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Managing Retirement: Declutter EARLY

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HoardA Funny about Money reader writes to report the difficulties he and his siblings have had in helping their elderly, recently widowed mother move out of a home and settle closer to the family. After sixty years of wedded bliss,  the senior couple’s house was full of — you guessed it: Stuff.

We’ve talked about the way Stuff accumulates like kudzu: all the valuable pieces of junk we guess we must have or that we can’t part with after we no longer need them.

  • There’s the collection of Costco soaps filling a giant black plastic lawn bag. Why throw them out? Everyone uses soap. Sooner or later these will get used. Right?
  • And Uncle Orville’s hand-carved plywood footstool that we’ve kept in the back of the hall closet for lo! these many years. Sure, it’s a little ugly…that’s why it lives in the closet. But how can we get rid of an objet with that much sentimental value? What would we have left to remember Uncle Orville by?
  • Never mind the 25 shoeboxes full of old Kodak prints.
  • The cabinet shelf crammed with old mayonnaise and jam jars, carefully washed and stacked on top of each other. Watch out! That pile is about to fall on your head!
  • The bike with flat tires.
  • You can’t get this insecticide anymore: the gummint took it off the market. Keep!
  • This collection of crumbling comic books is valuable!
  • Old Yaller’s collar, leash, and chewed up toys… Good Old Yaller, waiting at the Rainbow Bridge after all these years.
  • The 35-year-old bottle of Kahlúa, opened  34½ years ago and never touched since. You never know when you could have a dinner guest who likes the stuff.
  • The flowered Penney’s dinnerware, only slightly chipped. The kids will love inheriting it. These things are collector’s items!
  • The dresses and shirts that still have their tags with the marked-down prices. Never got around to wearing them because you can’t see them in the jammed-tight closet.

In my experience, the longer you live in a house, the more of this kind of stuff grows inside the closets, fills the garage, and packs the storage sheds. You don’t even notice it all building up…until you have to move it.

But chances are your retirement castle is the last home you expect to inhabit. You don’t have to move for a job and you can’t afford to move to a better house or neighborhood. So you’re likely to be there for a long time, especially if you live to an advanced age.

The problem is, even if you have a place out of sight for all the Stuff that accumulates in the course of daily living, when you die or move, someone is going to have to haul it all out. And that someone is likely to be your hapless kids.

Dear Reader describes filling a 26-foot U-Haul twice and making eight trips in the pick-up and still not emptying the house of its junk collection.

This is not uncommon.

When SDXB bought a house here in the ‘hood, he got it from a couple who were the original owners. The old guy was a stasher. He pretended to be in the junk-selling business as an excuse for acquiring and stashing piles and piles and piles of junk. The garage was stuffed to the rafters with trash — literally full all the way to the ceiling. The backyard was littered with things like old toilets and half-rusted evap coolers.

The inside of the house looked normal enough…until you opened a closet door or peered into the garage.  These houses were build in 1971, so the old boy had plenty of time to accrue valuables.

Their kids lived in a couple of small towns in southern Arizona. They had to drive up here to help the aged parents, who no longer were up to heavy labor. The son who lived in Willcox — on the way to New Mexico! — had to drive his flatbed truck up to Phoenix several weekends in succession. The other kid came up from Sierra Vista, a garden spot depending from an old Army base, also spending many weekends helping to shovel out the house. They made trip after trip after trip to the city dump. Finally, after the third or fourth time the flatbed showed up there in a single day, the lady at the dump’s gatehouse looked at the kid and said, “This is a business, right?”

He had to talk fast to persuade her that no, it wasn’t a business: it was just his father’s hoard.

So…have a little consideration, f’rhevinsake.

In the first place, even if you don’t care that your kids will have to break their backs to get rid of your lifetime collection of priceless junk, consider this: keeping Stuff isn’t frugal.

To the contrary, it’s unfrugal. If you’re not using it, then someone else could be using it. Donate it to a thrift store or yard-sale it so someone else can get some use out of it, and a little less junk will be manufactured.

Declutter early and often. Whenever you buy a new shirt or skirt or pair of pants, take one clothing item out of your closet and donate it. Bought a new set of wine glasses or dishes? Take the old set (or what remains of it) over to Goodwill.

