Coffee heat rising

Carnival of Personal Finance

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Time for another Carnival of Personal Finance! This one is the 265th edition, and once again many a PF blogger has submitted their best choice of articles for this week. All of these are good reading, but a few jump out at me. I’ve tagged those Editor’s Choices with little red hearts: ♥

Enjoy!

♥♥♥

Round Pegs: Posts That Don’t Fit into Square Holes

Donna Freedman
Surviving and Thriving
Malachi and mud
Research indicates that exposure to soil improves a person’s immune system and increases production of the feel-good chemical serotonin. No wonder gardeners and children always look so happy.

Darren
MORE than Finances
Social Security Benefits – The Six Categories Of Benefits
The Social Security Administration offers six categories of benefits. Here’s a brief overview of each benefit and its qualifications.

ElizabethG
Modern Gal
Career Advice for New Graduates
A few thoughts about life after school

Loans, Lending & Debt

♥ Neal Frankle
Wealth Pilgrim
Will I Lose My Home If I File Chapter 13 Bankruptcy?
Good question! Interesting article that discusses whether a person with overwhelming credit-card debt need even consider Chapter 13 in the first place.

Kris (Everyday Tips and Thoughts), guest post author
Budgeting in the Fun Stuff
A Home Equity Line of Credit (Example)
Crystal describes how a reasonably sane HELOC can work.

Sean
Grow Money
How to Save Money With a Government-Backed Mortgage
Discusses different types of government-backed housing loans.

Paul Williams
Provident Planning
How to Get Out of Debt: Step 8 – Celebrate Milestones
During your journey to pay off your debt, it’s important to celebrate milestones. Taking time to celebrate will keep you motivated and help you reach your destination.

Miranda Marquit, guest post author
Good Financial ¢ents
Will Credit Inquiries Hurt Your Credit Score?
There are two main types of credit inquiry: “Soft” and “hard.” Find out which can damage your credit score.

Craig
Free From Broke
Payoff Mortgage Faster – How Do I Do It? – Four Ways
Four ways you can pay off your mortgage faster.

Nathan Richardson
ComplexSearch
Fixing Errors on Your Credit Report
The title says it all.

Laura Adams
DINKS Finance
How to Know If Refinancing Is Worth It,
Today’s historically low rates should pique your interest if you have a mortgage or are thinking about buying a home. Here are some tips to find out if it’s worth it 🙂

Credit Card Rewards

mbhunter
Mighty Bargain Hunter
Rewards Giveth, and Rewards Taketh Away
Rewards programs just aren’t as rewarding as they used to be, unfortunately. The article explains why.

PT
PT Money
The Best Travel Rewards Credit Cards
PT shares his thinking opinion on some the best travel rewards cards available today.

Silicon Valley Blogger
The Digerati Life
Combine Credit Cards To Earn Up To 4% In Rewards
Some smart ways and strategies for using your credit cards. Make credit cards work for you, not against you!

The Smarter Wallet
Best Cash Back Credit Cards: Our Picks
Credit cards that give you cash back can be a good deal if you’re a responsible card holder.

Tim Chen
NerdWallet Credit Card Watch
Chase Freedom—Now With More Confusion
Tim has made no secret about the fact that Chase Freedom isn’t one of his favorite cards. Chase goes out of its way to make this one of the most confusing credit card offers available—you have to opt-in to the rotating 5% reward programs each quarter, and they seem to like switching the reward program every year out of sheer boredom. Now they’re offering two different versions, to make it even harder to keep track of.

Saving and Investing

♥ FMF
Free Money Finance
Great Offense AND Great Defense are the Keys to Wealth
To become really wealthy, you have to do two things well: grow your income and keep expenses low.

Penny Saver
The Saved Quarter
10 Things I Want…But I Want an Emergency Fund More
Penny engages in some serious delayed gratification!

