Despite the extreme market volatility and the various grim economic prognoses, so far my December investment statements come bearing news nowhere near as hideous as expected.
My big IRA went up by $2,000 last month. The Vanguard funds rose $5,000 in December. TIAA-CREF, in the past highly sensitive to recession, went up $40 over the past quarter. I haven’t received the quarterly report for the Fidelity funds in my 403(b), but the same guys who run my IRA and advised me how to invest in Vanguard also told me what to do with my contributions to Fidelity, and so I’m hoping that statement will show about the same results.
Though I’m certainly not getting rich here (or even keeping up with inflation), at least I’m not losing money. Given the situation, that’s pretty good.
Interesting what these guys have invested in. Hmmm…they’ve stashed a fair amount in cash: 45 grand in the money market, another ten grand in cash reserves. But we remain invested in American Express, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Caterpillar (need lots of tractors, presumably, in Iraq and Afghanistan)…ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum (they like oil)…General Electric (they like energy overall). And get this: they like junk food: McDonald’s, Yum Brands.
Awww…lookit this photo: junk food is good for young love! Doesn’t that warm the cockles of your capitalist heart?
They’ve dumped some stuff…Seagate gone. Actually, they’ve dumped a lot of stuff: this statement is signficantly shorter than it has been in the past. Fewer stocks, more mutual funds. And I’ve never seen them move so much into cash holdings.
Well, my shirt may be slightly frayed, but at least I still have a shirt. This is not the time that I would like to retire, perforce by layoff. However, if it happens, apparently I won’t starve.
For quite a long time, I’ve wanted to buy a three-speed or ten-speed bicycle. I have a coaster, but it’s no use for what I want to do: take long rides along the canal. Salt River Project has built a long, narrow park along the Arizona canal, with underpasses running under the main drags so people can go for mile after mile after mile safely. I live within walking distance of this convenient source of exercise and sightseeing entertainment. While I really do need the exercise, hauling my heavy coaster up from the bottom of those underpasses is not quite what I have in mind. I have to get off my bike and walk it out of the underground tunnels, a major pain in the tuchus. I love bicycling, though, and have thought that if I had a bike with gears, I could use it every day or two to get out of the house and also get some good exercise.
Wrong.
Yesterday I paid a visit to the bicycle store that, in years past, has sold me other bikes. Prices for multispeed bicycles range from $450 to $700!!! An ordinary cruiser with no gears and pedal brakes costs $350. Three-speed bikes cost more than 24-speed numbers. I don’t want 24 speeds—I’d never be able to figure out how to operate such an array.
I looked on Craig’s List and found the prices comparable for anything that appeared to be in decent condition. The rate of bicycle theft around here is phenomenal—at one point, a ring used to go onto college campuses in trucks and take bolt-cutters to the locks and just load the things up. So I’m kind of afraid to buy one second-hand, for fear of getting stolen property. Besides, the newer bikes are so involved and complicated, I would have no way of knowing what I was getting or if anything was wrong with it.
How disappointing. I guess I won’t be losing any weight that way. {sigh} It was probably a bad idea, anyway. What on earth would I do if I blew a tire ten miles from home? I wouldn’t have a clue how to fix it, and I sure don’t want to have to push a bike eight or ten miles.
🙁
This winter I decided to heat the room I’m occupying with a space heater, rather than use the central HVAC system (a heat pump) to warm the entire house. At night, I’m turning the heat off altogether.
The electric bill just arrived: $90.99. Last January it was $128.14. That’s a $37.15 savings. More, in reality: the power company raised its bills by 6 percent this year.
It’s up from last month’s bill of $63.52, probably because this January was cooler than December and I did turn the central heating on a few times to take the chill off the morning. This winter has been warmer than usual—only a couple of nights in the low 30s, though the neighbors’ roofs are white with frost every at every sunrise. January was rainy and gray. In December, the sun shone most every day, warming the house through the south-facing windows by 10:00 a.m. Still, if you believe the graph included in the power company’s bill, I used a little more than half the kWh I expended last January…and last winter was pretty cold.
So, now we have two months’ worth of data suggesting that the use of space heaters, sweaters, and warm blankets works to beat ever-expanding power bills.
Was I cold? A few times. But never unbearably so. When I felt cold I put on some more clothes. You are, after all, supposed to be cold in the winter.
Michael Florek
General Manager Scientific American
415 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10017
Dear Mr. Florek:
I believe your circulation department finally succeeded in snookering me with its flurry of hysterical “your-subscription-is-expired” mailings sent months before the real expiration date.
