Live from Austin!

The mainstream media coverage of the US subprime mortgage meltdown has mostly been about all the folk who have lost their homes, and various plans the government has come up with to try and ease the problem. Thinking about it more carefully, though, doesn’t it seem a little odd for the US government to interfere in the sacred free market merely in order to save a bunch of poor people from ruin?

Well, the SF Chronicle has an interesting article that explains this curious situation. It’s not about saving people from losing their houses, it’s about saving the banks.

During the housing bubble which was fueled by the subprime lending, banks sold mortgage-backed securities. For those who don’t know, mortgage-backed securities are basically in-place mortgage agreements, packaged for resell between financial organizations, or between financial organizations and investors.

The key is to view a mortgage in the abstract, as a promise by person A to pay an amount X for N years. That promise has a value, and can be sold.

For example, we arranged our mortgage through a small financial firm in the Austin area. Once all the paperwork was done, they packaged us up as an asset and sold us to GMAC. GMAC took on the business of extracting money from us over the course of years, and paid the small financial firm a lesser amount in compensation for the value of us as a customer.

This is generally a good thing. Because GMAC does administration for millions of mortgages, they can provide convenient billing and payment services, and reduce per-customer overheads. For the small firm, the benefit was immediate cashflow and no ongoing overheads.

A similar process can be used to package a mortgage and sell it to investors as a bond. The bank gets to remove the liability from their balance sheet; they can then use the cash to provide mortgage funds to more homebuyers. Hence, allowing the transfer of mortgages as mortgage-backed bonds should allow more people to buy their own houses.

For example, suppose John Smith owes the bank $1000 a month for the next 20 years. That’s a total of $1,040,000. The bank could sell that mortgage to an investor as a bond for (say) $750,000. The bank would get the $750,000 immediately, reducing their liabilities. They could use the money to finance some new homebuyer’s mortgage. Meanwhile, the investor would get $1,040,000 over the course of the next 20 years, making a nice profit. And the whole thing could be treated like a regular bond or stock market investment–the bank could continue to process the collection of the actual mortgage payments, just like it would process dividends on a mutual fund investment.

The problem is that since the banks expected to sell off the mortgages to eager investors hoping to cash in on the property boom, they didn’t really care too much about checking that the mortgages were sound; and the investors didn’t really have any way to check on the actual person paying the mortgage.

However, there’s language written into these mortgage transfer securities stating that if there’s fraud, the bank which sold the mortgage is legally obligated to offer to buy it back at the original price–which is now often ten times the actual value likely to be extractable from the homeowner. Fraud like, say, people lying on their mortgage applications, or inflated property appraisals, or e-mails on bank computers suggesting that they knew the market was a bubble that couldn’t last. Then there’s the issue of companies like S&P, who helped the banks to structure the subprime mortgage securities to look as good as possible on paper.

So if too many mortgages fail, and investors start demanding that their junk bonds be repurchased by the selling banks, those banks will go under. At that point, the FDIC and the government will have to step in, and we’ll basically have a taxpayer-funded bailout of a bunch of big corporate banks who defrauded investors. It’ll be the Savings and Loan crisis all over again.

How about pressuring the investors not to call in the cops? Well, unfortunately a lot of the investors are in foreign countries. Some of them are foreign countries. With the current state of US diplomacy, a conversation that starts with “Hey, we were wondering if you could eat a few billion dollars in losses to fraud so that we don’t have to bail out our rich corporate buddies in full public view” might not go too well.

But never mind, it may not come to that. A crack team of financial experts are trying to come up with a way to salvage the situation. We know they’re experts because, as the Chronicle points out, they’re exactly the people who got us into the mess in the first place…

Royal Bank of Scotland charges man £3,400 in bank charges. Man goes to court, claiming charges are illegal under UK law. Bank doesn’t bother to show up or contest the claim. Court rules in man’s favor. Bank doesn’t respond when payment of debt is demanded.

Man sends in debt collectors, who seize fax machines and computers from the local high street branch in front of startled customers, and tell the bank the equipment will be sold to pay the debt unless the bank coughs up the money it owes.

Freakin’ awesome.

Everyone should have a chunk of cash in an instant access savings account; see Dilbert’s guide to financial success.

If you’re in the US and have $250 spare to put in a savings account, I’ve got a voucher you can use to open an account with ING Direct, and they’ll give you $25 free. (Plus $10 for me.)

