Well that's $50 down the drain...

Chalk up another expense to exhaustion...


We had to board my cat for two days, to let the pest control chemicals evaporate for a bit. (I seem to be the only one amused by instructions begging you to keep your pet away for two days, but you can come on back after three hours. I swear PETA writes these things.)


When it was time to pick her up, I was so addled with exhaustion, I couldn't remember where her carrier was. So I just drove slowly/carefully for the mile and a half back to the apartment. And was rewarded with a big ole crap in the backseat.


I removed the actual offenders, but was too fatigued to actually organize a cleaning effort. My malaise continued until Sunday night, at which point I had to clean it up because I was picking Tim up the next day. So I opened up the back door, doused it in cleaning stuff and left it, as the instructions demanded.


The problem? I'm about 99 percent sure I didn't lock the door.


First thing we noticed was the remote was gone. It was a $25 deposit. But we thought perhaps I had just brought it in the apartment with me by accident. Then we went to get the office chair out of the trunk. The one that had been there for, like, a week and we just hadn't remembered to bring in. Except now, it wasn't there anymore.


I think someone noticed the door was unlocked and that the back seat pulls down. That exposed the office chair (still in box) and they helped themselves. It explains why no one took the small bag of miscellaneous office supplies up front: Accessing the trunk from the back seat, the bag wouldn't have been visible.


I'm pissed, too, because we waited for a good mesh chair to go on sale. (In case Tim needs to do phone work from home, the mesh will keep air circulating and prevent his skin from breaking out unduly.) I guess it's back to watching Staples sales.


Meanwhile, two $25 items are gone. Irretrievable. All because I just don't have the stamina of a normal person.


Don't get me wrong, my fatigue costs us in tons of ways that I've accepted and dealt with. I don't hit as many sales as I would like, because I have to apportion my energy to be sure other things get done. I sometimes pay a little bit in library fees because I'm too tired to get a book back on the due date. Little stuff.


But this one is new -- and pricey, at that. Especially considering that I'm normally a door-locking zealot.


I'm off to go stare at the empty spot in the office where a chair should be.

Upgrade Update: What's in your bills?

Well, several of you have written in with your feelings about the satellite package upgrade.


I found them very informative. There seems to be an even divide among people who couldn't do without TV and those who have taken the (arguably healthier) route of going out and becoming more active in the outside world.


Wait... there's an outside world? That must be what the Travel Channel's always talking about!


Kidding aside, I'm inclined to agree with Shtinkykat that two people who are less able to leave the house -- and home all day -- are more likely to consider entertainment a necessity. Of course, that could be pure rationalization on my part.


That said, I still don't feel comfortable adding to the budget, even at "just" $12 a month. So I've decided to find the $12 in our budget.


I spent 4 minutes on the phone with a very helpful lady from Qwest. She put a block on outgoing, long-distance calls. (I would have settled for a no-charge plan with higher per-minute rates, but with the block there's no charge for adding/removing a service.)


I feel stupid for not checking the bills sooner. At $20 a month -- $25 on a particularly chatty month -- I just assumed I was getting a "good enough" deal. Then, I noticed we had paid a whopping $9 for 11 minutes of calling. It went something like this: $3.99 for the low-usage long distance plan, $1.99 interstate fee, $1.99 intrastate fee, $0.55 for calls, and then taxes. That rate was a little too close to a dollar a minute for my comfort zone!


And now that we have cell phones that work inside the house -- cheap ones, at that, since they're part of a family line -- there's really no point in the long-distance plan.


So in under 5 minutes, I was able to trim $8 from our monthly budget. That's almost $100 a year.


I think this is an excellent reminder to scrutinize bills more carefully. You can save a surprising amount with some indignation and a phone call. I may just spend the last part of this month poring over our bills and see where else we can cut. It might be an interesting game! (Plus I still have to find $4 more for the upgrade.)

Do you hear that big, cosmic chortle?

One of the axioms I find myself repeating a lot lately is "If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans."


I've talked before about how easily a budget can be upset by unexpected expenses. In fact, the tighter the budget, the more easily a small item can completely turn your plans upside down. So it should come as no surprise that Tim and I are constantly revamping our outlook. We try to roll with the punches as best we can -- because the punches they keep a'comin'.


So why am I talking about this now?


