Coffee heat rising

Bureaucrats and the Workman Waltz

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Another monthly bill just arrived from Wellcare, the provider of my Medicare Part D (prescription drug) coverage. For the second time in our year-long relationship, they announce that I owe not one but two payments at once.

What’s happening here is Wellcare wants direct access to my bank account. They want me to give them my account number so they can engross monthly premiums whenever they feel like it. When I point out that I can EFT the money to them through my bank, they try to say my only alternative to letting them into my account is to pay by check, which I do not care to do. When I push back, I’m told well, yeah, sure I can pay by the credit union’s BillPay function, but it won’t post for a week or so, which means I have to pay well in advance.

O.K. That’s what I’ve been doing. Wellcare bills a month in advance. On January 10 I EFTed the February bill, which was due February 15; it cleared my account on January 12. How do I know it was actually the bill they claim is unpaid? Because they jacked up their premiums by four bucks, and last month’s bill was the first at the increased price. So I know that payment cleared my account, a month and three days before the due date.

Fortunately, their phone lines (presumably to a call center somewhere on the far side of Malaysia) are open until 2:00 a.m. EST. Sooo….

One ringie-dingie…two ringie dingies…about 40 ringie-dingies’ worth of  climbing around the aggravating phone tree…

And we reach a human being with a distinct but unidentifiable accent and a voice that makes her sound about fourteen. This is entertaining.

After making a pass at trying to suggest I must have missed last month’s bill, she caves at the revelation that the payment that cleared my account was for $23.80, not the prior premium amount of $19.70, and she allows that yeah, they received it.

Now she attempts to explain why they sent a bill demanding $47.60 even though they received my last payment on time. Her ever-so-slightly fractured English delivers an explanation along these lines:

The reason you were billed twice is that your last bill was sent out before you made your January 12 payment.

{moment of silence}

“Wait. Let me get this straight:

• You send me a bill.
• When I receive the bill, I pay it.
• Because I pay the bill promptly after I receive it and not before I receive it, I get double-billed on the next statement?”

“No, no! that’s not it,” says she. “It’s that the bill you have right now was printed before we posted your last payment.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course. I understand.”

Hee heeeeeee! I personfully refrain from remarking that maybe they shouldn’t assume, a month and three days before a bill is due, that they’re not going to receive payment.

Hilarious!

Well, in the same envelope came an announcement that they’re dispensing with monthly statements and sending coupon books, which makes so much sense a person wonders why on earth they haven’t always done it. Actually, one wonders why Wellcare won’t let you pay a year or six months at a time, as the Medicare Part B insurer does. Wouldn’t that a) put a heckuva lot of subscribers’ payments in their investment accounts in advance of a heckuva lot of due dates and b) eliminate a surprising amount of paperwork and hassle for all involved?

So that was a fun way to expend some time. The only thing more amusing is the Workman Waltz.

This morning the roofer had tons of asphalt shingles piled on the ridge of my roof and, while I was taking a 7:30 a.m. walk with La Maya, had a vast dumpster dropped on my driveway. I’d asked to have it put as close to the west edge of the driveway as possible, so I could get my car out. What I didn’t realize is how huge the container would be. There was no way I could squeeze my car past it, even if it weren’t placed so close to the eaves that I couldn’t open the garage door.

So the minute I shoot into the house, it’s on the phone to the roofer. He calls the trucker back, and they good-naturedly move the damn thing so I can remove the car from the garage and park it on the street.

Yesterday, when plans for this dance were being laid, RooferDude said he was going to have his crew rip off the existing shingles today, unless it was raining. I pointed out a 30 percent chance of rain was predicted for today, and I didn’t want the roof removed if it was gonna rain. He agreed that they would put off the job until Tuesday, by which time the rain was expected to pass and a freeze warning would be in place.

So with the car parked on the street, I’m sitting here building next summer’s freshman comp courses, when Cassie starts to bark at some mysterious thumping. Look outside thru the windows. Trucks.

A half-dozen Mexican guys are on the roof, getting ready to prize off the shingles. Weather report says there’s now a 40 percent chance of rain today; I put it at 100 percent, since La Maya and I got sprinkled on while we were circumnavigating the park. I trot outside and ask them what they’re doing, because their boss said they weren’t supposed to be here today.

One, and only one, of the men speaks fluent English. He says, “Well…well, but it’s not raining.”

