Coffee heat rising

Love (of $$) in the Time of Cholera

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I’m cruising down Conduit of Blight Blvd, headed for Costco’s gas station, whereinat I need a fill-up. A half-block from the intersection to turn west toward the CC stands a nondescript gas station. I note that they’re proudly offering regular gas for $2.89 a gallon. Huh.

Around the corner, into the gas lines — NO WAIT!!!!!! — jump out, and eyeball the pumps: $2.59 for regular. A thirty-cent a gallon difference! 

Ten gallons would save you three bucks. Can you imagine? At that rate, if you commuted a distance to work it wouldn’t take you long to pay for the CC membership just in savings on gasoline.

The dust from this weekend’s Plague Frenzy seems to have settled. Was able to buy the few little things I needed at Sprouts and Albertson’s uneventfully. Nothing that I needed was sold out. Across the floor at the Albertson’s I could see the pickin’s were slim in the paper goods department, but thanks to Costco I have a lifetime supply of that stuff.

It’s a beautiful, warmish overcast day — a San Diego day, as I like to think of this kinda weather. Supposed to rain in force for the next four days, but so far little precip has…precipitated. Our bums are out in force this morning: you never saw so many derelicts in your life. I imagine they’re headed for shelter from the rain, wherever that may be. Some of these folks are very colorful, indeed. On occasion, rather raucous, as they do battle with their Voices or try to persuade you to give them a handout.  But on this day: to a person, they’re quiet and mellow.

It’s too bad Conduit of Blight isn’t safe to walk on. Today’s errands ran a tight little loop over to the post office (couldn’t pay me to walk through that neighborhood), then back to the Sprouts on CofB, then straight down CofB to the Costco, then right straight back up CofB to the Albertson’s, and from there about 40 seconds back home. If it were even faintly safe to walk in that area, I would’ve been able to get a nice little bit of exercise on a beautiful day. But it’s not. So I didn’t.

Covid-19: Hysteria or Common Sense?

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So, yes: some of us are wondering how much of the squealing and the yelling about the coronavirus is justified and how much of it is clickbait. Okay…I shifted into science writer/tech editor mode and took a look around. Here’s what I found out:

As far as we can tell to date, Covid-19 has a death rate of about 3.4%, although among the elderly that figure jumps to 15%.

Let us compare these figures with the mortality rates of a few other famous dread diseases.

Swine flu: .5%
H1N1: .01% – .08% (one strain of swine flu is a sub-type of H1N1 influenza, but since 2017 the dominant subtype is H3N2)
Spanish flu (responsible for the 1918 pandemic): 10%
SARS (also caused by a coronavirus) 9.3%
Ebola: 58.5%
MERS: 9.4%

Several of these ailments are spread most commonly by contact with certain animals, such as pigs or camels. At least one, Spanish flu, is thought to be extinct. What seems to make Covid-19 so terrifying is that it spreads much the same way the common cold or seasonal influenza spreads: by direct contact between humans or by contact with surfaces recently contaminated with fluids from people who already are sickened by the disease. And of course: it’s new. We don’t know exactly what it can or will do, so of course we’re scared. We do know those who have an underlying illness are most vulnerable. And, for reference: 60% of adult Americans host at least one underlying health condition, according to Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now that we have the mildly alarming facts — Covid-19 is more deadly than swine flu, one helluva lot less deadly than the Spanish flu, and one whole helluva lot less deadly than a horror like Ebola, but the older you are the more at risk you are — let’s take a look at what some experts have to say.

STAT, a science magazine that focuses on life sciences, convened a panel of Harvard scientists to address the question of just how worried we should be, and about what, specifically. Although we know there are similarly dangerous or worse diseases out there, most of them haven’t affected Western countries, with the exception of Spanish flu, which struck over a century ago. As epidemiologist Michal Mina observes, the present issue is that “We have an entirely susceptible population. The potential for this to burn through a population very quickly is very high without extraordinary measures.”

The experts are alarmed because this virus has some odd characteristics not seen before in similar flu-like ailments: younger people are mildly affected, but the disease’s severity grows with increasing age of the victim. The older you are, the sicker you are likely to get. The death rate among the elderly is apparently around 15%.

By way of background: in China, 78% of cases occurred among people aged 30 to 60; 2.3% of these patients died. However, among patients 80 or older, the death rate leapt to 14.3%. This is thought to be a function of  the strength and health of one’s respiratory system and the presence of other conditions.

For other age brackets, the death rates were 1.4% among people in their 50’s; .4% for those in their 40s; and .2% among ages 1-30.

