pocketmint

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend (well, those in the States, anyway — I hope everyone else had a great ordinary weekend). We had an awesome dinner, if I do say so myself. I am almost done with the cost calculations I promised; I just need to get a few prices from Costco for some pantry staples that I already had on hand.

I did not for a moment consider doing any sort of shopping on Black Friday. Even before my recent focus shift towards non-consumption, when my thrifty streak manifested as Serious Sale Shopper, I never waited in the wee hours of the morning to fight other people for … well, whatever they’re fighting for.

And frankly, I was deeply appalled and disgusted by the news reports. Pepper-spraying your fellow shoppers, really? Did we not learn anything from the poor guy who was trampled to death a couple of years ago? How can anyone imagine this whole consumerism thing has not gone way, way too far?

What did we do instead? We worked on a new 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that I bought at Goodwill for eighty-two cents, and ate lots of leftovers.

We did participate in ‘Small Business Saturday’, however. Despite it being basically a marketing gimmick for American Express, I support the concept.

Jak and I made dinner plans with some friends, and since I didn’t particularly want to cook again just yet (after the all-day marathon of Wednesday and Thursday), we met at a little family-owned Indian restaurant. The proprietress is this sweet older Indian lady who barely speaks any English; she waits tables while her husband and son do the cooking.

We used to get takeout from there pretty regularly, back when we were both working full-time, but in the last couple of years we’ve cut back sharply on our eating-out. I checked Mint to see the last time we were there, and it was nine months ago.

I know that they’ve struggled; they’ve moved three times since we first discovered them, and their restaurant is often nearly empty despite the excellent food. So in addition to getting my masala fix, I feel good for helping them out a little bit — something that no one in line outside a big box store Friday morning (or Thursday night) could say.

(Photo by stromnessdundee.)

Pocketmint now spans three and a half years, and while there are certain posts I would write the same today, other things in my life have changed over that time. I think this personal evolution is often meaningful, so periodically I’ll be highlighting something I said in the past and updating it with my current perspective.

First, shrimp.

(Yes, I am writing a whole blog post entirely about shrimp. Just call me Bubba. Vegetarians and ostraconophobes: move along, nothing to see here.)

Here’s what I wrote in September of 2009:

And then there’s the chapter on the dangers of cheap food. I gave up meat twenty years ago, so the description of what the pork industry calls “PSE” (for “pale soft exudative”) left me shuddering but secure in my moral stance. Unfortunately for me, however, most of the chapter is devoted to the environmental deterioration and human degradation resulting from the explosion of Asian shrimp farms. Shrimp is a significant component of my diet, in part precisely because it’s become so cheap. This presents a dilemma I have yet to resolve.

I’m pleased to be able to say that I did in fact resolve that dilemma; since reading that book over two years ago, I have only purchased and served U.S. wild-caught shrimp. (I would buy U.S. farmed shrimp, but no one seems to sell them here.) Also when eating out, I usually:

• patronize restaurants (Mashiko, Duke’s) which advertise sustainable seafood
• choose tofu (cheap), scallops (not cheap!), or some other option over shrimp

My track record is not perfect; on a few occasions in the past two years I’ve indulged in restaurant shrimp which (in the absence of assurances to the contrary) I assume was foreign-farmed. Still, I estimate that’s roughly fifty pounds of environmentally-damaging shrimp I have not purchased so far.

Unfortunately from a frugality standpoint, wild-caught shrimp is considerably more expensive than farmed shrimp shipped in from Vietnam, Thailand, or Ecuador. Like more than double. Imported farmed shell-on shrimp is commonly $5.99 a pound from Costco or a grocery sale. Comparable U.S. wild shrimp, on the other hand, is usually between $12.99 and $15.99 a pound.

So here’s how I’ve adjusted, financially speaking, to this self-imposed ethical requirement:

1. Substitute Oregon shrimpmeat. For West Coast folks this is a winner, being both cheap and relatively local. Rated as a ‘best choice’ by Seafood Watch, Pink Shrimp — sold here as ‘wild Oregon shrimpmeat’ — are a small coldwater species. You might think of them as ‘bay shrimp’ or ‘salad shrimp’; they’re sold preshelled and precooked. Regular price is $5.99 or $6.99, but they are on sale somewhere at least once a month for $4.99, and often available fresh during the late-summer season for just $3.99 a pound. The flavor is vastly superior to farmed prawns, especially when fresh, and I don’t have to spend half an hour shelling them. I use Oregon shrimpmeat in shrimp tacos, shrimp enchiladas, shrimp étouffée, corn and shrimp chowder, shrimp-stuffed mushrooms, and avocado-shrimp salad, just to name a few of my family’s favorites.
2. Watch for sales on wild shrimp and stock up. Three or four times a year, a grocery will put U.S. wild-caught shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico on sale for $9.99 a pound. These are much larger than their Pacific cousins, usually between 15 and 30 shrimp per pound. Every time this happens, I buy two or three pounds of still-frozen shrimp (separated into one-pound portions), and keep them in the deep freeze for the rare garlicky treat.
3. Eat expensive shrimp less often. And by rare I do mean rare. Instead of serving large shrimp three or four times a month, I serve it perhaps once every two months. This has not been as much of a hardship as I would have imagined, in part because of the many dishes which I can make with the cheaper baby shrimp, but also because I’ve developed increased appreciation for purely vegetarian meals.
4. Control portions. Though a vital step, this has actually been the most difficult part, because the culture of our home dinners has always been ‘eat as much as you want’. The problem is that for something as yummy as gambas al ajillo (garlic shrimp) we would go through a half-pound or more per person in a single sitting. That’s $20 for just one meal, before counting any of the other ingredients! So I started setting limits on expensive items. I now allot a quarter-pound of large shrimp per person per meal. No one goes hungry; they are welcome to have seconds of rice, veggies, or whatever else is served. This line met with some resistance — Claire pouted, Jak groused — but I secretly think we all wind up appreciating it more because of the scarcity.

(Photos by MangroveActionProject, Renée S, Lydiat, and asiansupper.)

As I mentioned once before, I have a block on ‘formal’ book reviews, so consider this just a friendly little chat, okay?

I trust Stacy’s opinions implicitly, particularly on matters of journalism, so when in passing she praised Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, the very next thing I did was hit the library web site to reserve a copy.

However, even with her endorsement I was so put off by the summary blurb that I almost abandoned it right there. “… Tells the story of some of these short-sellers, exposing many of the systemic flaws in the financial markets along the way.” Um, yawn? The first user review on the library site gave five stars but somehow managed to sound dry as dust. Maybe there just isn’t a way to make ‘sub-prime residential mortgage crisis’ sound compelling in three sentences, I don’t know.

Before giving up entirely, however, I ran a general web search and turned up an excerpt published in Vanity Fair last year. You should read it, and if you find it as fascinating as I did, you’re a good candidate for the rest of the book. This piece showcases the most pleasant surprise for me: the author’s attention to characterization.

He sensed that he was different from other people before he understood why. Before he was two years old he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and the operation to remove the tumor had cost him his left eye. A boy with one eye sees the world differently from everyone else, but it didn’t take long for Mike Burry to see his literal distinction in more figurative terms. Grown-ups were forever insisting that he should look other people in the eye, especially when he was talking to them. “It took all my energy to look someone in the eye,” he said. “If I am looking at you, that’s the one time I know I won’t be listening to you.” His left eye didn’t line up with whomever he was trying to talk to; when he was in social situations, trying to make chitchat, the person to whom he was speaking would steadily drift left. “I don’t really know how to stop it,” he said, “so people just keep moving left until they’re standing way to my left, and I’m trying not to turn my head anymore. I end up facing right and looking left with my good eye, through my nose.”

His glass eye, he assumed, was the reason that face-to-face interaction with other people almost always ended badly for him. He found it maddeningly difficult to read people’s nonverbal signals, and their verbal signals he often took more literally than they meant them. When trying his best, he was often at his worst. “My compliments tended not to come out right,” he said. “I learned early that if you compliment somebody it’ll come out wrong. For your size, you look good. That’s a really nice dress: it looks homemade.” The glass eye became his private explanation for why he hadn’t really fit in with groups. The eye oozed and wept and required constant attention. It wasn’t the sort of thing other kids ever allowed him to be unself-conscious about. They called him cross-eyed, even though he wasn’t. Every year they begged him to pop his eye out of its socket—but when he complied, it became infected and disgusting and a cause of further ostracism.

from “Betting on the Blind Side”, Vanity Fair April 2010

Michael Lewis is … well, he’s just an extremely good writer, for one, but he’s also got to be one hell of a meticulous researcher. He’s gone back and pieced together a detailed timeline, cross-referencing with dozens of interviews and using the email archives of his chief subjects.

