Bye-bye, Bag Lady Syndrome

So I’m sitting in my counting-house entering Friday’s paycheck in an Excel account, when suddenly—ever so belatedly—it registers with me:

One of these diddly little semimonthly community college paychecks is almost as much as my entire month’s nondiscretionary budget.

Yeah. I could cover all of the monthly recurring can’t-get-out-of-it bills with a single net paycheck. Not only that, but my discretionary budget—all other costs except those that are required to keep the power and water running and creditors away from the doorstep—is about the same. Which is to say that when I’m teaching three sections, my measly community college pay alone would cover all my regular costs.

Naaaahhhh….couldn’t be! Out comes the calculator: tap tap tap tap…

Sure could be: the net pay from two paychecks comes to $35 short of my total month’s budgeted expenses. That means that Social Security—almost a thousand bucks!—is mostly gravy.

How did this come about? Three months ago I figured I would be living out of a grocery cart under the Seventh Avenue underpass. How could I have so radically misestimated my cost-to-income ratio?

Well, in the first place, when I started at the community college, I had no way of knowing for sure what my net pay would be. Tax rules are a total mystery to me. Extrapolated from what I’d earned in the fall from two courses, my guess at the net for three sections was significantly less than the actual amount.

Then there’s COBRA. From what I can tell, there’s no way to know what that will cost in any given month, at least here in the State of Arizona, where the Beast has effectively been killed. Since last January, I’ve had four bills for COBRA, no two of which have been the same. COBRA is the largest single item in the expenses list, and it’s impossible to predict. When you don’t know what the bill is going to be, all you can do is budget for the highest amount you can imagine and pray for the best.

And there’s Social Security, whose rules are almost as bizarre as the IRS’s. When you “start” SS in January, you don’t get your first check until February. No, you can’t “start” it in December so you’ll have an income during your first month of unemployment; try that and they’ll count your soon-to-be defunct 2009 salary against you and take the SS money away from you for having committed the crime of earning too much. Because I was forced to take Social Security a year early, thanks to GDU’s layoff activities, in 2010 I come under the government’s earning limitation: every penny more than $14,160 is taxed at a 50% rate—to extract the amount owed, the government withholds an entire month’s SS check, the unused remainder of which you will see (if you’re lucky) the following January.

Well, 14 grand is well under the poverty level. The gross for the two—$14,000 for the part-time teaching and $15,000 for the “unearned” Social Security—also comes to a figure that IMHO qualifies as “poverty.” Because my investment advisor wanted me to forestall taking a drawdown from savings for a year in hopes that during 2010 my investments would recover from the rape of the economic crash, that left me trying to live on 44 percent of my former pay. Significantly less than that—more like 34 percent—if you counted last year’s freelance income and noonlighting income.

So I started out feeling mighty poor. And not knowing what the 2010 take-home from the various sources of cobbled-together income would amount to, it wasn’t evident in January that enough would come in to cover $1,600 worth of expenses. Nor, since in the old regime the discretionary budget was $1,500 a month, was it evident that I could actually buy groceries and live comfortably on about half that.

What to do with these new-found riches?

Before we make an appointment with the style adviser Neiman-Marcus, let’s consider that the freelance teaching income stops in May, just as utility bills climb toward the stratosphere. It doesn’t restart until the end of August. If the only revenue that arrives during the summer is net Social security, each of the three summer months will see a $475 shortfall. So, I’ll need $475 x 3, or $1,425, stashed in savings to see me through the summer.

But that’s only a month and a half of thousand-dollar surpluses. [ahem.] But what we have here is three months of thousand-dollar surpluses. Come summer of 2011, we’ll have nine months of thousand-dollar surpluses.

Gosh.

One way or another, even in 2010, the Year of Penury, I’m looking at about $1,500 that could be saved or spent. Just during the spring semester.

My inclination? Spend. Well, at least spend part of it.

Every time I think of myself sliding into my dotage on the cusp of poverty, I think of My Bartleby, the eccentric woman of my own age I stupidly hired as a secretary. It was hard for me to go in for the kill with Bartleby, because I empathized too much with her. Crazy old ladies have a lot in common. So I think “there but for the grace of God” and contemplate ways to avoid going down her path.

To wit:

• I would like not to live so cheap that my hair looks scruffy and I go around in scroungey-looking second-hand clothes that are out of date, saggy, and baggy.

• I would like not to get so far behind the times that there’s no hope of catch-up, simply because I refuse to update my hardware and software, refuse to plug in to pop culture, pay no attention to what’s going on around me, especially if paying attention costs more than about a buck and a half.

• I would like not to let minor health issues go until they become middling- to major health issues because I’m too cheap to cough up the copay to see a doctor.

• I would like not to be so afraid of spending a few bucks here and there that I bring personal growth (and life) to an end.

So. First off, the hair: last time I went to the $30 hairdresser, he gave me a tuft sticking out of the back of my head and a half-spiked “cap” on top of too-short sides and back, which can be made presentable only by dint of 20 minutes worth of primping in front of a mirror with a hair dryer. Every. single. time I walk into that guy’s salon, I tell him I hate bangs falling down in my face. Every. single. time I walk out, I walk out with bangs falling down in my face.

The $75 hair stylist knew how to cut short hair without bangs, and he knew how to make a style that could be fingered into curls and waves without benefit of hair dryers and strand-scorching curling irons. Today I’m going to a new stylist, closer in than the old guy, about the same price. By the time I’ve added the tip to her $65 charge, it’ll be right up around $75. But it may be worth it. We shall see.

Next: I have got to get some clothes! Day after tomorrow, when I’ll have a free day, it’s off to B’Gauze and Talbot’s in search of something that will fit. Don’t hold out much hope, but at least the search can begin.

Then: entertainment. Ticket purchased for a concert downtown May 1. Then, it’s off to the Botanical Garden for a membership and tickets to Jazz in the Garden, if they have any left.

Alors, it’s a start, anyway. With any luck the clothing stores will have something on sale.

Image: Gypsy woman with her dog. Public domain.