Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Big-picture thinking and the penny-pincher

by

This morning a fresh experience led me to realize that I spend way too much time on penny-pinching and way too little on focusing on the big picture that is my life—or more to the point, that is my earning potential.

Yesterday one of my former students sent me a LinkedIn invite. This caused me to return to that much-neglected site, where I was reminded that an old friend, a graphic artist with whom I worked at Arizona Highways and later through a talent agency I ran, had made himself one of my “contacts.” When I dropped him an e-mail to ask how things were going and mentioned that I’m now free of the Great Desert University, he invited me to join him for breakfast today with a business networking group he frequents. So, as dawn first colored the sky, I was shooting across the city to a Good Egg restaurant in one of Scottsdale’s toniest strip malls.

I arrived early, and since I didn’t want to be first at the trough, I spent 15 minutes or so window-shopping.

In more halcyon times, a colleague and I used to meet about once a month for lunch at the expensive trattoria that forms one of the small gems in this iridescent commercial strip. She has since moved to a historic whaling village in Massachusetts, and I have since taken to clinging to every penny that comes my way, and so I haven’t been back there in a long time. As I strolled past the elegant interior design stores, clothing boutiques, and gift shops, I thought, “Imagine what it would be like to be able to shop in one of these places whenever you feel like it!”

But when my friend and I were hanging out there, I used to shop in those glittery stores every now and again. And before then, when I was married to the corporate lawyer, I could indeed have shopped there any time I felt like it. Yes, it is true that even when my husband was bringing home a generous six-figure salary, I would never have purchased the luminous bedding set, redolent with satin and hand embroidery (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it…but you can be sure it’s more than my entire month’s discretionary budget). However, on my Great Desert University salary I did buy smaller items, which today I would not buy because I wouldn’t spend that much on, say, bubble bath or bathroom towels.

Can’t say I feel any great loss in the absence of these things, but still…the point is, I’ve taken to denying myself a lovely venue to hang out in and also small, not very expensive luxuries.

The meeting soon got under way: about a dozen small-business owners meet once a week to socialize and trade leads. I enjoyed these guys very much (the group was all-male, though they swore a couple of women belonged). They seemed like pretty nice gents, all of them fully engaged in their businesses and their lives. The group offered a number of ideas for expanding and improving on the enterprises I have in hand just now, and believe it or not, I got a lead to a full-time job. My old Arizona Highways pal has become a successful web design artist, and another member bills himself as “The PC Magician.” These two got me thinking about ways to improve and grow FaM.

At the end of the get-together, the group’s president suggested I apply for membership. Dues are $110 upfront and $50 a month, for which you get the pleasure of their company and breakfast every Thursday.

Gulp! thought I: Where the hell am I gonna come up with fifty bucks a month?

The money would have to come out of the S-corp’s checking account. The corporation actually has enough to cover that. But…it only just recently accrued enough to get me out of teaching one section of freshman comp next fall. And oboyoboy, do I want to get out of teaching one section of freshman comp! If I spend the money on socializing, I’ll be stuck with three sections next fall. And that, in addition to adding to the misery quotient, will put me over Social Security’s penurious earnings limit.

However, I did feel the group delivered more than that much in value received. And it really would take only one assignment to pay for it. Or one full-time job, eh?

Driving home, it dawned on me how ridiculous it is to feel I can’t spend $600 a year to belong to a trade group.

And, like the morning star sitting in that early dawn light, the thought also struck me that I don’t need to draw down money from the S-corp to get out of teaching one section of composition. In fact, I would do a great deal better not to do so! It would be far better to use $2,400 of the $10,000 emergency savings cushion, and to use the pretax money in the S-corp to pay for business expenses.

Duh!

The savings fund has already had the tax gouged out of it. The community college is withholding 15 percent of the $2,400 I earn per class, so that third section is actually worth only $2,040. Using after-tax funds I already have would provide an extra $360 to live on. Meanwhile, The Copyeditor’s Desk can pay for anything that’s even vaguely presentable as a business expense with revenues that are effectively tax-free.

