Remember that I mentioned the Unemployment Insurance representative told us, during the 90-minute chivaree in which all us furloughed Great Desert University employees were to sign up for the Shared Work program, that we should be careful of the various “fees and penalties” Chase Bank was likely to charge against the required debit card we would be given? Well, the guy wasn’t kidding.
CNN runs an article today detailing exactly how many gouges the banks are digging out of Americans’ unemployment benefits: 40 cents for the privilege of asking how much remains in your balance; 50 cents if they deny your card; 35 cents to access your account by phone. According to this report, ripoffs range from around 40 cents to as much as $3 per transaction.
These, we may note, are being coughed up to the very institutions whose executives are using the taxpayers’ TARP money to frolic in fancy resorts and fly around the country in private jets.
Oh, yeah, speaking of gouges: you get to pay income taxes on your unemployment insurance, too.
Talk about a Nation of Sheep. I can’t believe we’re not at the barricades!
It’s good to hear that someone, somewhere, is trying to put these clowns’ feet to the fire. What’s amazing, to my mind, is that we don’t have riots in the streets. But I guess as long as we can afford our cable bill, we can keep sucking on our pacifier. What, us worry?
How do you account for your spending at emporiums that sell household and personal care items as well as food? In the past, I’ve let Quicken record any charge that occurred at, say, a Safeway or an Albertson’s as “groceries.” But the truth is, a substantial part of what you buy there isn’t groceries at all—it’s household gear, personal care products, or even yard-care items.
When I bought a freezer and started the great Food Hoarding Project a few weeks ago, I decided to break these things out, so that I could see what portion of my spending is really going to food and what to household and other items. It occurred to me that this might explain how some punkin’s can report spending $200 a month (or even more spectacularly parsimonious figures) on groceries for a family of four: maybe what they’re classifying as “groceries” is food and food alone.
Yesterday I made another run on Sprouts, Costco, Target, and Safeway, pretty well making my goal of storing about three months’ worth of food and household supplies. Except for a few perishable items, I now have enough meat, vegetables, cheese, beans, rice, sugar, flour, cornmeal, pasta (& cetera) to last for a good three months, stored up against the specter of catastrophic inflation or, more realistically, of a layoff. From here on in, it shouldn’t take much to keep this store up to date, and I believe I can do that in no more than one or two trips to the markets each month.
The total amount I’ve spent on groceries (bear in mind that I was almost out of everything when I started) is $519.36. That prorates out to $173.12 a month: an all-time record low for me. Especially when you realize I don’t break out pet food, what with Cassie the Corgi dining on human food.
But maybe not so record-breaking, because cleaning products, shampoo, contact lens stuff, Bandaids, and the like previously counted as “groceries.”
Since the start of the Hoarding Project, total spending on household and personal care goods has been $151.80, which would work out to $50.60 for each of the next three months. That’s not bad either, in my universe: a total of $223.72 ($173.12 + $50.60) is still significantly less than I ordinarily have spent per month in that lumped-together “groceries” category.
But…we have to bear in mind that while I was almost out of food when I started this scheme, I had plenty of household goods: lifetime supplies of Simple Green, paper towels, toilet paper, and the like. This month’s “household” category was inflated because my ancient Brita water filter gadget broke, because I dropped my indispensable little kitchen timer on the floor and broke that, and because I decided to buy a lifetime supply of Costco’s tinfoil at a very good per-unit price but a breathtaking out-of-pocket price. If I hadn’t purchased those items, the total for “household goods” would be much lower. But in either event, the total we have is unrealistic, because I avoided buying stuff I would normally need to stock up on and because I bought items that I would normally purchase once every few years, not once every few weeks or months.
IMHO, it’s a little more enlightening to be able to see how much is actually spent on food, as opposed to everything that’s spent at a particular type of merchant. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, though.
So, out of curiosity: how does your accounting system register “groceries”? Do you break out supermarket and big-box purchases into categories such as “food,” “household items,” “personal care items,” and the like? Or do you lump everything that appears on a supermarket receipt into one category?
I stumbled across Woody Tasch on NPR yesterday afternoon, when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a segment on his “slow money” concept, as it applies to a small organic dairy farm in upstate New York. It’s basically a variant onpeer-to-peer lending, or disintermediation, which cuts out the lending institutions with which we are presently feeling disgruntled.
The idea has a certain postmodern (or Depression-era?) charm. Like small-town bankers, we will all lend money to our friends and townspeople, here in the global village. Tasch’s take on it, however, is intriguing: that the speed with which financial transactions fly around the planet is a weakness in the global economy, because there are “structural limits to the power of industrial finance.”Speaking in favor of a simplified market, Tasch observes that “most recently, the subprime mortgage collapse signals the limits of ever accelerating, ever more complex, derivative-driven financial markets.”
