Coffee heat rising

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!

😆  🙄  😆

Assets reviving

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Well, even though unemployment doesn’t seem to get any better, the economy is said to be recovering. And as a matter of fact, my savings are starting to come back. Last March, investments hit a low point of $420,565, having lost just under $160,000 in ten months. This month, the balance is at $480,753, a $60,188 gain in 8½ months. Not bad, considering that after we were told our office would be closed and our entire staff canned, I used $25,000 of my savings to pay off the second mortgage on my house and that I pay my $800 share of the mortgage on the downtown house with proceeds from those investments.

My financial advisers hope I can refrain from drawing down anything, including the mortgage payments, during 2010. I’m cashing in part of a whole life policy to cover that bill—it will pay the entire year’s worth. They think that if I can leave the money alone for a year, it will recover its former glory. With a $60,000 increase in less than a year, that almost sounds believable.

I’d be happy if it would come back up to $500,000—just another 20 grand—and stay there. A four percent drawdown from that, plus Social Security plus part-time teaching, would yield a net income just slightly less than GDU pays me. And that would cover the bills reasonably well, even though Medicare will drive my monthly costs significantly higher in retirement.

If I’d left the $25,000 in savings instead of using it to pay off the loan, of course, the total would be back at $500,000. But consider: the loan cost $169 a month. Four percent of $25,000 prorated monthly is less than half of that. And if anything happened so that I couldn’t make those payments, I could have lost my home. Now it’s very unlikely that anybody is going to take my house away from me. Not even if the market crashes so spectacularly that I lose every penny.

Let us watch and wait.

Image: ScooterSES, Tokens from the U.S. Deluxe Edition Monopoly.
Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons

Do you use all your vacation time?

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Surf off Sutro Baths, San Francisco
Surf off Sutro Baths, San Francisco

Brip Blap posts an interesting rumination on the question of why Americans tend not to take all the vacation time they’ve earned. I sure don’t: my most recent paycheck says I have 324 hours coming (with almost seven hours accumulating each pay period, that will come to more than 350 by the time the job ends), and I’ve used 138 hours so far this year.

Do you take all your vacation time? If not, why not?

Personally, I don’t because I get so much vacation time that if I took it all, no work would ever get done around that place. Or so I’d like to think. 😉

But the truth is, several factors come into play:

• The university will pay me for 176 hours at termination. I don’t want to accidentally eat into that time.
• I get a lot of holiday time anyway, as a state employee.
• My job allows me to telecommute. Cutting out that 44-mile round trip to campus is almost the same as a vacation.
• My house is every bit as nice as any resort, with lovely outdoor sitting areas (and indoor ones, too) and a beautiful pool. So most of the time I am on vacation, even when I’m working.
• There’s no one to take care of the house and the dog while I’m gone.
• I’m too cheap to spend money on hotels and restaurants.
• I’m not fond of camping.
• I don’t enjoy traveling alone and have no one to travel with.
• I hate eating out alone.
• I’ve already traveled plenty and, having seen quite a lot of the world, feel little need to see it again.
• And I really, really, really dislike airports and airplane travel.

Got any better excuses?

Why I secretly feel glad my job is ending…

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Overjoyed, even.

Today I started about 8:30 ayem and worked straight through until 6:30 p.m. without a break—well, with one break long enough to bolt down a piece of cheese slapped on some dry bread—typing the last stage of an index.

My RA had compiled about half the book’s index; I took the rest. It was possible for us to do this because the book is a collection of essays. I was careful to give her essays whose subject matter would not much overlap the pieces I kept for myself to work on. Late last night, she e-mailed me her list of subject headings and subheadings (unformatted). I was just finishing the job of plowing through and marking up my  half of the page proofs, so today had to go through the proofs and compile my list, which I entered in the file she’d sent me. Then I had to alphabetize the headings; format each entry with indented subheads; alphabetize the subheads; format the entire 28-page document properly; proofread.

The word-processing alone occupied ten hours. Ten of the most mind-numbing hours you can imagine.

Two things on this earthly plane, and only two things, are more boring than compiling an index: formatting it and proofreading it.

It’s not that writing an index is especially difficult. Really: in principle it’s pretty simple. But I do have to say that reading scholarly copy for a fourth time, after having gone through each article at least three times during the editing process, is less than a thrill a minute. One of these articles is 148 typeset pages long, and it requires the indexer to ponder a minute discussion of homage and castle-guard among provincial aristocrats in 13th-century France, brought to you in English, French, and Latin. Subject matter is arcane, language is demanding, and the indexer has to know what she’s doing and stay awake to do it.

When reading freshman comp papers begins to look good, you know you’re in trouble.

This is not the first time I’ve felt my job is excruciatingly boring. Far from it. Indeed, when I first noticed  the thought that entered my mind as the car rolled onto the freeway, outward-bound, was “I can’t wait to get home,” it occurred to me to wonder why I found myself anxious to leave the office while I was still 22 miles away from the office. Didn’t take long to figure it out: bored.

I’ve been so bored, I could barely stand to drive out to that place. So bored I have seriously wondered if I could make a living stringing beads and selling the jewelry at craft fairs and on Etsy.com. So bored I’ve considered buying a run-down cold-water shack on the desert and becoming an anchorite.

Understand, the journal that publishes arcane studies of medieval and Renaissance history is the most interesting and best written of our client publications! Indeed, it’s a very fine journal, featuring top-flight scholarship by highly professional, often senior scholars. This is a claim we cannot make about all our client journals. The math journal is pretty good, except of course that none of us can understand a thing the mathematicians are saying.  And any day, thank you, I’d rather read about medieval cartularies than contemplate the maunderings of radical feminists indulging in cultural studies, especially when they turn their criticism to the white male hegemony of the hard sciences, a subject of which few if any of them have the vaguest comprehension. On the other hand, one has to say the radical feminists do not bore: they annoy. Especially when they’re in prima donna mode, which, given the fact that professionalism is apparently part of the white male hegemony, most of them are, most of the time.

Along about 5:00 I was reduced to tears when, asked to do a replace-all on a selection, my computer reformatted the entire document…and then would not undo!

I’d made it to the Rs. The stuff before the Rs was more or less OK, although it would require close reading and some fixing. But everything after the Rs was scrambled eggs. The choices were to crash out of the file and revert to an older saved version, thereby throwing out about two hours’ worth of dreary, mind-numbing, ditzy, tedious, dry, eyeball-parching work, or to unscramble the eggs. I chose unscrambling.

Finally finished and shot the file back to my RA for her proofreading (lucky she!), just in time to race out the door to choir practice.

This is the last significant job that remains to me to do for the Great Desert University. My beloved employer owes me something in excess of 350 hours of accumulated vacation time, but it will pay for only 176 of those hours. So, the minute this journal goes to the printer—which it should do by Thanksgiving, with any luck at all—I am gone. Out. Exit stage left, never to return.

And never, ever to write another index again.

Beads, anyone?