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From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogNovember 17, 2020 at 5:01 pm ET
I am some sort of lightning rod for financial identity theft. Dedicated readers will recall my grousing last April when my American Express card got hacked and fraudulently used. I never lost the card; someone got hold of the numbers and used them. As I mentioned in April, that wasn't the first time I'd been through the theft rigmarole. It was the third -- first time with Amex, after two previous attacks on my NetBank check Visa/ATM card. Remember my oh-so-chipper post title? "At least it's less painful than having my debit card hacked."My debit card got hacked this ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogNovember 13, 2020 at 2:54 pm ET
Well, I opted for the HSA, though I almost didn't at the last minute thanks to a loophole that makes it problematic if you have my precise, fairly unusual situation.In my earlier post I mentioned that an HSA (health savings account) is logistically similar to an FSA (flexible spending account), with the big difference that money in your HSA doesn't disappear at the end of the year. If it's unspent, you keep it. Because of that distinction, the government doesn't want people double-dipping with an HSA/FSA combo: you can't set up an HSA, also fund an FSA, and then use ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogNovember 9, 2020 at 4:09 pm ET
This week the Washington Post profiled Goozex, a used video-game swapping service that aims to fetch gamers better value for their old games than they'd get selling them to retail used-games shops. It sounds like a good idea (gamers, check it out), but it's also a nice illustration of what I'm coming to think of as the yuppie subscription economy. (OK, I know "yuppies" is hopelessly '80s. What are we now? And if anyone suggests bobos, I break out the knives.) I love the concept of libraries but am a poor user of them. Books ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogOctober 29, 2020 at 12:27 am ET
Picture a home insurance sales brochure offering a rundown on various coverage options. One option is described this way: You may benefit from this plan if: - It's hard to remember the last time your home burned down. ... and yet, this is the pitch my health insurance company, Empire Blue Cross, is using to sell its Medical Savings Plan option (better known as a "health savings account," or HSA), which the brochure cheerfully touts as a good plan if "it's hard to remember the last time you went to the ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogOctober 27, 2020 at 2:13 pm ET
A while back I grumped about the "$X minimum purchase" claims some merchants make (which are in violation of Visa & Mastercard contracts). My friend Matthew, proprietor of Roots & Grubs, went further and actually did some investigating to find out more about what processing small transactions actually costs merchants. It's a great, very informative post. Though I am dubious about this whole "making calls for information" thing. It sounds very un-bloglike, involving effort and journalism. Aiee!(And hi! I'm alive again.) ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogSeptember 8, 2020 at 2:20 pm ET
The Checkout blog today spotlights a bizarre practise I wouldn't have imaged exists: Marketers are using your cookies to play with price points for flexibly priced goods (magazine subscriptions, airline tickets, etc.)
Basically, the post explains how clearing your cookie cache can change the prices you're shown at online storefronts. Offering different shoppers different prices is a longstanding marketing tactic, but this is an impressively personalized level of targeting. Yick. ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogSeptember 5, 2020 at 4:35 pm ET
Rental cars and medical bills: these are the two planets around which my financial life seems to orbit. This weekend I stumbled across an unusual bit of consumer-unfriendliness I hadn't hit before. I had a rental reservation with Dollar, made through Travelocity. I scanned the fine print when I made the booking for the usual catches, but I can't swear I scoured every bit of it on every conceivable link -- though I did print the reservation and bring that along. When I arrived to pick up my car, I was ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogAugust 31, 2020 at 5:07 pm ET
"I'm an old Marine. I'm going to follow the chain of command. I can go until we hit God."
