Motorcoach vrs. Camper, Yacht vrs. Boat

Middle-class and even upper-middle-class people get into trouble when they think they can afford luxury items (or knock-offs of luxury items).

A reader writes asking me about hydronic heating for motorhomes.  I wrote about hydronic heating before - it is a complicated system of pumps, pipes and a "boiler" that never boils.  It is expensive to buy, install, and maintain - and woe be to you if it ever leaks.  A series of pipes behind every wall, floor and ceiling - what can possibly go wrong?  And in this day and age, even people in Alaska are installing air conditioning - which hydronic heating has no provision for.   So you end up with two HVAC systems to purchase and maintain - hey, that has to be even more affordable, right?

No, it isn't.  It is just spending money on status.  And no, the floors aren't "warm" like they claim.  You still have to wear your shoes or slippers in the house.  And the idea of putting hydronic heating under your driveway so you don't have to shovel snow?  How inexpensive is that?  Heating the whole neighborhood!

It is just craziness.  But as our reader noted, in some high-end "Motorcoaches" they have hydronic heating under the marble floors, because you need that to go camping.   Big diesel "rock star" motorcoaches have this sort of nonsense.  Engine coolant can be circulated under the floor to heat the coach. When parked, a "Webasco" diesel-fueled water heater (also popular on yachts) heats the water to heat the floors.  They are noisy as all get out, too.

But note I said "Motorcoaches" and "Yachts" - two things that people of ordinary incomes (under $200,000 a year, at least) have no business buying.  Worse yet, people in the middle- and upper-middle-income brackets are often enticed to buy "lookalike" products that they still can't afford and often end up costing them, well, almost everything.  The cheap motorhome styled to look like a "Motorcoach" is no real bargain, as it has a lot of complicated systems, but like most RVs is poorly made.

Similarly, the stylings of the yachts of five or ten years ago filter down to the boat world, where a 30-foot boat is now shaped like a football with "Italian" yacht design cues, including large, ellipsoid-shaped windows located alarmingly close to the waterline.  Looks cool on the Mediterranean, but you ain't fooling no one at the local boat ramp.

What's the difference between a Yacht and a Boat?  As one wag noted, "A Yacht doesn't move when you step onto it.  A boat does!"  Most of us can only realistically afford boats.

Mark likes to peruse motorhome and yacht sales and he has an encyclopedic knowlege of makes, models, and prices.  To the uninitiated, they all look alike, And often I am surprised when he tells me what looks like a rather plebian boat is actually a million-dollar yacht.  With motorcoaches, it is easier to tell the million-dollar "rock star" buses from the consumer-grade crap we plebes buy.  Gas engine up front?  Wanna-be.  Rubber roof and fiberglass laminate sides?  I don't care if it is a "diesel pusher" it still is an RV and not a motorcoach.

Yet, some middle-class people get caught up in this nonsense and spend more on a motorhome than they spent on their house.   Worse yet are those who sell their home and plow the money into an RV.  If they are lucky, maybe they have 10 years of "seeing America!" before "ill health forces sale" and they realize the are upside-down on the coach, and have nowhere to live and no money left.  Far-fetched?  I've seen it happen, more than once, to people who ordinarily would seem to be of sound mind.

Don't get me wrong - toys are nice and all, and I should know, I've had enough of them.  But they are a huge hole in your wallet - a depreciating asset for which there is no depreciation deduction.  Trust me when I say you'll never regret spending less on toys but willl always regret spending more.  The most fun we had with toys was with $1500 cars we fixed up, our first and second boats that we were not afraid to take anywhere, and the Casita travel trailer that, since we spent so little on, had no compunction of driving it to Alaska.

The "ultimate" or "dream" RV, boat, or car, often ends up being - if not a nightmare - at least a disappointment or less than expected.  Old men figure to "trade up" their paid-for boat or RV or motorcyle or whatever, for the 'next level' only to realize they lost interest in boating or RVing or whatever, and the boat/RV/motorcycle was not the problem.

