The Washington Post has a free stuff resource guide that was published last Thursday. I don’t know if you need a log in. You might. Try Bugmenot.com if you do.

It’s focused mostly on DC area stuff, but there is plenty in there for people who live all over the US.

With that, let me plug my favorite bi-ennial-ish arts show, Art-O-Matic! It’s in Crystal City, VA this year instead of it’s usual locale of DC. It’s metro and bus accessible. Drinks and snacks are sold but mostly to fund the event. Donations are accepted. It’s free and there is a lot of good stuff there, say the 3-7 people I know who regularly display their work or perform there.

For those of you who don’t know Art-O-Matic, it gets its name from its first venue inside a laundromat. The organizers try to find an old office building every two years or so and open it up, warehouse-style, for artists’ galleries and performance areas. This is the third or fourth time I’ve gone. It’s usually in November, but due to some issues they moved it to April this year.

If you are local to DC, check it out. It’s free and fun!

Right now, my favorite stuff there is Tim Hayes, 4traits, Dead Men’s Hollow, Tim Tate and Laurie Breen.

I’m not a Virginia Tech grad, but several of my knitting friends are. They speak very fondly of their years in Blacksburg. In honor of the victims and their families, this will be my only post today and I will digress into a memory of another springtime college shooting.

(more…)

UGH. I wonder where my level of commitment is to debt repayment? I think I must be making a mistake by socking away as much as I can in my 401k plan. I decided to change my 401k contribution to 17% instead. Hopefully that means that I will be able to move the 3% difference over to debt repayment.

Behind the cut are the tax musings.

(more…)

I am liking and yet hating Turbo Tax right now.

I love it because I got a crazy federal refund in 4-digits that I wasn’t expecting. I am also getting a refund for VA state taxes. However, I hate Turbo Tax because now I have to print out the forms and white out the $30 telephone excise tax because I don’t have long distance service at home.

It’s a long story, but I don’t have any and my cellphone is paid for by someone else, so I cannot take that credit. SCREW TURBO TAX and the inability to delete line items like this one. For some reason, you can zero out some items, but not this one.

I also really hate the way TT integrates into my Quicken. I must have really effed up my categories when assigning stuff last year, like my medical expenses and tech books. I will say that for some of the home business stuff I have going on, it’s worked out quite well.

I was really afraid of preparing my taxes which is why I procrastinated for so long. I had no idea if I was going to owe or get a refund till this very minute. I took some side income, about which I have not blogged, and that was making some serious impacts.

My single best piece of late advice is to do intermittent saves, more often that TT prompts you to do it. I wasted an hour after closing what I thought was an informational window and not understanding the pop up message about saving.

Note to self: Accrual basis, not cash.

There were a plethora of NPR stories this week on personal finance topics.

Banks trying to stem mortgage foreclosures, plus legislative discussions for action.

Financial counseling so you don’t end up with a mortgage foreclosure. This just reinforces my thought that everyone who wants to buy a house needs to learn about mortgage products before they look at houses. It isn’t just a house you’re getting, but a financial burden. Picking the right one will make all the difference in your enjoyment of that house.

University professors are making more, but still less than football coaches.

Tax fraud through identity theft. Fascinating story. Of course, he did end up getting caught.

Summer gas forecast. My boss is playing a game. We’re betting on the summer’s high gas price at the Exxon near our office. I said $3.82 just for kicks.

And Joshua Bell plays in the DC Metro. It’s not really about personal finance. I just love him. I’d marry him in a heartbeat. He’s very versatile. He played Bach’s Chaconne in the metro one of my favorite pieces, but he likes American music too, like bluegrass. [Link is to another NPR story on the Chaconne.] The one personal finance angle is that in a hour, he can make $40. That’s about what I make. Of course, I don’t own a crazy gazillion dollar Stradivarius.

This guy says there really is watered down gas. It’s the additives and ‘aromatics’ they gas companies put in.

Question from chat room: Is watered down gas harmful to the car engines?

