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The accidental frugalist

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After this morning’s inauspicious start, I ended the day feeling pretty good. Mighty good, as a matter of fact.

The roses have been looking peakèd, mostly because I’ve neglected them shamefully. They’ve hardly blossomed at all over the past couple of years. The ones in front are planted in rock-hard caliche, and even though they’re somewhat protected and have drip irrigators, they don’t get enough water. They suffered terribly through last summer’s endless spate of 118-degree days. The ones in back get either too little sun or too much sun, and they also haven’t been watered adequately.

The other day I happened to look over the vast collection of old pix in iPhoto, most of which feature the beautiful little flowers that have grown around my house in the past. Where have all the flowers gone? I wondered. Aside from a couple of cacti, no flowers have blossomed in the yard for a good year. On reflection, I realized I’ve been so depressed I haven’t felt like fooling with them. I pulled up the last of them when they ran out of juice, and that was that.

Also deceased: the vegetable garden, which was planted in large pots full of potting soil and compost.

It occurred to me that while I was pruning the roses, I could scrape back the gravel that sort of serves as mulch (and also covers the ground with stuff that doesn’t have to be watered), mix some fertilizer into all that dried-out potting soil/compost, and dig it in around each plant. This would serve to loosen up the hard soil at the same time as it would feed the roses.

This was quite the project: there are five rose plants in front, one of them with a cane as high as the eaves. Every summer a cactus wren builds a nest in this resurgent cane, and I so always feel bad about pruning it back. She doesn’t seem to mind, though: she just brings new twigs and weeds and rebuilds.

After I finished digging the fresh soil in around the four plants closest to the house, I realized that they reside along a slightly inclined plane…and that if I were to dig small trenches connecting their watering basins, I just might manage to water more than one of them with a single hose-drag. Maybe several of them. Hm…maybe even all four of them.

So, with great shoveling, dragging, and mounding of gravel, I finally got these little ditches built.

Because I got such a late start, it was about dusk by the time I reached this stage. That rose on the far right probably can stand some more pruning, but not today…  When I put the hose on that plant and turned on the water, what should happen to my delight but within ten or twelve minutes, the water flooded all four rose basins!

What started out as an exercise in laziness—I didn’t want to have to move the hose four times to water the plants—turned into a nice little coup de frugalité. Not only does this require only one hose drag, it deep-waters all four plants in under fifteen minutes, with the spigot barely running. Ordinarily, to water these four plants, I have to move the hose to each basin and let it run about fifteen minutes per plant.

This will represent a significant saving, not only in hassle factor but more importantly in water! So, it was a nice discovery to stumble upon.

Yes, the roses do have drip irrigation, but for that system to work, you have to let it run six to eight hours a day, several times a week. Think of that! It’s like having four faucets leak, all day long, every two or three days. Experience shows that, ballyhooing be damned, drip irrigation saves nothing on the water bill and in fact often runs it up. It’s arguably more economical to take the hose out and water the plants by hand.

Now, it must be allowed that this arrangement leaves something to be desired in the aesthetics department. However, I have a plan.

First, move the hose pot that’s outside the courtyard wall out of sight, to the other side of the wall’s wrought-iron “window.” Then shovel out the gravel behind the plants, between the rose basins and the wall. Use that to fill areas where the gravel is thin, in other parts of the yard. Dig up the hard-pack soil, turning some more compost into it.

Then line the curvilinear border along the front edge with river rocks, easily obtained by walking up and down the neighborhood alleys. This will help to keep the gravel from working its way back into the planting bed. Possibly mulch with forest bark, creating a delineated planting bed that looks like I actually intended it to be there.

A friend gave me some seeds from her hollyhocks for Christmas. I’m thinking it would be neat to sow those in behind the roses, something that will be made possible by shoveling out the gravel. Hollyhocks don’t last long in the low desert, but they will grow here and blossom in the spring. Some bulbs would be nice there, too. Anemones, lots of anemones…

The sum total of the rose crop this fall filled three old bottles pressed into service as bud vases, shown here with Rosie the Dancing Rat, who resides on the dining-room table…

and one impromptu bud vase in the bathroom…

I hope there’ll be lots more in the spring.

New Year’s Screwup…

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Why? Why can’t any of the best-laid plans EVER go right, just once?

