So the dogs are walking the human this morning when we come upon the gay guys who live up the street. They’re dragging a garden cart behind them, filled with full recyclable shopping bags.
I say, “Did they make you walk home from the airport with your baggage?”
They laugh and say they just came from one of those migrating food sales — the sellers are camped out in the church parking lot at the corner of Feeder Street East-West and Conduit of Blight Boulevard.
Hot diggety!
What happens is that grocery stores will take produce that’s reached the end of its (brief!) shelf life and, instead of throwing it away, donate it to organizations who distribute it to neighborhoods at an outrageous discount. They dispatch a semi truck filled with produce to a distribution center — usually a church or nonprofit — and set up shop for all comers.
The men got 60 pounds of produce for $10. Apiece.
The moveable feast was to be there from 7 to 9 a.m., said they.
As soon as the dogs had perambulated their daily mile, I flang them in the house, jumped in the car, and shot out the door.
WHAT a mountain of food I came back with! Videlicet:
The bag of lemons and the artichoke came from the Sprouts, where I went to pick up some onions and things so as to process this bounty. But the rest of it: hand0uts.
A gigantic pan of eggplant lasagne awaits in the fridge: my son is coming over this evening to help eat some of this stuff.
Made a marinara sauce for the lasagne with some of the giant tomatoes and some of the frozen hamburger found at the bottom of the recently shoveled-out freezer. That’s going to be very nice.
Also cooked one of the little acorn squash and stuffed it with some of the hamburg: breakfast. I’m thinking the rest of them (eight of the things!) can be fixed the same way and then packed in baggies and frozen. The summer squash and the beautiful eggplants can be made into a mountain of ratatouille. The rest of the tomatoes: soup! Hey: gazpacho!
Between this bounty and the several bags of meat I found hidden in the freezer, I shouldn’t have to go to the grocery store for a month! Except to buy some salad greens.
JestJack replies to Wednesday’s post, in which I held forth on the new formal budget and revealed how much I need to live as a retireee in nominally “middle class” but in fact pretty modest circumstances.
The sad thing is I see no glaring evidence of living beyond one’s means in your or my lifestyle for that matter. But yet I seem to get the feeling you feel, like me, that you are “living on the edge” despite a pretty nice “safety net” to fall back on. I share your concerns on many levels. With poor returns on savings it seems the Fed in their efforts to prop up the economy are doing so at the expense of “savers” …i.e…..seniors. As you aptly point out, there is no substitute for “a paid for home”….that peace of mind is priceless. BUT today’s environment is very tempting. I can borrow money in the form of a mortgage for 10 years at 2.25% with no points and may even get some help with closing for the effort. I just wonder sometimes how folks WITH rent, a car payment, cell phone bills, student loans, utilities and child care make it….
The answer is, of course, that they can’t: not without a decently paid full-time job and a side gig or two.
I’m sure JestJack and I are looking through the same lens that confounded our parents at retirement age: inflation. Though it’s not nearly as rampant as it was during the 1970s, inflation will never go away. So to minds like ours, thirty grand a year looks like a LOT of money. The realization that one can barely get by on it — and only if one doesn’t have a house or car payment — is startling.
And it’s horrifying to understand that one’s “real” income — $14,400 in Social Security benefits — is well below the poverty line. Drawing down from a finite amount of savings is not creating “income”: it’s just using up your resources until such time as no more resources remain.
Thirty thousand dollars — the net amount I need to live on, not the amount I can, realistically, afford to disburse from my funds (assuming my doc’ is right that I’ll live into my 90s — or even if I make it to my early 80s), is untenable. If the entire gross RMD from my savings is consumed by taxes and living expenses each year, in 20 years I will be utterly destitute: I will have nothing left to live on but Social Security.
“Twenty years” assumes I don’t get warehoused in a nursing home, which will eat up $4,000 to $6,000 a month. That will impoverish me a whole lot sooner.
For anyone in their right mind, this represents a HUGE psychological disconnect. If you are a young person, it means the amount you will need to support you in comfort through retirement is far more than you can realistically expect to earn and save over your lifetime.
Net Social Security — $14,400 — is nothing like enough to live in a safe neighborhood, with decent food, adequate clothing, and independent transportation.
