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Blog Carnivals: A thing of the past?

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Welp, it’s beginning to look like blog carnivals are dead. Too bad…out of style, maybe?

I’ve kind of given up on the Carnival of Personal Finance: so many posts are rejected that I figure I’ve been blackballed there, for reasons probably related to my left-wing politics. That’s OK — it’s a host’s prerogative to be unfair, and if they want to do that, I don’t begrudge them.

So this week I sent posts to four other carnivals, through Blog Carnival HQ, a site that aggregates submission forms to these things. Tried for the Carnival of Retirement, the Lifestyle Carnival, the Carnival of Financial Independence, and the Yakezie Carnival, all of which were scheduled between the 21st and the 24th of February.

Not one single carnival went live!

Presumably the listed hosts either forgot they were supposed to run the carnivals or had something better to do.

Annoying. It’s kind of time-consuming to submit posts to these things, even though Blog Carnival HQ makes it simpler than it used to be.

And too bad. It was a handy way to get a little link juice and, as a host, to perform a small service for the blogging community. Oh well.

Nothing lasts forever.

Tales from the Crypt…uhm…the ’Hood

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Now that was an entertaining dog walk!

Last night along about sunset, Cassie and I were headed homeward through the more upscale neighborhood to the west of us. It’s an area of old 1950s ranch houses, some of them very large, on large, irrigated lots: classic North Central. And as neighborhoods go, it’s seen better days.

The properties are tired, and a few need major, major fix-up. Some in fact have been purchased by affluent folks who want to live in a central location and who like large, grassy, shady lots in the center of the city. The houses lend themselves to upgrading, and because of their size and location, once a place has been spiffed up, it can be worth a lot. Values in the area hover in the $500,000 range.  Within steps, right around the corner are houses on the market for over a million dollars.

But. It’s mixed: some owners have been there for decades, and so a few places are a shade on the decrepit side.

In the middle of this small part of the ’hood is an old abandoned house, a place that must once have been a very nice property, indeed. It’s on a pie-shaped lot with a huge front yard, shaded by vast, once spectacular orchid trees. It’s been running down for years; of late it has been abandoned. The old guy who lived there alone disappeared — I assumed he’d been shipped off to the nursing home. The house is a real wreck.

So the hound and I are strolling past this pile when we come across a couple of the neighbors. I notice someone has hacked limbs off the overgrown trees and shrubbery in front and left the debris laying there, so I ask, while chatting, what’s the deal.

And from this chatty, chatty woman comes a story:

The house  is foreclosed, and it’s taken years to get that way.

The old guy was not the owner. He was living there rent-free and had been, for years. One day he just up and disappeared.

The owner himself was a tax protester, of the BAT-SH!T CRAZY variety. This guy carried one of those “sovereign citizen” cards around and proclaimed that the US gummint had no authority over him and therefore he did not owe it (that would be “us”) any taxes. He had his own bank in a DYI basement under the structure, where he would hide money. He gave out fake addresses — including a fake address for the house — so when revenooers and other creditors would come around looking for him, they couldn’t find the place. When last heard from, he hadn’t paid taxes — or lived in the house — in over 10 years.

In the attic, which you access by a trap door over the carport (rather common in these parts), there is a hidden closet. God only knows what’s in there. From that closet, you can access the interior of the house through another, hidden trap door.

Somebody recently bought the house out of bankruptcy, but they are apparently raving idiots. They hacked back the plants but have done nothing more, except they tried to get into the house through the attic. They failed to find the closet and so did not find the door into the house from the attic. So they took an ax and chopped their way through the ceiling.

The chatty lady with whom I was speaking, it develops, is a cat lady. She has eight cats that she allows to roam around the neighborhood, stinking up people’s yards and killing the wildlife. When it was observed that cats are very destructive and make a mess in the neighbors’ yards (yes…I did actually say that), she said oh, no, her kitties are good. Then she remarked that one had just killed a hummingbird. They also have several dogs, rabbits, chickens and the like. Her husband said they have 18 animals. Godlmighty.