Because this dishonest tactic has become the custom in magazine fulfillment, I started using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of when I actually pay for subscriptions. However, your flurry started before December, and in the holiday rush I neglected to look up the last date I paid.
Note the enclosed, stating that my subscription has “officially expired,” which arrived last month. Don’t think so. A belated look at the spreadsheet (also enclosed) reveals that I paid for a year’s subscription on 2/20/08. This means that at the time I sent you another check, on 12/9/08, my subscription still had almost two and a half months to run!
This is a rip-off, and I highly resent it. I work for a university, and believe me, my friend, I am not paid what some publishing executive on Madison Avenue earns. I cannot afford to be gouged two or three months in advance for a bill I do not owe.
If you want to keep me as a subscriber, you need to credit me for the extra two months and 11 days I’ve paid for. I will resubscribe (maybe) in February of 2010, which is when the two subscriptions I now own will expire.
You and your fulfillment contractors should be ashamed.
Sincerely, (etc.)
Attached: Letter from Mr. Florek exclaiming the subscription expired, received in December
Excel spreadsheet showing payments on 2/20/07, 2/20/08, and 12/9/08
Well, here’s one of the problems of senility: if your notes to yourself are to work, you have to readthe notes! You can’t read notes to help you remember things unless you remember to read the notes.
Yesterday afternoon I took the Sanitas back to the Shoe Mill in lovely downtown Tempe (for those of you who haven’t been following along, these pain-free shoes are made by the original makers of the formerly glorious Danskos, which are now manufactured in China thanks to a corporate change of hands). This put $129.72 back on the AMEX card. Then I ordered an identical pair from Footprints.com for a total of $79.95.
Tax on the local purchase was $9.72. Shipping for the online purchase was $10. So even though the tax was on a larger amount, I see that as kind of a wash.
My savings on this transaction: fifty bucks.
One thing I’ve discovered over the years is that you can return most things to most stores. If you find a better deal somewhere else before you’ve put any wear on an item, take the thing back to the higher-charging merchant and buy it where you can save some cash. Ditto if you realize you don’t need something after you’ve made an impulse buy. Obviously, you shouldn’t abuse this—buying a dress or a jacket to wear to a wedding and then returning it to the vendor is exploitive and dishonest. But if you haven’t used it at all, there’s no reason not to return it.
After bicycling over to a neighbor’s house to help her climb into her car (she’s moving clumsily from recent foot surgery), I spent about an hour this afternoon riding around the neighborhood and the one closer to Central Avenue. One of my RAs said she and her new husband put a bid on a house somewhere in that area, and I was curious to see which place it might have been. A couple of places were possibilities, but if so, then the new hubby must be earning a ton of money.
I never cease to marvel that somehow I managed to land in such a lovely, in-town area.
Fifteen years ago, as a new divorcée I was living on an amount of alimony that my lawyer and my financial advisor had urged me not to accept. Neither of them thought I could possibly survive on it, nor did anyone expect that after 20 years as a society matron I had a chance of landing a job that would pay a living wage. A drive-by shooting outside the apartment complex where I was living led me to contact a real estate agent and set him to searching for a house.
The old house: front yard in a rainstorm, through the living room window
During the several weeks we looked at candidates, he took me to a 1970s block house that seemed dark and un-promising. Though it had been immac-ulately maintained, it still had the harvest gold shag carpets, formica countertops, and appliances that must have been installed when the place was built. I rejected it. We continued to look. After I saw the other shacks that I could afford, harvest gold took on a certain retro charm. And the house’s beautiful, professionally landscaped yard with its mature trees that created a park-like atmosphere in back looked downright gorgeous.
My agent managed to get the house for $30,000 below the asking price. Meanwhile, I had cowritten a book that quickly became a best-seller. My pay for that was enough to put down more than 20 percent on the house, leaving me with a mortgage that I couldn’t possibly pay alone. However, I easily persuaded SDXB (who at that time was simply BF: Boyfriend) to move in with me. He paid half the mortgage and part of the utility bill, which I carried on my books as rent. This allowed me to deduct a large portion of the many improvements the house needed, making new carpets and countertops more or less affordable.
As it developed, the little tract of block houses that I’d bought into is adjacent to one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city. The centerpiece of this area is a large, beautiful park which, because the residents insisted that no bathroom facilities be installed, is free of the usual midcity transients and so is a safe and pleasant place to hang out: an asset instead of the drawback that a public park can be. My neighborhood forms a buffer zone between the fancy district and a pile of ratty, crime-ridden apartments on the other side of a main drag that has long been a conduit of blight. Because of that and because of the large number of rentals in my area (at one point, Mr. B***‘s rental empire comprised six houses in the two- by three-block development, and his were not the only rentals), the value of the sturdy, well built, and well designed houses has consistently lagged behind comparable properties in the North Central district.
