Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Dog Food: The costs and benefits of making your own

by

Cassie, the Little Dog, turns up her dainty nose at Science Diet’s best lamb and rice kibble. Won’t touch packaged doggy treats. Doesn’t think much of ultrapremium canned food, either, though she’ll gag down a few bites. After three days of hunger strike, she’d already lost about two pounds—a lot when you weigh 23 pounds.

At first I thought she was off her feed because of the stress of being dumped in the Humane Society shelter, a place as wild as a nineteenth-century madhouse, then yanked out by a strange woman, fussed over by the woman’s friends and relatives, dragged to two vets, sickened by bordetella, and dosed up with antibiotics and cough medicine. Concerned because she was eating almost nothing, last night I fixed her a dish of the same kind of food I cooked for Anna and Walt during the last year’s Chinese pet food scare: half a piece of steak grilled for my own dinner, a few spoonsful of boiled rice, some spinach, and some peas.

She inhaled the stuff and begged for more.

Makin’ It

Hot dang! Dollars to donuts, this dog has been eating real food. That would explain her perfect coat and teeth in such excellent condition it surprised both vets. It also would explain why she didn’t get the doggywobbles despite the stress and the changing food. When dogs eat real food, their tastes are catholic and versatile, and diversity in their diet does not trigger gastritis and diarrhea. Possibly her humans fed her the BARF diet: raw meat and bones. This is somewhat risky, given that pathogens are pathogens, whether they’re attacking people or dogs, and raw meat is full of pathogens. BARF is probably the most popular of the do-it-yourself dog feeding projects, though, and so chances are good this is what she ate.

A little undergraduate coursework in microbiology has left me unwilling to ingest raw meat or to feed it to a domestic mammal. So my idea of homemade dog food is a combination of meat cooked rare to medium (well-done for poultry or pork), starch, and veggies. If you cook your own meals rather than eating out all the time, it’s no problem to put a little extra on the stove for the dog.

Why Feed Dogs Real Food?

Commercial dog food, whether kibble, semi-moist, or canned, is not food. It’s no more food than is junk food for humans. The fact that you can swallow something doesn’t make it food. For a dog to spend its entire life eating kibble is about like a person starting in on hot dogs and dry packaged cereal in infancy and having nothing else to eat for the rest of his or her life. Think of that.

Dogs are not evolved to eat bizarre chemicals. Dogs have lived with humans and have eaten what humans eat for thousands and thousands of years. Commercial packaged or canned dog food came into being in the early part of the 20th century. DNA testing suggests dogs moved into human camps about 15,000 years ago. But in a scant 60 years, we’ve allowed merchandisers and a compliant veterinary industry to convince us that dogs can’t survive on “people food.” Really: does this make sense? If dogs can’t thrive on real food, how did they manage to survive for the 14,940 years before manufacturers started peddling fake food for dogs?

When I switched Anna and Walter over to real food during the 2007 scare, the improvement in their vigor and health was striking. Both 12 years old at the time, they each were showing signs of age. Before long, their coats looked great, they had more energy, their dog breath disappeared. Their dog mounds became more compact and normal-looking, and instead of having to collect upwards of a dozen giant mounds a day, I found myself picking up only a couple. It was clear as day that both dogs thrived when no kibble crossed their bristly lips.

Feeding two 90-pound dogs, however, meant cranking 28 pounds a week out of my kitchen. It wasn’t hard, but it could be messy, especially if I tried to cook an entire week’s worth in a single day. When, after several months, Walt started to lose weight drastically, I thought he wasn’t getting enough nutrition and switched both animals back to commercial food. This assumption was wrong: he was wasting away with an aggressive cancer, which soon ended his life. By then, though, Anna was obediently eating Trader Joe’s kibble, and so I took the path of least resistance and kept her on it.

To feed real food to this little dog, though, would be pretty easy. According to the instructions on the 13.5-ounce can of premium dog food I brought home, she should have about one can a day-less than a pound. By my own rule of thumb-daily ration = 2% of body weight-she should have about a half-pound of real food each day. That’s a little scanty, though a full pound may be a little much. It’s easy to schlep her to a vet’s office to be weighed, and that’s how you figure out how much to feed: follow the animal’s weight for a while and adjust the ration accordingly. The amount I made Sunday evening, which started with a cup of rice to which, after it was cooked, were added meat and a few vegetables, fed her for three meals.

After her second little feast, Cassie perked up considerably. She’s been tearing down the hall after her toys and boldly exploring the house and yard. The cough has subsided and she evidently feels much better.

So…how much does this cost?

