Coffee heat rising

Time to dump the credit cards?

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Credit-card lenders, as predicted, are using the new credit-card consumer protection law to upgrade their profits. For a round-up of the latest “improvements,” take a look at Karen’s post at Smart Spending. Some of them are enough to make you consider canceling your credit cards altogether.

Citibank, for example, has raised its interest rates to almost 30 percent! Think of that. And especially think of the tricky ways credit-card interest is applied, so as to soak you on new charges made after the interest kicks in.

Karen reports that Citi proposes to gouge an annual fee of $30 to $90 from customers who have the temerity to charge less than $2,400 a year.

It’ll be interesting to see what else develops on this front. Personally, I never carry cash. I charge most purchases on Costco’s American Express card because AMEX gives a nice cash kickback; the very few merchants who won’t accept American Express get paid with a Visa from Chase. Every month I pay off the charges in full. Neither of these worthy organizations charges a fee.

Yet.

The minute one of them does, though, the card gets canceled. IMHO, credit-card lenders already earn plenty of cash from my purchases, even though I never pay a penny of interest. For every card transaction, the merchant pays the card issuer a fee. The truth is, you and I and everyone else pay the fee: of course, the merchant’s cost is passed along to the customers. The card issuer’s contract forbids the merchant from offering a discount for cash purchases. This means that everyone, even people who never charge anything on a card, has to pay extra for every item in the store. In other words, Dear Reader, we’re all already paying for the privilege of living in a credit-card culture. Card issuers earn quite enough from usurious interest rates and nicking merchants—they don’t need to zing you’n’me with annual fees to make a nice profit.

Evidently I’m not alone in that opinion. Karen’s Smart Spending article notes that a third of credit card customers have canceled their cards, half of them specifically because of changes such as higher interest rates or new fees.

Ever ask yourself how you would get by without a credit card?

If you travel a lot, it could be a challenge: you really need a credit card to make plane and hotel reservations. But they’ll probably take a debit card. You lose some of the advantages of a credit card: deferral of the payment date and some element of recourse if the purchase doesn’t work out for one reason or another. Still, if you were determined not to pay the additional rip of an annual fee, it might be worth the inconvenience.

But otherwise, it’s not horribly difficult. You have four fine alternatives to the credit card, at least one of them guaranteed to keep your budget running in the black:

• Cash
• Checks
• Debit cards
• Prepaid merchant purchasing cards

Each has its pros and cons. Videlicet:

Cash: The Good

🙂 Fast
🙂 Universally accepted
🙂 No need to memorize PIN numbers
🙂 No paper trail: protects your privacy
🙂 Hassle-free: no fights with banks or credit-card issuers
🙂 Built-in spending limit: keeps you on budget

Cash: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Too easy to spend
🙁 No paper trail: hard to track spending, no proof of tax-deductible purchases
🙁 No recourse in dispute with merchant
🙁 Easy to lose or steal; no recourse to insurance if stolen
🙁 No good for Internet shopping or phone transactions
🙁 Bulky to carry around
🙁 Unsanitary

Checks: The Good

🙂 Relatively easy to use: no PIN needed
🙂 Most merchants accept them
🙂 Check register: easy to track spending
🙂 Hard to use if stolen; no $50 liability limit for ID theft
🙂 ID checks at register: added theft protection
🙂 Paper trail; unarguable proof of payment

Checks: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Easy to overdraw account: stiff overdraft fees
🙁 Checking account fees: Need to use credit union to avoid bank gouges
🙁 Time-consuming hassle at check-out
🙁 Bulky and heavy to carry around
🙁 No good for Internet or phone transactions
🙁 Paper trail: accessible to those you’d just as soon not have knowing your business
🙁 Can be forged by thieves who know what they’re doing

Debit Cards: The Good

🙂 Lightweight, easy to carry
🙂 Fast
🙂 Widely accepted
🙂 Good for Internet shopping, phone transactions
🙂 Paper trail: statements show purchasing record

