Consumer lifehacking

There's some irony in the fact that ever since David left his job, almost every blog post I've made here boils down to "and then we spent money on this ..." Still. In the last few months, I've been, for no exactly definable reason, somewhat fixated on my own non-tech version of lifehacking: let's change what is sub-optimal in our daily lives. If that requires throwing money at the problem, conduct cost/benefit analysis, then spend.

One item that flunked this analysis: Vacation. We'd hoped to spend two weeks this fall doing a Vegas-San Diego-Grand Canyon road trip. Barring David landing a job, that's unlikely to happen. Much as I want to go, I don't want to ring up more debt to do it.

But in the last week, I've flung substantial sums at upgrading the household. In descending order, priciest (by far) first, the major expenditures were:

-New mattress

-Kitten! I miss River. David wakes up about once a week in tears about his tux not being curled up in her usual spot at her side. The saving grace getting us through all the sadness has been having our other cat, Kea, around. Which was, the ruthless part of my mind acknowledges, part of why I went and got Kea a few years ago. If we ever lost one cat, I wanted a backup around -- not to replace, but to remind us that we can love other critters that also need homes.

So last Saturday, I wandered into Petco, handed over adoption-fee cash (and another $80 for a carrier -- I abandoned River's at the vet because I couldn't stand to come home with it empty) and wandered out with a KittyKind cat. Ashley is five months old, three pounds, mostly gray and totally psychotic. It's been so long since we had a baby kitten I'd forgotten how insane (and tiny!) they are.

-Keyboard. This was the cheapest expense - $50 - but an amazing life upgrade.

I type loudly. At work, it's not uncommon for people I'm interviewing by phone to comment on my rapid typing speed -- which means that with my phone headset at least a foot away from my keyboard, they can hear me banging on keys. At home, this has traditionally meant that as soon as I started typing something like email, David, lying several feet away on the couch, would complain about the headache I was giving him.

After months of hunting online for a "silent" keyboard, with little luck, we finally went one evening to Staples and had me bang on their keyboards. We left with a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 1000. I was very dubious changing keyboards would make a difference in my typing volume. I was wrong. The minute I set it up at home, I could hear the difference -- muffled thuds instead of jackhammer clatter.

Keyboard: $50. Domestic harmony: Priceless.

Braving the mattress sales

When I bought my first mattress almost ten years ago, the whole thing was blissfully simple. I was just out of college, broke, and trying to buy all the basics for an apartment on a budget near zero.

I called Sleepy's and asked, "What's your cheapest mattress?" "$400," said the phone salesman. "Ah," I said, honestly chagrined. "My budget maxes out at about $200." "We can do that." Me: "Er, what?" Him: "$200, we can do that. When do you want it delivered?"

In retrospect, there's every chance my $200 mattress is whatever they picked up that morning from customers disposing of old mattresses. I have no idea what brand it is. It has no features, unless you consider "coils, mostly functional," a feature. It's iridescent blue and designed to be flipped, which I gather is no longer the done thing.

But when you're 21 and coming off three years of dorm mattresses, anything feels fine, and I slept happily on this for almost a decade. Until a few months ago, when I noticed that I could distinctly feel a few of the coils through the increasingly thin fabric. I started making noises at David about replacing it at some soonish point.

Then River got sick, and had a few accidents on our bed. Nature's Miracle is indeed amazing stuff, but I'm pretty sure not even Jesus could pull off the miracle of fully de-stinking our mattress. Replacing it suddenly gained urgency.

This time around, I felt obligated to approach The Mattress Hunt a bit more methodically than I did last time. (David delegated the task to me, claiming that he could sleep on anything and fully trusted my judgment on the matter. Translation: He really hates shopping.) So I started looking up information on what mattresses cost and what newfangled breakthroughs these modern-day, no-flip mattresses contain.

And -- woah. I don't have a car, but I imagine car shopping feels similar. "Sticker price" appears to be a complete fiction. You have to choose among all sorts of competing technologies -- memory foam, latex, natural fiber or synthetic, seventyzillion coils or no coils at all -- the salespeople are full of dire warnings about the consequences of choosing wrong ("Do you want to wreck your body with discomfort for one third of every day???"), and the prices are steep. Never mind $200 -- should I be spending $500 of $5,000 on this thing?

This is where I reveal my bad-consumer side. When it comes to major purchases, I hate the decisionmaking stage. My friend Karawynn will pour over Consumer Reports and read every scrap of available research before investing in a major household object. I tend to do a bunch of basic research, then get fed up and pull the trigger in a fit of "I just want this over with." After months of thinking about buying a new PC, I got my current one by one night simply getting annoyed with my constantly crashing desktop, going on eBay, and buying the first thing with a reasonable-looking price and enough oompf to run my word processor and Web browser.

So for the mattress, I tried to get a handle on the basics. I read New York magazine's I Slept on 100 Mattresses. It scared me. Removable top layers? Too springy? Too quicksandy? How would I know? $3,395!? Eek!

Then I hit Slate's Going to the Mattress, which hit the other extreme. Stevenson's basic premise is, "It's just a mattress, they're all interchangeable, buy the cheapest." The article was written not long after I bought my $200 special; I'm not sure if mattress technology really has come a long way in the past decade or if I'm just very easily sucked in by marketing hyperbole, but the Slate piece felt like simpler advice for simpler times.

But it did have some invaluable tips, including this detail: "Mattress makers rename identical products for each different retail store. Different labels, exact same guts. Why? Obfuscation. It's hard to shop for the lowest price when you can't compare apples to apples."

Ah! That kept me from even trying to use Sleepy's "We beat anyone's price by 20%" coupon -- not much use if it's a "guarantee" impossible to collect on because no one else "happens" to stock the same models.

Since I did at least want to try before buying this time, I headed to Macy's yesterday. I'd originally planned to go to a Sleepy's store or other mattress shop, but my friend Amy, who is also mattress-hunting, insisted Macy's had a better selection and comparable prices. Macy's in Manhattan is perennially a zoo, but the one in downtown Brooklyn was pretty empty, even amid the Memorial Day sales.

