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A little massaging of figures

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Interestingly, I found a table on the Social Security Administration’s site that calculates how much your “full” retirement age SS benefit is reduced according to the number of months you retire “early.” GDU is closing our office and canning me a year and four months before I reach so-called “full” retirement age.

This has caused many hours of worried number-crunching, because you can’t earn more than $14,160 in a  year without incurring a 50% surtax on the amount you earn above that threshold. If you have the temerity to overstep that boundary by a few dollars, Social Security withholds not just the amount you owe, but an entire month’s benefit! (Or more, depending on how gravely you’ve sinned.) You get it back, minus the amounted owed, the following January! That’s assuming, of course, that you haven’t starved to death by then.

It’s a real problem for me, because my savings, formerly adequate to support me in retirement, have been so dessicated by the crash of the Bush-Cheney economy that today a reasonable 4 percent drawdown plus Social Security plus the allowed $14,160 in part-time earnings will not yield enough to support me.

My financial counselor, however, advises me that my savings probably will outlast my lifetime even at a 6 percent drawdown, though he’s not happy at the prospect. On their own, the net of Social Security plus a 6 percent draw would leave my Ultimate Belt-Tightened Budget $5,544 in the red at the end of 2010.

Obviously, I’ll have to teach, do freelance editing, or some combination thereof as long as I’m splitting the cost of the downtown house with M’hijito. When that obligation goes away, I may just barely get by on Social Security and investment income. And of course…I can’t work forever—sooner or later the day will come when I can’t earn anything.

At the Social Security page above, I discovered that in January 2010 I’ll be “entitled” to 91.1% of my “full” retirement benefit. This comes to $16,026, about $2082 more than I’d been figuring.

Well. Every little bit helps.

It also occurred to me that I don’t have to put the $3,168 that I think I’ll net on the $5,280 GDU will owe me for unused vacation time, come next December, directly into savings. Instead, I could use it to live on in 2010.

In 2011, because I reach 66 that year, I’ll be allowed to earn something over $37,000 between January and my birthday in May (capricious as hell, isn’t it? the rules must have been written by a committee of asylum inmates!). This means that in 2010, I don’t have to worry about limiting earned income.

Taking the new Social Security estimate and adding estimated net vacation pay plus a 6 percent investment drawdown, I come up with a somewhat brighter estimate of 2010 income.

Without teaching at all, apparently I would end up only $2,376 in the hole at the end of the year. Since I will probably net about $1,920 for one community college course, this would mean I would have to teach only two sections a year to break even. That assumes that my estimate of the tax bite is correct, and that, at $39,672, I have not grossly underestimated my annual expenses.

However, if I chose to get off my duff and actually work, taking a 6 percent drawdown and applying the vacation pay to 2010 living expenses would provide a pretty generous income, without drawing any Social Security:

Teaching 5 & 5 (for a total of 4 GDU courses and 6 community college courses over a year), an unholy teaching overload, would give me plenty of money to live on in this first, terrifying year of unemployment. Even teaching a more reasonable load of 4 & 4 would provide an adequate cushion, assuming no really major expenses come up. The middle column in this table would have me teaching three sections a semester at GDU, which I think is disallowed—more than two would make you benefits-eligible, which of course is exactly what universities and colleges are trying to avoid by hiring adjunct faculty.

Advantages: It would free me from a lot of bureaucratic complications, and it would allow me to earn as much as I can.

Disadvantage: The massive workload would allow no time for freelancing, and over a year, I would lose my freelance clients.

A far better course load of 3 & 3 at the community colleges, combined with Social Security, vacation pay, and a 6 percent drawdown, also would keep me comfortably in the black. In fact, the result would be significantly better than working myself into an early grave:

Hot dang! In this scenario (if it’s accurate), I actually could bank the $3,168 vacation pay and still get by just fine.

Advantages: Though I still have to work, I don’t have to kill myself at it. The amount left here suggests I will have no problem covering expenditures, even if a large unexpected expense arises. There should still be time for freelance work, and every $2,400 earned there is one composition course I don’t have to teach!