Debit Cards: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Many nicks and gouges from bank fees
🙁 Also some merchants’ gouges
🙁 Merchant-instigated holds on bank accounts
🙁 Vulnerability to ID theft, armed robbery
🙁 Paper trail: little privacy from intrusive merchandisers and other uninvited observers

Merchant Purchasing Cards: The Good

🙂 Budgeting device: Limit monthly expenditures by limiting amounts on card
🙂 Fast
🙂 Easy
🙂 Lightweight, easy to carry
🙂 No fees
🙂 Relatively little hassle

Merchant Purchasing Cards: The Bad and the Ugly

🙁 Recurring inconvenience: Recharge as money runs out
🙁 Limited to specific merchants
🙁 Stealable: great windfall for thieves
🙁 Little use for Internet or phone shopping
🙁 Hard to track purchases
🙁 But easy for merchant to track your behavior: privacy issue
🙁 Various merchant scams and limitations

Each of these devices has its uses. Personally, I distrust debit cards—too many opportunities for banks and merchants to zing you with incomprehensible fees, too vulnerable to identity theft. If things come to such a pass that I decide to get rid of my credit cards, I think I’ll use merchant purchasing cards as “cash envelopes” for certain kinds of recurring purchases and then use real cash or checks for everything else:

Purchasing Cards:

Costco

• gasoline
• lifetime supplies of household goods
• bulk food purchases
• wine and beer
• casual clothing
• office supplies
• books

Safeway

• fresh food purchases
• bargain meats
• small incidentals

Cash:

• eating out
• entertainment
• very small incidentals

Checks:

• workmen
• veterinarian
• doctors’ copays
• all goods not purchased at Costco or Safeway (such as clothing, linens, decorating items, prescriptions, etc.)

It’s interesting to contemplate, because abandoning credit cards would force me to rejigger my budget. Right now I budget a certain amount (it’s been $1,200; is about to drop to $1,000) for spending on all costs other than regular recurring monthly bills. Those costs are all put on the card. So, I use two debiting tools: automatic bill-paying and the credit card, each of which has its own sub-budget ($840 for monthly bills and monthly savings; $1,000 for all other spending).

If I dropped the cards, I’d have to budget for not two but four spending tools: automatic bill-paying, purchasing cards, cash, and checks. Drawback is an added layer of complication. However, the trade-off is that such a system mimics the cash “envelope” budgeting strategy, and it might be a great deal more effective at keeping one on budget.

More on that topic tomorrow!

Real estate prices gone nuts

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Amusing myself in the wee hours by cruising real estate listings in my zip code, I came across one of the neighbor’s houses, comparable to mine, on the market for $199,000, some $36,000 less than I paid for my place.  The sales pitch shouts,

UPGRADED CABINETS, JENN-AIR APPLIANCES, ENGINEERED WOOD FLOORS, NEW LUSH LANDSCAPING WITH 12 ZONE IRRIGATION SYSTEM. NOTE**SQ FT INCLUDES 300+ BONUS ROOM OFF KITCHEN**COULD BE FAMILY ROOM,DEN/OFFICE,KIDS PLAYROOM OR???**THIS KNOELL HOME SITS ON A LARGE LOT(OVER 11,000 SQ.FT)LOTS OF YARD FOR THE KIDS TO PLAY**SEPERATELY FENCED SPARKLING DIVING POOL OFF COVERED PATIO**LONG DRIVEWAY W/ROOM TO PARK AT LEAST 4 VEHICLES

Gee, thanks, guys: Let’s invite some more chuckleheads to turn their houses into used-car lots!

It’s not an especially pretty model, and it’s a bit too close to the light-rail construction on 19th Avenue. But still…it has most or all of the amenities my house has, and they’ve set the price in the basement.

