Coffee heat rising

Personal finance IS politics

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A few days ago, JD posted posted a request at Get Rich Slowly as he was coping with the unexpected passing of a dear friend:

Finally, please stop sending me anti-Obama links. I’m not going to post them. I don’t post pro-Obama links, either. Nor did I post links in opposition to or in favor of President Bush.  Get Rich Slowly is not a political blog, and it’s not about to become one. The political divisiveness in the U.S. makes me tense, and I refuse to contribute to it.

This elicited some conversation, among which was a comment from Steve of Brip Blap:

I hear what you’re saying, and I wouldn’t want to see you start launching into political polemics on GRS…but unfortunately politics have a huge impact on personal finances (taxes, retirement savings laws, and on and on). The divisiveness is there for a reason – politicians have drastically different ideas about how we should be able to handle our own money.

So I understand completely where you’re coming from in regards to the blog – no sense in going there – but it’s a huge part of what’s going to happen with our money in the future. We will all need to contribute to whichever side we think is right.

800px-united_states_one_dollar_bill_obverseI have to agree with Steve: although I wouldn’t ask JD (or anyone else) to hold forth on topics that make him uncomfortable, the fact is that politics and personal finance are so tightly intertwined, there’s no separating them. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that personal finance and politics are aspects of the same thing.

We are all suffering today because a decade ago (much longer, really, looking back to the Reagan years) we elected a party whose dogma was largely based on some misguided theories. Among these was the idea that the market will keep itself healthy and on track if left to its own accord. This theory has given us unbridled greed and irresponsibility, eleven million people out of work, depressed salaries for those of us who have managed to hold onto our jobs, a plague of foreclosures that is casting millions of Americans out of their homes, astronomical gas price spikes, a failing healthcare system, collapsing banks, and the prospect of another Great Depression. The fix for this mess will saddle our kids and our grandkids with national debt, high taxes, and a lowered standard of living, and you can be sure the politics that will come out of that circumstance will be interesting, indeed.

Bill Clinton’s byword, “It’s the economy, stupid,” put this fact in a nutshell: politics and money are the same thing. Free-market economics is a political theory every bit as much as it is an economic theory, and it was imposed, in an extreme form, on our nation through the workings of politics.

That’s why it’s so urgently important for Americans to be well educated in the history of their country and in the history of the world: votes made in ignorance lead to disaster, such as the one we’re seeing today. It’s why we need a free press, and why the collapse of the Fourth Estate poses an enormous threat to America’s republic. We need to understand the workings of our government’s leadership, and the easiest way to spread that understanding to the largest number of people is through a free press that focuses on something other than celebrity antics.

And it’s why as Americans we need to return to honest, forthright discussion and quit sniping at each other. The bitter conflicts, the nasty behavior, the substitution of crass rudeness for “debate” that have been fomented in certain quarters for the purpose of putting a specific party in the dominant position it has held for the past decade need to come to an end. If we are to escape the quicksand that’s fast sucking us to our economic doom, we must work together in a political and a politick way to make things as right as we can make them.

Funny about Money will continue to refer to political topics, and incivility will not be tolerated here. I make no secret of my opinion of the Bush Administration and its controllers. And I respect the right of others to disagree: politely.

Cheapskate’s landscaping

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Some months ago, a commenter on someone’s blog (don’t recall who on whose: sorry!) remarked that she had filled in the cracks between her patio flagstones with (expensive!) black stones, to good effect. At the time, I thought there’s an interesting idea! Filed the thought away but did nothing about it.

Over the summer I cast wildflower seeds between the flags in the front courtyard. This worked to interesting effect…lots of bright, strange-looking, probably invasive blossoms. All very sweet. But the truth is, one person’s wildflower is the next person’s…well, weed. What I had left after the wildflowers had blown was a rangy tangle of straw with tap roots headed for the center of the earth. This, I realized, was not a practical idea.

