EditorMom offers a lead to a fun site that will give you a (free!) moment of serendipity. Go here and enter your blog’s URL or a passage of text, any passage. Or a del.icio.us username. While you’re at the site, don’t miss the gallery.
Moments of Fame
Mama Bear hosts the beloved Make It from Scratch Carnival this week at I’ve Got a Little Space to Fill, where Funny’s recipe for and analysis of DIY glass cleaner appears. And by golly, Mary at Simply Forties leads off again with another of her amazing recipes: Baked Adzuki Beans with Eggplants and Tomatoes. I dunno what adzuki beans are, but I’m planning to find out soon. Speaking of new-to-me foods, check out HowToMe’s recipe for a South African snack called rusks: it’s a kind of a sweet biscuit, interesting and it looks good. The only way to do justice to all the neat posts that appear in this carnival would be to copy and paste the whole darn thing here! So be sure to go to Mama Bear’s site and explore for yourself.
Money Beagle has posted an interesting Money Hacks Carnival this week…don’t miss the hilarious pooch pictures, BTW! Here, a spin-off of the DIY window cleaner project, the DIY spot remover, made editor’s choice amid a host of much more august writings. For us intellectual cheapskates, Monevator reports that Stanford researchers have kindly demonstrated that you can spend 20% less than usual on presents and still elicit the same pleasurable response from the giftee. Take a look at Len Penzo’s figures that led him to conclude that paying off a mortgage is the smart thing to do: this thing is a tour de force. I paid mine off, over three financial advisors’ protests, as a matter of gut instinct; Penzo produces some good evidence to support that strategy.
Credit Withdrawal hosts the 160th Festival of Frugality. This thing, as usual, is huge. Funny’s grouse-fest about Scientific American‘s questionable subscription renewal policies appears in the crowd. Fortunately, CW highlights a number of especially excellent posts near the top of this week’s round-up. My eye, of course, was instantly drawn to Lazy Man & Money’s advice on how to stock a bar. He makes some recommendations for staples, high-end and low. Money Ning contributed a nice article titled Five Surefire Ways to Stop Thinking Your Paycheck Is Never Enough. With M’hijito now seriously considering full-time pursuit of a master’s degree, Jim’s post, at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, on the importance of filling out a FAFSA application for low-interest student loans was a good lead.
This week’s Carnival of Money Stories is hosted, with an entertaining Blog Championship Series theme, by Adam at Your Money Relationship, where Funny’s latest shoe-buying tale appears. In the arrrrghhhh! department, check out Consumer Boomer’s story of the amazing deal Terminex proposed to install insulation (yes…they’re diversifying, apparently). Free Money Finance confirms my feeling about Macy’s, which IMHO needs to revamp its business plan if it’s to survive. The Financial Blogger’s house renovation project is finished, and he offers some reflections on the process. And finally, here is a very interesting post on class and moneyat GRACEful Retirement that has generated an enormous amount of lively and even passionate commentary, not to be missed.
Later!
Sorry, folks: I’m sick. Back tomorrow…i hope!
🙁
LOL! Georgie, we’ll miss ya!
Did you hear our soon-to-be-former President’s farewell press conference? I thought the high point came when he remarked that the press had “misunderestimated” him. {snark!} The man just can’t leave bad enough alone.
Another excellent moment arrived when he observed that he came into the presidency in a recession and is leaving it in a recession, but in between (like, oh, say the proverbial night bird flying through windows of the lighted beer hall) the economy has thrived. I will refrain from exclaiming Jesus H. Christ. Well, no. I won’t. As I recall, the country had no deficit (in fact, we had a budget surplus) when the Shrub took office, nor was anyone speculating about the onset of a second Great Depression.
What a moron. What a shameful episode in our country’s history. Heaven help us all now.
Can’t sell the house? Try swapping
One of the local television PlayNooz programs claims that some people have taken to trading houses when they couldn’t sell them—no indication of whether these prospective traders are having any luck at the enterprise, though.
It’s an interesting idea. A year and a half ago, CNN reported that some homebuilders were taking old houses in trade for new ones. Not everybody wants to live in a cheaply built house in the remote and treeless suburbs, but if you do, trading could be a way to get there.
It appears that the most likely use of this strategy is to get yourself from one city to another. Few people would trade a $300,000 house for another $300,000 house in the same city, unless the city is so huge that there’s some value for each party in moving closer to their places of work. Exactly how this would work for the mortgage holders is somewhat fuzzy. Apparently each “buyer” gets a new mortgage and uses it to pay off the existing mortgage. Nice trick if you can do it, in the present lending environment. Both traders would need sterling credit and a long track record of paying on time.
Several sites are in the business of helping would-be house traders get in touch with each other. Check these out:
Craig’s List has a house swapping category. Some of these are vacation or short-term swaps; some are efforts to make a permanent trade. The one here in Phoenix looks pretty active: a lot of the offers are local, but some are coming in from all over the country. Check the site in your area—look under “Housing Swap.”
OnlineTrading.com charges $19 for the privilege of using its site. Turn off your sound before hitting this site: they have a particularly grating ad that starts blatting at you the instant you get there. The site called House4Trade.com is actually a front for OnlineTrading.com; with that sort of oiliness going on, I’d be careful of this outfit.
RealEstateExchange.com appears to be a separate entity. They’re advertising trades of commercial as well as real estate properties. This site has quite a lot of information posted, and its proprietors say they actively pursue scammers.
If you decide to go this route, you probably should consult a real estate lawyer to be sure the contracts are written correctly and your interests are protected. If you can find a Realtor who is experienced in trading property, that also would be advisable, though I have no idea where you would find such a person.
Taxes! PeopleSoft! Garrrrhhhhh!
Is there a way to express my hatred for my honored government’s tax system?
Just ran a Quicken report for my tax lawyer. Haven’t printed it out…I don’t even want to know how many pages it will generate. There’s probably not enough paper in the house to print the damn thing. I’ll have to hire an elephant and a mahout to deliver it across town.
Because of PeopleSoft’s proven unreliability—and because I’m pretty sure they got last year’s W-2 wrong—for the first time I’ve broken out all the details of my paycheck as a split entry under each salary deposit. I wanted a record that I could compare with the figures that appear on this year’s W-2. The result is a mosaic of new entries, some under income and some under expenses, an awe-inspiring mess. Many of these entries are directly deductible from my salary. Because my gross (instead of net, as in the past) salary appears under “income” and because Quicken categorizes refunds, reimbursements, the IRA withdrawals that immediately were reinvested (and so are a wash, tax-wise), and all sorts of other little bits of b.s. as “income,” this report makes it look like I earned almost $100,000 this year. Which, oohhhh believe me, I most decidedly did NOT.
To arrive at the real, piddling income, you have to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. Nightmarish.
Why do we have to do this? Is there really some reason that every American, no matter how diddly his or her income, has to go through all the nonsense inflicted on our tax code to accommodate the very wealthy?
Maybe the Republicans had it right: just excuse rich people from paying taxes. If the wealthy few who could afford to hire lobbyists to instill these absurd complications in our tax law didn’t have to pay taxes, then the tax laws could be simplified and the rest of us would have a great deal easier time of it.
Let’s just give the obscenely wealthy a state—how about North Dakota? They can live there with no government and no taxes, they being, after all, wealthy enough to build their own private roads, airports, schools, and the like. Then the rest of us can go on about our business. Once you have a net worth of, say, $50 million, off you go to your mansion in North Dakota. And good-bye to all that.