Coffee heat rising

Shopping

All-Time RECORD LOW on AMEX! Woo hooo!

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The American Express bills came in yesterday, for both the personal and the business cards. The tab for personal spending?

$207.35

Whoa!!!!! That is an all time low! Literally true: I’ve never had an American Express bill come in under about $850. It’s usually around $1200.

To what can we attribute this miracle?

Well, I’ll tellya: I think it’s the Costco “envelope” budgeting scheme. Apparently, that strategy is influencing other kinds of spending. Because of course, since Costco dumped AMEX for Citibank’s Visa (I refuse to do business with Citibank ever again — period!), I haven’t been able to use the AMEX card at Costco. So…

????

Why on earth would putting all my Costco purchases on a pre-purchased cash card affect expenses normally racked up on AMEX?

Obviously, it’s a psychological thing.

I think it works like this: Making a list near the beginning of the month of everything that I know I need, including the estimated prices of those items, and trying to keep the total cost to $300 or less forces me to think carefully about what I really do need.

That is, the envelope method causes you to plan for purchasing. And when you plan, you get a grip on spending.

By thinking ahead a full month, I’ve been able to restrict almost all my household and food purchases to Costco, and that seems to limit impulse buys at other venues. In other words, I don’t have to run to a grocery store to buy, say, a can of Comet, and so I do not buy a bunch of other stuff while I’m there. Ultimately, I buy only the things I really need; not the things I imagine, on the run, that I can’t live without.

Yes, there was one impulse buy at Costco last month: I bought a pair of black pants, because our choir director asked us to wear black this year under our robes. Did I have a pair of black jeans? Yup. At least two of them. Did I need a pair of black pants? Nope. But they did not push spending past the $300 limit on the cash card. And they do look a lot dressier for church, and unlike other stretchy pants, they do have pockets to carry credit cards and the emergency phone (which can’t be left in the car at this time of year).

What happened, it appears, is that because of that careful plan-ahead, I bought almost everything I needed at Costco, within the $300 budget (plus the $60 for gasoline). Not feeling any crying need to buy much else, the result was that I simply stayed out of other stores.

{chortle!} I’d seen that $207 balance in the online accounting, but didn’t believe it. Thought it must have been a mistake (mine, no doubt: if it’s online, I’m unlikely to get it straight). But NOOOOO!

Who’d’ve thunk it?

Grocery Bags…Back to the Future?

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Have supermarkets in your parts begun to ration plastic bags? They’re hard at it here. Even Walmart prominently displays colorful (plastic…) tote bags near the check-out stands — for sale, of course; most certainly not for free. Whole Foods has been doing that for years, as has Trader Joe’s — no surprise there, given those chains’ overall zeitgeist.

Many stores offer a choice of paper bags or plastic now — Whole Foods gives you none, of course: it’s paper or else buy one of those totebags. Or you could pile everything in a grocery basket, roll it out to your car, and pack it in a piece at a time. 😀

How do you feel about that? Political correctness aside, do you sense even the slightest…oh…resentment at this shift?

Oh yeah? Well…can you remember when, back in the Day, grocery stores abruptly made the switch from paper bags to the filmy plastic bags that infest our landfills, our front yards, our streams, our lakes, our skies, and our oceans? And do you remember how you felt about it then?

{chortle!}

I sure do.

No choice was offered, during the Dark Ages. One day you went in, piled a week’s worth of loot into a grocery cart, arrived at the check-out stand, and…were presented with a grocery cart filled with limp plastic bags spilling out packages and cans and heads of lettuce.

And “spilling” was the operative term. When you were accustomed to a paper bag that could hold several days’ worth of food and cleaning goods, three wimpy plastic bags that together could barely hold the same amount were, shall we say, confounding. Where a paper bag would stand upright in the trunk of your car, these damn things would flop in there and disgorge their contents to roll around every time you turned a corner. When you got home, you had to gather all your purchases off the floor of the car trunk and pack them back into the wispy plastic bags before you could haul the groceries up the steps to your apartment.

Ohhhh GOD how I hated those plastic bags!

In those primitive times, makers of trash baskets turned out kitchen garbage cans designed to hold a paper grocery bag. You just dropped an empty bag into the trash basket — which fit under the kitchen sink (remember that?) — and when it was full, you browbeat your husband or a kid to take it out to the garbage bin. It was wonderful!

Halcyon times.

