Updates

1 - I called the Times. It turned out it was $27 / mo, which comes out to $6.50 a pop, significantly more than Watermark's price of $5. So I said, discontinue. So the customer rep said, would it may a difference to you if I gave you 1/2 off for the next 16 weeks? And I said, why yes, it would. So now I have the Times for $3.25 for the next 16 weeks. I marked in on the calendar, and at the end of that time, I'll either ask for it again, or cancel. I guess sometimes you really do just have to ask.

2 - We've been paying utility bills for the house in IL even though it's been vacant for 5 months. I probably should have just turned everything off then (my grandparents used to have a home in upstate NY, so I know how to winterize a house). But we were keeping it attractive in the hopes of attracting a buyer, ha ha. But I have 2 $130 bills here, one for electric and water, and 1 for gas. I'm not sure exactly how an empty house uses $80 in water, but the service rep said it might be a running toilet. All I know is, I ain't payin' no more. We're going to have the service turned off and have the neighbor who's been keeping an eye on it empty out the pipes. In July when the current insurance payment runs out, it won't be insured anymore. I just wish Sovereign would hurry up and foreclose already.

Something I bought, something I didn't

1 - We had some money at Radio Shack because I'd spent $60 on an emergency radio/lights thing, which I think we need in Kansas but DW didn't. So she returned it, we had some credit and we bought a new DVD player, because ours had crapped out. I wanted to hook the audio to both the TV and the stereo, but there was only one audio output on the back of the player, so I went back to Radio Shack to look for some sort of junction so I could take the signal from the DVD and send it to both places. The best they could do was a $50 switcher. I walked out of the store and then said, Hey, why don't I just put it into the stereo and forget about feeding the sound through the TV? So I accomplished the need with a $6 coupler that let me extend the cords from the DVD to the stereo.

2 - I took over the bill paying when we moved here, I don't really know why. I've been doing a lot of it online but have been having a heck of a time keeping track of everything using the checkbook. I'll start even, but within a month or two I'll be off, like really off, like $500 off in the checkbook, plus or minus, with no idea how I got there no matter how long I stare at the statement. So I gave up on doing it that way and spent $30 on a basic Quicken, so I can do it on the computer. You enter all the purchases, all the deposits, all the bill paying, and it does the balancing for you. I'm sure it has other capacities, like maybe keeping track of where I am with the credit cards, but I'm not sure yet.

What I don't like about it so far is that it didn't download the pending transactions (i.e. purchases I've made with the debit card but which haven't cleared yet), which are posted on the on-line banking but which I had to enter manually. It also gives me 3 different balances - what the bank says now, what I have pending currently, and everything that's entered to be paid through the end of next month, which is pretty misleading. So I'll have to play around with it to make sure it's giving me an accurate sense of where things are. But I think in the long run it'll be worth it, especially since it'll automatically tell me if I neglected to put something into the checkbook, which was probably the source of my troubles all along.

Recessionary Non-Spending

Whenever there's economic troubles there's a renewed interest in frugality on the part of the mainstream media. A couple of weeks ago there was a story in Newsweek about frugality blogs; they highlighted Be Thrifty Like Us which must have been very good for their number of hits! That's how I found Frugal Hacks, which is the centerpoint for the frugal blogroll, which I am on and which has a ton of good sites.

Then today there was an article in the Times (it may require some sort of sign-in) about people changing their buying habits, retrenching as it were, in the face of a weaker dollar, lower home values, and tightening credit. It's worth taking a look at but the article with a few changes in detail could have been (and probably was) written in 2000, 1991, or 1983.

Most of the things in there we already do, such as rarely eating out, buying store brands and staying away from Starbucks. Some of the things we are doing because of our financial state - I developed a taste for Banana Republic and the Body Shop but I expect that I won't be spending too much time or dinero in either of those places anytime soon. (Although BR does have a sale rack...)

But one thing DW pointed out to me is that we take a subscription to the Sunday Times. In IL we had it Saturday and Sunday, here we only get it Sunday (it's not available by subscription any other day). I tend to consider this a "makes-life-worth-living" issue, especially since the Wichita Eagle is so weak, but I already put cable TV into that category so really, how many times can I say that? It's also expensive - I think it's $6 a week but it may even be more. I initially took it because they called and offered me 4 free weeks, but at that point we determined that at full price it was more expensive to get it delivered than to drive over to Watermark Books to buy it.

So I think we're going to let it go. I may see if I can get a sub just to the Book Review, but then again, I may not. Even if I buy it at Watermark every week I'm ahead, but I just know there are going to be weeks when I won't, or maybe I'll buy the KC Star once in a while (which I never do now) for the Royals coverage, and it's cheaper.

The one drawback is that if you don't subscribe you have to pay to get into a lot of things on the website, like the columnists, whom I read quite often. So I'll have to price an internet-only sub, but last time I went without a Times sub I just checked the Washington Post on-line more often, and that's a pretty good paper too.

Yippee!