This resulted, for me, in a sort of retrospective rubbernecking. As he stepped through the relevant events of 2005 through 2007, I found myself remembering where I was and what I was doing at those times … and how little I knew about events already in play that would completely transform my life in 2008 and beyond.

For example, in October 2006 Jak and I decided to buy a house — a path that was doomed before we’d even conceived of it, because of some esoteric choices made by people I’d never met, working at companies I’d never had contact with. That kind of blows my mind. I long ago accepted that many things about my own life are beyond my control, but I honestly have never felt quite so helplessly (if retroactively) ignorant. (The fact that only maybe a couple of dozen people in the entire world were less ignorant than I was should diminish the sting more than it does.)

The flip side is that I feel a lot more informed now, after reading The Big Short. I haven’t read any other books about the mortgage crisis, so I can’t compare, but Lewis does an excellent job of taking obscure concepts like ‘collateralized debt obligation’ and ‘credit default swap’ and breaking them down into comprehensible English.

Also, if you’re having any doubts about where most of the fault for our continuing economic collapse lies, this might make things a bit more clear. Though I’ve seen people argue about whether the individual actions taken by the banks, insurance companies, and ratings agencies were based in amoral greed or egregious stupidity — Lewis tends to come down on the side of ‘a little greed, but mostly stupidity’ — I’m not sure it matters. Personally, I’d tend to hold them responsible either way.

(Photos by glasseyes view and hunter.gatherer.)

Thanksgiving is my very favorite holiday. I hear that some people have odd Thanksgiving customs like ‘watching football’ or ‘shopping’, but for us it’s pretty much an entire holiday about cooking and eating. These are two of my favorite things, so I’m happy.

This week I’ve started poking around recipe sites looking for menu-planning inspiration. Although we have a couple of traditional must-have dishes (cornbread dressing and pumpkin pie), I like to experiment too much to make the same meal every year.

Along the way I ran across a ‘Thanksgiving on a Budget’ article at Epicurious that I thought was worth sharing. It suggests a menu (soup, turkey, stuffing, vegetable, bread, dessert) that serves eight for $80, and also lists six very good general money-saving tips.

It also gave me the idea to document our Thanksgiving dinner this year, including tracking the recipes and actual cost. I have a monthly grocery budget and my usual frugal practices have kept us running well under it, so I wouldn’t ordinarily break out the cost of Thanksgiving particularly. But it might be an interesting experiment — too late to be of use to anyone else this November, of course, but maybe helpful for Christmas dinner or next year. I shall challenge myself to see how lavishly gourmet I can get … on the cheap.

(Photo by Andrew Huff.)

A lot of people are moving their money this week, either because of outrage at the imposition of yet another fee, or due to a general realization that customers tend to get better treatment from small not-for-profit credit unions than from gigantic banking corporations.

In tangentially related news, interest rates seem to be exploring Zeno’s Paradox — how low can you go and still not reach 0%? If you have emergency fund savings (and if you do, in the current economy, I congratulate you on being both lucky and smart) you probably know the agony of infinitesmal interest.

There is a way to solve — or at least improve — both of these situations at once. Our main checking account, with a credit union, offers 4.09% APR on the first $10,000 on deposit — which is not only far above any available savings account rate, but also well above the best current 5-year CD rate. So we can have our ethics and our interest too.

High-yield checking accounts

First, for readers who may be unfamiliar with high-yield checking accounts, an overview.

Sometimes called ‘rewards checking’, high-yield accounts are your basic free checking account: no monthly service charges, no minimum balances, and free online billpay, with a default interest rate just slightly above zero. However, for each month that you perform certain activities, you qualify for a much higher interest rate on your balance for that month — up to a certain cap, usually $10k or $25k.

The standard monthly requirements are:

• make 10 or 12 debit card purchases
• receive at least one direct deposit
• receive electronic-only statements

Some common variations and additions are:

• a direct debit payment* in lieu of direct deposit
• another ACH transaction in lieu of direct deposit
• access your online account or billpay
• make at least one payment through billpay

* (A direct debit payment is not the same thing as paying a bill through the online system; it must be initiated by the payee. So for example, if you gave your mortgage lender or your credit card or your orthodontist approval to deduct money from your checking account each month, that would be a direct debit.)