The accursed plastic bags, of course, did not fit into anything that even vaguely looked like a trash basket. About the best you could do was set a plastic bag on one side of the sink, use it to hold accruing debris as you cooked, then tie it off and toss it into the trash can, where it would sit there leaking and stinking until someone dragged it and a half-dozen other bags that collected with it in the old trash basket.

Note that I did not hate the bags for environmental reasons. In the Dark Ages, we didn’t get that kind of news. If we had any worries about the environment, they had to do with smog and nuclear fallout.What could a plastic bag have to do with those?

Unless plastic bags were manufactured in nuclear plants. Who knows? Maybe they were… They’re certainly radioactive now.

Switching back to paper bags, I must admit, elicits similar sentiments. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: now we get to change the way we run our kitchens AGAIN! at the behest of faceless corporations and bureaucrats who know better than we do. Always.

After all these years, I’ve arrived at a détente with the accursed plastic bags. I have a lot of uses for them. Uses that paper bags cannot handle.

• Kitchen sink cabinets no longer have room to accommodate a trash can big enough to hold a paper bag. So the plastic trash can is gone. Instead, wet kitchen trash gets stashed in a plastic bag, which lives in the refrigerator until I’m ready to brave the alley.

• Taking the garbage out entails retrieving a key, dodging the dogs, passing through two gates and unpadlocking one of them, dodging the occasional bum, wrestling a huge four-household bin, relocking the gates, putting the padlock key back, letting the dogs back out…good fun. Sooo….being able to refrigerate the trash so I don’t have to traipse out there every day is a great convenience. Not one I’m looking forward to losing.

• Nor do I look forward to having to keep a paper bag full of garbage in an expensive covered garbage can in the garage. This means every piece of trash or garbage has to be traipsed out through the kitchen door into the garage, and the whole mess has to be kept tightly covered to keep the rats out. That, I could truly do without.

And speaking of our little room-mates, have you noticed many sewer roaches dancing around the kitchen floor since the advent of plastic bags? Miss the little fellows, do ya?

• Paper bags nurture cockroaches. The little gals and their boyfriends ride the freighters and airplanes and trucks hauling foods across our borders and into the grocery stores. When they find those nice, dark paper bags, they lay their eggs in them. You bring those eggs home with you when you bring home the bacon. Pack those bags away in the pantry closet or the garage, and the babes hatch out and join the buggy can-can line!

This is totally the main reason I do not want to go back to the future with paper bags.

Well. Except for the dog mounds.

• Nothing beats a plastic bag for picking up dog mounds.

How, seriously, do our Respected Betters think we’re going to clean up after the beasts?

Never fails, does it?

 

 

New Knives? Or Old Folks’ Stuff?

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The honored Chicago chef’s knife…

{Chortle!} I remain bewitched with the idea of buying a gigantic set of fancy new German kitchen and steak knives (with white handles! oooooohhhh!) at Costco. The ridiculousness of dropping $200 on any such thing is manifest.

Still…if I don’t spend any more on anything else (and there’s no reason I should), by the end of this month (which it already IS, almost!) I’ll have $200 left in the budget. Why should I not spend it on myself?

Or, one might reasonably ask, why should I spend it on myself?

Thing is, a perfectly fine collection of fancy Wüsthof and Henckels knives is sitting right there in the drawer. I don’t need any fancy new knives.

But…but…the other thing is, every one of them is all scratched up, from the time I took it into my hot little head to use my father’s whetstone to sharpen the knives, which had gone mightily dull. This was an exceptionally bad idea. In my clumsiness, I ruined every knife in the house!

Except they’re not ruined. They look terrible, but they take a perfectly fine edge and there’s nothing wrong with the way they work. So what if they look terrible? Who sees them?

So, here’s another Thing:

Whenever you go to one of those uncountable estate sales out in Sun City, these scratched-up knives are the sort of thing you run into. Those, and the blue-and-pink furniture and the much-scrubbed Revereware pans and on and on. You find the leavings of the make-it-do, use-it-up generation: people who pay a middling-high price to get the best Stuff they can afford and who are then stuck with it, because it never wears out. By the time you’ve owned it half your lifetime and you’re tired of it, it really isn’t worn out.

These houses are full of tired, out-of-style Stuff that’s still perfectly serviceable. Serviceable outmoded furniture. Serviceable old-fashioned pots and pans. Serviceable mixers. Serviceable food processors. Serviceable blenders. Serviceable fans. Serviceable old analog scales and clocks. Serviceable towels. Serviceable sheets. Serviceable throw pillows. Serviceable half-bottles of Arpège and Windsong. Auuughhhh! So depressing it comes out on the other side of depressing.

