Author: A.T.

Yesterday I described a service that charges just a dime a minute for all calls within the 50 United States, anytime (not just after 7PM, a la Candace Bergen in the Sprint ads). If you’re someone who makes a lot of weekday daytime long-distance calls, check it out. (And if you’re an AT&T customer not getting a 20% or 30% discount and 5 frequent-flier miles for every dollar of calls, check it out, too.)

But all this phone talk made me think of something else.

You know how there’s this etiquette where, when you go to visit somebody, you have to make this big show of using your credit card to make long distance calls rather than stick your host with the 45-cent tab? (After all, it’s usually a weekend or an evening — what’s it gonna cost to call Chicago for a few minutes?) I’m not saying you can violate this behavioral code, but it’s becoming increasingly silly.

Sure, if you’re calling Kuala Lumpur or Bucharest.

Montevideo — sure. But New Jersey?

I mean, there you are drinking $4 of the guy’s Absolut and tonic, eating $14 of shrimp and that interesting chicken fricassee his spouse makes, but you’d rather spend $2 to make a credit card call than just dial direct and leave some loose change by the phone?

I do the same thing, of course. But whenever I see a guest of mine fumbling for his calling card, unless I know he does a lot of business in Japan, I insist he dispense with this foolishness immediately and just dial direct.

One thing you could do is dial via the 10811 DimeLine. If your host happens already to be a customer, already paying the flat $5 service charge, your call will cost him only a dime a minute, even coast-to-coast Tuesday at noon. And if, as is much more likely, he’s not a DimeLine customer, it will still cost him only a dime a minute. He won’t be charged the $5 access fee (unless some other guest tried the same thing last month). The first calendar month’s calls do not activate that $5 fee.

I’m not saying you should do this. I wouldn’t. But if you are going to beat your host out of the phone charges, you may as well save him a little money. (Remember, this works only on residential lines, and only really saves money in any meaningful way on weekday daytime calls.)

Boy, are the competing phone discount plans ever needlessly — and purposely — complex. It’s like life insurance: they don’t want you to be able to make easy price comparisons.

Sprint has a point about every call costing just a dime. But Sprint’s “dime lady” commercials are so cloying (even though Candace Bergen’s a swell lady), they’re reason enough to stick with AT&T. What’s more, there’s the teeny-tiny catch that the dime is actually a quarter every weekday until 7PM. That’s right: 25-cents a minute, not 10 cents.

Now comes a service called DimeLine. It’s not new, but new to me. And it really does charge just a dime a call. Anytime. Anywhere in the 50 states. Sort of.

I use AT&T. The basic daytime rate approaches 30 cents a minute, but I signed up for True USA savings, that knocks 30% off my bill if I make more than $75 a month in calls, 20% when charges run between $25 and $75 a month, 10% when they run $10 to $25. (You mean you use AT&T and you haven’t signed up for the discount? They must love customers like you. All you have to do to get it is call! Check your phone bill, and if you don’t see a line at the end talking about what you saved with AT&T True USA, try 800-222-0300.)

And I’m also signed up for AT&T True Rewards which gives me five frequent-flier miles for every dollar I spend. Assigning a value of 2 or 3 cents a mile, which is about what they’re worth to me, this becomes the equivalent of another 10% or 15% off my bill, for a total discount of 40% or 45%. (You mean you use AT&T and you haven’t signed up for this, either? They must adore you! This one doesn’t appear on your phone bill, but you get periodic statements of your rewards, and they try to get you to waste them on things less valuable than frequent flier miles. Again, call 800-222-0300 if you’re an AT&T customer who hasn’t signed up.)

After these discounts, night-time and evening calls aren’t much more than a dime for me anyway — sometimes less. But the daytime calls are still upwards of 15 cents, which no matter how you look at it is more than a dime.

I had a 76-minute call to Palo Alto last month for which I was billed $22.80, less the 30%, or $15.96. With Dime Line it would have been $7.60. I would have saved $8.36 on that one humongous call alone, plus another 46 cents in tax. Total saving with the tax: $8.82. Instead, I got 80 frequent flier miles (5 for each of the 16 or so dollars AT&T charged), worth about two bucks.

So why not switch to Dime Line for all your day-time weekday calling? A few possible reasons:

• It only applies to residential phone lines. Sorry, Sears.