Well, I’ll have to admit that preparing real food for two dogs as big as small horses was not cheap: a dog the size of a German shepherd or a male greyhound requires 14 pounds of food a week, of which five to seven pounds should be high-quality meat. Kibble doped with a small amount of meat or broth (the only way you can get a dog to eat that stuff) costs significantly less.

However, a home-made diet for a small dog like Cassie is cost-effective. In the first place, one will save a lot on vet bills if one is not forcing the animal to eat feed that is suspect at best and toxic at worst. But in the second place, the small amount such a dog eats costs no more than the best quality dog food you can get.

One can of Precise chicken dog food set me back $2.99; it will feed Cassie for just one day. A small bag of Science Diet and a bag of inedible dog treats rang up a $16 bill at PetSmart.

I returned the PetSmart foodoid—one thing you have to give to that outfit is that they will take back opened packages of dry dog food if your dog won’t eat it—collecting my sixteen bucks. Then I headed for Sprouts, where for $7.88 I got a package of hamburger (on sale for $1.99 a pound), a package of chicken, a bag of bulk converted rice, and some veggies.

Okay. That’s half of what I paid for the Science Diet and dog treats, all of which was going from the package to the dog bowl to the garbage. No matter what I put on the kibble, the dog flat wouldn’t eat it, and of course whatever I put on it quickly spoiled in the summer heat. So any money spent on the stuff effectively was tossed into the trash.

The hamburger, rice, and vegetables produced four days’ worth of Cassie food: that’s eight generous servings. For around five or six bucks, since the rice and veggies will go a lot further than that and I still have the chicken to convert into more dog food.

Once she’s over the kennel cough, I can occasionally substitute cottage cheese for meat, which will cut that cost, as will buying cheaper cuts of meat and having them ground or picking up meat at a better price elsewhere (at Safeway hamburger was selling for $1.70 a pound, but I learned of this after I was done driving through 112-degree heat). So, I expect I can feed her for a week for something between eight and ten bucks.

While this is high compared to dry dog food-which, bear in mind, isn’t food-it’s cheap compared to three dollars a can! One can whose ingredients resemble what I would cook lasts the dog for one day: that would be $21 a week, plus 8.3% tax. In Arizona, I pay no sales tax on human food.

From an early FaM post on making your own dog food:

How do you make dog food?

It’s pretty easy. Remember, over the past 15,000 years, dogs have evolved to eat what people eat. Like their wild ancestors, they’re nonobligate carnivores: this means they’re primarily meat-eaters but also can and do eat a fair amount of vegetable matter. Wolves have been observed scarfing berries and fruit, and you no doubt have watched your own dog munch things like cauliflower and popcorn.

The trick is to feed real food. By that I mean things that would be real food for humans, too: not junk food.

Real meat.

Real vegetables.

Unadulterated sources of starch.

Not junk food. Not hot dogs or leftover Big Macs or ice cream or pizza or peanut butter or any thing that comes in a can or a plastic microwavable package or as a mix to which you just add water. That leaves the entire world of real food:

Meat. Fresh or frozen veggies. Brown rice, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, yams, even real potatoes. Cottage cheese, yoghurt, and eggs are OK, too.

What’s not OK to feed dogs, in addition to junk food, are the following items:

  • 1. Onions (toxic; onion causes a life-threatening form of anemia in dogs)
  • 2. Garlic (ditto, no matter what people say about adding it for flavoring)
  • 3. Chocolate (poisonous to dogs)
  • 4. Corn (one of the most common allergens in dogs)
  • 5. Avocado
  • 6. Raw egg white (cooked is OK)
  • 7. Raw salmon (cooked is OK)
  • 8. Grapes
  • 9. Added sugar
  • 10. Added salt

About 30% to 40% of each portion should consist of high-quality protein: meat, eggs, or cheese. The rest of the ingredients should be divided about fifty-fifty between a source of starch (such as rice, oatmeal, potato, or sweet potato) and a wide variety of vegetables. Each serving should ideally contain both a green and a yellow or orange vegetable. Dogs can eat almost any vegetable except plants in the onion family (onions, leeks, chives, shallots, garlic), corn, and avocado.

Cook but do not overcook the meat; only chicken and pork should be well-done all the way through. Cook the starch; if the veggies are frozen, add them to the hot freshly cooked starch item to defrost them and cool the grain or potato. Mix in the meat. If the meat is a solid piece baked or grilled (as opposed to ground meat), cut it into small pieces before adding it to the rest of the food. Add a little olive oil or lard for coat quality and calories. Toss in a doggy vitamin-available inexpensively at Trader Joe’s—and you have dog food that more than exceeds ideal.

Take it easy with fish. Like corn, fish is a common dog allergen. And take note that this diet is for dogs only, not for cats, which are obligatory carnivores.