Having toys is a form of status-seeking, and yes "look at me!" HVAC systems are just status toys - not really necessary for daily living and not providing any (or very little) in the way of greater efficiency compared to the installed cost - and maintenance costs!  Marble floors in motorcoaches are nice and all, until they crack, which they will do, particularly on look-a-like motorhomes which tend to flex more.  Hydronic heating sounds like fun, but it weighs a lot (as does marble) and when those circulating pumps start to fail, it is not fun to repair.

It's OK to be a plebe and live the Walmart lifestyle and be content.  What I see causing unhappiness in the middle-class is when they want more than they can afford and borrow money to obtain that.

Not Just One Thing, But Everything

Dying of "old age" isn't dying of one thing, it is dying of everything.

A friend's father just passed away at age 101.  As the oldest in the family, our friend is finally free of being under his Dad's thumb - at about age 70.  Gee, finally free!  Enjoy that last decade or so.  It isn't fair, it seems, but then again, it takes two to tango, and if you allow your life to be dominated by your parents, is it their fault or yours - or both?

But I digress.

People want to see reasons for things that happen in their lives.  After every mass-shooting, people clamor for reasons.  What was written in his "manifesto?"  Was he going through a messy divorce?  What motivated him to shoot all those people?  When we don't get neat, pat answers, we panic.  If he went nuts and shot up a schoolyard, what's to prevent other people from doing the same?  Or prevent even us?

The answer of course, isn't sexy, it is mundane - and politically volatile.  We have - and always have had - a lot of crazy people in the world. But in America, they have access to cheap and readily available firearms. Crazy+Guns=Mass Shooting. Simple equation - remove or reduce either of the first two components and you tamp down the third.  But we can't have that, can we?  We want our "Freedums" - freedom to be shot at, I guess.

But I digress, yet again.

With death, everyone wants to see a "reason" as most people secretly believe that life could go on forever, but for a "cause of death."   We understand causes like "motorcycle accident" or "stabbing" or "cancer" but we don't grasp "old age" or "natural causes."  Whaddya mean, "natural causes?"  Death ain't natchurl!

Oh, but yes it is, and you have one coming to you at some time in the not-too-distant future.  But no one wants to think about that.  As I noted before, death gives meaning to life - you don't have all the time in the world - procrastination is merely frittering away your life.  Enjoy every moment when you can, because it is all-too-short.

Living on Old People Island for the last 18 years and seeing many older friends shuffle off the mortal coil or "move back home" to be close to their kids (who are no doubt thrilled about changing Mom's adult diaper - hey, she did it for you, payback is a bitch!), we've seen how this end game plays out. And often what happens is akin to the "coffin corner" when flying an airplane near its limits.  You get into a situation where is you speed up, you exceed the maximum velocity the aircraft can handle and the wings fall off.  Slow down, and you stall the airplane and go into a deadly flat-spin.  Or something along those lines.

As the body ages, the regenerative capacities slow down or even stop.  Your skin looks old and wrinkled and "livers spots" appear on your hands.  A simple cut that would have healed in a day or two at age five, now takes a week to heal and leaves an ugly scar - joining the rest of the scars you've accumulated over the decades.  Your internal organs slow down and start giving you trouble.  Your digestive system is no longer as robust as it once was.  When you were 20, you could down a six-pack and a pizza.  At age 80, it would put you in the hospital.

When you start getting up to 90 years and above, the body has reached a fragile equilibrium, and any tiny thing can set off a chain of events that will eventually result in your demise.  One of those tiny things is a visit to a hospital.  Your bones get brittle as you age, and one fall can mean a broken leg or hip.  You go to the hospital where Francine, the nurse, doesn't wash her hands, or worse yet, relies on rubber gloves she never changes.  If you spend any time in the hospital, your risk of infection skyrockets.  As your immune system ain't what it used to be, such infections spread like wildfire.

You read stories about old-timers who make it to 100 years and above, and when asked what their "secret" was, they say, "Stay away from hospitals!  Full of sick people!"  And everyone laughs, not realizing he was being serious.  Particularly in this age of CoVid (yes, it is still around) a hospital is a good place to catch something, rather than get rid of it.

