Coffee heat rising

Yard sale adventures

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It’s twenty after five and I’m done in…and I didn’t do much of the work.

VickyC is still trying to shovel out the mountains of clothing and other personal effects left after her mom passed last April. She’s already sold over $1,500 worth of clothing on consignment. But bags and bags of perfectly fine clothing—some of it very attractive—were rejected by the consigner. So, she decided to throw a yard sale. Another of her friends and I offered to help out and to bring some of our own yard-salable stuff to the big event.

And what a yard sale she’s got going! We convened at her central-city home right at 7:00 a.m. One of her house-mates put up the yard sale signs on his way to work, and shortly customers started to show up.

In addition to hundreds of clothing items and mountains of towels, sheets, and bedding, she offered several pieces of furniture, including a Thomasville coffee table and a handsome red upholstered love seat. I brought the security cameras M’hijito had installed to record activity in the backyard during the late great swimming pool vandalism adventures, plus some old stereo components and a few pieces of kitsch. A male friend contributed two electric guitars and an amplifier.

People will buy the darnedest things…and not buy the darnedest things. The clothing, as expected, sold well, even though there was so much of it we had no hope of hanging it up or even of spreading it out in any way to display it effectively. Buyers just pawed through stacks and bags of stuff, apparently undisturbed by the absence of merchandising flare. Someone paid $100 for one of the guitars, but no one would pay $75 for the love seat, which was clean and in nearly new condition. It took all day to unload the coffee table. Someone bought two of the stereo components, neither of which was the receiver. The cameras, hard disk, and electronic stuff to connect them to a TV set were stolen.

VickyC collected over $300 today and probably will sell more tomorrow, provided it’s not raining. Rain wasn’t predicted until Sunday, but gray clouds lowered overhead all day and it wouldn’t be surprising if we got rain by tomorrow.I collected $21 and change, and VickyC gave me a lamp that I coveted for M’hijito’s house as consolation for the theft of the electronic goods.

Staging this yard sale was an enormous amount of work, especially for the proprietor. We hangers-on didn’t do much, other than help drag a few tables around and spread out the loot, and then drag it all back into a secure area when VickyC was ready to close for the afternoon. Was it worth it?

Really: is a yard sale worth the amount of work it requires?

Only, IMHO, if you have a lot of stuff to get rid of and you can be pretty certain it’s the sort of stuff that will sell. Around here, that means clothing, children’s toys, tools, low-end cookware, and (sometimes) small household items. And by a lot, I mean a lot:a houseful of stuff left by a deceased relative, or everything you own when you decide to not to rent a truck or pay a moving company to decamp to another state.

Given the time and effort it takes to put together even a fairly small yard sale, I don’t think it’s worth the effort unless you can make at least $300. We held the sale open from 7 in the morning till around 2:00 p.m.—seven hours—and VickyC had put in many, many hours more than that. I’d estimate she put in at least 20 hours, bare minimum. That meant she earned about $15 an hour, not a bad wage.

In my case, however, if you count VickyC’s $15 asking price for the lamp as a fair trade for the $800 worth of security camera equipment that was ripped off (I hoped to get about $30 for the stuff, at yard-sale rates), then I came away with $36 for the seven hours of my time at the sale plus another hour spent gathering my junk, cleaning it up, tagging it, and hauling it downtown. That’s $4.50 an hour…a far cry from the $60 an hour my time commands on the freelance market.

So, no: in ordinary circumstances, I doubt if yard-saling is worth your time. Financially, I would have been better off to have spent today marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk or writing the proposed CE Desk book. Had I donated my junk to Goodwill, the deduction from my income taxes would have been worth more than my yard-sale proceeds. It was a choice people-watching opportunity, and I enjoyed spending the time with my friend. But beyond that, I don’t see it as a particularly efficient way to generate sidestream income.

Wah! I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up

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So I’m plodding across the freeway and thinking how much I hate wasting 90 minutes to two hours driving back and forth to the campus when it occurs to me that what I really hate is my job.