Alexg
Magic Formula Pro
Magic Formula Stocks: Apollo Group (APOL).
A review of Apollo Group’s stock.

Barb Friedberg
Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance
MBA Course: Investing & Portfolio Management-BONDS
Friedberg, a graduate level professor of business, has the advantage of being an educator. Her posts occasionally come direct from her graduate-level courses; this one is an example.

Clint
Accumulating Money
Institutional Investors are Investing In Money Market ETFs
Interesting article about an investment instrument I hadn’t thought about before.

D4L
Dividends Value
7 Dividend Stocks For The Ultimate In Deferred Gratification
Delivers a nice little jeremiad about self-discipline along with a good discussion of dividend stocks.

Mike Piper
Oblivious Investor
American Funds in Your 401k or IRA
Mike asks whether the third-largest mutual fund company’s products are really a good bet.

Bret
Hope to Prosper
My Visit with a Financial Advisor
Entertaining story about (yet another) encounter with a newbie in the finance industry.

RJ Weiss
Gen Y Wealth
How to Really Save Money Every Month
A one-step strategy for reliable monthly saving.

Kim Snider
Kimmunications from Kim Snider
Protect against inflation or preserve capital?
Asset allocation for a lengthy retirement

Charles
Money Green Life
Trade Stocks Like Stephen Strasburg Rookie Card
Trading encouragement

Squirrelers
Are You as Internationally Diversified in Stocks as You Should Be?
Do you fall into the trap of the home country bias?

2 Cents
Balance Junkie
10 Ways to Protect Yourself from a Double Dip
There’s a lot of debate about whether or not we’re headed into a slowdown or a double dip recession. These suggestions will help you protect your money if the economy dips. If it doesn’t, you’ll still be in great shape!

Jason
One Money Design
Why Your 401K May Not Be that Great and What to Do About It,
401K’s aren’t without challenges. If you have limited investment, consider these tips.

Wiley Strategies

♥ Tool Guy
Home Tool Review
Best Place to Buy Used Tools.
Think of it, guys (and gals)…a whole blog on tools! Weirdly, most of the posts are pretty interesting. This one is useful, especially for single or newly single women who suddenly find themselves in a house or apartment that needs some DIY care.

♥ Guest Post by Rachelle (Landlord Rescue)
Money Smarts
10 Resources to Check Before Renting an Apartment
Proprietor Mike describes the author as “a real estate guru who works as a property manager.” Excellent list for prospective renters to check out—issues that you might not otherwise think about.

♥ Michael
The DoughRoller
Which Netflix Plan is the Best Netflix Plan
A comprehensive and economical approach to determining which Netflix plan is the best bang for your buck. Very wiley!

Elle
Couple Money
Extended Warranties for Video Game Consoles
Should you get an extended warranty for your PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or Nintendo Wii? Find out how you can run the numbers and see if extended warranties are a good deal for you. This is a good survey of what different warranties cover.

Miss T
Prairie Eco-Thrifter
Finance and Emergency Kits: Be Prepared Not Surprised.
Lists several preparedness essentials.

Adam
Money Relationship
Spring Cleaning = Cash
Looking to scrounge up some extra cash? Check out this post to find out how to sell some of your junk for cash!

Mike
Saving Money Today
Organizing 101: Filing Your Bills Neatly
You’ll never forget to pay another bill if you follow this simple system for organizing your bills.

Simon Zhen
Realm of Prosperity
Unemployment” Is Life Giving You Lemons?
Includes a documentary video with a series of examples of people who took creative approaches to surviving unemployment.

Cara Henis
Taking Charge
Fashionable Ways to Fight Identity Theft
A witty series of product reviews. Some of these gadgets are so hilarious you have to check the post date to be sure it’s not April 1.

Ace
Ace of Wealth
5 Tips to Get Started on a Zero Based Budget
After a number of failed budgeting attempts, Ace has found a system that works well for him.