I’ve been saving with them for a while, because their rates are so much better than my bank’s savings account rates (4.4% APR with no fees). They’re a proper FDIC insured outfit backed by a real bank, a European multinational. I briefly had all the proceeds from selling my UK apartment in the account, and they didn’t abscond with it, so I’m pretty sure your $250 will be safe.

Also on the subject of free money, a while back Bank of America bought MBNA. I have MBNA credit cards; naturally I pay off the balance each month. Based on my transaction history, Bank of America have sent me mail saying they’ll pay me $100 to open a checking account with them. Maybe I’m crazy, but I haven’t rushed to do so. A quick glance at the relevant Wikipedia page and you’ll see that Bank of America has engaged in various sleazy business practices.

My current bank is Wells Fargo; they have a much cleaner record, and I also get the joy of knowing I’m supporting a company that really irritated Focus in the Family. Plus, they were the only US bank I could find that had all the necessary information about how to transfer money internationally available on their web site.

Update 2006-11-15

A customer was worried that a check for an eBay transaction might be fraudulent, so he asked Bank of America to examine it carefully. They said it was on a valid account, so he asked them to cash it. Then Bank of America changed their minds and decided the check was fraudulent, called the cops, had him put in jail, and effectively wasted $14,000 of his money on legal hassles.

OK, now I’m really sure I don’t want to do business with Bank of America.

The idea behind credit cards is simple: they’re a way for the bank to make money. And they do, billions of dollars of it every year. The trick is to find new ways to get as many customers as possible into the optimum debt profile.

The basic rules of the game are relatively easy to understand: The more you spend, the more you owe. The more you owe, the more you have to pay at the end of the month. And the more you owe after that payment, the more interest gets added on to your bill next month.

It’s a feedback loop: owe more, more interest, owe even more, even more interest, and so on.

At some point, many people let the feedback system run away for a few months, and they arrive at the optimum debt profile: they owe so much money that if they send in the biggest payment they can, it just about covers the additional interest they’re about to be charged that month.

At that point, they’re fucked. They are basically indentured servants to the bank. They can keep working, keep making payments indefinitely, and they will never eliminate the debt or reduce their monthly bill.

There’s a catch, though. Lots of people don’t fall for it, they don’t let their balance accumulate too far; so the banks are always looking for a way to tempt you to spend more.

The time-tested method is to increase your credit limit. Eventually you’ll see something you really want, see that big number on your credit card statement, and think “Wow, I could really have that, if I just give in to temptation and use the card.” That’s why people like me who pay their bills in full each month end up with a credit limit that could pay for a small yacht, while people who actually need it have trouble getting any credit limit at all.

But now, Citibank have found a better way to get people to let their credit card bills accumulate for a while. I have to say, it’s a work of marketing genius. Evil genius, yes, but impressive nonetheless.

The new Citi “Simplicity” card has one extra clause in the credit agreement: no late fees, as long as you spend more money in the month when the fees would be assessed. Oh, the cold, calculated evil.

Lose the bill on your desk, forget to make a payment by the due date, and suddenly you’re faced with a late fee of up to $39. Unless…you spend more money. And then maybe the next month you can’t quite find the monthly payment, plus a month’s interest on the full balance—so why not skip a payment spend more money instead?

And as soon as you do that, they start increasing your APR. After all, you defaulted on a monthly payment, so as per the agreement they’re entitled to increase your APR up to 30.74%, rather than the usual 0-9%.

Basically, this one simple gimmick means that you can keep spending pretty much without consequence until you hit your credit limit. And boy, are you screwed then! No more ways to avoid late fees, a sky-high interest rate, a balance you’ll probably never be able to pay off, and a terrible credit rating (because technically, you defaulted on those payments), so nobody else will take over the debt at a lower interest rate.

Citibank says it’s all about giving you “the treatment you deserve”. They also stress their “[t]ools for helping you keep a good credit history”—an option to change your billing date, e-mail alerts, and a handy automatic system to suck that minimum payment out of your bank account every month for the rest of your life. Now, isn’t that convenient?

Online forum SomethingAwful managed to raise $27,695 to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Then suddenly, PayPal locked the account.

When someone finally managed to contact PayPal, they were informed that PayPal has an exclusive contract with United Way—and that United Way’s contract would not allow PayPal funds to be transferred to the Red Cross.

