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Angst

Breaking up is hard to do…

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Uh-huh...

Getting disentangled from the Great Desert University and onto Social Security is a nightmare hassle! Right now I have an inch-thick folder of information, instructions, and policies about retirement, and it’s growing. There’s another folder full of paperwork specific to Social Security and Medicare.

Today I learned that when the state of Arizona pays me the first of three payments for my accrued sick leave (known appropriately as “RASL,” as in “you get to rassle around trying to collect this”), I will owe FICA and Medicare taxes on it. And, even though it represents money earned in 2009, it will not be paid until 30 to 90 days after my job is terminated.

Canning Day is December 31. That means the RASL will come in 2010, after I’ve started collecting Social Security. And that means the $6,355 payment will count as part of the maximum $14,100 I will be allowed to earn in 2010.

This will mean that in order not to have my Social Security benefits docked, I will have to refrain from teaching three of the six community-college classes planned for 2010. And that will mean I will have to use the RASL to live on, rather than putting it into retirement savings, as planned.

Item: I can’t afford to stand down from teaching next year. When you do that, you drop off the departmental chair’s radar, and you may find yourself never being hired again. I know: this has happened to me before. Next year I will need to teach as many sections as I can get, so as to build a track record that will get me hired in the future for as long as I can dodder into a classroom.

Item: I need to put that RASL money in savings!!!!! My investments are down more than $120,000 from where they were a year or so ago, and they certainly aren’t going to regain that in the six months I have left to work at GDU. I just can’t afford to substitute RASL for teaching income.

The university will owe me a little over $19,000 in RASL. This amount will be paid in three annual $6,355 installments: in 2010, in 2011, and in 2012. I will reach age 66 in May of 2011; after that, the dock-your-Social-Security trick stops.

Plowing through the stack of policy statements on RASL, I see that a) you can delay applying for RASL as long as 180 days after you’re terminated, and b) you can defer the first year’s payment (and only the first year’s payment) by rolling it into a deferred compensation plan. And c) the second and third annual payments are disbursed on the anniversaries of your first year’s payment, which comes 30 to 90 days after the state receives your application.

So, to avoid having my Social Security benefits dinged by the RASL and to avoid being forced to use the RASL for living expenses, I’ll have to put two maneuvers into play.

First, I’ll need to delay applying for RASL until the middle of April, so that the soonest possible time it would be paid is mid-May, after my 66th birthday. If I fail to do that, then the second RASL payment will also arrive before I reach the “full” retirement age of 66, and I’ll be dinged for that one, too. If I time my application so that the first RASL payment arrives after May 7, 2010, then the second RASL payment will not arrive until I’m 66, at which time I can earn as much as I want (or can) without affecting Social Security income.

Second, I’ll need to establish a deferred compensation plan before my job ends. This is required. That may mean that even though the damned furloughs just ended, I’ll have to continue having my pay docked. That I will get the money back sometime in the remote future is irrelevant to the fact that I need all my paycheck to stash savings to live on after I’m fired.

The deferred compensation plan is managed by a private provider. That means, of course, that there’ll be fees involved. So I’m going to have to pay someone for the privilege of letting them take my money away from me. Isn’t that sweet?

That’s just the start of it. Then there’s the realization that because I’m being canned in December I have to apply for Social Security in October in order to get the payments started in January. But I will not get my last paycheck until after January 1, because of PeopleSoft’s obnoxious lagging pay scheme. Furthermore, because of the furloughs, the gross amount on an October paycheck will not reflect accurately what GDU will pay me over 2009’s twenty-six pay periods. Nor will I have statements from my freelance clients, nor will I have any clue how much my S-corporation will pay me between September and December 31.

So, how will the Social Security Administration calculate my benefits, when no accurate statement of my 2009 pay will be available until after those benefits are supposed to start?

Then there’s the business of all the vacation pay the SOBs owe me: $5,287 worth. This payment also will come forth in January, 2009.

