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The High Cost of Culture: 16 low-cost routes to the better life

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Frugal Scholar reports on a wonderful day at the New Orleans Jazzfest (and ancillary activities), a good reason to live in or visit New Orleans. In passing she remarks that folks grouse about the $43–$50 ticket prices. That sounds like quite a bargain for twelve stages (!) hosting over seventy performances.

Some months ago my friend Kathy and I bought tickets to see Joshua Bell perform with the Phoenix Symphony, an event that coincided with a visit from her now-married daughter, who by the end of high school had become accomplished enough with the violin to consider a professional career. The concert was last night. When I pulled out my ticket, I was reminded that we paid $85 apiece. Parking was $12 in a garage whose elevator didn’t work, so, in high heels, we had to walk down and later up five flights of fire-escape stairs inhabited by bums, one of whom amused himself by filling up the stairwell with cigarette smoke. 

On reflection, I thought…good heavens! If you were a couple and you wanted to go to a symphony performance, it would cost you $182, and that’s before you’ve had dinner or spent the gas to drive downtown. Most people like to have a nice dinner before a concert or at least dessert or drinks afterward; around here you can easily spend $40 or $50 apiece on dinner, especially downtown. By the time they’d paid tips, a couple could have invested another $100 in the evening: almost $300!

It makes $43 for a daylong festival of jazz look like a mighty bargain, eh?

I certainly can’t afford to pay almost $100, exclusive of dinner, to go to a classical music concert very often, and I make a decent salary. The message is that “cultchah” is only for the rich. 

More plebeian pursuits will set you back a pretty penny, too. A single seat at an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball game at an elevation that does not require you to bring an oxygen tank can run $50 to $70. Apiece! Imagine bringing the whole family to that game: Mom, Dad, and two kids: $200, before you get to the hot dogs and Crackerjack!

Where do people get that kind of money?

I see the New York Times is about to jack up its subscription prices to almost $60 a month. Mine is a cut-rate deal for university employees, but I’m sure it will rise, too—after you get through the punch-a-button phone maze, the robot voice flicks you the gesture by informing you that no one’s there to speak to you, so it will be Tuesday before I find out whether I have to cancel the paper or not. I sure can’t afford sixty bucks a month…but then, just a glance at the Times‘s advertising tells you the news is not addressed to the peasantry, anyway.

PBS has been taken off the air for people who receive their TV by antennas. The new digital incarnation does not come in on my flicking “box.” I can’t afford cable, nor can I afford an expensive new antenna and a workman to install it, so apparently PBS is already a thing of my past, as the Times is about to be.

These developments impoverish America far more than does the general collapse of the economy. When people can’t get exposure to great music, can’t see a decent television program, and can’t even go to a damn baseball game because the better things in life are priced out of reach, we’re all dumbed down. We don’t need as much money as we imagine we do, but we do need access to the things that matter in life: music, art, serious news reporting, drama, sports. 

Fortunately there are a few back doors into some quality cultural events. The Phoenix Art Museum has a freeby night once a week, although of course we bums aren’t allowed in to see the major traveling shows. Several churches in the Valley have such high-quality music programs that attending a service is akin to enjoying a free chamber music performance—albeit, nonbelievers have to sit through a lot of hoopla for the privilege. Some church music ministries bring guest performers or engage Phoenix symphony professionals to put on religion-free concerts at reasonable prices. And there’s a surprising wealth of jazz in Arizona, much of which can be enjoyed in relatively affordable venues. And sporting events, not on the professional level but maybe so much the better for that, can be caught at nearby colleges and universities.

In most cities you can find guides to these events and activities at your local NPR station’s website, in events listings in “alternative” newspapers, and in handouts available at local libraries. Just because you can’t afford rich folks’ entertainment is no reason to sit at home. Here are a few places to look for free or low-cost cultural events, with examples from my part of the globe. Google…

  1. Your local NPR station(s); look for an events calendar at each station, since they may differ.
  2. Local museums, botanical gardens, and zoos    
  3. Events calendars at local colleges and universities  
  4. A nearby university + the team name  
  5. A nearby college + sports events  
  6. Your city’s Parks and Recreation Department  
  7. Your city + events  
  8. Event calendars for cities within day-trip driving distance  
  9.  Chamber of Commerce events calendars  
10. Volunteer gigs as ushers or ticket-takers at concert halls and theaters.
11. Nearby cultural centers  
12.  Jewish Community Centers   
13. Your local YWCA or YMCA  
14.  Local church events and music calendars   
15. Special interest groups such as the Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy, or the Sierra Club  
16. NPR online, PBS online, and Hulu   

Et vous? How do you find kultcher on a shoestring?

