Halloween candy at Cash'n'Carry. Regular size peanut butter cups for 50 cents each. Trick-or-treaters think they've got something special with a full-size candy. Plus family-size chips, unsalted butter.

Husband is out of town tonight so boy and I are living it up. I have some Koji Yamamura short films to watch,

$94.03 after a $5 coupon at a supermarket. Half of that was one full Coho salmon cut up into four-ounce portions. I also bought some discontinued white wine from the bargain shelf. Everything else was vegetables and items for baking cookies.

I am worrying about my short-term memory. It is blitzed. It has relocated to "Whattawa, Zontario." I don't even have alcohol or drug use or medication to blame for it. Today I went to a library I thought would have my book club selection -- this is the second time the online catalogue claimed it was available but turned out not to be so. Then I thought I'd visit another branch on my way home, but I stupidly neglected to WRITE the address down, instead I went by memory and veered everywhere like a trapped buzzing fly to get to the library. Then I had, on my list, to visit the supermarket but I pull up to a third library, after getting my book from the second. In the parking lot I thought "Uh I shouldn't be here. In fact I wonder if I am in a condition to drive."

I couldn't remember the name of Thomas Love Peacock's short Romantic Era rip of his friends ("Nightmare Abbey" I kept thinking "Crochet Castle" and "Northanger Abbey") nor the name of the Indo-Canadian author who wrote A Fine Balance, I was thinking Raj Viswanathan, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and not at all about Rohinton Mistry.

I wonder if I need a heavy metal detox, or a nootropics concoction. At least I went with a WRITTEN LIST and a PLANNED MENU for the week to the supermarket, with a coupon. At least that.

As payback for not immediately giving a dollar to the beggar who paced the doors of a lecture hall to block departing people in a rush to get home (it was a free event, no beverages or snacks, so it wasn't a fine-frocked concert affair), I had a fitful sleep with hunger pangs, dreaming of the psychologically worst time of our uneducated-single-parent poverty-stricken childhood. I had two bowls of Indian-spiced lentils and rice before heading to the lecture hall and thought that might tide me overnight but no.

Fascinating to remember how ashamed I was of our Studebaker which was more recent than our current beater. I am ashamed of the beater, but I am determined to run it into the ground before getting a newer car, as I hope a midsize sedan with equivalent fuel efficiency will be in our price range at that time.

If I have $10 or $20 remaining at the end of the payperiod, it's going to the local food bank. People can't function properly with empty stomachs. I don't apologize for giving to a food bank or to organizations: they give me a receipt and tell me beforehand what they will do with the money.

Several are asking me for money (school, political, charity donations) but nobody is asking me to work for money. No more political donations unless the candidate or incumbent can find paying work for me.
No more school donations outside of book purchases.

Austerity can be tiring -- this is how I feel. My self-control is stretched. I buy makeup every two-three years instead of every 6 months to a year, many of my clothes are secondhand or 7 years old and too small for me. I am reducing my vitamin and supplement intake to Vitamin C, D and Udo's Choice 3-6-9 oil with multi-vitamins for a few weeks.

My second mortgage payment has been received: only 142 payments and 98.6% principal left to go! The interest portion is 25% less than it would have been if we didn't refinance, so I blink a few times when I see it on our online statement. I don't feel any richer with the smaller mortgage payment -- probably because I am acutely aware of how my city plans to raise our utility charges, introduce a $60 vehicle license tab ($60 is about what we pay all year for gas in the scooter!), and most damningly, increased coffee bean prices at Costco.

Made butter tarts as promised for my child as reward for getting over ten people to donate to his walk-a-thon: they went very fast -- his friend fought him (!!) for dibs, and my poor overworked and frustrated spouse pouted when there were none left for him, so I made two more while the boys were distracted by outside play. I thought three tarts each would satisfy the boys but no. My mom made butter tarts that my brother loved but I didn't -- maybe they are a guy thing. I exhausted my awesomeness points with the butter tarts and turned into a pumpkin the moment I left the house for the evening.

Wondering if I could try some "Mildred Pierce" style Depression-buster entrepreneurialism and make "butter tarts" the foodie trend that poutine seems to be here. Certainly there's a market for sugar...
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if anyone has made it this far, I express my gratitude to the SavingAdvice admins for the swift and routine extermination of the spam blogs.

This week in Notices of Trustee Sale:

$706155.72 owing on a house that was bought for $774K in 2004 and is now worth $733000.

A house purchased in 1986 with a $65000 mortgage that is now facing foreclosure with a $300000 loan. If I foreclose with a half-million-dollar mortgage I never paid, one year after I was supposed to pay it off, I am either institutionalized with mental illness or I have a nasty drug habit.

I cannot be the only fossil who remembers when a house was a "money pit" and not a "piggy bank/credit card".