Will that be held against my Social Security earnings, even though it represents pre-2010 income? Can that amount be rolled over into this deferred compensation plan?

And if I have to roll it over…my GOD! I intended to use that money to cover COBRA. If I have to roll it over into deferred compensation, I won’t have anything budgeted to pay for health insurance between January 1 and May 7, 2010. I’ll have to dig into my retirement savings to cover that.

The more I look into this stuff, the more questions come up and the more unfair the whole mess looks. No wonder I grind my teeth all the time!

Legislators in moronic game of chicken

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Every year, Arizona’s political leadership engages in a frenzy of grandstanding around the state budget. And every year we’re told to be scared, be very scared, because if the budget isn’t passed by the end of the fiscal year, the state government will shut down.

And every year, up until this one, it’s been so much stürm und drang.

This year, though, things look a little more dire. In the first place, we have an out-of-control legislature filled with right-wing demagogues who, deep in their hearts, would just as soon see the state government shut down. In the second, the state is in the middle of a real-life perfect financial storm; it’s not something a bunch of dunderheads can deal with, as we’re seeing by our elected representatives’ mulish and self-serving actions. And third: we’re not a week or two from the deadline. We’re hours away from it.

What the fools are doing is using the crisis to force through pet schemes that they couldn’t begin to faze past voters or a governor under normal circumstances. They’ve engaged the governor, who herself is very far to the right, in an idiotic showdown, refusing until the last minute to send her a budget they passed over two weeks ago, so as to circumvent her veto. They have no intention of putting their budget before the governor until the 30th, the last possible moment before the government closes down. Their outrageous scheme includes a provision for a flat income tax and a plan to put a one-cent sales tax before the voters, who are guaranteed to turn it down. It’s a pretend budget because it relies on a tax that will not fly, and it’s a doctrinaire end run to pass a regressive income tax that will weigh most heavily on the tens of thousands of Arizonans who have lost their jobs and the hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who live on substandard wages.

While the governor probably is not prohibited from vetoing the budget if it arrives on her desk that late, they’re just daring her to veto it and shut down the government. She actually sued the legislature—a body dominated by members of her own party!—asking the state supreme court to find their actions unconstitutional and force them to get off the dime. The court agreed their actions are unconstitutional but declined to rule that they must play nice.

The characters in the legislature are so extreme, such right-wing wackos, that they make Governor Jan Brewer look moderate. That is quite an accomplishment.

If the budget is not passed by Tuesday, then none of us state employees will get our paychecks on Thursday. And one wonders whether we’ll be covered by health and dental insurance, since our premiums also will be in arrears.

One thing you have to say for Arizona politics: it’s always a spectacle!

Stress Control: Identifying rational and irrational causes of angst

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Lately, I’ve developed an attitude. I’ve come to loathe what remains of my job so much that if there were a reasonable way to cover my health insurance between now and the December 31 canning day, I would go out the door today. Such resentment feels irrational to me: shouldn’t I be grateful that the university is keeping us on through December instead of closing our office, as expected, on June 30? Shouldn’t I be delighted that we all come and go at will, unmolested, and that we’re all being paid for many more hours than we really put in? What, I keep wondering, is the cause of the stress I feel about the job? Have I slipped my trolley? Is there any real reason to hate this job so much I don’t even want to think about it, much less go and do it?

The stress spinning off this resentment keeps me awake at night, causes me to grind my teeth, and drives me to drink. (Okay, not much drink…but for me, two glasses of wine or beer every single day is about 1.5 glasses too many.)

Last night I sat down with a pad of paper and started listing every reason I could think of, sane or not, that might explain my loathing for GDU in general and for my job in specific. Didn’t expect much to come of it: at the outset, I figured my problem is simply unhappiness at being laid off and worry about how I’m going to get by in retirement that will start about six years sooner than planned.

