This was a productive but expensive weekend for stuff around my apartment.

1) My boyfriend and his friend replaced my kitchen overhead light for me. Total cost? $55.00 for a light and new wiring caps.

2) I picked up some used bookshelves from my friends. I bought them used for $100.00. One of them is solid wood. The other has solid wood shelves and particleboard, but it’s not as cheap and flimsy as an IKEA BILLY bookcase. With that were some old clothes my friends were getting rid of because they are moving. Turns out I am the same size as one of them, so I was able to take some fancy satin pants, shirts, dress pants, etc. With that was a pair of lamps my boyfriend wanted. That was $25.00 for a whole box of clothes and knickknacks. But I would have spent way more than that at Goodwill for the same clothes.

To pick up the shelves (one is over 7 feet in height), we borrowed a pick up truck from my boyfriend’s other friend. When we returned it, we brought over food for a small barbecue and put some gas in the truck. Total? $53.50.

Why were these two things acceptable purchases?

#1. I can’t see in my kitchen. I can’t cook in it because I can’t see, even with a lamp in the room. We actually tried to replace the ballast first, but that didn’t work, so we replaced the whole fixture. Lowe’s didn’t even bother to see that the ballast had been installed once before. They scanned the box. They scanned the original receipt. They printed a credit receipt for me, and I walked out the door.

#2. I’ve been without bookshelves since I’ve moved into the place. Everyone I know has threatened to take me to IKEA for some shelves. When my friends told me they were moving away and they were getting rid of their shelves, I acted quickly. I had seen these shelves before, and knew they were pretty nice. I consider $50 for each shelf a good price since the shorter case alone could easily have cost me $200-300 new.

So now my apartment is looking a bit tidier. I have a place to store things. In the process of looking at the kitchen light, we also ripped out the ADT alarm system I didn’t use. It was leftover from the previous owner, just drawing down power. I would have let it continue doing that, but the powersupply was getting in the way of the bookcase being flush against the wall.

Don’t ask me about the water damage on the wall. I’m not ready for that yet.

Read this daily meditation by 3 Things About Money. She writes a pretty good blog and this post caught my eye because I think I’m having a lot of anxiety about money lately. Scratch that. I KNOW I’m having a lot of anxiety about money lately.
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JD at Get Rich Slowly has a link to Business Week’s Poverty Business article. It’s about the business of keeping poor people poor.

The authors were on On Point, an NPR radio program yesterday. It reinforces what’s in the story. Some more insight, and a Byrider spokesperson gets questioned by the host. Kind of interesting, but really, it only infuriates me.

Think back to Edwardian England and Debtor’s Prison. If such a thing existed today, I am certain that a disproportionate number of poor people would be in it after getting a payday loan or other usurious loan.

I know that I used to get direct deposit advances from Wells Fargo when I was in my ’20’s and barely scraping by in San Francisco on $27K a year. I know what the temptation is to get a little cash today rather than wait a week. But the fact that relaxed availability of credit is actually hurting more than simple poverty is appalling. Working poor shouldn’t be made even poorer because they are being taken advantage of by these organizations.

I feel like there should be a picket line against these places, like the way pro-lifers stand out in front of Planned Parenthood every week. Maybe that’s what the next DC area PF blogger outing should be.

Don’t get me wrong, lately I’ve turned into a borderline Libertarian on issues for all my crunchy liberal positions, but this seems to push way beyond the Pale of blaming the people who take the loans. It’s like saying, well would you like to freeze or starve this week because you can’t pay both the utility and food bills? Any sensible person would take the payday loan and worry about staving off imminent starvation or freezing to death. (Let’s get real people, that is often the choice poor people are making. Ok, maybe not in May. I’ll concede that.)

Hello and welcome to readers of Blueprint for Financial Prosperity!

Jim posted what he’d do if he lost his job, including my old post on the same subject. and I appreciate your stopping by here.

New readers can subscribe to my feed.

I’m so sorry that my site STILL looks crappy in MS Internet Explorer 7, but you really should use Firefox anyway. (Truly frugal types go with open source software.)

Thank you for visiting me. Please feel free to leave a comment. I just have a few basic rules that boil down to these two:

1) Please try not to be anonymous. Even if you say something like ‘W.L.’ for a name, that helps clear up conversations that anonymous has with anonymous in the comments section.

2) Please try to be courteous. Rule of thumb, if you wouldn’t say it to my face in person, don’t say it here or to my other guests. (Read more about internet trolls and discussion moderation at InformationWeek in this great article by Cory Doctorow.)

Thanks and welcome!

Dong left a comment yesterday about my fortitude in staying 100% in stocks. However, I think I better clarify that.

I am in 100% stock investments via 8 different mutual funds in 2 different accounts and about 5 or 6 stocks for dabbling in active investing and learning about stocks. Let’s just say the latter shows that I’m not a winner. I’d be better giving that over to a chimpanzee with the WSJ and some darts.

But the 8 funds I have go like this:

Account #1 - a 401k Rollover into a private Traditional IRA:
Mid Cap - closed to new investors
Small Cap - closed to new investors
REIT

Account #2 - current 401k:
S&P 500 Index Fund
Large Cap
International
Small Cap Growth
Small Cap Value

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I just realized, I have 18 months to go before I am fully vested at my current job. WOO HOO!

