Coffee heat rising

Use caution when making DIY laundry detergent

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Many of us have begun making laundry soap with Fels Naptha soap, borax, and washing soda. If you’re doing that, please take a look at what’s in Fels Naptha soap. Turns out the stuff contains mineral spirits, a petroleum product. It can be highly irritating and apparently should not be used as a regular laundry additive.

Several bloggers have reported good results using ordinary bath soap, such as Ivory. See, for example, Thrifty Fun, Little House in the Suburbs, and The Simple Dollar, among others. Whichever bar soap you decide to use, be careful when grinding it in a food processor. Some soaps can throw off fine dust when processed, which will fly up into your face when you open the machine’s lid. Avoid breathing the stuff, either by waiting a while before opening the food processor or at least by keeping your face a good long way back from the machine.

Is it time to punt?

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This month’s statement from Fidelity shows another $10,000 loss in my big IRA, despite my financial advisors’ having moved as much as possible into conservative investments, gold, and cash.

At the age of 63—damn! soon to be 64!—I’m watching my retirement investments melt away. That IRA has dropped in value from a high of $326,000 to $193,000. Total savings have dropped from over $600,000 to less than $420,000. Meanwhile, we owe $23,000 more than the Investment House is presently worth, and I took out a second on my own house to renovate said investment.

I’m wondering if it’s time to do something completely, utterly, totally contrarian. Hang onto your hats, folks, because this is one scary idea:

Maybe I should cash out that big IRA before it’s all gone. I have enough set aside in savings to pay off the small second mortgage on my house; if instead I combined that with the amount remaining in the IRA, I could use the money to pay off the loan on the Investment House. My son could then continue to pay me the amount he’s been paying toward the mortgage as a variety of “rent.”

I would repay him his share of our combined investment in the house so far. This would provide him enough to go back to school, which he would like to do.

If he decides to go to the University of Arizona, which has a better graduateprogram inpublic administration than the Great Desert University’s, I could either rent his house, providing a nice bit of cash flow, or I could rent mine for even more, move into his, use the rental on my house to cherry out the little house downtown, and collect a ton of money.

Because I no longer have enough in savings to support me in old age, I’m going to have to work until I drop. When the deans physically throw me out of the place (assuming I haven’t died before then), I would have the rental income from one house, Social Security, and income from taking out a reverse mortgage on whichever house I’m living in.

Hm. I wonder what that would look like?

Let’s assume a miracle happens and the Obamaites succeed in turning the economy around. Let’s assume that starts to happen in, say, three months, during which I continue to lose at the rate of 10 grand a month.

Several options present themselves:
1. Stay the course. Change nothing in the investment strategy
2. Pay off the house; have my son pay the amount he’s been paying, only to me.
3. Pay off the house; my son goes to school elsewhere and I rent his house.
4. Pay off the house; my son leaves for graduate school; I move into his place and rent my house.

I ran some figures in Excel. My math is not very good, so these prognostications may be out in left field. But if I’m right, it looks like I would be better off to pay the mortgage and have M’hijito pay me a monthly “rental” in the amount that he’s now paying the mortgage company. I’d still have enough to refund him his investment in the house, which would pay a big chunk of his graduate school tuition, or at least revive his Roth IRA.

I posited three mortgage-payoff scenarios and estimated my net income if I retired at age 66 (which ain’t gunna happen) or at age 70 (the earliest I can imagine being able to afford retirement). I assumed equity investments would continue to drop 10% a month for the next three months and then begin to rise at about 3% a year from now forward. In scenario 1, M’hijito stays in the house and pays me rent of $600 a month. In scenario 2, he goes to graduate school in Tucson and I rent his house for $950/month. In scenario 3, he goes to Tucson, I move into his house, and I rent my house for $1,000/month.

I listed all the bottom lines in Excel and then sorted to show the numbers ranging from least income to most income.

Compared with staying the course (leaving my investments where they are and continuing to pay the mortgage), all three pay-off-the-mortgage scenarios seem to look better, unlessM’hijito stays in the house and I’m forced to retire or am laid off at age 66.

payoffhouse

The big unknown is whether I will keep my job. If I’m canned before I reach age 70, we lose a very big bet. But if I can hang on until age 70 and I’m not purely raped by the taxman, then I end up with a net income fairly close to my present net.

On the other hand, if I’m canned, we’re screwed anyway.

My son would get back the money he put into the down payment. He could continue to live in the house as long as he pleased, but he would no longer be chained to the thing: he would be free to go to school or take a better job elsewhere.If I moved to his house, when I really get desperate for money (which will inevitably happen as my health starts to fail and medical care costs soar), I could take out a reverse mortgage on the place. M’hijito would then lose that house after I die, unless he wanted to pay off the reverse mortgage, but he would inherit my paid-off house, which by then would be making a nice rental income for him, or (with some fix-up) would be a good place for him to live.

Whaddaya think? Crazy? Or not crazy?

