When you get a chance, check out a new website, martyduren.com which has launched with a giveaway contest: a ‘nook’ e-reader by Barnes & Noble. You can read about it and register to win here.
November 10, 2009
October 1, 2008
We Are Not As Dumb As Washington Thinks We Are
Like we don’t get it.
Tonight Senator Kit Bond on Fox News “Nightly Scoreboard” gave as his examples of the “credit market being locked up” the fact that the states of Maine and Missouri could not sell bonds to build highways. Is he serious? We need for congress to pass a $700B package so that a couple of states can repave some roads and build a few more? These cannot wait a couple of years? Please.
Dave Ramsey, on the same show, said that there are three tiers of credit: The top tier is the major players, LIBOR and such, which have slowed considerably. The second tier is the average Joe with excellent credit, who wants a mortgage or a car. That money is available. I should know: I bought a used car in July with no problem and while in a bank yesterday the offer of a home equity loan at prime+0% was still in full swing. The last tier was the poor credit folks that were involved in the sub-prime crisis to begin with. That market, of course, is gone. The reality is that there is credit, not a “seize up” like is talked about by every talking head.
The government has already approved $29B for Bear Stearns, $85B for AIG, and $200B for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, none of which has solved the problem. Washington, which gets virtually nothing right, now wants to print up more cash to make the American citizen the biggest owner of bad mortgages in the world. In addition to the aforementioned $300+B, the Federal Reserve has released, just this week, more than $600B of cash into the system. The taking over of Fannie and Freddie added $5T to your balance sheet and mine, or subtracted from, as the case may be. We are smelling the Fed’s printing presses burn up printing all the money being injected into the system which, as smart people know, causes inflation. Inflation is a hidden tax that affects everyone by reducing the buying power of your dollar and the value of your dollars in your savings account and 401(k) or 403(b).
The fear of the market has already been exposed. Mad Money’s Jim Cramer believes that “no bailout” will bring the DOW down to 8,800 or so. My retirement has already taken a hit in the order of 20%. The market wants money and probably will not be satisfied with less that a few more hundred billion put into the system. I’m patient enough to wait (but I have learned a little about how to plan when I’m sixty). Of course, the market is due for a correction. The DOW components might get shuffled around a little, but there will be new stars that shine in the shakeout. If Warren Buffet can find deals, so can we. Or we can buy Berkshire Hathaway-B shares and make money with him ;^)
If credit tightens for Main Street, as Princeton’s Paul Krugman said on MSNBC, then that means credit card interest rates could go up and credit limits could go down. And this is bad how? The fact that Americans are too far in debt is standard fare for the business pages. A lid on credit is just what some Americans need. If, as Donald Trump has mused, the price of oil will fall up to 70% with a large stock market correction, then we will all have saved enough money on gas to offset some of the credit we were having to use. If, that is, we can get the oil companies to acknowledge that the price of oil has indeed fallen and quit making up excuses to keep prices high.
The bad bill that was surprisingly defeated in the house of representatives has taken on a new life and new form in the senate. As is usually the case, add-ons now include energy tax breaks, movie tax credits, wooden arrows for children and mining subsidies or credits. Some think those add-ons will not be approved, but that the original bill will be passed. We’ll see.
My point is this: Those of us who are paying attention know that doing nothing is probably going to bring some rough times. We believe that we are ready to endure it. We know that both Washington and Wall Street are thoroughly screwed up and delaying the needed fix is not the answer. There is nothing to gain by continuing to buoy bad business decisions. The reality is that not passing the bill is not the same as “doing nothing.” Not passing the bill is saying that the market can work it out, though some will fail. Socialism is not the way to go. We can exercise patience.
If Americans are anything, they are these two things: creative and resilient. We are resilient enough to endure and creative enough to overcome it.
September 25, 2008
Ten Reasons To Oppose a Wall Street Bailout
This list is part of an article written by J. Boyd Page, and Atlanta attorney specializing in investment and securities litigation. It appeared in today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
1. The $700 bill Wall Street bailout is merely a “drop in the bucket.” It will not correct Wall Street’s problems.
2. The bailout plan smacks of cronyism.
3. Treasury Secretary Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke do not understand the problems confronting the American economy and are not qualified “to be king.”