Peter
Bible Money Matters
How To Save Money On Health Care
Peter suggests several ways to save money when having a baby or other medical procedure.

Chris
Stumble Forward
How To Get Dirt Cheap Airline Tickets
Chris says he knows how to save tons of money when buying airline tickets.

Nicole
Rainy-Day Saver presents
How Do You File Your Paperwork?
Getting organized and staying organized can be a challenge.

Revanche
A Gai Shan Life
The Niceness Effect
Revanche realizes some unintentional savings with a frank approach.

Funny about Money
The Burglar Jamboree: Nine Ways to Protect Yourself
A few strategies—some of them not so obvious—proposed as a gang targets Funny’s neighborhood.

Mr. Credit Card
Ask Mr. Credit Card
Costco Membership Review
Overview of the benefits of Costco membership, with an assessment of the upgraded “Executive” membership

John at Lifestyle Inflation, guest post
Budgets Are Sexy
How To Get a Bonus Four Times a Year,
John observes that “extra” paychecks generated by weekly or semiweekly pay amount to de facto bonuses.

Money Mindsets

♥ JLP
AllFinancialMatters.com
Ten Questions for Jason Kelly, Author of “Financially Stupid People Are Everywhere”
A very interesting conversation with a fellow who’s not afraid to call a spade a spade.

Kim at MMI
Blogging for Change
What Does It Mean to Be ‘in Debt’?
Questions whether the extent of one’s debt should be taken into consideration when applying the term “in debt.”

Craig Ford
Money Help For Christians
Christian Lending | Should Lending Be Abolished?
Craig ponders a mind-bending question: “If borrowing enslaves then why aren’t more people going after lenders?” This is a thoughtful rumination on whether Christians should lend or borrow at all.

Jason
Live Real, Now
Building 5 Bad Habits
A short list of PF don’ts.

Bob
Christian Finances
Poverty or Simplicity: The Choice is Yours
A look at how we get to choose what whether we doing without or are lacking.

ctreit
Money Obedience
Obvious and Hidden Financial Risks
We also take financial risks, even if one refrains from “playing the markets.”

MD
Studenomics
3 Reasons Why Your New Business Won’t Succeed.
Good common sense here.

Doc S
Finance Your Life
Parents Make Bad Money Decisions
Doc S begins to realize that his aging parents are making questionable financial choices and worries about how to discuss it with them.

Miss Bankrupt
Miss Bankrupt
Symptoms of a Shopaholic
Miss B does does a bit of research into a pop-psych condition.

Real Estate

♥ Arjun
Investing Thesis
Correlation of mortgage rates with real housing prices: How increasing inflation could affect housing prices.
Interesting rumination on the possibility that inflation could push housing values down, supported with statistical analysis and graphs.

Tornado damage

Insurance

Bucksome
Buck$ome Boomer’s Journey to Retirement
An Odd Couple Team Up for Long Term Insurance
Nontraditional businesses are now selling insurance. Is that in the best interest of the consumer?

Travel

Jim
Wanderlust Journey
Passport Fees Increase July 13th.
I’ve always considered a passport something that ought to be in one’s emergency kit, in case some reason arises to make you want to leave the country quickly. This makes your passport one of the most expensive items in the kit!

♥♥♥

That’s it for this week. Next Monday the carnival will be hosted by NerdWallet. Be sure to send your submissions by the Sunday afternoon deadline through this handy form. And don’t fail to check out NerdWallet’s findings next week!

Images:

Rangeland Fence. U.S. Geological Service. Public Domain,
Winona Savings Bank Vault. Jonathunder. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Cathay Bank, Boston. House of Scandal. Public Domain.
Wile E. Coyote. Link to screenshot.
Sigmund Freud, by Max Halberstadt. Life Magazine, 1923. Public domain.
Tornado-damaged House, Declared a Total Loss by Insurer, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License
Cathay Pacific Airbus, by Arpingstone. Public Domain. aaaa

“Managed Recreation Opportunities”: Big Brother’s Slice of the Great Outdoors

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Years ago I edited a huge report that comes out once every five years for the state Parks and Recreation Department. In it, the bureaucratic authors wrote several times about “managed recreation opportunities,” a term that neatly described their attitudes about you and me and the wilderness. When you go for a hike in the Great Outdoors, you’re not alone: Big Brother is watching you.

