Coffee heat rising

Some changes made tooodayyy….

Whew! What a week this has been! I about swooned under the workload, was reduced to tears this morning while contemplating my $448 (!) paycheck, finally came to and decided that there’s gotta be some financial and sanity-preserving changes made around here. Today!

Awoke at 3 a.m., stumbled across the hall into the office, and plopped in front of the computer, there to resume editing the copy that wore me to a frazzle last night. By 9:00, the phone was ringing, the e-mail binging, and neither Cassie nor I had had a bite to eat. Well, I swallowed a fake Pepcid around 4, but I don’t suppose that counts as “food,” eh?

Another bouncing young psychologist has found me and has been clinging to my skirts (well, blue-jean cuffs) as she struggles her way through the grueling process of applying for a clinical internship. This is a gawdawful rite of passage that happens as they’re trying to wrap  up the dissertation and engaged in research projects or assistantships. The competition for internships is so fierce and the standards so high that they live in fear of being turned down, so they churn out dozens of application packages, which are large and filled with arcane technical reports intended to show what they can do. Each package is prefaced with an elaborate cover letter, exquisitely tailored to its target institution, which is supposed to be two pages long but which requires so much information that squeezing it in to two pages is excruciating.

This project would be torment for a native speaker. But if the soon-to-be doctor’s first language is something other than English, the challenge is just horrific.

So I’ve been struggling with the client all week. Where I work 14 to 16 hours a day, she works 24. Last night we both collapsed into our respective sacks on our respective sides of the country at about the same time.

Meanwhile the li’l 101s are shoveling incomprehensible papers in this direction. Twenty narratives, penned by authors who express a certain puzzlement at the instructions, reside on the Blackboard server awaiting my attention.

Later!

This morning after reading a couple more client documents in their second or third iterations, I was forced to pay the AMEX bill. This caused me to look at my dismal finances and to be reminded of a few inconvenient truths; to wit:

I’ve already eaten $1,173 into my Absolute Catastrophe savings, and there’s no end in sight.
The $265 pool maintenance bill did nothing to help that situation.
A paycheck of $448 does nothing to help the situation, either.
Nor does reading and rereading and re-rereading vast swaths of arcana at $4.50 per single-spaced page (don’t ask!).
Although some pay periods bring in plenty of cash to pay the bills, many do not.
The combination of eight-week and sixteen-week sections magnifies this phenomenon no end.
It drives me screaming bat-shit crazy not to know from month to month how much net pay will come in.
Three months without teaching pay in the summer and another month without pay in midwinter are more than the money left over from decent pay periods will cover. Over 12 months, I’m running at a loss.
By the time I’ve worked from three or four or five in the morning till ten or later at night, I’ve racked up about 50 cents an hour for my elaborately refined skills.
The scheme to defer drawing down 4 percent of retirement savings for a year or two—or preferably till I reach age 70—comes under the heading of “forlorn hope.”
Sitting in front of a computer moving little other than my fingers from before dawn till long after dusk is making me flicking miserable.
The stress of worrying about how I’m going to make ends meet is making me physically sick.

This stuff has gotta stop.

Yesterday at the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the gents started talking about travel and play and life, the universe, and all that. The general consensus, led by Jerry Rose—a former teacher who decided there was more to life than teaching and so went into the travel business—was that you’d better live life now, because there may not be a later. This conversation was happening after I’d put in two hours of work before leaving the house at 6:30 a.m. to head over to the confab…

Listening to them talk, I thought, I need a life!

First off: get rid of the money worries. It’s time to give up on trying to preserve and build capital. Called the esteemed financial manager and arranged a meeting. Trotted over to his office.

There I explained that I need a minimum of $1,093 a month, net. Combined with the munificent $957 a month from Social Security, this will cover my basic bills, even in the hottest, most utility-heavy summer.

