Hoppin’ John: Black-eyed peas for New Year’s luck

My father, being a Texas boy (he used to say the best thing about being from Texas is being as far from it as you can get), loved black-eyed peas. I was never nuts about them, because Southern recipes overcook them to an unappetizing state of sogginess. But in my grown-up incarnation, I learned that they lend themselves to butter-braising very nicely. If you buy them fresh or frozen and cook them to just the far side of al dente, they can make a nice side dish. But first…in honor of New Year’s Eve, when black-eyed peas are said to bring luck to the celebrants, below is an authentic Hoppin’ John recipe, along with the best corn bread I know how to make.
written by Funny about Money. © 2008    
Hoppin’ John

You need:

2 cups dried cow peas or black-eyed peas
1/4 pound salt pork or one meaty hamhock
2 cups cooked rice
salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbsp butter

Ideally, you should soak the peas overnight. But if you’re getting a late start, cover the peas with water in a large pot; bring the water to a rolling boil and hold it there for one minute. Then turn off the heat and allow the beans to soak for one hour. (Skip this step if you’re starting with fresh or frozen black-eyed peas.)

Drain the soaking water and cover the softened peas with fresh water. Cook with the pork until the peas are tender, but be careful to keep them whole. Only a small amount of liquid should be left. When the beans are done, add the cooked rice and season to taste with salt, pepper, and butter; simmer another 15 minutes to combine flavors.

Serve with cornbread and butter. Add a nice green salad and you’ll have a full, healthful meal.

Cornbread

You need:

1/2 cup white flour
1 1/2 cups yellow or white corn meal
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 eggs
1 up milk
1/4 cup cream
1/3 cup melted butter
more butter to oil the pan 

Butter a 9 x 9-inch or 8 1/2 x 11-inch baking pan generously. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the pan into the oven to warm it while you’re combining the cornbread ingredients.

In a mixing bowl, stir all the dry ingredients together to combine well. 

In another bowl, beat the eggs well with a wire whip or hand mixer. Mix in the milk and butter. Using a wooden spoon or the wire whip, mix these liquids into the dry ingredients; stir to combine thoroughly. Add the melted butter and combine well.

Pour the batter into the hot buttered baking pan. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the cornbread pulls away from the surface of the pan. Serve with lots of butter and honey. Yum!

Yuppified Black-Eyed Peas

Here’s how I like them…

You need

1 bag of frozen black-eyed peas
a tablespoon or two of butter
herbs (fresh or dry) such as marjoram, oregano, or thyme: to taste
a little green onion
fresh parsley, if you have some around
salt and pepper, to taste
cayenne pepper or Tabasco sauce, to taste
water

Bring a pan of water to the boil. Dump the frozen peas into the water and allow to cook a minute or two. Drain the peas in a colander. Toss the butter into the hot pan. When the butter’s melted, return the peas to the pan. Add some herbs, as desired; stir to combine. Cover the pan and allow the peas to simmer gently over low heat until they’re cooked to your taste. I like mine softened but not soggy. At the end of cooking, stir in a chopped green onion and, if you happen to have it, some chopped fresh parsley.

To serve, season with salt, pepper, and (if desired) cayenne or Tabasco sauce.

2008 Financial Strategies: What worked and what didn’t work

As the year winds down, this is a good time to take stock of the various events, schemes, and impulses that drive our personal finance strategies, to consider which ones worked and which failed, and to think about how we can use experience to plan next year’s financial direction.
Written by Funny about Money. © 2008       
We all had our ups and downs. As we know, it feels like the “downs” took the race. But as I look back over my 2008 personal finance adventures, I see that quite a few ideas and strategies were successful. Like everyone, I took some big hits; some of those were beyond my control, or effectively so.

My Best 2008 Financial Strategies

Bar none, building a second income stream was the smartest move I made this year. At the start of the spring 2008 semester, I agreed to teach two sections of Writing for the Professions, a.k.a. “freshman comp for juniors and seniors.” When, hours before classes were slated to begin, I learned that both sections were double-enrolled and I was actually taking on the equivalent of four sections—the workload of a full-time lecturer—I threatened to walk; backed into a corner, the dean agreed to pay me for four sections.

