spugbrap’s blog

In the past, when my checking accounts have been overdrawn, it has been no laughing matter. I’ve been sad, angry, annoyed at myself, annoyed at my bank, etc. Earlier this week, though, I actually had an overdraft occur which made me laugh out loud!

First, a little context (impatient? skip to the funny scenario):

Lacey and I have been using USAA for our home, auto, and life insurance needs since we’ve been married (9 years now!). A few years ago, their banking division, USAA Federal Savings Bank (FSB), offered us a good deal to refinance our van loan, and we did that. We’ve been very happy with all of the USAA services that we’ve used, and have had countless frustrations with Bank of America (BoA), so in June of 2007, I opened checking and savings accounts with USAA FSB. Over the course of a month or two, I switched all my spending and bill payment over to that account. In September of 2007, I closed my BoA checking and savings accounts (the last straw was when BoA started charging me fees for not using my accounts!).

USAA FSB has been wonderful! I do all my deposits via USAA Deposit@Home, using my scanner and their web application. The deposits post to my account immediately. The savings account has a pretty high interest rate (way better than BoA’s), and even the checking account earns interest (way more than BoA’s *savings* account). I earn rewards points using my check card, and there are no minimum balance requirements for any of this.

Another great thing about USAA FSB is that they let you specify two overdraft accounts. I have my checking account set up to draw from my savings account, then from a credit card (issued by another bank, even), in case of non-sufficient funds (NSF). The best part is, there are no fees for the overdraft protection!

We had a charge which would have put the checking account in the negative by twelve cents, a couple months ago, and USAA just quietly grabbed that $0.12 from the savings account, and that was that! I say quietly, but I’m sure I received an email about it. BoA would have charged me $35 for the NSF, then $30 for using the overdraft protection (to transfer the $0.12 from savings).

Now, for the funny scenario that happened this week:

A couple weeks ago, an automatic recurring charge for $101.95 went on my credit card (a BoA/FIA Card Services card, formerly MBNA, Merrill Lynch branded). I scheduled a credit card payment of $101.95 through USAA Web BillPay, to be paid from my USAA checking account. However, my checking account balance was a bit too low, this week. There was not enough to cover that payment, and not quite enough to cover my Verizon phone bill payment.

Here’s a screenshot showing a few transactions (charges and credits) and my account balance:

So, check #354 brought my account balance down to $71.60. My Verizon bill payment was $71.90, so USAA transferred (without charging fees) $0.30 from my savings account, to cover that charge. Remember, BoA would have already charged me $65 at this point.

Now, there was a $0.00 balance and my credit card bill payment for $101.95 needed to go through. My savings account only had a couple dollars in it, so USAA didn’t bother with that. BoA would have transferred the remaining balance from savings, even though it didn’t cover the overdraft, and would have charged me for it. Instead, they transferred (without charging fees) $200 from my secondary overdraft protection account, which happened to be the same credit card! This covered the $101.95, and left the account with a non-zero balance. I assume this was just in case any additional charges come through before I got a chance to add funds to the account.

Summary:

So, the end result is that my checking account transferred funds from my credit card for overdraft protection, to cover the bill payment I was making to that credit card. Later that night, my paycheck direct deposited to the account, so all was well. (Well, actually, the credit card charged me a $6 fee for some reason (they called it “BANK TRANSACTION FEE”). No surprises there, though. BoA finds ways to charge fees for anything they can think of! But $6 was a lot easier to handle than BoA checking account overdraft and NSF fees). I went ahead and made a $206 payment to my credit card, and had a good laugh!

I’m happy with USAA Federal Savings Bank, and highly recommend it for anyone that is eligible. (That’s the only downside of USAA FSB. You have to be eligible for USAA membership to open accounts there. Check membership eligibility requirements here.).

Ever since I read an article a year or two ago about how to get a better shave, I’ve been wanting to try out some of their tips. I believe that’s when I started shaving in the shower, which I definitely like better than trying to shave at the sink. I’ve had “shaving brush” on my Christmas, birthday, and Father’s Day wish lists, but it just never happened… until this past Christmas (2007). Lacey bought me a shaving brush and shaving cream.

I’m not brave enough or motivated enough to try a different type of razor, at this point, so I’m sticking with either my Gillette Sensor (which I’ve had since Gillette was nice enough to send me a free one for my 18th birthday; nice marketing, Gillette!) or my Schick Quattro. I prefer the Quattro, but the cartridges are more expensive so I only get them occasionally (sale + coupon is always good!). I can usually get a big pack of Sensor cartridges for a less outrageous price, although even those seem pretty darned expensive. I actually tried some generic cartridges last year, which fit Sensor razors, but the difference in quality was quite noticeable. I’ll stick with the name brands.

Anyways, I’ve used the shaving brush + shaving cream 4-5 times, now, and I’m definitely a fan. I’ve been able to get the closest shaves I’ve ever had, with no irritation, and have even been able to get more uses out of a single razor cartridge than I could when I just used regular store-bought mainstream shaving gel (i.e. chemical-rich goo).

If you’ve never tried using a good shaving cream and a badger-hair shaving brush, you don’t know what you’re missing. I’ve always hated shaving, and although the brush+cream didn’t make me actually enjoy shaving, like they have done for some people, they definitely make shaving less annoying.