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Oops! By light of day, I see I repeated myself in (2) and (10)! Sorry about that. Safari crashed just as I finished that list, the first time around, erasing the whole thing. So, with great disgust and impatience, I had to try to remember and then rebuild all the suggestions I’d dreamed up and relocate all the links I’d dredged  up. Sooooo… Let’s change numero (10) to the hint I remembered after I first published this post.
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Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money

How to raise the hair on your head

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A FaM reader responded to Funny’s sassy rant about the use of Roundup and other politically incorrect lazinesses, with the suggestion that perhaps this was a little too blithe. Unfortunately, she sent her observation as an e-mail rather than as a comment, but along with her remarks she sent a link to an eyeball-popping documentary that I think you should see. 

It doesn’t pretend to come at you with no agenda—every now and then the narrator, who is seen reading reports that have been leaked to regulators or to investigative reporters, exclaims “it’s unbelievable!” But that honesty itself lends to the production’s credibility. I was a reporter for a fair number of years, and I’d say this is a good job. Sources appear to be checked, double-checked, and confirmed; most are primary sources with good to excellent believability.

You need to know about this. Set aside an hour or so and go there. Watch that.

Copyright © 2009 Funny about Money

The great no-‘poo experiment!

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Check out Chance’s new project at Room Farm: an experiment to spring free of commercial shampoos! Can’t wait to see how this works out.

Some Blogger sites refuse to recognize my existence in any permutation, and Chance’s is one of them. So I’ll try just adding my two cents here:

Back in the Cretaceous, we had shampoo but no one shampooed every day. We didn’t have conditioners of the sort available today—to get rid of the frizzies and tear-jerking tangles, we used this pink liquid (don’t recall the brand name) that you squirted on with a pump sprayer and combed through your hair. While it did get rid of mare’s nests and static fly-away, it left your hair kinda limp.

In the absence of hand-held blow dryers, washing your hair was a major project: you had to set your hair with bobby pins (twisting little pincurls allll over your head!) or, in later years, with rollers, and then you either slept in them overnight or you sat under a bonnet dryer for anywhere between one and three hours, depending on how long and thick your hair was.

Women in recent years have been bamboozled into dousing their heads with various chemical brews every day, when really it’s not necessary. One’s hair did start to get a little greasy-looking after a week, but the truth is most women’s hair can go for three days or so before really needing to be washed. 

In the past, I’ve used Neutrogena bar soap on my hair. It’s a little harsh, but it will get your hair clean. I found it drying, and if you get the stuff in your eyes it hurts like the dickens…probably not a good sign. Baby shampoo works quite effectively on women’s hair and is pretty mild. Like grown-up shampoos, it contains many ingredients straight out of a chemistry lab. 

Hair conditioner alone can be substituted for shampoo, at least for a few washings. It tends to build up in the hair like liquid fabric softener in the washer, not surprising since we’ve discovered that you can use hair conditioner in place of fabric softener. Here in the Southwest, ordinary bar soap makes a mess of your hair, because most areas have pretty hard water. This can be ameliorated to some degree by rinsing with diluted vinegar or lemon juice.

I’ve also used dish detergent in a pinch. It works exactly like shampoo, with exactly the same results…not surprising, since shampoo is your basic detergent. Clear Ivory dish detergent behaves just like shampoo, except at the cash register.

It’ll be interesting to see how Chance makes out with the baking soda-&-vinegar treatment. If you could use that on your hair and olive oil on your face, you’d go a long way toward breaking the grip of the cosmetics industry on women’s everyday lives.

