values

Monday miscellany: Murder houses.

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Want to pay less for real estate? Look for a place where someone died.

Myles Ma of Policy Genius has written an engaging piece called “How death can haunt (or help) your house hunt.” According to one of his sources, you can expect a 10 to 25 percent discount a house where someone died.

Morbid? Yeah, a little. That is, if you can actually find out what happened there. In 32 states you don’t have to disclose such information; in 15, you have to disclose if the buyer asks. The toughest laws are in California (death within past three years) and South Dakota and Alaska (one year prior).

It doesn’t have to be murder, incidentally. Some people just want to know if a person breathed his last in a place they’re thinking of buying.

One of the most geekily fascinating parts of the article has to do with the so-called “Murder House” – a Los Angeles manse where a season of the television program “American Horror Story” was filmed. The folks who bought the place are suing the realtors for allegedly not telling them that some creepy fans of that very creepy TV show known to, um, haunt the place. Some of them sleep just outside the property line and others have frequently trespassed to the point of actually trying to get into the house. Yikes.

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“I can’t afford to retire.”

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One day last week I was trotting around a big-box store, using the Shopkick* app. I hadn’t planned to buy anything; I was there simply to rack up hundreds of points by scanning universal product codes with my phone.

Out of habit, I checked the clearance rack and saw a slightly dented can of tomato soup for 55 cents. Since winter is coming and I loves me a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup, I grabbed it.

The last Shopkick scans were right outside the store’s beauty section, which has its own cash register. Rather than go to the front of the store and stand in line, I asked if I could pay there.

The cashier wore one of those clear face shields to protect against the virus. She looked tired, pale and a bit stooped. As she scanned my order she said, “It’s my 73rd birthday today.”

I wished her a happy birthday and she smiled just a bit. Then I remarked that I was on my way over to visit a retired friend in her 70s, and would now tell her to get off her lazy behind and get a job.

The woman smiled again, a touch wistfully. “I can’t afford to retire.”

Boy, did I feel like a horse’s patoot. Here she was, obviously fatigued and having to stand for her entire shift, and there I was, making a clumsy joke about working in one’s 70s.

I took a closer look and she seemed older than 73. DF’s mom is 20 years older than that, but doesn’t seem“old.” Sure, she has a lot of wrinkles and is increasingly frail – 93 years will do that to a person – but she still takes both a daily walk and a lively interest in the world. Heck, she gives her great-granddaughter art lessons every week.

The cashier, on the other hand, seemed beaten-down by life. Perhaps she’d had bad luck: illness, job loss, a divorce that didn’t come out in her favor. Possibly she’d earned very little during her lifetime due to social pressures to stay home with a family and/or social mores that didn’t encourage women to seek highly skilled (or highly paid) employment. Could be she’d made bad money decisions due to a lack of financial education.

Whatever happened has left her where she is: weary, and working because she has no choice. Which is why I wanted to share her story with you. The moral of that story is simple:

 

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Automatic forwarding: Please stop it.

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(Happy Throwback Thursday! Given the current hullaballoo about the election in general – and that ghastly debate in particular – I decided to bring this article back. Originally published on April 12, 2012, its central message seems more urgent than ever.)

Recently a friend sent an e-mail to me (and a bunch of other people) asking for prayers for a battalion of Marines that had lost nine soldiers in four days.

It included this sentence:

 

“Nothing in the media about these guys because the news does not seems to care.”

 

In fact, this incident was reported by a number of media outlets – when it actually happened.

I wrote back to her: “All soldiers can use our prayers. However, this is an outdated post. The 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines were in Afghanistan from October 2010 until April 2011.” In the note I included a fact-checking link to show her where I had retrieved the information.

She replied, in part: “I guess you’re into extreme details. … You really could have just ignored the request.”

No, I couldn’t. Here’s why.

 

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Monday miscellany: Decision fatigue edition.

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Note: Surviving and Thriving is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.

“Decision fatigue” is hitting women hard during the pandemic, according to the HerMoney newsletter from money expert Jean Chatzky. A leadership coach and resiliency expert named Beth Benatti Kennedy reports a widespread issue among her clients: “I’ve never had to think about so many personal and work decisions.”

These women were already busy before COVID-19. Here’s what their lives look like now, Chatzky says:

“In an average day, women are making decisions for their families regarding school, play, meal planning, cleaning, pets, who goes to the grocery store, and whether or not risk for catching the virus should be taken in order to go to an event or have an experience, and all this is being done alongside a paying job for which you’re hoping to have a nice quiet office space in which you can comfortably earn a living.

