It’s that time of year again.  If you haven’t started doing so yet it won’t be long before you start dragging out boxes of receipts and paperwork to begin preparing your taxes.  Assuming that, like most people, your (so called) fair share this year is more than you expected and or thought fair yourself you’ll be looking for ways to reduce that debt without having to go to jail for noncompliance.  Well, have you considered donating your old car to get a tax write off?

I know, I know, it’s too late to get the write off on the taxes you’ll be paying in April, but it’s never to early start for next year.  Especially once you take into account that you won’t know the exact value of your donation until after the car is sold.  That’s because the federal government prohibits non profit organizations from assigning values to material donations. However, your donation is valued at the full retail value of the car. So this is how it works…

1. Call your charity of choice to find out the procedure in your area
2. Turn over the car and wait for it to be sold
3. Once your vehicle is sold, you will be notified of the sale price and all the documentation that you will need to claim the deduction on your tax return will be sent to you, including a donation receipt and the IRS Form 8283.

That’s all there is to it!  So it’s not difficult, but it can take some time.  You’re thinking about taxes now anyway, right, so why not keep that forward momentum by donating to your favorite charity as well?

Sometimes I hate being right   Two weeks back I asked if Morgan Hill gas prices had bottomed out.  Turns out they had.

When I was out running errands earlier this afternoon all of the Morgan Hill gas stations I passed were posted at $1.89 per gallon with only Safeway bucking the trend at $1.86/gallon.  Of course, they’re likely going to increase tomorrow and the next day as people once again start accruing gas rewards through the use of their Safeway loyalty cards.

Speaking of Safeway gas rewards, they were sure nice while they lasted!  And I’m clearly not alone in that belief as the record gas lines at the corner of Monterey and Dunne on New Year’s Eve proved.  With gas rewards expiring that day (and prices increasing elsewhere) it seemed like the entire population of Morgan hill was filling up the family car.  I know this, because I was in line there myself.

Check out that pic! Yes, I paid $0.67 per gallon of gas! Woohoo! And that was just in this final fill up of the year.  Over the three months the new PowerPump Gas Rewards program was in effect I managed to accrue and use more than 35 $0.10 per gallon discounts.  Since my average fill up is between 25 and 30 gallons and I fill up every ten days or so this really added up, allowing me to be a little more free with my holiday spending this year.

Safeway still has its expanded PowerPump Gas Rewards program in efect. The next expiration date for the gas rewards is March 31, 2009. Unfortunately, they aren’t currently doing the Double Gas Rewards for Gift Cards promotion that ran throughout December. Hopefully, they’ll manage to keep the core price per gallon down low enough that I can get more fillups like the one pictured above.

On my way up to Golden Gate Fields yesterday I realized I wasn’t going to have enough gas for the round trip.  I had planned on saving my Safeway Gas Rewards until after returning from LA on Tuesday night as then I’d need a full 30+ gallons.  Then I remembered the mail spam I’d received from the Shell Gas Station on Dunne.

These two coupons were perfect as I only needed about a dozen gallons of gas and they currently have the same “basic” price as Safeway.  So, the $2.00 off would be the same as using my two available Safeway gas rewards.  Woohoo!!  Of course, at Safeway the savings are calculated right there at the pump so I wasn’t exactly sure how this was going to work.

I pulled up to the pump and went into the “shop”, handing my credit card and the coupon to the clerk.  He told me to go ahead and pay at the pump then bring the coupon back in and he’d give me $2 cash.  Bonus!  Cash from my credit card with no service fee   I put in about 11 gallons at $1.81 per gallon, plus got the $2 back in cash so it came out to around $1.65 gallon.  Not bad at all.  And, I have another coupon that doesn’t expire until the end of January.  Not a bad piece of spam after all.

Despite many, many people still reflexively kvetching about the price of gas, we’ve actually got historically low gas prices here in the United States. According to information provided by the Energy Information Administration the average price for a single gallon of “regular conventional retail gasoline” in the United States was $1.68 per gallon on December 8th, 2008.  You’ve got to go all the way back to March 15, 2004 to find a lower price ($1.675 per gallon).  And let’s not forget that (according to CaliforniaGasPrices.com) $0.62 per gallon is the average Federal and State excise taxes on a gallon of gas.  This tax alone is probably higher than it was in 2004, though I gave up trying to find historic gas tax data.  If you have a site that proveds that info please leave a link in a comment or email me!

Here in Morgan Hill the lowest gas price I’ve seen advertised is $1.69/gallon at World on Monterey.  They’ve been sitting at that price for a few days now, even before Safeway dropped to $1.71/gallon mid-week.  However, yesterday Safeway bumped their prices back up to $1.75/gallon. So the question becomes… have gas prices finally bottomed out even before people stopped complaining about the”high” cost of gas?

Sorry I haven’t been around much, but I’ve been living through a bit of a nightmare thanks to Mike at Bill’s Custom Transmission over on Joleen here in Morgan Hill.  Here’s the story…

Last month my daughter Z and I took a long weekend trip to Southern California to finish up my California CoasterQuest.  Upon our return to the Bay Area we headed over to Santa Cruz to enjoy the surf and take our annual Old Tyme Photo.  As we pulled off the freeway we heard a very loud KER-THUNK come from Rover (our beloved and ever-faithful 1989 Ford Bronco).  Everything seemed fine until we headed home when Rover refused to shift into fourth gear.  AAARRRGGGHHH!!!  Clearly the transmission was dead or dying.  Unfortunately, I had just spent something like 80% of that month’s paycheck on our trip, so I was going to have to wait until mid-August to have it looked at.

