If Murphy’s Law can have global warming, that’s what we’ve got here.
First day of class. All my coursework is neatly online. It has, some of you may recall, taken weeks of 16-hour days to mount this stuff on BlackBoard, the courseware that ate Philadelphia.
Today I needed my students to access the site, in class, to download materials, to upload short in-class essays… Wednesday they have two assignments due in this system.
You see where we’re going here… OF COURSE the goddamned BlackBoard system is DOWN! It’s having a FRENZY OF INSTABILITY.
Is it my sweet little college that’s brought this on? Hell, no. It’s the vendor. BlackBoard. Blackboard Freaking Inc. Tina forwarded a memo from the university’s IT people saying they expect it to be nonfunctional for a week or more. GDU is activating its emergency backup system; meanwhile, it’s telling faculty to post materials somewhere else, Google Docs or wherever the hell they can figure out to get online.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
You develop an instinct for these things, after you’ve worked with BlackBoard long enough. So I created a WordPress.com site as my own fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants backup. It’s just a blog and its interactivity is limited to comments. But at least it can hold the most crucial course material, for the nonce, and I can communicate with the little things. The papers they’re doing next week will just have to be printed out. Just what I needed…to have to touch paper. The dratted stuff has acid in it, you know. Burns your fingers.
Ah, but that wasn’t all.
No. Not all. This morning the iMac’s hard drive crashed, once and for all. Down and out. Blue Screen of Death, accompanied by weird Knock of Death. That will be $260, thank you, and say goodbye to all your programs and data.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
One could do without it happening on the first day of class. But thank goodness everything of any import was backed up to an external hard drive, except for a small project I finished about 11:00 last night. Not pleased about having to do that four hours of work over, but it’s a heckuva lot better than having to do four months’ worth of work over.
And boy, am I glad I sprang for the extra coins to get the MacBook! The iMac got cloned onto this handy laptop computer, and so life goes on, with few interruptions. The 87 gerjillion passwords the iMac had memorized have to be looked up and entered into this unit. But otherwise, the system is much the same. And the repair dudes should be able to clone the MacBook back onto the new iMac hard drive.
All that notwithstanding, it’s been one hellish day.
Well, I got screwed royally by Social Security. Five ways from Sunday!
In the first place, on Friday I checked and learned it really is true that when you’re taking so-called “early” Social Security, if you go even a dollar over the $14,160 allowance for earned income, they take away an entire month’s check. Not only that, but because they pay your Medicare Part B out of the monthly check, you get to come up with $111 out of pocket to cover that, too!
You get the money back the following January. But until then, you just go hungry.
It gets better. If your greed exceeds the amount of one month’s gross check—even by a dollar—they take away another whole month’s benefit.
In other words, over the entire 12 months of 2010, if I earn $1,276 more than $14,160, I lose $2,550—two entire months’ of income—and I have to come up with $222 out of savings to pay for Medicare.
If I earn $2,551 too much, then they take three months’ of payments away, and I have to come up with $333 for Medicare. And so on to infinity.
In other words, if you have the temerity to earn more than a poverty income, they break your back financially.
Because the college (unexpectedly) paid me a stipend to develop the online course equivalent to the amount of teaching a three-credit course, I’m already over the $14,160 limit: three and three at Maricopa County pays you $14,400. I figured I would report this near the end of the year—legitimately, I won’t truly know that much is coming in until we see whether the online course makes, and it doesn’t start until late October. That stipend paradoxically means next fall will be extremely tight, but I’d figured I could make it, probably, because I’d get the post-tax-gouge money back in January.
But because they starve your bank account more and more for each chunk of earnings that equates to a month’s Social Security check, it means I could not apply for the excellent opportunity that recently came up: One of the other colleges was looking for someone to teach American literature and, better yet because it only meets once a week, mythology. I really want to get my foot in the door to teach something other than composition. These courses require a LOT less work, because you’re not having to grade student writing every time you turn around, nor are you required to grade on the basis of their writing skills—all you really have to do is look to see if they more or less did the assignment.
If I had landed even one of those two sections, the extra pay plus the $500 “salary” I have to draw from the S-corp would have caused Social Security to withhold not one, not two, but three checks and gouge me $333 for Medicare. I would net less than the amount I would earn by taking on extra work to help make ends meet.
So, this is intensely frustrating.
It feels like a kind of punishment for doing what Americans are supposed to do: be entrepreneurial. Dare to earn something more than bare poverty wages, dare to get off your duff and do some productive work, and we’ll wallop you upside the head.