So one straw breaks the camel's back, upsets the teacart, or whatever metaphor you want to use.  Actually, it is more like a cascade of events, starting with something innocuous.  In the case of our friend's father, he was trying to unload a watermelon from the back of his car.  At age 101 he was still driving (!) and thought it would be nice to buy a watermelon and slice it up for the family.  He fell, broke a leg and ended up in the hospital, where infection took hold.  He went down quickly from there.

Mark's Dad died the same way - in his 80's - getting "sick" and going to a hospital, where infection finished him off.  This is not to say hospitals are death traps, only that when you reach a certain age, they might do more harm that good.  When you are 25 and injured in your motorcycle accident, they can cure you as your immune system is strong.   When you are 85, well, it is a different story, particularly in smaller, rural hospitals.  And lest you think I am picking on nurses, apparently doctors are the worst at not washing hands and touching patients one after the other.

There are other hospitals who are better at this sort of thing.   A friend of mine had a bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins and they destroyed her existing immune system with radiation before the transplant.  There was a brief time when she had no immune system and even a simple cold could have killed her.  The procedures we had to follow to visit her were pretty severe - and probably what hospitals should do all the time for all patients.   But that gets expensive.

Of course, you don't have to be 100 to end up in this "coffin corner."  Your health can deteriorate due to illness or disease to the point where you have achieved a fragile form of stability and balance.  This can go on for years and you can delude yourself you are "healthy" and "OK" when you are just once incident away from going down the water-slide of consequences which will cascade one after another.

For many people in this precarious situation, the triggering event was the CoVid pandemic.  And I am not sure that a vaccine or masks would have helped them at all.  If you are overweight, have heart problems and were a chronic smoker, well, it doesn't take much to tip you over the edge.  Enjoy that water-slide!  Wheeeee!

We all want to see reasons why people die.  And perhaps this is why so many conspiracy theories swirl around CoVid.  Your husband, who was overweight, had type-II diabetes, worked in a coal mine, and was on heart medication, dies of CoVid.  This can't be happening!  It must have been the doctors that killed him!  The masks!  The vaccine!  It had to be something, not this mysterious "virus!"

And maybe that is also why, after a famous celebrity dies young, people spread conspiracy theories that they are still alive.  "I saw Elvis at the grocery store!" they cry.  Because a millionaire pop idol would be doing his own grocery shopping, right?  It is comforting to believe that he ducked out on celebrity life and retired to a beach hut in Hawaii, swilling booze and pills and fried-peanutbutter-and-banana sandwiches.  Or maybe that is what killed him.

Two Bedrooms, One Bath

Young people today complain that previous generations had it so easy.  Yet most young people wouldn't set foot in the houses we lived in back then!

The above image is a contemporary photo, scraped from the Internet, of the first house I bought, at age 22, in Chittenango, New York back in 1982.  It had a new roof back then, and new siding as well.  But it seems to have fallen on hard times since then, at least in the roof department.  But hey, they have satellite television!  Priorities.

It was a tiny house (odd to say in this era of "tiny homes") built after the war as part of the boom in suburban growth.  It was a 20-minute drive to the factory at Carrier, down back roads, so it was convenient for me.  It had two small bedrooms, one bath, a living room, and an eat-in kitchen.  That's it.  Originally most of these houses were built on a crawl space.

Entire families were raised in these houses.  The kids would have bunk beds in one bedroom and everyone shared the one bathroom - no loitering!  In that neighborhood, it was typical for Dad to come home from work and "dig out" the basement.  He would dig down through the crawl space, one bucket of dirt at a time,  until it was 8 feet deep or so, and then they would put in a retaining wall and pour a concrete floor.  It took months if not years of backbreaking work.

My house had the basement "dug out" by some enterprising boomer back in the 50's or 60's.  It even had a steel "Bilco" door!  I had a laundry room down there and someone even put in a wood stove.  If you wanted more space, you had to build it.  Those "wealthy baby boomers" of the 1950s and 1960s weren't all that wealthy - just resourceful.

Another common tactic was to build up - adding dormers to the attic to make new bedrooms for a growing family.  Or sometimes the roof was raised.  Additions were also popular - and again, no one dreamed of calling a "builder" and spending as much on an addition as they did on the house.  You got our your hammer and started building.

