Coffee heat rising

Wow! Major storm hits lovely uptown Phoenix

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Power is still out for tens of thousands of Phoenix residents. Just now, at 10:30 in the morning, it’s only 92 degrees on my back patio, but humidity is said to be 61 percent.

So, I account myself extremely lucky that here the power was down for only an hour or so, and even more extremely lucky that the devil-pod tree* did not snap off in winds clocked as high as 100 miles per hour. Nor did any of the other trees, all much in need of thinning: desert willow, Texas ebony, vitex, palo brea, palo verde, yellow oleander, and the moribund ash.

Check out this photo, baldly stolen from ABC News (Channel 15), of a large billboard bent all the way down to the ground! Don’t know how long that link will stay live: it’s worth a visit for the amazing slide show of 185 dramatic photos, among them some stunning shots of lightning.

Our associate editor e-mailed early this morning to say DON’T COME TO CAMPUS! She said trees were down and blocking the way into the building. To get into the office, she had to wade through a six-inch deep puddle. News reports show signals out at several of the major intersections I have to traverse, and so…I believe we’ll be telecommuting today. Unclear whether our offices, which occupy a condemned building (yes) (don’t ask) (it’s better not to know), got any water; I asked her to check, and, having heard nothing, imagine we’re O.K. Hope so. I don’t want to have to traipse two hours through impossible traffic and chaos to deal with that.

It took about three hours to clean up the back yard, though I hafta admit that a large part of that time was spent cutting back the red salvia that tried unsuccessfully to cannibalize the Myer lemon (salvia 10; lemon 98), the overgrown lavender, and the overwatered, rotting sage plant. Even the aggressive salvia was less than happy: we’ve had so much rain this summer that many of the Mediterranean and xeriscapic plantings I put in the yard are turning to black slime. The pool would have been OK — in fact, probably wouldn’t have needed any extra attention — were it not for the devil-pod tree. I pulled a good bushel of pods, pollen balls, leaves, twigs, and small branches out of the water.

I occasionally consider whether to have the tree taken out. That will cost almost a thousand bucks, on top of the thou’ it will take to remove the dying ash tree in front. Really, only in the summer does the tree turn into a real nuisance. The rest of the year it’s quiescent. On the other hand, I was alarmed enough last night to stay out of the bedroom, where the tree will hit if it decides to fall on the house. The wind came up again after I posted last night’s storm report; Cassie and I ended up sleeping on the living room sofa. Less than perfectly pleasing accommodations.

The tree has some advantages, not the least of which is that its thick foliage forms a privacy barrier between the pool and passers-by on the street. Some members of the public are given to using the shrubbery as their toilet, so…as you can imagine, these are not folks you want peering into the yard. It could take a couple of years or more to get something else to grow big enough to block unwelcome gazers. And it does put some shade on the concrete pad, which functions as a horizontal trombé wall to conduct heat into the bedroom all summer long. Removing the tree would make the bedroom even hotter than it is (which is plenty: it’s the warmest room in the house), jack up the summer power bills, and take a great deal away from the backyard’s privacy.

In terms of making the house affordable for retirement, though, getting rid of that tree might be the best thing to do. It would be one fewer tree that needs a professional to thin and groom it every year or eighteen months. Last year I spent about $750 on tree care, all of which needs to be repeated right now. And Matt didn’t even touch the devil-pod tree. Who knows what he’ll charge this year? If I’m to stay in this house, I’ll have to cut the costs of yard maintenance somehow.

devil-pod-tree

* Satan and Proserpine, the previous owners of the House from Hell, planted this tree directly upwind from the swimming pool. They claimed it’s a weeping acacia. Unlikely. Whatever it is, the thing is a good forty feet tall, a height it has attained mostly in the five years since I moved in, and “low litter” is not the operative term: it drops leaves, twigs, pollen puffballs, and seed pods that stain the CoolDeck and the pool’s plaster. This was not a pair who understood much about plants: they thought the two(!) sissou trees they stuck in the front yard would never get taller than about 15 or 20 feet.