I can’t even begin to live on the piddling net from a $14,160 gross. The Social Security income is what’s making it possible for me to survive at all in underemployment. But the $15,000 from Social Security is no more a living wage than is the dinky amount they limit you to earning.
Six sections a year is half-time work. It’s so part-time you don’t even get benefits. To add to the annoyance, an adjunct’s position is extremely ambiguous. My pay statements explicitly say the pay is for contract work. But the district will not pay my S-corporation, which they should do if indeed I’m a contractor and which would resolve the whole issue with Social Security. And my tax lawyer insists I’m not a contractor for the district, I’m an employee.
What’s especially annoying about this is that I had no intention of starting Social Security at age 64. After the crash of the Bush economy, I figured to work until I was 70, since that’s how long it would have taken for my investments to recover their former glory, with regular employer-matched contributions to my 403(b). The only reason I’m taking it now is that I was forced to do so by the destruction of the U.S. and the world economy, something that came about directly from federal government policy and the mismanagement of government policy by elected representatives. It’s not my fault I’m out of work, and it’s not my fault there are no jobs for aged female Ph.D.’s. Or, in Arizona, for anyone else.
So. The hard times—and they have been hard—are will not end when this penurious summer ends. In the fall, I’m going to be $1,275 short of the amount I need to get by. This afternoon I’ll return the curtains I bought to help black out the bedroom so I can sleep past the first crack of dawn; that’ll put a few bucks back in my account. The iMac is showing signs of hard drive failure; the repair job will far exceed anything I can get back from returning the curtains.
Sure do wish I could’ve made something on that yard sale yesterday…
And there’ll be no new dryer, even from Craig’s List, when the junior-college pay starts to roll in next month. Thank goodness most of my stuff can be line-dried. The comforter, when it needs to be washed, will just have to be done at M’hijto’s house.
Yes, I do have emergency savings to fall back on for a month—and yes, I’ll have to use those to get by this fall. But the point is, I shouldn’t have to use emergency savings when I could earn enough, combined with Social Security, to live on. The point is, when you’re earning this little, there’s nothing left to put back into savings. So when I use up that emergency fund, it’s just gone. It won’t be there when a real emergency happens. And with my arm out the way it is, it will only take one more fall, one car accident, one minor injury to make it impossible for me to work…and then I’ll really need that fund.
And yes, I have retirement savings.But I’m not retired. I’m not retired—no, indeed; I’m working 16 and 18 hours a day, seven days a week—thanks to the economic collapse. That money has to sit there without being drawn down until the market recovers enough to rebuild at least some of the outrageous losses that occurred during the crash and that continue to occur because the continuing slide in real estate values here in Arizona continues to sap equity from investments in two very modest houses.
Yesterday I had reason to revisit the website of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, a worthy organization where I was a member for some years. Eventually they jacked up their dues so high that I felt I could no longer justify paying them—you probably get value received from $200 a year (plus, plus) if you live in New York, but those of us out here in the hinterlands miss out on much of the group’s benefits.
Nevertheless, I see they have a new refinement in place, a job bank purporting to connect prospective clients with members. As the pitch for membership observes, one or two assignments would more than pay for your dues.
On the other hand, I’ve never had much luck with freelance job banks. Someone’s always ready to underprice you. And given the East-Coast orientation of this outfit, I suspect most of the customers are based somewhere around New York and feel no interest in working with an obscure scribbler out in the Wild West. So, I’m not at all sure it’s worth rejoining.
Come next January, some better ways to earn more cash have gotta be in place. The Social Security earnings limitation will expire then—because I’ll reach so-called “full” retirement age in May, I can earn around $30,000 between January and May, and after that, as much as I can get anyone to pay me.
Truth is, if both of next fall’s classes make, I’ll exceed the earnings limit this year, too. It’s so low, you have to work at not making too much. So, in November or December, presumably I’ll have an entire Social Security check withheld, to be returned to me in much diminished form the following January. That will mean I’ll have to dig into my emergency fund to survive that month.
I’m going to have to find better ways to make money. Freelance editing is not what you’d call a lucrative endeavor. Blogging earns even less—with Funny now bouncing up the front page of the top 100 PF blogs, yesterday it earned all of 33 cents. That would give me a pay rate of about a 50 cents an hour. Clearly, if I’m going to keep blogging, I’m either going to have to come up with a better way to monetize the site or simply quit running ads on it and invest that energy in some other endeavor.
