Tag: money

In which brain melty need stopping

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It has been a hell of a day, not in a bad way but in a there is too much information in my head and I don’t know what to do with any of it sort of way. I was out and about for a couple of hours– actual hours! Not just a quick trip to the Target in my back yard!– this morning, mostly running errands for my father-in-law, and I just had a conversation with my wife that ended with not only deciding to go ahead and move forward with LASIK but I also need to look into either a home equity loan or a mortgage refinance tomorrow, and there was a lot of talk about things like new roofs and bathroom and kitchen renovations and my brain has already spent some time today trying to figure out how to rearrange my office so that the layout makes a little bit more sense and that’s a lot of work and there is some work around the house that I need to do and oh a lot of that stuff needs contractors and do we know any contractors or maybe does your dad know any contractors and I really need to repurpose my entire computer setup to be better for video editing because I’m going to have to do a lot of that this fall one way or another and oh America just had its biggest day so far in terms of new cases of COVID so let’s fall down that depressing-ass rabbit hole too while we’re at it.

I need a nap.

7:46 PM, Wednesday June 24: 2,376,263 confirmed cases and 121,932 Americans dead.

Okay FINE then I WON’T

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

The picture almost makes customer service seem cool, doesn’t it?

I was recently able to zero out all but one of my credit cards, and Lord willing and the creek don’t rise it shouldn’t be long until I’m able to whack that one as well. I was startled to see a bill show up from one of my cards a few days ago; the card actually got overpaid a bit so the last I’d looked at it they owed me money, which is always a fun thing to have happen with a credit card. Turns out they’d charged me a $59 annual fee. Now, chances are this fee has been around for all if not most of the time I’ve had this card, but during damn near 100% of that time I’ve carried a balance. It pissed me off that I suddenly owed them an annual fee on a card with no balance, so I did a brief check to make sure it wouldn’t affect my credit rating too unduly and then called to cancel the card.

(A five minute period ensues here, as we go from blustery-but-dry outside to torrential rainstorm hello tropical storm Cristobal in about ten seconds and then the power blinks out. By the time I have the computer back online and the Internet back up, the rain has stopped.)

Anyway. That was a long lead-in to a quick resolution, but: it turns out that if you’ve had a credit card for 23 years and you call them and say something along the lines of “Hey, y’all charged me this annual fee. I don’t wanna pay it. Cancel the card!” they will not only remove the fee from your card (and, to be honest, I pretty much expected this result) but they will set things so that you are never charged an annual fee again. Which, paradoxically, is kind of annoying, because I find you must pay this annual fee, unless you don’t want to to be really obnoxious as a policy.

But, hey, I guess I don’t have to cut the card up now? All told, I’d rather have the credit than not, so I went ahead and kept it.

Also, I can see blue sky outside now. Weather is weird.

5:45 PM, Tuesday June 9: 1,973,803 confirmed cases and 111,751 Americans dead.

An addendum to the previous post

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

One of the following two things is true, and I’m not sure which, despite having read more than your average person about British history and literature:

OPTION ONE: British currency, pre-Euro, is bullshit, and I refuse to believe anyone can keep track of how many guineas are in a shilling or how many Robux are in a whangdoodle or whatever; y’all make fun of us for not having the metric system but this is how you do your money?

OPTION TWO: British currency is not in and of itself bullshit, but the way people write about it is; anyone mentioning British currency in any capacity is consistently doing the equivalent of saying “she spent three dollars, two quarters, two dimes and three pennies” instead of the more sensible “she spent $3.73.”

It’s gotta be one or the other, I just don’t know which.

In which I ask the interwebs for financial advice

On By Luther M. SilerIn life6 Comments

… and, okay, ultimately I’m probably gonna listen to my wife on this more than y’all, but it’s not like I’m overflowing with other subjects to discuss today.

So like a lot of you (so many people are checking their bank balances online that the apps are crashing) we got our stimulus money today. Twelve hunnert for me, twelve hunnert for my wife, and another five hunnert for the boy. My wife and I mostly keep our finances separate; we divide up the bills, so, like, I pay the mortgage but she buys the groceries and pays for utilities, and any bills that are ours, like cars or student loans, are our own personal responsibility. The boy’s chunk of the money will probably end up going toward tuition.

