Make Your Nut

We’ll be off on a trip starting this Wednesday, and this is the first time that we’re going to be flying since most of the airlines started charging fees for checking baggage. At first, it was only one airline, charging a fee for the second checked piece of luggage. Soon after, it cascaded and now it’s most airlines charging for the first piece of luggage.

We checked this morning, and we may or may not be forced to pay $15 for checking our bag (depends on how the airline handles code-sharing, one carrier doesn’t yet charge a fee, but the carrier whose airliner we will be physically boarding does).

I don’t understand why the airlines are going through the seemingly more complicated path of charging a baggage check fee when, in reality, they could simply incorporate the $15 fee into the cost of the tickets as an increased fuel surcharge. Because, when you think about it, this is really the reason why they have to bring in more money.

Doing it this way would also be more likely to engender some form of empathy from the travelers, who, with respect to the baggage check fee, are just bitter and resentful because it looks like a completely arbitrary additional cost. But, if you presented the fee in terms of the costs of fuel to fly the airliner from point A to point B, divided by the number of passengers on the flight (which undoubtedly would work out to well over $15 per passenger), then people would be much more amenable to paying it.

Tomorrow is the day that I am scheduled to receive a new PC at work. They do a tech refresh about every four years, and I’ll be happy to finally give up the 256Mb piece of crap that I’ve been tied to for something that can actually do more than one thing at a time.

As a result of the upgrade, I’ve been cleaning off the hard drive of the soon-to-be old machine, and also tidying up my desk so that the PC tech doesn’t get eaten alive by dust bunnies when he comes by. After throwing away piles and piles of old paperwork that no longer has any relevance to the modern world, I came across a stack of post-it notes.

As it turns out, these post-it notes chronicled my various research efforts into getting preapproved for a mortgage, back in spring of 2006. In addition to various names, phone numbers, and scribblings of rates and whatnot, is this one quote that I had transcribed from a conversation with a mortgage broker:

“Can get rid of PMI in a year or so with appreciation of the property”

Um, yeah, right, that would have worked out real well. Mind you, this was only two years ago, and as of two years ago, the real estate market was still in a state where brokers (and mostly everyone else) genuinely thought that a property purchased with less than 10% down would appreciate so quickly as to overtake 20% in equity within a year of settlement. As we’ve seen, for some areas of the country, what really happened was the exact opposite of what people thought was going to happen.

I debated whether I should post this to Make Your Nut or The Best Food Blog Ever, but having come across a search for “party for 100 on a budget” that led the seeker to this site, I ultimately decided to put this here.

Every summer, in the weekend that falls between my birthday and my wife’s, we throw a huge smoked barbecue extravaganza. We’ve been doing it since before we even moved into a house, and it’s amazing to think that we even pulled off, one year, hosting seventeen people stuffed into a 800 square foot apartment. It was amazingly amazing last year, because it was the first time we were able to do it in the new house and we didn’t have to really worry all that much about maximum capacity.

So, this year brings us the Big Pig Gig 2008, and we’re a few days less than a month away from the big date. As the years go by, more and more people find out about it and we get a bigger turnout each time, and this year looks to be biggest ever as a result of some new factors. Allow me to elaborate.

We have a husband-and-wife couple that have their own band, and we catch their local gigs every so often when we can. At last summer’s big barbecue, they met another one of our friends who, as a result of that fateful evening, is now their drummer. When the wife got final word on the date of our barbecue, she actually rebooked one of their gigs for a later date so that she wouldn’t miss the barbecue - now that’s dedication. One thing led to another, and now it turns out they are PLAYING at the barbecue.

So, we have a band. Gonna stick ‘em in the basement, which we need to spiff up (lights, posters, drag some couches down there) prior to the party. It’s never been done before, which is why I’m so excited about it.

Then, another husband-and-wife couple, Tim and Steph of Brew.Cook.Pair.Joy, volunteered to brew a special batch of beer for the party, and who were we to say no? For the cost of materials, this was definitely a deal that could not be refused. They brewed all of the beer for their wedding back in April, and are some of the most focused people that I have come across with respect to their passion.

So, we have beer.

