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The Worst Financial Mistake You Didn’t Make

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Recently I was asked to describe the three worst financial mistakes I ever made. Well, that was easy… But later, it occurred to me that a more interesting question might have been “what was the worst financial mistake you didn’t make.”

Have you ever been tempted to do some damnfool thing and then later realized that you were smarter or luckier than you thought? What’s the worst mistake you could have made, almost made, but then didn’t make? And why didn’t you make it?

If you’re a blogger, please join the conversation with a post and link back to Funny. If you don’t have a site, please leave your story in the comments section.

To get the ball rolling, here’s this:

The worst financial mistake I didn’t make was to quit my job about a year ago. By the end of 2007, I was utterly fed up with the difficult personnel problem embodied inMy Bartleby. I had decided that if I could not get the Great Desert University to RIF her position by the time of the next performance evaluations (which occurred in spring 2008), I would take the earliest of all possible early retirements. It was her or me: either she left, or I did.

Luckily for me, after she went to visit her out-of-town son over Christmas break, she came back resolved to quit.

What serendipity!

The factotums in the Dean’s Office had already decided that we would RIF her job, and so at least I had the support of my betters in my little project. But really: she could have protested, she could have claimed I was unfair to her (I’d been hounding the poor woman for months, building a case to show not only that we no longer needed the services she’d been hired to perform, but that her editing skills were not up to snuff), she could have engaged all sorts of bureaucratic machinery to delay dismissal. We were required to give her several weeks of notice, and although our HR rep said in these cases the worker is normally told to go home and collect her money, Bartleby—you can be sure!—would have preferred not.

If she’d put up a fight and made my life even more miserable than it was, or if she’d managed to evade dismissal, I very certainly would have quit. I was determined to bring an end to the whole unhappy business.

{LOL!} Having a son of my own, I can hear the male voice, embued with common sense. He would have said one of two things:

MOM! If you’re that unhappy, why don’t you just retire?

or, knowing Bartleby’s nature as he must have,

MOM! Don’t give that bitch the satisfaction! Quit before she can fire you.

Whatever he said, it was the right thing. Bless him.

If I’d retired last spring, I would have been just getting by on the proceeds of my savings and a minuscule Social Security benefit. When the economy crashed and $200,000 of retirement savings disappeared, I would have been flat out of luck.

Don’t know how God felt about Bartleby, but She was on my side that time!

More on unemployment insurance ripoffs

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Remember that I mentioned the Unemployment Insurance representative told us, during the 90-minute chivaree in which all us furloughed Great Desert University employees were to sign up for the Shared Work program, that we should be careful of the various “fees and penalties” Chase Bank was likely to charge against the required debit card we would be given? Well, the guy wasn’t kidding.

CNN runs an article today detailing exactly how many gouges the banks are digging out of Americans’ unemployment benefits: 40 cents for the privilege of asking how much remains in your balance; 50 cents if they deny your card; 35 cents to access your account by phone. According to this report, ripoffs range from around 40 cents to as much as $3 per transaction.

These, we may note, are being coughed up to the very institutions whose executives are using the taxpayers’ TARP money to frolic in fancy resorts and fly around the country in private jets.

Oh, yeah, speaking of gouges: you get to pay income taxes on your unemployment insurance, too.

Talk about a Nation of Sheep. I can’t believe we’re not at the barricades!

The William E. Morris Institute, a nonprofit that represents low-income people in court pro bono, is spearheading a class-action suit against Arizona’s Department of Economic Services, which administers Unemployment Insurance disbursements here (after a fashion). The complaint is that DES isn’t processing claims fast enough—or, in some cases, at all. That’s not surprising, given the agency’s antediluvian operations.

It’s good to hear that someone, somewhere, is trying to put these clowns’ feet to the fire. What’s amazing, to my mind, is that we don’t have riots in the streets. But I guess as long as we can afford our cable bill, we can keep sucking on our pacifier. What, us worry?

Slow Money: Countercultural thinker may have something…or not

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I stumbled across Woody Tasch on NPR yesterday afternoon, when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a segment on his “slow money” concept, as it applies to a small organic dairy farm in upstate New York. It’s basically a variant onpeer-to-peer lending, or disintermediation, which cuts out the lending institutions with which we are presently feeling disgruntled.

