June 2008
Do you shop online?
I do. Aside from groceries, I probably make 80-90% of my purchases online. It suits me, because I am very big on product research and price comparisons and bargain-hunting, and because I usually find in-person shopping to be terribly inefficient. There are a few things it doesn’t work for — I’m afraid to buy an armchair online, because if it’s uncomfortable or poorly constructed, returning it would be next to impossible — but mostly it works just fine, and often saves me hours per week.
Currently we are remodeling our living room, and on our list of needed furniture is a coat rack. I could have spent an entire weekend day going from store to store in search of something suitable, but instead I opened two browser tabs and typed ‘coat rack’ into Amazon and Google.
Right away I found a solid wood style that I liked, listed as ‘on sale’ at coatracks.com for $80 plus $6 shipping. Now, I wasn’t going to assume that $80 was any kind of bargain just because one random site said so, but another half-hour of concerted searching convinced me that this was, in fact, the best price. The style I wanted wasn’t common, and the only other site I could find it on was charging $95.
And then, having already decided on the purchase, I worked internet magic.
Prior exploration of the site had revealed that coatracks.com was a front for a larger company called NetShops, so I googled ‘netshops coupon code’. Within two minutes I had a promotional code for $10 off a $75 purchase. (Turns out ‘coat racks coupon code’ would have worked just as well; I was being unnecessarily clever.) Typed the number in at checkout, and bang — saved ten bucks.
I do a code search every time I buy something online. When a friend had emergency surgery last month, I sent her flowers … and saved $10 with a promo code. (Which is a good thing, because the $30 arrangement was over $60 by the time all the extra fees were calculated!) I don’t always find a code, but it works more often than you might think. And it only takes a couple of minutes.
The trick, as with all coupons, is not to let them sway you into buying something you wouldn’t buy anyway. Some people are daily visitors to the coupon-code aggrecation sites and forums, but I recommend against that; better to search for something in particular when you’re ready to buy.
When I made my coat rack purchase, I got another promo code for $10 off $50 or more at netshops.com. I don’t need anything else that they sell right now, so I won’t be using it. But you can, if you want: it’s PP-5353 and expires July 7, 2008. One per household, so feel free to pass it on.
No posts for the last couple of days — instead I’ve been spending a lot of time in orthodontist’s offices with the kids.
Up until this year, both girls had dental coverage through their mother’s insurance, but it was an HMO situation and the care was pretty poor. Fortunately, the job that Jak got earlier this year offered not just better dental coverage, but even $1500 for orthodontia, which none of us have ever had before. So I jumped at the chance to move the kids to a better class of tooth care.
Finding a good orthodontist presented the first challenge. I started with recommendations from my dentist’s office, and then cross-checked them against Consumers Checkbook’s ratings. I came up with two orthodontists in my area (actually three, but two worked out of the same office). So I made two sets of two back-to-back appointments, and we took both girls.
Michaela is 15, and at a casual glance appears to have wonderful teeth — more straight and even than mine have ever been. Closer examination reveals a perfect left side but a messy right: one of her top permanent teeth never bothered to join the party, while — almost as if by compensation — her bottom jaw sprouted an extra. Unusually enough, the spare tooth is sitting behind (on the tongue side) of her other teeth, pushing them outward … which means that whenever the subject of teeth comes up, Jak and I affectionately call her ‘Shark Girl’.
Claire, at 9, has some typical minor crowding in her lower front teeth, but far more worrisome to me was the way that her upper front teeth have come in tilted sharply inward. Turns out this has to do with her lower jaw being set too far back; it’s also giving her a convex profile with a ‘weak chin.’ (In ortho-speak, she’s Class II, division 2.) I won’t go into all the details except to say that we’ve decided to put her on a ‘wait and see’ plan, where she goes in every six months for the doctor to measure her growth rate and decide when to intervene, with a likely start sometime in the next two or three years.
For Michaela, the two doctors’ recommendations were surprisingly different. One doctor explained that since Michaela had not just one but two molars in behind the missing upper tooth, they wouldn’t be able to make enough room to pull the impacted tooth down, and so would just move the other teeth to cover the hole. The other doctor recommended first expanding the palate slightly (still possible at 15) and then moving the other teeth and pulling the impacted tooth down. She said that if we didn’t, the only way to get a balanced mouth would be to pull three perfectly good teeth from the other three corners.
Faced with these two very different approaches, I was more glad than ever that we’d gotten multiple evaluations. Most orthodontists offer the initial consultation for free; I strongly recommend going to two or even three different doctors if you can.
The doctors had one thing in common, though: they both charged more than either Jak or I had imagined. He was apparently hoping for around $3500 per, or $2K after insurance; I was expecting in the neighborhood of $5K, or $3500 to us.
The total quote for Michaela was $6000 by the ‘cover the hole’ orthodontist and $6500 by the ‘pull the tooth down’ one. Neither covers extraction of the extra bottom tooth, which will be done by our dentist; with the latter we’ll also pay a separate $235 for out-of-house x-rays, plus an unknown amount for a surgeon to attach a ‘button and chain’ to the upper tooth so it can be maneuvered down, so the total cost will be more like $7500 when all’s said and done.
Optional upgrades included a) clear brackets on the top, for $300 extra, and b) custom wires to reduce the time in braces by around 6 months (or about 1/4 of the total) for $950 extra. But I was wincing long before we ever got to those numbers.
Despite the extra expense, though, we’ve decided to go with the ‘pull the tooth into place’ option. My opinion is that getting this right will be important for a long time to come, and dentistry is not a good place to be frugal. We are, however, skipping the cosmetic and high-tech upgrades.
