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Lives of the Self-Employed

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“Self-Employed”: that’s another way of saying “underemployed,” which ultimately is another way of saying “unemployed.”

It happened again last night: I worked until 11:30 trying to keep up with a set of jobs that pay poverty wages. This is just flicking INSANE!

Over the weekend it occurred to me, once again, that I need to get a grip on the way I spend my time. Too sick to go to choir, on Sunday I was struggling to get even with the 101 papers so they’d be off my desk, to the extent they ever are, by the time the 235 students’ first real assignment came in. But I realized the house was so filthy it was actually making the dog sick: Cassie’s eyes water all the time because she’s allergic to something, probably all the dust on the floors. Her little nose is only about 10 or 12 inches off the ground, so naturally when she goes tearing around on floors that haven’t been properly cleaned in three months, the dust flies up into her face.

So I finally decided I would have to let the student papers go for a day in favor of basic sanitation.

But not before I tried to sketch out some sort of schedule that might get the massive amounts of work under control. Caring for the house, the dogs, and the yard alone could fill one’s day; add trying to run three exercises in underemployment and you’re doomed.

This, to my astonishment, is the result:

Lives of the Self-Employed
You'll need to click on the image here; it's so large it won't fit in a column.

The plan was to try to keep the actual paid work hours down to 40 a week, and also to work in time to walk Cassie and to take Charley to the park for a leash-training session. Also, I wanted to get back into the habit of bathing and painting my face early in the day, instead of having to race through those jobs in the 15 minutes before I have to run out the door to class.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I don’ t have to leave for campus until almost 11:00 a.m. However, if I do the other things I need to do—walk the dogs, make the bed, pick up the pigpen (which while the weather is warm—we’re just coming off another three-digit spell—entails tending the pool and watering plants), fix and eat breakfast, take a shower, paint my face, and get dressed for class—this schedule still leaves me working into the middle of the night.

Every flickin’ night.

Seven days a week.

Out of curiosity, I added up the number of hours for which I actually get paid, which I’ve called “productive hours.” All that teaching and editing and blogging adds up, during a well-organized week with no rush jobs, to sixty hours a week!

Know what I earn for a sixty-hour work week? $29,790.

Yes. Less than half of what I earned when I had a real job, at which I worked about 30 or 35 hours a week.

All it takes is one thing to disrupt this finely juggled schedule. Today, for example, I have to go to the dentist at 10. That cuts short the time for writing this blog post—Charley’s half-hour training session will have to go—and pushes the other work forward until after I get back, sometime around noon.

Gerardo just showed up. The disruption he and his sidekick create distracts from trying to get the present chore (blogging) done. Just spent 20 minutes cleaning up the dog shit I didn’t get to yesterday because it was well after dark before my son picked up his dog, and instructing Gerardo on the plants that need to be pulled out because they died during the summer’s heat.

And I have to be back here by noon so I can sit here for five hours waiting for the pool guy to come back and fix the filter AGAIN.

Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars. The dentist is going to clean out my checking and savings accounts today. There’s been NO WAY I’ve been able to set aside another $40 a month for routine dental work. Not only have I not been able to self-escrow enough to cover tooth-cleaning (to say nothing of the new interesting thing that’s developed), I’ve been dipping into savings every month to cover ordinary expenses.

Leslie’s said they might forgive the cost of today’s service call, because it’s not been very long since the guy was last here. But if they don’t, that’ll be at least another $160.

Next month I have to drain and refill the pool: $200.

The $185/month water bills this summer happened after I’d turned off the water on the front east side. I’d forgotten that last winter I figured all that xeric landscaping needn’t be watered and had pledged to manually water the roses and hollyhocks three times a week. Well of course while struggling to keep afloat in the tsunami of work that was last summer, I forgot that best-laid plan. So two of the roses in front are dead; the hollyhocks are seared back to the ground, the yellow oleander just barely recovered from last winter’s freezes and has a lot of deadwood that needs to be cut out.