We are not among the people who need this money. It’s nice; I’m never going to turn down cash, but we do not need it. We both have jobs that provide us with sufficient funds for our lifestyle and furthermore we are in a position where our jobs are at least less likely to go away because of the pandemic– she works in the health care sector, broadly speaking, and while disaster-related teacher layoffs are always a possibility I have enough seniority at this point that I’m highly unlikely to be affected by them, and they won’t happen until this fall at any rate. I may not like my job once everything shakes out, but there’s not a huge possibility of losing it.

(He said, casually knocking on wood afterward.)

So the question becomes what to do with it, and … well, like I said, I don’t have lots else to talk about at the moment. So:

  • OPTION ONE: SAVE IT. Probably the most obvious choice; the merits of saving money don’t even really need to be explained. Things are okay now; they may not stay that way, even if I think it’s probably likely that they will. Somebody could get sick; something could happen with one of the cars or the house, shit happens. Especially in the last couple of years.
  • OPTION TWO: PAY OFF CREDIT CARD. My overall credit card indebtedness has gone down enormously recently; I only have one card with a balance right now and $1200 would pay off a sizable fraction of it, but not finish it off. Yet. That said, the monthly bill for the card isn’t that high, and I’ve been paying twice that amount every month. It’s gonna go away (again, assuming no financial disasters) soon enough even if I don’t put this big chunk into it.
  • OPTION THREE: SAVE HALF, PAY OFF HALF. Probably the most reasonable option unless I decide to prioritize saving.
  • OPTION FOUR: BUY MORE BOOKS AND DICE. You can never have enough books and dice. This one is probably not the smartest idea, but would be the most fun.
  • OPTION FIVE: DONATE IT TO SOMEONE. The most socially responsible option since, again, I don’t need the money, but I think a certain amount of financial selfishness is warranted right now for the exact same reasons one might give to save the money. We’re not so well off that this money is nothing— it’s still definitely a good chunk of change– it’s just not immediately necessary for anything.

So, whaddya think? How much should I be tilting toward paranoia and safety right now? Or, alternatively, what are you doing with your $1200?

12:56 PM, Wednesday April 15: 610,774 confirmed infections (and over two million worldwide); 26,119 Americans dead.

In which that’s enough of that

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

So here’s the thing about the con I just did: I like all the people who run it. For the most part, I liked all the other vendors I talked to. I really enjoyed the panels I did; they weren’t heavily attended, but it turns out if you put a bunch of authors in a room and tell them to yap about something we’re perfectly happy just to talk amongst ourselves for a while even if there aren’t a whole lot of people there to listen.

Actually, true story: one of my panels was scheduled against the charity auction, which was heavily attended, and as a result there was literally no one there when our panel was supposed to start. The four of us just got to talking about microfiction anyway. Eventually one person showed up and joined the conversation. We did some readings, just for the hell of it. We had one person attend and it was the best panel I did, and I didn’t record it because I didn’t think it was going to last an hour– and somehow it did.

So, yeah, I’m not going back.

And, like, it’s weird– I like these people, and I had fun, and I’m not even going to use the name of the con in this post specifically because I don’t want anyone connected with the con finding it by accident, because this isn’t their fault. It’s not a poorly run show, but this is a small show, and the majority of my sales over the weekend were to other vendors, which is practically unheard of– and there were long stretches of time, especially today, where I didn’t see anyone in the vendor room who wasn’t a vendor. That’s not sustainable. It’s just not.

And the people who do show up for this con tend to do all of the cons in the Indianapolis area, which means I’ll catch them at some point at some other show. I recognized easily 50% of the folks who walked past my booth on Friday. There was a guy who was a booth barnacle from Hell for both of the people on either side of me who was at ConGlomeration in Louisville, and I’m pretty sure he was at the last one of these cons, and when I’m recognizing even the people I don’t want to see again? Sigh.

It’s just not worth it to me as someone who at least hypothetically wants the chance to make some money at one of these damn shows. And, of course, the flip side of that was the couple of people who did buy something from me at the last show, remembered me, and bought more books– I love that. It’s a wonderful feeling. But I spent $90 on my hotel room last night and sold two books today, for an amount of money that did not cover my breakfast and lunch today.

