The cost of food

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It’s not easy to make money selling food. Dear daughter and I have been engaged in a summer long project of exploring an artisanal jam-making business and once you use those calculators to figure your retail price, well, let’s just say now I know why stuff at a farmer’s market costs so much. Once you add up the cost of top quality ingredients, transportation, packaging, etc., and do it on a small scale (so you don’t get the kind of wholesale discounts Wal-Mart can command), you come up with a pretty big price. On the other hand, you can also come up with a fresh and excellent product.

So, if I have to sell an excellent product for $9 a jar, how can these big companies make money selling for $4? Besides the economies of scale and bulk pricing, read the ingredients. As Michael  Pollan says, how many? Ones your great grandmother would recognize?

In his book In Defense of Food, Pollan describes how the food industry can and does make money. After all, it’s a somewhat inelastic market—even a dedicated trencherman can only eat so much. After we lick the plate at around 3,500 calories, most of us are way beyond caloric needs, and probably at as much capacity as our stomachs will hold. So how to make money? Repackage the plain stuff in ever more attractive ways—Go-gurt instead of the plain variety—using ever cheaper ingredients, otherwise known as high-fructose corn syrup, chemical flavorings, and value-added vitamins, fiber, or health ingredient of the moment (whether oat bran or Omega 3). You can charge more for the fruit leather than the amount of apples that might be in it, and individually packaged containers can make more money than a tub. A lot of it is fake, not very good for us, and high calorie.

Pollan, in his many books, blasts the food industry (organic is not spared!) but blasts us, too—our willingness to trade “convenience” for effort, our loss of taste in favor of a shot of sugar or salt, the demise of conviviality and unity represented by a sit down meal with friends or family.  It’s all a sad cycle. We grab a convenience dinner because we’re too tired after paying time and money to work out at the health club, we eat at a restaurant after a too-long day working to pay for that restaurant meal (the restaurant  spending is probably the single most outsized cost I see in budgets); we invest in family vacations because otherwise the only time we spend with our kids becomes driving them to after-school activities.

Yet, I can’t help feeling a certain utopian-ness to Pollan’s works. As anyone knows who has ever cooked primarily from scratch, day after day, it’s real work. And not only the cooking, but the shopping, and just plain thinking up what to eat, week after week, year after year. Add to that the cost of organic, of pasture raised meat, of the inevitable spoilage of some portion of the fresh vegetables, and you’re looking at a big bill.

If anything, Pollan’s books might slow up your buying a little, when you realize how long a chain is attached to any purchase decision you make—environmental, taste, time management, employment issues, government price support policy, nutritional bang for your buck.  I don’t have the right answers here, but he’s given me a lot of thought provoking questions.  The most pressing of which, for the moment, is whether I can wrap my mind around ordering a heritage turkey that will cost about what I normally spend on a week’s groceries.

College planning—this year’s version of what we’ve learned

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I’m the sort of person who mulls over mistakes, but it’s mostly to do better next time, or advise other people in a better way. There’s no point in it if it’s just to beat yourself up for something you can no longer fix. In all financial planning, you have to go forward from where you are. However, dear daughter is now a junior, and there’s nothing like continuing first-hand experience.

  1. Order it online. I strongly urge you not to buy a lot of stuff for the dorm room for your child’s first year. Dorm rooms can be shockingly small (maybe smaller than your master bath). Once you see it, you’ll be able to drive to the local Target or Bed, Bath, and Beyond and purchase identical items to what every other parent/child team is purchasing at the same time (wait until you see the lines during move-in week!) However, if you thought the dorm room purchases were then over, well, ha! Ha! Chances are your little darling will discover new stuff he or she needs every year. Do your looking at home, then order online and have it sent. The benefits? You get to curb what your kid is buying, they may deliver it for free (instead of you paying to send it), and in the case of Target they also give you 5% off—and another 5% if you wait for a one-day pharmacy rewards discount pass. Not a plug for Target, it’s just a card we have.
    Yes, I hate paying shipping. Particularly since it’s been 4 times a year—back to school, home for the month at winter break, back after winter break, home again for the summer. Oh wait, there’s that other season: the-stuff-I-forgot-on-the-first-shipment. Then there’s the care package season, the mom-misses-you season, the can’t-find-this-nearby season…
  2. The job on campus is sometimes better than any at home. Dear daughter has had more responsibility and learned more skills with her on-campus jobs than the few crappy jobs she’s landed during the summer. Don’t bank on the summer job—at least for DD, they’ve been really hard to land. And be sure your child looks hard for some good jobs on campus where they might actually learn something.
  3. Think carefully about choosing a school far from where you live. Although DD’s school has been perfect for her in many ways, we both wish she was in driving distance. I’ve blogged before about the cost of transportation and shipping, so I won’t hammer that again. However, even a prominent school’s best network may be in a fairly close radius to campus. Resources for internships, summer jobs, etc. may be best nearby. If your child wants to stay on either coast, that’s fine, but if she wants to return to the Midwest, not so much.
  4. Find a doctor near the school, but make sure they’re in your provider network. The farther away, the less likely your current doctor really knows anyone. Student health services can handle a lot (although they generally won’t bill insurance—have fun) but some events require real medical consultation. I hope you will never confront this, but be sure you understand the benefits available if your child needs emergency treatment or has any sort of psychological crisis. Mental health reimbursement varies greatly.
  5. If your child has the option of taking classes among several different schools, find out how they’ll get there. It’s a trend lately for nearby schools to form consortiums which allows schools to tout 5,000 classes available through our consortium. Okay, this is dumb but be sure to ask what transportation is available. Is there a dedicated van? How often does it run? How long a trip? (really affects scheduling of other classes) How can the student meet with the prof on another campus (particularly those who are, ahem! somewhat cavalier about office hours). If there’s no van and it’s a lab class, it might meet 4 times a week x $8 for the train and it can really add up over a semester.
  6. What will the school do if the student needs a class that’s not offered at the school? Now we know that every single child knows exactly what they will major in and want to do in life at the point where they enter college. And they’ll never, ever change their minds or develop other interests, right? Okay, I have the only one. But let’s say your child discovers that they want to go into a medical field after choosing the school based on the archaeology department. Will the school help your child find an Anatomy Lab? Any extra cost on that one? If you have to pay thousands for them to snag the class over the summer at another school, well, you’re not going to get any financial aid for that one.
    This requires some pretty close scrutiny if it happens. After all, the child who has to take a summer class isn’t going to be earning money, she’s going to be costing more. It’s probably only going to result in “extra credits”, not a reduction in tuition at the primary school. If the primary school arranges the class at a nearby school, check to find out if the academic calendars mesh—we had already booked the return-to-campus flight when we found out the other school started a week earlier.
  7. Make sure your child checks into what other people are giving away. You absolutely cannot believe what kids throw out. DD’s school has a “free box” system at every dorm. I think a kid could make a business selling on eBay what they can scrounge from these boxes. Some of DD’s major finds: bags of unopened pistachios, a new pair of Ugg boots, countless t-shirts and tops, and a $300 pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones that were still under warranty and which Bose replaced for $97. (Then again, there was the container of Jello shots.) If your child’s school doesn’t have a free box, encourage them to suggest starting one. If you have some means to store the stuff, check out what’s dumped the week before graduation—refrigerators, coffee makers, bookshelves. I’d have a heart attack if I were the parent that paid for this stuff.

