I (heart heart heart) Amex

I rent cars a lot -- probably ten-to-12 times in a typical year. (Living in Brooklyn, I've never owned a car.)

I'm a klutz.

At some point, these two data points were bound to collide. Literally.

In July, they did. David and I rented a car for a day trip to Pennsylvania, to photograph a friend's wedding. The car pickup went smoothly. Traffic was good. My nifty and much beloved GPS got us to Bangor, Pennsylvania, with no trouble. We were early. We stopped to get lunch. We got a parking spot right bang outside the pizza parlor, and I managed to parallel park. Lunch was tasty. Birds were singing, the breeze was soft, the sky was blue, etc etc.

Then we went to pull out of the spot, and our day went to hell. I misjudged just how big the car I'd rented was, and pulled out of the spot in such a way that I managed to a) smack the hell out of the passenger-side mirror, which promptly fell into a dead-mirror slump, and b) totally annihilate the left taillight of the SUV parked in front of me.

@^&@%^$#%$#

To our credit, David and I didn't kill each other with blame and recriminations (him over my clumsy driving, me over his criticism of my clumsy driving). We Exhibited Teamwork and managed to stay rather calm throughout the afternoon, even through the "I can fix this with Krazy-Glue!" segment of the escapade, which is really better left unexplained. (A proper rendition of it requires many alcoholic drinks to cushion the horror. Note for future Krazy-Glue Experimenters: Did you know it's not recommended for use in 105° heat?)

Eventually accepting that both the sideview mirror and taillight were irrevocably smashed, I left a note for the SUV's driver and proceeded grumpily on to the wedding. (The bride, K, was gracefully sanguine about our ill-disguised crankiness and wish for a do-over of the entire day. The ceremony was beautiful and incredibly touching; I'm glad even the inevitable calamities that ensue when you throw together family, friends and Momentous Occasions didn't detract from the loveliness of the very happy occasion.) Driving back to NYC, mentally tallying the cost of fixing the rental car and the sideswiped SUV, I braced myself for our excursion to PA to cost $800 or so more than budgeted.

The next morning, returning the car, I sheepishly recounted my sad saga at the rental counter. "Something in the air today," the guy at the desk said. "You're the third one to come back with an accident this morning." Since it was 7:20am, I was pretty impressed.

As I always do, I'd rented the car on my In NYC Amex credit card. And as I always do, being cheap, I'd declined all additional insurance coverage.

In the back of my mind, I knew that my Amex, like many credit cards, came with some kind of rental-car protection. I'd never dug into the details -- and frankly, I assumed that in the event of an actual accident, I'd face some deductible or fine print that would render the Amex protections virtually worthless. The one previous time I'd had a rental-car issue (the hubcabs got stolen) and called Amex to ask about coverage, I'd been told that since I'd used a corporate card for the rental, sorry, I had no coverage, and would be eating the $40 for the hubcaps.

But on the off chance my Amex coverage could help get me out of my mess, I Googled for details on my Amex coverage -- and found actual, helpful info. In fact, what I found online suggested that my little smash-up would be 100% covered. No deductible. No cost. Completely, 100% covered.

Disbelieving, I rang the insurance customer-service number (1-800-338-1670) and asked about details of the card's coverage. "Fully covered," the saintly person on the other end of the line said. "You can file a claim online."

And so you can! And, wonder of wonders ... I did, the car-rental company sent an estimate straight to Amex, and Amex took care of the whole thing. After filing that online claim, I did not lift one finger further. Amex paid the $397 Thrifty charged for the damages, and the whole mess went away without any further intervention or expense on my part.

Wow.

I actually have warm, fuzzy feelings toward a credit-card conglomerate.

One of the things I'll have to figure out with my new Amex Blue card (grumble grumble) is whether or not it has the same rental-car coverage as my In NYC card does. I dearly hope so. I'm not planning to make a habit of smacking around rental cars, but it's pretty awesome to know that if I do, the damage is 100% covered. (Up to $50,000 or so cap -- which, since I don't rent Mercedes, is fine by me.)

Epilogue: The bill for the SUV's taillight totaled $47, since the person-I-hit had a husband willing to replace the light himself, and I only needed to cover the cost of the actual light. I remain amazed I got out of the whole thing with a total bill of $47. And I am never again in my entire life parallel parking.

Why I'm never ever ever renting from Dollar again

Rental cars and medical bills: these are the two planets around which my financial life seems to orbit.

This weekend I stumbled across an unusual bit of consumer-unfriendliness I hadn't hit before. I had a rental reservation with Dollar, made through Travelocity. I scanned the fine print when I made the booking for the usual catches, but I can't swear I scoured every bit of it on every conceivable link -- though I did print the reservation and bring that along.

When I arrived to pick up my car, I was told the rate would be $55 a day higher than the one I had confirmed. What!? Why? Because I have a Brookyn zip code.

Yep. Dollar discriminates based on where you live.

Never mind that this car was being picked up in Manhattan and had no restrictions on where we could take it. Dollar wanted to charge me $110 more for my rental than they would if I lived on the other side of the bridge.

I argued with the counter person (nothing on my Travelocity printout mentioned this charge, though Dollar insists it's listed somewhere on the site), then called Dollar's customer service number and argued my way up the command chain there. No luck. I finally cancelled the reservation and made something of a scene, standing outside Dollar's office screaming into my cell phone that this was the worst customer service I had ever encountered from a car-rental company.

Now for the particularly spectacular bit of corporate stupidity. It was the Friday afternoon of Labor Day weekend, I was already behind schedule, and I now needed a last-minute car. Where did I end up getting one?

Thrifty.