I’ll have to pay Gerardo extra for all the extra work he and his slavey are doing.

The work tsunami hasn’t subsided. I guess I must have washed out to sea.

Speaking of the which, I must hurry to get some food before the kid shows up here with that dog. Bye!

By the way: that 59.6 hours a week? That’s just the paid work. As for the “nonproductive hours”—the hours of work around this place that are NOT paid: 49.65 hours a week.

Is It Time to Go?

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This, from our neighborhood’s self-elected Intrepid Leader, who forward the remarks from a neighbor:

I have a bit of information about the shooting Saturday night at Side Road and Feeder Street.  The detective told me that the victim lives far from our neighborhood.  He suffered a gunshot wound while at the wheel of his car which looks like it then slow-rolled up over the curb.  Last I heard, the victim is in critical condition.  They have not found the suspects.  It is important to note that eyewitness accounts place two suspicious individuals loitering within 50 feet of the assault around 15 minutes before the attack.  They were witnessed 3 times over a 10-15 minute time frame.  I relay this information as a reminder for us as a neighborhood to be vigilantly proactive.

The detective said if you see anything suspicious at all, please call the non-emergency police number for our area so they can come, investigate, and identify the individuals.  The number is 602-262-6151.  I just put it in the contact list on my cell and on the fridge.  Hopefully, this note encourages others to do the same.  For anything which seems dangerous or has the propensity to get that way, the detective said we should not hesitate to call 911.

All residents, adults and children alike, should feel free and secure in our neighborhood.  While this is not the first crime in our area, it is an alarming rejolt to the system.   I am quite confident  in our neighborhood’s ability to send the message to criminals of any type that we will have the police here to welcome them.

I know I speak for many when I say how thankful I am for those who have been working collectively on this issue for so long.  It is just sad and senseless when a situation forces us to remember the need for our collective diligence.

Saturday night. That would be what we call last night. Last night an hour before this happened (Play-Nooz reports peg it at 8:00 p.m., which doesn’t prove that’s when it happened — only when police showed up to find the half-dead “victim,” who presumably was not made of virgin snow), Cassie and I were walking over to La Maya’s house, whence we were invited for dinner. Three hours later (if you believe the reports), we were walking home through the faintly creepy darkness.

Much creepier is the fact that the crime was happening, or a-borning, about the time I was walking around in the vicinity.

This is not quite a block from my house. Most nights, when it’s not still 108 degrees at 10 p.m., the dog and I cross the street at that intersection as we perambulate the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this is the very intersection where the Renter’s Friend’s German shepherd attacked and tried to kill Cassie.

I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve had about enough of this.

Lookee here at what I found in Scottsdale, within walking distance of the tony Scottsdale Fashion Square: it’s an aged townhome built in the 1970s. Looks a lot like the place my father and his wife retired to, except that it has an actual kitchen and it has no nursing home. And they welcome people of all ages, not just the decrepit.

In fact, most of the residents appear to be on the high side of decrepit. It’s a small tract of patio homes, off the main drag, clustered behind a gate with a 24-hour guard. From what I can tell, it’s a lifecare community without the life care: no nursing home, and though there’s a restaurant on the grounds, no one requires you to show up once or twice a day on pain of being relegated, willy nilly, to said nursing home. It looks like maybe it was somebody’s idea of upscale collective living before the idea of collectives ever came about.

A hundred and forty-five grand is significantly less than I could get for my house. Well…assuming that not everyone in the neighborhood rushes to put their houses on the market. This place is already fixed up. It’s as centrally located as Scottsdale gets, and instead of a menacing slum just to the west, it’s bordered on the west (and the north, and the east) by multimillion-dollar estates. It’s like a tiny chip of Sun City dropped down in the middle of Central Richistan. It’s larger than M’hijto’s house. Upgraded. Doesn’t need to have anything done to it (though I’m not fond of carpets). I could probably even hang my laundry on that covered, enclosed patio (though that little oven would be crushingly hot in the summertime!).