A little frugality goes a long way

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Well, I was about to say “I amaze me with my frugality,” but the truth is, I haven’t been pinching pennies any more rigorously than usual. That notwithstanding, despite almost $1,000 in “extraordinary” (read “not in the budget”) expenses, I’m only going to have to pull about $245 out of savings to cover this month’s charges. 

dcp_2529Yes. This month I ran amok with the extraordinary expenses. To kick off the budget cycle, a Talbot’s junket racked up an $86 debit when I succumbed to the lure of the Sale! tag. Got a cute little top at B’Gauze, also allegedly on sale at the bargain price of $47. Then we chose this month for Mrs. Micah to migrate Funny to BlueHost, which was quite the project. Her fee was amazingly reasonable, but it also could be viewed as outside the realm of ordinary costs. Next, nothing would do but what I had to harden the security on my office right this minute, in light of the swarm of burglaries the neighborhood has seen: $295 for purchase, delivery, and installation of a solid-core door plus $281 for purchase and installation of a pick-proof, drill-proof lock and metal door guard. (Gulp!) Moving on, the locksmith profited further when Bila the Painter couldn’t figure out how to remove the (very involved!) antique Baldwin lock from the front door at the downtown house: $150 for two visits, one to get it off the door and one to put it back on. All these added up to an astonishing $969.67 in extraordinary expenses.

Gasp!
😯

My de jure budget now has me spending $1,200 on ordinary, day-to-day expenses, such as gasoline, food, household goods, and whatnot. That amount should cover one or two out-of-the-ordinary costs, such as a visit from the plumber or a trip to the veterinarian’s office. Against the desired $1,200 limit, I’m actually $396 in the red. But the de facto amount that goes into the credit-card piggy bank (a money market checking account earning a little interest) is $1,500; anything that doesn’t get spent out of that sits in the account and serves as emergency back-up. Against the $1,500, I’m “only” about $245 in the red. As a practical matter, the accrued cushion in that piggy-bank account will cover it, so I really won’t have to transfer a dime from savings to pay for this month’s spending extravaganza.

Could I have exercised some restraint?

Well…yeah. I needed some summer clothes, but you know, there’s no law that says just because a store is advertising a sale you have to run right in and buy stuff. The clothing purchases could have been deferred to the end of the month, at which time I would have been out of money and so wouldn’t have bought the shirts at all. Staying out of Talbot’s and B’Gauze would have cut the deficit by $133, leaving me a modest $112 in the red. 

But some of these things really needed to be done now: I wanted to install the door and lock while I still have an income from the Great Desert University. And theoretically the locksmith’s work on the downtown house could be included in the cost of the paint job, which is coming from a different piggy bank. The project to monetize Funny needed to start soon, so I would have some time to learn how all that works and possibly to improve earnings from the site before I’m out of work. Eight or nine months seems like a pretty short lead time, really: that was a sooner-the-better proposition.

So, I don’t feel too bad about all this. Riding the train (and taking two weeks of vacation time, eliminating a bunch of endless gas-guzzling commutes) eliminated one gas fill-up. Thanks to the stash in the freezer, I haven’t had to buy much food. And the stockpiling strategy allowed me to put off purchase of a few household items into the next budget cycle. 

Once I’m retired, of course, $1,200  will have to be the real maximum expenditure limit, and not a pretend “can I really live on this” figure. As a practical matter, I’ll have to come in well under $1,200 in most months to get by. That will be a challenge as inflation rises. But right now I’m spending significantly less than that in ordinary, day-to-day expenditures. If I spent about $970 in extraordinary expenses and overdrew the $1,200 budget by only $400, that means regular, routine costs consumed about $570 less than budgeted ordinary expenses. (I think: arithmetic is not a science that serves me well.) 

Whether that figure is right or wrong, it’s pretty clear I can eat, drink, and make merry on less than $1,200 a month. Meanwhile, with the Renovation Loan now paid off, recurring monthly bills drop from $840 to $670, a figure that will drop another $30 when I cash in a whole life policy in January (because I have to pay taxes on the proceeds, I’ll need to put that off till I have no earned income to speak of). 

So let’s say I can expect to spend maybe $1,000 a month on routine living expenses. That plus the remaining $640 in recurring bills comes to $1,640 a month, or $19,680 a year. Think of that: a retired person can (in theory) live on less than 20 grand! For me, investment income alone will almost cover that.

Of course, we still have my share of the downtown house’s mortgage: $9,600/year. The net on $13,944 in Social Security benefits should cover that, but if not, I’ll earn more than $9,600 teaching at the community college. So, even after taxes, any freelance income will be pure gravy.

Although some observers might regard my lifestyle as ascetic (I refrain from spending on cable TV or a cell phone, for example, and I rarely go out to eat), I don’t think of myself as extremely frugal. I never clip coupons, I don’t pursue freebies from CVS, I buy my clothes new, and any day I’d  rather own a book than borrow it from the library. I eat like the Queen of Sheba and do not stint on wine and beer purchases. 