The tax refund came in today. Since I no longer have a pulpit, I expect this will be the last of the major-league tax refunds (upwards of 3K) that I'll be getting. (There are a couple of major tax breaks that pulpit clergy get that ordinary mortals don't, and also since I won't own a house anymore - one way or the other - there won't be much in the way of itemization).

I've mentioned that we've been having trouble making ends meet. In part this is because I've been attempting to put the pedal to the metal in dealing with some of our debt. So here's what happened to the new money:

$1,000 into savings, to provide an overdraft cushion. (We had to use what we had there this month to cover Pesah expenses.)

I doubled what we've been paying monthly toward credit card debt - I paid off the Banana Republic card, which was small beans but a high interest rate and according to the debt snowflake model you should deal with the lowest balances first.

$400 to DW's card, $800 to my card. (Her's has a lower balance and a lower interest rate.)

$200 toward my Federation pledge (mustn't forget our tzedakah!)

That about does it. The rest of it will go to the rent, and a little cushion until DW's part time jobs start paying. When I get the so-called stimulus check, I may make an extra payment on our car loan. I'd also like to bolster our savings a little bit more. But our highest priority are the credit cards.

More on the house

I think I might have mentioned that we got the letter from Sovereign telling us they weren't going to accept the latest short sale offer. Now we're on the short track to foreclosure. (For those who haven't been keeping score, we're no longer living in the same state as the house, which has been up for sale for 14 months now.) I called the foreclosure guy at Sovereign whose number I had, he doesn't know how long it will take until the sheriff's sale. Meanwhile, we've been paying insurance and utilities on the empty house, to keep it saleable. Now that a sale doesn't look likely, we're probably going to stop doing that. Our insurance is paid through July, but we've been paying $130/mo. that we really can't afford to keep the empty house heated all winter. The RE agent wants us to keep it up, but why should we?

Getting through on fumes

I'm not exactly sure how this happened, but we didn't stockpile enough food for the week. We have a good amount of Pesah matzo-meal rolls that DW makes every year, and a couple of boxes of matzo left. (I'm very big on cream cheese and jelly on matzo, it almost makes Pesah for me.) But we are out of cottage cheese, out of eggs, out of most veggies. I froze the leftover brisket because I was sick of eating it. We were long on potatoes, and I had an extra leek, so the other night I made potato and leek soup, and then tonight I made a potato fritter with a slice of hard boiled egg inside that I found in the Jewish Festival cookbook that we've been using this year. But I had to borrow an egg from a neighbor to make it, and now we're out of potatoes.

Because Pesah is so darn expensive we're basically out of money for 10 days, until I get paid next week. I had $15 in my wallet and DW had a $20, and we're basically buying as little as we possibly can to sneak through and avoid any further debting. But, you know, we've got to eat. I think I'm going to buy some ricotta cheese tomorrow and make some sort of cheese pie for Shabbat. I think we have some beets in the fridge. (This is the one cicumstance under which I will eat them without complaint.) Usually we spend another $200 on replenishing the kitchen right after the holiday to go with the $400 we spend on getting the kitchen ready for the holiday but this year we won't be able to do that - until Wednesday at least. Or maybe I should listen to my own advice and make beans and rice for Shabbat. I know I'll be eating them most of next week!

Pesah report - disposables

Because we keep Pesah enough to switch out our dishes, and because we don't have china or enough money to invest in a very good second set of kitchenware for a 7-day holiday, every year we are faced with the dilemma of whether to buy plastic or paper goods to get through the holiday or whether to spend the money (and the effort) to buy something more substantial and longlasting and green.

We have leftover ceramic plates from a previous set that we use for milk, but our seders are usually meat, and for those we have fairly durable plastic bowls and plates that we've been using for a couple of years. Not the highest quality place settings in the world, but it works okay.

We realized in preparation for the holiday this year that we didn't have hot drink cups or salad plates. My family, which was with us this year, also has a custom of serving eggs in salt water as an appetizer before the meal; this is not DW's custom and she has been trying to get us to stop it for years, but it's a custom that seems to be held pretty dear. This necessitated another bowl, so we would either have had to wash out the soup bowls in between courses or buy some more bowls.

My parents came home from the shopping excursion with plastic salad plates and styrofoam bowls and hot cups. Styrofoam was more than DW could stand so I was sent back to the Dillons to look for something else. I don't know if there's really any appreciable difference in greenitude between styrofoam and any other kind of disposable kitchenware but in any case there weren't any disposable hot cups that weren't styrofoam so I ended up buying 8 glass coffee cups (usable with both milk and meat). After another effort by DW to get the eggs served on a plate with the fish, we kept the styrofoam bowls and plastic salad plates. (This latter we'll reuse all week at least.)

The glasses cost $2 each, and that's our investment in Pesah kitchenware for this year. Next year perhaps we'll buy some more ceramics to replace the plastic we've been using. At least some more bowls. And anyway, if we're with DW's family next year, they don't serve eggs that way so they don't need 2 bowls.