The annual barbecue has engendered so much goodwill, in fact, that every year it gets a little easier to throw. We’ve got so many people inquiring as to what they can bring, what we need to borrow, and what they can do for us that it becomes almost criminal that all we are doing is making space available and smoking 60 pounds of meat.

As I’ve said before, every so often people come by Make Your Nut because they search on terms such as “big party on a budget” or some other similar phrase, and I find that these kinds of hits show up more often in the summertime. I have to tell you, budgeting for summertime fests, for me, is not as hard as throwing more formal dinner parties at other times of the year.

The most important thing to remember, for any of these types of things, is not to overextend yourself. For us, I love smoking barbecue, and I enjoy making it and people enjoy eating it - it’s my area of focus, it’s what I do best and what I will contribute to our party, along with a dessert or two and the general design of how the day and evening will go. It comes easy to us because we’re good at it. Don’t do things that you aren’t good at, and generally you will find others who are more than willing to do what they’re good at. Embrace the collaborative effort.

People love to bring stuff to parties, and you should let them because they are happy to do so. I mean, there is a wrong way to go about it, and that’s to cruise-director everyone into roles that they’re not happy with and not qualified to handle, but if you let people bring their favorite dish, or let them know what you’re making so that they can coordinate appropriately, you’ll find that you’ll never run the risk of running out of food.

And it’s not necessarily about food, either. As I’ve said above, we’ve got folks who’ve asked if they can contribute music, and folks who are using the barbecue to show off their beer. Just yesterday some friends in the neighborhood gave me the okay to borrow their folding tables, which we can set up outside in the backyard, to extend the basement music stage into an indoor/outdoor affair.

More updates as the date approaches. Food-focused entries will probably be hosted over at the Best Food Blog Ever.

It seems to happen every year at around this time. We start out with every intent to see a movie, and then another one that we want to see comes out, followed by another one, and before you know it the movie that we wanted to see is no longer playing.

I’m not saying that this is a bad thing, though, in the grand scheme of things.

Given the present cost of movie tickets, and the rapid availability of new movie releases on the home market, I’m no longer a fan of catching anything but the biggest blockbusters in the theater. Big, critically-acclaimed blockbusters, and anything with a twist ending.

Before I get to the economics of it all, I’ll start with the “getting older and grumpier” section of today’s entry. Back in the day, which wasn’t too long ago, people knew how to act right when they went to the movies. It’s not a complicated formula beyond the grasp of everyday people - you get your ticket, get your snacks, find a seat before the movie starts, and sit quietly for two hours.

Today, going to the movie theater involves dealing with a whole host of issues that are refreshingly absent from my living room. I’m always stuck sitting either directly behind or in front of the person who needs to carry on a full-on conversation with the person next to them, or on the phone, because they’re bored with the movie. Or, I’m a few seats away from the people who decided it was a good idea to bring their infant to an R rated film. Ultimately, the kid gets bored or scared, stands up in the aisle, and starts talking or otherwise demands appeasement, which never gets delivered, oh, in the hallway outside the theater, but right there - because the parents don’t want to leave the theater and miss part of the show. Parents and guardians, indeed.

And I get all of this for $9.50 a ticket. Yes, here’s where we start the economic part of today’s entry.

So, the cost for the two of us plus snacks runs about $25. For $25, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a near-flawless moviegoing experience, with the only variable being the quality of the movie itself. If the movie has good reviews across the board, though, I want to be fully entertained, without distractions, for two hours for $25. I can safely say, and you all can chime in here, that in today’s modern world this is no longer possible. It gets even pricier if you’re taking an entire family out to the movies, so you’re looking at possibly dropping over $60 for two hours of distraction-filled entertainment for a mom, dad, and two kids.

Let’s turn to the economics in full. Even the biggest summer movies will last in the theaters for what, eight weeks at best? Bad or obscure movies will disappear even sooner than that, and we can all count on seeing new releases available for home rental much more quickly these days because that’s where the long-term profit lies.

Here’s an example. We missed the new Harold and Kumar movie when it was out a few weeks ago, despite really wanting to see it. As it turns out, as I have just Googled now, the DVD is going to be available on July 29. This, for a movie that was released on April 25, roughly three months ago.

