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Shopping in the Commissary: Would it save anything?

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A day or so ago, SDXB clued me that Luke Air Force Base has changed its rule about bringing guests into the commissary: your sidekick no longer has to be a certifiable family member. As we were discussing the coming tax on food, which, when it goes into effect on March 1, will hike my grocery costs by 2 percent, he suggested I drive out there with him to do my major shopping trips.

Sounds like a good deal, eh? Not only would I evade the regressive food tax, I’d also weasel out of the much higher 8.3 percent gouge charged on all other purchases made inside the Phoenix city limits. On the other hand, I’d have to drive all the way out to Sun City to meet SDXB. He would drive us to the base (since his car has the AF parking sticker), so that would save some gas…but still, according to Mapquest, SDXB lives 15.91 miles from my house.

Let’s think about that.

In a recent shopping trip to Costco, purveyor of the lion’s share of my food stockpile and household goods, I spent $38.26 on groceries and $109 on household goods, dog supplies, clothing, and the like.

Tax on the $109 came to $9.05. The proposed 2 percent tax on the groceries would add 77 cents to that, for a total tax bite of $9.82.

On a good day when prices are low, gasoline costs about $2.50 a gallon around here. My car makes about 18 miles per gallon. Thus a round trip to SDXB’s house will cost, optimistically, $4.45.

So, my net savings on the tax will be $9.82 – $4.45: a grandiose $5.37.

For that munificent amount, I will have spent at least half the day driving out to Sun City, riding from there to the base, waiting around while he enjoys himself shopping in the BX, the commissary, the Class 6, store, and getting a haircut. Somewhere along the line we’ll get hungry, and so will eat either at his house or at the relatively clean Burger King on the base. This will morph a 90-minute shopping trip (during which I would normally hit Target as well as Costco and Costco’s gas pumps) into a five-hour trek.

In other words, I would “earn” about $1.07 an hour in savings on the tax bill.

LOL! Well, shopping on the base might be worth it if you lived close enough that you didn’t have to burn much gas to get there. But unless you enjoy the serenade of F-16 afterburners (amazingly, some people do!), that’s not a very practical proposition.

Pour moi, it doesn’t look like it’s worth the effort.

Early Retirement: The health insurance hurdle

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In a comment on yesterday’s grouse about the GOP’s stubborn resistance to a viable national healthcare program, Bucksome Boomer remarks that the main thing blocking her way to early retirement is the difficulty of obtaining health insurance.

There are a few ways around this.

One is to go back to college.

Yes. Tuition at most state and community colleges is far lower than private health insurance, and many colleges provide group policies for students. Arizona’s Maricopa County Community College District, for example, offers quite a nice policy for anyone who is enrolled in even one credit! Pre-existing conditions are covered if your prior policy covered you for 12 months without a break before you enroll (rules vary somewhat by state). Californians have access to student health insurance through the Community College League of California. In Texas, Houston Community College is among many that offer health insurance for students—here, you have to be signed up for three credits, but it can be an online course. A list of Texas universities that offer student health plans appears here.

If you’re yearning for early retirement and you live in a state where the colleges do not provide decent student health insurance, it might be worth considering a move to a state where such programs are offered. Google community college student health insurance to bring up a list of leads. Be sure the program does not exempt pre-existing conditions or, if it does, whether having been covered for 12 months by your current employer’s plan will trump that rule.

Another option is to join a trade group that offers group health insurance. These are not so easy to find; you pretty much have to figure out what groups you might, by any stretch of the imagination, be eligible to join and then find out if they have health plans. This list from California might be a good jumping-off point. Here’s a list of writer’s groups with various plans. Different writer’s groups have different requirements for membership—some expect a serious publishing track record; others will admit wannabes. As a blogger, you are a writer, especially if you’re earning any money at all from your site. Look at all groups associated in any way with your trade, business, or outside interests. The American Library Association and the Modern Language Association, for example, offer group health insurance for members—and anyone can join these organizations.

A third possibility is a high-deductible HSA. In these schemes, you take out a high-deductible policy and combine it with a medical savings account. The savings account functions like a hybrid between an IRA and a flexible spending account. The money set aside is used to cover your health-care costs during your deductible period and any other expenses. If you’re within a few years of Medicare age and you don’t have an expensive chronic condition, this strategy could carry you over until you can get less risky coverage. Any amount that’s left in the HSA rolls over to you when you reach Medicare age, at which time you can use the money any way you please. Shop around for these. At one point I had an HSA that covered 100 percent of my costs at any doctor and any medical facility, once the $1500 deductible was exhausted.

