By now, I expect, you know there’s a movement afoot to get folks to transfer their cash out of the big banking institutions whose unregulated greed helped to bring on the Great Recession (if recession, not depression, is what it is). Armed with a powerfully emotional video, the Move Your Money advocates urge megabank customers to take their business elsewhere—to small community banks or to credit unions.
I moved my money to a credit union quite some time ago, and I’ve never regretted it. Service is infinitely better. Tellers, who are not locked in cages but seated behind open, bright counters, recognize me by name when I visit, and a telephone call reaches a live human being. With a credit union, there are no nicks, gouges, or zings entailed in going about your normal banking activities. Loans are cheaper: just now car loans with 100 percent financing can be had for 4.99 percent, and M’hijito and I nailed a 4.3 percent mortgage over a year ago. Because the credit union never involved itself in questionable lending practices, it remains eminently solvent.
Problem is, moving your money is a bit more complicated than waving a wand, hollering presto-changeo, and rapturing all your cash from Institution A to Institution B, especially if you’ve set up automatic payments for recurring bills. So, assuming you see Wells Fargo, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Citigroup as tentacles of the Great Satan, how do you get free without incurring a raft of unexpected bank charges, without bouncing a check, and without accidentally shorting one or more of your creditors?
In my experience, the easiest and safest way to get your money out of a given bank is through a two-pronged process: set up new accounts in the target institution and then ease your way out of the soon-to-be-former institution. This may take as long as a month.
Start at the time you ordinarily reconcile your bank accounts, so that you can easily identify transactions that have not yet cleared the first bank (let’s call it the First Avaricious Global Bank). Then follow these steps:
1. Cancel all automatic transactions. Check to be sure the cancellations actually go through. Pay any bills that are immediately pending with checks on your First Avaricious account.
2. Go to the new credit union or community bank (we’ll call it Benign Credit Union) and open a new account.
3. Arrange to stop any automatic deposits at First Avaricious and to have those deposits made at Benign Credit Union.
♦ It may take as long as a month for these changes to take place! Your employer may decide to issue a paper paycheck in the interim. This inconvenience will require you to stay alert to all transactions that occur at First Avaricious during the transition. Check your account online at least every other day.
4. Reconcile your accounts at First Avaricious and calculate the amount needed to cover uncleared transactions and the amount of money that will remain after all outstanding EFTs and checks have cleared. Write these numbers down. Let’s say this month you have $1,000 in outstanding transactions, and after those transactions have cleared, you’ll have $500 left.
5. Leave enough cash at First Avaricious to cover the outstanding transactions ($1,000) plus an additional amount to cover any little surprises—about $100 will probably suffice. So, you’re going to leave $1,100 at First Avaricious ($1,000 to cover uncleared transactions + $100) and move $400 to Benign.
♦ First Avaricious will find every way from Sunday to ding you as you draw down your account. Many banks charge customers for dropping below a certain balance. Leave enough cash in the account to cover these gouges; otherwise you will incur more gouges in the form of overdraft charges.
6. With your paycheck and any other regular deposits now going to Benign Credit Union, begin paying your bills from your Benign account. Do not close your First Avaricious account until all outstanding transactions have cleared.
7. As soon as the last outstanding transaction clears First Avaricious, close your account there. Again, check to be sure the closure actually happens.
8. Deposit whatever remains of the $100 you left at First Avaricious in your Benign account.
9. Now set up all your automatic deposits, payments, and funds transfers at Benign.
Voilà! You’re back in business. And business will move a lot more smoothly.
Image: First National Bank of the Republic, Salt Lake City, 1908. Public Domain
As Americans lose patience with the overweening greed on display at certain gargantuan banking institutions, a lot of people are talking about moving their money out of megabanks into small community banks or credit unions. I moved my money to a credit union years ago…and thereon hangs a tale.
From the moment I graduated from college, I did business with banks. I’d never heard of credit unions, and when I did get wind of their existence, I didn’t understand what they were. I imagined they had something to do with labor unions.
Throughout our twenty-year marriage, Ex-DH and I kept our checking and savings accounts at what was then a statewide bank, founded by one of Phoenix’s early movers and shakers. We had a successful and mutually beneficial relationship with this bank, whose founder’s daughter was a classmate of Ex-DH’s at Stanford. But as time passed, things slowly deteriorated.