Yup: United Way and PayPal would rather block $27k in relief funds, than allow the money to go to the Red Cross. So the money had to be refunded.

A lot of people are blaming PayPal for this. They certainly deserve a big chunk of blame; but really, what kind of charity makes you sign contracts saying you won’t let people donate to competing charities? Can you imagine if your bank bounced a check because they had signed a United Way contract and you were trying to give to the Red Cross?

Please, I beg you: do not donate through United Way or PayPal. If you want to donate to charity, send the money directly to The Red Cross.

The United Way also fund bigotry—they give funds to organizations which practice deliberate discrimination on the basis of religion and sexuality. If your local United Way has a non-discrimination statement, don’t believe it—at least one regional United Way has continued to fund organizations that don’t comply with their written policy. You need to specifically check what organizations your chosen United Way is funding; for example, Austin’s United Way no longer funds the Boy Scouts as of July 2005—but in Ohio, the BSA is still getting money. It looks as if United Way regional groups cutting off the BSA Are the exception rather than the rule—even in Vermont some are still funding the BSA.

I’m all for religious freedom, but if you want to teach kids about your god, be honest about it and send them to your church. And don’t expect me to pay for it, and don’t try to con or force other people to pay for it.

To me, having to read through a list of grand recipients seems like a lot of hassle when you could give to a charity that focuses purely on funding things that are actually important, like feeding the starving, rather than one that may siphon off money to teach kids not to be gay and indoctrinate them to believe in Jesus. You can also check sites like Charity Navigator for advice on which charities use the funds effectively, and which ones waste them on overheads and fat executive paychecks. (Hello, American Cancer Society.)

The Boy Scouts of America are a pretty sleazy organization all round. Not only was their director arrested for collecting kiddy porn, they also lied about their minority membership to try and get more money from United Way, and the FBI is investigating whether they might have made up names to boost their membership. Many local BSA groups also lie that they will not discriminate in the hope of getting funding.

When we arrived in Austin at the end of October, we didn’t expect major problems finding a house. During our visit in April we had spent an afternoon with a real estate agent, and had seen a number of suitable houses.

Sure enough, the first day we went house hunting, sara walked into a place and immediately thought “This is it.” We went back when I had finished work, and I agreed.

It was in Bouldin Creek, part of South Austin, more specifically Travis Heights. It was a newly-built house, extremely energy efficient, with zoned HVAC, high-e windows, the works.

As far as style, the house wouldn’t have looked out of place in New England—constructed with fiber-cement siding to look like wood, with decks front and back.

We put in an offer in November, and it was accepted. We thought we’d be moved in by Christmas…

Being cautious, we arranged for a full independent inspection of the house. Many people don’t bother to get new houses inspected; many people are idiots. Mold is a big problem in Texas, as it is in England, because of the damp and mild climate. Our realtor recommended a local inspector who does a particularly thorough job. Sure enough, there were a number of interesting things about the house.

First off, the foundation was pier and beam. Not unusual, given that the house is in the South Austin hills, but usually the wooden joists of the house rest on metal plates, which spread the load to the concrete blocks of the piers. Plates are added and removed as appropriate to level out the house.

The contractors putting together this house had invented a shortcut. Instead of metal plates, they had hammered in some small wooden shims. As a result, the load was concentrated into a tiny area instead of being spread, and the concrete posts were starting to crack.

They had also not quite put in enough ventilation for the space under the house. In fact, it looked as if they had almost forgotten the whole house part in their excitement at building the foundation walls, as in one place they had forgotten to leave a gap for a beam and had just knocked out a hole with a sledgehammer after the fact, and then filled around the beam afterwards.

The decks were a problem too. They had been built with no gaps between the wooden slats. Seems superficially like a good idea, as you can’t drop stuff between the gaps and lose it. Unfortunately, it also means that water can’t drain from the deck, and gradually pools up. Then the wood starts to absorb the water, and the space under the deck becomes moist, a breeding ground for mold. Finally, the wood rots away, and you have to do major repair work.

My favorite cock-up was the bathroom venting. The way it’s supposed to work is the bathroom vent connects to a duct, which goes up into the attic and emerges via a vent near the top of the roof. That had been too much work for the contractors; they had run a duct across instead, to the soffit vents. Hence the moist air would immediately be sucked back up into the attic.

