Verizon for the fail

The first time David and I moved apartments, back in 2000, it took us four months to get a working phone line.

The problem was a fight between Verizon and MCI. For reasons I happily no longer remember, we were caught in a giant wrangle between the two over whose job it was to physically hook up our line -- one company owned the wires in our area, the other had our account, and resolving the standoff took me more than two dozen phone calls and countless hours of battling through Inferno-like levels of "customer service." In retrospect, I can't believe I didn't just swear off landlines on the spot and go mobile, but the whole thing eventually got so Kafkaesque that I was determined to pry a phone line out of these companies just to prove that I could.

It was good foreshadowing. Ever since, pretty much every interaction I've had with Verizon has been fraught with errors and incompetence.

I was all set to join the modern world and scrap our landline in April in our move. We'd be just fine with Skype and mobile phones, I figured, and hey, it would save us $50-$70 a month. That's what it was costing us to have a dial tone and an occasional phone call to Australia. (I was paying $10 a month for an international calling plan that gave us sensible per-minute rates, since I learned the expensive way how bat@%^! the rack rates are for overseas calls.)

But then we found out our new building was wired for Verizon FIOS. That meant that instead of kicking Verizon to the curb and consolidating our communications bills with the cable company, we could instead give Time Warner the boot and go all-in with Verizon.

Like every other cable customer, I've watched my bills creep up over the years, from about $100 six years ago (for cable and cable-modem broadband Internet) to more than $160 this year. On the flip side, Verizon was touting its "triple play" cable/Internet/phone combo packages for $89.99 a month.

I knew our bill wouldn't really be $90 a month -- fees and taxes always seem to add another 50% to telecom bills -- but it still seemed worth investigating. So I rang up, asked many pointed questions about the plan ("Are there installation fees? Equipment fees? Fees for extra computers? Required blood sacrifices every fortnight, which you charge extra fees for missing?"), and signed on. The add-on fees I agreed to were an extra $5.99 a month for equipment rental (which really should be part of the standard cost quote, but whatever) and $10 a month more for a 300/minute overseas international calling bundle. So, total bill each month should be $106 -- plus, I figured, an extra $20-$40 for taxes.

On Friday, the first bill arrived: $203.96. <insert primal screams here>

It wasn't just that the bill was too high that irked me. It was that I would now have to slog through "customer service" to untangle the mess.

And it was indeed a total mess. Despite email records confirming my order of the triple-bundle-package thingie, Verizon ran my bill for each service individually. The amounts listed didn't even reconcile -- random charges and credits skittered all around the bill, making no sense on their own and, even better, not actually adding up to the listed grand total. Instead of even attempting to sort it out, I threw up my hands and called Verizon.

Where it took half an hour to fight through the automated prompts and connect with a live human being. Happily, once I finally landed one, he looked at my bill for about 30 seconds before agreeing that it was fubared.

Twenty minutes of hold music later, I had my bill "repaired" (in theory) and knocked down to $140.56. That seems to include two months of Internet charges (prepaying May), which doesn't make sense to me if this is supposedly a level-monthly-billing plan, but I'm not inclined to battle about it.

I'm also not convinced this whole thing is actually fixed. We'll see what shows up in next month's bill.

And since my bill has been screwed up literally every single time I've signed up for new services with Verizon, I've got to assume this isn't actually incompetence. It's a business strategy -- mess up the bills and see what percentage of customers notice.

Grr.

When Wall Street breaks

During September 2008, I almost came to regard three-digit Dow swings as normal. But seeing them happen in seconds isn't normal, and 2:50 pm this afternoon was a pretty wild time to be in the middle of a financial newsroom. In a blink, you've got the Dow flinging itself from almost 11,000 to below 10,000, and stocks zipping crazily in both directions: Accenture (ACN) rocketing from $40 to 1 cent while Sotheby's (BID) zooms from $30 to $100,000.

And what was I doing this evening, after watching an afternoon of Wall Street chaos? Going to see Enron, which I got tickets to last month for David's birthday. Talk about timing. High finance explained with lasers and dinosaurs! Now I'm gonna be grumpy if we don't get to use lasers and dinosaurs tomorrow at work when we try to explain The Great Market Crash of 2:47 pm.

I see that the exchanges and market regulators are planning to void trades in 286 stocks from 2:40-3pm that swung more than 60% either way. That takes care of the wildly crazy prices, like Philip Morris plunging from $48 to $2 or EQIX flying from $95 to $999,999. But it leaves standing some of the trades that really hammered the Dow, like P&G falling 37% in seconds and 3M sinking 21% for a blink. Tomorrow's open should be dramatic.

Meanwhile, in financial news involving vastly smaller sums, I have a new outlet for some of my personal-finance writing: For the next few months, I'll be filing a weekly dispatch to Make Love Not Debt. It was one of the first pf blogs to catch my eye when I started Birds & Bills years ago; while I get pretty solipsistic in my ramblings here, MLND has always been finance and relationships. It'll be fun to shift my focus and think in that vein for a bit. Plus, like all journalists, I've realized the only sure way to get me to actually write is to hit me with a deadline. Generally one that's two or three days past.

So hop on over and check out my first MLND column, on the two-income pothole:

Keeping separate bank accounts with your spouse or similarly intertwined partner has a whole spate of logistical issues attached. How do you split the bills? How do you make sure none slip through the cracks? How closely do you track your partner's finances – and how do you ensure you'll have access in an emergency?