Among patients who were hospitalized, about half developed acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Half of these people died (note that this implies about a quarter of people who land in the hospital with this disease die of it). ARDS fills up the lungs’ air sacs with fluid, restricting the intake of oxygen. Patients who developed ARDS had an average age of 61. Those who did not develop it had an average age of 49. Fifty percent of ARDS patients died, as compared with 9% who did not get ARDS.

You understand: 9% is almost 10 in 100. That is…well, alarming.

“We’re in the response phase, Juliette Kayyem told STAT. “Our measure of success is not containment anymore. Our measure of success now is, will fewer people die or get severely sick because of our efforts?” Kayyem is the faculty chair of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s homeland security program and a former homeland security official at the state and federal levels.

Dr. Mina added, “Part of the problem is the fragmented state of US healthcare system. . . . “[T]he way we have privatized everything about it for the most part, is going to seriously impact our ability,” he said,“[W]e have no ability to create out of the blue new hospital beds. We can’t even test appropriately.”

Helen Branswell, STAT’s infectious diseases and public health reporter, observed, “I’m really concerned about people living in long-term care facilities. If this virus gets into long-term care facilities [as it has in the Seattle area], it will be really bad. I’m worried about people who stay in homeless shelters. I’m worried about people who work in retail. I’m worried about people who don’t have the money to stockpile food because they don’t have extra money. I’m worried about the fact that there isn’t much social cohesion right now. People seem to be really angry at each other a lot and this is a time when we’re really going to need to help each other.”

So yes: when all Hell is about to break loose (at least, so it appears), it’s easy to get worried.

So what can we as individuals do to protect ourselves from this ailment, and what can we do as a people to try to contain its spread?

  • Number 1, first and foremost: WASH YOUR HANDS! And keep washing them. Get some hand wipes containing alcohol or, if those are not available, sanitizing countertop wipes such as the ones marketed by Lysol. Carry these in your car.
  • Whenever you go into a store where you’ll be pushing a cart, rub down the handle with one or two of these sanitary wipes.
  • As soon as you get back in the car, wipe your hands, your car keys, and your car’s steering wheel with an antiseptic wipe. If you have kids or other passengers with you, pass the wipes and be sure everyone wipes their hands thoroughly.
  • When you get home or to the office, wash your hands promptly and thoroughly with soap and water. Take your time. You should scrub actively for at least 20 or 30 seconds.
  • Stay out of crowded places. This includes restaurants, crowded stores, stadiums, rallies, and any other venue that draws large numbers of people together in close proximity. Try to allow at least three feet and if at all possible about six feet between you and the folks around you.
  • Avoid travel on public transit and airplanes if at all possible.
  • Stifle your sneezes and coughs in a jacket, handkerchief, or Kleenex.
  • Wash your clothes after each wearing.
  • Wash all fresh produce thoroughly, in detergent water (rinse well, of course).
  • Eat healthy meals, stay hydrated, and try to get enough sleep to avoid becoming run-down.

One thing you don’t have to bother with is wearing a face mask. These do nothing to prevent exposure to the virus.

Indeed, we are seeing a lot of hysteria out there. We’re also seeing some valid concern. The best way to deal with it? Common sense.

Panic à Costco?

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Went over to the Costco on the I-17 this morning to stock up on some products the store here in the po’ folks’ part of town doesn’t carry. Amazingly, for example, you can’t buy a chunk of blue cheese here in the low-rent district. But the store up north has a very nice Bel Gioso blue that’s wonderful. They also have a propane dispenser, the only Costco in town that does.

It’s always wise to plan one’s trips to that place propitiously. So a bit before noon on Friday morning I figured the store wouldn’t be too crowded. Hit the Albertson’s first, then hit the freeway, where a couple of those lighted message signs informed us that a construction worker had been killed. So got off the freeway to avoid a traffic jam and got to the store the back way.

Not too crowded? Hah! The Coronavirus Panic run on grocery and hardware stores has begun.

The place was jammed.

But it was weird. Normally Costco customers are exuberantly oblivious of their fellow grocery-cart pushers. And a lot of noise goes on and people are happily rolling toward whatever doodad they think they can’t live without. Not so today. Not that people weren’t talking and kids weren’t carrying on…it was that they were strangely quiet. And bizarrely polite — people would motion you ahead instead of cutting you off to get there first.

I got one of the last packages of toilet paper. People were buying a lot more TP than paper towels, but the paper towels were also going fast. And I nabbed the second-to-last package of boned chicken thighs. Drumsticks were gone. One of the butchers told us they were out of chicken and wouldn’t get more in until the first of the week.

