SDXB escapes from the hospitaltoday! They’re tossing him out sometime during the day. Sister-in-Sin is headed back to her normal life—BiS has already slipped out of town. And thank goodness, New Girlfriend has agreed to stay with him for the next month or so.
Yesterday he sounded pretty chipper over the phone. They’d let him walk around outside, which much revived his spirits.
He’s not supposed to be left alone at all for several days. But there’s some hope he’ll recover fairly quickly, all things considered. The Mayo Clinic website says many bypass survivors are driving after about three weeks and frolicking in the sack three to four weeks after the surgery. Apparently it takes about 12 weeks for the bones in your chest to reknit, about three months (uhm…four times three: isn’t that the same as 12 weeks?) for the person to start to regain normal energy levels.
The scary thing about this is that SDXB already does all the things the Mayo describes as “cardiac rehabilitation” strategies. It would be impossible for him to make the lifestyle changes this site recommends, simply because he already lives like that. He cooks all his own food, and it’s very good food—by and large low in fat, high in vegetables and fruits. He rarely puts any salt in the food. He doesn’t drink much any more—certainly not the way he used to—and he quit smoking twenty or thirty years ago. He exercises enthusiastically and with pleasure, every day. And he has few sources of emotional stress.
BiS remarked that an element of genetics comes into play with cardiac disease. His mother did die of cardiac problems, but not until she was in her 80s. You’ve gotta die of something, eh? The aunts and uncles are similarly long-lived. His dad died young of Parkinson’s disease brought on by exposure to chemicals in the cleaning plant where he worked, so we don’t know if he might have developed heart disease later in life—but at least one of the aged uncles is on the father’s side. Consider: this guy is 70 years old and he has relatives in his parents’ generation who are still living.
What will be will be, I guess. Meanwhile, just in case…this old bat is off for a vigorous walk, before the sun comes up.
Update:
So here he is, climbing into his car under the doting care of a pretty young nurse. He must be lapping it up. SiL sent this picture… This afternoon he sounded almost like his old self and was looking forward to a fifteen-minute walk (at least) around the neighborhood in the cool of the evening.
People talk about establishingseveral income streams to increase net household income, pay off debt, and build a safety net for hard times. I certainly have advocated that more than once, because I’ve done it and it’s worked well for me. A small, unsteady income from freelance editing combined with taking on a few courses at the Great Desert University and then at a community college earned enough to pay off the second mortgage on my house, leaving my house free and clear before I was laid off, and helped establish a $14,500 emergency fund, which, in a pinch, would cover a year’s worth of living expenses.
So…how did I manage to cobble that much together, when I certainly didn’t net $35,900 ($21,400 went to pay off the loan) in those two semesters of part-time teaching?
Well, you’ve heard ofsnowflaking, whereby we put every little windfall and every extra few pennies toward debt? I think of this as snowmelt into savings streams. For some years before I was laid off, I had several savings streams:
• One was a regular credit-union share savings account, into which I put a base amount of $200 a month. In addition, I also deposited any windfalls in here: the annual American Express card rebate, manufacturers’ rebates, gifts, whatever. In palmier days, come to think of it, I usually put the AMEX rebate into a Roth IRA, but that’s another story.
• Another was a money market savings account, into which I put everything I netted off sidestream jobs—teaching and freelancing—plus any other windfalls that came my way. This was the primary savings for the loan payoff.
• A third was a money market checking account. Each month as paychecks came in I moved $1,500 here, to cover the $1,500 a month I budgeted for credit-card spending. This represented discretionary spending, as opposed to monthly bills that have to be paid come hell or high water. Usually, I spent significantly less than this. Any money that was left over stayed in money market checking.
• A fourth was another share savings account at the credit union. It held a monthly $325 self-escrow to pay annual property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and auto insurance.
• And a fifth savings stream was a Vanguard Prime Money Market Fund, into which I put 30% of all freelance income—a set-aside to pay income taxes and my tax preparer.
