In an effort to rapidly boost our flagging economy, the federal government will be sending out the first stimulus checks four days early. So, for those of you who kited your tax payments, this is probably good news.

For some, well, it’s still a waiting game for those who view such things as “rebates” rather than ploys. If you’re in that group, well, you’re probably praying your check will be here in time to take advantage of the discounts retailers are offering.

And you are the precise reason why the government thinks this is such a good idea.

For others — and this includes the Venomous Household — it feels like a shady back-room deal. We wrote a hefty check to the IRS and now they’re writing one to us a bit later. Oddly enough, the amounts aren’t that different.

That makes our decision about how to spend our stimulus check pretty simple: it’s already spent. We paid it once toward a debt with the IRS and when we get that money back, well, we’ll pay it toward another debt… most likely our highest-interest credit card.

Yes, we’re aware that’s not what the idea was behind the whole thing. But then again, we don’t actually understand the fine economic distinction between receiving money from the IRS after having paid them nearly the same amount and, say, “robbing Peter to pay Paul”.

Sure, we’d like to spend that money on a nice big HDTV or a family vacation or even a new tile floor for our kitchen. But, really, isn’t that kind of “screw the budget, I want stuff!” thinking what led to the supposed “mortgage crisis” in the first place?

How about you? What will you be spending your money they shouldn’t have made you pay “stimulus check” on?

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Until recently, I’d completely stopped listening to television news. I get my news via RSS feeds and the occasional visit to Google News, the beauty of which means that I’ve only had to endure the news that interests me. Has Hillary said something stupid lately? I couldn’t tell you — I don’t pay attention to her if I can help it. Did Obama do something idiotic? I’d never know it — I don’t read much about him these days. For all I know, Libya could become part of Russia and I’d be the last one to find out… if I cared.

Then I bought my new treadmill with the thought of using it while getting a better butt blogging — something I’m determined to do by high summer — and suddenly I’m finding myself listening to television news nearly non-stop.

I remember now why I stopped.

When the media isn’t talking about the number of defaulted home loans they’re talking about the number of number of defaulted credit cards. The housing market is going to hell in a hand-basket. I got that. Didn’t you, oh, about five months ago?

Thing is, until recently I’d thought the problems were limited to the U.S. After all, isn’t that what the media’s preaching: that foreclosures and the “mortgage crisis” are all the result of bad federal regulation? After all, even John McCain is saying calling for legislation designed to help homeowners struggling to make payments to their home loan lenders. Isn’t that proof there’s a problem in our country?

Not so fast.

The housing market is cooling in Canada. Ditto with Scotland and England, too. Heck, even China’s housing market is struggling. I don’t know about you, but to me that’s seeming more of a pandemic — rather than a domestic — issue.

Granted, I’m not an economist. I get bored with numbers (heck, I just got bored typing the word “numbers”), so I can’t profess to understand the intricacies of worldwide financial dependencies. But I do know this: about four years ago VH and I were able to obtain a 4.3% home loan on the nicest house we could afford following the old rule that mortgage payments or rent should be equal to one-fourth of your monthly income. Then we made a 25% down-payment using the funds from the sale of our previous home.

We locked our new mortgage in with fixed payments on a 15-year note and rearranged the rest of our budget accordingly: the mortgage gets paid first, and everything else (aside from my internet connection and hosting fees) goes into the “hope we have enough” pile. Every single month we pay at least $200 extra toward our principle, because we figured that once our home is paid off we’ll have that much more to pay other bills, none of which will pull the roof from over our head simply because we didn’t pay more than the minimum monthly payment.

As a result, we’ve now paid off half of our initial mortgage. That equity, we’ve always figured, is our rainy-day savings: it’s something we can draw on — even if we don’t want to — should life run amok and we really need extra cash.

So, ultimately, I guess I’m saying that I’m having a hard time understanding thinking of the foreclosure crisis as a crisis in the system, as a paradigm for voting, or as something that requires yet more federal involvement. If it’s not limited to our country, and it’s something that people who took the “safe” path of investing in their own homes have managed to avoid, then is it really a crisis?