It was a horrible job, but the pay was as much as I hoped to earn on the side during the entire year. And because the Great Desert University canned all its part-time faculty in the fall semester, the serendipitous overload meant that I made my 2008 side-income goal in spite of the faltering economy.

Starting a side business independent of GDU seems to have been a wise move, too. Between The Copyeditor’s Desk and my own freelance work, I have made an extra $1,000 to $1,200 a month since late last summer. If I’m laid off and so forced to begin taking Social Security now instead of waiting until full retirement age, this will be about as much as I will be allowed to earn. The two income streams—editorial work and Social Security—may (with luck) cover my expenses until I can draw the full amount of Social Security income and forestall having to draw down my sadly depleted savings.

Stashing all my post-tax side income into savings instead of using it to pay down the $23,000 owing on the second mortgage I took out to renovate the Investment House seems to have been a wise move. At the outset, I was uncertain whether I would stay in my own house, given the skyrocketing crime in the depressed apartment complexes across 19th Avenue, the unholy mess across the street from me, and the growing presence of undesirable renters. If I sold, the loan would be paid from the proceeds, and I might be better off with the cash in hand from the side jobs. As the economy began to collapse in earnest and more and more credible-sounding layoff rumors circulated, I was glad I had the 23 grand to double as an emergency fund.

Moving the savings from the side jobs out of stocks and into the money market. As it started to appear likely that I would need the cash to live on, I yanked the side-job money out of Vanguard’s Wellington and Windsor II funds, which were just beginning to stumble, and put it where I figured it would be at least moderately safe. Since then, Vanguard’s funds have followed the rest of the stock market into the tank. At least I managed to hang onto that much of my savings.

Restructuring my monthly budget to put biweekly paychecks into a “pool” account from which contributions are shifted to “piggy-bank” accounts containing enough to cover monthly expenses. This strategy has trumped the wacky disjunct between biweekly pay (which allows the university to keep a chunk of its employees’ pay in its coffers, earning interest on unpaid salaries while the flunkies try to figure out how to stay solvent) and the reality of monthly billing cycles. Over time, it has the effect of accruing part of the two so-called “extra” paychecks (which are not “extra” but simply represent six months’ worth of unpaid salary disbursed out of synch) in the pool, padding the emergency fund a bit.

Continuing to set aside the $200 a month I was saving toward the Investment House Renovation Loan self-escrow account, even after enough was stashed to repay the debt. This effectively doubles my monthly after-tax savings and has restored my savings account to its former, pre-disastrous-expenses glory. That also helps plump up the emergency cushion to fall back on in the event of unemployment.

Taking time to think through how I would survive after a layoff and to build a proposed post-layoff budget. As rumors of impending layoffs intensified, the Bush economy slid into its catastrophic collapse. It became clear I will not be able to use what little remains of my life savings to support myself in retirement; not for a long time, anyway. The prospect that I might soon be out of a salary forced me to figure how I could get by on a fraction of full Social Security—$1,040 a month, as opposed to the $2,094 I would get by waiting until full retirement age—plus whatever I could scrounge by freelancing and taking on part-time teaching jobs at the community colleges.

Although it would be very difficult, it appears possible that I could get by for a year or two without having to sell my home. After that, I can raid savings to return the amount I’ve drawn from Social Security to the government, which will reset my SS payments to the full retirement figure. That should keep me going until the market improves enough to revive my savings. The benefit of this exercise is that I now feel fairly confident that I will survive the recession, come what may.

My Worst 2008 Financial Strategies

Leaving savings in the stock market as it became increasingly evident that the Bush “recession” is no ordinary recession but indeed will probably devolve into a depression. My savings are conservatively invested, about a third in stocks, a third in bonds, and a third in the money market. Bonds, as it developed, provided little or no protection in the crash, and although Vanguard’s Prime Money Market fund has not broken the buck, we’ve seen that losses in the money market can happen. 

If I’d had a crystal ball, I would have yanked every penny out of the market and stuck it all in laddered CDs. Lacking any such tool, though, I followed conventional wisdom and stayed the course. This, we can now see, was probably a mistake. 

Jumping the gun on refinancing the Investment House. M’hijito and I got a much improved interest rate on the mortgage refinance we took out earlier this year for the house the two of us are copurchasing. However, had we waited a few months, we might have landed a 4.5% rate.

