Coffee heat rising

Turning Freshman Comp into Personal Finance 101

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{Cackle!} Tina came up with a great idea for the transformation my English 102 sections will have to make, come next spring: give them, as their overarching writing theme, personal finance.

How obvious is that, anyway?

Old-timers here know that, to avoid having to read their ungodly clichéd recycled high-school senior English papers (“Why Marijuana Should Be Legalized”…“True Beauty Is Inner Beauty”…“The Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18”…gaaaaahhhhh!), I’ve taken to providing defined subjects for my stoonts to write about. Last year I went further than that: I actually assigned specific topics for each and every paper, requiring me to dream up several hundred reasonably focused essay themes.

Although that approach has some advantages, it was a time-consuming pain in the butt, and it had the disadvantage of not giving them a chance to learn how to frame and focus a workable essay topic. This semester I came up with a new theme—Public Education in America—and established four broad subjects within that theme. Each classmate will be assigned one of those topics to cover for all of the required papers, but they’ll have to come up with their own specific theses. Because it’s a new idea, and because it’s a TRULY gigantic pain in the ass to build a course around a preset theme, I applied both to my Eng. 101 and my Eng. 102 classes.

That’s fine for the nonce, but my 101 students tend to follow me into 102. So come spring, I’ll need a new theme for the 102 sections.

Personal finance. Great idea, isn’t it? How often have we PF bloggers bemoaned the presumed financial ignorance of our young pups? IMHO, it remains to be seen if that’s real, since the Millenials are now being called “the cheapest generation.” Frankly, I think a lot of the kids who show up in the community colleges are pretty savvy financially. Most of them are working their way through, and when asked “what on earth are you doing here?” they’ll often say they’re at the junior college to get the gen-ed requirements and prereqs for their major out of the way before they move on to a more expensive four-year school. The state universities here—especially the Great Desert University—have jacked up tuition so high that any freshman or sophomore with an ounce of common sense has been driven away.

More’s the pity for GDU: now the kids with common sense are in my classes! And since they’re intensely interested in issues like student debt, controlling the costs of college and setting themselves up as young adults, I think they’ll turn on to the PF topic.

So…what say you? They’ll need at least four broad subtopics to begin with. One of them, obviously, could be “Debt and the Modern Student” or some such thing. Within the broad theme of personal finance, what specific subjects can I ask them to write about? Check out the format for this approach at the course website. They get four topics on which to write (and are assigned to groups to give each other some moral support and to present discussion panels on their topics). These are listed in the right-hand sidebar, with a bunch of links intended as kick-off points for research. All of the 102 essays are source-based (i.e., research papers). What topics would you like the next generation to study about personal finance?

Why Can’t Life Happen at One’s Convenience?

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Nice relapse yesterday. Felt amazingly terrible all day. Damn it, this (whatever this is) couldn’t happen at a worse time. We have two projects in house and yesterday a potential new client called to inquire if we could work on his business’s entire opus. Since he’s been around for a while, there’s a lot of it.

This is exactly the kind of customer we’ve been praying for: a business whose needs can occupy us for a long time, and that’s likely to bring in enough revenue to contribute significantly toward our goal of having The Copyeditor’s Desk generate an income that both of us can actually live on.

Yesterday I called Young Dr. Kildare’s office and described the continuing onslaught of symptoms, which are not really helped significantly by large doses of meds. The only thing that helps is not eating, the result of which has been that I’ve lost seven pounds in seven days. That’s nice, since I’ve never been so fat in my life. But I’d kind of like to have more control over the process… He immediately had his underlings refer me to a gastroenterologist for the dreaded endoscopy. So obviously I’m not going to get out of that, and since they have to knock you out for the light-show, it will consume an entire day of my work schedule. And if they find anything significant, of course, it will consume the rest of my (not very lengthy) life.

YDK called last night after working hours, obviously concerned. I observed that one of my complaints is consistently listed as a symptom of gastric cancer and never as either of the two other possible ailments. He asked me to stop reading Internet sites and said indeed that particular part of the bellyache also can manifest itself with GERD and with peptic ulcer. Or a hiatal hernia.

My mother had a hernia. The resulting surgery was not minor. Had her in the hospital the better part of a week (true—that was in the day when we actually took care of surgery patients, which we don’t anymore), and it took about three months for her to recover. She never did fully recover, come to think of it. From that point on, it was pretty much a long, slow, downhill slide.

To complicate matters, the urchins turned in a raft of in-class diagnostic essays that I have to turn around before Monday, and another client sent a wad of copy to read. I don’t even know which one to try to move first. Guess I need to write a to-do list to keep this sh!t under control. As best as anything can be brought under control. Which isn’t very “best.”

