Sandy and the Need for More Time, Paperwork for Mortgages

ReutersHomes on the New Jersey coast damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

A colleague whose home is located in an area affected by Hurricane Sandy had applied last week for a refinance of his mortgage and thought he was done signing forms. But today, his lender said that because his home was in a declared disaster area, he'd have to provide additional documents.

That might not be the easiest thing to do, since getting documents may be a challenge for those in areas without power.

A Bank of America spokesman, Kris Yamamoto, said that due to “GSE guidelines and our policy, and depending on the category of the disaster area,” there may be additional requirements to process a loan, like an inspection or certification on the property. (The term GSE refers to government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which are major buyers of home loans.)

He also said that if the processing of a loan is delayed due to a bank site being temporarily closed  and the interest rate lock expires during that time, the customer will continue to qualify for their previous interest rate.

A Chase spokeswoman said she was looking into my inquiry. Meantime, she said, Chase is automatically giving many borrowers affected by the storm an extra seven-day extension on an interest-rate lock, if they were scheduled to close on a mortgage this week. (She said the extension applies to Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and Washington, D.C.)

Wells Fargo didn't immediately respond to an e-mail request for information about how the storm i s affecting loan applications.

Do you have a home loan or refinance pending? Has the storm affected your application?

Wrestling With Halloween Cost Creep

European Pressphoto AgencyA Halloween display in Decatur, Ga.

Halloween used to be a one-night event. When I was a kid, my mother helped me and my brothers put together costumes - usually, homemade. We carved a pumpkin. Maybe we bobbed for a few apples. We went trick-or-treating in our neighborhood. We tried to con each other into trading candy we liked better. And that was it, until the next year.

Times have changed. Halloween has morphed into days - even weeks - of October parties, festivals and candy giveaways that strain budgets and overload youngsters with more sweets than my Milky Way-addled childhood brain could ever have imagined. There's no need for sibling bargaining, when everyone has an over abundance of treats.

I find this “holiday creep” annoying, not to mention potentially fattening, as well as expensive. The average American will spend nearly $80 on decorations, costumes and candy this year, up from $72 last year, according to the National Retail Federation. Total Halloween spending is expected to be about $8 billion.

It's not that the organizers of all the extra events aren't well intentioned. Last week, my children attended a “fall festival” (it involves costumes and candy, but is apparently named so as not to put off those who object to Halloween). It was a fund-raiser for a very deserving local charity. But bringing two children, plus a friend, totaled $60 for the night. (I realize I have free will, and could simply have chosen not to go. But it gets harder to sit out when excess celebration is becoming the norm, and all of your children's friends are attending, too).

Today, my younger child had a celebration at school. (Call me a party pooper, but I didn't bake cupcakes.) And this afternoon, my offspring will go trick-or-treating at their dad's workplace, where employees elaborately decorate their cubicles for the holiday to entertain the kids. Finally, at dusk, we'll venture out into the neighborhood for the actual door-to-door event.

In addition to being tiring, the cost of all this partying adds up. Unless you're adept at homemade costumes or have time to browse thrift shops, you'll pay about $15 to $20 per child for an out-of-the-bag get-up, and three to four times that if you order from a higher-end catalog. If your child is the messy type, you may need more than one costume for the different events, which adds to the cost. (My youngest was a vampire for the fall festival, but agreed â€" whew! â€" to recycle a Pocahontas costume from a school play for the “official” trick-or-treat outing.) This year we're pet owners, so my kids begged for a pumpkin sweater for the dog. (O.K., I do h ave to admit that she looks really cute).

By the time we're finished, we'll have shopping bags full of candy. This is the situation that leads parents to turn to the “Halloween fairy,” who takes away excess treats in exchange for a toy, which adds to the cost further. But wouldn't it make more sense to scale back the excess in the first place?

How do you keep the lid on Halloween, without appearing to be a killjoy?

Digital Notes: Apple Delays Latest iTunes Upgrade

On Tuesday, a day after a management shake-up and a month after the botched release of its Maps app drew a rare public apology from its chief executive, Apple quietly delayed the release of its latest upgrade to iTunes, saying it needed more time to “get it right.”

The new version of iTunes was announced last month with no more specific timing than “coming in October”; on Tuesday, with two days left on the month, Apple revised that timing with an orange tab on its Web site that now says “coming in November.”

The company issued no formal announcement about the change, but in a comment to the technology news site All Things Digital, a spokesman said: “The new iTunes is taking longer than expected and we wanted to take a little extra time to get it right. We look forward to releasing this new version of iTunes with its dramatically simpler and cleaner interface and seamless integration with iCloud before the end of November.”