I’m not sure where the article that I read a couple years ago, that first sparked my curiosity on this subject, but here are a couple that I’ve read since then:

• Deeper Motive: A Simple Guide to Shaving
• MSNBC: How to get that perfect shave

and a couple of pages with links to more shaving-related information/tips/etc.:

• SoundMoneyTips: Tips on Getting a Close Shave
• Lifehacker: Grooming: Get the best shave possible

Over the weekend, my family and I went over to a friend’s house to carve pumpkins. I was a bit late, so by the time I got there, most of them were already done. Jena asked whether I wanted to carve a pumpkin, or a watermelon from her garden. At first, I was going to do a pumpkin, because I’d never heard of carving watermelons–at least not for making jack-o-lanterns.

But, then she sat down to try carving a watermelon, herself. It didn’t take long for us to realize why this was a great idea! Instead of scooping out pumpkin guts and throwing it in a bowl, we could scoop out the watermelon and eat it! So, I grabbed another watermelon, and proceeded to scoop out and eat the tasty insides.

When I was done, I had a hollowed-out green oval/cylinder shaped thing to work with. I sat for a few minutes, trying to think of something green to make it look like. My first thought was a Mountain Dew can, but I decided that it would be too hard to try and carve all of those letters into the small watermelon. Then, I thought of a turtle, and went looking around the house for turtle faces to imitate.

Luckily, Xander loves turtles, and I found plenty of possibilities. I finally settled on a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, from the cover of a video game. Most of the TMNT faces that I saw kind of needed visible teeth-separations to look good, but I found one that had a good enough facial expression without needing tooth detail.

I started by drawing on the watermelon with a pen, which allowed me to correct mistakes by wiping off the pen with a wet paper towel. I’m not very artistically inclined, so I really didn’t expect it to turn out very good. I was very close to giving up and going with a standard pumpkin carving style, rather than trying to make it look like something in particular. I also came very close to asking Xander to draw a ninja turtle face, for me, because that boy is a great artist, and I’ve seen some of his ninja turtle drawings before. But, I actually managed to draw a face that I was happy with.

Then carved it out with the pumpkin carving tools. I couldn’t decide whether to cut out the whole ninja turtle mask part, or to just cut the eyes out. Dallin suggested cutting out the eyes, then the whole mask, and then putting the eyes back into place with toothpicks. I knew that they’ve done the toothpick thing before, with pumpkins, so I trusted that he knew what he was talking about.

The final product turned out better than I thought it would! It’s easily recognizable as a ninja turtle, and I think I consider it my best pumpkin carving, ever. Jena’s carved watermelon turned out great, too! It’s cool to see this different color scheme: green with red inside, rather than the standard pumpkin orange with yellow inside.

Here are some close-up pictures of the carved watermelons, as well as some pictures of the watermelons next to the pumpkins that our respective families carved/painted:

We all had lots of fun, and look forward to doing it again next year! We will definitely be carving both pumpkins AND watermelons again.

Tissues work very well for erasing dry-erase marker!

Specifically, I’ve tried it with Kleenex regular unscented ones, but I assume others probably work, too.

I used to get frustrated, sometimes, trying to erase dry-erase marker off a kids’ workbook that had laminated pages. The first method I used was using a dry paper towel. It worked fine, for a long time (but sometimes it didn’t). So, I tried a wet paper towel, and that would usually do the trick (but sometimes it wouldn’t). So, I tried a wet dishwashing sponge, which usually did pretty well (but not always). The last resort was a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (awesome product!), which always worked. But that seemed overkill, and I hated to waste it on something that should be easier to clean, so it wasn’t an everyday solution.

Lacey saw me struggling with this, one day, and told me about the tissue thing. I’m not sure where she learned about it, or if she figured it out, on her own. But I always use a tissue to erase it, now, and that works like a charm.

I also tried this on my whiteboard, at work, and it works on that, too. Much cleaner than using the whiteboard eraser, which just pushes the dust around and leaves a line of it wherever you stop erasing.

We bought some Meunster cheese from the deli at Safeway recently, and it is the worst Meunster cheese I’ve ever had. It looks pretty normal, aside from some little tiny holes throughout it, but it smells wrong, and hardly tastes like Meunster at all. Meunster is one of my favorite kinds of cheese, but I can’t bring myself to eat this stuff. The brand on the label is Primo Taglio.

If this was an isolated incident, I would just chalk it up to one bad batch of cheese. But looking back, we’ve made the mistake of buying cheese from the Safeway deli before. We kept forgetting which grocery store had the nasty cheese. In the past, we bought Provolone, there, and I’m sure it was also Primo Taglio. It tasted like some kind of freak of nature, like 25% old Provolone + 75% extra-smelly Swiss. It even had holes — some of them pretty big, like domestic Swiss. I tried to eat it, because I like Provolone, and I like Swiss, but that stuff was disgusting!

Anyways, I highly recommend not buying Primo Taglio cheese from the Safeway deli. Yuck! Buy some pre-packaged/sliced Kraft or Sargento cheese from the regular cheese aisle instead, or buy your cheese elsewhere!