25 strategies for more affordable living

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The rumination on ways to maximize Social Security income — and even use early start-up payments as an interest-free loan from the government — led me to consider how I might stay in my home after I retire.

The house a little expensive to operate, it’s probably too large for one person, and the neighborhood is a whisper on the iffy side. On the other hand, I like the house quite a lot. It’s paid for, it’s centrally located in a neighborhood adjacent to a park and a very upscale enclave, and so far I’ve seen nothing comparable in a better area that I can begin to afford. Given that Biker Boob, Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, and the nightly presence of cop helicopters amount to the trade-off for an affordable home in a halfway decent central neighborhood, before I decide to move to cheaper housing, maybe I should first consider ways I can invest in my present home tocut operating costs.

ThoughI contemplatethese ideas in connection with pending retirement, they apply to anyone who’s trying to live frugally, and certainly to families who would like tohave one spouse quit working to stay home with the kids.

Ours is a hot climate. Winter heating bills are negligible, but summer cooling bills will knock you over. Each year they rise higher. Ditto water: though my yard is desert landscaped, July and August still bring $160 bills. These are the largest consistent hits. Other big costs are taxes and insurance, gasoline consumed in driving to safe, upper-middle-class shopping, and repairs & maintenance. So, some strategies to make my home permanently affordable:

Climate Control

  1. Install a programmable thermostat. Set the summertime temperature several degrees higher in the daytime and have it drop to 78 at night.
  2. Build a shade structure over the front entryway to cast shade on the flagstones and concrete. Make this large enough to seriously protect the front of house from summer heat.
  3. Remove the shade structure Richard built in back, which is out of code and sagging, and replace it with a shade structure that will run the entire length of the back wall. Again, make this wide enough to provide real shade.
  4. Replace the two remaining single-paned windows with double-paned low-E windows.
  5. Blow extra insulation into the attic.
  6. Install an attic fan, if this is feasible with blown-in insulation.
  7. Have Bila fir out the west and south walls in the master bedroom, install insulation, and apply new drywall over it.
  8. Remove the dying ash tree and replace it, now, with a tree that will grow big enough to cast shade on the west side of the house by the time I retire.
  9. Get the chimney cleaned. Install one of those heat-recirculating devices in the fireplace, so the fireplace can be used to heat the family room and kitchen during the winter.
  10. Provide the dog with a warm blanket so she can sleep comfortably on the floor during the winter.

Water Conservation

  1. Remove some of the overgrown planting in the front yard. Be sure all drippers and spigots leading to former plants are shut off.
  2. Confer with Matt the Tree Dude Extraordinaire to determine which xeriscapic plants in front are now established well enough to endure drought, and how to cut back on watering.
  3. Remove planting between flagstones in courtyard; replace with river stones. Turn off sprinklers in courtyard or convert them to drippers.
  4. Persuade Gerardo to create wider basins for the citrus trees in back. Deep-water established citrus only once a week in summer.
  5. Get Gerardo to put the potted plants in back on their own valve, or, failing that, get rid of the potted plants.
  6. Get timers for all three hoses and use them! Never leave the water running in the pool or on a plant.

Other Costs of Running the House

  1. Find out the answers to these questions: Do I really need enough insurance to rebuild the house if it burns down? Realistically, what are the chances it will burn down? Given that all the floors are tiled and the washer is in the garage, what are the chances it will ever suffer flood damage? Short of complete destruction, what is the worst that could happen and what would it cost to repair?
  2. With the answers to these questions in hand, reconsider the insurance coverage on the house. Reduce it, if that seems reasonable.
  3. In any event, raise the deductible as high as the Hartford will allow.
  4. Inventory the house’s contents. Estimate value. Insure the house’s contents for no more than what the stuff is really worth.
  5. Purchase a fire-proof, water-resistant safe. Bolt it to the floor in a closet. Place crucial documents and all real valuables inside this safe. Do not insure gew-gaws thatare stored insidethe safe.
  6. Challenge the next tax assessment. Raise hell and put a block under it the next time the county raises taxes.