The whole neighborhood was that way - the neighbors on both sides of me had pretty large additions, built by the homeowners themselves, and they raised families of children - sometimes four or more - in these small houses.  That was life back in the 1960's for working-class people.  Not everyone had a "Brady Bunch" house.

The second house we bought, in Alexandria, Virginia was nicer but also a two-bedrrom, one-bath house.  It had brick siding and a cathedral ceiling in the living room and a real fireplace!  But again, it was a postwar baby-boom driven suburban expansion home, with only two small bedrooms and yet people raised entire families in them.  Granted, there were larger homes in the neighborhood (three bedrooms and two baths!  The luxury!).  But many of the homes were 2/1 and were added on, piece at a time, by Dads who would come home from a hard day at work and then spend hours after supper nailing up 2x4's.  That is how it was done back then.  Indeed, we spend many an evening remodeling our kitchen.  Yes, we tried to get quotes from remodeling companies and carpenters - they all wanted far more than we could afford, even on my lawyer salary!

Today, I read online, pleas from the new generation, who complain they cannot afford a "two-bedroom apartment" on their minimum-wage salary.  We are not talking about two people, just a single person who decided they need to have two bedrooms for themselves.  Why, I do not know, as I rented a number of apartments over the years (I guess about five) and only one of them was a two-bedroom, and that was only because at the time, I was with Mr. See and we had two incomes and could afford it.  Even then, thought, we could have "made do" with one bedroom, as indeed we did when we first got together.

And yes, on more than one occasion, we slept on the floor, while saving up for a mattress.  In fact, we slept in the floor just last year, when we rehabbed the condo!  We're not too proud.

I see pleas online from young people, whining that they will "never be able to afford a house" because "all the houses" in their area are over a million dollars - or some unreasonable number.  If you scratch the surface of these stories, the house they want is more than what they need.  The apartment they want costs more than the apartment they can afford.

Bear in mind that after World War II, there was an acute "housing shortage" back then, with prices going through the roof (this is indeed, where rent control started) as returning GI's got married and settled down.  Huge suburban housing developments like Levittown were started - crackbox houses that progressives derided as "ticky-tacky" but were coveted by the new generation of young homeowners.  Today, if you visit Levittown, you will be hard-pressed to find one of the "crackerbox" houses in original condition - most have been added on and done over as to be unrecognizable.  And yes, back then, the remodeling was often done by Dad and a hammer.

By the way, the critique of "ticky-tacky" is somewhat apt.  Both of my first homes were sheathed, outside, with exterior grade sheetrock. I am not kidding about this.  Sheetrock covered with tar paper was the exterior sheething.   My house in Chittenango had asbestos shingles nailed to that (I had them removed, of course) and the house in Virginia had a brick "curtain wall" (non-structural) tied to the exterior sheetrock.

I believe our house here in Georgia was sheathed in a lovely material called "homasote" that is no longer as popular for exterior sheathing (oriented strand board has taken over).  The reason these alternative materials were used was the high cost of lumber and associated shortages.  The postwar era was marked by strikes and shortages and high prices - everything from steel to aluminum to lumber to cars.  Sort of like today.  Ironic that a nation that only a few years earlier had cracked out millions of tons of steel for weapons, ran short when it came time to make toasters and automobiles.

We really had shitty houses back in the 1950's and 1960's but no one wants to hear that.   Houses today have three or four bathrooms or more - one for every member of the family.  Sharing bathrooms is seen as third-world.  And of course, you expect to have a garage attached to your house - a two-car garage at that, at the very least.  Funny thing, but when I was growing up, having a "two car garage" was seen as ostentatious.  A three-car garage?  That was just showing off!

Our standards have changed over the years, and houses, as I have noted before, have gotten bigger and bigger, often for no reason, other than real estate agents tell home buyers to "buy as much house as you can afford!" as a house is "your biggest investment" - a lie I have exposed more than once.  A house is a place to live and owning a home can cost less in the long run than renting, provided you don't buy more house than you need.   But you can't eat a house.  It won't put gas in the tank of your car.  A house can end up being an Albatross around your neck, if you let it.  You can end up trapped in your home, which is what is happening to a lot of baby-boomers these days - too scared to sell, as everything is overpriced and where would they go?

