There you are, driving along one of the mainest of the main drags in the fifth-largest metropolis in the nation. You get into the left turn lane of the Vast Main Drag A so as to turn south onto Vast Main Drag B, you pull into the intersection preparatory to making your turn, and….your car bursts into flames!
Soon all the employees of the nearby bank and the various grocery stores, expensive boutiques, insurance and financial offices, and local corporate headaquarters are standing on the sidewalks watching your car self-immolate.
The Fire Department comes roaring up and stops traffic in all four directions. Now scores of homicidal drivers are cursing your name (if they don’t know your name, they make it up). Collective eons of time are wasted. Your insurance adjuster no doubt thinks you are…well, just another pain in the tuchus.
{sigh}
Luckily for me, as I was approaching said intersection minutes after the Bad Hair Day Victim’s car decided to destroy itself, I managed to dodge into the bank’s parking lot, maneuver my way onto the perpendicular main drag, and make my way across Vast Main Drag A (now conveniently brought to a halt) into the parking lot of Ridiculously Overpriced Gourmet Grocery Store, the purveyor of the sushi I wished to carry out for lunch. This would be the “it’s all about me” response. In reality I felt very bad for the poor soul whose car was melting down in the middle of the intersection.
Sushi packed away in the Dog Chariot, it was back to the Road Home.
Do I get home without incident?
Hell, no. At the intersection of Ordinary Main Drag A and Ordinary Main Drag B, what do I find but a chain wreck—at least four cars involved, two of which are totaled. Another road is completely shut down. Again, I manage to dodge around the closed road and continue on my way. Otherwise, presumably the sushi (and I) would still be cooking in the 90-degree heat.
Holy mackerel! Just when you get yourself wound up about every GD light turning red as you drive up to it, you’re snapped back to reality, here on the homicidal streets of Phoenix.
CBS Marketwatch reports that New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg and Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden are proposing a new attempt to simplify the tax code. For the average Jane and Joe on the street, it will mean a briefer and clearer one-page tax return form. Our present six tax brackets would be reduced to three—15 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. And the corporate tax rate would drop from 35 percent to 24 percent.
It won’t pass, of course, because it eliminates a bunch of lucrative tax breaks for corporations (to say nothing of putting an entire cohort of tax accountants out of work). But at least it’s an effort to make a step in the right direction.
That so many ordinary Americans have to hire a tax accountant to figure out their taxes—often paying more for tax preparation than is owed on taxes!—is just outrageous. This year I paid my tax lawyer $460 to prepare the tax return for the S-corporation, which owed no taxes at all. I paid a like amount to discover that I owed the feds $770 in federal taxes and to extract a $1,000 refund from the state. I have to do that because the absurdly complicated tax rules are utterly incomprehensible to me. There’s no way to understand them, because they make no sense and because they’re couched in cryptic language—only an expert can figure out what they mean and how to apply them, and even the experts regularly make mistakes.
What’s refreshing is to see a “Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act.” It’s long past time Republicans and Democrats of good will set aside the pig-headed partisanship and started to work together on the things that matter to the American people.
If people of good will do not step forward to overcome the corrosive divisiveness this country has seen, we will, I believe, be at risk of civil war within another generation—possibly sooner. When political leaders descend into demagoguery and talk about putting those who don’t agree with them “in the crosshairs” so that their followers start to rage about doing violence to elected officials, even the President of the United States, it’s inevitable that violence will follow.
On both sides, the leadership of this country needs to cut off the shackles of partisanship and extremism and come together to lead. Gregg and Wyden’s proposal is at least a tiny sparkle of light from that direction.
We’re being told that one of the future benefits of the new health-care plan (assuming it survives the Republican onslaught and general hysteria) will be an opportunity to buy long-term care insurance at an affordable price.
That’s a much-needed program. But one has to wonder: apparently the average benefit will be about $50 to $75 a day. That’s as nothing: in Maricopa County, where Phoenix resides, typical cost for a nursing home is over $200 a day! And that’s just the base rate: everything, but everything costs more. If you need a wheelchair, you have to rent it. Any therapy or special care beyond just leaving you sitting there and maybe wheeling you down to the dining room is extra. At that rate, a $50/day stipend won’t hold off bankruptcy for long.