Well, just the other day, Tim got a call from a debt collection agency. It's not an uncommon occurrence. Companies get some information -- sometimes outdated -- and go to work on the folks most likely to pay up.


It was an excellent reminder to do a piece about dealing with debt collectors. Some people have problems with harassing phone calls regarding past-due accounts. Others are bewildered by the same calls, but about debts that they didn't incur.


And so, in starting a post about that very subject, I seemed to have set in motion some epic, Rube-Goldberg-style mechanism. Witness the marble slide down the chute, knock over some dominoes, which push down a lever... You get the idea.


The end result was a letter from the IRS, received today, informing us that our refund was being withheld. It would be used as an offset against Tim's defaulted student loan.


Fascinating, since we finished paying the suckers off in early October.


So we called the Department of Education. It took several tries to figure out the right combination to get to an actual operator.


Apparently, we only paid off 2 out of 3 loans that Tim took out. The loan was assigned to the wrong Social Security number. Which means that, when we called two years ago and said we wanted to rehabilitate Tim's loans, there were only two on record. Those two got rehabbed.


Meanwhile, whoever got assigned Tim's third loan went through a dispute with the Dept of Education. An investigation was started, and they eventually concluded it was Tim's. So they assigned it to his social security number.


But by this point, his account was in good standing with the other two loans having been rehabbed. And the people who send out the ominous letters about defaulted loans don't check accounts in good standing.


So when we paid off the loans, apparently we finally -- in the last five months -- came to the attention of the Department of Education once more. But since it was so long defaulted (Tim went to school in 1999, graduated in 2000) no letters were sent, no calls made. We were just sent to collections.


As you can imagine, this kind of mind-boggling bureaucracy gave us both headaches. But the operator saw nothing strange about this cycle. I argued that we had made a good-faith effort to deal with Tim's outstanding debts, yet we were being penalized. Mainly for taking the government at its word. The guy simply replied that in each promissory note, the lender agrees to keep track of his/her own debts. Essentially, the operator said, it's not the government's responsibility to notify us about these things.


On the one hand, I agree -- if you take out debts, you need to be responsible and pay them back. And that means knowing what (and who) you owe.


On the other hand, it seems like the government does keep pretty detailed tabs on the status of various loans. It's certainly pretty active in sending updates/bills/declarations of defaults to most of the people who owe the department money. Which leads me to think it really just has that clause in promissory notes to give itself a loophole in situations like this.


So essentially the message is: "We will follow you closely to be sure we get our money back. We'll send you monthly bills and updates on your payments -- including how much is applied to principal vs interest. But just in case we're wrong and have been attempting to collect from some poor American who doesn't owe us money, we reserve the right to blame you and charge you interest for that entire time that we thought the loan was someone else's."


It seems like a pretty ridiculous set of circumstances, made worse by the dueling opinions in my head.


One side points out that taking on a debt should be a bigger deal in this country -- and it's a little ridiculous how many people owe money and don't even know it. Just because it's my husband, shouldn't excuse the fact that we should know exactly what he had taken out.


The other side says, sure that's true. But...

1. When the entity you owe money to states that you owe it $X, it's pretty reasonable to then assume you don't owe them $X plus $Y that it's forgetting about. Especially when the entity has a vast, computerized database.
2. Even if we had known about the third loan, wouldn't we have just assumed it was somehow lumped into one of the two other numbers -- because, again, the government would know what we owe it better than we do?
3. Even if we figured out the government had forgotten about it, what are the chances we would have wanted to risk asking about the loan? (I'm not saying it's right, but more than likely we would have just crossed our fingers and hoped we'd heard the last of it.)
4. Should we really have to pay interest on the last 2 years, when the loan wasn't technically on Tim's account or even tied to his social security number?
5. Once the account went from good standing/paid off to default/not goodstanding, shouldn't the Dept of Education have bothered to -- oh, I don't know -- inform us that the status had changed and give us time to respond before sending us to collections?
6. If a loan has been erroneously assigned to someone else, shouldn't the investigators just take a few minutes to type up a letter to the original borrower? If it wasn't tied to his social security number, after all, there's no way for him to make a payment. Ergo, he'd need to be notified, right?

But the other side just keeps repeating that it really is the borrower's responsibility to keep track of what he has borrowed.


