Funny about Money

PUPPY NAMING GIVE-AWAY: The 4-Month Diet Cookbook!

February 27, 2014 by funny

So… Soon, before we even know it, Pup will be here. Lindsay, our Pup Breeder, wishes to know what we wish to name this dawg. We have no clue.

BUT…we have a blog. We have clever, creative, and brilliant readers.

Let us call upon them.

My latest book, How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, is about ready for publication. It soon will be available on Amazon.

As a special gift to FaM readers ( 🙂 ), I propose to give away one (1) advance copy, in the form of a PDF, to the person who comes up with the cutest, most appealing, or most appropriate name for this tiny li’l corgi:

By “cutest, most appealing, or most appropriate,” we mean “the one I subjectively like the most.” 🙂

No guarantees that this will be THE name that sticks with the pooch for life, since I usually end up naming a pet after I’ve come to know it. But we do need something to start with.

The full title (speaking of names) of the diet/recipe book is How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months…Without Hardly Trying: Diet Advice and 125 Killer Recipes from Funny about Money. Not all the recipes are dietetic — those that shouldn’t add too much fat to the frame are tagged with stars. But all are pretty darned good to eat.

The winner will get page proofs for How I Lost 30 Pounds, in PDF format, complete with four chapters of detailed diet advice (largely unscientific) and about 125 recipes, some but not all of which have appeared at Funny about Money.

To participate, submit a comment to this post with your suggested name for this magnificent little corgi pup.

The contest will be open for ten days, starting today: Thursday, February 27, 2014.

Teva Teva Teva Teeeeevas!!!

February 26, 2014 by funny

Heeee! Who would think a pair of shoes made of rubber, Nylon, and Velcro could be soooo kewl?

Well…they’re probably not. They’re probably kewl only to a certain nerdly type.

Last year I bought my first pair of Teva sandals, hiking/loafing footwear favored by the outdoorsy set. I had resisted for quite a long while, because they came highly recommended by SDXB, with whom, by the time his love affair with the things began, I had become profoundly annoyed. If he liked the damned things, I reasoned in my girlish way, they couldn’t be much.

In spite of myself, last year I tried on a pair and was seduced into buying. And I’ve come to love them.

I wore them almost every day all through the summer (wading through water and mud and gravel and dust and grass and weeds in them) and then with socks against the cold all through the winter. That pair beginning to look a little tired, I decided that before the heat comes in this year, I should buy another pair. Several styles exist; one was much cuter than last summer’s style, and I thought maybe I should try that.

So it was off to Sportsman’s Warehouse, conveniently located next to my second-favorite middle-class Costco store (the Costco nearest me is conveniently located between a desperate slum and a Walmart). Tried on the “cuter” style and found, as I’d found a year or more ago, that it threatens to raise a blister on the tenderist part of the arch. But LO! The model I’ve come to love and worship now comes in…yes! LIPSTICK RED!!!!!

Who could resist?

So I bought a pair of those. If anything, they seem to fit marginally better and feel even more incredibly comfortable than the old black & grey model.

While I was at it, I also picked up a pair of Teva flip-flops (“slides,” the company calls this model). These, I don’t even have to bend down to pull on the feet. They won’t do for those two- and three-mile de-fatting walks around the ’hood, but they’ll be mighty handy around the house and yard. Assuming Pup doesn’t eat them. 😉

Here they are: Nerd High Fashion:

And your favorite fashion footwear is…?

Blog Carnivals: A thing of the past?

February 25, 2014 by funny

Welp, it’s beginning to look like blog carnivals are dead. Too bad…out of style, maybe?

I’ve kind of given up on the Carnival of Personal Finance: so many posts are rejected that I figure I’ve been blackballed there, for reasons probably related to my left-wing politics. That’s OK — it’s a host’s prerogative to be unfair, and if they want to do that, I don’t begrudge them.

So this week I sent posts to four other carnivals, through Blog Carnival HQ, a site that aggregates submission forms to these things. Tried for the Carnival of Retirement, the Lifestyle Carnival, the Carnival of Financial Independence, and the Yakezie Carnival, all of which were scheduled between the 21st and the 24th of February.

Not one single carnival went live!

Presumably the listed hosts either forgot they were supposed to run the carnivals or had something better to do.

Annoying. It’s kind of time-consuming to submit posts to these things, even though Blog Carnival HQ makes it simpler than it used to be.

And too bad. It was a handy way to get a little link juice and, as a host, to perform a small service for the blogging community. Oh well.

Nothing lasts forever.

Tales from the Crypt…uhm…the ’Hood

February 25, 2014February 25, 2014 by funny

Now that was an entertaining dog walk!

