Coffee heat rising

Angst

A Dark Glimmer of Hope

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Is it possible for a glimmer to be dark? Here’s what I mean…

I consider the prospect of advanced old age to be extremely dim. You’re old, you’re sick, you hurt all over your body, and you’re alone. Because our culture does not promote caring for aged adults en famille, you’re probably going to spend the last years of your life in an institution—at best a life-care community that provides a simulacrum of independence, at worst a nursing home that’s really an expensive prison for the infirm and the frail. I’m not looking forward to it. Indeed, I so don’t look forward to it that I quietly hope not to live more than another ten or, at most, fifteen years.

Last night some choir friends invited me to join them as a guest at a meeting of the church’s social group for the radically aged. It was something to do…well, it fit in with the new scheme to get out of the house. So I went to dinner with them at the church.

It started out as a quiet evening. Most of the folks there were pleasant enough but reserved; they looked like they felt less than thrilled to be there but, like me, had nothing better to do. After a while, though, perhaps under the influence of a little wine, the people at my table started to chat. Turned out they had interesting things to say not only about their own wide experiences but about current events and phenomena. So it turned out to be a nice enough thing to do.

What struck me about the group was that we had a roomful of very elderly people—most, I’d guess, were in their 80s—who are living in their own homes. Unlike my father, who checked himself into a life-care community called Orangewood immediately after my mother died (he had been lobbying her to go there before she fell ill, but she resisted), none of these folks seemed to feel they need the shelter of an institution to get on with their waning lives. Nor do any of them appear to be dependent on their adult children. They’ve managed to preserve their autonomy in various ways, and evidently those ways are working.

I used to think my father could have engineered most of Orangewood’s benefits at a lot less cost without having to give up his freedom. For example:

• He could have moved from his house into a smaller apartment or condo, eliminating yard care and reducing the amount of housework.

• For a very reasonable price, he could have hired a housekeeper to clean said smaller space once every two weeks, the same frequency he got at the old-folkery.

• He could have stocked his freezer and refrigerator with prepared meals from Costco and Trader Joe’s, as these folks reported doing. This would eliminate the need to go to a communal dining hall every day for a bad meal of starchy, salty, sugary steam-table food.

• For what Orangewood cost by the month, he could have hired a taxicab to schlep him from pillar to post every day of his remaining life, mooting the concern about not being able to drive in old age.

• Orangewood had hobby rooms, a pool, and a limited array of other small amenities. But he already lived in Sun City, whose amenities by comparison are vast. And, for residents, free: no need to fork over an “endowment” of your entire life’s savings.

The only advantage Orangewood provided, for the $30,000 buy-in fee and the $1,000+ monthly fee, was guaranteed access to a decent nursing home. Unhappy experience showed that, at least in the Phoenix area, getting access to even vaguely acceptable nursing care when you actually need it is damned near impossible. Consequently, it does make sense to put oneself in line for a nursing home well in advance of need. However…the trade-off that you have to make for the privilege is huge.

Some time in the near future, I’m going to have to think about unloading this house and moving someplace that requires lots less maintenance. I’d like to wait until the real estate market turns around, if it ever does. M’hijito and I will have to figure out what to do about the upside-down investment we made before I can do anything. And I’d like to wait until my son decides where he’s going to be if and when he finishes his proposed graduate program. If he goes back to San Francisco, then I probably would be better off moving to Sun City than staying in the decrepifying central districts of Phoenix. Sun City is safer, it has more amenities for the elderly, and the surrounding infrastructure is newer and more upscale.

But those concerns aside, finding a bunch of really older people who are managing to take care of themselves just fine, thank you, is encouraging.

Image:

Diego Grez, “My Grandfather.” Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license

Some changes made tooodayyy….

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Whew! What a week this has been! I about swooned under the workload, was reduced to tears this morning while contemplating my $448 (!) paycheck, finally came to and decided that there’s gotta be some financial and sanity-preserving changes made around here. Today!

