Expense after crazy expense keeps pouring in. I’m having a heck of a time staying on budget, not good during the summer when power and water costs run very high. My microbudgeting scheme, whereby I break a month’s budget into four roughly week-long periods, is feeling the strain. The ticket for blowing through a photo-speed trap at 45 mph on a seven-lane highway threatened to break the camel’s back. Faced with a week without enough cash left to buy groceries, I came up with a little strategy that may represent a real, permanent refinement on the microbudget.
Each month-long budget represents an American Express cycle, since I charge almost all my expenses and then pay off the bill at the end of the month. Dedicating $1,200 to cover all costs except regularly recurring monthly bills such as utilities, I allocate $300 to each of four “weeks” within each monthly cycle. If I can stay in the black for all four of these microbudgets, bully for me. If not, I can see at a glance when I’m slipping into the red and put the brakes on before it’s too late. Thus if I overspend in one week and underspend by the same amount or more the following week, I stay on budget without having to pinch pennies for the entire remainder of the month.
Last month I ran up a series of expenses, some of them unexpected: the chair from Pier One, the gutter installation, a forgotten air-conditioning bill, the surprise Costco membership renewal, the pool repair bill, the cost of three locksmith visits after the painter couldn’t figure out how to get the lock off the door he was refinishing, the speed trap ticket, and, more recently, the cost of the bargain landscaping bricks. Last month I ran $253 dollars over budget, and that was without the speed trap ticket, which got charged against this month’s AMEX bill. It was also after The Copyeditor’s Desk reimbursed me over $800 for costs related to the business.
Charging the $188 speed trap gotcha against the first week of this week’s $300 microbudget wouldn’t leave enough to buy gasoline and groceries. Even riding the train to campus, I can’t do without gas: I have to drive to the train stop. And by the end of last month, I needed to replenish the larder.
It occurred to me that if I divided the speed trap ticket by four and spread the cost over the month’s four microbudgets, it might leave enough in each week to buy necessities. The effect is to cut each microbudget by a relatively small amount but leave plenty to live on in each week.
In theory, it should work. In practice, the cost of the bricks (which included $18.68 worth of sales tax) overran the first week’s microbudget by $206.16. However, when that amount is subtracted from this week’s cycle, I’m still left $46.84 in the black.
Forty-six bucks will be enough to buy my lunch and my exiting RA’s (at our office, the boss traditionally buys lunch for an employee who’s leaving…and the university doesn’t reimburse any expenses related to food). Since I restocked food and filled the gas tank last week, I shouldn’t have to buy anything else this week. That will leave $253 to diddle away next week.
What happens if you spread all extraordinary costs over the month, instead of just a single unexpected large bill?
If I divided the $243.68 bill for the bricks in four, to get $60.92, and subtracted that amount from each week’s microbudget, the result would look like this:
The result is much more positive psychologically: now I’m only $23 in the red at the end of the first week, and instead of barely enough to get by in the second week, I’m left with a relatively generous $168 budget.
Is this a more realistic way of looking at monthly spending? It may be. It’s telling us that there’s plenty left for this month in spite of two extraordinary expenses. On the other hand, knowing that might lead the budgeter to relax her spending habits, which really could run the overall budget into the red.
Every year, Arizona’s political leadership engages in a frenzy of grandstanding around the state budget. And every year we’re told to be scared, be very scared, because if the budget isn’t passed by the end of the fiscal year, the state government will shut down.
And every year, up until this one, it’s been so much stürm und drang.
This year, though, things look a little more dire. In the first place, we have an out-of-control legislature filled with right-wing demagogues who, deep in their hearts, would just as soon see the state government shut down. In the second, the state is in the middle of a real-life perfect financial storm; it’s not something a bunch of dunderheads can deal with, as we’re seeing by our elected representatives’ mulish and self-serving actions. And third: we’re not a week or two from the deadline. We’re hours away from it.