Years ago, a Realtor friend remarked that North Central is “today’s Encanto district.”

Yeah.

Former DH and I spent about 15 years in Encanto. We lived in a spectacularly beautiful 1929 house in a lovely, quaint “historic” neighborhood. Yes. Though the house was newer when we moved in than the houses in in my present neighborhood were when I moved here, it qualified as what Arizonans think of as “historic.”

I loved the house, much more than anyplace else I’ve ever lived. But the neighborhood, for all its cohesion and Yuppie camaraderie, was something else: overrun by derelicts who would camp in your yard (and use it as a toilet), who by night would sleep in any car left carelessly unlocked and by day would stumble up and down the streets.

There was always some background noise going on: burglaries, peeping Toms, bums thrown out of some young doctor’s or lawyer’s car, the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (ask me to tell you about that one some day!), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (I’d tell you that story for a dime and a cup of coffee, too). Over time, though, the volume rose.

It rose on the axe murder at the end of our street. A little old lady came home from the beauty parlor to find a burglar in her house. He picked up a hatchet in her garage and hacked her to death. When he and his girlfriend were stopped in her car outside of Blythe, he was wearing her tennis shoes. The only reason the cop pulled him over was that he was speeding. If the turkey had minded the speed limit, he would have gotten away Scot-free.

The friend who was with me that day—we were hanging out with my little boy in a neighbor’s pool when we heard the cops converging on the old lady’s house—moved out shortly thereafter. The woman who bought her house was home alone one night when a guy who had been watching her and her husband’s movements for awhile came in through the only window in the house that wasn’t alarmed. He spent the entire night beating and raping her.

So…what do we have by way of gradually increasing volume here?

• The cops killed in the apartment complex across the road
• The gangbangers who loiter in front of the Walgreen’s at all hours of the day and night
• The guy killed in a mugging at the corner of 19th and Northern
• The 24-hour Albertson’s that you wouldn’t even think of going into after dark, and that you think twice about visiting in broad daylight
• The shoplifter strangled by Fry’s employees at the corner of 19th and Dunlap (that store is long gone, replaced by an ethnic market)
• The chucklehead who ran off when the door squealer interrupted his attempt to break in my westside Arcadia door (no cojones, eh?)
• The woman who was jumped by the would-be rapist when she went out to get the morning paper off the driveway
• And now…this.

Maybe enough is finally enough?

The Frugal Joy of Big Batches and a Freezer

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It’s 10:35 p.m. I spent two hours plowing through an excruciatingly bad student paper, trying to make SOME sort of sense of it, assigning a score of 35/100, feeling bad, the guy’s probably dyslexic, feeling frikkin’ frustrated, sick and tired of explaining the same grade-school trivia over and over and over and over and over and over and over to adults who didn’t learn it in 13 years of K-12 schooling and certainly aren’t going to learn it now and truly I remember why I said all those years ago that I’d rather go on welfare than ever teach freshman comp again.

Then presto-changeo, the next paper is almost perfect!

What happens that some people never manage to learn the most basic writing skills? And some, stuck pointlessly in English 101/102, perform on a near-professional level?

Another 12-hour day. I’m whipped. The dog hasn’t been fed, I haven’t been fed, and it’s past bed-time if I imagine that even under the influence of a pair of Benadryl I’m gonna get more than four hours of sleep. Nose has been so stuffed up I’m not hungry, but Cassie the Corgi certainly is hungry.

Unclog the nose with a toxic medicinal spray. Realize I really should eat something. But there’s precious little, we having run out of food and out of money near the end of the budget cycle.

But…

But YES! There’s a freezer!

Dive to the bottom of the chest and resurface with a container of home-made stew, redolent of onions, carrots, celery, and wine. And a smaller plastic box containing one serving of lovely comfort food: Costco’s excellent scalloped potatoes!

And there’s exactly one glass of wine left in the bottle of plonk on the kitchen counter.

