I got a letter in the mail today from the county about my house. The value shot up again in the past year. To put this into perspective, I almost made as much in the market value this past year as I make at my job. If I could buy a house sell it off after a year, I wouldn’t have to do anything for the rest of the year from all the profit.
I got the HDTV from wall-mart that I was looking at. I tried to purchase on my wal-mart card, but the purchase was denied. Even though I had over $1500 credit on it, it had a $350 credit limit. I went ahead and purchased it on my debit card instead and asked the folks to refund me the extra funds as a check in the mail.
Apparently, I already had HDTV capability on my DVR box. Everything was showing up in black and white with red/purple dots. It took a while to figure out how to switch the box (Explorer 8000HD) from standard mode to HDTV. I had to press INFO+GUIDE to get the settings to show up. The only option displayed was Standard Mode. One time, I did something else for a moment and then looked at the television to see that the settings had changed on its own to HDTV. I quickly grabbed the remote and confirmed that I wanted HDTV. Things worked. I found that later when trying to hook up the DVI cables, my cable box had them blocked, so I stuck with the RGB component cables.
Things show up so much clearer now. Even my DVD player seemed to have HDTV capability since the picture looked so crisp. I doubt it since I only connected it to the television with a normal yellow component cable rather then the RGB component cables known for HDTV. I was able to hook my computer up through S-Video. I tried the DVI with the computer, but apparently my video card treats regular VGA as the primary output. I would hook up VGA to the TV, but I get better resolution on my monitor.
I also picked up a hard drive this past weekend. I reinstalled my operating system. Windows complained that I had activated it one too many times. Interesting, as I had not reinstalled it since I received my computer a few years ago. Calling the toll free number, I was able to chat with a nice woman with an Indian accent. I was able to get in after that and it’s been a constant event of installing, patching, and upgrading software.
I got four new tires for my car and an oil change. It only took four hours and seven hundred dollars. A woman came in asking the people to squeeze her in. She thought that they were putting other people in front of her. I went over to the mall while waiting and picked up a book of over two hundred su doku puzzles. I only got a few puzzles done before I was completely bored.
I’ve just gone through a night mare. I’m still just exhausted from the experience. I’ve recently got my tax refund on payday, so I have over $6,000 to my name at this moment. What better way to spend it then invest in a nice HDTV?
I’ve trodden along with my mother in-law going to different stores and comparing prices and features. I finally settled on a 42″ plasma HD Monitor from AKAI for $1497.76. I went into Sam’s club, picked up one of many tickets available under the television and went to the front to purchase it. I headed over to customer service afterwards to pick it up. Unfortunately, there was only 1 television in there inventory and that was the floor model.
After a half hour of store employees running around and figuring out what to do, I was left with a refund of $1572.65 including taxes. Since I purchased it with my debt card, they could only refund in cash. The cashier started counting money and quickly ran out of hundreds and fifties. I’m there looking at the pile of money dreading the fact that I would be carrying it all out in an overstuffed wallet.
“Don’t worry, we can just call the bank if I don’t have enough”, she said. “More time”, I thought. In the mean time, my mother in-law and niece were waiting outside in the van for me. I came up with an idea and asked if it could all be put on my Wal-Mart card. “Just pretend that you cave me all the cash, and then take it all back as a payment on my card”, I said. After thinking about it, she agreed that it would work.
So in the end, I walked out with an over-paid Wal-Mart Credit Card and a form to file a complaint. It took me a while to find that form as well, as it was well hidden behind a display at the exit. I spent a minute trying to reach back far enough to grab it.
I’ve got such a head ache from this. My wife started rubbing my temples and it helped relax me much. Still, I feel like I went through all of that hell for no reason. Next time I’ll go to customer service first if I make a purchase like that in Sam’s Club again.
The cashiers computer should have picked up the fact that there were not any television models remaining. Even if the floor model was available (which it wasn’t), the computer should have flagged it as such and directed the cashier to confirm that I did want it. Customer service should have been able to issue a ticket of some kind to me to let me come back when the televisions did come in stock again so one would be reserved and paid for in my name. Someone should have removed all tickets under the display model once all available inventory was sold out. I should have been given some form of compensation for having gone through this ordeal.