If you cook like that for your dog, the pooch likely will be eating better than you do.

Veterinary bills will drop to almost nil. Ear infections—often a manifestation of food allergies—will subside or disappear. Backyard cleanup will be hugely easier. Your dog’s coat and teeth will be healthier. And the dog will love you.

Ultimately, this is highly cost-effective. If your dog is healthier, any extra amount you spend on purchasing real food is recouped many times over in savings on the most costly item of pet ownership: veterinary bills. And if your dog lives longer, obviously you will spend less on pets, because over the long term you will have to buy fewer of them.

2 Comments left on iWeb site

!wanda

Do you really need to take her to a vet to weigh her?You could put her in a box and weigh her on a human scale.

I wonder why people who had evidently been taking such good care of her left her.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 – 03:55 PM

vh

One of my eccentricities is that I don’t own a scale. Throughout my life, my weight has been very stable, never varying more than a pound or two from a set point, and so a scale is redundant and something else for me to find a place for.

Also it’s easier to get a dog on a scale with a large platform, such as veterinarians have. Vets generally allow you to walk in and weigh your dog for free.

The whole issue of why Cassie’s humans dumped her at a shelter gets curiouser and curiouser. It’s now developing that she DOESN’T bark much. She may yap for couple of minutes after I leave, but she quickly settles down. No matter when I come back—whether it’s just five or ten minutes later or several hours later—she’s quiet.

It’s clear she was a child’s pet. At the moment, my neighbor’s nieces and nephews are playing in the pool next door. When Cassie went outside, she heard their voices and SO wanted to get over there and play with them. In their paperwork, the previous owners said they had a seven-year-old daughter. So that means they got rid of their little girl’s little dog. It almost sounds abusive, doesn’t it?

The only thing I can figure is maybe they lost their home and were too embarrassed to discuss that with strangers, so they made up an excuse instead of admitting to a catastrophic financial crisis. There’s apparently more to the story than “dog barks.”

Wednesday, June 18, 2008 – 04:40 PM

Humane Society Offers Deals! Frugalist pleased

by

Never in my entire life, which as you know began during the Cretaceous Period, have I ever walked into a veterinarian’s office and managed to escape without some sort of charge. Until today.

Even the Wonderful New Vet zinged me $7.50 after the “free” introductory visit for Cassie the Pembroke Welsh Corgi: charge for setting up records. Right. But the Humane Society, where last Friday I scored the nifty Little Dog, promises that you can take your adopted pet to any VCA animal hospital for a free check-up and two weeks’ worth of free care for several ailments typically picked up in animal shelters. I figured this would be about as “free” as WNV’s “free” service; maybe more so. But nay!

As expected, Cassie began to show signs of kennel cough last night. Few dogs get out of a crowded animal shelter without kennel cough, an extremely contagious bacterial disease that can bundle with it a virus or two and maybe another bacterium. While this ailment can spirit your pet away (and it can be zoonotic-that is, contagious to humans-under rare circumstances), it’s usually not very serious. It’s a lot less serious and a lot more easily dealt with if you attack it at the first sign of doggy di$comfort. Oh. $orry. Make that “discomfort.” Doggy discomfort.

Well, Humane Society clients have five days in which make an appointment to take advantage of the two-week “warranty” period, so I called this morning and to my amazement got an appointment mid-afternoon. The luncheon on today’s schedule, thank God, got moved to Wednesday (don’t ask!). This allowed me to race out to campus, actually get some work done, and race back in time to appear chez the corporate veterinarian at the appointed moment.

Dr. Brad Walker and his brand-new sidekick, Dr. Rebecca Baciak, a freshly minted young veterinarian awaiting her state boards, examined the pooch, opined that a case of kennel cough indeed very likely was a-brewing, and forked over not one but two prescription meds.
Total cost of their services and meds: $87.50
Total cost to moi: $0.00

Yesh. Not even a “records fee.”

They suggested testing her little rabbit pellets for worms but allowed as how waiting until payday would do no harm. If done within 14 days of the adoption, the fecal test could be done on the Humane Society’s dime, too. And of course they want to get the dog on heartworm meds, a lifetime pharmaceutical that other vets have advised is unnecessary in my part of town. Big Pharma’s tentacles are everywhere: in your doctor’s office, in your shrink’s office, in your dentist’s office, and in your veterinarian’s office.

That notwithstanding, I liked this guy, a former large-animal vet from the Midwest who had shifted gears to small animals. The place was clean and he projected an air of experience and competence. It struck me that Doc Walker would be a mighty fine mentor for a young veterinarian at the start of her career.

So, kudos to the Humane Society for cooking up these freebies.