So the question becomes one of WTF are you saving that two hundred bucks for, anyway?

I dunno. I’m so cheap I don’t want to part with it. Plus I like my knives. I’ve collected them over a lifetime. Handing them over to Goodwill feels like a betrayal. How can I even think of taking my knives to the pound? Auuughhhh!

One thing we can be assured of: despite all those expensive German brand names, the best knife in that drawer was made by Chicago Knives. It takes an edge like a razor blade and holds the edge forever with just light honing. A-n-n-d you cannot buy a decent Chicago knife anymore. That’s another fine American product that has gone down the tubes — though reviews at Amazon average in the four-star range, still some 11 percent of reviewers hate it. Here’s my knife: one guy says Chicago “must be the name of a town in China.” 😀 This one is particularly juicy: “After some very light use and cleaning, the wood on the handle SHRANK exposing the sharp edge of the full tang in the handle. The edge of the tang is sharp enough to cut my fingers.” Hee HEEEEE!

Okay. Yeah. Why, again, do I want to replace a lifetime collection of high-quality German and (real!) American cutlery for…what? Something made in China, like everything else? So my knives are old folks’ stuff. BFD: I am an old folk.

What’s a few scratches, after all…

Why I Bank at a Credit Union…

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A fine Day from Hell in every way: at five in the morning, temp on the back porch in the 90s and air so thick you need a spoon to breathe it. It rained during the night, so that did cool things off. But. Ugh.

First order of the day’s business, once business establishments opened, was to run up to the credit union and try to find out why all my accounts are scrambled.

Ugh, indeed!

You’ll recall that to reset my grip on the finances, I decided to use Costco cash cards and my existing credit union cookie-jar accounts to create an “envelope method” approach to budgeting. Purchases at Costco would stop when the current cash-card was used up ($300, though I may drop that to $200). And (as usual) set-asides for 2019 taxes & insurance, for incoming Medicare and Medigap reimbursements, and for an emergency fund would be doled out, monthly, among three credit-union savings accounts.

These accounts have always existed. You can make as many savings accounts as you choose at my credit union, plus your checking account. So I’ve always had an account called “Emergency Savings,” one called “Mayo” (for the medical reimbursements), and one called “T&I” (for tax & insurance).

At the time I make this decision, I figure I’ll live on my 401(k)’s Required Minimum Drawdown (or try to), and transfer all the Social Security payments into “Emergency Savings,” an account whose balance had dwindled to a little over five dollars. To accomplish this, I get on the phone and talk with a credit union’s CSR. I ask this person how I can arrange to auto-transfer the gummint’s monthly electronic deposits from checking to the account branded “emergency savings.”  SS payments come in unpredictably, roughly depending on what cycle the bureaucrats use to send them to you. Mine arrive sometime between the first and about the 12th of the month. I explain that I’d like this money set aside to build an emergency fund and I’d like not to have to do that manually whenever the SSA gets around to sending the money. She says she will make it so.

Good. Days go by.

Now I do some more budgeteering — and I realize that there’s no way I can possibly live on the RMD alone. While I probably can avoid suctioning up all the SS income, I’m going to need at least $500 a month of it. Probably more. When I go online to arrange an automatic transfer of $530/month, I’m astonished to discover the “Mayo” savings account has disappeared, and the chunk of dough set aside in there to pay the Mayo’s next bill has disappeared with it.

The money to cover medical bills has been moved over into my regular savings account (which I’d dubbed “Emergency Savings,” but which has been renamed “Share Savings”).

When I go to double-check the scheduled transfer of the SS funds, I can find exactly no trace of it.

So. You know better. I know better. We all know better: Never do your banking over the phone.

This meant I had to drive to the credit union, collar a manager or assistant manager, and find out WTF is going on.

  1. What happened to the scheduled transfer of the monthly Social Security deposit into Emergency Savings?
  2. If it didn’t get arranged, why not?
  3. If it did get arranged, why doesn’t it show as a scheduled transfer? Where did the transfer that was supposedly arranged go? Is that monthly deposit going to disappear into limbo?
  4. If it did not get arranged, can we arrange it? Can we be certain that we’re not duplicating a scheduled transfer that doesn’t show even though it  supposedly was made?
  5. Can we arrange an auto transfer on the 20th of each month from Emergency Savings (holding the SS deposits) to checking, enough to make ends meet?

Oh, those lucky people! We need to start a U-Tube Video series: Here She Comes Again!