Last night along about sunset, Cassie and I were headed homeward through the more upscale neighborhood to the west of us. It’s an area of old 1950s ranch houses, some of them very large, on large, irrigated lots: classic North Central. And as neighborhoods go, it’s seen better days.

The properties are tired, and a few need major, major fix-up. Some in fact have been purchased by affluent folks who want to live in a central location and who like large, grassy, shady lots in the center of the city. The houses lend themselves to upgrading, and because of their size and location, once a place has been spiffed up, it can be worth a lot. Values in the area hover in the $500,000 range. Within steps, right around the corner are houses on the market for over a million dollars.

But. It’s mixed: some owners have been there for decades, and so a few places are a shade on the decrepit side.

In the middle of this small part of the ’hood is an old abandoned house, a place that must once have been a very nice property, indeed. It’s on a pie-shaped lot with a huge front yard, shaded by vast, once spectacular orchid trees. It’s been running down for years; of late it has been abandoned. The old guy who lived there alone disappeared — I assumed he’d been shipped off to the nursing home. The house is a real wreck.

So the hound and I are strolling past this pile when we come across a couple of the neighbors. I notice someone has hacked limbs off the overgrown trees and shrubbery in front and left the debris laying there, so I ask, while chatting, what’s the deal.

And from this chatty, chatty woman comes a story:

The house is foreclosed, and it’s taken years to get that way.

The old guy was not the owner. He was living there rent-free and had been, for years. One day he just up and disappeared.

The owner himself was a tax protester, of the BAT-SH!T CRAZY variety. This guy carried one of those “sovereign citizen” cards around and proclaimed that the US gummint had no authority over him and therefore he did not owe it (that would be “us”) any taxes. He had his own bank in a DYI basement under the structure, where he would hide money. He gave out fake addresses — including a fake address for the house — so when revenooers and other creditors would come around looking for him, they couldn’t find the place. When last heard from, he hadn’t paid taxes — or lived in the house — in over 10 years.

In the attic, which you access by a trap door over the carport (rather common in these parts), there is a hidden closet. God only knows what’s in there. From that closet, you can access the interior of the house through another, hidden trap door.

Somebody recently bought the house out of bankruptcy, but they are apparently raving idiots. They hacked back the plants but have done nothing more, except they tried to get into the house through the attic. They failed to find the closet and so did not find the door into the house from the attic. So they took an ax and chopped their way through the ceiling.

The chatty lady with whom I was speaking, it develops, is a cat lady. She has eight cats that she allows to roam around the neighborhood, stinking up people’s yards and killing the wildlife. When it was observed that cats are very destructive and make a mess in the neighbors’ yards (yes…I did actually say that), she said oh, no, her kitties are good. Then she remarked that one had just killed a hummingbird. They also have several dogs, rabbits, chickens and the like. Her husband said they have 18 animals. Godlmighty.

She is enraged at one of the neighbors, who called an exterminator to remove a hive of Africanized bees that had taken up residence in the haunted house’s front yard. Just because they were swarming her koi pond, Chatty Lady thinks, was no excuse to murder all the little thangs.

He’s a retired lawyer. They’re graduates of Pomona and Claremont.

Heee! Money doesn’t buy good sense, eh?

Several of the places on the street where the haunted house stands have been fixed up handsomely. One of them was recently purchased by a young family with a cute young boy, who was playing outside when the dog and I strolled past. This is always good: more young families are moving in, and they’re exactly what an older neighborhood like this needs. The parents settle in and fix up the houses, and the young adults and their children are just grand to have around.

Heh. Betcha they don’t know they moved in next door to a level 2 sex offender.

That guy lives in another run-down house, right next door to the haunted manse. He appears to be living with his mother.

Across the street from him is yet another run-down house occupied by two young men and another elderly woman, presumably their mother. The gents have converted the carport into an automotive shop, and a fine mess that is, indeed! When you walk by at night, you can see into the front room and see that the interior of the house seems tidy and rather nice. But that garage! Lordie!!

Chatty Lady said one of the guys who lives there likes to work outside at two in the morning.

That’s good, I suppose. Keeps an eye on the sex offender, and also on the various wandering burglars who come through after dark.

KISS: Simplifying the Budget Unearths a LOT of Money! (uhh…sorta)

February 24, 2014 by funny

Okay, so now that I’m a rich old retiree, instead of doling out a few bucks per month or per quarter from retirement savings to meet day-to-day living expenses, in 2014 I decided to draw down enough to cover the entire year’s living expenses, taxes, and insurance, dump it into checking, and hope it lasts 12 months.

