Coffee heat rising

Link love

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A walloping wind storm blew up this morning, just as my friend and I were heading out for our morning walk. What a sirocco it was! We saw a patio umbrella fly through the air over a neighbor’s roof, like Mary Poppins’s brolly without the Mary. And on my way home, who should I meet but a fire hydrant wearing a bright red hat! A nice one, too, and in practically brand-new condition. I rescued the lost chapeau and brought it home. If no one puts up a “lost” flyer, it’s mine. Believe I’ll give it a purple hat band.

Meanwhile, various things are going on in other parts of the world:

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly finds a secret millionaire living next door.

Five-Cent Nickel starts a conversation on the qualities (or not) of CFLs.

Mrs. Micah opens an envelope and finds a dunning letter from a collection agency-nothing actually due, but the hassle leads her to describe what you should do if you find a collection letter in your mailbox.

Paid Twice has a mellow reflection on the psychology of budgeting.

In the reflection department, Plonkee has posted several lately. Today’s has to do with why one likes one’s job.

SVB at The Digerati Life launches a discussion of why long-term investing beats short-term trading.

Over at the Simple Dollar, Trent is expecting a zillion-dollar tax rebate…well, make that $1,800. And he aint’ buyin’ a TV with it.

At Queercents, Paula has an interesting post on what networking is really all about.

Come to think of it, I’d better get off the Internet and make a reservation for the next book publishers’ association meeting. ‘Bye!

Targeting your emergency savings

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J.D. at Get Rich Slowly discusses author Mary Hunt’s idea for the freedom account: an emergency fund in which you subdivide out amounts for specific intermittent expenses, such as car repair, wedding gifts, or expensive clothing purchases like shoes. The way J.D. describes it, you keep the money in a single checking account; then estimate your irregular, intermittent costs and keep a little log showing how much is dedicated to which purpose.

The basic idea is a good one. Trying to keep track of a bunch of different purposes for money accruing in a single account, though, strikes me as a giant pain in the tuchus. Also, even an ING checking account doesn’t earn enough to make it a good place to store money for long-term expenses.

Here’s a slightly different approach to the same goal of targeting your emergency savings:

Establish the categories in which you have intermittent expenses and identify the time intervals in which they occur: totally irregular, yearly, biannual, over several years. Then open separate accounts for these purposes. The length of the interval determines the kind of account you use.

For example, I look to the irregular little surprises that can happen at any time (plumbing or car repairs, vet bills, etc.), annual expenses (car and homeowner’s insurance, property tax, income tax), and long-term expenses (purchase of a new car, about once every ten years; major repairs or renovations on the house, which I hope don’t happen more often than about once every eight or ten years).

For the constant extra gouges, I have a money market account at the credit union. Into it I put $87 per paycheck–down from $200 a month since GDU’s shift to biweekly pay, because of the drop in net income that caused. When I have to cover an expense, I simply transfer the needed amount back to my checking account.

To pay my annual automobile and homeowner’s insurance bill, the annual cost of registering my car, and my annual property tax, I put $300 a month into a separate money market account, also at the credit union. I keep these funds physically separate from the day-to-day emergency funds because I can’t afford to have that money disappear: if I don’t pay my property tax, the house will be confiscated; if I don’t register or insure the car, the state will forbid me to drive it.

For long-term expenses, I use Vanguard funds: the Prime Money Market fund for major house expenses (reroofing, for example) and the Short-term Investment Grade Investment Corporate Bond fund for savings toward my next car. I plan to keep a car for ten years, so if I put even only a thousand bucks a year into that fund, what’s in there after a decade should be enough, combined with the clunk’s trade-in value, to buy another car in cash. Although neither of these is FDIC-insured, they’re both very safe (neither was exposed to subprime mortgage instruments) and they each earn more than I can make in a checking account. AND you can write checks on either of these funds. So it’s easily accessible when I need it.

When savings for specific purposes are collected in separate accounts, to tell how much you have for a given need, all you have to do is look at the bottom line. To my mind that’s a lot easier than trying to keep track of a bunch of separate theoretical subtotals in a spreadsheet.

2 Comments left at iWeb site

hatuman

Some good thoughts.Thanks.It wouldn’t hurt to have more accounts open to help keep track of things.

Monday, May 19, 2008 – 07:22 AM

Cordelya

I have a similar thing going on as far as emergency money goes. I have a savings account at ING, and I also have several cash CDs there. I have one CD ($500 for 5 years) to stand as my auto insurance deductible. If I need to pay the deductible, there it is. If I don’t, it earns good interest and I have an incentive to not touch it (early withdrawl loses me 6 months of interest). I have a similar CD that is labeled “New Washing Machine” – our existing machine is rather old and I’d prefer to have money standing by to replace it. I’ll have to get some more CDs set up for car purchases – that’s a perfect candidate for laddering.

By the by, I choose cash CDs over money market specifically because of the withdrawl penalties – it’s that extra incentive I need to keep me out of them!