The good news was that the problems were fixable. We got an estimate from a builder our agent recommended, and put in a revised offer—we’d buy the house if the seller would pay our choice of builder to fix the problems. We wanted the work done by our choice of builder to ensure that The O’Reilly Men wouldn’t be hired to fix the problems they caused in the first place.

[Our builder has found a neat way to fix the decks, too. Rather than rip them off and rebuild them, the plan is to use an industrial covering material to put a single-piece waterproof surface on them. No holes for things to fall into, rain will just drain off, and the result should be more durable than a properly-constructed conventional deck. The downside is that it’s expensive, but it’s cheaper than major structural work, and the final result can be colored to match what the wooden deck looked like.]

So once again everything was agreed. We thought we’d be moving in in January.

Then came the next problem. It turned out that the house and its neighbor to the west had originally been part of one large lot. They shared a separate two-car garage, subdivided into two single garages. Unfortunately, when the builders divided up the original lot, they ran the property line across the corner of the garage.

Our neighbors-to-be had discovered this and weren’t happy about it. The city of Austin wasn’t happy about it either, and had refused to issue a certificate of occupancy for the houses. The neighbors-to-be got someone to draw up a revised plan which changed the property lines to skirt around the outside of the garage. The garage would be entirely on next door’s lot, and an easement agreement would be drawn up to give us perpetual usage of half of the garage for a nominal $10 fee to make the contract legally binding.

Unfortunately, the revised property lines needed to be approved by the city’s property zoning people at their next monthly meeting. In the mean time, our mortgage deal fell through, so we started that process again. Fortunately we’d elected to work via a mortgage agent, so he handled all the re-submitting of application forms and documents. We expected to be moving in by the end of February.

Unfortunately, there was a snag. When the city reviewed the redrawn lots, they rejected the changes because the diagram was missing some essential information. The whole thing had to be sent back to be re-drawn and then re-submitted for the next month’s review meeting.

That was done, and things looked like they were falling into place. We had sorted out the financing, we’d checked the easement agreement was OK, the price and terms were agreed, and the money was ready to go.

It was about then that we discovered the IRS had recategorized my UK flat as a speculative business investment, rather than our only real estate property. There was a rather spectacular tax bill due. Massachusetts wanted a big chunk of cash too. The good news was that we had the money to cover it by April’s deadline. The bad news was that it was the money we were planning to use for furniture and appliances…Oh well, c’est la vie.

The city approved the change to the property lines, and we still expected to move in some time in March. Then our new neighbor asked a lawyer to check over the easement agreement, and the lawyer went nuts. He put in clauses saying that nobody could ever park in front of the garage, even temporarily; that we couldn’t keep housepaint in the garage; and that I couldn’t repair my bike in there either. There was also stuff about not being allowed to play musical instruments in the garage, not that I cared about that; but for good measure, he added a clause saying that no such restrictions applied to next door.

My objection was pretty simple: the agreement said we would split the maintenance costs for the garage 50/50. If we were going to split the costs equally, we should have equal use of our respective halves of the garage. I shot off an e-mail last week. The good news was that everyone agreed the lawyer had been a touch overzealous, it was perfectly reasonable to store a couple of cans of paint in the garage, I could clean and repair my bike if I wanted to, and if people wanted to visit us and park in the driveway that was fine so long as the car was on wheels, rather than on bricks. This was written into a revised contract (yes, even the bit about cars on bricks not being allowed), and everything looked like it would happen some time next week.

On Friday I was out getting some photocopying and faxing done, arranging for the bank to wire the money to the escrow agent, when I got a call from our realtor.

It turned out that the bank who had offered us our mortgage deal was getting pissy. In the last few days, oil prices had hit the US economy, and interest rates had jumped up 0.75%. The bank said if we didn’t complete the transaction that day, our interest rate would be raised 0.5%. In fact, to get that concession our mortgage broker had had to scramble around and contact senior management at the bank and explain the reason for all the delays.

So I finished my faxing and collected sara, and we drove over to the land and title company immediately. We spent a couple of hours reading and signing a couple of dozen pieces of paper. Technically, we completed the transaction “pending funding”—instructions may have been sent to my bank in Boston, by fax and now by FedEx as well, but they won’t act on them until Monday. However, since the money is sitting in my account, cleared and ready to go, I have confidence that I can get my bank to deliver the funds Monday, so we went ahead and signed accordingly.

