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Month: December 2008

Long-term care insurance

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Metlife sends a notice inviting me to designate someone who can be alerted if a payment on my long-term care insurance is missed. Good thought: obviously, if you get into a predicament where you need long-term care, you may not be competent to pay your bills. I have the premium, which comes to about $75 a month, paid electronically, and so its unlikely the bill will go unpaid unless M’hijito has to take over my affairs and changes things around.

This policy, which I originally bought from TIAA-CREF but was sold to Metlife, will not cover the exorbitant cost of nursing-home or nursing care 100%. However, it does cover enough that my Social Security and (if my mutual funds ever recover) a 4% drawdown from savings will take up the slack. Because my house is paid for, if the utilities are turned off the house will cost nothing while I’m incarcerated in a nursing home. Well, that’s not so: it will cost the property tax and Gerardo’s bill to come around and clean up the desert landscaping once every month or two.

The cost of nursing care in this country is just astonishing, and because much of it is delivered by minimum-wage workers laboring in extremely difficult conditions, it behooves you to get yourself into the highest-quality nursing home available. And of course, the higher the quality, the higher the cost. By 2004, the average annual cost of nursing home care was over $70,000. This amount increases at about 6% a year; the annual cost is now said to hover around $76,500. In the Phoenix area, if I get sick this year it will cost me about $76,200 to get myself cared for.

Home nursing care, which sounds ever so much more desirable if you’re lucky enough to find someone competent, honest, and caring to do the job, runs about $43,885 a year nationwide and $45,800 in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Assisted living would cost me around $29,700, significantly less than the nationwide average of $33,100.

Is there any question about why some old folks ship out on luxury liners in their sunset years?

Neither Medicare nor health insurance will cover nursing care, at least not for any length of time. In theory Medicare will cover 100 days following an acute illness, but you have to show signs of recovery to get even that much coverage—and of course if your problem is acute senility, “recovery” is not in the picture. When my mother was dying of cancer, we found that Medicare and Blue Cross did everything they could to get her off their rolls, to the extent that my husband, who was a lawyer, and I spent so much of our time and energy fighting bureaucrats that I was left with almost no time to spend with my mother in her last weeks. SDXB had to arrange to have his mother divorce his father when the old man was dying of Parkinson’s, in order to force the VA to cover the his care and avoid pauperizing her.

Medicaid will cover nursing home care, but only after you have utterly pauperized yourself. You must be left penniless, meaning you have had to sell your home, your car, and expendall other assets on medical and nursing home bills. In Arizona, if you’ve made the mistake of gifting your children, as is allowed under federal law, with a few thousand inheritance-tax-free bucks over the two years prior to your falling ill, you can be disqualified from this state’s equivalent of Medicaid on the theory that you must have been trying to cheat the system.

So as you can see, if you’re “lucky” enough to make it to advanced old age, you’d better have long-term care insurance. Fourteen percent of people over 71 suffer from dementia, and that doesn’t count strokes, broken hips, chronic heart failure, Parkinson’s disease, or any of the multitude of other causes that put the elderly out of commission.

The problems with long-term care insurance are a) there are lots of shysters out there selling products that will not provide adequate care; b) premiums are high and must include a provision to adjust upward for the skyrocketing cost of care; and c) the older you are when you buy a policy, the pricier the premiums will be.

In general, you should plan to buy long-term care insurance in your early fifties. Obviously, if you purchase a policy when you’re too young, you’ll pay premiums over a long period when your chance of needing the coverage is almost nil. If you wait until you’re too old, you may be disqualified from buying a policy or pay an exorbitant premium.

You need to investigate any insurance company carefully before buying a long-term policy from it. Be sure it is financially sound and highly rated by Moody’s and A.M. Best. In addition, it’s important to fully understand what you’re buying. Most states have an agency on aging or an insurance commission. These agencies can provide you with information on what to look for and what to avoid in long-term care coverage. AARP also offers a lot of valuable information, but you should be aware that this organization is in the business of selling long-term care insurance.

It’s never too early to look into this issue. And if your parents are baby-boomers, now is the time to find out whether they’re covered and to urge them to get coverage if they’re not. Ten million baby boomers are expected to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and as we’ve noted, that’s not the only ailment that can render an elder helpless. The cost and anguish entailed in having to care for an adult who is fully disabled by senility or other illness are devastating—you should not assume that you will be able to care for your parents in your home, especially since you and your spouse will probably have to work to keep a roof over your heads and you will be trying to deal with raising children at the same time.