Three of the five monthly “snowmelts” happened as automatic transfers: on the first of the month, $1,500 was moved to money market checking to cover discretionary expenses; on the last, $200 went to monthly savings and $325 went to tax & insurance savings. Instead of “paying myself first,” I kept that $525 in my primary checking account until the last of the month to ensure that no checks would bounce. They never did. But in Quicken I deducted the amount from the bottom line, so I would always know what was left in the account with those savings streams flowing out.
In other words, what I left in checking from each month’s pay was only enough to cover monthly nondiscretionary expenses. Funds for costs over which I had some real, credible control were paid from the credit card budget, which flowed into an account specifically to pay off the card in full each month.
Because the discretionary budget is based on summer expenses, which are about $300 higher than late fall, winter, and early spring costs, over time quite a bit of leftover money quietly accumulated in regular checking, just as it was quietly accumulating in the discretionary spending account (because I rarely used all my discretionary budget).
It’s surprising how much money accrues—and how painlessly it accrues—when you make savings streams a part of your financial life. When I was finally laid off last December, I was pleased to find something over $28,000 lurking in the credit union. That was after the second mortgage was paid.
Admittedly, a credit union or bank account is not the best place to stash 28 grand. I simply hadn’t registered how much had accrued in the various accounts that I wasn’t deliberately using as savings accounts. When you added the serendipitous savings that resulted from living within my means to the deliberate savings, it came to quite a lot. I moved $14,000 to investments and kept $14,500 as this year’s “cushion,” knowing that with Social Security’s stringent earned-income limit, 2010 would be tight.
Although 2010 is tight, I still haven’t lost the savings-stream habit. In semiretirement, I no longer feel the need to save as much—largely because I no longer live in fear of layoffs. And restructuring The Copyeditor’s Desk from a sole proprietorship to an S-corporation changed its tax structure, so I don’t have to set aside a chunk of dough to cover taxes on freelance enterprises.
• I’m now keeping all budgeted spending money—discretionary as well as nondiscretionary—in my primary checking account. Because I’ve undershot both budgets all winter…uhm, well…ahem…until the great Shopping Spree Episode…about $2,100 extra has accrued in there. So it’s a de facto savings account, although I expect to spend that money over the summer, when teaching income dries up.
• Regular monthly savings still gets its $200/month deposit, plus all other small windfalls. As a matter of fact, this is where the $700 to cover the clothing frenzy will come from. With over 14 grand sitting in checking as a gigantic emergency fund, the regular monthly savings account, which I used to regard as “emergency” savings, is now a diddle-it-away fund.
• Another $325 still goes into the self-escrow account each month. Taxes and insurance being unavoidable, that one’s not an option. Starting this month, I’ll add another $90/month to that, to cover the annual cost of Medigap insurance.
• The corporate account now collects all freelance and blogging income. With an S-corporation, you pay yourself a salary, which can be fairly modest as long as it recompenses you reasonably for the work you do as the corporation’s director (which ain’t much). The money that remains in the corporation can be used to cover your incorporated enterprise’s operating expenses (such as computer equipment, office supplies, server space). Money that you draw out after you’ve been paid your salary is treated as dividend income. To date, I haven’t needed any of that money to live on. So, the corporate account also functions as a de facto savings account.
Even though I’m now unemployed (or, we might say, “underemployed”…in a big way), with a total gross income of about 58% of what I earned at the Great Desert University, money is still flowing through four income streams (teaching, Social Security, a small pension drawdown, and the incorporated freelance enterprise) into three formal savings streams (tax & insurance, regular monthly savings, and the corporate account) plus an informal savings stream in the form of unspent cash in regular checking.
Savings streams ensure that there’ll always be enough to cover those ugly recurring tax and insurance bills, plus something to pay for the occasional indulgence. Consequently, my lifestyle has really not changed much, despite the 42 percent cut in income. Thanks to a few small income streams and savings streams.
So I’m sitting here sweltering through a crush of semester-end stoont papers when what should pop up in the e-mail but a last-minute call for someone to teach a humanities course in the first summer session at a different campus in the community college district. Money happens!