Oops! Say what? I hate my job? Come ON! Sure, the pay’s not equitable (my new opposite number is coming in at six figures on a 9-month contract, very annoying), but it’s still a decent living and it ain’t cleaning terlets or flipping burgers. The problem is, I am soooo flicking bored!

Writing the index for the current issue of the renaissance and medieval history annual meant having to read all that stuff AGAIN. Once was quite enough. Twice was more than enough. Three times is decidedly not a charm.While a couple of the essays are pretty interesting (relatively speaking), the archival study where the author notes every single sale of every tiny plot of land in the ninth-century Spanish March, with the name of each buyer and seller, was almost as mind-numbing as the excruciatingly detailed analytical comparison of Bromyard’s Tractatus iuris ciuilis et canonici ad moralem materiam applicati with his Summa praedicantium, a lively work when set next to the endless dissection of Milton’s educational theory and practice.

The index took all day Friday, all day Saturday, half of Sunday, and all of Monday and Tuesday to complete. By the time I sent it off to one of the RAs to be edited, at 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, I thought I was gunna die.

Why keep your pay statements, and how

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Recently My Dollar Plan told the story of a family member whose employer, in her early years on the job, neglected to withhold her retirement contributions. Fifteen years on, the accounting department noticed. In the discussion that ensued, she offered to contribute the unpaid amount but was told all would be fine, not to worry. Now, after thirty years in the salt mine, she retires, thinking indeed all is fine. But noooo…now they tell her that her retirement fund is not funded adequately to support her in her dotage.

This is big. Not just for the poor soul who’s looking at a lengthy struggle over this and the possibility of an impoverished retirement, but for all of us. The trend to outsource payroll to companies for whom employees are just so many numbers—or, if living entities at all, sheep to be sheared—distances workers from employers who have to look them in the eye. So does the increasing use of electronic systems that function more or less unobserved by human beings. The potential for error is much higher, and the potential for errors never to be noticed grows by the day.

A year or so ago, the Great Desert University turned over its payroll (and just about everything else having to do with sheepherding personnel management) to PeopleSoft. A huge fiasco ensued. Supposedly by the turn of the year everything was straightened out, and on the surface things have appeared to be running smoothly ever since.

Then we had the last round of layoffs. A number of the most recent cannees had worked in maintenance and support jobs for decades.

One benefit of working for Our Great State is that your sick leave hours accrue separately from vacation hours. Over the years, if you’re lucky enough to stay healthy or you come to work when you’re ill, a lot of sick leave hours pile up. After you reach 500 hours, the state will pay you 30 percent of your hourly pay rate as severance pay when you leave employment. Stash 1,000 hours, and that rate jumps to 50 percent of hourly pay. As you can imagine, this adds up nicely. At the moment, for example, if GDU lays me off today, OGS will owe me $16,500.

When the most recent RIFed workers applied to HR for payment reflecting their accrued unused sick leave hours, they were told they had none. PeopleSoft had no record of their sick leave balances. None.

Well. Of course, in the absence of their entire archive of back pay stubs, there’s no way for any of the laid-off workers to prove how much sick leave they earned, how much they had used, and how much remained for the state to pay.

This is why it’s crucial to keep copies of every pay stub or statement you get. If your pay statements are posted online instead of being delivered to you in hard copy, print them out and keep them in a fire-proof file cabinet. You should also be able to copy them to disk as PDFs, a good back-up, especially if you have electronic storage space somewhere other than at your house.

Keep these permanently. Never throw them away.

Not only that, but you should check every paycheck carefully for accuracy and completeness. During the Great PeopleSoft Fiasco, I received eight paychecks whose gross or net income figures were wrong. Twice, PeopleSoft failed to withhold my contribution to my retirement fund, and three times it failed to make GDU’s contribution. When accounting for my vacation hours disappeared, I was informed that—after 15 years of working for this fine institution—I was ineligible for vacation time. When, after weeks of squawking on my part, they decided to fix this, they got the figures wrong time after time after time. They got my sick leave figures wrong, they got my federal withholding wrong. And finally, come January, they got my W-2 wrong, too.