I know the feeling.

I am not blaming the young generation for having unrealistic standards.  They grew up in what are lavish homes by 1960 or even 1970 standards.  Remember that the Brady Bunch had to share bathrooms and bedrooms.  The original house was recently remodeled as part of one of those "makeover" shows.  They doubled the size of it to a whopping 5,000 square feet and added extra baths and bedrooms because subsequent generations expect that sort of thing.  Private bath? Well, your highness, to be sure!

I think expectations have been raised, which is again, one reason why "luxury student housing" has become so popular these days.  College apartments are expected to be like a hotel, not a hovel. No hot-and-cold running roaches for this generation!  No dingy cinder-block dorm rooms!  No siree!  Today we have "suites" with common areas and "suite-mates" instead of "roommates."   How times have changed.

But of course, shortages are not perpetual.  Eventually the postwar housing boom caught up with demand and housing prices leveled off - and houses slowly started getting bigger and fancier over time.  I suspect the current "shortage" will resolve itself, as our population growth stalls and as the baby-boom generation dies off or goes into assisted living.  And yes, a lot of commercial properties may end up being torn down or remodeled into residential properties - as my old office was, in Old Town Alexandria.

The laws of Supply and Demand cannot be denied for long.  This does not mean, however, that housing will be cheap or free or not take up the lion's share of your paycheck.  That is the way it has been since the dawn of time.  Your Dad and Granddad didn't get free houses after the war.  And there is a reason why Granddad built that addition, one nail at a time.

The Crazy New World of Tires!

Like everything else, they changed tires while we were sleeping.

I noted before that sea changes in technology occur and no one really tells us about them.  I read a thing online where some whiner complained that the clerk at Home Depot asked, "what do you need them for?" when he asked for nails.  "None of your damn business!" he replied.  "Then, I can't help you," the clerk said.

You see, if you put something like galvanized nails or screws or bolts into modern pressure-treated wood, they will rust through in a matter of months.  Something about the new technology in this "yellow wood" that just attacks zinc or something.  So we have yellow screws for yellow wood, green screws for green wood, stainless steel for Kumaru or whatever, white screws for PVC trim boards - and so on and so forth.  You can't even find galvanized screws, half the time.  And since Home Depot doesn't want to be sued when your deck collapses, they have to ask what you need the screws or bolts for.

Lightbulbs - you know the drill.  No longer do we look for 60W or 100W bulbs, but 2700 "Kelvin" bulbs whose intensity is measured in Lumen or something.  You have to keep up with the times and technology!

In the tire department, the same is true.  When I was a kid, there was Goodyear and Firestone, as well as lesser-known brands like Goodrich and General.  Maybe you had a fancy imported car that took those "Michelin" radial tires.  But most people went with good old reliable G78-15 bias-ply tires - maybe even recaps, if you drove a "junker."   But all that changed over time.

The switch to radials nearly killed or did kill Firestone, which is now part of the Bridgestone group.  Firestone came out with a set of radials - the "Firestone 500" which had a nasty tendency to come apart, as the workers had no experience with laying cords radially.  These were recalled and replaced, but the damage was done.  To seal the deal, they came up with "Firestone 721" radials, and I foolishly bought a set - what crap!

Goodyear fared better, but has had its mis-steps.  Oddly enough, I bought a set of 29" bicycle tires online which are branded (in raised white letters) as "Goodyear" but only on one side (like a car tire) so clearly they are licensing the name to other companies.  What does this say about their other tires?  Are they merely rebranded Chinese radials?  Who knows?

I wrote before about the Obama tire tariffs and how the only effect they had was to jack the price of tires to the moon - particularly if your car takes prescription tires.  American makers, when confronted with higher-priced imports, did the obvious and logical thing and raised their own prices to reap windfall profits.  No, they didn't plow that money back into their factories or into automation to remain competitive.  And today, I think we are seeing the result of this - you can hardly find "American" brand tires (whatever that even means anymore) and if you do, they are twice the price of other tires.