It’s poverty level.
Yet it’s almost $2,500 more than my boyfriend in college regarded as the income he hoped to have when he was “set”: a target he figured would support him and a family quite comfortably (at a time when most women didn’t work). I can remember young men, including my young lawyer husband, remarking that they would have “arrived” when they could earn $12,000 a year. Twelve grand in 1969 would be worth $78,551.28 today.
In that light, the numbers we’re looking at in Wednesday’s post don’t compute.
Even an income of twice what a young man in 1969 regarded as comfortable affluence would support a retiree, today, just barely. It might not support two people at all. Certainly not in middle-class circumstances.
If I were going to advise young people planning, very long-term, for retirement, I’d say “Figure out what you think you’ll need per year, and then multiply that figure by three. That’s how much you’ll need as a net annual drawdown from retirement savings, since there’s a good chance the Republicans will cut Social Security or make it go away.”
So. If a man in his late 30s thinks he’ll need $30,000 a year, exclusive of Social Security, to live in the splendor I enjoy just now, then in another 30 years, he should figure he’ll need enough to DRAW DOWN at least $90,000 net per year.
Gross, that’s probably about $100,000 per year, after taxes and Medicare. Let’s say he retires at 70 and he hopes to make it to about 90.
Let’s suppose Social Security survives and increases with inflation. In 2046, my $14,400 net annual Social Security benefit will have bloated to $30,205. That leaves “only” $69,800/year for our Nimrod to come up with by way of keeping a roof over his head in retirement. To maintain that between retirement at age 70 and death at age 90, he’ll need $1,396,000 in savings at the time he quits or is forced out of his job.
That’s a bare minimum. It means…
•No eating out in restaurants •No travel •No entertainment that costs anything •Purchasing all clothing in second-hand stores •Purchasing any needed furniture or household appliances second-hand •No car purchases •No mortgage payments •Not even cable TV or a cell phone
And that figure doesn’t account for inflation over the 20 years of his retirement.
To retire in what most Americans regard as near poverty, today’s young men and women will need almost $1.4 million in savings. In cash dollars.
That’s assuming they plan to leave nothing to their children.
Does the whole prospect of pinching pennies get you down? Or were you already feeling like Eeyore before the idea arose?
Our friend Abby Freedman Perry (I Pick Up Pennies) realizes that trying to get a grip on your personal finances is even harder if you happen to suffer from physical disabilities or from depression. Contemplating that truth, she discovered that no one else has written about it or suggested ways to take control.
By Susan T Mason on May 26, 2016 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase
Refreshing to find a book that does not just tell you to “get with it”, but admits that it just is not going to be perfect and that is okay. While I am not a depressive, I do live with one. Neither of us is getting any younger and are finding it hard to keep up with stuff like we used to. Being frugal is important to us, but if you are not 100%, it is good to have permission to prioritize.
If I’m gonna start budgeting again, I’m gonna need to have a budget. So it’s off to Excel, the classic tool of the numerically obsessed and the arithmetically challenged.
In this draft of the new scheme, monthly figures are arranged horizontally, rather than in a single column per month. This JPEG may not be very scrutable on a web page; try clicking on it for an enlarged version.
The header row lists all the spending categories that consume my annual mite. Some of these things are paid annually: taxes, for example, homeowner’s and auto insurance, and some of the healthcare policies. Even though they’re actually paid when they come due, in order to account for them, they’re prorated monthly. Effectively the money is not available for monthly spending, even though it’s in the bank.
The greyed-out figures in this image are theoretical entries, since July has yet to occur. The bottom line (row 12 here) will represent the amount spent in each category in a given month. The figures on the far right total, horizontally, the amount available (row 6) and the actual amount spent (row 12). The bottom figure in column T ($199 here, as an example) represents the difference between row 6 (amount available) and row 12 (amount spent).
We shall see if that latter figure is ever expressed in positive numbers….
Utility bills will drop to around $300 in the four winter months. They probably will exceed $400 this month and next, given the early heat and now early humidity. And unless we get some old-fashioned summer afternoon rains — which we rarely see anymore, thanks to the paving over of paradise — the water bills also will exceed budget between now and September.
