- I miss electricity. #
- @prosperousfool Do you still need a dropbox referral? in reply to prosperousfool #
- @prosperousfool Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE1Mjk2OTU5 in reply to prosperousfool #
- Don't let anyone tell you otherwise: Electricity is the bee's knees, the wasp's nipples and lots of other insect erogenous zones. #
- @prosperousfool Throw in a Truecrypt partition and the PortableApps launcher and it gets really neat. in reply to prosperousfool #
- @prosperousfool Universal accessibility. I put an encrypted partition on it so any receipts or credit card info or login info would be safe in reply to prosperousfool #
- RT @untemplater: RT @jenny_blake: Deep thought of the day: "How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours." -Wayne Dyer #quote #
- @FARNOOSH So what's happening to the one good show on SOAPNet? in reply to FARNOOSH #
- RT @flexo: RT @mainstr: 1 million Americans have been swindled in an elaborate credit card scam and they may not know http://bit.ly/cr8DNK #
How Much Should You Tip?
- Image by cemre via Flickr
This post from CNN Money has been making the rounds. I’m getting into the game today.
With the holiday season upon us, tipping the people you work with is a tradition in some cases and actually expected in others. Here’s what CNN came up with and my take:
- Housekeeper. We don’t have one. I’d think $75-100 would make a nice tip/Christmas bonus. I seem to be more generous than average with my imaginary maid. Maybe that’s because of the outfits she wears.
- Gardener. Once again, we don’t have one. Even if we did, I live in Minnesota and have close to a foot of snow over the patch of weeds I call my garden. If I did have a gardener, I wouldn’t have seen him for a few months by now, anyway. $0!
- Mail carrier. I’ve only met my mail man a dozen times and I’ve never considered giving him a Christmas present. Do people really do that?
- Barber. I don’t have one any more. My wife has started doing my hair for me. When I did, I tipped about 25%, but again, I wouldn’t think about a Christmas present. I only saw him quarterly. I don’t think my wife has a regular stylist either. She’s just got a shop she goes to and gets whoever is available. Is there holiday tipping protocol for that?
- Garbage collector. No way. Really? I don’t know that I’ve seen the same guy twice. Am I supposed to give a present to the anonymous, interchangeable union guy that drives past my house every Friday?
- Newspaper carrier. One night, twelve years ago, while my wife was still working graveyard shifts, she had a hard time sleeping on her nights off. That’s natural for 3rd shift workers. At about 4AM, she was watching TV and saw someone run past the window. Scared, she came to wake me up. I handed her the phone to call the police, while I grabbed the only thing I had for self-defense and went to investigate. I ran out on the front step–in my boxers, carrying a sword–and saw someone lurking in the neighbor’s yard across the street. I yelled, “Y0u don’t belong here!” only to hear “I’m delivering the paper!” That’s when I start tipping the newspaper carrier. I stopped when we canceled our subscription a few years later. Who needs a dead tree in the morning, when there are a million news sites on the internet?
If the majority of people are giving Christmas bonuses to that many people, and are as generous as the article suggests, then I fall far to the loutish end of the bell curve. I am planning to give my virtual assistant 1/12 of the pay he’s earned this year, so that should make up for some of it, but that is an ongoing business relationship.
How do you compare when it comes to holiday tipping?
Good Friday
We don’t have daycare on Good Friday.
We do, however, both have to work today. Two rounds of little-girl tonsillitis have zapped our available vacation time.
On an entirely related note, we put our 12 year old son through Red Cross babysitter training a few weeks ago, just for something like this.
My wife gets nervous at the idea of leaving the girls with the boy for very long. I think she thinks the world will explode if he takes care of them correctly.
Our solution for today is to have a slightly older friend come over and help.
She’s 13 and she brought her 10 year old brother with her.
That’s kids aged 3,5,10,12, and 13 in my house today. Total Lord of the Flies.
Hold that thought.