But a caveat: as I write this, I just got a telephone solicitation from VCA, which obtained my phone number from the Humane Society. That, I could do without.

Reviews of VCA shops range from very positive through mixed to negative, with many complaints about high prices and at least one allegation of questionable billing practices.

Wonderful New Vet’s statement doesn’t itemize the amount she would have charged for Cassie’s free Humane Society Exam, but only lists it as a write-off at $0.00. How that works, I don’t know: it could be a lagniappe, or it could be that her office has a less elaborate deal with the Humane Society. Her first examination of Anna H. Banana came to $278, but it included an X-ray of a very sick, very large dog, a lengthy consultation, and fistfuls of high-powered meds. Remember, at the end I was giving Anna 11 pills a day, four doses of eyedrops a day, and smearing two ointments on her four times a day. So no comparison is possible.

Any outfit that asks me, as the VCA folks did, what my “baby’s” name is arouses my suspicions. The Humane Society’s paperwork folder is labeled “New Pet Parenting Guide.” This is the sort of sentimentality the pet industry fosters to persuade you to part with lots and lots of your money. I figure an old guy who used to run a practice for farm animals probably knows better. But hey! The man has gotta make a living.

Remember this mantra, no matter how cute, valiant, or smart your dog or cat:
It’s a dog!
It’s a cat!
It’s not your kid!

Adopt a dog or cat from the Humane Society. If you’re smart and lucky, you’ll get good deals all the way around. But bear in mind: caveat emptor.
3 Comments left on iWeb site

Squeezenickel

Don’t forget to factor in the cost of transporting Cassie to the “free” vet for this treatment of follow-ups.

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 – 06:22 AM

BeThisWay

I got the same deal with VCA when we got our dog through the Humane Society.I went back to our regular vet afterwards.

I know you don’t think dogs are human, but you never met my Jonah.Now my current dog, Phoebe, is a dog.Definitely.

😉

Tuesday, June 17, 2008 – 01:24 PM

vh

True enough. On the other hand, I don’t deny that dogs are sentient, feeling beings.

I’ve had dogs all my adult life, and during that fairly lengthy time, I’ve had one that I would classify as “great”: a German shepherd who came to live with us when her humans divorced. She saved my son’s life, saved me from a rapist, chased a cat burglar out of our house, drove off a man who came up to me and my son waving a machete in the neighborhood park, knew who belonged where, demonstrated that she could make decisions based on facts and judgment (not an exaggeration!), and was generally a mellow and wonderful friend.

Most dogs are mellow and wonderful, given half a chance. All my other dogs have been good dogs, but only Greta was truly a great dog.

Doomed!

by

So much for the planned five-day no-purchase binge that was supposed to rescue my bleeding budget, or at least keep the hemorrhaging under control.

I forgot that we have to take an exiting colleague to lunch at an EXPENSIVE restaurant today. And guess who gets to pick up the tab? Shee-ut.

My research assistants are just going to have to pay for their own lunches. I’ll cover my colleague’s (since I have to), but I can’t buy lunch for myself or for anyone else. And there’s absolutely no way to weasel out of this gracefully.

So…we’ll be covering the red ink with savings.

Wouldn’t it be nice if GDU would pay a living wage? If GDU could manage something like pay equity, maybe? This guy, who’s quitting to escape academia, earns 90 grand on a nine-month contract. He teaches two-and-two, all graduate courses, and the class sizes are minuscule. When I guest-lectured in one of his courses, the full complement of FOUR STUDENTS showed up. (As you’ll recall, I spent the spring semester teaching 80 undergraduate students—the equivalent of four sections!—in a drech service writing course that every single classmate justifiably resented being made to take.) I earn two-thirds his salary, for a twelve-month 40-hour-a-week job.

What a place!

The little dog has, as expected, started to show signs of kennel cough. Fortunately, the Humane Society has a deal with a chain of veterinarians whereby they’ll treat kennel cough and ear infections (she appears to have one of those, too) for free for two weeks. So, somehow I’ve got to arrange a trip to an unknown vet around today’s shindig. This does not promise to be an easy week.

A Square Peg in a Round Hole: Biweekly pay in a bimonthly world

by

As advantageous as a biweekly pay schedule may be to The Man, it sure is a pain to us wage slaves. Creditors expect to be paid once a month, not whenever our biweekly paycheck shows up. Because biweekly pay dates precess throughout the year, they don’t coincide neatly with due dates for bills. No matter how accommodating your utility company or credit card provider tries to be, there’s no way you can schedule bill due dates to be sure enough money will be available to cover every monthly payment. Why? Because you’re never paid on the same date. Some months, the second paycheck arrives after bills start to come due.