My insurance covers nursing home care and in-home care. It also will pay a relative or friend a small stipend to care for me at home, and pay to have the person trained in caregiving. As I look at the budget items I can cut if I’m laid off in the next few weeks, one of the items I do not consider to be an option is the long-term care insurance.

Thinking of turning your blog into a book?

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It will be a challenge, because blogging is intrinsically different from book writing. However, if you’ve organized your categories intelligently, you may be able to extract enough material for a salable book out of a year’s worth of posts.

I just posted a quickie guide to getting a book published over at The Copyeditor’s Desk. It’s not the be-all and end-all of publishing advice (it’s a blog post, for petesake), but it does clue you to a valuable resource many writers have yet to discover. Check it out!

Spectacular ending to a difficult day

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dcp_2265Unbelievably gorgeous Arizona sunset this evening. The air is crisp—almost cold—as a rain front is ambling in from the west. A buttermilk sky floating in ahead of the storm turned first hot gold and then deep red against a turquoise backdrop. Very nice: A-minus, God.

Today piled atop yesterday to create 48 hours from Hell. At four in the morning, the dog threw up all over the bed. I’d run out of meat last night and so cooked her a couple of eggs…you can imagine what a mess that made. But try not to! By the time I got out of bed and got her off the bed and pulled the soiled blankets off (the heat has been off to save money toward the expected RIF, and so four blankets and throws were stacked on the sheets), we had yellow, stinking barf all over me, all over the floor, all over the throw rug, all over the bed, all over the bureau drawer. Fortunately it didn’t get on the pillows and didn’t soak through to the mattress, but I had to launder every stitch of bedding.

Since I don’t have any other blankets or sheets, that was the end of sleeping, after a five-hour nap.

The washer ran from four in the morning to about noon. So did the dog: she kept right on barfing, even though she had nothing left in her to throw up. After about the dozenth woof, I called the vet.

The issue here is that a day before Thanksgiving she got ahold of some sort of plastic–what it was and where she found it remains a mystery. Whatever, she chewed it up into tiny sharp pieces and swallowed a fair amount of it. This put her at risk of an obstruction or a perforated intestine.

Over the phone at the time, the vet advised me to feed her some vaseline, which works like mineral oil to…uhm…grease the works, as it were. We managed to get through the holidays without incident, but the vet also had said to watch for vomiting. Here, we had vomiting. With a vengeance.

Meanwhile, I have 200 typeset pages of medieval and renaissance research to index by tomorrow. Wuz supposed to have read a chunk of it yesterday, but as you may realize, that did not happen, partly because I was so exhausted and so harried I couldn’t function.

After the 9:00 a.m. junket to Borders to pick up the lost AMEX card, it was off to the vet at 12:30, marking pages and cleaning up barf around those trips.

A set of X-rays showed the dog has something in her gut near the caecum. What, the vet did not know. She advised watchful waiting. Gave the dog an antiemetic shot, advised me to give her Pepcid AC to try to cut down the barfing of yellow bile, and said to ease up on feeding her. That’ll be $225.

So much for trying to live on $300 this week. Well, I wasn’t going to make it anyway, but now I’ll have to raid savings to make ends meet. How on earth do I imagine I’m going to live on a gross income that’s $880 a month less than I net today?????

Managed to get through 52 pages before I fell asleep. Woke from a nap with the same headache I’ve been enjoying nonstop for the past two weeks. Do wish it would go away.
There are a lot of things one wishes would go away.

Perusing the daily news, I about had cardiac arrest when I read this story. If I may be permitted to say so: God Damn It! A cherubic eight-year-old child dies because some moron hands him a loaded freaking Uzi. No ordinary moron, mind you: a freaking chief of police!

As a screaming left-wing liberal who happens to take the Constitution literally and so believes that law-abiding citizens do indeed have a right to bear arms, I am so enraged by this stupidity that I can barely breathe. What in the name of heaven could these people have been thinking?

  1. An eight-year-old is a child. Spell it: c-h-i-l-d!
  2. An Uzi has a recoil. That’s r-e-c-o-i-l.
  3. If you don’t know what that means, try k-i-c-k-b-a-c-k.
  4. An Uzi is designed for soldiers in combat, not small children at play.
  5. A boy will get just as big a thrill out of shooting a .22 as anything else, and a .22 will let him learn how to handle a gun safely and hit a target accurately.

But apparently “handle a gun safely” was not on the agenda at this fun event. w00t! Full auto rock & roll!

Forty-eight hours from Hell.