And every now and again, look around the house and garage and ask yourself what can go. Stuff has a way of making itself invisible — we get so used to having it around we no longer even see it.

The other day I gave a pricey grown-up’s scooter to the neighbor’s kids. It had been gathering dust on top of a garage cabinet, where it went after I was laid off from ASU. If I want to get around the ‘hood on two wheels, I use a bike.

The kiddies were thrilled to have it! 😀 Very, very adorable. And I was very happy to see it get some use.

Stuff: Use it up. Wear it out. Get rid of it!

Image: TheDoctorMo – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34481543

Propane & the Fire Department

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That was a strange experience…  Last night I called the fire department after discovering a slow leak from the backyard propane grill. I’d cleaned it earlier in the day, scrubbing off accumulated grease spatters, and in doing so apparently managed to turn one of the burners slightly to “on.”

Later I smelled an odor that I thought was a dead animal. Looked around under the shrubbery to see if Ratty might have croaked over someplace in the yard (some people put out rat poison, which you’d like your dogs not to eat when the victim comes crawling into your yard to die…). Nothing. But by the time the dogs went out for their final patrolling of the yard, around 9 p.m., the odor was clearly propane.

So I called the firemen. The dispatcher wasn’t sure it was necessary to send anyone. He said propane is lighter than air and quickly dissipates.

That was not my understanding. Years ago, I read a Consumer Reports article that said propane is heavier than air, that it can linger for quite a while and will collect in low-lying areas, and that if you live uphill from a neighbor, your leaking propane can flow downhill and accumulate at the neighbor’s place — and explosions have occurred in which a neighbor’s leaking propane drifted downhill and blew up in someone else’s property.

The air was still. No breeze at all was moving. And when I went back into the house from the front patio to get the dogs’ leashes, I could smell propane inside the house, especially in the kitchen.

When I mentioned that the interior smelled of propane, the guy decided to send a crew.

They looked around, turned off and disconnected the tank, and loved up the frantically affectionate corgis. They repeated what their dispatcher had said: that propane is lighter than air. Then they went away.

Huh. Propane is lighter than air, eh?

No.

It’s.

Not.

Some training these guys have had, somewhere, has misinformed them. I wonder what else they’ve been told that’s not true?

Disconnecting: A Good Thing?

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DayUM but I’m sick of the whole time-sucking, tooth-grinding, sub-minimum-waging computer effing CONNECTED goddamn THING. Here’s a question (by way of getting a word in the title into the first graf, as an SEO thing): what if, what IF you disconnected (got that, Google? DISCONNECTING!) about every second day? Yeah, you got that right: what if every other day you refrained from signing on to your computer, your tablet, your phone, your whateverTF?

Oh, let’s go all the way: what would happen if you only signed in every third day? What if you read your email and cruised the net and dorked around with your social media no more often than once every three days? What if you reserved the third out of every three days for computer connectivity, and all the rest of the time you reclaimed for your SELF?

Dare one suggest that your sanity might be much bolstered by such a scheme? Dare one suggest that, in fact, you might regain a grip on your humanity?

This morning as I was driving out to the Thursday wee-hours meeting in Scottsdale, a thought intruded on the zen-like calm elicited by sharing the roads with several thousand fellow homicidal drivers:

• I want my ranch back.
• I want my horses back.
• In specific, I want a propane refrigerator and a propane range and water running in from the Hassayampa and a stockpond full of bass and couple of candles for light after dark and my dogs chasing after me and Babe as we roam across the landscape and Ruby trying to catch a cow and most specifically I do not want a fucking computer yammering at me.
• At 7:16 in the morning, I want not to be running effing LATE to a business meeting but saddling up Babe for a day-long amble through the back-country of a thousand BLM acres.
• I want to spend the day exploring the back-country by horseback, not exploring the Internet by keyboard.
• I want my effing life NOT to come to an end because Cox’s effing connection to the effing Internet goes down for half a day. Or for any length of time.

My life is wonderful and urban and technologically enhanced and amazing and unimaginable just a couple of decades ago and godDAMN but I hate it.

