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Happiness is a Warm Sparkler: Where Spending Overlaps Joy

July 3rd, 2009 by Sara
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: Image via Wikipedia

Books & Memories is a secondhand book store in Syracuse, New York, with a terrible name and dead web site.
2600 James St
Syracuse, NY 13206-2842
(315) 434-9268

But because visiting it made me enormously happy, I’ll describe it here, so that you may believe, despite the inability to click on it.

Like any good independently owned store, Books & Memories’ ramshackle appearance is part of its appeal — the piano, the oversized glass-display checkout counter, the vintage magazines. The store sprawls out from its center to satisfying library stacks with plenty of comfortable nooks.

It doesn’t take long to discern that “discount” is not shorthand for “junk.” True, the “97-cent” shelf does offer books like, “68 Reasons the Internet is Cool.” But then I spied Updike. And Jane Hamilton’s “The Book of Ruth.” And Margaret Atwood. On the new release shelf, I bought a copy of Caitlin Macy’s short-story collection, “Spoiled,” for $9 instead of the listed $24, as well as Nam Le’s “The Boat,” in paperback, for $5.

Happy Happy Joy Joy?

Yes, I found books I know I will love at “unbelievable prices!” But if you’re skeptical that Books & Memories would make you equally happy were you to visit, then you’re onto the links to come.

My favorite money blog Get Rich Slowly (despite its recent less attractive redesign) just ran a riff on the links between expense and happiness based on a Greg Tierney’s New York Times Lab column, which was in turn based on a reader survey about the subject by Geoffrey Miller, U of M professor and author of “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.

(Whew.)

Readers’ Biggest Expenses included kids, most cars, and boats. Their Most Happy lists included booze, meals with friends, hobbies, education, and charity. What overlapped? Homes, education, travel, electronics, and certain vehicles.

Here’s my Venn diagram of expense versus happiness. Childcare, food, kids and travel overlap both categories. So not surprisingly, my trip to Books & Memories, which was a kid-free trip to visit family and happen upon some books as well, is a ding ding on my happiness meter.

If your definition of “travel” does not include “being able to leave the house alone,” well, I’d be surprised if you’d read this far.

There’s some artifice to these lists, naturally, as it’s hard to reconcile past and future time, whether the “lack” of something would influence our happiness, and the shifting interpretations of happiness. For example, “education” doesn’t top my list of things that make me happy now, but I’m happy to have had it. My car doesn’t make me “happy,” but I’m usually much unhappier when it’s in the shop.

Fresh from picnics, parades, and pie, what tops your lists?

I just hope your “expenses” column doesn’t include an emergency trip to deal with the fallout from an exploding Toot & Twirl.

Tags: happiness · money psychology · Venn diagramNo Comments.

Can’t Afford a Pet? Skip the Ant Farm: Try Fostering a Dog or Cat

June 24th, 2009 by Sara
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Dead Ants

Did you know ants bury their dead?

Last night, the last ant standing in our $12 ant farm (courtesy of my mom, so free to us — thanks mom!) joined its companions in the designated burial ground — sand mounded like drifts of snow around the little plastic barns and silos. As you can see, one hangs gruesomely from the top of a barn; the other from a tree.

We hadn’t anticipated the ugly reality of the ant farm. We waited months for the ants to arrive (it had to be warm enough for them to survive the trip). Then we worried about how they were adjusting to their new home.

Why are they just standing there?
Do they have enough food? Or water?
Maybe they’re too hot. Or cold.
Uh oh, it looks like some of them didn’t make it.

Long before they dug any tunnels, in fact, they created the mausoleum above their home. Tunneling excitement lasted perhaps a week of their two-month existence; most of the time, the ant farm was Reality TV: Death watch.

Which brings me to a much happier pet story.

For several months, a friend of mine has welcomed many different pooches into her home through a local dog foster program run by a nonprofit animal rescue agency. She and her husband and son get to hang out with the dogs — and familiarize themselves with the kind of dog they might want to own — until they are adopted into a permanent home. Foster families also help ensure that the prospective home the dog will be adopted into is a good fit. (Cats are also an option at this and other agencies.)

Best of all, the organization she works with, the Midwest Animal Rescue Services, based in Minneapolis, will buy the dogs’ food, as well as cover vet expenses.

I did some looking around, and it looks like the story is similar throughout the country. Depending on the program, you may pay for foster dogs’ food and routine vet expenses, like shots, but each program I looked at covers any major vet expenses.

Why is that so significant? From this article in the Los Angeles Times:

Americans spent more than $10 billion on veterinary care last year, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Assn.

