Get Rich Slick

So I’m stuck in a city because of bad weather and the next flight won’t be available until the next day.   I end up in a fleabag hotel for the night and am so hungry (without access to a car) that I decide to order a pizza.

I call up Pappa John’s and ask for the cheapest special.   Note:  It is late, I’m hungry but won’t likely eat more than a couple of slices of pizza.

Pappa John’s “Jennifer” suggests I order the $11.99 special which is an Extra-Large Pizza with four toppings for $11.99.   I tell her that I want that special but to make the pizza a MEDIUM instead of extra large since I won’t eat but more than one or two slices anyway.

“I can’t do that sir” she says.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I can’t make your pizza a medium for $11.99″  she says.

“You mean you can’t make a medium pizza with four toppings for $11.99?” I ask bewildered.

“No, you need to get the extra large pizza!” she retorts.

“So even though I’m only going to eat only two slices at most and subsequently throw away 80% of the pizza, you can’t make it a medium?” I ask again.

“No, you have to get the extra large” she laments.

So I ordered the extra large pizza, end up eating 3 slices and, you guessed it, threw away the rest.

I offered to SAVE this pizza joint money but taking a smaller pizza with subsequently less toppings but Pappa John’s would have none of it.   What a strange world where the incentive is to throw away food instead of preserving it.    This is just one of the many ways I know humanity is headed for self-destruction as no other creature on earth is as wasteful as humans.

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So I went to the dentist again to get my teeth cleaned and I got a big bill which made me wonder.  Before I get into the big bill, let me give you a little bit of background.   Growing up as a kid I rarely went to the dentist and the only time I recall visiting a dentist was around 18 or 19 years of age when I had a really bad tooth ache at the back of my mouth.   The dentist checked out all my teeth and said he was surprised I didn’t have any cavities but determined that my tooth ache was a wisdom tooth coming out and impacting one of my other teeth.  He said I would eventually need to get them (wisdom teeth) removed but if I could tolerate the pain for a while it could go away.    The dentist said to me that there were two kinds of people (referring to teeth), those that get cavities, fillings and root canals but get to keep their teeth till they die and those that don’t get cavities but eventually lose their teeth to gum disease.

Flash forward 8 years and I began making regular dental visits with the first appointment being to remove four wisdom teeth.   Ever since that time I have been visiting the same dentist and dental hygienist for all those years and I’ve lately become suspicious of some of their business practices.   As insurance companies have negotiated and tightened down rates for regular treatments, my dentists seems to have migrated to more “ancillary” services to make up revenue (I presume).

For the past few years, the dentist tried to get me to buy invisiline braces.   I have only ONE tooth that is slightly misaligned and the dentist thought it would be a good idea to spend $3,000 to get it fixed.  I politely declined and let it go.  Evidently the business profit for braces must have plateaued because now he’s moved on to some periodontal trays which supposedly “clean and kill” bacteria off my teeth.   Guess how much the treatment costs?  Yeah, about $3,000.

It seems every ancillary service at the dentist runs about 3k and I find that a remarkable coincidence.   The dentist and hygienist did a great job in convincing me that I needed to have the trays to kill all that bacteria that was supposedly hurting my gums.   I nearly signed up for the process when the dentist’s office manager gave me a disclaimer form.  The form had statements like, “dentist is not a periodontist surgeon or expert”   and “treatment success varies from patient to patient” and “no guarantee or results from treatment” so I immediately told the dentist that I would speak to my insurance company to find out how much they would cover before I signed up for the treatment.

In addition, the dental hygienist suggested that I needed to have scaling done (again) which coincidentally matched the time frame the health insurance covered (every three years).   So I’m beginning to think I may be undergoing unnecessary procedures to keep this guy in business and that’s the problem.  The dentist is running a business complete with receptionists, accounts payable, accounts receivable, etc and I don’t fault him for it except that it is now looking more and more like a scam and I’m losing trust.

I won’t be surprised to see a new product line in two to three years and I’ll be sure to write about that when it happens.

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Well here’s an interesting story… I received my property tax appraisal document in the mail this week and thought it was interesting that my home value has been assessed 20k lower than last year.    I certainly don’t mind the lower valuation as it means I’ll be paying less in property taxes but while I received a lower valuation, I also received notice from the city that water & sewer rates would rise over 15 percent.

