Free Water, Expensive Notebook

I got a kick out of this article from the NY Times yesterday: Commuters Overlooking Free Treasure:

I might not have appreciated the marvel of the Grand Central Terminal water fountain if it hadn’t been for the notebook.

I had run into Posman Books after getting off my train and finding myself without a notebook, and grabbed what Moleskine, the high-end paper packager, calls a reporter’s notebook. I’m a reporter; it spoke to me. Until I got to the counter and learned it cost a cool $17.95 plus tax, a sum no reporter I know would shell out for a notebook, even if it came with the story already written in perfect Pulitzer-worthy prose.

I put the notebook back, and felt a flash of frustration. Now I needed a notebook and a drink of water. For most of my adult life, I’ve either commuted through Grand Central or lived within five blocks of it, but I didn’t know of a water fountain in the place.

I was on the brink of buying a bottle of water along with my not-quite-as-overpriced notebook at Rite-Aid, but balked. It’s not just that bottled water is a waste of money and plastic; I also never need as much as a bottle carries, so it would either go to waste or I’d lug it around all day, with a lot of overpriced liquid weighing down my bag.

Maybe the saleswoman knew where a water fountain might be. She didn’t, but asked someone. There was one right by the Chase A.T.M.’s.

There, just a 30-second walk from the saleswoman, who surely must occasionally feel thirst, was the perfect water fountain. The spout juts out from the cool, beige Botticino marble wall of Grand Central, a handsome basin below it, a marble relief of some natural harvest above. Water was arcing above the spout, so high that I felt reassured no thirsty germy toddler had mouthed the metal at the base. A fluid piece of accessible history, that fountain, I later learned, has conveniently been spouting water almost continually since the terminal opened in 1913.

The reporter ends up observing the fountain for a while, and it turns out that hardly anyone ever uses it, which probably won't surprise you. Americans have become so conditioned to drinking bottled water, and to thinking public things are germy (not to mention socialist).

I remember that at one of my previous jobs there was an old-fashioned water fountain-- I went to drink from it one day, not long after I'd started working there, and someone cried out "eww, don't use that!" I never saw anyone else use the fountain, since bottled water was provided by the company. They later switched to using water coolers to save money.

I've also filled a water bottle from fountains while traveling in Europe. I probably wouldn't do it in other countries but it somehow seemed safe there-- every town square seemed to have a fountain. And once, on a mountain hike, I was running out of water when we came to a pipe just sticking out of the side of the mountain, pouring water into a small basin-- I had my doubts about that, but my friend drank it and said for all we knew it was probably from the best, cleanest mountain spring in France!

Anyway, one of the first posts I wrote on this site was about saving money by skipping bottled water, and it's still a rule I try to follow. But unlike that Times reporter, I'm still a sucker for nice notebooks, and I've also written about buying Moleskines! However, I've never paid $17.95 for one, and I recently discovered a much cheaper and almost equivalent brand called Piccadilly, sold at Borders for about 1/3 the price of a Moleskine. So whether it's water or high-end notebooks, never think there aren't ways to shave a few dollars off your budget!

Links I Liked

A few recent items of interest from around the blog world and beyond:

April Showers Bring May Flowers @ Fabulous Financials

Amortization Schedules and Principal Repayment @ My Money Blog

A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Deal-Finding Homepage @ The Simple Dollar

Do Rich Women Spend Less Than Rich Men? @ The Wealth Report

Properly Destroy a Credit Card @ Bargaineering

'I-Bond' Payments Get Wiped Out from the Wall Street Journal

Little Things

The last few days have been happy ones, as far as finances go. It's not like anything all that fabulous has happened, just little things to feel good about.
First of all, I finally got around to filing an expense report at work, and was reimbursed for over $1,600. I often lose track of how much I have outstanding for reimbursement, so I never count it towards my net worth at the end of the month. Realizing I hadn't actually spent that money on myself kind of feels like winning the lottery!