A single visit to a vet cost an average of $135 for a dog owner as of 2006, the last time the veterinary group took a survey of those costs. That’s up 83% from 10 years earlier.

All right, granted that’s nowhere near the $2.3 trillion we spent on people health care last year. But having been regaled with stories of vet bills that run into the thousands for many dog owners, $10 billion sounds about right.

Here are some more links to crunching the numbers on lifetime dog ownership costs. Costhelper (figures are annual). One owner’s own calculation (love the blog name, Fiscalfizzle.) And yet another owner’s own calculation that I apparently thought was good enough to be redundant. You be the judge.

Where might you go to find a foster program? I thought you’d never ask.

In the Boston area, try Underdog ResQ.

In Virginia, try the Animal Welfare Foster Program.

In Seattle, try Seattle.gov.

In Ohio, try CircleTail.

In Austin, TX, try the Austin Dog Alliance.

I also saw foster organizations dedicated to specific breeds, such as dalmations, Paris poodles, and pit bulls. I’m sure there are many more.

Good luck, and I salute all of your who take the real pet plunge.

Now I’m off to bury some ants.

Tags: foster dog programs1 Comment

Frugal Hack: Let Kids Invent Their Own Toys (Or, It’s Only Dental Floss)

June 22nd, 2009 by Sara
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Dental Floss? No: Kickball Dispensing Robot

When my kids make up their own toys and games, it is worth far more to them (and me) than the priciest, faddiest, shiniest, bestest toy ever.

Here are some recent tops:

Dental floss: Robot; alien ship.
Hand towels: Food to wear on your back if you’re an ant.
Wine stopper: Airplane; spaceship.
Q-tips: Boats, but only for sailing down the stairs.
Clean laundry: Dress-up; catch; keep-away; relay race; tug ‘o’ war.
Dirty laundry: Garbage or recycling; leaf pile.

Pro: Children are engaged, happy, creative, and funny.
Con: I relinquish any control of the agenda.
Pro: I relinquish any control of the agenda.
Con: One gigantic mess.
Pro: One gigantic mess that was not purchased specifically for play.

What are your kids’ most ingenious made-themselves playthings?

Tags: household objects · toys8 Comments

The Easiest Way to Check Your Credit Reports

June 19th, 2009 by Sara
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In dealing with this Wells Fargo letter we received, I decided to get our credit reports from all three credit bureaus, to dispute any application for credit the bank may have made for us, and to otherwise check for any errors.

I went to AnnualCreditReport.com, which all three bureaus direct you to, and which makes it look like you can easily request all three at once, online. That turned out not to be the case, as each bureau wanted different verification information, including account numbers to long-since-closed accounts.

I discovered that a faster way is to simply call this number (which is not the one listed on the site): 877-322-8228. By phone, the bureaus only want the usual verification information: name, address, SS#, date of birth, address. The reports will come by snail mail, but these are the kinds of things I want to look at on hard copy, anyway.

One more note: In a previous post, I advocated using the site MyFico, particularly if you wanted to see your FICO scores, the “gold standard” for lenders and the closest thing consumers have right now to an apples-to-apples comparison between the three credit bureaus. Experian has since quit using MyFico in favor of its own scoring system. What does this mean for us? It’s not good, as this report at credit.com makes clear:

Experian will continue to sell their PLUS and VantageScores to consumers through their various consumer websites but without the myFICO agreement, consumers will have no way of obtaining their FICO score based on Experian data.

At a time when Congress has called for more consumer protections (although not nearly enough) and more transparency, Experian is opting out.

Tags: credit reports · requestingNo Comments.

Budget, Meet Exceptions: Irregular Expenses Are Gonna Get Ya

June 17th, 2009 by Sara
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Cash Husband writes:

There comes a point in any grand plan when circumstances conspire to deliver a seemingly karmic smackdown.

June is that point for our budget. So far in June, we’ve racked up the following irregular expenses:

$588 car repair (with a note about potential future repairs totaling $2,500)
$300 window unit air conditioner
$275 pre-school summer session
$435 annual professional writer’s insurance
$150 monthly housecleaning (the previous one retired; new service is great but more expensive)

Total: $1,748

All of which neatly erases about six month’s worth of proposed savings and debt paydown.

We will keep at it, but sometimes the game feels rigged.

(Editor’s/wife’s note: We were budgeting $475/month for this category. But we forgot a few items — a big one being car repairs. And, our budget being pretty new, we didn’t have enough in the kitty to cover so many of these expenses hitting at once. We have now bumped up this category to $600/month.

