Coffee heat rising

Month: September 2012

A 10-Minute Post: For Plantar Fascitis: Freeze Your Shoes

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Ten minutes before I have to race out the door to another networking meeting. So here’s an amazingly short post:

Got plantar fascitis? Hurts like the dickens, doesn’t it…and it takes weeks and weeks and weeks and then some more weeks to go away. If it ever does.

Among the various things you can do to help yourself is to apply cold to the pained foot. This is not every practical if you’re on your feet for hours at a time, as, say, yours truly happens to be. But…I figured something out.

First, take your gel heel cups or your orthotics and keep them in the freezer. If you have several pairs, you can pull out a fresh pair and stuff them in your shoes as you’re about to hit the road.

But…second, and better yet, FREEZE YOUR ENTIRE DAMN SHOE!

Yes. It doesn’t harm leather to put it in the deep freeze. And if you have a fairly hefty shoe, like a Dansko or Sanitas clog, the bulk in the heavy soles will keep the shoe cold for a surprisingly long time. Put your shoes in a plastic bag and stash them in the freezer. Let them live there. Take them out and put them on just as you’re ready to head out the door.

Or…put a fresh pair of frozen shoes on as soon as you come back in the door, after traipsing around on your feet.

It feels sooooooo good to slip your sore foot into that icy-cold shoe!

And I think it may actually help. The current episode I’m enjoying has been particularly stubborn–it’s gone on for about three months now. And lo! Since I came up with this idea, it started healing (heh!) up. Most of the time now, the foot hardly hurts at all.

Combine a frozen shoe with your usual stretching therapy and see what happens.

w00t! 6:41 a.m.! Got this done in less than 10 minutes. And….she’s off and running!

Is My Boss Watching?

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LOL! As if by magic, my excellent chair has been showering paid extra gigs on me this week! Did he read the last few days’ worth of rants and schemes to deep-six the teaching noncareer? Maybe he wants me to stay around.

Tempting enough, really. He is such a nice man! How many people can say that about their bosses? However many you guess, you can be sure many, many fewer academics can say the same about the chairs of their departments. A competent academic administrator who manages to retain his humanity is rarer than feathers on a cat.

At any rate, these little honoraria will help make up, in a tiny way, for the summer’s financial drought. And that’s nice.

Meanwhile, work continues to trickle steadily in the door. One long-time client has a publisher interested in (and the hook out for editors at another, even more prestigious house) a collection of testimonios, memoir-like essays by adult children of Mexican immigrants escaped poverty and ended up as academics and business executives. So far we’ve read two of them, both very interesting and in some places quite moving. And a newer client keeps manufacturing new projects. He seems to like our work, for which I’m duly thrilled and grateful.

If the editorial work keeps coming in, there’s no reason why the teaching endeavors can’t come to an end. You know, I enjoy the students, who are by and large interesting and good people. But the sense of futility aside—why are we jumping them through a hoop that teaches nothing for those who haven’t learned, after 13 years of schooling, how to write short essays or research papers and that is utterly unnecessary for those who have?—the amount of time a comp course requires makes it a huge distraction from the effort to get a business up and running.

Tomorrow, for example, I have to leave here at 6:45 to get to campus by 7:30 a.m. I have a meeting on the campus after class, so it’ll be 10:00 before I get back to the computer. Then I’ll have to turn around and race to a Chamber luncheon in Scottsdale, which will absorb a fair amount of the afternoon. Then we have choir practice in the evening. So that makes a day that begins at 4:00 a.m. (the hour at which I commonly write these blog posts) and ends around 10:00 p.m.

Today’s class starts at noon. That carves a huge chunk out of the middle of my day—obviously, I can work around it, but it breaks one’s concentration, and it means that whatever I’m working on will have to stop and start, and also that Tuesdays and Thursdays can’t be used for lunchtime networking. Thursday I have to give a dog and pony show at my 7:30 breakfast meeting, also in Scottsdale, then fly back into town for a doctor’s appointment, then meet the noon class again, leaving only the afternoon to do any editorial work. I need to go by a client’s office while I’m in Scottsdale but can’t do that and make the doctor’s appointment, too.