There's also the philosophical issues. Why are the accounts separate, and do you both have the same reasons, or at least understand and respect your partner's rationale if it's different?

I have to issue 1099s!?

Funny I just wrote yesterday about how I don't hate taxes. Today, I'm less enamored with 'em. Or, at least, with the paperwork they entail.

I spent most of today working with my friend Neil to piece together a major and underreported story he stumbled on over the weekend: Tucked into the 2,000-page health care bill is a significant tax-code change. Gotta love how Congress tacks riders and stealth legislation into totally unrelated bills (like tossing "hey, bring your guns to national parks" into the credit card act).

From the story:

An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork.

Beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year. The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.

"1099 tax form" sounds like an eyeball-glazing thing, but anyone who has ever freelanced knows what it is. Companies send out millions of them each year, to any individual they pay who isn't a salaried staffer. The vast bulk of the money I make comes from my day job, but every year I end up with a few stray 1099s for freelance articles.

Because I have freelance income, in the eyes of the IRS I'm running a small business. That means I file a Schedule C and -- the painful part -- pay self-employment taxes on my freelance income. (You know those Social Security and Medicare taxes you see deducted on your paycheck, which typically add up to 7.65% of your wages? What you're paying is actually only half the tax. Your employer pays the other half. Those who are self-employed get hit with both ends and cover the full 15.3%.)

Like all freelancers, I offset this pain by deducting anything I reasonably can. If I buy a new computer or phone line to use exclusively for work, I write it off as a business expense.

Starting in 2012, the health-care law requires businesses (that means us too, freelancers) to send 1099s not only to workers they pay for services, but to any entity they pay more than $600 to in a year. The example in Neil's story: If you buy an iMac, you have to send Apple a 1099 reporting what you paid for it.

As Neil quipped in response to my shocked "they're kidding, right!?" noises: "It's the Accountant Full Employment Act."

After we thrashed out as many details as possible -- which is not many, considering the IRS is a long way off from issuing guidance on how this will work -- I calmed down a small bit.

On the one hand, while I've received dozens of 1099s over the years, I've never issued one to other businesses. That sounds ... daunting. On the other hand, this is why tax software exists. I imagine Intuit's TurboTax team is doing the dance of joy over this looming tax change. By 2012, when the law actually kicks in, tax software packages should be well-equipped to fire off the millions -- or, as a CPA the Cato Institute talked with predicts, billions -- of new 1099s this will require.

Still. I see why activists are really, really tempted to just chuck the U.S. tax code and start over.

What your tax dollars buy

Like everyone else who has to balance a household budget, I flinch every so often when I see how much of "my" paycheck is disappearing toward taxes. Between that and my retirement/health care/etc deductions, I actually take home less than 50% of my gross pay. That's pretty common.

... and then I read stuff like today's news about the Johnson & Johnson drug recalls, which are fast getting ugly. The FDA did some serious smacking of J&J, especially for its failure to take action fast when it became clear something was amiss:

In its report, the FDA said McNeil did not initiate "corrective and prevention action" after it had received 46 consumer complaints from June 2009 to April 2010 regarding foreign materials and black or dark specks in its drugs.

Reading such things reminds me afresh of why I am happy to hand over a chunk of earnings to taxes: Because unfettered capitalism is actually a pretty crappy way to run a society, and I don't especially want to worry that over-the-counter painkillers are going to kill me or a nearby toddler because it was cheaper for a company to cut corners and ignore problems. I want regulators cracking whips over those who process meat, hold savings accounts, build bridges, fly airplanes and so on.

Sure, the government could be a more efficient steward of our cash -- I like internal watchdogs and get very cranky when they're hamstrung or ignored -- but in general, I'm a big fan of this whole "pay for an infrastructure that keeps society running" deal. It was a pretty clever system for us human beings to invent.

Things you learn along the way

At some point I will get my head together and start properly describing the real-estate adventure. Basically there's two things I learned along the way:

1) buying real estate is insanely complicated and involves an epic ton of paperwork and logistics; and

2) like having a kid, this is a really complicated and responsibility-fraught thing that anyone who wants to can manage, no matter how ill-prepared they are for the task. David and I knew nothing going in, right down to the basics of "ok, we want to make an offer ... um, how do we actually do that? E-mail the seller's broker and say 'hey, we'd like Apartment X, how do you feel about [insert made-up number here]?' Fax? Call? Send carrier pigeon?"

And yet, roughly 90 days after deciding we wanted to buy an apartment, we got to move into our newly owned condo.

Saturday is May 1, when we'd typically write our rent check. But one of the Things Everyone Apparently Knows But I Didn't is that when you take on a mortgage, you don't make a payment the first month. Because unlike rent, which you pay in advance at the beginning of the month, mortgage is collected in arrears, after it's owed. So because we closed in April (and at closing prepaid the interest the loan would accumulate in April), our first payment is due in June, to pay off the debt we incurred in May.

Practical upshot: A month in which we owe no mortgage or rent payment. Hooray!

Reality check: Like any new homeowner, we had a ton of stuff we had to buy to make the place functional. Including a couch, 7 chairs, a deck table, a bench, lamps, a bedside table, and roughly a dozen boxes of cleaning supplies. Our Amex bill for the month was about what the mortgage would run. So much for spare cash.

But hey, we did what the government hoped we'd do with the first-time homebuyer credit -- economically stimulated every retailer within a half-mile blast radius.

