As first-time homeowners, we watch more than our share of DIY Network / HGTV / buying and selling home shows. My wife and I work as a team: she concentrates on making home improvements, and I’m concerned with making sure things don’t fall apart. I also worry sometimes that any project we undertake might be a waste of money, or at least, not realize the return that some people promise.

I’m sort of haunted by this phrase that shows up in a commercial for DIY Network’s show “Sweat Equity”, where the host Amy Matthews is heard to say, “You’ll get two dollars back for every dollar you spend.” That might have been true when she said it, depending on which project she was talking about in the specific real estate climate she was in at the time. I asked my parents, who have dozens of years of real estate experience between them, and my father, who is as scientifically-minded as I am, found me a good resource:

Remodeling Online has a “Cost vs. Value Report” that analyzes the average cost of 29 common projects one might undertake to increase the resale value of a home – if not the resale value, at least the likelihood that someone will buy it.

What’s more, they have specific information for different regions of the country, even down to the City level in some cases. Where we live, for example, remodeling the bathroom will recoup 90.9% of what it cost us, when the national average is 78.3%. But none of the projects listed indicate a cost recoupment of over 100%, nationally or regionally, so we’ll probably never get even one dollar back for every dollar we spend. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop making improvements. It just means that the main reason to make home improvements is for the sanity of the current owners. I’m okay with that.

(Here’s a direct link to where the average numbers come from, as well as complete descriptions for each project analyzed.)

Update: Justin points out in the comments (below) that my comparison isn’t quite fair, since in the Sweat Equity scenario, you’d be doing all the work yourself. The Cost vs. Value table assumes that you’re paying full price for labor, so there’s bound to be some percentage that you’d be saving / recouping by doing it yourself.

A few years ago, when I started paying attention to my diet, I found that drinking at least a liter of water a day kept my brain functioning better, and in the case of two liters a day, kept me from gaining weight. Where I was living, the tap water was unpalatable, so I made a habit of stopping at the Kwik-E-Mart and buying some bottled water for the road trip and the rest of my morning.

I’ve been a fan of recycling since I was a child, so none of my bottles ever got thrown away, but they hardly ever saw a second use. What I didn’t realize (and please forgive my lateness in arriving to this party) was how many of the Earth’s natural resources went into making, filling and then shipping each bottle so that I can buy it in the morning. Let me sum up: a lot.

Some alarming statistics from Wikipedia:

• The Pacific Institute estimates that producing the bottles for American consumption in 2006 required the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil.
• Once the bottle is created and filled with water, large amounts of fossil fuel are expended delivering the water from its source to end user by means of ground transportation.
• If a container holds 1 litre it requires 3 to 5 litres of water in its manufacturing process

When people hear “petroleum,” we think “I use gas in my car”, but food costs and petroleum prices are so tightly knit. I am embarrassed that I never realized that before. If only to help reduce our dependency on oil (foreign or otherwise), I have stopped drinking bottled water.

My wife and I finally hooked up the water line to our refrigerator, which has a filter and a water dispenser (it was not an expensive refrigerator), and I started looking for a resuable mug for my water. I wanted something that could fit a liter, but I settled for the 32 oz. Eddie Bauer model in the picture over on the side. I found it at Target on one of our increasingly-consolidated shopping trips.

The mug cost about $16. The water line was at Lowe’s for $7. I imagine our water utility bill will be higher than it was, but annually, I bet I’ll still be saving money over $1.09 / day. More importantly, I’m helping reduce our need for oil. Please consider joining me in this effort.

In about 6.5 months, I will be free of credit card debt for the first time since 1998. Much like Inigo Montoya and the “Revenge Business”, now that it’s over, I don’a know what to do with the rest of my life.

Readers of Consumerism Commentary have proven their wisdom many times over, so I’d like to take that into consideration. Please visit my YayBoo page on the subject and help me prioritize my next steps.

Or, you should be able to use the widget below:

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NPR syndicates a show called “Marketplace” all over the country (and online, of course). I like to listen to the Morning Report while driving to work. The show does a great job of explaining current economic stories without a lot of technical explanations and acronyms.

I found a game on the Web site called “Budget Hero” which simulates the different factors that go into saving, or destroying, America’s national budget.