Costs of living in a waning central city core

  1. At retirement, buy a car that uses less gas, so as to drive to now far-flung middle-class shopping and medical care.
  2. Add security to Arcadia doors, and replace back screen door with security door.
  3. Use train to ride to AJs, central library, museum, and downtown theaters.

A tiger of a storm

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Wow! What a storm! I’m writing this on my laptop, since it’s not connected to a power outlet. Internet connection is down. Half the TV and radio stations are off the air: Channels 15, 12, 10, and 8, as far as I can tell, plus NPR and most of the stations on the lower end of the FM band.

Not much rain, but the fiercest wind I’ve ever seen swept through here a half-hour ago. It really ripped—I was worried that the devil-pod tree would break and fall on the house. The prevailing direction was out of the south, though, which likely would have blown a major limb northerly of the house with minimal damage. The scary part was the noise: it sounded like a fleet of jet airplanes revving their engines, and it went on and on, for a good half-hour like that. No hail, not even enough rain to flood the back patio: just high winds, lightning, and weird noise.

I can’t get online and there’s no news on the couple of broadcast TV and radio stations that are still live. The power has come back on (and gone off; and come on again) and the wind has died down, leaving an eerie stillness now that the neighbors have shut off the chorus of berserk burglar alarms. As far as I can see with a flashlight, the roof looks OK, though it’s awfully dark out there and I can’t tell much. None of the trees in my yard seems to have snapped, a small miracle considering how overgrown they all are. Cassie the Corgi was visibly frightened but she’s calm now; apparently her terrors pass as quickly as an Arizona monsoon.

In any event, we have two three-gallon containers of water, 40 gallons in the water heater, the better part of a canister of propane, two good flashlights, a store of candles, and two butane lighters. So I guess we’re OK for the nonce and then some, except that I have only a quarter tank of gas in the car. Wuz waiting till tomorrow to refill, by way of staying on budget this week for a change.

This area isn’t prone to natural disaster. Even so, it’s a good idea to be prepared: extended power outages are not unheard-of. Some areas lose power for hours or even days as a result of storm damage, not a good thing when temperatures are over 100 degrees all day. A monsoon normally will drop the air temperature 20 degrees or so, leaving us with a tolerable night. But come 8:00 in the morning…yipe! At the very least, what’s needed is water, candles, flashlights, propane, and a propane grill or camp stove. Modern gas stoves are kept alight by electricity, and so when the power is out your gas range is out too; at best, it’s unsafe.

And clearly…LOL! It would be wise not to let one’s gas tank run dry.

Hmmmm… We appear to be back online. So, to post and then to bed.

“We Value Your Business”: Reaching a person at a company that doesn’t want to be reached

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As we saw in yesterday’s encounter with Qwest, many companies—often those with a vested interest in customer service—do not want to deal with the unwashed masses with whom they are forced to do business. They make it as difficult as possible to reach a human being, because they don’t care about their customers and do not wish to waste time speaking with them.

There are several avenues to get their attention.

You can often get through to a live human by calling a phone number listed at Get Human. This useful site lists telephone numbers and strategies for getting past the punch-a-button maze.

Failing this, try googling the company’s name + “corporate headquarters.” This often will bring up a snail-mail address and a viable telephone number; sometimes a working e-mail also will appear. Invest in a stamp to send your comments or complaint by snail-mail. This was how I got an address for Steve Jobs, during the late, great MobileMe fiasco. I printed out my post, “An Open Letter to Steve Jobs,” and mailed it to Cupertino. Interestingly, an underling in Apple’s corporate offices telephoned me –several times! –to discuss the matter. Didn’t succeed in fixing things, but at least he pretended he cared, which was comforting.