Not only did I save a great deal of money frugally building a delicious stew and squirreling away one-person portions of the lifetime supply of potatoes, last winter’s me rescued this evening’s sickly overworked little me from a miserable dinner of cheese rinds and stale crackers.

Frugality! There’s more to it than meets the eye.

Yay! Not strep, after all

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So I drove across town to an urgent care clinic on the southern fringe of the affluent Arcadia district (on the northern fringe of a barrio) because the nearest urgent care clinic to me has gawdawful customer reviews.

Along about 5:00 p.m. my temp suddenly spiked and I thought “yipe!” Grabbed a flashlight, ran to the bathroom mirror, peered into the throat, and saw much more scary-looking white crud than the last time I worked up the courage to look in there. Since this is in the running for the worst sore throat I’ve ever had, naturally I figure the  streptococcus had its tiny tentacles around my neck.

There’s an urgent care clinic closer to me, but it’s had some pretty negative reviews.

Okay. I suppose one ought not to take consumer reviews on the Internet as worth the pixels they’re published in. But that place sent some very angry people out onto the Web.

So off I go across the city, about a 20- or 30-minute drive, to a place with many happy reviews. I took a sheaf of Medicare open-enrollment paperwork, about fifty poorly reproduced pages that one is required to plow through by way of figuring out if one should keep the current providers, look for someone cheaper, or opt for someone more expensive who provides better benefits. Figured it would take about an hour to sift through all this bureaucratic excrescence, which, I expected, would occupy around a third of the time I’d be sitting in the urgent-care waiting room.

But…

To my astonishment, there was NO WAIT!

I couldn’t believe it.

By the time I got to their screening tech, the temp was back to normal. Either that or something’s wrong with my mercury thermometer.

They took me right in and plopped me in an examining room. Naturally, I expected about a 45-minute wait there, so I went back to sifting through pages of Medicare comparisons.

About two minutes later the doctor surfaced. Examined. Opined that it’s not strep throat.

Did you know that if you have the head congestion, cough, and sinus headache typical of a cold or flu, a sore throat is probably not streptococcal but viral? Who knew? Not moi!

He remarked that if it was worse tomorrow I should come back. He must have seen the subliminal wince, because he said, “If you want, we can do a strep throat test now. If it’s negative, you’ll know you don’t have strep.”

Uhm…”You’re the doctor. Whatever you think is best is fine by me.”

So he did the unnecessary test, and yes, it was negatory.

Thank goodness!

They sent me out into the night without once asking for payment. They accepted Medicare (that alone is a miracle), and they asked for nothing. No doubt a bill will come in the mail. But for the nonce, at least I didn’t have to run up the credit card on the last day of the billing cycle!

Now to get back to work…

Stress-Free Finances: Deposit and Pay Electronically

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Once you’ve built a reliable budget, you know certain recurring bills are always the same. Others may change from month to month, but they can’t safely be evaded. Paying these bills with checks amounts to a major hassle and, given the ever-increasing cost of postage, an annoying extra expense. Check-writing also subjects you to some risk: your payment could get lost or stolen in the mail, leaving your bill unpaid and you in hot water. And having a piece of paper with your account number, name, phone number, and signature on it bounce from hand to hand sharply increases your exposure to identity theft.

It’s much safer, much easier, and far more reliable to pay bills through your bank or credit union’s Bill-Pay system. At my credit union, this service is free.

Bill-Pay allows me either to set up regularly recurring automatic payments or to send payments manually each month. I use automatic payment for bills that are the same each month, such as insurance premiums and the Cox bill. This is extremely convenient, because I don’t have to do a thing to get the bills paid. For figures that vary from month to month, such as the utility bills, when the statements arrive I just click on a button, fill in the current balance, set the date for payment to be delivered, and click “pay.”

Once I’ve created a payee, it remains on the credit union’s payee list until I delete it, so I don’t have to re-enter data each month.