“If it sounds like a pipe dream, that’s because it is. Because working from home has removed the boundaries that helped separate work and life, women are now working longer hours and are unable to turn work (off).”

That’s some serious fatigue.

 

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What to do with “extra” money.

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Recently I interviewed personal finance blogger Jordanne Wells and something she said really struck me:

“If you know having money in your pocket will make you feel like you want to spend, then don’t have money in your pocket.” 

Wells didn’t mean using cash vs. credit/debit, or walking around without any money/plastic. She was referring to having “extra” money, as in spending less than you thought you would.

For example, maybe you budgeted $100 for groceries but the total was only $80 thanks to wise coupon use and some really good sales.

What to do with that $20?

“Put it toward something right now,” Wells says.

As in, right now. Don’t wait for the monthly credit card statement, or hesitate to move those bucks into your emergency fund. Do it nownownow.

“All of those payments just help to get you in that habit of ‘When I have money, I do something (positive) with it’,” the writer says.

She’s no ivory-tower theorist. Her lessons came the hard way. When Wells came to the U.S. from Jamaica to attend college she had zero information on how to handle money. Credit cards were a revelation: “I can charge $50 and I only have to pay $10? Awesome!” What with school expenses and then “work-appropriate” clothing, Wells amassed debt that she couldn’t pay in full – and that grew to $30,000 by her early 30s.

Needing to buy a vehicle after a car wreck, she learned that she had “awful” credit; the best car loan she could get was at 11 percent interest. So she set out to improve her financial life via what she calls the “Debt S.L.A.Y.E.R” method. Wells also wrote an e-book called “How to Build Credit and Raise Your Credit: Everything You Need to Know to Understand, Build and Maintain Excellent Credit.”

 

 

Right now a lot of folks would love to be in the position of having “extra” money. Plenty of people would have liked that opportunity pre-pandemic, too. If you’re living from paycheck to paycheck, or even just on very thin margins, the notion of surplus money cluttering up the checking account is something of a pipe dream.

Or maybe it isn’t.

 

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Reminding myself of the good.

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The ongoing COVID lockdown and its associated nationwide healthcare and financial woes have left me feeling both detached and hyper-focused.

I don’t care much about anything, yet I worry nonstop about another massive recession (or, dare I say, a depression).

On the topic of depression: I remain very concerned about what the prolonged COVID isolation is doing to my daughter’s mental health.

(This is not meant to infantilize her. Quite the contrary: I’m in awe of her strength. But it’s a mom thing. We worry.)

To make matters much, much worse, I recently learned that my dad has cancer. He is optimistic – and he’s also 84, and aware that he’s had a pretty damn good run – but I struggled with the news.

Taken together, the result has been me wanting to bury myself in reading whenever I’m not working. It’s a handy way to numb my reactions to Just About Everything.

This was once an unhealthy coping mechanism, because the numbing was nonstop. Suspended animation was my go-to response to anguish, and I spent decades in emotional exile. If I buried myself in a book, or took on freelance assignments in addition to my day job, I’d be far too busy to take honest stock of my life and what was really going on.

These days, the numbing is not prolonged. It’s more of a pause than a freeze.

Specifically, it’s me working my way through the bad stuff by allowing myself to acknowledge it. I’ve found that it’s easier just to admit you’re scared than to fight being scared. Yes, my dad is sick; yes, the country’s economy is in a horrible place; yes, I am concerned about my daughter. It all stinks. Now: What are you going to do about it?

On Friday I stopped in the middle of an editing gig to write down the following phrase: “Reminding myself of the good.” Then I went back to editing, knowing that emotional work was likely going on under the surface.

It was.

 

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Poor, poor (but not pitiful) me.

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(Happy Throwback Thursday! This piece originally ran on July 21, 2015. Right now seemed like a good time to remind ourselves that a lot of the things we think are necessities really aren’t.)

The response to my early-June reboot of “Surviving (and thriving) on $12,000 a year” was humbling. It was great to see reader comments about the impact this piece had on their lives.

When the post originally ran (January 2007) it got more response than anything else MSN Money published that year. The editor immediately said, “Write another one.” So I did.

The headline I chose was the one you see above; it got changed to “Living ‘poor’ and loving it.” (I refrain from comment.)