Joe Stronsick: Yes! Cars these days are not able to burn the aromatic properties as efficiently as they should. All cars require a fuel-injection clean out at 30,000 miles. That is because those aromatic properties added by the oil companies give you less fuel economy, clog up fuel injectors, and build up carbon and varnish in the engine. So, if you do look at your gauge in terms of what you’re getting in terms of miles per gallon, once you see it drop by any amount, there’s a good chance that it’s due to the aromatics, or the watered down gas.

I still find the assertion ‘watered down gas’ to be crazy since oil and water don’t mix, but I will buy that gas can be diluted to a less efficient mix. FWIW, I am trying to find out more about this guy, but his website doesn’t seem to be anything more than a place holder 6 years later and I can only find his free gas book at Amazon. But there’s no photo of it. There are two reviews of it and the reviewers seem to like it since their gas savings pays for the book. (Well perhaps for the original cover price. It’s going for over $70 a copy now!)

My assertion that gas that’s actually watered down will result in stuff like this happening, where a gas station got a bad shipment of gas with way too much water in it and the cars conked out, just like I thought they would.

However, they probably didn’t bother taking their dipstick to the tank. I remember my pop had a this ginormous metal pole he’d actually stick into the tank till it hit the bottom and then he would record the water level in the tank in his record books to show the state EPA if they ever came around. The little worksheets that come from the gas company HQ actually has a line for recording it next to your daily inventory level.

Meh. That’s why I have blog. To pompously write about anything I damned well feel like. But I’m learning to say very little at work till it’s like pulling teeth.

Read this article at Kiplinger’s about learning the value of saying less at work.

I used to think it was my job to help my superiors make better decisions by presenting all the information. Now in my older age, I know that they don’t actually care. It’s actually rather disheartening to find that senior management at some firms would rather be manipulated by their juinors than actually be told the truth about what is going on. It’s pretty sad.

So don’t be so fully honest. Omit stuff or else get a bad rap for being a gasbag. *shrug* Pretty sad state of the world if you ask me. And people wonder why there is an ethics problem. I’ve been counseled at several jobs to be less forthcoming with information. And when I do hold back information, I get yelled at. It’s really a no-win situation.

I think this single question is the “To Be or Not To Be” dilemma of frugality.

Recently a friend gave me a strip-cut shredder to replace a broken cross-cut one my dad gave me to try and fix. I am really bad with shredders. I was Fawn Hall at one company and had to shred entire file cabinets of old documents to make room for the current stuff. (Please God, tell me the younger folks remember who she is.) Since I had access to an industrial shredder I would throw in huge chunks of paper at a time. Uh. That doesn’t work so good with the home shredders you can buy at office supply stores. Not by a long shot. Read those directions and take good care of your office machines.

Basically, I break every shredder I have. My dad broke the cross-cut when cutting used lottery tickets. Retailers take the winning cards and report the results to the Lottery Commission, but they don’t have to send in the cards anymore, so he shreds them. That was his second shredder, like father, like daughter. Anyhow, I tried my best to repair the damned thing, but couldn’t. One of my friends decided that strip-cut wasn’t good enough for her and got a cross-cut one instead. She knew I had a broken one and offered me her strip-cut for free just to get it out of her house. She said it didn’t work great, but it’s better than nothing.

Well, I ended up breaking it too. I resorted to my old practice and shoved in too many papers doubled over, i.e. whole envelopes of junk mail. It’s max 5 sheets, but really works best with about 2 at most. I had almost given up hope, but decided to get out every single piece of paper stuck in the damned thing to see if that would help. I broke out the chopsticks, needlenose pliers and tweezers. I cleaned out every piece of paper I could from the thing and TA-DA! It worked like a charm once again! The AUTO setting didn’t constantly grind because the sensor wasn’t blocked. I got the REVERSE setting back too! It worked better than it did when my friend gave it to me. (Please remember to unplug your shredder when attempting repair!!!)

The point is, I was going to replace that first broken cross-cut because I couldn’t fix it. When faced with the karmic opportunity of a second shredder, I couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. I took it and repaired it to spare myself the expense of a third shredder.