Or is it just a lack of poor planning on the part of too many people who wanted to live large without having the patience to wait until they could afford to do so?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, as Truthful Lending explains, the feds response to the poor planning entails authorizing the “the quasi-governmental agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to lessen their qualification requirements and allow more homeowners to refinance into conforming loans”, with the result that these agencies take on higher-risk notes so that the gub’ment benefits when those higher-risk borrowers do default. Can you say, “All your houses will belong to Them?” No??? Well, bend over and grab your ankles and see if that doesn’t help your pronunciation, folks.

After three years of living in a house I once thought was far too big for us, we’ve now reached the point where we’re running out of closet space. That might not sound surprising at first, but consider this: there nine closets in my house, three of which are 8′x9′ walk-ins, as well as a 20′x20′ storage room and they are all full!

Part of the problem is that VH loves his stuff. Truly, honestly loves it with a passion that I cannot comprehend. But what man with a full head of hair honestly needs 100 never-worn baseball hats? And why must they all hang on the wall of my closet, gathering dust, just as they’ve hung on the wall of every bedroom closet we’ve had in every house we’ve owned since we got married? He’s never once worn them. So why not turn them into cash?

He defends his collection by pointing to my boxes of Mikasa china — stuff I once liked but don’t anymore and have long since replaced. I just haven’t been able to force myself to get rid of it because it’s all still in great shape. I always wonder: what if I need it someday?

So, fine, we agreed we’re both pack rats, and that we both need to do something about it. So I hopped on to one auction site and watched how sellers did with similar listings. Their results were about 50-50, with half never selling their stuff at all.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate the thought of going through all the effort to actually gather my stuff, clean it up, photograph it, weigh it, list it and pay for the listing only to find that it didn’t sell and I’m out even more money. That’s precisely why our stuff keeps piling up: we’ve paid for it once already, and neither VH nor I like the thought of paying to get rid of it, too.

Turns out, the problem isn’t with the stuff those people had listed. The problem was where they’d listed it: you know, the online auction place that grew so big so quickly, the one that forgot to look out for the folks who make it money: the sellers listing their stuff? Yeah, that site.

I’d already said once that I wasn’t going to use them anymore since they prohibited homeschoolers like me from reselling our used curricula. But until recently I didn’t really know about other reputable online auction sites. I was always afraid of trying some new place for fear I’d get ripped off.

Then I stumbled across eBid Online Auctions, which offers free listings and only charges a small percentage if you sell your item. There’s no re-list fee, either, so if something doesn’t sell the first time you’re not out extra cash trying to get it to sell again.

Not there seems to be any reason to worry about making sales: between their “Happy Hour” listings (a term that automatically earned a smile from Yours Truly) and the 29 primary auction categories, there’s a place for everything a person might want to buy or sell. They also have a “Wanted” section, for those of us who like to save money buying gently-used items on auction… not that I need more stuff right now, of course, but with our homeschooling family’s demand for books, toys, games and educational equipment, it’s nice to know it’s there.

For people like us, who have a lot of stuff to move, they also offer the ability to create up to 5 stores with category listings for your items. There aren’t too many stores on their U.S. site at this point, which I’m hoping is a sign that our listings wouldn’t have to compete for buyers.

The only thing I couldn’t find on the auction site was an additional 12 hours in my day to go through our closets and gather all the things I’d like to get rid of. But I’m not worried: the interface is easy to navigate, unlike some online sites, so creating listings takes less time than retrieving the stuff from my closet.

That means I stand a chance of gathering up some of the things we don’t really need anymore and getting them out of the house before VH realizes what I’m up to. So, at some point soon if you happen to see a listing for 100 never-worn baseball hats from a seller whose name seems an awful lot like mine, I promise they’re a good deal. I’ll even throw in a set of Mikasa china if you’ll get the things out of here.

Want a hot stock tip? Ask me which stock I’m thinking about buying… then buy anything else but that. No, I’m not joking: I now have a 5-year track record of picking hot stocks the instant they lose their momentum.

Men’s Warehouse? I bought stock last March 5 at $42.60. By the end of the day it closed down at $42.23. But I wasn’t going to panic. Oh, no, not me. I have, after all, taken a well-respected stock trading course, although not being a “numbers person” my mind kept wandering. I regularly browse the columns over at Motley Fool and even have a print subscription to The Wall Street Journal… although I tend to use it to line my cat box more often than I actually read it.

