Coffee heat rising

How to get rich on Black Friday

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Saint_Nicholas
Saint Nicholas

Comes the American Express statement in the mail, bearing good tidings. In only two more months, our annual rebate will be comin’ your way.

Here’s a strategy, we’re told, “to give yourself or your family something special from Costco”: use the holidays as an opportunity to buy, buy, BUY and charge it all up on your credit card!!!

Woo. Hooo. I can hardly wait to run out to the sales tomorrow and rack up several thousand dollars worth of debt, so I can get a few bucks back.

As  practical matter, if you have one of these cash-back cards and you religiously pay off the balance every month, you don’t have to go out and spend yourself stupid during the holidays (or any other time) to get a nice kickback. I put all my budgeted discretionary spending on this card—that is, everything that is not a regularly recurring utility or insurance bill—and pay the entire balance promptly. AMEX says the rebate I’ve accrued so far is $276.04.

Nice. That will cover the cost of draining and refilling the pool. Merry Christmas!

The ghost of Christmas Present visits Ebenezer Scrooge
The ghost of Christmas Present visits Ebenezer Scrooge

Images:
St. Nicholas of Myra: Cultural Universe. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 Wikipedia Commons.
Ghost of Christmas Present: John Leach, from Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.


Rent-a-solar-panel

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In this month’s Scientific American, writer Christopher Mims reports that a few enterprising businessmen have figured out a way around the daunting cost of installing solar panels on private homes: don’t buy the things—rent them.

It’s a brilliant idea. Here in Arizona, where a cloudy day is so rare as to elicit excited news reports from local television stations, the one thing that keeps people from covering their rooftops with silicon is the breathtaking expense. My electrician, who solarized his own home, said it would cost $30,000 to switch my house to solar power. It nets out to around $17,000 after various government rebates. But still…

That’s a lot of $300 summer power bills, and, as much as I’d dearly love to get off the grid, it’s way more than I can afford pay for a principle.

One of these outfits, SolarCity, proposes to install the panels on your home for nothing and lease you the equipment. The combination of a reduced power bill and the monthly lease payment represents a significant savings on your power company’s bill (or so it is claimed). And SolarCity points out that on average power companies have been jacking up the cost of electricity about 5 percent every year, so if you lock in your rate with a several-year-long lease agreement, your effective savings increase at 5 percent a year.

In a slightly different spin on this idea, SunRun, a company based in San Francisco and serving Northern California, charges around $1,000 up front and then sells you the power. Power costs, we are told, should be less than or about the same as your power company’s, but one way or the other, you get that comforting self-righteous feeling of powering your home with “clean” solar energy. It would be good to know what’s involved in the large-scale manufacture of solar panels and their ancillary equipment, but for the nonce we won’t look too hard at that issue.

Apparently a number of cities and states are also experimenting with ways to make retrofitting your home affordable, and many will provide rebates for residents who install various kinds of energy-efficient devices. Mims reports that Berkeley and Boulder will lend homeowners enough to pay for solar panels and installation, allowing them to repay the loan over 20 years as part of their property tax bill. There’s no sign of these programs at either city’s site, and so it’s impossible to tell whether such programs, if they exist at all, would save you anything month to month.

At this time, the cost of rooftop solar still exceeds the cost of buying power from a local utility. For me, that’s the bottom line: my summer bills are already way more than I can afford, and they never will go down. I don’t like leasing, which resonates of debt payment. And I’m certainly not going to lock myself into another $30,000 worth of debt slavery to install my own system. But I might put those compunctions aside for a no-money-down arrangement that would guarantee lower power bills than what I pay now.

Unclear what happens if you sell your house while you’re in the middle of a lease with an outfit like SolarCity. It would not be good if you had to pay the whole cost of the solar array out of the proceeds of the sale.To recover it, you’d have to jack up the sale price about 30 grand—good luck with that, anytime in the foreseeable future! Since yours would be the name on the lease, transferring the monthly payments to the buyers would be problematic: if they default, you could end up having to pay for their power until the lease expires.

What’s your take on this? Would you lease a solar power system from a private company?

Let us count our blessings

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How lucky we are. How incredibly lucky we are to have been born when we were born and where we were born.

Every now and again, I cruise the Web looking for my grandparents and great-grandparents, whom I never saw and about whom I know only some tantalizing hand-me-down legends. Because the pool of public records online grows deeper with each passing day, occasionally I come across something new.

Last night, what should I find but the 1900 census records listing my father’s parents, living way to hell and gone out in some godforsaken patch of east-central Texas. My father was not yet a proverbial twinkle, but both of his brothers had come into being in the early 1890s.