After a few glances at the mattress sales tags, which featured minimal text and explanation, I ended up giving up entirely on trying to "shop" by feature -- latex? foam? coils? I had no idea which I wanted -- and just road-tested a few. And ... they mostly felt alike. I could feel some slight differences between styles, and could tell if I was on a "plush" or "firm" variation, but which did I prefer? No clue.

Thirty or so mattresses later, I was getting slightly dizzy from the constant vertical-to-horizontal variation and still had only vague leanings toward one or two mattresses. Tempurpedic I hated instantly -- it felt like it would swallow me -- and a few mattresses with "pillowtops" that could hide elephants also went into my "no way" pile. But beyond that ... I tried $5,000 mattresses and $500 mattresses, and they felt different but neither was clearly better. At least, not for me. I just couldn't tell in a few minutes of lying around how I'd feel on each after a night of sleeping.

I had two mattresses I kept gravitating toward, though whether that was a real preference or simply a burning desire to make some kind of choice, I honestly couldn't say.

One was a Sealy and one was a Simmons. I copied down all the sales specs and headed home for some attempts at comparative Googling. The Simmons was, shockingly, Googleable: "Simmons Beautyrest NxG 250" turned up in a few outlets, generally for a few hundred less than it was priced at Macy's. On the other hand -- even with sales, discounts, rebates and whatever else crammed in, it was still over $2,000. Which seemed excessive.

The other mattress I was eying was a Sealy "Loring Park" Euro Pillowtop Firm. The "Loring Park" part was clearly the retailer-specific branding mentioned in Slate. A pretty stupid branding, at that. "Loring Park"? Other variations on this model appear to be the "Candle Glow," "Hidden Meadow," and "Pecan Ridge." Pecan Ridge? Are they naming these things with Mad Libs?

The "Loring Park"'s most salient feature was its price tag: Nominally $1,099, but on "Memorial Day sale" for $999 plus an extra 10% off. (I use the scare quotes because I imagine the mattresses are always on some sort of "special" sale.) Since I only wanted a mattress, no box spring (we're upgrading the mattress, but our bed remains the $150 Ikea platform bought back in the original-apartment-furnishing whirlwind), I knew it would be a bit cheaper.

Even though I didn't buy a set, Macy's waived the delivery charge, and I got an additional 10% off by opening a Macy's card account. So, final tally, with taxes, no-boxspring, sales, etc all factored in: $700.

Which seems not too terrible for my first plunge into the horrors of mattress shopping. Now to find out how we like sleeping on this thing ...

The cost of a broken heart: $1,071.50

It's a bit strange to say "three years ago I wrote," but it turns I've had the blog that long. Time goes fast. Life goes faster.

The day I moved into my first post-college apartment, I went to the animal shelter to get my first post-college cat. Ever since I was a kid, I've been a cat nut -- I spent about five years pestering my parents before they cracked and, right around my 11th birthday, let me get a cat. My dad and I went to the shelter and returned with Max, who slept on my bed every night until I headed off to college. Max stayed in Maryland when I moved to New York, but there was little question that as soon as I left the dorms and had pet-friendly accommodations, I'd be procuring a cat.

As soon as I got that apartment, I went and adopted River, who came home with me in October 1999, when she was about three months old. David moved in about a month later, and even though I had her first, River instantly decided she was his girl -- I often referred to myself as her Emergency Backup Human.

Three years ago I wrote about the financial cost of pets, including the inevitable whopping vet bills.

Monday, we noticed River was sniffling a bit, and she had an accident on our bed. I thought she had a bladder infection and maybe a cold. I called and made a vet appointment for Tuesday morning.

River had a panic attack on the way to the vet, and started panting in a way we'd never seen before. The vet seemed more worried about her panting than any of her other symptoms, which initially struck me as strange. Three hours and two X-rays later, the vet was proved right: What I'd thought was a cold was a massive tumor filling River's chest and pushing on all of her organs. By the end of the day, she couldn't breathe well without an oxygen tent.

Wednesday we found out it was lymphoma, inoperable and incurable. Only 48 hours after we realized our cat was sick, we had to say goodbye to our girl.

It cost just over $1,000 in vet medical bills to lose River. We would have paid any multiple of that to save her. As one of my friends said about two years ago on the night he lost his own cat -- "It's the price you pay. They're guaranteed to break your heart at some point."

David and I had River as long as we'd been together. We knew she'd be gone someday, but she was only nine, and we didn't expect it so soon. It's kind of a new milestone for us. Our family, without River.

Pets. One of the most expensive, devastating --and rewarding -- investments you can make. We've spent the last few days giving our younger cat a massive overdose of snuggling.

Shining light on financial monsters

The thing about this recession is that I know almost no one unaffected. All around me, I've got friends who have been laid off, had their salaries cut, seen their hours pared back, or finished grad school just in time to hit an epically bad job market. My own household is down one job, with an income that's half of what we had a year ago.

My friend Rose recently put up a blog post I found fascinating: Talk about how financially screwed you are. I think it's great, because hearing so many stories helps dispel the thing that perpetuates financial problems. Shame.

When the numbers are awful, you don't want to look at them. After college, when I had a monthly income that fell a few hundred dollars short of what I'd need to pay rent, student loans, living expenses and the bare minimum on a credit card debt that felt insurmountable, I threw bills out unopened. Sure, paying things months late trashed my credit score and racked up late fees and yet more interest charges, but the whole thing felt so hopelessly out of control I psychologically couldn't cope.

Two things finally broke that cycle: 1) David, who had just moved in with me, said that he couldn't stand that approach, and if I couldn't deal with taming my finances, he'd do it for me. He called my credit card companies and dealt with all the logistics of figuring out the size of the problem. 2) David got a job just a month after arriving in the U.S., and suddenly our household income doubled. Step 1 was critical in getting a handle on the problem, but there was no way we could possibly have addressed the financial shortfall without more money.