Awoke at 3 a.m., stumbled across the hall into the office, and plopped in front of the computer, there to resume editing the copy that wore me to a frazzle last night. By 9:00, the phone was ringing, the e-mail binging, and neither Cassie nor I had had a bite to eat. Well, I swallowed a fake Pepcid around 4, but I don’t suppose that counts as “food,” eh?

Another bouncing young psychologist has found me and has been clinging to my skirts (well, blue-jean cuffs) as she struggles her way through the grueling process of applying for a clinical internship. This is a gawdawful rite of passage that happens as they’re trying to wrap  up the dissertation and engaged in research projects or assistantships. The competition for internships is so fierce and the standards so high that they live in fear of being turned down, so they churn out dozens of application packages, which are large and filled with arcane technical reports intended to show what they can do. Each package is prefaced with an elaborate cover letter, exquisitely tailored to its target institution, which is supposed to be two pages long but which requires so much information that squeezing it in to two pages is excruciating.

This project would be torment for a native speaker. But if the soon-to-be doctor’s first language is something other than English, the challenge is just horrific.

So I’ve been struggling with the client all week. Where I work 14 to 16 hours a day, she works 24. Last night we both collapsed into our respective sacks on our respective sides of the country at about the same time.

Meanwhile the li’l 101s are shoveling incomprehensible papers in this direction. Twenty narratives, penned by authors who express a certain puzzlement at the instructions, reside on the Blackboard server awaiting my attention.

Later!

This morning after reading a couple more client documents in their second or third iterations, I was forced to pay the AMEX bill. This caused me to look at my dismal finances and to be reminded of a few inconvenient truths; to wit:

• I’ve already eaten $1,173 into my Absolute Catastrophe savings, and there’s no end in sight.
• The $265 pool maintenance bill did nothing to help that situation.
• A paycheck of $448 does nothing to help the situation, either.
• Nor does reading and rereading and re-rereading vast swaths of arcana at $4.50 per single-spaced page (don’t ask!).
• Although some pay periods bring in plenty of cash to pay the bills, many do not.
• The combination of eight-week and sixteen-week sections magnifies this phenomenon no end.
• It drives me screaming bat-shit crazy not to know from month to month how much net pay will come in.
• Three months without teaching pay in the summer and another month without pay in midwinter are more than the money left over from decent pay periods will cover. Over 12 months, I’m running at a loss.
• By the time I’ve worked from three or four or five in the morning till ten or later at night, I’ve racked up about 50 cents an hour for my elaborately refined skills.
• The scheme to defer drawing down 4 percent of retirement savings for a year or two—or preferably till I reach age 70—comes under the heading of “forlorn hope.”
• Sitting in front of a computer moving little other than my fingers from before dawn till long after dusk is making me flicking miserable.
• The stress of worrying about how I’m going to make ends meet is making me physically sick.

This stuff has gotta stop.

Yesterday at the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the gents started talking about travel and play and life, the universe, and all that. The general consensus, led by Jerry Rose—a former teacher who decided there was more to life than teaching and so went into the travel business—was that you’d better live life now, because there may not be a later. This conversation was happening after I’d put in two hours of work before leaving the house at 6:30 a.m. to head over to the confab…

Listening to them talk, I thought, I need a life!

First off: get rid of the money worries. It’s time to give up on trying to preserve and build capital. Called the esteemed financial manager and arranged a meeting. Trotted over to his office.

There I explained that I need a minimum of $1,093 a month, net. Combined with the munificent $957 a month from Social Security, this will cover my basic bills, even in the hottest, most utility-heavy summer.

No problem, said he. This can be accomplished with a 3 percent drawdown. Since my retirement investments, which he and his colleagues have put into a wide variety of instruments (some of them calculated to be inflation-protective), are earning between 5 and 7 percent just now, he notes that this should not eat into principal. He remarked that I could draw down 4 or 5 percent without causing any harm.