She is enraged at one of the neighbors, who called an exterminator to remove a hive of Africanized bees that had taken up residence in the haunted house’s front yard. Just because they were swarming her koi pond, Chatty Lady thinks, was no excuse to murder all the little thangs.

He’s a retired lawyer. They’re graduates of Pomona and Claremont.

Heee! Money doesn’t buy good sense, eh?

Several of the places on the street where the haunted house stands have been fixed up handsomely. One of them was recently purchased by a young family with a cute young boy, who was playing outside when the dog and I strolled past. This is always good: more young families are moving in, and they’re exactly what an older neighborhood like this needs. The parents settle in and fix up the houses, and the young adults and their children are just grand to have around.

Heh. Betcha they don’t know they moved in next door to a level 2 sex offender.

That guy lives in another run-down house, right next door to the haunted manse. He appears to be living with his mother.

Across the street from him is yet another run-down house occupied by two young men and another elderly woman, presumably their mother. The gents have converted the carport into an automotive shop, and a fine mess that is, indeed! When you walk by at night, you can see into the front room and see that the interior of the house seems tidy and rather nice. But that garage! Lordie!!

Chatty Lady said one of the guys who lives there likes to work outside at two in the morning.

That’s good, I suppose. Keeps an eye on the sex offender, and also on the various wandering burglars who come through after dark.

KISS: Simplifying the Budget Unearths a LOT of Money! (uhh…sorta)

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Okay, so now that I’m a rich old retiree, instead of doling out a few bucks per month or per quarter from retirement savings to meet day-to-day living expenses, in 2014 I decided to draw down enough to cover the entire year’s living expenses, taxes, and insurance, dump it into checking, and hope it lasts 12 months.

Because a) I’m not very competent with math and b) I tend to overcomplicate things in my desperation not to make a mistake or overlook things, my budgeting spreadsheets have become hideously involved. “Tangled,” actually, is the word we might use. When I look back over them and try to remember why I made this or that decision, I can’t figure out what on earth I was thinking.

So, I decided to start all over.

Step 1 was to pose a series of questions designed to lay out the data needed to create a coherent, uncomplicated, nonstupid, and reasonably accurate budget. Videlicet:

1. What is the total amount that will become available from all sources (savings drawdown, Social Security, teaching) during 2014?
2. What are the routine monthly nondiscretionary costs?
3. What are the routine monthly discretionary costs?
4. How much was in the bank on January 1, 2014?
5. How much do the two spending categories really add up to by the month? (i.e., not how much do I think they add up to…)
6. How can I know how much is left at any given time?
7. Can I create a spreadsheet where I can just plug in monthly discretionary, nondiscretionary, and extraordinary totals (“extraordinary” = unexpected costs) and get a snapshot of where I stand at any given time?
8. How much, realistically, should it cost to live in 2014 (i.e., including extraordinary costs, taxes, and insurance)?
9. What is the difference between projected total 2014 funds available and the projected realistic 2014 cost of living?

Step 2: Fill in the answers:

SimplifiedBudgt5Step 3: Figure out a relatively simple way to keep track of expenditures so I’ll know whether a) this is right and b) I’m about to run into the red.

SimplifiedBudgt3In this scheme, the first line of the spreadsheet shows the total amount I believe will come available over 2014. This includes 12 Social security checks and future teaching earnings for three sections. Because there’s a good chance I may teach four sections this year, the $36,342 shown on January may actually be conservative.

Now the idea here is to add up, once a month, all the nondiscretionary expenditures (utilities, long-term health care, yard dude) and enter that total each month; add up all the nondiscretionary costs (these would be the AMEX and Mastercard bills, since I charge almost all nondiscretionary expenses); enter (among “Other”) any extra incoming funds, such as the checks from Medicare and the Medigap insurer; and enter any extraordinary expenses, also among “Other.” Then keep a running balance in column 3.

Thus at the end of any given month, the balance should show how much money remains to cover 2014 living expenses.

