- "The best way to spend your money is to spend it on time, not on stuff." http://su.pr/2tr5iP #
- First bonus by stock options today. Not sure I'm impressed. #
- RT @chrisguillebeau: US border control just walked the train asking "Are you a US citizen?" Native American guy says: "One of the originals" #
- @FARNOOSH My credit score is A measure of my integrity not THE measure. in reply to FARNOOSH #
- I'm listening to a grunge/metal cover of "You are my sunshine" #
- There's something funny about a guy on reality TV whining about how private he is. #LAInk #
Optimized to Go, Part 1
Last weekend, we held a garage sale at my mother-in-law’s house. It was technically an estate sale, but we treated it exactly as a garage sale.
A week before we started, a friend’s mother came to buy all of the blankets and most of the dishes, pots, and non-sharp utensils so she could donate them all to a shelter she works with. She took at least 3 dozen comforters and blankets away.
Even after that truckload, we started with two double rows of tables through the living room and dining room. The tops of the tables were as absolutely full as we could get them, and the floor under the tables was also used for displaying merchandise.
Have you ever had to display 75 brand-new pairs of shoes in a minimal about of space? They claimed about 16 feet of under-table space all by themselves. Thankfully, the blankets weren’t there anymore.
We also had half of the driveway full of furniture, toys, and tools.
We had a lot of stuff.
Now, most people hold a sale to make some money. Not us. We held a sale to let other people pay us for the privilege of hauling away our crap. As such, it was all priced to move. The most expensive thing we sold was about $20, but I can’t remember what that was. Most things went for somewhere between 25 cents and $1.
At those prices, we sold at least 2000 items. That isn’t a typo. We ended the day with $1325. After taking out the initial seed cash, lunches we bought for the people helping us, and dinner we bought one night, we had a profit of $975.
At 25 cents per item.
We optimized to sell instead of optimizing for profit. At the end of a long summer of cleaning out a hoarding house, it all needed to go.
In the next part, I’ll explain exactly how we made it work.
Breaking Bad: The Economics of Meth
In AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” Walter White plays the role of chemistry teacher turned meth producer and drug kingpin. While it certainly makes for good television to think about the profits available to someone willing to trade in illegal drugs, the mountain of money that Walter makes by the end of the series is actually not that unrealistic. Meth has a street value that approaches $30,000 dollars per pound. Not only that, but Walter displays a deceptively keen business acumen, especially for a chemistry teacher. A number of keen decisions allowed Walter White to become as successful as he has.
Production Costs
As any business owner knows, merchandise costs are a major portion of any operating budget. Mr. White keeps his profit margins robust in a number of ways. The first of these is by managing his production costs. When he started out in the business, Walter simply stole the majority of the required chemicals from the high school where he worked. This allowed for the product to be sold at a substantial profit when compared to producers who are required to invest more upfront.
Location, Location, Location
On top of his discounted production, Walter was able to stay ahead of the competition both literally and figuratively by utilizing his RV for production. Typically, meth is produced in a laboratory environment, which requires a building. This adds an additional cost of rent to the typical business profile. Walter, on the other hand, produced out of his RV in the early stages of his business’ growth, further increasing his profit margin.
Distribution
On the production side of the economy, a major consideration is distribution costs. While most of Walter’s competition used pricey, established lines of distribution for their products, he cut out the middle man by distributing his product with his team. This caused major disruptions to his business when his competitors tried to kill him. However, while he was able to accomplish this model, Walter was the beneficiary of increased profits. Then, when he killed his competition, he was able to return to the healthy margin he enjoyed previously.
Advertising
Many new products are launched with a full blown media campaign. This is a costly proposition. Walter, instead, relied on the quality of his product to speak for itself. This competitive advantage reduced the need for an extensive advertising budget. Furthermore, after a period of time, his product became a preferred choice by consumers everywhere. While he was required to distribute a few loss leaders at times, Walter kept the advertising costs down and profited greatly.