To “pay myself first” by depositing monthly savings promptly, I use the credit union’s scheduled funds transfer function. This is extremely easy to set up and relieves me of having to remember to do it each month. At any time, these scheduled transactions can be changed or canceled.

It’s also possible to do a one-time scheduled electronic transfer. For example, to pay the $2100 property tax bill this year, I needed to move money out of the money market savings account where I accrue savings for annual bills into my checking account and then pay the County Treasurer from checking. Well, since that sinking fund is in the money market to earn interest, I didn’t want to move the money until it was actually time to pay the bill, but neither did I wish to try to remember to do this manually on the appointed date. So I arranged a one-time transfer from money market to checking to take place on the first of the month, and then scheduled the property tax bill to be paid on the second. In that way, I got a full month’s interest on the $2100, the bill was paid on time, and I didn’t have to think about it again.

Recently the credit union subscribed to a new service called PoP, which allows you to pay individuals. This competes directly with PayPal, which can give you a sharp ding on certain transactions—PoP appears to be free. And you don’t have to wait three to ten days for money to transfer from your account to PayPal to before you can transfer money to an individual. Perfect for kids away at college…and for my business’s subcontractors!

Just as you can pay your bills and transfer funds electronically, people, businesses, and government agencies that owe you can and should deposit funds electronically to your checking account.

Most employers prefer to direct-deposit paychecks. This requires you to go to the employer’s HR site and download or print out your pay statement, but that minor inconvenience is as nothing compared to having to traipse to the bank with a check. The money hits your account on payday, not whenever you get around to going to the bank, and not whenever the bank gets around to posting the check. And it never gets lost!

State agencies that disburse Unemployment Insurance checks resist direct-depositing, apparently because they’re getting some vigorish from banks to load your UI onto debit cards, which are subject to the usual bank gouges plus some unpredictable ones. But you can insist that they direct-deposit your Unemployment check. And you definitely should: it will save you a lot of hassle and bank charges.

Social Security cheerfully direct-deposits old-age benefits. I’m not eligible for veteran’s benefits or a pension, but no doubt they can be direct-deposited, too. I do have Fidelity direct-deposit the tiny drawdown I have to take to remain eligible for the state’s retiree sick leave payout; this amounts to 77 cents a month. The annual sick leave payout (RASL) of about $4,500 net is also direct-deposited.

Then there are the folks who just insist on paying with checks.

Banks and credit unions now have a feature that allows you to stay friends with these people: you can scan a check to a JPEG and then electronically deposit that! Depending on the quality and speed of your scanner, it’s a little bit of a hassle…but it sure is better than trudging to the bank.

All these tools, now available through most banks and credit unions, work to reduce financial stress. They save you the time and hassle of having to drive through traffic to make routine transactions; they guarantee that your bills get paid on time (assuming you have enough cash in your account to cover them!); and they make saving easy and automatic.

Updates

PoP decidedly is not free. When you send a payment, the charge is $5 for standard delivery and $8 for same-day delivery.

Depending on the amount, this may be more or less than PayPal. Paypal is cheaper than PoP for amounts below $162. When you get above $162, you start to save money as long as you’re using standard delivery. At $265, you could get the next day delivery for the same as PayPal’s “some day my love will come” service, and anything above $265, PoP’s express delivery would be cheaper than Paypal.

Unless you ask the bank in person, you don’t find out how much these fees are until after you’ve signed on. The terms of service contain some onerous conditions hidden deep in the fine print.

If you have a payment that needs to be delivered across the country today, it may be worth the cost (and the risk). But otherwise…for small amounts, eventually PayPal will do its thing.

The New York Times has been holding forth about how online banking entangles customers with pricey fees and discourages them from changing banks.

If your bank charges for the bill-pay service, that’s yet another good reason to move to a credit union! Credit unions do not abuse their customers.