Because a) I’m not very competent with math and b) I tend to overcomplicate things in my desperation not to make a mistake or overlook things, my budgeting spreadsheets have become hideously involved. “Tangled,” actually, is the word we might use. When I look back over them and try to remember why I made this or that decision, I can’t figure out what on earth I was thinking.

So, I decided to start all over.

Step 1 was to pose a series of questions designed to lay out the data needed to create a coherent, uncomplicated, nonstupid, and reasonably accurate budget. Videlicet:

1. What is the total amount that will become available from all sources (savings drawdown, Social Security, teaching) during 2014?
2. What are the routine monthly nondiscretionary costs?
3. What are the routine monthly discretionary costs?
4. How much was in the bank on January 1, 2014?
5. How much do the two spending categories really add up to by the month? (i.e., not how much do I think they add up to…)
6. How can I know how much is left at any given time?
7. Can I create a spreadsheet where I can just plug in monthly discretionary, nondiscretionary, and extraordinary totals (“extraordinary” = unexpected costs) and get a snapshot of where I stand at any given time?
8. How much, realistically, should it cost to live in 2014 (i.e., including extraordinary costs, taxes, and insurance)?
9. What is the difference between projected total 2014 funds available and the projected realistic 2014 cost of living?

Step 2: Fill in the answers:

Step 3: Figure out a relatively simple way to keep track of expenditures so I’ll know whether a) this is right and b) I’m about to run into the red.

In this scheme, the first line of the spreadsheet shows the total amount I believe will come available over 2014. This includes 12 Social security checks and future teaching earnings for three sections. Because there’s a good chance I may teach four sections this year, the $36,342 shown on January may actually be conservative.

Now the idea here is to add up, once a month, all the nondiscretionary expenditures (utilities, long-term health care, yard dude) and enter that total each month; add up all the nondiscretionary costs (these would be the AMEX and Mastercard bills, since I charge almost all nondiscretionary expenses); enter (among “Other”) any extra incoming funds, such as the checks from Medicare and the Medigap insurer; and enter any extraordinary expenses, also among “Other.” Then keep a running balance in column 3.

Thus at the end of any given month, the balance should show how much money remains to cover 2014 living expenses.

The glasses, the ER visit, the eye specialist’s ministrations (much of which were disallowed by Medicare & Medigap), the contact lenses, a car repair bill, the landscape improvement needed to redirect rainwater away from the back patio and wall, extra pay for Gerardo to fix the landscapers’ screwups, a dental bill, and clothing to replace items that no longer fit after the 30-pound weight loss have already racked up a phenomenal amount of “extraordinary” bills — as much as I had planned on for the entire year. And they don’t include the $800 I’ll have to pay for the puppy a couple of weeks hence, plus the veterinarian’s puppy exam, plus the food and gear for the pup, plus the obedience training class, plus the remaining shots, plus the spay job. Pup may not need to be spayed until 2015. But she probably will come into heat by the end of this year. If so, she’ll have to be “fixed” forthwith.

All that nothwithstanding, though, when the January and February bills are plugged into the new spreadsheet, things look a great deal brighter than I expected:

So the balance at the end of this month will be $31,164: more than the projected cost of living for all of 2014.

That’s not as cheering as it looks: to get the true picture, we have to subtract the cost of taxes, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, Medigap insurance, and Part D insurance. That leaves us $25,824 to last from March 1 to December 31. That’s still slightly higher than the $20,664 budgeted for 2014 ordinary living costs.

Assuming unbudgeted “extraordinary” expenses will average out, over the year, to around $300 a month, the total cost of living should come to $23,664 in 2014. Even with taxes and insurance added, that will put me in the black this year. Anything left at the end of December will defray the amount of 2015’s saving’s drawdown. And every dollar that stays in savings now is a dollar that will help support me in my dotage.

That certainly is a huge improvement over the grim outlook I enjoyed in 2010, 2011, and 2012, when every goddamn month posed the question of how to make ends meet while living like an anchorite. In 2013, things were a little brighter — at least it didn’t look like my house was likely to be condemned for taxes. It may also just be that the convoluted system I’ve been using obscured the difference between the amount I would need this year and the amount I pulled out of savings. Either way, this year things look pretty good.

Probably it’s because the economy is better — investments have recovered so much that total savings are now almost back to where they were before the Crash of the Bush Economy, meaning that the overgenerous drawdown I seem to have made this year plus the amount that covers my share of the downtown house’s mortgage together do not exceed 4% of total savings. If I’m right that drawdowns can be much more conservative, it looks like things budgetary can continue as they are for the foreseeable future.

Bueno!