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Personal Finance

Got Parents? Keep an Eye on Them!

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It is freaking amazing how vulnerable we old folks get to scams and sales pitches as we descend the steps toward the grave. Lissen up,  you young pups: if you have parents, it is sooo incumbent upon you to quietly keep an eye on whatever financial mischief they’re getting up to. If not to protect them (as most of them did for you when you were too dumb to know better), then to protect whatever assets you might inherit or to delay the day, as long as possible, that the old folks become dependent on you.

Here’s what brought on that outburst: Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend called, all hepped up about having dropped something in excess of five grand on an improvement to his 35-year-old tract house in Sun City, a venue that most Boomers avoid like it was radioactive. While the house is ideal for a single person who doesn’t live there year-round, Zillow believes it to be worth $6500 less than he paid for it in 2004.

Here and there around Sun City, you’ll see old masonry houses that recently have been clad in stucco. Most of these get a layer of insulation under the new mud, which in theory should save on power bills.

Welp, one of SDXB’s neighbors decided to do this. Curious, SDXB stopped by to inquire, and that gave the contractor an opportunity to offer him a smokin’ deal if he would just sign on the dotted line before the guy moved his crew out of the area. So now he’s all excited because he expects this will increase the value of his hard tent (his term: a guy with terminal wanderlust, he wishes to spend his dotage in constant motion, using the place in Sun City as a place to camp out during the winter, when the weather’s livable). And it is true that the houses modernized with a layer of stucco do look a lot better than those with naked slumpblock walls.

So now he’s saying maybe he’ll sell the place, taking advantage of what he thinks will be spectacularly improved property value, and upgrade to a better place on the golf course.

Well. This sounds grand, until you think about it:

a) During the winter, it’s a rare day when you’ll turn on the heater. Today as we speak we’re in mid-November and it’s 73 degrees on my back porch. Last month my power bill was $66; this month it will be less. Ditto SDXB’s.

b) In addition to her house in Sun City, New Girlfriend owns a lovely home in Boulder, to which she repairs at the first sign of undue warmth. SDXB either goes up there with her or soon follows, every spring. She stays there until October. He spends most of the summer there, when he’s not hanging out with his relatives at the Hood River in Oregon or visiting boyhood friends in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Thus, when my  power bills run upward of $200, he has exactly no power bills. None. Nil. Zero. Zip.

c) The two of them have developed a love of ocean cruises. They are merrily squandering their kids’ inheritance on wonderful cruises, and having the time of their lives! In summers past, they’ve been all over the Caribbean, to say nothing of the trip to Italy. And just now he’s got NG persuaded that nothing will do but what they must head for the South Pacific. Thus, between the summer home in the high country and the constant peripatetic mode, they’re hardly ever there!

d) SDXB has taken his neighbor’s word for it. He’s done nothing to check this contractor out or to get competing bids. This is SO out of character that it defies belief.

Well. IMHO if you plan to spend the entire year in one of those hard tents and if you believe you’re going to live in it until you croak over, this stuccoing scheme may not be a bad idea. Although God only KNOWS how many years it will take to recover the cost if only utility bills are taken into consideration, SDXB’s slump-block home is fully painted. A new paint job, if it’s done with a decent grade of paint, will cost him two or three thousand bucks. Newer forms of stucco come dyed to the color you please and, in theory, never need to be painted. So assuming that’s true and assuming he lives, say, another 15 to 20 years, he could save as much in paint as he spends on mud. In that case, whatever savings he realizes on the air-conditioning (which could be non-negligible, should he ever break up with NG) would be gravy.

But as a practical matter, SDXB has no intention of EVER spending another summer here in the Valley of the We-D0-Mean Sun. So that leaves us with the question of

W

T

F

???

IMHO, this is a case where a competent family member — a son or a daughter, for example — needs to be on hand to keep an eye on big-ticket decisions for an aging parent.

Of course, none of us wants to give over our autonomy to the younger generation (or to anyone else, for that matter). And naturally, none of the young folk wants to have to take on the responsibility of riding herd on an increasing frail (and so increasingly annoying) parent. However…it must be recalled that, after all, those parents shouldered 18 years or so of responsibility for the pups. Or, less altruistically: our assets are their assets. Whatever we refrain from squandering will help to keep our kids in the middle class, to the extent that a middle class survives in this country.

So. Keep an eye on us old buzzards, you young thangs.

😉

.

 

What’s Your Least-Favorite Financial Task?