And finally, you might take a 50% FTE job with a public college or government agency—if you can find one in the current economy. Half-time jobs are usually considered benefits-eligible. This means you can get the health insurance without having to hang around the salt mine all day long. It’s not as good as being fully free from the day job, of course, but it’s a lot better than a 40- or 60-hour work week. Some government employers offer health insurance that is significantly cheaper than Medicare; when I go on Medicare, for example, I will pay about 10 times as much as I was paying for the State of Arizona’s EPO plan, and more than I’m now paying for COBRA.

None of these strategies is perfect. But then, no health insurance plan is perfect, at least not any I’ve ever heard of.

This post is part of a series on achieving financial freedom.
Our story so far:

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

Good-bye to all that…

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Here’s another volley in the endless blitz of retrograde comments from Republican congressional representatives, reported by The Wall Street Journal:

“When it comes to some health-care summit that’s nothing more than a photo op designed to pave the way for Obamacare 2.0, the answer is no,” Rep. Mike Pence (R., Ind.) said Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Still, they plan to attend and highlight public opposition to the bills and to spotlight their own ideas. “If the president is sincere about moving forward in a bipartisan fashion, he must take the reconciliation process—which will be used [to] jam through legislation that a majority of Americans do not want—off the table,” House GOP Whip Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said Friday.

“Obamacare.” How that term rings of partisan nastiness and intransigence! What on earth is the matter with the Republican party—one I once belonged to and was proud to serve? When did the Grand Old Party come to represent downright backwardness? I’m afraid that’s the word that comes to my mind (well—one of the words) as I watch members of my former party dig their heels in the sand and do every cussed thing they can think of to derail any positive action of any kind that might make life better for Americans…for no other apparent reason than stubborn hatred.

Not for one moment do I believe the GOP is even faintly interested in “the reconciliation process.” Actions speak ever so much louder than words. The actions we have seen have revealed extreme right-wing dogma and loyalty not to America but to well-heeled corporate supporters and their accomplished, amoral lobbyists.

The issue has little to do with universal health care coverage. As Megan McArdle writes for The Atlantic, we don’t even know for sure whether access to health insurance really does save lives—whether it has any long-term effect on mortality at all. No one has seriously asked that question during the fruitless “debate” (one might call it “impasse”) that we have watched over the past year or so. No. The issue is that the American political system is grinding to a halt, hung up by a kudzu-like bloom of stubbornness, dogmatic hostility, flowering greed, and grotesque thinking that the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated would take hold in America.

Politicians used to be self-serving now and again, but at least most could manage to get past their short-sightedness to function in their country’s interest. As we have seen, that is no longer true, particularly of the GOP. When Congress ceases to function—which is exactly what is happening—then America ceases to function as a free republic.

What a sorry spectacle!

Property tax statement arrives

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The county has dropped its estimate of my house’s 2011 value by $19,500. That’s down $62,300 from the 2009 valuation.

In theory, this should provide some tax relief. In reality, though, it won’t: Maricopa County is going broke, like all the other municipalities in the state, and so the county supervisors intend to raise property taxes by a walloping 10 percent. They also intend to take away the 50 percent tax break on historic homes that has led to the vibrant restoration of the cultural district and urban neighborhoods flanking Central Avenue as it passes through the once-decrepit downtown area.

Out of work, Mr. Taxpayer? Broke? Living out of a cardboard box? Lie still there on the ground so we can aim another sharp kick to your kidneys.

The county offers a tax freeze for people who are over 65 and have a gross income of around $32,000 or less. I realized I could qualify for that…until I saw the form you have to fill out. What the county deems to be your 2010 income bears no relation with how much you have in 2010. It’s based on your 2009, 2008, and 2007 gross income figures. Thus after you lose your job on December 31, 2009, as one of us has, your penurious 2010 income is irrelevant.

Let us give you another swift kick, Ms. Taxpayer!

So, chances are my time in the present abode is limited. Last year’s taxes were a stretch, and that was when I was employed and self-escrowing $325 a month to cover the various annual homeowning charges. If taxes rise now that I have no credible income, I won’t be able to stay in my home without drawing a lot more down out of my retirement savings. And that may be contraindicated.

A letter to the Phoenix City Council

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Dear Councilman Claude Mattox:

Okay, so this article appears in today’s Arizona Republic: the City of Phoenix is about to spend $6  million to buy a vacant motel so the property can be handed over to Arizona State University to expand ASU President Michael Crow’s overweening plans to expand his empire.