Girl Scout cookies arrived at the office today. Originally they were supposed to come in on Friday. I’m a bit strapped for cash until then. I was allowed to bring mine home on good faith. It seems that they know where I work.
In other news, my tax refund from the IRS hasn’t arrived yet. They advertise that it takes 5 - 7 days. I did mine on Last Sunday morning. I figured that they mean business days, but it’s been eight business days since I submitted everything.
I guess I shouldn’t have been paying so much attention to it. I check my bank account every day in the morning, after 2pm and after 4pm. I’m down to four dollars and some change. The amazing thing is that I’m still above zero. I’ve fallen so low in the past year that I’m usually five to six hundred dollars in debt every two weeks. So any day now, I’ll get a tax refund on top of a full pay check.
Last year I thought I was rich. I always get impressed with the assessed value of my house when I receive them in the mail. Today I heard about a website called Zillow. This website gathers public information about houses and makes it easy to find out how much your house is worth.
It turns out that my house on Zillow is currently valued at $352,690. I thought it was a mistake, because last year my house was assessed at just under $250k. I originally purchased the house for $156k a few years back. Looking at more data, I found that houses around my neighborhood generally sell for that amount.
They have a lot of little features on the site. One feature shows how much ($2,658) my house went up this week. They have charts for 1, 5 and 10 years that you can compare with the average value of its zip code, city, county, state, and the country. One interesting feature is that I can get email updates on my home.
I’m a third of the way to becoming a millionaire.
I filed my federal taxes this past weekend, so my wife and I should be getting a refund any day now.
I discovered that one of my tires was down so low that some metal threads were exposed and even broken on the edge. A trip to Guaranteed Used Tires solved the problem before I had any serious trouble. A new set of wheels for the car is one of the items on my to-do list with the tax money that we get back this year.
Another item on the agenda is rabies and distemper shots. I have eight cats, and limited room in the car. We are looking into a veterinarian that does house calls for our little colony. I think our youngest cat, Bandit, is not old enough for the rabies shot just yet.
I got a violation notice in the mail from the county about my front handrail. One of the bolts came off and the bottom corner of the steps cracked off. In response to the first violation, we took the handrail off and put it on the side of the house. It seems that our solution wasn’t a good idea since we got a second violation on it. It appears that I’m going to have to invest in some bolts and learn how to make cement, or try my hand with lots of superglue.
I’ve got a few forms here for filing my taxes. I installed some software (TaxCut) to take care of them and almost have everything done at the federal level. I’m missing a tax form for my mutual fund this past year. I logged onto the website where I can access tax information and the only forms available were for every year up to 2004.
You would think that if a service was available through an automated system, then forms like this could be generated on the fly on the first day of the new year. I wonder what the hold up is. I’ll just have to wait it out until they can get there act together.
Usually I go to H&R Block every year. I spent $167 filing my taxes last year for state and federal returns. I haven’t figured out if there is a place on my tax forms to claim that fee. This year I’m getting frugal about everything. I’m trying to do things on my own - or with the assistance of the internet and cheap software. That means I have $167 extra in my pocket until the refund comes. Actually, I still have filing fees, and the price of the software. I’m still saving money, I think.
So my oil ran out on Thursday. I got one hundred gallons on Friday for a little over five hundred dollars (including a payment for money I owed them for earlier repairs). Problem - I can’t purge the air. I tried looking for a bleed valve at a hardware store and found something to close the line. Problem is that I didn’t know what a bleed valve looked like. Found some pictures on the internet and got the concept down.
I went back and couldn’t find one that allows you to choose both passages to be open or just one. I ended up buying a T-shaped pipe and figured I could hook the earlier valve to it. Unfortunately, the pipe doesn’t connect to a three-eighths inch thread. Most that I read about on the internet said that three-eighths inch is standard. This one appears to be a half inch or perhaps larger. I gave up and called the oil company for a technician to come out and purge the air out of our system. I only got a message service that told me that they would notify the office.
There is some good news in my life. I replaced the air filter in my car but that still didn’t fix my engine trouble. I stopped by an auto-parts store on Friday and picked up some spark plug wires. I replaced them rite there in the parking lot after I did some shopping next door to it. The engine light remained on, but I didn’t have any misfired pistons. The car even ran smoother. Later that night, the engine light went off.