We could put the movie on our Netflix queue, which means we would get to watch it and not pay any more than our $12 monthly subscription cost, and probably tack on quite a few others that we’ve missed and still be within that same pricing structure. We could rent it using Amazon Unbox, and pay $3.99. If we had an Apple TV, we could rent it off of iTunes and watch it for $3.99, or even in HD for a dollar more. Or, if I really were in love with the movie, I could just go out and buy the DVD and own the movie for $15 or less. I could even go to one of those red boxes in the supermarket and rent it overnight for a dollar.

My point is this - why would anyone pay so much money for all of the hassle and inconveniences associated with seeing a movie in the theater when, for so much less money, you could have such a better experience watching it at home?

For the price of two movie tickets, and the license to sit in a theater seat for two hours, you could own two movies and watch them whenever you wanted. For $60, you could pay for a Netflix subscription for five months, or rent twelve movies online.

Or, as the case may be, I could get with nothing.

I discovered, just today, that whenever we receive an incoming call on our Vonage box, my wireless network goes down. We don’t even have to answer the phone - even if it is just ringing, something is happening that is suppressing the wireless network signal coming out of the router. Once the ringing stops, or we hang up on a phone call, the wireless network comes back in about two or three minutes.

This presents me with a dilemma. We were among the first subscribers to Vonage, so our Vonage box is one of the original Motorola black boxes, before they came out with their shiny Linksys-branded routers. So, our Vonage equipment is old. The cordless phone that we have, likewise, is old. We didn’t have the wireless networking issue until only a few months ago, and none of our equipment has changed. Deductive reasoning tells me that one of these components is degrading, either the Vonage box or the cordless phone.

I’ve done my requisite Googling and found a few people with the same problem. In some cases, older 2.4Ghz cordless phone systems cause interference with the wireless signal (this can happen with microwaves, too) and so, if this is the case, my solution would be to go get a new cordless phone that operates on a different spectrum. In other cases, routers get old and start dropping packets, and perhaps the situation is that when a Vonage call comes in, the router can’t handle the additional load and drops the wireless signal.

If I guess wrong, and upgrade the wrong component, then my wireless signal dropping issue will continue and I will have bought new equipment for nothing.

Oh, and did I mention that I actually have two routers? I have a wireless router daisy-chained to a non-wireless router, so it could be a problem with one or the other.

I am hesitant to upgrade routers because I don’t want to make a lateral move from a G router to another G router, but the N routers are still in draft, or pre-N, mode because the N standard hasn’t been finalized. Plus, the N routers are all pricey.

On the third hand, we really don’t even use the house line that much, so the issue of the wireless signal dropping out only rears its ugly head once in a while and doesn’t really interfere with anything of vital importance.

I’ll probably do nothing about it at this point and wait a bit. Maybe I can catch a good deal on a new phone system, or routers will finally standardize on the new protocol and start to come down in price.

About eight years ago, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes after a brief stay in the hospital for ketoacidosis. After being put on oral medication, the overwhelming fear of death made me give up fast food, non-diet soda, most snacks, and I began a rigorous exercise regimen at the local gym. In a strange way, being diagnosed with diabetes early was one of the best things that could have happened to me. I dropped 52 pounds and have only gained back 10 in eight years.

After a month of watching my diet, exercising, and taking the medication, my blood sugar was normal, my blood pressure was normal, and I felt amazing - except for the occasional low blood sugar woozies. My doctor cut my dosage in half. After another month, still with the woozies, my doctor took me off of the oral medication completely, because my diet and exercise routine was sufficient to control my glucose levels.

Ever since moving into our house, one of the things that got cut from our budget was the gym membership (it also does not help that there aren’t any decent gyms that are convenient to us anymore). That, and probably age, meant that my average glucose levels started inching higher, to the point where I decided that it was time to get back on medication.

Thus begins the prescription medication tango.

I went to our regular doctor’s office and saw a nurse practitioner. I told her that I wanted to go back on the stuff that I was taking eight years ago, and I didn’t want any of the new medications - I knew what worked and I wanted to stick with it. She convinced me to take a different prescription, one that she said was “tested for years and reliable”. Hey, she’s a medical professional, so I figure she knows what she’s talking about.

It was only after I got home that I looked it up - it had only been on the market for a year. FDA-approved in April of 2007.

