Uhm…I guess I’ll have to rescind my ire at the remark by one of our state legislators that teachers are feeding at the public trough. Now, bear in mind that the Goldwater Institute is a conservative think tank, and as we all know, it’s pretty easy to slant a survey. But…hevvin help us, take a look at this. After you’ve run your eye down the list of very basic questions the surveyors asked Arizona high school students, go on to page 2 for the eye-popping results.
Don’t believe it? I wouldn’t, either, if I hadn’t asked a roomful of university juniors and seniors to brainstorm a list of important events that happened in the U.S. during the nineteenth century. World War I made the list. What didn’t make it? Emancipation. The Spanish-American War. The Gadsden Purchase. Lewis and Clark’s expedition. The War of 1812. Construction of the Erie Canal. Nat Turner’s revolt. Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. War with Mexico.
None of those. Didn’t happen. Or if they did, we didn’t notice.
Well. Bring up ignoramuses, and they elect ignoramuses to state and federal office. Explains a lot, doesn’t it?
Maybe there’s method in our state legislators’ madness…
The other day it occurred to me that I was constantly digging through my file drawers to pull out the same folders full of material I’m wrestling with on a regular basis. The stuff falls into two major categories: the Layoff/Retirement hassle (phone numbers; the 403(b) rollover; COBRA; RASL; back vacation pay; relevant official policies; unemployment insurance) and the upcoming Social Security/Medicare hassle (estimated benefits; tax & earnings information and ancient W-2’s proving SSA’s errors; identifying documents). I hate dorking with pieces of paper—just hate it. Consequently, I try to be as organized as possible. That urge has led me to create altogether too many files stored in altogether too many places. Time to reorganize this stuff and make it a lot more accessible.
Some time back I’d realized that printing out my online Rolodex and storing it in a three-ring binder simplified life significantly: no more waiting for the Mac to grind away at the speed of a galloping snail to open the online file, and no more having to reboot if the machine was off.
So…why not organize the mounds of paper associated with the two current projects into loose-leaf binders, too? These can be stashed with the reference works atop the desk and grabbed whenever they’re needed. No more pawing through one, two, three, four file drawers in search of that one elusive sheet of paper!
This afternoon I dug out all those files and organized them into two binders. Original, official documents that I didn’t want to submit to the three-hole punch got photocopied; on the photocopy I noted where the original is stored.
I made dividers by sticking one edge of a mailing label to the edge of a piece of notebook paper, then folding the label over and sticking the back side to the paper sheet’s verso side. I’d bought some cheapie dividers at Target, but because the labels were supposedly erasable, ink smeared on them—covering the slick labels with pieces of mailing label fixed that problem.
Keeping paper and electronic records organized is a key process in frugal financial management. You can’t manage your money easily unless you know where your information is. Searching through drawers and boxes of files is a pain in the tuchus, and so is trying to find a single file or datum hidden deep inside a computer.
Yah, I know; Spotlight. Very nice: it brings up 87 gerjillion files for you to rifle through. Argh! Not to say $#%@&@*@*#$D!!!!! Eventually you’ll probably find what you’re looking for in a computer search, but it may be a long eventually.
Lots easier to organize this stuff efficiently at the outset than to do searches every time you turn around. Though there may be a better way, I’m fond of folders and subfolders:
Every now and again you should go through your files, toss or shred the junk, and tidy up the organization. This means more paper-pushing, virtual and real, a hateful process. However, sometimes it can be instructive. Today, for example, I discovered that the ancient piece of cardboard I thought was my original Social Security card is not; it was a “stub” that came with the card, issued in 1967. So now I’ll have to go in person to the Social Security office and order a new SS card—good thing I found that out before I went in to get SS benefits started! I also reviewed some old W-2’s my ex- sent a couple of years ago and realized that they show earnings for several of the years Social Security claims I had no earnings. That may jack up my benefits!
As exercises go, today’s project was less than fun. But the result, I expect, will make life a lot easier. And if that little revelation above increases my retirement benefits, the past two hours of ditzy work will pay for themselves many times over!
Yay! Funny is back on MSN Smart Spending with the piece on the charms of older houses. Thanks, Karen!
If you haven’t come upon Smart Spending yet, you should check it out. It’s a rich compendium of tips, leads, articles, and opinion about personal finance and frugality. Some of the articles are guest posts by PF bloggers and some are written by the blog’s administrators, both experienced journalists. It’s very high in quality, with interesting posts appearing daily.
Out at the Great Desert University, our business manager says our July 2 paychecks have already been processed, and so they should be issued on Thursday, come what may. So that shoos the wolf away from the door for another two weeks.
What will happen over the next fortnight remains to be seen. BizMan says she hasn’t heard anything about the university shutting down. Second summer session begins on July 6 and runs five weeks, so presumably they will at least try to keep the classrooms open. By far the majority of the university’s employees, however, are not in the classrooms. So I suppose we can expect to see bathrooms go uncleaned, landscaping go unwatered, trash go uncollected, computers and computer network go untended, perps and derelicts go unmolested by the campus cops, funding go untended, journals go unedited, paperwork go unpushed. Perhaps, we might say, business go unmanaged.
Given the legislators’ vendetta against education and in specific against higher education, if state departments are, in their words, “ratcheted down,” I’m sure GDU will bear the brunt of the ratcheting. And since our office serves the institution’s teaching mission only undirectly (through vocational training and mentoring of graduate students), we’ll likely be among the first to shut down.
So, even though I’m mighty happy to get this week’s paycheck (assuming it really does materialize), my expectations for the future remain low.