This strategy has two other sterling advantages:

• By pushing my earned income below $14,000 in 2010, it would ensure that that I absolutely would not exceed the subsistence wage Social Security allows.

• It would cut my taxes significantly, since my total taxable income would drop well below $30,000.

I came away from the meeting feeling energized and excited about building Funny about Money and The Copyeditor’s Desk into serious money-making operations that might, in the future, support me in the manner to which I wish to become reaccustomed. And in that flush of ambition, I realized that I spend too much energy and time figuring out how I can live on next to nothing, and way too little time developing assets that I already have and that could do a great deal more for me.

Case in point: sitting here in front of the computer shivering with cold because I’ve calculated, penny by penny, how much I need to save on utilities in the winter to pay the exorbitant air-conditioning and water bills next summer.

Why have I spent all that time counting little pieces of copper? Wouldn’t I be a lot better off to invest some money in living normally and to devote that time to marketing FaM, spinning off a book from it, and hustling some more editorial clients?

And why am I wasting my time teaching time-consuming, exploitively underpaid junior-college courses when I can live on cash I already have and use that time to develop the two far more interesting enterprises that have already shown they can generate income?

Why? Because I’ve been obsessively focused on pinching pennies, at the expense of thinking about the big picture!

What’s the big picture? It’s life. And it’s how I can make life in Bumhood comfortable without having to accept insulting wages and without having to deny myself little luxuries like central heat.

And so, my friends, to work. It’s time to jump-start that old entrepreneurial engine and get it running again!

The great mineral make-up experiment

by

Okay, so after we decided I needed a retread and then we went out and bought a kit of mineral make-up from Costco (nearly removing my fingers in the process of opening the thing), I broke out the camera and conducted a few quasi-scientific experiments.

The research questions:

Does make-up do a woman any good at all, or is it just another waste of money designed to enrich gigantic corporations at the expense of the consumer’s vanity, whims, and general silliness?

If make-up does anything positive for the aged face, how does regular cream foundation compare with the new powdered mineral make-up variant?

The research method:

Stage 1: Wash face. Apply face cream. Photograph subject’s face using “macro” setting of swell new camera (lab equipment!) donated by M’hijito.

Stage 2. Wash face. Apply cream. Apply full full complement of L’Oréal’s True Match Foundation; color n5, “True Beige.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.

Stage 3. Wash face. Apply face cream. Apply coat of Kirkland Borghese Mineral Make-up, color “Light to Medium.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.

Stage 4: Compare.

Results

Stage 1, the Naked Face, is pretty alarming, even to a seasoned researcher:

BeforeRightNoMakeup

Amazingly enough, this is our subject’s “good” side. A liberal sprinkling of age spots lie along the jaw line, to the extent that one can say a jaw line is still visible through the fat and sagging jowls. When I said this face looks like the surface of Mars, I wasn’t kidding. The wrinkles in this region are less pronounced. However…

BeforeLeftNoMakeup

The left side shows the true vintage leather effect produced by a combination of genetics (my mother’s face looked just like this) and too much sun. The age-freckles and moles (I’ve always been speckled) along the jaw are joined by a prominent brown spot high on the cheekbone, one that I’ve never been able to persuade a dermatologist to remove because, of course, he knows he’s not going to be reimbursed by my insurance and he also knows I can’t afford to pay him out of pocket for any such procedure.

So, now we’ve established the reason the subject avoids mirrors and cameras. Moving on…

Stage 2, cream foundation, produces some results. What they are remains to be seen.

Here’s the right side, slathered with plenty of L’Oréal. This make-up has as its sterling quality a capacity to cover brown spots. As you can see, it does a pretty good job of smoothing out the blotchy coloring and hiding the brown speckles. Like all make-up, though, it settles into the crevasses of the aged face, thereby not only not hiding the wrinkles, but actually accentuating them.

