Coffee heat rising

Angst

Lives of the Self-Employed

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“Self-Employed”: that’s another way of saying “underemployed,” which ultimately is another way of saying “unemployed.”

It happened again last night: I worked until 11:30 trying to keep up with a set of jobs that pay poverty wages. This is just flicking INSANE!

Over the weekend it occurred to me, once again, that I need to get a grip on the way I spend my time. Too sick to go to choir, on Sunday I was struggling to get even with the 101 papers so they’d be off my desk, to the extent they ever are, by the time the 235 students’ first real assignment came in. But I realized the house was so filthy it was actually making the dog sick: Cassie’s eyes water all the time because she’s allergic to something, probably all the dust on the floors. Her little nose is only about 10 or 12 inches off the ground, so naturally when she goes tearing around on floors that haven’t been properly cleaned in three months, the dust flies up into her face.

So I finally decided I would have to let the student papers go for a day in favor of basic sanitation.

But not before I tried to sketch out some sort of schedule that might get the massive amounts of work under control. Caring for the house, the dogs, and the yard alone could fill one’s day; add trying to run three exercises in underemployment and you’re doomed.

This, to my astonishment, is the result:

Lives of the Self-Employed
You'll need to click on the image here; it's so large it won't fit in a column.

The plan was to try to keep the actual paid work hours down to 40 a week, and also to work in time to walk Cassie and to take Charley to the park for a leash-training session. Also, I wanted to get back into the habit of bathing and painting my face early in the day, instead of having to race through those jobs in the 15 minutes before I have to run out the door to class.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I don’ t have to leave for campus until almost 11:00 a.m. However, if I do the other things I need to do—walk the dogs, make the bed, pick up the pigpen (which while the weather is warm—we’re just coming off another three-digit spell—entails tending the pool and watering plants), fix and eat breakfast, take a shower, paint my face, and get dressed for class—this schedule still leaves me working into the middle of the night.

Every flickin’ night.

Seven days a week.

Out of curiosity, I added up the number of hours for which I actually get paid, which I’ve called “productive hours.” All that teaching and editing and blogging adds up, during a well-organized week with no rush jobs, to sixty hours a week!

Know what I earn for a sixty-hour work week? $29,790.

Yes. Less than half of what I earned when I had a real job, at which I worked about 30 or 35 hours a week.

All it takes is one thing to disrupt this finely juggled schedule. Today, for example, I have to go to the dentist at 10. That cuts short the time for writing this blog post—Charley’s half-hour training session will have to go—and pushes the other work forward until after I get back, sometime around noon.

Gerardo just showed up. The disruption he and his sidekick create distracts from trying to get the present chore (blogging) done. Just spent 20 minutes cleaning up the dog shit I didn’t get to yesterday because it was well after dark before my son picked up his dog, and instructing Gerardo on the plants that need to be pulled out because they died during the summer’s heat.

And I have to be back here by noon so I can sit here for five hours waiting for the pool guy to come back and fix the filter AGAIN.

Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars. The dentist is going to clean out my checking and savings accounts today. There’s been NO WAY I’ve been able to set aside another $40 a month for routine dental work. Not only have I not been able to self-escrow enough to cover tooth-cleaning (to say nothing of the new interesting thing that’s developed), I’ve been dipping into savings every month to cover ordinary expenses.

Leslie’s said they might forgive the cost of today’s service call, because it’s not been very long since the guy was last here. But if they don’t, that’ll be at least another $160.

Next month I have to drain and refill the pool: $200.

The $185/month water bills this summer happened after I’d turned off the water on the front east side. I’d forgotten that last winter I figured all that xeric landscaping needn’t be watered and had pledged to manually water the roses and hollyhocks three times a week. Well of course while struggling to keep afloat in the tsunami of work that was last summer, I forgot that best-laid plan. So two of the roses in front are dead; the hollyhocks are seared back to the ground, the yellow oleander just barely recovered from last winter’s freezes and has a lot of deadwood that needs to be cut out.

I’ll have to pay Gerardo extra for all the extra work he and his slavey are doing.

The work tsunami hasn’t subsided. I guess I must have washed out to sea.

Speaking of the which, I must hurry to get some food before the kid shows up here with that dog. Bye!

By the way: that 59.6 hours a week? That’s just the paid work. As for the “nonproductive hours”—the hours of work around this place that are NOT paid: 49.65 hours a week.