So, while it may seem like Walter White was simply a chemistry teacher who got lucky, it’s clear that he actually had a specific plan for his upstart business. By following a few standard economic principles, he was able to increase his margins at the crucial beginning phase of his business, and had established himself as a leader in the market when he chose to expand
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Fixing Your Credit Report
Sometimes, negative things appear on your credit report. Usually, they do a good job of maintaining
Credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)accuracy, but mistakes do happen. The creditor or the reporting agency may screw up, or you may have your identity stolen. If either of these situations are true, you’ll want to correct your credit report, making yourself eligible for lower rates on future credit and, occasionally, lowering the cost of things like auto insurance.
If you throw “credit repair” into Google, you get 18 million hits. Most of those are either outright scams or hopelessly optimistic about what they can accomplish. As I said once before:
Credit Repair is almost always a scam. There are ways to get correct bad information removed from your credit report. If the information is correct, those methods are illegal. There are two legal methods to repair your credit. First, stop generating bad credit. Make your payments on time and eventually, the bad items will fall off. Second, write letters disputing the actual incorrect items on your credit report. There are no quick fixes, and anybody telling you different is flirting with a jail sentence, possibly yours.
There are ways to avoid the scammers.
- Avoid advance-fee credit repair. If they are any good, you will pay for results, not intentions. If they charge beforehand, they are already breaking the law.
- If they insist they can erase the accurate, but negative information, run away.
- If they tell you to dispute everything negative, even the accurate information, run away.
- If they tell you to create a new credit identity, don’t just run, report them. It’s a felony.
Legally, you cannot get valid information removed from your credit report. Anyone who tells you differently is advocating a crime. However, according to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), you are entitled dispute incorrect records.
To verify the accuracy of your credit report, you need to see it. You can get a free report if your credit is used to deny you for something. This is known as an “adverse action” . You have 60 days from the denial to request the report. You can also get one free report from each of the major credit bureaus each year. I space out these requests so I see my credit report every 4 months.
If there is inaccurate information on your report, dispute it in writing. Send a letter to the credit bureau that is reporting the error. Explain the problem and politely demand an investigation. They will contact the creditor, who usually has 30 days to respond. In the meantime, send a dispute letter to the creditor, along with proof of the inaccuracy. If the investigation does not go your way, the creditor will have to report the dispute status to the credit bureaus in the future.
If the negative items are accurate, there is only one way to get it off of your report legally: Wait. Most negative information can only be reported for 7 years, while a bankruptcy will be reported for 10.
Another way to build your credit in the face of negative credit is to start building good credit to overshadow the bad. Get a credit card. Your first credit card from the bottom of the debt-barrel will probably be a gas card or a store-branded credit card. That’s fine. The main consideration is are low or nonexistent fees. Don’t accept application fees, activation fees, fees for carrying a balance or fees for not carrying a balance. Annual fees are becoming a fact of life, so look for low fees. The interest rate does not matter. You will be paying this card off immediately, meaning no less often that every two weeks. Make sure every penny is paid during the grace period, and make sure your card comes with a grace period. Some don’t. Those are bad cards to get.
There are no quick fixes for bad credit, just good new habits and time.
You’re Gonna Die, Part 2
You know that, at some point, you’re going to shuffle off of this mortal coil.
You will die.
Hopefully, you’ll have lived your life is such a way that the even won’t be easy for your heirs, but you can do a bit to make the process less painful for them. Do you want them gutting your house trying to find out if you have a will, or does the idea of a treasure hunt for a life insurance policy make you smile?
Assuming you don’t intend to sit in the afterlife giggling about how difficult you’ve made life for your offspring, the first thing you need to do is find a spot to put your important paperwork. This should, ideally, be a fireproof safe, which you can get for under $50. You’re looking for something big enough to hold the things that matter, while being able to withstand a bit of fire, in case the part of “Grim Reaper” is being played by an arsonist.
