On Handling Telemarketers

"Oh joy, oh rapture! A telemarketer!"

When I was first rich in spirit but poor in pocket (read: the year after I graduated college), I held a variety of part-time jobs to make ends meet. I was a part-time English teacher for a group of home-schooled high school kids. I worked at Panda Express for a while, until the manager told me that I wasn't smiling enough. I seriously considered dumpster-diving with my roommate for bottles and cans to recycle until someone pointed out to me that I probably shouldn't take personal finance/lifestyle advice from homeless people.

But the job that I liked the least was when I spent a couple of months as a telemarketer.

It was too simple to get the job; I just had to show up to a training meeting. I don't think I even interviewed with anybody, which probably should have alerted me to the fact that this job wasn't going to be pleasant. I was payed a base rate (minimum wage), but I could also get bonuses if I got a certain number of people in a single week to show up. Spoiler alert: I never made more than minimum wage.

I worked for a company that tries to set up appointments for people to get hard-sold on timeshares. Basically, if you see a car at a mall or a county fair or something, and you fill out a form to win it, what you're actually doing is giving your contact information to the company I worked for.

That brings us to step number one of handling telemarketers: don't give your personal information out if you don't want to be called.

In my company's defense, if you showed up to the timeshare presentation, you were bound to "win" something for your time. I think the top prizes were a Hummer or $50,000 in cash, but there were a plethora of lesser prizes as well (from what I heard, most people ended up with a free weekend at the timeshare). The fact that my company wasn't a scam is what kept me working there as long as I did, even though, for me, the work was miserable.

I'll let you in on a little secret: people hate telemarketers. I don't blame them. I hate telemarketers. And this ended up being my problem with the job. Some people have the constitution to be forever friendly and gracious while trying to sell people on going to timeshare presentations to people while being met with rage at being inconvenienced.

I just don't. I can only take so much anger and vitriol directed at me. My last shift at the telemarketing position had me just staring at the phone, petrified at being on the receiving end of somebody's wrath again. After that, I just stopped going.

However, my time telemarketing taught me how to get off of calling lists, and it's simpler than you might expect. As stated above, the first step is to not give out your number to contests and drawings.

Assuming you already fell for the first step, the next step is to calmly state to the telemarketer that you want to be taken off of the calling list. At least in California, the telemarketing agency is required by law to remove you if you ask.

The third step is to document for your own records when you asked to be removed. To be honest, the telemarketing agency may call you again (my agency was fairly low-tech, and so our "leads" were in the form of 3x5 scraps of paper with names, phone numbers, and whatever other information had been given. These "leads" were in a huge box in the middle of room, and the same person might be in the box multiple times). If they do call again, ask to speak to a supervisor, and state that you already asked to be removed from the calling list, and remind them that it's against the law for them to keep calling you.

After that, you'll probably never be called from that agency again. Unless, of course, you enter another contest.

Photo by epSos.de.

Some Ethics of Spending

So minutes, hours, days, month, and years,

Passed over to the end they were created,

Would bring white hairs unto a quiet grave.

Ah, what a life were this! How sweet, how lovely!

-- Henry VI, Part 3, II.v. 38-41.

I was watching the ... documentary? filmed series of mostly one-way conversations? I'm not sure what to call it ... Examined Life on Netflix the other evening (because I am a pretentious jerkwad)*, and one of the speakers in the film, Peter Singer, said something obvious in a way I hadn't considered before. He posed the following hypothetical situation, and he then asked people how they would handle it.

Here's the scenario:

A screen that offers time to reflect.

Suppose you're walking in a park on a bright, sunny day, and you walk past a pool that's only a foot deep. You notice that a young child has waded into the pool, and the child is obviously having some difficulty. After watching for a moment, you realize that the child is about to drown, and you know that if you act right now, you can save the child's life. This action will involve walking into the pool (which poses no danger to you as an able-bodied adult) and retrieving the child. The only reason that gives you pause is the fact that the shoes you're wearing are expensive, and by walking into the water, you will necessarily ruin them. You know that there's no time to hesitate if you choose to rescue the child; another few seconds, and the kid will drown. What do you do?

I'm fairly certain that approaching 100% of the people reading this would decide to save the child's life because, on a very basic level, most people agree that the direct saving of a life is more important than shoes, expense be damned.