Big Brother is installing toilets at the trailhead, pouring loose scree on the trail (erosion control, not a deliberate attempt to break your ankle), putting up signs to herd you this way and that, and roping off areas you oughtn’t to see (clearcut forests, for example). Such “improvements” to the out of doors often do little or nothing to change the reason you’re there, but are simply crowd control or worse, crowd encouragement. Fewer toilets and tourist centers would mean fewer people thumping the wilderness, for example…but without them, how could your “recreation opportunities” be properly “managed,” eh?

These “improvements,” which cost money, often entail erecting a gate across roads that access the “opportunity.” Usually the accompanying gatehouses stand empty. But in the most popular places, such as Oak Creek Canyon’s Slide Rock, recreation managers staff the gates with ticket-takers and charge people to use the parks and forests for which we’re already paying with our taxes. “No Parking” signs go up for miles along the roads leading to the parking lot, so you can’t use your public lands without paying a second tax in the form of a “parking fee.” Effectively what this does is make the site inaccessible to those who can’t or won’t pay extra to use it.

The City of Phoenix hosts a number of desert preserves, land that was donated or purchased to preserve small stretches of desert, mostly graced by low mountains, from the fierce sprawl of development. Our city parents watched what was going on with the state’s efforts to manage recreation opportunities and took the lesson.

Over the past few years they’ve quietly been installing gates across access roads to all the city’s desert parks. When I saw the one they stuck up at Piestewa Peak (formerly “Squaw Peak”; the difficult name is a politically correct bow to folks who think the Anglicized term is an insult to Indian women and an effort to honor a young Navajo woman who died in Iraq), I wondered when they were going to start charging people to use the hugely popular park.

Well, the answer is “now.”

The City recently announced it would start charging five dollars (!!!) to park your car at the mountain preserves!

Understand, large numbers of regulars use these parks every single day. I’ve mentioned my friend Garnett Beckman, who at 104 is still going strong. She was one of those regulars; at age 65, when she retired from teaching, she began climbing to the top of 1,190-foot Squaw Piestewa Peak every day. This produced an amazing effect on her health. She continued to hike there, all over the American Southwest, and all over the world…well into her 90s. When I went with her on one of her Christmas hikes to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, she was 84. So well known was she that a bench with her name on it has been installed three-quarters of the way up the mountain.

That would be one of the “improvements.” It’s gracious and lovely, as gestures go; but if you can hike 890 feet up a steep hill, you probably are tough enough to sit on a boulder or the ground to catch your breath.

Like me, Garnett was living on Social Security and not much else. There’s no way on God’s green earth that Garnett could have afforded to pay $5.00 a day for the privilege of parking her car at the base of the mountain. Neither can I.

I used to hike there or in North Mountain park several times a week myself. After I took on the 40-hour job at the Great Desert University, that went by the wayside, but one of my plans for this fall, after the weather cools and I’ll be teaching only one section at at time, was to get back into hiking.

Now that won’t be happening.

So loud was the uproar over the $5 soaking that the city backed down and said it would charge only $2 at the most popular parks, including Piestewa Peak and North Mountain. Mighty white of them.

For $50 you can get a pass to park for six months—a hundred bucks a year to use a park your tax dollars are already paying for.

These fees are supposed to pay for the “improvements” the City took upon itself to build. The gate, for example. The toilets. The running water. The tourist center.

North Mountain did not need a tourist center. While parking-lot bathrooms are nice for the kiddies, the truth is the trails are so sparsely vegetated there’s no place to hide to do your thing, and so most adults hold it until they can get back to their car and drive to to a bathroom. During the many years before some genius decided to run plumbing into the desert, the trails were never running sewers.

