Close Encounters of the Cheap Kind

This isn’t directly related to personal finance, but I liked this list of things to add to your daily routine to make your life less cluttered that was posted at Unclutterer. A lot of the list, however, deals more with just getting things done rather than managing stuff. Here’s a quick run down, and for more detail check out their site.

1. If you have pets, make your bed. Doesn’t really apply to us, but I can see where pet hair and the like would be unwelcome bedmates. 
2. Know where you’re going. This includes nothing your route and the traffic conditions that might warrant a detour. While traffic is a fact of life, a lot of traffic jams and wandering around looking for something because you’re lost can be avoided, saving time and money.
3. Plan your perfect day. I’m an accountant, so there are no perfect days. However, I do find making a list of what I need to do the next day helps to focus my energy when I get into the office in the morning.
4. Clean out your desk’s inbox. Some sorting and weeding of easy items is good, but it seems like trying at absolutely clean out the inbox is a recipe for either getting stuck at work late or leaving a bunch of stuff unorganized and unfinished for your arrival the next day.
5. Set your desk for tomorrow. This should include cleaning up your desktop. I’m not the best at doing it, but I like to at minimum sort through the papers that accumulate on my desk during the day (in my job I do a lot of analysis, so I can end up with multiple schedules scattered on my desk by the end of the day). This goes well with #3 and #4 above.
6. Sort, open, and act on your mail. I’m trying to get better at this as well. We moved my office downstairs in our house, so the shredder is now easily accessible as I sort the mail. The credit card offers and such go directly into the shredder and the other junk mail goes into the trash. Bills go into my work bag to pay while I’m taking my lunch at work the next day. The weak link for me is statements and such which end up in a pile on my desk until I get tired of looking at them and bring them to work to scan. I just need to bring them with me to work with the bills and scan as I receive them.
7. Load (and, if necessary, run) the dishwasher or hand-wash the dishes. We’re pretty OCD about this. We never leave dirty dishes out overnight. Larger stuff gets hand-washed and everything else goes in the dishwasher. The only disagreement between me and the wife is she insists on running it nightly, even if it isn’t full.
8. Get ready for bed an hour before you plan to go to sleep. I don’t use a full hour, but I’ve gotten into the habit of making sure my clothes are laid out and my lunch is packed before I go to bed. It is a waste of time and money for me to go out to lunch just because I was too lazy to pack the lunch the night before and I was too rushed to do it that morning. I also make sure that those bills and anything else that needs to come with me to work is packed up and ready to go.

Here are a couple of bonus tips of my own for you:

1. Use your lunch break to take care of personal business. One of the luxuries of bringing your lunch to work and eating at your desk is that you normally won’t need the whole hour. Keep a list of personal items you need to work on (bills to pay, rebates to submit, etc.) and use those to fill the remainder of your lunch break. It helps allow you to relax once you get home from work and avoid booting up the computer to clear your personal tasks list. Haven’t you already spent enough time in front of the computer by the time you get home?
2. Keep a to-do list with you at all times. We’ve all done this: think about something that you need to do and then completely forget about it. A lot of times these types of things will come back to bite us in the butt (i.e., when you forget to send in the credit card payment), other times it will just mean wasted time and effort (i.e., when you go to the store and remember something you were supposed to get after you’re already home). A great way around this is to keep a “to-do” list with you so you can jot things like this down and review it regularly. A pad and pen will work, although I find using the Fliq Tasks app on my iPhone to work really well. It helps keep me on track when I ask myself the question “what was it I needed to do.”