With the economy at a standstill, most of us can't do anything right now on Step 2, Increase Household Income. But Step 1 is do-able. The first step toward getting rid of the monster lurking under the bed is looking at it. Without letting it make you feel ashamed or afraid or like a bad, horrible person for having a lurking monster -- because hey, recession? Right now, lurking financial monsters are fashionable! Everyone is having money problems! You have company!

(Financial Monsters are spikey and they drool. I also strongly suspect they are purple. The illustrative Financial Monster pictured above is borrowed with permission from Mac McRae's extremely awesome monster gallery.)

This isn't something you have to do alone. If you have a stack of credit card, student loan or medical bills that you aren't paying, or that you don't even know how much you owe on, or the rates are stratospheric but you can't stand the thought of calling to negotiate -- enlist a close friend. Other people's stacks of intimidating bureaucracy are so much less daunting than your own. Have a friend over -- someone with a penchant for organization is perfect -- pour a glass of wine, and dive in. Once you know the shape of the problem, it generally stops feeling like a scary vortex of failure and shame, and starts becoming manageable.

On that note, I'm buckling down tonight to finally sort out our chaotic mess of retirement accounts -- the goal is to turn our two abandoned 401(k)s into IRAs. And over at Rose's, there's a followup post about what people are doing to tackle their financial demons.

And if you're doing financial debugging, here's two past posts that may prove useful:

-Debt statute of limitations - what they are and how to use them, plus a debunking of the apparent myth that contacting a debt collector restarts the clock

-The simplest good investment strategy for your 401(k) (aka "why management fees matter")

Value my social graph

When I hit Google tonight to search for something or other, the top "Google Promotion" link was something I'd never seen before: Google Profiles.

Naturally, I Googled it to see what it was. Some very quick-and-dirty research suggests it's not new -- I very quickly landed this reference from 2007. I clicked the Google Profiles link out of curiosity but probably wouldn't have given it a further thought, except for this line of text in the standard "give us your stats" solicitation:

"A little personality: Something I can't find using Google."

Sure, I can tell you something you can't easily Google using my relatively public legal name and Google.com. I play the cello extremely badly. (Though really dedicated Googlestalkers could even figure that out.) I have a totally excellent recipe for something resembling pan bagnat, which I can't spell without consulting a dictionary or other reference text, and which I made for dinner tonight but didn't start making till about 9pm, kicking off an extended debate with the spouse about what time "dinner" should traditionally occur at.

But I'm not going to tell Google Profiles any of that. Because I'm currently in the mood to be fairly guarded about who by and how my personal information gets monetized.

This is on my mind lately because I'm very, very suspicious of Facebook, which I cracked and joined last-yearish and check more often than I like (maybe twice a week) because it's where a lot of my friends have migrated for their social networking needs. I set up my own first-and-primary social networking profile in 2002, on a site that I still check daily but am grudgingly accepting is becoming passe. (Hint: It's the one popular with teenagers and geeks, and now owned by "a Russian media company.") My original site has the ethos, community and interface that most appeals to me, but it's fast losing its original core crowd -- at least among my demographic -- to Dreamwidth, and I can see it going to way of my beloved Palm pilot: eventually, I will be one of the only ones left clinging to the neglected ruins of this once-trailblazing technology.

Which leaves the nextgen upstarts like Facebook and Twitter, with the slick interfaces (ok, that one, not so much for Twitter) and nakedly commercial ambitions. I don't like Facebook. Never have, doubt I ever will. I don't like it because it feels like all Facebook really cares about is using widgets and memes to entice me to cough up details of my social interconnections, to help it fill out its Social Graph Theory of Everything so it can sell that info to whoever will give it a zillion-dollar valuation or IPO.

I don't think anyone has quite figured out the business model just yet, but someday, the social graph is going to be an incredibly valuable piece of marketable data. To lots of people, I suspect. I, personally, might not be that valuable a marketing target. But if you can figure out who I talk to, what I care about, what I'm doing right this minute, where I am, what I'm reading, or what I care about enough to write about, and do that for millions of people -- you have a very saleable data set. Right now, Facebook is the leading application. Everyone, especially Google, would love to toss out APIs and become the infrastructure.

And I don't wanna play. If I'm going to hand over all the details that create a map of me, that some corporate entity will aggregate and sell for a billion dollars at some point, I don't want to do it because someone said "throw a sheep!!! and shsssh we'll infer from that who you know well enough throw a sheep at!"

Some years ago, I heard estimates kicked around about the value of all the physical components in the human body. The estimates appear to range wildly, from $4.50 to $45 million. I wonder how long it'll be till we know precisely the value of a human mind, and all the monetizable social connections it sustains.

My own personal M&A frenzy

Continuing my track record as an identity theft lightening rod, I got yet another of the "we've noticed some unusual charges on your account ..." calls this weekend. But this time, I was wholly innocent; my habit of using skanky ATMs bears no blame. The charges hit a card I haven't used for years. Seriously, how easy are these algorithms to crack?

I remain impressed that the credit-card companies are as good as they are at sussing out what transactions are fraudulent. In this case, I guess it wasn't so tricky -- a card unused for years is suddenly broken out for a wild shopping bonanza -- but full credit to Chase for catching this and calling me just hours after it started.

However, it did raise an interesting issue: The rep asked if I preferred to have another card issued or cancel the account. In past years, I don't recall that being a choice; the companies would do almost anything to keep you an active customer. Seems this account of mine (credit limit, $6,000ish) was a potential credit liability Chase didn't mind killing off.

Here's what made me decide to cancel the account: I didn't know at first which Chase account they company was calling about.

The piece of plastic in my wallet that I use most often is my Amex, my primary credit card. Beyond that, I have my bank-account debit card, a MasterCard. I also have (had) two backup cards, both Visas, which only ever get used if a place doesn't take Amex.

My oldest Visa -- the one that got hacked this weekend -- began life years ago as a Providian card. Then WaMu bought Providian, and suddenly I had a WaMu card. Around that time, I picked up a Chase Visa card, as a backup. My primary bank was Netbank, so my financial life was nicely diversified. Plastic tally: 1 Amex credit card, 1 Netbank debit card, 1 WaMu credit card, 1 Chase credit card.

