The 100 by 30 project

Is this the worst possible housing bill possible?

I would love to see a housing bailout bill that refinanced loans for primary homeowners who are in homes at high-rate ARMs that they could actually afford with a 30-year-fixed at, say, 5-6%. Cuts down on foreclosures, but doesn't waste money on hopeless cases or reward speculation.

But the Senate just stripped that out of their "housing relief package"! Luckily, "forty percent of the cost of the bill will fund a business tax break expected to help homebuilders." Yay! Anything in the name of preserving jobs.

Unbelievable.

Advice for people who contact my department looking for tutors:

I can't speak for the other professors in the department, but my advisor bills out his consulting time at the rate of $2500/day. And we grad students are actually paid well enough that we don't see a lot of benefit to doing tutoring on the side, once you factor in the logistical hassle and the inflated expectations of tutorees.

So when you send an email to our department looking for a tutor for $20/hour and no one responds, leave it be. Don't follow it up with an angry email about how you can't believe no one is willing to earn "good money". We're all already taking financial hits in the interest of advancing our field and educating people in it: it's called "being a professor/grad student instead of being in industry". We don't owe you anything, although maybe we'd feel some obligation if you were actually an undergrad in our department -- or even taking a class in our department -- as opposed to being a grad student in a BS professional masters program who is only required to take an exceptionally watered-down class to begin with.

I swear I'm not going to turn into a political blogger...

... but because it's very personal finance, I'll mention it here.

I've gotten used to the fact that there's going to be a lot of very public casual sexism directed at the Clinton campaign and if I get upset at every instance I'll go insane. So my new litmus test is what I'm calling the "Robin Morgan rule", based on her comment in her new "Goodbye to All That":

Goodbye to Comedy Central's "Southpark" featuring a storyline in which terrorists secrete a bomb in HRC's vagina. I refuse to wrench my brain down into the gutter far enough to find a race-based comparison. For shame.

I had noticed this very same phenomenon -- I get upset about sexist comment a prominent (often supposedly impartial) figure makes, wonder to myself, "Can you imagine the ensuing shitstorm if someone had said something  analogous about Obama, like...", and then stop because I guilty for even starting to wander down that path.

How perverse is that? Things are being uttered about Clinton every day that I can't even stand to bring myself to mentally construct an analogy to.

Anyway, here's my new rule:

Every time something passes that test, when I feel ashamed just trying to construct an analogy in my head, I'm donating another $20 to Clinton.

(Yes, it'll apply retroactively to Shuster, although luckily he does seem to be facing some the flak he's due for implying that a 27-year-old woman choosing to campaign for her mother is a whore.)

Update: My goodness, I feel like adding another Shuster-related $20 just for his laughable non-apology apology (see fourth video on this page).

"I didn't think that people would take it literally, but some people have."

David, no one took it "literally". No one thinks you actually thought the Clintons were pimping out their daughter. Astonishingly enough, people think terms like pimps and whores are inappropriate even when used metaphorically.

"To the extent that people think I was being pejorative, I apologize. I should have seen that people would view it that way."

Just uggggggh.

I need to avoid Shakesville for the next few months or I'll quickly go broke!

Things I wouldn't have known if not channel surfing between football games

Slimebag extradorinaire Kevin Trudeau -- author of Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About,  More Natural "Cures" Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease, and The Weight Loss Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About -- is now positioning himself as a personal finance guru with The Debt Cure 'They' Don't Want You To Know About which he's currently hawking via infomercial.

If you're going to take financial advice from an infomercial, it should only be this one.

I feel sick

I generally spend very little time regretting bad financial decisions (if I did, would I still be spending $150/month on soft drinks?). But recently, a mistake has come to light that I think will be causing me waves of nausea every time I recall it over the next two weeks:

Every year my husband and I dutifully go through most of his (and formerly my) employer's open enrollment package. This package covers all non-PTO benefits, such as health, vision, dental insurance;  life and long-term-disability insurance; and health care and dependent care reimbursement accounts. We've been doing it either as singles or as a couple for six years, so it can be pretty routine.

But, you know, it's a long binder. So after we read through all the changes to the four different available medical plans -- even the ones that aren't ours, just in case the changes make them more attractive to us than they've been in the past -- and once again weigh dental and vision options, which has become more interesting to us after having spent $1200 on a root canal and crown combo of mine that was hardly covered by insurance, we get a little worn out and don't always finish the binder. After all, the very end is just the long-term-disability insurance, which I know is very important for kids our age and we already have maxed out, and life insurance, which we already have through State Farm, which also carries our auto and homeowners' insurance.

But this year, being in no particular rush yesterday afternoon and enjoying our time together doing Adult Things, we decided to continue onto the regions of the binder we usually ignore. The first section was LTD, and we ended up deciding to buy a new option that improves the cost-of-living increases for LTD payouts, because it was $3/month.

Then we got to the life insurance section. (Note that currently I have $125k in life insurance via State Farm, and my husband has $60k via work that he gets for free as some percentage of his salary. The imbalance is mostly due to inertia; if anything, he should have the higher coverage so that I could finish my degree even if I lost him.) The rate, for people under 30 like us, was $.07 per thousand dollars in coverage per month.