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Hereabouts, it’s not the budget. Not economizing through tight times. Not even paying the bills. My least-favorite financial task is scanning checks and depositing them electronically.

A close second — about neck-and-neck, come to think of it — is driving to the credit union to deposit checks. The only branch on this side of town is up at the Great Desert University’s west campus, about as far off my beaten track as possible. Literally, nothing calls me in that direction anymore, and I deeply resent having to burn gas and time to schlep a few checks up there. Hence: electronic deposit.

Two factors contribute to turning this task into an exercise in frustration. First is the exigencies of the credit union’s software system. Second is the endlessly annoying, ditzy HP ScanPro software.

To begin with, the CU demands that checks be scanned in black & white JPEGs, 200 to 300 dpi. NOT color, my scanner’s default (it likes to brag about its “millions of colors”! The CU’s system just hates that). Try to deposit a check accidentally scanned in “millions of colors,” and you’ll hang the credit union’s software. Nor does said program care for grayscale: a check scanned in grayscale is instantly rejected.

So this means you have to remember to fiddle with your software to persuade it to do a b/w scan. But that’s the least of your headaches.

To please the credit union, your check must be scanned JUST SO. The image has to be cropped to exactly the size of the check, with no border around it. And the image of the check’s backside has to be exactly the size of the front image. If it’s not, your deposit will be rejected.

This means you have to set the check on the scanner’s flatbed exactly straight. That is 100% straight straight. The scanner then copies the entire flatbed, and you have to crop the image to the edges of the check. The cropping tool, of course, appears as a rectangular box with right angles all the way around. Set the check on there cattywampus, and you get part of it cut off and part of it with the hated border.

The inside of the scanner’s cover is white, right? Ohhhhkkkaaayyyyy…. If your check is white or pale gray or pale beige, it’s extremely difficult to line up the edge of the cropping rectangle with the edge of the check’s image. Get that wrong, and the CU rejects your deposit because it thinks you’re trying to deposit a fake check, because the size of the front doesn’t match the size of the back.

The first time I rescanned a check four times and couldn’t get the goddamn software to accept a deposit, I called the CU and asked what was wrong with their software.

Nothing, their CSR said. “But here’s a suggestion: scan the check on a black background. Then it’ll be easier to see the check’s edges”

Black? Say what? Am I supposed to paint the inside of the scanner’s lid??????

Well, I had some black card stock from an art class I’d taken some years before.

Set a small piece of paper on a glass plate — dare you to get it straight in the first place! — and when you lay a black card over the top of it, what will it do? Scootch around, of course.

So, you have to tape the damn check to the damn piece of black paper.

And you have to get it straight. Really, really straight. And sometimes when you align it with the edges of the paper, the scanner fails to pick up the edges of the check.

How to do that? Well…scout up a white pencil and use it to draw rules on the damn piece of black paper, so that you can line up the check at right angles to the edges of the scanner glass. Like so…

BlackThingStarting to get time-consuming, eh? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Okay, now you have your check and you have your annoying black background template sheet thing. Now you have to tape your check to the black sheet. Very, very carefully, because of course you’re going to have to take the tape off one side and turn the check over for a second scan, meaning you dare not rip the damn thing.

BUT…

One piece of tape will not suffice. If you tack the check to the black card with a single piece of tape, the check will…yes!…scootch when you set the card upside down on the scanner bed. No. The scanner software will NOT straighten the image. No. Not a chance. So, you have to affix two pieces of tape, very, very carefully, one to the check’s top edge and one to its bottom edge.

Now, at last, you have the thing in place and you tell HP ScanPro to run “New Scan.” Obediently, it does so, producing a kind of preview that you have to adjust as necessary before scanning to disk. It scans the entire flatbed, meaning you have to grab the cropping tool and reduce the image to fit the check’s image.

BUT…

For unfathomable reasons, if the cropping rectangle that comes up touches the left-hand margin of the flatbed image, HP Scanpro will not allow you to grab the left-hand corners or edge of the cropping rectangle!

This means that if it produces a rectangle that runs all the way from the left side to the right side, you have a little headache. No two rectangles, BTW, are ever the same size or shape. Sometimes ScanPro will produce a cropping rectangle that’s almost the size of the check; sometimes much smaller; sometimes horizontally wide enough to run from edge to edge of the black image but otherwise fairly normal; sometimes deeper than the check but not as wide; and on and on and on to infinity. Sometimes it throws two cropping boxes at you, and then you have to figure out which one will work and delete the other, in a process that is not obvious.