Is It Time to Go?

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This, from our neighborhood’s self-elected Intrepid Leader, who forward the remarks from a neighbor:

I have a bit of information about the shooting Saturday night at Side Road and Feeder Street.  The detective told me that the victim lives far from our neighborhood.  He suffered a gunshot wound while at the wheel of his car which looks like it then slow-rolled up over the curb.  Last I heard, the victim is in critical condition.  They have not found the suspects.  It is important to note that eyewitness accounts place two suspicious individuals loitering within 50 feet of the assault around 15 minutes before the attack.  They were witnessed 3 times over a 10-15 minute time frame.  I relay this information as a reminder for us as a neighborhood to be vigilantly proactive.

The detective said if you see anything suspicious at all, please call the non-emergency police number for our area so they can come, investigate, and identify the individuals.  The number is 602-262-6151.  I just put it in the contact list on my cell and on the fridge.  Hopefully, this note encourages others to do the same.  For anything which seems dangerous or has the propensity to get that way, the detective said we should not hesitate to call 911.

All residents, adults and children alike, should feel free and secure in our neighborhood.  While this is not the first crime in our area, it is an alarming rejolt to the system.   I am quite confident  in our neighborhood’s ability to send the message to criminals of any type that we will have the police here to welcome them.

I know I speak for many when I say how thankful I am for those who have been working collectively on this issue for so long.  It is just sad and senseless when a situation forces us to remember the need for our collective diligence.

Saturday night. That would be what we call last night. Last night an hour before this happened (Play-Nooz reports peg it at 8:00 p.m., which doesn’t prove that’s when it happened — only when police showed up to find the half-dead “victim,” who presumably was not made of virgin snow), Cassie and I were walking over to La Maya’s house, whence we were invited for dinner. Three hours later (if you believe the reports), we were walking home through the faintly creepy darkness.

Much creepier is the fact that the crime was happening, or a-borning, about the time I was walking around in the vicinity.

This is not quite a block from my house. Most nights, when it’s not still 108 degrees at 10 p.m., the dog and I cross the street at that intersection as we perambulate the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this is the very intersection where the Renter’s Friend’s German shepherd attacked and tried to kill Cassie.

I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve had about enough of this.

Lookee here at what I found in Scottsdale, within walking distance of the tony Scottsdale Fashion Square: it’s an aged townhome built in the 1970s. Looks a lot like the place my father and his wife retired to, except that it has an actual kitchen and it has no nursing home. And they welcome people of all ages, not just the decrepit.

In fact, most of the residents appear to be on the high side of decrepit. It’s a small tract of patio homes, off the main drag, clustered behind a gate with a 24-hour guard. From what I can tell, it’s a lifecare community without the life care: no nursing home, and though there’s a restaurant on the grounds, no one requires you to show up once or twice a day on pain of being relegated, willy nilly, to said nursing home. It looks like maybe it was somebody’s idea of upscale collective living before the idea of collectives ever came about.

A hundred and forty-five grand is significantly less than I could get for my house. Well…assuming that not everyone in the neighborhood rushes to put their houses on the market. This place is already fixed up. It’s as centrally located as Scottsdale gets, and instead of a menacing slum just to the west, it’s bordered on the west (and the north, and the east) by multimillion-dollar estates. It’s like a tiny chip of Sun City dropped down in the middle of Central Richistan. It’s larger than M’hijto’s house. Upgraded. Doesn’t need to have anything done to it (though I’m not fond of carpets). I could probably even hang my laundry on that covered, enclosed patio (though that little oven would be crushingly hot in the summertime!).

Years ago, a Realtor friend remarked that North Central is “today’s Encanto district.”

Yeah.

Former DH and I spent about 15 years in Encanto. We lived in a spectacularly beautiful 1929 house in a lovely, quaint “historic” neighborhood. Yes. Though the house was newer when we moved in than the houses in in my present neighborhood were when I moved here, it qualified as what Arizonans think of as “historic.”

I loved the house, much more than anyplace else I’ve ever lived. But the neighborhood, for all its cohesion and Yuppie camaraderie, was something else: overrun by derelicts who would camp in your yard (and use it as a toilet), who by night would sleep in any car left carelessly unlocked and by day would stumble up and down the streets.