Shortly before we divorced, I came into a $40,000 inheritance. Naive as I was about personal finance at the time, I had no idea what to do with this money. I knew it should be invested, but I didn’t know where or how. I also knew I should keep it sole and separate from the marital community.
Incredibly, when asked what I should do with the cash, our personal banker advised me to invest it in seven-day CDs.
Yes. Forty grand got stuck in extreme short-term CDs earning something less than .5 percent—make that lots less. It sat there for over a year, as events progressed.
Once I was out of the marriage and free to get a grip on my own finances, I began to understand how astonishingly stupid this arrangement was. So I made an appointment with the same personal banker, whose services followed me into singlehood, to discuss what I should do with the inheritance and also how I should handle the alimony that now was coming into my account. She advised me to invest $30,000 in a municipal bond, on the theory that it was a conservative, safe place to park the cash, with the added benefit of tax-free proceeds.
That proceeds were minimal, that this strategy could tie up 30 grand for ten years? Nevermind…
As time passed, the bank was acquired by the now-defunct First Interstate Bank. Shortly, getting through to a human being grew well-nigh impossible. My old personal banker was replaced by a crew of CSRs, none of whom knew much about anything and all of whom seemed to be trained in the high arts of stonewalling.
First Interstate began to make various small errors. Because my math leaves a lot to be desired, it would take hours of anguished puzzling to figure out what went wrong, and still more cerebration to confirm in my own mind that an error had occurred on the bank’s part and not on mine. Each time this would happen, I would have to jump through flaming hoops to reach a person and then would have to do battle to prove some transaction—often one that cost me money in the form of various gouges—was the bank’s mistake. Even going in person to the main downtown office would result in a long wait to speak to a representative and a complicated discussion to get the point across, an activity that often resulted in no action.
Meanwhile, I learned that one of Ex-DH’s ex-law partners’ ex-wives had established a practice as a financial counselor. She specialized in advising single women. When I went to her to learn more about how to handle my finances, she advised me to cash out the municipal bond and invest in a mutual fund.
Before the bank was engrossed by First Interstate, I had arranged for the bank to keep the municipal bond, since as a new divorcée my life was pretty transient and I was concerned that the bond might get lost as I moved around. (As an example, I spent three months traveling on foot through the outback of Alaska and Canada, sleeping on the ground, hiking, and hitch-hiking.) Now, when I asked to have the bond, the CSR with whom I spoke said it would be FedExed to me.
No.
They dropped it in mail.
And predictably, it disappeared. Weeks later, no bond had surfaced. When I called, I found out they had put it in the USPS and lost it!
Yes. First Interstate lost a $30,000 bond!!!
And what did they propose to do about it?
Nothing.
They informed me that it was my problem, and I would have to go to the Postal Service and try to get them to find it.
Only after I complained to the federal banking commission and threatened to call the U.S. attorney general did a bank vice-president appear at my front door with the bond in hand.
About at this time, First Interstate was agglomerated into Wells Fargo. By then I had quite enough experience with large national banks, and so I moved my money to another bank, a small local institution with a branch near my house.
Before long, this bank began to falter. It also was consumed by one of the steadily bloating national megabanks, which promptly closed the nearby branch.
SDXB(Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend) had been lobbying me for quite some time to move my accounts into a credit union. Finally I began to pay some attention. By now I was working at Arizona State University’s west campus, which housed a credit union in one of the buildings. As a university employee, I was qualified to join (so, it develops, is just about anybody…).
So I opened an account. And to my great surprise, I encountered service very similar to the service Ex-DH and I got when we did business with a quaint local institution and he was a heavy hitter at one of the most prominent law firms in the Southwest. But this service was available to everyone, not just to a few elite customers! Call on the phone, and a human being answered. The car loan the credit union offered far underpriced anything available anywhere else. They even had a broker who would help you buy a car and insulate you from the horrors of having to do battle with car salesmen. Mistakes? What are those?
That service continues to this day. Although they now have a phone tree, it’s pretty easy to break through it, and their online help is prompt and accurate. Online banking services: awesome. ATMs: available everywhere, at no charge, thanks to deals with a network of credit unions. Solvency: excellent, because credit unions refrained from issuing bizarre loans to borrowers who obviously couldn’t pay. Deposit insurance: through a separate federal agency that is in no danger of being drained dry by the current spate of bank failures. Costs: almost nil—no checking account fees, no gouges for cashing checks, no costs unless you bounce a check.