With a base, steady income of $2,050, anything I earn through teaching, editing, or blogging is pure gravy. It makes a $448 paycheck look good! In a month, that’s an extra $896 on top of what I need to live!

Eight hunnert and ninety-six dollars would buy a lot of clothes at J. Jill’s. It might even take me to Santa Fe for a weekend. 😉

Knowing from the git-go that there’s going to be enough cash in my checking account to pay the bills is a huge relief. And it’s mighty nice to know that I can get there without leaving myself a pauper at the age of 90, should I live that long.

Welp, money may not buy happiness, but it’s about to buy a nice chunk of stress relief. What this means is that I don’t have to teach two or three sections of composition a semester. Hell, I don’t have to teach any sections if I don’t feel like it.

Whatever I do earn teaching can go to paying the mortgage on our upside-down house, to setting aside some money toward the next car (which I’m going to have to buy one of these days), and to buying something nice for myself and M’hijito now and again. Probably I needn’t teach any more than one section to pull that off. I’m thinking what I’ll do is limit my course load to two and then just take whatever comes along. If our chair comes up with a summer session course for me, that will be nice. If he doesn’t, that’s fine, too.

So, that should help a great deal.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with this life I’m shaking free.

Image:

Charles Sprague Pearce, Detail from Labor mural in lunette from the Family and Education series by Charles Sprague Pearce. North Corridor, Great Hall, Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Public domain.

Busted, Disgusted, and Cain’t Be Trusted…

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Welp, my pay statement went online this morning. Thanks to PeopleSoft’s accursed lagging pay system, it only goes to the 15th. So I don’t get paid for this past week of teaching two sections.

The fine grand total? $448.87.

With Social Security confiscating an entire month’s pay for the crime of earning enough to owe $340 in extra taxes, I had to eat way into my catastrophic emergency fund to pay this month’s bills—and this month isn’t over! Next month SS will deduct $222 instead of $111 for Medicare, leaving me with just barely enough to cover basic living expenses…assuming PeopleSoft bestirs itself to pay out what the College will owe me for both November pay periods. I’m $70 in the black right now, if you don’t count the fact that I transferred money from tax & insurance self-escrow savings to get that way, but I’m going to have to come up with about $555 to cover food and gasoline charged on AMEX. So in fact at the moment I’m $485 in the red.

Truth is, I couldn’t have made it anyway. The amount I transferred out of tax & insurance savings was $18 more than the amount of my net Social Security income.

Except for one lunch out and $5.88 for some gardening supplies, I’ve bought nothing other than food, gasoline, and a couple of small pool maintenance items. We had the hottest September on record, the power bill was $174, probably low compared to what others around here pay—while my neighbors’ units thump way 24/7, I sit in my house and swelter all day, turning the air-conditioning down to 79 at night so I can sort of sleep.

In November, by transferring over the second of three monthly prorations of net summer stipend money and pushing the accounting for October AMEX charges forward a month (this month’s bill isn’t due until the 11th), I’ll just have enough to pay bills. It’s robbing Peter to pay Paul again—October’s charge account bills should be paid with October income, not with November income. But if I buy nothing but food and gasoline in November—say goodbye to Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas gifts—by the end of November I should have caught up. In December I will not get two full paychecks, and so I’ll sink below the waves again then.

This is happening because the long summer with no teaching income drew the excess that I collected through the spring semester of penny-pinching down to almost nothing. Income from one course in the first eight weeks of the fall semester, even though paychecks were doubled up because that course extended over eight weeks instead of sixteen, was not enough to cover expenses, and so the amount available to spend dwindled into the negative numbers.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to go to the doctor. Six weeks of self-medicating and waiting have not helped whatever ails me. I have no idea what that’s going to cost, but I’m afraid that anything will be more than I can afford. Whatever expenses come from that also will have to come out of savings. Plus any tests or treatment that require time away from the classroom will result in pay being docked.

Adjunct teaching plus Social Security just simply won’t support me. I’m going to have to start drawing money out of retirement savings, which at this point is still about as contraindicated as contraindicated can get.