We’ve got one more year after this one. I can’t wait to see more surprise costs—I bet they’re still out there.

Home ownership and (not so) routine maintenance

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I’m a born condo dweller so I don’t know why I still have this darn house. Okay, it was because I didn’t follow my own advice and kept the house in the divorce. (See this post for why you shouldn’t.) It wasn’t a terrible decision financially—the divorce valuation was at the height of the bust, so the value has allegedly gone up quite a bit, it has a great home office, and my dog thinks the yard is her kingdom. But the reason I should be living in a condo is because I hate maintenance.

If you’ve slugged it out for a while in a divorce, or been on the rocks for a few years before (my hand is up!), you can bet there’s a ton of deferred maintenance. But even if you’re as on top of maintenance as my mom used to be, you can count on being frenemies with some contractors every year your address is a single family dwelling. It’s very important to recognize the ongoing nature of repairs, and budget for them (especially when you’re thinking through a divorce or retirement).

A decent rule of thumb is to budget 1% of the home’s value for regular, ongoing repairs and maintenance. I suppose this might have been accurate if the ex had been dependable and completed the myriad of projects he either started or ignored. But the first few years after my own divorce I had a ton of clean-it-up projects to fix—including the raining in my office which he had been “getting to” for 7 years.

The 1% is a good place to start, but take a closer look at your home for better estimation. Consider these points:

  1. What’s the house made of? If you have wood siding or a lot of trim, you need a paint job probably every 5-7 years.  Get an estimate and divide by 5. If it’s stucco, not so much maintenance but in my first hand experience you occasionally have a piece crack and fall off. Even if you have brick, you’re not home free—tuck-pointing and trim painting will need to be done if you’re not going to develop “unexpected” leaks.
  2. What’s the yard look like? Personally, I’m continually at war with the weeds. In 20 years, I haven’t won, but they really gained ground during two consecutive summers when I first broke my foot and then had to get my dad’s (neglected) home ready for market–I barely touched the yard. My DIY tendencies are rampant when it comes to the yard and I’ve wasted a ton on harebrained ideas—a push mower, lots of plants that I forget to water, and plants sold to me as shade tolerant that succumbed nearly instantly. Nevertheless, if you have a yard you have to budget for plants and trees: replacement plants for the ones that inevitably croak, and tree maintenance. Trees are huge (ugh, pun)—trimming at least every other year, various schemes to abate or prevent pests, and crashes. In 5 years I’ve had to remove 3 trees–$890, $1,600, $2,500. Breathtakingly expensive and often an emergency. If you have teenage kids or are paying for a health club, in my view you don’t need a lawn service. Your mileage may vary. Lawn services, if regular, are not really part of this 1% rule.
  3. How old is your heating plant, water heater, and roof? Make a good guess and put them on the maintenance calendar.
  4. Painting, floor refinishing, and new carpeting are a few things home and condo owners will both need to replace, but for most other issues, the condo assessment fee (if well thought out by the association) should pay for most structural, exterior, or common elements.

As an aside, if you are a condo dweller and want to analyze your assessment, add up the cost of any utilities and insurance it covers, a decent allowance for “saving” for future repairs, and that 1% of value and you have a rough gauge of whether your assessment is reasonable. I’m not quite sure how to measure the aggravation level of finding contractors who actually show up and finish the project.

Every once in a blue moon, I don’t actually spend that 1%. Okay, I do (and more) but I dream about the time when I might get a break. You might not spend that every year, but suddenly get hit with the need to replace the furnace. Start that repair fund now and you’ll keep your plastic in your pocket and your heart in your chest.

So long carpenter. I have to go call the painter.