• There’s a 3-minute minimum, so for those calls where you just get an answering machine and hang up or leave a short message, you’re billed 30 cents, compared with the 15-20 cents it might have cost during the day on AT&T (after your discount and frequent flier miles).

• There’s a flat $5-a-month access charge, so if you normally make $30 a month in calls on AT&T — which works out to $24.00 after your 20% True USA discount, and $21.00 after figuring in the value of your frequent-flier miles — Dime Line would save you little or nothing. Indeed, if a good chunk of that $30 was for calls after 5PM (evening rate) or after 11PM and weekends (night-time rate), then you might actually wind up spending more.

• On the other hand, for someone with, say, $100 a month in AT&T weekday long distance charges before 5PM, the savings would be on the order of $30 or $40 a month — maybe $400 a year. Not half bad! Home-office types, take note.

• If you are someone whose long distance bill is near one of the AT&T break points at which the discount falls, from 30% to 20% or from 20% to 10% (or, below $10 of charges, to zero), then carving the weekday day-time calls out of that and making them with Dime Line could be doubly dumb. First, you could lower your AT&T usage from $26, say, to $24, and knock the discount down from 20% to 10% (thus losing about $2.50). Second, if you only used Dime Line to make a few day-time calls, the $5 flat fee would swamp any savings you got from the low dime-a-minute rate.

• There’s the hassle of dialing 10811 before proceeding with the usual 1-area code-and-number.

But you don’t have to wait for a second dial tone, you just dial “straight through.” And you don’t have to do anything to sign up for this service. You’re already “signed up,” in the sense that you could start using Dime Line this instant, and would simply find a separate place on your local phone bill next month tallying the charges. And because the first month the $5 access fee is waived, you really have little to lose by giving it a try.

The Dime Line customer service rep I spoke with (800-583-5801) answered promptly and avowed that parent VarTec Telecom, Inc., a privately held company headquartered in Dallas, was founded in 1989 and is now the nation’s 7th largest long-distance carrier. (And here you thought there were only three, so how impressed can you be?) You don’t have to remember to call and cancel the service if you don’t like it, he explained. The $5 access fee is only charged in calendar months when you make calls. So you could try it a few times today, and until the end of this calendar month, with no $5 access fee, and no need to cancel the service. (Or so they promise. Don’t blame me if there’s a billing glitch! I just work here.)

There’s actually a way to beat the $5 fee altogether, it seems to me, if you’re the kind of person obsessed with cutting costs yet possessed of more than one phone number. In May, make all your day-time long distance calls on Phone #1. You’ll be charged just a dime-a-minute with no $5 fee, because it’s the first calendar month you’ve used DimeLine. For the next few months be sure not to use DimeLine with that phone number — even once. Instead, switch to using Dime Line with Phone #2. And so on.

I think the slate wipes clean after 90 days of non-use. If so, and if they don’t change it, you could just keep rotating the phone line you chose to use. Of course, you could always do the decent thing and, if you decide to become a DimeLine customer, just pay the bill. I’m going to try it for a while — for weekday day-time calls only.

Some statistics lie, but others tell the blunt truth:

Tax on a Pack of Cigarettes in:

I came upon this while filing some old stuff — the figures are dated January 17, 1995, and will have changed somewhat, with currency fluctuations if nothing else. For more up-to-date statistics, and a whole bunch of other stuff, try The Smoking Cessation Location.

This just in: I followed one of my own recommendations just now, and I can’t resist sharing the outcome.

Remember where I was railing against IBM’s less-than-perfect customer service a week or two ago, contrasting it with the amazing folks in places like New Hampshire? Well, I was about to order a CD with 80 million home addresses and phone numbers on it (a mere $39, if you can believe the miracle of it all) +. . . was all set to fill out the order form the publisher, ProCD, provided +. . . until I noted the $9 shipping charge. Hmph, thought I.

So on a whim I called the New Hampshire outfit I had recommended here (PC and Mac Connection: 800-243-8088). It was Saturday night but I got a human on the first ring, ordered the CD for their price of $29.95 plus $5 shipping — already I was $13 ahead — and asked when it would arrive. This was Saturday night, remember. She said: Monday. Get outta here! I said. But darned if it wasn’t true. They ship Airborne every day of the week including Sundays. The package arrived Monday morning. Now, that’s service.

I recently had occasion to ogle a business plan for what may wind up being a major Internet player in a few years. It’s smart and backed by people with proven track records, and there were the obligatory pie-in-the-sky, worst-case/best-case projections.