It really was just…kind of a weird experience

Anyway, if you haven’t already done so, now may be the time to make a provisions run. If Costco is any measure, it looked like paper goods (especially TP!) and easily cooked or grilled meats were going fast. In these parts you can’t buy hand wipes, but countertop wipes by Lysol will work as well or (probably) better.

Don’t forget to keep the gas tank topped up, too.

WordPress.com Hack

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Recently, the venerable blog host WordPress.com was massively hacked. If you subscribed to an RSS feed for a WordPress.com site, the hack started sending you rafts of spam emails for scams of all descriptions.

How does this affect you’n’me? With any luck it doesn’t…UNLESS you subscribed to the Plain and Simple Press website’s blog several years ago.

When I first started the P&S blog — the one that has been posting chapters from my various bookoids — it was on WordPress.com, and it was titled “Writers Plain & Simple.”

After a while, our Web guru, Grayson Bell, suggested we move the blog from WordPress.com to the server that now hosts Funny about Money and make it a subdomain of Plain & Simple Press, which also resides at Bigscoots. This freed us from some of WordPress.com’s peculiarities and put all our shiny little pebbles in one bucket.

If you are a long-time subscriber to Plain & Simple Press’s blog and you suddenly find yourself besieged by junk emails, check the URL in your RSS feed. It should NOT end in wordpress.com. The site’s correct address is http://www.plainandsimplepress.com.

I have now deleted the old P&S Press site from WordPress.com. The current P&S blog and is hosted at Bigscoots.com, and so the URL contains no reference to WordPress.

Four Quick and Easy Ways to Generate Income In Your Everyday Life

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by John Garber

If you want to improve your financial situation, you have two options. The first and easiest is to cut expenses. There are plenty of articles on our site and elsewhere with great advice on how to do that.

What’s rare is good advice about the other option: how to make more money. Adding more cash to your bottom line will improve your financial position. Below are our four favorite ways to do that.

Note: These Are Not Second Jobs

Some ways to earn extra income amount to getting a part-time job or starting a business that becomes a part-time job. These are great ideas for people with extra time and energy, but they’re not the only option.

This list has four solid models for you to bring in extra money without devoting significant time to it. You have a life to live, people you love to spend time with, and a career. These ideas will help ease financial stress without spreading yourself too thin.

Four Personal Income Generators You Can Start Using Today

1. Purge and Profit

This income generator combines the benefits of making your home tidier with bringing in extra cash, usually for a one-time or short-term money infusion. There are many variations, but they all follow the same basic framework:

  1. Clean your house, using a box or bin to accumulate things you can live without. Move stuff too big to fit into the box to a special place in your house.
  2. Identify which of these items has a monetary value.
  3. Sell those items on Craigslist, eBay, or similar websites or have a garage sale to sell lots of items at once.
  4. Bundle up items that didn’t sell the first time and re-list them together. Often, people will see the value and buy them during this second round.
  5. Donate what’s left to Goodwill, and get a receipt for tax season (you can deduct charitable contributions if you itemize).

Whether you do this with a single collection you once loved but now don’t interact with, or by pulling stuff out of every room in your house, it’s not hard to make several hundred dollars from this method. It’s even easier if you follow a few of these best practices:

  • Clean the items first, so they look as attractive as possible
  • Take high-quality photos to include in your listings
  • Write detailed, compelling descriptions for each entry
  • Answer potential buyers’ questions quickly and professionally
  • Set prices according to what similar items sell for
  • Don’t hesitate to haggle and bargain to sell as much as you can in as little time as possible
  • Publicize your sale on social media and other venues

2. Monetize Your Hobby

You likely have a hobby or interest, something you enjoy and you do well. There are ways to make money off the skills and expertise you’ve accumulated from it. Examples include:

  • Creating an Etsy account to sell the product of your crafting hobby
  • Writing articles for magazines associated with your hobbies and interests
  • Pet-sitting or dog walking if you’re an animal lover
  • Offering personal services, such as cleaning if you’re an organization junkie
  • Coaching or teaching people who want to learn more about your hobby or interest
  • Creating online content, like an e-book or video course
  • Putting your photographs on image clearinghouses like Getty Images or Flickr
  • Selling your artwork in local galleries and cafes

These are just some of the ways people turn their passions and interests into cold, hard cash. For some, it’s a way of helping the hobby fund itself. For others, it’s a route to a better financial situation.

Start by considering your hobbies. What do you love doing so much you’ve become an expert at it? How might you turn that skill and expertise into something other people want or need? From there, put together a plan.

