Coffee heat rising

When foreclosure makes things better…maybe

by

The former home of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum is looking pretty spiffy in its new coat of paint. Yesterday I spoke with the painter (the man works even cheaper than my guy—who would think it possible?). He gave me the grand tour of the worksite.

As it develops, they are replastering the pool, contrary to my speculation that they were just sanding and painting the interior. The back yard is already looking better with the outhouses dragged off, the dead stumps pulled, a new watering system installed, and the jury-rigged aluminum screening removed.

Ken the Painter (presumably a long-lost brother of Joe the Plumber) said that the owner is a speculator who intends not to rent but to sell, at a price hugely marked down off the going rate in our neighborhood. He said she has been buying and flipping houses steadily and having no problem unloading them.

She’s doing a lot of things right over there—removing the popcorn from the ceilings, replastering the pool, covering all the concrete in back with KoolDeck, getting rid of the hideous work sheds, pulling up all the flooring to replace it with tile. But she’s also cutting some corners: she plans to keep the ugly, worn-out dwarf-sized 1970s kitchen cabinetry, though she’s having the black formica countertops replaced. The house desperately needs new cabinetry, and the kitchen is so teensy it just wouldn’t cost that much to put in some Home Depot cabinets. She’s painting the eaves and other wood trim, but not painting the cinderblock walls on the sides and back—and especially in back, those walls really need to be painted! As long as she has the guy there, how much more could it cost to have him spray three not-very-big block walls?

So, that’s too bad. Of course, she’s not replacing the decrepit roof (which, it must be admitted, is nowhere near as decrepit as the roof next door, where Inez and Carlos the Knife reside), and she’s not replacing the ancient, loudly groaning air conditioner.

This will allow her to sell the house to someone else who likely will park his junk on the lawn and let the place go to pot. Any time a neighbor’s home sells, of course, what you get for a new neighbor is a pig in a poke. But when prices drop into the basement, you often find that people buy an older house without realizing what it costs to maintain it; once the learn that, they just let the place go. Because the have to: they don’t have enough to keep it up. And often you’ll get what around here are affectionately called “cultural problems”: people who don’t understand that in a middle-class neighborhood you don’t celebrate New Year’s by shooting your shotgun up in the air, you don’t let your pit bull run loose, you do put a muffler on your Harley, and you do store your pick-up, your trailer, and your unseaworthy motorboat somewhere other than on the front lawn.

But there’s always a chance that someone who’s thrilled to get their first house will move in, someone who will fix it up and keep it fixed up as long as they live there. That happened with Steve the Contractor’s house. Steve was a sketchy sort of guy who spent most of his time pretending to be a self-employed contractor (what he actually was doing was sitting around a lot while watching his house fall to rack and ruin). He finally was evicted—the previous owner had carried back the mortgage and it took her two years to get him out of the place—and the house was sold to a young couple who did a KILLER job of repair and renovation. To this day, the house is a neighborhood showplace.

Wish I could figure out how to unload the house downtown and install M’hijito in Dave’s house. He could bicycle to work from here. And it has a nice pool with plenty of backyard space for him to entertain his many friends. Plus it has four bedrooms, making it a lot easier for him to conduct his money-making room rental enterprise. Hm. Wonder if the speculator would take a trade….
😉

Work is a place…

by

…not an activity.

Over at the Empowering Mom blog, author Tisha Tolar posts a thoughtful and interesting rumination on the way people react when they learn someone is stepping off the job treadmill to start a business—especially a work-at-home business. She takes the negativity that you can encounter (especially when you first get started) as a manifestation of jealousy.

There’s no question that people say the strangest things to freelancers. A friend’s mother, for example, asked her when she was going to get “a real job.” Said friend’s pretend job entailed stringing for Time Magazine (a nicely paid gig), regularly writing for The New York Times, generating 30 to 40 column inches a week for a Scripps-Howard business journal, running a successful public-relations practice, and (oh, by the way) raising two children and functioning as an active corporate wife for a successful lawyer.

I don’t think, though, that jealousy is quite the word for it. It’s more that people are trapped in a specific mindset and can’t break free from it. For most people, work is a place, not an activity. You’re “at work” when you’re at the office, on a jobsite, down at the shop…never mind that half the time you’re standing around the water cooler, a quarter of the time you’re out front smoking, and the rest of the time you’re building a championship score at Spider Solitaire on your office computer. When you’re “at home” you can’t be working. Can you?

This is a cultural box, like all the other cultural boxes we use to compartmentalize our lives. Most of us find it difficult to climb out of any given box and see the world from a new perspective. The result is that most people genuinely, truly cannot imagine that you’re gainfully employed if your workplace and your home coincide. To their minds, if you claim to be working while you’re physically at home, you’re in the wrong box.