That quote is from Katrina survivor Leon Dupreire, explaining in a Washington Post article how he got Allstate to pay out a storm damage claim they initially denied. I'm tempted to plaster it across the box in which I amass bills and such. Unfortunately, it feels like squeaking loudly and persistently is ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogAugust 18, 2020 at 4:33 pm ET
I have an entitlement complex about software. The universe of applications is so vast these days, and the barriers to creating new ones so low, that I expect some clever programmer to have solved pretty much any problem I can dream up. So when I have a problem that seems ideally suited for a software solution, but can't find a good application, I get vexed. Vexed and cranky.Right now, the gaping void vexing me is software for tracking medical expenses. I take a fairly laid-back approach to budget administration in general. I use PocketMoney on my Palm for day-to-day tracking ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogAugust 8, 2020 at 4:25 pm ET
Business Week inspired much yelping in the blogosphere this week with a splashy cover relying on some incredibly dodgy math. "How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months," touts the cover ... glossing over the small detail that the profiled digg founder hasn't "made" any major cash money from the site and that the $60 million is a plucked-from-the-vapor calculation based on some unnamed sources' estimates of digg's worth. (The site currently claims $3 million a year in revenue. Mature companies generally get acquired for a single-digit multiple of their annual revenue. Early-stage ventures with very bright prospects go ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogAugust 7, 2020 at 5:38 pm ET
The Washington Post's Checkout blog picked up my Time subscription saga today, so here's an update: I eBay'd it. Paid $10, and didn't end up missing any issues after all. Looks like eBay will be my route for all future magazine subscriptions! And just in time. New York magazine has this crackheaded notion that it's going raise prices to $40 per year, up from the $15 I've been paying ...
(As someone who makes a living writing things for Big Publishing, I'm very sympathetic to publishers' need to turn a profit. But trying to pry high subscription rates out of loyal ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogAugust 3, 2020 at 2:15 pm ET
Lately my main financial occupation has been researching medical parity laws and investigating the likelihood of successfully challenging an insurance company's coverage caps.
I like my new job a lot, but as I've mentioned earlier, one area where it falls way short of my last job is on insurance. I'm now with Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I've always chosen PPO options for my insurance, even when it costs more, because I want the option of going out of network if I need to. I was prepared to choose the PPO option and pay more with Blue Cross -- until I realised that ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJuly 19, 2020 at 1:45 pm ET
Sorry for the long patch again of radio silence -- it's been a month of travel and bureaucracy. I'm in one of those stretches right now where I feel like my sole purpose in life is to facilitate the movement of bits of paper.
This week, it's New School University I'm shuffling paper around for. I'm heading into my third and final year of finishing off a degree there. When I enrolled, New School ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJuly 6, 2020 at 4:53 pm ET
A recent acknowledgement from the U.S. Mint that rising metal costs now mean it's more expensive to make a penny (manufacturing cost: about 1.2 cents) that to buy one have sparked a fresh wave of news articles about the imperiled penny and editorials calling for its death.
I don't have strong feelings either way on the fate of the penny. I do actually drag them around in my wallet and spend them, and don't see much about the weight of my wallet or my spending habits changing if they get exterminated. On a practical note, my Aussie partner David notes that ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJuly 5, 2020 at 2:37 pm ET
One of my friends posted today about how her family is making life work on a single income. The aspect of it that intrigued me the most is: plan. This is a terribly basic thing, but I still struggle to implement it in my daily financial life. The thing savings buys you isn't more stuff, it's flexibility. The value of have flexibility when you need it? Priceless.
... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJune 21, 2020 at 6:59 pm ET
Greetings from Seattle. Another city, another free rental car upgrade -- National had no compacts in stock, so I ended up driving off with the same mid-size I had just declined to pay an upgrade charge for.
Someday I hope to acquire the skill of regular blogging. For now, I'll have to be sporadic -- sorry! But be assured that even if I go silent for a stretch, I'm not abandoning the ship.
I finished one of the house-buying books I mentioned earlier, June Fletcher's House Poor: Pumped-Up Prices, Rising Rates, and Mortgages on Steroids. My verdict: It's a clip job, but ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJune 8, 2020 at 12:44 pm ET
Like many people these days, I deal with actual paper checks rarely. I write one a month for my rent, cash one perhaps every few months, and deal with all the rest of my financial matters (paycheck deposits, bill paying, etc) electronically.
Those electronic transactions come with elaborate consumer safeguards. As many times as I've had my accounts used fraudulently, I've never been personally libel for any of the losses. Not so with checks. If a check you deposit bounces, you eat the loss. Here's the not-so-well-known catch: A check can bounce long after the bank has cleared it and ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJune 6, 2020 at 3:49 pm ET
When I was ten and first started paying attention to my allowance money, I resolved to only spend it on tangible things. A sandwich would disappear once it was eaten, so what was the point? I reasoned. I would keep my money for lasting objects.
