Coffee heat rising

Month: July 2009

Update: Programmable thermostat vs. electric bill

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Comes a new electric bill in the mail. You may recall that last month I had another kitten because the revered Salt River Project presented a bill that was $37 higher than the June 2008 bill, when (all things being equal) last winter’s 3 percent rate hike should have delivered a $13 increase. Two factors could have had to do with this: a new programmable thermostat and a new chest freezer, which resided in the ovenlike garage.

The thermostat had been set to 80 degrees during the day and 76 at night. After perusing June’s $158 bill, I decided to reset the thermostat to 82 during the day, leaving it at 76 for sleeping. And I put Gerardo the Lawn Dude up to moving the freezer inside the house.

This month’s bill, at $165.78, came in $36 under the July 2008 bill of $201.92! Hallelujah!

I still don’t know which circumstance drove up the May bill—fricasseed freezer or programmable thermostat. Probably it was a bit of both.

June was fairly mild: only a couple of 110-degree days. July is the cruelest month here. This weekend we’re supposed to see temperatures of 114 to 116. That’s fairly typical. So, the bill that arrives in August covers the hottest period of the year. Last August’s bill was $229.54.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Tuesday I reprogrammed the thermostat to run at 82 degrees from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (about when I just can’t stand it another minute); then drop to 78 degrees between 5:00 and 10:00 p.m.; and then to bring the temp down to 76 degrees between 10:00 p.m. and 12:30 a.m., the period when I usually start trying to get to sleep. After I should be asleep, then the temperature goes back up to 78.

Chances that I’ll actually sleep through a 78-degree night, of course, are nil. This morning I was up at 4:30, feeling just slightly too damn hot. But what the heck. If a miracle happens and I manage to drop off around 10, that’s 6 1/2 hours, bordering on adequate.

If this scheme keeps the August bill under about $225, I’ll be happy. SRP is going to raise rates again in November, so any cuts I can make now will just keep my head above water next summer. After that? Well…after “retirement,” move to Prescott, I guess, where temperatures are milder.

How come our post office doesn't look like Prescott's?
How come our post office doesn't look like Prescott's?

If you’re in debt…

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Javanese piggy bank, 14th or 15th century AD
Javanese piggy bank, AD 1300–1400

…you’re not alone! AARP recently published the results of a poll in which respondents were asked what proportion of their monthly income their monthly debt obligation amounted to. Nineteen percent of adults under 50 said they owed more than their monthly income! That’s almost one in five Americans.

We old buzzards weren’t much better off: 14 percent of people 50 and older were in the same boat.

Among the younger set, 24 percent saw about three fourths of their monthly income go to debt service, and 25 percent spent about half their income on debt. An incredible 26 percent of us dinosaurs said we spent 75 percent of our pay on debt.

Twenty-nine percent of the young things—more than a quarter, almost a third!—said they owed less than half their monthly income; 38 percent of survivors of the Cretaceous put our debt load at less than half of monthly income.

And…apparently the surveyors didn’t think to ask if anyone owed nothing. Too unlikely, eh?

IMHO, the most surprising element of this probably not very scientific survey was that over 1/4 of post-50s owed around 75 percent of monthly pay. Say what??? How could you possibly hit 50 or 60 or (hevvin help us) 70 and have to fork over 3/4 of your income to some lender?

Well…OK, two words: Edmund Andrews.

And no, I dunno how old he is. But obviously, if they included mortgage debt in this question (and there’s no sign they didn’t), folks who bought houses in the last three years or so are surely strapped.

In other categories, it’s not so surprising that old duffers are doing better than the rangy young pups: if you bought a house ten or fifteen years ago, what was once a breathtaking mortgage payment now looks pretty good. And most people hit their financial stride around age 50: typically people reach the peak of their earning power between ages 50 and 65. So if you earn more than ever before and you have an old mortgage, your debt ratio is probably lower…especially if you’ve been figuring you’d better shovel out from under the debt before you retire.

How about you? What proportion of your monthly income would you estimate your monthly debt to be?

Image: Wikipedia, GNU free documentation license

Impromptu shrimp curry

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I ate it before I could take a photo of it. Sorry. It deserved a picture.

The other day M’hijito and I went over to the new westside Lee Lee, an Asian supermarket of local fame. While there, I picked up a three-lifetime supply of Madras curry.

If you’ve never tried Madras curry powder, consider seeking it out or making it. So lovely! It’s spicey-warm and…well, the only word I can think of is “mellow.” It’s a deliciously mellow, just slightly hot spice.