Well, I guess I should start looking for some sort of work that will pay a pittance year-round. I can answer phones and do secretarial work. With the arm out, I can’t stock shelves or do any other very physical work. I need about $20,000, but that’s what full-time secretarial work pays around here. If you can get it.

Getting through a Social Security-free month

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Despite the late, great annoyance of having Social Security confiscate an entire month’s SS income in direct contradiction of what two of its workers said would happen, it looks like October will pass without too much disaster. I’ve managed to scrounge together some cash by combining last spring’s American Express kickback (which, mercifully, I’d stashed in a savings account and so not diddled away) with part of the summer stipend the college paid me to develop this fall’s online magazine writing course.

When it looked like I would only be teaching two sections this fall, one at a time(!), I’d planned to pay the saved stipend to myself over the four months of the fall semester, prorating it so as to provide what I’d get from teaching three sections.

Pay for a semester-long course disbursed over an eight-week short session, obviously, would amount to paychecks equivalent to teaching two sections over sixteen weeks. Not awful, but not enough.

Well. Yes: awful.

I’d figured that if I spread that stipend money over the semester, I’d have about the same as what I’d earn teaching three sections this fall. However, in September I had enough to get by, partly because we had a mild July and utility bills were lower than planned. So I just left that month’s prorated stipend payment in savings. Thank goodness! That allowed me to prorate the chunk of money over three months instead of four, giving me a monthly disbursal of $641.

Without the Social Security income, ordinary cash flow will not provide enough to get by in October. It wouldn’t under the best of circumstances, but…as usual, when you’re broke everything breaks. The most recent storm has cost $100 so far—Gerardo and his sidekick spent three hours yesterday afternoon cleaning up the blanket of debris that was spread over every square foot of my quarter-acre lot. I managed to get most of the crap out of the pool, but now the filter’s clogged. I’m out of diatomaceous earth and so will have to drop another unplanned $20 on that, so that I can backwash the pool. When I backwashed briefly yesterday, the backwash hose burst in three places, spraying me and half the yard with dirty, DE-mudded water, so now I’ll have to buy and install another hose. The electric bill hasn’t arrived yet, but it will be astronomical: last month was the hottest September on record, and it was so humid that I couldn’t keep the thermostat at its usual 84 degrees all day.

I hadn’t planned on having Gerardo come over this month—the storm changed that penny-pinching scheme. And I hadn’t planned on having to get another haircut this month—the new hair stylist, who took the place of the other new hair stylist who did such a great job but who immediately flew the coop, isn’t skilled enough to do a short style that lasts two months. So that’s $150 off the top, as it were…and we’re just one week into the month. Ugh!

Over this penurious summer, I’ve been eating out of the freezer and off the pantry shelves, and so the larder is about bare. Yesterday I spent $113 at Costco, and pretty quick I’ll have to buy more to restock the staples and frozen stash.

OK, so there’s $641 from the re-prorated summer stipend. Sifting through the savings account where that was stashed, I realized I’d never spent the $333 that came in from the Costco AMEX cash “reward” last spring. Actually, I’d stashed it to cover taxes and insurance, after I realized that the $300/month self-escrow I’d been making last year would not cover the jump in homeowner’s and car insurance, on top of property tax on a valuation far in excess of the house’s real value. The AMEX kickback went in there and I jacked up the self-escrow to $325, figuring that amount would cover the 2010 bills. Maybe.

However, this year the county cut property taxes, bringing them more in line with the actual value of Arizona real estate, which at the moment is about nil. So I figured I could raid that $333 and let the future bills take care of themselves. Thanks to the startling cost of Medicare and Social Security’s mandate that “early” retirees live in poverty, my medical expenses will come in well over 7.5% of 2010 income. So I should get a tax refund next April—that can help to cover the insurance and property tax.

Amazingly, $333 plus $642 comes to exactly the amount of a net Social Security payment: $975!

So, if no more unplanned expenses come in this month (har! this is only the 7th!), I should get by. Maybe.