The left side, courtesy of L’Oréal:

It covers the large brown spot to some degree. Blotchiness can be said, perhaps, not to have been elided but simply to have been moved around in new ways. As for the wrinkles: the microbial flora on this face need rock-climbing tools to get around.

Stage 3 engages the powdery new mineral make-up, co-branded with a big-box store’s warehousey name and a line of expensive department store cosmetics’ exotically Italianate name. Surely with fire-power like that, it’s gotta do some good.

The right side: fairly smooth, with neither the age spots nor the general blotchiness too pronounced. Not sure what that grayish effect is. Following the instructions given on a YouTube tutorial, I used a small amount of cover-up to help disguise the brown spots; that may be showing through here, or it may be the lighting. In later efforts, I deleted the cover-up step, since the makeup itself seems to do a fairly good job of hiding spots.

And so, to the left side…

It should be noted, too, that I added the mineral make-up’s blusher, which is very light and (seen in a mirror) hardly noticeable. I don’t use blusher with the L’Oréal, because it makes me look like something from Ringling Brothers.

Conclusions

Well, now that we’re at stage 4, I’d say something’s better than nothing. I guess. Both foundations provide some degree of cover-up, and given that the skin has suffered significant damage from the effects of weather and age, cover-up is what’s needed. Probably a veil of the sort favored by Taliban women would fill the bill.

For comparison’s sake, can we get all these photos together in one place?

Ah. Science advances. Et aussi la nausée.

I kind of like the mineral stuff, though it’s significantly more hassle to apply. However, I found that as time passes, it tends to yellow a bit. After five or six hours, it doesn’t look all that great. The L’Oréal does not do that: it retains its initial qualities even after several hours, although it does rub off over time.

What think you, fellow lab rats?

Sartorial Elegance: Thrift store edition

by

Check out SDXB’s new threads, acquired earlier this week at a thrift store in Sun City:

Whether New Girlfriend’s costume came from the same source, I have no idea. But (LOL!) doubt it.

Says he:

Bought the tux for $15 at the Lutheran Thrift Store in Sun City. Bow tie, $23. Tux shirt [at the Luke AFB clothing store], $29. There were 2 other tuxes on the thrift store rack. This one is traditional cut and fits me as if it were tailored. I suspect that the tux and other fine clothing arrived at SC thrift stores following deaths. Sun City is, after all, God’s waiting room.

VOTE for Funny at March Madness!

by

Hey! Funny’s post at Free Money Finance’s March Madness is up for a vote. I submitted Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep. As you may know, many of the entries are top choices in the Best of Money Stories Carnival, and so the competition is august, indeed.

Would you please go to the March Madness site and vote for Funny’s post? All you have to do to vote is enter your choices in a comment.

Winners have a donation of $100 to $500 made in their name to a charity of their choice. I’ve selected my church and, especially, the choir, because of the good works they do and because of the central part the members of the music program play in the city’s cultural life. The church itself supports a soup kitchen, an ecumenical chaplaincy for the homeless, Habitat for Humanity, a nursing home, an orphanage in Honduras, and a variety of other charitable causes.

When the new pastor learned that I’d been laid off my job, he called on the phone, if you can imagine, to offer his sympathies and to say the church would do what it could to help me out. Then he talked me into making a pledge of one dollar. Would I ever love to do him five hundred better!

The contest starts Monday, January 18. I would like to ask you to support Funny about Money by going to Free Money Finance’s contest site and voting for Funny’s post.

To vote, all you have to do is go to FMF’s contest page and enter the word “Truth” in a comment. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the link to “Post a Comment.” Your privacy is secure, and you will not receive e-mails or any other intrusions from FMF.

Bingo! Loan modification scored

by
Under construction

After much hassle and bureaucratic hoop-jumping, the credit union finally let us know on Friday that we got the desired loan modification on the downtown house M’hijito and I are copurchasing.