But I’ve picked up enough to know that I take a little off the table simply because the market is getting shaky or an otherwise well-performing stock is starting to slide. So I held on to those shares and waited… and waited…and waited for the up-trend. I’m still waiting — for the entire year since I purchased the company’s stock it’s crept steadily downward, closing at $23.09 on Friday.

For a while there, I stood to actually make money with my Microsoft shares. That is, if I’d been paying attention to my portfolio any time prior to the news about Microsoft’s failed bid for Yahoo! Which I wasn’t because, no matter how hard I try, financial news bores the heck out of me.

See, that’s the downside of being the kind of person who mentally shuts down whenever there are too many numbers in front of me. Knowing that the ultimate goal of any good stock trading system is to “buy low, sell high”, I’ll see a headline about how the Dow and NASQAQ fell but the S&P edged up and figure I’d better check it out.

Then I’ll read something like this:

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was off nearly 100 points earlier before paring those losses to end down 28.77 points, or 0.23%, at 12,348.21. The Nasdaq Composite gave back 10.74 points, or 0.46%, to 2321.80. The S&P 500 spent much of the session in the red before ending higher by 1.13 points, or 0.08%, at 1349.99.

Did your eyes just glaze over? Mine did. Which is why I’ve decided that the only way to truly protect my investments at this point is to sell stocks, regardless of whether I’m doing it at a loss, and stick that money where I just might have a chance of not losing it: my mattress.

I can’t stand the commercials by that Question Mark guy. You know the one I’m talking about, Matthew Lesko, the man who’s made a name for himself hawking his “free money” books, all named with super-hyped titles like You Won’t Get Rich Working For Somebody Else.

Even so, when two o’clock a.m. rolls around and I’m lolling on the sofa because I can’t sleep through VH’s snoring, there’s something about Lesko’s pitch that sounds appealing. Could I really get free cash from the government to start a brewery? Do I get more because I’m a short, left-handed woman working from home?

He makes getting US small business grants sound as easy as 1-2-3. Provided I’m willing to shell out for his book first, of course.

Which I’m not.

But I do like the thought of running my own business. After all, I’ve been telling the IRS for years now that blogging is my business, albeit one that’s been running at a loss until this past year. Could I really qualify for small business grants in addition to tax deductions for my blogs? Why, that’s almost like discovering calorie-free chocolate that makes you lose weight with every bite, or a pill that can keep a mother-in-law quiet.

It’s Xanadu, baby.

To listen to Lesko, one would think that obtaining US business grants is as easy as dialing up the Small Business Administration and telling them where to send the check. But nothing involving the government is ever really easy, is it?

I wound up launching the SBA’s assessment tool that evaluates whether people are really ready and skilled enough to start a small business. Then I found myself getting bored.

Don’t get me wrong: the questions were all about me, and that’s ordinarily one of my favorite subjects. But I’ve never been a fan of filling in little bubbles, even the electronic kind, and so I gave up halfway through, which is probably what I’d wind up doing once I started thinking of blogging as really being a business.

The way I see it, I just saved the U.S. government — and you, my fellow taxpayers — a load of cash.

You’re welcome.

My husband, I like to tell him, would be lost without me. After all, I am the one who knows where all missing things can be found: his keys (beneath the wool hat he tossed onto the kitchen counter), his cell phone (invariably underneath the driver’s seat in his car), the TV remote (probably in the crack between sofa cushions). I am also the one who regularly has to tell him the location of his head and does so quite often, moreso at certain times of the month than at others.

Recently when a newly single girlfriend of mine was over, VH passed through our living room right as she asked “Given how different the two of you are how have you managed to stay married?” It’s a question we both get a lot from people who haven’t spent much time around us as a couple, which she had not because her ex-husband was a bit of a control freak whereas mine is not. (That’s my job.)

As I explained to her, neither VH nor I believe in divorce. Taking out no medical life exam insurance policies behind each other’s backs, yes. But divorce? Most definitely not.

It dawned on me today, however, that if something were to happen to me (God forbid), my husband would be utterly clueless about how to keep our house running. If a pipe burst and began spewing water all over the kitchen, he wouldn’t know that which plumber e call is entirely dependent on the time of day (because one of them is notoriously drunk by 6 p.m. but is both perfectly sober and $45 cheaper than the other on weekdays) or the day of the week (the guy who’s drunk by 6 p.m. might be sober during the day on the weekends but charges three times his normal rate on weekends).