The problem is, I have no idea what my salary will be and can only  make an estimate. It’s a rare day when two successive adjunct paychecks are the same. But if I’m right, there should be enough to make it through October.

November will be another matter. The government is withholding not one but two months’ worth of Medicare payments in November, since obviously if you don’t get paid in October you have nothing for them to engross the Medicare Part B premium from. So that will cut my net income by $111 right off the bat, merry Christmas to one and all. I’ll be buying precious few Christmas presents for M’jihito, and I probably won’t be able to afford the usual Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts.

Speaking of feasts, the choir director informed us last night that we’re expected to show up at the annual fund-raising shindig. The dinner is a hundred bucks! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that. I don’t have a hundred bucks to spend on dinner—the $20 donation I made toward the altos’ contribution to the silent auction was more than I could afford, with no Social Security coming in and no real idea what I’m going to earn from my laughable “salary.” Guess I’ll just lay low and pretend I didn’t hear him.

Last year he footed the bill for my dinner. But I really don’t feel comfortable about that and most certainly don’t feel it can happen more than once. Oh well.

Jeez…it’s getting late. Almost 6:00 a.m. Gotta run!

Auughhh!

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No time to write this morning. Substitute post: an e-mail exchange…

Sunday, August 29, 1010, 8:48 p.m.
Funny to Tina

Annoying end to a hassle-filled week. Went down to my son’s house w. the little dog in tow. He fixed a wonderful dinner.

Having been up since 2:00 a.m., I thot I’d stop in the park in the way home, exercise the dog for a few minutes, then come back to the house and fall face-forward in the sack. You can sense this coming, eh…? Naturally, when the dog and I climb back into the car after a frolick in the park, the goddamn thing won’t start!

Dead battery. Sunday night.

I figure to walk to my friend La Maya’s house and ask her to call her AAA (which I can’t afford). Fortunately before I got there (she only just walked in the door a couple of minutes ago…just got off the phone from her), I ran into my neighbor Harriet, who called her husband. He used my jumper cables to start the van, and they figured out that the former Checker (now OReilly’s) at 7th St & Dunlap (garden spot!) is open till 9:00 p.m.

Miracle! Mighty miracle, because La Maya didn’t get home until about 10 minutes ago.

Ninety bucks later… Hell. That’s just about what I had to cover groceries until the end of September. What a fu*king nightmare.

I know that battery is newer than two years old!!!!!!! Oh well. Now there’s a new one in there. And now at least I can get to workoid tomorrow.

Gotta go to bed.

Sunday, August 29, 2010, 11:35 p.m.
Tina to Funny

E-gggaaaddsss! I hate days like that. I am currently sitting at Denny’s, visiting with my mom, drinking free coffee, using free Internet, fixing hundreds of files for Pearson. Boy will I be thrilled when this is over. The project manager actually told me to send her an invoice…they’re going to pay me everything in one big check! Holy cow…it’s a downpayment on a house (or in this economy half the cost of one).

I hope everything’s ok with the car. Not having transportation is one of my recurring nightmares. When do you need [the current editorial project]? Wednesday? I’ve got to finish up Pearson tomorrow…and tonight…but should have some time on Tuesday.

August 30, 2010. 6:00 a.m.
Funny to Tina

It got better… After I sent off that e-mail to you, I heard from my son. He tried to do his laundry. When the washer drained into the workroom sink, a gusher erupted…from under the sink, through the wall!

So evidently the pipe is ruptured inside the wall. Oh god. Think of that THAT’S going to cost. He doesn’t have a nickel or a dime since he threw his roommate out over the girlfriend episode, so now I’ll have to come up with that, too.

Meanwhile, my lawn guy is supposed to show up at M’hijito’s house to cut up and cart off the tree that sheared off at the ground in Saturday’s microburst. It literally snapped the tree off right at ground level. He’s going to do his routine clean-up of the yard and said he’d charge what I normally pay every two or three months…seventy-five bucks. I think M’hijito can cover that. But meanwhile, the plumbing bill is going to run into the hundreds of dollars. At least.