However, Singer, as philosophers are prone to do, doesn't let the question stop there; he goes on to ask, basically, if you would allow your money to be lost by ruining your shoes to save a child's life, why not, in the first place, instead of spending the money on the expensive shoes, spend that money by donating to one of the various, valid charitable organizations that use your money to feed starving children?

I know some of you reading this will immediately claim that Singer's question poses an absurd reduction. After all, why go the movies when you could help at a soup kitchen? Why read a blog post when you could be learning first aid? Why do ANYTHING immediately gratifying and enjoyable when you could be helping others?**

But to react in this way is to miss an opportunity for reflection. There is truth in what he says. After all, economics studies how people spend their finite resources, and it follows (by definition of finite) that spending money on one item necessarily means that that money is unavailable for other expenditures (credit cards work to make people feel like they're circumventing this, but as anybody who has read a personal finance blog knows, the reckless use of credit cards frequently ends in disastrous results).

It is important to realize that each dollar we spend is a dollar we can't spend another way, and I think it's worthwhile to remember this on a weekly, daily, or even a transaction by transaction basis.

What do you think? Do you consider where each dollar you spend could have gone, and/or what help it could have provided? Let me know in the comments.

*Though, to be fair, you could probably add that clause to the end of nearly any sentence I've written on this site, and it would remain accurate. "Should I Drop Chase Bank?" because I am a pretentious jerkwad? Here's my Lending Club update because I am a pretentious jerkwad. Here are 6 things you don't know about me because I am a pretentious jerkwad. You get the idea. Apt, no?
**I would argue that helping others can be both gratifying and enjoyable; I find that little in life is truly an either/or situation.

Photo by psd.

**This post was featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #364.**

Should I Drop Chase Bank?

"Chase your money" indeed!

I have frequently said to myself that if ING DIRECT could get remote deposit figured out, I'd close my Chase account. Here's some back story.

Several months ago, I posted how enamored I was with J.P. Morgan Chase because they allowed me to deposit checks remotely (even though I was also cranky with them because they made it difficult to make online payments). These issues aside, I've not been pleased with how Chase and other big banks handled themselves during the financial crisis of 2008, and I'm especially not happy with Chase losing over $2 billion in what were supposed to be low-risk hedges.* While I didn't take part in last year's push by many financial bloggers to close their big-bank checking accounts and move their money to credit unions, I appreciated the idea and thought long and hard about doing so.

All that said, I keep another set of bank accounts through ING DIRECT. Unfortunately, for much of its existence, to use ING DIRECT in a timely manner you basically needed another checking account to transfer money in and out of. You could send them checks, but that seemed like such an antiquated method considering ING was an online bank. It was like somebody offering you a free place to store your valuables, but in order to get your valuables to that location, you needed to send them via horse and buggy. What are we, Amish?

However, these draconian deposit methods are no longer the norm. As of last month, ING DIRECT has added remote deposit. As Five Cent Nickel has done a good job of explaining ING's rules for remote deposit, I'll leave you to look over the specifics there. A couple of those rules stand out, especially ones regarding limits of what how much money can be deposited and how quickly those funds will be available for use.

One cool option that ING DIRECT gives with this remote deposit is that one can either snap pictures via smartphone (like Chase does), or folks can scan the image at home and deposit online via computer. While I haven't tried the computer scanning option yet, I'm tempted to like this better than the cell phone option, as, at least with Chase, I frequently have to snap more than one picture as the first one isn't clear enough, and the Chase app on my iPhone makes me take another one.

And yet...

I'm finding it difficult to close my Chase account, and I'm having a hard time discerning why. I've written before that nostalgia can be a chief reason people make bad financial decisions, but I don't think I'm nostalgic for this account. In the first place, this account started when I opened my account with Washington Mutual back in 2000; Chase only took over my account when it took over WaMu after WaMu failed in 2008. Chase has since added fees to WaMu's "free" checking accounts, though I've largely been able to circumvent these charges due to getting paid via direct deposit (direct deposit being one of the handful of exceptions you can use to keep your checking accounts "free").

I think I just like the safety that comes with the ability to go into a brick and mortar bank. For instance, though many ATMs allow you to deposit cash, I very rarely take advantage of this. Though I've never had any problems with deposits, it feels like if there were ever a problem, I'd just be out my cash. With cash, I much prefer to go to a teller, have him or her count it, and get my receipt knowing that there can't be any confusion about my deposit.