I say (stepping around a container of salsa someone has dropped and left spilled all over the middle of the accessible part of the driveway), “Well…well, but it’s GOING to rain. And I don’t want that roof torn off there when it’s just about to rain and we’re supposed to get thunderstorms!”

“I’m calling the boss!”

“Bueno.” I go inside and dial up the boss, too. He doesn’t answer my call, but apparently the crew foreman gets through; he tells them to stand down. They climb off the roof and go away, bearing the busted-open salsa container, which I placed in the back of one of their pickups.

An hour or two after they left, it rained. Pretty generously…certainly enough to cause a leak, if they’d pulled off the shingles and not nailed down enough plastic tarp to cover half of Disneyland. So far, none of the high winds and pyrotechnics one expects with a Sonoran Desert thunderstorm have come up. But the night is young.

And dark. My car is parked on the street out in front of my house, about as vulnerable a spot as you can find this side of the parking lot at the nearby Metrocenter Ghost Mall, which has the highest rate of car theft and break-ins in the city. One leaves one’s car parked outside around here at one’s peril.

RooferDude says he’ll have the job done in a couple of days. We’ll see about that.

Image: Songbird Perched on an Asphalt Shingle Roof. TriviaKing. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Coupons for Sale or Rent…

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Did you know you can sell coupons—the kind of stuff that comes in junkmail—at online sites? Saturday’s PlayNooz reported on a New York postal carrier who was arrested for the sale of coupons he’d ripped off from residents’ mailboxes and peddled on eBay. A commenter observed that some coupons, such as the ones that come from Penny’s, are worth ten or fifteen bucks. Or more…one shoe store here routinely sends out 30%-off coupons, and all its stock is in the $100-plus range.

Turns out this enterprise is not very difficult. You simply collect coupons, organize them in some intelligible way (such as by category or by likely frequency of purchase), and advertise your stashes on eBay or Craigslist. You can even consider collecting coupons that are listed online. I have found that you can go here for Amazon coupons and a ton other top retailers. Apparently you can get as much as 50% to 75% of the coupons’ savings.

There’s actually a site that will let you resell coupons from sites like Groupon, Living Social, or Tippr. How exactly you’d make a profit on coupons you have to pay for is unclear, unless you could charge a premium the ones that sell out fast.

What a hoot! Talk about your passive income…just let that junk mail roll in!

Image: Ticket for a free glass of Coca-Cola, ca. 1888; believed to be the first coupon ever. Scanned by uploader from Wired (Nov 2010), Vol. 18, No. 11, p. 104. Public Domain.

Busy Weekend Roundup

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Jack the Handyman, literally a Jack of All Trades, came over yesterday to lighten my bank account considerably. Lordy! Three hundred and fifty dollah to repair a foundation crack aggravated by some previous owner’s half-baked DIY patch job and ingress by water, to sand and paint an exterior door that Satan had bought with a white primer and never actually painted, and to climb up on the roof and repaint three sun-blasted gables, along the way prizing out some badly applied filler that was shot and replacing it with a new, longer-lasting product. Though I’m low on cash at this time of month, I didn’t feel too bad about his fee: he worked from around 10:00 a.m. until after dark, mostly doing hard physical work that takes some skill and know-how.

The damage on the west side of the house was a little alarming, and kind of odd given that the yard there is so xeric almost  no water is applied to the cacti and there. We figure either rainwater is backing up against the foundation or someone in the past had a garden that they watered copiously. Since the pitch is away from the house and too little rain falls to eat into the concrete, it’s probably the result of someone’s ill-advised flower garden. At any rate, it looks like he did a decent job of repairing it, this time with concrete patching compound, not stucco.

Southwesterners love stucco.

I loved a number of posts around the web this week. Check out some of these:

• At Canadian Finance Blog, you’ll find a hefty dose of common sense about the commonly accepted buy and hold strategy.

• Speaking of common sense, here’s another shot of it at Sustainable Life.

• At I Pick Up Pennies, Abby reflects on the aftermath of her brush with Guillaine-Barré syndrome, and her mom, writer Donna Freedman, also recalls that horrifyingly difficult time.

• Mrs. Accountability has a nice post on ways to use up veggies, my fave being (yes!!) stir-fry. In a similar vein, over at The Digerati Life, SVB reflects on the long-term economy of sticking to healthy foods.

