This week I submitted posts to only two carnivals: Best of Money and Money Stories. Didn’t make it in to the elite ten at BoM, but Green Panda Treehouse kindly included “Other People’s Pets” in this week’s Money Stories Carnival.
A bunch of good stories surfaced this week. Among them:
• Free Money Finance’s story of his (former, I hope) maniac boss • Money Smart Life is fighting a telephone prankster and figures the war will cost some money. • My Dollar Plan’s guest author Todd Campanella describes the benefits of delayed consumption.
Today MSN Smart Spending also featured a version of the other people’s pets story, where it stirred up some skeptical commentary. Thanks again, Karen!
And also today, It’s Frugal Being Green ran Funny’s guest post, an update on the food futures project.
Funny will host the Carnival of Money stories on August 3. Remember to send your posts to the carnival’s submissions page before then!
Comes a new electric bill in the mail. You may recall that last month I had another kitten because the revered Salt River Project presented a bill that was $37 higher than the June 2008 bill, when (all things being equal) last winter’s 3 percent rate hike should have delivered a $13 increase. Two factors could have had to do with this: a new programmable thermostat and a new chest freezer, which resided in the ovenlike garage.
The thermostat had been set to 80 degrees during the day and 76 at night. After perusing June’s $158 bill, I decided to reset the thermostat to 82 during the day, leaving it at 76 for sleeping. And I put Gerardo the Lawn Dude up to moving the freezer inside the house.
This month’s bill, at $165.78, came in $36 under the July 2008 bill of $201.92! Hallelujah!
I still don’t know which circumstance drove up the May bill—fricasseed freezer or programmable thermostat. Probably it was a bit of both.
June was fairly mild: only a couple of 110-degree days. July is the cruelest month here. This weekend we’re supposed to see temperatures of 114 to 116. That’s fairly typical. So, the bill that arrives in August covers the hottest period of the year. Last August’s bill was $229.54.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Tuesday I reprogrammed the thermostat to run at 82 degrees from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (about when I just can’t stand it another minute); then drop to 78 degrees between 5:00 and 10:00 p.m.; and then to bring the temp down to 76 degrees between 10:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., the period when I usually start trying to get to sleep. After I should be asleep, then the temperature goes back up to 78.
Chances that I’ll actually sleep through a 78-degree night, of course, are nil. This morning I was up at 4:30, feeling just slightly too damn hot. But what the heck. If a miracle happens and I manage to drop off around 10, that’s 6 1/2 hours, bordering on adequate.
If this scheme keeps the August bill under about $225, I’ll be happy. SRP is going to raise rates again in November, so any cuts I can make now will just keep my head above water next summer. After that? Well…after “retirement,” move to Prescott, I guess, where temperatures are milder.
How come our post office doesn't look like Prescott's?
M’hijito called yesterday afternoon and invited me to drive out to the new westside Lee Lee, a long way from the central city but probably not as far as the original location in Chandler. Lee Lee is a large, interesting Asian supermarket, where fish are sold fresh-caught from huge tanks, the produce department offers treats you’ll never see at Safeway, two long aisles are filled with exotic cooking gear, and ethnic foods are organized by country.
He wanted to buy a mah-jongg table. We found one, but, being a chip off the old block, he felt $60 was more than he wanted to pay. He’ll be back.
While we were there, we picked up a variety of wonders, such as chunky anemone-shaped Japanese mushrooms, Madras curry powder, coconut milk, Philippine mangoes, and a variety of Asian snacks and candies that made M’hijito nostalgic for his old neighborhood in San Francisco. From there, it was on to Costco.
Interestingly, at about the same moment, Carrie over at It’s Frugal Being Green was making the Costco rounds in her precincts. As part of her project to find the best meat at the best price, she had already pretty well decided that the venerable warehouse store does mighty well in this department. Lo! What should we each discover in our separate treks: Costco’s got prime beef! Holy mackerel!
Well, at the Phoenix store, the choice was limited to a few packages of prime New York steaks, and they were frozen solid. They did look pretty rich: so baroquely marbled they must have contained as much fat as protein. Though the price was not off the scale, we were a little put off by their being frozen (like we don’t freeze the stuff after we get it home?). However, when M’hijito and I compared them with the ribeye steaks, we concluded that the choice quality ribeyes showed about as much marbling as the prime cuts…and they were two bucks a pound cheaper.
So, we settled for the middle-brow stuff.
That notwithstanding, I spent about $105 at the two stores yesterday. Not good, since I had exactly $2.82 left in this week’s microbudget, to last until tomorrow. Strictly speaking.
Not so bad, though, if you look at it from the new angle I cooked up: by spreading extraordinary expenses over the entire month-long budget. From that point of view, I could have spent almost $125 and still be OK.