No problem, said he. This can be accomplished with a 3 percent drawdown. Since my retirement investments, which he and his colleagues have put into a wide variety of instruments (some of them calculated to be inflation-protective), are earning between 5 and 7 percent just now, he notes that this should not eat into principal. He remarked that I could draw down 4 or 5 percent without causing any harm.

With a base, steady income of $2,050, anything I earn through teaching, editing, or blogging is pure gravy. It makes a $448 paycheck look good! In a month, that’s an extra $896 on top of what I need to live!

Eight hunnert and ninety-six dollars would buy a lot of clothes at J. Jill’s. It might even take me to Santa Fe for a weekend. 😉

Knowing from the git-go that there’s going to be enough cash in my checking account to pay the bills is a huge relief. And it’s mighty nice to know that I can get there without leaving myself a pauper at the age of 90, should I live that long.

Welp, money may not buy happiness, but it’s about to buy a nice chunk of stress relief. What this means is that I don’t have to teach two or three sections of composition a semester. Hell, I don’t have to teach any sections if I don’t feel like it.

Whatever I do earn teaching can go to paying the mortgage on our upside-down house, to setting aside some money toward the next car (which I’m going to have to buy one of these days), and to buying something nice for myself and M’hijito now and again. Probably I needn’t teach any more than one section to pull that off. I’m thinking what I’ll do is limit my course load to two and then just take whatever comes along. If our chair comes up with a summer session course for me, that will be nice. If he doesn’t, that’s fine, too.

So, that should help a great deal.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with this life I’m shaking free.

Image:

Charles Sprague Pearce, Detail from Labor mural in lunette from the Family and Education series by Charles Sprague Pearce. North Corridor, Great Hall, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Public domain.

5 thoughts on “Some changes made tooodayyy….”

  1. @ frugalscholar: He didn’t think that was a great idea, though he didn’t seem to be adamantly opposed to it.

    There’s only just enough in savings to generate $2050 a month at 3 percent. Meanwhile, at the moment the entire fund is making around 5 or 6 percent. To pay back 18 months of benefits, I’d have to fork over twenty or thirty grand, plus the taxes I’d have to pay upon withdrawal. I need to find my figures to calculate whether the increase would be worth as much as or more than 5 or 6 percent.

    Obviously, if you hand over money to the government, it’s gone. So if I croak over in a year or so, a distinct possibility at this age, my son doesn’t get a penny of it. Twenty grand would fund a fifth of P.A. school for him.

    True, the market can’t be trusted and of course that 5 or 6 percent could go away at any time, whereas Social Security behaves a bit like an annuity. However, it must be borne in mind that there’s an element in the Republican party that doesn’t just want to cut Social Security. They want to get rid of it. While they’re unlikely to risk the rage of a large portion of the voting populace, a surprisingly large number of younger voters are hostile to Social Security. All this bunch has to do is wait until the boomers are too old and sick to dodder to the voting booth or fill out an absentee ballot, and they’ll be able to cut off Social Security altogether.

  2. Hooray! I am happy you are finally seeing the light. No more stressing yourself about work that pays pennies. You may find your health improving with more sleep and less stress. If you have true emergencies arise you could take on a class to cover after the fact.

    Instead of freaking out about my monthly expenditures I spend NOTHING and go NOWHERE in the months I have paid those huge bills. I live from my freezer and pantry buying only perishables. That means next months AmEx and Visa are small to non-existent, no gasoline charges, basic phone bill, etc. I allow one day for errands to library, post office, grocery for perishables and miscellaneous stops with zero backtracking. There is no need to go more than once. Run those errands on the way to or from choir practice.

    In the end my finances balance. It is amazing what it has done for my thoughts and clarity.

    “Don’t sweat the small stuff.”

  3. @ Brenda: I’m getting mighty tired of spending nothing and going nowhere month after month after month, huge bills or not. This will even out the income and allow me to know how much is in my pocket at the beginning of each month…and that the amount indeed will be enough to cover the base cost of living.

    It’s going to make life a lot less annoying. 🙂

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