Technology 1: Smart Phone

The other week I went out on a Saturday night to see a friend of mine play jazz piano in a bar. He's in his 20s and a number of his peers were there, and I noticed that quite a few of them (I don't want to say all, but it might have been all) had either Blackberrys or iPhones.

I don't have either of these. In our last renewal of our cellphone plan, DW and I both bought phones that open up to present a keyboard for texting - I had started to text a little with the old phones but with the three-letters-on-a-key thing it was too much of a pain to use much. But this phone makes it much easier, so I've been using it to Twitter as well as to text people in situations where either I didn't want to have a phone conversation or there wasn't the opportunity. I don't really have long conversations on it like teenagers do but it has been pretty useful to me.

As far as the smart phone goes, the price of the equipment has gone down quite a bit, but with them you need a mobile internet subscription, and that's upwards of $90 a month for an iPhone, I'm led to believe. And, well, I just haven't felt the need. A lot of my peers in the non-profit world have them, and if I had more people on my staff or agencies that reported to me or something I could see having one, but then of course my workplace would pay for at least part of it. As it is now, it would be a rather elective purchase, another opportunity for me to check Facebook some more, and believe me, I don't need that.

Whether the 25 year olds at the bar had so many direct reports that they needed to be in constant touch, I can't say. It seems to be one of those many pieces of technology that has become a "need" over the past few years. And it's just s a need I've managed to resist so far.

Which leads me to a word about our technology. When we got back from Israel in 1999 we bought a desktop PC which we kept until late last year, having it refurbished a couple of times until it just became too slow to be worth updating anymore. Then I bought a new computer with Windows 7 on it - basically the one Ribbit had on the shelf, I really didn't do much in the way of research on it, it has a three year warranty and that was enough for me. I also have a laptop that I bought from my previous place of employment when I left it, it's about 4 or 5 years old now and I use it when I travel or want to work in a coffee shop or something.

They're both PCs, and since I mentioned iPhones in this piece and the iPad was unveiled last week I will say that the appeal of Macs has always been rather lost on me. I have some friends who are practically religious about them, but they're significantly more expensive and the PC does everything I need it to do so why would I pay more? I understand the Microsoft-is-Goliath argument and usually I'm sympathetic to that sort of thing but as corporations go, Microsoft seems relatively harmless - I mean, they drove Netscape out of business but their business model doesn't involve making 8 year olds desire food that will kill them, for instance. So I just never got that worked up about it.

And now we've bought a new PC, which seems plenty enough for us.

You are what you cook

Tonight's frugal meal: I had a couple of already cooked but frozen lamb chops. I sauteed a little onion, garlic and ginger, added 1/2 cup broth and 16 oz can diced tomatoes, 1 tsp each hot curry and cumin, and the cubed lamb, cooked off the liquid a little and served over rice. It would also, of course, work with tofu.

A while ago I wrote a post about how preparing and eating your dinners at home is a cornerstone of the frugal lifestyle, because it's cheaper as well as healthier - you know what's in what you're eating. My old friend Sue F. got a little mad at me because her family has two working parents and five kids running in all different directions, and she didn't need to feel bad about the fact that they needed (out of respect I won't put it in quotation marks) to eat prepared foods fairly often.

Well, now that DH is working so much (at least three full days and two half days per week, plus three evenings a week) we have had to face this issue in a way we never had to before. The questions facing our household are three: would we eat out more, would we be able to continue to put interesting, lovingly prepared cooked-from-scratch foods on the table, or would we rely more on convenience foods?

Well, I can tell you that we ain't eating out more. I have lunch out sometimes, mostly for my job, and I may eat lunch out by myself once a week or once every two weeks, usually a sandwich or a salad bar, sometimes some grocery store sushi. But our family just doesn't eat in restaurants. We might bring in pizza once a month or so, and once in a great while we'll bring in thai or chinese, but now that I think of it we haven't done that for a while either. Neither we do we do the prepared foods from the supermarket or Boston Market thing either. So that part has remained constant.

Regarding the convenience foods/cooking from scratch thing, though, the results aren't fully in yet. It feels like we're eating faster foods, but I'm not sure if it isn't that I'm just doing more of the cooking now. When I do the shopping I usually buy a box of fake-chicken patties and a package of some kind of veggie hotdog or sausage. Then I usually alternate between buying a box of frozen pierogies and the dyna-sea shrimp that I wrote about here. Once in a while I buy the boil in a bag indian food, but DW doesn't like the selection in the supermarket and I don't often get to the asian store that has a better selection so we haven't been doing that much lately. And we usually have a couple of frozen pizzas in the freezer, we probably eat that once a month.

