a vacuum cleaner that doesn’t make your ears ring?
clock/timers for microwaves and stoves that run on batteries instead of sucking household electricity?
a computer operating system that runs forever and never demands to be updated?
a freestanding, energy-efficient room air conditioner (not a swamp cooler) that doesn’t have to be mounted in a window or punched through a wall?
good-tasting mass-produced prepared meals with no artificial flavors, preservatives, or other weird ingredients? And that are not oversalted and oversugared.
an inexpensive hose timer that works when the water is turned to a slow dribble?
Last evening Cassie and I walked past the proprietorship of an eight-year-old entrepreneur, who sells garden flowers out of a sidewalk stand built of his mom’s card table and some paper signs. Turns out the kid has made about $70 from his various projects, which also include peddling the citrus from the backyard trees and handing out gift cards to relatives. Kid and a half!
Chatting with his mom, I learned the family had recently moved in, after her mother-in-law, the home’s original owner, had passed. Sad though they were to lose the grandmother, they were thrilled to be in the house, which they’ve begun to renovate.
Among several things she revealed, the young mother told me that her mother-in-law had demarcated certain parts of the yard as outdoor living areas; other parts she simply wrote off. This explained why half the front yard was green and happy, and half was mostly bare dirt. The parts of the large lot that she didn’t personally use as living space did not get water wasted on them.
Click! Here I am sitting here wondering how the heck to cut some of the amazing costs of living in my quite desirable house, one of which is the astonishing water bill, which rises apace.
My house has an advantage over the mother-in-law’s, in that it’s already desert-landscaped. Where no plants grow, rock mulch covers the ground. But the problem is, I don’t take advantage of it: the place isn’t a desert…it’s a jungle!
The frontyard west of the driveway is overwatered, because I couldn’t make the landscaper understand that the potted plants around the westside deck need to be watered every day in summer and so they needed to be on their own valve. Disregarding the Female Voice, he linked the front west with the irrigation lines that water the potted plants. This means that all summer long a half-a-yardful of xeriscapic desert plants get watered every day. Needless to say, I’ve quite the thicket out there.
There’s no reason I can’t have about two-thirds of the berserk plants removed and then simply put plugs in every one of the drippers. Let those xeriscapic plants fend for themselves during the summer, or haul a sprinkler out to them about once a month. That would cut a substantial part of the water bill.
Ditto the useless plants along the outside of the eastside back wall, whose main purpose seems to be to block pedestrians from strolling along the sidewalk and to provide cover for the bums who use that wall as their public toilet. Why am I watering plants that don’t populate my living space? There, too, Gerardo could yank out the plants and we could plug all the drippers: more water saved!
Most of the plants in the east front yard are highly xeriscapic. Several of those—a palo brea tree, a vitex, a yellow oleander, a cassia, and a Mexican bird of paradise—were installed to create a visual screen between my front windows and Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. That they do, effectively…and a little weirdly, given that they’ve grown into something that resembles a huge green bunker instead of a screen. Now that they’re firmly established, they also shouldn’t need to be watered more than once or twice a week. Plug up their drippers, for hevvinsake, and drag a sprinkler out there every two or three weeks during the driest part of summer. And get the darn things trimmed!
The weeds between the flagstones in the front courtyard have crowded out the dichondra, are always out of control and usually overrun with hated bermudagrass. Dig out the dirt between those pavers, fill the spaces with river rock, and turn off the sprinklers. Connect octopus heads to the sprinklers and run dripper hose to just a few ornamentals, thereby bringing a stop to a great deal of water wastage there, too.
I’ll bet that by mapping out three relatively small outdoor living areas—the back porch, the westside deck, and the front courtyard with its backdrop of xeriscapic shrubbery—and cutting off the water to everything else except the fruit trees, I could save $40 or $50 a month on water. More, maybe: the base water, sewer, and trash bill is about $60; my bills have been more than twice that. Whatever dies gets pulled out. The yard would look better because it would be less overgrown, and my checking account would also look a lot better.