Here’s another post about budgeting for irregular expenses from Think Your Way to Wealth, and a handy tool called NeoBudget dedicated to just this problem. As advocated by many, we’re looking into opening a separate savings account dedicated just to irregular expenses — otherwise known as “life.”)

Tags: Budgeting · irregular expenses3 Comments

Mafia Wars Money Warps Hubby’s Perspective of Chump Change

June 15th, 2009 by Sara
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Mafia Wars

Thanks to my wife’s insistence, I joined Facebook a few months ago. After the initial shock and awe, I stumbled into an online game called Mafia Wars. It’s essentially a role-playing game reconfigured for social networking. You create your character, then ask your friends to join your mafia. The bigger your mafia, the more fights you win. You can also improve your character by doing jobs (otherwise known as “clicking on stuff”). Jobs are sorted into nine tiers. Each one requires a different amount of energy (which regenerates continuously) and pays out a unique number of experience points and cash.

The first tier, “Street Thug,” features such attractive jobs as Mugging ($200 – $300), Beat Up Rival Gangster ($580 – $870) and Rob a Pimp ($1,200 – $1,600). To master a job, you have to perform it anywhere from 10 to 50 times, and then (and then!) there are three separate levels of mastery. So make that 30 to 150 times per job. (I have completed around 3,700 jobs to date.)

Each time you complete a job, you get a few hundred to a thousand bucks. The more money you bank, the cooler weapons, vehicles and armor you can buy. You can invest in real estate (which can then be robbed). Eventually, you need to acquire specific gear to complete certain jobs. In the first tier, it’s no big deal… a machine pistol ($5,500) and a motorcycle ($15,000).

Every time you move up one tier, the jobs pay out more. Jewelry Store Job, $16,000. Museum Break-In, $80,000. Federal Reserve Raid, $500,000. Now we’re talking! Of course, the prerequisites get more expensive too. Three Getaway Cruisers, $90,000 each. Ten Tommy Guns at $120,000 a pop. Five Chain Guns times $200,000 is a cool mil. And we’re only in the fourth tier (Enforcer)! You spend anywhere from one week to a couple weeks on each tier, if you’re into it (but not OCD into it).

By the time I got to the upper levels (Tier 6, Capo and Tier 7, Consigliere), the payouts per job are in the millions. At the final two tiers (Underboss and Boss) each job pays out in the tens of millions. Tens of millions of dollars with one click! You can pretty much buy anything you want. You can buy casinos that earn $300,000 every hour. Luxury hotels, restaurants, marinas, you name it. Need 200 Town Cars at $400,000 each? No problem. The game never ends. While you sleep, the millions keep piling up.

My current earnings are around $3 million per hour, and I’m a relative newbie. I’ve got more than $3 billion in the bank. There are “achievements” for earning your first trillion, and your first 10 trillion.

Still with me, nerds? OK, good. Here’s where it got weird for me, money-wise. When I reached the millionaire tiers, the early levels looked positively strange. $300 for a mugging? Ridiculous. $300 is nothing! Even the once tasty museum heist… now a paltry $80,000. Chicken feed! If it’s less than a million, it’s not worth my time (clicks).

And yet, as our household budget screams at us every month… $300 is not nothing. It’s a big deal.

Yes, I know the Mafia Wars dollars are play money. The game itself is free. It’s just a bunch of clicking, with nothing really at stake. But my sense of what constitutes “a lot of money” got genuinely warped in about three weeks. It makes me understand just a little bit of how it must feel to be raised with money, without any real want. It’s bizarre and obscene, and it sure feels normal in a hurry. Quite comfortable, really.

Now if you’ll excuse me, “Mafia Wars: Cuba” just got out of beta test.

Tags: Mafia Wars · money psychology2 Comments

Kids: Allowance or Chores? Yes

June 3rd, 2009 by Sara
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Train Bank and Monsters

My 5-year-old son has discovered desire’s connection to this medium called money, as well as the art of peppering discussions of commerce with persuasive key phrases:

“Mom, can I have Sir John?” (A GeoTrax character that costs around $25 at Target.)
“I think it’s in the toy insection. It’s not too expensive! I think it costs … five dollars!”
“Please?”
“Pretty please?”
“Hmmm. Mommy? How about, we can go to Target and buy Sir John. That sounds like a good idea!”

Repeat, substituting “Iron Man costume,” “all the Thomas the Train characters,” and “a sparkly motorcycle with a sidecar.”

As usual, his development is ahead of our plans to develop the perfect “teachable moment” strategy. While I was out of town for a week, my husband started paying him money for chores. He grasped the concept immediately and with great enthusiasm. “I want to earn some money!”