I guess that's my sticking issue: depositing cash. To be fair, to my knowledge, there's no way to deposit physical cash to ING DIRECT, so this whole blog post has been something of a red herring. I set up what my conditions were, and I then went with an undisclosed condition. I'll keep my Chase account open for the time being. Feel free to leave your hate at my misdirection in the comments.**

On the subject of comments, does anybody out there ONLY have an online checking/savings account with no corresponding brick and mortar account? Would you consider doing so? Let me know.

*There's got to be more to this story than Chase is letting on. While J.P. Morgan has admitted that the traders in charge of those funds were using different risk rules than the rest of the company, it smells awfully fishy that the "safe" investments the traders were supposedly choosing caused such a big loss.
**While I guess I've made up my mind for now, if I ever have to start paying a fee for Chase's checking account, I'll pretty certainly close it. I suspect I'll trade it for a free checking account from a credit union rather than going all online though.

Photo by neoliminal.

Update 05/29/2012: This post was featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #363.

30 and Flirty -- An Evaluation

It's my 30th birthday today. While in reality, this is just a day not too different from either yesterday or tomorrow, there's something about this new milestone that feels resonant.* In a culture that worships youth as much as America (nay, western culture) does right now, it's almost ingrained within us to view aging with some combination of contempt, curiosity, and/or cheerlessness. This attitude was underscored in this week's episode of Mad Men where the young character Ginsberg, after doing some good work, proclaims, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!", to which Rizzo retorts that Ginsberg should really read the whole poem (which is about how even the greatest fall into obsolescence).**

Even so, I'm not one to mourn the passing of age (even as I realize that I'm now closer to 40 than I am to 18...gross) because I think that each new season of life offers advantages that each previous season did not (though there are also negative trade-offs, to be sure). In particular for me, I've always looked a bit older than my age said that I was, and so now that my age and my looks are a bit more similar, I think casting directors will have a better idea of what to do with me as I continue to audition.

Further, I'm happy with where I'm at in my life, and my life will only get more fulfilling come the fall as I start work on my Ph.D. While I don't think that further schooling is an end when it comes to happiness***, I'm actually excited about the work that I will be doing. I say "actually" because, oddly, in the last few months, I had become kind of burnt out on the ideas of deep analysis and art criticism, but in the last few weeks, I've found a couple of great, contemporary writers of long form criticism that have re-sparked my fire and reminded me of why I want to pursue this path.

In short, I feel that I, like Milhouse, can proclaim that everything's coming up Bryan.

*My wife and I were talking about going to see a play tonight as a birthday present, and I realized that she could still qualify for the "Under 30" ticket discounts that some of the theatres in the area use as a ruse to get younger people into the seats, whereas I would, obviously, no longer qualify. I wonder whether I will now enjoy the show 2-3 times as much as that's how much more my ticket will cost. What a difference a day makes, eh?
**I also found out that I'm younger than Kim Kardashian, which makes me profoundly happy for some reason.
***It has become something of a tradition with my friend group to hold roasts for the birthday boys when they turn 30. To paraphrase a line from a friend, "Bryan was recently accepted into a Ph.D. program in theatre, which is pretty great, because if the theatre needs anything right now, it's more doctors."

Photo by Aih.

Benihana Is Pretty Generous

Spoiler alert: at least in California, they can't do this anymore.

If you're anything like me, then you're probably the world's fattest man you probably enjoy the occasional nice meal out. One place that my wife and I enjoy from time to time is Benihana. What can I say? Having Mexican hibachi chefs pretending to be Japanese hibachi chefs just screams foodie haven to me.

Joking aside, Benihana is delicious, but it's dang expensive. What to do?

Well, I recently found out that Benihana is very generous when it comes to birthdays. If you sign up for their email list here (which is a drag, I know), they will send you a $30 gift certificate towards food during your birthday month. The catch is that it's only good Mondays through Thursdays. Still, $30 will pay for most of your steak dinner.*

I'll be turning 30 this month (woo-hoo!...?), and so I just got my certificate in the email. Here's hoping that $30 worth of fried rice and scallops helps drown my sorrow at being closer to death.

*I am in no way affiliated with Benihana. It's just a good deal that I recently learned about. Free money for having been born! Hooray!

Photo by NathanReed.

Do I Need a Financial Adviser Anymore?

Money and butter: both are lubricants.

When my wife and I started our full-time jobs several years ago, my wife was interested in getting a financial adviser that would keep track of her/my/our money (we weren't yet married) and suggest investments. We found a very nice, qualified person who has more or less done well for us. As we were young and didn't start out with a lot extra to invest beyond our 401(k) plans, our financial adviser exclusively invested our money in a couple of mutual funds.