There was always some background noise going on: burglaries, peeping Toms, bums thrown out of some young doctor’s or lawyer’s car, the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (ask me to tell you about that one some day!), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (I’d tell you that story for a dime and a cup of coffee, too). Over time, though, the volume rose.

It rose on the axe murder at the end of our street. A little old lady came home from the beauty parlor to find a burglar in her house. He picked up a hatchet in her garage and hacked her to death. When he and his girlfriend were stopped in her car outside of Blythe, he was wearing her tennis shoes. The only reason the cop pulled him over was that he was speeding. If the turkey had minded the speed limit, he would have gotten away Scot-free.

The friend who was with me that day—we were hanging out with my little boy in a neighbor’s pool when we heard the cops converging on the old lady’s house—moved out shortly thereafter. The woman who bought her house was home alone one night when a guy who had been watching her and her husband’s movements for awhile came in through the only window in the house that wasn’t alarmed. He spent the entire night beating and raping her.

So…what do we have by way of gradually increasing volume here?

• The cops killed in the apartment complex across the road
• The gangbangers who loiter in front of the Walgreen’s at all hours of the day and night
• The guy killed in a mugging at the corner of 19th and Northern
• The 24-hour Albertson’s that you wouldn’t even think of going into after dark, and that you think twice about visiting in broad daylight
• The shoplifter strangled by Fry’s employees at the corner of 19th and Dunlap (that store is long gone, replaced by an ethnic market)
• The chucklehead who ran off when the door squealer interrupted his attempt to break in my westside Arcadia door (no cojones, eh?)
• The woman who was jumped by the would-be rapist when she went out to get the morning paper off the driveway
• And now…this.

Maybe enough is finally enough?

Cloud Computing, Marketing Strategies, Hopeless Jobs, and Mad as a Cat

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On days like this, my father used to say he “got up on the wrong side of the bed.” Me, I think the explanation is that God Herself is pissed off at me. Can I compute in the cloud? Can our new marketing plan bring us some decently paying work? Are we doomed to an endless series of hopeless jobs paying Third-World wages? And why does all this make me feel mad as a cat?????

It’s been one of those cranky days. Started out that way and went downhill.

Shot off to Scottsdale de bonne heure, well before seven in the ayem, dressed not quite to the nines but certainly to the eights. Good company. Friend who’s a graphic designer of some renown and substantial talent took it upon himself, volunteer-wise, to take control of Tina’s and my project to design a logo and a business card. He surfaced with a truly gorgeous design. Love it covet it want to print it NOW, today! Tina loves it. Test client loves it.

“Test client”: friend who is also a client, whose taste and honesty can be trusted.

Only problem is, designer thinks copyeditor is two words. (He are, as we used to say at picture magazine Arizona Highways, a artist, he are not a english major.) The gorgeous design engages this small misapprehension. To fix it is to TOTALLY SCREW UP THE INCREDIBLY AWESOME UNBELIEVABLY FLICKING SPECTACULAR DESIGN!

In a word: auugghhhhh!

I incline to let it fly.

Colleagues say…wait! Given the business you’re in, it had better be right.

I say, one in 100 of my clients has a snowball’s chance of noticing that copyeditor is one word. Forgodsake, most of them are graduates of Arizona’s abysmal bottom-of-the-state-rankings public school system. They can barely spell their own names. That’s why they need us.

They say, given the business you’re in, it had better be right.

Taking this under advisement, I take the proofs and drive toward Client/Friend’s office, whereinat I need to deliver a job. I figure to ask her what she thinks of the copyeditor/copy editor issue.

But…at her office, no one’s there. It’s after nine, but not a soul is around. The door is locked. And the mail slot, where in the past I’ve dropped packages  of edited copy, is sealed shut.

I walk across the street to the publisher’s bookstore. Doesn’t open till 10:00 a.m.

Visit all the shops and offices in the publisher’s building, hoping to find someone who will take delivery of the mound of work I’ve done till Client can get back and retrieve it. No one’s open. (When do these people start their workdays??????). I can see a hairdresser working on some broad’s hair, but his door is locked. I leave, the work undelivered and the pay undeliverable.

Eventually reach Client on her mobile device. She’s trapped in an all-day meeting. Says she: copyeditor. One word. Copyeditor.

Says she: bring the copy by next Thursday. Doesn’t matter: production manager is off for the week.