The idea has a certain postmodern (or Depression-era?) charm. Like small-town bankers, we will all lend money to our friends and townspeople, here in the global village. Tasch’s take on it, however, is intriguing: that the speed with which financial transactions fly around the planet is a weakness in the global economy, because there are “structural limits to the power of industrial finance.”Speaking in favor of a simplified market, Tasch observes that “most recently, the subprime mortgage collapse signals the limits of ever accelerating, ever more complex, derivative-driven financial markets.”

He argues that the make-big-money-fast model, organized from “‘markets down’ rather than from the ‘ground up,'” works in favor of environmental degradation and, where food is concerned, brings us chemical-laden food, obesity, and hunger. Tasch focuses on socially responsible food production, suggesting that capital should be steered toward small, local, environmentally friendly farms and businesses.

It would be good to see organized support of farms that produce high-quality food all over the country. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have access to this kind of dairy product at a nearby market? Assuming, however, it came at a price one could afford…

Possibly if more financial support materializes for operations that produce organic foods, milk from grass-fed cows will become available at something less than $20 a gallon.
😉

A Close Brush with Financial Disaster

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Some years ago, I came very close to jumping off the financial cliff: I seriously considered buying a 100-year-old bed-and-breakfast in Flagstaff, Arizona. I was reminded of this episode by a post at Manely Montana, a blog whose proprietor runs an inn that appears to be very beautiful. All so idyllic.

innat410The Inn at 410 occupied a fine old building, an elegant Victorian house in the middle of Flagstaff’s gentrifying downtown. It was owned by a couple who had moved to Flag several years earlier, having long dreamed of living in a small town. He was a successful businessman—had an MBA and ran the family business in Chicago for many years. At one point, the house had been a Northern Arizona University frat house, and as you can imagine it was quite a mess when the students were done with it. It was, however, a historic house in the center of what was once the town’s ritziest district, formerly inhabited by movers and shakers, some of whom went on to do some moving & shaking on a national level.

They renovated the house to the nines. At the time I stumbled upon it in connection with a story I was writing for Arizona Highways, it was just lovely. Because of the article, they comped me a couple of weekends. I was enchanted.

For a number of years I’d been teaching in a nontenurable position at the Great Desert University’s unhappy west campus. The job was underpaid and the workload was obscene—often I put in 70- and 80-hour weeks, with no overtime pay, and I spent my unpaid summers preparing the following year’s courses. When I started, it was an upper-division and graduate-level campus serving older students, and so the teaching wasn’t intolerable. But now the university was converting the campus to a four-year institution, and suddenly I was being expected to teach freshman English, a task that in the academic world ranks slightly below cleaning the toilets. I had not signed on to teach freshmen, and many years before, after TAing my way through graduate school, I had pledged that I would go on welfare before I taught freshman comp again.

If that weren’t enough, the atmosphere on the campus was toxic. Morale had taken up permanent residence in the sub-basement: everyone was miserable, from the provost’s office on down. At one point two of my colleagues came close to a fist-fight. We kept driving young faculty insane, quite literally. One of my students, a cop, blurted out that she had arrested one of my wacko fellow professors for beating up a young boy—and that guy was not the only one who took a swan-dive off the deep end. We were all swimming in the deep end, truth be told, and I wanted to get out of the water in the worst way.

So I was on the job market. For a time, I’d been applying to anything and everything I thought I might conceivably, by any stretch of the imagination, persuade an employer I could do. But there were never many jobs for the likes of moi, and as I grew older, fewer presented themselves.

A year or so before I made the acquaintance of the Inn at 410’s proprietors, I had fallen in love with Santa Fe. I would have killed to live there. In fact, I applied for a job at a private college there and was told that I was decidedly not their type. I considered applying for an opening at the city newspaper, but the pay was far too low to support anyone in that expensive venue. While I was wandering around the town, I came across a busy, successful bed-and-breakfast near the downtown area. Its owner took time to chat for a few minutes and said that she and her husband had always dreamed of living in Santa Fe—owning an inn was the only way they could afford it, since the place provided them a place to live as well as a living. They were, she claimed, very happy.

So, when the owner of the Flagstaff inn told me that he and his wife wanted to sell the place, he got my attention in a big way.