Ah, yes: the light-rail construction. Make that nonconstruction: the City has changed its mind, after having ripped out the better part of an entire row of homes in our neighborhood and spread hideous cement-gray gravel over the resulting scars. The SOBs came in here, wrecked our neighborhood, and then walked away! They’re now considering other routes to serve the west side (read “the multimillionaire developers who own the new stadium out there, not to mention the occasional politico and city official”). It’s pretty clear the proposed line past our area will be abandoned, leaving us with devalued homes and enhancing 19th Avenue’s premier characteristic as a conduit of blight.

That would explain the cut-rate price on this house, which is owned by a couple who have lived there for many years.

Not the cuttest of all possible rates, though: a house on the street just to the south of me, which was wildly improved by a speculator who bought on the deflationary edge of the bubble, is offered as a short sale at $130,000.

Meanwhile, about 100 steps down the street from the first house, another neighbor is trying to unload a bland little house, “as is” with no photos at the Realtor’s website, for $229,000. That place has been on the market for quite a while. It’s not a short sale or foreclosure, but between the lackadaisical sales effort and the unexceptional front elevation, one could easily think it is. The house doesn’t look all that bad, but it’s nothing special, either. Houses around it, though, are badly run down: the Rental Baron’s slum property was bought by a woman and her son who put way too much money into fixing up but succeeded in selling at the height of the bubble to Adam the Pool Guy, not the brightest decorative light hanging in the backyard gazebo. Adam now owes over $325,000 on a house that he has allowed to go right straight back to pot. The kids across the street from Adam inherited their house from his mother, and they also are letting the place crumble away.

It costs a lot to water a lawn around here. So people who can’t afford the water bills will just let the grass die. Xeriscape it? That costs a chunk of change, too…if you can’t afford a $300 water bill,  you sure can’t afford to have someone come and convert your bermuda grass to imitation desert.

“SEPERATELY FENCED.” Heee! Well, I guess you can’t expect much better than a pitch to people who use the front yard as a parking lot from sellers who can’t run a spellchecker and haven’t heard much about periods. Another house around here is described as having an “UP GRATED KITCHEN.”

😀

Someone wants $239,900 for a very pretty little house that has been massively overimproved in the seedy neighborhood just to the north of us. What could they have been thinking? Our friends who moved out of that tract several years ago finally had to default on the house that backed on to the grocery store. The bank wants $129,000 for it.

A bank is trying to sell a house that fronts on the seven-lane main drag that forms our neighborhood’s southernmost border: $251,500, rather more than anyone should pay to live on a feeder street for Interstate 17.

"Must be seen to be believed!!"
"Must be seen to be believed!!"

Next street to the north of me, a neighbor wants $264,000 for a place that has been “upgraded” in fun-house style: red kitchen cabinets, black countertops, blue carpets. While the price is what you’d think of as about right for this area, it would take a special buyer to fall in love with this place. The present owners so loved the eyeball-popping scarlet cabinetry that they put it in the bathrooms, too.

The folks who want $289,900 for the house with the view of the 19th-Avenue nonconstruction site are still waiting for their dream buyer to come along. That place has been on the market for months. Many months.

And in the what were they thinking department, a house on my  old street, about two blocks to the north of the present manse, recently came on the market for $294,900. It has some recent upgrades (2008), but it has no pool and its exterior is so undistinguished I can’t even picture which house it is—and I walk or drive by there every couple of weeks.

The $199,000 model is the same or a similar model, and it does have a pool. That’s a $95,000 range for identical houses in the same six-square-block neighborhood!

Add the slightly more decrepit tract just to the north of us into the mix, and you get a spread of $160,000, for housing that’s all pretty much cut out of the same cloth.

Think of that.

Chuck roasts, cheap: Safeway

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Hey! Check your local Safeway today for its meat prices. Here in the arid Southwest, I just bought a ton of beautiful chuck roast for 99 cents a pound.

Two of the roasts got ground into deee-licious hamburger. Another gigantic beauty will soon be basking in the crock pot with onions, carrots, celery, wine, and spices. Hot diggety!