What the fools are doing is using the crisis to force through pet schemes that they couldn’t begin to faze past voters or a governor under normal circumstances. They’ve engaged the governor, who herself is very far to the right, in an idiotic showdown, refusing until the last minute to send her a budget they passed over two weeks ago, so as to circumvent her veto. They have no intention of putting their budget before the governor until the 30th, the last possible moment before the government closes down. Their outrageous scheme includes a provision for a flat income tax and a plan to put a one-cent sales tax before the voters, who are guaranteed to turn it down. It’s a pretend budget because it relies on a tax that will not fly, and it’s a doctrinaire end run to pass a regressive income tax that will weigh most heavily on the tens of thousands of Arizonans who have lost their jobs and the hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who live on substandard wages.
While the governor probably is not prohibited from vetoing the budget if it arrives on her desk that late, they’re just daring her to veto it and shut down the government. She actually sued the legislature—a body dominated by members of her own party!—asking the state supreme court to find their actions unconstitutional and force them to get off the dime. The court agreed their actions are unconstitutional but declined to rule that they must play nice.
The characters in the legislature are so extreme, such right-wing wackos, that they make Governor Jan Brewer look moderate. That is quite an accomplishment.
If the budget is not passed by Tuesday, then none of us state employees will get our paychecks on Thursday. And one wonders whether we’ll be covered by health and dental insurance, since our premiums also will be in arrears.
One thing you have to say for Arizona politics: it’s always a spectacle!
Earlier today I was reminded that I neglected to follow up on the remark, made several days ago, that the Dean had her amanuensis summon me into The Presence.
To my astonishment, what She wanted to do was carry out one…last…annual review. Why, I could not imagine: it’s pretty obvious that at my age I’m not going to get another job, and since the state government, universities included, is crumbling like a chunk of limestone dropped into a bucket of vinegar, it’s especially unlikely that I’ll be finding any appropriate openings at the Great Desert University, the Tucson variant thereof, or the Flagstaff variant therof, any of whose supervisors are allowed to see employee evaluations. It seems like a vast waste of Her time and mine…but whatEVER. She’s the boss.
Hang onto your hats, folks: Her Deanship delivered the single highest performance rating I have ever received in the entire 16 years of my tenure at This Great Institution. She raved about my genius and then generously offered to recommend me for any damnfool thing I imagine I want to apply for.
The performance score she dealt out comes under the heading of Not Possible. Truly: it is amazing.
What, oh what does it mean?
Let’s bear in mind that Deans do not speak plain English. They speak in tongues. This happens because there are a lot of things (as in “most things”) They can’t safely say directly, for more political reasons than any of us (the Deans Themselves included) can count. Like the Delphic Oracle, university Deans speak to you obliquely. They imply. They suggest (subtly). They emphasize. They de-emphasize. Whatever it is that They wish you to understand, They rarely (perhaps never) say it directly. It is not in Their nature to do so.
So, two Sherlockian questions present themselves:
a) Why on earth would Her Deanship spend Her valuable time on what appears to be an utterly futile and pointless exercise?
b) Whence this rave review (after we’ve been becalmed for a full year!), and why?
As for question (a): It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Her Deanship is just being kind. Possibly she wants to send off the underling with good feelings; possibly she truly does feel bad about the demolition of a project that took untold hours and effort by staff, faculty, and administrators to launch and has proven to be utterly unique on the planet.
Could be. Anything’s possible. Nooooo…..
There’s a reason for this. Could be that She knows something’s up. Experience shows She always knows when something’s up. She hinted around that opportunities may arise near the end of our tenure at GDU. Inscribing an ecstatic performance review into the record could put Her in a position to do a targeted hire (oh, no: make it “will” put Her in that position), much simplifying Her life and everyone else’s. It also would help Her to argue effectively for…whatever She expects to have to argue for. And She knows that if I don’t hate Her, I’ll write any proposal She asks me to write. I’m very good at writing proposals. The more entrepreneurial, the better. University presidents love entrepreneurship. For that reason, university vice-presidents, the immediate bosses of Deans, love entrepreneurship.
So, there’s that entertaining possibility. One can always daydream.
It also could be a good review of me (i.e., our office) makes Her look good.