3. Find Part-Time Work Online

You don’t want the demands of a traditional part-time job, but you can make money in small sessions of flexible work using a number of different online sources. As with monetizing your hobby, there are dozens of ways to do this. Here are nine you can get started on right away:

  • Log in to Mechanical Turk to do small jobs that add up to big money.
  • Get paid to fill out market research questionnaires on sites like Focus Pointe Global and Delve.
  • Participate in paid surveys from Survey Junkie, Pinecone, or Prolific.
  • Set up an account at Fiverr or Upwork to do simple design, editing, and writing tasks.
  • Review websites for UserTesting.
  • Google “Get paid to _______”, filling the blank with tasks you might find fun to perform, like “write,” “watch TV,” or “play games.” Log in to the sites that best match your needs. Read the fine print carefully.
  • Deliver with services like DoorDash and Deliveroo.
  • Review music at Slicethepie.
  • Become a mystery shopper through any number of sources. (Just Google “mystery shopper” plus your location.)

You can choose one of these options and pursue it heavily, or work on several options over the course of a month to generate a substantial income stream. Either way, the opportunities are real, as is the difference they can make for your finances.

4. Flip Products

This is the riskiest item on this list, but if you have the expertise and a little cash available, it can become a reliable and easy way to make extra money.

  1. Find items for sale at well below market rate. Books, furniture, power tools, yard equipment, and watches are good candidates for flipping.
  2. Clean them up and research their potential full value.
  3. List and sell them on eBay or Craigslist.
  4. Use some of the profit to scale up the project by buying more items to list.

The key to success is finding reliable sources of goods at well below the price people will pay for them. Research how much certain items are selling for on eBay and Craigslist, then look for them in locations such as:

  • Estate sales
  • Garage sales
  • The clearance rack at stores you frequent
  • Lots and bundles sold on eBay
  • Thrift shops
  • Craigslist giveaways
  • Flea markets

Also, let friends, family, and acquaintances know you’ll take their items to the dump or Goodwill when they clean out their homes. Make it clear you plan to sell things you think you can flip. Most people won’t mind if you’re upfront about it.

Final Thought: The Real Question

When deciding which income generators are right for you, ask yourself how you want to earn your extra money and what you want to use it for.

Do you want to earn a one-time lump sum to pay off credit cards, afford something you need, or make a single change to improve your life moving forward?

Or do you want to earn a little extra money on a regular basis, so your monthly financial life is a little easier?

There’s no right or wrong answer, but knowing your goals will help you pick the strategies that will make the biggest difference in your financial life.

John Garber lives on the West Coast, where he works in technology and currently has a few side hustles in play.

Of Taxes and Best-Laid Plans and Lamps…

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WonderAccountant is having a tax frenzy. Honestly…I don’t understand how anyone can do that crazy-making tax-prep ditz for a living!

I thought I’d set up my spreadsheets to totally simplify this year’s antics, but apparently I failed. One thing I didn’t realize is that repairs and maintenance on the house are now tax-related because we’re now a sole proprietorship, not an S-corp. It’s been many a year since I incorporated The Copyeditor’s Desk. We decided to de-incorporate, though, because she felt we would do better on the personal tax side if we did that.

This afternoon the young(ish) eldercare lawyer is supposed to call. I want to discuss the matter of the long-term care insurance, which everyone is telling me to get rid of. Naturally, when I called to cancel it, Metlife had a trained poodle on the phone coming up with every which way to keep me paying premiums.

So the next step was to plow through a four-inch-deep pile of paperwork from Metlife and its predecessor, TIAA-CREF. Metlife is truly notorious for trying to weasel out of paying benefits.

It was my understanding that if you quit paying, the issuer was supposed to pay back your premiums ($19,000, so far, since I started with TIAA in 2001). But…no. However, according to the original policy, which as far as I can tell was unchanged when Metlife bought TIAA’s LTC insurance business, they apply the balance to any nursing home bills you rack up — but they do not repay the unused premiums to you.

Well, after all these years, 19 grand would pay for 2.8 to 3.6 months of nursing home bills (private room/shared room)

Most people die within 3 months of admission to a nursing home. So what remains there would probably cover most of the bills.

If I quit paying premiums now and instead put the money in a CU savings account, at $133/month, that would add up to $1596 a year.

American baby-boomers can expect to live to be about 85, on average. So that would add $15,960 to the 19 grand already in Metlife’s coffers, for a total of $34,000 available (supposedly) to cover nursing home bills. Assuming I can get Metlife to return my money to me if I cancel their policy. At about $5,000 a month (by then, presumably), that would cover about 7 months in a home.

