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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!

Life Is Short. Eternity Is Long.

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So another attention-getting life-shaker just happened. M’hijito called to report that his dad was going in for an angioplasty Thursday evening. Forthwith, though, they decided he needed a quadruple bypass and scheduled him into an operating room the first crack out of the box Friday.

Needless to say, my son was (and remains) alarmed. To say nothing about how ex-DH and his present wife must be feeling. Apparently the surgery went well. But it’s disturbing. Very disturbing.

For one thing, no one expected XDH ever to be anything other than extremely long-lived and healthy. His mother is still living—she’s pushing 100, and the only physical issues she has are macular degeneration that has made her blind and a lifelong hearing problem that has left her stone deaf. Her father lived to the age of 96, quite well all the way to the end. XDH is only 72, same age as SDXB, who underwent the same experience a couple of years ago. Whether XDH recovers as quickly and as completely remains to be seen: he’s nowhere near as fit as SDXB—never has been a fan of strenuous exercise—but he sure does enjoy good food and wine. And he has some pesty ailments that do not afflict SDXB, two of them potentially life-threatening over the long haul.

We are nearing the end of our journey, we who are on the leading edge of the baby boom. Most bypass veterans survive at least five years; the 15-year survival rate is about 55 percent. That, of course, means 45 percent reach the end before then.

And y’know…the perspective from here sure is different from what it was, even five or ten years ago!

Yesterday I shocked a few readers by proposing to spend an outrageous amount on some overpriced dishes. And by admitting this was a want, not a need…but still persisting in a plan to diddle away money on the junk, anyway.

It’s an apparent about-face, of course. This scheme contradicts everything I’ve advocated at Funny about Money. But it’s a manifestation of a new line of thinking that’s been ticking away in the back of my mind ever since that Mayo doc suggested that the current bellyache could very well be a symptom of a cancer that will carry me away in about six months. Should it really be that.

As I was driving away from that meeting, a haunting thought came to mind, one I haven’t been able to shove back under the rug:

I am making myself miserable trying to preserve capital so that I can support myself during some future time when I expect to be miserable.

Over and over, the same question returns: WTF am I doing????? Making myself miserable so I can be miserable? What is that?

I hate teaching freshman comp with every fiber of my being. After I’d taught two sections a semester (just two sections!) for about four years in graduate school, I walked away with the Ph.D. in hand and this vow in my heart: “I will go on welfare before I ever teach composition again.”

And now here I am, approaching the end of my life, and I am on welfare—collecting Social Security. And I’m spending these last few reasonably viable years doing just that: teaching freshman comp.

I loathe it more than I can express. It’s such a waste of time and energy, such a pointless exercise, and so intensely frustrating that it makes you feel every moment you spend on it is simply wasted. And wasted in ways that are not fun. This is not playing World of Warcraft here. It’s not diddling away your time in front of a movie screen. It’s far from playing with New Yorker jigsaw puzzles. It is hard goddamn work, and it is stupefyingly underpaid.

Time wasted: students’ and instructors’.

• The students have been over all this ground many, many times. We misapprehend when we assume they can’t write a simple sentence or a coherent paragraph, and they can’t formulate a topic for a diddly little 750-word essay because they were never taught this stuff. Trust me: they have been told this stuff. Time and time again. Among the fine young nimrods who couldn’t even begin to come up with a focused idea for the next 102 essay were two students who have been in my 101 classes…and I know I taught the 101s how to focus an essay topic. You wanna know something? If they haven’t learned this grade-school stuff after thirteen years of K-12 education, they are never going to learn it. It is an utter waste of their time to make them spend another year going over the same old stuff they’ve ignored all their lives.

• The instructor spends hour after hour, many of them unpaid hours, devising original and engaging strategies to instill grade-school knowledge and skills into young adults, to no avail. Many more hours are pointlessly spent reading, commenting upon, and assessing piles of student papers equivalent in mass to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. All of that person’s time, all of that person’s effort, and all of that person’s creativity are just wasted.

So why am I doing this?

