Una Casita Para Mi?

So, for the first time ever, we're contemplating buying a house. We could have bought something all along, but we've been reluctant to spend what we have (because then it's gone) in a place we're not sure we'll stay in in order to take on a mortgage that might be the same as our rent or higher. It didn't make sense for a few years. But El Hijo has probably a year and a half on the dissertation, and then we're probably looking at a transition year or a year apart :( for the job market -- if we're that lucky on a first plunge into the job market for profs in his field. On top of that, a little house just a block away is for sale. So, we're looking into it.

And by "little" I really mean TINY. Hence, why I'm calling it a Casita instead of a Casa! I would post pictures, but they all come with an address attached. I'm taking my own pictures tomorrow, so we'll see. We'd be giving up space; we would be losing a whole room, plus a utility room. It's got two bedrooms allegedly about the same size as the ones we have now; it has a "dining room" that is tiny, a galley kitchen and a living room; it has a "full bath", and I'm interested to see how they've managed to cram a toilet and a bathtub and a sink in that house in addition to the other rooms. It was built in the 1930s; it has a huge yard, which is great. We'll just have to see. D/B is going with me tomorrow to look at the house; she owns property and has maintained them all her life. If anyone can spot a lemon, it's her.

The benefits would be the mortgage payment is significantly less than our rent is now. We lose a lot of energy (and pay for it) in this apartment because the window seal is broken in most of the rooms; so the living room and Dante's bedroom are always colder than they should be in the winter time. We have central air, but we live over a brick garage, so the bricks act like an oven in the summer time (and oddly don't do the same in winter time, just when we'd need it most!) -- you can run the air, but it hardly matters. By 4:00, it's sweltering in the summer time. You have to go up stairs on either side of the house to get into it, a real pain in the winter time. We'd have a place to call our own that people couldn't jack up the rent on or throw us (and our cats) out of. There would be a cheaper place to stay if the job market proves problematic after El Hijo is done with his PhD. We get to take advantage of the new first time home buyer's tax credit, which would give us cash in hand up to $8000 at tax time (although we wouldn't get that much off of this place).

The cons to buying this little house would be giving up space, first and foremost. While I'm one to stuff myself into a tiny but clean box in order to call it my own, that's me. Dante needs to have enough stomping off in a huff so he can "show us" space. El Hijo needs to feel like he has a place to escape and be all intellectual. I have to have a space to read books and drink tea and pretend I'm a lady detective in Botswana. All these things are critical. Second, there is no air conditioning in the house. It looks like it sits in the shade, and it's not like we've actually gotten the benefit out of our air conditioning in this place (we mostly use fans); but that's a consideration. I think the washer and dryer are in the kitchen. The optimist in me goes "Yay, more 'counter space'!" but the pessimist in me goes "Where the hell do you iron clothes?"

The other problem is that somebody already has an option to buy contract on it -- once her property sells. But, if we came in with an offer the seller liked, the first buyer would have 48 hours to get her financing together or the deal is rejected and ours would be accepted. So, we could even make an offer, be accepted, and we still wouldn't get it. I don't like that. Seems stressful. The good news is we seem to be credit worthy and the loan seems like it's not going to be hard to get (so far). I'm working on getting a preapproval letter from the bank I like (going to try to go with the credit union, if they can give us the best deal), we're looking at the house tomorrow.

And then, if we like (or can tolerate) what we see, we might just make an offer! That's scary and exciting all at once. I'm trying not to get attached to the concept -- although I will admit to having a moment of daydreaming about planting sweet pea all up the lattice work on the sides ...

Anyway, it seems like the choice might be to downsize ourselves and live snugly or to keep renting and just wait out the next few years. It all depends on how snug "snug" really is. I'll know more tomorrow.

If we do decide to proceed, I'm going to call it Casita "Virgil" (insert real last name here). :D

-- DV

Oh, and if you have horror stories, warnings and advice about houses and the purchasing of them, please do tell!

Congratulations!

To Kitush & Huffers, who were supposed to get married today.

I got a beautiful invitation, but the time was "out of joint", as Hamlet would've said, and I could not fly across the pond to attend.

I hope everything went well, I hope it was beautiful, and I'm still selecting my wedding present, which is a hodgepodge of things from my country that I hope the both of you will enjoy. :)

Let me know where to send it.

Congrats again! I expect an emailed pic!!


<3 DV

The Revolutionary Experience of Emily Dickenson

Great name for a band, isn't it? I'm going to put together a band that only covers 80s songs and does it with instruments like the dulcimer. We'll be The Revolutionary Experience of Emily Dickenson, as an ode to both Prince and Jimi Hendrix and the English Department.

An Emily Dickenson poem I like:

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink
And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying over the hills,
And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!




For all those with a little brook in their hearts.

-- DV

Baby Steps Into Activism

This Friday we're reading The Real Rosa Parks (plus two other articles) in class. I like this small article, because it's about the little things that go into making big changes. The article explains the danger of idolizing (essentially) key figures in historical movements, because it gives us the impression that they are somehow in possession of above average ability.

This conventional portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, at least initially. And that change occurs instantly, as opposed to building on a series of often-invisible actions. The myth of Parks as lone activist reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life figure--someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.