Then Netbank met its unfortunate end, I went bank shopping, and I landed at WaMu. Plastic tally: 1 Amex credit card, 1 WaMu debit card, 1 WaMu credit card, 1 Chase credit card.

Then, of course, WaMu also went the firey-death-in-flames route, and Chase snapped up their charred remains. My plastic tally: 1 Amex credit card, 1 Chase debit card, 2 Chase credit cards.

Which is kind of absurd. I don't need both my backup credit cards to be with the same bank. So, despite mild pangs of regret about the potential FICO effects of reducing my total available credit and closing one of my older credit lines, I waved adios to the ProvidianChaseWaMu card.

But I'm left wondering -- with all the financial melting down, will we have more than one American bank left at the end? My forecast for next year: My plastic tally will all be Wells JPMorgan Sachs credit cards.

The insidious disenfranchisement of the local pharmacy

I've lately discovered the joy of batching paperwork. Every Friday afternoon at work, I blast through incoming freelance bills and payment complications; doing it once, at a scheduled time, keeps me saner and makes it go faster than trying to field every query right as it comes in.

Similarly, I don't like dealing with bills and bureaucracy as they comes in. I'd rather stack it up and deal with a bunch of related paperwork at once. Tonight, I finally broke down and attempted to sort out accumulated medical paperwork.

First cranky sidenote: I have at least three (prescription, physical doctors, head doctors) and probably five (add vision and dental) separate medical providers, for one (1) company health care plan. Now, this company health care plan is by far the best I've ever been on and I'm wildly grateful to have coverage at all, so I'm not complaining strenuously, but it took me several rounds of Login Routlette to land on the right combination of website and user name to pull up the first bill I wanted to sort out.

Once I finally found the bill, the first bit was easy if a bit pricey for those of us suddenly on a fixed budget: an $84.11 ambulance bill. "Er?" I inquired of spouse.

In January, he fell on an icy sidewalk and whacked his head, hard enough to spook those nearby. "Hi from the ER!" is not the text message you really want to get right after you walk in the door at work. Happily, all was well; the ER docs took a look and pronounced him probably fine, I came home to keep an eye on him for the day, and three months later, all is good. But it turns out he got to the ER via a local ambulance, which happened to pass by moments after he fell, and which those nearby flagged down. (This is not quite as random as it sounds, since we're literally a 13-block, 1/2 mile ride straight up one street from the local hospital, and there always seem to be ambulances around this particular intersection.)

Want a case study in the unfair tilt insurance gives to health-care access? The rack rate for this 13-block ambulance trip was apparently $908.25. Our plan reimbursed the hospital for $694.82 of the cost, and negotiated a $136.23 discount. (So if you were uninsured, you'd pay $136.23 more for the identical service. No, this does not strike me as a sane way to run a health care system.) Our remaining copay was $77.20. Writing an unexpected check does not fill me with joy, but I'd much rather pay $77 and have a spouse who came through a potentially ghastly head injury with no problems than not pay it and have Later Complications, so I happily filled out the paperwork and moved on to the next hurdle.

Our medical plan uses Medco to fill prescriptions. Last year, Medco barraged us with info about how much we'd save filling prescriptions online instead of at retail. We have one prescription that need to be filled every month, at $40 per pop. Medco wanted us to know that if we instead ordered it online, we'd instead pay $60 for a 90-day supply, or $20 a month.

The tricky part: This prescription is for more than the (legally? medically? I've never been wholly clear) recommended dose. This is the dose that works, and my cursory troll of Google when this prescription got ramped up turned up ample evidence that this drug is widely prescribed in higher-than-guidelined doses, but every time this prescription goes to a new pharmacist, they refuse to fill it without calling the doctor to confirm that this is the intended and prescribed dose. Which can get be slightly frustrating when you're in a hurry, but is fine; pharmacists are supposed to be a check-and-balance against prescribing doctors.

So, Medco kept sending little alerts that we could save money filling this prescription by mail, but we chose to keep filling it at our local pharmacy. The pharmacist knows the prescribing doctor, the store is very conveniently located, and it's worth the extra $20 a month to us to fill it in person.

Until this December, when Medco's little "helpful alerts" turned into "urgent warnings": The company was switching from carrots to sticks. In 2009, if we chose to take a covered drug (and this one counts) to a retail pharmacy instead of using their mail-order system, they'd radically cut their subsidy. A drug that used to cost us $40 a month would now cost vastly more -- banging around on their online system, the closest thing I can get to a "how much?" answer is either $68/month or $300/month. Nifty.

So, Medco is essentially forcing us to switch to online ordering -- but for a drug quantity that their automated order systems will almost certainly reject, since I don't think they can legally dispense a full 90-day supply of what is actually the prescribed 90-day supply, and at the cost of cutting out our local pharmacist who actually knows this case and does a good job keeping tabs on it.

Guess what I'll be spending lunch break tomorrow on the phone with Medco wrangling about? Can we please replace this mess with a functional health-care system, stat?

Being frugal is expensive

In preparation for David's last day of paid employment at the end of last month, we took stock and battened down the financial hatches. This somehow cost us about $1,600.

(Once again, we're all shocked that the two of us haven't managed to save an apartment downpayment yet, right?)

It started with us doing an overview of the disorganized house. "If we're going to be staying in more, we should neaten this place up," I said.

That required finding ways to relocate some of our Vast Debris Stacks collections onto shelves. I'd long thought we were at max shelf/wall space capacity, but David wrangled another two feet or so out of the wall closest to the door. So off we went to Gothic Cabinet Craft to procure a shelf to fill the exciting wall vacuum. $189 later and one very creative deployment of a rolling laundry cart later, we had a new shelf dragged home and three less piles of DVDs and CDs.