Both offices offer 2-year financing at 0% interest, or a 5% discount if you pay in full up front. Right now, with our highest available savings rate at 3.65% (and falling), I considered dipping into our emergency savings to pay the full amount. After insurance, we’re left with about $5K now and another $1K of outside costs at various points. (The kids’ mother may contribute, but until that actually happens I’m running numbers from a worst-case scenario.)
What complicates things is our pretax medical savings accounts. Unfortunately, though we had planned for some orthodontic expenses this year, we were expecting a much smaller number. My account is already dry, and we’ve got around $1600 left in Jak’s for the rest of 2008. My medical FSA renews in January, so (assuming I’m still with my current employer) if we went on the payment plan we’d be maybe $600 over for the year, and I could factor the rest into 2009.
Since Jak and I are both in the 25% tax bracket, though, we’re going to be better off taking the payment plan and running as much of the cost as possible through the FSA. That’s almost 33% (once you include FICA) of every dollar we don’t have to send the government, which makes a lot more difference than a percent or two of interest.
Since we’re expecting a similarly exorbitant outlay for Claire in a couple of years, we need every last break we can get.
(Photo by Pikaluk.)
In the 1990s credit reporting company TransUnion thought it had a great way to make more money. By filtering its already enormous database of credit information on U.S. consumers, it could sell highly targeted mailing lists to marketers.
Just one little problem, though: the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which allows the use of such data for credit, employment, licensing, and insurance transactions, but not for ordinary old unsolicited advertising. Thousands of junk-mail deluged consumers hired lawyers and began legal protest.
TransUnion shut down the marketing-list practice in 2001, but it’s taken an additional seven years to settle the consolidated class-action suit over the practice. The result: a $75 million payback, and free credit report/score access for anyone who’s had an open line of credit since 1987. That includes not just credit cards, but mortgages, car loans, and student loans as well.
That’s an estimated 160 million living Americans.
To partake of this punitive largesse, you may register at listclassaction.com. You will be provided with four settlement options, though unless you care to file an individual lawsuit the first two can be quickly discounted. The remaining choices are: six months of credit monitoring and a ‘potential cash payment (if available)’, or nine months of ‘enhanced’ credit monitoring. ‘Enhanced’ refers to ‘a suite of insurance scores and a mortgage simulator service’. Both options include access to your TransUnion credit score
In a nutshell: everyone gets six months of credit report and score access; the choice is between an extra three months of access, or a chance at a bite of the dollar pie. I’m not a big gambler, and I note that the $75 million pot has to cover more than a decade of lawyers’ fees before being divided between up to 160 million possible claimants, so I’m going to opt for the 9-month option.
Nothing happens right away; registering just means you will be notified by email when the settlement is final (probably late September). You then have until March 2009 to activate your six or nine months of service. Cash distributions, if any, will take ‘at least two years,’ no specified maximum.
Unlike the normal monitoring service sold by TransUnion, you do not need to give a credit card number to activate it, and you will not be automatically billed for renewal at the end of the 6- or 9-month period.
Also note that you only get TransUnion report and score access, not Experian or Equifax, which will almost certainly differ. Still, that’s 1/3 of your credit history. One benefit to having score access over a period of months is that you have time to make changes and see exactly what effect different actions have on your score, all for free. If I learn anything, I’ll certainly report it here!
Other sources: CNN, LA Times
Gasoline prices are on the mind of nearly every American right now. Here in Seattle, where gas is currently climbing past the $4.50 mark, we like our hybrid cars. A lot.
But Seattle had an environmentally ‘green’ culture long before the recent spike in gas prices, which suggests that a lot of those hybrids are being purchased by people who already had reasonably fuel-efficient cars.
Which is fine, but upgrading your existing 30 mpg vehicle to a 50 mpg hybrid won’t help nearly as much as upgrading from 15 mpg to 25 mpg.
Wait, what? Shouldn’t an increase of twenty miles per gallon be twice as good as an increase of ten miles per gallon?
Actually, no — in this case, it’s only half as good.
Turns out that our intuitive math is all wrong, thanks to the ‘miles per gallon illusion’. As explained last week on NPR’s All Things Considered, the number that really matters is ‘gallons per mile’.
Like this: a 15 mpg minivan uses .0667 (1/15) gallons per mile — or to make the numbers a bit easier, 6.67 gallons per 100 miles. A 25 mpg station wagon needs 4 gallons to go 100 miles. Trade the minivan for the wagon, and you’re saving 2.67 gallons per 100 miles. (That’s worth about $12 in Seattle right now.)
Now, a 30mpg sedan uses 3.33 gallons per 100 miles, compared to 2 gallons per 100 miles from a 50mpg hybrid. That’s a savings of 1.33 gallons per 100 miles (currently $6).
Or, only half the improvement of the 15-to-25 mpg upgrade.
The way cars are advertised in the States (the rest of the world, apparently, gets it right) leads people to make the wrong decisions about which cars to upgrade. A 3 mpg improvement hardly seems worth the bother … and if you’re already getting 30 mpg, it’s likely not. If you’re going from 12 mpg to 15 mpg, though, the difference is a lot bigger than you probably think.
I confess that I am periodically tempted to trade our 1999 Civic (rated as a respectable 24 mpg in-city, but in practice we get over 30 mpg) for a shiny new (or at least new-ish) hybrid. But even though we could literally cut our gas bill in half, it wouldn’t come close to making up for the roughly $16K more we’d have to spend to trade up to, say, a 2006 Prius. Gas will need to be a lot more expensive for that math to work out.
Update 14-Jul-08: Rick Larrick of Duke University offers a more thorough mathematical explanation of the problem.
(Photo by Casey Hamilton.)