So I get up there and discover…

  1. If a scheduled transfer was made from the CU’s environs instead of by you, you can’t see it in the online “scheduled transfer” function. (Naturally! Why did I ask?)
  2. He doesn’t have a clue what happened to the “Mayo” savings account.
  3. He suggests it would be simpler to transfer the difference between the total SS monthly deposit and the amount I need  into the “Emergency Savings” account. Keep whatever is needed in checking and transfer the rest to the savings account.
  4. He will rename “Emergency Savings” as “Mayo,” leaving the amount for the medical bills in that account rather than transferring them around.
  5. And he will create a new “Emergency Savings” account to hold a little over half of incoming Social Security deposits, leaving the rest in checking to cover cash flow. We hope.

Sounds OK, right? He says what I see at home is different from what he says on his monitor. He suggests I send him a screenshot, after I get back to the Funny Farm, so we can check that all this is working.

And so, off I go to retrace the 8.2 miles of my steps back to the house: it required driving 16.4 miles and about 90 minutes of my time to accomplish this.

A check-up revealed that we had it almost right. We ended up with…

  • a checking account  (Balance: one year’s worth of RMD plus a few bucks)
  • a savings account (“Emergency Savings, 00.” Unfunded)
  • a savings account, (“Taxes & Insurance, 60.” $8408)
  • a savings account (“Taxes and Insurance, 61.”  $538.95)

So what has happened is that the set-aside account to cover medical bills was redundantly named “taxes and insurance” rather than “Mayo.” But at least we have an account into which to stash Medigap and Medicare payments.

Gaaaahhhhhh! So I had to get on the email, send him the desired secreenshot, and ask him to rename account 61 in such a way that I can distinguish it from the real tax-&-insurance “envelope” at a glance.

Jeez.

Long as I’m wrestling with money online, I decide to check to see how much AMEX thinks I owe it as of this minute, to be sure it jibes with the $130 I believe I’ve charged up.

Well. No. AMEX’s website says I owe that fine outfit $682!!!!!!

WTF??????? Have they not received the seven-something I sent them when the last statement came in?

Go back to the credit union’s site and find that they have indeed paid last month’s bill, as directed. AMEX should have received the money on or about the 5th…four days ago.

Get a chat rep online at the AMEX site. After endless waiting and screwing around with typing out the question and explaining that it was paid electronically and should have been received, I learned that yea verily it had been received. It would take another 24 to 48 hours  before that fact registered on their website.

Ducky.

Q. So, I ask: how much have I charged up on the card in the current billing cycle — that is, how much do you see owing right now?

A. About $126.

That’s four bucks less than my records say I’ve charged — probably because this card applies an automatic cash kickback to eligible transactions. But at least their conception of reality is now close to my conception of reality.

What a bitch of a morning! And early afternoon.

Coulda been worse, though. Just imagine if all those cookie-jar shenanigans had been happening at, say, Wells Fargo.

Needing to pick up some one-pound bags of chlorine shock treatment this morning, I serendipitously discovered a Leslie’s about six blocks from the campus (where the CU office resides). And even more serendipitously, right next door to the thing was a Fry’s grocery store….where I could buy another breakfast melon, some grapes, and a few tomatoes to restock the larder.

And at the Leslie’s, I discovered that eight pounds worth of shock treatment in bags costs about $14 less than the same amount of the same stuff dispensed in bulk. Jeez. Such a deal.

 

 

Amazon the Addictive

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Returning home from an aborted trip to the westside (wherever you’re going in lovely Phoenix, ya can’t get there from here!), I found the door to the front courtyard standing wide open.

Gerardo and his crew were here early in the day, but if they’d left it open, I would’ve noticed it on the way out. Park the tank. Walk into the courtyard, check the front door and windows. No sign of breaking and entering. If anyone tried to get in, that hardened drill-proof lock stopped them. Enter through the garage, call the dogs, check the house: no burglars.

Drat! Never any fun around this place! Oh well.

I figured Amazon must have delivered the RV hose I ordered (the Depot has quit carrying them) and a porch pirate probably lifted it. Once ensconced indoors, called up Amazon’s “orders” menu and found the thing is not supposed to arrive before tomorrow.

When I looked at the list of things I’ve ordered from that place, I was amazed at the number of items!

It is just too damn easy to buy stuff on Amazon.

Or…is it?