The result surprised me. At the outset, the list consisted of petty, stupid things that really don’t matter much: being rusticated to a decrepit building that was called out of condemnation for no discernible reason; the enduring stench of chemicals used to remove asbestos nine months ago, fumes that have never fully dissipated; some SOB from FacMan turning the thermostat as high as it would go (!) and then bolting the cover to the wall. I mean, really: get over it!

But as I was scribbling these things on paper, more serious issues arose:

• It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy to accept a full-time salary for doing practically nothing. Profoundly uncomfortable and unhappy.

• I’m bored stupid on the campus. Reading academic copy is not one whit more fascinating than reading freshman comp papers; it’s just a variant on boredom.

• I dislike the fraudulence of many degree programs offered not just by GDU but by universities in general. We’ll refrain from naming these, for obvious reasons, but let us observe that too many undergraduate and graduate programs take students’ money and give them precious little in return. Some courses of study turn out graduates with neither the learning and critical thinking skills a traditional liberal arts degree should cultivate nor a salable vocational skill. We have professional programs that turn out not professionals but dunderheads. Although GDU, like most large public universities, does have many highly worthwhile programs, it no longer is easy for a student to distinguish between a worthy program and an academic scam. I don’t like working for an institution that generates much of its income from questionable products.

• And speaking of fraudulence, I’m unhappy with the discovery, made in the course of doing my job, that about 95 percent of academic “research” and publication is unmitigated bullshit, and I resent being made an accomplice to that variety of institutional fraud.

Finally, as the hour grew later and I was nodding off to sleep over the notebook, the real cause of my nausée about the job surfaced. Several years ago an incident occurred whose details I can’t describe here. Suffice it to say that as a result of my doing something my dean had approved, I pissed off an über-dean, who, in a highly actionable way, shafted a woman I had hired. So actionable, in fact, that I gave her the name of a barracuda lawyer and advised her to sue the university. Had she done so, she would be corresponding with us from the Riviera, where she would be enjoying the life of Riley.

What this guy did was so crushing and so demoralizing that at the time I made a considered decision never again do anything even remotely entrepreneurial for the university. Bear in mind: I was hired because of my proven entrepreneurial track record and led to believe my job was not only to establish an office unique in the Western hemisphere but to grow it into a significant enterprise. I decided that I would allow the office to perform the work it had claimed for itself—nothing more—and that I would keep as low a profile as possible. Indeed, I would do as little work as possible, given the kind of appreciation my work had elicited.

There it was: I’ve hated my job ever since that happened. And there’s nothing even faintly irrational about it.

Over the past three or four years, I’ve pushed the incident out of my consciousness. But it hasn’t gone away. The guy pulled a nasty stunt on me and on an innocent bystander, and he should have been canned. In fact, a year or so later he was evicted from that particular über-deanship and shoved laterally into a less influential (but still highly paid) position. A day late, we might say, and a dollar short.

What can I do about this?

Probably nothing. I can’t undo what happened four years ago, and I can’t change the disaffection the incident created. There’s not a thing anyone can do to repair the damage that was done to me and to our operation, and even if there were, it’s too late now.

Still, when I awoke this morning I felt a lot better. Identifying the causes of distress and recognizing that at least one of them is in no way unreasonable helps to create perspective. At least I know I’m not crazy: I really do have good cause to feel some anger and resentment.

Should you put things like this behind you? Well, obviously. If you don’t, sooner or later you’ll drive yourself nuts. But you can’t put an issue behind you until you know what it is. I knew what this one was a long time ago but deliberately neglected it. That probably was a mistake: given that there was no recourse within the institution, I should have left the job as soon as possible. “Putting it behind me” without taking action on it was like burying radioactive waste in a vegetable garden.

Putting a problem behind you probably needs to include doing something, no matter how minimal, to resolve the issue: physically getting away from it, confronting its cause, asking for redress, or finding a way to undo harm that has been done. It may be that you must do something about an issue before putting it to bed; otherwise, you risk chronic angst whose real cause grows more and more undefinable as the years pass.

What about you? Have you encountered an issue that came to affect your thinking, your attitude toward life, or your well-being? How have you dealt with it?