His mother was born in Arkansas. Her father came from Ohio, her mother from Indiana. His father said he was born in Illinois and that his father came from Tennessee.

With a banjo on his knee, no doubt.

By the time my father came on the scene, they were living near or in Fort Worth. He lied about his age as soon as he could get away with it and ran off to join the Navy. He used to say the best thing about being from Texas was being from Texas: as far from it as you could get. I found Google satellite and street-level photos of the wide spot in the road where his parents and brothers must have lived in 1900. Gives technicolor meaning to my father’s words.

Ever have the privilege of visiting east-central Texas in a blue norther? God help us, it’s as cold as you’ll ever get, this side of Antarctica. That’s when you’re inside a house. The icy wind seeps in through every microscopic crack it can find. Imagine living through a Plains winter in a tent, a dugout, a mud hut, or a log cabin! Imagine working through a Texas or an Arkansas summer without air conditioning. Imagine what Illinois and Ohio would have been like before there were cities, before towns, before even a lean-to on the grassland.

Sometimes I think about those folks and I wonder: what on earth were they coming from that this looked good? It’s hard to conceive of the desperation, the poverty that would spur a man or a woman to take off across the Great Plains on a horse or a wagon. Think of that. It’s the equivalent of climbing on a camel and riding into the Sahara Desert. Imagine how hard they must have worked, how hungry they must have been, how tired they must have been, how sick they must have gotten. Imagine giving birth—facing down death to do it—in the middle of nowhere. Really, literally, nowhere.

What drove those people?

We are so lucky to have a roof over our heads and four walls (sometimes more!) around us. Miraculously lucky to be able to turn on a heater when the cold wind wails in from the north, to flick a switch to pump in cool air when the sun starts to bake, to make our livings as wage slaves rather than having to dig our lives out of the rocky soil or chase cattle across the desertifying plains. Lord, what lives they led.

And what lives we lead!

Where my great-grandfather hunted buffalo
Where my great-grandfather hunted buffalo

Image: The Llano Estacado, Texas. Twenty-First Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey. Wikipedia, Llano Estacado.

Would you buy a house near a Walmart?

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Mighty Bargain Hunter has a new money site, called Cash Commons. It’s pretty interesting: readers ask questions, others answer them, and people earn “reputation points” whose value is unclear but which make for a fun gimmick.

One of the questions, “Is having a Walmart hundreds of feet from a property a good or a bad idea,” led me to draft a response that was way too long for the site, which apparently is designed for the short & the quick. The more I thought about it, the more my response began to look like a whole new post. So I decided to cut it short there and hold forth at greater length here at FaM.

There’s a Walmart within walking distance (more or less) of the house M’hijito and I co-own in mid-town Phoenix. His neighborhood is on the low side of middling; it’s one of the few in-town areas that have been seriously thumped by the recession—in general the worst-affected districts are outlying suburbs. The main source of the property devaluation in that specific residential area, sandwiched between a slum and a very upscale district, has not been the nearby mall—also the scene of a Costco and a Target—but the many foreclosures that have driven down comparables.

The shopping center, which is extremely busy, has a correspondingly high rate of car break-ins, thefts, and robberies. So, when you look at one of those online maps of crime rates, it appears that the entire area has a high crime rate, even though the neighborhood to the east of it, where the pretty little house resides, is relatively safe. This factor undoubtedly will influence some potential buyers.

The area just to the south of it, on the other hand, consists of run-down apartments and is the scene of almost nightly cop helicopter fly-overs. A few years ago, a friend of mine, who lived in one of those dumps, was murdered in the parking lot by some guys who were trying to steal his car. The low-rent apartments were there before the WalMart went in and probably were neither created nor worsened by the nearby commerce.

Reds show high criime areas, yellow middling rates, greens relatively lower rates. The Walmart shopping center forms the bull's-eye here.
Reds show high-crime areas, yellow middling rates, greens lower rates. The Walmart shopping center forms the bull’s-eye.

The City has built a light-rail line that passes about a half-mile from the house and has a terminal in that Walmart shopping center. This has turned a substantial part of the mall’s parking into a park-‘n’-ride for those who are brave enough to leave their cars there. We are told that light-rail is supposed to increase property values in bordering neighborhoods. So far we haven’t seen that happen in the area; this could be attributable either to the scruffy shopping mall and tenement district or to the deprecession.