Now at last, folks, we’re talkin’ fair wage: a summer session runs for five weeks; $2,400 for a month and a week of light work comes under the heading of decent pay. Although my Ph.D. is in English, not humanities per se, my undergraduate degree is in French language and literature. “Humanities” is a vague term that used to mean “classics” but now means almost nothing—as a practical matter, colleges will hire people with almost any degree in the liberal arts to teach these courses. And the beauty of these courses is that assessment can be largely through online tests. Naturally, one would like to assign a term paper or a couple of shorter papers, but they don’t have to be parsed for mechanics and style. People grade these things on the basis of whether the student seems to have responded to the assignment and done the reading, rather than for the student’s writing skill.
Piece. of. cake.
It would push me over the Social Security earnings limit by about $350. More than that, really, because I’ll have to take a “salary” from the S-corporation in December. However, it could be worth it: barring another market crash, I’ll have enough cash to weather a month without the Social Security payment (loss of which is one of the consequences of exceeding the limit).
More to the point, we don’t know that either of the two courses I’m lined up to teach in the fall will make. They’re set up as two eight-week sessions, back-to-back, English 101 first followed by an online feature-writing course. The idea that a freshman comp student will sign up to sit through two three-hour sessions a week verges on the preposterous. And the feature-writing course will follow a nearly identical in-class section a colleague will teach in the first half of the semester.
BTW, if anyone would like to sign up for that feature-writing class (it’s billed as “magazine writing”), it’s 100 percent online, and there’s no out-of-state tuition for online courses. If you’re a blogger, I probably would accept posts that fit the parameters of the assignments—these will include things like a profile, a straight report, an opinion piece, a brite, a how-to, a round-up, or whatever else I can dream up. The course is English 235, Magazine Article Writing; it runs from 10/18 to 12/10/2010. You can register online; from what I can tell, you need to start by getting admitted through this site. There’s a phone number: 602-787-7020.
Anyway, back on topic: I’m less than thrilled at the prospect of working away half the first real summer break I’ve had in 20 years. On the other hand, trying to get through the summer on less than half the income I’ve had this semester is a little scary, plus next fall’s semester will pay $2,400 less than I’ve been earning. The hot season pushes utility and water bills through the roof, and that coincides perfectly with the switch to Medicare, which also will elevate my health coverage bills significantly.
I’m thinking it may be worth having a month’s worth of Social Security taxed at 50%. From what I’m told, the minute the IRS finds out you’re going to exceed the annual earnings limit, they withhold an entire month’s SS benefit. From that they subtract the amount they figure you owe in the tax rip-off—but you don’t get the remainder of the money back until the following January! So the punishment for exceeding the earnings limit is effectively the loss of a full month’s SS income. That’s pretty hefty, when it represents half your net income.
But it may be worth it, to be sure there’s enough to live on over the summer. Maybe.
So SDXB came through the gerzillion-bypass surgery with flying colors. They dissected him yesterday; today he he’s been up walking around twice, and he socialized so exuberantly with all his relatives that his sister (who runs the tribe) had to send them all out of the place so he would settle down and sleep. New Girlfriend went off to transport a recliner from her palace to his—oddly for such an Archie Bunker sorta guy, he’s never had a classic Naugahyde recliner (or any other kind of recliner).
SiS (Sister-in-Sin) sent a photo, saying he looks “cute”…
Except for all the gear attached to him, the old buzzard looks almost normal. It’s amazing, isn’t it, what medical science can do? Now if we can just manage to get access to it…
SDXB has a combination of military retiree coverage and Medicare, which should pretty well cover what probably is something over a hundred grand worth of surgery and treatment.