It is true that during the summer morons get themselves stuck up there on those hills with regularity. They don’t carry enough water (often they don’t carry any water!) or they go off the trails, and then they have to be hauled down on a litter or airlifted off the side of a mountain. But instead of gouging those of us who have better sense, why not charge the chuckleheaded and the feckless the full cost of sending a rescue team after them?

And it is true that the homeless mentally ill sometimes set up semipermanent camps in the desert parks, and so the city has to hire park rangers to chase them off. That problem could be resolved by providing decent mental health care services for everyone. Oh sorry, I know: s-o-o-o-cialism!

And it is true, I will not deny it, that a couple of times I’ve run into some scary dudes out there, including a man who chased me up a trail behind SqPiestewa Peak. None of the hired park rangers, however, were anywhere to be seen. I eluded him by hiding in a draw, pushing my bright blue day pack beneath me so my dun-colored clothes would blend in with the brush. Unless the city can put a cop at every bend in the trail, rather little can be done to stop that kind of thing. The laws have been changed so that women can carry concealed weapons into those parks, likely to be more effective protection than absent park rangers.

So what’s happening here is the City is using its “improvements,” most of them utterly unnecessary, as an excuse to start milking the cash cow that’s been standing there staring the city parents in the face all these years.

It’s amazing they haven’t gotten around to it before this. Piestewa Peak is so popular you can’t find a place to park at all when the weather is nice. Regulars who are acclimated to heat either go up there around five in the morning or wait until mid-day, when it’s too hot for most casual exercise walkers and families with young kids. Same is true on the north side of North Mountain, where you can access a milder trail than the one on the south side. The parks have been money waiting to happen for years. I guess, though, that the city council members figured they’d better wait for a really serious recession to pull this stunt; if they’d tried it with no obvious excuse, they’d have all been voted out of office forthwith.

So there you go. Another cut in our fair city’s quality of living.

w00t!! Funny Breaks into the Top 100

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OMG! Funny just made it onto the first page of WiseBread’s Top 100+ Personal Finance Blogs! Number 99 out of 100, with an Alexa ranking of 127,986.

This, thanks to Financial Samurai‘s Yakezie Challenge to bloggers who wanted to improve their traffic and various measures of popularity. The idea was, by July 4, to move your ranking from wherever it was up to the next rung. If, say, you were in the 200,000s (on a scale of 1 at the highest to a zillion at the leastest), you would vow to break into the 100,000s. If you were already there, you would try to get into the five digits. And so on. The theory behind Sam’s scheme: Power in numbers. Collaboration surely had to get us all somewhere.

Funny was a late-comer to this effort. Several friends urged me to join, but I was busy and came up with many excuses to drag my feet. Finally, a little more than a month ago, I downloaded the medallion, installed the Alexa toolbar, and announced FaM’s participation.

At the outset, FaM’s ranking was about 235,000. In just a week or two, this dropped to 199,463. It took 29 more days to arrive at today’s figure, which lifts the site into the Top 100.

So, who are these Yakezieites and what can they do? Just yesterday, Penny at The Saved Quarter published a really nice round-up of the some of the members’ best posts. This is a great place to go to find PF bloggers showing off their favorite work.