Worse than the 15% hike is the fact that the city has continuously cut back on picking up garbage.   At the rate the city is cutting services, we’ll have to soon resort to burning garbage in old drums like I remember people doing in my childhood neighborhood over 30 years ago!

Along those lines, I received a letter this week from Chase stating that one of my credit cards would be “upgraded” to the new Slate Chase card provided that I met their new credit worthy standards.   Sorry Chase but I have my own new “Ethical Worthy Standards” and you don’t make the cut.   I closed another Chase account this week and I am now down to one checking account and two credit cards – those will all be gone by June or July if I am able to meet my transfers and schedule for complete severing ties with all big banks.

Many people were talking about the consumer credit dropping in February and I’m not surprised:

U.S. consumer credit unexpectedly tumbled in February, reversing the prior month’s surprise increase, as households refrained from taking on new debt in favor of deleveraging.

February’s total consumer credit outstanding dropped $11.51 billion or at a 5.62 percent annual rate to $2.45 trillion, the Federal Reserve said on Wednesday.

I’m not surprised because banks are still cutting credit lines or imposing new standards on consumers so accounts will continue to drop off.  Additionally, some people (like me) continue to be disgusted with big banks and are purposely closing accounts.   By the time I’m done moving my money and closing accounts, I will have shut down over $100,000 worth of credit lines with big banks.   I am currently 40% of the way there and I’m replacing those credit lines with credit union credit lines and other debt instruments.   Someone has to take a stand and I’m doing my part…

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I had originally entitled this post, “Facebook, The World’s Most Dangerous Application” but I decided throwing in Hitler would be better to make a point.  I admit, I was peer pressured into creating a Facebook account.    Many of my family and friends were on Facebook and kept sending me links or notes to it and I finally relented.   Initially I didn’t have a problem with Facebook until I started digging deeper into their privacy policy and there ever changing stance on what was considered private and what was not.  Worse yet, Facebook took it upon themselves to automatically change privacy settings much to my chagrin allowing more people access than before but here’s a list of things that broke the camel’s back.

First, Facebook seems to love to gather and horde information on you.   Almost daily, I get reminders to define my relatives in Facebook.  Why?   Why does Facebook care who my relatives are and why do they want this information?

Second, Facebook seems to know a bunch of people in my life that aren’t friends or family.  Actually vague acquaintances show up in Facebook under the Suggestions section on who to add to my Facebook.    I don’t know how Facebook is getting this information or why it is in there but it’s rather disturbing to think that data mining is in full force with Facebook.

Third, Facebook desperately wants me to add a picture to my profile.  Why?   A little window kept popping up from “tagged” photos wanting me desperately to link my photo to my profile.

From a security standpoint, I’ve read stories of Facebook members writing posts like, “I’m headed on vacation to the Caribbean”  only to return to find their home has been burglarized during their vacation.  Well that makes perfect sense, why not place a flashing neon sign on your home that reads, “This House Is Full of Stuff and Empty! – Owner on Vacation.”

Of course the most dangerous thing is what happens to this data in the wrong hands?   Imagine if Facebook gets bought by Annoying-Debt-Collectors-R-Us and now ADCRU has full access to all your friends and family!  Yippee!  Imagine the possibilities!

But if history is ANY indication of what will happen someday soon it is the history of evil fascist dictators throughout the past few decades slaughtering and abusing MILLIONS of people.   Imagine if Adolf Hitler’s Germany had access to Facebook, rounding up Jews would be matter of a few clicks.    Mao didn’t like capitalists so imagine him searching for bourgeoisie type people and their friends.    You can use your own imagination and determine who the next Adolf will be coming for via Facebook.   There is really too much complacency by Facebook and the public on these types of data collecting systems but anyone who doesn’t study history is bound to repeat it.

I have deactivated my account and I know wish to permanently delete it but I can’t seem to find a way to do it so perhaps it’s too late.  All I can hope for now is for this company to go bankrupt.   Let the fad end!

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If you recall last year, there was a stampede at a Wal-mart during the big “Black Friday” event in which a person was tragically stampeded to death for the sake of shoppers buying cheap plastic crap from China.    I still can’t figure out the whole marketing genius of keeping/holding all of your sales potential for one damn day.  Often it isn’t even a whole damn day, it’s only a few hours of teaser items which no one is ever able to get unless you show up at 4:00 a.m. and wait for a few hours to be the first one in the store.