If you have the misfortune of finding a rectangle that spans the black image, then you have to TRY to grab the right-hand side, reduce the rectangle horizontally, then move the rectangle rightward to align with the right-hand edge of the check image, then grab the left-hand side of the rectangle and size horizontally. Then you can get around to sizing the thing vertically.

Very carefully.

Now you scan the thing.

HP ScanPro presents you with FIFTEEN CHOICES for what to do with this check.

The credit union, by the way, also has software that supposedly will scan your check. It will not work with FireFox; it will not work with a Mac. So you have no choice but to scan your check to disk and then upload it to the CU as a JPEG.

As it develops, the best of the 15 choices is to scan it to an Apple e-mail message. This works handily because Apple has the annoying quirk of insisting on inserting JPEG and PDF images into the body of an e-mail message. This actually shortens the increasingly aggravating process you’re enjoying, because you don’t have to open the e-mail and download an attachment: all you have to do is right-click on the image, which pops up automatically in ScanPro, and save to disk.

First, though, you have to check the image to be sure there’s no significant amount of border around the outside of the image — i.e., that you got it straight, and that you cropped it as tight as possible to the check’s border.

If there’s any border to speak of at any edge, or if the JPEG is not straight, you’ll have to go through all of the above to scan it over again. And, quite possibly, again.

And no,  you can not export the image to iPhoto and crop & straighten it there. If you upload the check’s JPEG image to the CU from iPhoto, it will be rejected faster than you can type FO*K! on your keyboard.

So, you finally get this right.

Now you have to trudge through the same process for the other side of the check, making sure that you place the back side on the flatbed in such a way that the endorsement will show on the right-hand side of the image.

By now, you’ve spent about as much time on this process as it would take to drive to the credit union. But presumably you’ve saved the amount of time required for a round trip, eh?

Well. Maybe not.

Why, you ask, don’t you just put the checks in an envelope and snail-mail them to the credit union?

Why, indeed. The last time I did that, some chucklehead there lost the goddamn checks! Yes. They lost a thousand dollars’ worth of checks from my clients!!!!!!!!! Weeks later, just as I sat down to call each one of those worthies and ask them to go to the time and expense of stopping payment on their checks and sending me new ones, the credit union finally managed to find the things.

And that is why, my children, we never send checks to the credit union by snail-mail.

Okay. Now it’s time to upload your images to the handy-dandy Deposit from Home program.

Including the hassle of signing in to the credit union (it often thinks my password is wrong and then I have to go to a special page to convince it otherwise), uploading one check takes SEVENTEEN STEPS PER SIDE!

Got that? You have to jump through those hoops twice for each check (less the two-step sign-in and the navigation to the Deposit-from-Home page): front side, back side. That’s a total of 31 hoop-jumps! Per check!

😆 😥 😆

By the time I’d managed to deposit the two checks that evinced the present rant — one from Medicare B and one from my Medigap insurer — I still had not paid their total toward the Mayo Clinic bill they were intended to defray. But I had killed about as much time as it would have taken to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus, deposit the checks, and then plod all the way back home.

Remaining to do: Exit Deposit-from-Home; boot up Bill-Pay; remit the total amount of the two checks to the Mayo electronically; print out a report proving I’d done the same; file the stack of paper from Medicare, the Medigap insurer, the Mayo, and the credit union.

The only thing this process saved was about a gallon of gasoline.

Et vous? Do you have a least-favorite financial chore?

This post was included in the October 24 edition of the Yakezie Carnival at Figuring Money Out.

One More Year…Until the Year Arrives

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Frugal Scholar writes about the latest budgetary convulsions in her state, recurring politico-fiscal nightmares that have already had baleful effects on higher education there. With one kid fresh out of college and the other on the brink of (parent-assisted) homeownership, the sails of the Good Ship Retirement have appeared on  the horizon. Though she says she’d like to teach several more years, FS reports that she’s fallen into the habit, particularly where optional expenditures are concerned, of asking herself “what would I do about this if I had only one more year before retirement?”

Good question, isn’t it? She finds it deflects impulse buys. But it’s also an interesting mind-set — maybe one that anyone of any age should engage.

What if we all kept in the back of our minds that we had OMY — One More Year — before we chose to or had to quit working?  What would that do for us?