The phone bill is due the first of the month, and Qwest, my only uncooperative creditor, absolutely will not change the billing date. All my other bills come due on or after the 20th. Most months, two paychecks have arrived by the 20th, providing enough to cover all my regularly recurring household and insurance bills plus the credit card charges for groceries and routine living expenses.

But a look at the Great Desert University’s payday calendar shows problems arise in April, May, June, and September. In April, GDU doesn’t disburse its second paycheck until the 25th. By then, an American Express bill is due; I budget $1,500 for food, household, yard, gasoline, and such, all charged on AMEX. Usually I spend about $1,100 or $1,200. Utilities and other regular recurring bills can run as high as $840, especially in the summertime, when the costs of water and electricity track the thermometer. AMEX closes on the 20th and the check needs to be mailed by the 1st. Visa closes before then (sometimes I’m forced to use Visa if I have a lunch meeting at a restaurant near the campus—few of them take American Express). Power, water, insurance, and the Renovation Loan are due on or shortly after the 20th. With as much as $2340 due, I need that second $1,522 paycheck by the 20th, not whenever GDU gets around to paying me.

Meanwhile, each month I have to put into savings $300 a month to cover annual property tax, homeowner’s insurance, auto insurance, and car registration; $200 a month to put into the Renovation Loan payoff fund; and $175 for extras such as clothing and to cover emergencies such as vet bills, car repairs, and house maintenance. So in any given month, I’m disbursing up to $3,015 out of a $3,044 income. With $29 to spare, that’s too tight to cut corners.

But in April, we’re not paid until the 28th! That paycheck has to cover bills that have already come due and cover the $87 Qwest bill due on May 1. It also has to cover half the monthly savings setasides: $337.50. I don’t get paid again until the 9th, when again I set aside half of all the monthly expenses and savings. But this doesn’t cut the mustard: In May I again go unpaid until after my monthly bills come due. Same thing happens in June. And in September. And in October. In every one of those months, I wonder if enough cash will be available to pay my regular bills!

Another consequence of this annoying system is that I never know how much is left over from a month’s worth of pay, making it impossible for me to “snowflake” the Renovation Loan. With bimonthly pay, checks posted on the 1st and the 15th. Each check covered the same two-week period. So, on the 31st, I could look at my checking account’s bottom line. Any amount left after all my expenses were paid was mine. It either went into my diddle-it-away savings or, more recently, it went to snowflake down the Renovation Loan. But now the cash remaining in my account on the 31st has to last me until a week or 10 days into the following month. Who knows whether there’s any disposable money there?

I need to be paid on a bimonthly basis. I finally figured out how to swing that. If my employer won’t pay me bimonthly, I will.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Set up a savings account and a checking account.
  2. Try to get as many of your creditors as possible to bill you after the 20th-as late in the month as possible.
  3. Arrange to have all EFTs taken from the checking account, and pay for all other bills and living expenses from that account.
  4. Make an accurate estimate of all your monthly expenses. For amounts that fluctuate, such as power and water bills, use the largest amounts to figure these estimates.

Starting in a month when you get paid on or very near the 1st:

  1. Have your pay deposited to the savings account. (Or, if necessary, transfer the entire amount from the account that receives it into the savings account.)
  2. On the first of the month (or the payday that comes closest to it) pay yourself 1/2 of the estimated amount of your monthly expenses. Put this in the checking account, which serves as a “cookie jar” to hold funds to pay expenses.
  3. Bills that are paid before the 20th should be covered by this amount.
  4. When your 2nd biweekly check comes in that month, again pay yourself 1/2 the estimated monthly expenses. Try to pay yourself on the 15th. Because twice a year an “extra” paycheck arrives, your “pool” in savings eventually makes this feasible.
  5. Bills that come due after the 20th should be covered by this amount.
  6. On the last day of the month, transfer your monthly savings to whatever instrument you’re using (money market account, mutual fund, stocks & bonds, etc.)*

Now put your entire biweekly paycheck in the savings account as it comes in. Then pay yourself bimonthly from the fund that accrues in the savings account, by transferring the amount you need to live on from savings to checking and the amount you want to save from savings to the desired financial instrument.

The effect of this is that you should always have enough in checking to cover your regular expenses. If any money is left over from your monthly budget, you will see it in your checking account.

But because of the precession of the biweekly pay, over time extra money will also accrue in the savings account. You can determine this leftover amount ONLY in months where you get paid on or near the first. In my case, that’s January and July. It looks as though after about six months of this, something like $1600 of unused money should collect in the account that receives automatic pay deposits.

