Coffee heat rising

Angst

Jack Daniels and the Swizzle Stick

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Annoyingly enough, I’ve taken to calling my son’s dog, tentatively named “Jack,” by my idea of his name: jackdaniels.

My poor son. Will there ever be any relief for him?

Jackdaniels is quite the active puppy. He’s been keeping me and Cassie the Corgi busy every living breathing minute between the time I get home from campus and the time M’hijito comes to pick him up, which is often quite a while, because my son regularly puts in 12-hour days.

This has been putting a crimp on my blog-scribbling and paper-grading activities. Clearly something had to be done to distract him.

Today I decided to celebrate the end of my Eng. 101 summer class with a trip to Whole Foods. Though I can’t afford Whole Paycheck, I was hungry and wanted something good to eat and there’s precious little left in the pantry. They had none of the stuff I craved: the sale on $4.50/lb wild crab doesn’t start til tomorrow and they were out of my beloved tuna and salmon poke and I can’t afford their cheeses. So it was on to the Trader Joe’s in the same strip mall, where I snabbed a very fine chunk of ripe brie and some exceptionally nice baby artichokes. And across the parking lot, what should I spot but…a fancy pet store!

Mais certainement!

Jackdaniels has taken to chewing on the kitchen cabinetry, which will never do. So I dropped by to ask if they didn’t have some sort of chew toys that will not choke the dog, and (as I’ve read elsewhere) the salesdude said all the vets were recommending bull pizzle as relatively safe. The product is also called bully sticks. Right. For the sake of our male readers we will not discuss what these objects actually are.

Suffice it to say that the fancy pet store was the Whole Paycheck of the dog world. Bull pizzle is selling for just slightly under the price of gold, which in these panicky times is fairly high. No joke: $45 for a package of the damn stuff!

Well, I did find some six-inch pieces selling at an astonishing $4 apiece. To prevent mayhem and bloodshed, I realized I’d have to get two of them, one for the pup and one for the Queen of the Universe. And remembering how Anna the Gershep could polish off a large chew stick in about 30 seconds, I figured I’d better get two apiece: $16 for four six-inch pizzle sticks.

Hence, across the city with two bags of groceries and the gold-plated dog chews in tow.

Well, it was $16 worth of dog joy! And interestingly, neither dog has been able to destroy one yet. They must be pretty sturdy, because both pooches have been chewing happily on them for the past two hours, and neither has made much progress at consuming them.

So it looks like even though these things are stupidly overpriced, they may at least last longer than your average pig’s ear.

Cuter than cute!

Meanwhile, we’ve been dwelling in Stress City for the past few days. Oh god.

It’s effing hot here in the kitchen, where the dogs and I are penned in to ensure that jackdaniels doesn’t demolish the rest of the house. With the AC set at 80, which is about what I can afford in the summer, it’s 88 degrees here in the kitchen. And humid…sticky, sticky, icky humid. This is August. You don’t need a calendar to know that.

So this is a bit draining and does little for my enthusiasm to grade papers or clean house or work on a blog carnival or do much of anything. But…much must be dealt with.

Tomorrow morning the Mr. Lutz the Trustworthy Plumber is coming over before it gets too, too hot to climb into the attic, there to examine what I expect is a half-assed repair job on the water heater vent. He said he would inspect the other vents, too, although he thinks they’re probably OK because those are hard pipes rather than aluminum ductwork. I wouldn’t put it past the roofer’s bunch, though, to have screwed those up, too.

And I’ll have another little chore for him: at 5:00 this morning when I went out to shovel back the results of last night’s violent windstorm, what should I find but this nice little damp spot off the east side of the patio slab… The spot above it is dog pee, but the large puddle is neither dog pee nor rainwater. Though the north valley was inundated, we in the rain shadow of the North Mountains saw nary a drop last night.

Soooooo….one might reasonably ask, “WTF??? Where is that coming from?”

Well, there’s a hose bib on a standpipe coming off a line that runs (where else?) underneath the KoolDeck-swaddled slab that covers about 550 square feet out there. Uh uh.

Visions of jackhammers dance in my head…

One of my students is an architect, interestingly enough. I asked him what he thought fixing that would entail, and he thought that if it was actually a leak (and what other than a leak could explain yesterday’s HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-DOLLAH WATER BILL!!!!!?????), the water would not have moved in that direction.