• At the Ultimate Money Blog, Mrs. Money considers whether she can (or should) quit her job.

• Money Crush warns of the expenses that can accrue after you move into a new home, unless you keep a strong grip on things.

• Bargain Babe is running a video series on one of my favorite topics, drugstore beauty products.

• Hot diggety! Frugal Scholar has a recipe for Texas Caviar, a truly delectable treat.

• At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche is discussing her wedding plans with the family, and wonders if it’s OK to be married in a “borrowed” wedding dress—actually an offering from a friend.

• Evan, proprietor of My Journey to Millions, contributes a good post on reviewing your will to Bargaineering.

• Budgeting in the Fun Stuff got into Free Money Finance’s March Madness contest—FaM entered too late to make the cut (gotta stay alert to this thing next year!). So go on over to FMF and vote for BiFS!

• And if this round-up had an editor’s choice, it would definitely be Steve’s outstanding post at Brip-Blap, “Why We Need Immigrants.”

The Incredible Lightness of Our Economy…

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Yesterday SDXB and I hiked to the top of a hill in a desert preserve park on the west side of town. In the fine, clear weather, we could see for miles in all directions. And what could we see? Sprawl.

Mile on mile on mile on mile of sprawl, most of it cheaply built housing for people who don’t earn much (the median household income in Arizona is around $47,000—not great, when you figure for most households it represents two people’s salaries). In square miles, the city is now larger than Los Angeles, the avatar of ticky-tacky sprawl.

When you consider the sheer size of the population, it’s amazing that the cost of living here is relatively low. The reason for this much-ballyhooed low cost of living is low wages. The business interests that control the local government see to it that right-to-work laws keep wages down. Phoenix residents earn well below national medians. In Arizona, for example, educators and librarians earn about $5.20 an hour less than than the median national pay in their trades. In the legal profession, hourly pay is $14.23 below the national median for comparable work. Healthcare practitioners earn almost $6 an hour less than their counterparts elsewhere.

What are all these people doing here? Today,  hard to tell: the most recent figures I can find are dated 2005. Since then, many residents have moved away, as jobs have disappeared and homes have been foreclosed.

But in 2004, about 8 percent of greater Phoenix metropolitan area workers were employed in construction. If you added in those who working in “financial activities” (presumably in banking and lending) and in trade, transportation and utilities, you come up with 617,000 people: that’s 36 percent of the workforce.

So when Arizona was booming, over a third of its population was employed in building and selling houses. In other words, what we were doing was employing people to build and sell houses for people who build and sell houses.

The data above don’t count people who work for construction suppliers like Home Depot, lumber yards, masonry suppliers, plumbing and electrical supply houses, and the like; it may not include groups such as Realtors, interior designers, landscape designers, and nurserymen; and it certainly doesn’t include government workers engaged in building inspection, environmental oversight (such as it is), transportation planning, and tax collection. In 2004 the largest employer was the state of Arizona, followed, as a distant second, by Walmart.

Well, obviously, if the proper study of Man is Man, then the proper economy of humankind is serving other humans. Still, something seems oddly circular here, not to say unduly limited. Our problem in this state is that we don’t produce much. Through much of the twentieth century, our economy was based on the Three C’s: Cotton, Cattle, and Copper. All of those activities made something. Generally the manufacture wasn’t what you’d call environmentally friendly, and in fact these enterprises tended to siphon resources out of the state to the moneybins of vastly wealthy men back East. However, something at least came of it all.

Tourism, which arose in the early part of the century, eventually expanded to join the Three C’s as a major economic engine. And then: Construction.

To accommodate this fourth C, our august leaders made a conscious decision to rid the state of agriculture, reroute water to the cities and suburbs, and pave over the fields with asphalt, concrete, and stucco. What all the sprawl-dwellers were going to eat was never explained…we needn’t worry our pretty little heads about that, eh?

Yesh. Allegedly responsible civic and state leaders quite deliberately decided to create the vast, overweening, and ultimately disastrous fungus upon the land that anyone can see from the top of any of the low hills in the valley. It was as though they studied Los Angeles, identified everything L.A. did wrong, and then chose to do that.

An economy that produces nothing and does nothing other than feed on itself is doomed. IMHO, we’re seeing that doom, here as in Las Vegas and in other Southwestern cities. Our leaders took us down this path; our citizens didn’t seem to have the sense to realize where we were going, and now…here we are.