Then, there was a little shopping expedition I did with a friend in the suburbs. We went to the local Sports Authority, thinking we'd buy her a pair of swimming goggles and both of us a pair of surf shoes so we wouldn't be skeeved out by swimming in a lake near her house. Lo and behold, the Sports Authority was having a sidewalk sale with big discounts, and one of the items featured was surf shoes, at $6 a pair! I was so happy to check that off my list, I was ready to quit right there but my friend wanted to look at the other tables, one of which turned out to have a pile of my favorite kind of flip flops. I'd been thinking I could use a new pair, but it has always bothered me to pay over $20 for flip flops-- it just seems wrong! But at the Sports Authority that day, it was all right: they were marked down to $11 on the table, and then when I paid for the two pairs I grabbed, the cashier marked them down a further 40%! I love it when things like that happen!!

And I also love it when you can kill two birds with one stone. My recent discovery that I have high cholesterol has had me eating a lot less meat, which has made meals a bit cheaper. It's also inspired me to try to exercise more. In order to make it easier to fit exercise into my day, I've been starting to go to the gym in the morning, instead of after work. This is something I never thought I could do. I am totally not a morning person and the idea of exercising in the morning was just incomprehensible to me. But now that I've been seeing someone who lives in the same country as me, who I can actually spend time with, it's harder to go to the gym in the evenings, and once I started to force myself to go in the morning, I discovered that I actually love it. It's really refreshing to start my day with a nice swim, and if I eat just a yogurt or a granola bar or a banana before I get on the subway, my energy level is fine. So this means I'm not buying breakfast in the deli as much. I stock up on breakfast items to eat at home, and then just buy coffee and make instant oatmeal in the office. I think I might even have lost a teensy bit of weight already but I may just be thinking over-optimistically about that... and that would be a third dead bird, which begins to seem cruel.

Anyway, don't you love it when the little things in life work out? It makes the big things seem less daunting...

T.M.I. Friday: Money, Thongs, and Full Frontal Savings

This may cross the line a bit into too-much-information territory, but aren't you dying to know how a thong can save someone money? (Or perhaps make them spend it...)

I haven't noticed if any of our male blogging friends have done a financial analysis of their preference for boxers vs. briefs, but in the spirit of full openness, I'll admit that I have always tended to favor pretty boring underwear. No longer the rib-high baggy cotton ones with bumble bees on them that I had to wear in 4th grade, but I have stayed a bit closer to that end of the spectrum than to the little lacy racy things you see at Victoria's Secret. For years, my favorites were Calvin Klein cotton bikinis bought on sale or at an outlet store. More recently, I've been trawling the $3.99 bins at the Gap. My main concerns were that my underwear be cheap, comfortable, and not something that would embarrass me if I was hit by a bus and taken to the hospital, a worry instilled in me by my mother. (Hmm, in that case why did she make me wear those bumble bee ones???)

When various women in my life, including my sister, aunt, cousin, and a friend or two said they often wore thongs, I said no way, not for me. Not only did the concept strike me as uncomfortable, I thought it was a big rip-off, some clothing designer's scam to make women pay more money for less fabric.
Anyway, someone finally clued me into the main reason to wear these things, which is only indirectly related to sex appeal: no more panty lines!!! Once that little lightbulb went off in my head, (yes, female readers, perhaps this is a bit sad given that I'm almost 40... but hey, better late than never...) I raided those $3.99 bins at the Gap again to actually try this exotic undergarment. And what further developed upon trying on certain items of clothing, was that the absence of all that extra undie fabric and its associated panty lines allows me to fit into smaller pants.
SO! At Ann Taylor, I am no longer painfully between sizes! And they're having a big sale lately! I proceed to have this big orgy of trying things on that actually fit me for a change. Then it gets even better: they were offering a deal where if you spent $100, you'd get a coupon worth $50 off your next $100. Immediately I start to strategize about how I can milk this deal for all it's worth. I have over $200 worth of clothes I want to buy. Can I buy $100 worth now and then use the $50 off coupon on the rest? Turns out the coupon won't be valid until a few days later. Should I buy some of the stuff and hope the rest is still there in a few days? Very risky, but I decide to try it. This decision is made on a lunchtime shopping trip, and by 2:30pm I'm convinced I've made a big mistake. At 5:15, I'm back in the store buying the items I'd left behind, none of which, luckily, have been snapped up by other shoppers. So now I've got 2 $50-off coupons.
My new plan was to see if I could wait, repurchase the same items using a coupon, and then return the original ones. Also, in the meantime I'd showed one of the sweaters I bought to a friend who tried it on, loved it and said she wanted one too. Great! I thought, now I know what to give her for Xmas. I had no doubt that I would walk back into Ann Taylor in a few days and have no trouble using my coupons.
But no such luck. Women in New York are real sale-stalkers. By the time I went back, those lovely sweaters were gone, vanished, vaporized. As was a lot of other stuff. At the nearest Ann Taylor store, I couldn't find $100 worth of stuff to buy. I ended up going to 2 more locations before I found anything I wanted. But when I finally did, it was great-- I got a suit that would have originally cost me $384 for only $130. I got a couple other things too.
All in all, I got a suit (jacket and pants), 4 pairs of pants, 2 sweaters, and 3 silk shirts, one of which will be returned. I spent just over $500. Of course I was already a bit over my clothing budget for the year, but as long as I don't gain any weight (please- god- please- god- please- god- I'm- going- to- swim- and- run- and- do- yoga- every- day- for- the- rest-of- my- life), these clothes should get me through a couple more fall seasons. I'd realized lately that I was really running out of professional-looking clothes-- I can dress fairly casually if I want to, but I've been a bit too lazy about it lately, and it was about time I got some grown-up garb back into my wardrobe! One must always remember to dress for one's next job, not the current one!