Then we decided that since we're going to be cooking more, we should do a full stockup run at the Red Hook Fairway. $211 got us enough staples to keep your average militia fed for a few seasons. (And 2 squab. "Because it's good for us to experiment a bit when we find unusual stuff at the store," I insisted. Verdict on experiment? I am fine with regarding squab as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)

I thought we were financially clear. Then Elder Cat started having Intestinal Distress. All over our bed. Three times in one week. "Well, it's been a while since cat checkups, and we should get all this stuff sorted while we're wrapping up bills ..." I thought. $348 later, Elder Cat was sent home with antibiotics, which turned out to be unnecessary because the prospect of continued medical intervention immediately cured kitty of all ills.

And finally, a vicious round of fights with the bathroom scale convinced me that I am tragically not immune to the metabolic effects of aging, and can no longer remain in denial about this "exercise" thing I hear rumours about. However, past attempts at physical fitness have taught me that unless it's tennis, my natural slothful instincts will overrule all attempts at physical activity for its own boring, painful sake. The only way I was going to conquer my own self-sabotage was bribery. IE: Join the fancy gym right in the basement of my office and be able to exercise without even leaving the building. (Seriously, two blocks away and I wouldn't go. I know my limits, and in combination with my vast powers of procrastination, they are formidable.)

Like many companies, mine offers nice subsidies for using the nearby gym. However, thanks to bureaucratic wrinkles that keep my employment situation only slightly less complex than 2010 federal budget negotiations, the office I actually work out of each day isn't considered my "home" office -- that's 10 blocks away. So to use my basement gym, I have to pony up for a special all-access pass, which incurred a one-time payment of OhDearGod$.

After trying for two weeks to bargain, then moving on to the acceptance phase and grudgingly deciding to cough up the gym-access key money, I signed up. (Beginner Yoga left me almost immobilized for four days. Clearly, this fitness thing will be a gradual endeavor.)

Add in a handful of other odds-and-ends, and getting set up to run on a "scaled down" budget cost us almost as much as a month's rent. But, er, now, we're done with the expenses, I swear ...

And I've warned the other cat that if he starts coughing or showing signs of needing a pricey vet trip, he's being auctioned off on eBay.

What 'refundable tax credit' means

One provision in today's stimulus bill that's attracting lots of attention is the $8,000 refundable tax credit for first-time homebuyers who purchase in 2009. But what does "refundable" actually mean? The confusion runs deep. Since most of us are doing our taxes right about now, it seems like a good time for a rundown on the often-slippery distinction between credits and deductions.

Here, in ascending order of usefulness, are the various ways the IRS lets you adjust your tax bill:

Tax deduction: Most items you "write off" on your taxes are deductions, which reduce the amount of your income that the IRS considers taxable. The actual cash you save depends on what tax bracket you fall into. A single person with $40,000 in income would, for 2008, fall into the 25% tax bracket and owe $4,981 in federal taxes for the year (saith Bankrate's tax calculator). But add a $1,000 deduction, and the tax drops to $4,731 -- $250, or 25% of the $1,000 that's been deducted.

Most deductions require you to itemize your return -- and about two-thirds of American tax filers don't itemize. Itemizing is only worth it if your deductions will exceed the standard deduction. Unless you have a mortgage, extremely high medical bills, or other major expenses, the standard deduction is a better deal.

I didn't expect to itemize my return until we eventually had a mortgage, but I was surprised two years ago when my tax software spat out an itemized return. One of the things you can deduct is state and local taxes, and in NYC, those get whomping -- they finally overwhelmed the standard deduction David and I would otherwise take. If you do venture into Itemizationland, it pays off to start tracking deductible things like charitable contributions and unreimbursed business expenses.

Adjustments to income: A handful of deductions are available even to those who don't itemize their returns -- which is a great deal, especially for students, at whom many of these deductions are aimed. Two common ones: You can deduct tuition expenses and student loan interest (subject to income caps).

Often called "above the line" deductions, these adjustments work out mathematically just like itemized deductions. For a single filer with income of $40,000, a $1,000 income adjustment will lead to a $250 savings.

Nonrefundable tax credits: A tax credit is better than a deduction. Instead of adjusting your income, a credit adjusts your actual tax bill, dollar-for-dollar. Mostly aimed at students and low-income filers, credits are powerful weapons that can take your tax liability all the way down to $0.

One popular tax credit is the Lifetime Learning Credit, which lets you deduct 20% of your educational expenses. If you had income of $40,000, a $4,981 tax bill, and a $1,000 Lifetime Learning Credit (for $5,000 in eligible expenses), you'd get to shave $1,000 straight off your tax bill, cutting it to $3,981.

Nonrefundable credits are only useful to those who make enough to owe tax. If you had income of just $4,000 instead of $40,000, you'd have earned less than the standard deduction and you'd owe no tax. If you also had tuition expenses, you wouldn't get any extra tax benefit -- you already owe nothing, so there's no tax bill for you to deduct them from.


Refundable tax credits: If credits are "powerful" weapons, refundable credits are nukes. These rare beasties can take your tax bill below $0 -- instead of you owing the IRS, Uncle Sam owes you.

One of the most common refundable tax credits is the Earned Income Credit, which works to boost income for low-wage workers by offering tax breaks. The credit will reduce your tax bill, but if it reduces it past $0, you still get the cash.

That's why the $8,000 homebuyer credit in the economic recovery act will have such a profound effect on the tax bills of those who qualify. That single person with $40,000 in income and a $4,981 tax bill -- add in an $8,000 homebuyer credit and their tax bill drops to -$3,019, meaning there's a nice check on the way. If, like most of us, you've already made tax payments through payroll withholding or other methods, you'll get what you're owed on the credit plus a full refund of what you've already paid.

The Finance Buff has a good explanation of how refundable-versus-nonrefundable credits work, and a list of various credits and which category they fall into.

Now, having written all that up, I'll go stare forlornly at my 2009 tax filing, which has none of those nice credits and deductions I got to play with in past years. Still, since it netted me a nice refund check that arrived a few days ago, I can't whinge too much.