After leaving the doctor with some samples of the new stuff, and before actually getting to the point of picking up a prescription at the pharmacy, I happened to run into a fellow diabetic at a party. He was complaining that his doctor had put him on these meds that weren’t covered by insurance, and that it was costing him $109 for each refill.

$109. Dang yo, that’s like half of an iPhone right there.

That got me worried. When it came time to pick up my prescription, I called the pharmacy first and asked them how much my drugs were going to cost me. The pharmacist checked and told me, “109 dollars.”

Well, crap.

I called the doctor’s office, and they said a) they weren’t going to change my medication to something else until I came in for an office visit, and b) they could fax some authorization forms in to someone to get insurance to cover part of the cost.

Now, mind you, this all would sting a lot less if the new medication actually worked. In my case, it really didn’t - it reduced my glucose somewhat, but did not perform anywhere near as well as the old stuff. My inner conspiracy theorist tells me that the doctor’s office makes more money by prescribing the newer medications, and that I’m more important as a statistic for an extended in-field beta test than as a patient. You have to wonder when the tissue dispenser, soap dispenser, and every single pen and notepad in the doctor’s office is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. You really have to wonder.

I called the pharmacy back. Good news! We’ve received authorization forms and now your medication is only going to cost $50!

Well, crap. I wasn’t having that. I ended up not picking up the prescription and survived on my mediocre samples, for what little good they did.

So, last week, I finally got around to getting into the doctor’s office again. I showed her my glucose readings, empirical proof that this new medication did not work with my physiology, and again firmly encouraged her to give me a scrip for my old stuff. I could tell she wasn’t happy to do so, and she said that the stuff that I wanted carried a great risk for hypoglycemic episodes. I said, “I know what low blood sugar feels like, I can handle it.” She faxed my prescription into the local supermarket.

I went grocery shopping and stopped by the pharmacy. I gave my name, they gave me drugs. But, as it turns out, the cost was not the standard copay of $20, as I was expecting it to be.

It was $10! Generic drugs FTW. Plus, this stuff actually works.

This week started with a news report stating that, from May 2007 to May 2008, calls to AAA from stranded motorists who have run out of gas have doubled. It seems that folks are being hit so hard by fuel costs that they are trying to delay buying gas until payday, and some of them don’t make it.

Part of me doesn’t understand this mentality. If you are a daily commuter, with no access to public transit, the only part of your gas consumption that is truly under your control is your weekend driving. So, to me at least, it doesn’t make any sense to buy only half of a tank of gas if it means that it’s going to last only half as long as usual. Instead of filling up every six days, I’d end up having to buy gas every three days.

For commuters, everyone knows how many miles they drive every week, and so gambling against running out of gas before payday becomes a mathematical calculation. Unless you start cashing in vacation days so that you don’t have to drive to work, you should already know whether you need to buy gas to get to the end of the week or not.

…which is a great thing to say in this day and age where everyone’s ARM is resetting higher.

Back in April, I wrote about receiving a letter from Countrywide stating that we had an escrow shortage, and that our options were to pay the shortage (around $480 or so) or let Countrywide split the shortage across twelve months, so our mortgage payment was about $40 more each month.

I was initially going to pay the shortage in one lump sum. Having given it some thought, though, I figured I’d rather have the money sitting in my bank account earning some interest, so I decided to let it ride. The other part of the notice, though, was about an additional escrow reserve requirement, which is an escrow cushion that Countrywide collects as a hedge against “unexpected increases in taxes”. The letter stated that they were imposing an additional reserve requirement of $88 a month. So, starting in May, our mortgage payment was around $130 higher.

I didn’t mind the escrow shortage payment, because looking at the statements, it was clear that the Countrywide computer screwed up the calculations, because we settled in September, and it took a full year’s worth of tax payments in 2007 before it was adjusted correctly. But the extra reserve requirement was really bugging me, because I felt it was paying more money into escrow for no good reason - in fact, $88 is about 25% of what was going into escrow in the first place.

I was bugged so much, in fact, that yesterday I Googled ‘Countrywide escrow reduce’ and came up with a few hits where people were hit with increased reserve requirements and were able to get the additional charge dropped. Basically, federal law allows mortgage companies to collect additional escrow reserves, but does not require them to.