Disadvantage: I’ll have to draw more than is desirable from savings.

Dropping the drawdown to 5 percent would reduce the total annual net to $45,170, cutting the year-end black ink to $5,500. Even at 4 percent, I stay in the black, but with a much smaller margin: about $1,950 at the end of the year.

What I ultimately do depends on what Social Security actually pays me, which will be different from my guesses. They’re missing two years of income that I can prove I had; though it’s not much, it may increase the benefits a little. More likely, though, benefits will be less than I estimate. That’s just the way my karma goes.

It also depends on the tax load: I’m estimating 20% based on the facts that not all your SS is taxed and that I will deduct everything I can think of from all this contract income. With any luck, the taxes won’t bankrupt me—but again, we’re depending on luck, and the way things have gone over the past year, it looks like the luck well is running a bit dry.

The safest course, it appears, will be to take a 5 percent or a 6 percent drawdown in 2010, start Social Security in January, and sign up for three community college sections in the spring semester. Then, in the fall, reduce the teaching load according to the amount freelancing brings in during the spring and early summer. Then in 2010 I can drop the drawdown to 5 percent or maybe even 4 percent, depending on how much freelance income is happening.

Do you do mail-in rebates?

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Grrr! I think I just got jumped through the hoops for very little in return. At Costco I picked up a package of three air-conditioning filters for $39.99; mail in a rebate form (which asks for personal information such as your e-mail address and phone number) and they’ll send you a munificent three bucks, dropping the per-filter price to $12.33.

They’re high-quality filters, the nonallergenic electrostatic variety supposedly good for three months, reinforced well enough that they don’t foop up into the air-conditioning vent and form a giant concave toy whistle every time the AC unit comes on. But still.

In June of 2008, I bought two similar filters from Ace for $31.17, or $15.58 apiece; allowing for 3 percent inflation, today they might be expected to sell for $16.04. In other words, I used my time and my 44-cent stamp to save $11.13. Had I chosen not to kill time, compromise my ethics by lying about my phone number and e-mail address on their form, and use up a postage stamp, my savings over an Ace Hardware purchase still would have been $6.75—without the rebate.

Was it really worth the hassle to send in a rebate for three bucks, which I may or may not ever see?

Do you consider a mail-in rebate offer a strong enough come-on to persuade you to buy a product, or to prefer Product A (with rebate) over Product B (same price, no rebate)? Is there a limit on how small a rebate you’ll bother with?

Recession kills off local merchants

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The buy-local movement struggles under the best of circumstances. All you have to do is walk into your nearest mall to see that: every shopping district in the land, except for those targeted exclusively at tourists, looks identical, a mind-numbing array of the same boring, cookie-cutter chain stores. Even some tourist traps are chain stores.

So it’s disappointing to learn that one of Arizona’s most prominent local merchants, Eddie Basha, had to declare bankruptcy and close a slew of his statewide chain of grocery stores. He’d already closed 10 stores; this latest round of cuts will shutter 14 more.

Bashas’, owned by an old-line Arizona family descended from a Lebanese couple who immigrated here in 1884, actually comprises four subchains:

• Food City, downscale markets that target the Latino population;  
• Bashas’, middle-class neighborhood grocery stores, most of which are small supermarkets;  
• AJ’s, expensive upscale gourmet grocery stores on the Whole Foods model—they actually were here before Whole Foods and in many ways are preferable; and  
• Diné Markets, which cater to Indians on three reservations.

Most of the original Bashas’ markets, at least the ones in the central part of the city, are small and located in aging facilities. They function more as neighborhood convenience stores than as full-blown supermarkets, and so they often have even less selection of goods than the pared-back Safeways with which they compete. In the suburbs and in some smaller towns, the stores are larger, very much like a Safeway. Prices are often better than Safeway’s. But Bashas’ real claim to fame is a friendly, neighborhood-market atmosphere where employees behave as though they care whether customers live or die.