May 12, 2008
Post Denominationalism-Economic and Technological Hammers
Last week my friend Matt McGee of the Duke Law School emailed me with an interesting chart tracking the total membership of SBC churches as a percentage of the United States population since 1971. After seeing his work (the top line in the graph), I asked him to check the total attendance figures for the UMC (US members, second line), the ELCA (yellow line), and the PCUSA (purple line). It is plain to see that, as a percentage of total US population, the SBC has been in nearly unceasing decline since about 1985. Keeping in mind that “active membership” is only about twenty-five percent of reported membership, it appears that current active SBC membership represents about 1.3% of the U.S. population. With that as a backdrop…
By most reputable accounts we are entering or are already into an economic slowdown that will almost certainly turn into a recession. The housing market collapse in much of the country, the burst of the sub-prime mortgage bubble and related financial market uncertainty will take our country into places unknown to people under the age of 20. Writing in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Nouriel Roubini gives five falling dominoes which will lead to a “financial pandemic”: a drop in trade, the weakening of the dollar, worldwide bursts of housing bubbles (already happening in France, Greece, Hungary and Italy, on the verge in Britain, Ireland and Spain), falling commodity prices (projected to happen as the economies of the U.S. and China slow, though drops in oil and grain prices would be welcomed), and faltering financial confidence. He summarizes,
During the last recession, the United States underwent a nearly 6 percent change in fiscal policy, from a very large surplus of about 2.5 percent of GDP in 2000 to a large deficit of about 3.2 percent of GDP in 2004. But this time, the United States is already running a large structural deficit, and the room for fiscal stimulus is only 1 percent of GDP…President Bush’s fiscal stimulus package is too small to make a major difference today, and what the Fed is doing now is too little, too late. It will take years to resolve the problems that led to this crisis.
The Economist seems to agree. A lead story in the May 3-9, 2008 issue says:
The malaise that started the crisis-the American housing market-is still getting worse. The month-on-month decline in the Case-Shiller index of house prices in 20 large cities is accelerating; on the latest reckoning, it was down by 12.7% over the 12 months to February 29th.
Also, this:
After a long period with scarcely any bond defaults by companies, there have been 21 failures this year, according to Standard & Poor’s, a rating agency; some 122 issuers, with debt of around $102 billion, are deemed vulnerable to default. Ominously, corporate debt is the shaky foundation for trillions of dollars of derivative contracts.
Consumer confidence is in the tank and both individuals and churches will soon begin, if they have not already done so, making the difficult choices about which budget items will stay and which ones will go. Add to this (at least in the SBC) Dr. Frank Page’s warning that 1/2 of all SBC churches will close by the year 2030. Do we really think that 22,000 churches will suddenly call it quits on December 31, 2029? No, there will be a consistent downward slide as aging churches, refusing to move to a missional mindset, simply die away with neither pastor nor members to keep them alive. This recession may prove to be more than scores of small churches of all denominations can weather.
Many churches that do survive will, for the first time, begin to scrutinize their support of their denominational structure. They will begin asking about waste, mismanagement, bureaucratic overlap, and redundant ministries concluding that far, far too much of their donated funds are not making it to benevolent ministry, education or missionaries, but are going to support a structure. Many will conclude, as many already have, that if the only vision offered is to “keep Denominationalism alive” then it will no longer hold any appeal. (I recognize that giving has bounced back from recessions of the past, but during those times there were no legitimate options for “doing missions” except the denominational structures; that has now changed.)
Denominations’ tenuous relationship with technology will exacerbate the situation going into and leading out of the economic downturn. Most denominations would be satisfied to have their annual sessions broadcast live via streaming video and that would be fine…for a year or two. Why is it so stinkin’ difficult to grasp the concept of satellite feeds to multiple locations?