Maybe not, too: at this point we’re upside down on that house, and it’s questionable whether the credit union would give us a loan against what the property is now worth.

The problem with the refinance is that to get the 5.3% rate we obtained, we had to take a 30/15 loan. At the time, we figured the market would turn around before 15 years passed; in the event that we had not sold the house by then, we would have no trouble refinancing the remaining principal. 

I no longer think that’s true. IMHO, the real estate market will not recover for another eight to ten years. By that, I mean we will not break even on the sale of that house anytime in the next decade. If I’m right about this, we may not be able to sell the house for a profit after 15 years. This will force us to refinance or to take a bath on the sale. And if by then mortgage rates are in the double digits, as they have been historically, we may not be able to negotiate a monthly payment that would be covered by rental income. Thus the 30/15 mortgage terms could lock my son into the house at a time of his life when he’s likely to marry or find better job opportunities in other parts of the country. 

I failed to contest the county’s property tax valuation. This resulted in a breathtaking tax increase on a house whose value is less than the county claims. The reasons for my lapse were a) the county’s statement is well-nigh incomprehensible and I had no way of assessing whether it was anything like accurate, nor could I tell what its effect on my taxes were going to be (tax statements arrive several months after the property revaluation statements); and b) the window for protesting lasts only a couple of weeks after the valuation statements are mailed, so that by the time you realize what those statements mean, it’s too late for you to do anything about them. Clearly, I should have protested as a knee-jerk reaction, even though I had no idea what the statement implied.

All in all…

I’m way worse off financially than I was at this time last year, that’s for sure. So, I expect, are most Americans. 

On the other hand, so far I still have a job. I’ve managed to salvage some of my savings—enough to pay off the small loan against my house, if push comes to shove. Our little editorial business has a couple of regular clients, and we’re working on landing some more. At this point, every week that passes without a layoff puts me in a better position to survive without a salary.

My plan…

• …starts with continuing to stash as much as possible into savings.

• That dovetails with cutting back on spending so that I’ll be accustomed to living on less, should I find myself unemployed. As long as I’m still working, savings from the spending cutbacks will go straight to the emergency fund.

• Instead of trading in my 10-year-old vehicle this year, as I would normally do, I’ll drive that car until it falls apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.

• This spring and summer I’ll continue to try to build Copyeditor’s Desk income; if that doesn’t pan out, in the fall I’ll sign up to teach composition at the community colleges.

• And finally: Funny about Money is doing surprisingly well, considering that I don’t work very hard at it. The site’s page rank is 4, and its most trafficked post has a page rank of 2. I will try to focus Funny more sharply and develop its readership more broadly, and if it continues to draw readers, I’ll consider monetizing it.
Written by Funny about Money. © 2008

Moments of Fame

The 158th Festival Frugality is live at the Well Run Dry, whose proprietor leads with a nice discussion of what “frugality” really means. Funny’s post on “real wealth” appears in this week’s round-up, along with a number of posts that suggest Well is not alone in thinking about the meaning of wealth and frugality. I enjoyed Miss M’s rumination on the size of her house (which is larger than the two-bedroom apartment I once found plenty roomy) at M is for Money. Mighty Bargain Hunter shows that he’s a pessimist after  my own heart in predicting a decade of bear markets and hard times; he offers some survival tips. And I really liked Jim’s advice, at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, to refrain from giving people high-maintenance gifts. 
Today’s post written by Funny about Money. © 2008  L
This week’s Make It from Scratch Carnival at Stephanie’s Make It from Scratch site.  Uh oh! This looks dangerous: TRIPLE CHOCOLATE biscotti, from The Thinking Mother! The photo alone is to die for. Mary at Simply Forties offers an original and very interesting recipe for shrimp and quail baked in a pie.  Oh My Aching Debts has a neat and simple idea for making your own dishwasher detergent, plus several other DIY household products. Be sure to visit the carnival for the many other great ideas and recipes presented there!

Read your credit card statement carefully!

Whoa!

Here we are, just getting our Christmastime bills. What should we notice on our Costco American Express bill but that the closing date has magically advanced from the usual 20th of the month to December 21. written by Funny about Money. © 2008

Isn’t that cute?