In terms of brands, there is now a confusing array of odd-ball brand names: Falken, Khumo, Nexen, Summit, Accelera, Fullway, Fuzion, Long Wind(!), Riken, Otani, Landgolden, Maxtour - the list goes on and on.  As I noted in another posting, sometimes it is best, if you were happy with the tires that came with the car, to replace them with the same brand and model.  Bear in mind that "OEM" tires sold directly to the manufacturer may be slightly different than the same tire sold to consumers at retail.  Nevertheless, it helps in narrowing down the field - and comparing different brands of tires is akin to comparing different models of cars when shopping.  Focus on one model and then shop on price.

The last three sets of tires I have bought, I did just this.  For the King Ranch, I found the pricey 20" Michelins for about $225 a tire, which wasn't too bad a price. They lasted over 50,000 miles and probably had another 20,000 or more on them.  I am sure the tire guy who mounted the new ones, sold my used ones to some other customer.  For the trailer, I found the "Ranier" tires from a guy in Alabama for an astounding $50 a tire.  And for the Nissan pickup (still tooling around the island by the guy I sold it to) the "Goodrich" tires were found online for about $150 apiece.

By the way, it pays to replace tires before the bitter end.  With both trucks, I replaced the tires at the 50K mark because we were towing a trailer and going to places like Alaska and remote parts of Canada.  Sure, you might be able to wring another 5K or 10K out of a nearly bald set, but is a blowout worth it?  Skidding out of control on wet pavement?  Of course not.

The worst way to buy tires is the way I see all the time at the tire center counter at Walmart.  Someone comes in with a flat tire, and the other three are bald or nearly bald.   The manager sells them what they have in stock, for retail, and tries to convince them to replace all four - or at least two!  The poor (in every sense of the word) working-class person tells him, "I can't afford that this month!" and goes ahead and pays as much for one tire as they could have paid for two or maybe even all four!   By not planning ahead and shopping around, the poor get the rawest deals imaginable.  You can tell when you need new tires, just as you can tell when you need a new battery.  But so many people act shocked at "surprise repair bills" which should not be a surprise at all.

I knew I needed new tires when I realized that, even though the Hamster has only 36,000 miles on it, the tires are nearly ten years old.  Yesterday, the "low tire pressure warning" light went off and I was embarrassed to admit that all four tires were at 25 PSI or less (should be at recommended 33 PSI, max load is at 40).  There was nothing "wrong" with the tires, just the slow leakage that occurs over time.  I usually check the tire pressures when we return from our summer sojourn, but this time I forgot.  Pump up each tire and the tire pressure warning goes away.

But the big deal was dry rot.  While pumping up the tires, I noticed that small chunks of rubber were falling off the tread of the front tires as shown in the above photo.  Maybe this is dry rot, or maybe also the result of "dry turning" on the tabby parking lot at the Arts Association (Tabby is a concrete made with oyster shells, and the shells stick out of the concrete and cut like a knife).  The rear tires don't seem to have the problem.  I suppose I could rotate them and go for another year, but one blowout at highway speed could ruin your whole day - or life.  Ten years is a long time for tires.  36,000 miles isn't a great tire life, but mileage isn't the only indicator of  when to change your tires.

But speaking of tire pressure - how long will the tire pressure sensors (TPMS) last?   After nine years, should they be replaced?  And since we are mounting new tires.... oh well.  On the one hand, I don't want to be like some of my neighbors who refused new pressure sensors when they got new tires and now drive around with the pressure warning light on all the time.  On the other hand, I don't want to pay $100 a wheel for new pressure sensors (although prices have come down considerably lately).

Again, they change the technology and they don't tell anyone.

I very briefly considered used tires.  The problem with used tires, I noted before.  They might also be dry-rotted.  The cost of mounting and balancing two sets of half-worn tires will be more than the cost of a new set of tires.  Other than brand-new "take-offs" from an idiot who wanted to put bling rims on a brand new car, there are few deals to be had with used tires.  And then again, "take-offs" can be scandalously priced and are only a deal if the price is right or they include rims that you need or want.  I searched online but found  nothing of merit.  $69 a tire for "80% tread" brand-X tires is no real bargain.