Planning for layoff-induced “retirement”

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In a moment of lucidity, I realized that of course if my basic survival account is padded with a five- or ten thousand-dollar cushion, what will matter in “retirement” is not month-by-month income (earnings will fluctuate wildly because teaching money will come only in spring and fall), but how much I will earn on average. That is, after the layoff, I won’t be living on bimonthly paychecks. I’ll be living on a fund of money that is restocked once a month from a variety of sources. 

When income from these sources runs low, I’ll have to use some of the cushion to live on. But when income rises while community college classes are in session, the cushion should be replenished, assuming my average costs don’t overrun average income.

Thinking about this the other day, I realized to my amazement that—any way you look at it!—my income in forced retirement will be higher than my salary. Unfortunately, the changed circumstances of retirement will make that irrelevant, because costs will rise significantly. However…there it is.

When GDU is paying my full salary, the net is $3,044. The pay cut created by two furlough days a month has reduced my take-home pay to $2,836.

My financial advisor says that with a 5 percent drawdown, my savings will last 100 years. At 7% the money would last 50 years. A 5 percent drawdown plus Social Security plus teaching income should create a net of $3,288, assuming the total tax gouge is around 20 percent. 

This looks wonderful, eh? Well…not so fast.

Even though my net monthly expenses will drop because I’ve paid off the second mortgage on my house and because I will cash in the whole life insurance policy as soon as this tax year ends, it still won’t be enough.

Right now I’m paying my share of the mortgage on the downtown house with a small drawdown from my largest IRA. In other words, I’m not paying the mortgage out of my salary. That cost will have to be folded in to the 5 percent survival drawdown—in fake “retirement,” I will have to help pay the mortgage out of money I would ordinarily use to live on.

Even that would be manageable…except for Medicare.

Medicare, Medicare Part D, and Medigap insurance will cost twelve times what I’m paying for health insurance now! And that will run my average costs over $3,288 a month.

Freelance income might take up the slack, but it’s so sporadic and so unreliable, I’m not including it as a source of average monthly income. As we’ve seen, the likelihood that I can keep my credit card charges down to $1,200 is slim, and so overruns of this tight little budget are probable and may be frequent. All it will take is one vet bill or one repair bill to run the thing deep into the red.

It looks like I’ll be forced to take a 6 percent drawdown, even though I don’t want to and even though I think it’s highly ill-advised.

One pool repair bill runs upwards of $115. You can’t walk into the vet’s office for less than $100. A pair of glasses costs $300. As you can see, then, at 6 percent I’ll get by…but it’ll be tight. Very, very tight. 

Probably some freelance money will continue to flow in, maybe as much as two or three hundred dollars a month. whoop-de-doo!

Yesterday I dropped by the college, where the departmental chairman was hanging out with the secretary. They said not to worry about enrollments: because the college nullifies unpaid early enrollments and community college students are just as broke as the rest of us, most people wait until the week before classes start to sign up for classes. The chair was confident all three classes would make, but, he said, even if they don’t, he still has several unstaffed sections. He said he was sure I would end up, willy-nilly, with three sections. 

So that will help to fill up the fund that I’ll be living on after December.

And it’s pretty clear there’ll be no problem landing three sections a semester as long as I can dodder onto a college campus. GDU has so massively shot itself in the foot—in both feet!—by jacking up tuition, adding a per-credit surcharge to the inflated tuition, and by generally mistreating students that vast numbers of students who would qualify to get into the university are going to the community colleges for their first two years. 

It will be a very long time before the university recovers from its own missteps and from our right-wing legislators’ fierce, vengeful animosity toward higher education, set loose by the departure of Governor Janet Napolitano, who was able to keep the kookocracy under control to some degree. The universities in this state, especially GDU, have been permanently damaged by the crash of the Bush economy and actions of the surviving extremists in our elected offices.

It’s too bad—a disaster, really, for our state—but on a selfish, personal level…what redounds to the junior colleges’ benefit may redound to mine.