Apple Computer
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA
408-996-1010

A search for Qwest’s corporate headquarters gives us this intelligence:

1801 California St.
Denver, CO 80202
For general inquiries: (303) 992-1400
or (800) 899-7780
Fax: (303) 896-8515
Customer Service

Investor Relations
(800) 567-7296
email:investor.relations@qwest.com

Qworst’s customer disservice link takes you to another infinite loop, wherein you have to register and reveal private information before you can wander through an off-putting maze in your attempt to get some help. However, in a past experience I learned you can reach a high-ranking P.R. officer by contacting investor relations. So, that’s where I sent a link to yesterday’s rant about the company’s execrable DSL customer service.

When you believe you’ve been treated unethically or actually cheated, think about what regulatory agencies and trade groups govern the offending corporation. For example, banks and credit unions are regulated by a national banking commission. Insurance companies are to some degree regulated by state agencies. The U.S. Attorney General is interested in frauds and scams that cross state lines. The state attorneys general in your own state and the state where the company is based also may be helpful. Even if they can do nothing, management in general does not enjoy receiving a telephoned or written inquiry from an attorney general’s office; often a simple notice from a regulatory or law enforcement agency will spur a response to your issue.

Also consider contacting companies whose employees have to do business with a wide variety of vendors. Your complaint probably isn’t the first; if you get in touch with agencies or companies serve as intermediaries, you may find a way through the maze.Your credit-card issuer, for example, may have a telephone number that will reach a person at the problem company.

It takes ingenuity and persistence to get past the ramparts erected by megacorporations, which are specifically designed to repel all comers. But keep at it: if you can’t get through, try to enlist the aid of an agency that can.

Back again…temporarily?

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What’s more annoying than a punch-a-button phone maze? A robot that answers the phone!

Qwest’s DSL connection went down around 8:00 this morning, just before I left for work. After dinner tonight, I called the Philippines in hopes of finding a tech who could figure out how to fix it.

Make that “I tried to call the Philippines.” All of Qworst’s online tech help appears to be based in Manila. But you can’t get to them without trudging past a robot gatekeeper animated with a peculiarly infuriating smug voice. By the time I reached the first live human — get this: after the oily robot actually cooed “hold on while I make a note of that”!!! — I was so enraged I could barely speak.

So now I have this Filipina techie on the phone and she’s asking me how the DSL contraption is acting. Following what is clearly a canned routine, carefully enunciating a script, she guides me through a number of little tests: disconnect and reconnect this, that, and the other. These require me to climb on top of the desk and fiddle with the gadget, because I can’t pick the gadget up easily because the cords, which are too short to start with,are snugly tucked in along the back of the desk to keep all that junk off the floor. Many of the connections are invisible to me, even with my head upside down and jammed up tight against the wall. But none of these experiments work, anyway.

Next she gets me down on the floor, upside down under the desk. “Unplug the telephone line from the wall socket and plug it back in,” she says.

Ohhh-kayyyyy….

Not surprisingly, this strategy disconnects me from the Philippines.

I call back and get the same enraging robot. By now I’m so angry I’m choking and so the robot doesn’t understand what I’m trying to say, possibly because some of it isn’t printable. I slam the phone down and dial “0.” Applying a superhuman effort, I stay polite long enough to ask the operator if she could please connect me to a human being. “Sure,” she says: and connects me right back to the same effing robot!!!!!

By the time the robot ran me through another 8 or 10 minutes of the same enraging hoops (asking questions that the live human would soon repeat, again), I was so furious I found it extremely difficult to be courteous to the poor wretch who finally picked up the phone.

He now starts to repeat the same series of instructions, word for word, that his compatriot so recently fed into my ear. I explain that I’ve already done those things and none of them worked. I also explain that unplugging the telephone from the wall causes the phone to disconnect. He, being smarter than the average bear, says, “Well…do you have another cordless phone in the house?’

Uhhmm, yeah. Duh!

“Go get it,” he says.

So now we disconnect the phone line from the wall socket and reconnect it, to no avail. DSL is still nonfunctional.