Monday, May 19, 2008 – 08:18 AM

Shaking off the blues

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Of late, I’ve been sliding into the Slough of Despond.

It’s all freaking depressing, what with the dog ailing, hundreds of dollars in vet bills piling up, plagiarizing students (and more recently, a plagiarizing client), barely literate university seniors, the economy, the mess in Iraq, the horror in Burma, the meanness of the Democratic presidential campaign when we so desperately need leaders of good will, the neighbors having fits about a few enterprising burglars, and the general loneliness of onliness.

Time to shake that off!

Here’s the plan: come up with several things I would like and do them. These things have to

  • be within reason;
  • be possible to do in a fairly short time; and
  • create a change, no matter how small, in the routine or the scenery.

So. Here are some things that would brighten my days:

I would like to keep my house cleaner!

  • Start with a real spring housecleaning:
  • Oil the kitchen & bathroom cabinets.
  • Clean & condition the leather furniture.
  • Scrub the dog nests off the walls.
  • Wash the windows.
  • Clean the dust off everything.

I would like my nails to quit splitting.

  • Go to a salon and get a silk wrap or have product applied.

I would like the front yard to look less cluttered.

  • Put Gerardo up to digging out some of the extraneous plants.
  • While he’s at it, persuade him to clip off the frost-killed bougainvillea branches I can’t reach.

I would like to keep my car cleaner—gratis.

  • Use early Sunday a.m. to wash car.
  • Use shop-vac to wet-vacuum areas where coffee has spilled.

I would like to establish a second income stream that will bring in $12,000 to $18,000 a year by the time I retire.

  • Go in with T.M.; frame the proposed business plan.
  • Attend ABPA meetings; schmooze.
  • Figure out how to increase blog traffic; monetize Funny about Money.

Really, there’s nothing we can do about the larger issues around us. We can’t change the damage an incompetent and craven leadership has done to the economy and to our country’s place in the world; we can’t talk sense into any of the candidates who hope to take over that leadership; we can do little or nothing to help the Burmese or make up for the failures of our educational system or get us out of Iraq; we can’t even stop burglars from burgling. Whatever changes make life more tolerable happen on the individual level. Voltaire was right:

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

One frugal move = 12 to-do’s done

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So this morning I decided to wash the car in the driveway, my $13 having purchased a less-than-perfect job the last time I took the minivan to the car wash. Figured it was time, since I couldn’t see through the windshield.

In particular, I wanted to try to get the old, stale coffee stains out of the carpet, where over the months and years I’ve spilled my favorite potable while driving around town. Toyota’s carpet and upholstery are practically invulnerable. Hence, a rough-sounding strategy: spray plenty of window cleaner on the rug, scrub the stuff around with an old sponge, and then suck it out with the shop vac.

Amazingly, the scheme worked with no ill effect. It not only got out the coffee stains, it also pulled up a number of other spots scattered around the vehicle. Other than the Great Automotive Coffee Extraction Project, the rest of the job was pretty easy: I sprayed the van with a little Windex Outdoor, which doesn’t do much for windows but works great on paving, walls, and your car. This product comes in a container that attaches to the hose and has a spray attachment that turns the water flow off (saves water!) and also switches to “rinse,” making it simple to lather and rinse off the vehicle.

The Coffee Extraction Project got the eight-year-old carpeting almost as clean as new, and a little Murphy’s Oil Soap cleaned and polished up the vinyl interior trim. So, for the price of a quarter-bottle of Windex Outdoor I saved myself $13 on the wash-and-rinse and, if you believe Johnny’s Carousel Car Wash prices, another $80 on the detail job.

Better yet, because I chose to wash the car in the driveway, in the process I did a whole series of small chores I wouldn’t even have thought about had I schlepped to Johnny’s:

  • Filled a spray bottle with a handy solution of diluted Murphy’s Oil Soap
  • Cleaned the fingerprints off the garage cabinets
  • Refilled the window-cleaner spray bottle
  • Cleaned the garage door threshold
  • Cleaned the utility sink
  • Cleaned the clothes washer
  • Took out the garbage
  • Cleaned the garbage basket
  • Washed the grackle guano off the pavement under the ash tree
  • Picked wildflowers and put them in the kitchen
  • Cleaned the fireplace ashes out of the shop vac & washed the filter
    Memo: Don’t use the shop vac to clean out the fireplace!

Voilà! In the time it would have taken to drive across town to Johnny’s and wait around for a half-baked car wash, twelve household projects got done (counting the car wash). The cost was almost nothing, and no gasoline was consumed.
w00t!
Frugality pays, in more ways than one.

Nine Ways I’m Saving on Gas: What’s your strategy?

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My car gets about 18 miles a gallon. Coincidentally, my office at the Great Desert University is just about 18 miles from my house. So when gasoline sells at $3.50 a gallon, it costs me $7 a day to drive back and forth to work, or about $140 a month. That’s from the git-go: before driving to the nearest decent grocery store (about eight miles round-trip), to the Costco (about 10 miles round-trip), to the nearest Home Depot (about 16 miles round trip). Unless I’m careful, the monthly gas bill could easily add up to $200…quite a jump over an $80 tab just a few months ago.

