Evan, our favorite conservative and proprietor of My Journey to Millions, is a father! The Wife brought a baby boy into the world, and Evan lived to tell the story. Congratulations, Evan.
If you’d like to celebrate the arrival, consider subscribing to LoveDrop, a micro-giving group that engineers monthly gifts to needy individuals and families. For as little as a dollar a month, you can join a community whose founders include Budgets Are Sexy founder J. Money, obviously a high recommendation. Do be aware that it’s not a 501(c)3 charity; it’s a for-profit group dedicated to doing good works. Fifty percent of revenues go to recipients, 20 percent to taxes, and 30 percent to operating costs. Given that the group has to pay taxes (unlike traditional charities), this is a very good ratio.
Well! The first payment ever from Amazon Affiliates just surfaced! It ain’t much, I’ll tellya…but it’s sure better than a hit on the head.
For a week, I thought it hadn’t landed in the S-corp’s checking account. The darn thing didn’t appear in the credit union’s online page! Today, though, I got around to reconciling the paper statements that came in the mail and discovered the credit posted on a date far from the one Amazon posted it.
Kewl!
Only trouble with electronic funds transfers is that you can’t frame one and put it on the wall. 🙂
What’s your preference? A real tree or a fake one to stick in your living room and adorn with Christmas lights and gewgaws? Over at Bargain Babe, the conversation is under way: she lists the pro’s and cons of each (fake ones are cheaper over the long run but shed pollutants—maybe even lead—and are expensive upfront; real ones are cheap as a one-time cost but cost more over time, and besides, they suck up fuel), and then leaves it to readers to consider.
Reminds me of my misbegotten childhood. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, of course, we had no access to any kind of tree, unless you count the occasional date palm as a “tree.” Everyone had fake trees, purchased at the commissary.
When I was small, my mother had a weird white thing made of…what? some sort of early plastic? Nylon? I believe it came with its own built-in colored Christmas lights. It was about two feet high. She would put it on a table, drape the table and base of the…uhm, “tree” with white flocking to suggest “snow,” and that was that. Far more interesting to a little kid was the tableau she built by arranging some of the flocking around a small metal mirror set on a table and then placing a couple of plastic reindeer atop the mirror. This was meant to evoke wild game standing on a frozen pond.
All very fascinating to a child who never saw snow until she was almost 18 years old.
Not too long after my first exposure to snow, I got my first exposure to marriage. My husband insisted on bringing a real pine tree into the house and setting it up in the front window.
This custom has always mystified me. What is it about killing a living thing and then watching it wither for two weeks that appeals?
Oh well.
For some years, we had these trees. The house we’d moved into had thick, luxuriant shag carpeting. Know what dead pine trees do? They drop their needles. The needles—scores of them!—would work their way into the warp and woof of that fancy shag carpet.
As it develops, there’s a reason pine needles are called needles. I would walk around my house barefoot. For months after Christmas, whenever I’d walk into the living room, I’d get a jab on the bottom of the foot! No amount of vacuuming could get all those damn needles out of the carpeting.
Mercifully, the price of Christmas trees outpaced the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. One year my husband allowed as how the tree business was getting a bit out of hand.
That was when we got the Christmas jade plant.
As was the fashion in that decade, I had put a jade plant on a stand in front of the south-facing two-story-high window that graced our living room. The jade plant shivered with joy and soon grew to be something of a jade sequoia: large and green and muscular.
Come Christmastime, I started decorating the thing with ornaments and aluminum icicles.
It worked. For several years we were free of Christmas trees, thanks to the Christmas jade plant.
Eventually, though, the jade plant got a fungus and croaked. By then my husband was making an income that was large and green and muscular. The Christmas tree discussion returned.
Don’t remember how, but I managed to convince him that we preferred a living tree. I must have threatened to sue his a$$ if I ever got another pine needle in my foot. At any rate, however it came about, after the demise of the jade plant we took to buying small potted pine trees at Home Depot. These would survive for two or three years in a good-sized pot. Once Christmas was over, we’d tote the living Christmas tree outdoors, water it well, and there it would reside for a year. The following winter it would be hauled back inside, tormented for two or three weeks, and then dragged back outdoors.