The original tires on the Hamster are Nexen Classe Premier CP671 94H P235/45 R18 tires.  What does 94H mean?  I find the same tires online for radically lower price ($118 versus $155) as "94V" models instead. 94 is the load rating (1477 pounds) and H and V are speed ratings (130 versus 149 MPH respectively).  Since the Hamster would not hit even 130 MPH if dropped off an airplane at 10,000 feet, it seems excessive to go to a V rating - although they oddly enough are cheaper!

Oddly enough, I found some 93V tires in this series - for even less. The load rating was less, too - 1433 pounds versus the 1477 for the 94 models. I even found a 91V model on Amazon, but that is rated for only 1355 pounds.  Bear in mind that is the max load at max rated pressure.  Most cars run below rated pressure, and load capacity drops off non-linearly with tire pressure.  Drop your tire pressure by 10% and you may see a 20% decrease in load capacity - or more!  As a result, blowouts are more likely.  Check your tire pressures more often!  Don't be like me and forget - and wait for some dashboard light to shame you!

Load Index has replaced the old letter-based load ratings, such as the E, F, G, and H-ratings back in the days of bias-ply tires.  Trailer tires are still rated by letter - load range C, D, and E, for example.  But I suspect they too, will adopt to these new two-digit index ratings.  Again, they change this stuff and don't tell us about it.

Then there is the "671" moniker which is a model number Nexen uses.  The 671 is a summer tire, while their similar 672 is an all-season tire, which oddly enough is sometimes cheaper.  And of course, there are tire treadwear ratings to consider as well.  It isn't as simple as rim diameter and profile, like in the old days.  It gets complicated!  Now you see why I tend to stick with the same make and model of tire the car came with.

The Tire Rack used to be my "go to" place for tires, but their prices are, well, kind of insane.  They want $178 for the same tires that came on the car (which, after 9 years are just starting to dry rot).  Walmart has a much better selection and lower prices.  Amazon has a shitty selection and higher prices.  Amazon doesn't have a brand search feature and keeps trying to sell me high priced tires.  Screw Amazon!

eBay seems no better and in fact has the same $178 price, which tells me they are sourcing from the same wholesaler.  Walmart has the exact same tire on sale for $155 a tire, and since that is where I will probably get them mounted, might be the way to go.

But it gets better.  Walmart has the same tire directly from them, for about $118 a tire - CP671 94V (higher speed rating) P235/45 R18.  Mounting is about $18 a tire and I can have the tires shipped directly to the store.  So I think I will go with that - later in the month.

Note that tire wear, like gas mileage, depends an awful lot on how you drive.  Hard acceleration, particularly peeling out, scrubs rubber off a tire. As our professors at GMI noted, a tire is like a roll of tape or toilet paper, and  you "unwind" it as you go down the road, leaving behind a thin layer of rubber as you drive.  Peel out, and it is like your cat unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper because, well, cats.  Hard braking and hard cornering also can shorten tire life as well.  The rubber that comes off tires forms a fine dust and is an emissions issue with cars.  And let's not talk about the nightmare of old tire disposal!  Tires, it seems, are not as simple as they appear.

Dental Insurance?

Is dental insurance worthwhile buying?

It is "open season" for ACA or as some know it, Obamacare.  Every year, the cost seems to go up.  And right now, we are looking at $380 a month to continue with our current plan, so it pays to look at other plans in the ACA universe.

Which leads us to our first problem - one that might mystify Canadians or Brits. Why are there different plans with different levels of coverage?  Why not one plan for everyone?  Are we supposed to figure out how sick we will be, in advance, for 2024 and then pick a plan based on this?  Doesn't this defeat the whole point of "insurance"?  I mean, it makes about as much sense as buying health insurance only when you get sick.

The second problem, as I noted before, is that when you sign up, you have to predict, with some accuracy, what your income will be for the next year.  If you have a salary job, this is not hard to do.  If you work part-time or get overtime, well, it can be next to impossible.  If you are retired and living off your 401(k) money, well, how much you spend is what your "income" is - and with inflation last year, the amount we spent was about 20% more than the year before and 20% more than we predicted.  We will have a hefty tax bill in April, which means we have to take more money out of the 401(k) which means we lose more Obamacare subsidy, which means a higher tax bill for 2025 which means.....wash. rinse. repeat.