He concludes the unit is broken and says Qworst will send a new modem, which is to arrive on Friday. Once this wonder gets here, I have three weeks to return the old one or be charged a hundred bucks for it. I express my appreciation for this charming demand and the graceful terms in which it is couched. I also suggest to him that if he is earning less than $20 an hour, he is being underpaid and he and his workers should unionize and demand a decent wage.

He says he’ll make a note of that.

I say, “Here’s how you spell it: h-u-e-l-g-a. That’s v-i-v-a l-a h-u-e-l-g-a!“ Then, so infuriated am I at the maddening robotic hoops and the barely competent customer service, I remark that after three interactions with Qworst’s smug robot, I’m beginning to understand what motivates people to wrap themselves in explosives and blow up corporate headquarters.

So, I expect the next post you read from this blog will come to you from Cuba.

All this notwithstanding, the DSL mysteriously came back online, which explains why this last post is reaching you from Arizona.

How hard is it to have a human being pick up the phone? And what makes the executives of a faceless corporation think a) that anyone on the planet wants to be run in circles by a smug-sounding robot voice, or b) that even one of its customers is so stupid as to believe “your business is important to us” when they can’t spring for the subminimum wage required to have a nice citizen of the Philippines answer the G.D. phone?

Tomorrow, assuming I’m not riding a black helicopter to Guantanamo Bay,I intend to find out what’s involved in switching to Cox. Can I even get a cable internet connection without having to sign up for cable television that I’ll never watch? If so, can I get out of Qworst’s nonservice? We shall see.

Social Security as Investment Account?

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Sunday while I was wrestling with the indexing project,PBS mumbled away, background noise that I wasn’t listening to. My attention was snared, though, by a personal finance program identifying itself with Kiplinger’s, whose guests were going on about ways to finance one’s retirement. In the course of conversation, they reminded me of something I’d heard before: if you start taking Social Security early, there’s a way to engineer your way into the higher payment bracket you’d have qualified for if you’d delayed collecting Social Security payments. You can repay the entire amount the government has doled out through Social Security, and that will allow you to start over.

This provision in the Social Security code allows a person who retires early, changes her mind, and goes back work to stop collecting Social Security, remit the funds she collected, and then later restart payments at the amount she would have had if she had not tried to take early retirement.

One of Social Security’s several catches is that if you retire before the so-called “full retirement age,” the government giveth and government taketh away. For every buck you earn above a certain very low threshold, they take back 50 cents, meaning that if you dare to earn a living wage, you get $0.00 from your “entitlement.” This policy ends when you reach “full retirement age” — for me, that’s age 66 1/2 — and after that you get to keep your Social Security, though you have to pay income tax on it. So, if you quit your job and start collecting Social Security at age 62, then go back to work at age 64, your payments are “disappeared” as long as you’re earning more than about $14,000 a year.

Second catch is that the amount of your Social Security payments depends on the age when you start collecting: the younger you are, the less you get. If I had retired at the age of 62, for example, my payments would have been $857 a month. According to the latest statement, retiring right now would give me an income of $1,019. If I wait three and a half years before collect, my monthly Social Security income would be $1,394. But if I can hold off retiring until I’m 70, my payments will be $2,094. These figures are based on actuarial statistics that estimate how long Americans in a given age range will live. The government plans to pay out a specific amount to each participant; assuming you live out your full life expectancy, you would get about the same total distribution no matter when you started collecting.

You can recover from the error of continuing to work after early retirement by canceling the SS payments and returning the money you were already paid. Then when you reach the next age plateau (or when you decide to quit working in earnest), you start collecting at a higher rate.