From the Yakezie site I found what appears to be the latest membership list and alphabetized it. There may be others who don’t appear on the list—I see a few names on Penny’s post that don’t seem to be here, while some here aren’t in hers. But it was the only membership list I could find. This, then, is my version:

• The Amateur Financier
• Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance
• Beating Broke
• Bible Debt
• Bucksome Boomer
• Budgeting in the Fun Stuff
• Canadian Finance Blog
• Car Negotiation Coach
• Chasing Prosperity
• The Centsible Life
• Christian Common Cents
• CJ Bowker
• Clarifinancial
• Consumer Boomer
• Cool to Be Frugal
• Couple Money
• Credit Card Chaser
• Dividend Monk
• Downturn Living
• Early Retirement Extreme
• Eliminate the Muda
• Ending the Rat Race
• Engineering Your Finances
• Evolution of Wealth
• Family Balance Sheet
• Financial Samurai
• Fiscal Fizzle
• Foreigner’s Finances
• Free from Broke
• Frugal Confessions
• Frugal Zeitgeist
• Funny about Money
• Girl with the Red Balloon
• Deliver Away Debt
• Invest It Wisely
• Joe Taxpayer
• Len Penzo dot Com
• Little House in the Valley
• Miss Thrifty
• Monevator
• Money Beagle
• Money Funk
• Money Reasons
• More Style than Cash
• My Financial Objectives
• My Journey to Millions
• The Millionaire Nurse
• My Money Minute
• Narrow Bridge Adventures
• Not Made of Money
• 151 Days Off
• One Money Design
• Out of Debt Again
• Peak Personal Finance
• Personal Finance by the Book
• Personal Finance Ninja
• PF Firewall
• Planting Dollars
• Punch Debt in the Face
• Rainy Day Saver
• Redeeming Riches
• The Saved Quarter
• Saving Money Today
• Simple Life in France
• Single Guy Money
• Single Mom, Rich Mom
• SmarterSpend.com
• Stay at Home Mom CFO
• Sweating the Big Stuff
• 20smoney
• Ultimate Money Blog
• Watson Inc.
• Wealth Pilgrim
• Well-heeled Blog
• Young and Thrifty
• Zach

Many of our doughty bloggers have reached the WiseBread Top 100. Some were already there at the time the Yakezie Challenge began. And others are closing in fast.

Bookmark Penny’s page and this page! Come back and check out each of these ambitious writers’ sites as you have time. You’ll find it’s very rewarding.

🙂

Hot and Muggy!

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Sun-limb-flare

Well, the power and water bills showed up at once yesterday. Not too bad: the electric was only $176.63 The water came in a dollar over budget at $126.42, but at least it didn’t out-zing than the power bill, as it did last month.

When it gets to be over 100 degrees, you have to water the potted plants every day. The roses, of which I have way too many, also need to be watered several times a week. And ohhh yeah: yesterday’s water bill also reflects the day I forgot and left the water running in the pool! Dumb tax!

So far, we’ve had a pretty temperate summer…only one 115-degree day. Now, though, we’re headed into monsoon season. At 5:30 this morning it was 90 degrees out there, and overcast. The air conditioning was roaring away when I awoke…had to jack it up to 85 to settle it down. Yuck. It’s hot and wet outdoors. This is the only really uncomfortable season in Arizona, and it will last through to the end of August.

That means the really big power bill is yet to come. The $175 is for June, a relatively cool month. The 115-degree day, when the A.C. thumped along alllll daayyyyyy long almost without stopping, occurred in July. The bill for that (and for most of the really hot and humid days) won’t come until next month. The past few days have seen the shaded back-porch thermometer at 110, and the unit has been running pretty much continuously all day long, except in the morning, when I shut it off until I can’t stand the heat any longer.

By comparison, last July’s power bill was $165.78, ten bucks less than this month’s gouge. Salt River Project, our power provider, has jacked up its rates. I forget exactly how much they managed to wangle out of the corporation commission. They tried to get an increase of 8.8%, but as I recall they dropped it, in the face of shrieks from customers, to 4.9%. That would’ve raised this year’s July bill to $174. Since I’ve kept the temps around 85 during the day—it has to go down to 78 or 80 at  night, or I can’t sleep at all—that means that even at uncomfortable temps the power bill continues to move toward unaffordable.