If you have my arithmetical skills, too, you can start paying yourself a bimonthly salary only in a month where you get paid on or near the first. Otherwise it’s impossible to make the transfer needed to cover the first two weeks of the month in any comprehensible way.

Here’s how this looks, over the second half of 2008:
Green type shows what is in the “Inflow” savings account. Black type shows what gets transferred to checking to cover expenses. I start in July, because we get paid on the 3rd, which is pretty close to the start of the month.

We’re not quite on track to “pay” me on the the 1st and the 15th, because GDU doesn’t cough up the paycheck until the third. In August we do get paid on the 1st. Not only that, but on the 29th we get a so-called “third” paycheck, which is not really three paychecks to cover a single month’s expenses but simply the check that, in a bimonthly world, would have been paid on September 1, arriving five days out of synch with the following month’s billing cycles.

In July, things are pretty tight. If I’m lucky, I’ll have $29 left from my July paychecks. Mercifully, in August a small miracle happens: we get paid on the actual first day of the month. So, that $29 doesn’t have to cover the $87 phone bill. This puts my monthly pay-me system on track. After I’ve paid myself on the 1st and the 15th, I still have just enough cash in the inflow savings account to cover the monthly savings setasides of $675; that amount isn’t actually coming out of the the August 29 paycheck, which now starts to form a “pool” from which I will pay myself bimonthly.

In September, things start to get interesting. After the three paychecks in August, we end up with $1,609 in the inflow savings account. We don’t know how much, if any, of that is “free” money, not committed to paying October bills, it has to stretch until September 12. The September paychecks, due on the 12th and the 26th, are totally out of synch with bill-paying reality, and so there’s no way for an English major to understand what’s what here.

Not until December do we see clearly how this is working out. All the December bills and savings setasides are covered by December 15, with $164 to spare. Then on December 19 another paycheck comes in, bringing the inflow savings balance to $1,684.

But… We see from the payday calendar that GDU cuts the next paycheck on January 2. In other words, January paychecks coincide with the actualities of monthly billing. The January 2 and January 15 checks will cover all January bills, and so that $1,684 is not needed to pay expenses! It amounts to six months’ worth of snowflakes, and it can be used to pay down the Renovation Loan or put into savings. w00t!

Not being an accountant or a mathematician, I have no idea how this works. Evidently forcing bimonthly pay from the biweekly paydays must capture one of the so-called “extra” paycheck every six months. When you disconnect your monthly “pay” from your biweekly pay, somehow you recover the 25th and 26th paychecks that otherwise would have to serve to cover their own two-week periods.

Biweekly paychecks come on or near the first of a month only a couple of times a year. But this is apparently the only time when you can be certain of how much unspent income has accrued.

It’s a damnable nuisance, of course, all the shifting of funds. But this system-pooling biweekly income to pay yourself bimonthly-works to cover your bills reliably. It ensures that the money to pay your recurring obligations will be available when it’s needed.

* Although in Quicken I “pay myself first” by posting transfers into savings and mutual funds on the first of the month, I delay making the actual transfers until the end of the month, so the cash will be there to cover unexpected budget overruns or small emergencies. Posting the transfer at the start of the month shows a balance after the savings setasides, which keeps me from overspending except in emergencies.

6 Comments left on iWeb site:

!wanda

I’m so happy I’m paid monthly.

Thursday, June 19, 2008 – 01:29 PM

Seeking Clarification

I’m confused by some of your terminology… “bi-” means “every other…”, and “semi-” means “twice a…” The title of your article is “Make bi-weekly pay work in a bi-monthly world” which says “Make an every-other-week payday work in an every-other-month world.” I don’t know many people who could get paid every other month and survive! Certainly not me! 🙂

Should that be “Make biweekly pay work in a semi-monthly world” meaning, get paid every other week, when twice a month would be more conducive to bill-paying?

Friday, June 20, 2008 – 08:45 AM

vh

Actually, in current usage “bimonthly” is correct. My Random House Webster’s, for example, defines “bimonthly” both ways: “2. occurring twice a month”; and “5. twice a month, semimonthly.”

A discussion of this usage appears with the entry for the prefix bi-. “Most words referring to periods of time and prefixed with BI- are potentially ambiguous. Since BI- can be taken to mean ‘twice each’ or ‘every two,’ a word like _biweekly_ can be understood as ‘twice each week’ or ‘every two weeks.’ Confusion is often avoided by using the prefix SEMI- meaning ‘twice each’ (_semiweekly; semimonthly; semiannual_) or by using the appropriate phrases: _twice a week, twice each month, every two months, every two years_).”

I usebimonthly to mean “twice a month” because that’s how my employer uses it and it’s how HR people and payroll accountants across the nation use it.

