Coffee heat rising

A$k and Ye Shall Re¢eive

by

A small mercy: The air-conditioning guy returned to the downtown house to fix the rattle in the motor he’d installed in the swamp cooler. As you may recall, they clipped us to the tune of $500 for that job, something that frosted my cookies because the guy showed up when neither of us was there (the roommate was in the offing) and they didn’t bother to call and let us know how much it was going to be.

Although a swamp cooler is vastly cheaper to operate than refrigeration, $500 is way, way more than the cooler will save on electric bills this summer. If M’hijito had known how much they intended to charge, he would have told them not to do it.

Then about three days after the work was done, the thing developed a rattle. So I called and bellyached. They said they’d send him back to fix it, free of charge. Last I heard, the thing was working OK.

Sooo… Friday evening along comes a bill in the mail: $85.

Ever notice how announcements that agitate you always arrive on Friday, about an hour after the close of business hours?

In-freaking-furiating! The main reason I’m $94 in the hole right now is that the dentist and the air-conditioning guy joined forces to clean out my checking account last month.

So I called and pointed out that they didn’t leave me with enough cash to pay this bill, and besides, they said they’d get the job done right without charging us for it.

She said, “Just void it!”

Done!

Whenever you have a question about a bill or—let’s be frank—get even a whiff of a possibility that you can work a better deal for yourself, A$K! Merchants do want to keep your business, and they often will try to give you a break if you have a good argument for it.

Frugal Scholar reminded me this morning that everyone has been urging me to take the unfortunate progressive glasses back to Costco and ask for a refund. Since I paid for them last November, I kinda doubt they’re going to do anything for me. But at her urging, I’ve decided to try it.

What can they do? Throw me out of the place? I doubt it.

The worst that will happen is they’ll tell me “no,” and then I’ll wander off to the cooler room and buy the bottle of orange juice I need.

Back in the Red Again

by

{gasp} Maybe I should type this entire post in virtual red “ink.” Today is the seventh—fourteen more days to go until the current budget cycle resets—and I’m already $93.77 in the hole.

Augh, augh, and augh!

Well, two causes for this predicament:

1. I bought that Shark vacuum cleaner from Costco that I mentioned, after having mulled it over for several days. By the time the obnoxious 9.3% sales tax was added, the $158 selling price ballooned to $174.

It’s too late to return the clunky Eureka I bought from the Fry’s electronics last March. What a piece of junk! So that’s about $300 ultimately paid in search of a decent vacuum.

2. My car was way, way, way overdue for an oil change, tire rotation, safety check, and windshield wiper change. That trip racked up an $86 bill.

Lordie! The last time I had the car serviced was in August of 2009!!!!! Inexcusable. Plus the car has needed new windshield wipers for a year. They had reached the point where their only use was to mix dirt with water and smear it around like paint. Artistic, but hard to see through.

So, those two things pushed me into the red. The vacuum cleaner alone would’ve done it. Add the car service, and now I’m in the hole with two weeks to go and not enough food to last that long.

Last month was the first time this year I’ve run in the red on the discretionary budget. But it was huge: $1,600!

That notwithstanding, I still have some money in savings, and so there’s something left to pay for the car and the vacuum cleaner. But I can’t keep on drawing down savings to meet living expenses.

Ordinarily, a fair amount is left in each month’s nondiscretionary budget—money set aside to pay utilities, Medicare premiums, and long-term care insurance. But summer is now here. Yesterday was a 110-degree day, and it’ll be the same today, cooling to 106 Wednesday and Thursday. That won’t max out the air conditioning bill (the electric company walloped us with a hefty rate increase this spring, BTW), but I expect this month’s bill will be close to $200. Same with water: if you want anything in the yard to stay alive, you have to run the water. The watering system is now on its summer schedule—and I can tell you one thing for sure: drip watering is about as overrated in the economy department as the digital thermostat. The water bills go through the roof when that thing is running. Plus of course I have to refill the pool every day; it loses an inch a day to evaporation.

If the electric and water hit their maximum levels this month, I’ll have $2.59 left in the nondiscretionary fund come June 30.

All of this is happening, natch, when no income other than Social Security and a pittance from Fidelity is flowing in to the coffers. No word from the college about when they’re going to pony up the first payment on the stipend they say I’ll get for preparing the online course.

The problem with that is they’re making me schlep up to the college every week, and that runs up the gas bill. Eighty bucks down the drain there, and two more weeks to go. Just bought gas yesterday; the last fill-up was 12 days ago. So there’s an outside chance I might make it to the end of the budget cycle without pumping gas again…but not likely.

It’s impossible not to drive around this city. Today, for example, I have to deposit some checks for the S-corporation. The credit union is way to hell & gone up at 43rd and Thunderbird, a fourteen-mile round trip. The last time I tried mailing a deposit to the CU, using their self-addressed envelope, they lost the checks. It was over two weeks before the deposits cleared, just as I was about to call clients and tell them to cancel payment.

And a couple of days ago I went over to the downscale Albertson’s, which theoretically is within walking distance, to buy some salad to feed our bloggers’ group. They didn’t have the basic things I needed to make a very ordinary meal. Wanted some cherry tomatoes: the only ones they had were in plastic boxes, and in each box about half were shriveling up like raisins. So ended up having to drive seven miles, round trip, to the Safeway to buy salad stuff!