Around 10:15 this evening, I was moved to fix dinner. As you can imagine, the bare fact that it was after ten o’clock before I got around to eating reflected a difficult, nay, hair-pulling day. Luckily for you, you weren’t here!

Anyway, with the air conditioning system fixed and an estimate of taxes on Social Security benefits run and a new set of survival figures calculated (*$%$&*#@!!!), bills paid, budget rejiggered, pool cleaned, copy read, more copy left unread, inadvertently dessicated lime tree rescued, associate editor’s new GDU horror story confronted, friend’s woes heard, dog walked, thermostat re-re-re-reprogrammed, and the general hysteria ebbing, I wanted something easy and fast to prepare. Pulled an open bag of frozen shrimp out of the fridge and proceeded:

I had…

• four or five medium-sized frozen shrimp (one serving), defrosted and patted dry with a towel or paper towels
• some leaf lettuce
• a ripe mango (any fruit would do)
• 1/4 lime
• Madras curry, about 1 Tbsp
• about a tsp. of whole mustard seed
• 1 little green onion, coarsely chopped
• a few spoonsful of cooked rice
• a splash of olive oil

Peel and slice the mango. Place some nice leaves of lettuce on a dinner plate and set the mango slices on the lettuce. Squeeze a little lime juice over this mini-salad.

Pour a small amount of olive oil in a frying pan. Warm briefly over medium-high heat. Add the defrosted shrimp and the cut-up onion, a tablespoon or so of curry powder, and a sprinkle of mustard seeds. Cook the shrimp until it’s about done. Add some cooked rice. Stir gently until the shrimp is finished cooking and the rice is warm.

Place the cooked shrimp and rice on or very near the mango salad.

This is a lovely flavor combination. Easy, quick, and minimally messy. Good eating!

🙂

Retirement planner yields interesting discovery

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If you’re nearing retirement or thinking about how you can escape into early retirement, check out Vanguard’s retirement planning tools. You don’t have to be logged in to use these things. Go to https://personal.vanguard.com/us/home and click on “Planning and Education”; from there navigate to Retirement Planning > I’m Planning to Retire > Evaluate Your Expenses and Income. Entering the site through this pathway takes you past a number of other options, including some for people who aren’t yet on the verge of retirement.

For example, you can create an investment plan, plan for college, learn the basics of estate planning, and discover how to manage your portfolio with an eye to tax savings.

But since I equate the coming layoff with enforced retirement (as in please don’t throw me in the brier patch), my exploration soon took me to Vanguard’s paired worksheets, one that allows you to estimate your expenses and one that helps you estimate your retirement income and figure whether it will support you.

To my amazement, Vanguard’s machine-generated planning estimates are more optimistic than what Excel  has been telling me. As you may recall, I’ve figured I might have to draw down as much as 6 percent of total savings to get by; at best, 5 percent was a likely number.

Because Medicare will cost about 12 times what I pay for health insurance now and because I’ll have to pay my share of the mortgage on the downtown house out of cash flow, my monthly living and emergency savings costs will rise from the current $2,800 to about $3,275—$425 more than my present take-home pay!

However, even with that stunning expense figure entered in the retirement income worksheet, Vanguard tells me that the amount I’ll have to draw down from savings will be only 4.3 percent of the total.

I can’t account for the difference. At first I thought it had to do with the way taxes were figured—Vanguard’s income worksheet automatically generates an estimated tax liability based on the tax rates you provide—but punching a few numbers into a handheld calculator shows that not to be so. Unless I’ve made a mistake in entering expenses, it looks like Social Security, part-time teaching income, and a drawdown of a little over 4 percent will just about cover the average monthly cost of living. Excel shows an average monthly cost of $3,306; Vanguard’s comes to $3,275, not a significant difference.

Either of these figures requires me to avoid extraordinary expenses at all costs, something I haven’t succeeded in doing for lo, these many months. One crazy cost after another—some optional, some decidely not—has overrun my budget three out of the past five months, and probably will overrun it this month, too. Last year I ran in the red five out of twelve months; once by only $37, but still…

If we think in terms of the whole year rather than focusing tightly on given months, last year’s total black ink came to $1,397.37; red ink totaled $726.23, leaving me $671.14 to the good at the end of the year. However! Last year’s discretionary budget was $1,500 a  month. The amount I entered in Vanguard’s worksheet comes to only $1,265—and that includes a $500/month allowance for extraordinary expenses. It’s highly questionable whether I can live on that: last year’s expenditures averaged $1,440 a month.

Starting in January, I cut the budget for nonrecurring expenses to $1,200 a month. As of June 20, the end of the last budget cycle, I was $681.89 in the red: an average of $136 a month! That’s after The Copyeditor’s Desk covered every expense I could justify as a business cost.