Projected cash flow at 5% drawdown
Projected cash flow at 5% drawdown; red = outgo

Reno loan GONE!

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Well, after two days, almost two hours of dorking around at the credit union, and a quiet stress attack, finally I managed to get someone to take my $21,000. 

At one point I thought maybe I should take it all out of the bank in dollar bills and sprinkle it around the floor of the credit union’s lobby. Let the janitor find a way to use it.

Lenders do not want you to pay off a loan. No. Bad. D-o-o-o-o-n’t take our interest payments away!

Just before the flu struck, Shibu (doughty manager of the credit union branch on the Tempe campus) obtained the precise amount that would be owing as of last Tuesday and e-mailed clear, understandable, easy(-sounding…) instructions for how to pay off the Renovation Loan, which is actually a second mortgage on my house. He said any teller should be able to perform the transaction. 

Then I got sick, in the middle of a vacation. So instead of schlepping to the main campus amid (chaotic!) commencement preparations, I decided to run over to the West campus, which also hosts one of the credit union’s branches. Since I had several other errands to run on the West side, this would work out OK.

So it seemed. 

Teller took one look at Shibu’s instructions and said, “This is something our  manager will have to do. I don’t know how to do it.”

Manager was in with someone else. She would, the teller thought, surely be free soon.

A half-hour later, I was still cooling my heels. The work I needed to do for a client was still waiting for me. The syllabi I’d promised to send to the chair of the department who proposes to hire me to teach three sections next fall were still waiting, yet to materialize even in draft form. The groceries remained to be purchased. The signature form for the locksmith was still to be delivered. My stomach was achingly empty. So, annoyed, I left.

The main campus’s branch is dead empty, the whole place having lapsed into a state of exhausted vacancy after last night’s 70,000-guest Presidential commencement bash. This, I imagine, should be easy.

I hand over Shibu’s written instructions to the teller. Fortunately, he’s in the offing.

She takes about 20 seconds to reach full flummoxhood. He has to come over and take her through the process, step by step. But even then, they make a couple of errors and have to back out and start over. Then they get mysterious error messages and have to figure a way around those. 

This procedure took almost 45 minutes! Then it took another ten or fifteen minutes to make Shibu understand that I wanted the monthly automatic payment that had been going from checking to the loan now to go from checking to money-market savings. Think that finally got settled. I hope.

Now, you know, being an inveterate cheapskate I experience the act of forking over $21,422 as stressful, even when it’s 21 grand that I saved up precisely so I could fork it over. Just hate letting go of pretty little dollars…you have to prize my fingers loose from them. So 45 minutes of repeated efforts to hand over a chunk of dough felt like 45 minutes of waterboarding. At one point as I’m standing there watching them and trying to remind myself that it’s their problem, not mine, my little heart started to pound, the metallic flavor of adrenalin to flood the tongue, the ears to ring, the room to spin. Damn!

From there I had the pleasure of visiting the gynecologist, whose nurse noted that my blood pressure was a shade high. 

No kidding? 

At any rate, the loan is finally paid off. And good riddance. Shibu said it was accruing interest at about $3.50 a day. If one paid it down at a stately rate over its thirty-year term, one would end up paying out exactly twice the original loan amount. What with the extra $200 a month added to routine savings, plus the net teaching salary, plus what I expect to earn freelancing, by the time I exit GDU’s ivied halls the credit union will be holding about $24,000 in savings, more than replacing the amount I earned last year for the express purpose of the pay-off.

Whew!