What a wonder.
I would never do business with a bank again. Credit unions are the only way to go.
That six-month free ride for COBRA sounded too good to be true, and, as the saying predicts, it wasn’t. True, I mean. Called the Department of Administration again today to confirm what I thought I’d heard and learned that the “six” syllable actually occurred in the word sixty, as in sixty days.
You have sixty days after canning to enroll in COBRA and start paying up.
LOL! My scheme would’ve worked if I’d been born on March 7 instead of May 7. But in the cold cruel light of reality, it fell way short of its goal.
Oh well. At least I still have the $571 GDU dumped in my account today. Now all I have to do is persuade the federal government that it’s 2009 earnings (which it is), so that I don’t get nicked on the Social Security earnings limit. Even five hundred bucks will make a difference.
Medicare is going to cost a lot of money. Relatively. Yes, I do understand that $300 a month is a microscopic droplet in the bucket compared to what some people are paying for health insurance. But nevertheless, it’s more than eight times what I’ve been paying for an excellent plan, at a time when I’ll be earning a third of what I grossed on the job. With the ARRAS discount in force, Medicare will actually cost more than COBRA!
The base cost of Medicare Part B will be $110 a month. Parts A and B cover your basic needs, but leave your pants down around your knees: it’s an 80-20 coverage with rather limited hospitalization and no prescription meds. As we all know, one serious car accident, one heart attack, one stroke and 20 percent of the resulting medical bills will ruin you financially.
To take up the slack, you have to buy a “Medigap” policy from a private insurer. These policies, which come in a dozen flavors, are standardized, so that all policies issued in any one of the 12 available plans are the same. Only three—Plans C, F, and J—seem to cover all the contingencies well. Insurers charge whatever they feel like charging, and so in Arizona premiums for Medigap policies range from around $80 a month to over $300, depending on your gender and age. One outfit charges $417 to $560 for plan J—this is for supplemental insurance!
On the low end, a 65-year-old Arizona woman will pay between $107 and $163 to get into one of those three plans. Well, at least she did last year; I can’t get my hands on the 2010 rates, but I’m sure they’re higher.
Then you have to buy a prescription drug plan—and you have to get it whether or not you take any meds. If you don’t buy in as soon as you’re eligible, you’re penalized with a whopping fine when you go to sign up later. These plans run around $25 or $30 a month, and they don’t cover all drugs nor do they cover all costs of drugs; you still get to pony up a hefty copay for most prescriptions.
So: $110 for Plan B + $110 or so for Medigap + $25 for drugs and you’re at $245…at 2009 rates. Let’s add, say, 10% for inflation, and that brings us to about $270, for the cheapest plans on the market. By way of comparison, my cost for COBRA will be $185 a month; my cost for an employer-based EPO that let me go to the Mayo Clinic was $36 a month.
I guess you can get cheaper coverage by going with an HMO, which is what Medicare Advantage is. But having watched my mother die pretty hideously in the negligent hands of HMO doctors, I’m not going that way (it’s not in an HMO’s financial interest to treat you when you have a catastrophic illness; au contraire, what works for them is to deny you’re sick until it’s too late to do a thing for you, and then to withhold palliative care).
Interestingly, AARP’s much vaunted senior-friendly plan is far from the cheapest. They charge $187 for Plan C, $190 for Plan F, and $217 for Plan J. By comparison, the lowest rate I could find for Plans C and F was $107; four companies charge around $115 to $120, and quite a few are in the $150 range.
Well, I’ll be happy if I can keep the total cobbled-together cost of this pushmi-pullyu lash-up under $300. But I figure three C-notes a month is what I’d better budget for Medicare over the next two or three years…until it goes up.
Whoa! I think I just stumbled onto something amazing. Remember how SDXB told us “money happens”? Well…the stuff appears to be materializing as we scribble.
Yesterday I was talking with the people at the state Department of Administration about COBRA, which is administered through their agency.
The Great Desert University did another of its little numbers on me. Despite handing me a contract that says my last day of work was December 31, they “termed” me (the bureaucrat’s salubrious term for “terminated”) in their system on January 10. Because the eligibility for the COBRA discount ended on December 31, this would have rendered me unable to pay for health insurance, except that (thank God!) the Obama Administration extended the stimulus discount for those who are canned into February.