To cover my various expenses and bills while I was employed, I set up three “cookie jar” bank accounts, one to pool all incoming revenues, one for electronic fund transfers and the few checks to workmen I write, and one to hold my monthly credit-card budget. Paychecks came into the one for electronic fund transfers; a flat amount went out of that into the “pool,” and from there amounts needed for EFTs (utility and insurance payments), checks, and credit-card bills were disbursed to their respective cookie jars.

Complicated? You bet. But it worked.

The middle of last month, I went in to the credit union branch on the Main campus and sat down with one of the account managers to cancel those transfers, since incoming revenues will no longer cover those transfers and since I intend to simplify my banking by eliminating all these cookie jars and paying all bills out of the original EFT checking account. I swear to God, I watched her cancel those things! She confirmed it by showing me on her computer screen where all the scheduled transactions were CANCELED. No more. Dead transactions. Stiff parrots, one and all!

One of these transfers was triggered by the arrival of my ASU paycheck. However, the credit union can make only two such transactions in a month; in the two months of each year that PeopleSoft issued its bogus “extra” paycheck generated by ripping us off with bimonthly pay periods, I had to make the third transfer from the EFT account into the Pool account manually.

My last paycheck from GDU indeed arrived on one of those “extra” paydays. So, even if I hadn’t canceled the transfers, no transfer should have occurred when that check hit my account.

Moving forward with the simplification agenda, on December 31, after confirming that all my outgoing transactions had cleared, I moved all of the funds remaining in Pool and Credit Card Budget over to the EFT checking, planning to close the latter two accounts and two others, leaving only three accounts to have to reconcile each month (EFT, Tax & Insurance Savings, Emergency Savings). It seemed safe to do that, since no more automatic transfers would happen.

Wrong.

Early this morning, after I’d just turned out of bed and before even stumbling into the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee, I happened to look at my online account. God damn it!

They’d transferred $1522 out of the incoming account into Pool, $840 back to EFT, and $682.18, the entire amount remaining in Pool, to Money Market Checking. Meanwhile, despite American Express’s announcement that it received this month’s payment, the check I wrote to AMEX last week still hasn’t cleared. Fortunately, Money Market Checking has plenty to cover it, and fortunately, because I’ve been living below my means for these past many years, I had transferred $20,000 from all those cookie jars into that main “Pool” checking account, preparatory to sending most of it off to Stellar for investment. So the $1522 transfer barely dented that.

But because there are so many other automatic transfers scheduled (all of which should have been canceled) into so many other accounts, I had to sift through eight accounts to determine that these were the only three fuck-ups and no overdraft fees had been incurred. It took two hours to do that, to enter the errors and their fixes into Quicken, and to e-mail the credit union explaining what happened, what was supposed to happen, and what they need to do to fix it.

It’s now 11:30. I haven’t had breakfast. The dog hasn’t been fed. I haven’t written the post that I sat down to write in the first place. The newspaper is still sitting in the driveway (assuming no one has stolen it yet). I have a migraine that remains to be treated with a large dose of caffeine. Half my day is gone, after I’d intended to prune the roses (a half-day job) and write my 102 syllabi (another half-day job).

Wasting my time fixing someone else’s screw-ups seems to be the eternal story of my life. A friend in banking once remarked that mediocrity is the standard of the business world. She wasn’t kidding.

Financial Freedom: An Overview

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Having finally arrived at financial freedom, I’d like to write a series for Funny about Money on how to achieve financial freedom before you drop in the traces. We’ve seen that SDXB managed to escape in early middle age and that he’s never had to go back to a day job. So we know that with luck and smart financial management, it can be done.

If and when reasonably priced universal health care coverage becomes available in this country, quite a few Americans will be in a position to get off the treadmill. Too many of us work in miserable day jobs, pushing paper or waiting on other people who are in equally miserable day jobs, for no other reason than that we must have health insurance and there’s no other way to get it. When we’re freed from that trap, the possibility of running our own daily lives becomes a realistic choice…but only if we can achieve financial freedom: freedom from debt and from the pervasive cultural and psychological influences that herd us toward debt.