I don’t know where the money will come from. The goddamned ASU Fidelity morons…I told them to cut my drawdown to the minimum NEXT month. While I had the idiot on the phone, I repeated over and over and OVER: DO NOT CUT MY DRAWDOWN IN AUGUST! Open my checking account and what’s the drawdown? Seventy-seven cents. So I have no money. I called and yelled at them over the phone; 45 minutes later they were claiming they would fix it but it would take days and days. So it’ll be another week or more before they come up with the paltry $385 that amounts to after taxes.

It was $209 to install a new hard drive in the iMac. Now I have a computer that has to be completely repopulated. My son says he knows how to clone the MacBook back over into the iMac, but to do it, I’ll have to buy a FireWire…another thirty bucks or so. Jezus.

Yeah, the car: thank god Harriet came along. Otherwise the damn thing would be sitting there in the park as we scribble. It’s ten years old and has 100,000 miles on it. Normally I would hold a car 10 years and then buy a new one. But I can’t do that now. Even if I felt I could pony up the cash (I certainly can’t afford a loan payment!!!), the cost of registration and insurance on a new car would send me to the poorhouse.

No. Wait. I’m already in the poorhouse, aren’t I?

Small but Alarming Indicator

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Yesterday I trotted out to Scottsdale to meet, over breakfast, with the small business owners’ group I first visited just six months ago. At the time, I considered taking them up on their invitation to join, but then never got around to it, mostly because my editing business has been quiescent and I ended up spending every living, breathing moment of the summer working on this fall’s classes and increasing FaM’s visibility. So, I wasn’t doing much editorial work. The current visit was to hit them up to buy ad space in the Bach Festival program.

This group, which at one point had 24 members, appears to be down to about a half-dozen.

Think of that: three-quarters of the members have fallen away, either because their businesses have folded (a common fate of small enterprises) or because they can’t afford the $50/month dues. Since even I could afford the dues on the piddling amount my S-corporation has earned this year, that is one scary figure.

Then, an even more striking bit of news: about two months ago, my old friend, the one who originally invited me to the group’s meetings, took a full-time job.

This guy is one of the most prominent graphic artists in the Southwest. A designer and illustrator for print and Web media, he’s run his own business, quite successfully, for as long as I’ve known him: at least 25 years. His prices have always been well outside my range. His clients have included monthly city magazines and large corporations nationwide. For him, to take a full-time job must have been a wrenching decision. It would mean the income from his formerly thriving business must no longer have been supporting him and his wife. That he also is teaching a community college course on the side suggests he must need the extra coins.

One of the other members owns an office building. His largest tenant failed to renew its lease. “Life,” he remarked laconically, “sucks.”

If the group represents the larger economy in microcosm, its direction suggests something very scary. At least in the Southwest, small businesses and the larger companies upon which they depend are suffering badly. Many have not survived, and those that have survived may not continue to operate much longer. In June 2009, the large credit bureau Equifax issued a report showing that small business bankruptcies rose 81 percent. A more recent report suggests that despite some improvement in the overall economy, things are still about the same in specific regions, not all of them concentrated in the Southwest. Last month the American Bankruptcy Institute found that in 2009 almost 61,000 businesses declared bankruptcy, the highest number since 1993.

And that, my friends, explains why the nation’s de facto unemployment rate is hovering at around 27 percent…not counting those in prison and in the military.

The last high rate of business bankruptcy occurred in the aftermath George I’s administration. Numbers began to fall sharply the year after Clinton took office, dropping by 10,000 in 1994. Interestingly, NAFTA was ratified in 1993, and that year the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation was signed into law, cutting taxes for 90 percent of small businesses and raising taxes on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of Americans. And it was in 1993 that Clinton said, “Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

What do you think we, as a nation, can do about this? Does America still have enough right with it to recover again? Can our elected leaders do anything to turn the economy around? If so, what?