Because I’m scared? I am. I’m scared unto paralysis by the prospect of living to advanced old age, utterly alone, and not having enough to provide even halfway decent dotage care for myself.

But of course, there’s no guarantee—or even great likelihood—that I will live into decrepitude. None at all.

The real reason I live like an anchorite, trying to scrabble together enough to barely live on so that I can avoid drawing down a very modest 4 percent of retirement savings, is that I’m in the habit of crimping my life for no other reason than to admire the bottom line in a spreadsheet.

In a word, I’m a tightwad.

I allow my life to be constrained to the point of entropy because I don’t want to spend any of my precious dollars. And yes: I am making myself miserable at a joke of a “job” (which is what adjunct teaching is: a cruel, exploitive joke) so that I can live on something well under $30,000 a year so that I won’t have to spend any part of $550,000 sitting in brokerage accounts and mutual funds, which are merrily averaging 6 percent to 8 percent per annum. For chrissake, the big IRA earned ten grand last month! That’s well over half, in one month, of what I earn in an entire year of making myself miserable in the classroom.

This returns us to that question: WTF am I doing?

Maybe I abuse the whole idea of money. Maybe my ex- is right: Money is to be spent. Not admired.

Hence, dear readers, the impulse to spend a little something on myself. On a want, not a need.

Yesterday, more or less in response to Remy’s and Frugal Scholar’s and Mrs. POP’s surprised comments, this whole train of thought came into sharper focus for me. And I realized: I have simply got to stop teaching composition. As endeavors go, it is just too crushing. It’s interfering with my life and blocking me from being able to build a business that I actually do like and that does not feel futile.

But how?

Well, the train of thought continues.

About 18 months ago, a friend in a business group suggested, with a straight face, that I quit teaching altogether for a year or at least for a semester and spend all the time thereby rescued on developing and marketing my editorial enterprise. Naturally, I smiled; murmured sure, sure; and went on about my misbegotten business. I was dead certain that I couldn’t earn enough at editing and ghostwriting alone to make put food on the table.

Recent developments, however, suggest that is no longer true. With a very minimal amount of marketing, a small but steady stream of commerce has come our way.

If I were not distracted with teaching—if I were not preoccupied with wasting the remaining hours of my life—but instead spent those hours on making my business visible to the kinds of people who would hire us and on persuading said people that they need us more than they need whole-wheat bread and sex, we would have more work than Tina and I could handle together. I don’t think that’s a “maybe.” I think that’s an “absolutely so.”

But even if it were a “maybe,” the truth is, at what we’ve learned is the fair rate for our services, I would not have to work anything like full time to earn enough to make up for the absence of teaching income.

Let’s say, for example, I keep the magazine writing courses, which are easy to prep, easy to teach, relatively low in enrollment, and mounted 100 percent online. I dump the spring and fall comp courses. And during the summer, when more skilled and motivated students show up, I teach one composition section. In that scenario, assuming blog income stays steady and my one regular customer keeps paying me to read detective novels(!), I would have to earn only $700 a month to make up the loss of the composition income.

At $60 an hour, $700 represents 11.67 hours of work. A month.

A single customer routinely gives us more work than that.

And does it or does it not bring us back to the eternal question: WTF am I doing?

Before the end of this semester (only 13 weeks to go!), I am going to tell my honored chair that I would like to keep the magazine writing course but drop the spring comp courses. And I will ask him if he would be kind enough to allow me to teach one or maybe two comp sections in the summer. Then I’m going to work on building The Copyeditor’s Desk:

• Attend at least two CofC meetings a month.
• Take full advantage of all the Chamber’s many marketing and advertising opportunities.
• Volunteer with charitable groups that are favored by the local movers & shakers. Get to know these folks.
• Join the Better Business Bureau.
• Join Local Arizona, a coalition of locally owned businesses.
• Start an advertising & PR campaign.
• Step up the communication with former clients.
• Approach major textbook publishers for project management contracts.
• Approach genre publishers in an attempt to get more of them to pay us to read light fiction.

And if that doesn’t generate seven hundred bucks a month? Welp…$700 a month is 2 percent of retirement savings. Somehow I think I can afford it.