The speakers on the PBS program pointed out that because only earned income counts against the amount you’re allowed to keep when you start collecting early, if you have enough to live on from dividend income, pensions, and annuities, taking Social Security at the earliest possible moment can be made to amount to an interest-free loan from the government, one that you can use to generate extra income. Here’s the strategy:

  1. Retire from your job and start taking your Social Security payments.
  2. Pay the required income taxes on the Social Security gross.
  3. Immediately place the net Social Security in a fairly low-risk interest-bearing instrument.
  4. Collect until you reach the next highest age plateau.
  5. Repay the government the amount it has doled out to you. Note that no interest is charged on this amount!
  6. Collect the tax refund that the government will now return to you. When you repay Social Security funds to the government, the taxes you paid on them are refunded!
  7. Reapply for Social Security and collect a significantly larger monthly payment.

Effectively what you’re doing is funding an investment with an interest-free loan from the government. If for some reason you decide not to go through with the plan, you still end up with a nice kitty in the bank.

Now, that’s all very well and good if you have plenty of money: enough invested to put you past the crossover point (where passive income = amount needed to live on) without benefit of Social Security. I don’t, of course. So far do I not that my present plan is to continue working until I’m 70 or until the Great Desert University cans me, whichever comes first.

Let’s suppose I actually do manage to cling to my job for another seven years. That would allow me to collect “full retirement age” Social Security for 3 1/2 years. By the time I turn 70, I will have collected $1,394 x 12 x 3.5 = $58,548. The tax rules for Social Security income are, like all tax rules, stupefyingly complex, but from what I can tell they do not amount to the rate for ordinary income because some part of the Social Security income may be exempted. Presumably, then, I would pay something less than 28%. Let’s say it’s around 20%: $58,548 – 20% = $46,838 net income over three and one-half years. At a 6% return, interest income on that would be roughly $2,810 of free money.

When I reach 70, I return the Social Security lucre to the government. The Treasury Department refunds $11,710 to me, leaving me with a total of $14,520 to go back into my retirement savings (at 4%, that yields a munificent $580 a year, just slightly better than a hit on the head). But now I collect $2,094 a month: $700 a month more than I was paid when payments were based on my starting age of 66 1/2.

Seven hundred bucks a month is worth the effort. If I haven’t already done so, I quit my job now. My earned income drops significantly, and so taxes on the Social Security drop commensurately. I end up with a Social Security drawdown that makes a real contribution to my living expenses, something $857 would not do and $1,019 would barely do.

So, here’s the Poor Woman’s Answer to the Fat Cat’s Social Security Investment Strategy:

  1. Hang on to my job for all I’m worth.
  2. Start collecting Social Security at age 66 1/2, but do not quit working then.
  3. Bank every after-tax penny of Social Security income in an instrument that returns at least some interest income.
  4. At age 70, quit my job and repay the government the amount of Social Security paid to me.
  5. Reapply for Social Security, giving myself a $700 a month raise plus a “bonus” of 3.5 years’ worth of tax refunds.

What if I don’t make it to age 70? What if I throw over the traces before then, or if the university lets me go?

In that case, because I’ve banked every net penny of the $1,394 the government started paying me at age 66 1/2, my retirement savings have grown considerably. If nothing else, I’ve accrued a nice emergency fund, or at least enough to kick off retirement with a vacation in the south of France.

If I die before the age of 70, I’ve contrived to recover a certain amount of my contributions to the Social Security fund, which I can pass down to my heir — something I could not have done had I tried to delay collecting until I quit my job.

So, is this worth the trouble? Only if you live into your mid-80s. If I die in my 70s, then I’ve stayed in the salt mine altogether too long and missed out on a real retirement period. That certainly is a possibility.

However, if I dodge the family disease (and chances are I’d have it by now if I were going to get it), then I may be carrying the “good” genes. My father lived to the age of 84 after a lifetime of heavy smoking and unadulterated scorn for the concept of teetotaling. I don’t smoke and never have. The two women that I most take after lived into their mid-90s…and they were Christian Scientists. With decent medical care, I could live at least to age 95 and possibly to 100. Since that kind of longevity poses the risk that I could outlive my savings, yes. Yes, it is worth the trouble. An extra $700 a month could mean the difference between cat food and canned salmon.

Assuming any salmon are still swimming in the ocean by the time I reach that age.