If you are one of the retrograde frugalists, like me, who budgets a specific amount per billing cycle for charge card purchases, you might have you carefully waited until the day after your billing cycle customarily closes to go out and rack up a bunch of Christmas presents, planning to pay for them out of your January income. In that event, your gift from American Express would be a big fat finance charge.

Luckily, the last charge I made in the November-December cycle came on the 17th. I was under the weather around the 20th and 21st and so delayed shopping for last-minute presents until the 23rd and 24th.

If I had felt better, I almost certainly would have gone out on the 21st, thinking the billing cycle closed on the 20th. And I would have been screwed, screwed, ge-screwed, because that would have pushed me way over budget. I couldn’t have paid my bill in full this month.

Sumbitch. 

Credit card companies are not your friends.
(Just in case you hadn’t noticed that yet…)

Frugal Household Hack: Conserve dish soap

Dish detergent comes in a soft-sided bottle with a squirt nozzle for a reason: so you’ll use plenty of it and soon have to go out and buy a new bottle. When you tip the bottle into the sink and give it a squeeze (and maybe another and another for good measure), you use several times more of the stuff than necessary. Truth to tell, a little liquid dish detergent goes a very long way. So, it behooves you to conserve dish soap by transferring it into a container that dispenses it more frugally. © 2008 Funny about Money     

For quite a while, I used a cheap glass cruet (a vinegar or oil cruet) purchased at World Market (Cost Plus). This worked fine, except that I was always concerned that I might drop the thing in the sink, breaking it and creating a nice mess to clean up. And also, for reasons unknown in the realm of common sense, dish detergent is laced with wax, the better to clog up your drain and any container that collects a residue around the lid. This is why you’ll often find a gummy layer around the top of a detergent bottle: that goop is built-up wax. This kept collecting inside the cruet’s stopper, so I’d have to take the it apart and wash it out in running hot water every few days.

One day it occurred to me that I could put the stuff in a squirt bottle. The pressure of the squirter would force the liquid through firmly enough to push the wax on through, or so I hoped. And a single squirt should be all that’s needed to clean a frying pan.

Ta DAA! Turns out both of those are so!

I poured a bunch of clear detergent (I favor Ivory but couldn’t get it at the Safeway at the time I first tried this experiment, so used Clorox’s “green” variety) into a heavy-duty spray bottle. Yes, the viscous liquid will move through the squirter. And yes, just one or two squirts is all you need to clean a frying pan or greasy dish. And no! so far, after a couple of months the squirt nozzle has not clogged!

Only drawback is it’s not very pretty. But then neither is a detergent bottle. Keep it under the sink.  © 2008 Funny about Money

Making less…less

Is there no end to merchandisers’ ingenuity in dreaming up ways to get us to pay more for less? 
written by Funny about Money © 2008      
We all know that many a 32-ounce container no longer contains 32 ounces, even though we still pay for 32 ounces. But here’s an improvement on that angle: make the stuff inside the container weaker, so you have to use more of it to get the same result.

The chemicals used to test the acid, chlorine, and alkalinity balance in swimming pool water come in small plastic squeeze bottles. You measure out a certain amount of water and then add a few drops of the dye used to test the concentration of the desired chemical. The two that you check most often are the acid and the chlorine levels. To test the acid level, you add four drops of phenol red to a small vial of pool water; hold it up against a white background and you can easily judge the water’s pH, which ideally should be around 7.6. A test kit, which comes with several testing chemicals and vials, gives you a table that shows you how much acid you need to add, depending on the size of the pool.

Well. Home Depot used to sell phenol red in one-ounce jars. Four drops would stain the test water a deep color, easy to assess. 

Last time I went to the Depot to replenish the stuff, suddenly phenol red was available only in 1/2-ounce bottles. Ohhh-kayyyy….  So I bought two, by way of cutting the number of trips to Home Depot. Get it home, drip it into the water, and find the result so pale I can’t even begin to figure out what the pH level might be. It’s almost like looking through plain water.

I already know this is true of the phenol red sold at Leslie’s, which is why I refrain from buying the stuff there. But Leslie’s employees at least have some training in pool maintenance and can answer questions, sometimes even correctly. So next time I’m there I ask if they can sell me some phenol red that works.

Noooo, says the technician. But these great pool dip sticks are better. 