Food City stores appear in barrios and low-income neighborhoods, some of which middle-class shoppers will not enter. These stores, too, are staffed with friendly, upbeat employees, and their merchandise lines are extremely interesting. The Food City near me, for example, carries every variety of fresh and dried chili pepper known to humankind, plus a wide variety of organ meats and animal products with which most Americans are unfamiliar. When pasillos are fully in season, Food City employees set up a big grill in front of the store and roast them over mesquite coals: the perfume is glorious!

Personally, I much prefer this store to the nearby Albertsons, where I haven’t felt safe in years and where customer service is next to nonexistent. Food City stores are frequented by immigrant families; I’ve never been panhandled or hassled in the parking lot, nor have I ever encountered any scary characters inside the store. At the Albertsons, I have actually been chased around the parking lot by a panhandler—two of my neighbors reported the same experience—and I have stood in line with a man who had tears tattooed down his cheek, walked past shady characters doing business on the public phones outside the front door, and otherwise socialized with folks that you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. You never see low-life at the Food City.

AJ’s is the jewel in Eddie Basha‘s crown. It’s hard to imagine how it could be profitable, because it’s expensive and pleasant to shop in, and because when Whole Foods came to town, it acquired a competitor with deep pockets and an organic-foods motif. The best of these stores, IMHO, is the original outlet at the interesection of Central and Camelback. Newer, fancier stores with better sushi and wider choices of food and wine have opened in the suburbs, but they lack the warmth and friendliness of the central-city store, a hangout for midtown professionals, socialites, and old-line Phoenicians who still live in North Central.

It’s interesting that the sole AJ’s he’s closed (so far) is the big, gaudy production out in Chandler. M’hijito suggests it’s because all those suburbanites, with their houses worthless and their jobs evaporated, no longer can afford to buy fancy foods. People who live in North Central are largely lawyers and doctors, most of whom are still employed.

We thought our AJ’s would be the first to go, because during the real estate boom the stores at Central and Camelback were slated to be demolished and replaced with another faceless high-rise. We were spared that loss (temporarily) when the bubble popped…but it’s still surprising to see this smaller, less elaborate store survive as 24 other stores in the Bashas’ chain shut down.

The closure of these stores is a real loss to Arizona and Arizonans. Clearly, it’s too late to resist the homogenization of America’s cities, but many of us believe we should cling to those institutions that make our towns, cities and regions unique. Speaking as one bereft American, I find it depressing as hell that Atlanta looks just like San Antonio looks just like Phoenix looks just like San Diego looks just like San Francisco looks just like Seattle. We used to fly up to San Francisco to buy clothes and furnishing, because the City had a wide selection of locally owned, unique stores selling stuff we couldn’t buy anywhere else. Now the place has nothing we don’t have here: nothing but Talbots and Ann Taylor and Crate and Barrel and the Gap and Boston Stores and on and deadeningly on. Clone stores for clone people living clone lives in clone cities.

Is it any wonder we’re so disconnected from our surroundings that we can’t walk without yakking on a phone or drive up the road without texting? The dystopic future imagined forty years ago is here, folks, and we are living in it.

Fight back, my friends. Buy local! Google “buy local” or “local first“plus the name of your city, and you’ll likely find an organization that lists local merchants. Make it a point to do business with one of these merchants at least once a month. Better yet, find one you like and become a regular. Resistance is not futile.

Greener Grass? To move or not to move

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La Maya and La Bethulia have made up their minds to sell their beautiful, hacienda-like house down here in the Valley and move to Prescott, a more or less historic town in the cool upland parts of the Colorado Plateau. The redoubtable La B is applying for jobs there, and if she lands one (a foregone conclusion!), the house goes on the market forthwith.

So La Maya invited me on a real-estate expedition to Prescott in the near future. That should be entertaining. She’s already spotted a couple of houses online that she wants to see.