He wouldn’t know which doctor to call if the Big-Eyed Boy got sick since the last time he went to a doctor’s appointment was… um… well, he was there at the birth so I’ll give him credit for that at least.

Since my husband’s rather notorious for spending large sums of money without telling me, particularly if his computer’s involved, I’ve set up a few savings accounts at banks so I can stash emergency cash that he can’t touch. (This, incidentally, is why I also find second to die life insurance attractive since they ensure my children would actually stand to inherit something and are untouchable through life settlements.)

Oh, he knew about the bank accounts when I set them up — he signed the papers after all. But like everything else in our lives that involves finances, cooking, cleaning or social obligations, he dismissed the information as something that is My Job To Remember and promptly forgot all about them. Most times that works in my favor. I will, after all, soon have enough in one of those accounts to get my Wii and that Kindle I’m lusting after, too.

We are, in other words, precisely the kind of people whom professional organizers are thinking about when they suggest creating a notebook training the other spouse to run the household in the event of death, illness or disability.

My newly-single friend is in that very situation, completely at a loss as to how to handle the details of running the formerly marital home that she won in her divorce. She has no idea where her ex stored their financial papers, for instance. Since she was divorced in October, she won’t be filing a joint return for the first time in 5 years but has no idea which deductions are hers or how to prove them. (To be fair, she’s also enough of a scatterbrain that she’s not even sure where she’s placed her own copy of the divorce papers, which would probably tell her these things.) Had she and her husband prepared a notebook while they were married, she’d be much more prepared to start her single life now.

After my friend left, VH and I got to talking. How is it that we’ve managed to stay together, we both wondered, given that I’m a rather hot-tempered kind of woman and, being his third wife, our friends had all placed bets on our divorce before the minister had even finished pronouncing us man and wife.

We think, with the help of a few cocktails, we finally figured it out. We’ve stayed together because, if I wasn’t around to do everything for him, he’d have to handle stuff himself and he’d just screw it up somehow. The fact that we agreed on that explanation probably tells you what’s really kept us together for 10 years now: we have the same sense of humor and both of us are perfectly fine with how truly Venomous I am.

If you haven’t been blasted with enough pink-colored clothing, appliances or products — or packaging bearing pink ribbons — to know that it’s National Breast Cancer Awareness month, then you must be living in a cave. Or color blind. Or both.

Everywhere, it seems, companies are jumping on the bandwagon to support the NBCA cause. Those who buying into the “shop for a cause” notion might be surprised to discover they’re supporting companies who knowingly use chemicals and additives that are known carcinogens.

Those pretty Pink Ribbon lipsticks sold by Estee Lauder, which promises to donate $500,000 of the proceeds to the NCBA effort? Estee Lauder refuses to cease its use of parabens, a chemical associated with increased rates of breast cancer.

How about Yoplait Yogurt’s pink foil lid “Save Lids to Save Lives” campaign where they promise to donate ten cents for each pink lid mailed to the company. A woman would have to eat three containers of yogurt every day for three months to net $36 for breast cancer research. Meanwhile she’d be ingesting plenty of recombinant bovine growth hormone, a substance also linked to increased cancer risks.

Before you buy into the hype, the folks at Think Before You Pink want to remind you not to be misled by the promise of a pretty pink ribbon.

Want to really help? Save your money (and your gasoline) and donate to the Susan G. Komen foundation where your funds will actually do some good without cluttering up your home with that ghastly pink stuff.

I just sent off our credit card payment. For the first time since I began staying home with my son, our payment actually exceeded the interest charges for the month. That feels so good, and yet it’s infuriating, too.

See, our low-interest credit card spiked up to a shockingly high rate thanks to the company unilaterally amending our credit terms by inserting one of those ‘universal default’ provisions… in very small print… in a completely separate mailing… which I didn’t read.

Under that provision, if you’re late on any payment with another creditor, the company can raise your interest rate even if you’ve never been late making a payment to their company. Which we weren’t.

But around two years ago, I did send in my husband’s car payment two weeks past its due date. I’d simply gotten confused, since both of our cars were financed through Chrysler, and had sent my van payment twice while overlooking his car payment.

Immediately, our credit card rate went up.

