Just Bought Some I-Bonds

Jim at Bargaineering has a great post explaining why now is a good time to buy some Series I Bonds. It reminded me I hadn't bought any bonds in several years, and hadn't even checked how much interest I'd earned in quite a long time. So I went through the lengthy log-in process at Treasury Direct (it's set up to be extremely secure, with various access codes and security questions required), and was pleased to see I had over $140 more interest than I had the last time I checked, and I also moved $5,000 out of a couple of savings accounts to purchase additional bonds, bringing my purchases up to $8,000 in online-only bonds, and a $1,000 paper bond sitting in my fireproof box at home. The total value of these is currently $10,196.80 with the interest I've earned. I think I may start buying these a bit more aggressively, as I'm sitting on too much cash earning almost zero interest. I now have bonds that are old enough to redeem without penalty, so I could access the money if I needed it. Earning over 3%, and even more for the next few months, is very attractive right now!
If you haven't bought bonds before, check out TreasuryDirect.gov for more info.

Net Worth Jan-June 2011

I've been very bad about keeping up with my monthly updates, but here's some summary numbers I ran a while back looking at net worth shifts for the first half of this year:


I moved some cash into my investment account in March, which explains cash going down so much that month. (Though cash went down by less than investments went up because I also received my bonus that month.) My credit card balance is fairly consistent most months, except in March-- not sure what happened then, I don't remember being particularly frugal that month! (Just as a reminder, I do pay my credit card in full every month, but I count whatever's outstanding at the end of the month as a liability.) My overall net worth rose nicely over the 6 months, but you can see that May and June were tough, due to the stock market.
I'll be posting another update soon to bring things up to date for the 3rd quarter. It's not going to be pretty, I'm afraid. Back in April I was thinking I could hit $600k by the end of this year, but the market has been crazy and I don't think I'll even be close...

New Productivity Features in iPhone OS5: Email Flags and Reminders

In the almost 15 years since I've started using electronic devices to manage my life, there's one thing I've wished for: the ability to read and FLAG emails and synchronize that with Outlook.
Flagging emails, and sorting my inbox so they remain at the top, is my number one tip for staying organized at work and making sure things I have to do don't slip through the cracks. But when I first had Palm Pilots, I either couldn't sync my email, or they didn't have a flagging option. I have had Blackberries issued by my employer, but until the most recent one, flags weren't supported-- and I really hate the Blackberry screen, so I've avoided using it since I got an iPhone. But the iPhone email app isn't that great, and didn't show flags at all... until now!
I just upgraded to iOS5 on my iPhone 3GS, and now the flags synchronize perfectly with Outlook! I can read my email on the go and not have to mark it as "unread" if I want to remind myself to follow up when I am back at my desk. Unfortunately, the iPhone email app still lacks a lot of features I'd love, like being able to filter the view to only unread messages, or sort the inbox so flags are at the top.

The other feature I'd been looking forward to in iOS5 was the "Reminders" app. I've used other 3rd party To-Do list apps-- Toodledo is pretty good, but the problem with that was that syncing to Outlook was always a bit dodgy (and the app I used is no longer even supported)-- and that was when I was able to actually install the needed desktop program on my work computer. When I was upgraded to a new computer, the IT department totally locked down our ability to install any non-approved programs, so I completely lost my Outlook syncing.

But now that I've got iOS5 and Reminders, the problem is solved! After upgrading, Reminders was automatically added to the apps syncing with my Exchange account, and the first time I opened the app, my tasks were there and syncing worked perfectly in both directions. Unfortunately, there are a couple of major features missing again! First of all, my tasks are not sorted in any order I can figure out in the iPhone app list view-- they aren't by date created, they aren't alphabetical, they're just totally random. There are no options to determine your preferred sorting method. You can sue the date view to see tasks due on a particular date, but you can't see more than one day at a time, so that seems pretty useless.