M’hijito gave me $22 to reimburse for dinner out a week ago. I can apply that toward groceries. Plus I have a few paper dollars stashed away from other reimbursements. Over the past year, I’ve been squirreling that money for these summer months, when I figured to run short on funds. But I’d expected that would happen in August.

Not June.

Three Don’t-Miss Personal Finance Posts, Plus One

by

Here is a story that truly is not to be missed: Donna Freedman contributes a retrospective post to Get Rich Slowly describing what happened after she published an amazing post at MSN.com about getting by on $12,000 a year. Lordie, but this woman can write! Follow more of her stuff at Surviving and Thriving.

Frugal Scholar, who likewise is no slouch in the writing department, reflects on proposed rule changes governing private student loans, bringing a fresh point of view on the issue.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche reports success at returning a defective sweater to a reluctant retailer and proves that persistence pays dividends.

And Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has a new do: she’s migrated her site from Blogger to WordPress. The new look packs a lot of features into one page and yet keeps the body copy clean and easy to read. Click on the banner and a new image comes up! Some of the scenics are really spectacular—I love the pearlescent sky; reminds me of Arizona.

Summer’s here!

by
the-sun

Welp, it’s supposed to hit 110 sometime in the next few days. The flowers are frying, and summer has finally arrived.

A few blogging friends came over yesterday. The pool was warm enough to swim in but still cool enough to be refreshing—not yet bathwater temp but getting there.

A 110-degree day means the air conditioning will have to run all day long. Hateful. I don’t like having to keep the house closed up 24 hours a day. It’s stuffy and claustrophobic. And the expense! OMG! I’m expecting bills to rise well over $200, and that’s if I keep it uncomfortably warm inside the house. If you want it cool enough so that you don’t break a sweat walking to the bathroom, you’ll pay $300 for the privilege.

According to Wunderground, though, night-time temps should stay in the 70s—tonight it cools to 77; on Thursday (supposedly) it drops all the way to 70. So maybe I can shut the AC off at night. That will help some.

And in my new penury, I’m going to have to wrestle with the ever-annoying digital thermostat, the contraption that decidedly does not save on power consumption. Right now it’s set to cool the house to a temperature where I can sleep at night and then go back up to stifling about midnight, when I hope to be out cold. That’s going to have to stop: cooling the place into the 70s, even for three or four hours, is now outside my budget.

I need to find a new air-conditioning contractor. Our regular outfit has gone to seed. In addition to having installed said thermostat, which appears to be inappropriate for the heat pump on my house, they gouged us $500 for a repair on the downtown house’s swamp cooler that we would not have done had they called first and said what they intended to charge, and now they’re trying to nick us another $85 to have the guy come back and fix it because he didn’t install the pump right! I’m totally fed up with that outfit and am going to call my neighbor Sally’s AC guy to do the annual service on my unit, which my guys have quietly forgotten.

I’m sorry to can them, because I know the company has been struggling through the deprecession—they’ve laid off all their staff but one guy, who apparently is not busy full time, because they cut his salary to half-time. But we can’t support their business single-handed, which is evidently what they expect. Hope Sally’s guy is OK…the air conditioning business around here is awash in incompetents and crooks. She’s a wily old gal, though, and so I have some hope that he can do the job without cleaning out my bank account.

Maybe.

You know you slept through the end of the Pleistocene when…

by
Apatosaurus

…you ask a young woman in the glassware department of Gargantuan Booze Warehouse if they have any highball glasses and she doesn’t know what a “highball” is.

…you’re glad to see the latest shades of green, brown, gold, and orange back in style, because now you can haul out the old 1970s knick-knacks you stashed in the back of the closet because you could never bring yourself to throw them way.

…the piece of junk you gave to the Salvation Army last year is going for $500 at Snooty Antiquities.

…you think capris are just as unflattering now as they were back when you wore them and called them “pedal-pushers.”

…a front-loading washer brings to mind all those sudsy overflows and all those back-aches from bending over to unload and reload the darn thing.

…you find yourself instructing young women about how to hang their laundry out on a line.

…young girls tell you that women in the 50s dressed elegantly to do housework, and then say they know that’s so because they saw it on I Love Lucy reruns. 🙄

…you still have an Encyclopaedia Britannica in your bookcase.

…you know how to use an Encyclopaedia Britannica.

…you have a smallpox vaccination scar.

…you can remember when all women were SAHMs—or 99.8 percent of them, anyway.

…you think that holidays once came on specific days of the year, not on Monday. Come to think of it, school’s not supposed to start till after Labor Day, is it?

…you know how to use a typewriter.

…the last time you worked as a secretary you were called a “secretary,” not an “administrative assistant.”

…cheap tumblers remind you of the glasses and mugs gas stations used to give away.

…you miss having a gas station attendant fill your car, check the oil, and wash the windshield.

…you still use a lamp, tableware, wicker hamper, or other valuable purchased with S & H Green Stamps.

😀 Are you a survivor of some prior geologic age? What memories do you own to prove it?

Image: © S&H Green Stamps, date unknown. The fair use rationale for this use, educationally illustrating an article mentioning the depicted subject, is that the reduced size image of a trading stamp has no substantial impact on the commercial value of the original, and cannot replace it in the marketplace or diminish its value there (which is in any event negligible).