How do I know? Because when I realized what a mess they were making of things, I started keeping track of each item on my paycheck in an Excel spreadsheet:121008payrollerrorsThese figures, of which you see only a small part, came in mighty handy every time I had to send yet another written complaint to HR and to the Dean’s office over the mess PeopleSoft was making of my pay.

I knew the W-2 was wrong and that the error was in my favor, but not being an accountant, I couldn’t prove it and had no idea how to identify the errors. On the advice of my lawyer, I decided to let it go; it’s the employer’s responsibility to get the tax withholding right, and I was assured that I would have no liability if an IRS audit (which GDU and PeopleSoft richly deserved) showed irregularities in the W-2.

But…the discovery that the university was blithely distributing W-2’s that PeopleSoft knew to be in error (we actually were told this, and told we should calculate the correct figures ourselves!) led me to realize I’d better do more in Quicken than just enter my net pay. Starting on January 1, I began to enter a split entry for each paycheck, showing the gross payment less each deduction:121008splitentry

This, of course, is a gigantic pain in the buns that adds extra work time to my bookkeeping. However, I suspect it will be worth it.

For one thing, I discovered another error in a paycheck, which PeopleSoft never could account for. And for another, my annual Quicken category report will print out totals for each of the items shown in the split entry, making it easy for my tax lawyer to compare the actual income, deduction, and withholding figures with whatever appears on next January’s W-2.

Those are short-term issues. But the long-term issues could add up to something much more significant.

If Dollar Plan’s relative and GDU’s RIFed workers had kept records like these, they’d have a potent weapon in their fight with their employers. That would make it well worth the extra time and effort it takes to review your paycheck carefully and keep a running record of everything that has to do with it.

Moments of Fame

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Dough Roller selected Funny’s rant about the couples culture as an editor’s pick in the 88th Carnival of Money Stories! So I certainly was tickled about that, particularly since quite a few distinguished pieces appear in this edition. A propos of an earlier FaM post question about whether you should try to turn something you love into a living, The Financial Blogger reflects on the success he’s had with blogging. At Budgets Are Sexy, I got a boot out of J. Money’s story of having taken out a whole paycheck in cash. My Dollar Plan tells a cautionary tale that underscores the importance of keeping records related to your pay and your job. Single Guy Money tells a story of helping a friend organize her personal finances, an experience some of us share.

The Carnival of Personal Finance is up at Free from Broke. The “turning what you love” post was included in this round-up, which as usual is huge. At this carnival, The Strump pushed my button with a report on how she got suckered into taking a contract at significantly less than the client’s going rate…been there, too! Everyday Finance predicts that many of us mutual fund holders will be rudely surprised at the capital gains taxes we’ll be paying for 2008, thanks to the current economic fiasco. LOL! I’ve become rude, all right, but I’m no longer surprised at anything emanating from the Bush economy. Mighty Bargain Hunter worries that the bailouts will ultimately harm everyone’s standard of living; this post offers several good points that add to my own slowly germinating theory that Big Auto, alas, should not be rescued by the taxpayer.

Moving on, Simply Forties has posted the 93rd Make It from Scratch Carnival, always a boot. Whaa? “How to Make a Horseshoe?” Check it out at Midwest Neurotica! Who’d’ve thunk it? The proprietor of Frugal Antics of a Harried Homemaker had an end-of-season tomato extravaganza that involved a lovely spaghetti sauce. And don’t miss Simply’s amazingly delicious-looking parmesan and herb-crusted beef tenderloin (ohhh hunger! I shouldn’t be reading this stuff before breakfast…). Funny’s blurb on nabbing nice picture frames on the cheap appears in this round-up.

MSN Smart Spendingpicked up my discussion of long-term care insurance and is running it as a guest post today. Check out proprietor Karen Datko’s article, posted yesterday, about the long-term implications of the mentality instilled by the need for kids to go deep into debt to get a basic college degree.