The other issue is that I can create multiple task lists on the iPhone, and all the tasks in those lists will sync with Outlook-- but on Outlook all the lists are merged. There is no way to map your Outlook task categories to your Reminders lists. So much for my idea of going back to having multiple task lists on Outlook for Business, Personal, Grocery List, etc. Yes, I can have these lists on my phone, and I can recategorize tasks on the desktop, but it will be annoying to have to maintain this somewhat manually instead of having it automatically sync.
I have yet to come across any other reviews that address these issues, but I can't believe I'd be the only one to want these features, so here's hoping they add them later! I won't hold my breath, though. But I can at least loop this back to the topic of money by pointing out that these kinds of productivity aids help me manage my job and hopefully get ahead in my career and make more money... and the iOS5 upgrade was FREE!

Does anyone else have any good iPhone productivity tips?

Refinancing a Mortgage

As you've no doubt heard, mortgage rates once again at historic lows. I've thought about refinancing, but I think I may just leave it alone for now, as it just may be too much trouble. The background on why relates to the story below.

A friend of mine, who I'll call Maud, is currently in the process of refinancing a property. In the course of talking to her about this, she told me all this interesting stuff about the history of her home-ownership. This all starts about 30 years ago, when Maud's parents sold their share of a small business and suddenly had some cash to invest. They decided to buy an apartment in NYC, figuring that their kids might rent it from them while they were students, and they could rent it to other tenants as well. After one of those other tenants left, Maud decided she wanted to settle in the apartment long term, but the problem was that she wanted to buy rather than rent, but the apartment was too expensive for her at that time. Meanwhile, her parents had also decided to buy another property elsewhere as a vacation home. They ended up inviting Maud to buy a share in the vacation home at a level she could afford.
Now this sounds weird, but it all ended up being part of some complicated tax shelter scheme, which allowed Maud to swap her part-ownership in the vacation home for shares in the NYC apartment over time. There was a big tax advantage for her parents, and for Maud the advantage was that she borrowed privately from her parents and stretched out the purchase in a way that made it more affordable. Over time, Maud's income increased and she was able to pay off the loan from her parents early, leaving her in full possession of her apartment. This all sounds kind of odd, but Maud insisted that she paid her parents the full appraised value of the apartment plus interest. As a real estate investment, it didn't turn out that well for her parents since the market crashed after they first bought the place, but I guess they at least saved on paying some capital gains taxes. This would be an example of the sort-of-rich getting sort-of-richer based on hiring good lawyers!

Anyway, a few years after Maud paid off the apartment, she was doing very well in her career and had saved a lot of money, since her monthly costs were quite low without the mortgage. She started thinking about real estate investments herself. She looked at properties outside the city and came across an inexpensive, very small, but charming house. It was so charming, in fact, that she decided she wanted it for herself and bought it to use on the weekends. She admitted that it was a rash decision and not exactly the kind of "investment" she'd had in mind! But she loves having the house as a retreat, especially since her city apartment is also fairly small and she can use the extra space, which seems cheap compared to buying a bigger apartment in the city.
When she bought the place, she got a fixed-rate mortgage of about 6.5%. So of course the rates we've been seeing in the last few months were very attractive to her, and she decided to refinance. But here's the reality of what's happened in the last couple of years: banks are actually being a lot more picky about who they'll lend to these days. Because the market value of her house was down since she bought it and because there were some other complicating factors, the bank that held her existing mortgage didn't want to refinance it, and it was unlikely any other bank would either.
(At this point, my question to Maud was why the same bank would ever want to voluntarily lower the rate on a mortgage from 6.5% to 4.5%-- sounds weird, doesn't it? But aside from not wanting to drive you to their competition, and benefiting from the fees that the refinance transaction generates, Maud pointed out that the rate itself is a wash for the bank, as they are always pricing the mortgage as a spread from the prevailing rate set by the Federal Reserve.)
Back to the problem with refinancing: Maud was a bit dismayed, but her very sharp loan officer came up with a great solution: instead of refinancing the weekend house itself, why not take out a new mortgage against the paid-off apartment and use that cash to pay off the house in full? The apartment had gained a lot in value over the years, so she had way more equity there than the value of the house. She'd be nowhere near the usual loan-to-value ratios banks would require for a mortgage. All in all, it was a brilliant solution, so Maud forged ahead with the application.
As the process went along, I began to compare her updates with the process I'd gone through to get my mortgage at the height of the real estate boom. It was amazing to me how exacting they were being about every little detail, verifying addresses she'd lived at 30 years ago, asking for all kinds of documentation on the monthly costs of both her homes and the finances of the co-op. An appraiser came and did a whole report with photos and floor plans of every room attached. And this is all for someone with a high income and a perfect credit score, whose apartment is in an established building with other recent sales. This was definintely not a "liar loan!"
Maud also said that the good faith estimate and other application paperwork she received was very clear in its disclosures of the terms. So if anything good has come out of the economic crisis, it may indeed be that our real estate market will now have more stable underpinnings, with mortgages only given to people who can afford them, for properties that are actually worth it.