I guess it's real now

Just as two of my friends are writing extolling the financial savvy of renting forever, we got our first "please to be sending the mortgage check on June 1, kthxbye*" _{[*'no really, please please send the check, we really need it']} letter from Bank of America.

So it's official ... we own now. Eeek/yay! I have economically stimulated half of Brooklyn's homewares shops, much to Amex's glee. We celebrated coughing up five figures at the closing table by immediately dropping almost as much again buying a couch, terrace table, chairs, groceries, and enough laundry detergent to last us eons, because I am celebrating having a washing machine for the first time in my adult life by doing approximately fourteen loads of laundry a day.

At some point the giddy euphoria will wear off and I will return to talking sensibly about finances. In fact, I'm gonna go take the edge off right now by wrapping up some day-job work and delving into corporate tax filings.

While listening to the background noise of my whirring washing machine.

$48,986.93

... is what it costs to transfer one piece of residential real estate, the apartment David and I are buying tomorrow (if, *fingers crossed fingers crossed* the close doesn't get delayed again).

None of that sum is the down payment, or any piece of the actual sale price. It consists entirely of title costs, attorney fees, broker commissions, taxes, and every other bit of this transaction that some third-party is managing to carve a piece off. I knew going in that this was going to be pricey, but damn. I'm impressed. And boggled.

Happily, we're not on the hook for all of that cost (merely the vast bulk of it), and some we financed into the mortgage loan. But still. This is not some Donald Trumpian multimillion-dollar real estate deal. It's a standard-issue, six-figure home loan, one in which I fought hard at every step against junk fees and avoidable "extras" we could opt out of (I now speak fluent GFE, HUD-1, RESPA and TIRSA Rate Manual).

That is an impressive amount of price padding from what you see on the sticker.

Health care reform zero hour

For someone who both a) cares a ton about healthcare reform, and b) works in a newsroom, I've been remarkably out of the loop on the whole Washington slog this past year.

Basically, I followed the details of some of the early proposals, but things were changing so quickly I lost the motivation to keep up. The best quote I've heard about Washington's legislative process came from an SBA spokesman last year, when my reporter pressed him for comment on stuff being talked about for inclusion in the not-yet-passed Recovery Act stimulus bill: "You don't give farm animals names if they're just going to get slaughtered. We're taking the same philosophy with these provisions."

That's how I came to view health reform: Call me when there's a bill about to go to the President to sign. Until then, everything in it is in quantum flux and not yet real.

So imagine my surprise when suddenly this week everything started moving super-fast and dominating the news and journalists began assembling for an all-day "this is it" coverageathon on Sunday. My reaction: Wait, what? What's happening? Is this going to be a really final bill?

Here's the best, clearest description I've seen (hat tip to Neil for the link) of the process now unfolding: from the Wall Street Journal, "Health-Care Bill's Final Act: A Look at Possible Scenarios." The gist: Yes, this is really it. By Monday, we could have new law.

What's in that law? That's what I'm trying to find out next. (It'll be what the Senate passed on Dec. 24, but I haven't delved into the details of that bill yet.)

How to celebrate the anniversary of screwing up your taxes: Do it again

"We have a letter from the IRS saying we owe them money!" is not what you want to hear when you pick up the phone to answer a call from your spouse.

Ten years ago, the first year we were together, David and I managed to short the IRS to the tune of three grand and unexpectedly owe it all come April 15. The culprit was W-4 confusion: We both checked "married," not realizing that would set our withholdings as if we were each married *and* the family's only wage-earner. Throw together two salaries and a higher tax bracket and you have an expensive oops.

Since then, I've been pretty meticulous about the taxes, and we traditionally come in for a hefty refund. (Yes, intentionally -- we both would rather use the forced savings of overpaying the IRS than cut it close and end up owing. I realise that's financially foolish, but so far, the money I'm "losing" this way isn't enough for me to care.) This year's refund landed in my bank account just three days before David's panicky phone call.

It turns out what we owed money for was our 2008 taxes. "The income and payment information that we have on file does not match entries on your 2008 Form 1040," the letter sternly informed me.

"Calm down, wait till I get home, and I'll go through the records," I told David.

"Please give the IRS money so nothing bad will happen!!!" he replied. I admit, I shared a bit of the panic -- stiffing the IRS sounds like one of those things the federal government takes a very dim view of.

The form had one slightly reassuring line in it, though. "If this information is correct, you will owe $508," it said.

Okay. Suddenly owing $508 is no fun, but it's not like we were being told "cough up $10,000 and prepare for a stint in the debtors' gulag, and by the way, we're now gonna audit EVERY FORM YOU'VE EVER FILED WITH US, you untrustworthy tax-dodging leech."

The letter's "summary of proposed changes" showed two income payments unaccounted for on my 2008 taxes, but apparently very accounted for in documents the paying parties sent on to the IRS.

The first was $1,200 from Time Inc. for freelance work I did before I joined the staff, and for which I'd been paid on a 1099. When I went back in my records, I realised to my chagrin that the IRS was right. The work was done in late 2007 and paid in early 2008, and I'd totally forgotten about it by the time I filed my 2008 taxes -- which I did before the 1099 arrived in the mail. I hadn't included it. Note to self: Mint.com columnist Matthew might be on to something with his checklist manifesto.

The second entry in the IRS list was "taxable dividends" of ... $13. This came from the Sharesave account I cashed out just eight months after I started, because I left the company long before the shares vested. Apparently I made $13 in interest off it. I have no idea if that's true or not -- my dim recollection is that I got back exactly what I'd put in -- but since the taxes due on $13 are about what a cup of overpriced coffee costs, I had no interest whatsoever in digging out records or trying to fight that charge.