That's for two weeks worth of meals, and that's it for quote-unquote convenience foods. We're probably talking 3 or 4 meals out of 14 in a two-week period. And really, when you think about it, aside from the chicken patties, the indian food and the pizza (the latter two, as I say, relatively rare) there really isn't any purely convenience food on the list - even the hotdogs go into a cooked dish, so what we're really talking here about are substitutes for the meat that I don't eat a whole lot of and DW doesn't eat at all.

As I say, I've been taking on a lot more of the cooking since DW has been working so many evenings, and I've been trying to keep it interesting - soups are big this time of year. The hardest times are when I have an event in the evening, because by the time I get the kids home, give them snacks and do their homework, there isn't a lot of time to cook before I have to go out again. That's when we might do the indian food or a simply broiled tofu and microwaved vegetables. Kasha varnishkes is also a popular "convenience food" by which I mean - quick and simple!

So I feel confident in saying that we have managed to maintain a) our homecookedness, and b) our ability to put varied, interesting and nutritious foods on the table. Of course, two of our kids won't eat anything but noodles and cheese, but that's a story for another day.

Smoking cessation

I'm friendly with a guy here in town who is graduating college this year and probably moving back east, to DC or New York. He told me that he's going to a smoking cessation doctor in the next couple of months so he can get treatment while he's still on his mother's health insurance. I said, What do you need all that for? When you're ready to quit, you'll quit. He said, No one quits cold turkey.

It is just me and my deeply cynical nature, or do all these patches and pills and things seem like just another way for some corporation to make some more money off someone's nicotine addiction on the way out the door? And is it really true that "no one" quits cold turkey?

Then in yesterday's Times business section there was an article about Altria (formerly Phillip Morris) in which this appeared:

About 70 percent of the nation’s 46 million smokers say they want to quit, government surveys show, and about 40 percent try every year. But only 2.5 percent succeed, the surveys say. The government estimates that 400,000 Americans die of smoking-related diseases each year.

I have to say I find this kind of hard to believe. I suppose I shouldn't replace analytical studies with my anecdotal experience, but I basically was this kid 20 years ago, all my friends smoked, and today virtually none of them do, and they didn't quit by dying. (Most of them, anyway.)

Not that it was easy. I developed a plan to wean myself off tobacco over the course of a week, and it went like this: the first day I waited an hour after waking to have a cigarette, and then I had one per hour after that. The second day I waited two hours, the third three, etc., until on the seventh day I had to stay up extra late to get to the second cigarette, and after that, that was that. This worked for me on three occasions - the first two I went back after some months, and the third time I stayed off till this day, kineyenahora, ptui ptui ptui.

I put the cost of a pack of cigarettes into a jar each day for the next year or so (even though I really smoked more than a pack a day) and used that money to make my first trip to Israel. Me being the anti-corporate type that I am, quitting giving my hard-earned money to Phillip Morris was a major motivating factor as well.

I don't want to minimize the addictiveness of cigarettes or the fact that many people never manage to quit. But I quit when I was 28, when the circumstances of my life changed and it was time to, and it's a long time ago now, and like I said, all my friends have quit since then too. I still stick with what I said to the kid: When it's time to quit, he'll quit. And he won't need to give Big Pharma his money to do it.

Or am I wrong?

Personal Finance Update

Well, obviously I haven't blogged here much for a while, although it's interesting that the site gets a small but fairly consistent number of hits even in the absence of new content, more so than my other blog so what do you know about that? Anyway, I've been thinking of trying to get some more content up here, but don't want to make any promises I might not be willing to keep!

I thought I'd give a little update on our family financial situation. The big important news is that DW is working more consistently now. She has a job as a para at an organization that works with kids with severe communications difficulties, and although the pay isn't great she's working a good number of hours, 25-28 most weeks. Then she's still working at Sylvan learning center 4 hours a week, as well as teaching Hebrew school. So there's some more income there.

What this means is that we're more or less breaking even every month, so we are no longer consistently digging into reserves to make the nut every month. That is good news. The ability to pay down debt hasn't really magically appeared, though.

I consolidated my student loan with the Department of Education because there's supposedly a new provision that if you work in the non-profit sector your loan will be forgiven after 10 years. I had to give an income statement to qualify for it and because of DW's increased income our payments actually went up, which threw our budgetary balance off a bit. Unfortunately it's 10 years from the refinance and not from graduation so it's almost like starting from scratch, and who knows if this provision will even exist in 10 years?

We still owe a touch under $6K on my card, which is 19% interest, and almost $9K on DW's, which is at about 10%. Getting them down has been tough; mine was a little under 5 at one point but then my car needed almost $800 in repairs so there went that. We also owe about $10K on DW's car (dumbest purchase ever made, next to the house) and of course there's my ridiculous $60K student loan, which I prefer not to think about. We pay $400 on my card, $200 on DW's card, $340 on the car and $500 on the student loan every month, meaning that, as ever, debt service adds up to about 1/4 of our monthly income.