Now, the irony of this is that just last month I paid off my husband’s car. Yes, I probably could’ve thrown that money at the credit card, but given the choice between eliminating one debt entirely and not even making a dent in the other, I went for the option that gave me one less bill to keep track of each month.

To make matters even more ironic, I’ve since done the math and realized we could have taken out a signature loan at a more reasonable interest rate to pay off that credit card — and paid them off already. We just didn’t because, on the surface, it seems so irrational to incur new debt to pay off older debt.

Then I did the math and realized over the past two years we would’ve saved close to $5,200 in interest and have paid off both the credit cards and the loans.

Clearly, financial management isn’t my bailiwick. After last night’s Korean food fiasco, I’m pretty certain cooking isn’t, either. Thank goodness I at least know how to blog.

Good credit is much like youth: you never really appreciate its significance until it’s gone, and then it’s all too tempting to try just about any scheme promising to restore it to quickly restore it to you.

I myself struggled in the past to erase bad credit, a consequence of the days when companies handed out credit cards as freely as Halloween candy. At the time, I remember feeling that the task of rebuilding my credit was almost overwhelming and painfully slow.

This, of course, has given rise to an industry designed to help people with bad credit repair by helping people systematically tackle the most credit-damaging incidents on their record, one at a time, while advising them in ways to re-establish good credit.

It’s also given rise to a number of other, less legal practices like “credit piggybacking”: allowing someone with bad credit to become an authorized user on the account of someone whose credit rating is superior. As shifty as that sounds, it’s a practice once recommended by MSN’s money experts.

It’s also a practice that, as Motley Fool predicted a year ago, is about to get clamped down on.

Fair Isaac Corp., the company that developed the formula used by lenders to calculate credit ratings, is preparing to change its methods. Under the new rules, the credit rating of an account will only reflect the actual primary account holder’s payment history; authorized users will no longer receive the “trickle down” credit boost that gave piggybacking its appeal.

As a result, around 3.3 million Americans will lose their credit ratings, since their scores were the result of being authorized users on others’ accounts. While the change in the rules is designed to prevent fraud and misrepresentation of a person’s ability to repay their debts, critics say its approach is like “using a shotgun to kills flies”.

After all, married people commonly pool their credit together under one spouse’s name with the other being an ‘authorized user’ on the account. Under the rule change that spouse won’t have any credit history if, say, the couple eventually gets divorced. Which means that even while newlywed couples pledge to spend their lives together, they’d better keep “his and hers” credit lines as a hedge against future trouble.

It also means, just as I learned after college, that the best way to go about establishing or repairing credit is not through quick and easy approaches like piggybacking. Doing anything right requires time and effort, and that goes for legal credit repair, too.

When it comes to picking out stocks, I suck. The magnitude of my suckage pales in comparison with VH’s and yet it’s still inescapably there. I couldn’t pick a good stock out of a lineup if my life depended on it and, in fact, I have a proven track record for buying stocks in high-performing companies just days before they declare bankruptcy.

I’ve poured over prospectuses (prospectii?). I’ve read all of the advice on Motley Fool. I’ve even taken one of their courses which promised — promised — to help me make better stock choices. So, ok, I didn’t learn better than to avoid buying stocks just because their initials are the same as my husband’s, but I did learn a healthy respect for emini trading and those who can make money at it.

Of course, by that point it was obvious I was not one of those people. Not yet, at least. My idea of smart trading was doing a good Gordon Gecko impression: “Buy it, dammit! Wait, hold on — the price went up ten cents per share. Sell it now! SELLLLLL!!!!” Which, really, makes no sense when you’re only buying two, maybe three shares at a time — peanuts compared to most emini deals. But it felt good, and VH rather liked how I looked suspenders.

At one point, I logged on to my account and realized that the cost of selling my remaining stocks exceeded their combined value. Which meant, obviously, that I had to hold on to them, and that meant I forgot completely about them. That was two years ago.

Today, having received an email from my online trading company, I remembered those stocks and decided to check up on them. Perhaps they’d gained value since the last time I looked? So I logged in, visions of having doubled or even quadrupled my investments dancing in my mind.

They have, in fact, increased in value: I can now afford to sell off shares in each of the poor-performing companies I picked out and have a little profit to show for it.

Just enough, as a matter of fact, to buy a Whopper, Jr. It’s on the 99-cent meal menu, right?