All told, estimated living expenses should add up to about $23,100 annually. The mortgage on the downtown house, which my son and I are copurchasing, runs $7200 a year, for a total of about $30,300 a year.
Alas, Social Security covers less than half that.
Net RMD (required minimum drawdown) from the big IRA is a little over $18,000. I’d prefer not to use that to live on, but it looks like there’s no choice. So, unless living expenses can be cut, the net amount left at the end of the year should be around $2,300.
Not great… I’d hoped to be able to reinvest a fair amount of the RMD, but evidently that’s not going to happen unless something upward of 10 grand can be withdrawn from the S-corp. This will require a lot more editorial work to come in.
So… Can savings be found in this budget, without having to sell the house and move to abhorred Sun City?
To start with, I expect the Costco bill will drop significantly. I’ve canceled the unwelcome Citibank Visa cards, which will require me to write a check or use a debit card to shop there. The extra hassle will be enough to discourage casual shopping there. After this, I’ll go into the store only to buy a few very specific items that are hard to find elsewhere.
This afternoon I bought a $50 cash card at Costco to cover next month’s gasoline, so I won’t have to use a debit card at the gas pump. Since I no longer have to traipse to a job in Tempe — and because prices are so low now — gas bills have dropped to around $45 a month. That will increase, of course, as oil prices rise, but for the nonce, fuel for the car is within reason.
I could cancel Amazon Prime. But…it’s not very much, prorated monthly. And as I scribble, I’m sitting in front of an episode of Downton Abbey, which of course I’ve missed, in the absence of a television. Amazon’s offerings are better than Netflix, and it doesn’t seem to require software that won’t run on my computer or (so far) any other techno-weirdnesses. Since I have no other source of entertainment, it seems to0 bad to get rid of it.
But if it has to go…well, it just has to go.
Laundry can be soaked and washed by hand, and then run through the short, cold-water rinse & spin cycle. That will save a few pennies on electric and gas. I already hang most of the clothes to dry, so there’s not much to be saved there.
The dogs can do without their vaccinations. The vet’s office says they’re not due this year. And in fact, after they’ve had a number of shots, there’s really no need to keep getting more. Most of them confer lifelong immunity, or nearly so. At any rate, the problem is moot until this time next year. Thank heaven for small mercies.
Clothing is easy enough to cut — I surely don’t need any more right now. Future purchases can happen at My Sister’s Closet, a second-hand store fed by Scottsdale socialites. It carries some very nice examples of last year’s latest styles.
Eating out will have to go. There’s not much of that, but it has been sneaking in now and again. No more of it!
Groceries: No more frolics at Whole Foods. Food will have to come from Fry’s, Target, Walmart, and Safeway. There are a few things I’ll still need to get at Costco — chicken, for example, is usually cheaper there than anywhere else, and the pork, which is quite good, is rock bottom.
That’s about it. My lifestyle is already pretty frugal. It’s hard to see what more to cut without selling the house and moving somewhere cheaper to maintain.
Take a look at this amazing opinion piece that just popped up at Salon. Presumably the writer, Patrick Lawrence, isn’t a native speaker of English. But still: do they really not have editors? And is the teaching of history in American schools really so bad that a person can so misunderstand the reception of One-World ideas among post-war voters?
I tried to comment on the thing at Salon, but they want you to sign in to their site. At 23 single-spaced pages of user IDs and passwords in my secret printout, I’ve had quite enough of that, thank you. So I’ll share my thoughts on the article — not just its style but its thinking — with you. Lawrence writes about the recent Brexit vote and reflects, wisely enough once you get past the awful writing, on the reasons for it and on the failed promise of the European Union. He reflects on the brilliance of Wendell Wilke’s vision of a utopian post-war “One World.”
Did anyone even try to edit this thing? “Willkie was not alone in his aspirations. Very far from it. But he did well expressing those of very many. And it is these that have just died a death on the English Channel’s northern shores.”
Those of very many what? Brits? Americans? Europeans? citizens of the world? Cats? It is these that…: these what? Aspirations? the “very many”? And how did a vague, verbose structure like that get past the copy desk, anyway? ...died a death on the English Channel’s northern shores. What else would they die? Come to think of it, is “die” a transitive verb at all?
