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My Money Blog:

While shopping at Costco yesterday, I was greeted with a peculiar sign:

We bought one bag, which apparently did not require supervisor approval. My weak understanding of all the buzz:

1. Rice prices globally are rising.
2. This is greatly affecting countries like China, Vietnam, India, who are usually great exporters.
3. They may not export as much.
4. US citizens will likely pay more as a result.
5. Big rice buyers like bakeries worried, want to buy lots of rice now.
6. Costco and Sam’s want enough rice to make all their customers happy, so they limit purchases.
7. Buzz from CNN playing this story all day long causes (I think) undue hoarding.

But, why not just raise the prices now? It’s not like a Wii where the price is set by Nintendo. Is this happening near you as well?

My Money Blog:

While I tend to be straight-laced when it comes to taxes, I also think it is our right - heck, even our duty - to pay as little taxes as legally required. I take every deduction that I can substantiate. While learning about property taxes, I read that somewhere between 30-60% of homes in many areas are over-assessed. If the estimated assessment value is too high, then those homeowners are paying too much in taxes! In areas of dropping home values, you may be able to get your assessment lowered.

But don’t expect anybody to tell you this. From this 2000 and 2004 articles about property taxes, both from CNN Money:

“It’s an unfair system,” Lewis said. “You can go to one particular block in Long Island, for example, where 11 houses got a tax reduction last year because they filed grievances. The remaining 4 homeowners who didn’t file a grievance are still overpaying. In most municipalities, if you don’t file it means you accept the assessment value of your home.”

“The bottom line is that if homeowners aren’t focused on what has happened in their marketplace, they are paying too much in property tax,” says John Brusniak, a Dallas property tax lawyer.

My sister-in-law recently contested her assessment and successfully got a reduction in her property taxes. The way to do it seems to be for (1) each homeowner to do a little research as to how their local government does their property taxes, (2) figure out if they are…

WalletPop:

Filed under: Budgets, Debt, Extracurriculars, Wealth, Relationships, Recession

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a backlog of newspapers and happened across two articles that addressed the rippling effects of the country’s current economic woes. Although these two stories had almost nothing to do with each other, it seemed to me that, between them, they very eloquently showed how economic problems have a way of affecting everybody.

The first article dealt with food banks in the Bronx. The area’s food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens provide food to unemployed and lower-income individuals, often on a short-term, emergency basis. These organizations, in turn, receive their food stocks from a combination of personal and corporate gifts. Unfortunately, higher food costs and smaller amounts of disposable income have translated to massive drops in donations. Added to this, the unemployed population is steadily increasing, which means that a smaller and smaller pie is getting divided into more and more pieces.

This problem is, apparently, very widespread. For example, a food bank in Idaho has reported that the number of jobless people that it helps has increased by 10% every month this year. Moreover, these new food bank clients often come from the ranks of the middle and even the upper middle classes; for example, CNN recently reported the story of Patricia Guerrero, who went from having a $70,000 a year job in February to using a food bank in March. While Ms. Guerrero might have had fewer money in savings than most people…