But back to my situation: I put 20% down when I bought, and I've paid off some extra principal over the last couple of years, but I'm not confident that my apartment would be appraised high enough if I tried to refinance now. It might also be a concern that the developer still owns some of the units in the building. I'm also wondering about selling the apartment in the next few years-- I think I'll be renting it out soon and moving in with Sweetie, but I don't want to be a landlord forever. So it's a dilemma... I may make some inquiries anyway, so I can assess this based on real info rather than my own gut feelings. I'll of course keep you posted when I do!

Yard Sale Economics

Have you ever had a yard sale? I've been to many, but never actually ran one myself until just recently, when my sister and I helped my mother sell some stuff.
First of all, you get a lot of interesting people showing up, who I'd group roughly as follows:
--low income people buying household items and clothing
--frugal people looking for bargains
--hoarders who just can't walk away without taking "good stuff"
--dealers who want to re-sell items
--collectors who are looking for very specific items
--curious neighbors who always wondered what was in your house

Most of these people will want to haggle. They know that whoever's having the yardsale just wants to get rid of stuff. My sister and I didn't have time to tag everything with prices before all the early birds started showing up, so we found ourselves often just quoting totally random prices that were quite low. Sometimes I wondered if we should have started higher to give ourselves more room to negotiate, but on the other hand, I didn't want anyone to walk away from something they might otherwise have bought-- and I wanted them to buy lots of items!

I took charge of selling my father's old CDs, DVDs and books. Most of the CDs were swept up by a guy who showed up at about 7:30am, with a car already full of stuff from other yardsales. He asked if I'd take $75 for "all the CDs". We'd started off quoting $1 per CD, and I knew there must be a couple hundred CDs at least, so I said I wanted $100 considering he was getting that many, and he agreed. But then I realized I'd undersold myself when we started packing up box after box of CDs for him-- my dad was passionate about music, and he'd collected more like six hundred CDs, at least, and we hadn't even set them all out on the lawn yet! While the guy was looking at other stuff, I started telling our friends who were still bringing CDs out of the house to stop, which made me feel a little sleazy... In the end, the guy ran out of space in his car so he didn't really get "all" the CDs, but he knew he'd gotten a great deal-- I'm sure he's reselling them online somewhere for at least $5 a pop now! I was hoping some other collector or dealer would snap up the rest, but we still had a lot left over at the end of the day.

The hoarder types were funny -- several of them bought bags of random stuff that we never thought anyone would want. My sister had put out a plastic bin of weird junk that seemed so lacking in value that she just labeled it "free." A guy grabbed the whole bin and took it away, and gave us a dollar for it just to be nice!

There were times when it was hard to let things go. Ever since my dad's death, I've struggled with this-- I became a booklover from hours spent as a kid looking at all his bookshelves, and there were other odds and ends that had some sentimental value even though I knew I had no use for them and no place to put them. My sister and I both felt some anguish at moments when people seemed dismissive of the value of things that meant something to us... but there was also one guy who made me really happy. From appearances, at least, he would not have been someone who I would think would have anything in common with my dad, but he kept finding stuff he wanted. He'd buy a few things, then come back for more. You could tell he didn't really "need" any of these books and DVDs, or the old shortwave radio or the tools, but he obviously shared my father's sensibilities in some way, and he kept saying that we had some great stuff. I almost wanted to give it all to him for free, just knowing he appreciated it.

In the end, we cleared about $600, and made a lot of room in my mother's basement and garage. It's sad to think how much my parents paid for the stuff that was sold, as I'm sure it was more than ten times what we got for it, but it's more sad just to say goodbye to some of those things, and it will be harder still when I have a dealer come and buy most of the rest of my dad's books. I just have to keep remembering that it's not about the money, and not about the stuff-- it's about the memories, which will stay with me much longer.