There’s no way to compare the water bill with last year’s, because the City of Phoenix screwed up the billing by canceling my service when someone gave them the wrong address to close out their own service. In July 2008, I had a $127 water bill. I wouldn’t be surprised but what the actual bill in 2010 was somewhere near that. In January the City also jacked up its rates, by 7.2% (!). I expect the fact that this month’s bill didn’t rise to $136, even after I almost overflowed the pool one fine day, reflects the savings realized from cutting down the endlessly thirsty, moribund ash tree.

Despite my intermittent bitching about it, the pool has earned its keep this year.

Earlier this season, I discovered that ten or fifteen minutes of paddling around in the pool really made the sore arm feel better. A lot better. So lately I’ve been setting the kitchen timer to go off every two hours, to force myself to get up off my duff and drop into the pool. While the injury is not healed and probably never will fully heal, it certainly is much improved. At least I’m not waking up in acute pain every morning, and I can now move the arm into most positions where it needs to go without too sharp a jab.

This has led me to rediscover what I’d long ago forgotten: the way I managed to  keep the power bills down in the gigantic, leaky house my ex- and I occupied was by staying wet all day. I used to shut off the AC the minute the man walked out of the house, and it would stay off until around 5:00 p.m.; because he got home around 6:30, the house would be cool by the time he came in from work. This was tolerable for me because I would run out to the pool about once an hour. In those days, I wore a swim suit and my hair hung down to my shoulders, and so my clothes and hair were damp almost all the time.

And that’s how you survive two months of 110-degree weather without bankrupting yourself. 😉

Image: Filamentary plasma in the sun’s chromosphere. NASA. Public domain.

Safeway’s Got a Meat Sale

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Just came back from the Safeway. They have incredibly gorgeous 7-bone chuck roasts on sale for $1.57 a pound!

Glorioski!!

Don’t know if this is nationwide or just local to the Phoenix area. Might be worth checking, though, if there’s a Safeway on your way while you’re out and about today.

I had mine ground into hamburger, which is my preferred way of serving up chuck. It makes THE best burger, and when you have the butcher grind it for you, at least you know roughly where it came from. Have them give you the bones to simmer with some onion, celery, carrots, and herbs to make an awesome beef broth.

The Burglar Jamboree: Nine Ways to Protect Yourself

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Yesterday at four o’clock in the morning La Bethulia was awakened by a knock on the front door. A cop was standing out there, inside the courtyard. When she opened the door to him, he said, “I think we have something of yours.”

And thereon hangs quite a tale.

As it develops, the entire neighborhood was targeted by a band of burglars last night. One of them entered La Maya and La Bethulia’s courtyard and stole a small, slick piece of a table, apparently to use as a tool in burglarizing their neighbor’s house.

Meanwhile, the Next-Door Neighbor Husband awoke some time before 4:00 and walked out to the kitchen to get a drink of water. As he went toward the front of the house, he noticed the lights were on in his car, which he’d parked in the driveway. Looking out through a window, what should he see but a guy methodically going through the vehicle, stealing everything that wasn’t red-hot or nailed down and neatly stacking it all in a box.

Rather than confront the creep or try to scare him off, he called 911.

The 911 dispatcher told him that all the cops in our area were occupied, dealing with other burglaries in progress in the neighborhood! They sent a squad car that was, at the time, clear over on the east side. It took about a quarter of an hour for this crew to arrive.

While the cops were in transit, Perp strolled across the street and broke into another car, having carried all the loot from Neighbor Husband’s car around the corner to his accomplice, who was waiting in the getaway car. The neighbors watched as he looted that vehicle, too.

Eventually the police arrived. They trapped and caught the perp, but the guy in the getaway car escaped, taking with him everything his pal had taken out of Neighbor Husband’s car, including about $700 worth of stereo equipment. The officers did retrieve the piece of junk Perp had lifted from La Bethulia and La Maya’s yard.

Perp, it develops, has quite the rap sheet. He and his colleagues live next-door to each other, apparently in a colony of felons. They targeted our neighborhood last night, spreading out to raid the properties that interested them most.