That will help a great deal. It drops the mortgage payments from something over $1400 to about $1,085 a month. This comes as M’hijito’s roommate is talking about leaving (an on-again, off-again proposition). Roommate’s rent payments have been modest, but he’s also been paying all the utility bills, which, because the house is a sieve and because Roommate is home during the day, can be very high in the summertime.

It means that if and when Roommate leaves, M’hijito should have no trouble continuing to pay his half of the mortgage. Meanwhile, as long as the rent continues to come in, we can either stash the extra $300 savings to cover repairs and upkeep on the house (which is what M’hijito is already doing with the rent income) or we can use it to pay down principal.

My part of the mortgage payments comes out of a nontaxable fund of cash retrieved from an ancient whole life policy. If we do nothing at all, it means we now have enough to cover almost 18 months’ worth of bills instead of only a year’s worth. If we manage the money intelligently, we may be able to engineer something better.

What we really needed—and what I asked for, in the nothing-ventured-nothing-gained department—was a cut in the principal on that loan. We need to have the principal reduced to something closer to the house’s actual value. If you believe the ever-reliable Zillow, the place is now worth about $52,500 less than we owe on it.

In about 11 years, the loan will spawn a balloon payment: at that time, we will have to pay off the balance, refinance, or sell.

I will be very surprised if the house is worth what we’re paying for it 11 years from now. Under the original 30/15 terms (interest is figured on a 30-year basis, but the loan comes due in 15 years), by the end of the 15-year period the principal would have dropped to about what Zillow says the place is worth today. This mortgage modification will change that: to engineer the drop in payments, the credit union not only is dropping the interest rate to 4 percent, it also is prorating the loan over 40 years. Thus in 15 years we probably will owe more than we originally calculated (because principal and interest payments are both lower), unless we use the $300 a month savings to knock down principal now.

But we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.

February Budget: On target

by

Well, so far, so good: We’re two months into Bumhood, all this month’s bills are paid, and the budget is still running in the black!

That’s in spite of a plumber’s bill!

This month’s regular recurring bills were quite low. One was zero: having prepaid the February COBRA premium in January, I owed nothing this month. The power bill (SRP) also was very low, because the weather has been warm enough that I haven’t had to run the central heating.

What we can see here, though, is that even if I had paid COBRA in February, I still could have afforded to pay a modest repair bill: $252 less the COBRA premium of $185 would have left $67 in this part of the monthly budget. That happened only because the plumber’s bill came in the middle of the winter. In the summertime, power and water bills run about $200 higher than the winter bills, and so those costs would have eaten up most of the budget, leaving too little to cover a household repair.

However, last month $112 remained from the budgeted amount, despite my having paid $313 to COBRA. When the January balance is added to this month’s $252 remainder, some $364 is sitting there, waiting to take up the slack in the summer.

To cover the May, June, July, and August utility bills, I’ll need at least $800 more than I’m having to pay now. The amounts budgeted, as a matter of fact, are based on the summer 2009 utility bills, and so even with the coming rate hikes, there probably will be enough to pay the highest 2010 power and water bills.

Moving on, this month’s “discretionary” spending—the cost of everything other than monthly recurring bills—also stayed under control:

With $73.91 left over at the end of the credit-card billing cycle, I’m doing better than last month, when only $43 remained of the budgeted $800. This is in spite of making a run on the very dangerous Baker’s Nursery and in spite of buying $61.97 worth of cosmetics. Too, gasoline ran significantly higher than the $60 allotment: in February I ended up spending $95 on gas!

But here again: with $74 left from this month and $43 from last month, a small, de facto cushion is slowly piling up in the “discretionary” category, too.

Now that cash is finally flowing in from Social Security and from the community colleges, there seems to be plenty of money to cover budgeted costs. Projecting all income and outflow through the end of March:

February was a little precarious, I will say… But it looks like after this things will be better, at least until the end of August, when (assuming no major emergency expenses come up) the month-end balance will drop dizzyingly: to $22. In September it starts to climb again, and by the end of November it’s back up to around $1,800.

So, in a strange way, “money happens.”