shopping in gourmet specialty stores, and I do not worry myself with such details as how much food costs.

But within the constraints of the “commute-route” rule, AJ’s, a local retailer, is the only fancy grocer on my way. It suffices: you can bankrupt yourself there just as easily as at Whole Paycheck.

In June of 2007, my grocery bill was (hang on to your hats, frugalists!) $721.99.

Done hyperventilating? O.K. In June 2008, it was $334.96.

Wow! In 2007, I made 17 trips to purveyors of groceries, three of them to the dangerous AJ’s. This year, I made 12 grocery runs, five of them to AJ’s. Even though I made more hits on the fancy store, I spent less than half as much on groceries this year as I did a year ago.

Why? In June 2007, the Great Chinese Dog Food Scare was peaking. That was when I decided to make real food for Walt the Greyhound and Anna the Ger-shep, both 90-pound dogs. This would be about the equivalent of inviting a couple of 12-year-olds (or petite adults) to your dinner table. In May, shortly before the Scare, I spent $417.25, a more normal figure. But still: way more than I paid out last month.

In any event, restricting grocery-store runs to stops on the way home from work cut out five trips to the store, which evidently limited grocery spending

Yard Items

In this category, Home Depot is a real menace. I love plants. It’s almost impossible for me to walk through Home Depot’s nursery without buying a plant, a pot, or both. And the swimming pool chemicals are located in the garden department, so you have to walk past the plants to get to the chlorine, acid, and diatomaceous earth. Cleaning goods and some electrical gear are right next to the plants. Meanwhile, the whole store is laid out like a medieval street bazaar: impulse buys as far as the eye can see.

On the other hand, Ace Hardware, which unlike HD is on my way home from campus, has no garden department. I started buying at Ace to avoid the 8-mile round trip to HD. Ace carries almost everything one needs from Home Depot, but the store layout is pragmatic, boring, and untempting. The place encourages you to get in, pick up only what you need, and get out.
June ’07: $61.62 (3 trips)
June ’08: $7.58 (1 trip)

Why? No Home Depot!

Pool

In these parts the weather heats up the first part of May. Warm weather consumes chlorine tablets and, unless you stay on top of things, grows algae. Until the gas run-up, I’d been buying chlorine tabs, shock treatment, and acid at Home Depot. Lately, though, I’ve been stopping for those things at Leslie’s, in the same strip mall as the Safeway that’s directly on the way home from GDU.
June ’07: $92.78
June ’08: $55.98
Why? Lest you think that specialty-store pool chemicals are cheaper than HD’s, the truth is that in 2007 I spent $42.50 for a service call, and so the real cost for chemicals was $50.28. Still, that’s only five bucks less than I paid this year.
HD’s shock treatment contains a chemical that causes the filter to clog up, and so every time I use it, I have to backwash and then add 8 pounds of new diatomaceous earth (DE), which HD does not give away for free. A DE filter in theory is not supposed to need backwashing more than about every three months, and so having to do that noxious chore once a week got old real fast. Not only that, but the HD shock treatment turned the pool into a puddle of Clorox that was unswimmable, even in the hottest weather, for at least three days. Since I’m in the water two or three times a day, I found myself putting off shock treatments until the walls were coated with green stuff, not a good habit.
Leslie’s has a non-chlorine shock treatment that does not contaminate the water and does not clog the filter. You can dive in the water right after you dump the stuff in. And thanks to this stuff, I managed to delay the quarterly filter clean-out ($100) for about six months.

So, even though I paid $5 more in June 2008 than in the same month of 2007, over the long run I’ve been paying less on pool maintenance because I haven’t had to buy giant boxes of DE every time I turn around and I haven’t had the pool guy over here every three months. And now I can use my pool every single day, with no hiatuses to wait for scary levels of carcinogens to drop from ungodly toxic to only mildly poisonous.

Gasoline
June ’07: $ 83.45
June ’08: $138.20

That’s a $54.75 increase.
Grocery savings: $ 387.00
Yard item savings: 54.00
Pool savings: 36.80
Less gas rip: -54.70
Result: $423.10

Approximately: when I copied and pasted these posts out of iWeb into Word, the last character before each hard return disappeared, so I have no idea what appeared in the ones columns. At any rate, when I wrote this I appeared to be $423 to the good, thanks to the inflated cost of gasoline.

If This Is So Great, How Come I’m Busted, Disgusted, and Can’t Be Trusted?

Those of you who’ve followed my whining know I’m up to my eyeballs in red ink. Last month’s budget cycle ended $111 in the hole. So far this month, I was $126 in the red at the end of the first week and, with three days to go am $17 in the red against this week’s budget.

I’ve blamed this on the run-up in gas and food prices. But a closer look reveals the actual cause: a long series of extraordinary expenses biting into cash flow over the past two months.

Between April 21 and June 20, I racked up $1,012 in veterinary bills for the dying German shepherd. In May I pledged $100 to a charity, Andrea’s closet, thinking the amount would come out that month; instead it was charged against American Express in June, when I had to cover $332 of those vet bills. While I might have been able to handle around $300 of unplanned charges, $432 broke the bank. And so far in the first week and a half of this month, I’ve had to pay $55 for car service and $87 for pool service.

So, while I may have saved some $430 in a few categories these past couple of months, it’s as nothing compared to the $1,254 in unplanned expenses ($1,012.33 vet bills + 54.72 car repair + $87 pool service + $100 donation) that I’ve been trying to cover with cash flow and emergency fund savings.

Without those extra expenses, I would be doing just fine…thanks to the gas prices.