The trick is to get out of debt, including mortgage debt. Once the house and the car are paid for (and you’re not trapped under a load of revolving debt), you’re home free—given decent retirement savings. Without a huge cost for the roof over your head, a very moderate level of frugality will allow you to live quite comfortably.

Two new blogs

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These have little or nothing to do with personal finance, but… Here are two blogs you might enjoy.

One is by my friend Judy Galbraith, who teaches journalism at Paradise Valley Community College and writes affectingly about subjects ranging from her obvious professional commitment to censorship, politics, and the good life. 

And not to be missed is Let’s Call Him Bob, a hilarious journal of my pal VickyC’s rambunctious dating life. This promises to get more and more amazing as it grows!

Check those out. 🙂

Credit card companies to penalize “freeloaders”: What’s your plan?

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As we know, credit card companies call people who pay their bills on time and in full “freeloaders,” and management highly resents such deadbeats because they’re not cash cows like people who sink over their heads in usurious debt. Credit-card issuers make something on us bums, of course, because each charged transaction nicks the merchant a percentage of the sale price. But it’s nothing like the criminal interest rates and extra gouges they get from people who run a tab on their cards.

Well, if you’re one of those losers who pays your bills on time, watch out! The legislation pending in Congress to limit credit-card penalties and curb wacko punitive fees is about to backfire on you. In response to having to quit ripping off feckless consumers who can’t or won’t clear their credit-card debt, the nation’s banks are about to curtail cashback and other rewards, eliminate grace periods, and sock every card user with an annual fee. As American Bankers Association CEO Edward L. Yingling told the New York Times, “It will be a different business. Those that manage their credit well will in some degree subsidize those that have credit problems.”

Don’t think so, Ed. Charge me a fee to carry your plastic around in my purse, and you can have the piece of plastic back. I, for one, do not and will not pay an annual fee (or any other kind of fee) for the privilege of going into debt at a usurious rate. While it’s a great convenience to have an American Express and a Visa card in hand, it sure doesn’t come under the heading of “necessity.”

So, what will we do if suddenly all our credit card issuers inform us that cash kickbacks and airline miles are things of the past, that we now have to pony up $25 or so to use any credit card, and that the grace period for paying one’s bill has died?

The AMEX cashback scheme is the sole reason I use my Costco American Express card for every purchase I make. The reason I got the AMEX card in the first place is that Costco quit accepting any other credit card at its gas pumps, which dispense the cheapest gas in town. Costco won’t accept cash for gasoline, and I don’t care to use a debit card. If AMEX reneged on its cashback plan, I probably would continue to use the card exactly as I do now, because it’s a great convenience and because the “float” between charge date and payoff date makes it easy to manage my budget. 

However, if they demanded an annual fee, I’d cancel the card in an instant. Ditto the Visa card.

There are some good reasons to have a credit card, most of them related to booking travel arrangements and to the extra back-up in case of a dispute with a merchant. I’d be sorry to see the cards go, but go they would if I were made to pay to carry them around.

In lieu of cards…what? There are several fine alternatives:

• Use a debit card instead. Costco’s gas pumps accept debit cards, and so do most other merchants. Disadvantages: it’s a fair way to bounce a transaction, and there’s little or no protection if someone steals the thing and hacks into your account.

• Pay recurring bills with EFTs from your checking account, not by charging them on your credit card. Disadvantage: some vendors won’t accept EFTs. But they may change their attitude when their best customers dump credit cards.

• Use cash. Some people find they spend less when they carry cash instead of a charge card. I personally have the opposite experience: cash flows through my fingers like water, and at the end of the day I have no clue where it went. But I suppose you could keep every receipt and enter it in Quicken or Excel; if that helps you keep a grip on credit-card spending, it presumably would do the same for cash.

• Use checks. This creates a paper trail, just as charge card statements do. Disadvantage, of course, is that checks are an expensive nuisance. 

My strategy: First, to find out if policies to shaft us “deadbeats” apply to the Visa cards available through the credit union. If not, get one of those; if so, get a debit card and start using lots more cash.

Times reporter Andrew Martin reminisces that in the good old days only the best consumers could get credit cards—and indeed, I do recall the time when flashing a credit card advertised your status. Now everyone will know that only the worst money managers have to use credit cards—pulling out a credit card at the grocery check-out will signal fellow shoppers that you can’t afford to pay your bills in cash.

What do you plan to do if your credit card issuer yanks your benefits and proposes to charge you an annual fee?