During the several periods when I worked as a freelance writer out of my home, I published four books and more articles than I can count, spoke at endless writers’ conferences, and taught feature writing on the college level. Despite a busy schedule and some high-profile success, the wrong-box phenomenon manifested itself over and over.

There was the time, for example, that my son was in preschool and the school’s volunteer room mother was trying to round up moms to drive vanloads of kids to a farm south of the city for a Hallowe’en pumpkinfest. She called every mother who had been foolish enough not to provide a business telephone number. I used to repeat my home number as my business number, because that’s where editors and clients called me during the daytime; when you do that, people assume you’re not working. She called me while I was on deadline for a national magazine and demanded that I “volunteer” to drive kids to this farm.

I explained that I could not, because I was working on a job and I had to meet a deadline.

This simply did not register with her. She persisted. I tried again to explain that I couldn’t drop what I was doing to drive kiddies around the landscape. She grew angry. She insisted that I certainly could take a full day off my job (because, understand: in her mind I didn’t have a job) to drive children to the pumpkin farm. By the time I finally scraped her off the telephone, she was furious!

At the time this incident occurred, I was writing one feature-length article a month for a city magazine, one to three short pieces a month for each of two monthlies, 30 to 60 column inches a week for a business newspaper, and one to three feature-length articles a month for regional and national magazines. None of that activity came under the heading of an unpaid hobby.

This effect—the “you must be eating bon-bons in front of the soap operas” reaction—is particularly pronounced where women are concerned. Men face a slightly different response (the “what kind of lazy worthless fruitcake of a bum ARE you, anyway” question). Women, when they’re working out of a home office, are assumed to have nothing better to do than socialize, volunteer, and babysit.

The most extreme episode that I can remember came the morning my son committed the heinous crime of uttering the word “fart” on the kindergarten playground. I was on deadline for an article that had to be finished that day when the school principal called on the phone to announce that I had to come and pick up my child forthwith.

I explained that I had a job I had to finish, and that I would come and get him as soon as I could.

No, he said, he was being sent home and I had to come and get him RIGHT NOW. I said, look: I’m a journalist. I write on deadline. I’m writing a project that has to be done today. If I miss my deadline, I will lose my client—the editor will not hire me to do any further work for him.

“Well, that’s fine, but you have to come and get him right now,” he said.

Understand: Editors and publishers have no commitment to freelance writers. You’re not an employee. Some of these people never see your face. All you have to do is miss one deadline, and you’ll never get another assignment from that editor.

I called one of our adult sitters and arranged to drop the kid with her while I finished the job. Traipsed over to the school, drove him down to her house, and raced back to my computer.

An hour later as I was sweltering through the feature, phone rang again: babysitter.

“He hasn’t stopped crying since you left him. You have to come and pick him up.”

Yes.

The kid was so anguished by being thrown out of school for half a day, he was beside himself. He was just frantic, so much so that our sitter, an accomplished mother and grandmother, could do nothing to console him. So…

Of course, I missed the deadline.

By midafternoon, I was so furious—especially after I got off the phone from my audibly irked editor—that I called my husband to vent.

He called the school principal to inquire what was going on, and in the course of the conversation, he explained in exactly the same words I had used that I worked as a freelance journalist, that I had to make my deadlines, that I had to finish an article that was due that day, and that picking up my son before school was out meant that I would miss my deadline and risk losing an important client.

The principal said—get this!—that if he had known that, he wouldn’t have insisted I come and get my son.

Two phenemona were engaged there:

1. The ineffable inaudibility of the female voice; and
2. The impossibility of conceiving that a person who works at home is working.

It’s not jealousy. It’s not meanness. It’s not even stupidity. It’s plain old social convention. You can’t beat it. You just have to learn to ignore it or work around it.

Moments of Fame

by

Outstanding! Don’t miss Silicon Valley Blogger’s rendition of the Carnival of Personal Finance at The Digerati Life. It has some of the neatest—and strangest!—illustrations from a nineteenth-century children’s book. How times have changed!

SVB kindly included Funny’s squib about a couple of real estate speculators bidding up the price of a foreclosed house beyond the asking price (more about which in a later post). This carnival includes a lot of cool stuff. One that caught my attention, now that I’m staring the Panther of Penury in the eye, is the list of seven ways to use your computer to get free entertainment at StopBuyingCrap.com. And w00t! Here’s another list of apposite advice: Eleven Things to Do Immediately after you’ve been laid off, from the recently laid-off Kyle at Amateur Asset Allocator. Lazy Man and Money takes stock, intriguingly, of his position on the route to his goal, early retirement, with some details about what he earns online that give me some hope that monetizing Funny might help with the layoff threat. In the investing department, Four Pillars has an entertaining and interesting article reflecting on the advantages of real estate over dividend investments. This carnival has more excellent and informative articles than you can count—be sure to visit ASAP.