As soon as I got home, I pulled up my Countrywide account online and got on the phone with a nice lady from Arizona. I explained very politely to her that I was calling to get the additional reserve requirement removed because I needed that money for gas, so I can get to work, so I can make money, so I can pay the mortgage.

She was way more understanding about it than I had expected. She said it would be no problem removing it, that I would be receiving a letter in the mail informing me of the new payment, and gave me a confirmation number for our conversation. It would have been a two minute affair had I not chatted with her for ten more minutes about her kids, credit scores, and other miscellaneous stuff. All in all, it was a very pleasant interaction which went much more smoothly than I had anticipated.

So now, our mortgage payment is $88 less, which translates to two tanks of gas, or 800 free miles a month of driving.

Our story begins at a carnival.

Every year around this time, there’s a carnival that sets up about ten minutes away from us. Since the weather was so cooperative, we decided to spend Friday evening there, walking around and getting our annual funnel cake fix.

The carnival itself is altogether very ordinary and much like any other carnival - it’s got the big ferris wheel that can be seen for miles, one of those super-shot rides that freefalls a ring of passengers, and a number of vendors hawking fried food, hot dogs, and cheese fries. It’s all stuff you’ve seen before, if you’ve been to a carnival, except for the used book tent.

So we go into the used book tent, and I do a quick scan of the books, finding absolutely nothing interesting - mainly stacks of microwave cookbooks and romance novels, literally boxes of yard sale-type literature that have been donated. Hardcovers are $2, paperbacks are $1. My wife, however, being an English major, spends more time browsing, and has more patience than I do.

After a few minutes, she comes out of the tent with a small stack of books, for which we paid maybe 5 or 6 dollars. The one hardcover she picked up was old, with a worn dustjacket - a copy of Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen, first edition, published in 1937.

First edition. We figured it might be worth something, so for $2, we bought it. Mind you, the cost of this book was fully a third of the price of a steak sandwich at the carnival.

Later, through the magic of the internet, we find out that a first American edition of Out of Africa, in near-perfect condition, can go for as high as $1275, in good condition, around $400 to $600 (the first London editions appraise for between $2000 and $3000). We are not book appraisers, but the copy that we picked up at the carnival seems to have a lot of mileage on it, so we believe that its market value is far below that for “good condition”, but certainly higher than $2.

Maybe one of these days we will bring it in to be officially appraised. I’m curious to know.

One of the things that is both sucky and exciting about getting your first house (new construction) is that you start with nothing in the way of appliances, so it’s a big hit financially when you have to buy a fridge, washer, and dryer, all within a few days of taking on the largest single-source debt of your life.

So, when we first bought our house, back in 2006, I opened a credit line with Sears, by way of Citibank, so that we could buy a washing machine and dryer. Since then, I’ve made the payments on time and used the card on a fairly regular basis. My FICO score has remained fairly steady, neither moving up or down very much. A few months ago, I took the card out of my wallet and stopped using it, so it’s been sitting on my computer desk gathering dust.

My first thought was that I was the victim of a computer error when I checked the account online - it showed a balance lower than the credit limit, yet the available balance was zero. I called the customer service number on the back of the card, explained the situation, and the representative cheerfully informed me that my account was closed as of May 13th.

Huh.

I received the explanation letter from Citibank two days after the phone conversation. It basically reads like a rejection letter for an initial application for credit. Based on a number of “factors”, the letter stated that my “score” was not high enough to justify reissuing a card (I guess I was getting close to my expiration date).

There are two things that immediately come to mind when I think about this situation. The first, and most obvious, is the credit crunch, which would typically make it harder for consumers to qualify for new lines of credit, is now being extended to renewals of existing credit lines. Whereas I had no problem qualifying for this account back in September of 2006 with my FICO score, that same FICO score doesn’t cut it in May of 2008.

The second factor, which I have no way of proving, is the fact that my Sears card wasn’t getting much use in the last few months, and as a result the balance was slowly coming down. So, in Citibank’s mind I was no longer a revenue producer, and my FICO no longer merited that credit limit under the new accounting rules, which put me into the killfile.

I suppose it’s a good thing, because now the balance has nowhere to go but down. Now I’m wondering if this is going to happen to any of my other mothballed credit lines.