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Saturday Roundup: Winter Wonderland

Misc

Today, I am planning to be on the receiving end of a foot of snow coming in at 30 miles per hour. Tomorrow, when it’s time to clean all that crap out, it will be 30 degrees below zero. Fun!

The drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card is still going on!   Go here for details.  It ends on the 15th, so you have 4 more days.

Best Posts

Santa’s got a new phone number!   It plays a simple message when you call it, but it’s an easy way to make a little kids smile.

How many days of your life did that that new gadget cost you?

Go watch Crystal get all survivalist and stuff.  Have you ever though about what would happen if the world as you knew it ended?  Even for a few days, say, after a hurricane hit?

It’s great to live in the future.  I can’t wait to hit Lunar Starbucks.

LRN Timewarp

For those unfortunate enough to not have been tuned in since the beginning, I’m going to spend some time reviewing posts from a year ago.

In How to Have a Perfect Life, I layout the planning necessary to live a life you don’t regret on your deathbed.   Just take the first step.

Babies are Expensive is one of my most-visited posts to date, and was my first carnival submission, and my first editor’s pick for that submission.  The truth is, babies are expensive, but they don’t have to break the bank.

Don’t Screw Future-You was a fun post to write.  What would the you from 20 years in the future have to say to you?

Carnivals I’ve Rocked

Consumer Action Handbook was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Mistakes Made was included in the Carnival of Money Stories.

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Selling Your Car

Finance

English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Pa...

English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money.  Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value.  Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”

When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:

  1. Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
  2. Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well.  Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
  3. Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.”  It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.

When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.

  • Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses.  Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
  • Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept.  Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time.  Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
  • Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car.  That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car.  “Officer, Sumdood took my car.  He was wearing jeans.”  That won’t get your car back.
  • Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer.   A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars.  It’s well worth the expense.

Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.

Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?

This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.

 

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The Unfrugal Meal

Finance, Parenting

A Teppanyaki chef cooking on a modern gas powe...
Image via Wikipedia

I spend a lot of time talking about how to save money here.  It’s kind of what I do.

Not today.

Today, I’m going to talk about the best way I’ve wasted money during my vacation this week.

First, so my feelings are completely understood:  A vacation is about experiences and memories.   I could spend all day at the park with my kids, or I could spend a memorable meal with them.   Which will they remember longer?

It ain’t the park.  They are there almost every day.

Of course, if the restaurant is McDonald’s they wouldn’t remember for long, either.

Tuesday, after a long day of hands-on, interactive museum-going, we took the kids to a Japanese steakhouse.   Teppanyaki, where they cook the food at the table, complete with fire, spatula spinning, and airborne food.

I’m the only one in my family who has seen that before.    Honestly, watching the art, the skill, the banter, and the giant fireball leaves me as wide-eyed as my kids.

They loved it.

Watching the chef throw a bowl full of rice across the table made my son’s jaw drop.

Seeing the chef carry fire from one side of the grill to the other on his fingers made my youngest squeal and beg for more fire tricks.

Getting squirted by the chef when he was putting out a flare-up made the middle brat giggle, possibly because the squirt gun was a little kid, dressed up as a fireman, with his pants down.   She got “peed” on and loved it.

Aside from cooking-as-a-show, the service was fantastic.   There was always a waiter nearby to keep our water glasses full or to provide “little kid” chopsticks, which are modified with rubber band to remove the need for skill to eat.   They had the courses perfectly timed.   The minute the salad was cleared, the soup was delivered.   When that was done, the chef rolled up to start on the rice.  My two-year-old was eating white rice without complaint for the first time.

Giggles and squeals.  Three days later, they are still talking about it.   My 11-year-old, who’s trying so hard to be an unimpressible teenager, says it was the coolest restaurant he’s ever seen.

Frugal, it wasn’t, but the memories were worth the money.

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Priorities

Business

I once saw a sign on the wall in a junkyard that said, “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Another good one: “If everything is top priority, nothing is top priority.”

Once a week, I meet with my boss to discuss my progress for the previous week and my priorities for the coming week.   This is supposed to make sure that my productivity stays in line with the company’s goals.

Great.

Once a day, my boss comes into my office to change my top priority based on whichever account manager has most recently asked for a status update for their customer.

Not so great.

At least twice a week, he asks for a status update on my highest priority items.   Each time, he could mean the items we prioritized in the weekly meeting, or the items he chose to escalate later.   Somehow, getting a new task escalated doesn’t deescalate an existing task.

Everything is a top priority.

To compensate, I’ve been working a few 12 hour days each week, and occasionally coming in on the weekends.

I’m dedicated and still behind.

Prioritizing is treated as an art, or in the case I just mentioned, a juggling act.  It should be considered a science.  It’s usually pretty simple.

  • Is the problem costing you money? +1
  • Is the problem costing your customer money? +2
  • Is the problem going to hurt your reputation? +1
  • Is there a deadline? +1
  • Is it soon? +2
  • Is it urgent? +1
  • Is it important? +2
  • Are there absolutely no real consequences for anyone if it doesn’t get completed? -500

That’s it.    Too many times, we get hung up on urgent-but-not-important items and neglect the important things.

The hard part comes when it’s someone else setting your priorities, particularly when that person doesn’t rate things on urgency, importance, and cost but rather “Who has bitched the loudest recently?”

Can I tell my boss that I’m not going to do things the way he told me too?  No.  A former coworker very recently found out what happens when you do this.