The glasses, the ER visit, the eye specialist’s ministrations  (much of which were disallowed by Medicare  & Medigap), the contact lenses, a car repair bill, the landscape improvement needed to redirect rainwater away from the back patio and wall, extra pay for Gerardo to fix the landscapers’ screwups, a dental bill, and clothing to replace items that no longer fit after the 30-pound weight loss have already racked up a phenomenal amount of “extraordinary” bills — as much as I had planned on for the entire year. And they don’t include the $800 I’ll have to pay for the puppy a couple of weeks hence, plus the veterinarian’s puppy exam, plus the food and gear for the pup, plus the obedience training class, plus the remaining shots, plus the spay job. Pup may not need to be spayed until 2015. But she probably will come into heat by the end of this year. If so, she’ll have to be “fixed” forthwith.

All that nothwithstanding, though, when the January and February bills are plugged into the  new spreadsheet, things look a great deal brighter than I expected:

SimplifiedBudgt4So the balance at the end of this month will be $31,164: more than the projected cost of living for all of 2014.

That’s not as cheering as it looks: to get the true picture, we have to subtract the cost of taxes, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, Medigap insurance, and Part D insurance. That leaves us $25,824 to last from March 1 to December 31. That’s still slightly higher than the $20,664 budgeted for 2014 ordinary living costs.

Assuming unbudgeted “extraordinary” expenses will average out, over the year, to around $300 a month, the total cost of living should come to $23,664 in 2014. Even with taxes and insurance added, that will put me in the black this year. Anything left at the end of December will defray the amount of 2015’s saving’s drawdown. And every dollar that stays in savings now is a dollar that will help support me in my dotage.

That certainly  is a huge improvement over the grim outlook I enjoyed in 2010, 2011, and 2012, when every goddamn month posed the question of how to make ends meet while living like an anchorite. In 2013, things were a little brighter — at least it didn’t look like my house was likely to be condemned for taxes. It may  also just be that the convoluted system I’ve been using obscured the difference between the amount I would need this year and the amount I pulled out of savings. Either way, this year things look pretty good.

Probably it’s because the economy is better — investments have recovered so much that total savings are now almost back to where they were before the Crash of the Bush Economy, meaning that the overgenerous drawdown I seem to have made this year plus the amount that covers my share of the downtown house’s mortgage together do not exceed 4% of total savings. If I’m right that drawdowns can be much more conservative, it looks like things budgetary can continue as they are for the foreseeable future.

Bueno!

Corgi Cute-ification

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Breeder Lindsay sends new photos of Pup, who’s now six weeks old. Click once on an image, then again to get the full, glorious effect:

I hafta ask ya: Does she redefine Cute or not?

😀

Self-employment Mantra: Paying Work First; then Playing Work

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So I spent about half of yesterday in a prolonged flinch reflex. Heh…that would be another way of saying “diddled away hour after hour after in raw procrastination.”

There was this little job I needed to do for the current client. The previous day, somehow I’d managed to convince myself that this was going to be another of the exercises in tedium that blight my career. And I think I’m developing an allergy to tedium.

Now, if I’d scheduled a couple of hours right after I got back from the (somewhat abortive) meeting, along about 9:00 or 9:30, to perform said spate of tedium, then by lunch it would’ve been done and I could’ve filled the entire afternoon with the things I wanted to do, like writing chapter 4 of the next book and organizing the cookbook and walking the dog in the park and generally dorking around.

But nooooooo…. No, not a chance.

Wrote a blog post instead.

Moving on: lunch. Grilled mahi-mahi, avocado salad. Dates stuffed with walnuts. Tangerines. Read the paper. Read an article in the New York Times.

Very nice. Killed another slab of time.

Next: dream up the backstory for a character who’s proving singularly difficult to turn into a live human being. Or a representation thereof.

That wasn’t especially productive. Well, maybe, on a subliminal level. But not so much that, say, a credible dialogue could be gagged out.

Getting fat: still haven’t dropped the two pounds picked up after the greasy, salty breakfast at iHop. Go for walk: 1.75 miles.

Welp, now it’s gettin’ along toward three o’oclock in the afternoon. Huh. Time to start working. I guess.

The stupid project only took about an hour and 45 minutes. Soooo….