Phantom vesting strikes again

I left my old job in December 2007. The employer had a five-year vesting schedule for its 401(k) match, and since I'd worked at the job for just under two years, I assumed I'd be walking away from the unvested 80% of my match. Annoying, but them be the rules, and it was hardly incentive enough to turn down a new job I really wanted.

I didn't get around to organizing a rollover right away, though, and when I checked my 401(k) a few months later, I found that it was 40% vested. Even though I'd left the company, the extra 20% that would have vested on my two-year anniversary in February vested right on schedule.

One of my friends had previously mentioned that when she left IBM, her 401(k) kept vesting years later. Which made me wonder if the same thing was going to happen here. I mean, clearly, it shouldn't -- I'd even confirmed with HR before I left: I go, my vesting stops, right? Of course, said the HR rep.

And yet. This month would have marked my third full year with the company, if I'd stayed. And lo, when I logged on to check my 401(k) this morning, it's now 60% vested.

If this was just me, I'd assume something had gone seriously screwy. But since this is now the second time I've heard of this happening, I'm wondering how widespread it is. Are companies just routinely forgetting to tell their 401(k) vendors about employee terminations?

On a more practical note: I left the 401(k) alone this year as an experiment, to see if this would happen. If I wanted to absolutely maximize my returns, I guess I should leave it alone another two years and see if I can get the other 40% to vest. But since what remains unvested is now less than $1k, and there's still the chance my improperly-vested portion gets yanked back when I eventually do the rollover (I assume those forms will ask me what date I left), I'd rather go ahead and consolidate my accounts now.

Next step: Figure out if I should simply roll this over to my current 401(k) or if there's advantages to doing an IRA.

The case of the disappearing In NYC points

When Amex discontinued my beloved In NYC card (*insert sniffling noises here*), all the mail they sent about the switchover to their Blue card emphasized that there would be minimal disruption. Similar terms, same card number, and the seamless transfer of my balance and my accumulated rewards points.

Oops. In practise, not so much.

I procrastinated as long as I could, but at the start of January I finally activated my Blue card and retired my old card. When I got the first statement, though, I noticed something a bit odd. My rewards points balance was 0. It should have been somewhere north of 30,000, since I'd had a whole bunch of unused points lingering.

At first, I figured it was probably a transfer glitch that would work itself out. But when weeks passed with no sign of my points reappearing, I finally bit the bullet and called American Express. The customer service rep had no idea what was up, but opened a dispute.

That was on Jan. 19. On Jan. 31, I got an email from Amex saying the dispute was being investigated: "You should expect to hear from us further once this investigation has been resolved. We try to resolve investigations in less than one month, but complex cases may require additional time."

The email also came with a link to Amex's inquiry center, where I can "check the status of your inquiry and learn more about our billing disputes process at any time." Oddly, when I log on, it shows no active inquiries on my account, and no closed ones within the past 12 months.

I casually mentioned my disappearing points to another friend who had an In NYC card -- and she said hers had gone poof, too. Has this happened to anyone else? I assumed this was a glitch unique to me, but if all the In NYC points have vanished, that's worth a phone call to Amex's PR department for comment on when they'll be resolving this ...

Introducing Shopping Pr0n

One day last spring, work asked if I'd be willing to do a TV interview to promote a big project publishing that week. "Sure," I said. I was (briefly) a theatre major in college, and I'd done TV stuff before on occasion; public speaking holds no fear for me.

What did strike fear into my heart? Clothes. Specifically: Television clothes. My office is relatively relaxed, and I'd long gotten along with nothing more formal than business casual, even for job interviews. I didn't own a suit. Even if I had owned a suit, TV clothes are a whole other ballgame -- certain colors don't work, patterns are problematic ...

With about 48 hours to pull something together, there was only one obvious course of action: Ping Fashionista Friend to say HELP. Fashionista Friend has, aside from her generous nature with advice, two rare and incredibly useful skills: she's good at explaining, in basic terms, what works and why - and she's been through a range of about 10 dress sizes in her life. Unlike most fashion mavens, Fashionista Friend can make suitable recommendations for anyone size 2 to 20. (Her range probably extends beyond even that, but allow me my alliteration.) Also, when you ask for fashion advice, her first question is "give me your measurements," and her second is "what's your budget?" Because unlike most glossy fashion mags, she can adapt to the idea of dropping less than $1k per outfit.

Consulted by IM, Fashionista Friend was full of invaluable recommendations - pants suit, hitting "at or just below the hip," splash of colour underneath, "conservative, but not black," and absolutely no matter what, three buttons not two. Her tips were so specific that I managed to find a workable outfit in less than an hour of shopping. (You can judge the results for yourself ...)

So I was thrilled a few weeks back to hear that Fashionista Friend was launching a blog. Shopping Pr0n covers all sorts of topics, from plus-size fashion to bargain buys to straight-up luxury splurges.

Right now, I imagine most of us are cutting our clothing budgets to the bone. My personal weakness is handbags, and I'm on a purchasing moratorium. But in this kind of climate, I find reading sites like Shopping Pr0n even more valuable, because it helps me make smarter choices with the money I do spend. Now that we're heading into the crunch days of one paycheck - David's job ends at the end of February - I'm trying to make sure that we only spend on things that are exactly what we need. Shopping Pr0n is fun for window shopping, but I'm also relying on it to help me get my work wardrobe into shape.

In which I help bridge New York's budget shortfall

This is one of the simplest tax years I've had in ages: one W-2 for me, one W-2 for David, some charity deductions (we don't have a mortgage, but we pay so much in state & local taxes that we do an itemized return anyway), and that's it. I had a 1098-E form for my student loan interest, but didn't get to deduct it this time around -- I seem to have capped out on that.

The 1098-E was a bit eye-opening. It reported that I've paid $1,407 in interest on my student loans this year. Considering that I paid about $2,600 total toward my loans this year, that sounded like a hell of a lot of interest. And my loans are at reasonable rates! I have two, one consolidated at 4.7% and one fixed about a point higher. So how on earth did I end up spending more than half my payments on interest when my rates are single digits?