In the course of conversation, the ADOA rep remarked that during the first six months of COBRA, you’re covered whether or not you’re paying every month. For me, the payment under the ARRAS discount would amount to about $200.
I said, “So, if I haven’t paid for the first couple of months and then I’m in a car wreck and break every bone in my body and they cart me off to St. Joe’s emergency room, I can pony up the back payments and be covered?”
“That’s right.”
Hm. Come to think of it, I’ve heard that before.
Now, my Medicare card came in the mail yesterday afternoon. On the first of May—three and a half months from today—I will automatically go on Medicare. At that time I’ll want to sign up for a Medigap policy.
According the the reams of paperwork I have here, Medigap insurers cannot zap you for whatever pre-existing condition they can dream up if you have “no gap in coverage” with your prior insurance.
“No gap in coverage.” That is exactly the ADOA rep’s wording. She said, “Don’t worry. You have no gap in coverage between your state insurance and COBRA,” even if you’re not paying the first few premiums.
So. Because Medicare starts less than six months from the start of my COBRA coverage, in theory if I never paid a penny in COBRA premiums, I still would be covered right up until the time the government program takes over, and, because I would have “no gap in coverage,”the private sharks who run the Medigap insurance programs would be unable to screw me because 20 years ago I broke a wrist when I fell on the rocks in the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon while hauling a 30-pound backpack.* And there would be nothing they could do to claim the stress attacks engendered by working for Our Beloved Employer are some sort of excuse for why they shouldn’t cover me.
This sounds too good to be true. But it gets better!
As dawn cracked, I got on the phone to Medicare and tried to formulate this question for the rep who answered: Is it true that if I don’t pay for COBRA I would still be “covered” technically so that I could get Medigap without being zinged for pre-existing conditions.
Irrelevant, says she. Here’s the deal: When you turn 65, you have six months of open enrollment, during which time you can select a Medigap provider who has to take you without regard to pre-existing conditions.
You catch my drift, right?
If I remain “covered” by COBRA for six months whether or not I’m paying the premiums and I attain Medicare in 3 1/2 months, then effectively what I have here is free health insurance for the next several months. There’s no reason for me to pony up the $200/month COBRA premium.
Eight hundred dollars would just about cover the increase in power and water bills over the summer—my combined bills go up by about $200 a month during June, July, August, and September.
With enough in the bank to pay the summertime utility bills, my 2010 budgeting problems disappear into the overheated desert air.
My health is excellent. Except for my neurosis about Arizona State University, I have no health problems at all. I often go six months to a year without seeing a doctor. So it makes good sense to take a chance—especially since no real risk is involved—and quietly not pay the COBRA premiums unless something drastic happens.
Meanwhile, because in direct contradiction to my contract the state carried me on its payroll until January 10, they deposited another $517 into my checking account! This happened because, contrary to what HR told me, in the two December 31 paychecks PeopleSoft did not pay off everything ASU owed me: the five hundred bucks represents pay for the two days in December that I worked past the final 2009 lagging pay period.
I think I’ll be able to argue that this is 2009 pay, so that Social Security will not ding me for it—although from the blank looks I’ve gotten from ASU functionaries about this matter, it’s pretty clear that no help in proving it will be forthcoming from those quarters. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Let’s see here… $800 + $517…that’s $1,317 of money happening!
*No joke! Blue Cross/Blue Shield once actually told me it would not cover me for any broken bones or back problems because they believed the hairline wrist fracture and a later X-ray of a foot showing mild osteopenia meant I had osteoporosis (even though I decidedly did not and still do not).
Well, it’s almost tomorrow, so I’m gunna write this tonight (Wednesday), let it post tomorrow, and take a day off from scribbling to continue the various gardening projects.
Back from choir a little after 9, a cloud cover blown in on the nighttime air and a very light sprinkle starting to spit. Naturally, Cassie the Corgi was not wrung out after her 6:00 p.m. dinner, so grabbed an umbrella and the leash and set out for a late evening constitutional.
Driving home I’d seen some lightning off in the distant east but didn’t think much of it. The day was clear as a proverbial bell and I didn’t expect any rain would blow in. As we reached the apogee of our stroll the sprinkle began to come a little harder (Cassie hates rain!). We’re about as far as we usually get from the house when a big bolt of lightning C-R-A-A-C-K-s out of the sky with a clap of thunder bold enough to knock you off your feet! It was really close, certainly this side of the mountains a mile to the north.