I was IMing with SF Money Musings on Meebo the other night. She asked me about my 401k investments because I was keying them into Quicken while chatting with her. I am very close to hitting the $20K milestone in my account, however, that is the fully vested balance.

That got me to thinking about how long I’d been at my company and I realized that I only had another 18 months before I was fully vested! That will take me to the end of 2008 and then at that point, if things look good, I’ll stay through the 2009 bonus season. That’s kind of crazy for me since my average tenure is less than 2 years. If I stay through the 2009 bonus season, that will be about 3.5 years. Might as well stay for four!

If my company keeps incentivizing a long tenure, I might never move back to CA till I actually do have to retire.

On a side note, I was trying to explain why a company match is so fantastic. At my old company I made peanuts, but I managed to put away 3% of my income into the 401k plan, with 1.5% of my salary in matching funds. That means I got a 50% rate of return automatically, on top of any other gains I had on my contributions. (Of course if I had losses, it would only cushion the blow rather than sit like the cherry on top.)

If I contribute the maximum amount of 20% of my salary, I only get 2.5% matching at my new company, but that’s still a 12.5% return. Not to shabby since I’m only looking for an 8% rate of return on my retirement investments.

Of course I could ride the market down horribly in stock funds in my 401k plan, but to each their own when it comes to risk. I’m 100% into stock funds at the moment having sold off all my bond fund holdings. I’m uber-aggressive. I expect to live to 95 with technological advances in medicine, so I will probably stay 100% in stock funds till I’m close to 50, heck maybe even 60. I have to make that money last me another 35 years!

ps- I usually don’t have spring allergies in DC, but for some reason, this spring, I am miserable. Gotta love generic Claritin, i.e. Loratadine. I get mine from CVS primarily for evil cat allergies, but Target has 120 tablet bottles if you are desperately sick. It costs about $20 bucks there, which is way cheaper than branded-Claritin in wasteful single blister packaging.

CNN/Money has an article that says gas boycotts are dumb.

I dug up something old I wrote to a mailing list, circa 2004. I thought I posted a similar rant here ages ago, but my archives tell me I haven’t. So here is most of what I wrote, edited for clarity, time-perspective and a removal of some of my snarky comments. Sorry for the holier-than-thou attitude. I was arguing against a bunch of tree-hugging hippies I like to call my friends. Sometimes it takes a verbal can of whoop-a$$ to get them to take you seriously.

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I went to a reunion this weekend and one of my old classmates is a financial advisor. We got to talking and I admit, I was feeling the waters a bit for a consultation. I also was complaining that my parents’ broker has wandered around to about 3 firms in the past 15 years, which I think is sketchy. My classmate thinks that could be sketchy too and advised that I check into his record to see if he’s ever been disciplined by NASD, the National Association of Securities Dealers.

NASD’s disciplinary actions webpage has a monthly report of which firms and brokers were disciplined, fully barred, etc.

This site also has links for arbitration requests as well.

Of course, I’m not saying that my parents’ broker is actually sketchy, but I know my classmate has been with the same firm since we graduated college and in the same period, my parents’ broker has moved at least once.

I just resent that every time he’s moved and taken my parents with him, it’s incurred fees for them that probably weren’t necessary if they had just stayed put and got reassigned to someone else. They aren’t too crazy with their money so I just don’t see the point of eating up their gains with stupid fees just because their broker is unhappy with his firm. That’s his problem, not theirs.

Anyhow, my only other comment is that I actually know a person who went to arbitration against their broker. It turned out the broker was freshly minted, but had a bad history with the insurance industry and had been barred from selling insurance, which is how they turned to securities work. So even if you go check this site, you might want to check a few other trade associations and the Better Business Bureau as well.

Good luck to you!

Use the Meebo window on the left to chat with me this evening from 10pm EDT to 11pm EDT. (That’s right now for Cap, who can’t tell timezones.)

So we had this argument about the car and whether or not to have the tow truck take it to an expensive dealership on a Sunday.

I called two different dealerships and no answer. So I Googled for towing service and found one very close to home. It’s 24-hours and in a pinch, we can walk to the garage. It’s a mighty long walk, but one I used to do when I was a kid and REALLY wanted McDonald’s for lunch.

The nice man at the garage said he knew exactly where we were and that he’d stop by. I asked how much for the tow, he said $45 bucks. That’s it. I asked if we were going to need a new battery or if he was going to just charge it up. He said he’d have to take a look.

The guy comes out, and has this less than fancy gadget. He hooks up the battery and jumps the car. EASY.

Total cost? $35 smackaroos, plus a tip of $5. No need to join AAA at $85 a year.

My mother is a ditz. Well so am I.

I did the same thing about 5 hours later when I was ready to leave her house. I rolled the windows down, left the keys in the ignition, went to chat with the new and friendly neighbors I didn’t know, and promptly forgot where the keys were. I went back into the house and tore up my luggage when some logical thinking kicked in. Why were the windows down on the car? Derf. I left the keys in the ignition. Fortunately, not in the ON position, because I am kind of stuck in my habits and always put the keys back into OFF if I am getting out of the car.

Lessons for you?

1) AAA may not be your best bet. A local towing company might be cheaper if you’re in your own neighborhood when a breakdown happens.

2) A local garage might have better hours than the local dealership does. And they

3) Always leave your keys in the OFF position if you are going to leave them in the ignition. Better yet, just take them out and put them back into your pocket.