Bigfoot | Domesticus

Texas Teresa with husband Chester and a few of the grandkids

I guess it’s not so surprising, really. There are lots of Teresas now. (When I was growing up in the ’60s, when everything was funky and groovy, they were all turned into Terrys or Teris or Terries, which I thought was ratty.) There are a fair number of Meeks, too. So why shouldn’t there be another woman about my age with my name, spelled the same way–Teresa with no h and Meek with no s on the end?

There’s only one of me, Bigfoot has spent a lifetime telling people who try to call him Meeks. But in a way, that’s not true. There are two of us in this household alone.

And more in Texas, where the other Teresa Meek lives.

One Teresa Meek in Palestine, Texas and another in Kauai, Hawaii. What are the chances we would ever meet? Probably zero, before the Internet Age.

It was Yahoo that brought us together. A glitch in the system somehow allowed us both to use the same email address. We never got mail from each other, but we both started getting mail from people trying to email us.

I was selling Hawaii real estate, and the Texas Teresa started getting listing brochures and questions from my clients. She was selling Avon, and some of her valued customers doubtless ended up in my junk mail. I had no idea anything was amiss, but it went on for several weeks, and it happened at a time when Bigfoot and I were planning a trip to all the places in the Hawaiian Islands that we hadn’t yet seen before we embarked on our big move to Seattle.

Hotel reservation confirmations from all over Hawaii started pouring in–to the other Teresa. Boat tours, rental car receipts, plane tickets. Not to mention all the luxury home photos for my real estate business. I must have appeared quite the jet-setter. My name and photo were all over the internet, as they are for all realtors, and so was my phone number.

And one day I got a most unusual call. A lady with a deep Texas twang. She was hesitant, surprised that someone as busy as she thought I was answered her own phone.

As she talked to me in her soft, polite southern tones, I tried to stay calm, but I couldn’t believe the emails she was getting. I didn’t see how it could happen. Then, the truth suddenly struck both of us, but my mind still balked. The same email address?! How is that even possible?

It shouldn’t be, but it had happened.

I don’t remember how that first conversation ended, but I was stunned. And the more I thought about it, the worse it got.

The other Teresa had been using the address for years when Yahoo somehow allowed me to sign up for it. I signed up because I needed a web-based account to do business from the mainland. I had already sent out several batch emails to make sure all my 1000-+ clients knew about it and nobody would try to contact me at my old Hawaii email address, which wouldn’t function after I left. Now what? I started to panic.

Contacting Yahoo proved useless. Not only do they have no phone support, they don’t really offer online help either, unless you call referring people to a forum help. Nobody in the forum seemed to have a problem like mine. I was on my own.

There was only one solution I could see: I had to try to buy the address from the other Teresa.

It was rightfully hers–she’d had it for years. Any change should be paid for by me. But she used the address for her customers too. Why would she give it up just because Yahoo screwed up and gave it to some realtor in Hawaii?

I wondered what I should offer. The address meant a great deal to me, but we’d shot a lot of our wad on our farewell tour and moving expenses.

I dialled the Texas number with a base offer in mind, figuring we would bargain, like in real estate.

But there was no counteroffer. My offer to buy the address was flat-out rejected.

Instead, she gave it to me for free. Insisted on it. Wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Have you ever tried to argue with a Texan offering hospitality? That’s when their longhorns come out. No use trying to wrassle with them, you won’t win.

I felt guilty. She had to change her address and notify all of her customers just as I had done, but I did it because I wanted to, and she was doing it because somebody–me–had hijacked her account.

I couldn’t repay her, but I did become an occasional Avon customer.

In the confusing months after the address change, she continued to get a few emails from my clients, and forwarded them on. We chatted on the phone and learned a little more about each other.

In addition to selling Avon, Teresa works fulltime at Walmart. Her husband Chester works at a Walmart warehouse. They’ve been with the company for over 20 years. They have a big extended family with grown kids and grandkids–lots of grandkids.

Once, around the time Facebook was getting into hot water about its use of photo tagging, one of the little grandbabies appeared on my Facebook page, up at the top, right under my own photo. So did a Google Sketch of Teresa’s house. To the many Facebook “friends” who don’t know me, I was a young mother with a cozy home in Texas.

Eventually, the other Teresa and I became Facebook friends ourselves. Now I get to see all the cute grandkid pictures. She sees Bigfoot’s photos of Puget Sound.

Though more than three years have passed, our relationship probably would have remained on Facebook had not fate intervened again in the form of an Alaskan cruise Teresa and her husband saved up for and were finally ready to take.

It left out of Seattle.

Of course, we had to meet. Teresa and Chester would have a two-day stay in the city after the cruise and before their flight back to Texas. She called me and asked about hotels near the port.

Cruise ship, hotels? I was preoccupied with finishing the final phase of a year-long technical writing and editing program at the University of Washington, and my mind initially drew a blank. I made a mental note to call her back, then forgot about it. By the time I did call back, they had already booked. In the meantime, I had talked to Bigfoot, and we had agreed they could stay in our guest room, but it was too late. At least their hotel was centrally located, unlike our house.

I graduated and started picking up more freelance work, but my schedule was now my own. Bigfoot and I would have at least one free day to spend with the other Meeks.

I realized that despite all the email exchanges and Facebook pictures, we really knew very little about each other. What would our time together be like? What would we do? Would we even get along?

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“Honey, I want to sell some naked puts.”