There’s some debate about whether the gameplay is faulty or based on incorrect premises. I definitely recommend you don’t “skip the briefing” before playing. Here are some illustrative comments from people who have played the game:

I am a Scottish citizen aged 13 and i can control America’s Budget better than the Bush White House. By M L, From Aberdeen, 07/25/2008

Interesting, but based on a flawed premise. Everone should read “Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete” to get a look into the mindset of the Federal Reserve, which is neither federal (not a Gov’t. agency) nor a reserve … By Art Northrup, Jr., From NC, 06/18/2008

I wish the people, especially the local candidates, we will be voting for this fall would take this test. Then I’d have an clearer idea of their beliefs. By cj r, From FL, 06/13/2008

Have you played the game? How did you do? Do you agree that it’s flawed?

It’s barely been a month since the iPhone update which allows people to download applications written by 3rd-party developers, and there are already more than 1,000 to choose from. Here are a few of the more promising entries in the field of Personal Finance:

Loan Shark

(Web | iTunes)

It’s unreasonable to expect that a person, when presented with a loan offer, can glance at the numbers and determine whether the salesperson is trying to rip them off. If it hadn’t happened to a friend of mine, I might’ve chalked this scenario up to simple paranoia, but it does happen. Thankfully, what with the Internet empowering us all, it happens less and less.

If all you’re looking to do is check the math on a loan offer, there are other ways to go about it. For example, you could point your mobile browser to CalcNexus’s Auto Loan Calculator and get an answer pretty quickly. The major advantage to the Loan Shark iPhone app is that it saves loan details to a Favorites screen so you can compare offers from different banks.

It also shows amortization tables and works as well for credit cards and home loans. For my money, in this case US$4.99, that’s a lot more convenient than carrying around a notepad and a pen.

Save Benjis

(Web | iTunes)

At some point (for me this happens weekly), you’ve been in a store, looking at something you probably want to buy, and you thought to yourself, “I could get this cheaper somewhere else.” Save Benjis answers your doubts for you in a matter of seconds. Best of all, it’s free, so you have nothing to lose if you want to give it a try.

Pick & Choose – Groceries

(Web | iTunes)

“Okay, I’m at Target. What was that other thing I needed to buy?” The analog lifestyle solution to this conundrum was always to keep a shopping list on the fridge and take it with you. But more often than not, I’m coming straight from work, or I forgot the list at home.

You may have noticed by now that I have a sort of contempt for paper records. Anyway…

This app has a built-in database of over 1,500 grocery items, so you barely need to type anything. In fact, I think I’m going to buy this app right now.

I recently sold a number of possessions in my year-long quest to vanquish my credit card debt as quickly as possible. Before this, I had very limited experience using online selling tools, and generally thought of them all as a hassle, so I thought I would try more than one and see how they stacked up. Your experiences may differ, along with your selling requirements, but here’s what I found:

Craigslist

I’m fortunate enough to live in a city with a Craigslist presence (check to see if your hometown is on the list), and I had something that I really didn’t want to bother trying to ship: Guitar Hero III for the Nintento Wii. Craigslist, if you haven’t heard of it, is sort of like a city-wide distributed garage sale. You describe what you have using a free-form text entry field, pictures optional, prices optional, limited only by your imagination.

I said that I had Guitar Hero III for sale, found some Creative Commons photos on Flickr, asked for $50, and that was all there was to it. Within a couple of hours I had two offers. The first person haggled with me and asked if $40 would be okay. So I found a Starbucks that was easy for both of us to get to and met her that evening. If I’d waited a little longer, I could have gotten $50 for it from the second person. Lesson learned.

eBay

I had a number of DVD box sets of a favorite TV show that I wanted to unload (while keeping a soft copy of the better episodes on an external hard drive at home). It was easy enough to copy the details of each episode from a wiki to the “Sell item” page on eBay, and after a few repetitions I found it was even possible to find the vital stats with a database that eBay provided.

There are, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of options for how to sell an item on eBay. I sort of wish there was an “eBay lite” option, or better wizard that stepped me through the process. Also, it tended to break when I used the Safari browser at home. I had to remember to use Firefox.

But my biggest problem with eBay was not really eBay’s fault: they wanted me to estimate shipping costs. The thing is, I don’t own a scale, and I can’t hold something in my hand and say, “yep, that’s about six pounds.”

In general, it seemed to me that eBay is geared toward professional sellers.