I started to think seriously about buying the business. Although I had no spouse to help and was not about to get one, Northern Arizona University had a world-class hospitality program. The inn had hired one of its senior-level students as its full-time maitre-d’ and general factotum. The guy was good, and it was clear that he was doing much of the heavy lifting. The proprietors spent a great deal of time hiking, volunteering for The Nature Conservancy, and hob-nobbing with the town’s business class. They would show up to supervise the cooking of breakfast and socialize with guests, and then they were outta there. The grass on their side of the fence looked mighty green.

In the course of considering this scheme, I became friendly with the young man, who clued me to a number of issues, not the least of which was the amount of work and expense entailed in maintaining a century-old building. Not long before, he revealed, they had had to jack up the structure (!) and rebuild its foundation to keep it from collapsing. The place had over a dozen rooms, each of which had to be cleaned and restocked every day—assuming you could keep them occupied. The kitchen was actually a licensed restaurant, with all the regulatory and tax issues that entailed. There was lots more, too.

On the other hand, because it was a business, the Inn made life virtually tax-free for its owners. They lived on the property, meaning the business paid the cost of their quarters. The business owned their vehicle. The business paid their salary. The business paid for their groceries. The business bought their health insurance. Clearly, setting up your entire life as a business had its advantages.

But on the other other hand… After a while I noticed that the proprietors didn’t spend a lot of time together. When the breakfast rush ended, he went off to spend most of the day hiking and bicycling. She disappeared in some other direction. Why, I wondered, did they want out of this arrangement if it was as idyllic as he claimed? I began to suspect that all was not beer and skittles in Paradise. Could it be that their marriage was strained as a result of the stress and demands of running a very public, very work-intensive operation from which they evidently had no easy escape?

When I sat down with the guy to discuss a deal, he offered to sell the inn for something over a million dollars. My house was paid for, and it was worth about a fifth of that—enough to make a down payment. The economy was good at the time, and I would have had no trouble getting a business loan to cover the rest of the sale price. He offered to hang around for a year on a consultant basis, to assist me in learning the business and to help keep it going until I could develop the experience and expertise to operate the inn on my own.

It wasn’t a bad offer. But a million and a half bucks? Wow! It did give one pause.

It gave one a long enough pause to look at other inns that were on the market…and to discover that most of them had been for sale for years. Even in some of the most spectacular and desirable areas of the country, bed and breakfasts do not sell quickly. In other words, if this scheme didn’t work, there was no easy escape plan.

Further investigation showed that one of the reasons the couple wanted to sell—besides the one I suspected to be their real motive—was that a long drought was devastating the tourist business in Flagstaff. The town’s main draw as a tourist venue is not the Grand Canyon, which is a long way off, but a small ski area on the nearby dormant volcano. Although tourists pass through Flag on the way to the Canyon, relatively few of them stay there. They stay at the lodges around the Canyon itself, of course. No snow meant no tourists.

Global warming was already being talked up, and some people (such as the Nature Conservancy types the proprietor hung out with) were predicting that the drought would be a permanent fixture. If that was so, Flagstaff—and the Inn at 410—was withering on the vine.

Looked like Bankruptcy City to me. I declined the offer.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I had bought the inn. Other times…well, I can just imagine! I think I made the right decision. It’s never a good idea to get into something without a credible escape plan, and “no credible escape plan” described that scheme to a T.

NAU announced it would its hospitality program, shutting the spigot on quality low-cost hired help. The drought continued for several more years, spurring a massive die-off of the ponderosa forest that covers northern Arizona. Each summer brings huge and dangerous wildfires, some of which encroach on Flagstaff itself. And of course, now that we’re in a deprecession, the hospitality industry in general is suffering.

I managed to escape teaching and land in a decently paid editorial job. It’s boring as hell, but it is a job. Though I’m sure life as an innkeeper would have been interesting, it might have been a bit too interesting. I’m glad I looked before I leaped.

At the Farmer’s Market

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Yesterday morning a friend drove into town from the far-flung suburbs so we could visit the downtown farmer’s market together. People say this is the best farmer’s market in the city. The ones I’ve seen in other parts of town have been a bit lackluster, more crafts fair than produce market, so I was curious to see what “the best” means, particularly since other bloggers say they get good deals on local produce at these operations.