The new version is supposed to have a streamlined look and better integration with iCloud, its service for synching music and video collections. It is said to be the most significant upgrade to iTunes in the 11-year life of the program, which has grown from a simple music player to the most powerful retailer in the music business - and a force in the movie, television and e-books businesses - and, on Apple's PCs, the portal to its app store.

Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

Gay Couples May Want to File a Protective Tax Refund Claim

The recent decision by a federal appeals court regarding the Defense of Marriage Act suggests gay couples may want to file something known as a protective refund claim with the Internal Revenue Service in the event the Supreme Court overturns the law, according to accounting experts.

The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York struck down the law's definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman as unconstitutional. The decision was the second by a federal appeals court striking down DOMA, as the law is known. The law's constitutionality is expected eventually to be considered by the United States Supreme Court.

If the high court invalidates DOMA, legally married same-sex couples will be able to file claims for refunds of federal tax overpayments, said Janis Cowhey McDonagh, a partner at Marcum LLP in New York and a specialist in the firm's national LGBT and non-traditional family practice.

Currently, same-sex marriage is recognize d by six states - New York, Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont - and the District of Columbia.

Patricia Cain, a law professor at Santa Clara University and an authority on legal issues faced by same-sex couples, said others might want to consider filing a protective claim, too.

For instance, she noted that an additional nine states, as well as Washington, D.C.,  recognize “marriage equivalent statuses” for same-sex couples, like domestic partnerships or civil unions. While most people presume those relationships aren't marriages, she said in an e-mail, “there's a good argument that absent DOMA such relationships should be treated as marriages for tax purposes.”

In light of such uncertainty, she said, some details may end up being settled by further litigation. “I actually would advise anyone who would benefit from joint filing to file an amended return as a protective claim for refund if they ar e married (no matter where they live) or in a marriage equivalent status.”

Ms. McDonagh said couples should file a protective refund claim now because there is a three-year statute of limitations on tax refund claims. By filing a claim now, couples will have standing for overpayments dating to 2009, while DOMA wends its way through the court system. The claim applies to income taxes, estate taxes as well as gift taxes, she said.

It's possible, Ms. McDonagh said, that if the Supreme Court voids the law, the I.R.S. could waive the three-year statute of limitations. That would seem the fair thing to do, she said, but there isn't any precedent for the agency doing so. So to be safe, filing a protective claim makes sense.

Couples should consult their accountants for advice about filing a protective claim, which essentially involves filing an amended tax return, she said.

The case decided earlier this month was brought on behalf of Edith Windsor of New Yo rk City, who married her longtime partner, Thea Clara Spyer, in 2007 in Canada. When Ms. Spyer died in 2009, Ms. Windsor inherited her property. Because the I.R.S. was not allowed, under the Defense of Marriage Act, to consider her as a surviving spouse, she faced a tax bill of $363,053 that she would not have had to pay if the marriage had been recognized.

Do you intend to file a protective claim?

How Sandy Slapped the Snark Out of Twitter

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters People congregate on Tuesday in front of a building in Manhattan that still has wireless Internet access.

Twitter is often a caldron of snark, much of it funny, little of it useful. But as a social medium based on short-burst communication, Twitter can morph during large events - users talk about “watching” the spectacle unfold across their screens. It is, after all, a real-time service, which means that you can “see” what is happening as it happens.

As a media reporter, my Twitter feed has a strong Manhattan bias, serving as a sandbox for media and technology types that I follow. Under norma l circumstances, we show up on Twitter to preen, self-promote and crack wise about the latest celebrity meltdown. If that New York cohort has a soul - insert your own joke here - you could see into it on Twitter.

And then along came Hurricane Sandy. For most of Monday, people on Twitter were watching an endless loop of hurricane coverage on television and having some fun with it, which is the same thing that happens when the Grammys or the Super Bowl is on. But as the storm bore down, Twitter got busy and very, very serious.

It is hard to data-mine the torrent â€" some estimates suggested there were three and a half million tweets with the hashtag #Sandy - #8212;but my feed quickly moved from the prankish to the practical in a matter of hours as landfall approached. I asked Simon Dumenco, who writes the Media Guy column for Advertising Age and is well versed in the dark arts of Twitter analytics, about the tonal shift via e-mail.

“I kept a close eye on th e Top 10 Trends chart as Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast, and there was no shortage of gravitas on Twitter,” he wrote. “The last time I checked before losing power in my Manhattan apartment, seven of the 10 trends were Sandy-related - New Jersey, ConEd, Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, FEMA, Queens and #SandyRI. Clicking on each of them yielded plenty of information.”