As for the repair work, that’s starting this weekend, hopefully. The builder says we can go ahead and start moving in. The seller is going to cut a couple of checks and give them to us, one will be given to the builder up front, we’ll hand him the second one when we’re satisfied with the work done. The reason for that arrangement? Well, we’re not the only ones hurting from the delays—the builder found himself sitting on two houses, unable to sell them for almost a year, and for cashflow reasons needed to rely on the proceeds from the sale to fund the repairs. Something of a leap of faith by us, but it’s not going to keep me awake at nights.

I’m the kind of person who reads documents before signing them. There was one exception: the “meat” of the agreement is a 25 page nightmare mandated by Texas state law. Since we didn’t really have any say in what that one said, I just signed it. I have mixed feelings about that—on the one hand, I wonder if a non-state-mandated document might have been readable. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been state mandated and had been (say) 20 pages, I would have had to read it.

The seller’s agent thanked us for our patience. Both realtors agreed that it had been the most protracted delay in closing they had seen in about 35 years of combined experience. Our neighbor-to-be arrived and signed the easement agreement. Everyone seemed relieved that it was finally over.

So it all comes down to this:

After four months of delays, we bought the house we wanted. It’s actually purchased, in a legal sense.

The original contractors, who cocked everything up? They were all fired.

Hopefully we’ll pick up keys to the house on Monday when the deal is funded; then we need to sort out getting our stuff out of storage, and work out who we can bribe to help us unload our worldly possessions.

So, it’s the end of 2004, and once again my life has changed in major ways. In less than a year I’ve:

• sold my flat in the UK,
• learned to drive,
• packed up my worldly possessions and put them in storage,
• bought a car,
• gone on a road trip half way across America,
• moved to Texas, and
• made an offer on a house.

The house thing is still stalled, however. Right now the critical path bottleneck is that the people buying the house next door feel that they need to get the property lines re-drawn. The way things were built, the property line ran across one corner of the shared garage, which meant that we would also have property rights over it. The neighbors aren’t happy with this; they want to have the entire garage on their property, and have us use it via an easement.

That’s fine by me; it’ll mean they have to deal with maintenance, and there’s parking out the front of the house if necessary. However, it should obviously impact the price of the property, so our bid is effectively stalled until we can at least see what we’re now buying.

On a more positive note, I sent off affidavits and documentation to two of the credit reference agencies, the collection agency, and the LA police department. Sure, you can try and talk to collection agencies and Trans Union by phone, fill out forms, and so on—but I wasn’t in the mood to screw around. Instead, I got a sample legal affidavit from the FTC web site, wrote everything up in exhaustive detail, attached insurance documents and other info proving I was nowhere near LA ever, signed it with a witness, and sent copies off in a big envelope. As a result, the collection agency has agreed that the guy in LA who used my name to run up a $5,000 phone bill wasn’t actually me. They say they’ve asked the credit agencies to remove all the bad stuff from my credit reports.

Hopefully that’ll make the bank happier. The latest from them is that they are suspicious that I’m buying the house as a vacation property or an investment, and don’t believe I’m really living in Texas. That’s a response I’ve had from a quite a few people now. I’ve sent a photocopy of my Texas driver’s license and the HMO card that proves that even IBM knows I’m living in Texas.

Minnesota was bitterly cold, very flat, and covered in snow—just the way my beloved spouse likes it. Today in Austin, on the other hand, it’s up around 25 celsius, warm and sunny T-shirt weather.

What with car repairs, a new Palm, air fares and Christmas shopping, December was a bit of a financial disaster. Since we’re planning on going to the UK for my cousin’s wedding in the spring, it’s time for some austerity. Fortunately, you can go out and get breakfast for two for $10 in Austin, so austerity doesn’t necessarily mean misery. Still, if anyone has a spare McArthur Genius Grant or something, I’d be very happy to transition to being an independently wealthy author of free GPL software and documentation. In the mean time, a visit to the Skunk Show gets put off for another year.

I’m off to Vegas again in January, another IBM conference. I’m working a pedestal and helping at the info booths, which means long hours and not much opportunity for expensive vices. Plus, my only real vice is Krispy Kreme. There’s one of those located in the Venetian, allegedly the hotel I’m staying at.