Somehow, I think I can afford to have a life.

Images:

Still Life with a Skull. Philippe de Champaigne. Public domain.
Proto-composition paper: shamelessly ripped off the Web.

Delayed Gratification and the Beloved Dishes: I want these!

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I want them. Gotta have them. Want them so much I NEED them!!!!!!!

They are a few Heath stoneware bowls to replace several that have been busted, leaving my beloved set short of its original eight place settings.

Alas, however, my set is so old that Heath no longer makes dishes in the color, a kind of aqua blue. They also no longer make the larger of the bowls that came with the set, one that apparently was once billed as a “salad bowl.” Checked on e-Bay, where I found only one dinner plate in The Color, which I don’t need and which is in a different style from mine, anyway.

Interestingly, prices on e-Bay are just about the same as the prices Heath Ceramics is charging for brand-new pieces. Only trouble is, Heath’s offerings are somewhat limited. But then…so are e-Bay’s. Prices for these “mid-century modern” dishes are, in a word, bracing.

However, they’re almost unbreakable, the style is so pleasing that one never tires of them, and they last a lifetime and then some. M’hijito has my mother’s set, which he uses every day (as I use mine), and I still have the earth-mother green set my ex- and I bought shortly after we married, a ceremony performed by gaslight. I no longer use that set unless an awful lot of people come to dinner, but it’s still unchipped and unwinnowed by breakage.

Okay. Can’t get the color anymore, and for one bowl, can’t get the shape. What to do?

Well, my set is in the style that has a wide unglazed-looking rim. The native color of the stoneware is a kind of taupe, a very pretty shade that contrasts nicely with just about any glaze Heath uses. No law says that every piece in the set has to be the same color—matter of fact, at Heath’s website you see “curated” (yeah) (stop that laughing!) sets that mix & match. Why not get replacement bowls in a color that would pick up the rim on the smoky aqua plates? Like this:

For example, here’s the dessert bowl, of which I need one and would like five, in a color combination called “cocoa fawn”:

That would go exceptionally well with the foggy sky-blue set I have. In fact, it would help to tone down the turquoiseness of the blue. Could be a very desirable choice.

When I got the set, I bought only four of these, because I didn’t expect to use them much. However, as it develops, I use them all the time. I’ve broken one and so need to replace that, but if I’m going to have three in blue and one in greige, then I guess I’d like to fill out the set to eight (i.e., buy five of new bowls), so if anyone ever comes over to dinner and we need to use this size dish, everyone can have the same color.

This bowl comes in a style called “coupe,” which was introduced in the 1960s. They’re only making two bowls in the desired style anymore, one the size above, which I need, and one billed as a “cereal bowl.” That means I can’t replace the larger bowls I originally bought. The available 6.5-inch bowl looks like this:

Note that it’s a different shape. The old “salad bowl” was the same shape as the “dessert bowl,” sleeker and lower. I got them because I don’t eat cereal often and because I much preferred the leaner, crisply-lined design. But if I’m going to get a 6.5-inch-diameter bowl in Heathware, I guess this is what I’ll have to settle for. To make up for the missing bowls, I need three of these.

Let us consider the price: The dessert bowls are $23 apiece. The cereal bowls are $28. So… just to replace the missing bowls:

That’s not too breath-taking. I can afford that this month, with no problem.

However, I really do think that if I’m going to do this, I ought to get eight of each, so as to have eight in the same color to go with the eight otherwise intact place settings I already own. How much would that set me back?

Four hundred bucks. Holy mackerel! That’s pretty problematic, especially at this time of year. The August power bill will arrive this month, and it’s likely to be around $250, as high as it gets all year. And as we speak, my car is at the shop for its regular maintenance, plus I think its battery should be replaced before it craps out in some remote place, and I’ve whacked the front right wheel on curbs several times, and I hit a pothole with the same tire twice, so I suspect it’s out of alignment. And one of the rear brakes is squealing again. These things could add up to a substantial hit.

And we know—we know, because it’s a law of physics—that the instant I pony up $408 for a passel of dishes without which I probably will not die, Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic will come up with $650 worth of repair bills.