Happily, the penalties on stiffing the IRS -- at least for the three-figure amount I did -- are completely minor. The IRS says I owe $489 in taxes on the $1,213 I underreported, and $19 for a year's worth of interest. That's it. No "pay this draconian fine so you learn to never again shortchange the taxman" fees. I'd owe more interest and possibly some penalties if I didn't pay up straight away, but if I sent the check before March 31, I'd be back in Uncle Sam's good graces.

I cut the check that night. ("I will take this to the mailbox right this second," David said, sealing the envelope as he changed out the door.) The Treasury cashed it yesterday.

And I hope to never again be a tax scofflaw. I mean, I'm pretty sure the government (current debt: $12,644,040,577,175) kinda needs the cash.

The cost of dying

Hello world. Sorry I've been so quiet; balancing apartment-buying (eeek) and work is brain-and-time consuming. The real-estate adventure has yielded a ton of blog material, but I feel like I need to sit on a fair bit of it until the closing contracts are actually signed and stuff can't suddenly go awry -- which it has been on a fairly regular schedule. So I'm stockpiling material and planning lots of updates in a month ...

Meanwhile, I wanted to drop in a link to one of the best magazines pieces I've read in years: "Lessons of a $618,616 Death," this week's BusinessWeek cover story. (The cover itself is also breathtaking, with its fade-to-white line "The End of Life." The whole package is a wonderful reminder of the unique ways design and writing can fuse together in print.)

Health care is a topic I frequently come back to in this blog. I can't think of any financial decision more urgent -- what wouldn't you pay when you life is at stake? I also can't think of any financial system more utterly broken in this country. You think the housing market got irrational during the last decade years? It's nothing compared to health-care spending.

Amanda Bennett and her reporting colleague, Charles Babcock, do an astonishing job illustrating both the micro- and macro-economic issues of our current health system. The story's eye-grabbing headline number, $618,616, is what it cost for a seven-year fight against the kidney cancer that in 2007 killed Bennett's husband, Terence Bryan Foley -- "father of our two teenagers, a Chinese historian who earned his PhD in his sixties, a man who played more than 15 musical instruments and spoke six languages, a San Francisco cable car conductor and sports photographer, an expert on dairy cattle and swine nutrition, film noir, and Dixieland jazz."

It's a vast number -- not to corporations and Fortune 500 CEOs, but to those of us who budget carefully each month to pull together rent or mortgage checks. "I think had he known the costs, Terence would have objected to spending an amount equivalent to the cost of vaccine for nearly a quarter million children in developing countries," Bennett writes. "That's how he would have thought about it."

It's a number with almost no basis in tangible costs. The list price on one chest scan was $3,232. Medicare pays less than $300 for that scan. UnitedHealthcare pays almost $2,600. Empire BlueCross pays $775. What does it actually cost? "The documents revealed an economic system in which the sellers don't set the prices and the buyers don't know what they are," Bennett reports. "Prices bear little relation to demand or how well goods and services work."

Was one life worth this investment? Bennett does a deft job illustrating how fraught and unanswerable that question is. "Who did the paying? The health insurance system depends on healthy people bearing the cost for sick ones like Terence," she writes. "Should you have had a voice in Terence's final days? Would I make the same decision with my money for your loved ones? These are things I think about now but can't answer."

And yet. The intensive medical intervention -- at a six-figure expense -- bought Terence some statistically improbable extra time. I'll leave it to Bennett to describe what those extra months meant to her family -- stop reading this, go read her article.

I have my own version of the story, which almost certainly colors my health-care views. My mother was diagnosed with cancer when I was 14, and died of it when I was 16. I'm almost 32 now, which means I've lived nearly as many years without her as I had with her -- but there still isn't a day I don't feel how strongly how who she was affects who I am (hi, pitch-black sense of humor and perfectionistic streak! Also, the financial geekery. I like reading SEC filings. There's no way that's not genetically influenced by my bookkeeper mom -- it's downright unnatural.) And four years ago, I spent most of a week haunting the ER and waiting rooms at our local hospital. It was a medical problem with a lingering aftermath, and a fresh reminder -- not that I needed one -- of how essential good health is to having a life you enjoy living. And how financially fraught trying to safeguard it can be.

Fixing our health-care system is a bogglingly complex undertaking. There's a thousand ways changes can go wrong, and just as many ways for those with vested financial interests to hijack improvement efforts. But there's also a giant cost to leaving things as they are. And even for those like me, like Bennett -- with top-quality health insurance and the financial resources to navigate the labyrinth -- it's a badly broken system.

We can't afford to maintain the status quo.

Notes from the trenches

I'm now midstream on the buying-real-estate process. Almost every email I've sent in the past week begins with "EEK!"

The status: We made an offer. We haggled. The seller counter-offered not just a different dollar figure but an entirely different apartment. (It's a big building, about 250 units, of which a bit more than half are sold.) We liked the new (cheaper!) apartment much better and asked why we hadn't been shown it before. Answer: Because the asking price was vastly higher than the one on our original target. But since the square footage is a tad lower, the developer will take a lower price on it -- despite it having various other advantages that made it, to us at least, more attractive.

NYC real estate is insane.