Work is…well, the project I’ve been working on is now being transitioned to an officially supported server run by IBM Global Services. If you’ve worked with IGS as a customer, you can probably imagine what it’s like to work with them when you have no choice and they can set whatever price and define whatever working practices they like.

People often wonder if they should turn their computer off, or leave it on but put it into “sleep mode”. I decided to do some analysis a while back, here are the results.

If you look up the specs, a Sawtooth Power Mac G4 in deep sleep uses about 4 watts of electricity. In MA you pay $0.04823 per kWh, so it costs 4 / 1000 kW * 24 hours * 365 days * $0.04823 = $1.68 per year to leave a Mac sleeping instead of turning it off. So, it’s not going to break the bank.

Heat-wise, conservation of energy tells us that no more than 4W of heat is being emitted by the machine. Compare that to the average human body, which radiates 50-100W (estimates vary, Google if you feel the need to check). So, the G4 isn’t going to heat up the room significantly when it’s asleep either.

What about the environment? Well, let’s assume the worst possible case, that your electricity is all coal-generated. That means emissions are around 0.43kg per kWh of electricity used by the consumer. So in a year of sleep, your Mac would cause the emission of 15kg of CO2. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Well, according to space research you produce 1kg of CO2 per day by breathing, or a massive 365kg per year. So the Mac is 20x better for the environment when asleep than you are.

What about the hardware? Well, in deep sleep almost all the hardware is powered down exactly as if the machine was turned off. The hard drive, which is the piece most likely to wear out, is powered down. The CPU and RAM are incredibly unlikely to wear out even if you run them 24×7 for the next ten years, at which point the machine will be so obsolete it’s worthless. So turning the Mac off won’t make it last any longer or protect your ‘investment’.

So, I conclude that there is absolutely no economic or environmental need to turn your Mac off. If you have a UPS, you may as well leave the Mac asleep when you’re not using it.

Of course, if your computer is a PC which doesn’t have an Energy Star “deep sleep” mode, the above calculation may be off by a factor of 10 or more. However, most PCs are now Energy Star.

My Prius arrived! Three days ahead of the most optimistic estimate! Now it’s purchased, time to tell the whole story…

I started the search on September 16th. Calling the local Massachusetts Toyota dealers quickly established that they all had ridiculous wait lists; the best wait time I was quoted was a year. However, the situation wasn’t completely hopeless—according to the online forums like priusonline.com and priuschat.com, dealers often get cars that are a color or a package that nobody on their wait list wants, or nobody on the list who wants the car can get financed at that particular moment in time.

Because we wanted the high end package with the GPS navigation system, I had a hunch that the legendary thriftiness of New Hampshire residents would make it a promising place to hunt for unwanted Priuses, not to mention that you can’t fit a gun rack on one. Another point in our favor was that we weren’t too fussy about color—we’d take silver, gold, green, red, maybe even black. So, I started checking every single New Hampshire Toyota dealer that had a web site, searching their inventory, and calling or e-mailing all the ones that actually had a 2004 Prius listed.

Almost the first response was from Autofair Toyota in Manchester, NH. They called me back about half an hour after I sent an e-mail. They said that the 2004 Prius they had on the lot was being shopped to their wait list, and that someone would likely take it even though none of them had said they wanted the BC package. However, they were expecting two more BC package cars in October, and could put my name down for one of them. The incoming cars would be brand new 2005 models, and they expected them to be at the dealership around October 10th-14th. Price would be MSRP—no special markup.

I should explain that unfortunately, a lot of dealers are taking advantage of the constrained supply of vehicles by adding $3,000-$5,000 to the price. Since the MSRP already includes a healthy profit, and the dealers get a bonus from Toyota for selling the cars immediately, people on the Prius forums have been rather scathing about the practice. I have no real ethical problem with pricing up—after all, it’s just supply and demand—but I had already decided I would rather buy a second hand temporary car than pay over MSRP.

The Autofair sales associate told me up front what the total price would be, including their processing and admin charge—a mere $121, whereas I’ve been quoted up to $500 elsewhere.

I explained up front that I wanted to continue to look for a car actually available, and they said all they wanted was a $100 deposit, which would be fully refundable if I managed to get a car somewhere else first. Again, other dealers are asking for $1,000 deposits, and some are even demanding non-refundable deposits. Autofair seemed completely reasonable and up-front about everything, so I agreed.