Well, we’ll see what the miracle plumber says, assuming he can think through the sound of the cash register jingling in his head.

Damn. I’m beyond being able to cope with any more zillion-dollar emergency bills.

If I have to have the pavement jackhammered out, the plumbing dug up and repaired, the paving relaid, and the hideous KoolDeck smeared all over everything again (what is the appeal of that stuff?), it’s going to cost every penny I earn this summer plus several thousand more. Oh…damn, oh hell, oh damn!

Really. I’ve worked like an animal all summer, devoted weeks of unpaid labor to creating my own CMS in WordPress and Google Docs to get around the flicking NIGHTMARE that is Blackboard, and I’d planned to use the munificent three grand I’m earning to fold into survival savings to delay having to draw down from retirement savings another three months.

And as we see the market swooning once again, we can see that said delay is no longer a “want” but an absolute, positive need. The last time this happened, grâce à our fine political leaders, I lost two hundred grand from my savings. That loss was just about recovered, and now, thanks to the FLICKING STUPIDITY we’ve seen from what passes for our elected leadership, the money is going right back down the drain again.

And so, believe me, the last thing I want to do is pour my summer earnings into the literal drain.

Nor do I want to do what I’m about to do, which is to take off my clothes, go out in the blast-furnace midday sun, and work on the pool; then come back in and start grading student papers.

Still Pouring Out There…

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Geez. It never rains but it pours. So they say.

Paycheck for these past two weeks posted (but not received by my bank until tomorrow): $200 less than expected.

Bill for car repair posted on American Express: $786.58.

I don’t have that much left in emergency savings, so about $90 of it will have to come out of cash flow. But it doesn’t stop there:

Rip-off to register the car: $72.56.

Rip-off for car emission test: $27.75.

Fortunately, exclusive of the unexpected car repair bill, I came in $55 under budget this month, for the first time in recorded memory. So despite the $787 car bill and the $140 in repairs on the pool equipment and the $95 to the electrician to repair the shorted, overheating light switch, and the $140.76 in medical bills not covered by Medicare, I have yet to overdraw my checking account.

Barely. Give it time, though. Today is only the 27th. This month has 31 days. Plenty of time for some new expensive fiasco to occur.

It’s clear now that we won’t be receiving next month’s Social Security checks. Bloody lucky thing I managed to land these two summer classes; tomorrow’s paycheck is just about the amount of a Social Security payment. It will tide me over August.

September, however, is a different matter: I stashed enough in my son’s and my joint account for mortgage payments to cover the summer, but in September I have to start coming up with $717/month again. And if those bastards in Washington haven’t gotten off the dime, I won’t be able to pay it.

Well. I will, but it will mean my savings to survive on for the next year will quickly disappear.

Damn it. Even when I manage to keep day-to-day spending well within the budget, I’m still swimming in red ink!

Image: Rain from a thunderstorm over Fogg Dam. Bidgee. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Making $7,390 stretch for a year…and living decently

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Okay, so just now $7,390 is left of the $28,000 of layoff savings that I entered unemployment with 18 months ago. This little stash, which I found sitting in my various bank accounts as my fine former job wound to a close, has been supporting me, along with Social Security and the irregular pittance I earn as an adjunct professor of English, while I try to delay having to draw down my IRA and brokerage accounts.

It’s lasted longer than anyone thought it would, and with any luck at all, it’s about to last another year.

The other day I revisited my ultracomplicated cash flow scheme, largely because I need to find a way to extract more monthly spending money from this Pushmi-Pullyu. The truth is, I’m not giving myself enough to live on comfortably. It was tight when I started a year and a half ago, but the increases in food and fuel costs (not inflation, right?), along with a never-ending slew of unplanned expenses, lately have made it impossible to stay on budget. I’ve been allocating $800 for discretionary expenses (a total of $2050 a month for all expenses, discretionary and fixed), when the fact is I really need something more like $1,500, for a total of around $2,750.

Unless a miracle happens (for example, I land that one-year-only job or, more likely, win the lottery), not only am I never going to earn any more than the $19,200 I’m making this year, my earned income actually is going to drop $2,400, because of the recently announced tightening of the noose around the adjuncts’ necks.