Which is owned by the same parent company as Dollar. Thrifty, however, has no surcharge for Brooklyn residents. "I've never heard of anything like that," the Thrifty agent said when I made the new booking.

And it was $30 cheaper than my original Dollar rate. So, Dollar's parent company managed to both infuriate a customer and make less money on the transaction than they otherwise would have. Go corporate America!

But seriously, I am never ever ever booking with Dollar again, anywhere.

Real estate: Buying doesn't always make sense

Greetings from Seattle. Another city, another free rental car upgrade -- National had no compacts in stock, so I ended up driving off with the same mid-size I had just declined to pay an upgrade charge for.

Someday I hope to acquire the skill of regular blogging. For now, I'll have to be sporadic -- sorry! But be assured that even if I go silent for a stretch, I'm not abandoning the ship.

I finished one of the house-buying books I mentioned earlier, June Fletcher's House Poor: Pumped-Up Prices, Rising Rates, and Mortgages on Steroids. My verdict: It's a clip job, but a pretty decent one. In the acknowledgments, Fletcher makes a comment about the project coming together very quickly. She's been covering real estate for two decades, lately for the Wall Street Journal, and my guess would be that a publisher approached her about striking while the market is hot and scraping together information from her articles for a quickie book.

Which means there's some definite filler in the already-fairly-slender (224 pages) book, like the "Going Global" section with snapshots of, say, buying conditions in Panama. I would guess that almost no one picking up this book is actually looking to buy in Panama, and people who are will need a lot more data (and more current data) than this offers.

For those at the earlier stages of considering real-estate purchases, though (like me!), House Poor has value. The main point I took away from the book -- and I think it's a pretty useful one -- is "don't fall for the line that everyone needs to buy, quick quick quick!" Fletcher has covered several complete real-estate boom-and-buy cycles, and she doesn't endorse the notion that buying an apartment/house is always a smart investment -- even for your primary residence. On a purely financial level, renting can be smarter in a number of circumstances.

For instance, one of her anecdotes concerns a couple that bought at the height of the last boom in D.C. -- and found, three years or so later, that they couldn't resell the house for enough to cover its mortgage. Over the last few years, with prices skyrocketing double-digit percentages each year, it's tempting to see real estate as the investment that just keeps giving. But booms always inspire that sense of frenzy -- and booms don't last indefinitely, no matter how much industry observers cry "but *this* time the fundamentals are different!"

Friends of mine in the D.C. area just had to sink five figures into a complete overhaul of the piping in a house they bought only a year or two ago. If your house is intended as your long-term primary residence, you sigh and grumble about those sorts of unexpected costs, but can take some comfort in recognizing that they'll be amortized over the lengthy time you spend in the dwelling. If this is a house you intend to unload in five years? If prices don't jump a *lot*, you may not recoup what you've paid for those unexpected fixes.

There are, of course, non-financial advantages to owning. I want to decorate and have the freedom to treat the place I live as *mine.* I'm willing to spend extra money for that psychological comfort. In NYC now and for the foreseeable future, buying costs a fair bit more than renting a comparable apartment. Even if I crunched numbers and discovered that the equity of owning a place didn't offset the costs -- that renting and investing would be a more financially advantageous option -- I would still buy, for the psychological reasons.

However, I likely wouldn't if I knew I'd be reselling in less than, say, a decade. Imagine a couple with part-time kid custody. They know that when the kids leave for college, they'll move to a smaller place in a better location. They're deciding whether to rent in the interim or buy a larger place that they will eventually sell and "trade in" for the smaller one. It isn't a given that this couple should buy. Depending on the relative costs of each option, and the likely appreciation in housing prices in their market, it may be wiser to rent, sock away difference each month between what they pay for rent and what they would have spent to buy, and use that cash pile -- rather than equity/appreciation from the house they would have bought -- to fund their eventual trade-up.

Fletcher kicks around such scenarios to make the point that buying real estate is a complicated calculation. That alone makes House Poor helpful and interesting. It's also a good basic reference for information on how things like interest-only loans, reverse amortization, PMI, and other logistical considerations work.

Rebuff the upselling, score perks anyway

I'm in Vegas this week for a software conference, and my company kindly shelled out for me to stay in style at the conference hotel, the
Venetian. (Motto: "More gilt per inch than Trump's most lurid imagined fantasyland!") When I checked in, the clerk promptly asked if I'd like to upgrade to a larger room. Larger!? Ha ha, no. The basic room is already bigger than my first NYC apartment. Next question: Would I like to upgrade to a room with a view of the Strip? Again, no.

Turns out the only rooms available at the moment all had Strip views -- so I got for free the "upgrade" I'd just declined to pay for. Rental car companies pull this scam all the time. I always book economy cars. (I'm short; I don't need legroom.) Inevitably, the first thing I'm asked when I arrive is "would you like to upgrade to a full-size?" Trick is, many car companies don't even bother actually stocking economy cars any more. More than half the time, when I turn down the full-size upgrade, I get a full-size car anyway for the economy price.

Insurance is another area where rental-car companies famously try to slip in lucrative, unnecessary add-ons. If you have your own auto insurance, you're generally covered for anything that happens with a rental car. If you don't have personal insurance, you still likely have some coverage on your credit card -- many offer policies that cover loss and damage, as my Amex does.

But here's something particularly insidious I hadn't known about before. Two weeks ago, I rented a car from Hertz for a quick day trip to Long Island. While filling out the forms, I noticed a small sign on the counter (very small) mentioning something legalistic about Hertz's optional CDW (collision damage waiver) covering damage beyond the insurance level mandated in NY. Googling turns up the info that New York requires rental car companies to cover collision damage on all rentals -- making Hertz's add-on CDW coverage in NYC even more ridiculous than usual.