Is it only people who grew up in other countries with shorter boom-bust cycles who know real estate can go down when they're not actually in a down cycle? Or people with at least a passing knowledge of economics?

Someone at the Blonde & Balanced Blog (I used to be both, am now neither) stated that homeownership peace of mind was most likely when the 20/25 rule was followed: 20% downpayment on a property, and no more than 25% of your gross income as a monthly payment.

Put some more toward the HELOC and look! I have one of my goals completed! It is my hope to have at least one goal crossed off every two weeks: at my least ambitious I am sure I can afford Maybelline or one gallon distilled water.

This HELOC balance chokes my head and heart. I'm considering liquidating some certificates of deposit to rapidly reduce the balance.

Right now the HELOC usurps 17.173% of our available credit. It is our debt with the highest APR and the shortest payoff period.

If I wanted a car I could borrow up to 12% of our available credit. Weird that twelve years ago we were making less together than what the spouse makes now, paid 10% more for our mortgage. and had a car payment, and didn't see ourselves as suffering. See what fiscal responsibility conditioning can do to one?

The difficulty is working with my family. The boy and man seem to think that there's always money for afterschool activities, Pokemon booster decks and fantasy wargaming weekend tournaments. Meanwhile I have to wait eight weeks to replace my walking shoes and eleven weeks for a haircut. I desperately need some fall/winter skirts, tops, and boots. I buy at consignment stores and Value Village, except for the boots -- I always buy footwear new.

I saved some money yesterday: several years ago I bought some shabby chic style used bedside lamps. The paper lining in one of them disintegrated. I live close to a lampshade store that boasted 320 lampshades. I come in with my shade and am told that the style of my shade, specifically how the lightbulb is secured within the shade, is not one that is carried, and I'd be looking at $25 labour + $5 parts in addition to the purchase price of an equivalent lampshade. I look at the lamps available and they are priced from $95+. I go home, retrieve my SunUp daylight lamp, and secure it to the ceiling. Now I can program myself to wake up in the dark and have more space on my bedside table.

It saddens me that it is just one week away from the equinox and I have the daylight lamp operating. It also reminds me to take 2000 IU Vitamin D for every incremental hour of darkness. So in December I'd be taking 8000 IU of Vitamin D daily.

Several families I know are looking for a "new" used car. My credit union is having an auto loan dealer event this week, offering 2.49% on new cars, 2.99% used. I visited some participating dealers' websites and found one offering 0.9% on a 60-month auto loan for highly desirable (but currently out of our reach) cars. 2.49% APR for 3 years vs 0.9 for 5... even I know what the better deal is.

Yesterday was a bad day for me and electronics: crashed another person's machine (but I restored it within 90 minutes), my phone battery lost a lot of power. I'm a social media coordinator for this person and have been promoting her online but I wouldn't be surprised if she never let me touch her computer again. All I did was insert a thumb drive containing three small document files, no autorun.exe, no scripts, no viruses, no executables in the USB port on the left and the MACHINE SHUT ITSELF DOWN. That is NOT EXPECTED BEHAVIOUR.

We observed Meatless Monday last night. I get a special thrill of seeing my son eat zucchini and eggplant without complaint.

I have learned our city's water rates are among the highest in the nation -- why? we don't live in Palm Springs or Albuquerque or Bullhead City. We live on a coast. This explains why my water use is 54% of what it was last year, yet I am paying 95% of what I did last year. Naturally the city water utility rates for residential users will rise AGAIN. Utilities (except for natural gas), insurance companies, and child care businesses will always fix it so no matter how much less of a burden you or your child may be to their operating costs, you pay more than you did the year before. Oh yeah our assessment went down this next year but our property taxes went up.

Bellingham, Point Roberts or Coquitlam next year, I swear.

Although 87% of Jean Chatzky's Pay it Down is obvious and simple for anyone who's read a get-out-of-debt book, I'm forever hopeful for fresh innovative ideas and as I don't have a lot of options: no cable to cut, no gym memberships, no weekly massages, no second car (scooter doesn't count! that is for commuting to and from work!), I may do something daring and act on the obvious suggestions: record expenditures, exercise to lose weight, because calorie reduction, digestive enzymes and eating well (low carb, organic, lots of water) aren't helping me burn fat and lose weight.

Please support me as I attempt to rejoin the human race and make the effort to do what everybody else seems to do without effort.

Period: September 1 - September 10

Notice of Trustee Sales for King County, Washington State

in 2001: 47
Representative Notice of Trustee Sales shows five months' delinquency in payments, from 2/1/2007 to 6/1/2007. Obligation is $317,182 for property purchased @ $347K, now zillows for $225K.

in 2006: 77
in 2007: 97
in 2008: 217
in 2009: 339
in 2010: 451

in 2011: 188
Representative Notice of Trustee Sale shows total arrearage of $82221.18. Obligation is $308934.36 for property purchased in 1995 @ $27500. No, there really are two zeros -- that's a five-digit amount. Zillows for $253000.