Why do we labor under the illusion that life ever is under control?

Hm. I suppose it’s a survival adaptation. If we fully appreciated how random and pointless it all is, we’d go mad. What creature would put out the amount of energy and work required to stay alive if it thought food and mates and shelter came its way more by chance than by its own efforts?

I wonder if an amoeba believes it has some control over the environment it swims through. Probably does.

Well, it’s already after 5:00 a.m. Since I’ve got to arrive at an office halfway to Casa Grande by 9:30, I’d probably better try to work on at least one of those projects before any more time passes.

This & That

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Un-freaking-believable! It is 75 degrees out on the back porch! That is unheard-of in August in the Valley-of-the-We-Do-Mean-Sun. Night before last we had a fair amount of rain, and then a sharp storm last night—between the two, they walloped the heat down. Wish I didn’t have to be in Scottsdale at 7:30 this morning. It’s such a gorgeous morning, I ‘d sure like to be able to enjoy it over my nonbreakfast.

Beginning to feel a little better. Still far from normal, but nothing like as sick as I was. Over the past 10 days, I’ve lost seven pounds, most of them at the alarming rate of a pound a day. However, the weight seems to have stabilized at what was “normal” six months or a year ago: just overweight instead of downright fat. I’ve learned how to keep the double dose of omeprazole from upsetting the gut—it’s amazingly easy: guzzle a large mug of hot water flavored with honey & ginger before gulping down the disgusting pills; then guzzle another one immediately thereafter. Voila! No ill effect from the annoying drug. Yesterday I was actually able to eat some real food, as opposed to a tablespoon or so of yogurt at a time: a chicken thigh and a baked potato. So, maybe this thing is settling down. Either that, or I’ve already croaked over and am writing this to you from the other world.

Class started on Monday. Depressing. One poor kid in those sections is on the sixth try to get through a semester of freshman comp. How these children are gonna get by, I just don’t know. Our country needs decently paying blue-collar jobs so that people who are not cut out to sit in a classroom until their eyes glaze over can get on with their lives fresh out of high school. Offshoring those jobs or pushing down wages for the few that remain guarantees that a particular set of hard-working, honest Americans who deserve to be in the middle class will instead spend their lives in the underclass. And an underclass is not something America needs, whether you’re in it or not. A large number of citizens who are permanently under- or unemployed is, in a word, a drag on the economy.

I have nothing much else to say about money today, other than that I wish I had enough of it.

Others, however, have had plenty to say this week.

Most notably, TB at The Blue Collar Worker has had so many hair-raising life experiences crammed into this week, he must wonder if he’s living in a soap opera. It was not enough that he had to go to court (again) to testify against the nut case who pursued him into a parking lot and drew a pistol on him. A few days ago he’s driving down the road minding his own business when he witnesses a horrific crash between a motorcyclist and a semi. As you might imagine, the biker lost. Big time. TB was the first to determine that the guy was gone, a pretty disturbing moment.

Folks. You need as many tons of metal as you can get between you and the next guy on the road. Stay off the motorcycles!

Mrs. Accountability may at last have come across a way to help her DH get the accidental overspending under control. He loves his debit card, but he never has a very clear idea of how much cash is in the communal checking account. The result, of course, is an unending string of overdrafts. First, she set up a secondary checking account to protect the main, working account. And then she and Mr. A discovered that if you enter your PIN when you use the debit card, the swiper machine will tell you how much money is available in your account!

Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff asks the hive mind to opine about whether the builder is responsible for the cost of locking in the interest rate if the house isn’t finished by the time the lock ends. Interesting question.

A cadre of bloggers is writing about the current life insurance meme. IMHO, Evan’s post, at My Journey to Millions, about buying whole life for his infant son is the most interesting of the lot.

Money Beagle shares tips on how to keep the kitchen looking good.

Welp, gotta go. Twenty minutes before I have to fly to Scottsdale, and I haven’t even bathed, to say nothing of feeding the dog and dosing myself with disgusting pills. And so, it’s off and running.

Staying on Budget: Manually Track Credit-card Charges

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Over at Planting Our Pennies, there’s a nice discussion about the many tergiversations of budgeting, kicked off by an acquaintance’s remark that the best way to budget is to put cash in envelopes by category, and quit spending on a given category when the envelope runs dry.

Like me, the POPs rarely carry cash and instead use a rewards credit card (paid off at the end of each month) as a budgeting device. They like the way this allows you to track where every penny goes, in excruciating detail.