And … yeah. I’ve still got two or three more shows coming this year– and I had to cancel two because of the family stuff I’ve been going through in the last couple of months– but I have to start being a lot more selective about which shows I go to, and this one just can’t make the cut again. I’m not happy about it, but I don’t think I have a choice.

If I had a million dollars

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

Maybe a nice Chesterfield, or an ottoman …

(Chesterfields are generally insanely uncomfortable and I don’t know why anyone would want to sit in one.)

Anyway, the lotto’s up over half a billion bucks again and I’ve been letting my mind wander, because that’s actually what you’re doing when you buy two lotto tickets: you’re buying the ability to pretend for a couple of days that you’re about to be rich for that $10 or whatever you spent. I’m sure I’ve said this in this space before: I have known for years that if I were ever to come into a lot of money the first thing I would do with it is pay off the student loans of damn near every single person I’ve ever met. I’d have to figure out a way to do it without everyone taking on some sort of massive tax burden but that’s what lawyers are for.

Next step: large education-related donations. Hogwarts is gonna have to name something after me and so is the district I work for, although I’d have to come up with very strict conditions about how the gift to the district I work for would be used because I’ve seen how these people act with grants and I don’t trust them as far as I can throw them. That said, we’ve got some buildings that need some renovations. If I’ve got half a billion bucks I can afford to renovate a couple of them.

A new house and a new car are possibilities but not guaranteed. I’m pretty happy with our house, and millions of dollars would provide plenty of funding to fix the couple of things that aren’t perfect. We don’t need a bigger place and I like our neighborhood; that said, I might be willing to pony up for a place with a flood-proof basement with lots of wall space that I could turn into a huge library. There are bookshelves on every wall in this place as is; if we run out of room, that will be why. I’m not about to move into a mansion or anything but if I could find a house with room for all of my books until I die that’d be great.

If I were to upgrade my car it would be to buy a hybrid of some sort. I like my Kia Soul a lot and you could literally give me a billion dollars and I still wouldn’t end up buying a sports car. I’m just not interested.

Writing a single check to pay off the rest of my student loans would put me on Cloud Nine for weeks.

I would keep working, but I would probably not keep my current job. Honestly I’d probably end up setting up a family charitable foundation with a large portion of the money that was left; running that could become my job easily enough, and I’m sure I could find a way to keep busy giving a couple million a year in charitable donations.

I have spent a few minutes trying to think of some single outlandish purchase that I’d be almost guaranteed to make, and believe it or not I can’t come up with one. I am materialistic in certain ways– I have thousands of books and a huge music collection and thousands of comic books– but, like, our TV is mid-sized at best and we just don’t really do expensive stuff around here, and I pretty much buy whatever books and music I want without paying attention to the cost already. Becoming a multimillionaire wouldn’t really add much to how much I spend on those things. I’d probably end up with four times as much computer and four times as much laptop as I needed, but that’s all I can think of. Flying lessons, maybe. How expensive are those? I really have no idea.

What about you?

So, my car

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

Screen Shot 2017-05-25 at 5.02.01 PMI done fucked up today, I think.

My current car is a 2001 Ford Escape with nearly a hundred and seventy thousand miles on it.  The fabric on the driver’s side door is mostly peeled off, there are big patches of rust inside all the doors, and there’s a big crack in the rear bumper.  The radio intermittently decides it needs to take a rest and won’t turn back on for anywhere from a few seconds to a day.  It leaks oil from a leak so deep in the engine that repairing it is an absurdity.  And its gas mileage… well, leaves something to be desired.

That said: it turns on when I need it to turn on and it gets me where I want to go, and while it’s loud as hell at speed it’s not an uncomfortable ride by any means.  It’s just that at 170K it is only a matter of time until something breaks that will be pointless to repair.  To get ahead of myself a bit, I was offered $1200 for it as a trade today and I think it was probably a pretty generous offer, all told.

The boy has named the car Joey Car Kristofferson.  I will very much miss having a car named Joey Car Kristofferson, to the point where I will probably insist that its replacement be named Joey Car Kristofferson II.  (My wife’s car, incidentally, is called Lisa Car James.  Don’t ask where the boy got the names.  No one knows.)