Next Tuesday Funny about Money will host the Make It from Scratch Carnival. This will be Funny’s first effort at hosting that entertaining and fun event, which always features many excellent recipes, clever crafts projects, and frugal ideas.
The deadline is Sunday, so be sure to get your submissions in this weekend: go to the carnival’s submission form to upload your best ideas for DIY and make-it-from-scratch projects.
Yesterday I called my investment adviser to discuss the possibility of buying a smaller house in a nicer neighborhood. I was operating under the assumption that I would apply all the proceeds from my present paid-off home’s sale to the new house.
He, however, urged me to finance as much of the new purchase as possible—80 percent—and invest the remaining cash in the stock market. The 5 percent drawdown (projected “take” for retirement income) from the increased amount in savings would cover the cost of the mortgage and, when combined with Social Security, would give me enough to live on. And then some, in his opinion.
Leveraging debt, as we know, is something that goes against my bourgeois grain. However, since this is a very smart guy with an MBA, I reckoned I’d better listen up.
So today I ran a bunch of figures, in an attempt to see the practical outcome of borrowing against real estate instead of paying it off. The fly in the proverbial ointment is the $1,000/month payment I’m making toward the house my son and I are purchasing as an investment, which we would like to hold until after the housing market turns around. That could be anywhere from two to ten years.
I assumed my monthly costs of groceries, clothing, gasoline, and the like will not change significantly, since I do not eat out and don’t have to buy special clothing for the office. Gas probably will drop a little, but not much, since the Valley’s sprawl requires everyone to drive from pillar to post just to accomplish ordinary errands. Monthly routine nonnegotiable costs such as tax & insurance, utilities, and the like probably won’t change if I move to the cute little house in Willo, but will drop sharply if I move to Sun City.
So: would I be better off to mortgage my home and add the cash to savings? Here’s what my calculations show:
In the first scenario, my real estate agent gets the seller to come down off his price by $10,000 and I get my full asking price of $325,000, netting a grandiose $274,100 after the Renovation Loan and closing costs are paid.
That’s depressing. Even without the cost of the Investment House, I can’t afford to move to the cute little house in Willo. Moving on…let’s suppose the guy is right, that carrying a mortgage on my house would allow me to leverage debt in such a way that I would have more to live on in retirement. Maybe that strategy would make it possible for me to stay right where I’m living. Suppose I did that right away, while I have a job, since no lender is likely to fork over 240 grand to an old lady on Social Security.
Wow! I profit by a fantastic $1,076. What keeps me in the black is my salary. In theory the positive balance is a bit higher, because I get a small income tax advantage. That notwithstanding, this does not look like it’s worth the effort, or the psychological stress of diving into debt up to my eyeballs.
Once all I have to live on is Social Security plus retirement savings, this scenario puts me deep in the red. Clearly I can’t afford to stay in my house using this strategy after retirement.
So, what if I pay off the Renovation Loan, leaving my house free and clear, and try to stay here after I retire. Can I afford that?
What with the ever-increasing property taxes and skyrocketing utility bills, it doesn’t look good. The only way I can stay here is to sell the Investment House prematurely, taking a loss on that. This will cause my son also to take a financial hit, which I would prefer not to do.
Ohh-kayyyy…. This leaves moving to Sun City as the last option. Costs there are much lower, because taxes are controlled and home and car insurance is much lower. Videlicet:
This represents a significant savings on the cost of living in my present (much preferable) home. So, what happens if I finance a sorta comparable house, which out there will cost around $260,000?
Lovely. I’m still in the red. Either my son has to come up with an extra $542 a month, or we have to sell the Investment House. This is getting depressing: so far, no matter what I do, I can’t afford to retire. Period.
But I can afford to pay for a Sun City house in full. What happens then?
OK! I probably could survive if I move to Sun City, buy a place for much less than I get for my present home, and continue to live frugally. The amount of play in my present budget is $29 a month, and so in this scenario my lifestyle would not change much. Except, of course, I would be enjoying the silence of the mausoleum in a ghetto for old folks.
In any event, this comparison suggests that paying off your debt is better than leveraging debt, at least in terms of providing you with cash to cover your living costs. Math is not my strong point, and there very well may be something in the logic that I just don’t understand. But if these figures are right, paying off all debt—mortgage included—is the sanest way for a middle-class earner to go.