Layoff: The emotional journey

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche (one of our favorite readers & writers) reports that the predicted layoffs have struck her company and she also is about to join the ranks of the unemployed. We should have quite the campsite, all of us laid-off bloggers dwelling together under the Seventh Avenue Overpass. I propose we call it W-ville. Oh! Sorry. Politics again! 😉

At her site and in a comment to a post below, Revanche describes experiencing a roller-coaster of emotions in response to the anticipation and finally the confirmation of the layoff. Several other bloggers have described wild swings from elation (free at last!) to panic (uh-oh!) to depression (OMG!). Fortunately, she’s managed her money well and has enough to tide her over until 2010, by which time she undoubtedly will have found another job. The panic and depression phases have got to be a lot worse for those of us who haven’t had enough time to shovel out of debt and accrue an emergency fund. But prepared or not, apparently that series of reactions is normal for everyone.

As I remarked some time back, we wouldn’t call it “work” if working were expected to be fun. The vast majority of employees work hard and don’t extract a great deal of personal satisfaction or joy from having to earn a living. But what might be a more or less neutral attitude—i.e., that’s just life—has for many of us turned pretty negative as morale at stressed workplaces heads for the city sewer. Low morale, pinched budgets, and fear make for a toxic environment that anyone in her right mind would be happy to escape. So it makes sense that your first reaction to a pink slip is hallelujah, brother!

The next thought that enters your mind is what on earth am I gonna do? The realization that you’re still going to have to pay your bills and eat, paycheck or no paycheck, is one scary critter. If you’d like to spook yourself a little more, take a look at this interactive feature at Slate.com, an item that will take your breath away. There’s a reason we’re all blogging away at three in the morning: we can’t sleep for worrying. And it’s a good reason.

Then sooner than later, depression sets in. It doesn’t take long to realize that the few employers who have job openings are so swamped with applicants they don’t even bother to respond to your carefully crafted résumé and cover letter. If you’re the kind of person who defines your self-worth according to your job, you feel as though you’re suddenly not worth much. Even if you recognize the important difference between you and what you do, you can’t help but feel that you’ve lost control over your circumstances.

I think there are only three ways to deal with this: plan, plan, and plan.

Plan for your mental health. Lay out some easy-to-follow strategies to keep yourself from going nuts. Most of these are obvious and most are inexpensive: get regular exercise, cultivate friendships, join groups or get more active in the groups you already belong to. Eat well. Stay off the sauce and refrain from using recreational drugs. And especially get yourself out of the house, so you don’t sit around and mope. If you can afford a trip or even just two weeks of informal vacation time at home, give yourself a break during the first days after the layoff.

Plan for the short term. If you have some advance warning—or even if you suspect the ax will fall but don’t know it for sure—build that emergency fund, stock up on food and other necessities. Think through ahead of time how to apply for unemployment, where you will look for work, and what you’ll do until you land a new job. Consider how you might build any current side income streams into bigger or more reliable sources of money. Update your résumé and draft a basic cover letter that you can customize for each job application. And build a list of sites where you can start applying. Don’t forget government agencies, BTW—check out USA Jobs, whose search engine kindly suggests new terms after you’ve entered the keywords that come to mind. If anyone’s hiring, it’ll be the feds.

Plan for the long term. Contact your creditors and try to negotiate short- or long-term ways to ease your loan obligations. Think through whether you can afford to take work at lower pay than the job you just left, and if so, how much lower. Consider whether any alternative kinds of employment would suffice; can you do something altogether different to make a living? Find out whether you can borrow against your 401(k), and if so, how much. Decide how long you can stay in your current circumstances before you have to make a major change, such as renting out a room or subletting your apartment, moving back in with your parents, selling a vehicle, or even defaulting on loan obligations. Think about whether you can relocate, and if so, where. And consider the possibility of going back to school: even though you’ll be racking up student loan debt or borrowing from relatives, at least student loans will keep a roof over your head, you can get health insurance through a college or university, and you’ll be doing something constructive by building new job qualifications.

Some of these are scary prospects. None of us wants to have to think about them. But facing them down and preparing for them does help to rebuild a sense of having some control over your life. I think that feeling of being out of control is the worst contributor to fear and depression. Making some plans, even if they have to be finessed or if they never need to be put into action, goes a long way toward smoothing out the emotional peaks and valleys of the layoff roller-coaster.