Someday I will have a proper blow-by-blow, but here's what I've learned so far:

-NYC real estate is insane but the closing costs are off the planet. My whole real-estate quest started because I got envious of my friend's story of buying a Baltimore townhouse with an FHA loan and total cash costs of $4,500. My cash costs? We will be damn lucky to get out for $40,000. That includes 3.5% down and -- the really ouchie part -- NYC's smorgasboard of closing costs. Corcoran has a breakdown that seems accurate in my limited experience so far.

-If you're buying NYC real estate, do anything you can to get a CEMA (Consolidation, Extension and Modification) from the seller. I'm told they're more work for the banks and the lawyers, but they also save you vastly on the tax costs. Originating a new mortgage costs you almost 2% of the sale price in New York taxes. A CEMA transfers the seller's existing mortgage to you -- you only own taxes on the difference between their mortgage and your new one. We got a CEMA, and it's saving us a five-digit sum.

-On other hand, even with a CEMA you'll still get hit in New York with property transfer taxes. In our case, that also equals just under 2%, which has to be paid at close. Did I mention how much NYC real estate bites?

-If you're planning to tap investment or retirement accounts, start setting things up as early as you can. I'm pulling money from my IRA (Fidelity) and David's IRA (Vanguard).

When we went to transfer funds to cash in his IRA, we found that Vanguard didn't have proof of his taxpayer ID. That required sending in a W9. We're now waiting for it to process.

In my IRA, direct deposit of funds you're withdrawing requires activating a connection with your checking account. Fidelity claims that takes seven days, but I activated last Wednesday and my account says it won't be ready for transferring until this Friday. Then the actual transfer can take up to five days to process. I imagine I'll be paying the $15 fee to wire cash, which I could have saved if I'd set up the electronic account connection sooner.

Selling investments to move the money to cash also takes time. I did that too last Wednesday and am still waiting for my VWO trade to settle.

-If you can avoid an FHA loan, do it. It's pricey, costing 1.75% of the loan amount upfront (you can fold the cost into your loan, but you still have to pay it) and a monthly premium of up to 0.55% of the loan amount (calculated annually, paid monthly). It takes the place of PMI, which you don't pay on FHA loans. In our case, the premium adds $260 a month to our payments. If you have the money for a more substantial downpayment (we don't), you can avoid all this.

-EEK!

Hold breath, leap

Last time I posted, I was consumed with changing bank accounts. (I'm trying Schwab now, btw. Will report back soon on it.) Life is odd in how damn fast it changes.

We're trying to buy an apartment.

I kind of don't want to say much in case I jinx it, but if this works -- or if it irrevocably doesn't -- I'll post all the gritty details. The short version: The annual lease on our apartment runs out Feb. 28, and we'd planned to move. I **loathe** moving, but after five years here, I can't pretend any longer that two people, two cats and 2,000 books fit into a glorified studio with one (ONE!) closet.

I grumpily started scoping out rentals. I pretty much assumed that these days, if you can't put up 20% for a downpayment (and in NYC, that means six figures), you're toast. But one of my friends recently bought a house (in Baltimore) with an FHA loan. And I'd been hearing about various Brooklyn condos getting FHA approval. So I did a bit of poking around -- and found, much to my shock, that it has suddenly become a somewhat viable option.

You lock yourself out of most listings if you need to go the FHA route. I'm told getting approval for single family houses is very hard (many still exceed the loan-size caps, even though they've been raised), and you flat out can't do a co-op, which is what vast swathes of the NYC apartment market are.

But there's a half-dozen high profile Brooklyn condo projects that now have the fast-track FHA approval. And there's one I'm really drawn to. And we found a unit in it that is really, really intriguing for us. And I spoke with the building's preferred lender, and he gave us the green light for a loan with his bank. (5.5% interest! at worst! he thinks maybe less!)

So after two days of incessantly banging on my HP 12-C to work out all possible fees, contingencies, etc ... we're about to ready to put in a bid.

EEK. This feels like jumping off the high diving board.

Chase's incredibly sleazy WaMu bait-and-switch

Well, I need a new bank. Again.

As mentioned before, I have one hard-and-fast, possibly irrational demand for my bank accounts: No fee for using outside ATMs. I'll pay a fee to the ATM operator. I think the fees are obnoxiously high ($2 to spit out some cash? Really?), but I can at least recognize that the ATM owner is providing me with a service. For my own bank to charge me a fee for daring to venture outside its ATM network is punitive and controlling and it makes me wildly angry.

I realise that getting as wound up as I do about something that, at the outside, would cost me maybe $100 a year is unreasonable. I'll drop $100 for a dinner out without wincing. But. For whatever reason, this is my flash point. I do not want to do business with a bank that charges me for outside ATM withdrawls.

The last time I went bank shopping, WaMu won in large part because it didn't have outside ATM fees. That turned out to be not wholly true -- WaMu sneakily snuck in fees for checking your account balance at an outside ATM, even though withdrawing cash was free -- but I grouchily decided to let that stand.

When WaMu went down, this was my biggest and most immediate concern about getting rolled to Chase: ATM FEES, DO NOT WANT.

It took Chase nearly a year to actually force migrate me from the WaMu platform to their own, which finally happened in full in July. Chase sent out a giant, thick packet of diclosures about my new bank account. I, of course, skipped right to the ATM fees section, and found what seemed to be good news. For ex-WaMu customers, Chase was creating a new account, "Chase Free Extra Checking." Key difference between that and Chase's usual checking: No outside ATM fees.