It’s not that there’s no time to work on the editorial business, but that a lot more time would be available without the constant interruptions for class meetings. On Thursday, for example, I could have made the doctor’s appointment later in the morning, allowing time to meet the client. Whether I can even get to the doctor’s office by 9:30 remains to be seen. In fact, as I think about it, it looks like I probably should call today and try to change that to a less hectic day…if any such thing exists.

 

The Great Escape: How to Make This Work

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Well, for cryin’ out loud. I just sat down and earned $240 for four hours of work.

Meanwhile, Friday the community college district deposited $486.60 for three weeks of work. Uhm…since they don’t count grading and course prep, that actually was for 18 hours of work, not for the de facto 54 hours of work I’ve put in so far this fall.

Do we need anything more to convince of the rightness of my proposition?

So right. So right is it that I even have an inchoate plan. It goes along these lines:

Create goals to be accomplished by quarters. Within each quarter, establish monthly and weekly to-do’s. This should break down some rather large, broad targets into manageable chunks.

How on earth would this look? Well, let’s look at some inchoate schemes:

Fourth Quarter 2012

• Develop plans.
• Lay groundwork to put plans into action.
• Begin marketing program.
• Begin advertising program.

 Looks pretty easy, but each of those four little bullets represents an amazing amount of work and hustle. The marketing plan alone, for example, entails these tasks:

Focus sharply on two specific networking groups.

• Become actively involved.
• Volunteer for specific roles.
• Revisit regularly to perform these roles.
• Gain recognition.

Develop a “presence” in Arizona business community.

• Local Arizona
• Better Business Bureau
• Rent space at appropriate business or arts fairs.

Volunteer actively for two carefully targeted groups that attract active business people and “old Arizona” elite.

• I’ve already identified those and moved to join them (in one case, to rejoin it).
• These activities will require considerable work, energy, and entrepreneurship.
• Set aside time to handle these projects.

Approach mainline national publishers and literary agents.

• Emphasize textbook publishers, since this is about the only part of the book publishing industry that’s still making a profit.

Develop “product packages.”

• This idea comes from our SBA counselor: lines of closely related services that could be delivered in packages.

Develop a social media campaign.

• LinkedIn
• Yelp
• Angie’s List

Launch a public relations initiative.

• CofC’s newsletter: ask about writing a column.
• PBJ: try to pitch columns to it.
• Send press releases to PBJ and other local rags.
• Track down [friend from long ago]’s magazine and try to get mentioned there.
• Try to get publicity for FaM, too.
• Ask clients to plug CED on social media sites.

Advertise.

• CofC’s radio program: get on it.
• Small local publications and websites.
• Update website!!!

Then we have a few other small schemes:

Improve revenues all the way around.

• Raise rates again.
• Market CED to mainstream publishers and major scholarly & scientific publishers.
• Design “packages” to sell at specific rates.
• Create e-books; market on FaM and Amazon.
• Develop social media campaigns for e-books.

Identify at least two types of subcontractors and establish reasonable pay rates for each of these:

• Interns
• Proven professional editors, writers, and designers

Visualize an organizational plan that will provide a way to handle more work than one person can handle.

• Establish amounts that subcontractors can be paid. For example, reserve project management to Tina and charge enough to make a profit on subcontracting her skills.
• Start lining up work for them.

Create a time management program that will accommodate all of the above.

LOL! That’s just for what remains of 2012. Don’t ask for much, do I?

Saturday Pick-ups

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Half an hour before I have to leave for choir, so this will be short. Videlicet: go here, read these!

At Planting Our Pennies, Mr. & Mrs. PoP ponder a major plant question.