After some fix-up, I fell in love with my house and the immediate neighbors, some of them original owners and all of them friendly and quiet. After several years, though, the harassment factor from the constant cop helicopter flyovers and the noise from the thundering intersection about three blocks away came to feel like real problems—you could set your clock at 11:00 p.m. by the cops buzzing the war zones to the north and the west of us, and some nights the traffic roar was so loud SDXB and I had to shout to hear each other speak in the backyard. The trees in the yard were dying: I lost an olive tree in front, two of the three ash trees were suffering from ash decline, and the gorgeous old fig tree developed a canker disease that an arborist had declared incurable and terminal. I replaced the olive with a mesquite, but the other trees would each cost about a thousand bucks to cut down, and when they were gone, the back yard’s charm would go with them.
I began to think I wanted to move somewhere else in the central part of the city. Months of searching elided into years, with no luck at finding a new-to-me place. By now, my house was paid for, because I stumbled into a good job whose salary allowed me to apply all the alimony plus a small inheritance to the principal, eliminating it fairly quickly. I did not want to take on another mortgage. Because of the location and the rentals, what I could get for my house would not buy another place comparable to mine in a neighborhood that felt safe for a single woman. Everything in my price range made my house look fantastically good. Any house that was similar to my place cost $80,000 to $100,000 more, and anything better—either in design and construction or in location—was astronomically beyond my means. Eventually it became clear that my only options were to stay put or to move to the suburbs or Sun City. I don’t care for the ‘burbs; my commute to the university is long enough, thank you; and Sun City is anathema.
Climbing roses on the deck
Just as the housing bubble was starting to inflate, the house I’m in came up for sale: in the same neighbor-hood I was living in. The owners, lovingly known as Satan and Proserpine, had done a lot of fix-up: removed the old dark-brown 1972 tract-house cabinetry and replaced it with handsome new cabinets, appliances, and countertops, installed very attractive floor tile, ripped out the plastic shower surround and replaced it with travertine, knocked a hole in the west wall and installed an Arcadia door opening onto a pretty little covered deck, installed an Arcadia door in the master bedroom…all of which created a bright, updated effect. The house had a fireplace and a big swimming pool—which my old place did not—and best of all, it sat on about a quarter of an acre in the quietest part of the neighborhood: the house is located as far away from the tenements and the main drags as you can get without being in the more expensive tract. It is, in a word, right in the rich folks’ laps.
This corner of the neighborhood is much, much quieter. Although the cops still roar overhead once every evening or two, they don’t park right on top of the house while they harry the perps, as they still do over the old house. Traffic noise is barely audible here. At night, I can sleep with a window locked partly open, out of the question in the other house. With Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum out of the picture, the street is pleasant enough. And the mature, shady neighborhood of $500,000 to $1.5 million homes that starts about 200 feet from my front yard is very pleasant, indeed.
Come to think of it, the very idea that a middle-aged grass widow without a hope of ever earning a decent living should land in a beautiful—paid-off!—placelike this is absolutely incredible. I should still be dodging bullets and fighting off car thieves downtown, or trying to sleep through the midnight serenade of boomboxes and remote car door lock quacks and yaps from an apartment-house parking lot, or at best hunkered into a condo in some rabbit warren on a main drag in Scottsdale or Tempe.
For quite a long time, I’ve wanted to buy a three-speed or ten-speed bicycle. I have a coaster, but it’s no use for what I want to do: take long rides along the canal. Salt River Project has built a long, narrow park along the Arizona canal, with underpasses running under the main drags so people can go for mile after mile after mile safely. I live within walking distance of this convenient source of exercise and sightseeing entertainment. While I really do need the exercise, hauling my heavy coaster up from the bottom of those underpasses is not quite what I have in mind. I have to get off my bike and walk it out of the underground tunnels, a major pain in the tuchus. I love bicycling, though, and have thought that if I had a bike with gears, I could use it every day or two to get out of the house and also get some good exercise.
Yesterday afternoon I took the Sanitas back to the Shoe Mill in lovely downtown Tempe (for those of you who haven’t been following along, these 
After bicycling over to a neighbor’s house to help her climb into her car (she’s moving clumsily from recent foot surgery), I spent about an hour this afternoon riding around the neighborhood and the one closer to Central Avenue. One of my RAs said she and her new husband put a bid on a house somewhere in that area, and I was curious to see which place it might have been. A couple of places were possibilities, but if so, then the new hubby must be earning a ton of money.