I guess things are getting better, or getting slower.

...for me. My kid had an okay day except for the buses taking extra time dropping off children on the home trip, owing to security roster check-off procedure. He was worried we'd be upset about his tardiness that he ran, tripped, fell and skinned both his knees. I don't know what happened between then and his arrival other than he lay on the ground until a neighbor "Juan" helped him walk home.(If it were any other kid but mine I'd have been concerned, but mine equates a nosebleed with a near-death experience.) Bandages, there-theres and vanilla custard made for a rapid recovery. His haste was in vain: I already got a phone call from the district transportation. I wonder if he's seen too much "Sons of the Desert" (1933 film, Laurel and Hardy star in it -- at the end they await punishment). I've not EVER laid a hand on him south of the neck--I don't believe in corporal punishment--but let me whip a belt in front of him and he's a

tearful Stan Laurel.

CoreLogic's 2011 first quarter report on home equity is a downer, although its headline claims a slight decrease in negative equity. My Schadenfreude spreadsheet shows the largest negative equity amount as -$32679, half of the national average. We have been in an equity downturn for so long I am beginning to feel like a chump for paying the mortgage. Ohio's average negative equity amount among underwater homeowners is -$31000, the lowest average in the nation. In my state, Washington, 16.9% of mortgages are underwater. That's a disturbingly high number: I would say 70% of the states have lower percentages of negative equity mortgages.
Average property value in our state is $303874. Average equity in our state is $97289.

Once in a while I will read newspaper columns and online petitions about people who want loan modifications from their mortgage processors, and frequently I read notice of trustee sales where the mortgagee owes dozens of thousands more than what the property would sell for. Some lawyers advise their clients to live in their houses for up to a year without paying, and then walk away. As the Sex Pistols say, "when there's no future, how can there be sin?"

I received an e-mail from "ReadyForZero.com" -- I must have signed up for this at some point but everything is a haze as my brain atrophies. I don't believe I'd put my debt accounts info on a third-party website. I have one page of my debts on my credit union page. And several freebie debt repayment calculators. ReadyForZero.com boasts that its registered users pay debt twice as fast as those who don't use the site. Maybe that claim is true. I'd like to pay off my HELOC, but not to sacrifice the pleassure of paying for the car in cash, or my precious metals. I'm uncomfortable enough with my debt to post about it here, but for now I'll content myself with tooling about with my spreadsheets.

Listening to "Old Codger", an occasional WFMU podcast where someone pretending to be a contemporary of Mamie Smith and Sophie Tucker "plays 78rpm records like they're going out of style!" Paying off mortgages seems to be going out of style, too.

Signed, My Kvetchy Mama


Aren't women grand?

Feeling brain-damaged, sleep-deprived and unsuitable to be out with humans.

I don't know if that is a good sign or a bad sign. People talk to me about buying cars, and their hospital bills, and I see hot tubs on people's properties. I imagine our recent mortgage refinance will mean a hit on our credit score, so it would be best to buy the car with 100% cash, or a combination of cash and credit cards. I see that my liquid savings is not quite enough to pay off our home equity line of credit. I also see we use our credit card every month, and not all families do that. I would like to see us restrict our credit card use to: ordering online; emergency usage; out-of-the-country usage; rental cars; hotel reservations.

From a May 2011 HousingWire article:
[quote]U.S. consumers also reduced their revolving credit card debt by 18% since mid-2008 through default, borrowing less or paying down debt outstanding. This is the longest and fastest credit card deleveraging since record keeping began in January 1968.[/quote]

That's good. No doubt the raising of the minimum payment as mandated by Congress had something to do with that.

My husband tries to comfort me to say that many people are in debt, but I say if one is uncomfortable with one's debt burden, one has taken on too much debt.

We aren't doing ourselves any financial favours by eating out, either. The boy and man went to Flying Squirrel Pizza to welcome it to our neighbourhood, and the man returned looking as overjoyed as he was in Gainsbourg, looking at the Scopitones and having good food, booze and dessert. Then we learned a beloved dessert place may be lost as the building housing it is to be demolished.

Today I perform inventories on the freezer, pantry and larder, as I promised myself not to go shopping for groceries until I had a menu plan, and I'm buying lunch supplies for the boy tomorrow, the day before school starts. I hate turfing out vegetables that have gone bad.

My son and I are attempting to eliminate the word "should" from our vocabularies. Replacing it with "must" or "will" or "would like to" or "plan to" makes it sound less like we are distanced from making appropriate choices in our lives.

Bank of America sold its global credit card business to Toronto Dominion. Bank of America's mortgage subsidiaries are embroiled in lawsuits by state Attorneys General.