To engineer financial freedom, several components of personal finance need to be dealt with and brought under control:

• Education
• Work
• Debt
• Housing
• Transportation
• Savings
• The health insurance hurdle
• Strategies to maintain financial freedom

Though none of this is nuclear physics, it’s a process takes several years. Short of inheriting a fortune or winning the lottery, you can’t achieve financial freedom overnight.

To begin with, you need some education or training that will allow you to earn something more than minimum wage. While you don’t need to earn big bucks to find your way to financial freedom, you do need to earn above the bare subsistence level. You need enough income to pay off debt that can’t be avoided (such as student loans and mortgages), to stay out of credit-card debt, and to build savings.

Then you need to find housing that’s affordable, not only in terms of what you earn but within the framework of your goal to escape the rat race. The cost of your roof, whether it’s rent or mortgage payments, has to be low enough to leave something to put into savings.

The same is true of your personal mode of transportation. If you live in one of the few U.S. cities that provides good public transport, you’re in luck. The rest of us have to own a car. We need to find ways to keep the cost of car ownership from consuming funds that could keep us out of debt or be invested in savings.

The foundation of financial freedom is freedom from debt. All debt, including mortgage and car loans. This is tightly linked with another key component of Bumhood, building and investing a fund of cash. Debt and savings have been talked to death on the personal finance blogs, but we’ll review those issues in the coming series.

Finally, there’s the question of how you manage to stay free once you’ve managed to break free. Any number of issues bear on your continued financial freedom, ranging from adult children who need help to the lifestyle you want to (or can) sustain. Since that exploration is about to become the subject of FaM, over the next few months we should make plenty of discoveries along that line.

Financial Freedom

• An Overview
• Education
• Work
• Debt
• The health insurance hurdle
The roof over your head

Happy New Year! What are your goals?

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It’s a spectacularly beautiful New Year’s Day here. The sun is shining bright, birds are singing, the rose bush outside the office window is in bloom. Very shortly now, Cassie the Corgi and I will head out for a nice long idle stroll.

I’ve been so happy (and at times so  harassed) at getting free of the Great Desert University, I haven’t put much thought into the future. I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions—a resolution being something to be made and soon forgotten. General goals are good, but they need to be realistic and doable. Over at Bargaineering, Jim suggests using the SMART guidelines to set 2010 goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely).

That’s highly practical where financial goals are concerned. For my taste, it’s a bit too quantitative: the things I’d like to accomplish this year have to do more to do with quality of life than with numbers. After all, we build our financial lives—working and saving and paying off debt—so we can improve the quality of our lives. IMHO, that’s what money is all about.

So, though I have a few SMARTable yearnings, I also have a few that are softer and less measurable.

First, the SMART goals:

♦ Support retirement with Social Security and part-time teaching, so as to delay drawing down 4 percent from savings for at least a year, possibly longer.

♦ Generate enough blogging and freelance income through the S-corporation to pay for computers hardware and software, high-speed internet, blog consultancy, membership in professional organizations, and other business-related blandishments. I expect Funny about Money and the Copyeditor’s Desk to generate about $4,800 without my having to work very hard at it and hope to make eight to ten grand in 2010. Even at the low end, which will come about simply from proofreading detective novels (!) and daily blogging, it will cover basic computer and office costs.

♦ Simplify my financial life. Get rid of the various “piggybank” accounts and run all my personal bookkeeping through three credit union accounts: checking, saving, and one self-escrow money  market account holding cash to cover property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance.

♦ Figure out a way to pay down principal on the investment house, or at least refinance to get rid of the 30/15 terms.

Now for the more interesting goal, one that can’t be quantified by any SMART guidelines:

♦ Get a life. Shake off the inertia that has come with sixteen years of treadmill-trudging and build a new and more interesting life. Possible strategies:

• Volunteer at places where I wouldn’t resent spending time. The botanical garden and the Phoenix Art  Museum come to mind.

• Take courses in voice and music theory at the community college, so I can join more advanced choirs.

• Learn silversmithing. Learn how to make some of the jewelry designs that float at the edges of my consciousness, and then find out how to market them through galleries and shops.

• Take up painting again. See if I’m still as good as I was when I was 22. Pursue courses in art and design at the community college.

• Get back into hiking and bicycling.

• Create at least one and probably two books based on FaM.

• Write one of those detective novels!

That’s it. Nothing very ambitious. But it represents a whole new world for me. What’s your plan?