When Richard the Landscaper installed the flagstones on dirt, the plan was to cultivate dichondra in the cracks between the pavers. Great plan. Except that in Arizona, two other varieties of groundcover are endemic: burr clover and bermudagrass (known in some parts of the country as “crabgrass” and in others as “devilgrass”). Burr clover has a certain charm: it makes pretty little yellow blossoms, and it doesn’t seem to grow burrs. But bermudagrass is as horrid an invader as you can imagine: steel wire with ugly scrawny leaves attached. Left to its own devices, it will grow as high as your hind end. People cultivate it as lawn grass here, because it’s about the only grass that will survive a 115-degree summer. All you need to make it grow is water. It loves heat and water. The more water you dump on it, the thicker it will grow. It has, however, a somewhat contrary personality: this is a plant that thrives wherever you don’t want it and dies wherever you do want it.

Where I did not want it was between the flagstones. Consequently, that’s where I had a fine stand of the stuff. Between the bermudagrass and the burr clover, the dichondra was snuffed out and the whole place looked pretty grungy.

So, last fall I decided to dig all the tired, wiry, failed ground cover out from between the flagstones and fill the spaces with stones. A few trips to nurseries and warehouse stores confirmed that black rocks were well beyond the price range, and besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted black. It’s plenty hot in that brick oven during the summer without paving the ground in black stone. Another discovery: occasionally, Michael’s sells decorative polished stones at incredible markdowns. But even on sale, these would cost way too much to fill in an entire patio’s worth of flagstones. And contemplating the number of little mesh bags of such stones that would be required boggled the brain.

However, this neighborhood is full of river rocks: polished multicolored stones used as decorative landscaping accents. People buy too many of them or get tired of them and dump them in the alleys behind their houses. When I pulled a bunch out of my old yard, two blocks to the north, that was exactly what I did with them: tossed them on the ground in the alley. Lo! A quick reconnoiter confirmed the things were still there.

And they’re scattered all over the other alleys throughout the neighborhood. Free for the taking!

So: for the past many weeks, I’ve been slowly digging out the weeds and roots from between the flagstones, collecting stones from points far-flung, and redecorating the front courtyard. A week or so ago, I got tired of hauling bagsful of stone around the neighborhood (I’ve burned off eight pounds in this endeavor!) and capitulated: drove up to a quarry not far from my neighborhood and bought two big plastic binsful of stone for all of five bucks.

As of this weekend all but one corner of the patio was done. Today I dug out all the rest of the weeds and sand between the stones, and also dug out the burr clover growing under the olive tree on the patio. Around that tree, I planted about a zillion anemone bulbs. Love anemones. A couple of other unknown bulbs had managed to push their way though the clover, and so I’m hoping that with some cultivation these will join the anemones and fill in the basin under the tree with lots of color.

At this point, it should only take another four or five bags of stones quarried from the alleys to fill between the rest of the flagstones. I should be able to gather those in another week or two.

Meanwhile, I think the overall effect is pretty nice, especially considering what I paid for it. Sprinkling on a few polished stones from the craft store really zings up the river stones, and when they’re wet after a rainfall, they all look like they’ve been through a polisher. It will take some doing to beat back the bermudagrass and burr clover until they give up, but a weekly application of Roundup to each new sprig should do the trick, after a summer or so. And no, I don’t like Roundup…but it is biodegradable, it can be applied with a dropper (I use an old Spray & Wash bottle with one of those squirter nipples) to the target’s leaves only, and it’s better than any of the alternatives. Including a yardful of weeds.

So far this project cost me about $15 or $20 plus four months of sporadic work, not a bad price! And it should save on water, because I won’t be trying to cultivate dichondra, wildflowers, or clover.

Coyote bait

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Cassie the Corgi is not quite as large as a grown jackrabbit in a good foraging year. In the eyes of some, she is small, tender, fuzzy, and juicy-looking.

This evening we had a close encounter with a pair of those eyes. We were ambling up the backside of our block, taking in the balmy evening air, when who should come flying across the perpendicular street but a fine, muscular young coyote!

What (from any point of view other than a rabbit’s) an amazing and fantastic animal! It moved like a shadow, soundless and illusory. To come up to that pace, a German shepherd would have to launch into a gallop, but this wild dog’s gait was a smooth, even trot.

Coyotes inhabit our neighborhood. Unknown to most urbanites, they dwell in most districts of the city, and these days they’ve moved into most parts of the United States. A couple of years ago, neighbors were up in arms because we had a denning pair with a litter of pups, making them marginally dangerous. Coyotes who are in the business of raising young do not like to be interfered with by, say, your dog, and so they will ghost over a six-foot fence (easily!) and come after even a large dog.