I’ve decided to re-boot the second piece as well, again in its original format vs. the MSN-edited version. Once again, asterisks indicate that updates can be found at the end.

Comedian Dick Gregory grew hungry and cold in an impoverished home. Yet his mother always assured the kids, “We ain’t poor, we’re just broke.”

 

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Scenes from quarantines, Part 1.

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The times in which we live are not just potentially deadly. They’re psychologically and emotionally exhausting.

People are dealing with not just varying degrees of isolation but also variables like:

– The fear that loved one (especially elders) will get sick and they won’t be allowed to visit

– Unemployment (or having to keep working without reliable child care and/or proper protection)

– Food and household product shortages

– Generalized anxiety, which can mean existing in fight-or-flight mode 24/7 and can also make the simplest tasks of daily living feel insurmountable

– Being full-time parents in a pandemic, i.e., trying to explain the new normal to housebound kids who can’t quite grasp why they can’t visit friends or go to the movies

– Maybe being not just full-time parents but also homeschool teachers who are still expected to put in a full day’s work from home

Yet among the ever-more-horrifying news articles and social media posts, I’ve also read some  pretty funny scenes from quarantines. Moms and dads talk about all the math they can’t remember, or moan that the math they do remember has been replaced by Common Core.

People who wear glasses joke darkly about their masks’ effects on their specs. (I’ve had some fairly foggy vision myself on our weekly trips to the Outside World.)

Work-from-home* parents report the mortification of having pants-less offspring run through the room during video conferences. Once-tight couples realize that their SOs have some Really Annoying Habits, or at least habits magnified by enforced togetherness.

I laugh at these things, sometimes harder than the actual humor warrants. We need laughter right now, to offset the daily horror show that is the 24-hour news cycle.

Hence, this article – not intended to make light of a very real public health and economic crisis, but rather to provide what we hope will be a few much-needed laughs.

“We”? Yes, we. The first part is running here and the second is over on my daughter’s site, I Pick Up Pennies. We’ve recorded a few random observations about the new normal.

 

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The low-maintenance preppers.

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th-2(Happy Throwback Thursday! This article was originally published on Feb. 27, 2014. But the subject matter seems pretty current.)

I just went shopping in our basement, bringing up several items that were missing in our upstairs cupboards: catsup and ibuprofen (both from Costco), a jar of homemade jam, a can of chicken soup.

It always tickles me to see how much we’ve got stored down there, from the kale we grew and dried to bedpillow-sized sacks of dried beans.

Since I live in a really seismic state, the stockpile also makes me feel safe and prepared. Well, as prepared as one can ever be for another Good Friday Earthquake. (And yes, I’ve thought about what might happen if the house collapsed into the basement: Anger, panic and finally rueful laughter.)

That’s probably why an Everyday Cheapskate post called “Don’t be scared, be prepared” resonated so much and got me thinking, once again, about food preparedness.

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Coronavirus: An object lesson.

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This isn’t a post about or whether our country’s belated reaction to the coronavirus is in fact an overreaction. I’m not writing about whether or not we should self-isolate*,  or whether schools and public venues should have closed, or whether we’ve lost our collective damn mind in terms of toilet-paper hoarding.

I just want to point out that frugality (or intentional living, or whatever you want to call it) positions us to outlast both minor and major emergencies. Personally, I think that the coronavirus is both minor and major.

It’s minor (thus far, anyway) in that relatively few people are actually sick. If the epidemiologists are correct, “flattening the curve” may keep the medical system from being too overwhelmed to provide care for all.

It’s major in that many people’s livelihoods (both regular jobs and side hustles) are being hammered. When your finances are already chancy, losing a couple of weeks’ worth of work doesn’t just hurt – it might actually take you down.

Which brings us back to intentional living. If you were able to reduce/pay off your debt and build an emergency fund, then you are now better-equipped to handle the coronavirus troubles.

Facing reduced hours at work or even outright layoff because customers have disappeared? No longer able to pick up those extra 10 hours a week walking dogs or selling hot dogs at the basketball arena? Or maybe your job hasn’t gone away, but you now need to pay for weeks of childcare due to school closure.

That stinks, to be sure. It won’t be fun to use some (or all) of your EF to make up the difference. Instead, try thinking of it this way: I’m very glad I took the steps to build this cushion. And when this is over, I’ll get back to rebuilding.

 

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