Ask yourself, when do you give up on fixing things? When is the repair not worth the replacement? I love fixing up my old shoes because I hate the pains and aches of breaking in new shoes. I get joy out of repairing things myself because I’m a nerd like that. But when I read Maus, by Art Spiegelman, I remember his father being a saver, scavenger type because of scarcity in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. It’s a life-long frugality that stayed with him, but embarrassed his son. (Especially the groceries at the beginning of the sequel, Maus II.) His father would try to fix everything Even my pop tells me too about scarcity in post-war Korea for things like clutches on cars, fresh produce, pocket knives, etc. (I used to sharpen my pencils with razor blades as a kid, like my pop taught me to do when I didn’t have a sharpener around. It sounds crazy now, but it teaches responsibility and how NOT to behave carelessly.)

I don’t like living in a disposable society. We don’t take care enough of the world in which we live. Stewardship matters, and if that means repairing things instead of replacing them, we should think about doing so. Making your car or TV last an extra year on a lifetime of cars and TV’s is a lot of money. Think about that.

Millionster is back online!

It’s an occassional read for me. It’s pretty funny at times. It’s a group blog and I’m glad they are back! Blogging is a labor of love and it is really tough to be down for two weeks. My heart goes out to them and their troubles.

Yes indeedy. I did it.

I am cheesed off with Wachovia for charging me to download from within Quicken, but not so cheesed off as to kill that account. I really do feel more comfortable with a brick and mortar bank locally. So this means my Philadelphia based checking bank is going the way of the dinosaur. I feel so bad because I opened that account in 2003 at the bank branch I used to go when I was a little kid with my piggy bank. I still think of it as my bank, even today, though I don’t even take cash out of their ATM’s when I go home. Screw the sentimentality, let’s talk brass tacks on why I chose ING.

1) I already have a relationship with them: I really didn’t want to go through the annoyance of learning a new GUI with Virtual Bank or NetBank. It was extremely easy for me as an existing account holder to click a few clicks and open a checking account.

2) It’s paying 4.00% APY: My old checking account paid no interest at all and was free with direct deposit. Seems to me, for the $1000+ deposits I would make there for my fixed expenses, I might as well earn some interest on the float while the funds were still in the account.

3) It uses Quicken! Sounds crazy, since all banks pretty much have an interface with Quicken. But for some reason my old bank in PA was really behind the times on this and did not integrate well with it. I had to get crazy stuff set up by calling a rep, etc. It was phenomenally stupid, so I didn’t bother with transaction download. Because this is a low-traffic account for fixed expenses. I could pretty much balance it once or twice a month with Quicken’s reconcile feature and it would work just fine.

4) My girlfriend did it first: One of my local friends was asking me about it. I told her I really didn’t know much about it, but then she decided to do it because of Reason #2. She seems pretty happy with it and has no serious complaints other than the fact the ATM card hasn’t arrived yet. But for me, I won’t even use the ATM card since I have my local brick-and-mortar bank which is convenient enough to home and office.

5) I think there is a hard credit pull: There is an overdraft protection feature that offers you X dollars of credit. I am pretty certain this means they’ve done a hard credit inquiry. Yes, I realize this possibility may drop my credit score, but I don’t really care since I haven’t opened a credit account since June 2006 and have no plans to open another for any reason whatsoever in the next 2 years. EDIT: Per Reader Dave, there is no hard credit pull, via the ING FAQ. THANKS DAVE!!

I haven’t done anything yet with it. I am in the process of transferring over my direct deposit from work. I did set up some of my regular outgoing expenses and that was fairly easy. I don’t like going entirely paperless, but I don’t think this transition will kill me, and perhaps it will help me tame “the paper tiger” around the house. I keep too much paper crap and it’s bugging me. I actually spent some time de-cluttering the mess on my desk and I am happier as I write this post.

PS - I just noticed that the DST change has effected the posting of my posts since March 11th. I just added an hour to the time on this post to reflect the accurate time.