Can I remind him that I’m busting my butt as hard as I can?  Yes, but it will just earn me a request to come in on the weekend, too.

Can I ignore the official priorities part of the time, and work on what I feel is most important to keeping our customers happy?  Yes, but it’s easy to go too far.  “Boss, I ignored what you said, but this customer is happy, now!” won’t score me any points if it happens every week.

Priorities are simple, but not always easy.  How do you balance your priorities?

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Power

Finance, Life

At 8PM Friday night, our power went out.

We had 70 MPH straight-line winds and horizontal rain.  Trees came down all over the neighborhood.  Two houses down, 3 tree played dominoes, creaming the house, the fence, and two cars.

How did we do?

The skeleton I keep hanging in my tree lost its right shin-bone and we lost power.  So did 610,000 other people in the area.

It’s interesting to watch what happens when the power goes out.

I’m assuming every generator in the area sold out.   I don’t know, because I already had one.   I do know that most of the gas stations near me ran out of gas on Saturday.   Most places were out of ice, too.  Batteries were hard to scrounge.

The restaurants that either didn’t lose power or had backup generators were raking in money all weekend.  Sunday morning, McDonald’s had a line of cars backed up an entire block.

Our power came back on Monday night.  74 hours of living in the dark ages.  We had to read books on paper and cook all of our food on the grill.

We did okay.  A few years ago, when the power went out for a day, I bought a generator.  Saturday morning, I finally had a reason to take it out of the box.

The generator cost me $450.   Over the weekend, we put about $40 worth of gas into it.  That kept our refrigerator and freezer running, saving at least $5-600 worth of food.   Two neighbors filled up our available freezer space, so that’s another $200 worth of food that didn’t die.

That’s a $500 investment to save nearly $800 worth of food.

Pure win.

The generator also allowed us to keep a couple of fans running, which is great when the power goes out when it’s 90 degrees outside.  We also fired up the TV and DVD player at night to help the kids settle down for bed.  This is one time I was glad to have an older TV, because cheap generators don’t push out a clean electricity that you can safely use to run nice electronics.

We have a couple of backup batteries for our cell phones, so we got to stay in touch with the world.   We borrowed an outlet at our rental property to charge the batteries when they died.

We had about 5 gallons of gas on hand, which was convenient, but not enough.  I’m going to grow that.  A little fuel stabilizer and a couple of 5 gallon gas cans and we can be set for the next time gas runs out.

We cooked everything on the propane grill.  I keep two spare propane tanks on hand, but we didn’t use them.   Sunday night, my wife made spaghetti on the grill.  The hard part was keeping the noodle from falling through.   Nah, we threw the cast iron on the grill and cooked away.   Had pancakes and bacon made the same way on Sunday.

We had to buy more lanterns.  We had two nice big ones, but at one point, we had 9 people in our house.   That’s a lot of games, books, and bathroom breaks to coordinate with only two main lights.  This weekend did teach our daughters that the emergency flashlights are not toys.  Two of them had dead batteries that needed to be replaced.

Going out to dinner Monday evening was a treat.   We sat in a building with air-conditioning!

All said, we spent about $250 that we wouldn’t have if the power would have stayed on.   That’s $40 for gas, $80 for dinner(you try feeding a family of 5 for less than that at a restaurant that doesn’t have a drive-through) and $130 on new lanterns.  The lantern bill caught me by surprise, by a lot, but now we are set for next time.

How would you do without power for three days?

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Walking Dead: Would You Be Ready for the Apocalypse?

News

Would you be ready for the apocalypse? The Walking Dead asks that question every week. There is a great deal of human intrigue in the show, but the show is always asking you, the viewer, if you would be ready to deal with an apocalypse on that order. The idea goes much farther than dealing with zombies. Truly, zombies are the easy part of the apocalypse.They feed off of #austerity... A #soulless society of #zombie workers, like a scene from #Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, but instead of #sucking the life out of #everybody, these #fluoridated motherfuckers are hungry for your #money! #hashtag #illumin

Lost People

We live in a world where we are very connected. You know people from all over the world, and it the entire world has been overrun by an apocalypse at once, all the people you are connected to around the world are effectively gone. There is no chance you will ever see them again. The people on the show deal with those ideas every day. There are so many people they miss that they never go to to say goodbye to.

Insecurity

The one thing that the apocalypse creates is insecurity. You will have no idea what is going to happen the next morning. You never know when someone in your crew is going to be bitten or killed. You have no idea when you will run into other humans you cannot trust. There is not a safe place on Earth. Even if you lock down a house, there is no way to know for sure that zombies would not get in.

Violence

The Walking Dead graphically depicts the violence that is necessary to kill zombies. You would have to “kill” thousands of people who have become zombies. You can see their wedding rings. You can see them in their uniforms, and you know that they used to be somebody. However, you have to end them in order to save yourself. Many of us believe we could do that, but we need to think twice before we assume we could be that violent.

Order

The lack of order in the world is the thing that would break most of us. We can reconcile loss, but that loss is hard to reconcile when there is no order in the world. There is not one authority on the planet that is still operating. How would you be able to resolve problems without such a structure?

On the show, all these problems are handled violently. Murdering violent people is all part of the job if you want to stay alive. It is one thing to kill a zombie that is no longer a person, but it is something else to kill a real person who is simply a thieving criminal.

You might think that you would do just fine when you are watching The Walking Dead, but you would not know unless it happened in real life. The zombie apocalypse is not all fun and games. At its heart is a tense human emotion called loss that we would all have to confront head on.