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

Miranda
The Tempest, Act IV, Scene I
William Shakespeare

Kill-the-Beaster Logic

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Children are crammed like sardines into Arizona’s public school classrooms. State and county parks are closing down. The Department of Public Safety is looking at laying off hundreds of police officers. Firefighters and paramedics are being laid off across the state. The university system is imploding. The Department of Transportation, which maintains roads and administers driver’s licenses, plans to lay off half its employees, close all highway rest areas, and shut almost all its Motor Vehicle Division offices.

So…what do our intrepid legislators do?

Of course: cut taxes!

Yes. Today when I was dragged out (again!) to GDU, I was made to fill out a new Arizona tax withholding form, even though I’d filled out my third copy of said form and turned it in just yesterday.

Said I: “I just filled that out yesterday!” (This was after having filled out and hand-delivered an eight-page surprise form, an activity entailing a 44-mile round trip and the waste of three hours of my time.)

Said the HR rep: “Oh, but this is a new form. They’ve changed it. Even though you signed a tax withholding form yesterday, we’d better do it again, just in case they decide your signature’s not valid unless it’s on a 2010 form.”

Uh huh.  So I look at the form.

The change is a 1.6 percent cut in tax withholding.

Yes. They’ve cut state taxes almost 2 percent at a time when the state is suffering from a historic $1.5 billion deficit.

The average Arizona citizen will see no huge windfall from this tax cut. It works like this: You pay x percent in federal taxes. Your state tax is—or was—21.9% of that x percent. So, say your federal tax rate is 20%. You earn $100. You pay the feds $20 in taxes. You pay the state a grandiose $4.38.

No more, though: my rate dropped from 21.9% to 20.3%. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: I save 32 cents per hundred on my state taxes.

What a windfall. On the $29,160 I’ll be earning next year, my state taxes will come to all of $1,183.89 — less than that, really, after I deduct COBRA, Medicare, long-term care insurance, mortgage interest, and everything else my tax lawyer can dream up. That represents a saving of $93.31 on a year’s tax bill, just under 29 cents a day.

Somehow I think I could have afforded 32 cents/hundred to help keep a school functioning, a road safe, a police officer in uniform, a fireman on the job, maybe even a picnic ground open. What are citizens for, anyway?

Stupidity piled on stupidity!

School Days for the Typical Arizona Legislator
School days for the typical Arizona legislator

Image: Dunce cap. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

Exit, Stage Left: Goodbye to Arizona State University

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Today I went out to the Great Desert University—which (let it be known!) is in reality Arizona State University, the center of the canker upon the Sonoran Desert known as the City of Tempe—to wrap up my 26-year existence in that place. I locked the laptop the College bought for me into a file drawer; cleaned all my data off my terminal and the shared server; erased everything still lurking in Outlook’s e-mail, calendar, and tasks; locked my keys and my underlings’ keys into a desk drawer; gathered the few things remaining that belong to me; checked to be sure the main entry to our suite was locked; and walked away, shutting the door behind me. From there I hiked to my car, drove to the HR building, parked illegally (risking a ticket: yes! ASU employees, would-be employees, and soon-to-be-former employees have to pay to visit the university’s HR department!), walked inside, and delivered my RASL application to a young woman who was too busy talking with a coworker about her five-year-old’s birthday to break off long enough to look me directly in the eye.

Then I left, never (I sincerely hope) to return.

Can you imagine? T-day—termination day—is the day after tomorrow (and it’s 6:00 p.m. as I write this, so in terms of business days it’s actually one freaking day from now), and not once has anyone asked me where the five sets of keys to our office are, where the Dell laptop and the raft of peripherals we bought for it are, what has become of the god-only-knows-how-many flash drives we’ve purchased. Nary a soul has suggested a walk-through to inspect the tens of thousands of dollars worth of capital investment still sitting there in our offices. Not one word.

Think of it. And oh, my friend, if you live in Arizona and you are a taxpayer, do think of it.

Bemused, I’ve been silently waiting to see if anyone would have anything to say about all the loot we’ve been sitting on. But nothing. I’ve announced to one and all that I’m using up my vacation time, so as far as they know I’m not around and never will be around again. The underlings went out before me, my RA on the 15th and my associate editor yesterday. To all intents and purposes, the crew has abandoned ship.