What if I bought the replacement pieces (5 dessert bowls, 3 cereal bowls) this month, and then next month, when I’ll have new cash infusions from Social Security and the junior college district, round out the collection with to bring the total up to 8 apiece? It would cost me $199 this month, and then $209 next month.

This would leave enough in the September budget to cover moderate-sized unplanned expenses, and then the October budget, which will reflect slightly lower power bills, should be able to accommodate the second order.

What we have here is an example of the frugal principle of delayed gratification. When you want something, wait.

Wait until you have the cash to actually pay for it, rather than racking up the cost on a charge card. Requires some restraint. But it keeps you out of debt, and eventually you get what you want.

 

Cost of Education: Another Country Heard From

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So I’m haranguing the 101s about the 102s’ having flubbed their first effort at framing a thesis for the extended definition essay, and in the middle of my rant I ask them if they know how much it costs to put 25 Arizonans through 13 years of K-12 schooling.

They of course don’t know, so it’s a SMARTPHONES OUT! moment: I reveal the $7,813 annual per-pupil spending our illustrious state commits these days and holler “multiply that by 13! Now multiply it by 25!” Forthwith, they come up with the $2.5 million figure that we have spent on the members of my English 102 section. And, for that matter, on their own section.

They’re shocked.

But one guy, a freshly returned Navy veteran, keeps calculating. Hand goes up.

“Just for comparison,” says he, “the cost of operating an aircraft carrier is $1,450,000 a day. Let’s see…my last deployment was for 10 months…{tap tap tap}…that’s $435,000,000 to send us to sea for ten months.”

We all look at each other. Silence descends over the assembled company.

Me: “uhhhh…. So, we’re spending, what…? About a zillion times as much to send our young men and women to war as we’re spending to educate them?”

Vet: “Looks like it.”

{sigh}

 

 

Holy Cripes!

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You have got to read this post about what devolved from my English 102 class yesterday. It defies belief. Holy cripes, indeed.

I’m back in that place where I keep asking myself, why am I doing this? Surely I could work as a greeter at Walmart and earn as much with less aggravation. And be paid for all the time I put in on the job.

Actually, things are looking up in the Department of Making Myself Miserable. So far this week the editorial business has earned $440, and I expect to rack up another few hundred bucks today. And the new client just sent another document for us to edit. We have three clients in-house just now; taken together they’re cranking steady work for us. If we could keep this pace going all the time, 50 weeks a year, enough cash would come in to allow me to chuck the teaching gig. Or, if I chose to continue making myself miserable, to allow me to live a normal middle-class life again.

In the Department of Already Miserable, the unending bellyache bizarrely ended. Bizarrely and abruptly.

A few days ago I woke up and realized I felt better. Didn’t think much of it, though, because there have been a couple of days when the thing hasn’t been too bad, but the following day it would come back with a vengeance. But then the next day I felt more or less OK. And then the next day! This morning I feel downright normal, for the first time in over two months.

So it looks looks like this thing is passing. Thank God!

And Gaviscon.

Yes. I discovered an over-the-counter nostrum that actually works on gastric reflux.

Rifling through the hypochondriac’s treasure chest that is the Internet, I came across one of those message boards for people whose illnesses have driven them neurotic, and on it several people remarked that the only thing that had helped them was an antacid called Gaviscon.

As it develops, in addition to the usual antacids that potions like Mylanta contain, this snake oil includes an industrial chemical called algin or alginic acid. Among its many properties, algin foams up on contact with liquids. Its foam floats on the top of the liquid. The geniuses who concocted the stuff thought that if they could incorporate an antacid with the foam, it would come up against the base of the flaccid and irritated esophagus, where it would create a protective barrier. And y’know what? It works!

Gaviscon itself is expensive—ten bucks for a bottle of icky-tasting lozenges. However, Walgreen’s has a generic knock-off that sells for six bucks. The queasiness began to subside the minute I chewed up a couple of the things in the car outside the store. It took about a day and a half of swallowing the stuff after every meal and before bed-time, but shortly it took effect.