The next thing you need to do is put your important papers in the safe. Seriously, this beats both filing your insurance papers in a telephone book stacked in the corner and wrapping an envelope full of cash in a 10 year old newspaper and storing it with your recycling. It’s also superior to tucking an insurance policy in a coupon mailer and losing it the cracks of a chair.*
Important papers include:
- Your will
- Life insurance policies, including accidental death policies
- Bank account information, but don’t forget to remove these if you close an account
- Safe deposit box information
- Car titles and lien releases, if applicable
- The deed to your house
- Investment accounts
- Retirement accounts
Things that are not important papers for your heirs:
- The last 30 years of your monthly gas bill
- The last 30 years of your electric bill
- Home Shopping Network receipts
- Child support filings for your 33 year old daughter who has 3 kids of her own
- Coupon mailers
- Credit card offers
- 10 year old angry letters to the police department about that guy in the silver car who ran a stop sign in the grocery store parking lot
The final thing you need to do to make this all work is tell someone about it. Don’t hope somebody will find a book that has “In case of death, my will is here” scrawled inside the cover, buried in your kitchen. Really. And if that is your plan, don’t move the will later, without updating the book.
Your homework over the weekend is to gather up your important papers and put them in a box. Then tell someone about the box.
*I wish I was making this up.
Medical Costs and Choices
- Image via Wikipedia
I’m not a bad father.
Last spring, we noticed my son had a wandering eye. One of his eyes would just drift when he was looking at something. It was happening consistently, so we brought him to the eye doctor. After an exam, we found out that his eyes were 20/100. The doctor said that getting him classes may be enough to fix the wandering eye problem. The theory was that his eye was drifting because his eyes weren’t able to focus. Bringing the world into focus could have let his eyes train themselves to work right.
Nine months with glasses later, the problem hasn’t gone away, so we went back to the eye doctor.
He’s got alternating exotropia. His eyes aren’t working well together. One eye will focus, and the other will drift. So now we’re looking into vision therapists.
A friend went through something similar with his kid, so I asked him for the name of the doctor he used. He gave it to me and told me the clinic was the best in the business, and I would be paying for that. I asked about the cost and was handed the doctor’s spiel about how sad it is that parents focus more on the cost of care than getting the best possible care.
What a load of crap.
First of all, that’s a sales pitch. Of course the doctor is going to defend his prices. If his prices are exorbitant(I don’t have a basis for comparison) and he can’t defend them, people will go elsewhere. $3000 isn’t pocket change. That’s a significant chunk of change. Refusing to look at your options is irresponsible.
Second, price does not equal quality. There are a ton of things that are overpriced garbage. Not only do scam artists abound, but some legitimate things are are horribly overpriced at one location and reasonably priced at others. To stay on the vision theme, my $10 glasses are every bit as high quality as any $400 pair I’ve ever owned. The difference between generic and brand-name drugs? The label and the price. The FDA requires they be chemically identical to be sold. If you insist on the brand name because it’s “better”, you are flushing your money down the toilet. If you live by “you get what you pay for” you are guaranteed to get ripped off.
Third, balancing cost and treatment doesn’t mean I care less. Yes, I am killing my debt as fast as I can right now. Even when I was willing to use a credit card, I wouldn’t drop $3000 without considering my options. I have an entire family to consider, not one problem that my kid doesn’t even notice. Grr. I hate getting told–implicitly or otherwise–that I am a bad parent because I don’t choose to waste my money the way other people do. I’ll check out my options first, thank you.
Now, I will pay for the best when it is warranted. My wife wants Lasik and mentioned some sale some company was having. No. The guy sticking a laser and a scalpel in my eye will not be the lowest bidder. When I left the gene pool, I went to one of the top guys in the state for the procedure. When those things screw up, it’s permanent.
Vision therapy? Not so much. If it comes to surgery, we’ll go with the best. But it’s not there, yet. My kid is going to get a series of eye exercises, no matter where we go. Even if I go to some back alley vision therapist with a degree from a Nigeria U, what’s the worst case scenario? We may have to try someone else. Since I will be doing a bit more research than that, odds are better that my kid will get exactly the same therapy regimen for 1/4 of the cost. That’s the difference between a perfectly competent doctor and a perfectly competent doctor who convinced some trade magazine to write him up as the best in the business.
What do you think? Am I neglecting my kid by wanting to save some money for his braces, too?