Anna’s Biscuits

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Here’s an old family recipe: it came from my mother’s best friend, an amazing Pennsylvania Dutch cook. What makes these unusual is the addition of egg to the batter.

You need:
dcp_24012 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons double-acting baking powder (such as Calumet)
4 generous tablespoons butter, margarine, or Crisco
1 egg
Milk to fill one cup

Time: About 20 minutes
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Combine dry ingredients—Anna used to sift them together, but I don’t bother with that.

Place the egg in a measuring cup and beat it with a fork or wire whip until it is well mixed. Then fill to the one-cup line with milk. Mix egg well with milk.

With a pastry mixer or two knives, cut the shortening into the flour until well mixed—that is, until it’s about the texture of coarse corn meal. Make a well in the center and add the liquid. Work together gently with a spoon. Do not knead! The secret to this recipe is to handle the dough as little as possible.

Drop the dough by large spoonsful onto a nonstick or greased baking pan. If you prefer, you can turn the dough out onto a floured board, gently roll it about 1/2 inch thick, and cut biscuits with a small floured glass or orange-juice can.

Bake 10 to 15 minutes at about 400 degrees.

At the ripe old age of 8, my son was selected as a “Chef of the West ” by Sunset Magazine, which published his variant of these biscuits. His version:

Drop a small spoonful of the dough onto a greased baking sheet. Flatten it out a bit. Place a small dab of jam or jelly in the center of this. Drop another spoonful of dough on top of it. Gently push the dough around the outside edge to seal the filling inside the biscuit. Bake as usual.

As the twig is bent…

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…So the oak will grow, eh?

Speaking of the Make It from Scratch Carnival, as we were in the last post, this week’s edition is hosted by Feels Like Home, whose “Grace’s Kitchen” feature addresses issues of children’s nutrition. This week she begins a discussion of how to fit a toddler’s diet into the present USDA guidelines for the recommended 1,000 calories a day.

Thinking through your little one’s diet this carefully is the best favor you can do for your child. My mother, following the advice that was current in her time, kept few sweets in the house and did not serve desserts, but her refrigerator was always full of washed and prepared fruits and veggies, and her snack cupboard was stocked with things like nuts and other nutritious foods. She wasn’t wildly restrictive—I still ate the occasional piece of candy or bag of pretzels. But she quietly emphasized nutritious stuff to eat.

When I reached high school, my best friend’s mother would give her money to buy a sandwich, a drink, and a dessert. That’s what the kid bought, every day: an ice-cream sandwich, a can of pop, and a candy bar. One day she watched me eat the lunch my mother sent to school with me and asked, “Don’t you want some dessert?” When I said I had dessert—an apple—she visibly shuddered (!) and exclaimed, “You think an APPLE is sweet???”

She was already overweight. If she’s still living, she probably still struggles with the weight and health problems fostered by her childhood eating habits.

I think, however, that you can go overboard with insisting that not one bite of unhealthful food may ever pass your child’s lips. My best friend of young adulthood was one of those. The sole taste of sugary stuff her kids had during any given year was on their birthdays, when, in deference to the surrounding culture’s tradition, she would make them a birthday cake. This would be a heavy, soggy carrot cake. As soon as the party was over, the leftover cake went straight into the garbage (where, IMHO, it belonged…).

She was a wonderful cook and she did fix delicious meals at home. But she was such a lunatic about what her kids would absolutely positively not eat that they both went into full rebellion and, at every opportunity when they were away from home, scarfed down as much junk food as they could get their hands on. Interestingly, as toddlers both kids were prone to bouts of diarrhea. My son, who ate as healthful a diet as I could construct but was not forbiddensuch delicacies as pizza and the occasional Whopper, never once had an intestinal upset.

If there’s a point here, I think it’s that the middle road is best. Create a nutritional environment in your home that fosters healthy, whole foods with lots of fruits and vegetables. But don’t be afraid to let the kids have an occasional taste of what other people eat. Over the course of their lifetimes, they’ll come to prefer whatever you feed them routinely as their day-to-day sustenance.

Finding a human at a corporation that repels all boarders

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Few things in modern life are more frustrating than navigating a punch-a-button telephone maze (these things are called “phone trees,” BTW) when you have a problem that needs the attention of a human being. By the time you reach an actual person, you’re peeved as all get-out. No matter how polite you try to force yourself to be, the poor wretch on the other end of the line hears your annoyance in the tone of your voice and responds in kind. It turns doing business with major corporations into a predictable exercise in rage.

And if you’re already enraged…well. The late great fight with Qworst was hugely complicated by the difficulty of getting in touch with anyone who knew what to do and who had the authority to do it. I finally found a snail-mail address for the home office at The Consumerist. After the dust settled, I posted a list of ways to reach a human being at a company that doesn’t want to speak with us troglogytes.

Here’s a site that does me one better, though: FIFTY ways to hack your way through to a live person! Check it out. Also check out the comments; one commenter is a former customer disservice rep who has some enlightening things to say about a few of these hacks.