Holy Mackerel! And there we are with a fine metal-ribbed umbrella in our paws!
We sprinted for the house, dog and human at a dead run (did you know you can run pretty well in Danskos?) and just reached the eaves over the front door as water began to pour out of the sky.
So that was a rousing end to another trying day.
Up at 3:00 a.m. worrying about the COBRA and money. If because of a bureaucratic screw-up my termination date goes into the system after December 31, am I going to lose out on the ARRAS discount? If so, then I can’t afford to buy ASU’s health insurance, and because of the ominous stress attack that landed me in the ER for a day because it so cleverly mimicked a heart attack, there’s no chance I can buy insurance on the private market. Though I have enough cash in my checking account, even after sending my excess savings off to the financial dudes for 2009 and 2010 Roth contributions, that money is earmarked for me to live on, not for some insurance company to rip off. If I spend it on $600 or $700 premiums over the next five months, there won’t be enough for me to live on without drawing down several thousand dollars from the IRA, exactly what we’re trying to avoid in an effort to recover the losses of the past 18 months or so.
And speaking of retirement funds, what about the $500 from the Fidelity 403(b) that now is not going to show up this month, thanks to yet another screw-up on the part of my beloved former employer? When I sent that cash off to the Roth, I’d figured on getting the drawdown and using it to help fund my January/February budget. How the hell am I going to get by without that five hundred bucks?
And speaking of the enforced drawdown from the 403(b), the one mandated so that the state will cough up the $19,000 of unpaid sick leave (RASL) it owes me, if those idiots screwed up entering my termination date in the state’s system, that means the ornery RASL lady also thinks I’m still on the payroll. That means she’s not processing my RASL application. And that means an even longer delay in stumbling through that procedure. The longer it takes her to do that, the longer I’ll have to take a drawdown, and the longer it will be before I can move the 403(b) money over to my financial managers, who just now are doing a great deal better with the big IRA than Fidelity is with the 403(b) funds.
{moan!} Got up, wrote the post you may have read Wednesday, dorked around online for a while, wrote a list of things to do. Went back to bed just before dawn. Got up again around 8:30 or 9:00. Sat down at the desk and got back on the phone.
First I called the Department of Administration again, reaching a new CSR. Explained the story again. She opened the payroll system while she was on the phone and said I was still shown as employed at ASU.
I said HR Lady claimed there was a “delay in the payroll system” and she intended to get in touch with DOA on Thursday. That would be tomorrow.
DOA Lady said she didn’t know about that, but she repeated that the HR system shows me as not terminated. She then remarked that DOA has no direct contact with ASU’s HR department. “They never call us on the phone,” said she.
No. Of course not. Why am I not surprised?
Eventually, I called my former husband, a corporate lawyer, to ask what he thought I should do about this, if he could suggest any regulatory recourse, and if he could refer me to a labor lawyer.
He said he didn’t know much about that sort of thing, but he did give me the name of a guy in town, a man whose name I recognized as a fellow with a reputation as a heavy hitter. Then, on reflection, Ex-DH observed that the university’s present general counsel is one of his former law partners. He suggested I should get in touch with that gentleman, since the business with the COBRA is a federal issue that could pose a fairly serious problem for ASU.
I said I doubted if he would remember me. He said maybe not, but he certainly would remember Ex-DH. I should call, remind him that I’m Ex-DH’s former wife, and tell him what is going on. Given that it’s extremely unlikely I could get past the gatekeepers in the general counsel’s office, we agreed I should try e-mailing him.
Meanwhile, Ex-DH suggested, I should e-mail and snail-mail a history of this to someone at ASU and someone at ADOA, so as to get it in writing (again!) that I was supposed to be terminated as of December 31. He said that time is now an issue.
Oh, God.
So I spent about an hour boiling the story down into as brief a form as possible, without all the flourishes one finds in blog copy and without the expressions of distress, annoyance, and cajoling one emits around the HR functionaries. Then I spent another hour writing a short history of the COBRA fiasco. This I addressed to HR Lady and cc’ed to Dean Debby (former supervisor) and the college’s Business Office Manager, adding that I hoped to see the mess cleared up within 24 hours. This little tome took BOM’s name in vain, when, among other things, I reported that during the November retiree meeting we were asked to attend, we were told to ask our departmental BOM to submit a “retire employee” request through the manager self-service system, no later than the last pay period, and that BOM had accordingly done exactly that.