Well, obviously, it would make us think twice about the various extravagances and flings we’re inclined to when we know that a steady income will replenish savings or pay off the credit card within a month or two or three. It might lead us to plan for the future more carefully: what kind of housing would we like to have, once we’re retired? And where? How much, realistically, is it going to cost us to live in retirement? If the projected retirement date were accelerated by x or y years, how much should we be saving now to accommodate such a change in plans? What kind of vehicle will we drive? How will we fill the free hours…maybe with volunteering? travel? a new job or enterprise? hobbies?

My dean gave me nine months’ notice, although I realized well before then that the university was unlikely to continue to keep our expensive research support office, what with the president saying he would pare back operations that did not contribute directly to the institution’s primary mission, teaching.

So what was the OMY effect on me, a person who actually knew she had only one more year of employment?

• Debt clearance. The number-one goal was to get rid of a $30,000 home-equity loan I’d taken out to renovate the house my son and I copurchased, to make it livable for him. It required me to take a second job, but I accomplished that.

• Budget reallocation and expense control. Believing I soon could be living under the Seventh Avenue Underpass, I started getting used to spending a lot less. Over the course of nine months, I cut the discretionary budget from $1,500 a month to $900, and aimed to get it down to $850. I got used to running the air conditioning a lot less during the summer and trained myself to tolerate uncomfortable temperatures inside the house.

• Food purchase habits. I began stockpiling nonperishable foods, such as canned goods, beans, and rice. Eventually I bought a freezer so I could store meats and frozen vegetables purchased on sale or in bulk.

• Cultivation of new income sources. I got my foot in the door at Heavenly Gardens Community College, so that a teaching gig of 3 & 3 + 1 — the maximum number of courses an adjunct could teach at the time — was waiting for me the minute I walked off the Great Desert University campus. Meanwhile, I ramped up The Copyeditor’s Desk so the contract editorial work was flowing in by the time the salaried job ended.

• Early Social Security draw. With retirement investments down by something over $200,000, my financial manager strongly advised me to delay drawing from savings as long as possible. Even though it was not in my interest to start Social Security before reaching so-called “full” retirement age, the piddly income from teaching and freelance editing was not enough to keep me in my home and put food on the table. So, I was forced to start taking Social Security two years before “full retirement age” and six years before I had planned to do so.

When one is laid off a job in one’s sixties, one is “fully” retired, no matter what some rule-making bureaucrat or affluent legislator imagines. I applied for job after job after job — everything that I was well qualified for, everything that I was even remotely qualified for, and everything I figured I could stand to do even though it was menial work. Believe it: no one is interested in hiring an elderly worker, especially not during a major recession.

• Postponed or canceled decisions about planned major purchases. Even at the time the job ended, my car was reaching its dotage. Normally I keep a car for 10 years or until it reaches 100,000 miles, whichever comes first; the Dog Chariot was 10 years old on the first day of my surprise retirement. I’m still driving the thing. It’s rounding on 14 years old now and has almost 120,000 miles on the odometer. I probably will run it into the ground before buying a new tank.

All of these OMY strategies cushioned the fall into permanent unemployment (which is, after all, what retirement really is).

And when one bounces off that trampoline into a brave new world, one finds that permanent unemployment is just another word for freedom. Today I can’t even imagine going back to a full-time job — perish the hideous thought!

It really is true, contrary to the warnings of ever so many financial advisors who want you to give them your money to invest, that you can live a lot more cheaply in retirement than you do while you’re working. With fewer external demands pushing up your expenses, it simply doesn’t cost very much to live well.

I’ve managed to stay in my home, despite increasing insurance and tax bills. My son and I have not defaulted on the downtown house (although, admittedly, for awhile it did look like we might have to). I don’t seem to be having any trouble keeping the place maintained. Gerardo is still employed. Various workmen still find jobs to do around the place, and none of them is being asked to go hungry. I still have a dog. I can still buy the clothing I need, whenever I feel so inclined (which isn’t often). I can still get a monthly haircut. And I can even go out to lunch or dinner occasionally.

Without the cost of a daily commute, without the need to buy and wear expensive dry-clean-only clothes, without  the five-day-a-week restaurant lunches, without the repair bills occasioned by the wear &  tear on your car, and without the many other expenses one invests in a career, you save a surprising amount of money. And one quickly becomes accustomed to buying more intelligently, to curbing extravagances, and to cutting waste — so quickly that these new habits are not perceived as significant hardship.

Thinking about your financial life as if you had only One More Year to go will not only help you to get your money affairs in order, it will smooth the way into a comfortable and happy retirement.

