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No Debt Plan hosts the 165th Carnival of Personal Finance today. Looking forward to the start of this fall’s college football season, he’s running for a touchdown with this enormous and lively carnival. Funny’s guest poster Miranda Marquit made the line-up with her article on keeping debt under control while attending college.

NDP is giving away $50 Amazon gift cards to those who subscribe to his site, BTW. Check out his offer at the carnival, and while you’re there read some of the many good entries he features. My Two Dollars has a nice rumination on some of the things (other than $$) that make an employee happy. An extremely interesting article appears at a site called Really Better Real Estate, where Realtor Joe Manausa challenges the worth of three widely held real estate statistics. Not the Jet Set describes what happened when a perp got ahold of his wife’s debit card number–good reason to use credit cards. Though their bank caught on quickly and they did not have to pay for the charges, with a debit card a criminal can clean out your account and you can end up eating the loss.

We’re having a little heat wave here in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun. Night before last it was 105 at 8:00 p.m., sunset having brought the thermometer down from a bone-baking 114. Arizonans have a summertime equivalent of Michiganders’ snowbound: I am not sticking my nose outside my air-conditioned box today…no way, no how. Instead, let’s catch up with the blogosphere, an entertainment I’ve allowed to slide a bit over the past couple of weeks.

First, two really neat new-to-me sites: Correr es mi destino, despite the title an English-language production emanating from Canada, and SmallNotebook.org, featured on Get Rich Slowly for the proprietor’s “Month of No Spending” and blogging about a subject dear to my heart, simple living. I love the design on each of these things! Both authors write gracefully and engagingly; don’t miss them.

Speaking of GRS, J.D. is taking time off to deal with an illness in the family, and so some guest writers are filling in for him. Appropriately enough for a Sunday, today’s post comes from an Oregon pastor, Steve Ross, who contributes a thoughtful–even profound–essay on how his congregation is dealing with a financial crisis and what money and work really mean.

Mrs. Micah and the Mr. have taken off for Michigan. This week I really enjoyed her response to a remark a commenter posted at The Simple Dollar, which she crafted into a lively discussion about whether it is unethical for banks to charge interest.

Be This Way mourns the loss of an innocent child to the unholy combine of vicious parents and a craven child welfare system. We as taxpayers have a moral obligation to see that our state child protective services are fully funded to hire enough competent caseworkers to deal with the huge workload social workers face, and to eliminate the temptation to cut corners. Pay more taxes? Yup: if that’s what stands between a child and the forces of unbridled evil.

Speaking of taxes (and on a lighter note) this is extremely good: Plonkee figures out what her taxes would be if she lived in the U.S. and then compares U.K. vs. U.S. costs and services. Awesome!

Paid Twice recommends tracking the per unit price of goods in your price book. This is an excellent idea, since items are packaged differently by different retailers. It also allows you to get a better handle on prices advertised in the weekly flyers.

Five-Cent Nickel reflects on some of the hidden hooks in great deals. Be sure you read the fine print and understand all the details before grabbing a bargain.

Jim at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity won the free copy of Break Down Your Money in the Alpha Consumer challenge, edging out Funny by a percentage point. Because the contest was so close, he has graciously offered to share the book with me after he posts a review of it.

GLBL has posted a thoroughgoing discussion of how to create your own online store at Gather Little by Little. Looks suspiciously like work to me. Dang. Another source of “passive” income gone to seed.

Much, much more out there…my system has started to run with the speed of a stampeding snail, meaning the Mac wants me to close out Excel, Quicken, Word, Safari, iWeb, and the printer, shut down, and reboot. Time to stop. Enjoy all the great posts above!

1 comment left on iWeb site:

Rachel

Thank you so muchyfor including my site. I appreciate it.

Word on the street has it that American Express has already told employees to prepare for layoffs in the U.S. and in India. My informant says rumors on the inside allege layoffs will represent a substantial part of the workforce, possibly as high as 20 percent.

This follows yesterday’s news that the company’s second-quarter earnings dropped to $653 million, a 38% decline, and today’s reports that shares dropped 7.5%.

Meanwhile, with credit card rates soaring and mortgage expenses out of hand, cardholders are beginning to default on charge card debt. Jonathan Stempel, writing in the Guardian, calls AMEX “a bellwether for the consumer economy” and quotes CEO Kenneth Chenault as saying that even big-spending, affluent customers are cutting back. Stempel also quotes analyst Andrew Boord in observing that AMEX customers are largely middle-class people, the same Americans who are overextended on their mortgages or driving gas-guzzling SUVs. Other card issuers, notably Citibank, Bank of America, and J. P. Morgan, are seeing double-digit rises in credit-card charge-offs.