That means, I guess, the allocation from this serendipitous little “survival fund” will have to be adjusted.

Also, I’d like to simplify my bookkeeping.

What I have been doing is when money comes in, I transfer some of it to the joint account from which M’hijito and I pay the mortgage on the submerged house, transfer some of it to a self-escrow account for paying insurance and tax bills, transfer some into a short-term emergency and diddle-it-away fund, keep some of it in my checking account, and transfer $1060 from the survival fund to make up the shortfall between income and outgo. This complex shuffle no longer suffices to cover expenses. Way complicated!

So, I’ve cooked up something slightly different. In some ways, it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other (or, could we say, robbing Peter to pay Paul?). But it’ll give me a little bit more money—raising the discretionary budget to about $1,100 most (but not all) months—and the process will be simpler. I can’t afford the amount I actually need, but even a little increase will help.

Instead of moving money from Survival Savings to checking in amounts that supplement Social Security and teaching  pay, I’m going to go the other way around: move every penny of income—Social Security, teaching, bank heists, windfalls—from checking to Survival Savings. Then, once a month, I’ll pay myself $2,300. If any cash is left from the previous month’s budget, I’ll just “top up” the checking account to reach a base figure of $2,300.

This gives me a raise of about $250 a month, which I hope will cover the increase in routine expenses.

The problem with figuring out whether this will work and what it will do to the Survival Fund’s longevity is the extreme irregularity and unpredictability of adjunct income. From pay period to pay period, I rarely know what my check is going to hold. One week I can get $300, and two weeks later it’ll be $800 or $1,000, with no clear rhyme nor reason. HR seems not to know how to figure out what one will be paid, and not being an accountant, I can’t even make an educated guess. All I know is that during the summer when I most need extra money, my teaching pay drops into the basement, and during the month between fall and spring semesters I get nothing.

The only way to project the effectiveness of this scheme—and the length of time the Survival Fund will last—is to enter 2010-11 pay amounts into a spreadsheet showing how the new transfer scheme will work.

The upshot is surprisingly positive. Well…all things considered. Transfers into and out of Survival Savings  look like this:

If my amazingly tedious calculations are correct, Survival Savings will run out in August 2012. At that time, I’ll have to cash in a whole life policy; the post-tax balance from that will probably stretch another year or 18 months. After that…well, let’s hope the stock market is doing OK, because at that point I’ll have to start drawing down investments.

During the winter break and the month or so of summer that I’ll have no income, I’ll have to drop my living-expenses budget back to its present level, $2,090. This will be difficult next summer, because utilities are so high during the heat and because, as we’ve observed for the second summer running, everything goes wrong when you can least afford it. However…that comes under the heading of tough nougies.

If all this comes to pass as estimated (a very big If, indeed), then I should be able to live adequately and pay my share of the mortgage without exhausting Survival Savings until a year from this August. Might even be able to stretch it out for another month or two, if I can keep expenses significantly under $2,300 for several of the cooler months. That’s not unreasonable; when nondiscretionary bills are at their lowest, I can have a surplus of $300 or $400. Four of those would keep that $7,390 grubstake going through September.

Obviously, I’m not thrilled at the precariousness of this system. On the other hand… I feel like it’s really not too bad. If in fact the insurance payout will last another 18 months or so, then I will have succeeded in pushing back the time I’ll have to draw down investments for four years after Canning Day.

Those investments have about recovered their former, pre-Crash glory. Assuming our esteemed leaders don’t bring on another market crash with their grandstanding shenanigans, a 4 or 5 percent drawdown plus Social Security (assuming, again, that it still exists in 2013 or so) should cover my expenses and pay the mortgage—without benefit of flakey part-time teaching income.

Clean-up Day

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The late great dust storm left an astonishing mess. And nice timing: The day I bring home 150 student papers to grade (yes!), I get distracted by a good four hours of shoveling mud out of the pool, two trips to the pool shop to keep Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner staggering along (to the tune of $70), an hour of scraping dust up off the floors…my god.

I’m so tired I’m physically sick.

It’s 9:30, I have another 75 papers to read between now and 6:15 tomorrow morning, and I give UP. There’s just no way I’m going to get through all that stuff.