So I don't quite know what to think. I'm disheartened and Tim is pretty devastated. He felt so free finally putting those student loans behind him. They had loomed so large for so many years, while he struggled to keep any job around his health problems.


And there's not a whole lot we can do. I asked the operator for a copy of the promissory note. That will take 2-3 weeks to get here. (I searched through Tim's papers and found a Direct Loan document that appears to match up with the alleged loan, but I want to see his signature on that piece of paper.)


I also touched base with the collections agency. I explained that we had just received all this news today, were pretty upset and generally confused. As far as we knew, we had completely paid off Tim's loans. My blood sugar was low and I was a little emotionally punch-drunk, so I spilled out our sob story -- combined monthly income of $3,100, rent of $700, insurance of $500, and credit card debt (mostly from medical-type expenses) of $8,000.


I made sure to mention that we could not acknowledge this debt as belonging to Tim until we had a copy of the promissory note in hand. But I wanted to know, if this proved to be a valid debt, what sort of plan we were expected to adhere to.


The agent was actually very kind (of course, most are to crying females but it's still nice) and took all this information into account. He agreed that any payment could wait until we had proof that this was Tim's loan. Additionally, he gave us the lowest payment option -- $51/month for 9 months. After that point, the loan would be considered rehabilitated and the collection fees would be dropped.


So this is more of a emotional than financial blow.


We don't have the money sitting around, obviously. But it was relatively small as student loans go: $2,625 at 6.96% became $4692.21 over the last 10 years. Once our withheld tax return gets applied, it'll be just about $4100. The 9 monthly payments will take it down to about $3650. Then the collection fees ($917) will be dropped, taking it down to just about $2700. Or about the amount Tim borrowed... allegedly.


Still, the emotional impact was pretty big. We thought we had closed the book on one section of our debt. We thought we were on track to just pay down this credit card debt, after which we'd be done with interest-bearing loans.


But, besides calling and arguing the case (probably without any results) with the Department of Education, what can we do?


We can suck it up and pay it down. We can use this as an object lesson in organization and thorough research. We can realize that it's definitely a step backward, but that we're still making good progress.


We can remind ourselves that this sort of thing is why we always have to be careful -- with our money and the plans for our money. Relying on a smooth ride is generally the best way to find yourself with a flat tire -- and no spare in the trunk.


And finally, we can hope that God (or fate or whatever entity you believe in) got a nice, deep guffaw out of this one. Because if we can't keep our deities entertained, really what's the point?





For those of you still interested in the "how to" of dealing with debt collections, the post will be out on Thursday.

The worst part of frugality: patience

I've always been an impatient lass.


If I think of something, I want to do it now. And I'm not exactly good with waiting for other people to find their own methods, either.


The latter trait is from being a precocious little overachiever in school. I'm always (annoyingly) convinced that my way is the best way and that no other way will arrive at satisfactory results. When Tim tries to do a web search on his own, he ends up turning to look over his shoulder -- where I'm hovering and offering advice -- and asking if I want to do it myself. That usually shuts me up and sends me back to the couch.


But the impatience, that one's a head-scratcher. It's not like I got everything I wanted when I wanted it. My parents taught me to save up for things. A standing deal was that any big ticket item (ie, $20 or more) would only be purchased if I saved up half.


So I'm not sure why I have so much trouble waiting. I suppose it's tied back to the utter obsession with doing things a certain way. That is to say, my way.


And so you can imagine how difficult it is for me to deal with the necessary wait of debt reduction.


It's necessary, of course. None of us got into our debt overnight. We certainly won't get rid of it that way. (At least, until the lottery this week. Then this will be a very different blog, believe you me!)


Still, it's times like these that make the wait particularly unbearable. The future in uncertain, for Tim's career and for the country's economy. And we have no idea what kind of schooling he will need, how long it will take or how it will affect our ability to pay off debt. So much is up in the air. And I can't do a single thing to make the answers come any faster.


I'm also beginning to suspect that I definitely need to up my medication, but that's a post for another day. Suffice to say, it's not helping the general anxiety and restlessness.


But I'd have those anyway. Once my brain latches on to a subject, it's tenacious. And hard to shut off. I end up trying to guess every conceivable outcome, which is, of course, impossible. But as a rigid, controlling personality (as I often am) I need to know. So mere impossibility doesn't deter my brain.