We’re told it may be enough to cover adult day care, which apparently ranges in cost from $20 to $75 a day, depending on where you live. This arrangement, which essentially entails institutionalizing an infirm senior during the day but allowing her or him to return home at night, would require someone to schlep you to a day care center every day. You have to possess all your marbles, be continent, and be mobile, a combination that doesn’t necessarily describe most elders who need daily care.
In-home care, which might keep you out of an institution or at least stave off the evil day, costs $112 to $192 a day, only a few dollars less than the average $205 a day for a private room in a nursing home.
My long-term insurance with Metlife costs just under $80 a month, and it will pay up to $128 a day for nursing care for an unlimited number of years, plus caregiver training, respite care, durable medical equipment, and installation and maintenance of an emergency response system.. The cost is relatively low, compared to the CBO’s estimate for the federal program, because I bought in when I was fairly young.
So, by comparison the government plan will be expensive and its benefits skimpy. Given that nursing home care can quickly bankrupt you, even a little help would be good. But if you’re on the hook for $150 a day even after having paid $128 a month for coverage over many years, you’re looking at drawing down $4,500 worth of your assets a month for nursing care. That’s $54,000 a year.
A $50/day benefit comes under the heading of too little, too late.
So here’s what $75 buys you at th’fancy hair salon:
LOL! Once, within living memory, it looked like this!
Not bad, given the model’s overall decrepitude and the truly awful haircut the artist was presented with.
🙂 Even though Art the Barber had pretty much shaved my head around the sides and back (except for the wad he left in back), I walked out of the Salon Estique (sic…no kidding!) feeling like my head was about five pounds lighter. Amazingly, the new stylist, Judee, managed to cut a fair amount of hair, mostly from the shaggy pouf Art had left on top. There wasn’t much she could do with the sideburns, which are supposed to be feathered (or at least, used to be under Shane’s regime), but they’ll grow in.
The coif is now back to where I can scrunch the curls in, without having to stand in front of a mirror and primp with a hair dryer for 15 minutes every morning. That helps a great deal.
With the introductory discount, Judee only charged $35 for her $65 talents! I gave her a $10 tip for a total of $45, a real bargain considering what she accomplished with a disaster area. Not only that, but the salon provides free “bang trims,” touch-ups around the ear and hairline, an amenity that can delay a full haircut for a couple of weeks or more.
Judee is a tattooed, pierced pistol with a scarlet streak in her black hair…in fact, a very charming woman once you get yourself settled in to the colorful external persona. She recently moved here from Portland, having coveted a life in the low desert since she was five years old. A great conversationalist, she described how she had developed a love of fine cooking and learned how to do it from a number of well-known chefs she’s met in her many travels. I liked her a lot.
Having my hair hassle-free and looking halfway decent is going to be worth her regular fee. Well worth it.
So I’m sitting in my counting-house entering Friday’s paycheck in an Excel account, when suddenly—ever so belatedly—it registers with me:
One of these diddly little semimonthly community college paychecks is almost as much as my entire month’s nondiscretionary budget.
Yeah. I could cover all of the monthly recurring can’t-get-out-of-it bills with a single net paycheck. Not only that, but my discretionary budget—all other costs except those that are required to keep the power and water running and creditors away from the doorstep—is about the same. Which is to say that when I’m teaching three sections, my measly community college pay alone would cover all my regular costs.
Naaaahhhh….couldn’t be! Out comes the calculator: tap tap tap tap…
Sure could be: the net pay from two paychecks comes to $35 short of my total month’s budgeted expenses. That means that Social Security—almost a thousand bucks!—is mostly gravy.
How did this come about? Three months ago I figured I would be living out of a grocery cart under the Seventh Avenue underpass. How could I have so radically misestimated my cost-to-income ratio?
Well, in the first place, when I started at the community college, I had no way of knowing for sure what my net pay would be. Tax rules are a total mystery to me. Extrapolated from what I’d earned in the fall from two courses, my guess at the net for three sections was significantly less than the actual amount.
Then there’s COBRA. From what I can tell, there’s no way to know what that will cost in any given month, at least here in the State of Arizona, where the Beast has effectively been killed. Since last January, I’ve had four bills for COBRA, no two of which have been the same. COBRA is the largest single item in the expenses list, and it’s impossible to predict. When you don’t know what the bill is going to be, all you can do is budget for the highest amount you can imagine and pray for the best.