Decided to opt dusting the furniture (and the baseboards, and the walls, and the cabinetry, and the appliances, and the lampshades, and the fans, and…) in favor of microfiber-ragging up the tiles and vacuuming the garage floor, since they were gritty underfoot. There’s so much dust in the air, it will take several days for it to settle out. But settle it will: all over the furniture, the baseboards, the walls, the etc.

So much dirt is still hanging in the atmosphere that, as I was driving up to campus this morning, it was shrouding the hilltops like fog or low-flying clouds. But neither fog nor cloud is what this stuff is. If you linger outdoors, a layer of fine, scratchy grit settles on your skin. Work up a sweat (as I spent the entire afternoon doing), lick your lips, and along with the salt you get a mouthful of crunchy stuff.

So I figured it would be better to just wait until it all settles out than to clean and then have to clean again.

But the pool: that had to be dealt with. What a mess!

Looked like someone had dumped about half a wheelbarrow of dirt in there. Mud rippled across the bottom like sand at the seashore, dusted the walls, piled up in a dune at the deep end.

Started working at dawn, as soon as there was just enough light to grope around. So much dirt lay on the bottom that I didn’t see the wads of devil pods under there. Ran the pump long enough to skim off the floating debris; then pulled out the skimmer basket, dipped Harvey in the drink, and plugged him in.

Took about 10 minutes to bring him to a dead stop. And to push the filter’s pressure gauge to 22 psi.

Backwashed, recharged the filter. Pulled Harvey out and found he was gagging on devil pods and strappy leaves. Put him in the back of the car.

On the way home from the interminable classes, took him by Leslie’s. The manager discombobulated him, cleaned him out, replaced a gear box (which I doubt needed to be replaced…I don’t trust that guy), and charged me $70. Another unexpected, unaffordable little surprise bill.

Back at the house, attached the bonnet to the garden hose, sucked all the pods and other debris off the bottom, put a spray attachment on the hose and swept down the walls as best as I could, reattached the rejuvenated Harvey. He waddled s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y across the bottom, barely moving. Something wrong, but not having time to think about it, decided to let him run a few hours while I graded papers.

Read one batch. Looked back out there: Harvey is at another dead stop.

Haul him out of the pool, schlep him back to Leslie’s. Guy says there’s really nothing wrong with Harvey that another $90 repair wouldn’t fix. He says probably the filter is clogged and needs to be backwashed.

I say I’ve already backwashed this morning.

He says one of his customers had to backwash three times.

Shit.

I plod back to the house. PSI is only 12 pounds or so…about normal. The filter does not need to be backwashed.

So I attach the manual vacuum to the hose, after engaging in a lengthy fight with the in-line leaf catcher, one of the most annoying inventions known to pool-going humankind. Clog the vacuum hose. Get it working. Takes about an hour to vacuum the mud off the walls and floor.

By then, yes, the filter indeed is straining again.

Backwash thoroughly. Run and run and run the water into the alley until it finally starts to run clean.

By now I’ve drained the pool almost to the skimmer basket. When I go to pour some DE in there to recharge the filter, the pump starts to cavitate.

Shit, shit, shee-ut!

Abort, abort abort! Shut down the pump before it sucks too much air in. Drop the hose in the pool and let it run full-bore, about 45 minutes.

Fire up the pump again. Bleed off the air. It’s running OK…at 15 PSI.

Ducky.

This means that before long (as in probably less than a week) the Leslie’s service dude is gonna have to come out here and take the whole damn thing apart, haul the heavy filter out to the alley, deconstruct it, wash all the filter pads (illegally in the alley), put it all back together, and recharge it.

I just had that done a month ago. It costs $120. One shouldn’t have to do that kind of procedure more often than every six months to a year.

So now we have $120 + $70; that would be another $190 this month, on top of the various other unexpected nasty bills that are rolling in while I have no income.

All told, I’d say I worked about four hours cleaning the pool, starting at 4:30 a.m. An hour on the house. Four hours of standing in front of a classroom starting at 7:00 a.m. Ninety minutes or two hours driving back and forth and dickering with the Leslie’s store. And I didn’t keep track of the time spent reading the 75 papers I’ve managed to get through.

Ugh. Life in Paradise!