Okay, this brings us to question (b), most succinctly expressed as “HUH?”
I just can’t imagine!
Last summer Her Deanship agreed to let us hire a third RA, giving us a total staff of five. At about the same time, She apparently became aware that our days were numbered. Consequently, She kept putting me off every time I lobbied for more client editors, more work, oh god anything to keep this horde of eager young geniuses occupied. It became painfully clear that She knew something, and that what She knew meant that She dared not commit our services to faculty editors, because She either knew or expected that those services were about to go away. The result of it was that we didn’t have enough work to keep all our staff busy, and the result of that has been that I have foisted every scrap of work my associate editor and I might have done ourselves onto the graduate students. Otherwise, they would have had nothing to do, and they’re here to gain experience and learn from it. As a matter of fact, one of them ended up with precious little to do, much to my chagrin. This has been the worst year our office has ever experienced.
One expects She knows it. And that, with singular circularity, brings us right back to question (a).
Mysterious, isn’t it?
Image: Sherlock Holmes, by Sidney Paget. Public Domain Wikipedia Commons
Comes a newsletter from the predominant Realtor in our neighborhood, the ineffable Sandy Goodheart. She reports that she just unloaded a house in the neighborhood for a mere $325,000, not bad under the circumstances. Then she adds,
The real estate market has improved dramatically since the first of the year. In January of this year, the inventory of homes for sale stood at about an 11-month supply. A balanced inventory is between four and six months. As of Memorial Day, the inventory stood at a 4.5-month supply.
Of course, what she’s not saying is that the drop in inventory came from foreclosures and short sales. Foreclosures in particular have become so hot that buyers are bidding up prices. La Bethulia missed the boat twice in efforts to buy foreclosed properties in our area; she eventually bought a nice little place near M’hijito’s downtown house, to rent to the two nieces.
That notwithstanding, it’s a good sign. Before the real estate market could even begin to recover from the burst bubble, we needed to clear the flood of foreclosures and houses that couldn’t be sold when lending dried up. If it’s true that the inventory is about back to normal, we should see real estate values begin to appreciate at their former stately but dependable pace.
In fact, that’s about what’s been happening, if you pretend the bubble never occurred. I bought my house right before the inflation started. Assuming Zillow’s machine-generated estimate of its present value is roughly correct, it has appreciated at about 4 percent a year over the past five years.
As for the downtown house, this development means there’s a good chance the credit union’s loan officers are right that by December its value will increase enough to put us rightside-up again. Right now nothing is for sale in that neighborhood. With one possible exception, the foreclosures have sold, and no new ones have come on the market.
The damnable City has decided to turn down the stimulus money that would have completed the light rail line up the main drag past my neighborhood. That’s bad for the area where I’m living (since the city has already ripped out homes facing that road before it decided to suspend construction, trashing nearby property values), but good for the downtown house: it makes close-by light rail a rarer commodity, and that will increase its perceived value…jacking up the real value of neighborhoods near it.
Un-freaking-BELIEVABLE! I just scored enough red bricks to build the coveted garden wall at the downtown house and probably pave a couple of patios: for about 15 cents apiece!
The things are selling for 65 cents apiece at Home Depot. They’re practically brand-new: the “estate sale,” as it develops, was actually a foreclosure sale. The evicted owner had planned to build a circular driveway in front of the large tract house that he was forced to vacate. He never got the things on the ground, and so…his misfortune is my good luck.
The sale organizers advertised 1,000 bricks, but when I counted them I came up with 1,448.
Gerardo sent a crew in a decrepit pick-up to load the bricks. I had my van, too: there were so many bricks it took us two trips with both vehicles. The men loaded and unloaded all those blocks, one at a time. While Gerardo was at the estate sale, he picked up another job: some used furniture dealer hired him to transport a heavy, solid brass baker’s rack. So he did OK, despite not asking anything like enough for his and his workers’ time.