Don’t think so, I say. I’ve never been able to get an accurate reading from those things.

Oh but these are soooo much better. Here. Try these.

So I buy the paper dip sticks, which do produce a brighter color but which don’t give you any clue—nay, not ONE CLUE—to how much or how little acid you need to add to balance the pH. Whatever result you get comes about by guess and by God.

Next time I’m in Leslie’s precincts, I complain about this.

Well, says the tech, you know…you don’t have to stop at four drops.

Say what?

Sure! Watch this!

He dumps six or seven drops into the vial. It pinks right up to a readable color.

You can add a fair amount more than the instructions say without interfering with the read-out.

Uh huh. Why didn’t your guy tell me that when I came in and asked about it, instead of selling me these useless test strips?

Because you didn’t ask?

Kewl. You have to know the right question to ask before you can ask it, don’t you.   
written by Funny about Money © 2008
You see what’s happened here: not only is the manufacturer distributing its chemical in smaller bottles, the better to charge consumers more, but the product itself has been diluted so that you have to use almost twice as much to make it work!

Rip-off artists in action.

Decluttered and recluttered

PF bloggers hither, thither, and yon offer as a current gem of instant wisdom that when you buy a new clothing item, you should rid your closet of one, too. 

Did them one better today, I did. Actually, I did ’em 6.14 better.

This is the time of year when I like to make a run on Talbot’s, one of the very few clothing stores that sells pants that fit around my capacious rear end without leaving six extra inches of fabric around the waist. Talbot’s actually has two major sales each year, one after Christmas and one in the dog days of the summer. The summer sale, however is N.A., because their buyers’ taste in warm-weather togs is incomprehensible: runs to polka-dots and pastels. But their fall and winter clothes are always classic, handsomely tailored, well made, and fully worth whatever price you pay for them.

Because Talbot’s has moved out of the central city, the choice for the likes of moi was to journey to Scottsdale or to the far northwest valley. Decided to head to the north and west, because SDXB agreed to meet me at the nearby fancy grocery store for a cuppa. After leaving him, I dropped by Chico’s and B’Gauze before hitting Talbot’s (all in the same strip shopping center). Found nothing en route.

Talbot’s was having a 40% sale off already marked-down merchandise, plus an additional 40% off the cheapest item you purchased (“cheap” is a relative term in a joint like this). So, this brought the prices down to almost within reason. w00t! I got TWO blouses, TWO pairs of pants (one washable wool, one washable velour) that look like they were tailored for my bizarre figure, two knit pullovers, and a nifty knit vest: SEVEN highly serviceable and reasonably good-looking items. The bill was bracing, but only about half as bracing as it would have been had I purchased the stuff at presale prices.

Well, my New Year’s resolution is to start looking less like a slob and more like a normal human being. 

I’ve fallen into the habit of wearing dungarees to the office…and just about anyplace else I happen to wander. This is partly because our office is isolated and inhabited solely by graduate students, and so there’s really no need to wear anything other than blue jeans, and partly because of my general depression: there’s no one in my life to care what I look like, so why should I care?

Gotta quit that.

All my jeans and easy-wash no-iron tops have resided in the master bedroom closet. Dressier clothing has been stashed in the closet of a bedroom that serves as the TV room, with the result that when I’m racing to get out the door, I grab whatever comes to hand from my bedroom closet: generally unironed jeans and a top that grows shabbier with each laundering. Occasionally I show up on campus in my decrepit gardening shoes, having forgotten to change to newer Danskos, a circumstance that I suppose ought to embarrass me.

So this afternoon when I staggered in the door bearing the weighty haul of the afternoon’s hunt, I went straight to work: dragged every piece of clothing out of the bedroom closet and threw out every stitch that was tired, ugly, or didn’t fit. Then I headed for the TV room and emptied that closet, too: tossed out another mound of old, dusty, tired, unsightly, and ill-fitting costumes from that cache. Then I transferred the jeans, the gardening clothes, and the swimming coverups to the TV room closet and filed the grown-up clothes in the bedroom closet! 

And resolved that henceforth the jeans will be worn only around the house and maybe to Costco or the grocery store. Socially acceptable outfits will be worn to the university, to meetings, and to upscale malls where shopgirls won’t wait on you if you look like you’re one of the Clampitts.