At my home in suburban New Jersey, a 30-foot limb dropped down at 4 p.m., so the illusion that this was an event happening to someone else quickly dissipated. And at 8 p.m., just when we hunkered down in front of the big screen, the house went dark. This very large event would not be televised. We built a fire and sat around a hand-cranked radio, but I was diverted over and over by the little campfire of Tweets on my smartphone.

It was hard to resist. Twitter not only keeps you in the data stream, but because you can contribute and re-Tweet, you feel as if you are adding something even though Mother Nature clearly has the upper hand. The activity of it, the sharing aspect, the feeling that everyone is in the boat and rowing, is far different than consuming mass media.

Because my Internet connection was poor, so much of the rich media - amazing videos and pictures documenting the devastation - was lost to me. In true media throwback fashion, Hurricane Sandy was something I experienced as a text event, but I don't feel as if I missed much. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel inundation, the swamping of the Lower East Side, the huge problems at New York hospitals, the stranding of the holdouts in Atlantic City, all became apparent on Twitter in vivid detail.

At the same time, much of the seen-it-all and isn't-it-dumb seemed to leak out of my Twitter stream. (The message that earnestness was nascent and irony was on the run seemed widespread - the servers of Gawker, the hilarious and ill-mannered Manhattan snark machine, were drowned and the site went down. Still is, as a matter of fact.)

Many local television stations did an amazing job and the big cable-news outlets played large, but the template of the rain-and-wind-lashed correspondent shouting to a blow-dried anchor back in the studio has its limits. The local radio stations were nimble and careful, including WCBS, WNYC and WINS, but they were part of the story on occasion, with transformers going down and hurricane-induced glitches along the way.

Manhattan is the epicenter of a number of big blogs, including Gawker, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, but each had to pivot to Twitter, among other platforms, as their servers succumbed to encroaching waters. (At a conference last year, Andrew Fitzgerald of Twitter wondered about the utility of the platform if the end of the world arrived in the form of an alien attack. The people participating in the discussion pointed out that the lightweight infrastructure of Twitter and its dur ability would probably make it very practical should end times draw nigh.)

In the early days of Twitter, there was a very big debate about whether reporters should break news on Twitter. That debate now seems quaint. Plenty of short-burst nuggets of news went out from reporters on Twitter on Monday night and they were quickly followed by more developed reports on-air or on the Web. There were abundant news Tweets from @antderosa of Reuters, @acarvin of NPR and @brianstelter of The New York Times, among many others, but there were also Tweets from plain old folks retailing very important information about their blocks, their neighborhoods, their boroughs. I knew what was happening to many of my friends as far away as D.C. and as close as the guy up the block. There is no more important news than that.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, wrote in a note: “To me the most basic act of journalism there can be is: ‘I'm there, you're not, le t me tell you about it.' Or: ‘I heard it, you didn't, let me tell you what Bloomberg said.' And the fact is Twitter is rife with such. That is why it is basic in a sprawling emergency.”

Twitter is a global platform, but it can be relentlessly and remarkably local should the occasion - or crisis - arise, as Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl, pointed out.

“Twitter was phenomenally useful microscopically - I was literally finding out information about how much flooding the Zone A block next to me was having, hour by hour - and macroscopically, too - I didn't even have to turn on the TV once the whole storm,” he wrote. He pointed out, as have many others, that there was abundant misinformation rendered in 140 characters as well, which reminded @kbalfe of another rapid-fire medium, actually. “Was a lot like cable news: indispensable … yet full of errors.”

In fact, some people used the friction-free, democratic nature of the medium to intentional ly stir panic. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed outed - “doxed” in the nomenclature of the Web - a person they said they said was the guy behind @comfortablysmug, an account that suggested that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had been trapped by rising waters, that Con Edison was shutting down all of Manhattan and that the floor of the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded.

BuzzFeed identified the person behind those tweets as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of Christopher R. Wight, this year's Republican candidate to represent New York's 12th Congressional District. (Mr. Tripathi has since apologized and resigned from the campaign.) Because his Twitter feed was followed by a number of New York-based reporters, the misinformation spread quickly, although John Herman, also writing in BuzzFeed, suggested that “Twitter is a Truth Machine,” writing that “during Sandy, the Internet spread - then crushed - rumors at breakneck speed.”

Margaret S ullivan, the public editor of The New York Times, said in a message on Twitter that whatever the quality of the feed at any given moment, it was riveting: “Impossible to tear one's eyes from, with occasional nuggets of helpfulness amid constant stream of flotsam and jetsam.”

The day after the storm, Twitter shook off much of the earnestness and reverted back to its snarky self, although the storm's death toll and the quest for resources made it a more serious village common than usual. In an e-mail, Peter Kafka of AllThings D, considered the value of Twitter in a big news event by running it through the way-back machine.