On a slightly tangential note, friends owned a house that backed onto a Fry’s Supermarket. In our area, Fry’s caters to a downscale crowd, and in this case that was true with a vengeance. The Fry’s and the shopping center owners were particularly insouciant about the neighboring residences. They arranged for garbage to be collected (illegally) in the wee hours of the morning (commercial garbage collection sounds like a wrecking yard—SDXB and I lived several blocks away and could not leave a window open on a nice night without being awakened by the racket) and allowed homeless mentally ill to camp in the parking lot and throw trash, garbage, and human waste over the neighbors’ walls.

At the top of the bubble, the couple arranged to have a new house built.  Lacking a crystal ball, they decided to stay in their existing home while construction proceeded, rather than selling right away and squatting in a rental until the new house was ready. We know what happened next. After the market crashed, they couldn’t even give away the old house. No one in their right mind would buy a house—or rent!—behind a Fry’s, not when far more desirable property could be had for a song. After several years of struggling to sell it or to keep it rented, they finally defaulted.

The bank hasn’t been able to unload it, either.

Extrapolating from that, I’d advise that the instant you get wind of a new Walmart or any other large commercial retail about to go in near your home, sell!

Image: Phoenix Police Department Uniform Crime Reports, Monthly Maps, Property Crimes

Paper

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Like dust, paper sifts into my house and settles on the countertops and furniture. If I don’t get to it, before long it stacks up in great dunes of paperwork, forms to be filled out, bills to be paid, statements to be entered in Quicken or Excel, junk to be filed away. Whether its ultimate destination is a return envelope, a file folder, or the trash can, every single piece of it has to handled, examined, thought about, and acted upon.

I’ve known for a while that I would have to get to the stacks on the dining-room table and on my desk. It couldn’t be put off another day, nevermind the stack of student papers and the remaining work to do in the index of medieval & Renaissance history, forget the housework that hasn’t been done in three or four weeks, the empty gas tank, the long shopping list hanging on the fridge. Somewhere deep in the pile was a Visa bill and a car insurance bill, both of which needed to be paid. Soon. Maybe yesterday, for all I knew.

So, having overslept Saturday morning, along about 8:30 I dove into the dreaded task. And…

It took a good four hours to dig out from under all that crap!!! Filling out the forms and copying all the receipts and supporting information for the Avesis claim was probably the most infuriating. Why is it necessary to ask the customer for policy numbers, group numbers, and individual numbers that do not appear on the insurance card, were never sent in the mail, and have to be retrieved by calling the company? What is the point of demanding repetition of facts that are already in the company’s records?

And how, pray tell, do my gender and birthdate bear on my purchase of one, count it, one pair of cheap glasses? What is the point of wasting paper, ink, postage, and my time on this redundant and irrelevant trivia? By the time I finished, I’d filled out a two-page form and photocopied nine more pieces of paper to stuff into the envelope with it. Postage consumed two of the USPS’s pricey little stamps.

Then there’s the form required to ask for the $10,000 of tax-free funds residing in a Northwestern Mutual whole life policy. Is there a reason a form has to be incomprehensible? What, for example, do you suppose is meant by “cash value of,” “face value of,” and “to cost basis”? These terms have exactly zero meaning to me, and I can’t even imagine where to go to look them up and try to figure out how they apply to my particular request, which is a simple “please give me back my money.” No one’s home at Northwestern Mutual, of course: on a Saturday, only the customers have to work.

The Hartford sent not only the current policy and two copies of the piece of paper the State of Arizona requires one to purchase each year and carry around in one’s car, but also three more envelopes full of paper. Lots of dense copy there, too, much of it mind-numbing. The vast amount this company charges to insure my aged car, OF course, requires me to get online and transfer funds from the money market to a checking account, another time-consuming bit of ditz that has to be entered in Quicken, after the credit union’s receipt is printed out and filed. More paper, more ink: more of mine.

By the time I was finished, along about half-past noon, the house was still filthy and the larder still bare. Half the day was absorbed by dealing with paperwork, much of it pointless and way too much of it invasive demands for information that is strictly none of anyone’s business.

A nation of sheep is what we are. If, as a people, we were not passive and indolent, we would rise up in full rebellion at corporate demands for private information that go way beyond anything needed to get a given job done, at the deluge of unnecessary and wasteful paperwork, and (most infuriatingly!), at the newest trend that requires consumers to download and print out online forms, thereby wasting their own ink and paper for no very good reason.

Allons, enfants de la patrie!
To the barricades!

What’s more important than a Costco card?

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Student A (engaging a discussion about the current Presidential administration): I registered to vote, but I didn’t actually vote. I wish I had…

Student B: When I turned 18, I got my Costco card. Getting your Costco card is more important than voting!

😆  🙄  😆