I was pleasantly impressed. Chase seemed to be doing the right thing by its WamMu crowd. I carried on, relatively happy with my new bank.

Until this morning, when I went to balance my checkbook. And found, littered through my November transaction register, two $2 fees labeled "NON-CHASE ATM FEE-WITH"

What. the. hell!?

So, spitting bullets, I called Chase customer service. The rep explained that my account terms called for no fee for the first two non-Chase ATM withdrawls each month, and a $2 fee thereafter.

NO, I fired back. NOT TRUE. I have here this giant thick account disclosure paperwork stack which explicitly says no fees ever ...

While she put me on hold to go find an account specialist, I went Googling.

And found this blog post, with a warning in the comments about "IMPORTANT CHANGE TO NON-CHASE ATM FEES
FOR CHASE FREE EXTRA CHECKING"

Oh bugger.

Seems Chase snuck a pretty significant change in the account terms into the fine print of September statements. Here's the thing: Like almost everyone else on Earth these days, I have paperless statements. I don't read them. I scan my account register to reconcile things, but don't go reading fine print each month. And Chase never sent any kind of alert or special disclosure about "hey, we're changing the terms of your account, here's the explainer to read."

I pulled up the electronic version of my September statement, and sure enough, there's the ATM fee change notice. A whole TWO MONTHS after Chase helpfully assured me it wouldn't change fees. And the "two a month" bit is temporary -- starting 2/2/2010, all non-Chase ATM withdrawls are slapped with fees.

I'm pissed off and bank shopping.

It's not just the fee. It's the slimy way it was snuck through, and the lack of transparency, and the general sense I've always had from Chase that customer service is way, way down on their priority list, significantly below "pry every dollar we can from the marks we do business with." I always hated the way they treat credit-card customers. I shouldn't have expected them to treat banking customers any better.

So. Anyone have a bank they actually like? With no ATM fees. Because I am getting the hell out of Dodge, before Jamie Dimon's hordes figure out a way to slap a surcharge on customers for consuming oxygen or whatnot.

Must be love

The spouse and I just had an epic, high-volume heated debate about federal financial regulation. Now that we've made up, I'm utterly amused by this. Perhaps this is a topic they should add to premarital counseling -- "What's your theory on housekeeping? Do you want kids? And how do you feel about the last five Treasury secretary appointments?"

Silicon bonanza

Twenty years ago right about this month, my dad went out and bought our family's first personal computer. It was an Apple IIGS, and ours was the first family I knew of with our own computer. I recall it costing around $2,000.

My sister and I loved the new computer. It arrived just in time for me to hit middle school and start having papers to write, and I still can't fathom how anyone did that before electronic word processing. My family also had an electric typewriter, which I think I might have used to write precisely one school paper, but even then I had the sense that typewriter was more of an archaic novelty item than an actual functional tool.

The IIGS was eventually joined by a Mac (nominally bought for my Mom to use for her business, but Lisa and I mooched it frequently), and when I went off to college, I spent all my savings buying a Mac laptop. It had a 500MB hard drive and cost me about $1,000.

Not long after that, my sister got a first-generation iMac, and thus began our era of everyone in the family having their own PCs.

Since that first college Mac laptop, I've run through more computers than I can count. (In several cases, the line between what was 'mine' and what was my job's computer has been fuzzy -- starting my sophomore year of college, I had a school-issued laptop for my Residential Computer Assistant gig, which I basically used as my own personal machine as well as for work stuff.) But for the past decade, one split has been clear: I have my computers and David has his, and the two sets stay very separate.

Some of this comes down to preference. I like desktops, and by the end of college I'd made the switch from being an Apple fan to preferring Windows. (Yes yes, I know, this makes me an inferior human being. Trust me, there's nothing you can say on this that David hasn't already.) David strongly prefers Macs and laptops. So as soon as we had the spare cash, he went out and got his own MacBook.

This popped to the front of my mind right now because my current desktop has been showing signs of impending death for months. It's only the second desktop I've had since 2002, and I got about four years out of it, so I can't complain too much about having to upgrade. I took the early Windows 7 reviews (the general tenor seems to be "well ... it's waaay better than Vista ... and seems to be actually ok ...") as a sign that I should finally let go of Windows XP. So, sitting on my living room floor and waiting to be installed, is a new HP Pavilion desktop with Windows 7. Total cost: $544. Can't complain about how computer costs have fallen over the years.

But I'm curious: Are David & I now the aberration or the norm? Do most families share one computer, or does everyone (adults, at least, and probably older teens) have their own?

Also, I remain slightly boggled by just how damn much computing power we get to take advantage of these days. David's standard computing lineup consists of: MacBook, iPhone, iPod 60GB classic, BlackBerry, fancy Canon camerathingie I forget the details of.

My computing setup: Windows desktop at home, HP Mini netbook for travel, BlackBerry, cell phone (very primitive Samsung, but it does have a browser), Palm (Tungsten E2, and I remain in deep denial about Palms basically being discontinued), iPod nano and Bluetooth-equipped Canon PowerShot. And all of that together costs less than my family's first IIGS. Wow.

Paychecks -- YAY!

One of my goals for 2010 is going to be "regain this mythic Work-Life Balance I hear talk of." But for the moment, I remain buried in gianter stacks of Things to Be Edited than I'd ever imagined existed. Possibly deciding "sure, I can manage 50 pieces for this upcoming big package!" was not one of my cleverest moments. (Caveat: I like my job better than any I've ever had, which is nifty. However, I wish I had 40-hour days in which to do said job.)