Personally, I don’t have any plans on fighting for parking spaces, fighting with crowds, fighting with cashiers or other customer service people to get attention if I need something.   I’d rather just order my stuff on Amazon or online and if I need to go to a store I’ll head over to Costco where the crowd is a bit more subdued.   According to FatWallet, it looks like Wal-mart is finally implementing some sensible rules to keep tragedy from reoccurring this year.

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As far as I know, most Ph.D scholars around the world make nowhere near the kind of money that Wall Street Fraudsters make so why is everyone “worried” about a brain drain on Wall Street if pay limits are imposed?   This is the stupidest argument I’ve seen in a long while for almost anything.    The entire concept that people will leave because they won’t get paid hundred million dollar bonuses is ridiculous.  Don’t let the door hit your ass on your way out buddy!

“These people are considered the brains of the machine. They are who can pull you through the tough times,” said Steven Hall, who runs an executive compensation firm that bears his name. “This will give them reason to leave.”

NewsFlash:  There are millions of hungry Chinese and Indian college graduates ten times smarter than any of the idiots on Wall Street that will work for $50k a year.    Most of these guys do all the back end programming for financial systems anyway so who’s kidding who here?

What a load of crap!

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I received notice from one of my banks with the most draconian new change of terms I’ve seen in a while.   The terms are so draconian that there is even a clause in the agreement that I cannot link to the bank without their express explicit permission!   But the terms include some of the following for my “free” banking:

“I understand that to use <bank online services>, I must first obtain access to the Internet with compatible hardware, software and web browser.”

So my “free” banking and “free” online bill pay now requires that I have and pay for my own internet access, hardware, software and web-browser.   OK, so you would need that anyway right if you’re going to bank online so what’s the big deal?   Well the big deal is that the bank is now REQUIRING that I get all my statements online.  In essence, they no longer plan on sending out paper statements so the burden is now on me to have a computer with internet access to get my statements from the bank!

“You are also responsible for maintaining your own connection to the Internet. Internet connections are not part of the services of <my bank>. Furthermore, we recommend that you also have a printer connected to the computer from which you are accessing your account so that you may print and save these disclosures and other information you receive electronically, including your online statement. You understand that you are responsible for installation, maintenance and operation of your computer and its software. You assume full responsibility of ensuring these requirements are met should any changes be made to your existing computer system. The Bank is not responsible for any errors or failures of your computer or its software.”

So printer, toner, paper are now all on my dime to print out the disclosures, statements and anything else the bank wants to send me!

“You understand that you may create a bookmark in your web browser to the Bank home page. You may not create any link to either the  Bank home page or any other of the Bank’s web site pages without the written approval of  Bank, including, without limitation, a link on a publicly accessible web site.”

Wow, I wish I could link to the bank page to show you but I’d get in trouble.   Oh well, not to worry, I’ll be closing my account before the terms take effect next month.

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Over the past few weeks I’ve seen snippets and clips of people complaining about the health care bill Obama has proposed and I honestly haven’t read the bill nor kept up with most of the discussion on it because I’m really tired of watching MSNBC wackos and Fox News wackos nonsense all the time but I did hear something about some alleged “death panels” on one of these sound bites while I was flipping through channels.

I did a little research and found that the death panels are nothing more than end of life counseling by doctors and if I’m mistaken perhaps someone can correct me but I then ran across this article on CNBC regarding new “exotic” investments Wall Street is eager to bank roll.

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

So clearly, behind the scenes there is a huge profit motive from Wall Street banks to incentivize the early demise of the elderly and what better way to do so than though the health care system?  The article claims that the earlier the elderly die, the bigger the profit to the investor, how quaint.   I told a friend not too long ago that I stopped believing in coincidences a long time ago, too many things all seem to be inter-related on some level and I find the timing between the controversial health care plan and Wall Street too convenient and too timely.    Sometimes, free market capitalism makes me sick.

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Well I’m in the process of ordering books for my MBA classes and one thing that hasn’t changed since the last time I was in college it is the ridiculous cost of college text books.   What really gets my blood boiling is the incessant distribution of new editions when there is hardly anything new in edition x than from edition x-1.

I have a proposal to solve this problem, the government should mandate that publishers should release a digest between editions that encompass all the changes from edition x to edition x+1.   By doing this we’ll get the full benefit of recycling older additions while minimizing the publishing costs of reprinting a full book where the only difference is the color of the book and a couple of paragraphs of content.