After all, what can we know about the future?

And this being a fairly complicated business, with all kinds of variables, there were a lot of different worst/best possibilities, all multiplying together to various potential profit outcomes.

Why am I telling you this?

Because while I was mostly struck with an enormous feeling of “why didn’t I think of this great business, I was also struck by something else:

Every variable had a worst/best scenario but one. That one — an “Internet price-earnings ratio of 75.”

In other words, it was anybody’s guess whether this company would be making $2 million or $50 million — who could say? But at least one thing was clear. Whatever profit it made, the stock market would presumably multiply it by 75 in deciding how high to bid the shares.

And of course this may be true. Indeed, these days, for anything vaguely related to technology or innovation of any kind, 75 is a fairly chintzy multiple.

I would just like to point out for you youngsters in the crowd that once upon a time a multiple of 75, even for an exciting, fast-growing company with great prospects, could not be taken for granted. Maybe that will be the case again some day, though I hope not. This is much more fun.

And while it lasts, it does have one highly positive effect, even if most of these valuations are absurd: it fairly sucks money into new ventures and innovation, which bodes well for America and the world.

You’re probably too young to remember what Europe was like after the War, or even in the Sixties, when I first went, but it was the era of Europe on $5 a Day. Now it’s like $40 for orange juice and a cup of coffee.

But in 1967 it was like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputs. We and our giant wallets. I remember once in Tossa, Spain, getting a hotel room not far from the Mediterranean that was $4 a night — including breakfast and dinner. We felt rich as kings!

Now, I’m not saying the Bright-Life mail-order catalog fully duplicates the post-War Mediterranean experience, and I’m not vouching for the quality and durability of all its offerings. But talk about feeling rich! Or at least affluent. The Sharper Image catalog makes me feel poor. Neiman Marcus leaves me gasping. But this thing?

How about a 12-foot roll-out pre-seeded flower garden (“plant a beautiful row of flowers — automatically!”) for five bucks? Feeling rich? Take three for $13. Your choice: flowers or herbs. (The herb roll-out mat could save you quite a stitch in thyme.)

How about an electric hook-hanger of the type you may have seen advertised on late-night TV — hang pictures without having to bang nails into the wall, and remove the hooks if you change your mind without leaving a hole — not for the $29.95 price that two-A.M. cable-TV viewers have come to expect, but just $9.95?

How about the razor-blade hair trimmers I’ve plugged from time to time (“cuts any style — long or short hair — no skill required”) that can save you hundreds of dollars a year on haircuts. (You needn’t go to extremes and never get a real haircut. But what if you got them just once in a while and used this doohickey between times?) The cost of this particular tool was always an afterthought, as far as I was concerned — I think they were $12.95 or something, which you’d recoup the first time you used it. But they’re not $12.95 at Bright-Life. No way! Just $5.95, three for $14.

Miracle Scissors? Three for $13. A 10-in-1 Multi-Fishing Tool (screw-driver, tape measure, fish scaler, pliers, weight scale, line cutter, knife, bottle opener, hook disgorger)? I don’t even fish and I couldn’t resist this at $9.95.

Not to mention the World’s Lightest Shoes for Men (“like floating on clouds — as if your feet had wings”) at $25 for three pairs. Hey: I’m a guy who sometimes spends $25 for one pair of shoes.

Solar powered radios; $69 “giant” inflatable swimming pools; “vacuum-air, soft-suction blackhead removers” ($4.99); three dozen fake long-stemmed roses that last forever ($13). I am not a religious man, but I bought three Micro Bible Key Chains (“Entire New Testament, just 1-1/2′ x 1′ — always there to comfort you wherever you go”). At $5.95, how could they not make great gifts?

I didn’t buy everything in the catalog, but for the price of a couple of things from Sharper Image, I could have. Many of the items might only have made good joke presents (the Exotic Balancing Birds struck me as such an item). But hey! The call for a catalog is free (800-206-9849). And one man’s kitsch is another man’s car freshener.

[Along the same lines, you might want to request a Lillian Vernon catalog if you aren’t already on their list — 800-285-5555. I have half a dozen American-flag donut-shaped floats making my pool look tres Olympique and they haven’t sprung a leak yet. Cheap!]

Massachusetts Congressman Studds is leaving the House after 26 years. Voluntarily. (He won with 69% of the vote the last time out.)