This kind of thinking, believe it or not, was much favored among Americans at the time.
I’m old enough to remember one-worldism. Trust me, it was NOT “much favored among Americans.” Most people regarded it as a radical, seditious scheme. Few Americans were open-minded multiculturalists who wished to merge their cultural, economic, and (yes) racial identities with everyone else’s. And the people I knew believed that if and when the idea became reality, Americans’ wages would dwindle, the country would be overrun with foreigners, and American sovereignty would be threatened. The then new middle class would see its hard-won comfortable standard of living go away. Were they still living today, they would not be surprised at the present outcomes in Europe and England. Watching the bureaucratization of the EU, they would be saying “there but for the grace of God go we.”
Did Britons make a mistake in voting to leave the EU? That remains to be seen. Common sense was overruled many years ago; it’s no doubt too late to go back. But one never knows.
Why does a prospective insurer ask you if you have a dog and, if so, what kind of dog it is before issuing you a homeowner’s policy?
Well, the obvious answer is that some breeds have a reputation for biting — no matter how much you love pit bulls and other kinds of molossers, you can’t deny the statistics. Dogs bite: some 4.7 million times a year, leading 800,000 humans to seek medical attention, of whom 386,000 will need emergency treatment. A third of all homeowner’s liability claims result from dog bites, at an average cost per claim of $32,072. Every year, the insurance industry shells out over a billion dollars for dog-bite claims.
My son, a claims adjustor for a major US insurance company, once remarked that the most serious injuries insurers cover result from dog bites.
So, on the surface, it sure looks like dogs are a menace on four wheels feet, eh?
Well. Yeah. However…
The problem, IMHO, is not so much the ferocious dog as the stupid human. What we’re looking at here are statistics largely related to human stupidity.
•Dogs allowed to roam loose or walk off the lead •Dogs that have been abused •Energetic working dogs cooped up in someone’s house or apartment •Dogs that have never been adequately trained •Dogs not given enough to do to work off energy •Dogs left unattended outside in a yard, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month • Dogs bred to fight •Dogs bred as “guard dogs” •Dogs whose innate aggressive tendencies have been encouraged •Children not taught how to behave around dogs •Adults who don’t know how to behave around dogs •Kids allowed to tease dogs •People who get drunk or stoned around dogs, putting themselves at risk •Humans who overall lack good sense
Oh yeah — and the occasional hapless burglar.
If you look at media reports — many of which admittedly are dramatized by way of selling papers and baiting clicks — you see that the vast majority of dog attacks involve some degree of human stupidity.
•Leaving a tiny infant accessible to a large dog. •Keeping pit bulls with young children in the house •Having six dogs around an 87-year-old woman •Keeping a male pit bull, a female pit bull in heat(!), and a 12-year-old in the same house •Keeping dogs (time after time after time!) that had previously demonstrated aggression •Chaining dogs outside in yards •Letting dogs run loose around a neighborhood or in rural areas •Allowing small children to approach food-defensive dogs while they’re eating(!!)…one could add “keeping food-defensive dogs at all after a child is born” •Attempting to feed strange dogs •Keeping six pit bulls(!) around the house •Mother sleeps through attack that kills 7-day-old infant sleeping next to her in the bed (what do we drink? what do we snort? what do we shoot up?) •Mother sleeps through dachshund chewing both legs off an infant (ditto) •Keeping nine dogs with a three-month-old baby •Starving dogs until they attack to obtain food •Leaving six-month-old baby alone with large molosser-type dog •Bringing nine-day-old infant into home with five molosser dogs •Interfering in a dog fight involving pit bulls, armed with a garden rake •Allowing six-year-old to try to ride a pit bull like a horse
Oh god. You could go on and on.
A tiny minority of these reports involve people who are just going about their business and dogs that have never been a problem and apparently never were abused. But about 99.9 percent of the cases entail some kind of stupid behavior on the part of the humans involved.
This brings us to the stupid human incident of the day. No: to the two stupid human incidents of the week.
Stupid Human Incident the First
At this time of year, the corgis and I have to leave the house by 5 a.m. if we’re to get in anything like a dog-and-human walk. So a couple of days ago, we’re out the door shortly after the crack of dawn. About a half-mile from the house, as we enter Richistan (the upscale part of the ‘hood to the east of us), we come upon our neighbor Josie and her daughter with their three Chihuahuaoid dogs.