But while I've been toiling in the edit mines and not blogging, David returned to the working world. Six months after he quit his job, he's landed a new one.

Which changes our economic picture quite a lot.

We managed the one-job period better than I expected. Dropping to one income was always one of my personal nightmares, and it's been a happy surprise to find that we managed to pay our rent on time every month, cover the bills, and not slip into more credit-card debt than we can clear up in a month or two. This remotivates me to actually attempt some frugality and savings when we return to our usual two-paycheck state.

David's new job has two key features that make it very of-the-zeitgeist. First: It's a contract job. The general idea is that if both sides are still happy in a few months, it will convert into a standard salary-and-staff position. But he came in the door as a freelancer, and for the moment, the company prefers to keep it that way.

Which is fine by us, since we're covered on the only area of staff-vs-freelance job I don't want to live without: health insurance. My company has an absurdly good plan, and David switched onto mine as soon as I took this job. Paid time off, a 401(k), job security and other such luxuries would be nice, but as long as he's got health coverage and is getting steady paychecks, I can't get too fussed about 'em.

Second: David landed this job through personal networking, not a recruiter or job board. Personal networking of an especially oddball sort. He and a friend of his volunteer as Stats Dudes for the local roller-derby league. One of the skaters is a statistician. She and David got to chattering, and when an opening for a statistician came up at her company, he used the ref to get in the door. Ask me which of his many interests and hobbies would lead to a job, and I would never have guessed roller derby ...

We're still a few weeks away from actually getting that first check, and having to sort out freelancer taxes is going to be lots of fun. (I am suddenly very grateful for an excellent article a freelancer pitched me a few months back: "Freelancers: How to not screw up your taxes.") But we're at least tentatively back to full-operating-budget status.

And as the cliche goes -- David losing his job (in a roundabout way, since he quit) may have been, unexpectedly, the best thing to happen to us all year. He spent almost 10 years there, and many were good years, but things had gotten pretty rough. He needed new projects and challenges. Having a few months' break cheered him up astonishingly much, and he's really enjoying the new gig and the people he's meeting there. I thought quitting a job in the middle of a recession would be a horrendous mistake, but it seems to have led to much better things.

I like when life works out like that.

(Edited to add -- I've had this blog almost four years and never before made a "jobs" tag? How odd.)

My story of medial rationing

Something that can't be said often enough or loudly enough during the ongoing heath-care reform debate: Most of the dire things protestors and reform critics are most anxious about are happening now.

Want to see a real death panel? Go before an organ transplant board. Scared of waiting two months for an appointment with your family doctor? In Boston, the average wait time is currently 63 days. Worried that scarce and expensive health care will be rationed? It already is. The only difference is that the decision-makers about who gets care and who doesn't are insurance companies, not government-backed organizations.

Three years ago, we had a health care scare in my family. David and I are among the medically lucky: We've always had plans provided by large, multinational employers with relatively deep pockets. An ambulance ride, a night in the ER, a week in the hospital, and prescription drug costs of around $120 a month were covered with fairly little fuss. Of the roughly $20,000 that emergency week cost, we paid only around $1,500 out of pocket.

But this health scare necessitated weekly follow-up visits, initially with more than one specialist. It happened literally in the very first week of the year -- after I'd made my health care elections and locked in my FSA contributions (then at $0, because we'd never before used much medical care). In the 52 weeks that followed, about 60 follow-up appointments were required.

These weren't optional. I had letters from three different doctors attesting to the extremity of the situation and the fact that, in their opinion, this was a potentially life-and-death situation.

But our medical plan capped outpatient visits at 30 a year. Somewhere in my filing cabinet I have a letter where the company explains that in this case, the medical necessity of the appointments was irrelevant. Having letters from doctors saying "left unsupervised, this could result in death" didn't matter at all. What mattered was that the fine print of my insurance plan said that beyond 30 visits a year, the company would not pay a penny, no matter what.

So we had a choice: Come up with $125 a week for these appointments, or take our chances without.

We're lucky. We were able to scrounge up the almost $4,000 a year that cost (on top of the $1,500 in out-of-pocket costs for Emergency Week, the $3,000 a year we already paid toward our work health-insurance plans, and the $500 we spent that year on prescription co-pays).

But if we hadn't been able to pay? No health care. If the result of that had been death, the insurance company would have had no liability, because in this case, it was completely within the terms of its agreement to entirely disregard the medical needs of its clients.

So when people drag out scare quotes about government health care rationing, I get extremely cranky. Doctors, drugs, hospital beds and the money to fund all of the above are limited. There is a reasonable debate to be had about how those resources should be allocated.

But let's not go into it pretending that we're not already making some brutal decisions about who gets care and who doesn't.

And if you're one of those who, like me, has a nice cushy corporate insurance plan, don't think you can't land in a situation where you're left without essential medical care.

Financial shocks

Today's fun money stat: Your ATM is a drug dealer.

From the AP:

Chances are there's cocaine in your wallet. Researchers looked at 234 bank notes from 17 cities in the U.S. and found that 90 percent had small traces of the illegal drug.

Bills from larger cities, such as Baltimore, Boston and Detroit, were among those with the highest average cocaine levels. Salt Lake City had the lowest.

Not surprising on either the high- or low-end front -- glad to see my semi-hometown, Balmer, is representin'.

