Letters to the Editor
-
Must Have Your Fancy Coffee Hit? Buy An Espresso Maker!
At one time I had a serious coffee habit, and my daily average of two double-caps a day were just part of it... I was spending around $5 per day just for the espresso drinks. I won't try to figure out what it cost to drive to the local coffeehouse and waste the better part of an hour in the process.
Then my wife bought me a nice little Italian-made home espresso maker for Christmas. Ironically, it came from the Starbucks mail-order catlog (I never set foot in McStarbucks...) and being on sale it cost around $400 for the machine and accessories.
When the espresso maker arrived I began keeping track of the coffee drinks I made with it, "charging" myself $2 per drink (admittedly a bargain even in 1994...) In three months the original "investment" was paid off, so since April 1994 all I have had to pay is for consumable supplies (currently around 50 cents per drink for $12/pound beans and organic milk) and to have the espresso maker rebuilt a few years ago for around $100 including shipping.
I quit keeping track of my coffee drinks since I hit the magic $400 mark but I have easily saved many thousands of dollars over the years. I can afford beans from one of the best old Italian roasters in San Francisco (shipped via UPS) and I make the best cup of espresso in my neck of the woods. Plus I get the chance to play barista for friends and family.
All the money I have saved has allowed me to pay-off my house, car (OK, it's 14 years old but Toyotas last forever...) and I don't have a single penny of credit card debt. ;)
So if you must have that daily hit of espresso, consider making it yourself... Just don't use your credit card to buy the machine.
-
Geez, simerator
"i've read your idiotic articles in so many other publications and i still can't believe you get paid to write. you're giving writers a bad name. go wait tables somewhere and let someone with a brain, a heart, and some real life experience take your place in the godforsaken media."
Why tee off on Sarah like that? She's just penned a little self-centered thing congratulating herself for having a daddy to borrow money from. I agree it's shallow, but is it worth that amount of venom? She's obviously struck a chord with a bunch of other people who, for one reason or another, are a little bit of a shambles in the finance department themselves, and seem to need understanding more than beratement.
Save the venom for the next Mary Williams piece. You can tell her film reviews, because they're the ones that start with "We now pronounce this...".
Her writing is quite a bit worse, and quite a bit more self-important and precious. See, she not only writes reviews for the drippiest romantic comedies available, the movies no one with a brain would ever want to see, but the fact that she considers that job beneath her comes through in every line. Fish in a barrel, says me.
-
Credit card companies
Credit card companies are much like drug dealers. They try to hook us early, right out of high school, with deals aimed at youth. Even Sears gave a credit card to my son at eighteen with no credit check. Then when a Republican congress passed a new tougher bankruptcy law, the Republicans resited all efforts to restrict the giving of credit to the vulnerable.
-
Not all debtors are created equal
This thread reads a lot like debates I've had on the mortgage meltdown: one-half think it's attributable to a bunch of greedy jerks trying to get something for nothing and the other half thinks it's people who were fundamentally unlucky and taken advantage of by credit card companies, hospitals and insurers. IT'S ALL OF THE ABOVE. I can read these things in isolation and agree with all of them -- they are all true at least some of the time. The fundamental problem with bankruptcy law and creditors and credit card companies is that they really don't care about the reason for your distress. Indeed, with some kinds of debt, like student loans, you might have much better reasons for not paying it back than someone has for avoiding credit card debt. Yet, the young mother with a boatload of trade school debt who now has to stay home with a sick child is treated much worse than the deadbeat who maxed out every credit card he has in order to buy five flat screen tvs and anything else he can think of. Bankruptcy is supposed to provide an equitable adjustment of one's debts in light of one's circumstances. But the trend over the last 20 years, at least, has been to be less and less equitable and more and more pro-creditor all the way around. So yes, the writer did basically create her own distress -- which is stupid, because among other things, it makes her much more vulnerable to foreseeable bad luck (downturn in freelance assignments). But there are some kinds of distress that are truly random and not expected that no amount of planning can compensate for. Our laws aren't very good at sorting it all out, and they have become less so with every round of recent bankruptcy reform.
-
Childcare?
I've only read 1/2 of the reader responses, but so far I haven't seen one mention of childcare expenses! We have 2 young children and both of us work fulltime. We paid almost $30K in childcare expenses last year (if one of us stayed home and didn't work, we'd have even less). It's by far our biggest expense, and one that can't be reduced (expensive city, no family in the area, etc). Yes, it was our choice to have 2 children. However, other countries do provide various childcare options and subsidies, and it's really almost impossible for people in our situation to create savings (even cutting out all restaurants, social life, clothes, etc). If you are single or childless, I can see how the advice in these letters might help. But talk to a working parent - the choices are much more limited. I'm hoping our next president can at least address some mild debate about the state of childcare in the US.