After putting about 200 more miles on it I finally got paid and headed to Bills Custom Transmission to find out how much the repair was going to set me back.  Long story short, he held my car for six days, cost me $300, and I’m now in the exact same position I was a week ago except that I’m going to have to put even more miles on the transmission while I wait for yet another paycheck to start the process all over again at another shop.  How could this have happened?  Read on…

I actually communicated with Mike at NBill’s Custom transmission a total of seven times as follows-

1. Tuesday 08/19 11:30am – Drove into shop (asked for diagnosis)
2. Tuesday 08/19 3:45 pm – Mike called me
3. Thursday 08/21 4:50pm – I called Mike
4. Friday 08/22 8:30am – Walked to shop (asked for car back)
5. Monday 08/25 1:15pm – Mike called me
6. Monday 08/25 2:00pm – Walked to shop (called Morgan Hill Police Department)
7. Monday 08/25 3:30pm – Walked to shop

Every time I spoke to him I got a different story.  Sometimes I even received multiple stories in the same conversation.  I’m not going to repeat every conversation, but here’s some highlights (superscripts refer to the communication numbers in the list above)-

• Jumping straight to tearing it apart and looking inside probably won’t save time or money¹
• The free diagnostic showed nothing – we’ll have to tear it apart.  Will take a couple of days to get your diagnosis and cost $525²
• We just got the transmission out and haven’t had a chance to open it up yet³
• We’ve only had the truck one day³
• We pulled the transmission this morning and haven’t had a chance to open it up yet⁴ (at which point I’m already fed up with delays and ask him to put it back)
• We’ve only had the truck since Thursday⁴
• We can’t put it back in until Monday⁴
• It’s back in you can come pick it up.  Will still cost you $525⁵
• We pulled it out Wednesday night – I remember because I smashed up my truck that night⁶
• We pulled it out Thursday at lunch⁶
• We put it back in Friday⁶
• We pulled it out Friday night⁶
• We pulled it out Friday morning⁶
• It took 6 or 7 hours just to take it out and put it back in⁶
• I still have to pay my mechanic $110/ hour⁶

Do you notice all of the inconsistencies?  The guy not only can’t keep straight when he pulled out or put in my transmission, but also doesn’t even know when I brought it in.  One would think the latter would be a simple matter of looking at the paperwork, but he never filled out any paperwork or had me sign any kind of work order.

He also never did the inspection, despite having the truck for 6 days, and still wanted me to pay the full $525 for an inspection despite the fact that he didn’t do one and couldn’t tell me anything about my transmission.  His justification for the bill was that he still had to pay his mechanic $110 per hour for 6 or 7 hours work.  His math skills are clearly no better than his time-keeping skills as that would make the bill $660 to $770 dollars plus the time to do the actual inspection – all of which he was going to charge me only $525.

In other words, this guy makes everything up as he goes, changing stories to fit his mood with no regard for his customers or even reality.

As mentioned above, I called the Morgan Hill Police Department to come down and help me out with the situation.  Not only was the officer useless, but he was also clueless.  When asked if there was a requirement that a mechanic get a signed work order before doing any work, he claimed ignorance of the law despite the large sign in the shop lobby stating that very fact.  When asked if I would be within my rights to simply drive the car away he simply dodged the question.  Even when pressed on whether he’d arrest me for driving away right that moment he refused to answer. At least they’re consistent – in the dozen times I’ve actually called the police in my life not once have they actually been of any use – but that’s a rant for another day.

I ended up having to pay a $300 ransom to get my keys back because driving away without paying just seemed like too sleazy a thing to do.  The morals of the story – never deal with Bill’s Custom Transmission,  always go to a AAA approved shop, get a time estimate as well as a cost estimate in writing before approving any work, the police are useless. Negotiating Rover’s release through the Bureau of Automotive Repair would have taken weeks and there’s no promise I would have avoided paying the ransom despite the fact I never signed a work order.

The good news – I’ve found a GOOD and HONEST mechanic much closer to home that will do the work for 2/3 of what Bill’s Custom Transmission was going to charge me and in a matter of a couple of days.  Of course, since I was ripped off for $300 it will now have to wait until next payday.  ::sigh::

I was pleasntly shocked to walk by the Safeway gas station today and see that they’d dropped their price all the way down to $4.09 (matching World’s reduction as well).  This means that anyone with a Safeway loyalty card can get gas in Morgan Hill for $4.06 and anyone who’s purchased more than $50 in groceries on their loyalty card in the last 6 weeks can get gas for… drumroll please… $3.99!

Yes, sub-$4.00 per gallon gas has found its way back to Morgan Hill.  Sort of

It seems I was wrong about the gas price increases I predicted earlier this week.  But, as the title says, sometimes it’s good to be wrong.  Safeway came back down to $4.22 today and World has dropped all the way down to $4.15.  Even the Valero in San Martin has dropped down to $4.15!  But the real gas savings I found today was while I was running errands for a client in Gilroy.  Every station on Leavesly (in Golroy), including both the Chevron and the Shell, were all the way down to $4.09!

The San Jose Mercury News columnist Mr. Roadshow is having a contest to see who can predict the exact date that the average price for a gallon of gas drops back below $4.00.   I was one of those smart asses who replied “never”., but it looks like it may be soon after all.  Right now I’m predicting Seoptember 8th.  That seems to follow the current trend with a small bump for the traditional increased Labor Day bump.

Although it now seems like $3.99 (or less) gas is now a distant memory, it was actually less than three months ago (on May 20th) that the average price for a gallon of gas in Santa Clara county it $4.00/gallon.