Cottonwood tree in fall
Cottonwood tree in fall

I’ve toyed with the idea of moving to Prescott myself, and with two of my best friends about to make the leap, it’s something to consider again. Summers here are getting really obnoxious. Temps of 110 degrees are tolerable, but when it gets up to 115 (or higher) and stays there, day after endless day, it’s just not livable. And whether or not you believe in global warming, it looks like what used to be a fluke is settling into the routine now: these extreme temperatures have happened for the past several years.

After the recent astronomical power bill, I turned the thermostat up to 85 degrees. Eighty-five is balmy enough when you’re outdoors in the open air, or when you can open up the house and let the outside air flow through. But when you’re cooped up in a boxful of stale air, 85 degrees is just plain hot. The house felt hot when I came in the back door from work, and it feels hot now. Most of the rooms, including the office where I’m writing this post with two fans blasting on me, really are uncomfortable.

And of course, there’s the ongoing drudgery (and cost) of pool maintenance.

Just imagine living someplace where it’s always cool enough to sleep at night! Where the locals think a 90-degree day is pretty darned hot.

Dang. With retirement coming up and GDU beside itself with joy at the very thought of farming out online scams courses to underpaid adjuncts, MOVE TO PRESCOTT oughta be a no-brainer. But being myself, of course I have to chew over all the possibilities.

Number One issue: What, really, is it gunna cost to move up there?

The last move I made took me across all of a block and a half. It cost about a thousand dollars. On the same day, a dear friend moved about five miles across the city. She paid two thousand dollars, and the difference in outcomes proved that my choice was radically penny-wise and pound-foolish. I won’t go into detail about the cocaine-snorting movers whose discarded baggy clogged the toilet, causing it to overflow  at exactly the moment my Realtor called to say the buyer was on her way over for the walk-through… Suffice it to say that it was The Move from Hell. After this, Funny ponies up enough to hire a decent moving company.

Average cost: about $100 an hour.

Well. To move my belongings a block and a half, the cut-rate chuckleheads I hired had to make two trips. Assuming I hire a major cross-country carrier, presumably they’ll bring a truck big enough to hold everything. Even so, it will take the better part of a day to load the contents of a four-bedroom house, and then it’s a two-hour drive to from here to Prescott.

Let’s give them ten hours for the first day; they stay overnight (do I pay for their time in a Prescott motel?); then they spend the better part of another day unloading.

If I don’t have to pay for their down time while they overnight in Prescott, then we’re looking at about $2,000. If they get paid $100 an hour for sleeping in a motel, dining, and eating breakfast, we can add another $1,000 to that. I’ll bet about $3,000 is conservative for a city-to-city move.

Now we have the cost of selling this house and buying a new one. Guess who gets stuck with all the closing costs? These days, sellers routinely are being asked to pay for the buyer’s closing costs, meaning to unload this place I’ll probably have to pay more than just the Realtor’s 6 to 8 percent fee (on $270,000, that will come to $16,200 to $21,600!). And how likely is it, really, that a Realtor who is invested in getting me to buy a house in Prescott is going to press for a seller to cover an out-of-towner’s costs, especially if that out-of-towner has sold her own home and now has no place to live?

We’re looking at a bare minimum of  $19,200 in selling and moving costs…and that’s before we learn that the water heater is crapping out, the dishwasher doesn’t work, the refrigerator leaks, and the wiring is not to code! Add the usual three percent of purchase price for the inevitable fix-up and nasty surprises: since I’ll only be able to afford about $250,000 for the Prescott dwelling, that will tote up to a mere $7,500 in first-year costs.

So: this proposed move could easily take $26,700 out of my pocket. Or more.

Compared to a $50 increase in summer power bills…uhm… Does that compute?

Number Two issue: Once I get there, then what?

Well, I’ll have two, count ’em, two friends: La Maya and La Bethulia. My son will still be here.

I kinda like being able to see M’hijito now and again. Sometimes he even drops by on the way home from work! If I lived in Prescott, I’d be lucky to see him three or four times a year.

Then, if seeing my pal who lives in Waddell takes an Act of Congress and logistics like those required to move the Continental Army, how likely is it that I’ll ever see her again? Or VickyC, whose social life is so vibrant she has to be trapped with a butterfly net to get her into my slow-moving orbit?

