Criminey, I go from feeling poor as a church mouse to rich as Croesus. My life is a symphony of clichés.
The community college district extruded a paycheck today: $1348.75 that I don’t need to live on this month or next month. According to my excruciating calculations, all the bills for this month are now covered, barring another colorful exploit by the Gods of Summer Expenses. If nothing else goes wrong, every penny of that 13.5 hundred dollah is mine, all mine!
ohhhh cash it out in one-dollar bills, strew it across the floor, and roll around in it!
Well, actually: Transfer it over to long-term survival savings. Hot dang! That’s over a month of living expense money.
Last December, acting on the advice of financial counsel, I made the decision to use the rest of the post-tax emergency savings that, on Canning Day, resided in my bank account to defer the need to draw down from pre-tax brokerage and IRA accounts. According to this logic, the longer I could avoid drawing from the pre-tax funds, which represent my true retirement savings, the better. At the time, enough remained in what’s now dubbed the Survival Savings account to cover about ten months. This September was the tenth month. Last December, I figured that fund would run out on September 1.
But nay!
With today’s transfer, the fund contains enough to last for another eight and a half months! A miracle!
So, thanks to my having stashed every windfall and every snowflake into Survival Savings, this means a fund I thought would help support me for ten months is actually going to do the job for eighteen months.
In fact, it very probably will last longer than that. Because…
Until the end of spring semester, I was dumping my entire paycheck into M’hijito’s and my joint account for paying the underwater mortgage. This was significantly more than my share in any given month, but I wanted to be sure we had enough to cover the summer, when I needed to use my pay to cover the higher cost of living. In September, I’ll begin paying back into that kitty, but instead of forking over every penny, I’ll deposit only my share—$717. About eight months out of twelve, that’s less than I actually earn.
I’d originally thought, well, I’ll just spend the leftover on myself, since I do tend to feel pretty pinched, especially when unplanned expenses arise. However, I’ve now decided that instead of doing that, I’ll shovel every extra dollar into the Survival Savings account and then, from that kitty, dole out a slightly larger amount than I’ve been giving myself. This will provide a few extra dollars for small indulgences but still slow the depletion of that account to some extent.
So, it looks like…I think…that fund will end up lasting even longer than another eight months, because I’ll be adding two or three hundred dollars a month to it, offsetting the $1,100 a month drawdown that helps cover living expenses. Plus next February’s RASL payment (about four grand) and any tax refund will go into the survival fund, too.
That’s reassuring. Makes me feel a lot better than I did two days ago, when I wrote the post that went live earlier this morning!
Image: Graffiti depiction of Gollum on the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall. Gorgalore. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.