Eighteen years later, my philosophy has basically done a complete turnaround.
I still spend plenty of money on things. I cheerfully describe both myself and my spouse David as materialists, because we are clutterrats who accumulate lots of things -- books lead the list, but we also round up souvenirs quite a bit when we travel, and ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogJune 5, 2020 at 11:32 am ET
A few habits from my childhood have proven impossible to shake off, and reading Time is one of them. My browser homepage is washingtonpost.com, which keeps me somewhat attuned to the daily news cycle, but I've never subscribed to a daily newspaper myself (though my parents had a WashPost subscription for as long as I can remember) -- I lack the time and discipline for that kind of reading. I rely on a weekly newsmagazine to make sure I don't miss anything huge. Time brand loyalty runs deep. Although it's gone through periods of being frustratingly fluffy, I've always stuck ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogMay 30, 2020 at 2:07 pm ET
I had the clever timing to start my new job just as my employer was switching 401k providers, from Scudder to JP Morgan. The various confusions meant that it's taken more than three months since I started for my 401k to be completely set up and functioning properly. So, last week I finally got around to going through my rollover forms from JP Morgan and contacting my old 401k provider, ING, about transferring funds from my old employer's plan to my new one.
ING, of course, doesn't like the idea of losing my money. The rep I spoke with first pitched ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogMay 25, 2020 at 12:40 pm ET
Whoops, that was not intended to be a cliffhanger and long hiatus. Once again, the culprit was travel. SF & DC were lovely.The credit reports I pulled were surprisingly accurate. It's a bit daunting to realise just how many credit lines I've had in my not-so-very-long consumer lifetime. Each report showed more than two dozen accounts -- credit cards, retail cards (usually opened for discounts, used once, and subsequently ignored), student loans, and other assorted bits. While I only actively use two credit-card accounts and my student loan lines, I apparently still have another fistful of still-living retail accounts. Of ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogMay 6, 2020 at 12:20 pm ET
As part of my house-buying daydreaming, I decided to do the annual credit-report pull -- now free, yay!
I did this last September, soon after it because available in New York, for David. That was tricky, since he has no credit cards in his name and has a very limited credit history in the U.S. None of the three credit-report vendors would give us online access to his reports. Each required a paper request. We filed those, and after a month or so got the reports for him from each place. (Tiny, two-page reports. Mine are like phone books.)
I'd thought ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogMay 5, 2020 at 1:55 pm ET
Two of my close friends are in process of buying a house right now, the crazy kids. (An actual *house.* In New York City. Who knew such things existed?) This has gotten me thinking wistfully again about real estate. We're not in a position to buy anything now, and I doubt we will be for at least another year, but since I'm always information obsessive, what's to stop me getting started with some research?
Listening to these two go through the details of the buying process, it hit me how little I understood it all. Inspections? Title checks? Swarms of ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogMay 4, 2020 at 3:40 pm ET
It had to happen, I suppose. For years a handful of organizations have focused on advocating socially conscious investing, encouraging individuals and organizations to weed out of their investment portfolios those companies that perpetrate environmental, cultural and political ills. So what's a red-meat right-winger do to? Fight fire with fire (or money with money), of course, and launch a mutual fund pledged "to defend free enterprise from the Left’s use of capitalism against capitalism." Hence we have the Free Enterprise Action Fund, which Daniel Gross entertainingly smacks around in Slate today. It seems that fighting the Left's crimes against ... ( more)
From Birds and Bills - view blog entries - visit this blogMay 2, 2020 at 12:43 pm ET
Back from the road again -- travel and blogging just don't mix well for me. I see my post about keeping separate accounts with my spouse generated comments while I was gone. One point in particular caught my attention:
My wife and I used to operate the exact same system as you and I have to say the best financial decision I ever made was to change this round. ... Our savings rate has tripled since we started doing this and yet we haven't felt deprived. We have just stopped wasting money.
That makes sense to me. It also touches on one ... ( more)
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