Way back when Dr. Jimmy Draper alerted the Southern Baptist Convention that the “younger leaders leaving the SBC” was at the “Severe” level, one of the commonly seen online suggestions was the exploration of multiple meeting sites and the ability to vote either online or at a satellite site. The ignoring of the money saving suggestions will come to haunt any denomination as a generation arises that is hardwired for efficient spending of Kingdom dollars. Through a video conferencing website called Genesys, I simulated an SBC meeting being held in Denver. The total estimated costs of video conferencing 7,000 delegates was about 17% of the cost of flying from various U.S. cities to Denver, saving an accumulated 31 years of cumulative travel time and 8,555 metric tons of carbon footprints.
The former print mag, Business 2.0 (now online here), in an August 2007 article entitled, “The Rise of the White Collar Nomad,” told of Anthony Page and Simon LePine, among others, who had ditched their offices (and sometimes homes) to spend the majority of their working hours out of doors. Armed with a laptop and a few hundred dollars worth of wireless connectivity equipment, these folks have taken moofing to a whole new level. Their offices were the entire outdoors. Mountains, lakes, London, Canada, India, they simply live where they want at the time, get paid through Pay Pal or other online account and see as much of the world as they desire. Sure, most of them are in consulting or sales, but it is technology that makes this wireless lifestyle possible. The same kind of technology could, and should, be helping denominations make better use of kingdom funds.
The Siemens corporation, as reported in Fast Company, September 2007, is working on a wireless check-in system for airports by which there would be no paper ticket, no kiosks, no boarding passes, only a bar code downloaded to your cell phone scanned at the gate and presto, you’d be good to go. Wouldn’t that be nice at the annual meeting? New Bethany’s partnership in Siberia is going to be strengthened as the M there takes advantage of a satellite connection that will allow video conferencing. Last year we hosted, via Skype, our missionary in Eastern Europe who actually taught three sessions through the video hookup and cost us absolutely nothing. Completely free. This while many M’s routinely have monthly meetings requiring multiple day excursions from their country of ministry. Some Regional Leadership even fly back to the states for meetings that could easily be held online or via satellite saving their denominations thousands and thousands of dollars.
Trustee meetings, board meetings, Executive Committee meetings (state and national) could all be streamlined and made much more efficient if advantage was taken of existing and developing technologies. In the Southern Baptist Convention alone, the six yearly meetings of one entity’s trustee board costs $500,000 of Cooperative Program missions giving. With almost no effort, change could take place immediately. But it will not and we all know it.
Instead, denominations will hunker down and try to ride out the coming economic storms. (In fairness, per capita SBC giving has been increasing over the past few years. IMO, that trend will change within five years.) As they prove more inflexible structurally and wasteful economically, churches of all sizes will conclude that money given to support the inherent denominational bureaucracies is no longer good stewardship of God’s money.
April 30, 2008
April 27, 2008
Saving Money Through Lifestyle Changes
There are lots of ways to save money with minimal effort. This post deals with lifestyle changes that, added together, can cut living costs substantially.
1. Learn to live with heat. During spring time, allow the house to get as hot as you can stand it before turning on the AC, then keep the temp around 77-78. You will acclimate to the temp as it will still feel cool after a hot ride in the car or working in the yard. If you have a two story house, keep the upper story cooler by a degree or two. You’ll be surprised at how this will keep the lower story cool as well.
2. Walk when you can. You may live so far out that you have to go hunting toward town and, if so, then this may not be practical. We live about a mile from a Kroger grocery store and, on occasion, I will walk to the store with a backpack and buy the few things needed. In addition to saving gas, the exercise does not hurt. One day last week my “spare donut tire” went flat at the Kroger. Once home in the afternoon (after getting a lift) I walked to Kroger, removed the tire, carried it to the repair shop about .25 miles away, back to the car and then drove home.
We have a mall near our house that has several out-parcels with various stores. When comparison shopping, I will often park equidistant from Best Buy, Circuit City and H. H. Gregg then walk to all of them. Throw in Target and I’ve saved a lot of starting and stopping as well as cranking and shutting off the engine. (Shopping online cuts down even on the cost of driving to the mall, but one must plan far enough ahead to consider the shipping time. That’s a tough one on me.)