I know it’s borrowing troubleand there’s no point in thinking about this, but being a little funny about money I can’t help laying out some plans in the face of the possible shutdown of my employer, the Arizona state government. It will happen this week if our craven legislature can’t quit playing political games by tomorrow.
After going through the credit union accounts, I see I have a substantial amount of unused cash laying around, enough to stave off having to raid retirement savings for a little over five months. Monthly savings, which doubles as an emergency fund and a source of cash for indulgences, currently has $10,578. Of that, $2,500 is set aside to cover COBRA between the Canning Date and my 65th birthday, when I’ll be eligible for Medicare, and another $1,200 is earmarked for my car’s 90,000 mile service, which needs to be done very soon.
There are cushions of $663 in the account that holds money budgeted for charge card expenses, $1,635 for regular monthly expenses (such as utilities), and $4,891 in the “pool” from which funds are drawn for the savings, charge card, and recurring expense piggybanks. All told, available savings plus the cushions come to $14,067. My regular expenses, especially at this time of year when utility bills are astronomical, run about $2471. Assuming I’ll have to go onto COBRA, adding another $170 a month to costs if Arizona employees can get the stimulus discount, that’s enough to sustain me for 5.32 months.
Problem is, this is all money I figured I would fall back on when the university cans me in December. Every extra dollar I have to use now is a dollar I won’t have when I’m permanently unemployed retired. Because I won’t have enough to make ends meet during the months when I’m not teaching part-time at the community college (that will be about four months out of every twelve), I will need that money to survive. The suffering may be deferred, but it will come.
Every unpaid day is $82.36 I’ll have to raid from savings to live on now instead of after I’m unemployed—assuming no major expenses arise. It’s $97.86 of take-home pay that disappears from my wallet.
(Kind of shocking to realize how little I earn, isn’t it?)
Clearly, even with my minimalist income I can get by for a few days. But they’re talking about closing down state government for as long as 30 days. If this absurdity continues for a week or more, my boat is going to start to take on water.
If our august leaders don’t get their act together by tomorrow afternoon, I’ll need to take the following steps:
• Cancel all automatic transfers and electronic payments to creditors • Stop charging day-to-day expenses • Obtain enough cash to get by for a week or so, and pay expenses in cash only • Pay off the amount I’ve charged on AMEX so far in this billing cycle
Two of these—canceling EFTs and withdrawing cash for living expenses—will need to be done quickly, because the credit union branches within driving distance occupy buildings on the university campuses. If the university closes its buildings, obviously the credit union will have to close those branches. From what I can gather, if the budget isn’t passed on Tuesday, most government entities will close on Thursday. So that gives one day to fly to the credit union, where the lines no doubt will go out the door.
How much longer, Lord, before we can vote these clowns out of office? Can an entire legislature be impeached?
Bet you thought I was exaggerating when I described the shenanigans going on down at the state house. Truth to tell, though, that post was barely the half of it: a lazy job of reporting, indeed.
To date, budget shortfalls have gutted higher education in Arizona, trashed K-12 education, closed down state parks, and shut down important segments of the state government. Tens of thousands of state workers and employees of companies that contract to the state have been thrown out of work. Far from showing any concern about these disasters, our legislators persist in a demented campaign to balance the budget on the backs of our children, of our most vulnerable citizens, and of every other resident.
What they are proposing to do is cut state income tax revenues by a half-billion dollars, repeal the $250 million state equalization tax, and inflict a further 5.2 percent cut on our already devastated education system. Health care for low-income children would be cut. Child Protective Services, never the nation’s finest agency of its kind, will be further reduced. Food banks will be cut.
To silence opponents, the legislature’s plan proposes to put the governor’s desired temporary 1 percent sales tax increase to the voters; in the unlikely event that they approve it, the 5 percent education cut will be erased.
The 3 percent flat tax legislators are straining to push through in this budget proposal will cut state revenues by $450 million just as a three-year sales tax hike phases out.
As a clue about what kind of people these are, Arizona Senator Jack Harper has described teachers as “feeding at the public trough,” and he made himself the subject of an ethics complaint when, acting as chairman of the committee of the whole, he “accidentally” shut off all the microphones in the room and then cut off an ongoing debate.
Meanwhile, these nut cases are legalizing dangerous fireworks, banned in Arizona for years because of the horrific risk they pose to the children to whom they are marketed (good idea: the more of the little darlings we can maim and kill, the less we’ll have to pay to educate them!), ending the hard-won domestic partner benefits for state employees, and planning to allow Arizonans to carry concealed weapons without a permit and to carry guns into public buildings and schools. They want to close the Arizona Historical Society (shutting a half-dozen museums and effectively discarding their holdings) and they have withheld $18 million in research funding promised to the Science Foundation Arizona. However, overcoming their distaste for “socialism,” these worthies are applying for $1 million in federal funding to save the state’s debunked, intellectually bankrupt abstinence-only program.
A million bucks for abstinence-only…these are the same folks who tell us that if you’re poor and your sick child needs expensive medical care, you’re out of luck. See? If you had just abstained, you wouldn’t have had that weakling brat!
Jon Talton, an observer who calls the gang in power the Kookocracy, suggests we allow the fools to have their way. The disastrous result, he thinks, will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt what extreme right-wing dogma means to the individual citizen’s pocketbook, jobs, and quality of life. That’s what it will take—the collapse of the state’s government and economy—to persuade Arizona voters to put the wackos out of office, once and for all.
Maybe so. In the interim, the disaster that will ensue—that is ensuing—will make this state a terrible place to live for a long time to come. Friends are talking about retiring to northern New Mexico. Not a bad idea: once I’m out of work this winter, thanks to the dismantling of higher education, I won’t really have to stay here. I may follow them to Los Alamos, joining the brain drain that’s already under way.