As for the likes of Cassie the Corgi: dinnertime! Given enough hungry cubs to feed, a coyote will try to grab Fifi right off the end of your leash. Some reports have claimed coyotes have actually tried to snatch little dogs out of the arms of their doting owners. They also, on occasion, will go after small children, but those occasions are extremely rare.

The coyote was so focused on whatever it was chasing (cat?) or whatever it was running from (human?) that I don’t think it noticed us. Nevertheless, I picked up the Corgi and carried her the half-block back to our house. Tomorrow: remember to bring the pit-bull shilelagh! Gotta quit leaving that thing at home.

Photo: Coyote by Arizona Roadside, Marya

RSS feed changed to summary

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If you’re reading Funny through an RSS feed, you’ll be seeing a summary instead of the former full post. This setting is recommended by WordPress, so I just discovered. You can click on “more” to see the entire text and graphics.

I have yet to figure out how one gets an RSS feed to a WordPress.com blog (apparently you can set one up through Google, but how???). From what I can tell, these freebie sites come with an RSS feed by default, unless you set up the site as private. WP’s proprietors, being very bright young things, assume as bright young things will that the rest of us are just as bright. Alas, we’re not. For the life of me, no matter how assiduously I search Support and Forums, I can not parse out how a reader subscribes to an RSS feed to one of these blogs, or whether (and how) you can see how many people have RSS feeds.

Mysterious. Possibly it’s just one of those mammalian things that’s beyond the Cretacean brain’s capacity to grasp.
apatosaurus33

View of the Good Old Days by?????via Wikipedia

Credit cards, debit cards, cash cards

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Good grief! Rousted out of the sack at 6:30 ayem by the bulk trash pickup, flashing their lights into the bedroom. I thought it was the Fire Department! Grr…I’d planned to sleep in for a while today, after working myself stupid yesterday on a horrifically mind-numbing project.

{Ugh!} Speaking of bulk trash, what do we have here but an e-mail from the sidekick reporting that our brilliant author’s 87 gerjillion ditzy boxed pullouts disappeared from the file I sent her!? How many more hours am I going to have to spend on this garbage?

Where was I? Yesterday, comes in the snail-mail a notice from Sears saying its credit-card issuer, Citibank, has made “some changes.” I’ll bet, think I. Actually, I expected the “change” would be to cancel the account, which I opened only to get the benefit of a 12-month no-interest scam on some appliances and have never used since.

No. They’re writing mostly to say they’re upping the already usurious interest rate another couple of points.

Interest on this card, in the wacko free-for-all age of the unregulated market, can go as high as (hang onto your hat) 29.9 percent! For heaven’s sake. And this is on a card for Sears, a joint commonly patronized by folks who never spend their time swimming in money. Is that or is that not the most rapacious thing you ever heard?

Over at Consumerism Commentary, Flexo has a discussion going about the merits of debit cards vs. credit cards. I’ve never used a debit card, partly because I have enough numbers to memorize, thank you, without yet another PIN, but mostly because I think they’re dangerous. If someone steals it, he can not only empty your checking account, he can drain it to the bottom of your check-cashing credit line. In my case, that’s $3,000 plus whatever cash is in the account at the time.

I realize they’ve changed the law since these things first came out, so that you do have some protection from rip-off artists. But the fact remains that you may not realize what’s happening until the account is already bouncing EFTs. So even if the bank reimburses you for the stolen money, you still are faced with the enormous hassle trying to explain to all your creditors that you’re not, no indeed not, a deadbeat. Your credit could be damaged, and who has time to run through every punch-a-button maze for every faceless corporation with which we all have the pleasure of doing business? That’s a nightmare scenario that I’ve preferred to avoid.

A credit card—providing you pay it off on time—has many advantages. First, most credit card issuers back you up to some degree in a dispute with a merchant. Second, many credit card issuers provide insurance for products that are lost, damaged, or stolen shortly after the purchase. Third, many credit cards give you kickbacks in the form of cash or “rewards.” And finally, you make only one transaction a month in your checking account, rather than a score of them. This allows you to keep your money in a money market account, which earns a sou or so more in interest than a checking account does.