Is there anyone out there, anywhere, who wants as much as I do to be FREE of the technological glory that is Life in Twenty-First Century America? Am I the only person on this planet who would dare suggest our lives today represent some kind of Hell?

We have, it must be said, devices (naturally…) to help us avoid wasting exorbitant numbers of hours on the Internet.

But I don’t think that’s the issue. To use moi as an example again: Although I do waste a certain amount of time on the Net reading the news and playing repetitive computer games, in fact MOST of the time stolen from my life is devoted to work: writing blog posts; tracking down factoids; downloading, storing, and documenting Shutterstock images; keeping a grip on the vast organizational challenges entailed in coordinating the publishing, editing, writing, and blogging empires; paying bills online; managing blogsites; riding herd on the freaking endlessly fire-hosing e-mail; creating a “presence” on other sites…and on and on. Most of this is work-related or IRS-related.

Most of the time absorbed by Connectivity has to do with business or with attempts to make some kind of profit.

And most of that profit, to the extent it exists at all, is minuscule. The Third-Worldization of educated American workers happens through a computer portal. The miraculous technology that infests our lives has taken us back the the sweatshop.

So I wonder: what would happen if we time-stamped ourselves out of the sweatshop? What if we restricted computer time to once every other day or once every third day? Would we not, given a shorter time frame, accomplish the same amount of online work in fewer hours, simply because we would have to focus on getting through x or y amount of work in half or a third as much time? And would our professional and personal lives come to an end if all we did on the Net was specifically related to a given client or job? And the rest of it went away because we limited the number of hours online?

What I propose is not exactly going off the grid (although just at this moment I would be beside myself with joy to find a practical way to do so). The question is, can we go partly off the grid without watching our lives grind to a halt?

A Little Luck, A Little Smart$

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lightrail-Phoenix_Exterior_7417.2008This morning as I drove through the ‘hood toward the freeway, there to connect with points north and west, it crossed my mind that in the years after my son’s father and I divorced, I’ve benefited by a strange confluence of raw luck and moderately smart financial decisions. Most of these have had to do with real estate, though some are more directly tied to the economy.

After I’d had a couple of years to recover from the Parting of the Ways, I decided to buy a house — mostly by way of putting some distance between myself and the drive-by shootings near the place where I was renting. By sheer chance, the Realtor I hired, brother to a former City of Phoenix mayor, came across a house about two and a half blocks from the present Funny Farm.

Also by chance, the economy happened to be in the doldrums of the most recent savings and loan fiasco. Arizona was one of several epicenters and so was experiencing a major real estate crash, with borrowers defaulting, banking institutions collapsing, the federal government taking over property…and on and familiarly on.

My guy looked at the house in question, a single-owner property craving updates but not needing any truly major, bone-surgery-type repairs, and calculated. The owner, a widow, had died, leaving the house as part of an estate that needed curating. The place had been on the market for three months: nary a sign of moving. Meanwhile, the estate was having to pay taxes and utility bills, as time ticked on and property values continued to plummet.

He mulled this over for a day or so, after he’d shown me all the other properties on his list he thought I could (marginally) afford and watched me reject them one after another, then took me back there for comparison. I said welllll… it was better than any of the other dumps we’d looked at.

Forthwith he made an offer to the seller: 30 grand under the sale price.

Forth-forthwith, the seller grabbed it, and I was the happy owner of an aging tract house on the fringe of North Central that needed a new kitchen, new flooring, and new landscaping. Most of the stuff, SDXB (who moved in with me) and I could live with. Soon I had new countertops installed; eventually I had the floors tiled and the front and back yards xeriscaped.

Incredible luck.

The house turned out to be sturdily built; the neighborhood mostly pretty good except for a questionable area across Conduit of Blight Boulevard, the main drag to the west.

Day came when I was cruising up a freeway with the brain in idle. Through that twilight state, a thought dawned: when the alimony ran out, as it would soon, the mortgage on that house would consume slightly more than half of an entire month of my pay, which was more than I’d ever earned in my life and slightly more than the county’s median family income. By then I’d concluded it was time to eject SDXB. Without his contribution to the mortgage in the form of “rent,” I would not have enough to eat on after I’d paid the lender.