BiS, the eminent cardiac anaesthesiologist, says the reason SDXB was navigating pretty normally despite a chestful of clogged arteries is most likely is steady, vigorous exercise. He climbs the hills in the local mountain parks, hikes, walks, bicycles, and swims—a day never goes by when he doesn’t get some kind of exercise. As it develops, exercise causes your body to develop new blood vessels around the heart, and that probably is how blood was getting to his heart. BiS also learned that apparently SDXB’s heart itself is not damaged. So assuming he recovers from the surgery without complication, he should be OK. In fact, he should be better than OK.
I hope that New Girlfriend will stay around over the summer. She has a home in Colorado, where she usually decamps to escape the heat—he had planned to spend part of the summer there, in between junkets to Michigan, Canada, and the Pacific Southwest. In spite of SDXB’s apparent vigor, I’m afraid it will take two or three months before he’s back to normal, and somebody needs to be in the offing during that time.
The daughters discovered that both his insurance plans provide in-home care, though it remains to be seen whether he’ll be incapacitated enough to qualify (usually you must need help in several living tasks, such as dressing, bathing, feeding, toileting). If he can get someone in to help, that would be good. Otherwise…it’s 19.44 miles from my house to his. {sigh}
At any rate, the guy’s a poster boy for daily exercise. If he hadn’t kept himself in the kind of shape he’s in, he’d have croaked over long ago.
Between the semester-end deluge of student papers and SDXB’s illness, there hasn’t been a lot of time to write. But browsing other blogs seems to be irresistible, no matter how pressed for time you are! Over the last few days I’ve stumbled upon a few gems. Check these out:
Simple Life in France put up a guest post at Money Funk on the question of whether the $8,000/year average tuition for private schools is worth it. Simple Life is fast becoming one of my favorite bloggers because of the excellence of her writing. Add her engagement in an interesting life experience, and you have the perfect mix for a daily blog.
A Gai Shan Life is the story of a young woman whose life is an ongoing drama. It’s fascinating stuff, and along the way she wrestles with financial and life issues that all of us are either dealing with now or soon or later will have to deal with. Recently she observed that her new coworkers display an alarming tendency to workaholism, leading to a post that spawned a slew of comments on the subject.
One of my perennial favorites is Frugal Scholar, who’s been in the same game I have for about as long and whose running commentary on life, the universe, and all that I find endlessly sympathique. Today she’s set me off with a post describing a guy who made a nice pile of money when he sold a successful business and then went back to graduate school, working for slave wages as a T.A. Touches on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, the exuberant exploitation of graduate students and employees common to all universities.
Simply Forties, a single woman who sold her home to take off on a long life adventure, is given to publishing THE most incredible recipes, as well as interesting ruminations like this one on Kindle, books and libraries.
Mrs. Accountability is one of the few women PF bloggers who live here in lovely uptown Arizona. I think she must live in a semirural area, because she describes what sounds like a big lot with a magnificent garden. Of late, she’s been ruminating about her credit score, whose mysterious decline led to some interesting discoveries about how those things are calculated.
Oh, my… It’s getting late and I have to get ready to go to class. Amazing how fast time passes when you’re reading about other peoples’ lives, isn’t it?
YesterdaySDXBwent into the hospital for an angiogram. He’d been having some mild shortness of breath, which he put down to a hangover from a severe respiratory infection he’d had a couple of months ago. The doctor, however, thought otherwise: he diagnosed it as angina, but given SDXB’s vigor and overall physical condition, he thought probably treatable with an angioplasty or a stent. He even said it was possible the examination would find nothing.
In the afternoon, New Girlfriend called to report the amazingly bad news: the arteries on the right side of his heart are 70 percent blocked; on the left, 100 percent. The doctors were astonished that he hadn’t already had a heart attack and immediately put him on support to stave one off. They want to do a multiple bypass—and by “multiple,” we mean “quadruple” may be an understatement—and they plan to do it today or, at latest, tomorrow.
It’s hard to believe. The man is not just active; he’s athletic. This guy hikes up and down mountains several times a week. When he’s not climbing, he’s swimming laps in an Olympic-sized pool, bicycling twenty or thirty miles from Sun City into Phoenix and then bicycling back, hunting, fishing, camping, or taking long walks around town. He hasn’t smoked in thirty or forty years, he doesn’t eat junk food, he drinks moderately (of late…most of the time), he keeps his blood pressure under control.