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I posted a rant last week about poor customer service I have encountered while grocery shopping recently, including one particularly irksome experience at Kroger. To make the long story short, I had a coupon that should have doubled and didn’t and no one, including the manager on duty, would make the adjustment to my receipt to correct the error in accordance with their policy. The manager on duty was particularly rude, prompting me to write a nasty-gram about the incident to Kroger’s corporate office in Ohio and threatening to take my business elsewhere unless I received a sincere apology for the incident from the store manager and the manager I had the issue with and an assurance I wouldn’t have any problems in the future. (kroger-complaint.pdf)

Well, I received a letter back from the corporate office yesterday and I must say I am amazed at how pathetic a response to the issue I received. You can read the response letter here. The jist of the letter is “thanks for writing us to let us know how crappy our service was, and we’ll load a whole dollar on your Kroger card to say we’re sorry and let the store know they pissed you off.”  Here are my complaints with the response:

1. They addressed me as “Ms.”, when my name obviously indicates I am not female.
2. The lack of any acknowledgement that the store was wrong in their handling of this incident.
3. The request that if I want to hear from the store manager I need to mail a form back to them with my phone number, a form which wasn’t even included with the response letter. Can retail managers not read and write anymore to the point they can send a letter in response?
4. The gesture of loading $1.00 onto my card. Really? I have an unsatisfactory experience in your store with three of your employees wasting a good 20 minutes of my time arguing for an adjustment that should have been made without me even asking and $1.00 is going to make everything all better? If you aren’t going to make a meaningful gesture just don’t bother. Crediting me a whole dollar is just insulting!

So my point in this post other than pointing out Kroger’s horrible customer service is to show that complaining won’t always lead to a satisfactory resolution, but it can provide you the confirmation you need to know that you no longer want to do business with a company. I’m destroying my Kroger Plus card and plan never to return!

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Easy money from Chase is back again! Using this link you can generate a coupon for a $200 bonus when opening a Chase Business Checking account with a minimum of $500. The offer expires on July 31, but go ahead and print the coupon now since Chase will often pull the coupons off the website prior to the end of the promotion.

You can read about my initial experience with the Chase Business Checking bonus here. My wife actually received this as a direct mail offer a month ago and was able to open the account with no problems with her CPA license. The only change from the last time I did this was that you apparently have to have five debit card transactions per month or have a linked business credit card to avoid service fees on the account. She opted for the business credit card, which luckily offered a $50 bonus after the first purchase as well.

There is also a link for a $100 personal checking account bonus, although Chase recently had $125 bonus coupons in the USPS change of address kits. This offer expires July 24.

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Two bad customer service experiences in the last two weeks having me wondering if the general level of customer service is getting worse, or if I am just getting more irritable as I get older?

Here’s the first one: I was at Kroger picking up a few items, including two packs of Kraft American singles. For each pack I had a 50 cent coupon, which based on their policy should have been doubled. Of course the coupons didn’t double, and when I point it out to the cashier she just nonchalantly says “it just does that sometimes”, making no attempt to fix the error. I then ask for a supervisor, who comes over and basically says the same thing, making no attempt to fix it. I finally ask for a manager, who I think will surely make this right, who gives me nothing but a line of BS. She first says they can’t double it because the manufacturer won’t let them, and then when I point out that there is no restriction stated on the coupon to prevent doubling she gives me a line that it must be coded into the barcode. When I specifically ask her to adjust the total for the coupons she refuses, saying she doesn’t have the authority to make any adjustments. I had them take off the cheese and give me my coupons back, and followed the incident up with a letter to their corportate office in Ohio. At this point, I haven’t received any acknowledgement or response.

The second incident was at Randalls earlier this week. In their sale that ended Tuesday, they had two really good meat sales: one for bone-in pork chops for $0.99/lb and the other for 80% lean ground beef, also at $0.99/lb. Surprisingly they were out of both, and when I asked at the meat counter the butcher said that I just needed to get a raincheck in the front. OK, fine. I finish my shopping and check out, and tell the cashier I need to get a raincheck for the meat sale items that are out of stock. She then tells me I need to go to customer service for a raincheck, which has a line of about 12 people and is showing no signs of moving. Noting it is ridiculous I should have to wait another 30 minutes to get a raincheck for something they should have had in stock in the first place and that all my cold items would be warm by the time I was done, I asked for a manager. The manager comes over and when I explain what I need and that my cold items will be hot by the time I get through the line at customer service, he tries to stick to the line that all rainchecks must go through customer service. After a few minutes of arguing and me threatening to void the sale of the other $50 of items I was getting, he finally points me to the head cashier who is standing at the next register with the raincheck book ready to go. I ultimately got what I wanted, but I found it incredible how much of a douchebag the manager was about the issue.