Getting there was a challenge: you have to navigate the new train tracks and a labyrinth of one-way streets—the City has kindly made a nightmare of driving downtown. Parking, at least, was free: in a graveled lot with no markings, overrun by people scrambling to get space between cars left sitting cattywampus, higgledy-piggledy and willy-nilly. My friend found a paved lot, where she parked in an end space; when we went back to leave some of her purchases in the car while we walked to a restaurant, someone had parked a pickup with an extra-long truck bed at right angles to her vehicle, blocking her exit. Fortunately, the space next to her was empty, so she wriggled her car out and reparked it in that spot. While she was backing out, two drivers came along and tried to grab the empty space; if I hadn’t been standing in it, they would have blocked her from getting her car out.

We enjoyed walking around. It was a stunningly beautiful day, cool and clear. The downtown area is gentrifying apace—or it was, until the Bush economy collapsed. Strips of old, formerly abandoned 1940s stores have been renovated and repopulated with new shops, and great blocks of so-called “lofts” fill former empty lots and the sites of demolished flophouses. In downtown Phoenix, a “loft” is an overpriced condominium apartment, less overpriced now that no one can or will buy them but still out of most buyers’ reach. Sadly, the area is still populated with homeless mentally ill people living on the streets, the first and worst symptom of America’s ailing healthcare system. As I was leaving, a particularly desperate panhandler came after me and would not stop pestering me even after I got into the car and locked the door.

The farmer’s market offered more produce and preserves per square yard than others here in Arizona, but about half the booths were occupied by people selling tie-dyed shirts, crocheted scarves, wood carvings, pottery, handmade soap, lost-wax metalwork, bead jewelry, and on and on. Prices didn’t strike me as much of a bargain, considering that a raft of middlemen supposedly are cut out of the marketing process.

I bought 2.5 pounds of tomatoes—a handful of vine tomatoes, two heirlooms, and two green tomatoes that I intend to fry for breakfast this morning—for $7.39. That was not a bad price: $2.95 a pound; unclear whether these were organic, but they didn’t appear to be. Potatoes and sweet potatoes were a dollar a pound. We came across a lady selling some exceptionally delicious hummus; I proposed to buy a container of that for $3.00 and a bag of pita chips for $6.00. On second thought, though, after the vendor mentioned that the stuff didn’t contain any tahini but really was just puréed chickpeas, garlic, and olive oil, I decided nine bucks was a little much for a can of beans and a bag of chips, especially since I have a perfectly fine food processor sitting in my kitchen.

After my friend and I parted, I wondered idly how some of the prices we’d encountered would compare with with grocery-store prices. So, on the way home I stopped by AJ’s (my favorite gourmet emporium and home of the Elegantly Overpriced Commodity) and Safeway (itself no bargain corner).

At AJ’s, vine tomatoes were selling for $2.99 a pound; green tomatoes, a rarity in stores here, were offered for $3.99. Campari tomatoes, the variety I buy because they are the only tomatoes with anything resembling flavor available in this part of the country, were $4.99. Pita snacks ran from $6 to $20 for a package. AJ’s carries our vendor’s hummus: $4.99, two bucks more than buying it directly from its maker at the farmer’s market. Potatoes were $1.49 a pound.

At Safeway, I couldn’t find pita chips, but a package of pita bread sold for $2.19 for ten pieces; easy enough to paint it with olive oil, cut it into triangles, and crisp in the oven. A can of chickpeas cost all of $1.39 for organic and $1.00 for nonorganic. Campari tomatoes were selling for the same price as AJ’s; vine tomatoes were $2.69 a pound. Neither store had any heirloom tomatoes. Sweet potatoes were $1.29 a pound, but regular Idaho potatoes went for 5 pounds for 99 cents—about 25 cents a pound.

Okay. Given that you’d have to make your own hummus (a process that would take all of about 5 minutes) and substitute bread, toast, or tortilla chips if you didn’t want to dork with cutting up and toasting pita bread, let us compare the costs:

Hummus:

Farmer’s market: 3.00
Gourmet market: $4.99
Safeway DIY ingredients: $1.00 plus a few drops of olive oil and lemon juice

Tomatoes:

Farmer’s market: 2.95 a pound
Gourmet market: $2.99 to $3.99 a pound
Safeway: $2.69 a pound

Potatoes:

Farmer’s market: $1.00 a pound
Gourmet market: $1.49 a pound
Safeway: 25 cents a pound

Pretty consistently, the Safeway underpriced the farmer’s market and the AJ’s on the goods I was prepared to purchase this weekend.