It is kind of a mess.

But speaking of subsidy, based on my "projected" income for 2024, the subsidy comes to over $18,000.  Read that again, dear taxpayer. And thank you for your contribution!  The "premiums" on most ACA plans start at about $1500 a month and go up from there.  ACA plans thus run (at my projected income level) from $0 a month to $500 a month or more.  So you pick a plan based on how much you want to pay per month, and they come in different levels - gold, silver, bronze, zinc, and lead.  We're on the lead plan.  It covers burial expenses.  In a pine box.

You can review the plans online, and this year there is more than one provider, including CVS Caremark. CVS has made big noise about getting into health care and away from being a Dollar General that has a pharmacy. The pharmacy business is cut-throat, with every grocery store - particularly Walmart - in on the game, not to mention online pharmacies.  On the other hand, $1500-a-month checks from ACA sound awfully enticing, provided you can keep costs down.  No wonder they are moving in that direction.

In reviewing the plans, I noticed that nearly all of them are "HMO" plans that only cover a portion of expenses, and then only for "in-network".  So you may pay only $100 for an emergency room visit, but if a doctor who is "out of network" is brought in (as a temp) he may bill you directly for his entire fee.  You might have insurance, but you might not be covered.  And when you are bleeding to death, you don't have time to ask for an in-network doctor.  Great system!

Other plans covered "in-network" services only, but only after you have reached your $18,000 deductible.  For many people, this is a half-year's income.  You get sick, go to the emergency room and end up socked with an $18,000 medical bill.  Of course, if you are astute, you try to negotiate this down, and then arrange an interest-free payment plan over a number of months or years.  Still, it is a lot of money - enough to buy a new car, or at least a lightly used one.

So the whole situation is kind of scary and I realize we have been lucky to be in relatively good health, to have "in-network" providers locally and at the local hospital.  But it can all go horribly wrong in a heartbeat.

But what about dental insurance?  We never opted for this, although some plans offer it. I have pretty robust teeth, but Mark has had some bridgework done, and over time, it needs to be re-done. He predicts that it will need to be reworked in 2024.  Maybe we should find a plan that covers dental?  Oddly enough, our "silver" plan doesn't cover dental, but some lower-priced "bronze" plans do.  But there is a caveat - or several.  First, it only covers in-network providers.  Second, it only covers 50% of costs.  Third, there are only three in-network providers locally, out of the dozens of dentists in the area.  So you give up choice of dentist, to save only part of the cost.  It might be a better bargain to just get a cheaper plan and pay cash for dentistry.

Yes, they are not giving out free money samples at the bank this week - nor are the insurance companies handing out free dental care. The idea that you can get something-for-nothing never pans out in real life.  So maybe we will give up on buying a plan with dental care - it just doesn't seem worthwhile - if you want your choice of Dentist, that is.

Of course, I am going by the search feature on the site for participating physicians.  Often, this data is outdated and obsolete.  So I will call around tomorrow to see if other Dentists accept the insurance - they might.  Our current Dentist is retiring and his son - fresh from medical school - is taking over the practice.  Apparently, he got perfect grades in "billing practices" in Dental School, as he is suggesting a lot of high-priced procedures.  After two visits, Mark noped out of that and refuses to go back.

So like Diogenes, I will keep searching for the last honest Dentist!  And maybe a dental plan, but I doubt it.

UPDATE:  I decided to go with a "Bronze" plan that had no dental coverage.  However, you can buy a separate dental plan for $25 a month or so.  I checked them out and none are from Ambetter - but Blue Cross has a plan.  Caveat?  12 month waitng period for major dental, 6 month waiting period for routine dental.  So you have to pay premiums for a year before the benefits kick in.

Also, like the health plans that include dental, few dentists take the insurance, including our current Dentist!  Our new Dentist takes no insurance but will process "out of network" claims - that only pay 50% of costs.  After a year, of course.

So you either have to get dental insurance and keep it a long time, or forgetaboutit!