It probably was inevitable that a wave of credit card defaults would follow close on the heels of mortgage foreclosures. So many people are deeply indebted to card lenders, it’s surprising we haven’t seen a plague of defaults before this.

The piper has tendered his bill and wants to be paid.

Virtual headache

Apple’s MacHeadache hit the New York Times this morning: the roll-out of the new iPhone hit a pothole or two, one of which was the complicated switchover to new servers. It’s this very pothole that Funny has fallen into-I have no idea whether today’s post will publish or not. Desperately confused, iWeb claims nothing is posted. But the published site itself displays everything I’ve written since July 9. If you don’t get the Times’s edition printed on ground-up trees, check out these entertaining pieces online.

• Joe Nocera’s column, “Talking Business“
• John Markoff’s report on the roll-out

Paper headache

Speaking of headaches, avert your eyes from your investment fund statements unless you enjoy migraines. When last seen, mine reported a $23,000 loss-that was before the market crashed through the 11,000 floor yesterday. Any ideas I might have had about retiring before the age of 70 just went <<POOF>>

Thank heaven we have a 30-year fixed mortgage on the Investment House, and my own mortgage is paid off. That notwithstanding, with the market plummeting like a meteor and the probability that we’ll have to hold the house for a good ten years, I can’t afford to keep rolling money out of my IRA into real estate. I’ll need to come up with a new way to generate $12,000 a year to cover my part of the mortgage payments.

Matter of fact, I happen to have one in the wings. Watch this space for more on that

And real-life headache

Meanwhile, in the stress department (one of this blog’s co-topics), I woke with a real, biological headache-no metaphor here-from once again kicking the Killer Caffeine. Dang!

The month-long spate of indigestion has three likely sources (that is, if you quietly overlook cancer, which we will do): caffeine, booze, or salmonella.

Any of these is possible. The epizootic started the day after a friend and I visited a popular New Mexican-style restaurant, where we did have a nice jalapeño-laced salsa. Some startlingly unpleasant manifestations occupied the next week or ten days. Our defanged federal regulators are now speculating that the source of the salmonella plague we’re now witnessing may have been jalapeños or cilantro. However, my friend didn’t get sick, so I kinda doubt this is the cause of my present ailment.

Noooo. Ever so much likely is one (or both?) of my favorite potables.

I live to drink coffee. No mere coffee, mind you, but the highest of the high-test. I use fresh-ground espresso beans-because espresso demands a better variety of coffee-to fill a ten-cup French press every morning. And do I drink all that, all by my little buzzing self? You bet! Whatever is left over in the morning gets consumed as iced coffee later in the day.

Well, in a body that dates from the Cretaceous period, the effect is cumulative. As you age (memorize this, you young pups), your metabolism slows, and so it takes a lot longer than it used to for drugs, prescription and non-, to clear out of your system. During my misspent youth, coffee had little noticeable effect on me. These days, though, guzzling enough of it before noon will keep me awake at night; especially after a couple months of drinking it daily.

Then there’s my other favorite swiggle: the daily boozie-poo. Because the lime tree is dropping beautiful, juicy, delicious ripe key limes, I (naturally!) had to have some Coronas. Matter of fact, I’ve been forced to take advantage of Costco’s incredible price on 24-bottle cases of Coronas. Neither limes nor beers have gone to waste: typically I drink two bottles around dinnertime.

Lately, though, I’ve also had a bourbon & water…or two…later in the afternoon. On a 112-degree day few things call out to you more appealingly than an ice-cold bourbon and water on the rocks. The other day I realized I’d swiggled two beers with cheese & crackers after coming home from work and then poured myself two Maker’s Marks a few hours later, with a late dinner. Uh oh!

So, it’s off the sauce and off the coffee.

I have no problem kicking the beer and bourbon-iced tea, V-8 juice, or fruit juice all substitute handsomely.

Kicking caffeine, though, is a whole ‘nother matter. Caffeine deficiency anemia causes a screaming real-life headache that can last a full week. I’ve learned, though, that a couple cups of caffeinated tea will take the edge off. It doesn’t contain enough of the drug to keep you awake at night, but it does stop your head from hurting. After a week, you can eliminate the tea, and voilà: caffeine-free existence.

The laundry remains to be laundered, the ironing to be ironed, the house to be cleaned, the plants to be watered, the pool gadget to be repaired, the garbage to be hauled, the dog to be tended to, a novel to be proofread, a new business to be launched… And so, my friends, to work.

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

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.