I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘musings’ Category

Well, first off, I can tell you what I did when my son’s preschool sent home a fundraising packet.  They are selling… oh, I don’t know.  I threw it out without looking past the intro page.

But this is the season of school fundraisers, at least here.  When I came home from work a few nights ago, my spouse met me at the door and asked “Are you mad that I spent $15?”.  I chuckled, and then responded that it depended on what he spent it on.   He told me that one of the neighbor kids from down the street, the older brother of one of our son’s friends, had come to the door selling popcorn as a fundraiser for his school.  And my spouse felt obligated to buy some.

He probably spent $15 on popcorn that comes from the same manufacturer as what you can buy at Aldi (the stuff I bought from a Boy Scout two years ago was) and that doesn’t bother me.  And I’m not bothered by my spouse buying the popcorn - I probably would have done the same thing.  But I really dislike the fact that the school system is trying to turn our kids into little salespeople.  And I hate feeling obligated to buy stuff I don’t want to be neighborly or nice or just to make the kid not feel bad.

So what do you do?  When you are approached by a friend’s or neighbor’s kid, or at work, to buy something for a school fundraiser, do you do it?  Pass?  Does it bother you?

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I have a tendency to let my past experience color my future actions in a big way.  I think that most people have this tendency, and used wisely, it can be a great asset.  But taken too far, and that asset becomes a liability.

For example, last weekend I had some romaine lettuce I had bought in three salads in one day.  My spouse and my kids had the same exact romaine lettuce (albeit it not as much as I ate that day) and they were fine.  I, however, has some intestinal issues afterwards.  Those issues were most likely not at all related to the romaine I ate.   But ever since then, I haven’t been able to imagine eating romaine, at all, even though it is one of my favorites.  I  just look at it and think, ugh.  Luckily my spouse has no such aversion, so the romaine will get eaten.

Now I’ve had weird food aversions before, and I know I’ll get over it with time.   That’s not the only way I let past experience color my viewpoint, though.  The last time I started investing in earnest, I was all excited and things were going to well, and then the dot com bubble burst, my investment portfolio plummeted, and I became a very cranky camper.  I didn’t pull my investments out, but I also stopped contributing to them.  Over time, things recovered, and my investments went back up.  But the whole experience left me very skittish about the entire idea of investing.

And here we are again.  I’ve been slowly preparing to put my kids’ college funds into 529 accounts, and now every headline I see says things like “financial collapse” and “market collapse” and “recession” and I start to feel, well, itchy.  I know historically, things improve.  I know that the potential of the market for returns is so much more than our little savings accounts.  But big companies start declaring bankruptcy, others appear on the brink, and I can’t help but wonder.

So here I sit.  I’m not pulling money out of our retirement accounts and stashing it in our mattress, or stopping our retirement contributions.  But I’m not pulling the trigger on the 529 accounts, either.  I’m just waiting, and thinking, and trying to remind myself that my past negative experience doesn’t predict the future.

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My daughter is going through a period when she doesn’t sleep.  Literally.  But that’s a story for another time and another blog. 

But because of that, I had the TV on in the middle of the night while pacing around with my daughter, and an infomercial came on.  A Kevin Trudeau infomercial.  Kevin Trudeau will try to sell you anything, and has theoretically written a book about anything and everything.  To me he’s like the ultimate scam artist, for no other reason than no one can be an expert on everything under the sun, although I have other reasons for my assessment which a simple internet search can turn up for anyone.  This infomercial caught my eye (and not because I want to buy it).  It seems he’s moved into fixing people’s debt problems, for his new book is called Debt Cures.

Seriously, this makes me laugh.    If you’ve ever called in response to one of his programs (I have not, but I have talked to people who have) the operator spends the entire time trying to sell you more stuff.   And of course, signing up for 15 different programs and 5 different books is an excellent start to being debt free.  The whole infomercial seriously made me both sad and irritated and almost laugh out loud.  The man made seriously outrageous claims, and VERY questionable math, and was big on reducing your minimum payments on your credit cards.  Um, if you only pay the minimum, that’s not going to help so much.  He does say that, and then in the next breath is all excited about reducing minimum payments so you pay less.  And oh - his claim of reducing interest rates?  I can tell you how for free - call the credit card company and ask.