So how about that magical thong, huh? It made me go to a good sale, it made pants fit perfectly instead of ickily, and it made me spend $500 to look better and hopefully get a big promotion as a result! Does that really count as saving money? Well, I had hoped I would go home and find several pairs of pants in my closet that I'd given up on that would now fit by virtue of wearing a thong instead of regular undies-- you know, my theory of going shopping in one's own closet... but that didn't really happen. I think I had already given all those away to the Salvation Army! So much for trying to streamline one's wardrobe! And of course on top of the $500 spent at Ann Taylor, I had to go back to the Gap and buy several more thongs...

Yes, this is the blog where all financial issues get FULL COVERAGE... or less...

Borrowing for a Bugatti?

I always ignore the automotive section in the NY Times-- I am one of those New Yorkers who may never own a car-- with public transportation, taxis, and the occasional rental, there's no real reason for me to buy a car, and no reason for me to read most newspaper articles about cars. But here's one that caught my eye, from the August 12th issue.

Exotics on the Easy Payment Plan: "some people wealthy enough to pay cash for the most expensive vehicles on the planet sometimes choose to lease rather than buy them outright."

Timothy S. Durham, a financier with a 45-space garage at his home near Indianapolis, said he put down about $400,000 on his latest acquisition, a black-on-silver Bugatti Veyron that sells for more than $1.5 million. His monthly payments on the five-year lease, he said, would approach $20,000 -- or, about enough to buy a new Honda Accord every 30 days.

Why would a multimillionaire submit to the paperwork and other obligations of leasing when he could simply write a check for the full amount?

In Mr. Durham's case, there were two important benefits: he had other uses for the money and, by stretching the payments over several years, he could put off paying some of the sales tax. For a car in this price bracket, taxes alone can run to $130,000 or more, depending on where the deal is struck.

''One of the biggest things is you're deferring your tax because the sales tax is getting stretched over some period of time,'' said Mr. Durham, whose investment firm, Obsidian Enterprises, controls several industrial companies as well as National Lampoon.

Although he expects to buy the Bugatti by the end of the five-year lease term -- at an additional cost of several hundred thousand dollars -- Mr. Durham said he would rather invest the difference in the meantime. He also said he expected that in coming years the Bugatti would be worth more than he has agreed to pay for it.

On the one hand, you can scoff at people who have nothing better to do with their money than collect dozens of million-dollar cars. But on the other hand, it's a good lesson that you should never stop thinking about the best ways to get the most for your money, no matter how much money you have.