My son, being 12, doesn’t feel it’s necessary to brush his hair for school, or change his clothes every day, and he needs to be reminded to brush his teeth.
This morning, he woke himself up and ran into the bathroom. He emerged with clean teeth and combed hair. I asked him if he was wearing the same shirt as yesterday, and he flew into his room to change.
Hmm. Something is afoot.
While I was putting my shoes on, I reminded him to take care of the house and his sisters, and he made some smart-aleck joke in response.
She giggled.
Watson, I think I’ve found a clue.
Her father told me, just yesterday, the she thinks boys are gross.
The boy has never shown an interest in girls, until this morning.
Grr. The next decade just got considerably more interesting.
Time to lock them both in their respective basements until college.
Insane Incentives
Spring is in the air.
At my son’s school, that means it’s time for the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment tests. These are the standardized tests created by the No Child Left Behind Act that determine if a school is doing its job in educating children. If too many kids have lousy scores, the school gets put on the “Adequate Yearly Progress” list and will eventually get penalized financially.
That creates a perverted incentive in the school system. The main metric for a publicly-funded school’s success in Minnesota is the MCA. If a school can churn out illiterate trench-diggers, they will get increased funding as long as the test scores are good.
For a full two weeks before this test, the school effectively shut down the education program to prepare for the MCA test. That’s two weeks of studying for a set of standardized tests that focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic. I’m a fan of schools prioritizing the three Rs over other subjects, but that’s not what they did.
They spent two weeks studying testing strategies, not the material contained in the test.
In science class, they covered essential scientific elements like “Answer all of the easy questions first, so you can go back and spend time on the hard ones later.”
Spanish class covered verb usage similar to “When the time is almost out on the test, answer ‘C’ for all of the hard questions you have left, que?”
They weren’t being educated, they were learning the most effective way to solve a test to gain funding for next year.
For 2 weeks.
That’s not reading practice, or reviewing the parts of speech, or covering the necessary math skills. It’s “This is a #2 pencil. This is a circle. Practice until lunch.”
Is this really what NCLB was trying to accomplish? Standardized tests to measure school proficiency should be a surprise. Let’s randomly send in test proctors to take over a school for a day and see what the kids have actually learned.
The heat(er) is on! 5 winter home energy saving tips
This is a guest post.
Turning the heat on can strike fear into the hearts of many a home owner. Rising heating bills are not a thing of the past. They are present and there is no end in sight. Relief for high winter heat costs can be found in every leaky window, poorly sealed storm door, inaccurate thermostats and many other locations in and around your home. Seeking out the cheapest gas and electricity prices from local suppliers can help reduce total energy costs and should include home energy audits and payment plans to equalize summer and winter energy bills.
Top 5 Tips for Year Round Home Energy Savings
1. Obtain a free energy audit kit from your local electric or gas provider. Approach your home energy audit as a family. Involving children is one of the best ways to decrease overall energy consumption. Teach the kids about leaving doors open, leaving lights on and the television on when not in the room. Appoint an energy officer for the house who will be responsible for reminding family members about energy conserving activities.
2. Install a digital thermostat, which can be programmed to automatically raise or reduce home temperatures when the house is not occupied such as when parents are at work and the kids are at school. Lowering temperatures to 60 degrees on mild winter days for just six hours during the work day can save on your heating bills without compromising comfort. By limiting the time not to exceed six hours the cost for bringing the home back to acceptable living temperatures is minimal; much longer and the bounce back time is increased sufficiently to mitigate any daytime savings. Reducing overall temperatures by one degree Fahrenheit can save as much as three percent on the total heating bill. Reduce the household temperature by five degrees Fahrenheit and experience a 15 percent saving which is a number most families can easily live with.
3. Comparison shop for the cheapest gas and electricity from local private energy suppliers. Ask about payment plans, adjustable billing cycles and energy reform programs. State and local governments have options for lower income homes, providing subsidies for high winter heating bills. Grants for home improvement along with energy conservation tax credits, which can be applied to heating costs, are another way to reduce budget impacting heating bills this winter.