At Financial Wellness Project, FWP has posted another gigantic Money Hacks Carnival. Check out Dividends4Life’s rumination on when (or if) the market will bottom out. Mr. ToughMoneyLove warns about cash-out refinancing deals; at DepositAccounts.com you’ll find seven steps to reduce the hassle when you have to (or just want to) change checking accounts. And Prime Time Money’s post about FreeShipping.org shows up here—I’ve seen this post before, & it’s a very handy thing to know about.

Power use cut—energy conserved!

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Wow! The electric bill just arrived. Salt River Project has started including a bar graph to compare 2008’s month-by-month kilowatt-hour usage with 2007’s. Though it’s a little hard to read, I’d say that this month I’ve dropped my power consumption by about 275 kWh off the same period last year, from about 875 to about 600 kWh. The bill is only $63.52, probably an all-time low. It also looks like I consumed about 150 kWh less than I did last month.

How? Here are the strategies I’ve been using:

1. Replace most incandescent bulbs with CFLs.
2. Cut the pool pump’s run time to four hours a day.
3. Jack up the thermostat in the summertime and jack it down in the winter.
4. Leave the air-conditioning or heat off if temperatures are even remotely tolerable.
5. This month, use a space heater instead of the central heating.

Last month, I did use the HVAC to heat the house on a half-dozen or so mornings when the house was chilly; as a result, usage dropped only a few kWh compared to the same month in 2007. But at the beginning of the current billing cycle, I bought a space heater and have used it to take the chill off only in the rooms where I hang out (not the bedroom). I’ve been using it just in the mornings in the kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Even though this month has been a lot cooler, the bill was $13 less than last month’s! It’s about $10 less than the 2007 bill—not bad, considering that SRP raised its rates by 6 percent this year.

This confirms my suspicions that, protestations of the air-conditioning service guys notwithstanding, it’s insane to heat and cool eight rooms when I occupy three rooms. I’m going to move forward with my scheme to install a room air conditioner in the bedroom. The programmable thermostat is already in place (hasn’t been used yet this winter, because I’ve left the system off). Now all I have to do is buy a unit and find someone who can cut a hole in the wall, install it, and caulk around it correctly. The bedroom has no window—only a sliding door—and so the contraption will have to go in a block wall. But since Satan, the previous owner, put one in the garage, I don’t see why I can’t get one in the bedroom.

Air-conditioning contractors will tell you things, by way of discouraging you from dorking with the system, that appear to be…well, shall we say, mythological.

For example, you hear all the time that you should not leave the air-conditioning off until the day starts to get uncomfortably warm, because this will cause your house to get “heat-soaked” and make your unit work harder to cool the place back into the comfort zone. Last time my AC guy was here for the twice-yearly routine inspection, he insisted this would cause the unit to run three to five hours, nonstop.

That is just flat not true.

I’ve been in the habit of leaving the AC off until the temperatures outside reach around 98 or 100 degrees and inside are in the high 80s. The unit most certainly does not run for hours to cool the place down to 82.

Slump block
Slump block

And IMHO, there’s no such thing as “not heat-soaked.” Block walls work very much like trombé walls: they gain heat during the day as the sun beats on them and ambient heat rises. They radiate heat late in the day and through the evening after the sun goes down. It does not matter whether you cool the air inside the structure, nor does it matter much whether the block has holes inside it; if your walls are made of slump block, your walls will heat up during the day and start radiating into the house about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. Concrete block has much the

Adobe block
Adobe block

same effect as adobe. If you live someplace where the evenings chill off after hot days, such as New Mexico, this is a grand thing. If you live in Arizona, where a balmy summer evening is around 95, it’s a less than perfectly ideal phenomenon.

That notwithstanding, I still wouldn’t have styrofoam, chickenwire, and mud walls. pbfttttt!

Next summer, I’m going to set the thermostat to effectively go off around 9:30 or 10:00 at night and then come back on at 82 degrees a half-hour before sunrise. Then I’m going to use the room air-conditioner to cool the bedroom to the 76 or 78 degrees I find comfortable for sleeping.

Why chill 1860 square feet at night, when I’m only occupying about 35 square feet?