Teaching is bringing in some money, but it’s piddling. The school paid me $2,400 to design and build the online magazine writing course this summer, which sounds great until you figure how many hours I’ve put into it.
So far I’ve attended 15 hours of workshops and spent about 5 hours in other meetings plus about 10 hours in one-on-one training sessions. Over the past 9 weeks, I’ve probably spent, on average, 3 or 4 hours a day, five days a week, in front of my computer building the course, for a total of 27 to 36 hours. (As a practical matter, I work 7 days a week, but let’s err on the side of conservatism.) Drive time to the campus, all told, probably comes to about 5 hours. So what do we have?
Just about what I was earning by the hour at the Great Desert University…except the course isn’t finished. I still have to read god only knows how many hours of lecture into the audio function, and those lectures need to be accompanied by visuals, which I’ll have to concoct with my scanner and then mount online. Probably at least another 20 or 30 hours of prep time remain.
I should be thankful; at GDU all this prep work would be done for free.
Still, it’s far from enough to live on.
Freelance editing brings in about $250 a month, except on the rare occasion when some random client pops up.
Blogging has dropped off from about $200 to about $150 a month.
So, what can I do to “work smarter”?
Foremost on the list: get a job. I’m going to have to start looking for paid work that produces a regular income, to start in January when the government will “allow” me to earn a middle-class living.
At my age, however, it is profoundly unlikely that anyone will hire me to do anything. Other options?
Teaching: Hustle more classes in the spring, preferably at better-paying institutions.
GDU pays a Ph.D. something over $3,000 per adjunct class. Two classes at GDU (the max they’ll hire adjuncts to teach) plus three classes at a community college would yield about $13,200 a semester. Five sections a semester amounts to a crushing workload, meaning I would have to stand down off all other paying work. Total gross would be $26,400; added to the Social Security, I’d earn $41,400, about $2,000 under the median household income in Arizona.
Another possibility: start now sending applications to schools out of state; an online course can be taught from anyplace, and I do have some impressive-sounding credentials. Pay would be very low.
Blogging: FaM is beginning to have some value as real estate. Try selling ads to companies, or selling editorial space to PR reps. Potential income: unknown. Probably not much.
Editorial work: Put more money and effort into hustling business. Try to target some corporations that might have money to hire editors for in-house publications. Potential income: same as above.
We’re brought back to job. I need to get a job. Too bad I’m too old for pole dancing.
Anybody got any other ideas? What can you do to make a steady, respectable living when you’re too old to get a job? And when no matter how qualified you are, 300 people, 299 of them younger than you, are applying for every opening in your field?
It’s getting untenable. I can’t keep on doing this.
Don’t know how long “this” has gone on, but it feels like it’s been forever. I’m working ten, twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Maybe longer than that. It’s 3:30 in the morning. By the time I finish writing this post, it’ll be time to get up and get going. By “get up and get going” I mean feed the dog and myself and then come back to the computer. Don’t know what time I went to bed last night, but it was late. The “workshops” I’m having to take to earn another $2,400 this summer (one of several tasks that have to be done to show I have done the course prep for the online feature writing section) turn out not to be what I would think of as idle on-the-job training workshops, but actual courses.
Yes. Yesterday afternoon I arrived home at 5:00 p.m. with homework! As though I had time for anything above and beyond the four hours a day in the classroom this thing requires. The instructor expects a documented and cited research paper, due today! By the time I finished that and fell into bed, I was so exhausted I didn’t even remember to lock the damn back door. Wouldn’t the roving burglars have loved that, if they’d come a-visiting tonight?
I feel like I’m tethered to the computer. I’m not getting any exercise at all. Not that I would get much if I could break free from the keyboard for any length of time: ten minutes ago, when the dog went out into the wee-hours darkness, it was 90 degrees out there! In this heat, even a walk around the block is more than I can contemplate, to say nothing of climbing hills (not that I can afford $2 a day to get into the city park) and riding bicycles.
At least for godsake when I was schlepping to GDU I had to hike a half-mile in to the office and climb up a couple flights of stairs.
When I wake at three o’clock in the morning after three, maybe four hours of sleep, what’s roiling through my mind is the scalding question of what on earth I’m going to do when I can’t keep working like this. I can’t get by without the piddling income I’m earning. Financially I’m barely making it. But this can’t go on forever.
“Forever” is likely to be a lot shorter eternity than I planned: sooner or later this is going to make me sick.
And what am I doing it for? For fourteen flicking thousand bucks a year?