The Carnival of Money Stories is up at the Carnival’s site, where another of Funny’s Tales from the Qwest Crypt appears. If you’ve been following the Financial Blogger’s story, you know the Bloggers have been contemplating a plan to start their own day-care center; well, they’ve decided to take the plunge, and the adventure is set to begin January 5. Five-Cent Nickel has an interesting story about having invested an emergency fund in long-term CDs—by choosing a CD with an early withdrawal penalty of only three months, he minimized the risk posed by the chance he and his wife would need the money unexpectedly.

The Festival of Frugality has gone live at Quest to Be Debt-Free, with a patriotic Veteran’s Day theme. Funny’s report on the meaning of the various “use-by” dates on food products appears here. With the nights chilling and not all of my proposed vegetable garden in, my attention was drawn by Geeky Poet’s post on cool-weather gardening at Walk a Greener Path; note several links to ways to create cold frames. Living the Frugal Life thinks about those small luxuries she’s held onto in her quest toward frugality. And if you also retain your million-dollar appetite on a ten-cent pocketbook, check out One Family’s Blog for a strategy to pursue downhill skiing on a budget.

* sigh II *

by

Joe Bfstplk

So I don’t have much to say today, other than I’m feeling slightly suicidal. Never open a statement from your investment funds during a deprecession. In October I lost another $33,000 (from one fund alone, not counting the two 403b funds at GDU, whose proprietors spare you the month-by-month gore and send statements only quarterly). Since last December, I’ve lost at least $100,000.

All of which, I’m told, will “come back” over time. Problem is, l’il chickadees, at some point in your life you don’t have any more time. My guess is it will take about 10 years for steadily reinvested returns (whenever returns return) to regain a hundred grand—optimistically speaking. I don’t have 10 years. In 10 years, should I live that long, I’ll be ready for the nursing home.

Eeyore the Gloomy
The original Eeyore

At this point, M’hijito has taken on a larger portion of the Investment House payments, but the amount I’m left paying is STILL more than 4% of my remaining savings. I can continue to pay my portion of the mortgage only if I survive the next round of GDU layoffs, a prospect that looks more unlikely as the moments pass. If I hang onto my job, I can add another couple hundred bucks to the mortgage payments from cash flow—only because I took on a ridiculous course load (behind my boss’s back) in the spring and saved every penny—and that will bring my savings drawdown to right around 4%. But…ah, my friends and oh, my foes: It will be a God’s miracle if I’m not canned in December.

I do not know what we are going to do if (read “when”) that happens.

Yes, I do. Default. That’s what we’re going to do. Sumbich.

Who’d’ve thunk it?

R.I.P.: Al Capp, Ernest H. Shepard
Loved and missed forever
…or until the rest of us die, whichever comes first

PAINT!!!!

by

Lhudly sing huzzah! Dave’s [Former] Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum [Under New Management] is getting a paint job!

Drove in from the office and what should I see out in front but a guy on a ladder with a paint brush. That’s right: he’s actually brushing the trim, not spraying it.

It’s a miracle.

The new proprietor’s choice of colors is not what I would’ve favored, had she asked: it’s your basic sh** brown. But beggars can’t be choosers. Who cares what color it is, anyway? It’s PAINT!

Yesterday she had a fly-by-nightish crew sandblasting the pool. This means that instead of doing the job right and replastering (which the pool really, really needed), she did a cosmetic job that will last a year or two, maybe. But: hey! Get rid of the mosquito pond and you get rid of any further complaints from moi.

All the workmen she’s had over there have possessed that fly-by-nightish look: nary a company sign magneted to the side of a truck, and most certainly no hint of a contractor’s license number. Suggests she’s doing the fix-up on the cheap, as fast as she can get it done.

And those two things (quickie pool job, sketchy workmen) suggest she intends to rent or sell. If she’ll just get someone in there who’s quiet, not a criminal, not a volcanic madman, and not given to living in squalor, we’ll be good.

Despite the obscenely low price (we learned the bottom-feeder bought it out of bankruptcy for $162,500—this is a neighborhood of formerly $300,000-plus houses), just cleaning that dump up has transformed this whole end of the street. Dave’s mess was dragging all the properties around him down. This afternoon I actually felt GOOD about driving up to the front of my house, for a change. Now we have only two seriously run-down houses in our little tract, and one of those is for sale.

No question we have some dark clouds scudding overhead, boding hard times. But maybe now and again we’ll see the occasional silver lining.