So is anyone else seeing the level of customer service decline as much as I am, or is it just bad luck on my part?

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In this environment, it is smart to minimize expenses as much as possible, and one place ripe for cuts is the cable TV bill. While the argument could be made that you don’t need cable at all, many of us wish to keep the luxury of cable and would just like to knock a few bucks off the price. This is pretty easy to do; all you have to do is ask the right person the right way.

All you have to do is work your money-saving magic through the Retentions Department. They won’t send you there if you just ask for it by name, so you have to threaten to cancel to get there and get the best deals. I called Dish Network retentions today, and my call went something like this:

BillyOceansEleven: Hi, I would like to cancel my service.

DishNetwork: I’m sorry to hear that and I see you’ve been with us for two years. May I ask why you want to cancel?

BOE: Well, money is tight so I am shopping around my service and I can get a programming package similar to my current one over at DirecTV for $29.99 a month, which is considerable less than the $44.99 before tax I’m paying you guys now.

DN: Give me a second to review your account…Okay, I can offer you a $15.00 bill credit for each of the next 12 months, which will bring your price before tax to $29.99.

BOE: Well, that would put me at the same cost as DirecTV, so let’s do that.

DN: Okay, give me a few minutes to update your account.

DN: Okay, I have added the discount to your account and you should see the first credit on your next statement. Thank you for choosing Dish Network. Goodbye.

Total time spent including navigating the phone tree to get to retentions was 3 minutes 48 seconds and total savings is $180 over the course of a year. Not too shabby!

A few pointers:

• Be absolute in your comments. Don’t say “I’m thinking about canceling.” Say “I would like to cancel.” This lets them know you mean business.
• Comparison shop and be prepared to present them will the best deal out there. Give them a reason to adjust the bill. “I think my bill is too high” is less effective than “I can switch to DirecTV and get this service for $29.99″.
• Give them some idea of what it would take to make you happy. If you simply want to lower your bill, focus on a competitor offer for the same service for less. If you really want more channels at the same price, present them with a competitor’s service offering around your current price.
• Remember that you have the most leverage when you are no longer contract. If you are under contract you probably won’t get much since they know you’ll have to pay the early termination fee if you really do cancel.

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Here in Texas there are only two certainties in life: death and property taxes (and probably mosquitos). Property taxes out here are ridiculous (for my home, I pay a rate of about 2.5% of the taxable value of the property every year), so there is a lot of incentive to protest your assessment. I did this for the first time two years ago using a third party consultant with limited success and had to pay the consultant half of the computed tax savings. Then last year I did the protest myself, and got my assessment dropped $28,000 on a home previously valued around $160,000, which is described in more detail here. I protested based on both unequal assessment and misclassification of the condition of the property, which meant I had to go down to their offices and provide pictures to argue my case.

As can be expected after last year’s big decrease, the appraisal district tried to recoup some of the lost valuation by unreasonably upping the assessment. My assessment went up over 8%, while my immediate neighbors each went down 4.4%. Harris County allows you to file online and request a settlement offer, and I did so with the reasons that the “value of the property was over market value” and “value is unequal compared with other properties” and with the following pithy argument:

The properties adjacent to mine had assessment reduced by 4.4% each, however mine was increased 8.2%, which proves unequal assessment. Subject property is not a magical place shielded from the economic realities of the world around it as the Appraisal District appears to believe. Considering the falling properties values in this neighborhood and across the county, the assessment of this property should be no more than prior year level, if not reduced a similar percentage to adjacent properties.