I kept track of the ejected stuff: four pairs of jeans, three pairs of better slacks, two knit tops, eleven better tops, eight dresses or skirt/top separates, one sweatshirt, three better skirts, eight miscellaneous items, one sweater, and one pair of shoes, for a total of 43 items. Figuring according to the late successful yard-sale prices, that’s a potential $344 worth of resale clothing: about $20 more than I paid for today’s finds.

Hm. Should I try to yard-sale all this junk? Craig’s List,  maybe?  Naaahhhh…. Come Monday, off it all goes to St. Vincent de Paul. 

But consider that: 43 is to 7 as 6.14 is to 1. (I think.) For every one new item I dragged into the house, I’m dragging more than six off to the charity. The used-clothing value of the outgoing stuff exceeds the retail price of the spiffy new loot.

Decluttering on steroids!

Today’s PF Post at The Copyeditor’s Desk: Freelance fees

I just spent a couple of hours writing on how freelancers should set their fees, based on posts by Mrs. Micah and by veteran editor Katharine O’More Klopf. The subject seemed especially germane to The Copyeditor’s Desk, and besides…neither Tina nor I have posted there for a while. So if you will, please drop by CED to view Setting Your Freelance Fees, a subject that seems to be growing nearer and dearer to PF bloggers’ hearts as more of us struggle to cope in the faltering economy.

Jobs we’re glad we don’t have

The neighborhood awoke to the sight of the Little Colorado flowing down the gutter on my side of the street. During the night the water main broke where it connects with Other Daughter and the Son-in-Law’s plumbing system, turning their nicely desert-landscaped yard into a swamp. As we scribble, the City is digging up the kids’ yard with a backhoe. The water is off for all the houses up and down the street and will be for another couple hours.
written by Funny about Money. © 2008   
Fortunately, I happened to notice this an hour or so before the City showed up, allowing time to draw out and filter a few gallons of water. The tap water is full of dirt, but the Brita seems to have screened out the visible particulates. I boiled a couple of gallons so as to refill the dog’s water dish and have a little drinking water. Now I’ll have to replace the filters on the Brita and the refrigerator and run the Brita jug through the dishwasher. {sigh} Ain’t life ruff.

The City’s guys showed up pretty quickly. Other Daughter said they’d noticed the mess when they got up around 8:00 a.m., and the workers were here within 90 minutes or so. And if you think your life is ruff, just consider what it would be like to spend the day after Christmas shoveling water-laden gravel aside and excavating an unhappy resident’s yard. Several times…. The guy who came to my door to report that they were turning off the water said they’d just come from another burst main and would go to a third one directly after this.

It rained so hard last night, a couple of times I thought it was hailing. It was still pouring when I went to sleep around 10:00 or 10:30. So the rock and soil those guys are shoveling is waterlogged to the tenth power. Augh! what a way to make a buck.

One of the things I can’t grasp is the niggling resentment of the union wages autoworkers and other laborers have managed, over decades, to put in place, and the insistence that these folks’ wages should be pushed DOWN rather than that workers competing with them in other countries and in right-to-work (for peanuts) states here should be paid a fair rate. Tradesmen and skilled laborers keep this country running, IMHO one heck of a lot better than the billionaire financiers who put us in our present pickle, than the pretty faces on television and movie screens, than the chemically enhanced athletes that amuse us by chasing a ball around a field, and than Congressional representatives who just voted themselves a raise in their six-figure salaries. 

Give the auto workers—and your city’s workers and your kids’ teachers—a raise, and make upper-level management and Congress take a pay cut. Now that would stimulate the economy!

And if you’re not in a job where the public begrudges what you’re paid for the privilege of shoveling mud, be glad of it.

w00t! Merry Christmas!

M’hijito got me an AirPort, hooked it up to the stereo in the front of the house, and persuaded it (after an hour or so of technodinking) to talk to the Mac. Then he produced an external hard drive and loaded his entire lifetime collection of 14,100 songs into iTunes!

LOL! Now I shall have music wherever I go.

May every reader’s Christmas be beautiful and fun and full of love.
For a Christmas money chuckle, try this one out.
And may none of you be reading from the Chicago airport.  

Photo: Mila Zinkova