Car: To Buy or Not to Buy…

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Well, the verdict on the car is it’s leaking oil from the head gasket (or something like that, which I’m not very clear about) in addition to needing a new timing belt. To keep it running is going to cost around $1,200 or $1,300.

Rather more than I’d like to spend on a car that’s well over 11 years old.

I have enough money in savings to buy a new vehicle, if I don’t go overboard. However, this just does not feel like the time to go out and drop fifteen or twenty grand on a car. On the other hand, with permanent unemployment a fact of life, no time is the time to go out and drop fifteen or twenty grand on a car.

On the third hand, I know the clunk is not going to run forever, and sooner or later I’m going to have to give up and buy a new car.

The issues are more complex than they seem on the surface:

Money

Before I was laid off, I had a Vanguard short-term corporate bond fund in which I’d saved more than enough for the next car purchase. That piggy-bank was raided when M’hijito and I bought the downtown house, which is now so deeply underwater that it looks like we never will get out from under it. Basically, everything we put into that house is gone, including a large chunk of the car-buying fund.

When GDU canned me, I consigned what remained of that money to my financial managers, who invested it intelligently. So, now that the market has revived a little, there’s just about enough to buy one more modestly priced car.

The Market

The stock market is on its way down. I really would like not to pull around $15,000 out of the market on the down-tick.

Taxes

However, the new accountant tells me that 2012 is the last chance I’ll get to withdraw that money without taking a tax wallop. The dividend tax will kick back in at the beginning of next year, and so if I want to use my savings to buy a car, I need to do it before the end of 2011.

The vehicle won’t run more than another few weeks without major repairs, and so I actually need to do this pretty quick, if I’m going to do it.

Insurance and Registration

I called The Hartford to see what buying a new car will do to my auto insurance bill. Add about $420 a year is what it’ll do.

To register a new car in Arizona costs $370. Although that amount dwindles as the car ages, it doesn’t drop fast enough to make the cost affordable, not for a very long time.

Right now I self-escrow enough from my monthly income to cover the annual insurance bill. However, the amount I set aside is not enough to cover the outrageous cost of new-car registration. The annual registration and emissions fees for an 11-year-old junker are so low I can pay them out of pocket; if I buy a new car, I’ll have to start self-escrowing enough to cover the new tax bill as well as the larger amount for insurance.

($420 + $370)/12 = $65.83 a month

I am just making ends meet on my piddly little scrabbled-together income. The truth is, I’m spending more than I earn almost every month, because every goddamn month some new unexpected expense comes up that causes me to go over budget. And “budget” = every after-tax penny that hits my bank account.

To save $66 a month on gas, I’d have to buy a Prius. The trade-in on the Dog Chariot is not enough to make it possible for me to afford a Prius. Nor am I even faintly interested in repeating my friends’ experience of having to pony up $3,000 for new batteries after five and a half years.

Thus I’m looking at something like a Hyundai Sonata, a Hyundai Elantra (too small for safety in this city, really, and uncomfortably low to the ground for an old lady to be climbing in and out of), or a Hyundai Tucson. The Sonata gets about 24 mpg in town; 35 on the highway. The Tucson, the Elantra, and Toyota’s RAV4 all get similar mileage: about 22/28. My car, in its decrepitude, registered 20 mpg on the last fill-up. IMHO the desired vehicles don’t do that much better than the Dog Chariot…certainly not enough better to save $66 a month on gas.

Honestly, I don’t know where an extra $66 a month is going to come from. Every time I cut expenses—which I just did, by shifting the cost of the DSL to the S-corporation, which pays for it with before-tax funds that cost me money to access otherwise—the cost of living goes up by just about the amount I save. Mostly it’s the cost of blindsiding, actually: the nasty little surprises never seem to stop, and they’re always worst when living costs are highest, during the summer months.

Jeez. I could not believe the $300 the damn Medicare would not cover. Did you realize Medicare does not cover what its bureaucrats regard as “preventive” care? So if you go in for a routine physical, most of the costs, except for some of the blood tests, are not covered? This means that you get to wait until you develop symptoms of, say, cardiac failure or diabetes, before you can have the treatment needed to prevent astronomically expensive medical costs, which of course Medicare will then have to pay. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Well. Back to trying to make sense of the problem at hand. We have the issue of…

Timing

When I started out buying cars, I realized I couldn’t easily afford to make car payments out of cash flow. So I snowflaked and snowballed and hustled to pay off the loan on the Camry that I purchased a year or two after I divorced, and then I started saving money toward the next car. I actually saved enough in that short-term corporate bond fund to cover more than one car.