I’ve stopped losing weight, because finally I can eat something other than disgusting yogurt. Matter of fact, this morning I seem to have gained a pound.

This excellent development, however, was not a free pass out of the Department of Misery. Ohhh no…not a chance!

Three days ago, my back went out. Excruciating! This is the first morning I’ve been able to sit in a chair, and it ain’t very comfortable. At the outset I thought I was going to have to farm out the dog, because I couldn’t bend down to put food and water on the floor for her. Since my son resisted and since La Maya recently adopted a dog that deeply dislikes the Corgi, it looked like I would have to board her. How to get her to a boarding kennel was unclear, since I couldn’t drive the car—take her in a cab, I guess.

SDXB, who suffers chronic sciatica because of a couple of herniated disks, suggested laying flat on my back in bed for the better part of a day. To that, I added a heating pad. After several hours, I was at least able to stand upright and limp into the kitchen. Today it still hurts mightily, but here I am in front of the computer.

The last time this happened, I knew what brought it on: picked up a writhing 40-pound German shepherd puppy to carry her away from the rush-hour traffic into which she was trying to lunge. This time, I didn’t do anything: it just started. My father had disabling muscle spasms in his back, which he kindly bequeathed to me. Like his, mine are usually in the shoulders and upper back. They rarely happen in the lower back, but when they do, they are crippling. So it may have just happened out of the blue.

Or it may be the result of the limp the plantar fascitis has induced.

Cripes. I’m falling apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay.

Turning Freshman Comp into Personal Finance 101

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{Cackle!} Tina came up with a great idea for the transformation my English 102 sections will have to make, come next spring: give them, as their overarching writing theme, personal finance.

How obvious is that, anyway?

Old-timers here know that, to avoid having to read their ungodly clichéd recycled high-school senior English papers (“Why Marijuana Should Be Legalized”…“True Beauty Is Inner Beauty”…“The Drinking Age Should Be Lowered to 18”…gaaaaahhhhh!), I’ve taken to providing defined subjects for my stoonts to write about. Last year I went further than that: I actually assigned specific topics for each and every paper, requiring me to dream up several hundred reasonably focused essay themes.

Although that approach has some advantages, it was a time-consuming pain in the butt, and it had the disadvantage of not giving them a chance to learn how to frame and focus a workable essay topic. This semester I came up with a new theme—Public Education in America—and established four broad subjects within that theme. Each classmate will be assigned one of those topics to cover for all of the required papers, but they’ll have to come up with their own specific theses. Because it’s a new idea, and because it’s a TRULY gigantic pain in the ass to build a course around a preset theme, I applied both to my Eng. 101 and my Eng. 102 classes.

That’s fine for the nonce, but my 101 students tend to follow me into 102. So come spring, I’ll need a new theme for the 102 sections.

Personal finance. Great idea, isn’t it? How often have we PF bloggers bemoaned the presumed financial ignorance of our young pups? IMHO, it remains to be seen if that’s real, since the Millenials are now being called “the cheapest generation.” Frankly, I think a lot of the kids who show up in the community colleges are pretty savvy financially. Most of them are working their way through, and when asked “what on earth are you doing here?” they’ll often say they’re at the junior college to get the gen-ed requirements and prereqs for their major out of the way before they move on to a more expensive four-year school. The state universities here—especially the Great Desert University—have jacked up tuition so high that any freshman or sophomore with an ounce of common sense has been driven away.

More’s the pity for GDU: now the kids with common sense are in my classes! And since they’re intensely interested in issues like student debt, controlling the costs of college and setting themselves up as young adults, I think they’ll turn on to the PF topic.

So…what say you? They’ll need at least four broad subtopics to begin with. One of them, obviously, could be “Debt and the Modern Student” or some such thing. Within the broad theme of personal finance, what specific subjects can I ask them to write about? Check out the format for this approach at the course website. They get four topics on which to write (and are assigned to groups to give each other some moral support and to present discussion panels on their topics). These are listed in the right-hand sidebar, with a bunch of links intended as kick-off points for research. All of the 102 essays are source-based (i.e., research papers). What topics would you like the next generation to study about personal finance?