Breakin’ Even!

Well! After teaching four sections this semester (one more than the District permits adjuncts to carry, and anything but a part-time workload), I almost exactly broke even!

That is amazing.

I’ve been drawing about $2,150 a month out of what remains of the emergency savings fund to supplement Social Security, so as to have enough to live on. This fund amounted to about $28,000 when I was laid off from GDU, at the end of 2009. It’s now at about $13,300.

Previously, I was putting everything I earned from the community college into a joint fund to pay the mortgage on the downtown house, until such time as my share for the entire year was covered; then I would give myself the rest. This usually amounted to a month or two of salary that I got to spend on my own living expenses.

This proving too nerve-wracking (I simply could not draw down enough from savings to pay my base expenses), along about the end of the summer, I decided to move my money out of the joint account and back into what I call the “survival savings” fund. Starting in August, I began withdrawing $2100 a month to cover a) my share of that month’s PITI payment and b) living expenses; and instead of paying into the joint fund, I started paying my salary into “Survival Savings.”

This in effect turned Survival Savings into a gigantic sinking fund, holding all income for the purpose of paying the mortgage and my bills.

I engaged this scheme with some trepidation, having no idea how well it would work. But I figured if I went broke, I was gonna go broke anyway. This system is more transparent and simpler than the previous one, which was involved to start with and then complicated further by the dizzying transactions caused by the insurance payments and payouts to contractors for the hail damage.

So. In August, as the fall semester opened, I started with $13,279.99. Today, as the year ends, I finish with $13,301.94, a shortfall of just $21.95.

That means, in effect, that even after paying into the mortgage and refilling the pool and having the oven fixed and buying some kewl outdoor furniture from Pier 1 and double-paying Gerardo one month for a staggering amount of extra month and then again this month for Christmas and buying a $140 crate for Charley, I still just about broke even!

It’s a miracle.

Can I keep it up? Not over the long term.

Next semester I’ll have only three sections. However, I’ll net about $3740 from the state’s last RASL (unpaid sick leave) installment, which will more than make up for the extra class. And I’ll get a kickback from American Express of about $150. That will about cover my expenses between now and May 10, including the unpaid month of January.

Then the gravy train reaches the end of the line. RASL is tapped out in 2012. And the District is cracking down on overloads. Next summer I will get one, count it, (1), $2,400 class to help me through the most expensive season of the year. That will cover expenses for one of three months. The remaining $4,800 will have to come out of my pocket.

After this, if the chair obeys the District’s rules (and he probably will: he’s a pretty straight arrow), I’ll be teaching three and three in the academic year and one section in the summer. And that returns far from enough to pay my bills.

Unless I get the full-time teaching job I’ve applied for (highly unlikely, given my age!), I’ll have to come up with an income stream that will bring in another $6,000 to $10,000 a year. Soon. Very soon.

Whether the plan to make The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc. return enough to support both me and Tina will pan out remains to be seen. It will have to earn a lot more than the 10 grand it made this year to do much more than pay its own overhead. In addition to paying for office supplies, computers, networking expenses, and subcontractors’ fees, it will have to net enough to pay me about $4,000 to $6,000 in salary and dividends.

For this summer, we can subtract the net on the course I’m scheduled to teach, requiring the S-corp to earn only enough to pay me $1,960 to $$3,960 this summer.

Interestingly, that may not be as impossible as it sounds. Funny about Money has started to earn a profit. It’s not much. But then…$1,960 isn’t much, either.

Heh…unless you can’t pay your bills without it….

We have discovered that certain potential clients do not blink at our proposed $60/hour rate. If we can find the clients, The Copyeditor’s Desk may actually be able to support the two of us this year. It won’t make enough to buy health insurance for Tina and the kidlet. But her ex- finally got another job and has put the kidlet on his insurance; and Tina is an artist at fending for herself.

Anyway. For the nonce, at least, it cost me just about $26 from savings to get through the fall semester. Not all hope is lost. Not by a long shot.

🙂

Miraculous sunrise image: Sun Rise at CuaLo. Handyhuy. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.