Make the grade and you get:

• a high interest rate on your balance (up to the cap)
• ATM fee reimbursements (usually a certain number or to a dollar limit)

Some credit unions also offer a free box of checks.

If there’s one requirement that’s likely to trip you up, it’s the minimum per-month debit card purchases. Since I log into Mint every few days anyway, it’s not too hard to check how many purchases I’ve made against the account, and adjust if necessary. But it is one more thing to keep track of, in an already long list.

On the plus side, with a buffer of several thousand dollars, you’ll never worry about overdrawing your account again.

My choice: Consumers Credit Union of Illinois

As of two months ago, our main checking account is Consumers Cooperative Credit Union, based out of the far northern suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. Joining is easy: you can do it online and the only requirement is that you deposit (and keep) $5 in a savings account. CCU offers the highest national rate available right now on deposits up to $10,000: 4.09% APY, which comes out to around $34 per month. This rate is guaranteed through June 30, 2012. (On any amount over $10k, the rate drops to 0.56%.) It has an above-average health and safety rating.

CCU’s specific monthly requirements are:

• 12 debit card (signatory, not PIN-based) purchases
• one direct deposit or one direct debit or one online billpay transaction
• electronic statements

The lack of a direct deposit requirement is unusual among rewards checking accounts, and is very useful if (like us) you work contract or freelance jobs, or are in any other situation where there may be interruptions in income. CCU’s qualification period is a calendar month, which makes it easy to keep track of whether you’ve used your card 12 times. The third-party billpay system interface is better than most; I’ve had no trouble figuring it out.

I don’t tend to use ATMs myself, but if you do it’s worth noting that CCU offers unlimited ATM fee reimbursements — no cap — if you meet the monthly requirements. There’s also a large national network of credit unions whose ATMs accept deposits for each other, in case you have a paper check or cash.

There are a couple of negatives, however. One is easily avoided if you know about it in advance, and I’ll share my workaround for the other, too.

Direct deposit fail

The first time I tried to set up a portion of my paycheck to direct deposit to CCU, it failed to go through. Turns out that the ‘account number’ I was sent in email when I opened the account is, surprisingly and inexplicably, not the same ‘account number’ that is needed for direct deposit. Neither number is provided in your online account information; the only way to get the special account number for direct deposit — or to even find out that it exists — is to contact CCU and ask.

To their credit, their email response was prompt. But the lack of upfront documentation meant it took an extra cycle for my direct deposit to kick in, which had the potential to cause all sorts of unexpected problems, from losing the high interest rate for a month to not being able to pay bills, if I hadn’t had another account I could do that from.

No ACH outbounds

This is not unique to CCU but is a problem with many small banks and credit unions; either they don’t offer ACH transfers at all or they charge a fee for them. In order to transfer money between CCU and another bank, you either have to initiate the transaction from the other end, or (reportedly, I haven’t tried this myself) route it through the online billpay, which takes longer and is more hassle.

If you keep only one bank account at a time, this won’t be a problem. However, I usually have accounts at three or four different places and shuffle money between them regularly. Personally, I solve this problem by keeping an Ally bank savings account that I use as a ‘hub’ and from which I initiate all transfers. (I’ll talk more about Ally in a future post.)

Find the best account and make the switch

None of the large national and international banks offer rewards checking accounts — only credit unions and small local banks. So if you’re looking to get away from supporting the big banks that helped torpedo the US economy, there’s no conflict.

For at least several months now CCU has had the best national interest rate, but you should check to see if rates have changed or there’s a bank or credit union local to you with a better offer. Ken at depositaccounts.com keeps the best list; click the blue filter bar and select both ‘national’ and ‘local’, then your state to see possibilities.

Note that some credit unions that appear in your state list may be limited to residents of a particular county or metropolitan region, so you should visit the web site for each one individually and check the member qualifications. (Indiana residents beware of the First State Bank of Middlebury; they charge a monthly fee against the account if you make fewer than 55 debit purchases, so the effective interest rate is much lower than claimed.)

CCU runs on a calendar month cycle, so joining this week conveniently maximizes your grace period. If you do decide to open a CCU account, let me know beforehand: we can each make an extra $50 bonus with their referral program. (I would be recommending CCU — with the aforementioned caveats — regardless, but hey, an extra fifty bucks is nice, no?)

(Image from the Bank Transfer Day poster by Fayerman. Photos by Frank Hebbert and Karen Hickey.)