Fortunately, they didn’t enter Neighbor Couple’s or La Bethulia & La Maya’s homes. But as you can imagine, the women were pretty creeped out, realizing the perp had been right outside the vast and vulnerable banks of French doors and windows that look out onto the enclosed courtyard. La Bethulia attempted to repair the lock to the courtyard door before she left for work, succeeding only in jamming the mechanism. So now that will have to be fixed, presumably by a locksmith.

What does this mean for us bystanders? Knowing that our homes are targeted now or one day will be targeted, what can we do to defend ourselves?

• First and most obvious: don’t park your car on the street. Clean out the garage and park your cars inside.

If you live someplace where you have to park on the street, for heaven’s sake don’t leave any valuables in the car. And don’t equip your car with expensive electronic equipment!

• If you have to park your car outside, drive a junker.

Perp didn’t touch the aging Toyota La Bethulia had left in the driveway. She bought her daughter’s car recently, when Daughter moved to Hawai’i, and she hasn’t had time to sell it. So the decrepit car was sitting right under Perp’s nose. With richer pickings nearby, Perp left the pile of junk unmolested.

• Lock your doors and windows at night.

• Alarm your doors and windows.

If you don’t have a burglar alarm system (they’re expensive and a nuisance…some of us do without them), you can get small, unobtrusive alarms that emit an ear-splitting squeal when their magnetic connection is broken. They’re very cheap and very easy to install—they run on small batteries and require no wiring. I bought a package of ten at Costco, and found they work on screen doors as well as regular entry doors and windows. So I’ve got one on the sliding screen for the Arcadia door and one on the security door in front. Security doors are easy to break into…but won’t Perp be surprised when he takes a crowbar to that thing!

Amazon sells them in packs of four as Mini Door & Window Contact Alarms rel=”nofollow”. I think they’re well worth the low cost. Fifteen bucks is sure cheaper than whatever a burglary might cost you.

• Don’t own a lot of expensive junk.

This basic tenet of the frugalist works nicely to frustrate burglars. SDXB was visited by burglars the night he moved into his house around the corner from me. Foolishly, we remarked that he could stay at my house that night, since his house was chaos…and we made that remark in front of the moving men. Equally foolishly, he had an NRA sticker on his truck, advertising his interest in guns. That night “someone” came through the only door that didn’t have a deadbolt on it (interestingly, they didn’t try any of the other doors or windows) and went through all his boxes looking for weapons. He had stored his guns elsewhere during the move, but they took a collector’s bow and all the knives and machetes he’d collected during his military travels. The bow was the only thing that really mattered…otherwise, his possessions came from thrift stores. Poor guys—they made a wasted trip.

• Don’t put an NRA sticker on your vehicle.

This is a big red flag that says “I have a gun in my house.” Thieves are attracted to guns as flies to molasses.

• Lock weapons, cash, negotiable instruments, and jewelry in a safe.

Gun safes are expensive, but your investment in arms also represents a big expense. More to the point, though, no lawful gun owner wants to contemplate having his weapons used in a crime or shipped across the Mexican border to be used in that country’s drug wars.

Be sure your safe is bolted to the floor.

• Insure your home and its contents.

If you do own anything of value, get a rider to cover it. While a rider does add a small amount to your homeowner’s policy, if you have to make a claim, you’ll be glad you planned ahead.

• Don’t even think a dog is going to protect your property or you from a burglar or home invader.

Though I had one German shepherd that chased off a home invader, that is not what dogs normally do. If you’re not home, it’s pretty easy to make nice to the dog. If it’s a protective or mean dog, all the burglar has to do is shoot it.

In our part of the country, burglars are given to tossing poison over the fence where targeted homes have a large dog. A day or two after the dog is out of the way, they come visiting again.

Rely on locks, alarms, and common sense instead. They’re a lot more reliable, and it’s fairer to the dog.