I submitted my protest with my opinion of property value at around $129,000 (versus their $146,000), and earlier this week got my settlement offer back at around $130,000. The reduction of $16,000 in market value represents a tax savings of about $400, all for about 15 minutes of work in looking up my neighbors’ properties and filling out the form. Plus since I did this myself, I get to keep all the savings!

I’d advise everyone to protest their assessments and do it yourself. You can find some good information in my post on last year’s protest here.

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My MIL sent me an email this morning asking about bank account bonuses, and in doing a little research I found this gem. You can get a $200 bonus for opening a no-fee Capital One Rewards Checking account with a minimum $50 opening deposit and a direct deposit. This offer has been sent to select credit card customers via US mail, however someone on SlickDeals also found the offer online. Just print off the offer with the promo code and bring it into a branch:

http://www.capitalone.com/bank/checking/200.php

This is a YMMV since the terms on the offer page online refer to the mailer, however some have reported receiving the offer via email only direct from Capital One, so they should take it. Here are the full terms of the offer:

^▲ $50 minimum opening deposit required. Bank rules and regulations apply. Ask us for details.

† The Capital One, N.A., payroll/direct deposit reward promotion is effective for sixty (60) days following the day of a consumer’s receipt via U.S. Mail of the required invitation addressed to his/her attention. To qualify for the $200 cash reward, you must present this mailer you received when you open a Capital One Bank branch personal checking account during the promotional period and enroll in payroll/direct deposit within 90 days of account opening. Qualifying individuals will receive a $200 credit to their checking account approximately 6-8 weeks after the first payroll/direct deposit transaction is posted to the account. Limit one reward per customer.

If you don’t have a direct deposit, check out my prior post on faking a direct deposit to qualify for bonuses and avoid service fees.

I did this deal last year after receiving the mailer and got my bonus without issue. One interesting observation is that Capital One doesn’t send 1099-INT forms for bonuses paid on non-interest bearing accounts, so this amount likely will not be reported to the IRS.

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To all my readers, let me start with my apologies for the lack of updates recently. As I’ve alluded to before, I am an accountant and work in the financial reporting function of a large publicly-traded corporation. That means that my office is crazy busy in the few weeks leading up to whenever we release earnings, which is once a quarter. Thankfully we have made it past the first quarter 2009 earnings release, which temporarily inches my life back towards sanity until we start this all over again shortly after the July 4th holiday.

Anyway, until I get back in the posting groove let me pass along this fun freebie. Today (5/6/09) only at Walgreens you can get a free 8×10 print, either by bringing in your memory card and ordering the print in-store 0using the coupon in the weekly ad, or by ordering online with the promo code “MOTHER” and selecting to pick it up in the store.

Walgreens prints aren’t usually the best quality in my experience, but it is hard to get better than free.   

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I posted earlier about my attendance at the Houston Tea Party, and here are some of the pictures I took from the event (except for the first that was taken by someone else).

An aerial view from an adjacent building in downtown Houston. I think that is definitely higher than the 2,000 the NY Times reported.

Concerned citizens look on during a speech discussing the actions of the Federal Reserve.

A good crowd - I wonder why no one in the press gave it any real coverage?

One of the best protest signs I saw. If you can’t tell, it is Obama holding a lighter and setting fire to the US Constitution.

The sign in the upper right corner reads, “Republican Leaders: Where are your cajones?!”. But didn’t the press tell us it was the Republican Party promoting these tea parties? I’m confused…

A scroll listing out all of the Congressional earmarks is unfurled. It went from one end of the plaza to the other (the plaza is a full city block) and I’m not sure anyone ever saw the end of it. I hope that poor girl isn’t still rolling it out.

Protesters take their voices down the street to  surround the Houston Chronicle building. Based on the story in the paper this morning, I don’t think the noticed that our group wrapped completely around their offices.

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