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Cheap frames

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In a comment at the post I published the other day about designing artwork to fit precut mats, photographer FF noted that acquiring frames is an expensive proposition. This is certainly true, even at an outfit such as Aaron Brothers, which has two-for-one sales every few months.

There are two very inexpensive source of frames, some of them quite nice: yard sales and estate sales. People are always trying to unload artwork they’ve tired of. Sometimes they’ll get the most ordinary prints and posters custom-framed. And of course, when they sell the print, they sell the frame and mat with it. You can usually buy these things very cheaply. Remove and throw out the cheesy artwork, and voila! a frame. Install your own mat (if you do this often, it soon becomes cost-effective to buy a mat cutter) and your preferred image or object, and you have a custom-framed work.

Here’s a pastel done by La Maya, whose hobby is painting in pastels and oils. The frame is an estate-sale find.

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She cut the two mats herself and placed the entire arrangement in the frame, using her dining-room table as a workspace.

dcp_22431The frame itself is rather interesting, and it works very well with the mats to display the image handsomely. The cost was a fraction of what she would have paid at a frame shop. If you do a lot of photography or painting, it’s well worth stopping at yard or estate sales to check the offerings. Ignore the ugly, faded prints: just search for desirable frames.

Single in a couples culture

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Have you noticed that? We live in a couples culture. Single adults constitute a large portion of the U.S. population:36 percent of women between 20 and 44 are single, and less than half of U.S. households consists of married couples. Yet the way our society operates is based on the assumption that most people are partnered, in a live-in way. America as an economy and Americans as individuals would profit if we changed that.

There’s nothing new about this observation. But until recently the only element about it that bothered me much was the inequity in the cost of traveling—a single traveler pays far more than she or he would as a member of a couple. As I grow older, though, and less able to handle mountains of work, it’s beginning to wear on me. It really takes two people to cope, especially if you have a job and expect to have a life, too.

Today was a case in point.

A trade group that The Copyeditor’s Desk belongs to was having a shindig this evening: a potluck. We’ve already generated a lot of work through this networking group, and so it behooves us to show up to the meetings. The DIY dinner (the group usually meets at a chain restaurant that caters the get-togethers) moved the meeting time up from 7:00 p.m. to 5:30, a freaking impossible hour when you have an hour-long commute and no place at the office to store food.

I was busy this week and didn’t have time to go out and buy extra food and cook up a potluck dish. Ech. I don’t at all care for potlucks, unless they’re at a friend’s house (and even those are suspect). Usually the food consists of tamale casseroles concocted with lots of Kraft cheese slices and canned enchilada sauce, accompanied by grocery-store raw veggie platters and grocery-store pies. This meant I would have to leave the office early, race to the grocer, pick up some sort of easy-to-construct foodoid, race home, throw it together on a sturdy paper plate or two, wrap it tight, jump in the car with it, and race to the meeting.

First thing in the morning, 7:15, La Maya calls and invites me to go for a 7:30 walk. I’ve overslept and haven’t even brushed my teeth at this point, but don’t want to turn her down because the morning constitutional is the main nexus of our socialization. Throw some food down for the dog and race out the door. Since the dog won’t go outside through a dog door, I figure to have to clean up a mess when I get back.

But no! Pleasant surprise; still, it means the dog has to be taken for a walk. By now it’s 8:30 and I still haven’t had one bite to eat, to say nothing of the morning dose of caffeine or even so much as a sip of water. My head hurts. Walk the dog. Race back in, fix breakfast, bolt it down, throw my dirty clothes on the bed, yank on some office clothes, race out the door, running radically late.

Drive for what feels like half my life to get to campus. Download a 200-page PDF and print it out, preparatory to writing an index. Spend a significant amount of time struggling with the printer, which has decided it has a paper jam in a place we can’t reach. Waste more time trying to figure out if an illegal charge was made on my purchasing card. Waste a bit more time yakking with one of the RAs. Waste another half-hour or so cranking an annoyed post about some very stupid stuff to the intranet blog and reposting a bowdlerized version to The Copyeditor’s Desk. By the time I leave the office, I’m hungry and still running late.

At the gourmet grocery store, in addition to the potluck makings I pick up some sushi to tide me over—or, I hope, to fill me up so I won’t have to eat another tamale casserole. Have you ever noticed that one package of grocery-store sushi is not enough for a single meal, but two is too much? Very hungry by now, I buy two.

At the check-out register, I discover my American Express card is missing. Nice timing!

Okay, there’s never a good time for a credit card to go missing. But in the have-you-ever-noticed department, have you ever noticed that things like this always happen at the most inconvenient of all possible moments?