If I’d prioritized the paying work (in some sort of serious way) and done it in the morning, $105 would’ve been in the bank (or good as) by lunchtime. With the wildly over-anticipated tedium out of the way, I would’ve felt a lot less stressed when I sat down to novelize…and maybe that character would’ve come to life.

Moral of the story? Paying work first. Then playing work.

😉

Another Day, Another Dollar…someday. Maybe.

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Okay, this is it. I have GOT to get my act together!

This morning I overslept big time. Awoke at 7:30, about the time the Thursday ayem meeting was starting. Called the speaker to let him know I’d be a half-hour or forty minutes late — he wasn’t there yet, either. Ten minutes later, FLEW out the door and hit the road.

No. Make that “hit a wall of traffic making like a molasses tsunami.”

The fake cowboy DJ on the radio remarks that there’s an estimated 95-minute back-up — that would be an hour and a half, he helpfully translates — on the eastbound 101 at a downtown exit.

We sit through six signals at the intersection of eastbound Glendale and State Route 51. Evidently every eastbound commuter who’s heard this news has dodged off the I-17 (which merges with the 101 downtown and is capable coming to a dead standstill when any significant event occurs). They’re all headed across the surface streets to the other southbound freeway, which arrives downtown several miles to the east of the wreck site.

So it’s quarter after 8 by the time I reach Scottsdale. The program is over and people are sitting around chatting. The chiropractor has already fled for another meeting, but others are socializing, and that’s nice. Chat for awhile; then burn some more gas to get back home.

The assembled company is looking and feeling a little groggy. At 3:49 a.m., reports George the Elder, an Amber Alert went off and rousted EVERYONE out of the sack with a shrill squeal and a desperate-sounding announcement. Some woman’s ex-boyfriend called the cops and claimed she threatened to harm  herself and her brats. She claims that is not so. The cops apparently doubt the accusation enough that they are not filing charges.

Whatever is true, the result was to jolt every cell phone owner in the city awake in the wee hours of the morning.

I’m thinking I may try again with the cell phones. So far I’ve really hated the android-type phones I’ve tried and deeply resent having to pay so goddamn much for something that a) I consider a nuisance; b) I can’t figure out how to work; and c) I hardly ever use and don’t want to use. However, it’s just so risky to be schlepping around the city without a phone when there are no pay phones left anywhere… My son has extracted 100 minutes a month with no contract for his iPhone with T-Mobile (whose service I loathed) for just $30 a month (plus the cost of the contraption). That’s annoying but not impossible. So if — and only if — I can persuade him to help me learn how to use it and help me get T-Mobile’s erratic billing practices as much under control as possible (they don’t bill you and then they cut off your service), maybe I’ll sign up for that. At least I know how to operate Apple’s hardware.

Lo and behold, it’s very easy to turn off the Amber Alerts on an iPhone. If and when I get this device, that will be the first order of business.

What an annoyance! As though in a city of 4.2 million people, I’m likely to spot some homeless woman’s three children at 4 in the morning! A homeless woman who lives halfway to Tucson…

Back at the Funny Farm at 9:30. Starved, of course: no time for breakfast, and I do not eat at The Good Egg (our meeting place), which like most chain restaurants serves processed foods poured out of boxes, bags, and cans. Still haven’t lost the two pounds I picked up on Monday at the IHOP.

And in the “still haven’t” department, it’s now 11:30 in the morning and I have not started on the client’s project, which I surely would like to get done today, so as to ship it off to him at the earliest. If I don’t quit writing this blog post soon, though, the possibility of reaching that little goal will be much diminished.

Met with him for almost two hours yesterday (imagine the number of hours that will be required to put all that content-heavy palaver on paper!). He arrived back from London with an airplane cold, thank you very much. By yesterday evening, it looked like I was coming down with it, in spite of my having driven straight to a store and purchased a package of sanitary wipes with which to scrub the hands, the computer, and the car’s steering wheel. But this morning I seem to have thrown it off.

What I have not thrown off, evidently, is stone laziness.

And so, to work. I suppose…