... and then, with the help of my trusty 12C, I finally got it. What is, or should be, blazingly apparent to anyone who pays a mortgage. A single-digit percentage of a Giant!Sum is still a Large!Sum, and interest isn't a proportion of your payments. Whoever is loaning you the cash is making sure to get their interest payments first, in full and up front, each year on the total debt. The only way to make progress paying down the principal is to a) pay extra specifically toward it each month, or b) get the total due down to a small enough figure that your monthly payments equate to a significant chunk of it.

When I finally did that depressing math, I realized it'll be years before I make any significant headway paying down my student loan debts, unless I allocate extra cash to paying them down each month. (I've always rounded up just to make the budgeting simple and paid $20 or so extra each month, specifically marked on the online payment form as "allocate toward principal, not toward next month's payment," but clearly, that $20 isn't going very far.) Kids: When your parents gripe about ever-rising tuition costs, listen to them. I did my final year of undergraduate college credits 10 years after I did the first three -- and I had to borrow twice as much to cover that final year as I had left on my loans for all of the first three. Ow.

Still, since my loan rates are reasonable, I think saving for an apartment downpayment trumps paying down extra loan debt. So, it lives on with me, for about 8.5 more years.

Also new this year: We owed New York money. Back in college (the first time, lo that decade-plus ago), I remember ending up owing New York money every year. It wasn't much, usually $50 or so, but it was still irritating. I always took 0 allowances; how did I end up owing? New York just seems rigged like that. Thinking back on recent years, I have a vague recollection that my tuition and loan debts were all that got us from the owing-money territory and into refundland.

Fortunately, the Feds owe us way more than we owe New York (that whole 0-allowances thing), so doing taxes was still a happy experience overall. Still, I grumped a bit* when I read the quote this morning in Reuters from New York budget spokesman Jeffrey Gordon that, unlike California, New York "is not 'running on fumes' and revenues are coming in every day."

As I IM'd a friend: "Yes, revenues are coming in every day, and today, $151 of them came from me!"

*(I am generally ok with paying taxes in exchange for the happy civic things my tax cash buys. David is even more so. None of his tax-and-spend liberal sentiments were harmed in the making of this post.)

The Chase!Borg begins

So, Chase bought out my ex-bank, WaMu, in September. Ever since, I've been waiting to see what will happen, integration-wise.

The first shot over the bow was a friendly one. Chase tweaked the ATM networks so that WaMu cardholders can use Chase ATMs without fees and vice versa. The networks weren't really integrated -- I can't deposit checks to my WaMu account at a Chase ATM -- but still, more no-fee ATMs? Works for me.

But Chase hasn't been very forthcoming with details on whether account terms will eventually change for WaMu cardholders. When I last went bank shopping, I actively chose not to go with Chase -- they charge back-end fees for using outside ATMs, a practise I loathe. Will that start happening as Chase integrates WaMu? No clue. I can't find anything in their disclosures that gets into it. A new notice on the WaMu.com frontpage notes that the name will change soon but "free checking will remain free." That's not a tremendously reassuring notice, since "free" in Bankese has a whole lot of wiggle room.

But the integration has started in another wing of the banking empire. For about four years I've had a Providan Visa card. Some years back, WaMu bought Providian. I paid off the balance on my Providian card long ago, and now only use it as my backup at places that don't take Amex and which don't take my debit Mastercard. But keeping the Providian card alive (and paying it off each month if I run a balance) gave me access to a neat perk: free TransUnion FICO scores each month. It's not a complete credit-history picture, but it's a helpful snapshot.

As of March 9, WaMu/Providian credit cards will become Chase cards. And Chase cards will not be offering the free FICO score fun. The notice about this on WaMu's site says Chase is "evaluating ways" to offer the FICO service, but I'm not holding my breath.

The other downside of this transition: I already have a Chase card. I only have three credit cards, and the Chase is my second backup -- if anything goes awry with the Providian and I really, really need a card, I have the Chase. I don't know how Chase is planning to handle this -- do I end up with two Chase accounts?

Chase, as noted before, does not thrill me. Their sales tactics lean on the pushy side. So the end result of this may be me retiring my backup cards and only using my Amex or my debit.

A sad farewell

My new Amex Blue arrived in the mail last month, but I ignored it and kept using my beloved In NYC Amex. Finally, though, I accepted that it can't be put off any longer. The Blue must be activated. So, after one final "hello to 2009" Amex swipe at my corner deli this morning, I grudgingly got online and activated my Blue.

Sigh. The membership rewards choices leave me underwhelmed -- no more Oasis gift certificates, no more fully paid Blue Water Grill brunches ... instead, it looks like the best I can do is cash in for gift certificates to Bananna Republic. Maybe we can use some of it for Amex's travel site. We shall see.

Given our new imminent-one-income-Recessionomics, I'm mostly trying to figure out how to use the points to pay for things we'd otherwise be spending cash on. Bananna Republic gift certificates might work for that ... but I'm still trying to figure out if there's any way to use points for the HP Mini 1000 I'm coveting to replace my unusably ancient laptop ...

Dusting off blog, tapping microphone ...

Hi all. Anyone still here?

Kind of funny that a financial crisis has left me with less to say here on my personal-finance blog ... because I spent so many hours at work dealing with facets of it that I forget to step back and think about its personal-finance ramifications. (Its smallbiz ramifications, I got that covered ... )

Since I'm a writer by trade, which is one step above theatre on the Professional Instability ladder, it took about three nanoseconds after the crisis hit in September for me to start seeing its ripple effects play out in my circle of friends. Literally about half have been laid off -- and one got fired for an innocuous online comment. It's nasty out there, and since this all started, my own personal mantra has been, "Wow. It's amazing we're still both drawing good paychecks ..."

Yes, the gods do laugh and smite when you say or think things along those lines. Just as unemployment rocketed toward record numbers last week, my spouse quit his job. Welcome to life on one paycheck. (... in a gradual sense. He's not actually stopping work till the end of February.)

Life On One Paycheck has always been one of my personal nightmares, right up there with nasty diseases, devastating natural disasters and the Cowboys winning the Superbowl. So, I was not wholly thrilled with this turn of events.