Cherry soup

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Here’s something I’d forgotten about, and it’s soooo good! At Costco the other day I came across a bag of frozen, pitted cherries. Also had to buy some wine for a stew recipe, and so had on hand the better part of a bottle of cheap red. Combine these judiciously and you come up with a delicious treat: cold cherry soup.

You need:

• blender
• a sieve, if desired
• one cup or more of pitted bing cherries
• cold water and red wine, combined, to cover
• sugar to taste
• dashes (1/2 to 1/4 tsp) of sweetish spices, such as nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, and coriander, to taste
• a few black peppercorns
• dollop of yoghurt, sour cream, or heavy cream, if desired

Place all the ingredients in the blender. I use a fair amount of sugar, because I like the soup to be rather sweet—maybe 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar to a cup of cherries and two cups of liquid. Adjust to fit your own preferences. Cover and turn the blender to “high.” Purée the bedoodles out of it.

When I first started making this soup, I ran it through a strainer after puréeing. This results in a more elegant product, but it’s not necessary for flavor or anything other than looks. Just to eat the soup en famille, there’s probably no need to strain it.

Chill the soup and serve in bowls. I’ve developed a taste for added heavy cream, a very bad habit. Sour cream is also very nice, and a good-quality low-fat yoghurt is just as pleasing but a lot more virtuous. If you’re teetotaling or serving this to kids (speaking of virtue), you can omit the wine and still come up with a good spiced cherry soup.

Theme Days, Reconsidered

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So earlier this week, I came up with what sounded like a great idea to manage time: set a “theme” for each day of the week and do tasks related to that and only related to that. Once caught up with all the work that’s gotten out of hand, I figured, this strategy would help control the sense of being utterly scattered and allow me to take control of the mounting flood of labor that is overwhelming my life.

Well.

What it does is demonstrate, loud and clear, why I’m falling behind in all the various survival and income-earning tasks: I simply have too much work for any one person to do in a reasonable pattern of waking hours.

Yesterday was to be a “teaching” day. I’d already spent half of Sunday grading papers, that being a “choir” half-day and a “teaching” half-day.

Okay. Yesterday morning I started at 4:30, and I worked all the way through until 9:00 p.m., with one (count it, 1) break for a 40-minute walk around the neighborhood. Food was leftovers, so consuming breakfast and dinner (no time for lunch) took no more than about 30 minutes. The only reason I stopped at 9:00 was the online grading system went down, blocking me from entering grades. At that point I realized I was so exhausted I couldn’t do anything more.

That was 15 hours of grading papers, standing in front of a classroom, fending off e-mailed queries and demands from students, and wrestling with computerized classroom management software. Add the number of hours I spent on Sunday, about 8 hours, and you have 23 hours. And I still have two more rafts of papers to grade and a three-hour class to meet on Friday!

Probably I’ll need to put in at least two more teaching days to handle the remaining work…and, you know…there are only six more days left in the week. Note that we’re counting Saturday and Sunday as “work week” days. The current Copyeditor’s Desk client thinks I’m going to rewrite his CV for him forthwith; page proofs were supposed to have arrived yesterday for one of our GDU client journals, and those have to be turned around instantly; and I haven’t even picked up the page proofs for the novel I’m supposed to be editing—those landed on my desk last week.

To keep up with the workload, I will have to work 15-hour days, seven days a week, non-frikking-stop!

No wonder my house goes uncleaned for two, three, four weeks in a row. And no wonder I feel crazy when I have to drop what I’m doing to fiddle with the pool equipment. There’s simply no time to get to ordinary daily household tasks.

I have no idea how I’m going to cope with this in the spring, when instead of teaching two three-hour class meetings each week, I will have six one-hour sessions and two ninety-minute sessions. That’s right. Yesterday the spring schedule came in: they’ve given me three sections, which is what I need to get by and for which I’m thankful (in a way). The Monday-Wednesday sections will span 5 hours and 45 minutes a day, from 8:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.—counting commute time—for a total of 11 1/2 hours a week. The Friday sections will consume another four hours (with commute time), from 9:30 to 11:30. Thus 15 1/2 hours of each week will be spent in the classroom alone. And I’m paid for slightly less than 20 hours of work a week.