I didn’t watch the entire infomercial - but here’s my unsolicited advice.  If you are reading this, you have access to the internet.  Read free websites.  Read some blogs.  You don’t have to pay Kevin Trudeau to get you out of debt.  He’s not an expert.    If it wasn’t 5:30 am and I hadn’t already been up all night, I’d write a list of actually useful and free websites.  But for now - debt doesn’t have a quick fix an infomercial can buy you.  You’ll just be in a little more debt after your infomercial phone call.

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Many of you may have noticed that my blog was down most of Wednesday.  I must confess, I am a blogger not because I love to fiddle with computer programs, but because I like to write.  Therefore, when weird things happen I’m not always able to figure out why.  Weird things are usually minor and can eventually be dealt with, but in this case, it wasn’t so minor and I was totally at a loss on how to find the culprit and restore my blog to its happy place.  My spouse is my tech support since he is a computer programmer by trade, but he has a job he has to go to and can’t sit here all day and try to help me fix things if something goes awry during business hours.  My host upgraded their servers this past week, and nothing here at the blog has been the same since.

So today is a little break from personal finance and my love for dissecting all the money that runs through my life (or I wish did) and I’d like to say thank you to Pinyo from Moolanomy and Mike at Four Pillars, both of whom offered me suggestions and ideas on what to try to fix my blog.  The tech support for my host was slow to respond and not very helpful, and Pinyo especially came up with a myriad of ideas for me to try to get things up and running again.   Eventually after a few false turns, the culprit was discovered and things are back to normal again (I hope!).

It is good to have friends, especially ones more knowledgeable than you are. 

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Last month, my parents bought us a LCD flat panel TV.  When I called our cable company to find out how much an upgrade to the HDTV package would be from our current one, I found out I could actually reduce our cable bill for the next year by switching to the HDTV package because they were running a special.  We have our cable, internet, and phone services bundled together, and switching from the bundle we had (extended basic cable) to the HDTV triggered a 12 month discount.

So I switched to HDTV, and last month, we got a credit on our bill for the half month of the old package we hadn’t used.  This month, we were charged for the half month of the new package we did use.  An odd way to do things, billing wise, I think, but it all works out okay in the end.  Except, on our bill, it appears we were charged the taxes and fees for the phone service twice for that half month.  Everything else matches up with a credit on last month’s bill, and a charge on this month’s bill, except the telephone taxes and fees.  Those appear as a charge for that half month on both bills.  It isn’t a big amount, less than $5, but still, being charged twice for them annoyed me.

So today I called Comcast (our service provider) to find out why.  And, after about an hour on the phone, first on hold, and then with a representative, who frequently put me on hold to consult with different people and access different databases (she claimed, at least), basically, Comcast claims *their* copy of my bill has more detail than the one they actually sent me, and supposedly, on their copy, I have credits for the taxes that got rolled into charges for the rest of the month for the taxes, therefore showing as a charge instead of a credit and a charge.

Maybe.  I mean, I’m not convinced.  This is the stupidest billing system ever.  The person I talked to never could find out how to even see a copy of the bill they actually sent me, just what was in her computer (which didn’t at all match up with what I had as far as details, except the total amount owed).

So she claimed I could create an account online and see my bill there, which supposedly had the detail of her bill (and why they couldn’t send me *that* bill instead of what they do send me, I have no idea).    So after I hung up the phone I tried to create an online account, and it wouldn’t let me.  I have to call Comcast to get some kind of authorization PIN number.

After an hour and a half invested, and at the end it may just be stupidness of their billing system and I may not be charged double after all, I’m not sure it is worth it to continue with this investigation.  I had to leave for work so I didn’t have time to call Comcast again and be annoyed further.  Maybe today I’ll have another free hour to waste. 

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