This is insane. I’m working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a poverty wage? I’d do better cleaning house! At 80 bucks a day, I’d make $20,000 a year, much of it under the table. And get some exercise in the bargain. Figure in the state’s tax increase, and the 14 grand a year I’m earning now puts a munificent $10,780 in my pocket!
Or maybe this?
I guess what I’d better do is see if I can get some sort of menial job. That would gross $12,000 or $14,000, but I’d only have to work 8 hours a day at it, a big improvement on 16 hours.
Problem is, I’ll have to dumb down the résumé. How do I explain the kind of work I was doing at GDU without admitting to an advanced degree or two? No one is going to hire a Ph.D.—or even an M.A. or a B.A.—into the kind of job that earns minimum wage or less.
What do I have to show for all these health-crushing hours of work?
Yesterday, Funny made all of $10. Day before, it made something like 8 cents. Over the past week, it’s made a grandiose $52.23. Before we bitch too much about that, we must say that it hits the goal. To get me out of one section of freshman comp a year, FaM has to earn about $50 a week.
But to make it do that, I’m working a good six to eight hours a day on it! Eight hours a day to earn $2,600 a year?????
Editorial work earns a helluva lot more than that, but there’s almost none of it out there. By the hour it pays more, sure. But by the job? It pays about the same: I’m earning around $250 a month reading detective novels. Little other work to speak of is coming in.
Teaching a few adjunct courses, which believe me can easily absorb eight or ten hours a day, pays the 14 grand. So if you add up the teaching, the editing, and the blogging income, you come to something like $19,600. Gross. Cut 23% out of that and you get a take-home of $15,000. Since that exceeds the Social Security limitation, it’s a liability: it means a chunk of my Social Security income will be taken away, cutting the total gross to something more like $15,000. Even with the contract income going into the S-corporation, the teaching income alone exceeds the SS limitation.
Still, add the teaching and freelance income to the 15 grand of Social Security, and it’s almost not bad. But in a major American city, $30,000 is not good. It’s poverty-level income. I’m getting by, but just barely. All it will take is one major expense—replace the air conditioner, replaster the pool, reroof the house—and I’m screwed big time. And if something happens to to put me out of commission, like the fall that wrenched my arm out of its socket, the result will be the same: screwed, screwed, ge-screwed.
I’ve got to get a break from this grind. Last night I couldn’t even take Cassie to her agility training (there’s a break for you: running around a field with a dog in 100-degree heat!), because I had to write a research paper. Sunday I couldn’t go to church (again!!) because I had to finish a rush job for the detective-novel publisher. And work on the Carnival of Personal Finance.
Tomorrow Today (!) before the workshop, I have to drive across the city, to the tune of a quarter-tank of gasoline, to deliver the edited page proofs. With any luck, the detective-novel publisher have another book for me to read.
Speaking of books, these workshops put the eefus on my plan to wring a book out of FaM this summer. There’s plenty of content to do that, but nothing like enough time. I figured I’d better take the money from the college, because it’s a sure thing…who knows how much an obscure e-book would earn?
But though there’s some money coming in, it’s a dribble of pay compared to the amount of work I’m doing.
The problem here is I’m working about as unsmart as it’s possible to work. I’ve got to find a way to make a living that will pay the bills without expanding to fill every waking hour, including those insomniac hours that take place in the middle of the night. Even if it means waiting tables.
Images:
Waitress Taking an Order. Alan Light. Creative CommonsAttribution 2.0 Generic License
“I Should Like to Make My Own Living.” William Thomas Smedley. Cabinet of American Illustration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.
{gasp}Maybe I should type this entire post in virtual red “ink.” Today is the seventh—fourteen more days to go until the current budget cycle resets—and I’m already $93.77 in the hole.
Augh, augh, and augh!
Well, two causes for this predicament:
1. I bought that Shark vacuum cleaner from Costco that I mentioned, after having mulled it over for several days. By the time the obnoxious 9.3% sales tax was added, the $158 selling price ballooned to $174.
It’s too late to return the clunky Eureka I bought from the Fry’s electronics last March. What a piece of junk! So that’s about $300 ultimately paid in search of a decent vacuum.
2. My car was way, way, way overdue for an oil change, tire rotation, safety check, and windshield wiper change. That trip racked up an $86 bill.
Lordie! The last time I had the car serviced was in August of 2009!!!!! Inexcusable. Plus the car has needed new windshield wipers for a year. They had reached the point where their only use was to mix dirt with water and smear it around like paint. Artistic, but hard to see through.