There is, as many PF bloggers note, the risk that you’ll spend more money when you’re waving a card around than when you’re forking over cold, hard cash. Personally, I have the opposite experience. Cash disappears out of my purse like water flowing through a pipe. Put $100 in my hand in the morning, and by evening it will be gone and, more to the point, I’ll have no idea where it went!A credit card statement gives me a paper trail, so at least I know where I diddled away the money.

And as a practical matter, I don’t diddle it away with a credit card. I budget a specific amount each month that can be charged to the credit card. The credit union automatically transfers that amount out of my paycheck into a money market checking account, from which I pay credit-card bills. Using an Excel spreadsheet, I enter each transaction as a debit against the budgeted amount, so that at any given time I know exactly how much remains to spend. I also know when I’ve spent it all, and so I know when to stop charging stuff.

This works effectively to keep me from spending more than I have.

Recently, however, American Express, which issues the card I use most, changed the closing date on a billing cycle. I dodged an overcharge only because I was ill and so didn’t make it out to buy groceries on the extra day that appeared in that cycle.

Needless to say, I was less than pleased. Because I was running pretty tight on the budget, had I bought the groceries I needed that day, I would have had to raid savings to pay last month’s bill.

It occurred to me that I could get around this problem by purchasing cash cards at Costco and Safeway (which collect most of my money) in the amount that I normally spend at those emporiums each month. This would set my budget in stone: run out of cash on a card, quit buying. It would moot any cute little changes designed to trip up credit-card users. But if I charged them on my AMEX card, I’d still get a bit of a kickback (not as much, because the Costco gasoline purchases get a very nice kickback, but something). It would also mean that if I had not used the entire balance on such a card, that much more would be available to spend the following month.

Let us ruminate…

If indeed I have not spent a month’s alloted budget at Safeway, so that I have, say, $150 left over at the end of a budget cycle, then the only place I can spend that money is at Safeway. Wouldn’t I rather have that money in the money market account, where it’s earning a little interest and where I can spend anywhere? While it’s true that the next paycheck puts another $150 spendable dollars in there, if the leftover cash remains in my account, the account contains 300 interest-bearing dollars rather than only 150 of the same.

And if a debit card is risky, how much riskier is a cash card? Anyone can use it, and as far as I can see, there’s no protection at all if you lose it or if it’s stolen. With a debit card you have a hassle. With a cash card, the money is already spent (effectively), and it’s as stealable as cash itself. Bad.

Costco’s cash card can be used to buy gasoline as well as food and household products. Costco will not take cash or checks at its gas pumps, which consistently underprice all other gas stations: you have to use an AMEX or a Costco card. If AMEX continues to close its billing cycle on unpredictable days, a cash card in the amount of $50 or so would allow me to buy gas near the end of a cycle without worrying about whether I would overrun my budget. While gas prices are low, it would even leave enough to buy a day’s worth of groceries. The theft of an entire month’s food budget would of course be a disaster, but fifty bucks wouldn’t break the bank.

It would be convenient to have a cash card to buy food and gas if, as happened a few months ago, the AMEX card mysteriously quits working. On the other hand…cash would serve the same purpose and need not be carried around in a wallet, where it’s infinitely vulnerable to diddling way, theft, or loss. It probably would be better to stash a hundred bucks in a file folder and use it as a small emergency fund.

Overall, then, pretty clearly a cash card has no advantage over a debit card and no advantage over cash. For those of us who need to see actual dollars in order to keep a grip on them, a cash card poses the same budget-busting risk as a credit card. In stop-loss terms.the debit card has only a slight advantage over cash should you lose it or have it stolen from you.

IMHO, the credit card has got it all over either a debit card or cash, assuming you can exercise a modicum of self-discipline. It’s safer, it lets you see where you’ve spent your money, and it gives you a kickback.

So… In the past I’ve made the day before and the day of the AMEX billing cycle end date “no-buy” days, to be sure all payments clear on the statement I’ve budgeted for. Now I’ll also refrain from spending on the day after the billing cycle is supposed to end. That should obviate any repercussions from this new “gotcha.”