So…did I go over budget? Well, I think not: as a practical matter, there was plenty of money in the month’s budget to buy a few food items this week. And I didn’t buy anything I didn’t need: the main reason I went into Costco was to pick up some orange juice and frozen strawberries, staples of my breakfast fare. I’d run my supply of meat down to nothing, so it made sense to pick up a package of ribeyes. I needed fruit, so the mangoes from Lee Lee and the Costco peaches (split with M’hijito) also were reasonable purchases. The only thing I didn’t really need were Costco’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans…but hey! Buttercup yellow! When would a person ever see buttercup jeans that fit, ever again?
I like the idea of spreading extraordinary costs over an entire month. Both unusual bills, $243.68 for the incredible bargain on 1,440 paving bricks and $188 for the speed trap ticket, came up in the first week. Dividing each figure by four and debiting each microbudget for the respective figures—$47 and $60.92—reduces the amount available for each week but leaves plenty of cash in each week for ordinary expenses. Trying to take those amounts out of the week in which they occurred runs the first microbudget deep into the red and, when the red ink is carried over into the second week, leaves too little in that week’s microbudget to live on comfortably.
All in all, a successful day: had a nice time with my son, got a few things I need, explored an interesting new store, and ended up with plenty in next week’s budget.
Now, we all know what Fox is…but do you think it’s really a newscast? The talking heads don’t look like SNL performers. Is it a joke, or is it Third-World-style journalism: can’t afford a real film clip or a trip to the zoo for the camera crew, so let’s punt?
Six-thirty in the morning and it’s already 90 degrees outside. Gotta go rescue plants. Later!
The other day it occurred to me that I was constantly digging through my file drawers to pull out the same folders full of material I’m wrestling with on a regular basis. The stuff falls into two major categories: the Layoff/Retirement hassle (phone numbers; the 403(b) rollover; COBRA; RASL; back vacation pay; relevant official policies; unemployment insurance) and the upcoming Social Security/Medicare hassle (estimated benefits; tax & earnings information and ancient W-2’s proving SSA’s errors; identifying documents). I hate dorking with pieces of paper—just hate it. Consequently, I try to be as organized as possible. That urge has led me to create altogether too many files stored in altogether too many places. Time to reorganize this stuff and make it a lot more accessible.
Some time back I’d realized that printing out my online Rolodex and storing it in a three-ring binder simplified life significantly: no more waiting for the Mac to grind away at the speed of a galloping snail to open the online file, and no more having to reboot if the machine was off.
So…why not organize the mounds of paper associated with the two current projects into loose-leaf binders, too? These can be stashed with the reference works atop the desk and grabbed whenever they’re needed. No more pawing through one, two, three, four file drawers in search of that one elusive sheet of paper!
This afternoon I dug out all those files and organized them into two binders. Original, official documents that I didn’t want to submit to the three-hole punch got photocopied; on the photocopy I noted where the original is stored.
I made dividers by sticking one edge of a mailing label to the edge of a piece of notebook paper, then folding the label over and sticking the back side to the paper sheet’s verso side. I’d bought some cheapie dividers at Target, but because the labels were supposedly erasable, ink smeared on them—covering the slick labels with pieces of mailing label fixed that problem.
Keeping paper and electronic records organized is a key process in frugal financial management. You can’t manage your money easily unless you know where your information is. Searching through drawers and boxes of files is a pain in the tuchus, and so is trying to find a single file or datum hidden deep inside a computer.
Yah, I know; Spotlight. Very nice: it brings up 87 gerjillion files for you to rifle through. Argh! Not to say $#%@&@*@*#$D!!!!! Eventually you’ll probably find what you’re looking for in a computer search, but it may be a long eventually.
Lots easier to organize this stuff efficiently at the outset than to do searches every time you turn around. Though there may be a better way, I’m fond of folders and subfolders:
Every now and again you should go through your files, toss or shred the junk, and tidy up the organization. This means more paper-pushing, virtual and real, a hateful process. However, sometimes it can be instructive. Today, for example, I discovered that the ancient piece of cardboard I thought was my original Social Security card is not; it was a “stub” that came with the card, issued in 1967. So now I’ll have to go in person to the Social Security office and order a new SS card—good thing I found that out before I went in to get SS benefits started! I also reviewed some old W-2’s my ex- sent a couple of years ago and realized that they show earnings for several of the years Social Security claims I had no earnings. That may jack up my benefits!
As exercises go, today’s project was less than fun. But the result, I expect, will make life a lot easier. And if that little revelation above increases my retirement benefits, the past two hours of ditzy work will pay for themselves many times over!