Some people, of course, are stuck there for a good deal longer than that.

My healthier relatives — the Christian Scientists who did not drink and did not consume coffee and walked daily and ate what we today call “whole foods” — lived to be 94. They each effectively dropped dead of heart attacks. Neither one went into a nursing home. But…let’s suppose you weren’t made of quite THAT sturdy stuff, but still you managed to stumble along to, say, about age 92 or so… Hmmm…. That would leave time, at $133/month, to accrue $27,132 for nursing home coverage. Let’s figure the price will be around 6 grand a month by then, eh?

$27,132 plus 19 grand (assuming Metlife even still existed to cough it up, assuming Metlife would cough it up) would give you $46,132 as a nursing home fund. Assuming nursing homes cost about 6 grand a month by then, that would last you about 7 1/2 months. According to my English-major arithmetic, which is nothing to place a bet on.

So…you’re takin’ your chances. My father was in a nursing home about two weeks before he croaked over. But…heaven help us! D-XMiL is a hundred and five years old and still alive, laying in a bed in a nursing home unable to see or hear. God help her. And she’s been in that state for years.

Interesting. Assuming inflation drives nursing home costs to “only” $5000 a month in 10 years (not a safe assumption) and to 6 grand in 15 years, the number of months that saving program would cover is almost same.

Jeez. Think o’that…

So after a brief telephone chat, our proposed new estate-planning/elder-care lawyer engineered a meeting in a couple of weeks. He thinks — contrary to the advice of the financial dude and the accountant but in accord with Consumer Reports’ opinion, that it’s actually a good idea to continue paying LTC premiums, if you can afford it. I can, but it frosts my cookies. PLUS: reviews of Metlife are awash in horror stories. Apparently they do every goddamn thing they can to avoid paying as agreed in their contract.

In less tenebrous climes…

Isn’t that a great word? Translations of the Greek epics describe Hades — which was just an underworld populated by the shades of the deceased, not Hell as in a place of torture — as “tenebrous.” Shady. 😀

In less tenebrous climes, the new glass shade arrived to replace the one I busted a couple weeks ago. None of us — we’re talking moi and not one, not two, but three lamp store and repair folks — could find one just like the deceased. The closest I could find is not opaline — it’s just milk-white — and is shallower & flatter than the late lamented shade. However, if you’d never seen the old shade, you sure wouldn’t know any better. I think it will do the job just fine. And to my amazement, it fits in the fixture and accommodates a 3-way bulb just fine.

The Lamps Plus dude proposed to adjust the fixture to make it fit exactly, which I suppose would be nice. But the fact is, it looks fine and I fail to see why it needs any adjustment.

And also in the lights department: The middle bathroom in my house is illuminated by a pair of matching wall fixtures, one on each side of the mirror over the sink, that each use a couple of small halogen lights. Naturally, one of those crapped out this morning.

So it was off to French’s Electric Co to try to snare replacement bulbs. Good luck, I figured, since every light bulb that works has been taken out of our sticky little hands.

To my surprise, they had a few! 40 watts, said he. So I bought the whole boxful, sensing that these will not be around much longer.

Indeed, when I got home I found that 40 watts was what the fixture was rated for…but that the other bulb in the lamed fixture was a 120-watt number. Jeez. So I replaced them both, elegantly not touching the glass on the things. Perfect!

Then I noticed that another bulb was out on the other fixture. Replaced that. Noticed that the two bulbs in there were also 120 wats. Hm.

BUT…the result was gorgeous! Much brighter than the incumbents…so much so that one could in theory paint one’s face in front of that mirror, which until today has not been an option. It’s been much too dim in that bathroom to make up your face.

I hope these will last. The upshot, though, was that I used two of the four lights I’d bought, trying to stockpile three of them for future use. So now I’ll have to go back over to French’s and buy another box of them, hoping to have enough to last into my dotage.

What a stockpile I have in the storage room! Almost every drawer is jammed with incandescent lightbulbs. That’s how much I hate, loathe, and despise the eye-stinging light from those horrid LED things. Once my stash is gone, I guess, I’ll have to switch to candles.

Since I habitually turn off the lights whenever I leave a room (unless I have to go out after dark and need to make it look like maybe someone’s home), light bulbs last a LONG time at the Funny Farm. A couple of those bulbs in the bathroom had been there since I had the fixtures installed — sixteen years ago. So I expect eight or twelve extras will last until I croak over. And then some.