In the last year, as I've grown more interested in money topics, I've started to do a lot more research on investing and what my wife and I will need to do to retire. I've taken what I've learned, and I started a Roth IRA for myself last year, and I put money into it and chose investments for it. While I don't want to go into the details of it, suffice it to say that I have not (knock on wood) lost any money in that account, and I'm even a few hundy in the black.

The problem is that I, like a good number of other adults, have come to realize and understand that mutual funds (while coming with the positive of being diversified) are not without the negative of annual fees. When you take into account that my wife and I pay an additional fee each time we make a purchase from our financial adviser (it is how she gets paid, which is fair enough), I'm not convinced that I need a financial adviser any longer to recommend which mutual funds I should invest in, particularly since Sharebuilder (my online brokerage) offers certain mutual funds for which I don't need to pay any fee to purchase.*

I guess I'm just saying that if I weren't so interested in learning about saving and investing right now, I would be a lot happier spending the money on a financial adviser to take care of my money. However, since I do spend a good amount of time each week researching money and investing, the work of a financial adviser (at least in the capacity that ours has thus far helped us) seems a little bit unnecessary.

I'm bring this up now because my wife and I met with our adviser last week, and we mentioned that we both had old 401(k) accounts (the company we work for has had three different owners since we started working for it, and with each new owner comes a new benefits program), and our adviser suggested that she facilitate rolling them over with the other accounts that we have with her. While this might be a good idea if we were especially concerned about having all of our accounts in one centralized location (which isn't necessarily a bad idea), I'm a little concerned about the fees we'll be charged to roll the money over (both from the banks as well as the chunk that will go to our adviser). When I reviewed my investments in the 401(k) last month, I verified that my money is already in low-cost mutual funds; why should I pay a chunk of money to move them to another set of mutual funds?

On the one hand, I think that I might just be being cheap. As I mentioned above, our adviser has done well enough by us, so I shouldn't be nonplussed by the fees that she gets to do her job (do I begrudge a waitress a tip for doing her job? Well, sometimes [at least on take out]). On the other hand, with my own burgeoning competence at investing, the money we pay her just seems like extra money out.

What do you think? Am I just being a jackwagon? Have you used a financial adviser, and, if so, have you had positive experiences? Let me know in the comments.

*To be fair, we're meeting with her next week, and, now that we have a bit more money to invest, it's possible that she'll advise us to invest in other avenues. We'll see.

Photo by emdot.

You've Got to Use Your Head, Son!

In my wife's department in the company, they work a lot. I mean, everybody at our company does a lot of work, but her department really pushes it every day. Because many people in her group were up against a big deadline a few weeks ago, they were asked to put in some overtime and to fill roles they don't normally fill. Everybody was stressed, but they muscled through.

After the deadline, the manager of the department wanted to do something nice for the group, so she invited those who had worked hard out to a happy hour, and she said that the first drink would be on her (well, the expense account, but still, I thought it was a pretty nice gesture -- events like these don't happen all that often). Some people had two drinks, and the manager was fine with that.

What she wasn't fine with was getting a bill that had five drinks priced at $75 a piece.

Needless to say, in the last few days, there have been some unpleasant conversations. From what I've heard, it sounds like the folks who bought these drinks were fully aware of how much they cost, and they "bought" them anyways.

You've got to use your head, son! Do you like having a job at a good company? Maybe it's best not to make your boss look foolish when she has to file her expense report.

I can't even fathom a scenario in which I would think it would be a good idea to put a ridiculously expensive drink on my boss's tab. Shoot, when I get to travel for my job (on the company's dime), I often worry about whether I should get the burger or the chicken, given the few dollars difference between the entree prices.

To me, it feels like the manager was just trying to do something nice for her employees, and the employees ended up throwing it in her face. On the other hand, I suppose you could make the argument that when the manager said that the first drink was on her, people assumed they could order whatever priced drink they wanted.

I was complaining the other day about an $8 beer, so perhaps I'm being a little too harsh. What do you think? Is this behavior justifiable? Let me know in the comments.

P.s.: To put the drink cost in perspective, I was at an upscale bar last night, and I asked how much a drink of Johnny Walker Blue would be (as it was the highest-priced drink my feeble mind knew about). The bartender said $35, which is less than half as much as the drink these folks got at the happy hour.

P.p.s.: If you're curious what the drink was, here you go.