Let’s see if a beleaguered taxpayer can get this straight:

The city of Phoenix is broke. It’s going to close our neighborhood library, which is mobbed every moment it’s open, and lay off cops and firefighters. It has abandoned the lightrail project up the conduit of blight that is 19th Avenue after having ripped out an entire row of homes in our neighborhood and covered the scars with hideous gray gravel. Then to add insult to injury it’s going to sock us with a regressive tax on food.

But it still has $6 million to stroke Michael Crow’s ego?????

Mr. Mattox, really. What on earth is the city thinking? ASU is out of cash, too. Case in point: the university closed my office, one of the most innovative academic publishing projects anywhere in the country, and canned all five of my staff. It’s shucking off staff as fast as it can dump them, its facilities are going to pot (our office was in an asbestos-ridden condemned building, one of whose floors was closed to public access for fear it would collapse, with no clean source of drinking water and bathrooms so decrepit we would walk to neighboring buildings to use the toilets). ASU is not going to build anything on that downtown site; not during your lifetime or mine. And I can assure you, once Crow is gone, the insanely ambitious schemes that are steering the university toward bankruptcy will come to an end.

I am now unemployed, thanks to the fallout from those insanely ambitious schemes, and at my age I’m not bloody well about to get another job. I’m only one of many thousands of unemployed Phoenicians who probably will never obtain work with anything like the pay we have lost. Of course, I would like to see my city’s downtown thrive as a vibrant urban core. But not on the backs of the new poor, people like me who are struggling to buy groceries as it is.

Use that $6 million to keep our police, firefighters, and libraries operating!

Another backyard project under way

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“Under weigh” is actually the correct phrase, a nautical term. But let’s go with the flow. The tidal flow, of course.

Old-timers here will recall that a year ago I had the bright idea of digging the sand and weeds out from between the flagstones in my front courtyard and filling in the spaces with river rock. It’s worked pretty well: minimal weed intrusion, and the overall effect is reasonably pleasant.

Outside the back door is another flagstone patio, installed by the late lamented Satan and Proserpine. For yea, many a year, I’ve tried to get dichondra, thyme, and other “steppable” plantlets to grow there. For yea, many a year, what’s grown there has been weeds.

Until last spring, the favored weed has been burr clover. This particular weed has not been unwelcome between the flags, because it makes a pretty little yellow flower and it does not, despite its name, make burrs.

Sweet little plant, isn’t it? In the past I’ve let it grow. It makes a nice mat similar to dichondra, and it costs nothing: it seems to materialize out of the air.

Last spring, though, a hideous invader took root between the back patio’s flagstones. Whereas it is true that I know almost everything, one of the very few things I don’t know is what the hell this little monster is. I don’t recognize it as a native desert plant (and I know most native desert plants). I don’t remember it among the many weeds that have grown in the several lawns I have been stupid enough to dump water on (but anything’s possible). I can’t find it among my favorite lists of invasive and annoying newcomers to the Sonoran Desert. The only thing I can think is that this thing blew in on the winds of globalization.

When it first appeared last spring, I thought, “Well, OK… It looks like something that will make flowers, so let’s leave it there.”

Wrong. It does not make flowers. And while it’s inoffensive enough when it’s young, as it ages it grows rangy, wiry, and uglier than pussley.

And it ain’t easy to pull out.

It crowds out the expensively installed dichondra I planted late last spring. Amazingly, it crowds out burr clover, an aggressive and resilient weed. When the heat comes up, what you have is an ugly tangle of wiry, tough gunk.

I pulled it out last summer and this spring found twice as much of it growing than I saw last year.

So I decided (once again!!) to dig out the weeds and dirt between the flags, only this time instead of trying to get something I want to grow there, to replace the stuff with stones, much like the front courtyard’s stoneware.

Consequently I’ve been scrounging free stones from the alleys again. Here’s the result, so far:

Daffodils
Red Salvia & Easter Lily Cacti
Shamrocks & other things

It’s working out. Only a few more crevices left to fill—maybe two or three runs up alleys with the pooch covering for me (oh, dear Manny, Nosiest of All Possible Neighbors: just wringing out the dog behind your house :-D). Unexpected benefit: no more ankle-turning trips on the flags. The dirt has settled so much since Satan installed the patio that if I’m not careful to set my feet firmly on a flagstone, half my foot will slip into a crack and I’ll wrench my already strained ankle once again. With the stones carefully set so they’re level with the surfaces of the flags, I can walk across the surface without risk of additional pain.

Very nice.

I hope this landscaping scheme is not altogether hideous. Frankly, I think it’s better than the weeds. But for sure, one man’s weeds are another’s Eden.

Burr clover image: Shamelessly ripped off from UC Berkeley, but probably in the public domain, UC being a state institution