There then followed a couple of weeks of anxiousness about whether the car would actually turn up in time for our move to Austin, TX. During that time I believe I checked every single Toyota dealer web site for Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, plus I e-mailed and called a few places that didn’t even have web sites.

As of this morning, I still had no lead on an actual Prius available any time before the last week of October. And then Autofair called. My car had arrived.

Of course, it’s not as simple as it ought to be. Massachusetts makes the whole process as difficult as possible, in an apparent attempt to stop people buying cars in New Hampshire and dodging tax, or not getting insurance. Since I didn’t manage to find a description of the process anywhere, even on the RMV web site, here we go…

I have to:

1. Get the money from the bank as a bank draft.
2. Go to New Hampshire, exchange the money for the certificate of origin and an RMV-1 form. Don’t collect the car, because Massachusetts doesn’t allow any kind of temporary plates, and has no grace period for vehicle registration.
3. Return to Massachusetts and physically go to a state-authorized Massachusetts insurance agency, certificate of origin and RMV-1 form in hand. Then I bend over and take it, and get the RMV-1 form stamped to say I now have insurance.
4. Take the stamped RMV-1 form and bill of sale to the Registry of Motor Vehicles in downtown Boston, pay tax on the car, and exchange the form for a Massachusetts license plate. (Hopefully the USPS will successfully redirect our mail, ’cause we probably won’t be here by the time the title deed arrives 4 to 8 weeks later.)
5. Take the license plate back to New Hampshire, and pick up the car.

Not that I had any intention of committing any kind of tax fraud; the only question was whether I could wait and register in Texas rather than go through the paperwork twice. In fact, MA is cheaper than TX, so I suppose I’m winning, but…

One added wrinkle is that the certificate of origin is transported separately from the actual car, and hadn’t arrived today, so they’re going to FedEx it to me. In the mean time, I can read the user manual. The car itself had only just been removed from the car carrier; they obviously called the moment it came in. Its audio system hadn’t been connected up and tested yet, it hadn’t been fueled, and there was still plastic film on the wheels. But, I did get to sit in it. Very nice, extremely ergonomic driving position. The sales guy seemed as excited as us.

Once we get to Austin, I have to get new insurance from a non-Massachusetts agency, because the MA agency don’t deal in out-of-state insurance. The new agency has to fax the Massachusetts one to say I’m insured with them, and then my MA policy can be cancelled. Only then can I get my MA license switched for a TX license; apparently if you switch the license before switching the insurance the police computer will flag you as uninsured.

We also went for the Toyota Platinum Warranty: 24/7 roadside assistance to the nearest Prius-trained Toyota dealer, and they’ll pay for a replacement rental car while they fix the Prius. I got the 6 years of extra coverage from Autofair, because the price they quoted me wasn’t much more than the ultra-cheap price I’d seen on the Internet, and I was obviously feeling very well disposed towards them!

So anyway…Prius! Prius! Prius!

I logged in and checked my bank balance this morning. The money from the apartment sale was there. I stared blankly at it for a while, then stared blankly at a bunch of other stuff. I’m not used to dealing with amounts of money that size, and my brain decided to go crawl into a corner for a while and pretend nothing had happened.

About half an hour later, the bank called. I had gotten their attention. They said they were never going to charge me fees for online bill payment ever again, and in fact they were going to refund this months fee, and had I considered a savings account?

Anyway… we’ve filled around 20 boxes with stuff. Somehow books take up a lot more space when they’re in boxes than when they’re on shelves. We picked up another 20 boxes this lunchtime.

I called a half dozen nearby Toyota dealers. None of them actually laughed, but the shortest delivery time any of them could offer was 12 months from now. They conceded that there was a remote possibility that they’d get a Prius that was a package or color nobody on their wait lists wanted, so I left our phone number just in case.

Next I trawled a few web sites. There are Priuses available right now, but they are in places like North Dakota and Washington State. I understand that one can get a car shipped across the country for a fee, but the idea of buying a car sight unseen from some dealer a few thousand miles away scares me more than…well, more than the idea of buying a car does in the first place. Come to think of it, there’s all sorts of stuff involved that I really have no idea about, like titles and taxes. Anyone have any experience at this kind of thing?

Also, what should car insurance cost in Masschusetts?