Well. You know, a tree is its own little habitat. Certain creatures like to live in trees. Some of these creatures like to lay their eggs in trees. One such creature is the black widow, Arizona’s finest earwig-, mosquito-, and cockroach-eating machine. This worthy arachnid is nice to have around the house. The outside of the house. It’s not something you want indoors, because it can deliver quite the nasty bite.
One year while the living Christmas tree was enjoying the out of doors, one of the ladies deposited a clutch of eggs in its boughs. When we brought it inside, the warmth of the heating system caused the babes to hatch.
Do you know what happens when a clutch of infant black widows gets into the air-conditioning ducts of a 3,300-square-foot house? No? That’s good. It’s best not to know.
The following Christmas we acquired a very convincing green phony Christmas tree. A fakenbaum, as it were. It was so believable that the only way you could be sure it wasn’t real was by the absence of pine pitch aroma. That, and by walking across the carpet barefooted.
The fakenbaum lasted for many years. I rather liked it. It didn’t hurt my feet. Setting it up inside the house didn’t entail killing anything. And the only thing that wanted to live in it was a vintage plastic troll.
This morning my friend La Maya and I joined a Starbuck’s drive-through line. Wanting to empty my purse of heavy change, I handed her $2.25 in quarters to cover the cost of a café Americano.
She put the change aside and paid for both coffees with long green.
Why?
Because, she explained, she stashes every quarter that comes her way to defray the annual state automobile registration fee.
Car registration in Arizona is exorbitant—ours is among the highest in the country. Last year, La Maya said, she paid over $140 to register her Toyota. Though she’s not one of those folks who resent paying taxes, she does regard the auto registration fee as a gouge. Which, of course, is just what it is. It’s particularly galling to see that the state has built a huge, expensive bureaucracy for the purpose of collecting this particular rip, especially when our hatchet-faced governor watches a man die unnecessarily for lack of adequate Medicaid coverage and remarks “we can’t afford it.”
La Maya says it makes her feel slightly less annoyed to pay it when she has a chunk of the bill set aside in her small change collection. Last year her quarter stash covered more than half the bill.
Good idea, isn’t it? When I have loose change (not often, because I mostly pay with plastic), I also toss it into a jar. But it’s not dedicated to anything, other than collecting dust and taking up space. This way, once a year you clear the clutter away, and you use it for a specific purpose.
Pour moi, I don’t know. I occupy a four-bedroom house. It’s a little loose for me, but at 1,680 square feet, it’s not so huge I want to get free of it. One of the bedrooms is devoted to storage—it holds a freezer that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen; the closet holds linens that won’t fit in the linen closet, some art and sewing supplies, during the summer the space heaters, and during the winter the fans. A wallful of old bookcases holds food staples that won’t fit in the kitchen pantry and shouldn’t be stored in 115-degree heat in the garage. Another bedroom holds my office, file storage, and office supplies; I spend most of my waking hours here, operating not one, not two, but three enterprises. The master bedroom is just another closet—none of these rooms is very large—but I can’t imagine doing without it.
I could, however, do without the bedroom that’s occupied by the television, since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Last night I sat down to veg out while writing a post for another site and found the offerings so bad, with all four channels of NPR begging for money and just garbage on all the other stations, that it didn’t even suffice as background noise.
And I could live without two bathrooms. And the extra living room that is the “family room.” That would cut about 470 square feet off my present space, bringing the desired living space down to about 1,210 square feet.
The underwater downtown house is about 1,300 square feet, to my mind just about ideal for one person. The kitchen is large enough to function. The dining room is big enough to entertain friends. The living room will hold an overstuffed sofa and chair (nonnegotiables, in my book); one of the bedrooms has plenty of space for an office, one is roomy enough for a queen-sized bed or maybe even a king; and the little back room will do for extra storage or as a guest room or sitting room.
What bothers me about Jay’s minidigs, besides the fact that you’d have to be pathologically tidy to live there, is the loft bedroom. It’s a firetrap. Get a fire started below you—propane is wildly flammable—and you’re dead. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get out of there. Check out that teeny little window: cute, but a grown man couldn’t begin to fit through it. And if he did, where would be be? Over the top of a flaming porch?
HUH-uh. Don’t think we’ll be contemplating life by Walden Pond in that thing.
Now the one in Texas that Mary photographed looks more reasonable. The bedroom is on the ground floor (there doesn’t appear to be a second floor). With some exuberant downsizing, you could indeed fit inside that place. At least, one person could. Two might be a little tight. Personally, I’d like more kitchen space—I cook a lot, and I’m not seeing enough space there for someone who likes to cook and likes to eat.