Charge the food on Visa, race home (all the while trying to remember where I was yesterday), race in the door, search the office and house: no card. Call the hair salon; then remember I’d gone by Borders to buy a 2009 wall calendar. Yes, Borders has the card locked in its safe. Too late now to drive way to hell and gone over there (one of the charms of being centrally located is that the middle-class infrastructure follows the white middle class to the suburbs, abandoning you in your central location); arrange to pick it up tomorrow.

Throw the potluck foodoid together, wrap it up, toss it in the car, and race downtown. I decide not to feed the dog, even though it’s coming onto her dinnertime, because I really don’t look forward to having to clean a dog mound off the family room floor when I get home from the soirée. Struggle through hideous traffic made even more gawdawful by the lightrail, which is being tested up and down my route by its proud developers. Lightrail morphs formerly timed signals into guaranteed reds at every intersection, and it takes a good two minutes (at least!) to cycle through a light change.

Arrive at the central library, where the shindig is taking place, so tired I can barely speak, much less “network.” I get stuck sitting next to an aged couple who have, God help us, written and self-published a book rhapsodizing about their lifelong extramarital affair, which culminates when their love child tracks the woman down and brings the two birth parents back together after they’d put their relationship in cold storage, thereby ending two thirty-year marriages and breaking up two homes that had nurtured a total of seven children. This story, I might add, was a great deal less entertaining in the telling than one might hope.

I escape early, lhudly sing huzzah, and plod home, navigating past what appears to be a fatal accident. By the time I turn into my driveway—narrowly missing my neighbor Al and his little dog—I am just dead exhausted. But I still have to feed and walk the dog. And of course I haven’t posted to this blog, either. The bed is unmade, dirty clothes are strewn around the room, running shoes rest on the floor beneath the bed, dirty dishes clutter the kitchen counter…augh!

Dog fed and wrung out, house sorta picked up, it’s now almost 10:00 p.m. as I write this.

The point? Yesh, the point:

All of this would have been a lot less nightmarish had I been a couple. Setting the meeting time and asking people to show up with food a half-hour after work guaranteed that a single person would have one heck of a time getting there. A spouse, a partner, even a willing roommate would have taken the pressure off, because that person could have…

  • fed and walked the dog,
  • picked up something at the store,
  • made the bed,
  • unloaded the dishwasher & put the dirties in,
  • put the food on the plate while I coped with the dog or cleaned up the house…

Even ONE of those little helpmeety acts would have made getting to that meeting a lot easier and a lot more doable.

The assumption that everyone has a life partner not only is bad for the general sanity of singles, it’s also bad for business. At the meeting, I was simply too tired to function. Because I ran so late for work, I didn’t do a heck of a lot for the taxpayer today, either. As a society, I suspect we would be better off if we would take account of the fact that fewer and fewer people live together and more and more live alone.

By all means, for example, we should provide mothers and fathers plenty of time off work (or better yet, make it possible for more parents to elect to stay at home when the kids are little, if they so choose). But we also should provide comparable amounts of time for single adults to deal with their home lives, which amazingly enough are not empty! We should refrain from gouging travelers who would like to go it alone. We should provide places in restaurants to wine and dine single patrons, and not park single concert-goers behind columns and in the depths of the concert hall’s dead space. In short, as a culture we should recognize and accommodate the fact that something between a third and a half of Americans are single.

How is this hard?

Get the mat to fit your artwork

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You’ve probably noticed that framing photos, small crafts, drawings, and paintings can be muy expensive. Often the most expensive part of the process is having a mat cut to size. You could, of course, buy a mat-cutter…for a small fee. This expense, however, is none too practical unless you’re an artist who’s producing framable work all the time.

An easy and frugal solution is simply to draw or make your artwork to fit a precut mat. Shops such as Aaron Brothers and Michael’s sell precut mats inexpensively, often on sale. Get the mat and a frame to fit. At home, unwrap the mat (with clean hands!), gently lay it on the paper or other medium you will use for your artwork, and lightly outline the opening with a hard graphite pencil. Then simply draw, paint, or collage to fit the space you’ve outlined.

Be careful in buying mats on sale, because these sometimes are dirty or damaged. Inspect them closely before purchasing.

I bought these two square mats at an Aaron Brothers, at a smokin’ sale price, and also found a pair of inexpensive frames to go with them. My hobby is pencil drawing, especially botanicals. The rose and the poppy shown here were drawn to fit the size of the mat opening.

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Great art, it ain’t. But the point is, you can mat images cheaply simply by sizing the image to fit the mat, rather than the other way around.