Check out SDXB’s new threads, acquired earlier this week at a thrift store in Sun City:
Whether New Girlfriend’s costume came from the same source, I have no idea. But (LOL!) doubt it.
Says he:
Bought the tux for $15 at the Lutheran Thrift Store in Sun City. Bow tie, $23. Tux shirt [at the Luke AFB clothing store], $29. There were 2 other tuxes on the thrift store rack. This one is traditional cut and fits me as if it were tailored. I suspect that the tux and other fine clothing arrived at SC thrift stores following deaths. Sun City is, after all, God’s waiting room.
Hey! Funny’s post at Free Money Finance’s March Madness is up for a vote. I submitted Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep. As you may know, many of the entries are top choices in the Best of Money Stories Carnival, and so the competition is august, indeed.
Would you please go to the March Madness site and vote for Funny’s post? All you have to do to vote is enter your choices in a comment.
Winners have a donation of $100 to $500 made in their name to a charity of their choice. I’ve selected my church and, especially, the choir, because of the good works they do and because of the central part the members of the music program play in the city’s cultural life. The church itself supports a soup kitchen, an ecumenical chaplaincy for the homeless, Habitat for Humanity, a nursing home, an orphanage in Honduras, and a variety of other charitable causes.
When the new pastor learned that I’d been laid off my job, he called on the phone, if you can imagine, to offer his sympathies and to say the church would do what it could to help me out. Then he talked me into making a pledge of one dollar. Would I ever love to do him five hundred better!
The contest starts Monday, January 18. I would like to ask you to support Funny about Money by going to Free Money Finance’s contest site and voting for Funny’s post.
To vote, all you have to do is go to FMF’s contest page and enter the word “Truth” in a comment. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link to “Post a Comment.” Your privacy is secure, and you will not receive e-mails or any other intrusions from FMF.
After much hassle and bureaucratic hoop-jumping, the credit union finally let us know on Friday that we got the desired loan modification on the downtown house M’hijito and I are copurchasing.
That will help a great deal. It drops the mortgage payments from something over $1400 to about $1,085 a month. This comes as M’hijito’s roommate is talking about leaving (an on-again, off-again proposition). Roommate’s rent payments have been modest, but he’s also been paying all the utility bills, which, because the house is a sieve and because Roommate is home during the day, can be very high in the summertime.
It means that if and when Roommate leaves, M’hijito should have no trouble continuing to pay his half of the mortgage. Meanwhile, as long as the rent continues to come in, we can either stash the extra $300 savings to cover repairs and upkeep on the house (which is what M’hijito is already doing with the rent income) or we can use it to pay down principal.
My part of the mortgage payments comes out of a nontaxable fund of cash retrieved from an ancient whole life policy. If we do nothing at all, it means we now have enough to cover almost 18 months’ worth of bills instead of only a year’s worth. If we manage the money intelligently, we may be able to engineer something better.
What we really needed—and what I asked for, in the nothing-ventured-nothing-gained department—was a cut in the principal on that loan. We need to have the principal reduced to something closer to the house’s actual value. If you believe the ever-reliable Zillow, the place is now worth about $52,500 less than we owe on it.
In about 11 years, the loan will spawn a balloon payment: at that time, we will have to pay off the balance, refinance, or sell.
I will be very surprised if the house is worth what we’re paying for it 11 years from now. Under the original 30/15 terms (interest is figured on a 30-year basis, but the loan comes due in 15 years), by the end of the 15-year period the principal would have dropped to about what Zillow says the place is worth today. This mortgage modification will change that: to engineer the drop in payments, the credit union not only is dropping the interest rate to 4 percent, it also is prorating the loan over 40 years. Thus in 15 years we probably will owe more than we originally calculated (because principal and interest payments are both lower), unless we use the $300 a month savings to knock down principal now.
But we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
So I did end up springing for $25 (plus 8.3 percent tax, for a total of $27.06) to buy the yearned-after mineral make-up from Costco. Pretty nice stuff. I like it. However…
Take a look at this:
That large flat chunk of annealed plastic and cardboard is what Costco deemed necessary to deliver five small plastic vials, a tube of lip gloss, and four small makeup brushes to the unwashed and thieving masses. By way of perspective, each of those floor tiles is 13 inches square.
Up at the top, you see the tools required to get into the thing: a box-cutter, a wrench, and a no-longer-sharp knife.
Yes. To get at a few ounces of colored face powder, I had to spend a good fifteen minutes hacking away at thick, almost impenetrable plastic. You’ll notice that no amount of struggling removed the entire plastic bubble from the hard cardboard backing to which it was sealed. No. I had to carve out every. single. separate. piece in this kit. To do so, I risked injury and infection: all the edges where the box-cutter sliced through the plastic are sharp as a razor. And so is the box-cutter itself.