Saturday, June 21, 2008 – 06:30 AM

Sally

I just pay half of my bills each payperiod. I’ve been doing this with online billpay, and I’ve had no problems at all. The only thing it doesn’t work with is my rent. I have to save half of it.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008 – 04:14 PM

PKSublime

Okay I really don’t like your solution very much.There is a better, easier way to do this.
What you do is save ALL your paychecks from month 1 and then pay ALL your bills on the 1st of month 2 that will/are due in month 2.
The concept of “living off last months income” is a great way to operate, and is anthemed by followers of “The YNAB Way” over at http://www.youneedabudget.com./

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 – 01:45 PM

vh

@ Sally: It’s never occurred to me to ask my creditors if they would accept half-payments. Besides, how would you know how much to pay? Creditors send out a bill once a month, not twice a month; and except for the phone company (whose bill is always the same because I don’t make long-distance calls), every statement is different. The power bill ranges from $80 to $180, for example.

@ PKSublime: Unclear how what I’m proposing here differs much from YNAB. Over six months, you would end up with the equivalent of one paycheck residing in your account (a little more, if you spend less than you earn); over a year you’d have a full month’s worth. That would happen because of the payday precession, with no effort on your part. With YNAB, it appears that the amount you would set aside to pay down debt or build savings would have to go to build a month’s worth of extra living expenses. It would take you quite a while to accomplish that. The scheme above lets you start right now, with no waiting period while you build a stash. Personally, I’m put off by the blatant commercialism of YNAB: pay us and we’ll tell you our secrets (which appear to amount to “budget, pay off debts, live within your means, build savings.” Thanks…I’ll figure it out for myself.

Thursday, June 26, 2008 – 05:25 AM

Stop the presses…literally

by

Word on the street has it that The Arizona Republic, the only daily metro newspaper serving the fifth-largest city in the nation, is laying off most of its photographers and much of its editing staff. A few unseasoned reporters will be retained. In the fall, we’re told, the Republic is slated to morph into a tabloid. Those who will staff this downsized entity, the ghost of our right-to-work state’s flagship newspaper, will have no health insurance and a pension plan that will be, shall we say, commensurately downsized. Thus saith the paper’s present owner, the Gannett Corporation.

The Republic, having abandoned journalism years ago, no longer has much of a readership. It’s losing readers even as the population of the Valley grows. There’s a reason for that: it doesn’t publish news.

This is no exaggeration. One year a mayoral campaign came and went with almost no mention of the candidates. Yesterday (we’ll give it this much), its print edition mentioned that unless Our Esteemed Legislators approve a budget within the next two weeks, the state budget will expire and state employees will not be paid on July 3. Having heard this from La Maya and having a vested interest in getting paid on July 3, I went to the Republic‘s online edition and found not…one…word about the possibility that Arizona’s largest employer may fail to pay its workers and that state government is, as we speak, preparing to shut down all nonessential services. The lead online story concerned the recent opening of a new ice cream store.

Turning this formerly major metropolitan newspaper into a throw-away tabloid will put it head-to-head with New Times, which succeeds because it has verve, sass, only the thinnest veneer of journalistic ethics, and lots of advertising. Lots and lots of advertising. New Times is entertaining but devoid of credibility. On the other hand, it does attempt to follow local politics. You can’t believe a word it publishes about local government, but at least it has some words!

Newspapers that abandon their mission to deliver the truth to the public and forget the importance of that mission have nothing to sell. For a long time the Republic has staggered along with dwindling advertising, but as readers lost interest in the paper’s content, advertisers lost interest in its ballooning space rates. Who reads the local newspaper’s classifieds when you can go to Craig’s List? What’s the point of pawing through page after page of irrelevant retail adds to clip a few coupons when you can download what you want from the Web? And why pay to advertise in a newspaper that nobody reads?

I canceled the Sunday Republic when I realized that the only things I was reading were the front page (part of it) and the funny strips; it felt ugly and irresponsible to throw away three or four pounds of advertising to read a half-dozen pages of ephemera. Just the thought of how many trees were pulped only to be tossed directly into the trash disgusted me, and I decided to stop abetting that kind of criminality. Not long after, I realized I’d rather pay to have The New York Times delivered to my house and so canceled the Republic altogether.

It’s a sad development. There’s a reason journalism is called the Fourth Estate. It’s an important part of the polity of a democratic republic. When we cannot get information about what’s going on down at City Hall or over at the State House, we as voters are in the dark. And our path through the darkness, as we have already seen over the past decade, is inexorably leading us toward tyranny.

Getting back on budget

by

[sorry: this is an old post from iWeb. i neglected to change the date on it]

I am broke, broke, y-broke!