NASDAQ.com - Too Big To Fail: Is Bank of America on Deathwat...

AMERICAblog: The increasing Bank of America Deathwatch

Its stock has fallen nearly 50% this year—the worst decline for any big bank in the U.S. or Europe.

I only wish the deadpool I am in with my friend allowed for corporate entities: I'd love to put Bank of America on my 2012 list.

Should I feel sorry for a bank who altered my grandfathered Versateller account so I could be charged fees? Or for a bank who made my husband go in person THREE TIMES to supposedly close his account, then, when he thought his account had been closed, charged him with a low-balance fee? Why should people be charged after they go through the motions of closing their account? If you're a Bank of America representative maybe you could share this reasoning with us consumer riffraff.

Should my heart break for a bank that bought out my original credit card company and shortened the grace period, upped the transaction fee from 3% to 4%, instituted arbitration, hiked the potential default rate to 26.74 points beyond the prevailing prime lending rate? Balance and usage have nothing to do with it: I haven't used the card since 2004.

Florida Homeowners Foreclose on Bank of America

Should I feel sorry for a bank who attempted to foreclose on my uncle's Florida house which he's owned for 18 years because the bank messed up Countrywide paperwork? Or for a bank that doesn't process payments to Wikileaks? Should I weep tears for a bank that attempts to sell properties from under owners who have paid their mortgages in full, and is being sued for illegal foreclosures? This is the bank that makes legal US citizens and residents jump through Patriot Act hoops, but awards credit cards to illegal immigrants.

I'm not going to go into politics: it's obvious who gave this bank bailout money, and that the bank needs restructuring. Maybe a Bank of America or government apologist can explain why restructuring didn't happen in 2008, and if they think the bank used the TARP funds wisely.

update: well some apologist hailing from Bank of America's Jonestown, Guyana branch was here, paid no doubt to do damage control, which means candy floss spin and a complete disregard for the indisputable facts I posted here, and deliberate ignorance of my questions "why should my husband have to go in three times to close one account", "did the bank use TARP funds wisely", "why did restructuring not happen in 2008." See what suckers' Bank of America account fees pay for? It sure isn't documentation quality control.

I didn't choose to be with Bank of America. I didn't know in 1996 that my bank SeaFirst was going to be bought by Bank of America; nor did I know in 2000 that in 2006 my credit card company would be sold to Bank of America.

Yves Smith of the Naked Capitalism announced two weeks ago she was initiating a "Deathwatch" on Bank of America. As we are weeks away from the third quarter of 2011, five years after many 5/1 Adjustable Rate and otherwise subprime mortgages were sold in the frothiest of markets the "stated docs" era, or five-year interest-only mortgagees get payment adjustments, and some retail banking customers wake up and head over to their credit unions, it'll be interesting to see how Bank of America comes up with capital to meet its lawsuit payments, and payments to its own creditors. I tell you this, they won't make money directly through me.

In Mr. Moynihan's most candid remarks yet about the troubled mortgage business, he told the 6,000 listeners who Mr. Berkowitz said were on the call: "Obviously, there aren't many days when I get up and think positively about the Countrywide transaction in 2008."

- Mish's Global Economic Analysis

Attorney General Brown Announces Landmark $8.68 Billion Sett...

Arizona Sues Bank of America

Illinois Attorney General Sues Countrywide

Nevada Attorney General Sues Bank of America

Painful last week of July. By painful I mean reducing meal portions because the freezer didn't have any protein in it and interrupted sleep due to hunger, check bounced, and scrounging coins around the house to put gas in the car.

At least we had vegetables, and the cats didn't nip at our ankles.

Why so bad? We scrounged $1649.55 of escrow deposit money for our new mortgage. We finally ditched our mortgagor of twelve years in favour of our preferred credit union, who lured us with a fee-free (no application fee and no appraisal fee, but conveyance fee, documentation fees: whyn't call it "fee-reduced" and be honest?) mortgage for twelve years at 3.75%. First payment is September, and we have three pay periods until then. Also the escrow balance of the old mortgage will come back to us.

For the bean-counters out there: "reduced" time period (the qualification to secure the 12-year means having fewer than 12 years left on the old mortgage, which if we had not prepaid by ten payments we would not have qualified for), reduced interest by an estimated $8700, reduced rate by 25%, and reduced interest&principal payment by 10%.

I thought I was going to blow wads o' dough @ Costco hours after the money came into the account but we've been visiting the closer discount groceries.

July was expensive: painted boy's room, framed a Matisse print, moto insurance, swimming lessons - chess membership, and caved into getting a RotoRooter dude over. After twelve years of managing a congested drain by ourselves. Now I know how to keep the drain decongested, and with us it requires more than baking soda, vinegar and hot water once a month.