As long-term readers at FaM know, that’s been my strategy, too. But I have to say, it’s gotten to be a time-consuming pain in the tuchus. Hanging onto 87 berjillion pieces of paper and then, once every week or two, entering them in Quickbooks or a spreadsheet, is a gawdawful nuisance. No two receipts seem to have the date printed in the same place, and then outfits like Safeway that proudly add up every on-sale item so they can crow about how much you’ve “saved” by spending money at their place drive you NUTS, because you have to study their receipts to find the figure that tells what you did spend.

I’ve begun to wonder what is the point of knowing precisely where every penny goes…does that degree of detail really provide any useful enlightenment? Is said enlightenment worth the time required to juggle receipts and allocate every transaction to its proper spreadsheet column?

Possibly not.

At the start of this month’s credit-card billing cycle, it was time to quit chasing flyaway receipts. And also to quit itemizing every expenditure and keeping track of how much is left in each and every ditzy little category. WGAS, anyway? All that matters is that there’s enough left in the discretionary spending budget to cover the month.

So. To get the wads-of-receipts nuisance under control, I’ve been carrying a checkbook register around and scribbling down each transaction as it’s made. This way, I never have to  look at the receipt again: just drop it in the current month’s receipts folder, so that after a given charge statement comes in and is reconciled, the receipts can be neatly stacked and stapled to the statement for the accountant’s future reference. That rudimentary organization, by the way, makes it easier to find a receipt if it’s needed some time in the future—instead of rifling through disorderly file folders or boxes full of receipts, simply scan statements until you find the transaction, and you’ll know the receipt is attached to that statement.

This new strategy has hugely sped the bookkeeping task! It’s now easy to see each transaction’s date and easy to see which credit card was used. The credit card is identified in the first column and the date appears in the second. I’m keeping track of three cards—the corporate card, a personal MasterCard, and a personal American Express card–in one book. To enter this month’s transactions in Quickbooks couldn’t have taken more than ten minutes.

Putting them in the new, simplified discretionary budget tracker took even less time. Instead of subtracting each transaction from a figure at the top of a separate column for each discretionary spending category (clothing, for example, or food, gasoline, personal entertainment, etc.), I’m entering one figure: the $1100 max budgeted to discretionary spending. All expenditures are subtracted from that, so at any given time I know how much is left. Separating out these hundreds and thousands of items, month after month, is just. not. worth. the. effort.

In the new regime, then, the budget tracker looks like this:

The panic-inducing bottom line is an illusion, because I’ve included among the charges two items intended to be paid not out of monthly cash flow but out of savings for extraordinary expenditures: the washer that I had to buy and the new interior door hardware that I chose to buy, which add up to about $1,000. Then my son reimbursed me $100 for a jacking-around The Hartford Insurance delivered when they raised the insurance on the downtown house because I changed the policies on my house and car to Safeco. Taken together, those three items “reimburse” the budget to the tune of over $1100. Figuring that into the bottom line, we see that at the end of the billing cycle, the budget was $95.32 in the black. Yay!

Should I ever feel impelled to scrutinize exactly how much I spent on a given category, it’s easy enough to create a little “report” in Excel with the “Sort” function.

Hmm… I got a little carried away with eating out (“entertainment, personal”), but it doesn’t seem to have busted the budget. In fact, I didn’t spend that much. Because I don’t carry cash, I charged the whole tab on AMEX and my friends reimbursed me in cash, which I then diddled away at the grocery store and waypoints.

As usual, I have NO idea what I spent that cash on. Cash flows through my fingers like water. This afternoon I used some of it to buy some yogurt at Trader Joe’s. But the rest of it…????

This is much easier than trying to categorize every little charge as it’s entered. And paradoxically, adding a manual stage—write charges down as they happen—certainly is easier and less ditzily annoying than shuffling dozens of pieces of fly-away paper.

Each, as PoP suggests, to his or her budgetary own. 😀

Click on the images for a higher-definition view. Why has WordPress suddenly decided to put low-def images in every upload? Gr!

What’s Clean? And…the incredible wastefulness of cleaning products

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Sunday afternoon: reduced to cleaning the filthy house. There’s a limit to how much dog hair and floor stickum a human can live with.

I also was reduced to having to buy another Swiffer dustmop, since I’d worn the old one completely out. It was eight or ten years old, and it’s dust-mopped many an acre of flooring—so it was no surprise when it pretty much fell apart.

The new, more chintzily built Swiffer came with two FREE!!!!! dry Swiffer rags and one FREE!!!!! wet-mop rag. I don’t use those things, having found that a microfiber rag works better with less hassle. But since they’d tossed them in with the push-mop duster thing, I decided to use them up.