Then I got the thousand-dollar-a-day dog, who was given to sitting on the back seat of the Camry, sticking her nose between my head and the driver’s seat window, and shrieking into my ear. By the time I’d get out of the car, my ringing ears literally hurt.

To avoid losing my hearing (and throttling the dog), I decided to get a larger vehicle, which would position her further back from my head. The Camry was only about six years old at the time.

My son needed a functioning vehicle; he was driving a car his dad had gotten him in high school, and it was falling apart. So instead of trading in the Camry, I gave it to M’hijito.

This meant I used a large chunk of the car-buying fund for the Dog Chariot.

Before I did that, the car fund contained enough to buy not one but two cars. At the time I bought the Camry, I figured I could drive it for ten years, carrying me to 2004: age 59. The next car would then run until I was 69; the final car I could afford from that fund would run until I was almost 80. At that point, if I lived that long enough (there’s a good chance I won’t), it would be about time to quit driving. If by some miracle I was still living, the theory went, I would buy a second-hand car to run the two to five years left in my driving career.

When I gave the Camry to my son after six years of ownership, I torpedoed that plan.

What this means today is that if I buy a new car now, in 2011, it will be ready to crap out in 2021. I’ll only be 76 then: I should have another five to ten years of driving time left, assuming my health holds. But by then I won’t have any cash to spend on a new car, because I will have used it up on the car I buy this year.

So, in that light, it’s in my interest to keep the Tankmobile rolling for another five years. Chuck the Wondermechanic says it should run another 50,000 to 60,000 miles; since I put about 10,000 miles a year on a car, that would fill the bill.

Salesmen

I just dread going into a car dealership and getting sheared by some crook. And I know that’s exactly what’s going to happen. In the past, I’ve dealt with those people by proxy: through a car broker. He would apply his savvy and his male voice to extract a fair price from the Toyota sleazes, and I would not have to go through the “I’ll have to talk to my manager” torture.

The broker is retired now.

Costco and the credit union both have auto purchasing services. It’s unclear how much you save off the bottom line, but it looks like a take-it-or-leave it deal. The amount Costco claims is the price is about two grand more than Edmond publishes, so that smells a little funny. You have to go through their dealers, and you have to give up your phone number, which means you get on their phone list, which means you’ll never stop getting soliciting phone calls.

The Earthquake

Japanese vehicles are in short supply, a situation expected to last until the end of 2011 (at least). This means prices of Toyotas, Nissans, and the like—if you can even find one—are through the roof.

Hyundai is manufactured in Korea, although you can be sure that company has been using parts made in Japan. That factor and the increased demand for alternative Asian cars probably also will drive the price of the proposed Sonata, Elantra, or Tucson.

Where the Repair Money Would Come From

The cash to buy a new vehicle would come out of the new-car-buying fund, which presently resides in the stock market.

But the cash to pay for repairs will come out of my bank account, which, assuming I get a decent tax refund next April, holds  just about enough to delay my having to start a monthly drawdown from savings for about 18 months. At least, it did until the dental and medical bills came along. I think we’re down to about 16 months now. Another $1,300 bill will shave a month and a half off that, hastening that particular day of reckoning.

On the other hand, obviously drawing $15,000 out of savings to buy a car now does nothing to keep me from drawing money out savings. It may be better to take the money out of cash flow and let the future take care of itself.

But on that third hand, if I don’t take the money out of the market in 2012, I’ll end up paying dividend taxes on it, which could be around 20 percent. That will not leave enough to cover the cost of another car!

Aaaaaauughhhhhh!

I guess I could take the money out in December (by which time, if we’re lucky, the market may have recovered from its latest swoon), stash it in a CD, and let it sit there until the clunk falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay.

I don’t know. Well…yes, I do. It’s four in the morning. I’ve been up since 1:00 a.m., and it’s time to go back to bed.