Also not surprising: The notice I got in the mail today from American Express today about their terms crackdown. In the face of growing defaults and next year's looming credit card reform laws, Amex, like most other credit-card companies, is looking to pry higher profits out of its remaining customer base. My APR is about to jump from about 11.5% (8.24% plus the prime rate) to 17.24%. If I'm late on a payment, it vaults to 27.24%.

I've never been late on this Amex, but I did go late on a Providian card payment about three years ago when I was traveling and lost track of dates. I'm usually careful, but I can't swear I will never for the rest of my life miss a deadline.

Should I do that, I'll also be whacked with a $39 late payment fee.

Meanwhile, Chase-- the bank with which I have a backup card that thankfully has no balance -- has yoinked minimum payments up sharply, in some cases more than doubling what people owe. Three guesses what happens when someone owes a larger monthly payment than they can afford to pay? Oh look, late fees and higher APRs!

I realize credit card debt is a problem people opt into, and bear responsibility for. But also -- arugh. This is gonna be ugly.

My next career move: Professional gambler

Back in 1969(ish), my mom decided to invest in real estate.

Her much-older sister, who was of a generation that strongly believed in investing in Tangible Things, bought a summer house upstate. It was once part of a batch of cottages owned by a local hotel, which got sold off piecemeal as the 20th century progressed. Soon after her sister bought her house, the one ten feet away came up for sale. Family lore (I haven't cross-checked against property deeds or anything) has it that my mom bought the house for $6,000, and its furnishings for another $3,000. Thus did my family acquire a 700-square-foot house named Covehurst, more popularly known as "the decrepit shack in the Adirondacks."

(That sounds unfairly derogatory except to those who have actually seen the place. It was built around 100 years ago and, until recently, left untouched. Functional plumbing was an exciting and rare occurrence.)

Since we had a "summer house," my family trekked up to Brant Lake every summer. And promptly began casting about for entertainments. Our 30-year-old vintage Monopoly set, Lake George tourist traps, and outlet shopping will only take you so far on a family vacation. You eventually need new distractions.

Like gambling.

At some point, my family realized that Saratoga Springs was less than an hour away. My mom and dad had always enjoyed horse racing -- my dad has stories of the Triple Crown race he watched Secretariat run live, and win by 31 lengths. So we began making annual day trips to the Saratoga races. I'm pretty sure my sister and I started betting on horses before either of us had our first beer, which has to be a fairly novel and backward way of doing things these days.

This weekend, my family converged upstate, and I spent Friday watching the last seven races of the day at this year's Saratoga meet. I don't know enough about horses to handicap with any kind of "effective" gambling system, and I suspect that if I did, I wouldn't be successful any more often than I am now. If gambling were a science, lots more people would be rich. So I look over the stats, but I'm still susceptible to a catchy name.

Like "Economic Tsunami."

In the middle of an epic recession, is there any way I'm not betting on the horse named Economic Tsunami?

I picked another horse that looked good and laid down an exacta box and an across-the-board bet on Economic Tsunami.

Who came second! I can't recall exactly what I was holding, but I hit the exacta and a few other bets, and my $10 wager paid me back around $100.

That was the first of three exactas I hit, my new daily record. Since I only place $2 bets, I'll never win crazy money, but I walked in with a stake of $120 and left with $296.40 (advantage of a statistician spouse: you always end up knowing exactly what you won or lost), which was definitely my best day at the track to date.

And I owe it all to Economic Tsunami.

*Crash* *bang* $40

One of my friends recounted yesterday the ironic tale of how trying to save $4.50 cost her $40. The gist: To save the cost of a round-trip subway ride, she borrowed her roommate's bike -- then inadvertently blew out a tire. Sometimes, the transit gods, they laugh and smite.

I had my own version of that this evening. For possibly the First Time Ever, I am aiming to stick to a weekly budget. This is not a budget in the traditional (and, from my admittedly spoiled viewpoint, impossibly restrictive) sense, with pre-assigned totals for each category of spending. This is simply a fixed weekly number I'm trying to stay in sight of.

So, in the pursuit of frugality, I decided to cook in this evening, even though David is out at a baseball game and that's usually my cue to go eat somewhere he hates. I stocked up massively at the Red Hook Fairway this weekend (aka, Supermarket Nirvana), so one quick trip through the supermarket in my office building's basement later, I had a $3.90 piece of wild sockeye salmon and all the ingredients I needed for dinner. Once home, I hacked up some cauliflower to caramelize, washed a few dishes, and set things to roasting.

And then, from the corner of my eye, saw a fast gray blur of leaping kitten and heard a gigantic crash of glass.

Ashley, who this week got big enough to leap onto the kitchen counter, had just had his first encounter with the dish rack. The blender lost.

My first thought was "!$%@$$@$! I will never keep us all from stepping on a glass shard." My second was "well, I never much liked that blender."

I'd be much crankier about this had I not been thinking idly for years about replacing my very inexpensive blender with something flashier -- or maybe even, dare to dream, with an actual food processor. I've wanted one for ages, and it wasn't the price that stopped me, it was the idea of surrendering counter space to a new gadget.

I'm off to Amazon in a bit to price food processors/blenders/combo gadgets (does the iPhone perform blender functions yet?), but I'm bemused that my adventure in frugal cooking in has likely necessitated the blowing of my brand-new weekly budget to finance a blender replacement. I know "accident" is a category we have to budget for, but is there anyone who doesn't get annoyed by the unexpected expenses they incur?

I guess I'll just go be grateful I don't own a car.