3. Reclaim your water. When you warm up your shower, you lose anywhere from 1/2 to 1 gallon of water-multiply that by everyone in the house and number of daily showers and it adds up to a lot over time. That water can be used on house plants, yard plants or even to refill the toilet tank after a flush (once you work on your speed). A plastic bucket in the shower is a very easy way to accomplish this.
For less than $50 you can purchase a 50 gallon plastic drum and convert it to a rain catcher (attached to a gutter downspout) complete with mounted spigot. It would only be good for outside watering, but it would save you some money on municipal water.
Also, as mentioned in the previous comments thread, skip a shower on your day off…unless you already smell like the goat man.
4. Buy clothes on clearance. Some clothes just never go out of style and those clothes can be gotten for a song at the end of winter and summer. Thursday I got a sweater for $4.00 and a long sleeved, solid color shirt for $3.40 at Kohl’s. Don’t buy faddish clothes on clearance-it’s too late by then.
Some very good deals can also be found on every day wear. I like colored tee’s that can be worn alone or under another shirt. Picked up two Jerzees at Target for $4.99 each. If they fade too badly, they become working around the house shirts that I can keep (literally) for years. I still have a shirt from high school (Riverdale, GA, class of ’81) that I wear to change the oil in the cars, etc. If you have to wear Polo to cut grass, you have some serious issues ;^)
5. Buy clothes that last. No, this is not contradictory to #4. For me, this depends on what I’m buying. Hiking-wear is inherently expensive, so I’m willing to fork over the extra. There is an art to packing a backpack and every ounce counts. Forty-five bucks for quick dry nylon pants is far superior to packing jeans that hold every drop of water for hours. (Although, I did pick up a couple of Columbia nylon shirts for $9.99 each at Target. Similar shirts would have been $14.99-19.99 at REI.)
Shoes are another place that I don’t cut too many costs, though I still look for savings. As one gets older, the feet need special attention so the shoes that I wear a lot I’m willing to spend $90 or $100 to get. For me, those are going to be Montrail, Timberland, The North Face, etc, not patent leather that I will only wear a couple of hours a week. On those I will spend just enough to get by, provided they have good arch support.
6. Don’t allow your kids to become “brand conscious.” You’ll go broke trying to help you kids keep up with Aeropostale, Abercrombie and Fitch, American Eagle, Hollister’s or whatever else is the rage. Many teens could set their own style if they would follow Napoleon Dynamite to the local thrift store where they could find cool shirts for $2.00 that would run $32.00 for similar ones at the mall.
Shop for kids under middle school at Wal-Mart, Target, Kohl’s, TJ Maxx, etc. Kids don’t stay the same size long enough to justify spending $25.00 or more for a pair of tennis shoes or $40 for some silly sailor outfit.
The same can be true for adults. I am hard pressed to spend $40-50 on Levi’s or Lee jeans when I can get Wrangler or Urban Pipeline for $12-15. They all last the same length of time.
7. Combine errand trips. Taking ten trips to go ten places is just bad stewardship. Keep a list on the refrigerator or the kitchen chalk board for a few days and run errands on one trip rather than five.
8. Call home before coming home. Cell phones are a God send for communicating with home base. Call home when leaving the office to see if anything (milk, bread, last minute dinner ingredient) can be picked up while driving by the story anyway.
9. Work from home or a coffee shop a couple of days a week. During this time of skyrocketing gas prices, churches should understand that the pastor can get as much done at home and should bless him by allowing him to save the money. Concentrate as much office work as you can around two or three day during the week and work from home (prepare sermons, write, make phone calls) the other day or two. Cell phones and the prevalence of the internet at coffee shops and restaurants should make us more mobile, not less. Besides this, working from home means you don’t have to wash, dry and iron another set of clothes.
10. In the summer, avoid using the stove. Grill out or eat sandwiches. The stove not only takes a truck load of power to run, it heats up the house requiring more power to cool it. Buy a griddle for breakfast foods or grilled sandwiches.
After using the stove in the winter leave the door open for a few minutes to allow the remaining heat to warm the kitchen. (If you have small kids or clumsy family members, this may not be practical.)