I, on the other hand, thought we would give him an allowance, (a weekly amount of half the child’s age is suggested) the logic being that kids then won’t refuse to do chores when the allure of earning wears off. They learn the value of money, and the things they are responsible for buying themselves.

The problem is in the communicating of any of these ideas, as anything that is not an immediate logistical concern gets lost in the fray. Our conversations tend to go like this:

“How was your day?”
“Well fine except … hey stop doing that! Sit down on your flat bottom and eat your dinner! So the repair shop called and … not now, your daddy and I need to talk to each other!”

Etc., until bath and bedtime have been executed, and we sit down next to each other. Mute, spent.

So what do you do about teaching kids about money?

On Monday, needing to sweep and mop anyway, I enlisted my son’s help, and paid him $5.

Too much? Probably. I really, really want him to be able to reach his goal before he forgets all about it. Counting the money with him in his train bank, I realized that the $5 was the lion’s share.

—

“How much did you pay him for chores?” I email my husband.

“I have not been keeping track,” he replies. “I think he helped me with various things for $2 here and there, but I’m not sure I ever handed the money over. I may have stuck a $5 in his bank. Or maybe it was just a $1. How much is it worth for him to help me put way the dishes? $0.25? $0.50? Please don’t make me sound like an inattentive dad.”

As if.

No, I get it. It’s the same as when he comes home to a riot of chairs overturned, the floor carpetbombed with styrofoam confetti and littered with the corpses of plastic monsters, me sprawled next to the kids, the merry rioters. “What happened here?” he’ll say. I shrug, and give him a look that says, “What do you want? We’re all still alive.”

–

We dumped out my son’s train bank on his bed, and I helped him count the money, stacking the dollars, grouping the quarters, sorting the rest of the coins by descending value — a lesson I could tell that is so far lost on him. How did I learn this? I wondered.

He helped me throw it all back in the bank. Total: $8.50.

“Now we can buy Sir John!”

“Well, not yet, pretty soon,” I call to his receding back, already half out of the room and on to the next thing.

Tags: allowance · chores · Kiplinger8 Comments

Why It’s So Hard to Pack Light and Spend Well

May 27th, 2009 by Sara
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Items packed, but not used, on my trip to Syracuse, New York:

Workout clothes (2 pr shorts, 2 shirts, 1 exercise bra, 4 pr socks)
2 work-related books
2 work-related files

Why do we think we’ll work and exercise according to our everyday schedules while we’re on vacation?

It may give you comfort (or an increasing sense of fatalism) to learn that it’s because our brains are just no good at handling the abstraction of time. According to Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert‘s “Stumbling on Happiness,” we can only imagine the future by comparing it to right now, and then trying to adjust our expectations of what our future selves will be doing.

Our brains put a priority on handling the present. And the more we’re wrapped up in doing the “right now” stuff, the harder it is for us to imagine the future. As an example, study participants under ideal conditions correctly predicted they would like spaghetti more then next afternoon than the next morning.

Those who had to identify musical tones at the same time, however, made the prediction based on whether they were hungry or not — they no longer adjusted their prediction according to future time.

We make the same mistakes with money. For instance, Gilbert writes:

Most of us would be willing to drive across town to save $50 on the purchase of a $100 radio but not on the purchase of a $100,000 automobile because $50 seems like a fortune when we’re buying radios, but a pittance when we’re buying cars.

Economists…will correctly tell you that your bank account contains absolute dollars and not ‘percentages off’… the dollars won’t know where they came from.

But we can think of neither time nor money in an absolute way, but only as relative to whatever we’re comparing it to.

With money, one of our most common mistakes is comparing a present price to a past price than to today’s (or future) possibilities. So, he writes, if we arrive at a concert only to discover we’ve lost our $20 ticket, most of us will walk away from the show.

But if we lost a $20 bill on the way to buying a ticket for this same concert, most people would still pony up $20 for that show. Even though it’s the same amount of money, replacing something from the past, in our minds, is paying twice for the same thing.

If you like mind twisters, you’ll like Gilbert’s book. But if you were to spend the money on it only to discover you hated it, he writes, at least by the end you’d know why.

Tags: money · relative comparisons · time1 Comment

Where We Are Now, and How We Got Here

May 27th, 2009 by Sara
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If you’ve got a little time, I have seen no better example that encapsulates, in one man’s story, the mania that preceded the housing bubble and its very painful aftermath.

His story is jaw-dropping. A financial correspondent for the NY Times Washington bureau, Edmund L. Andrews’s $120,000 salary was never going to support $4,000 in monthly alimony payments and a half-million-dollar new home for his new wife and family.