So anyway, I took that car up there for a test drive earlier today.  It’s a 2016 Kia Soul in the + trim level, with 28,000 miles on it.  It’s immaculately clean and seems to run beautifully.  It’s small– trunk space, in particular, is kind of a joke– but it fits my main need in a vehicle, which is that it rides high enough that I climb into the seat and slide out, rather than the other way around.  I refuse to struggle to get out of my car, which means I’ll never own a sedan again.  I’ve started to seriously hate them.  I test drove a brand-new Ford Escape a few months ago, and loved it, but financially I think it’s a better idea to go for a lightly used vehicle right now rather than a new one.  Unless I lease, which I might choose to do but <insert every website and argument about leasing ever> and my brain isn’t set up for that right now.

It’s just under fifteen thousand bucks, that car, and with the financing I’d expect to get I’d probably be making payments of just over $200 a month.  Which is in the neighborhood where I’m thinking Yeah, I can swing that rather than I can afford that.  To my mind, that’s a real difference; you can swing a new purchase if you can come up with some ways to cut costs that would absorb a lot of the new bill and figure you’ll be okay.  You can afford something if you don’t have to think at all about what you’ll do to pay for it.  For example, I can afford to spend $25-50 pretty much whenever I want so long as I don’t, like, do it every day.  But if I want to buy a new shirt or something?  I don’t have to think about that.  A car payment means I’m thinking things like well, I do eat out way too often anyway and I’m spending too much fucking money on comic books every week while I’m considering what it would do to my budget.  And the down payment would have to come out of our mutual savings, which my wife will likely have something to say about.  We did just drop three and a half grand on a new bed, after all.

I’m not sure I have a point here, and I don’t know if I’m asking for advice or just talking.  I just need to decide how quickly I think I need a new car, and whether I should buy a new one before I need a new one.

Go buy some of my books and make this easier, dammit.  🙂

In which I spend money I don’t have

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

2017-Ford-Escape-Left-Front-Angle.jpgNo, I didn’t buy a new car, but I’m thinking about it: I’m at a Ford dealership right now getting a recall repair done (for free) and literally just as I was sitting down to write this post I got an email with an estimate for all the repairs they think the car needs and it’s roughly 1 1/2 times the actual value of the car.  It’s running well for something that is about to fall the fuck apart, but even the shit that’s in BRIGHT RED SCREAMING HOLY SHIT YOU’RE GOING TO DIE font adds up to “may as well total the thing” territory.  So I’ve been sitting here in the dealership for an hour already and there’s possibly as much as another two before I can leave, so fuck it, I’m researching new cars.

I don’t really need another SUV.  I was driving a two-door Toyota Yaris (which I loved) when the boy came along, and upgrading to something with four doors seemed like a critical necessity what with several years of car seats in our future, and we’d been through a spate of scenarios where we’d had to borrow other people’s cars to move stuff right around the same time.  The Yaris, despite being tiny, rode really high, and I quickly discovered that after driving that and then an SUV I don’t ever want to sit down in a car ever again, eliminating virtually every sedan on the market.  I want to climb into my seat so that I don’t have to grunt like some sort of animal when I get out of it.  Despite its age, I’ve been pretty happy with the current (’01) Escape, so replacing it with another seems reasonable.  I just sat down and priced one out on the internet, and discovered to my mild amusement that I could put myself into a new Escape for a lower monthly cost than a Kia Soul (my other leading choice) would end up being, despite the Escape being a few thousand dollars more expensive.  Plus: union-made, a big plus.

(The punch line is I probably could afford a new car if I could just curb my comic book habit and dial back on how often I pay for meals.  That is insane, but true.  Today’s post was very nearly about how comic books are better now than I remember them being at any point in my life.  It’s crazy how much money I’m spending on comics every week.  Crazy.)

I am aware used cars exist, mind you.  And I know the current car was bought used and worked out okay.  I just… nah.  I know about driving shit off the lot and it losing half its value and all that nonsense.  And every computer I’ve ever bought has been obsolete when I bought it, and my Xbox will eventually be on sale for half what I just paid for it, and blah blah blah.  Shit loses value.  Welcome to reality.  I don’t plan on trying to resell anything I buy in two years; this is not worth worrying about at the moment.

Maybe I should get working on the new book before I do something stupid.