Evan at My Journey to Millions reports on a California law concerning liability for interference in an expected inheritance, very interesting, indeed.

Ever take your car to one of those oil-change places only to have them try to upsell you to a bunch of other (unnecessary!) services? Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB explains how to get your car’s oil changed without  getting ripped off.

I suppose you imagine PF bloggers have no sense of humor, eh? Well, check out eemusing’s new “Open Letters” post over at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander. 😀 She promises to make this a series. We can only hope!

And there’s gentle humor in Money Beagle’s post on a new vision of NFL football.

101 Centavos contemplates the possibilities in second-guessing (or even first-guessing) the investment opportunities presented by the gun-owning public’s uncertainty about the future. Interesting pair of posts, of which this is part 2.

Revanche, a particularly evolved type of working stiff, reflects on the sociopsycho-ecology of working space in an entertaining rant at A Gai Shan Life.

The eternally peripatetic Donna Freedman is at FinCon, as is the lively Crystal from Budgeting in the Fun Stuff.

Mrs. Accountability drives her employer’s van home. Protecting her from herself, it kindly locks her out and creates a spectacular new annoyance.

I must fly! Have a grand Saturday!!

The Opportunity Cost of Adjunct Teaching

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I just sat down and figured out the opportunity cost of teaching two sections of freshman comp, based on the $60 hourly rate we now know businesses will pay me and my sidekick, a figure we believe to be somewhat below market.

Hang onto your hats, folks…

If I teach two sections of composition—just two!—instead of billing the same number of hours for editorial work, it costs me $11,059 per 16-week semester in lost income.

That’s right. The privilege of earning $4800 in pursuit of your children’s higher education actually impoverishes me by more than 11 grand. In one semester.

Here’s a conservative calculation showing that to be true. Bear in mind that it doesn’t include commute time to campus (that would be six hours a week this semester) or the unpaid time we are asked to donate to departmental meetings and faculty development workshops.

Translation: I spend 96 hours in the classroom during a typical semester with two face-to-face three-credit sessions. My graders billed me $1,311 for plowing through the spring semester’s composition papers; at $10/hour, that suggests it takes 131 hours to read and assess a semester’s worth of postadolescent writing. Course prep for those two sections took me four full days this fall. Assuming I only worked eight hours each of those days (a very modest assumption!), that comes to 32 hours of prep time and website management. Thus the total number of hours consumed by two sections over a 16-week semester is 259. I’m paid $4,800 for all that labor, which, when divided by the number of hours required, works out to $18.53 an hour.

Not great, but not so very bad (as long as you don’t figure in the required and expected freebies).

Except…if I spent that many hours working at my editorial rate of $60 per hour (which, as it develops, is a little low), I would earn $15,540 during those 16 weeks.

Subtract the amount I actually earn, $4,800, from the real value of my time, and you get the opportunity cost: $11,059.

That is more than I’d need to earn all year—in 52 weeks!—to get by without teaching any comp courses.

Reality check! Could I actually do that much editorial work in 16 weeks? Let’s see…

Sixteen hours and eleven minutes a week? Somehow I think I can struggle through it.

If you’ll recall, though, yesterday I figured The Copyeditor’s Desk would need to earn only about $6,000 for me to get by just fine in 2013. Fifteen thousand five hundred and forty bucks is 2.6 times what I absolutely have to earn to pay the bills. So let’s prorate those hours over, say, 50 weeks—give me a two-week vacation, why not? This scenario would have me billing all of five hours and 10 minutes a week to earn enough to live rather comfortably, what with Social Security and a tiny drawdown from savings. Or actually, no drawdown: because Social Security covers almost half my expenses, an income of $15,540 would mean I wouldn’t have to raid retirement savings to live.

Think of that.