Given that we're at the break even point and can't expect any more income we really need to find some place to cut expenses if we want to dig out any faster. (Plus, DK1 still needs braces.) The likely candidates for excision seem to be cable TV and my old frenemy, the Sunday New York Times.

I was intrigued by this story in the Times about watching TV without cable - not rooftop antennae, but rather streaming either from your internet connection or through a device such as a Boxee. There's a small initial investment involved but after that it's essentially free unless you up for some premium content (like baseball), but even then it's a lot less than cable.

My man Phil P. is a tech guru and he tried to dissuade me, saying that cable was more predictable in terms of both content and technology, but that $50 we're spending every month is looking mighty enticing. We never had cable before we moved to Wichita and DW would be just as happy to be rid of it, believe you me. She thinks I'm watching too much TV, and most of what I want to watch (Colbert, for instance) I can watch on-line anyway. So it might take me a couple of months to work out the technical arrangements to a level of comfort, but I think that's the way we're going to go.

As for the Times, the land subscription gives me full access to their website, which is good, and if I call them to cancel they'll just offer me a discount for a couple of months, which is what they always do when I get to this point. And I do love it, it's like the only thing in my life that reminds me of my connection to New York. Still, it's $32 per month, which is a lot.

I did raise my payment on the car by $40 a month in the hopes of saving myself a little interest on the back end.

On the plus side, our housing situation is stable, the people who own it aren't going to be back for an extra year, which means we could be here for 4 or 5 years, or longer than we lived in the house in Illinois. (This is probably a topic for another day but I am not eager to get back into the homeowning thing after our experience there, not that I have the credit to now but if I can live in a nice house for rent and have someone else make the repairs why would I do otherwise?) I'm enjoying my work and of course the longer we stay here the more I meet people in town and the more interesting things I get involved in. I'm blogging for a political site now and that's gratifying. But I sure do wish we could work off this debt and get on the upside for a change. That's got to be more important than the Sunday Times, right?

National Thrift Week

Did you know there was such a thing as National Thrift Week? Neither did I, but here's a story about it from Education Week. And guess what? It's this week.

National Thrift Week had a 50-year run in our history before being dispensed with in the 1960s. It began on Jan. 17, 1916—the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, the “American Apostle of Thrift”—and soon spread to more than 300 communities. Everyone from the YMCA to the Jewish Welfare Board to the National Education Association sponsored the event. Indeed, educators, partnering with financial institutions and businesses, played a key role in promoting thrift during the week.

They apparently had essay and poster contests, and states sponsored savings accounts for kids at community banks.

Three bullet points in favor of thrift from the article:

• Thrift builds good character, through delay of gratification,
• Thrift encourages generosity, and
• Thrift encourages a wise use of resources.
  

Nowadays we're as likely as not to hear that thrift is a threat to the economy, because so much of our economy is dependent on consumer spending. That's an argument for another day, but here it can suffice to say that spending beyond one's means does no one any good, save the banks and credit card companies who can charge interest and fees on our largesse.

Here are a couple more webpages on the subject: bringbackthriftweek.org, and the same group's Facebook page.

(h/t Michelle Weiss Persons)

A couple of quick and easy meals

Bean and brats (from Vegetarian Times, which I pick up once in a while): Slice a package of veggie brats (I guess you could use meat, there's not dairy in the recipe, but I never have) and brown them on both sides, then put them aside. Fry some onion, then put in a can of diced tomatoes and a (rinsed and drained) can of white beans, a little water and some salt, pepper, and molasses. Heat through, put the brats back in and cook the sauce down for a few minutes before serving. Goes well with rice.

Usually when I have to get a meal on the table fast I do something simple with pasta, but I can't tell you how sick I am of pasta right now. So on Tuesday, when I literally had 20 minutes to put dinner on the table, this is what I made: tofu - drained, broiled 3 mins each side, then coated with a paste of miso and 1 tbls each of wine and mirin, then broiled again. Green beans, boiled for 3-4 minutes, then tossed with a small amount of soy sauce and tbls toasted sesame seeds. Rice. We love anything oriental-ish, and this made a rather stahm mid-week meal a little more special.

Cheap Jews

On Tablet, an interview with Lauren Weber, author of book, In Cheap We Trust: The Story of a Misunderstood American Virtue. Sample:

There’s something paradoxical about the connection between Jews and money. There are stereotypes about Jews being tightfisted, but also about Jews being gaudy.

The stereotype combines both admiration and resentment, and that’s a particularly American combination. On the one hand Jews were called miserly, on the other hand they were called ostentatious. Jews would be closed out of certain resorts because they were vulgar. In the book, I talk about this stereotype of the Jew living in a hovel that was secretly opulent inside. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

One of the greatest challenges of being a Jew interested in frugality and simplicity is the (almost exclusively internal) challenge of the "cheap Jew" stereotype. Jews will make poor decisions about money because they don't want to appear cheap.

I wonder if Scottish people have this problem?