New Girlfriend, present when this news was delivered, was unnerved. A recent widow, she’s already seen one husband and a son into the grave, and she doesn’t relish going through that again.
Everyone else is unnerved, too. Sister-in-Sin is on her way to Phoenix at this moment, as is Sane Daughter. Both are extremely competent women; the daughter is a nurse, and the sister, the wife of the pre-eminent cardiac anaesthesiologist in the Northwest. I don’t know how long his daughter will be able to stay here, since she has a full-time job and a family. But his sister probably can hang in for the duration.
Given that he is pretty fit—except for the fact that he’s about to keel over dead—maybe he’ll recover fully, and maybe he’ll spring back in three months or so. It’s extreme surgery, and IMHO dubious in some cases. Circulatory disease is not limited to the arteries around the heart. My father told me, after his triple bypass, that if he had known how much he was going to suffer for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t have called for help when he had his heart attack. But he was 80 when he went under the knife; SDXB is only 70. And at 80, my father was no athlete.
So, we shall see. I hope SDXB’s health and active lifestyle aren’t ruined.
In an unguarded moment, NG remarked that they had discussed marriage and she had told him that after what she’d been through with her husband, she didn’t want ever to marry again, because she didn’t want to care for and watch another man die. But now, she said to me, she was pulled into it.
Exactly so. Few women will admit it publicly, but that’s a large reason many active, lively older women don’t take on new spouses late in life. It certainly is the main factor in my lackluster interest in men. I watched what happened to my stepmother after she married my father.
My mother died in April, when my father was 70 years old. By December, Helen had him at the altar. She was a very active, social woman who loved to travel, loved concerts, loved church-going. My father had seen the world, thank you, and couldn’t see any sense in leaving a perfectly good home to go gadding around expensively. A committed atheist, he wouldn’t go near a church and thought anyone who did was a superstitious fool. He called classical music “piddly-piddly music” and loathed sitting through a concert.
Helen’s first husband, a coronary invalid, had died of a massive heart attack while she was off leading a bus tour. She never got over the feeling of guilt for not having been at his side when he died. So, as my father grew weaker and sicker—he also became a coronary invalid—her life grew more and more constrained. They lived in a three-room apartment in a life care community. I can’t imagine—make that “don’t want to imagine”—being trapped with my father in three tiny rooms, month after month after month.
She spent the last few good years of her life dutifully taking care of a sick, unhappy, cranky old man. By the time he passed, there was nothing left for her. She was a mental wreck, and her physical health was pretty well wrecked, too.
They were married for about 14 years. Eight or nine of those were years in which Helen was still vigorous enough to continue her active, outgoing lifestyle. But that came to an end within two or three years after they married. Long before he was hit with a heart attack, my father was unable to do much. By marrying him, she traded her vigorous, if sometimes lonely, life for one as an unpaid nurse and maid. She sacrificed the last good years of her life to take care of a man who secretly wanted to divorce her.
I hope she never realized that last bit.
That sacrifice is necessary and maybe even fine if you’ve been married to a man for thirty, forty, fifty years and you have a lifetime commitment. But not so much when it’s someone you’ve met late in life, when really what you’re looking for is not to build a family but to have someone to go out to dinner and a movie with. There are worse things than loneliness. Way worse.
Old age is not for the faint of heart. That’s for sure.
Update: SDXB himself just called on the phone, sounding as bushy-tailed as usual. He said the docs have moved the surgery up to 9:00 this morning. He didn’t sound too depressed; thankful, maybe, that this discovery was made before he had a heart attack. It’s possible the heart itself is not damaged, which would mean he may make a good recovery. Brother-in-Sin is also headed into town, an excellent development: Arizona’s hospitals leave a lot to be desired, and this guy, an eminent member of the doctors’ club, will ride herd on what’s going on there.