 

A Couple of Things I Can Afford to Do Without…

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1. New(er) Car

Toyota_Sienna_LEThe other day I picked up the Dog Chariot from Chuck, the Paragon of Mechanics. He charged me $300+ for a brake job and several other small details. I said I was thinking about replacing the tank with a Honda CR-V or a Toyota RAV-4. He and all the guys at the shop argued that the Chariot should run to 200,000 miles without major problems.

It only has 118,000 miles on it now. (“Only” 118,000 miles! Who would ever have thunk an American car owner would utter a phrase like that?)

Normally, I drive about 10,000 to 12,000 miles a year. Without the commute to various college campuses, the mileage is likelier to run on the low side than on the high side. So…if the Men of Chuck’s are right, the thing should last another 10 years!

Every day that car runs, it puts money in my pocket in the form of low insurance bills and negligible registration fees. If it actually survived another eight or ten years, a great deal of money could stay invested, rather than being engrossed by the various parasites who want to take it away from me.

I’d like to drive to the high country during the summers. But I’m not comfortable driving the aging Sienna up the rim, which is a steep climb, nor do I relish being stuck by the side of the road way to hell and gone out in the desert. But duh! It would cost a lot less than Arizona’s $420 registration fee to rent a car and drive it to Jerome or Flagstaff. What the heck? I could rent a Mercedes convertible for less than it costs to register a $25,000 car in Arizona! And not have to pay 25 grand for the privilege.

Yesterday morning I took the little tank by the annoying car wash (at Chuck’s behest: “Take it to the car wash!!!!!”) and paid their demand for an extra $4 to dust the interior. Therein lies the key: give them some vigorish and they do a decent job.

The clunk came out looking almost like a brand-new chariot! Very nice.

So I decided to touch up the paint on the two spots where the white enamel chipped off, one where either a rock or a BB hit the tailgate and another where I broke the tail-light and chipped off a little paint around the assembly. The trick (I learned after I left the tailgate open while backing into the garage and whacked it on the garage door) is to squirt a couple of light coats of white enamel spray paint over the nekkid metal ding. It worked, more or less…good enough for government work, anyway.

custom_paint_jobContemplating another eight or ten years of living with this contraption, it occurred to me to wonder if it would be worth having the clunk repainted.

I’ve always wanted a candy-apple red car. How cool would a candy-apple red Sienna be, anyway? Maybe with some nice yellow and orange flames along the sides?

2) Overcomplicated Decomplication Strategy

Several readers remarked, in puzzled tones, that my scheme to cut the number of credit-card charges to keep track of, month in and month out, was effectively self-defeating. They noted, for example, that buying a cash card for a grocery store would not be regarded as a charge for groceries but rather as a charge for a piece of plastic, counterproductive when the Costco AMEX kicks back 6% on charges for food, 3% on gasoline purchases, and 1% on everything else. Presumably a piece of plastic would come under the rubric of “everything else.”

Much more obvious strategy: cut the number of trips to the usual suspects among retailers. Where is it written that I have to jet off to the Safeway every time I notice that one or two small items have run out? Can one not make do for a few days?

Why not simply cut the number of trips to Costco to two a month (max)? And the trips to Safeway to four a month? Every Thursday morning, I drive right past the favored Safeway on the way home from the weekly networking meeting. Stopping for groceries then would serve two purposes: a) save gasoline by combining trips and b) reduce the number of visits to the supermarket.

Two Costco charges + four Safeway charges + three Costco gas fillups ≠ 98 gerjillion annoying little charges. Actually, they = nine charges.

What if I took out about $200 or $300 in cash each month, and paid any bills under $20 to $30 with actual dollars? Here in this stack of charge slips I see a $4.16 charge to Safeway, a $10.73 charge to a restaurant, a $12.39 charge to Trader Joe’s, a $19.05 charge to the propane dealer, and on and on.

If only Costco gas bills and bills over $30 were charged, last month’s number of transactions would drop from twenty-eight to to twelve. If the threshold were $50, then the number of charges made last month would have been seven. And if I limited Safeway trips to once a week and Costco expeditions to twice a month, the number might drop even further.

So. The new Decomplication Strategy: Use cash for purchases under $50; limit routine shopping junkets to specific days of the month.

Money Happens

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Lordie, money not only happens, it seems to materialize out of the air.

You can’t even imagine how little I am working, here in my dotage. But that notwithstanding, money keeps on happening.

At the end of 2012, I followed the accountant’s advice and withdrew from the S-corp what we calculated the S-corp should disburse to me plus repayment of the money I used to capitalize the business, which has been carried on the books as a loan. That amounted to enough to cover the business’s contribution to my upkeep for the first three quarters of 2013.