Have you ever noticed how wasteful cleaning gear that’s marketed to Americans has become? All these individual throw-away paper towels impregnated with this, that, and the other chemical, to say nothing of a different chemical for every purpose…bathroom cleaners, kitchen cleaners, tile cleaners, plastic “wood” floor cleaners, real wood floor cleaners, wall cleaners, window cleaners, counter cleaners, special sanitizing throw-away wipes for the kitchen, special sanitizing throw-away wipes for the bathroom, special toilet cleaners, special shower cleaners, special throw-away wipes to dust the furniture, special stuff to clean off the top of the useless glass stove…holy mackerel there’s no end to it!

Swiffer seems to me to be a special case in point.

The stupid little throw-away dust rags you’re supposed to clip to the gadget…have you noticed how they clog up after one or two rooms? Okay, at 1860 square feet of tile, I suppose my house has more hard flooring than most…but maybe not. A lot of people like to be able to clean under the sofa and the bed, and quite a few think carpets aggravate their allergies or are simply dirty, because it’s impossible to get them clean. Which, of course, it is.

So there you are with your tile floor. You Swiffer up a couple of rooms, take a look at the bottom of the gadget, and see the throw-away duster rag is chuckablock full of dust and dog hair.

But you have miles to Swiffer before you rest. (Click on the image to appreciate its full, high-res glory. This is how a Swiffer looks after I’ve vacuumed the floors: to get this place clean, first I have to vacuum, then dust-mop, then wet-mop or steam-mop. Yes. Here in the low desert we do have dust, and here in the Palace of the Queen of the Universe, we have dog hair. A lot of dog hair.)

Now you think, ah! rather than throwing this thing away, I’ll flip it over and do another room or two with the backside, thereby extending its life a little and cutting the waste a tiny bit.

Well, no.

Proctor & Gamble has designed its Swiffer rags so that they’re puffy and absorbent on one side and shiny and UNabsorbent on the other—the better to block consumers from doubling up on their use!

Cute. How much environmental degradation is a dollar worth, anyway?

Absent the questionable throw-away towels, Swiffer dust mop gadgets come in handy, and you don’t have to buy into clear-cutting Montana for the privilege of using them. The trick is pretty simple: get yourself a bunch of microfiber rags. These are available in lifetime supplies at Costco, and you may be able to find them at hardware and auto supply stores.

Attach a microfiber rag to the bottom of the Swiffer duster in exactly the same way as you attach the Swiffer cloth, by punching the fabric into the little punch-in clips.

Et voilà!

Because a microfiber rag is bigger and softer than a Swiffer paper, obviously it’s going to flop around the floor a bit. But for me, that’s just fine—provides a wider pick-up swath and makes it easier to push into corners. If you want it tight and neat, you can fold it envelope-style around the Swiffer head and clip it on with clothes pins or binder clips.

Microfiber fabric is much more efficient at picking up dirt and pet hair than a disposable Swiffer paper. Here’s what happened when I ran the clean rag over the area that I’d already Swiffered:

And a microfiber cloth will dust your entire house, not just a room or two. So you’re not having to fiddle around with changing the things out every five or ten minutes, as if throwing one dustrag in the trash every time you clean the floors weren’t wasteful enough. Here’s how the microfiber rag looked after I’d gone over the rest of the house:

Why can’t dog hair stay as cute when it’s off the dog as when it’s on the dog?

Jeez. Just imagine how much I’d spend on these Swiffer paper dusters if I went through four or five of them every single week? And think of the incredible waste of forest products, energy to produce the stupid paper rags, more energy to package them, still more energy to ship them, and still more energy to cart them to the landfill. Think of the waste of landfill space!

Microfiber rags last for-freaking-ever! There are some out in my garage that have gotta be eight or ten years old. Do they get grungy when you use them to clean the floor? Sure…that’s why we have clothes washers. Though they do get stained and tired, that doesn’t interfere with their ability to magnet up dust and animal hair, a job at which they are very, very efficient.

Well, anyway, now the floors are as clean as floors can get.

It was Erma Bombeck, I think, who once held forth humorously about how different people have different ideas of what makes their homes “clean.” She was talking about women, but it applies to men, too. Bombeck reflected that she didn’t feel like the house was truly clean if there were finger smudges around the light switches. Other women felt the house wasn’t clean until the kitchen counters were spotless or the baseboards dust-free or the house redolent of furniture spray or the bathroom fixtures polished bright enough to blind all comers. Everything else could be dirty, but as long as those things were right, the house was “clean” enough.