The Cheapest Noise-Canceling Headphones

A while back, I wrote a post called "We Want to Be Alone, about how a lot of our spending these days is driven by the desire to isolate ourselves from others. Well, here's a great example of that: Headphones to Shut Out the World. In his New York Times column from yesterday, David Pogue writes about what has become a de rigeur accessory for many travelers: expensive headphones that provide a true luxury: quiet on an airplane, or wherever you might want it.
These have been around for a few years, starting with the original Bose models priced at about $350. That is a lot to pay for peace and quiet! So Pogue takes a look at some of the competing headphones that have since been introduced, to try to find the best bang for the buck. Or perhaps that should be the least audible bang for the buck.
His conclusion: the cheapest headphones, the $40 JVC HA-NC100, are compact and have a nice retractable cord, but they don't do as good a job of actually reducing noise.
But the next lowest priced models, the Panasonic RP-HC500 T at $100 (Yahoo shopping's lowest price is $114), and the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC7 at $132 ($199 at Amazon, unfortunately) were judged to be comfortable to wear, and did a great job at reproducing music as well as canceling outside noise. Both were judged to be indistinguishable in quality from the Bose headphones that cost about three times more.
I'm not planning to buy noise-reducing headphones for myself, but I've considered getting them as a gift for a good friend of mine who is a writer and finds noise really distracting when she's trying to work. $300 was too much for me to spend on such a present, but at $100 or so, I might just do it.

Shoe Slash Shocker!

Here's some more fun stuff from ShopSmart magazine: a "Shoe Showdown!"
They took 4 pairs of almost identical black pumps, hid the labels, and had wearers rate them on comfort, fit, construction, and style, and asked them to guess which ones were the most expensive. So, did they find that you get what you pay for? Kind of!
The winning pair of shoes were $495 Manolo Blahniks, which were judged to be the best made, comfortable, and stylish. The runner up was a $69 pair from Nine West, which had some complaints about their construction but were judged to be "cuter" than the Blahniks. Steve Madden at $99 and Fioni/Payless at $20 were the losers.
Here's one comment that made me laugh: of the Nine West shoes, they said "Cushioning materials came apart in our hands after we cut the shoes in half." So if you're buying shoes based on their cut-in-half-ability, don't go to Nine West. And can you imagine them subjecting the Manolo Blahniks to that test? The moment they did it, every 20-something publicist in Manhattan probably experienced a collective shudder of grief just like Ben Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie when Darth Vader blew up that planet...

And one more interesting item from the magazine-- in an article rating bargain fashion websites (recommended were bluefly.com, eluxury.com, landsend.com, sizeappeal.com, and smartbargains.com), they dismiss "BagBorroworSteal.com" as a "Sad Site." The name is clever but the idea is kind of weird-- for a monthly membership fee of $9.95, you can rent a variety of handbags. Sounds like a good idea at first, as you might want to use a cute bag once or twice with a particular outfit without having to own it forever, pay for it, and fit it into your closet. But the downside is that you have to pay an additional weekly or monthly fee per bag rental, which can be up to $275, and there are waiting lists for the most popular bags. I suspect that if you really want to use a fashionable bag for only a short time, you'd be better off just buying it and then selling it on ebay, but I haven't actually analyzed both scenarios-- does anyone else have any info?

Rule #12: Coupons

• Pay attention to coupons

This would seem to be a personal finance no-brainer, right? You look out for coupons, buy things for a little less, what's not to love? For grocery and pharmacy items that are repeat-purchase staples, I definitely try to use coupons. Sometimes it's a little annoying if the coupon requires you buy a lot of something, but I know I'll use these basic things, so I will stock up a little to get the discount if I have to-- it makes perfect sense. But there is another part to this rule:

• Ignore coupons

Aside from the aforementioned items, I don't go looking for coupons, and I often don't use the ones I come across. Too often, seeing a coupon makes you think you should buy something that you probably didn't need. It makes you go to that store or website, and once you're there, you end up spending money. Sometimes coupons are only good on a large size of something, at McDonald's, for instance, where you end up paying what you would have paid for the smaller size you should have gotten in the first place. Sometimes the coupons aren't valid on certain merchandise, so you end up picking up all kinds of stuff at Macy's only to discover that since it was already on sale the coupon won't give you any additional discount but you buy the stuff anyway.
I pretty much try to ignore these kinds of coupons and discount deals. When I need to buy something major, I'll look around to see if I can get a deal anywhere. If I can't, I'll buy the thing anyway. If I end up buying fewer unnecessary things overall, I think that makes up for possibly paying a few dollars more for the ones I do buy.

Some more thoughts on coupons in this post and its comments.