Most of this stuff is “need it” items, not “want it” impulse buys. The hose in the backyard, for example, really needed to be replaced. Then: Birthday present for my son…very convenient not to have to drive across the damn city to get it. Crystal deodorant sticks: can’t buy them locally here anymore, not at Walgreen’s, not at Walmart, not at Target, not at Safeway, not at Costco. Bought enough to last the rest of my lifetime, with any luck. Le Creuset teakettle to replace one whose whistle gave up: no doubt one could get it at Williams-Sonoma, but again: wonderful not to have to do battle with traffic to get it. Three hard-copy books: there are no bookstores here anymore, except for one that sells nothing but detective stories. Bottle of bubble-wrap-free loperamide: not available here at all, anywhere.

True, I did NOT need a lifetime supply of diarrhea pills. But what the heck. Now I can give them away to friends. Or go to Mexico once a week from now until I croak over.

The prices seem to be within reason, and with Prime, Amazon sends them “free” (har har!).

When Amazon announced it was going to jack up the price for Amazon Prime, I was given pause. IMHO a hundred bucks a year is probably too much, since their video offerings can’t hold a proverbial candle to Netflix. Another $20 may be more than I want to pay. On the other hand, if you order a steady stream of stuff that you either can’t buy locally or can’t get without driving to Hell & gone and back again, over the course of a year you probably save that much in postage.

I’ll bet I’ve saved at least $20 in Amazon shipping fees since the first of the year. Probably more than that. But add to that the cost of gasoline, wear & tear on the vehicle, and wasted time driving from pillar to post: then you can be pretty sure that “membership” fee is paying for itself.

What think you? Is Amazon Prime worth the up-front cost?

Buying: The Herd Instinct

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Today I donated two ever-so-slightly pricey tops — or maybe very short dresses, depending on your point of view. They were cute enough, in their way. Quality construction, well made, handsome enough in their way. But every time I put one of them on and looked in the mirror, I wondered what on earth POSSESSED me to buy this? What? Herd instinct, that’s what.

There are three of us who like to go shopping together in an olde-towne shop in darkest Glendale. It is a cool little store in a vintage house. The owner has a killer eye for a certain type of clothing. We all like each other and have a great time. And we like the owner, because she’s quite a hoot, one of those gifted sales people who knows how to sell without seeming to be selling. Every time we go to this place, we all stumble out beneath the sheer weight of our purchases.

I bought each of these things there, probably during different outings. And here’s the problem: they have ruffles.

Ruffles are not my style. Decidedly not. In fact you could even say I hate ruffles. But for reasons unknown to personkind, I purchased not one but two garments with ruffled hems.

Ugh. Why?

The only explanation is that we were resonating off each other so vibrantly that we would each buy anything the others said was “cute.” One vote for “cute” would be persuasive. Two votes: a clincher.

It was far from the first time this phenomenon has struck in my precincts. I used to hang out with a friend, now long gone, whose tastes were far snootier than this pair’s. She lowered herself to shop in Saks.

One time she and I were shopping for Eileen Fisher at the local Saks, and we hit a mother lode. Everything we tried on (we assured each other) was exceeding cute. Not a thread of it was on sale.

That day I bought four or five hundred dollars worth of clothes. Yeah, that’s true: !!!!!

I got the pile of rags home — and with Eileens, you can’t miss. Modeled them in front of the mirror for myself. Was impressed. Clearly my taste was impeccable.

Then looked at the receipt that fell out of the bag and thought…holy shit!

Five hundred bucks was about $450 beyond my clothing budget.

So, without ever mentioning it to Her Snootiness (I kid you not: this woman, while married to a guy who owned a Kentucky bluegrass race horse farm, used to go to fashion shows in New York and buy designer outfits directly off the runway), next day I packed up all those clothes and took ’em back to Saks.

To my amazement, the saleslady accepted the returns without batting a proverbial eyelash.

No way on God’s Green Earth would I have have bought all that stuff if I hadn’t been in the store competing to try on clothes with my then-friend.

See what I mean? Herd instinct.

It got better, that incident did. Two or three weeks later, I happened to be passing through Saks and noticed they were having one of their seasonal sales. Naturally I trot over to the designer racks (doesn’t everyone?) and start to paw through them.

What do I find but almost all the rags I’d brought back…marked down about 50 percent.

Couldn’t freaking believe it.

This time — in the absence of my resonating friend — I picked out the pieces that I really liked and that really looked good on me. Walked out of there with the best of the things she thought I’d purchased, at a fraction of the price.

Never told her that, of course. She thought I was walking around in a $500 wardrobe.

Is there a moral to the story?

Sure:

Never shop in the company of friends.