It’s also the best example I’ve seen that intellectual smarts are no match for the emotional, and often lengthy, process of dealing with changing financial circumstances. Personal finance can be painful. Like many, he couldn’t face it in time, and now he’ll probably lose his house.

No schadenfreude here. There but for the grace… At least he was smart enough to write a book about it (”Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown,” out next month). Who knows, maybe that will save them. Or at least help the comeback.

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Gamers and Those Who Stop Playing: A Story Behind the Story

May 26th, 2009 by Sara
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In this story I wrote for CreditCards.com on which cards personal finance experts use themselves, Liz Pulliam Weston, MSN Money columnist, and Ron Lieber, NY Times columnist, are both whip-smart and serious about leveraging their credit cards rewards programs.

In the course of my conversation with Lieber, I asked something about how the card issuers figure out which rewards programs will make them the most money. He said:

Despite more than a decade of watching this stuff pretty closely, I haven’t yet figured out exactly where the breaking point is for the issuer. When I see a new deal, I can’t always tell in advance whether it’s sustainable, or will attract so many gamers it won’t work.

Gamers are those who, like Pulliam Weston and Lieber himself, have the best credit scores and who aren’t in hock to the industry. In other words, those in the position to actually make money back from their cards in the form of free airline miles, hotel stays, cash back, and merchandise. (It helps if you travel a lot.)

Before they had a child, for example, Lieber and his wife were able to parlay 280,000 frequent flyer miles into first-class, round-trip tickets to Australia for their honeymoon. (I wonder which he’s most wistful for now — the freedom before child, or the days before air miles started to disappear.)

Talking to them was eye opening — I actually had to look up the difference between a “charge card,” a term I hadn’t heard since I don’t know, the ’80s? Which is of course what American Express’s best cards are, versus a plain old “credit card,” which the rest of us schmoes use to carry a life-draining balance. Only two of the six experts I talked to didn’t carry American Express.

David Bach, not in the article, also carries American Express. Suze Orman? Never found out. She never consents to be a panel of experts, said her p.r. rep (who was in fact, according to this story, probably her partner). She prefers to be the expert. Indeed.

While I was reporting this story, I was envious. Aspirational. But the more I read about the behind-the-scenes news on the new credit card legislation, the more I realize — or am reminded, as we all have been with stark clarity — what a giant shell game it all is. Nobody’s getting any rewards, or cash back, or zero interest rates for free. Your 2 percent cash back reward is somebody else’s 27 percent interest rate. Whatever the rules, it’s ultimately the credit industry’s game.

What surprised me most was talking to Chris Farrell, public radio’s Marektplace Money correspondent. Like most of the other experts, he travels frequently for business. And, as a former merchant seaman, has raved about a financial services firm open only to those in the military (USAA) that issued his Master Card. But he’s not that interested in leveraging his cards for perks.

Two years ago, he says, he switched to paying for everything mostly in cash or with his debit card. “I tried a Microsoft Money program, and it didn’t do anything for me,” he says. “I tried the envelope thing, and that worked for a little while, but what really worked for me is converting to a debit card and cash and monitoring my checking account online.”

“Psychologically it’s easier to spend more on plastic. Moving to cash works for almost everyone I talk to who is trying to cut down on spending.”

I have to think that the current trend this way, and not some slight leveling of the playing field, is the biggest threat to the credit card industry.

Tags: cash economy · Chris Farrell · creditcards.com · Liz Pulliam Weston · Ron Lieber1 Comment

Happiness is a Warm Sparkler: Where Spending Overlaps Joy

July 3rd, 2009 by Sara
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Can’t Afford a Pet? Skip the Ant Farm: Try Fostering a Dog or Cat

June 24th, 2009 by Sara
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Frugal Hack: Let Kids Invent Their Own Toys (Or, It’s Only Dental Floss)

June 22nd, 2009 by Sara
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The Easiest Way to Check Your Credit Reports

June 19th, 2009 by Sara
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Budget, Meet Exceptions: Irregular Expenses Are Gonna Get Ya

June 17th, 2009 by Sara
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Mafia Wars Money Warps Hubby’s Perspective of Chump Change

June 15th, 2009 by Sara
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Kids: Allowance or Chores? Yes

June 3rd, 2009 by Sara
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Why It’s So Hard to Pack Light and Spend Well

May 27th, 2009 by Sara
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Where We Are Now, and How We Got Here

May 27th, 2009 by Sara
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Gamers and Those Who Stop Playing: A Story Behind the Story

May 26th, 2009 by Sara
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