 

More on the Great Escape

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OMG! The searchlights are off, the guards are dozing at their watch stations, and the way is cleared to go over the wall! Spent the better part of today plus the two hours of free time yesterday studying The Numbers, trying to see if my plan to escape from teaching could actually work. This is amazing. I’ve gone over this stuff several times and think I’ve got it right. Check this out:

After I wrote that cri de coeur the other day, bemoaning my hatred of teaching freshman composition and announcing a decision to QUIT IT, I realized I’d never done a budget for the little corporate entity. Its needs always seem to be more modest than its means: whenever I’ve wanted to spend money on the business (sometimes quite a bit of money, as in buying a fancy new iMac), the cash has been there. Within a month or two, whatever is spent replenishes itself. So I haven’t felt much impetus to add still more budgeting headaches to an already crabby-making personal finance routine.

Clearly if I’m going to try to live on what The Copyeditor’s Desk is earning rather than just using it as a reservoir to buy electronics and pay the cell, DSL and web-hosting bills, I’ll need some clue as to how much its overhead is. Quaint idea, no?

So far, in the first eight months of 2012, the S-corp’s overhead has been $10,700. That notwithstanding, it has shown a profit of $7,260.

If I teach two sections of Eng. 235 (Magazine Article Writing) in 2013, I will need to draw a net salary of $6,000 from the corporation. So, already, we see that by the end of the third quarter it has earned enough to cover four quarters of expenses. This assumes the business will perform at the rather sleepy pace we’ve seen in 2012; since I will have a lot more time and energy (and motivation!) to market it more vigorously, 2013 revenues very well may outperform 2012’s.

Now, in this scenario, about $3,840 pours into my personal coffers from the community college, and a small drawdown from retirement savings makes up the difference, providing enough cash to pay the bills when combined with Social Security and a “salary” from The Copyeditor’s Desk. Assuming inflation doesn’t rise unduly next year.

What if I teach NOTHING, yea verily not one course? 🙂

Then I would need to pull more money out of retirement savings. I’m already doing that to cover my share of the mortgage on the house M’hijito and I are copurchasing. In order not to exceed a 4 percent drawdown from savings, the maximum I could withdraw to cover my own living expenses would be $12,785. Actually, though, about $10,785 would be preferable; this would keep the total drawdown (for the mortgage plus my living expenses) safely in the 3 percent range.

Heh heh heh…. That, we might add, is 3 percent of what remains after I’ve raked 20 grand out of savings to buy a new car.

WhoEVER would’ve thunk it?

After much speculating and calculating, here are the numbers for 2013. Except for the teaching income, disbursals will happen quarterly, since revenues do not yet flow into The Copyeditor’s Desk in a steady month-to-month stream. Over three months, though, enough should accumulate to fill the bill. As it were.

How amazing is that?

I gained insight from this exercise. First, it’s costing more to run the S-corp than I realized. Overhead includes contracting pay for a variety of helpers whose functions run from keeping Funny about Money afloat to editorial, design, and project management. Not counting the one-time expense for the iMac, average monthly expenditures so far have been $965 a month; add it in, and that average jumps to $1227 a month. Yipe!

Second, to keep a grip on large expenditures, I’ll need to self-escrow about $200 a month into an emergency  & out-of-the-ordinary savings account, just as I do for my household finances. This will provide for unusually large expenses, for the cost of the annual report to the corporation commission, for tax preparation, for computer repairs, and for the Costco membership, and still leave something for the various little surprises.

Third, the largest contributor to CE Desk’s revenues is editorial work. Funny about Money runs a distant second; it pays for itself, but just barely. In the near future, I’ll need to revisit this issue and decide whether to continue trying to operate the site as a money-making venture or to demonetize it and treat it as a hobby.

By the time fall semester is over—obviously, I can’t walk now, because I’ve signed a contract (but there are now only 12 and a half weeks left!)—there should be enough cash reserves in the corporate bank accounts to easily carry me through 2013, and, if these figures are right, enough cash flow to support me permanently.

Mwa ha ha! I’m outta this place!