He argues that the make-big-money-fast model, organized from “‘markets down’ rather than from the ‘ground up,'” works in favor of environmental degradation and, where food is concerned, brings us chemical-laden food, obesity, and hunger. Tasch focuses on socially responsible food production, suggesting that capital should be steered toward small, local, environmentally friendly farms and businesses.
It would be good to see organized support of farms that produce high-quality food all over the country. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have access to this kind of dairy product at a nearby market? Assuming, however, it came at a price one could afford…
Possibly if more financial support materializes for operations that produce organic foods, milk from grass-fed cows will become available at something less than $20 a gallon.
😉
Dang! Now I’m stuck in the house for an hour or so.
Burglar tools, 1875
Thanks to a seemingly endless stream of missives from the neighborhood association warning of burglars who wait and watch on the street and then clean out your house when they see you leave on an errand, I’ve been checking all around before I drive my car out of the garage. At one point, our intrepid leader reported seven burglaries and prowlers caught in the act over a 15-day period—one every two days. Many of the perps arrive in pairs or groups; pretty clearly, some of this stuff represents organized gang activity. Others are singletons. The level of their determination to rip off the residents keeps step with the rise in the unemployment rate:
Neighbors,
I’ve received several emails and calls about an incident that occurred in the 8000 block of N 8th Ave today.
A 20-30 yr old Caucasian male approached two homes that we know of in the middle of the day. After ringing the doorbell and pounding loudly on the door but getting no answer, he attempted to drill thru the lock and pry open one of the doors. The homeowner was home but wisely chose not to answer the door for the stranger. When it became apparent he was attempting to break in, the homeowner yelled at the guy and he left.
I’m happy that he left and did not get into the house, but he’s still out there. Phoenix PD was called but the guy was long gone. They indicated they were aware of this guy and have been looking for him. We need to be especially watchful for this creep as it could be very dangerous if he gets into a house where the homeowners are home as he almost did today. If you see someone matching this description, call 911 immediately. You do not need to wait for him to do something. If he matches this description, call 911 immediately. If the dispatcher gives you any grief about it, tell them we’ve been told the police are looking for this guy and our Community Action Officer has asked us to call immediately.
The guy is 20-30 years old, white, about 5-10″, shaved head, dark, tightly trimmed goatee. His face was described as gaunt as you might expect a drug addict to appear. He arrived at the house on a red and black motorcycle, wearing a Yamaha motorcycle jacket and a helmet , carrying a backpack.
Be watchful, be safe, be quick.
{sigh}
Okayyy… Just a few minutes ago I gathered my junk to make a run on Costco, Sprouts, and Target. And what should I see parked about three doors down but an old beige Oldsmobile with someone sitting in the driver’s seat. Just a-sittin’ there, minding their own business, eh? Because I couldn’t see far enough to get the license plate from my front yard, I drove my van down there, wrote down the license number and car description, and then came back. The occupant had a shirt hung in the driver’s side window so I couldn’t get a good look at her. (Some of the perps of late have been women, BTW.) I wasn’t even sure it was a woman or a man in drag—the hairdo looked like a bad wig. It could have been a guy tricked out to look like a woman, by way of camouflage.
Damn it. I had a lot of stuff to do today, and I didn’t have in mind spending an hour or so waiting around for a cop to show up. That’s the usual wait time when you call 911 around here. Ohhh well.
In the protective coloration department, yesterday I realized that if I’m to continue shopping at the Sprouts, Costco, and Target in my general area, I shouldn’t be doddering around the parking lots with a purse slung over my shoulder. Since I charge everything, really there’s no reason to haul a bag around everyplace I go.
For a little old lady to carry a purse into the Sprouts or the Albertson’s shopping center down the street is like wearing a sign saying “Mug Me!” The Albertson’s is just creepy—I won’t go in there even in the daytime anymore. Sprouts’s parking lot is a bit sketchy, too. The Walgreen’s in that strip mall allows young toughs to loiter outside the front door, so when you go in there you have to run a gauntlet of threatening-looking men and boys, and you get to enjoy passing through a thick cloud of their cigarette smoke. They may be harmless fellows, but IMHO if you dress like a violent thug and affect the mannerisms of a violent thug, there’s a fair chance you are a violent thug.
La Maya had a close escape from a mugger at the gas station adjacent to the Sprouts parking lot, and then, more recently, she watched a hooker pick up a john in the parking lot. So, your choices are to burn gas driving into a better area, where the stores are nicer and the parking lots less littered with questionable patrons, or to take your chances closer to home.