So, those two things pushed me into the red. The vacuum cleaner alone would’ve done it. Add the car service, and now I’m in the hole with two weeks to go and not enough food to last that long.
Last month was the first time this year I’ve run in the red on the discretionary budget. But it was huge: $1,600!
That notwithstanding, I still have some money in savings, and so there’s something left to pay for the car and the vacuum cleaner. But I can’t keep on drawing down savings to meet living expenses.
Ordinarily, a fair amount is left in each month’s nondiscretionary budget—money set aside to pay utilities, Medicare premiums, and long-term care insurance. But summer is now here. Yesterday was a 110-degree day, and it’ll be the same today, cooling to 106 Wednesday and Thursday. That won’t max out the air conditioning bill (the electric company walloped us with a hefty rate increase this spring, BTW), but I expect this month’s bill will be close to $200. Same with water: if you want anything in the yard to stay alive, you have to run the water. The watering system is now on its summer schedule—and I can tell you one thing for sure: drip watering is about as overrated in the economy department as the digital thermostat. The water bills go through the roof when that thing is running. Plus of course I have to refill the pool every day; it loses an inch a day to evaporation.
If the electric and water hit their maximum levels this month, I’ll have $2.59 left in the nondiscretionary fund come June 30.
All of this is happening, natch, when no income other than Social Security and a pittance from Fidelity is flowing in to the coffers. No word from the college about when they’re going to pony up the first payment on the stipend they say I’ll get for preparing the online course.
The problem with that is they’re making me schlep up to the college every week, and that runs up the gas bill. Eighty bucks down the drain there, and two more weeks to go. Just bought gas yesterday; the last fill-up was 12 days ago. So there’s an outside chance I might make it to the end of the budget cycle without pumping gas again…but not likely.
It’s impossible not to drive around this city. Today, for example, I have to deposit some checks for the S-corporation. The credit union is way to hell & gone up at 43rd and Thunderbird, a fourteen-mile round trip. The last time I tried mailing a deposit to the CU, using their self-addressed envelope, they lost the checks. It was over two weeks before the deposits cleared, just as I was about to call clients and tell them to cancel payment.
And a couple of days ago I went over to the downscale Albertson’s, which theoretically is within walking distance, to buy some salad to feed our bloggers’ group. They didn’t have the basic things I needed to make a very ordinary meal. Wanted some cherry tomatoes: the only ones they had were in plastic boxes, and in each box about half were shriveling up like raisins. So ended up having to drive seven miles, round trip, to the Safeway to buy salad stuff!
M’hijito gave me $22 to reimburse for dinner out a week ago. I can apply that toward groceries. Plus I have a few paper dollars stashed away from other reimbursements. Over the past year, I’ve been squirreling that money for these summer months, when I figured to run short on funds. But I’d expected that would happen in August.
When I went there, I discovered they’ve published my street address—with a map to my house!—telephone number; approximate age; credit rating; wealth level; value of my home; gender; marital status; length of time I’ve resided in my home; socioeconomic status of my neighborhood; type of structure I occupy and and the year it was built; its alleged value; whether it has a fireplace, central heating, central air, or a pool; how many kids I have; my educational level; my hobbies; my occupation; my interests; and my zodiac sign.
To be fair, some of these are left blank. Some are wrong—hilariously, they think my house is worth in excess of a million bucks. I wish!!! Some of the data clearly came from Facebook: I recognize the disinformation I entered there.
However… Spokeo also has another me in its bowels: Some woman by the same name is still living with my former husband at my former address. Interestingly, this woman’s information happens to match my own real-life personal data.
Folks. I divorced before there was such a thing as social media. The Internet barely existed when I ran away to the Alaskan outback. So…wherever these SOBs are aggregating their data from, it’s not all coming from the Internet.
If you go to their contact link and send them an e-mail demanding that they take your personal data down, you’re forced to enter their choice of subject lines. Select “business matter” instead of “privacy” to reach a human being. Select “privacy” and instead of sending the dear-sir-you-cur you’ve scorched into their contact form, you get instructions for a hoop-jump and the advice that the only way to get your information off their site is to remove yourself from all the social media sites you use.
In other words, if you don’t want these bustards publishing your current address and phone number to your abusive ex- who threatened to cut off your head, pee down the hole, and flee with your children to East Zambia, you may not participate in any social media of any kind. Either that, or you must leave a trail of lies wherever you go.
I wonder if Spokeo’s management can spell “class action suit.”