By the time I walk out of a classroom, all I want to do is sit down. I certainly don’t want to jump into the morass of grading papers. To grade papers for one section—short ones, not the 2,500-word research papers required of the 102 sections—takes a good 8 hours. Assuming I wait until the day after papers are handed in, I’m looking at spending that entire day just reading, grading, and filing brain-bangers.

Next spring I’ll have three sections. So grading represents an additional 8 hours of work a week, bare minimum, if papers come in from just one section; 24 hours if all three sections turn in papers, as they do at the semester’s end. So: for 49% FTE pay, we’re proposing that I work 23.5 hours, bare minimum, or 39.5 hours in a week when all three classes are in full swing. That’s before the syllabus, assignments, and class schedules are written for these classes, large tasks I have to complete before the paid job starts.

What we’re looking at here, with three sections of freshman comp, is five full days of unrelenting work each week, and that’s before I get to freelance work, before I water the plants, before I clean the floors and dust the furniture and scrub the bathrooms and degrease the kitchen, before I clean the pool and repair the pool equipment. And before the usual unbelievably time-consuming crises, exceptions, and wackinesses associated with teaching take place.

Yesterday’s 15-hour day of brain-numbing work was not this week’s first such marathon. By 4:30 yesterday morning (when I awoke wondering how the hell I’m going to get by financially next year and how on earth I’m going to handle the workload), I had barely recovered from a similar 15-hour day of editing a psychologist’s reports, articles, and C.V.

I fail to see how these “theme days” are going to work next spring, when four of every seven days will be largely occupied with standing in front of a classroom. That will leave three days and scraps, of which half of one day and one full evening are already committed, in which to do as much as 24 hours of grading, an unknown number of hours of editorial work, plus all the shopping, housework, yard work, car care, dog care, and everything-else care. Forget having a social life: there just won’t be time for idling.

{sigh} Pretty clearly, I’ll have to drop choir again. Damn it. I love singing…it’s the only break in the drudgery I get. But I guess I won’t have time for that, either.

And I’ll have to dumb down the classes even more than they’re already dumbed-down, which is majorly dumbed. The only way to survive this will be to cut incoming papers to a bare minimum. Even now, I’ve succumbed to the “rubric” technique, in which you lay out a set of low-level standards you’re looking for and simply ignore every other error and f**k-up the students commit. Thus a C paper can easily earn a B or even an A, because you simply don’t have time to sift through, mark, and explain every single illiteracy in every single paper. It helps you to get through the stuff a little faster, but the result is less than satisfactory. IMHO. To coin a sentence fragment…

At any rate, this little experiment reveals why I feel like I can’t keep up with my life. I feel that way because it’s objectively true: I can’t keep up with my life.

Image: Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory. Wikipedia Commons.

Fair use rationale:

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House Maintenance: What you get for a thousand bucks

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Well, Saturday the guys from South Mountain Land Maintenance, LLC, showed up, hauling a huge trailer and equipped with all sorts of tools.

My  front yard has run amok. In the first place, at my behest Richard the Landscaper par Extraordinaire planted way too many trees and large shrubs. The idea was to create a screen between my front window and what is now the former Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. This scheme worked, with a vengeance: the screen grew up to become a solid wall. It really was a jungle out there.

Meanwhile, the sickly ash tree inherited from Satan and Proserpine, the previous owners, finally died outright in this summer’s unrelenting 116-degree heat. Sally, the neighbor behind me, wondered idly when I was going to get rid of the snag she could see over our roofs.

The palo brea tree, a ferocious monstrosity with thorns the size and shape of wildcat claws, kept draping over the sidewalk and threatening to gouge out the eyes of passing tourists.

