We learned this through an email my wife received last week. It instructed her to transfer $10,000 into a Bitcoin account lest a hidden device be detonated by a hitman “keeping the area under control.” I immediately recognized this as a hoax because, seriously — a bomb, an extortionist AND a hitman? So excessive for the suburbs.
These graduates spent so much on their education that they could not even afford pants. (Photo by Melissa Johnson on Unsplash)
You’ve undoubtedly heard about the rising costs of higher education in the United States.
As the parent of “rising” high school senior and a man with a "falling" income who is fresh from a two-day, three-university, 600-mile tour of prospective Northeastern institutions, I CANNOT say this is true.
Only because the astronomical price tags have left me completely speechless.
After years of bad news for the housing industry, conditions have started improving with notable increases in sales, starts and suckers born every minute.
I worked for a Fortune 500 homebuilder during the boom years, and several bust months, of the previous decade. Luckily for those who bought the company's houses, I only performed construction on the syntax of our executives. As the communications department's primary writer, I spent many fruitless hours trying to convince the stock-option eligible crowd that you can have tools in a toolbox and weapons in an arsenal but saying you have "tools in our arsenal" is bringing a socket wrench to a gunfight.
However, the most heinous crime the industry ever perpetrated on the public, strictly from the standpoint of abusing an English idiom, had to be selling home ownership as "the American Dream."
My Love and I once found ourselves at a charity wine-tasting, It should have been called a charitable wine-tasting because they we’re all pretty awful.
This explains why we were both sober enough to realize we held the winning ticket in the 50-50 raffle.
UNCOOL: Whoo-hoo! Look at that! (waving wad of twenties and singles) Two hundred and thirty-seven big ones!We got our admission fee back and a little more. Free bad wine for every one!
MY LOVE: Ssssssh! Put it in your pocket before someone comes over here.
UNCOOL: What? You think we have some thieves among us? Muggers? (shudders) Madoffs?
My Love is funny about money. She rakes it in professionally and is generous to a fault with friends and strangers alike, yet Scrooge-like with me and my doings.
ME?! The modern day Jack Benny of household and personal thrift? Let’s explore this in the next few posts.
+ + +
One night in the not-too-distant past, I sought the seclusion of my home office to finish some odds and ends on my computer. This immediately raised suspicions in my wife.
MY LOVE (decloaking from ninja mode): What are you doing?
UNCOOL (wetting pants) (because I spilled my beer): GAH! Jesus Alou, honey! I was sending an email to our neighbors.
Just before that first time we reached the mountain, we drove past two cemeteries. That's some potentially heavy-handed foreshadowing when your family has just decided to take up skiing.
Turns out, I misinterpreted this sign. The burial grounds we skirted en route to Ski Sundown (there it was again!) in New Hartford, a year ago weren't a harbinger of physical demise to come on the slopes. They were a warning that this hobby could lead to a pauper's grave.
This clarification came a few days ago after having survived my first full winter's skiing with minimal near-death experiences and one huge escape from blowing half a million dollars on a weekend hideaway in Vermont.
The near-fatal fiscal buildup came gradually. The previous summer, we wisely invested in helmets, goggles and arctic wear at mega-low online, off-season rates. Our family of four, still sporting shorts and sandals at the time, visited a local ski shop to be fit for a long winter's rental of skis, boots and poles – all at a pre-snowflake discount.
When December finally came, we hit the slopes. The slopes hit back at our bank account.
Gas. Lift tickets, which resorts upsell with movie-theater concession ingenuity ("Only $5 more for the all-day versus the half-day even though in reality I'll only ski an extra 45 minutes? What a deal!"). Lunch and post-run adult beverages to revive numb feet and soothe sore thighs. Repeated every few weekends and we're talking credit card bills of Swiss Alps proportion.
However, I figured that as long as My Love stayed employed, Wall Street didn't tank again and I avoided hospital expenses by managing to continue to weave around the snowboarders who randomly chill in the middle of every flippin' trail I take, we'd survive.
Then my wife started visiting real estate Web sites.
Although she grew up in the eastern Great Plains where the closest one comes to skiing is sliding down the stadium steps at a Nebraska Cornhuskers game after one too many tomato juice tainted Budweisers, My Love spent many hours swooshing down the Colorado Rockies while on road trips in college and even more so after shed moved to Denver the day she graduated. She gave this up when the company she worked for shipped her East and she meet me, a man committed to always avoiding situations that could land me in a full-body cast. This winter, though, she was in her glory because not only me but also the Things reveled in one of her former passions.
My Love read aloud the descriptions of this potential second home in the heart of the Vermont ski country. Four thousand square feet, 2.1 acres of land, stream teeming with trout, hot tub and just minutes from the slopes of Stratton Mountain.
"We're going to be near there when we stay at my friend's house this weekend," she said last Thursday, sounding even more upbeat than usual. "Let's check it out."
We had talked for years about investing in a property we could use as an occasional getaway and rental unit, but it never happened for several reasons. The biggest, as far as I was concerned, was a poor Schlep Ratio.