It’s a perfect little guest house or vacation getaway. As Mary points out, to make it permanently livable it would be good to have a place for a washer and dryer (or a washer alone…you hardly need a dryer, at least in a warm climate). For the $45,000 Mary’s friend paid to install this on her lot, you might be able to get an ordinary manufactured home in a park model; Cavco is selling them for around $49,000. Clayton claims to build a three-bedroom mobile home for as little as 49 grand…but who knows what you really get for that.
For not very much more that $45,000, I suspect you could get enough space that you wouldn’t have to ponder whether you really could live in it. You’d need to buy a plot of land, of course…there’s the rub! But if you already have one, this would be an inexpensive way to build on it.
Update:Bear in mind that much of what follows applies specifically in the state of Arizona. Each state has its own laws and regulations about the way property is held by more than one person, wills, and how heirs and appointed representatives can access, manage, and dispose of a deceased person’s property. You should check with a lawyer in your state to learn the best ways to pass down real estate and financial assets and how to make your wishes apply when you’re incapacitated.
So, when my lawyer and beloved tax preparer announced that she’s retiring, it crossed my mind that it’s been quite some time since my will was redone. It sets up a trust that expires when my son turns 21…and he’s now almost 35.
This morning I met with a Scottsdale lawyer and learned a number of interesting things. My vast financial holdings, of course, are so…uhm, less than infinite that they’re not very complicated. The main things I learned are these:
1. When a house is held in joint tenancy and one person dies, the other person gets title to the property without having to pay taxes or jump through probate hoops.
For reasons unknown to me, M’hijito and I are tenants-in-common on the downtown house. That entails a little more complication after the demise of one person. I don’t remember why we elected to do that…there may have been a reason. But since that house is going to have to be dealt with sooner than later, I expect the reason is moot.
2. When you own a house free and clear and there’s a single person you’d like to have inherit it, you should designate that person as the beneficiary for the house. Then he or she gets it without paying taxes on it and without hoop-jumping.
3. Same is true with bank accounts. If the heir is designated your beneficiary in the bank or credit union’s records, all the person needs is a death certificate to get access to the funds.
4. And you should also designate a beneficiary to your 401(k), 402(b), IRA, and mutual funds. Similarly, this avoids probate and gives the person immediate access to those funds that aren’t tax-deferred.
5. You now not only need a medical power of attorney to go with your living will, you need a mental health power of attorney. This allows your designee to get mental health care for you should you suffer dementia to the point where you need hospitalization.
6. Of course, you still need a durable power of attorney to permit your designee to pay your bills and otherwise deal with financial matters when you’re incapacitated.
7. If you haven’t updated your medical and durable powers of attorney recently, you need to do so ASAP. Recently the laws were changed so that some specific paragraphs need to be set out and initialed to make these instruments do what they’re intended to do.
8. When you owe on a mortgage, it’s a good idea to have a term life insurance policy that will provide the heir with enough to cover the cost of the mortgage. In M’hijito’s case, it’s de rigueur, since most of my funds are now in tax-deferred instruments, and he would lose about half the money to taxes if he had to withdraw enough from my IRAs to make payments. Besides, I want him to be able to keep the IRA funds until he reaches retirement age, since it’s very unlikely Social Security will be available for him.
She urged me, however, to talk with a real estate lawyer before taking out an insurance policy to cover the upside-down mortgage on the downtown house. Since I won’t be able to work much longer—certainly not at the pace I’m doing now—it may be in our best interest to consider a strategic default now, not later.
{sigh} Really, I don’t want to have to default. But neither do I want my son to be left holding the bag, which is where he’s going to be after I die, unless the credit union agrees to drop the principal to something near what the house is really worth. Even if he collects enough insurance to pay off the mortgage, all that means is he has to throw $210,000 of insurance money down the toilet. Better that than that he should be shackled to unaffordable payments that are also flowing into the same black hole. But neither option is good: they both amount to financial self-immolation.
Wow. What a world! Ten years ago, if you’d said I would ever seriously think about walking away from a debt, I would have said you were nuts. Now it seems like it’s nuts not to seriously think about it. Who would ever have imagined such a thing would come to pass?