And then we have the choir. Ah, yes. The choir. Prescott undoubtedly has ladies who sing in church. But I can tell you for sher: it doesn’t have a choir anchored by a half-dozen professional singers, nor is it likely that any choir directors up there are engineering a lot of performances by members of the fifth-largest city in the nation’s symphony. Betcha no one up there has a multimillion-dollar organ and a church designed to accommodate it, either… Do I really want to walk away from that, now that the director has agreed to let me come back?

Number Three issue: What if I don’t like it?

Another friend, having served on her homeowner’s association board during a difficult time and felt alarmed about the wackos who rose out of the swamp to threaten board members, decamped to Cottonwood, the blue-collar suburb (as it were) of Californicated Prescott. Her son lived there, where he worked with his father building upscale housing for wealthy California expatriates.

She was sadly mistaken in imagining her son would welcome her presence. He and his second wife decided her highest and best use was to babysit their brats. She was in a wheelchair; they lived in a two-story house. You see the mentality, eh?

Before the car wreck that landed her in the wheelchair, she had been a high-powered corporate executive. Child care was, shall we say, not her forté.

On top of this depressing turn of events, she found herself in a place where she had no friends, no social infrastructure, and nothing to do. She hated it. But because it had cost her a lot of money to move, she was pretty much stuck. And that’s where she resides, unhappily, to this day.

Well. If I can’t afford $26,700 to move up to Prescott (and I surely can’t!), as you might imagine, I won’t be able to afford a similar hit to move back into Phoenix. Or anywhere else. Once I’m there, I’m there. And the prospect of ending up in my friend’s predicament does not appeal.

And finally…

Number Four issue: Is the grass really greener on the other side of that fence?

The lawn is already showing the effects of a certain amount of blow-torching, wouldn’t you say? But the above three matters aside, it’s not altogether clear to me that, other than slightly more clement weather during two or three summer months, Prescott has $26,700 worth of advantages to offer.

Trade-off for a warm summer? Cold winters! It snows in Prescott. Rarely does the snow stick on the ground, but what does stick on the ground is ice. I personally am not fond of driving on ice. And while I think 60 degrees is fine for sleeping, 30 degrees does not seem like the ideal snoozing temp. During the winter, Prescott’s lows drop into the teens.

Brrrr, I say to that!

Then it must be remembered that Prescott is a small town. I am a city girl. Not only that, but I’m a raving bitch. Make one enemy in a small town, and you might as well start wearing a red letter on your bodice. I know: I’ve lived in a small town. They can be even worse than homeowner’s associations.

The past few mornings, Cassie the Corgi and I have awakened to 70-degree mornings. These days have been truly lovely until 10:00 or so…and we’re still in early August. Temperatures were tolerable enough, if warm, until the middle of June. So we’re really only talking about maybe six or eight weeks of really awful weather. The rest of the time, this is a gorgeous place to live.

And a lot of stuff goes on here. In a couple of weeks, Kathy and I will go to an evening of jazz to benefit a charity that VickyC supports. Recently we attended a very fine chamber music concert in the Phoenix Art Museum. And, for that matter, every Sunday is chamber music morning down at the church meetin’ hall.

Furthermore, the Valley hosts the largest community college district in the country. As long as I live here, there’ll always be teaching gigs for me. Not my favorite work, but better than driving the zoo train or selling cosmetics at Walgreen’s. Prescott  has only three institutions of higher ed: an aeronautical school; a junior college, and a small, rather eccentric private liberal-arts college. None of these will pay as much as the Maricopa County College District, which itself is presently offering adjuncts about $500/course less than the Great Desert University pays, nor will they have as many openings. And while it’s true that GDU offers many online courses, a) there’s no guarantee enough courses will be available to keep me going; b) if you’re not physically present to remind departmental chairs that you exist, you soon will be superceded by someone who is present; and c) I have some ethical issues with online instruction, which I regard as passing fraudulent.