Just reconciled the February and March statements (you can see with what enthusiasm I approach these tasks…). Lo! I’ll only have to earn another $2,000 all year long to bring the balance back up to what it was before that drawdown. That is just amazing.

Just now no business is on the horizon — I do need to get off my aching duff and hustle up some work. But this is a feast & famine business. Before long something else will come in, and then it will be like popcorn in a cooker. While it’s quiet, I need to finish the e-book that’s almost done and then put together a couple of others from the bottomless pit of copy that is Funny about Money.

Decomplicate Me!

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Ohhhhhh gawd one more piece of paper to have to figure out, act on, and file is gonna break my achin’ back! Yesterday afternoon I was trying to figure out how to organize the usual complicated mess before handing it over to The Accountant from Nirvana, who offers to take on the migrainish bookkeeping. Obviously, the less mess for her to have to plow through, the fewer hours it will take her to beat it back. Hence: decomplication.

So much paper comes pouring into my house that often I just can’t keep up with it. It piles up like dust on the Plains until finally I’m forced to deal with it, and that dealing can take the better part of an entire day. Yesterday, I thought if only i could find a way to cut the number of transactions and the number of pieces of paper i have to screw with, maybe it wouldn’t take half my lifetime to keep this shit under control…

One spring that feeds the flood of papers is the charge cards. Specifically, the AMEX card. Costco’s American Express card is one of America’s premier kick-back cards: almost every charge racks up a few pennies or a few dollars toward the annual “rebate,” which in my case goes directly into savings. Because I charge everything on the AMEX card and then pay it off at the end of each month, some years that kickback has amounted to three or four hundred dollars. To make that happen, though, entails snowflurries of charge slips, each of which has to be entered in Quickbooks.

Most of these small charges, some as small as a couple of bucks, occur at a limited number of retailers: Costco, Safeway, Costco gas, AJ’s (a local purveyor of fancy groceries and the best coffee beans in town).

What if…? What if I were to buy cash cards at the places where most of my charges take place? You can buy cash cards at Costco with which to purchase gasoline and groceries. Ditto Safeway: give yourself a gift card. Same at the local upscale AJ’s. A person could pay for these things with the richly endowed AMEX card, thereby preserving the coveted kickback.

Wouldn’t it make sense to buy gift cards or cash cards to cover purchases at the most-frequented retailers, thereby consolidating 87 gerjillion receipts into three or four?

If said person then paid for purchases under about $50 with cash, wouldn’t that also get rid of a lot of ditzy little receipts to keep track of?

Then how much would be left to charge on credit cards, track, and organize monthly payments for?

Hm.

Averaging charges in various categories over seven months, I discovered that typically I’ve been spending about $55 a month at AJ’s, $300 at Costco on groceries and household goods, $95 on Costco gasoline, $120 at Safeway, and around $160 on small sundries. On average, large planned or unplanned bills can come to as much as $370 in any given month.

What if the only things that went on the charge card were gift or cash cards and large bills? And all the little stuff were paid in cash?

This would hugely change the budgeting scheme. Instead of $1100 a month to be charged on the card and paid off at the end of each month, things would look like this:

CashBudget

Biggest drawback: it would require me to traipse to the credit union once a month and get actual cash, of all things…

On the first day of each budget cycle:

1. Drive to the credit union; withdraw $160
2. Drive to Costco: Buy $395 Costco cash card ($95 for gasoline; $300 for in-store purchases).
3. Drive to Safeway, get $120 Safeway cash card.
4. Drive to AJ’s, get $55 AJ’s card.

Manage funds accordingly.

This would consolidate all the charges for groceries, cleaning goods, personal care products, and household stuff into three charges — Costco, Safeway, and AJ’s. Gasoline and some clothing would also be comprised in the Costco card. There would be no reason to itemize every single stupid little charge in these categories; instead, all that would be noted is the cost of an estimated month’s worth of charges, to be paid with a cash card.   Same would be true of the ditzy little bills, 50 bucks and under, that would be paid for in cash.

The only bills requiring serious itemization would be bigger-ticket items such as major car repair bills, gifts, dental visits, and the like.

Right there, dozens of scraps of paper, direct to the trash! Or at least not stashed in a file folder or envelope to be inflicted on the (expensive!) accountant.

Today, speaking of major bills, I have to leave my car at the shop for a brake job, so I won’t be driving around buying cash cards and extracting cash from the credit union. But tomorrow…