I saw gas last night for $1.95 a gallon. When gas was $4 a gallon a couple of months ago, people were rushing to dump their trucks and SUV’s to get more efficient vehicles. So has the opposite happened now that gas is cheap again? Since car shopping in May, I’ve been on a bunch of car dealers’ e-mail lists. I got an e-mail this week from a Toyota dealer saying they are having a Prius Clearance Event, a “blow out” sale on 25 cars, selling them at dealer invoice cost.
Year: 2008
WordPress Blog
A guy wrote to me last weekend and said it would be nice to have a blog or discussion area on legislative issues for the Engineer’s Association website. I know that the web hosting company will allow a blog because we already have a discussion area set up that I’ve talked about before.
Keychain Swiss Army Knife
For years I’ve kept a small Swiss Army knife on my keychain. I use it almost every day, using the scissors probably the most. I lost my favorite which had a pen instead of a toothpick, but recently my backup to that broke (I sent it back under its lifetime warranty, we’ll see what happens). So I hastily bought another one, also without a pen (the stylus for my Palm TX has a pen in it, so usually I have a pen wherever I go). I regretted it almost immediately because I quickly discovered that Victorinox has a huge number of variations on a theme at Amazon. First, you can get all kinds of colors. I got a dark green one, but you can get the standard red, black, blue, purple, white, pink, yellow, or gray. You can get translucent colors which are called ruby, emerald, amethyst (purple), citrine (yellow), and sapphire (blue). You can get several colors of tie-dye (orange, green, purple, and pink) or you can also get a flowered pattern called Edelweiss with background in red, violet, blue, lime green, or pink.
Like I said, my older one had a pen. I found out this is called the Signaturewhereas without that it is called the Classic SD. If you get a Classic and swap the toothpick for a red LED light, it is called the Swisslite. If you want both the light and the pen (losing the toothpick and tweezers), it is called a Signature Lite.
You can also get a bottle opener with a Phillips head screwdriver, which would come in handy at times. You can trade in your scissors for a bottle opener (a bad idea since the scissors are one of the most useful things on there) and that is called a Rally. Alternatively you can just add a bottle opener, in which case you’d have a Rambler. Take the Rambler and put a pen where the toothpick goes, and it becomes a Manager. Take out the tweezers and put a light and now you have a Midnight Manager. By this time it is about twice as thick as the Classic, but the same length. This is what Jeb has, but he says he doesn’t use the light much, making me think the Manager might be ideal.
If you want something really thin, you can get the metal Alox classic which doesn’t have the toothpick or tweezers. It comes in red, black, green, and blue.
A Little Too Greedy
I’ve been buying stocks lately and sticking to my 20% rules. This worked great for Suntrust which has been oscillating up and down, but my other picks have only been going down, so I keep buying more. I bought Google earlier in the year, then again when it dropped 20%, then sold when it went up, then bought some more when it went back down. Then this month it went down even more, so I bought some more at $319 per share. My target sale price was $389 and change, so I dutifully entered a sell order at that price. When the stock market skyrocketed Monday, Google went up to the low 380’s, but not high enough for my order to execute. The next morning before the markets opened, I saw that pre-market trading had Google at $391. Even though a limit order will sell for at least the limit and more if the market supports it, I thought this would be a good chance to up my limit order. I noticed that European stocks were up by about 6% already, so if Google went up 6% from the previous day’s close, it would hit $402. I didn’t want to mess with the $400 barrier, so I changed my sell order to $397 which, on my 3 shares, would only have given me another $24. But sometimes you get big bumps at the start of the trading day, so I hoped for the best.
Know When To Walk Away
A guy I know bought a townhouse several years ago near me. He is very responsible and has never missed a payment, but he is on the verge of walking away from his house and mortgage. Like most townhouses, the neighborhood association charges dues, and maybe unlike a lot of townhouses, those dues pay the water bill since the units are not individually metered and can’t be retrofitted due to the water supply lines being shared among units.
The homeowner’s association went through some bad leaders, at least one of whom was stealing money or hiring family to do work at exorbitant prices. At some point, some people stopped paying their dues. Then they had a water leak which was at first identified as a natural spring until someone noticed their water bill was completely out of hand. This is when the trouble starts. The association was low on funds already from the theft, mismangement, and dilinquent dues and didn’t have the money to pay this huge water bill due to the leak. Over time the water bill got larger and larger and fewer and fewer people were paying their dues. They put liens on people’s units for not paying dues, but these were ignored and the liens expired. In order to evict people, lawyers would have to be hired, requiring more money that they didn’t have. Instead they paid what they could to the water company who at this point was threatening to shut off their water if they didn’t make good on the bill. People started to leave the complex or were foreclosed. Today only 20% of the units are occupied and there are only a handful of people still paying their dues. The water will be shut off soon and there will be no way to get it turned back on short of coming up with tens of thousands of dollars to pay the water bill. So after paying on the place for years, he’s just going to leave and rent an apartment. He knows his credit history will be trashed for walking out on his mortgage, but he can’t live there and he can’t sell the unit either. Even if he could pay off the water bill for the whole complex, they would soon be in debt again due to people using water and not paying dues. Soon all of these different mortgage companies will own all of these different units (or the water company will) and be stuck with nearly worthless property with no water service.
This guy loses all of the equity he had in his home. The mortgage company loses the money they lent out. And the water company still won’t be paid. Everyone loses.