Josie has the hilarious custom of rolling one of the Chihuahuas around in a baby carriage, on the theory that even though the critter is too old to walk very far, it loves to go out and get fresh air. This is very cute, and as you can guess, Josie is imbued with a degree of charm.
Okay, so Josie y su hija, also a grown woman and, to boot, a law-school graduate, are standing around schmoozing with a neighborhood fixture, a sweet and lonely old guy who amuses himself by driving around and feeding the local cats. If you pass by while he’s out of his car sprinkling cat food on the pavement, he’ll waylay you and feed a treat or two to your dog.
One of the Chihuahuaoids is a mean little bastard. It threatens to attack anyone who comes within ankle-biting distance.
So when I see this clutch up ahead, I veer out into the street to get around them, it being a little early in the morning to enjoy breaking up a dogfight.
Josie & company take the opportunity to slip away.
Naturally, Old Guy pursues me and my dogs.
He asks if it’s OK to give the dogs a treat. I say, “I wish you wouldn’t.”
This is far from the first time I’ve asked this guy NOT to give Milkbones to my dogs.
Why am I such a Scrooge that I don’t want some random guy giving my dogs treats? Let us count the ways…
They are corgis. Looking at a Milkbone causes them to put on a pound. Possibly a pound per glance.
They have their own treats. Load them up with Milkbone calories, and when I reward them with their treats for this or that achievement they get too many extra calories.
Ruby is all over the guy, jumping up on him and totally out of control. I do not want her to get the idea that strangers will give her treats for jumping on them.
My dog is not your teddy bear.
Ignoring “I wish you wouldn’t,” the old guy grabs a Milkbone out of his car, snaps it in two uneven pieces and tosses them to the two dogs. Ruby grabs the largest piece, which is about 2/3 of a Milkbone made for a Great Dane.
Forthwith, she starts to choke.
Actually, she’s having a reverse-sneezing attack, a common spasmodic condition among corgis. A mild incident looks like this:
When it comes on her with this thing in her mouth, unsurprisingly the crud goes down the wrong way.
Now she’s choking and horking and choking and horking and choking and horking and choking and horking. I realize I’m going to have to get her to the emergency vet — at five in the morning! — but we’re a half-mile from my house and that facility recently moved. I’ll have get her back to the house, look up the veterinary, figure out where the place is, and drive her down there. Meanwhile, my dog is choking to death.
Cassie’s lead tied to a belt loop, I snatch her up off the pavement and start hiking home as fast as I can go. About the time we get to the point where I think I simply can NOT carry her another step, she finally stops heaving.
This has gone on for a good ten or fifteen minutes. But once the spasms stop, she recovers well enough to walk the rest of the way home.
You realize: not only have I told this guy repeatedly not to give my dogs Milkbones, but this is not the first time such an episode has happened! Is there a reason the guy can’t remember that she had a spasmodic attack the last time he handed her a “treat” over my objections?
See what I mean about stupid humans?
So I figure that as long as it’s hot, Cassie and Ruby and I will have to stay out of our favorite part of the ‘hood, since this guy haunts at sunrise.
Stupid Human Incident the Second
So this morning we head south and end up in the park.
I know better than to enter the park at dawn because a LOT of people let their dogs run off the leash there. There’s the constant risk of a dog fight, because these folks don’t seem to understand that the leash laws protect their dogs and them as well as their fellow citizens who pay taxes for the privilege of using the park, too.
It looks clear, though, so I figure we can stroll through one quarter of the park, then come back around and loop through the ‘hood to the south of the Funny Farm, easily racking up a mile or so on the way home.
But naturally, pretty quick along comes an old guy with an aged black lab wandering around loose. Very nice dog: it’s too old and too mellow to argue.
So I’m standing there chatting with him, when along come some dog-walking friends from the Richistan Trail with their strange and funny-looking mutt.
This adorable dog, which is about the size of the lab, is the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. It has champagne-colored curly fur all over and weird blond eyes. I mean, its eyes are a sort of pale transparent tan, very light.