Even where the farmer’s market was a few cents cheaper, one has to question the cost of the hassle factor: shopping there requires a significant investment of time. The site was so crowded and so cluttered with sellers of kitsch that it was hard to make your way to the food stands. To buy something, you were supposed to get a slip of paper on which each of your desired purchases was marked, go to a central cash collection site to pay, and then take the receipts back to each of the vendors you’d visited. This would entail elbowing your way to the desired vendors and standing in line not once, not twice, but three times for each purchase you made!

Fortunately, some of the vendors would take cash and credit cards. Just as fortunately, the hummus vendor did not, and the prospect of dorking around in two more lines deflected me from making that impulse buy. In terms of gasoline expended, the Safeway is a third as far from my house as is downtown; the AJ’s is half as far. And no panhandlers harassed me in either grocer’s parking lot.

For a special outing, it was fun. But day by day, it’s not a venue I would add to my regular round of places to buy groceries.

Networking

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I am sooo bad at it. Networking, that is. I just don’t do well with schmoozing. Any day, I’d rather sit in front of my computer and type. Not that I don’t enjoy other people—I do, as a matter of fact. It’s just that I’m not very comfortable around strangers: don’t know what to say, don’t want to say anything, want to get back to…gardening, cleaning house, editing copy, cooking, eating, shopping, playing with the dog, writing blog posts, reading a book, hiking a mountain, just about anything.

{sigh} It’s four in the morning. In two hours I have to get up and get ready to fly out the door so as to spend the entire darned day—SATURDAY!—at a book publisher’s convention. There are so many things I need to do and so many things I want to do and so many ways I don’t want to spend seven or eight hours sitting around listening to people palaver about how to market your book online. Augh! If we don’t pick up some business today, I am going to croak my peonie!!!

Okay, let’s think positive here. There must be some advice on the Web about how to network effectively.

Hmmm… Here’s a guy who suggests you need to make yourself memorable:
-dress distinctively or at least sharp (heaven help me: my clothes are memorable, all right, for looking dowdy and out of style because I can’t afford the latest new duds and I refuse to wear shoes that hurt my feet!);
-“be fully present,” by which our author seems to mean you should sincerely pay attention to people (or at least pretend to);
-ask questions that cause your interlocutors to tell a story about themselves, an old reporter’s trick;
-find ways to repeat certain key words and phrases—videlicet, your name, your company’s name, your business or industry, your product, and your location; and
-contribute to the conversation, don’t just mumble semiconscious small talk.

Ah ha! I think that last is the stumbling block for me. I don’t have much to contribute to conversation and so tend to turn a lot of pet phrases like “is that so?” and “isn’t that interesting?” (not!).

Another scribbler tells us you should “be genuine and authentic”; I guess that’s the same as my mother’s advice to “just be yourself.” Trouble is, most people don’t seem very impressed with “myself.” She (the writer, not my mother) advises setting some goals for what you want to accomplish at a networking event (that’s easy: get a second client who will feed us at least one new thousand-dollar assignment a month); visiting lots of groups (eeek! one isn’t enough?); holding volunteer positions in organizations (uh huh: soldiers have got something when they say “never volunteer”); and becoming known as a resource for others (comes naturally for us fonts of all wisdom). Seriously: been there, done that…have yet to get business from one of these events.

Here’s another obvious piece of advice: follow up on business cards you collect with e-mails, phone calls, and personal contacts. And it’s another of those networking tricks I never seem to manage to make myself do. I’ve already got a stack of cards from ABPA meetings gathering dust around the house. Interestingly, none of the people who traded cards with me have tried to contact me, either, so I guess I’m not the only one who…well, would rather be dusting than doing this.

Is there ANYONE out there in the whole gigantic Internet who has anything intelligent to say about this?

…dear god… There’s an entire organization devoted to business networking. Of sorts. There’s a newspaper on the subject!

But in answer to the basic question: No. Evidently not.