I wonder how Costco would like the lawsuit that would have descended upon its management had I cut my hand and then gotten one of those flesh-eating bacterial infections in the wound?
Once I’d removed the plastic vials of make-up, I still couldn’t open the goddamned things!
No. Each one was sealed shut with a strip of plastic that could not be lifted with the fingernails and peeled off. Now I had to go and get a kitchen knife and slice each of the five vials along the seam where the lid meets the jar. Besides taking forever (by now I was running late to choir), this of course wrecked the edge on my knife.
Why is it necessary to seal every flicking piece of merchandise individually in consumer-proof packaging? Industry estimates suggest that 43 percent of “shrinkage” comes from employee theft, as opposed to 36 percent for shoplifting. “Whatever method employees use to steal,” the New York Times reports, “their take is more substantial than that of the average shoplifter. [Researcher Joshua] Bamfield’s global study of retail theft found that larcenous employees averaged $1,890 in theft, compared with $438 for shoplifters.” So is there really a good reason to put customers at risk of injury and to pack the landfills with vast piles of excess plastic packaging that will litter the planet for the eons?
Speaking of littering the planet for the eons, now get an eyeballful of this!
The last time I bought toilet paper at Costco, I absent-mindedly picked up the Kirkland brand instead of my usual Charmin’.
I hate Kirkland’s toilet paper. Not because the TP itself isn’t perfectly fine—it’s quite good, comparable to Charmin’, which IMHO is the best toilet paper on the market. But when you peel off the plastic sealed around a lifetime supply of Kirkland TP, what comes out is a big bundle of individual rolls…every. single. one. of. them. wrapped. individually. in. plastic. Because I like to keep several rolls in a straw basket in the bathroom, every time I pad out to the garage to refill the basket, I have to unwrap a half-dozen rolls of over-packaged toilet paper. I just hate that!
WHY? WHY, WHY, WHY?????????
Why on earth is it necessary to double-wrap every single roll of flicking toilet paper, adding a bushel of plastic to the landfill for every package of Kirkland TP you buy at Costco?
Answer: it’s not.
Charmin’ wraps its entire lifetime-supply package in one sheet of plastic. Even that is undesirable, but at least it’s better than Kirkland’s strategy.
According to Discover Magazine, 63 pounds of plastic packaging per person ends up in America’s landfills each year. Ninety-three percent of people six years of age and older excrete bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical used in the manufacture of plastic, in their urine.
What do you bet about 62 of those pounds comes from overpackaging like this? It abuses the customer on both ends of the retail cycle: in delivery and merchandising, and in clean-up after the mess produced.
If you complain to Costco about its absurd overpackaging (as I’ve been known to do in person), you’ll be told that it’s not their fault! It’s the suppliers who just insist on packaging products in consumer-proof plastic.
And that is about as specious as it gets. Costco has every bit as much clout as Walmart, an outfit infamous for its bullying of suppliers. All Costco has to do is tell Borghese it can’t sell its pricey products to the vast market that is the Costco membership unless it packages said products sanely. Borghese’s marketing people know that they’re reaching a large group of people who would not otherwise buy that company’s products. Most Costco consumers are savvy enough to know that the expensive stuff you buy in department stores (where Borghese is normally marketed) is really just the same darn stuff you can get in a drugstore at much lower cost. Threatened with a Costco boycott, Borghese will package the product in more responsible wrapping.
This make-up I bought: Costco sells a lot of it. In addition to the starter kit you see above (along with the tool kit required to get into it), Costco also sells individual packages of mineral powder foundation and eyeshadow. I like it. The effect is much nicer than the L’Oréal I’ve been using. But I probably will not buy it from Costco again.
That’s how much this annoys me. I won’t buy it at Dillard’s or Saks, either, for reasons of common sense: department-store cosmetics are obscenely overpriced. Probably I’ll look at Whole Foods, which carries eco-faddish products like “mineral make-up”; failing that, I’ll check the beauty supply store next door to the WF where I shop. I’d rather pay a few bucks more and not risk slicing my hands, and I deeply resent being forced against my will to add 63 pounds of plastic to the landfill.
Chant choir performed at tonight’s evensong service. It’s a monthly event in which a professional musician performs for about an hour before a high-church service that is almost all chanted. This evening was amazing.
Our director, Scott Youngs, performed a spectacular organ recital. The church has a world-class organ, and in fact the building itself was designed to accommodate it. In addition to his manifest talents as a music scholar and teacher, Scott is a gifted organist. He played pieces by Langlais (with whom, it develops, he studied in Paris), Bach, and Brahms. Absolutely magnificent music, and performed magnificently.
Afterward, eleven of us sang for the hour-long evensong service, mostly Latin chant. It amazes me that I can do that; it certainly would not happen without Scott’s tutelage, and the presence of several professional and near-professional-level singers on the choir.