Amazon Seller Account

One-click patent silliness notwithstanding, I like Amazon because it is easy. Even without 1-Click, it’s easy. And that ease of use has expanded to their options for selling things online, in my case it was a used video camera.

All I did was find the right model camera by acting as if I was looking to buy one and click a button labeled “Sell yours here”. Specify the condition (new, used, etc.), add comments, pick a price and that’s about it. You get to benefit automatically from any pictures, customer reviews, or any other information that Amazon is already storing about that product.

Amazon also did a good job of estimating the shipping cost for me. The drawback I experienced using Amazon was that I had to wait. This will vary from product to product, of course.

Conclusion

With both Amazon and eBay, there’s something of a process to setting up an account and getting paid. Craiglist is a lot more free-form in that respect. If I was in a real rush, I’d probably use Craigslist again, but for the most part, I prefer Amazon’s way of selling things. I hardly had to lift a finger.

I really enjoy good “data visualization”, which is a fancy, but more succinct way of saying “a way to look at information as more than just numbers.”

Last year, before most of us were aware of the “mortgage crisis,” some enterprising individual took a list of average housing prices in the United States since 1890, adjusted them for inflation, and then plotted them as if they were altitudes on a roller coaster ride. Watch the video, and you won’t be so surprised why the housing market took a downturn:

For the purposes of this article, the term “iPhone” includes “iPod Touch”, and I’m assuming that your operating systems are up to date.

Along with new firmware for existing iPhone owners, and the new iPhone 3G itself, Apple is releasing this week a new service called “MobileMe”, succinctly described as “Exchange for the rest of us.” In short, it automatically syncs your contacts, calendar, e-mail and photos between your home computer and/or work computer and/or iPhone. It stores these items in a 20 GB cloud of data and is smart enough to push updates to you from any of these categories, wherever you are, as long as you have an Internet connection or cell phone signal.

It sounds wonderful. Unfortunately, it costs $99 (US) a year for one person or $149 for a Family Pack. Calendars and contacts don’t take up much hard drive space, but between e-mail attachments and photos, it wouldn’t be that hard to bump up against the 20 GB ceiling, and it’s $49 for another 20 GB (or $99 for another 40 GB). As of this writing, a 500 GB hard drive goes for around $100. I will admit that managed data storage should be more expensive than buying yourself a hard drive, but twelve times as expensive?

I think we should hold off on signing up for MobileMe for a little while, because if the goal is automatic syncing of your contacts, calendar, e-mail and photos, I predict Google and Yahoo! are going to make this possible for free (and probably with “unlimited” data storage) in the near future. Taking each one in turn:

E-mail

If you use GMail (and I believe everybody should, even if your e-mail address is at a different domain), your e-mail is already syncing with GMail on your iPhone. Having it automatically pushed to your phone isn’t happening, yet, but it will be possible for all applications to take advantage of the “cloud computing” scenario that Apple designed for the iPhone. Do you suspect that Google won’t make a GMail app for the iPhone with push e-mail?

Contacts

With the update to OS X 10.5.3, you can already sync your contacts between your iCal (and by extension, the iPhone) and Google. See previous comment about future push scenarios, but for the time being, it would be a weird kind of emergency needed to make a lack of push technology a serious problem in this arena.

Calendar

I actually originate my calendar with Google Calendar, and subscribe to it in iCal, and by extension, my iPhone. See previous comment about future push scenarios, but Google already has a nicely iPhone-formatted version of the Calendar that loads in the Web browser.

Photos

This is probably the first thing that made me second-guess my temptation to subscribe to MobileMe, mainly because I love my Flickr account. It’s got a long history, and all my friends are there, etc. I can already e-mail photos from my iPhone to Flickr using a customized e-mail address, so that could hardly be simpler. Even so, it appears that Flickr has every intention of making their site as friendly as possible for the iPhone.

Now, I’m merely speculating that Google will come out with native iPhone apps that mimic most of the functionality of MobileMe, but look at Google’s track record. They try everything, and succeed at most of them. My plan as described may not be as elegant as a MobileMe account, but I think it’ll be just as easy, and it’ll cost 100% less.

This is only a prediction. Don’t blame me if I’m wrong. But unless you know something I don’t about Google’s plans, it’d still be smart to wait a month or so and see what they have to offer.