Somehow this also morphs into a belief that I'm not doing enough to get us out of debt. (I blame osmosis, since so many blogs advocate second jobs. Frankly, I'd be happy with a first job.)


This leads to me trying to do a bunch of little things, as though 20 hours of little chores is somehow less tiring than 20 hours of one big chore, which I know better than to attempt. In fact, it often takes more energy -- much like the difference between one full-time job and two part-time jobs.


I may have been an honors student, but sometimes I wonder about my actual intelligence.


Perhaps the single biggest problem with waiting is that you know it won't be time spent twiddling your thumbs. Murphy's Law is tried and true.


You can't predict what it is that will go wrong, but you can be pretty certain that something will. All you know is that you have very little control, and you have to maintain a long-term frame of mind -- all while dealing with crises in the short term.


So maybe that's the reality of thrifty living: not just saving money, but keeping it up in the face of everyday life.


The day-to-day world inevitably intervenes in all of our budgets: cars break down, kids outgrow clothes or get sick, insurance bills go up...


Whatever happens, it interferes with the long-term plan. You have to pay down a little less on the card, so that you can continue to get to work. It seems paychecks go a long way in the debt-reduction biz.


So waiting is awful because you know at some point, you will be faced with something you didn't plan for. It's one of those unwritten laws of the universe: You can't plan for everything, and the more you try, the more you'll be blindsided when it happens.


Because of this, people like me have a hard time making a good budget. Some people still don't have a problem and can account for the last dollar. Not me.


It might just be my temperament, or perhaps it's the unpredictable expenses of chronic conditions. Whatever the cause, the result is the same. I can't create a comprehensive budget, allocating funds for every aspect of life.


What I can do is focus on small areas of change. This month, it was Blockbuster Online. After comparing plans and usage, I found that we were really not getting the deal we thought we were. Now, we'll see how the limited-exchanges plan goes. If it succeeds, we'll save $15 per month ($180 a year). If not, we'll try the one- or two-at-a-time, unlimited rentals plan and save $5-13 each month.


In October, I would like to really try to focus on groceries. I would like to make sure we're staying in the realm of $200 in groceries each month. I suspect we're well above that. I'm not exactly looking forward to being proven right.


In this way, I have small spheres of control, which soothes the control freak in me. At the same time, I'm learning to survive the broader uncertainty of life.


Mostly, I try to remind myself that part of the fun in life is not knowing. After all, Christmas morning would be pretty dull if I knew what was in each box.


At least, that's what lets me sleep at night. And that's about as true as it needs to be.


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Be sure to check out the new giveaway that's (finally) been posted! It's a must for any and all who've survived this past week with their sanity even slightly intact.

Optimistic pessimist

I was reading an interesting post over at PT Money, "How to Save Money Like a Madman."


This is the part that really caught my eye:

Get Paranoid - Like the madman, you’ve got to believe that "they are out to get you!" By "they" I mean life emergencies and set-backs: job losses, higher taxes in retirement, medical problems, etc.

Tim and I have been living this way for years. When you have two people with chronic health problems, life setbacks are practically routine. They're everything but scheduled.


Tim's MRSA creates boils that have to be seen by his doctor. Two doctors' visits (treatment and check-up) means $30 of co-pays. That's twice a month (if we're lucky). Then there's the eczema flare-ups. And the cost of his quitting smoking again.


And even in regular "healthy" people's lives, there are always unexpected costs cropping up: there are cavities and illnesses, computers breaking and cars making weird noises, funerals happen across the country.


Anyone trying to live frugally and/or pay off debt needs to live by the motto: "Expect the unexpected."


Most people hate that saying. They think it's contradictory. But nowhere does it say that you have to guess exactly what's going to happen. But you do need to be prepared for your budget to be blown. If you aren't ready for it, you'll quickly go stark, raving mad.


When I used to do very detailed budgets (had to give it up for sanity's sake), I would always allot an extra $50-$100 for what I affectionately called the "Oh, crap!" fund. Well... That's the sanitized name, if you catch my drift.


Nowadays, we just use the broadstrokes: We keep checking around $150 and throw the rest at bills. It's easier and more realistic in the long run.


And so we come to the title of the post: Optimistic pessimist. Hope for the best, but expect the worst. If you're wrong, it's a good thing. If you're right, you're in a better position to laugh it off.


Sometimes it's about life not catching you off-guard. And often, it's about finding the small victories.