What is more important is realizing all the little things that led up to the big action.

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks's historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

Parks's real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another, helping build the community that in turn supported her path. Hesitant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply entrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery.

Parks also reminds us that even in a seemingly losing cause, one person may unknowingly inspire another, and that person yet a third, who may then go on to change the world, or at least a small corner of it. Rosa Parks's husband Raymond convinced her to attend her first NAACP meeting, the initial step on a path that brought her to that fateful day on the bus in Montgomery. But who got Raymond Parks involved? And why did that person take the trouble to do so? What experiences shaped their outlook, forged their convictions? The links in any chain of influence are too numerous, too complex to trace. But being aware that such chains exist, that we can choose to join them, and that lasting change doesn't occur in their absence, is one of the primary ways to sustain hope, especially when our actions seem too insignificant to amount to anything.

Sometimes all the little things you do may not lead to something greater, at least in your lifetime, maybe. But it is the striving that is the important thing. The striving is what inspires people to do something besides watch events unfold around them. Striving gives people a model to follow. It leaves people without an excuse as to what they could be doing. Striving tells people who would take advantage of others that they won't be able to do so without opposition; that if nothing else, someone will point a finger at the problem and direct attention to it.

It is my opinion that being a good citizen means being an engaged citizen. To me, that means being educated and it means being active. It means understanding my part in the issues of my community. It means I don't get the luxury of pretending not to care about the news or yawning about politics, because that makes more work on someone else. It especially means connections and community building to me. I believe in small steps that make small differences. I believe in being conscious.

It is easy for me to get caught up in the minutia of my job and my life and ignore those things that I could do. It's easy to think that my job is enough, since it is in academia and I mentor students who are living on the cusp of changing the life cycle of generations. And maybe it is enough; but it doesn't feel like enough to me.

So I'm going to devote some regular space to reminding myself of the small acts of power that are within my control, things that can make an actual difference. Who knows? Maybe somebody else will be inspired by it, too. :)

-- DV

Report Cards Are In!

How does your state fair when it comes to women's health?


National Women's Law Center Report Cards

Check out your state or just look at the key findings, if you want an overview. Interestingly, no state got a Satisfactory. The rankings start at a Satisfactory minus - and only three states achieved that! Most states rank as Unsatisfactory with the next biggest category being a flat out Fail. These health measures look at access to early screenings, dental health, pregnancy services, life expectancy, obesity and abortion providers, among many other things. Something else to think about in the ongoing health care debate.

-- DV

Credit Card Catastrophe

From the comments section in the most recent post:

"Additionally, many cards will soon be charging 5% minimum payment instead of 2%, which is more than doubling what you would be paying per month -- some people just aren't going to be able to afford this, especially with the economic conditions going on now."

This is one of the smarter regulations put in by the government. It is not the credit card companies that want people to pay more, they realize when individuals only pay the minimum 2% balance on their cards now they are not touching the principal portion of their debt and will never be able to pay off their balance. So, they have a consumer right where they want them a lifelong slave to the credit card company. By increasing the minimum payment balance to 5 percent it is ensuring that individuals who should've never put themselves in financial crisis to begin with by using credit instead of actually spending money they had, will actually begin to put a dent in the financial mess they created for themselves.

Anon, your first statement is simply wrong. The government did not put this regulation in place, and for good reason. The credit card companies put that new rule in place, although some like Bank of America have recently come out to say they will not raise the minimum payment percentage. Yes, it forces people to pay more on their principle and in theory that would get them out of debt faster. And I would agree with you that much of the debt Americans have gotten themselves into shouldn't have been racked up in the first place. But you have your facts wrong, and I'm afraid you're not thinking about the actual financial implications of this decision.

The government actually ruled that credit card companies could NOT impose rate hikes on customers (who weren't in default), and that law kicks in February 2010. To make sure they could get more money out of people, the credit card companies decided to hike the minimum pay back percentage to 5% during the grace period before the new rule takes effect, because the new law says nothing about raising the minimum payments, only stipulating that cc companies give 45 days notice to customers before changes are made. The only way out of the situation is to call the cc company and "opt out" -- but that means you must close the card down and make no new charges, which ultimately hurts your FICO credit score, because it is partly a measure of how much credit you have access to. You reduce that amount when you close a card down, which is why it is better to pay it off and leave it open rather than close it. A damaged FICO score means you will have a harder time qualifying for a good credit deal on everything from insurance for your car to the percentage you have to pay on a bank loan.

Mandatorily raising the minimum repayment amount is not the bright idea you think it is. The average American household has about $8300 in credit card debt. At a 2.5% minimum payment, they are paying on average a little over $200/month as a minimum balance. They can always pay more, but they have to pay at least that much. With this increase, it means that the average household must now pay $415/month minimum, without choice. If they cannot pay this 100% increase in minimum payments, then they will be hit by penalties and automatically fall out of the protection of the federal rule that does not allow cc companies to jack interest rates to 32%. Once they have defaulted once on a payment, that 32% kicks in.