“Would it have been better during 9/11 if we had Twitter?” he wrote. “Plenty of bad and good info spread that day, by mouth, web and TV. My hunch is Twitter would do the same. The difference? Twitter allows my friends/like-minded people/people I like to feel a bit more connected. And that's a lot better than less connected.”

Cal ling it a “pop-up town square” for the affected area, @editorialiste said in a message on Twitter, it was “a great place to laugh, cry, argue, sympathize together.”

Kurt Andersen, radio host and writer, said that the combination of utility and sociability made Twitter a remarkable informative shelter during the storm.

“I've never liked or used the word ‘community' about people communicating online, but the Sandy conversations seemed worthy of the word, actually communal,” he wrote. “And given the circumstances, it really could've only happened online.”

The Breakfast Meeting: Lucas Hands Off to Disney, and a Storm\'s Online Power

The Walt Disney Company strengthened its position in fantasy entertainment on Tuesday by purchasing Lucasfilm - George Lucas's company, which made the “Star Wars” films - for $4.05 billion in stock and cash, Michael Cieply reports. The move follows a string of similar acquisitions, including the $4 billion deal for Marvel Entertainment in 2009 and the $7.4 billion purchase of Pixar Animation Studios in 2006.

• Disney said it planned to release a seventh “Star Wars” feature film in 2015, with new films coming every two or three years. (Mr. Iger said Disney acquired a detailed treatment for the next three “Star Wars” films as part of the acquisition.) Also, the company said it saw great potential in selling “Star Wars” merchandise worldwide.
• The combination of two pop-cultural institutions (Disney and Star Wars) was easily mocked online, but the hard-core fans on a forum at TheForce.net were often sympathetic to Mr. Lucas and his decision to move on. One wrote: “What if he just wanted it all behind him, where he couldn't have an opinion anymore and could truly, utterly relax?” Another noted that in a New York Times Magazine profile this year, Mr. Lucas spoke of the pressure of tending to the “Star Wars” franchise:

Lucas seized control of his movies from the studios only to discover that the fanboys could still give him script notes. “Why would I make any more,” Lucas says of the “Star Wars” movies, “when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?”

The punishing winds and flooding from Hurricane Sandy on Monday night knocked out a range of Web sites whose servers sit in Lower Manhattan, including The Huffington Post, part of AOL, Quentin Hardy and Jenna Wortham report. The Huffington Post was back up by Tuesday morning, but others, including Gawker, were still down. The destructive storm nonetheless illustrated the vu lnerability of computer networks, particularly in Manhattan, where aging infrastructure and tight space force “servers and generators to use whatever space is available.”

• NY1, the local cable news channel, made a comforting and informative companion during Hurricane Sandy's arrival on Monday night, Jon Caramanica writes. Other local stations also went into round-the-clock storm coverage, but theirs tended to be more frenetic. NY1 has a 20-year-old style of unflashy, steady news coverage. Mr. Caramanica writes:

The plan seemed to be to find someone - a correspondent, a spokesman, a politician - with something to say, and stick with that person until someone else wanted to speak. One by one, they took their turn, everyone from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, to representatives of Con Edison and various local elected officials, speaking at length, and often in detail, and often until cut short by a dial tone or a burst of silence when the connection was lost.

Noam Cohen edits and writes for the Media Decoder blog. Follow @noamcohen on Twitter.

Wednesday Reading: Three Travel Trips to Get Around Sandy

A variety of consumer-focused articles appears daily in The New York Times and on our blogs. Each weekday morning, we gather them together here so you can quickly scan the news that could hit you in your wallet.

• Supporters of same-sex marriage see room for victories. (National)
• Oklahoma prepares for law that makes guns more visible. (National)
• For flood victims, an insurance blow is possible. (Business)
• The risk of tapping  your retirement fund for an alternative use. (Dealbook)
• Homemade Halloween candy for adult tastes. (Dining)
• Why Consumer Reports and J.D. Power are so different. (Wheels)
• A wireless charging solution for the Leaf and Volt. (Wheels)
• Google adds new emergency resources due to Sandy. (Bits)
• Insect robots, just in time for Halloween. (Gadgetwise)
• Sticking with Windows 7. (Gadgetwise)
• How to carbo-load for a marathon. (Well)
• Helpâ€"my daughter wants to make movies. (Motherlode)
• Three travel tips to navigate the storm. (In Transit)
• A shortcut for hailing cabs in European cities. (In Transit)
• A four-day, best-Brazil-beach quest. (Frugal Traveler)