Before they rescued it from the Humane Society, it had been abused. It’s afraid of people, especially men. They’ve been socializing this dog over the past year or 18 months, and the critter has come a long way.
One thing they do to try to convince the dog that it should be happy is take it to the park and let it run around on about a 50-foot lead. The dog loves this, and the interaction it has with other people and their dogs seems to be calming its neuroses considerably.
The old guy wanders off with his lab, and we’re standing there chatting. The ill-trained Ruby wants nothing more than to jump all over this dog (as she jumps all over everyone and everything). Dog is afraid of other dogs, too, but has pretty well overcome this fear and seems to recognize she’s playing.
As I’m about to go on my way, the dog takes off for a romp, dragging this long leash behind. He’s run around me and now wrapped my feet like a Maypole.
And when he shoots off across the park, he yanks me off the feet before his humans can stop him.
I manage to avoid falling on the ground, which has just been irrigated and is your basic pool of mud. This is good, because I have osteoporosis in one hip and would likely have broken that hip if I’d hit the dirt.
What I get instead is a rope burn around both ankles:
Doesn’t look like much, but lemme tellya: THAT HURT!
Is this their stupidity, my stupidity? Yeah: combined human stupidity. They should’ve had their dog at heel and not let it race around until they were clear of other people and dogs. I should have been paying attention instead of yakking with my friends and letting Ruby bounce around.
Note to self: Stay out of the park, stupid!
It doesn’t leave a lot of places to walk in the neighborhood: Can’t go through Richistan. Can’t go anywhere near Conduit of Blight, which thanks to the train construction is now awash in bums and creeps. That leaves an area to the north of us, not the greatest part of the ‘hood, and a small area to the south. Boring.
About the only way to get any variety, then, as long as it’s hot, will be to put the dogs in the car and drive to the canal or take them to the Murphy Bridle Path along north Central. And between you & me, stuffing the dogs in the car, hauling them someplace, getting them out, stuffing them back in the car, and hauling them home is counterproductive. It’s enough hassle to discourage me from taking them out at all.
Hence, this rant.
Can anything constructive come of a rant? How about this…
How to Avoid Dog Bites
•Never leave an infant or small child sleeping where a dog can reach it.
Close the bedroom door if the dog is at large in the house with you while the child is napping. Crate the dog or tie it by a leash to a doorknob if you intend to nap while the child sleeps.
•Never allow a child to tease a dog.
• Never let a child to try to ride a dog.
•Never leave a child unattended with a dog, in the yard, in a vehicle, or in the house.
•Teach your children to stay away from dogs that are eating.
•Crate-train your dog so that it can be kept out of harm’s way and gets a break from the kiddies. Train your children to leave the dog alone when it’s enjoying some private time in its crate.
•Teach your child always to ask permission before petting a dog.
•Teach your child not to wave her or his arms around when near a dog (dogs perceive this as a threat).
•Teach your child to avoid unknown dogs and leave the vicinity if they see a loose dog.
•Don’t allow your child to drag a small dog around, pick it up, or play “dress-up” with a dog.
•Do not keep a pack of dogs in a household with children.
•Never let your dog run loose. Anywhere. No, not even in dog parks. Especially not in dog parks.
•Do not chain your dog outside in the yard.
•Do not idiotically train your dog to be aggressive, and never keep a dog that has shown aggression toward humans.
Mmmm! Love human…for dinner…
•Unless you’re an experienced trainer and you have exceptionally good sense, avoid molosser breeds. Many or most of these dogs have been bred as protection, fighting, or herding dogs; they are large, powerful, and potentially dangerous. Some are unpredictable and have a short fuse.
•When you reach the age of decrepitude — say, over the age of about 60 — choose a pet dog that is not big enough or strong enough to overwhelm you. Bear in mind that you will not get any stronger as you get older, and that most large dogs can easily overpower an elderly or disabled person: not necessarily in an aggressive mode. Accidents happen…don’t invite any that are worse than they need to be.
•Do not drink when you have a dog around.
•Do not use drugs when you have a dog around.
•Try to use common sense, forhevinsake. If you don’t have any, see if you can buy some! Maybe you can get an inoculation or something. Arghhh!
Image: Cane Corso, By Kumarrrr – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1688119