Here are a few strategies I’ve come up with to try to keep a grip:

*Carry as little weight as possible. I’d already removed two of the four back seats from the van, to accommodate two large dogs. Since I never carry more than one human passenger, I took another seat out, leaving lots more room in the cargo compartment and lightening the car’s load by about 50 pounds. Allegedly, lightening up can improve your gas mileage by 1% to 2% per 100 pounds; so the absence of that extra seat should make things .5% to 1% better.

Drive slower on the freeways. To avoid confrontations with aggressive drivers, I watch for slow-moving traffic and then queue up behind it. The impatient folks jerking around me and my fellow tortoises pay an extra 18 cents to $1.16 a gallon for their bullying habits. Meanwhile, I save 40 cents a gallon by driving 60 mph instead of 70 mph.

Drive with overdrive on. It not only saves wear and tear on the engine at higher speeds, it also saves gas.

*Turn off the engine whenever a wait is more than a few seconds, such as at Costco’s gas lines, at a drive-through, or at an endless train crossing. Avoiding idling can save as much as 19%.

Keep the engine in good working order and keep the tires inflated to the recommended pressure. Although Edmunds’s tests found tire inflation made little or no difference in gas mileage, driving on low tires causes unnecessary wear on the tires and may be less safe.

*Build careful shopping lists and buy only at stores that are on the way to and from work. This lets out Home Depot, which has no outlets on any of my routes. However, there’s an Ace right on the way, in the same strip shopping center as a grocery store. Buying hardware and home maintenance items there allows me to buy necessities without having to rack up any extra gas mileage. Ditto picking up the groceries on the way home, instead of waiting till the weekend to go shopping. Safeway, Basha’s, two AJ’s markets, and two Costco stores are directly on my way.

Telecommute as much as possible. Working at home one day a week saves 20% on the cost of driving to campus: $7 a week or $28 a month.

*Use a day of vacation time now and again to engineer three- and four-day weekends, cutting another commute whenever possible.

Always use American Express’s 3-2-1 card for gasoline purchases. When regular unleaded is selling for $3.50, the 3% kickback on gas is the equivalent of 10 cents a gallon.

That’s about it. I can’t bicycle: too far, too dangerous, too hot. Can’t use cruise control: the freeways are so crowded they never move at a constant speed. Won’t ride the bus: turns a 30-minute drive into two hours and ten minutes of wasted time.

Are you doing anything special to save on gasoline? What is it?

Dog

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It’s four in the morning. The dog’s heavy breathing woke me an hour ago and puts sleep out of the question. Well…the steam-engine effect plus worrying about where the money to pay the vet will come from put sleep out of the question.

I’ve now spent almost $500 on the dog so far this month. The billing cycle closes on the 20th; today is only the 9th: plenty of time to rack up more costs against the amount available to spend—which also has to cover food, gas, and all other necessities.

In spite of four Benadryls, the dog can barely breathe through her nose. At this point she gets ten pills a day and four doses of eyedrops. She’s now developing the cracked, scaly skin around her nose said to be a symptom of lupus, another wildly expensive chronic disease. In saner moments, I think I should put her down. But in fact most of the time she seems pretty lively: she eats well, she plays with her toys, and although she can no longer run after the toys, she still wants them thrown and she still retrieves forever, albeit at a walk instead of a run. She’s as alert as a 13-year-old dog gets. Is a stuffy nose a capital offense? Or running the human into bankruptcy?

The thing that’s frosting my cookies here is that after two weeks of dosing her with antibiotics and smearing a veterinary ear ointment on her nether parts-a procedure that puts me at risk of having my hand removed at the ankle—she still stank until I broke out a tube of Myconazole 7, which brought an end to the problem in two days flat. Same as it brings an end to similar problems in a human female. In other words, $10 worth of an over-the-counter antifungal did what $500 worth of veterinary care did not do.

Since it’s not possible to get the stuff up inside the dog (not and live to tell about it, anyway), it may be that two rounds of $50 antibiotics were necessary. But as far as I can tell, they did little or nothing to clear up the infection. What worked was the grocery-store ointment. It would have helped a great deal if the vet had suggested this first, rather than clipping me for drugs that I can’t afford and that don’t seem to have done much.

That makes me reluctant to drag her back in over the nasal congestion. I suspect that every time I take the dog to the vet, the vet takes me to the cleaners.

But she’s doing the same thing Walt did at the end of his life: sticking to me like she was glued on. She won’t let me out of her sight-she follows me if I get up to go to the bathroom. The “Velcro dog” effect, IMHO, is not a good sign. Dogs, being social animals, want to hang out with other pack members, but it’s not their nature to be on top of each other all the time. When this happens, it means the dog is uncomfortable or in pain and is seeking reassurance. So, there’s probably more at work here than simple old age.

Sigh.