So it appears that in retirement, unless Medicare and income taxes are less than I think they’ll be, I will not be able to cover every expense that comes my way. I’ve got seven months to get the extraordinary spending under control.

Image: Micky, Hammock on Beach; Wikipedia Commons

State budgeteers continue to wrangle

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Hauled back into session by a vetoing governor, the Arizona legislature unanimously restored funding to the public schools. The governor has agreed to sign the revised bills.

While the gov’ won this round, the budget remains incomplete, and so we state employees still can’t be assured our next paychecks will land in our bank accounts. One way or another, the fundamental problem remains: the state simply does not have enough money to pay for basic services, and other than having the legislators and state employees get together throw a giant bake sale, there’s no way to get the money without raising taxes. And the legislature is philosophically (one might even say religiously) opposed to taxation. Our elected reps want to lower taxes, not increase them.

Well, I don’t want my taxes raised, either. But then neither do I want to lose the benefits of soooo-cialism such as

• roads
• police protection
• fire protection
• unemployment benefits
• child protective services
• prisons
• state prosecutors
• public defenders
• public records
• public health protection
• water treatment plants
• libraries
• museums
• schools
• universities

…and on and on. Given a choice between sinking further into Third-World living conditions or raising taxes, I’ll take the tax increase any day.

Shopping frolics; budget strategizing

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M’hijito called yesterday afternoon and invited me to drive out to the new westside Lee Lee, a long way from the central city but probably not as far as the original location in Chandler. Lee Lee is a large, interesting Asian supermarket, where fish are sold fresh-caught from huge tanks, the produce department offers treats you’ll never see at Safeway, two long aisles are filled with exotic cooking gear, and ethnic foods are organized by country.

He wanted to buy a mah-jongg table. We found one, but, being a chip off the old block, he felt $60 was more than he wanted to pay. He’ll be back.

While we were there, we picked up a variety of wonders, such as chunky anemone-shaped Japanese mushrooms, Madras curry powder, coconut milk, Philippine mangoes, and a variety of Asian snacks and candies that made M’hijito nostalgic for his old neighborhood in San Francisco. From there, it was on to Costco.

Interestingly, at about the same moment, Carrie over at It’s Frugal Being Green was making the Costco rounds in her precincts. As part of her project to find the best meat at the best price, she had already pretty well decided that the venerable warehouse store does mighty well in this department. Lo! What should we each discover in our separate treks: Costco’s got prime beef! Holy mackerel!

Well, at the Phoenix store, the choice was limited to a few packages of prime New York steaks, and they were frozen solid. They did look pretty rich: so baroquely marbled they must have contained as much fat as protein. Though the price was not off the scale, we were a little put off by their being frozen (like we don’t freeze the stuff after we get it home?). However, when M’hijito and I compared them with the ribeye steaks, we concluded that the choice quality ribeyes showed about as much marbling as the prime cuts…and they were two bucks a pound cheaper.

So, we settled for the middle-brow stuff.

That notwithstanding, I spent about $105 at the two stores yesterday. Not good, since I had exactly $2.82 left in this week’s microbudget, to last until tomorrow. Strictly speaking.

Not so bad, though, if you look at it from the new angle I cooked up: by spreading extraordinary expenses over the entire month-long budget. From that point of view, I could have spent almost $125 and still be OK.

microbudget2-7-6-09

So…did I go over budget? Well, I think not: as a practical matter, there was plenty of money in the month’s budget to buy a few food items this week. And I didn’t buy anything I didn’t need: the main reason I went into Costco was to pick up some orange juice and frozen strawberries, staples of my breakfast fare. I’d run my supply of meat down to nothing, so it made sense to pick up a package of ribeyes. I needed fruit, so the mangoes from Lee Lee and the Costco peaches (split with M’hijito) also were reasonable purchases. The only thing I didn’t really need were Costco’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans…but hey! Buttercup yellow! When would a person ever see buttercup jeans that fit, ever again?

I like the idea of spreading extraordinary costs over an entire month. Both unusual bills, $243.68 for the incredible bargain on 1,440 paving bricks and $188 for the speed trap ticket, came up in the first week. Dividing each figure by four and debiting each microbudget for the respective figures—$47 and $60.92—reduces the amount available for each week but leaves plenty of cash in each week for ordinary expenses. Trying to take those amounts out of the week in which they occurred runs the first microbudget deep into the red and, when the red ink is carried over into the second week, leaves too little in that week’s microbudget to live on comfortably.

All in all, a successful day: had a nice time with my son, got a few things I need, explored an interesting new store, and ended up with plenty in next week’s budget.

🙂