His farewell non-fundraising letter contained much that was wise and classy (or maybe it was just such a joy to get a letter from a politician that didn’t ask for money), but I liked this best:

“If working with six Presidents has taught me anything about leadership, it is that the world is not divided into good and bad. Human nature is not that simple.

“We all have the capacity for insecurity, prejudice and fear. It is to the darker side that the demagogue plays.

“Each of us can also evince strength, tolerance and compassion, and it is on these ‘better angels of our nature’ that the leader calls.”

If any of you happens to have Jesse Helms’s e-mail address, could you forward this to him?

Tomorrow: Bright-Life Catalog

The thing is, you have to have money to make money and save money to have money. And to do that — get out of debt and save money — you have to live beneath your means.

One key element of this is to stop buying things out of obligation. Buy things because you need them (and shop around for the best buy), not because you think you ought to. Like the new car you buy because yours sort of stands out in the parking lot. Or the budget-busting +anniversary gift you buy because you think something less would send the wrong signal.

Someone should come up with a bumper sticker that says something like:

“Sure — but MY car isn’t financed!”

That’d shut ‘em right up. It would show you have a sense of humor, that you are aware your car is a bit of a clunker (kitsch is OK if you know it’s kitsch) . . . and it would suggest that maybe you have a longer-range goal in mind.

A $3 bumper sticker could save you $10,000!

As for the budget-busting anniversary gift, that’s where the frugal poesy comes in.

Instead of two tickets to the opera with a fancy dinner beforehand, all in a chauffeured limousine — a $400 anniversary evening on your MasterCard that adds 18% interest to the bill — how about the same opera on CD (which she or he can listen to over and over without having to dress up), a book about that opera, and this poem? (Here comes the poem.) Total cost: $40. (Forgive me if you already read this poem in PARADE. It’s the only poem I ever wrote, so I’m milking it for all it’s worth.)

If love were cash you’d have it all.
But resources right now are small.
I’ve promised that I will not borrow —
The greater gifts to give tomorrow.

Better still, some frugal poesy of your own.

Tomorrow: Gerry Studds

Did you read Geraldine Fabrikant’s profile of SunAmerica Chairman Eli Broad (rhymes with road) a few weeks ago? Man’s built a heck of a company, heck of an art collection. But what really got me, near the end, was where she reported on his recent purchase of a Roy Lichtenstein for $2.4 million with his American Express card — so he could get the miles.

Now that’s what I call rich.

(Is it possible you have an American Express card and haven’t made the single call it takes to sign up for the Membership Miles program? Gad zooks! You are throwing money out the window! Call them at once — 800-297-3276. You can also use that number to see how many miles you’ve accumulated and check to be sure they have your correct frequent-flier numbers. You can’t yet do this via their web site, but it has some interesting features anyway, in case you want to check it out — www.americanexpress.com).

Tomorrow: Frugal Poesy

So here is this company that does . . . well, something, my broker’s not sure quite what, but it’s got a sexy symbol — DNA — and it had risen from just under 4 a year ago to 28 last month and 55 a few days ago. I had never heard of this New York Stock Exchange-traded company and neither had my broker. So now he gets a call from a client who wants to buy some. (It’s 77 when he gets the call, up from a low of 64 earlier in the day.)

“What?!” says my broker.

No, he’s not crazy, he says. He wants to buy this stock for his mother.

“Are you crazy?” asks my broker.

No, the guy is perfectly serious. Someone in his office bought 20,000 shares last week at 55. It’s a great stock. It goes up.

There seem to be a lot of stocks like that this year.

Does this make anybody nervous besides me?

My broker said, sorry, he wouldn’t buy DNA at 77 for this guy’s mom. His policy, in fact, is not to be stocks like this for anyone’s mom. Why? Part looking out for their interests, to be sure. But, he laughs, “they’re no lose stocks for these people! Stock goes up, they have a profit! Stock goes down, they’re in court in a wheelchair and respirator saying I recommended it.”

By the end of the day last week when he told me this story (Thursday), DNA had closed at 66-and-change. By the time you read this, it’s likely to be someplace between 40 and 100.

Typically, rising interest rates and pervasive speculation spell trouble in the stock market. Then again, who’s to say the upward climb in rates isn’t over and about to reverse? Or that the speculative frenzy is anywhere near peaking? Or even that DNA isn’t worth far more than 77? Heck, I don’t even know what they do (well, actually, they seem to be a holding company that invests in other companies) — and neither do at least some of the people buying their stock.