So, over my financial advisor’s strenuous objections, I combined a small inheritance with a chunk of my savings and paid off the $80,000 mortgage in full, getting rid of an 8.5% interest rate.

Surprisingly smart move.

The house was paid for. That allowed me to throw out the boyfriend and replace him with a German shepherd. And I lived there happily for quite a while, if not ever after.

A paid-off roof and a reasonably frugal lifestyle allowed me to stash substantial amounts of cash into savings. This worked out well.

Eventually I grew restless. Two houses across the street acquired problem owners: A single woman bought the place across the street from me. Her son had inherited his father’s vicious personality, and while he left the neighbors alone, he was seen beating up a girlfriend and terrorizing his grandparents. Then the people next door to them sold and that house was acquired by a single batshit man with two teenaged sons. He also was radically abusive, given to throwing furniture through the front windows. When he got into a fistfight in the driveway, screaming obscenities to the moon, that was when I decided it was time to move out.

Started looking around the city. The late, great Real Estate Bubble was just starting to inflate. With demand at astronomical heights, finding a comparable place that I could cover in cash was a challenge.

SDXB, who by then lived just up the road, happened to know a couple in the ‘hood who had just put their house on the market — two houses down the street from his.

It was still the same neighborhood about whose stability I felt profoundly ambiguous. But it was a half-mile from where I’d been living and well south of the war zone at the intersection of Conduit of Blight and Slum Borderline E/W. Although I would surely have liked to move further east, a mile or two away from Conduit of Blight, the price was right: I knew I could sell my house for what I would pay for this one. Plus the owners had cherried it out with all new kitchen cabinetry, nice bathroom fixtures, a pretty new covered deck with new sliding doors opening onto it, and a (supposedly functional) new watering system. And it had a pool, which I coveted.

Although the watering system was a joke and much of Former Owner’s DYI renovation was out of code, the place turned out to be a good buy. Real estate values continued to run amok, and within a few months the house was valued at $150,000 more than I’d paid for it.

Raw luck!

During the Great Recession, the value dropped to less than I’d paid for it, but since I wasn’t paying a loan and so wasn’t paying interest on a make-believe value, it didn’t matter: you don’t realize a loss until you sell. Today the house is now once again valued at about $125,000 more than I paid for it.

Luck.

As I drove toward Conduit of Blight this morning, I noted how much better the houses look. The place has gentrified mightily as the Lightrail Boondoggle has neared completion. Young urban types want to live near a lightrail. Not that any of them would commute on it: it’s just the politically correct, environmentally correct principle of the thing, I guess.

A whole raft of young marrieds has discovered the ‘hood — the only remaining middle-class neighborhood in North Central with even marginally affordable prices — and they’re gentrifying like mad.

Luck.

O.K. I’m glad I decided to stay in the neighborhood.

But soooo glad I moved a little further from Conduit of Blight. The tenements along that road are definitively NOT improved by the city’s shiny new train project. The train brings more noise and more characters you’d just as soon not have know about your neighborhood, more impossible traffic lights and more crazy-making traffic. So I’m happy to be mostly out of earshot from that thing and enough of a hike to discourage most of the drug dealers, prostitutes, and flakes it brings to us. And very, very happy for the young people who think the presence of a commuter train makes these houses worth buying and fixing up. 🙂

Very smart. I guess.

This afternoon a cop helicopter began to buzz the corner where my old house resides. It practically grazed the roofs, and the cops were hollering through a loudspeakers for people to get inside and stay out of the way. This went on for an hour or 90 minutes.

It’s not an uncommon occurrence. When I lived in that house, I could set my clocks every Friday and Saturday night by the 11 p.m. fly-over. The cops would park over my house right about 11 o’clock, almost every Friday and every Saturday evening. It was mildly annoying, because of course it would keep me awake. But with a German shepherd habitually described by my son as “batshit” parked at the foot of the bed, I figured WGAS? And honi soit (or legless soit) qui has the nerve to mal y pense.

And of course, it was in my present house that the Great Garage Invasion Episode occurred. So being a half-mile or more from the war zone does not necessarily make one any safer.

Raw Luck? Or Smarts?