Naked?

If my husband Bigfoot wanted to do a little nude sunbathing on our enclosed, private patio: No problem.

If he got a wild hare to streak the local campus: I’d put it down to post-midlife crisis and file it away for future dementia monitoring.

But no, he wants to write an option to buy a stock if it falls below a certain price, hoping it doesn’t so that he can collect a premium. The financial newsletter he reads says it’s one of the safest bets you can make.

Bets. I already don’t like the sound of it, so I do a little research. Sounds pretty straightforward. Assuming there are no complications, which could lead to “potentially catastrophic losses,” according to Wikipedia.

Now that kind of exposure offends my moral sensibilities!

But what do I have to offer as a sensible alternative? No matter what we do with our savings, there’s no safe place anymore.

We’re not alone. If you own a 401k, you’re a gambler too.

Consider the alternatives.

I could trust a money manager and pay him a fee to do the same kind of things my husband wants to do.

Financial managers used to say, just hold onto a diversified mix of stocks and bonds and you’ll do well in the long run.

Now, after the Great Meltdown of 2008, many of them are out of business. They didn’t even survive to profit from the Great Meltup of 2009. Those who did are understandably skittish. They tend to take profits and leave the table sooner, leading to even more market volatility, and greater potential gains–or losses.

I could buy Treasury bonds, which used to be considered the ultimate safe haven. But how safe are they really, now that China, the big buyer who’s kept the market stable for the past 20 years, is making threatening noises about our debt? And you can see why: We now have $13 trillion in outstanding public debt, the Treasury Department says, or $43,000 for every man, woman, and child. Paid for by Treasury bonds owned by Chinese, Europeans, Americans, and everyone else who bought them, all expecting to be paid back with interest some day, because surely there’s no way the U.S. government will ever default on its debt.

Is there?

For the first time, ever since Greece defaulted, the question is being raised in some financial circles. Because the mind-boggling $13 trillion, bad as it is, is likely to keep growing. There may be more stimulus packages. There may be more wars. And there will definitely be more people on Medicare.

What if we just imploded, like Greece?

Actually, the mainstream business press says Greece is doing OK, at least for now. The Euro community decided it was too big to fail, so Germany bailed it out.

But I don’t know. Does this look OK to you?

Still, maybe Greece will manage to survive and stay in the European Union.

But what happens if you’re too big to fail and too big to bail out?

Just thinking about it makes my head ache, and anyway it seems like one of those remote, “fat tail” chances.

Just the same, I think I’ll pass on government debt as a safe investment.

What about gold, the investment standard that has held up through the ages? As the value of government debt and the dollars the indebted government creates fall, the value of gold rises.

Image courtesy of www.platinumgoldcoins.com, broker/dealer for precious metals

Value of the Dollar Relative to Gold, courtesy of Charles Vollum, http://pricedingoldlcom

I could buy gold coins and gold bars and put them … hmm, where could I put them? Under the mattress? What if a burglar steals them? In a safe deposit box? There are reports of things disappearing from them sometimes. Maybe I should bury gold in a hole in my back yard like a pirate and hope I don’t forget where I put it, like the old guy in Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates.

But gold bugs say the yard is too close. If you want gold or silver, you need to keep it abroad somewhere, out of the reach of long-armed Uncle Sam, who made owning it in this country illegal during the Great Depression. (We couldn’t have another one of those again. Could we?)

Gold and silver may be shining investments, but they are unwieldy and complicated. And the world market for them is much smaller than stocks and bonds, small enough that a few huge banks have the ability to corner and manipulate it to a large degree. Which is exactly what the gold bugs accuse them of doing.

I could put my money in an index fund. Now there’s a simple concept. Mutual funds that merely track an index, such as the Dow Jones, as a class actually perform better than those managed by experts. They’re said to be so simple, even a monkey could run one. (A Dilbert cartoon once featured a hedge fund run by carefully selected monkeys. Yes, their fees are higher… but high performance has its costs.)

Smart Monkey

But it’s still going to be a bumpy ride in an uncertain market. No matter what I do, my fortune and my savings – my retirement! — are tied to fast moving, volatile forces way beyond my control.

It’s like throwing your money into a hurricane.

How did we get into this mess?

Back in the olden days, most people didn’t have much in the way of savings, but they did have extended families and communities to depend on in their post-working years. Many had a vegetable garden, and maybe some chickens and a cow to help with the grocery bill.

Later, when more people were living in cities among strangers, companies had pension plans for those who were lucky enough to live past retirement, which many did not. But then health started to improve, and they did. Lots of them. Underfunded pension plans started going broke.

The government’s solution? ERISA, the 1974 law that took us all out of defined benefit pension plans and put us into defined contribution 401k’s.

Whole industries sprang up around the change. Enormous amounts of money were invested–into the hurricane. Some prospered, some got smashed to bits. It’s still going on.

Isn’t there a better way?

It seems like there should be. Maybe if the country didn’t borrow so much and have to worry about paying it all back with interest, we could go back to collecting our measly 1.2 percent on a savings account (Remember those?) and still be OK, because we wouldn’t have to worry about our savings eroding through inflation.

But I have to deal with today’s reality.

Should I let my husband try his naked put strategy?

The gains are uncertain, and we have everything to lose.

But the way things are now, that’s true no matter which way you turn.

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The Other Teresa Meek – Part 1: Email Glitch

Investing: The Naked Truth