The olive tree went to town over the summer and was now intertwined with sharp branches from the palo brea, which also had wound itself into the innards of the vitex and threatening to strangle it.

The Texas ebony, another heavily armed xeric tree, had merged with the desert willow to block egress through the east gate. The willow’s limbs had climbed onto the roof.

The paloverde on the west side also had decided to rest on the roof, and several of its limbs were crossed or bending low enough to brain passers-by.

Richard had proposed to take out the ash tree for a thousand dollars. Add another two hundred bucks, and he would repair the landscaping where the tree would be ripped down.

South Mountain came in with a bid for a thousand dollars to do all the work that needed to be done in the yard!

The two guys who own the company recently purchased it, having completed a course to train arborists offered by the Desert Botanical Garden. Frankly, I suspect that Richard, who has been in the landscaping business for upwards of 20 years, had a better feel for what the job is worth. The two South Mountain guys showed up here with a laborer, and the three men put in eight uninterrupted hours—they didn’t stop for lunch—in 100-degree heat. That would be 24-man hours. Here’s what I got for $1,040:

• Cut down the huge, scraggly dead ash tree
• Saw up the wood and load it into their truck, leaving some for me to use as firewood this winter.
• Prune out vast quantities of viciously thorny palo brea brush—they must have cut out at least half the canopy
• Prune similar amounts from the palo verde
• Load all that stuff into their truck
• Haul dirt, build a mound over the tree stump
• Plant the baby vitex in the new dirt
• Repair, reset, and test the watering system
• Set about a dozen large rocks into the new dirt mound
• Haul in and spread about two or three inches of gravel over the dirt mound
• Climb into the weeping acacia on the west side, climb all the way to the top and inspect the entire tree for weak limbs
• Cut out dead stuff from the acacia; cut off a large limb that’s been trying to eat the lime tree
• Haul that stuff out and load it onto the truck
• Prune three major limbs out of the olive tree; shape up olive tree
• Trim the desert willow
• Trim the Texas ebony
• Pick up, rake, and blower the incredible mess that resulted from these activities

The two gringo bosses, who unlike the older and wiser Richard did not supervise but pitched in and did most of the labor, damn near expired from heat exhaustion. At this time of year the sun is low enough that no matter which way you look it seems to be glaring right into your eyes, making the unseasonable blast of 100-degree heat truly tough going.

Baby vitex, in DIY shade sgtructure to protect from unseasonable heat
Baby vitex, in DIY shade structure to protect from fall heat wave

Today the yard looks mightily thinned. The contrast with the jungle effect is pretty striking—to my eye, even jarring, since I’ve been so accustomed to the overgrown mess. Even the skeleton of the ash tree cast a surprising amount of shade, so the heat in the front courtyard come next summer is going to be truly horrible. Vitex is slow growing, so it will be many years before that little plant grows into something that resembles a tree. It never will create as much shade as a large ash or pine.

So I’m not happy to lose the ash tree after all the effort to keep it going. It was sick when I moved in, and as Mike the Arborist pointed out, once an ash tree shows signs of decline, it’s too late to save it. Five years of pouring water and fertilizer on it amounted to five years of wasted water and fertilizer. I should have had Richard cut it down when he installed the desert landscaping.

At any rate: $1,040 for 24 man-hours of work comes down to $14.44 an hour for each man. Assuming they paid the Mexican guy minimum wage, the two proprietors ended up grossing about $18 an hour apiece, or about $144 each for a very hard day’s work. From that they had to pay the gas for their truck (and presumably the payment on it and the trailer), the use fee at the city dump, and all the various other overhead entailed in operating a business. At that rate, our gents are not going to get rich soon.

So I felt like I got a smokin’ deal for all the work they did. In fact, I felt I was taking advantage of their inexperience as businessmen—Richard wouldn’t have touched that job for any such rate. Of course, that’s why it hasn’t gotten done: I can’t afford Richard anymore.

Savage palo brea, before & after…

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