Like the movie and music industry, the book publishers have to know what they have coming to them by now if they don’t change – massive book pirating when books go mostly digital.   From my orientation, the professors stated that most students were using electronic editions of the books and yet the costs haven’t come down…hmmm….why is that?  Publishers used to claim that publishing costs kept growing ever year as inflation eroded their profits because of the high cost of ink, paper, and labor to print, bind and distribute books but a funny thing happened on the way to the publishing shop…it became obsolete!

So what’s the excuse now book publishers?  Electron transfers inside a copper wire are crippling your profitability?

I understand capitalism and free markets but I don’t understand unsatisfiable greed when it comes to college text books.  It’s all about expanding people’s knowledge morons!   I don’t know the real statistics but I’ll venture to guess that an educated person is about 50% less likely to commit crime or at least violent crime.   An educated society is better than an uneducated society and all you need to do is look no further than any fourth world country where there is 90% illiteracy to understand the truth to this statement.

In the near future, just like the health care crisis we face today, we’ll have a college cost crisis and I can already here the pointless bickering between the red and the blue as fewer and fewer people have access to education.   Hey maybe the health insurance industry can sell “college book insurance” policies instead once they get the boot from Obama but then again Obama II might institute “start of college life counseling” which would be so controversial it would be stripped from the bill…ignorant college students are fairly profitable after all.

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So I have a family member that is interested in purchasing a home.   They asked if I could join them at the mortgage  brokers office to look over the documents and make sure there wasn’t anything weird going on with the process.    First, I have to give you a bit of a background and you’ll understand why we ended up here.

A few weeks ago, person x found a home they were interested in purchasing.   Person x asked for my help to look at the property and share some thoughts on the possible purchase.   I drove over, checked out the home and thought it was a reasonable deal.  Nothing out of the ordinary in my opinion until……I got a call from person x a few days later saying the Realtor suggested a particular mortgage broker.  We’ll call mortgage broker “Greedy Selfish Bastards Mortgage Broker” or GSBMB for short.

Immediately alarms went off in my head.   Hmmm…Realtor suggests mortgage broker….where have I written this story before?   So without going into a long convoluted story, the quick summary is that GSBMB came in with a ridiculously high loan rate, ridiculously high fees, and ridiculously high selfish greed.   So person X is advised to get someone else by another family member to comparison shop.   Sure enough, the second mortgage broker (SMB) is a bit cheaper because Person X gave them a COPY of what GSBMB  and they reduced the fees, interest and lowered their greed (a small bit).

I come into the story when Person X is heading over to SMB to sign some paperwork.  We get there, I sit down and start looking at all the paperwork and that’s when I go “ugh” and sigh a bit.    I immediately start off by asking why there is $1000 in fees for doing nothing more than shuffling paperwork and the response from SMB agent is immediately, “it’s cheaper than what GSBMB was charging and Person X is getting a great deal.”

Now if you paid close attention, you’ll note that the fees were still high just not as high as GSMBM which made Person X feel better but it’s still a big waste of money.   Unfortunately, Person X is too busy and too much in a hurry to take a step back and consult with another bank or broker and simply wants to get the deal run.  The meter is also running on their contract and they have to close within a particular date and time is dwindling away.

Person X signs the paperwork and we go to lunch.   “What do you think?” is the question I get and I respond, “You were in a hurry and probably paid an extra $2,000 for this home that you didn’t need to spend” is what I say back.    At the end of the day, we both agree that the interest rate is irrelevant because Person X plans on paying off the mortgage within a year or two so it’s no big deal but the fees are pure profit for the worthless mortgage broker.  As best I could tell, the SMB was making at least $3,000 in profit for doing virtually nothing but signing paperwork.

At some point in the near future, I suspect technology will overtake the real estate industry.  We’ve seen companies like Redfine and Zillow start chipping away at Realtor commissions of 6% (ridiculous) and some enterprising young man/woman will come up with a system to automate the whole process.   With the advent of things like Google streetview, Google earth, automated property tax records there is no reason why appraisals can’t become more automated and there really is no reason for the existence of real estate mortgage brokers anyway since you can go to places like Lending Tree or BankRate and get quotes for loans from most banks.

So to all mortgage brokers, I hope you’ve enjoyed the quick and easy cash but it’s all going away over the next generation or so and you will go the way of the dinosaurs!

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