The $1,012.53 the vets charged for Anna’s care over the past month and a half ran my budget into the red last month and did it again this month. Every week this month has ended in red ink. For the current week, which began the day before yesterday and runs through the 20th, I’m already $3.09 in the red. And I need groceries, dog food, gasoline, repairs on the irrigation system, and repairs on the pool cleaner. Getting back on budget before my financial structure implodes calls for some serious fiscal strategizing!

Here’s where we are now:

The first step in getting back on track with a budget is to figure out what you absolutely must purchase before the end of the limping budget cycle. Luckily, I have plenty of food in the freezer to carry me over for a week. I’m out of orange juice, but I won’t die without it, and besides, M’hijito has neglected to harvest the Arizona sweets on the tree in his back yard; before the hour is over, whatever fruit is still usable will be in my refrigerator. The repairs can wait-whether they can or not, they’ll have to. One is a minor fix that I tried to do this morning but found my hands were not strong enough to perform; with any luck I can get a male to do this for free. If not, the plants will have to live for a few days without water, or I’ll have to haul a hose around the yard.

So, this leaves us with only two genuinely imminent purchases:

With the van down a third of a tank of gas, there’s no chance I can make five round-trip commutes to the Great Desert University without refilling. A fill-up now exceeds $55, and so if I have to buy more gas between now and the 21st, I’ll be deep in the red. The little dog turns up her nose at Science Diet (which, despite the hype and the vigorous marketing to veterinary practices, really isn’t all that great for dogs-it’s full of meat “meal” [you don’t even want to know what that is!], corn, and brewer’s rice, baleful ingredients one and all). I found a canned food that contains real meat, brown rice, and vegetables, exactly what I would feed if I cooked her food myself, but as you can imagine, it ain’t cheap. Luckily, she doesn’t eat much. She’ll have to make do with the Science Diet I picked up when I got her, which I’ll use to stretch a can or two of fancy dog food. If I run out of quality canned dog food, she can eat cottage cheese with veggies and rice, which I have on hand. So, $55 for gas plus about $7 to $10 for dog food will put me about $68 in the hole at the end of this month.

That’s the best-case scenario. But there’s only five more days to go, and so it COULD happen. I might not even have to spend that much on gas-half a tank purchased on Wednesday or Thursday would take the car back and forth to campus for the rest of the billing cycle and cost about $30. So there’s an outside chance the budget may be only $38 in the red. Only. Argh.

ther expenses are pending. This situation requires me to list upcoming expenses, distinguish what is urgent and what can be put off, and how I will do without them.

So, let’s suppose that between now and next Saturday I manage to restrict spending to two or three cans of dog food and some gasoline. Where exactly will the missing $38 to $68 come from?

One source is the emergency fund. As I’ve remarked before, I keep $500 of my emergency fund in checking, to serve as a “cushion.” So in fact, even if I overspend my $1,500 budget, the cash will be there to prevent a check to American Express from bouncing. I could simply end the month in the red, put it behind me, and try to stay in the black next month.

But I’d rather not eat into the emergency fund unless absolutely necessary. Even though the breathtaking veterinary bills for Anna amount to a budgetary “emergency,” I’m close enough to the black that my regular diddle-it-away savings could cover the budget overrun. In fact, my “play money” savings account contains about $1,400, so I could easily convert the red ink to black right now. I could transfer the $368.53 deficit that ran this week’s apportioned budget into the hole from savings to checking. That would put this week in the black and cause me to stop grinding my teeth about this matter.

However, I’d rather use my diddle-it-away savings for something fun, not to cover the cost of my pet dog’s death. This is particularly so since GDU’s dratted biweekly pay schedule has reduced the monthly play-money savings from $200 a month to $87.50 a paycheck, meaning it took a long time to accrue $1,400.

The most sensible strategy, I think, will be to wait until the billing cycle ends, on the 20th, and then transfer the amount of the overrun from play-money savings to checking. If I manage to keep the red ink to no more than $70, that’s a lot better than a $368 bite. In fact, all I’d have to do is not make one of this month’s biweekly deposits to savings: the $87.50 would more than cover it.

So, to summarize: What are the strategies to deal with budget overruns?

  1. Establish and maintain an emergency fund!
  2. As the budget nears zero, list pending expenditures.
  3. Separate out absolutely necessary spending from purchases that can be put off.
  4. Describe in writing which spending to put off, and write down what exactly you will do to cope without these items or services.
  5. Calculate the amount of your shortfall, after necessary expenditures.
  6. Use discretionary savings to cover the shortfall, to the extent possible.
  7. Fall back on your emergency savings when you have to.