And there’s Social Security, whose rules are almost as bizarre as the IRS’s. When you “start” SS in January, you don’t get your first check until February. No, you can’t “start” it in December so you’ll have an income during your first month of unemployment; try that and they’ll count your soon-to-be defunct 2009 salary against you and take the SS money away from you for having committed the crime of earning too much. Because I was forced to take Social Security a year early, thanks to GDU’s layoff activities, in 2010 I come under the government’s earning limitation: every penny more than $14,160 is taxed at a 50% rate—to extract the amount owed, the government withholds an entire month’s SS check, the unused remainder of which you will see (if you’re lucky) the following January.
Well, 14 grand is well under the poverty level. The gross for the two—$14,000 for the part-time teaching and $15,000 for the “unearned” Social Security—also comes to a figure that IMHO qualifies as “poverty.” Because my investment advisor wanted me to forestall taking a drawdown from savings for a year in hopes that during 2010 my investments would recover from the rape of the economic crash, that left me trying to live on 44 percent of my former pay. Significantly less than that—more like 34 percent—if you counted last year’s freelance income and noonlighting income.
So I started out feeling mighty poor. And not knowing what the 2010 take-home from the various sources of cobbled-together income would amount to, it wasn’t evident in January that enough would come in to cover $1,600 worth of expenses. Nor, since in the old regime the discretionary budget was $1,500 a month, was it evident that I could actually buy groceries and live comfortably on about half that.
What to do with these new-found riches?
Before we make an appointment with the style adviser Neiman-Marcus, let’s consider that the freelance teaching income stops in May, just as utility bills climb toward the stratosphere. It doesn’t restart until the end of August. If the only revenue that arrives during the summer is net Social security, each of the three summer months will see a $475 shortfall. So, I’ll need $475 x 3, or $1,425, stashed in savings to see me through the summer.
But that’s only a month and a half of thousand-dollar surpluses. [ahem.] But what we have here is three months of thousand-dollar surpluses. Come summer of 2011, we’ll have nine months of thousand-dollar surpluses.
Gosh.
One way or another, even in 2010, the Year of Penury, I’m looking at about $1,500 that could be saved or spent. Just during the spring semester.
My inclination? Spend. Well, at least spend part of it.
Every time I think of myself sliding into my dotage on the cusp of poverty, I think of My Bartleby, the eccentric woman of my own age I stupidly hired as a secretary. It was hard for me to go in for the kill with Bartleby, because I empathized too much with her. Crazy old ladies have a lot in common. So I think “there but for the grace of God” and contemplate ways to avoid going down her path.
To wit:
• I would like not to live so cheap that my hair looks scruffy and I go around in scroungey-looking second-hand clothes that are out of date, saggy, and baggy.
• I would like not to get so far behind the times that there’s no hope of catch-up, simply because I refuse to update my hardware and software, refuse to plug in to pop culture, pay no attention to what’s going on around me, especially if paying attention costs more than about a buck and a half.
• I would like not to let minor health issues go until they become middling- to major health issues because I’m too cheap to cough up the copay to see a doctor.
• I would like not to be so afraid of spending a few bucks here and there that I bring personal growth (and life) to an end.
So. First off, the hair: last time I went to the $30 hairdresser, he gave me a tuft sticking out of the back of my head and a half-spiked “cap” on top of too-short sides and back, which can be made presentable only by dint of 20 minutes worth of primping in front of a mirror with a hair dryer. Every. single. time I walk into that guy’s salon, I tell him I hate bangs falling down in my face. Every. single. time I walk out, I walk out with bangs falling down in my face.
The $75 hair stylist knew how to cut short hair without bangs, and he knew how to make a style that could be fingered into curls and waves without benefit of hair dryers and strand-scorching curling irons. Today I’m going to a new stylist, closer in than the old guy, about the same price. By the time I’ve added the tip to her $65 charge, it’ll be right up around $75. But it may be worth it. We shall see.
Next: I have got to get some clothes! Day after tomorrow, when I’ll have a free day, it’s off to B’Gauze and Talbot’s in search of something that will fit. Don’t hold out much hope, but at least the search can begin.
Then: entertainment. Ticket purchased for a concert downtown May 1. Then, it’s off to the Botanical Garden for a membership and tickets to Jazz in the Garden, if they have any left.
Alors, it’s a start, anyway. With any luck the clothing stores will have something on sale.