But if you’re setting up payments on  your end—either paying manually or arranging for BillPay to send a specified figure to a creditor—turning off BillPay involves nothing more than a click of a mouse. You can then pay with checks for a month or two until you get all your funds settled at the new institution, or put enough cash in the new account to cover your bills and set up the manual, your-end-rules type of Bill Pay there.

Automatic payment’s only impediment to closing a bank account and moving money to a better institution would happen when you have allowed a creditor to engross money from your account from its end. This is how automatic bill-pay used to work: You gave your routing information to the utility company, a mortgage lender, or an insurer, and they sucked your payment out of your account on a given day.

I still have my utility bills and my long-term care insurance paid in this way. The credit union’s manager told me it’s a bad idea, and he said that insurance companies in particular were hard to disengage from this method. However, it seems likely that if you called and wrote their billing department and announced the account was being closed and you would pay with a new method, it would register.

Business Is Lookin’ Up!

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With great delight we came to an agreement with the new client, a charismatic gentleman with a lot of wit and talent who’s willing to pay us a living wage. I’m thrilled! We’ll back each other up on the copyediting and proofreading, and I’ll do the heavy lifting in the content consultation (which may read “rewrite it”).

Another client is in the wings, but that looks a little dubious. Don’t know if anything will come of that but kind of doubt it.

Meanwhile, my designer friend had no problem changing copy editor to copyeditor, one word on one line, and the result still looks great!

I spent a fair amount of the day, when I wasn’t reading opaque student copy, rewriting our website content. Now Tina needs to add her part, and once DesignerMan comes across with a logo, we’ll be ready to fly with that.

Another advertiser surfaced with an expression of interest in buying space for a real ad (not a blackhat SEO device) on FaM. So that also is very pleasing. Last month, as I may have mentioned, combined ad revenues and editing pay came to about what the college is paying me. If we could make that a regular thing, I could stand down off all the grinding composition courses. Might keep the online magazine writing course, which this semester attracted an amazing 20 classmates, all them claiming they’re actually interested in learning to write.

If the combined business enterprises generated that amount 12 months a year, one or two sections would add enough to allow me to live without having to draw money out of savings, at least for a while.

Meanwhile I have a running head start on the e-book I intend to publish. Its backbone will be how-to advice on minimizing financial stress, but it will be fleshed out with recipes, reflections, and various idle essays from Funny.

This will be the Funny’s 1,635th post. Can you imagine? There’s more, too, still marooned on iLife—a bunch of it didn’t come over when I moved to WordPress.com. Guess that’s all going to go away when Apple’s new Cloud service takes over. Oh well. Anyway, there’s a ton of copy on this thing that could be converted to books.

Caught a nasty cold this weekend. It was Day School Sunday, a chivaree celebrating the Anglican church’s large flock of private schools. About 75 choristers of grade-school age joined us (they, and all their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, godparents aunts, uncles, and accountants: the place was overflowing!) for an hour and a half’s hoedown.

Of course, naturally, I ran very late for choir and I’d forgotten to fill my water thingie as I was racing around trying to get robed and find the stuff I also didn’t have together to haul upstairs (and downstairs, and upstairs). As I was running for the choir loft I realized the water thingie was empty. A tide of bouncing young bodies was flooding out of the choir room, and it was like swimming upstream to get back in there where the water dispenser is.

Sooo…. I filled up the water cup from the public fountain, watering hole for two score and fifteen germy little kids, all the while thinking d-o-o-o-o-o-n’t d-o-o-o-o-o-o-o t-h-a-t!

Chalk up one point for the still small voice.

By the time I got up this morning I was convinced I had a strep throat. Drove around trying to find a clinic for a test this afternoon, but none of the outfits that advertised they would do it actually were doing it.

It’s settled down into a heavy cold and laryngitis now. Sore throat is fading, so I think it’s just the fall miseries.

What the heck. It means I don’t have to go to choir practice Wednesday, and I probably won’t be able to sing on Sunday, either. Since Wednesday is my Day from Hell, I secretly welcome a break that evening.