11. Cut down on household waste (limits trips to the dump or recycling center). Fruit peels, coffee filters and grounds, egg shells and more can be used for compost. A large, thick “bean bag” from Starbucks can be used to store them under the sink until taken to the compost pile or bin. Many Starbucks stores also have used grounds available for customers to use at home in gardening. Those grounds are usually in the silver bags referenced above. (If you do not garden, you probably have a neighbor that would love to have it.) Find out if your local government allows trash burning and create a small fire ring in your back yard, thus saving gas or cost of a trash hauling company. Our county does not allow trash burning, but has set up numerous recycle centers around the county so that conscientious residents can recycle a LOT of household trash and dispose of the rest.
12. Change the filter on your AC/Heat unit according to the schedule. It both keeps the air clean and allow the system to run more efficiently.
13. Gradually change over to fluorescent lighting. Incandescent light bulbs use more energy, don’t last as long and bring more heat into the room. If you use lots of lamps, you’ll have to make sure that the shade attaches in such a way to allow for a non-round bulb. Some of the florescent bulbs, such as n:vision available at Home Depot, are now as small as regular bulbs. That particular brand is warranted to last nine years.
14. Turn the heat down at night. That’s why God created blankets and Grandma makes quilts. Flannel pjs for the kids are fine. Why run the heat at 72 degrees when no one is awake to enjoy it? Turn the thermostat down to 65 or lower and cover up! (Turn it down during the day, too. A shirt and sweater will keep most people warm in a 68 degree house. Besides, it’s good stewardship.)
15. Invest in a freezer. A solid upright freezer can be gotten from moving sales, estate sales or your local appliance company. Make sure it is not too old or the efficiency will simply not allow it to pay for itself. In my next post, I’ll talk about why it is so important.
16. Buy groceries once a month. Get into this habit as quickly as it is possible, perhaps when your tax return or tax rebate arrives. You will not believe how much money you will save with just this one move. (More on this one in the next post).
17. Trade the gas hog for economy. Prices are not coming down so now is the time to trade the Suburban, Expedition or Mammoth Car for a 4 cylinder or hybrid. I’m so thankful for my 30 mpg around town Accord, but we’re really debating what to do about our 18 mpg truck. If it can reasonably be worked out, it’ll be gone.
Coming next: Saving Money Through Winning the Grocery Game
April 24, 2008
Saving Money in a Sour Economy
I don’t know about where you live, but “consumer prices” here in the Southeast are waaaaay out of control. Gas is up about 50 cents a gallon in the last 6 months and about 20 cents a gallon in the last two weeks. Emails about boycotting certain gas stations to force lower prices (which will not happen) will be circulating again soon and the “lowest gas prices in your area” emails have started now. I’m more seriously than ever considering buying a (used) hybrid vehicle as I don’t see that gas prices are ever going to fall substantially. Perhaps back down to $3.00, but not lower than that.
Because of an argument with Sonya over grocery prices about a decade and a half ago I am the primary grocery purchaser in our family. We do pretty well for a family of five (until August when it becomes four) but have seen our grocery bill skyrocket over the last few months. Due to the water shortage in Georgia local water prices have risen about 8% for 2008. Building materials and supplies are up. I haven’t checked clothes lately, but we’re about to have to spend a king’s ransom to provide proper attire for our two youngest.
I think I inherited frugality from my Mother. As early as I can remember she was clipping coupons and looking for the grocery store that had the best prices. Gas, at 40 cents a gallon, was hardly a concern. Most any of my kids would bear testimony to my unwillingness to eat out, leave lights on, buy branded clothing and probably things I’ve forgotten. Thankfully, Sonya balances me though we’ve had quite a few “discussions” over the years.
Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to deal with practical, easy ways to save money. Much of it will have to do with a grocery buying strategy that can save up to 30% of your monthly grocery bill. Some of it will have to do with utilities and living expenses. Perhaps you’ve put some of them in practice, perhaps some will be new to you but it will be an exercise on how to squeeze blood out of a stone.
