3466 Done and to do

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Please stop blaming your narrow-minded prejudices on God.

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I hope to accomplish a few things today. Last night I wrote checks for the month's bills and I'll mail them today. No, I don't do online or automatic payments - no one sticks their fingers in my bank accounts but me!

I'm paying $284 per month for fuel oil for the old house on a 12-month budget plan. Of course I've been using a lot less oil, so I now have a $1,200+ credit with them, with four more months to go on the plan. So I called them, and they have marked my account paid in full. We'll start again in July with a much lower monthly amount.

Same thing with the electricity for the old house. That's $164/month on the budget plan, and I'm running a healthy credit. It's the dehumidifier, furnace fan, and upright freezer eating power. Next trip up I'll empty the freezer and so that should drop, too.

I discovered that Classmates.com is still hitting my credit card for membership, so I went to the website and discovered that I have manual renewal, NOT automatic renewal so they shouldn't be doing that. I could probably sue them. I called the credit card company and that will now stop.

My GP and the urologist wrote some scripts for tests. I can't read them, so I don't know what to schedule with the lab and the hospital. I think I'll just go there, show them the bits of paper, and let the folks at the desks figure it out.

I wrote an email to The Angel to let him know I killed my DBA, and I need to pull together the tax stuff to mail to him.

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I have become more conscious of money lately. I sold $320K of stock (not from the managed account, from the portfolios I still controlled) to buy this house. Piper said it was fine, that I was just transferring investments from stock to real estate. He seemed to think it was an equal trade. His analysis annoyed me, because those stocks paid over $8K/year in dividends, adding to my income, plus they increased in value. So my disposable income dropped. Worse, this house is costing me almost $10K/year in taxes and insurance, for a net loss of $18K/year in cash that used to be available for other purposes. I do not consider trading an investment that paid 8k/year for an investment that costs 10K/year a wise investment. This house certainly is NOT increasing in value by 18K/year.

My retirement and SS checks total about $36K per year, so I now have to pull from my managed account to cover big ticket items like long term insurance, car insurance, life insurance, various taxes, and so on, thus reducing that principal.

My SS checks are not on my own account. I'm drawing widow's benefits on Jay's account, so I'm going to go to the SS office, maybe tomorrow, to see if I'll get more if I switch to my own account. I have a longer work history than Jay, at a higher salary, so maybe it'll be a little bit more. Maybe not. The online SS site won't tell me because I haven't worked in so long (or some dumb fool reason - I forget exactly).

I'm glad I'm on a diet.
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