For some reason, stucco often doesn’t seem to hold up well to the passage of time. The foreclosure is in a district of aging stucco tracts that once formed an upper-middle-class Scottsdale suburb, now surrounded by development and fading fast. The houses were built in the 70s and the 80s. Mile after mile of houses, many of them spacious and once upscale, are now tired and run-down—and they’re just not that old. IMHO, a thirty-year-old house shouldn’t look like it’s ready to be torn down. Too many of these houses, which were anything but cheap at the outset, look exactly that way.
A few houses in the tract were built of slump block, and they still look very good. But the stucco affairs have weary and worn-out air about them. And since stucco is the predominant style in all new construction here, I guess that in twenty or thirty years, we’ll be seeing vast swaths of blight where developers bladed an acre an hour to cover the beautiful Sonoran desert with tens of thousands of look-alike fake-tile-roofed stucco “homes.”
So I’m feeling smug about the two sturdy, centrally located block houses M’hijito and I managed to get our hands on. Once we finish the landscaping project, we’ll be done with making the downtown house livable. Now that neither of us has any debt other than the mortgage on that little place, we should be able to ride out the depression, come what may. After the economy recovers, both these houses will be worth a lot of money, because of their location and because of the quality of their construction.
Now…all we need is to find an estate sale where someone’s trying to unload 65 tons of Madison Gold quarter-minus and a pallet of extra-thick flagstones…
An auto mechanic turned radio personality and Internet entrepreneur: Cary Lockwood is the first star of Funny’s new series interviewing men and women who find creative new ways to jump off the treadmill.
I came across Cary after finding his website, YourAutoNetwork.com. At first glance, it looks like an Angie’s List for car mechanics, except you don’t have to pay for it. On closer inspection, some differences arise: all of the businesses listed are local companies, and unlike Click & Clack’s reader-driven listing, the site offers few consumer reviews. Thinking what a great idea to bring in some side income, I gave him a call. Turns out the story is a lot more complicated.
FaM: Thanks for chatting with us, Cary. Would you tell us how you came to start YourAutoNetwork.com?
Lockwood: I spent 20 years working for General Motors, at the automobile proving grounds here in Arizona. When GM closed that facility, the company asked me to move to Michigan. Well, I grew up in the East, and my wife and I decided we didn’t want to move back in that direction. So I started a repair shop. It did well, because we emphasized customer service and did honest, high-quality work.
One day a friend and local talk show host, Charles Goyette, invited me to do a segment on his radio talk show. I said I’m not very political and might not fit in. He said they had a Saturday show that didn’t talk about much controversy. So I started doing it.
Pretty quick I realized we were getting a lot of calls from people wanting to know where to get their cars serviced and repaired. There’s a huge need, because—well, to tell the truth, people do run into dishonest shops, and that’s left them untrusting and wary.
That’s when I started the auto network.
The radio show, which evolved into Your Auto Network’s Calling All Cars, began to get bigger. It grew from a Q-and-A segment to a twice-weekly show that covers everything automotive, covering everything from fuel and batteries to windshields and tires, from gas-saving strategies to laws affecting car owners.
Meanwhile, the list kept growing, too.
After a while I had an offer to buy the shop. My wife and I decided to sell and go with making Your Auto Network our business.
FaM: How does an automotive shop get on your list?
Lockwood: I seek out the proven performers, but listeners and friends recommend them. I check them out personally, along with doing a lot of research. The shops can be doing any work related to automotive upkeep—repair, bodywork, painting, parts operations, window tinting, tires, and the like—but they have to be locally owned independent businesses, not chains or big-boxes.
I check out their experience, because that’s one of the things that makes a great shop: we have minimum requirements for the number of years they’ve been in business. They have to have an A rating with the Better Business Bureau. Often I’ll call without identifying myself, to see how they answer the phone or whether they shunt you off to an answering machine. Then I observe the shop itself and study the operation.
The standards are high, because my name is on it.
FaM: One of the problems with Angie’s List is there’s no way to tell whether an owner has had all his in-laws, cousins, nephews, and nieces send in glowing reports.
Lockwood: That’s right. And that’s why we don’t have a lot of customer reviews, although we do make it possible for people to comment.