Now how hard will it be to get out of debt, with your minimum payment at $415, and the interest rate at 32%? Do the math for a typical American household on 32% interest for $8300, and you'll discover that raising the minimum payment to 5% won't help these people get out of debt -- once the twin problems of 32% and 5% minimum are in play. With the number of people having difficulty paying their debts, with all the unemployed folks out there, could there be a worse time to raise the minimum payment? This is a catastrophe waiting to happen. And this is just on the personal level -- think of the small businesses that use their credit cards as a line of credit for growth and development. Who, in fact, have been explicitly encouraged to think of their cards as a business line of credit by credit card commercials! Doubling their minimum payments hurts small business owners at a time when small businesses are being forced into bankruptcy right and left. It's a piss poor idea.

People who can get out of credit card debt and can pay more than the minimum payments often do. Once you are forced to pay that much more, you'll have to start digging the money out of some place else. Maybe it'll come out of the "right" spots. Maybe you'll eat out less or stop going to the spa. And those folks who live above their budgets are one thing, sure. But there are lots of Americans who are living within their means, and this move is going to drive some of them to default on their credit cards, which is going to drive up the interest rates on their other financial products like car insurance, mortgage loans, car financing, student loan payback percentages, etc. The market is all interconnected. We'll see the ripples from this shortly after it becomes permanent for a lot of people.

Personal note, my Bank of America card raised my APR by several unacceptable percentage points several months ago. I didn't have a lot on the card, I hadn't missed payments or made late payments. So I called to find out why I was being punished, and they couldn't give me a good answer. They said that they were having to raise rates on everybody in order to collect form the few people they couldn't get money from. I promptly closed the account, and told them they had permanently lost any future money from me, once the balance was paid off. If that's how they want to treat good customers, I don't want to do business with them. I wouldn't touch a Chase card with somebody else's wallet. That's why I'm sticking to my credit union credit card -- which has done absolutely none of the things that the giant banks (who took your tax dollars in the form of bailout money) are doing to people during one of the worst economic disasters in our history.

Screw them. Go to a credit union.

-- DV

Another One Bites the Dust

No, not blog stalkers -- although this guy probably had the same major.

By committing insider trading (JP definition: Verb. Def. 1: buying/selling stock based on inside knowledge you have that has not been made public yet. Def. 2: very, highly illegal. Def. 3: layman's terms -- getting first crack at it because of an unfair advantage; known examples: Martha Stewart), the CEO of Galleon Group Raj Rajaratnam and several others are being charged in court although they haven't pleaded to the charges yet. article link

These sorts of unethical and illegal things helped propel Rajaratnam to the status of billionaire, with his net worth at 1.3 billion. Happy Raj:


Now, lawyers will be getting a good chunk of that wealth to defend him against the charges that he greedily jumped ahead of ordinary investors trying to do the right thing with the information they have available to them to make wealth for themselves. Sad Raj:


If the gap between CEO pay and regular workers weren't so damned large, perhaps there would not be the incentive to cheat. After all, even the shoddy argument that the CEOs "produce" something that is so much more intrinsically important than those who work for them is completely blown away by the state of the economy that their clever decisions helped to create. CEO pay and bonuses need to be reviewed, in my opinion. The financial industry itself is full of ethical problems it doesn't want to examine. I remember one of my finance profs answering my question about the quality of information really available by looking at things like p/e ratio, etc. His response, "We assume everybody's honest." I lol'd. This was just before the Enron collapse.

There are always things a single investor can do to try to make a difference on the high seas of finance -- an ocean absolutely riddled with pirates. Credit card companies are a good place to start. Currently, some credit card companies are jacking up the annual percentage rates on some customers as high as 30-32% -- for people who have never had a late payment! Additionally, many cards will soon be charging 5% minimum payment instead of 2%, which is more than doubling what you would be paying per month -- some people just aren't going to be able to afford this, especially with the economic conditions going on now. So, why not move your money to a credit union? They offer credit cards, they're easy to get hold of, and they're staffed by people who live in the community. Oh, and they are not the same people who took a government bailout -- your money, remember -- and are set to turn around and pay out bonuses to their employees, all the while telling you they can't possibly give you a break on that 30% APR or that 5% minimum payment.

As for the stock market, there are places like Ethical Investing

that monitor both stocks from companies with ethical behavior and stocks without such companies. You can simply google "ethical investing" and be on your way. Of course, there is the usual caveat to make sure you're really picking an ethical stock, etc. Just because it says it is, doesn't mean it is. And finally, there's always the "make noise" category, for whatever it's worth. For every Raj Rajaratnam there are probably ten more who haven't been caught yet. Or maybe Raj was looked into because some of his donation money went to a Tamil Tiger front posing as a charity. Who knows why they were clued into him. But politicians need to know how angry people still are at the financial inequality in the market right now. It isn't fair that we have no money for health care (regardless of what you think of the plan) but we do have money to bail out businesses that turn around and put the squeeze on already squeezed citizens. They need to know how unfair it is that the average citizen tries to buy stocks on decisions made on the market based on good faith, while people like Rajaratnam and his crew take advantage of what they know to grow even wealthier than they already are. It doesn't always work, but at least it shakes the foundation a little.

-- DV