How many weeks are we into the ongoing Qwest DSL drama? I’ve lost track. Finally, yesterday Qworst sent a living DSL technician. John alarmed at first sight: tall, dark, and dreadlocked. On second glance, it became clear that John actually is tall, dark, and handsome, with a quiet and gentle demeanor that quickly charms the stranger. He is, I recognized, one of those rare men who can be called “sweet” without insult.
He also has an intellect, the first I’ve encountered since the DSL puzzlement began. He, too, was puzzled: why did Qworst Call Center Dude #3, the Josh, send him out with a new $100 modem, which indeed was identical to the modem I had been sent for free by Qworst’s Philippines subcontractors and been told by #3 to return. More puzzling: there was no reason to replace the existing modem, which works just fine.
After some experimentation, John concluded the problem was not in the modem but in the phone line. He set out to discover what was going on. He climbed around the yard for a while, but eventually tracked the matter into the garage. While he was outside, I started to hear an irritating little “beep” repeating about every three seconds—probably, I thought, his equipment at work.
Pretty quick he resurfaced.
“Hear that alarm?” he said.
“Alarm? You mean the beeping?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought that was your gear.”
“No. That’s your burglar alarm. Something’s wrong with it.”
The burglar alarm system has been turned off for a good year. After it became clear that the Perp was not going to commit all the mayhem my lawyers predicted he would, I discontinued the monthly subscription.
When I tried to mess with the control panel to see if I could turn it off, I felt something like an electric shock. He said, “That’s odd.” On further investigation, he announced the sensation wasn’t electricity: it waswater! The burglar alarm is mounted to the wall next to the water heater. Some part of the copper spaghetti above the water heater (lines to the swamp cooler; lines to the refrigerator; lines to parts unknown) had sprung a tiny leak, and it was spraying a fine, invisible mist. Lo! On the concrete floor below the burglar alarm panel, what should we see but a little puddle developing.
Dang. He now climbed up to the main panel and disconnected the burglar alarm system. This did nothing to stop the Chinese-water-torture beeping. We called the burglar alarm company: no answer, midafternoon on a business day. We punched buttons. Nothing. But—no cops; that’s good. Finally, he took out his wire cutters, pulled open the cover, and cut a fine fat white wire.
That stopped the alarm. Amazingly, it did not stop the telephone service, as friends have told me messing with a hardwired burglar alarm will do.
Then he said—get this!—”I don’t understand why they ordered this modem. You don’t need it. You don’t need any of this. I’m canceling this service call.”
So, I got the DSL fixed and the burglar alarm shut off just as it was starting to register its dismay at being sprayed by the defective plumbing: free of charge.
Such are the glories of having a live human being respond to a service call.
Along about 8:00 p.m., another live human being—the Plumber Extraordinaire—showed up to figure out where the water was coming from. Over the phone, he’d already coached me on how to make it stop, a maneuver that entailed shutting off the hot water to the house. In 100 degree heat, you don’t need a whole lotta hot water, anyway.
He replaced the two-year-old flex line, one of the many benefits of globalization we Americans now enjoy. Annoyed, he showed me a brand-new flex line that he had been about to install at another customer’s house: it sported a two-inch-long split. Then he handed me a bill for $75. I was glad to pay it for his long after-hours time.
Customer service personnel outsourced half-a-globe away. Plumbing supplies that break before you can install them. Think of it. Let those who question whether globalization equals the Third-Worldization of America think of it.
Well, La Maya managed to get into the County Recorder’s site and extract some information about the cute little Willo house. Taxes not only are NOT lower on a house and lot signficantly smaller than mine, they’re higher: $2,641. Good lord. I almost fainted when I got this year’s bill for $2,050!
Even if the utility bills are lower (they won’t be: the house is in a district served by one of priciest utility companies in the country, which charges extravagant amounts per KwH to fund its white elephant of a nuclear plant), I certainly can’t afford that. So…looks like it’s gunna be Sun City for me. Day-um!