So today I’d thought I would carry the laptop and the keys over to the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, since IT informed me that the hardware was not their department (uh huh) and since I have no intention of hiking to the Kampus Kops, halfway to Timbuktu (no place to park there, either!) and jumping through a half-dozen hoops to turn in the keys. But after some reflection, I thought why ask for trouble? Why bring myself and their administrative lapse to their attention by dumping the stuff on the student worker who passes for a receptionist over there?

If, I reasoned, the deans think the five desktop computers, the three printers, the high-end scanner, the five phones, and the assorted chairs, desks, tables, reference works, paper, pens, Scotch tape and staples are safe behind a locked door, surely the laptop and the keys will be just as safe. Why not?

So, instead of four traipses around the campus, I journeyed to only two destinations: my office and HR.

The elevator in my building has an odd, unpleasant smell. Normally I walk up the steps, but the wheeled suitcase I brought to drag the computer in and my books out was too heavy to haul up or down the concrete staircase. As I rolled the thing into the lift on the way out, a marvelous thought struck me: I will never have to ride this stinking elevator into this condemned building again!

No joke. I’ve spent the past six years working in a condemned building. When it showed signs of crumbling, the city said it had to be torn down, and the university evacuated the top two floors. But after the dust settled, the administration—whose leadership wished to invest not in another classroom building for the social sciences and the liberal arts but in astronomical salaries and extravagant structures for “star” faculty who teach no one and maintain some part of their tenure at more respectable institutions—these worthies quietly declared it un-condemned. The top floor is still cordoned off, but the rest of it was deemed good enough for the peons. It is, in short, a depressing wreck.

Arizona State University Main is one of the most plug-ugly excuses for a university campus on the planet. I’ve seen one campus that is uglier, and it is in Philadelphia. On the whole, I’d rather not be in Philadelphia. No thought of cohesion or thematic harmony was ever given to the jumble that is ASU, not by a one of any of the multitudes of architects called upon to design structures there. The newer buildings are eyesores. The Fulton Center, which houses the eyrie of our beloved president, Michael Crow: ludicrous, with its absurd and pointless glass flange, which we can only take to be someone’s idea of decorative humor. Give the thing wide berth during a high wind—in a stiff breeze panes of glass blow out and crash to the sidewalk below. The Coor Building, with its hilarious reflected WORD, evidently intended to give some sort of character to yet another glass cube: hideous! Looks like the Borg. The only buildings that are not blatantly ugly only just rise to the level of bland.

It’s a dreary, industrial campus in the middle of a tacky, grubby burg. Except for the faux-warehouse urban renewal effort downtown, the City of Tempe consists mostly of tired 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s bedroom tracts and cheaply built, run-down rentals. A six-lane bridge spewing smog and dirt over a eutrophic artificial “lake” counts as a scenic attraction; a lovely new railroad track a cause for celebration.

This garden spot next to the building that houses HR is pretty typical:

A couple blocks up the road, we have this bit of urban renewal:

Nothing like some fine orange facing to spiff up a concrete rabbit warren, eh? Click on the image to appreciate the actual color: true Hallowe’en orange. Love the way the gray parking lot blends with the architecture.

In a moment of ambitious entrpreneurship, the university’s administration decided to spend several millions of dollars to build a cloister for the students in the honors college. The idea was that honors students would live, attend classes, eat, exercise, and socialize within the nine-acre compound, effectively creating a small, exclusive campus-within-a-campus for the elite amid the tumult of the Great Unwashed. How would you like your kid to spend four years in this concrete bunker?

Nice view out those windows of one of ASU’s finest parking garages:

And the spectacle continues as we drive north toward grody south Scottsdale, one awe-inspiring scenic view after another:

Millions upon millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars went into building this astonishing landscape. Like the balloonish tent up there (yeah, that’s what it is: a tent), it stayed puffed up with hot air until the recession came along. Then, as the tent blew down in the first strong wind, so the whole mess has folded in upon itself. Hugely overextended, the university’s financial structure has collapsed, leaving students to cope with vast undergraduate classes overseen by underpaid, demoralized faculty and throwing thousands of support staff out of work. The way it operates is just about as lovely as the way it looks.

Beautiful sight, isn’t it?