7 cents per month per thousand. That seemed really, really low.

"What are you paying for State Farm?" my husband asked. Sadly, I had no idea. So I went to look up my latest bill. Astonishingly enough, for what I'm paying for $125k in coverage, we could instead be buying $721k in coverage through work! And to top it off, the first $50k of coverage is paid with pre-tax dollars!*

Sickening. Just sickening.

So what have we decided to go with? In total, my husband will have $250k in coverage and I will have $92k. Our family will have $160k more in coverage for $40 less per month. And we've learned a hard lesson about always reviewing all the options available to you.

* To be precise, for people who care about these sort of details: technically, the full premium is taken out of pre-tax dollars, and then the premium prorated by (total coverage - $50k)/(total coverage) is counted as imputed income, on which we must pay income taxes.

You know the marriage is more important than the wedding, right?

I've spent the past few weeks playing with a post about how being in a great marriage is changing my feelings on the institution and how it relates to personal finance. Specifically, I've become more conservative -- not in an anti-gay marriage way, and I'll certainly never be arguing for covenant marriage, but I do feel like we should either throw out the institution all together (which I'd actually be fine with) or have it mean something. Why bother going halvsies, leaving us with something that mostly means people enjoy a few legal benefits for a few years until the divorce (and then do it over again)?

But it just keeps sounding like a moralizing screed against pre-nups and women who obsess about engagement rings, which isn't quite what I feel. (Quite.) I don't know if I'll ever get it to a point where I feel comfortable publishing it, so for now I leave you with this great review from The Economist of a book that's getting a lot of press, Rebecca Mead's "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding":

Ms Mead takes special pleasure in “traditionalesque”; commerce disguised as tradition. An example of the traditionalesque would be the “Apache wedding prayer”, read by a freelance multi-faith wedding minister called Joyce Gioia, when neither the bride nor the groom nor the prayer itself has anything to do with Apache culture (the prayer was invented for a Hollywood movie called “Broken Arrow”).

The book sounds like a more journalistic approach to Caitlin Flanagan's excellent essay "The Wedding Merchants". (Although I generally find Flanagan intolerable; talk about your moralizing screeds!)

A retirement fund for me, but not Katie Todd

There's a great post up at Pandagon by my favorite music blogger discussing the idea of bands "selling out" by allowing their music to be used in television commercials. A lot of interesting topics are covered, from the earlier practice of highly esteemed bands doing advertisement work without a second thought, to whether ads are any less pure than other forms of cross-marketing. But I think Amanda really nails the issue when she writes this:

I think a lot of this “selling out” discourse is a way for middle class yuppies to delude themselves into thinking they’re more bohemian than they are. Except that we hang all the responsibility for making sacrifices in the name of being bohemian on musicians—they can sleep in a van, safe in the knowledge that we’re proud of them while we sit around our Pottery Barn-decorated homes and enjoy things like health insurance. That’s pretty assholish, in my opinion. Musicians shouldn’t have to suffer for our sins.

Honestly, I get genuinely annoyed when someone expresses disappointment that a band they like has hit the mainstream. I think the band prefers the ability to feed their children over preserving your small sense of specialness!

The $60 white cotton shirt

Yesterday I did something I never thought I'd do: I spent $60 on a white, cotton work shirt. It's amazing how quickly costs ramp up when I refuse to compromise on two things:

1. Tall sizing. I'm tall. I want clothes to fit. I don't want to flash belly at work. 'Nuff said.
2. Relatively slim fit. Clothing makers don't seem to understand that tall does not equal weighing a quarter of a ton. Even when I buy tall clothing in my fairly average size (for tops I usually go either with a medium or a 12, depending on how it's sized) the cut seems to be adjusted for "Women's" cuts, as opposed to "Misses", even when I'm ordering a "Misses". I'd be perfectly happy to buy non-tall short-sleeved blouses from JC Penney, but they all have weird billow fits going on in the abdomen. I sometimes feel like I wandered into the maternity department.

So I know people often rationalize expensive clothing purchases with claims like "it's a keepsake" or "paying for quality is better in the long run", but those don't really work here. It's a white cotton blouse. Before long it'll have pit stains or I'll stain it beyond repair or the cleaner will ruin it. It's just a financial sacrifice I have to make as a tall person who wants to look professional.

Talk about your irrational decisions...

I am so, so close to dropping out of grad school right now because I can't stand the brown-nosing. I can't.

Timing and the job market

Since it's been six years since I've hunted for a job, I'd forgotten how delicate the timing can be. Today I received a call from Dream Job Branch of the Federal Government wanting to interview me based on my internship app. That I submitted in December.

Sigh. It was five weeks in between submitting my resume and getting a job offer from Summer Company.

And did I mention that two weeks ago I received a call from Most Prestigious Think Tank For People In My Field offering me a position? That app was submitted in January.

I'm still happy with my summer job, and it's great to feel so employable.

But it's frustrating to have my employment be the uncontrollable interaction of so many factors: when I submit my app, when they get around to looking at it, when they make offer decisions, and what time frame they give for considering the offer. Next year I'll have to try and game the system a bit more and hold of on submitting industry apps until March or so.