4. Close vents, use energy efficient space heaters and alternative heat sources for additional energy savings. Closing vents to unused rooms will reduce energy consumption for the entire house. Heating less square footage will require less energy. When closing vents, be sure to seal those rooms well. Install thermal window coverings to reduce heat loss and temperature fluctuations and reduce air exchange at door thresholds with the use of a draft dodger. Using an energy efficient space heater in cold rooms can improve comfort without increasing overall heating costs. Spaces such as basements and laundry rooms can benefit from temporary use of space heaters to increase temperatures for those rooms temporarily. Consider alternative heat sources such as wood stoves and fireplace inserts. Fireplaces are generally inefficient as heat sources. However, wood stoves using catalytic converters can have energy efficiency ratings that rival high tech heat pumps.
5. Appliance energy hogs such as hot water heaters, washers, dryers, ovens and dishwashers should be evaluated each season. Lowering the hot water heater temperature and insulating the water heater and the pipes can reduce energy consumption of this one appliance by as much as seven percent. Wash clothing on cold water settings whenever possible, reserving hot water for only items needing sterilization, such as sick room bedding or cloth diapers. Never start the dishwasher if it is not completely full. The same amount of water and energy will be used to wash five plates and three glasses and will be required to wash a full meal’s worth of dishes for a family of six.
Mortgaging a Rental Property
Now that we’re down to the last ten grand on our mortgage, we’re starting to look into getting another rental property. The one we’ve got has worked out pretty well over the last two years, giving us about $800 extra each month. We broke even on all of the repairs we had to sometime in the spring. That’s almost $5000 in pure, almost-passive income.
With numbers like that, if we can get a similar property and keep the mortgage under $800, we should be golden for getting another property and avoiding having it as a new drain on the budget.
However…
There’s always a however.
Our current tenants are moving out at the end of the month, which means the passive part of the income is over while we either find a renter or hire a property manager to do that for us. Since that came at the same time I got the opportunity to be unemployed, there was a bit of panic at my house.
The idea of having a mortgage, no job, and no renter scared us into waiting to buy another property.
It’s not stopping us from getting ready for the next property, though.
We live in a fairly high-cost area. Our house is on an eighth of an acre and is valued at around $250,000. Our rental is on a slightly larger lot, but is a smaller house valued at around $200,000. We don’t have a quarter of a million dollars laying around waiting to hatch into a new house, so we’ll be getting a mortgage. A mortgage for a business property is a bit different than one for a home you’re planning to live in.
First major difference? You need a 20% down payment, with a 25% down payment getting you a much better rate. We don’t quite have that, but if we pushed, we could have it in 6 months, I think. And then we’d have no cushion if anything bad happened in our lives.
The next thing is that we’ll need a reserve that covers all of our expenses–personal and investment–for 6 months. That can be home equity, savings, cash, or retirement accounts. We’ve got this one covered.
We don’t qualify for a standard mortgage plan right now, but there are options:
- Live poor and save hard for a year. We could make it happen in 6 months, but I will still want an emergency cushion just in case a job or tenant go away.
- Buy as an owner occupant. This would mean we buy a new house, then move into it and rent out our current house. We’d have to stay there a year before we’d be allowed to rent out the new property.
- Compare mortgages online. The internet is a wonderful thing, full of the complete knowledge of the human race. There is no better way to try to find an affordable mortgage than hopping on the net. Just make sure you’re looking at a reputable site and dealing with a legit mortgage company.
- Live comfortably and save slower, then buy the property in 2 or 3 years.
Honestly, of all of the options, we’re probably going to do a combination of 3 and 5, but 2 is a serious consideration, since we’ve talked about moving out of the suburbs a bit anyway.
Did I miss anything? How would you fund a rental property?