😀

It’s true, I think. For me, it’s the furniture and the floors. I can’t abide dust on the furniture or grime on the floors. And when I can write my name on the top of the file cabinet and feel the grit under my bare feet, I know it’s time to clean. SDXB was obsessive about the bathrooms: if they weren’t clean and sanitized, the house just was not clean. La Maya believes clean baseboards make a clean home.

What’s the gold standard of cleanliness around your house?

What I’d Want to Do If I Still Had Time to Grow Up

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Commenting on the post about the costs and benefits of joining a fitness club, TB of Blue Collar Workman remarked humorously that maybe I could become a blue-collar worker, which certainly would run the fat off quick enough.

LOL! I wish.

Actually, on all those dead-end mornings during all those dead-end years of driving through the concrete ditch between here and the Great Desert University, I used to daydream about how I wished I could make a living with some light craft. No, not like what TB does—I’m not and never have been up for hauling busted trees and repairing busted plumbing. What I’d really like to do is make something beautiful—jewelry, maybe—that people would buy.

Preferably for a fair amount of cash. 😉

Therein lies the difference between teaching and working on a magazine’s staff. Both are underpaid jobs. But with publication work, you end up with a physical product that you can hold in your hand and say, I made that. With teaching, you rarely have anything to show for your work. Occasionally a student will resurface, years after you’ve forgotten the person’s name, and tell you how brilliant you were and how you changed her life. But usually they don’t…usually there’s no feedback at all. Just hard work with little reward and less pay.

At any rate, TB’s remark brought to mind how much I would love to go to one of the “Customer in Residence” workshops at the Thos. Moser factory, where they build beautiful, zen-like pieces of hand-crafted furniture. Much like the furniture prices, the cost for a workshop is outrageous,  ($3,500 for one person, plus the bracing retail price of whatever you build), but you get to spend a week learning how to make those beautiful and functional objects.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a (highly marketable) craft that you could do out of a studio or workshop on your property nestled in some staggeringly beautiful rural location?

I covet Thos. Moser furniture. Can’t afford it, but covet it dearly. Right now I crave a Newport chair to replace my threadbare office chair. How beautiful is this?

It’s on sale right now for a mere $975. Plus shipping. Hey! It’s a $250 saving.

Hm. Where to come up with $975 plus another two or three hundred bucks to ship it… Maybe I could kidnap one of the neighbors?

Of course, it’s not very practical in an office. I roll around from computer table to file drawers to bookcase and back, all day  long. Interestingly, Moser has an office chair version of that little beauty:

Even if I could afford the modest $1,625 price, to my mind the caster arrangement really uglies it up. So does the black seatpad, which will set you back another $150.

Oh well. Too late now. Too late ever to buy a gorgeous Thos. Moser chair. Too late to master a craft and build it into a paying enterprise.

What’s Going On in the Rest of the World?

Want to start a business? Lazy Man and Money has an incredible round-up of resources, including a link to something called Kickstarter, best described as crowd-sourced patronage.

Just when you think your costs are blinding, you learn what it costs to live somewhere else. Faced with astonishing homeowner’s insurance bills and annoying exclusions, Planting Our Pennies decides to self-insure an exterior structure vulnerable to storm damage.

Donna Freedman has been junketing in New York, and as she often does, posting entertaining despatches at Surviving and Thriving. This woman would make a great foreign correspondent…

Hmmmm…. Did you know Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has a bunch of co-owned sites as part of the Blogging Empire? Interesting. Check them out at her weekly round-up, and while you’re there, don’t forget to buy her book.

Nicole&Maggie prepare for the blessed event by cooking up interview questions for the proposed new mother’s helper.  Heh heh heh…one of the charms of old age is being able to say, “Ahhh…I’ll never have to do that again!” 😀

Abigail at I Pick Up Pennies plans a fun birthday celebration, largely financed by Groupon.

At Money Beagle, the Beagle couple have a cleaning frenzy. Wow! Would that I had so much energy. And of course, would that the temperature in the garage were somewhat lower than 110 degrees…

Looks like all that junk food populating the largest part of our supermarket shelves is about to get a lot more expensive as the price of high-fructose corn syrup rises. 101 Centavos entertainingly contemplates the (dis)glories of speculating in corn.

Revanche and PiC took an excursion to Half-Moon Bay. So, so lovely and relaxing. Wonder if the proceeds from kidnapping a neighbor would set me up in business there after the working vacation at the Thos. Moser factory….

Frugal Scholar urges shopping at stores that stand behind their products with unconditional guarantees to accept returns.

At Blue Collar Workman, what goes around comes around. Gratifyingly.

Down under in Auckland, eemusings asks readers to share their first job stories.

Welp, it’s time for me to have my first breakfast of the day. And so…to the kitchen. Happy weekend everyone!