It’s kind of a toss-up, I guess. Given a show-down, I’d say Raw Luck has beat out Smarts here. Nothing that happened, except maybe paying off the mortgage, was especially calculated. Everything that has been good probably has been a matter of chance or of being in the right place at the right time.

Isn’t that just like life?

Image: By KINKISHARYO – Phoenix_Exterior_7417, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31119699

Computer Kudzu

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It’s taken two days to prune the computer kudzu out of this little machine. Ever notice that? Files grow like horror-movie vines, shedding endlessly reproducing directories and subdirectories. After awhile you can’t find anything, because whatever it is that you need (right this minute, dammit!) is hidden under impenetrable mounds of digital debris.

Hour after hour of hacking and shoveling left just 12 main directories.

12FilesWho’d have thunk it? Two years of nonstop work occupying seven days a week boil down to 12 little computer folders.

…And 52 subdirectories with 118 sub-subdirectories… Ugh.

That doesn’t count the ones I threw out, the ones in the “Archive” folder, the ones in “Dropbox,” the junk that’s settled on the Desktop, and all the mystery files in “Microsoft User Data,” for which I disclaim responsibility. 😀

But the depressing part surfaced in a folder containing a bunch of projects I’d started and imagined working on after quitting the damn teaching job. An elaborate sequel to Fire-Rider involving a tribe of cryptids…a crime novel I drafted in graduate school, unearthed a couple years ago, dreamed up a new plot line for, and had begun revising…a corgi book…several books on nonfiction writing technique…a personal finance book…a science fiction story with an alarmingly clunky opener (gotta write that thing over!)…a book to be titled, creatively enough, I Hate Cats…Notes for the proposed (and long-defunct) boob book, complete with a full-blown proposal including two chapters, two appendices, and an introduction….

Ohhh well.

Really. If I’m going to do this publishing gig for nothing — actually, right now I’m doing it for considerably less than nothing, since the $34 I earned last month hardly comes under the heading of “profit” — then I might as well amuse myself by writing unpublishable books and stories, instead of working my buns off formatting, publishing, and marketing the unsalable. LOL!

In fact, if I pulled down revenue from The Copyeditor’s Desk, an ordinary year’s occasional income would come to just about what adjunct teaching pays for a course load equivalent to a full-time load with honest pay and benefits at the Great Desert University. It ain’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Thirty-four bucks a month makes adjunct teaching look good. Matter of fact, it makes reading Chinese dissertations and math treatises look good.

Editorial work doesn’t exactly overtax one’s skills or time. It would leave plenty of opportunity to write whatever drivel I feel like posting.

Or even to have a life. Can you imagine?

Bargain Find at Williams-Sonoma!

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Williams-Sonoma was one of my favorite stores back in the day when I was a corporate wife and rarely gave a thought to how much I spent and where. Not the sort of place where you’d expect to find a bargain. But…miracles happen.

Yesterday I had to traipse to the Apple store, located (where else?) in one of the city’s ritziest shopping centers. While I was there, I wandered into the Williams-Sonoma to see if they had some salad plates in the type of pattern I favor. They didn’t — my taste is now royally out of style — but they did have some in a plain navy blue that would do the job.

These plates are for the dogs. The ones I had, from an old set from Pier 1 that looked great in the store but not so great on the table, have been dropped on the floor and chipped so many times, it was getting time to replace them. Both dogs, being corgis, feel compelled to hoover up every molecule of dog food off their plates, which means they vigorously lick their dishes so clean it’s hard to tell the things haven’t been through the dishwasher. So a chipped rim risks slashing a doggle’s tongue.

So anyway, as you can imagine, I was not thrilled at the prospect of spending much on dog dishes.

Williams-Sonoma is having a 20% off sale on everything in sight…including things that are already on sale. In the back of the store, they have a clearance section. Some of the things there, mostly odd items, are quite pretty.

Lo! On the clearance shelf, there were a half-dozen coupe-style salad plates, very handsome and very un-clunky, already marked down to something under six bucks apiece. Though not exactly what I had in mind, they would do the job.

BluePlate

Couldn’t believe it! I got six for $23 and change! That’s less than $4 apiece.  That’s on a par with the similar but much cheesier dishes available at the Fry’s or the Target.

Blue plate specials!