Thursday 15 March 2007

Pic of the day: The chances to inflict punishment on me has decreased a lot, much to the consternation of the big companies who always look for a way to take the lunch money from the smaller boys.

Smaller bills

The 15th is the customary bill paying day here in the House of Chaos. I get my salary on the 12th, as is usual for state-employed workers, a rather large part of the populace here in Norway. Then it takes a couple days for me to transfer the money to Skandiabanken, which lets me pay bills for free. So the 15th is a convenient day.

One month ago, I paid off the two "usury" loans from moving to here one year earlier. (I wrote about this on February 16th.) Actually it is not quite usury. Most of the "interest" is actually a form of insurance because so many of these loans are never paid back. This sucks for those of us who do pay them back, of course. But it is the price we pay for putting ourselves in the same situation as the least stable part of the populace, financially and mentally. If I had gone with the mainstream and bought a house or apartment instead of computers (and instead of working less), credit would have been a lot cheaper. On the other hand, I would have owned something that didn't interest me and not owned something that did. But as I habitually say, all things have a price. This time the price was in money; I have seen worse things happen to people.

Be that as it may, I have suffered no serious deprivation in the past year, and even put on a few pounds. (As well I could, I was fairly skinny last year at this time.) And today was the first bill-paying day where the two usury loans were absent, sort of. What do I mean by "sort of"? For some reason, they both sent me a form exactly like the earlier months, only it said kr 0 (kroner being the Norwegian currency, about 1/6 of a US$, not that this matters much when they both are zero). I guess it was made as documentation to me that I had in fact paid the loans off, as if I didn't know. There will anyway be formal documentation next year before tax time, so I did not care much one way or another. I was just bemused to see the old bills show up after their death, so to speak.

I didn't rush off to buy a new computer. I still have a credit card to pay off. But I didn't even do that with all of the money. I let some of it remain on the quick-use account, in case there would suddenly show up some bill or some unexpected expense. In truth, it would make more sense financially to pay the credit card and then use it to borrow again if the need arose. But this is a slightly more protracted affair. By having the money at my Visa card it is as accessible as if I had the cash in my pocket, if not more so, and obviously safer.

Part of the motivation for having some money left is the former telecoms monopoly in Norway, Telenor. They love to send bills with as short a notice as the law allows… and somehow, mysteriously, it arrives quite a few days after the date on the bill. In fact, the stamp on the envelope is usually a bit after the date on the bill as well. It is hard to shake the suspicion that they sincerely hope people won't be able to pay it on time, so they can slap on a late fee. The only extra work they have if you don't pay on time is printing the line with the late fee on the next bill, which probably costs like 1/1000 of a cent or something, including the processing power of their computers and the ink. Pure profit. There are few things they love as much as pure profit. As of now, I have nothing to do with them except rent for the copper cables, cables which have been there since 1969 or so and are long ago paid off. Pure profit. Telenor uses this profit to expand in developing countries. If you are there and see them post some offers that seem too good to be true, they probably are true, financed with my money. Not that they do this as some kind of foreign aid. They probably hope to make a monopoly of sorts in those countries too, which they can then milk at some later time.

Oh, and there was a utility bill again. I know for sure that there was one in January as well, because I commented on how it came after people had spent all their money on Xmas and New Years. Again, I suspect this is intentional. The bill should probably have been sent out in December, but then people would have paid it off first and realized they did not have all that much left for gifts. By waiting, you increase the chance that they won't be able to pay it on time, and you can slap on late fees. I am not sure this is what the utility is trying to do, but it would not shock me to the core. As for Telenor, let me say that I would continue to suspect them even if they swore a solemn oath with one hand on the Bible and another on Origin of Species.

The "attack of the sudden bills" approach doesn't work on me anymore, of course. But most people are still on the level where bills are like the weather, some kind of divine intervention which you only have a moderate chance of predicting to some degree, but can never fully understand. Sad but true. Even Superwoman still has it that way with taxes, and she's probably half again as intelligent as I am, in raw IQ. (That's quite a bit, in case you wondered. I write 7th-grade level text here on purpose.)

Anyway, restoring the emergency fund should be a one-off event, so that next month I hopefully will be able to pay off more. The normal state of things for me before the move was to pay off the credit card before each new computer purchase, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be like that here too.