I’ve had times when the car is idling in park and it sounds like it is in a loop of strong and not so strong work. Oil changes wouldn’t help it and I figured the car was just getting old or something. It appears that spark plug wires can have a significant impact on your car. They were my last option before going to a mechanic. I think they came to about thirty-five dollars. There were about seven varieties to choose from, so I chose the second best.
I’ve been trying to do a lot of things myself lately to avoid the cost of service. I’ve been learning a few things too. It is amazing to find myself able to talk shop about a things, even if my knowledge is shallow. Maybe it is another level in my life that I am advancing to. Maybe I’m just frugal or broke. Maybe I’ll even do my taxes on my own this year.
It’s that time of season again. The furnace ran out of oil and I’m a little cold. I’m not good at keeping track of oil. I’d prefer to have electricity to heat the home as you always pay that monthly. It doesn’t run out. The price doesn’t fluctuate daily, and you don’t have to be home when someone delivers the goods. Purchasing heating oil socks a very large bill on me instantly. Electric can be paid monthly and budgeted easier. In fact, I pay my electric bill (and most other bills) every 2 weeks on payday.
I want a heating pump. These units suck the heat out of the air outside and pump it inside your home. Even in freezing temperatures, there is still heat outside. A heat pump is just like my air conditioner, except that you can choose if you want the heat to move outside, or inside. It serves as both a heating and cooling unit for your house.
Heat pumps are very energy efficient. They have a problem though where ice collects on the coils outside. The heat pump has to heat those coils up by running as an air conditioner. You don’t need to worry about cold air being pumped in your house when it is deicing itself because it also has burners or electric strip heaters to heat the cold air coming back into your house. There are also Geothermal heat pumps. These pumps use the natural heat from the earth rather then the air.
So how much does a heat pump cost? Early estimates look like the price ranges from $1,000 to $5,000 US depending on how much heat you need. Our tax return from this year could probably pay for the most of that. I’m still researching, so this may not even be close to the actual cost. I have to determine how much area my house occupies. I think there is something here that has to do with BTU’s, but I’m not sure how to measure. After finding the price, I’ll need to look into contractors to install the thing. Maybe I’ll talk to my dad about that.
I found a Kit Builder to help me figure out what all I would need to setup everything. Now the question is how many tons do I need? It is too dark to see the model number on my air conditioner, and my air flow system says that it can handle 131,000 BTU/hour. Possible Ton values are 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, 4, and 5. These values are way below 131,000 BTU as 1 Ton is equal to 18,000 BTU and 5 Tons are equal to 60,000 BTU. Getting too many tons would setup the pump to turn on and off frequently and dehumidify the house in a bad way. Not enough tons would keep the unit running too often.
After that, I need to determine what SEER rating I prefer (10, 12, 13). Seer is pretty much how economical the unit is with energy efficiency (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio). A higher rating helps you save more during cooling. A higher SEER rating increases the initial cost of the unit, but makes up in the long run by lowering the operating cost.
It would seem that I need to first determine what I have.
At digital NATION, (one of my past jobs,) I won a Land Rover Discovery Series II. Yea - I’m that guy. I sold the vehicle to the vice president and got myself a smaller car that I still drive today. With some of the extra money, I started investing in stocks since it seemed to be a smart idea at the time. One of them was Ask Jeeves (ASKJ).
Jeeves is a butler from a book called “Carry on, Jeeves”. He has an answer for everything and knows how to make things work out in the end. It is a comedy of sorts that originally appeared in 1925. I’ve heard a few of them on my XM Radio with Sonic Theater.
The company, Ask Jeeves, is a search engine that gives you results that other people have moderated. It was something new and catching on pretty quick at the time. I invested about a thousand dollars into it. I watched as my stock continued to go up higher and higher. Then I watched as it tumbled so far down that a single share of stock wouldn’t even cover the cost of the book that it was based off of.
I had long ago sold all of my remaining stock in my eTrade account due to the dot-com crash of 2000. I knew nothing about stocks and today I know less. Much to my surprise, I received a letter in the mail of a class action law suit against them. To sum up the summary, I could get nine cents per share, but pay three cents in fees. I only had a few shares of Ask Jeeves, so I might get a check for a dollar in the distant future. Maybe I should I start counting my eggs and plan for that trip to Hawaii.