Maybe if La Maya and La Bethulia make their way to Prescott, I can have my cake and eat it too: stay here, save 30 grand or so, and visit them when the weather’s hot here!

Image: Mike Pedroncelli, Wikipedia Creative Commons

Delayed Gratification: The frugalist’s secret weapon

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Over the weekend, M’hijito and I dropped by a Cost Plus (World Market) in hopes of finding some stylish and cheap outdoor furniture to decorate the newly refurbished yard. And did we hit the jackpot!

The past few months, we’ve admired various pieces of Late Downscale Designer furnishings there but generally thought they were too expensive. I’ve lusted after some faux teak outdoor tub chairs, very comfortable and kinda nifty-looking, and he has coveted various tile-topped tables and faux teak dining sets.

The tub chairs normally cost $100 apiece. And though they’re very nice, I’m sure, I never felt the quality was worth a hundred bucks. Especially since I already had some perfectly fine second-hand outdoor chairs. Once, feeling flush, I almost succumbed to temptation, but then personfully managed to resist. As for the dining set: the table was over $300 and each chair was $100. Nine hundred bucks plus 8.8 percent tax was outside M’hijito’s price range, and so for him such a purchase didn’t even rise to the level of temptation.

Well. Today when we visited the Camelback store, they were trying to move the last of their seasonal outdoor furniture off the floor. Oddly, in other parts of the country, summer is almost over (for us, outdoor season will return in about a month). So, just when we’re wanting to buy outdoor stuff, it all goes on sale.

And what a sale! Everything was marked down 75 percent!

There wasn’t much left, alas…but fortunately, Cost Plus is a cookie-cutter chain. The manager called around the city and located the pieces we coveted—four tub chairs for moi, two tub chairs for M’hijito, a table, and four side chairs—in Chandler, a quarter-tank of gas from our part of town. By the time the loot was found and claimed, it was too late on Saturday afternoon for us to drive halfway to the Mexican border, so we made the trek the next day, on Sunday.

What an incredible buy! M’hijito got a handsome faux-teak trestle table that seats six people plus six matching chairs for $231! I got four of the chairs I’ve quietly been coveting for the original price of one.

One of the frugalist’s most important strategies is to think twice about buying stuff you think you want. Pick it up, look at it, put it back down, and then take time to think about whether you really need the object of your current dreams. It won’t go away within the next couple of days. Often if you leave the store without it, you’ll find that on reflection you really don’t have such a crying need for it. If, on reflection, you do decide you need it, want it, and can afford it, then you can be confident that you’ve made the right decision.

And, as we see in this sterling example, sometimes when you come back to something you’ve resisted buying, you’ll find it’s on sale. Delay buying seasonal items, especially clothing, holiday gear, and outdoor items, until the designated “season” is almost over, and you often can almost name your price for the stuff.

Heeee! Seventy-five bucks for a sturdy, handsome table that seats six!

RIP $64 butternut squash

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{sigh} The amazing, struggling $64 butternut squash plant finally croaked over.

Yesterday it was looking a little yellow, the season being August. When it’s hotter than a three-dollar cookstove around here (the norm for the low-desert climate from May or June through mid-October), plants living in pots have to be watered every. single. day, no exceptions. And they need to be watered early in the morning, before the sun starts its daily baking process.

But…in August we get some humidity. This means that not all the water evaporates out of some pots, so plants that don’t like wet feet can show symptoms of overwatering. Like, for example, yellowing leaves.

So I decided to hold off watering the squash for a day, though left the shade cloth over it.

This morning—twenty-four hours later—it is stone dead. A stiff squash. A squash that has gone to meet its maker.

A couple of its viney arms were still clinging to life, having rooted in the sandy quarter-minus crushed granite that is my yard’s desert landscaping. Briefly I considered snipping those free from the dead mother plant and just continuing to water them. But really: what for? The original point of this exercise was to see whether seeds from a particularly delicious grocery-store butternut would grow in the back yard.

Welp…now we know the answer to that one!

😛