Schlep Ratio (SR) is expense and travel time multiplied by the weight and square footage of your luggage added to onsite, non-relaxation time (cleaning your vacation home, waiting in a lift line, etc.) divided by time spent actually enjoying the destination minus sleep but excluding naps. Weekend ski trips to central Vermont from southwestern Connecticut (it’s that little tail part that wags the rest of the state) have very high SR. This means acceptability on an infrequent basis and only if you're staying at someone's place for free.
However, I’ve learned over our 17 years together to never express these kinds of Doubting Thomas opinions directly to My Love. She’s the can-do dreamer; I’m the cynic who tries to disguise his fears as practicality. My negativity only makes her want to work harder to prove me wrong and she succeeds far too much at this for what remains of my ego.
Luckily for me, by the time we reached this mountainside dream home she was drooling over online, it was nearly four hours and a minivan full of kids, a kenneled dog and a ton of ski equipment later, My Love had already done some mental calculations of the Schlep Ratio on her own.
We looked through the car windows, nodded and left.
Somewhere safely down the highway, she started talking aloud – more to herself, really, than me. We’d need to get a third car, a 4x4, because the minivan only has front wheel drive. We’d have to hire someone to maintain the yard during the summer and plow the quarter-mile long driveway in the winter. She didn’t want to spend the weekend’s there cleaning so someone would need to come in at least monthly to do that. And four hours, even without traffic, now that’s a schlep.
It went on and on. I sat there and tried not to agree too enthusiastically.
"Looks like we'll be putting our money in the kids' college fund this spring," she said once we were many many mile down the highway.
For her sake, though, I'm going to start seeding the Things’ little minds about the importance of winning a ski team scholarship.
Everyone in my immediate family is or works for an accountant. I -- not once, but twice -- scored at least 130 points higher in math than verbal on my SATs.
Naturally, I became a writer. I blame a middle-school classmate who convinced me that, just prior to our taking a career-aptitude test, no job could be better than one in which you get paid to sit around and tell stories.
(Said classmate, the son of a minister, also had a premature taste for hard-core porn magazines. He kept out them out back, right across from the church.)
Still, from time to time, My Love asks me to handle simple financial matters. Why? Beats me. She has an MBA and spends most of her day converting world currencies and dissecting international monetary bylaws so someone who lives in Cheboygan, Mich., can be paid in British sterling via Turkish lira that has be filtered through Mexican counting houses because the person once saw a Taco Bell ad in magazine while flying over the Samsun province.
(Scene: My Love, lost in the thought at the kitchen table.
ME: "Honey, wha'chathinkin' 'bout?"
HER: "Oh, you know. Sometimes I just like to compound interest in my head.")
Last week, My Love phoned home with a mission: Go to our local Wank of America branch and have them make out a bank check to a car dealer. The check was for a tidy sum that made me gag on the store-brand peanut butter I was having for lunch.
"If we have that much in the bank, why don't I just hit the ATM?" I asked, mentally picturing such a thick stack of Jacksons. "I'll go change into some cargo shorts."
"No. I need a check made out by the bank because … (I zoned out during this part, probably as I was focusing on removing the generic Jif from my wisdom tooth) …, OK?"
"Yes, My Love."
I grabbed the checkbook she left for me on the countertop and headed out.
Hmm, if I have a checkbook why do I need a bank check?
God, this peanut butter is being feisty!
I arrived at the bank and informed the teller of my need.
"There's a $7 charge for that," she said.
Then she looked at my checkbook. The account I wanted to use was actually with another bank down the street.
Quarts of flop sweat later, my minivan pulled up to the nearby PityWank branch. As I do, it dawns on me: I was in this building many years ago … when it was an S&H Green Stamps redemption center. What did we trade our stamps in for? Blender? Mixer?
So, into the bank and another line. The teller asks for my bank card.
"Uh, I don't have one."
"You don't have a card for your account?"
"No. But I have this checkbook."
She looks exasperated. Then she asks for my Social Security number.
"It's not in the system. Do you know your wife's Social?"
"I don't know my wife's phone number at work. … But I have this checkbook. My name is printed on the checks. See. Do these checks serve any purpose at all?"
She commences banging away furiously on her keyboard. I feel like I just asked to upgrade my seat on the last chopper out of 'Nam.
Triggered by waiting impatiently and impotently at the counter, just as I did with my mom 35 years ago, The Green Stamp store flashbacks begin. Yellow linoleum floors crammed with vacuums standing under soiled throw rugs. Peeling wallpaper with crooked posters of smiling housewives in checkered aprons. Jesus, what did we get here?
Sewing machine?
Rowboat?
Dang it, that's an old episode of the Brady Bunch.
"You know," the teller interrupted, "there will be a $10 service charge for issuing this check?"
"You know," I countered, "it's only $7 up the street."
"Pardon me, sir?"
"Hey! Do you know what?" I said in mid-epiphany. "My mom and I got a toaster over in this building once and all it cost us was a few books of sticky green paper."
My Love and I once found ourselves at a charity wine-tasting, It should have been called a charitable wine-tasting because they we’re all pretty awful.