Testimonials are great if they’re fair and honest, but they don’t give enough information about the business. We go there to meet them, and we work hard to make the listings accurate.
FaM: It’s hard for the average consumer to get a good picture of an automotive service outfit. Often it’s by guess and by God.
Lockwood: I’m on the Auto Repair Advisory Committee for the Better Business Bureau. We review and advise about consumer complaints to the BBB. One of the first things I do when we get a case is to check out the company’s BBB rating. It’s unbelievable! People will go to F-rated places!
It’s really important to check out service providers before you do business with them. If you find a good independent shop, you save a lot of money—and you have greater peace of mind.
FaM: Other than the obvious publicity, what benefit do the shop owners derive from making the YourAutoNetwork.com list?
Lockwood: We’re trying to offer benefits that come from the power of collective buying and pricing. For example, we’re now working to get collective pricing on parts and auto supplies. And we’re looking into ways to offer members group health insurance plans.
FaM: Do you charge shops for listing on YourAutoNetwork.com?
Lockwood: Typically, we charge a small fee. Most of the monetization is coming from ad revenues, especially from the radio show. We now own the show’s air time.
FaM: It’s quite a leap from auto engineer to radio talk show host!
Lockwood: Well, I didn’t expect to be on the radio. When I was a kid, I took acting lessons and actually got parts. Then I got picky about what I’d do—decided I only wanted to act in Shakespeare plays—and also, I was very interested in mechanical things.
The show started live, and it’s now recorded. My wife and I do the editing. That helps a lot–it makes me sound a lot better, and also our guests.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the show’s community activities. We started a partnership with the Salvation Army, and network members have joined in a clothing drive. Shops have collections boxes for customers to donate. We sell a car care rewards card to consumers, and for each purchase we donate $4.00 to the Salvation Army, about 13 percent of gross revenues from the card sales.
We first got interested in helping the Salvation Army because of the economic downturn, with so many people out of work and being turned out of their homes. We like the Army’s emphasis on building self-sufficiency. They do more, though, than helping people who are down on their luck financially. In addition to the Family Center, for families who are facing a crisis, they have a shelter for abuse victims, they do drug and alcohol rehabilitation, and they provide care for the elderly.
FaM: These two enterprises—the radio show and the network listings—must be an enormous amount of work.
Lockwood: It really was a lot of work at first. It’s tapering off now, partly because we’ve achieved one of our goals, which was to have coverage for the entire valley. And over time we’ve learned to work more efficiently.
The big challenge is trying to get the data perfect, before it’s published. My wife helps with getting the information accurate, and we both work at proofreading and checking.
FaM: What advice would you offer a Funny about Money reader who might be interested in doing a similar website in another city?
Lockwood: To do it at a level that offers real value to your readers, you need to be very expert in the business you’re reviewing. Not just anyone can do one of these sites on automotive service. You need many years of experience to understand how these businesses work and what makes them successful, from the owner’s and the customers’ points of view.
I’d suggest that if you want to create a really useful consumer service website, you should pick a business that you truly know something about. If you’re an expert, if you know customer service well, and you know how the businesses operate, you may be able to pull it off.
It’s a lot of work, and you have to be fully committed to accuracy, honesty, and fairness.
FaM: Were you at all nervous about selling the shop to become a full-time radio personality?
Lockwood: No, but you have to be confident and hard-working to insure success.
FaM: What steps did you take to ensure that you could make the transition financially?
Lockwood: We never lived over our heads, so that wasn’t an issue. We did things like building our own house—I helped to build it myself. We didn’t want to get tied down with a large mortgage and other debts. We look at things this way: Say we’d like to get new furniture for the living room. It’s going to cost $4,000. So we ask ourselves, “Do we need it today, or are they still going to be making couches in six months?” If the the answer is “yes, living room furniture will still be around,” we save up and pay for it in cash.
FaM: What’s your strategy for retirement?
Lockwood: Hasn’t entered my mind, because we still have more to achieve. We diversify our investments. And besides, enthusiasm keeps you young.