So, realizing that when I shop I rarely use anything other than a credit card, I decided to disinter an old fold-over wallet and use it to carry the AMEX card, driver’s license, and Safeway nuisance card. It will fit in my jeans pocket, and as long as I’m wearing a shirt on the outside, the resulting bulge is unnoticeable. With any luck, the perps will prefer to knock over some other little old lady with her purse slung over her shoulder, and maybe leave me alone.
And besides, it has a benefit: one fewer piece of junk to drag around.
Of course, leaving my purse in the house poses the chance that it will be stolen, if indeed The Burgular decides to come visiting. But I have a weird little hidey-hole that is SO strange I doubt even a pro will think of it. So I’m going to hide the purse there whenever I go out.
I love a cool package. They say a large part of product mark-up comes from and is made possible by creative packaging, especially for make-up. Well, I’m wise to make-up and buy that in drugstores, but when it comes to ice cream…doomed!
This noon I drove to the Social Security Administration’s offices up on Tatum, at the north end of Paradise Valley, a pretty tony venue for us welfare codgers. The Trader Joe’s that used to be nearest my house closed its doors in the ghost mall that is Metrocenter and moved to the corner of Tatum and Shea, in the same shopping center as—oh, yes!—Whole Foods. I hadn’t been into that Trader’s, because I can’t afford to shop at Whole Paycheck and because I rarely go into those rarefied climes. So, partly out of curiosity and partly because I needed to add a couple more pounds of TJ’s $2.76 butter to my horde, I stopped by the shopping center on the way home.
Trader Joe’s: no bigger, no fancier than the one at 20th Street and Camelback, but cleaner, tidier, less crowded, and ever so much more air-conditioned.
Trader’s doesn’t carry spices to speak of, and I’ve been needing some fennel seeds and some poppy seeds. Annnddd….I happen to know that Whole Foods carries a line of spices packaged in large bottles with the name of each spice emblazoned across the lid. So…if, like moi, you store the bottles on a slide-out pantry shelf below eye level, you can find what you’re looking for without having to write the spice name on the lid with a Sharpie (who would ever want to have to lift her dainty little hand for that kind of labor?) and without having to pick up each bottle in search of whatever you need.
Do they cost too much? Undoubtedly. Do I need a justification? Sure, here it is: these bottles are so big I can store all sorts of other things in them, such as dried herbs from my own garden. Love bottles I can reuse.
Now, it gets worse.
Headed out of the place, what should I pass but the ice cream freezer. It is not possible to avert your eyes from ice cream, is it? No. Ah, Ciao Bella…love! But what is this? Something called “Talenti Italian Ice Cream”…in clear, hard plastic containers with screw-on lids. Stuff’s about 20 cents more than Ciao Bella and the like, but O…M…G… Just look at those amazing reusable containers! The size of an extra-large cold-cream container with an enormous wide mouth, exactly the thing I’ve been looking all over for but haven’t been able to find. Exactly the thing to store, say, home-made potato soup in the freezer.
So. There they are in my fridge: two fine plastic containers. Incidentally, there’s some peach-champagne and some lemon sorbet in there, too. And the containers only cost me 20 cents apiece.
😉
The beloved Make It from Scratch Carnival is up at I’ve Got a Little Space to Fill. This week’s edition is full of things that outshine Funny’s chard-with-walnuts contribution. In the course of offering up a delicious-looking French toast with ham recipe, GP of Manely Montana tells a cautionary tale about running a B&B—remind meto blog about that one of these days. Mary at Simply Forties hits the gong again with a recipe for spring rolls. I’ve always wanted to know how to make those, and this version looks even better than our favorite Vietnamese restaurant’s. As if I needed an excuse to consume some more honey, Victoria Kabakian produces an incredible honey ice cream (OMG!!!) at Mission: Food. A tempting site devoted to crocheting appears here…my mother taught me to crochet, but I’ve forgotten how. I think I have her set of crochet hooks somewhere; it might be worth watching the video to relearn that skill.
And here’s a new Moment for Funny: Dodgeblogium included the rant on trying to collect unemployment in the Carnival of the Vanities. This is the first time I’ve submitted a post to that venerable round-up. I see quite a few PF bloggers are there, many of the usual suspects like The Smarter Wallet, Silicon Valley Blogger, and Nickel. Because this carnival is very eclectic, it offers a diverse set of viewpoints, though. Check out GrrlScientist’s story at Living the Scientific Life about her experience with Finnish emergency care. Here’s an M.D. who’s into brain fitness, writing a site of interest to all us old codgers who so annoy the snark artist at the Shark Tank. Interesting!