Time passed. I went up to Home Depot to buy some compost and manure, the better to cultiver mon jardin. Then I spent what little remained of the afternoon pruning the roses in back and digging the fresh dirt into the soil around them, weeding the vegetables, and giving them some of the smelly new dirt, too. Along about 5:00 I remembered that tonight was choir rehearsal and realized I’d better wash the eau de cow coprolite off before leaving the house. Raced to draw a bath and toss some dog food down. Checked the e-mail while I was running around: nary a word from General Counsel.
Suspicions confirmed: university lawyers are not friends to university peons, not even if the peons are ex-wives of ex-partners. But…
Comes 5:30 p.m., my hair is wet and the bathtub is draining and the dog is running around and I’m freezing, wrapped in a damp towel, because of course it’s darned cold in here with no heat on, the phone rings and there’s HR Lady!
She’s calling, she says brightly, to let me know that ADOA finally does have my termination in its system (isn’t that great!). She will, she says, send me written confirmation of this tomorrow, but she thought I’d like to know it tonight.
Indeed.
Well, say I, what about the $200 I was supposed to have paid to COBRA by December 8, while I actually was still very much on the payroll and was still paying into the state health insurance system? (That would be the payment you never heard of, the one you said I shouldn’t have had to pay anyway…)
She will try to find out about that and report the results tomorrow, too.
Huh. Imagine that.
I figure either Dean Debby or General Counsel lit a fire under HR, given that HR Lady said she wouldn’t even get to my little problem before tomorrow. It’ ll be interesting to see what happens next.
Do they have me as terminated on December 31? Or will they decide that I died departed today, January 13, since that would have been the date the late great exit was entered in their system?
Will they refuse to enroll me in COBRA until I pony up the 200 bucks they demanded last month, which I forgot about in the confusion and general anguish that went on over the past several weeks? And if they demand that I pay that, will they also demand another couple hundred bucks for the January premium, bringing the total gouge to an unmanageable $400?
If so, where will I get the $400, since I had to pay $200 for the late great pool maintenance?
Thank God for choir. Rehearsal was challenging, as it involved a rather dramatic piece in Latin (oh, don’t we love DRAMA? 🙄 ) that I had never heard before. We got a new second alto, conveniently pushing the retired priest’s wife into the seat next to me. This lady has a good voice: she can carry a tune, she sings on key, and she sings loud enough to hear her. That’s all I need to fake success. So it was fairly easy for me to figure out the new music. And the mental workout went a long way toward taking my mind off the current spate of GDU hassle.
LS at Fidelity left word on my voicemail while I was out running around. She wanted me to call her back to communicate some unspecified information. Of course, by 2:00 our time her East-Coast office was closed. Reached B— H—, who couldn’t figure out from the notes she left what she intended to ask. Again (again, again, again!!!!!) I rehearsed my story. He discovered that the EFT arrangement to deliver the small monthly drawdown required to qualify me for the $19,000 sick-leave payout the state owes me had never been made, because Fidelity had never received the routing information.
This was part of the eight-page form I was required to run past GDU’s HR people. The first thing the idiot who took the form off my hands did, even before she walked away from me, is rip the canceled check I’d stapled to the first page off. I said, “Please don’t remove that from the form. Fidelity asked for it and needs it so they can set up an electronic forms transfer.” Said she, “I have to Xerox it.”
You can’t just fold back the check on the first page, copy it, set it aside, and then run the other 7 pages through the photocopier’s feeder? Obviously, the stupid woman failed to reattach the canceled check.
BH asked it if was OK to process a paper check. Then in the next breath he said he had no idea whether Fidelity would send said check this month.
Next, CS at ASU’s astonishing HR department called and said the reason COBRA thinks I’m still employed by the State of Arizona is that there were “system delays in the payroll process.” She claimed to have “scheduled time” on Thursday to confer with the Department of Administration folks and said she would get back to me then.
The upshots:
1. I will not get the $500 drawdown I had worked into this month’s budget, so I will be $500 short between now and the middle of February, when the first Social Security check is supposed to arrive.
2. And I now have no health insurance coverage!
I’m going to give these morons until Thursday to sort this mess out, and then I’m going to file a formal complaint. This has gone on too long.