On the flip side, I understand and support his reasons for quitting -- and I almost put him in the same situation about two years ago, when an issue at work arose that had me close to walking out on the spot. I remember calling him up at his office and saying, "I hate to do this, but if this doesn't get resolved I need to leave. Like, today." He was most excellent about assuring me that if I did need to go, we'd be fine (fortunately, my office resolved the issue and I got to stay employed). So, I am drawing deep breaths, running the numbers, and figuring out how to make things work on one paycheck while David starts looking for a new gig.

We're actually really lucky, as these things go. We can afford, on just my salary, to cover our rent and monthly bills, and still have a bit of wiggle room. We're not in the situation we would have been in 10 years ago of "eek! economic Armageddon! sell plasma!"

.... which makes us way luckier than most. If we're smart, this'll be a useful test. If we can get by on one paycheck, why the hell aren't we? Do I or do I not want to afford an apartment downpayment before, say, retirement?

We have two months to get ready before the paychecks actually stop coming. I suspect planning for this will motivate me to write more.

Global economies always have silver linings

Monday: Dead cat bounce or the start of the recovery? As the cliche goes, Only Time Will Tell, but today doesn't make things look good.

Meanwhile, as I catch up on news and wrap my head around the Dow's latest yo-yo, David points out that the Aussie dollar is currently trading at 67c on the U.S. dollar. The amazing part of that: In June, it was at 95 cents. When I first visited David in Melbourne, in summer '99, the Aussie dollar was worth about 66 cents on the U.S. dollar -- and having the Aussie dollar worth so much less than the U.S. one made visiting him much easier.

Now, it's down 30% from where it was in June. That translates to a cost drop of as much as $1k for us for a standard two-week trip, depending on what happens with air fares. If this keeps up, maybe we can go visit his family next year after all!

Apocalypse now

I finally steeled myself up and did it. I logged on and checked my 401(k).

It's down about 30% since I last checked in early September, which translates to a five-figure loss. The astonishing thing is that a whole chunk of that came this week. I knew in my brain that the markets got totally crushed last week - the Dow lost 18%, its biggest decline ever on both a points and percentage basis. But actually seeing more than $10,000 in paper wealth wiped out from my own accounts drives it home in a very visceral way.

It reminded me of two things.

First: I think the only thing for me to do is clench my teeth and stay the course. I haven't moved any money around. I'm not trying to time the markets. I have at bare minimum 30 years to go before I'm going to "retire" (which is kind of astonishing; I've only been in existence for 30 years. The entire span of my life is quite a long stretch still to come), and even if it takes a decade or two for the market to make up these losses -- which it very well might -- all the economic theories still say I come out ahead.

Two: 401(k)s only work as retirement plans if you manage the double trick of a) shaking off losses when you're young and investing aggressively, and b) switching to conservative, status-quo-preserving investments when retirement is imminent.

At my age, pulling out of stock-market-linked investments would be a mistake, all the experts insist. But if I were 63, or even in my late-50's and envisioning retiring within the next several years, staying invested in the market would be equally mistaken. When your retirement accounts cross the line from "investments for a far-off day" to "savings you will soon need to convert to cash," switching from volatile market-linked investments to conservative, funds-conserving ones is essential. Ditch stocks, move into bonds and T-bills.

The Washington Post has a great article that touches on all sorts of "eek look what the market did to my 401(k)!!!!" issues: "Retirement Wreck"

It's both interesting and scary to be living through the era of a giant economic experiment about whether 401(k)s and self-directed retirement systems are a smart move or not. Personally, I'm of two minds. I like having my retirement finances decoupled from a complete dependence on my employer. On the other hand, I think there's a lot of merit to the point raised in the Washington Post piece, regarding a study suggesting that defined-benefit plans outperformed 401(k)s in the past decade: "Pensions are managed by professionals with financial education and access to sophisticated investment tools. Indeed, part of the problem with 401(k)s, economists and advisers said, is that too many workers make bad investment decisions."

I'm not an investment professional. I make my living as a business journalist, my college minor was economics, I write this personal-finance blog, and still, I don't consider myself any kind of investments expert. Expertise is a hard thing to develop, and I'm dubious about the notion that the expertise needed to successfully run a personal 401(k) and save enough for retirement is something every single adult should have.

Still, I'm reminding myself: My 401(k) is a long-term investment. Volatility is an inseparable element of upside. Breathe in, breathe out, and remember that economic theory says that what happens in a week, or a year, shouldn't matter when your investment timeframe is 30 years.

But just how bad is the current economic mess? Two things from the past week stick in my mind.

First: I've had three friends laid off in the last week. Companies, especially small ones and startups, are clamping down hard. I don't think this downturn is going to be short or shallow.

Second: Another friend has spent the week at the local hospital, the one 15 blocks away with an ER I know all too well. Her partner had a stroke. He's uninsured. He's 44. I have to believe he's going to recover and be OK, because I can't quite fathom a world in which he isn't.

This is a very unpleasant and scary reminder that "will I have enough money when I retire in 30+ years?" or even, as the issue is for so many people, "will I have enough cash to pull through right now?" is not the most terrible problem to have. Finances matter, a lot. But being alive matters more. Every moment you have to breathe and experience and be with those you love and do the things you care about is valuable. Use them.

Life after your bank fails

I don't normally double-dip and recycle my work writing on the blog, but right now the subjects I would have been covering here are being covered there, so I'm going to be lazy and link the piece I spent Friday pulling together: "Life after your bank fails"

Amusing factoid I couldn't fit into the already-long story: Chris Coulthrust, who had all of his business' funds at NetBank when it crashed, shares my deathtouch with banks. Like me, he left ING after it bought NetBank ... and moved his personal accounts to WaMu. We'll have to coordinate on what bank we want to kill off next.

Greetings, JPMorgan Chase overlords

Sigh. This feels so ... familiar. All I ask is one full year in which my accounts stay in the control of an actual bank, rather than the FDIC. One year. Is that so hard?