{groan!}

Copyeditor. We are copyeditors. Not copy editors. Another week’s delay in receipt of pay, and a shot at another job.

Arrive casa mia, a half-hour later, feeling unduly cranky.

Pup is locked up in his crate, left there by M’hijito on his way to work while I was gadding around Scottsdale shortly after dawn cracked.

Yesterday a student has said she didn’t get her graded paper. I search for it on my hard drives. None. Where????? I think I’ve read it, hope I’ve read it, don’t want to read it, certainly don’t want to read it AGAIN.

There’s a score in the gradesheet for this paper. Whence???

Search two e-mail systems, in-boxes and outboxes. No, nope, not there.

Read the damn thing. Grade it. OK. Go to upload it back to her and…yes. Of course. At that point find the flicking GRADED PAPER!!!!!!!!

There was a good hour’s time wasted.

Another student sends a late paper. I stupidly neglect to tell him to take a flying F*** at the moon. Instead, like a fool, I read it. Just. flicking. God. AWFUL!!!!!!!!!

Two hours wasted, not counting the pointless trip to south Scottsdale. We’re really talking, if you add in that junket, three hours of wasted time.

All this wastage is interrupted every few minutes by Pup, who desires to go out, who desires to chew on stuff, who desires most of ALL to pounce the corgi and tup her until he’s blue in the doggy face. This desire is not shared by the corgi, interestingly enough.

Pup is beginning to get the message of “Leave It!” But it’s a slow process. Occasionally he will stop pumping away at the corgi. Briefly. Very briefly.

This morning it occurs to me that what’s really happening is that when I give him a treat for responding to “LEAVE IT!” he thinks I’m congratulating him for pouncing the corgi. Of course. Get this: Pounce the corgi; get distracted long enough to grab doggy treat; pounce the corgi, get called over for another treat.

Uh huh.

In the process of this discussion, Pup wraps his leash around my ankles as I’m walking down the hall. I fall on my face on the concrete-hard tiles.

Fortunately, nothing breaks.

Except my temper. The air all around me turns blue.

Dog is tied to the doorknob. I go back to work.

Now I have to read, comment upon, and advise about a raft of student drafts. Group 3, the bunch whose papers I should’ve read before I went to bed at midnight last night, has a half-dozen members. Three, count’em, three students have turned in draft comp/contrast papers. One of these is actually a comparison and contrast essay.

Now, I wasn’t surprised when the 102s couldn’t do the extended definition. That’s a difficult rhetorical mode and not one normally taught in our fine public K-12 system. They had, in a word, no clue. However, the comparison & contrast paper is a cliché. By now, they should know how to do it as they know how to breathe.

Another hour wasted, trying to explain to these nuclear physicists what is meant by “comparison.”

Took pup out in the yard again. Leash wrapped around my fingers as he was taking off like a rocket. Damn near dislocated my thumb!

None of these activities did much to improve my temper.

Now it’s time to feed said Pup. A.a.a.a.a.a.a.n.d.d.d.d.d…..we have no flicking dog food! M’hijito has forgotten, for the second day running, to restock my store of dog food from his giant Costco bag of it.

I decide that, rather than traipsing (again) to his house for a baggie full of the stuff, I should go to Costco and buy my own bag of it, thereby limiting the number of future junkets in search of toxic kibble. So, along about 12:30 I arrive at Costco, using time that I need to be using to read student papers and I need to be using for our marketing campaign and that I really truly wish I were using to unwind and that I do not wish to be using to run around the city.

Decide to pick up a bottle of wine, thinking maybe a glass will soothe my frazzled nerves. Also being low on human food, I decide to grab a container of tomato soup. Arrive in the dog food department.

And…yes, you know this, don’t you?

Yes, Costco is abiding by its First Corporate Internal Law of Nature: If the customer likes it, get rid of it!

The question is, how do they know?

Costco has quit carrying the expensive, tony, very nice variety of dog food M’hijito has decided to feed Pup. The new variant of that brand is turkey and sweet potato. M’hijito has told me, in the very recent past, that he believes sweet potatoes give Pup the runs.

This means M’hijito will have to select a new brand of dog food and will AGAIN have to ease Pup from present brand to new brand. Don’t know what kibble manufacturers do to make this happen but whenever you change brands abruptly, it invariably causes canine enteritis.

Interestingly, after you’ve accustomed a dog to eating actual, real human food, you can feed the beast any damn thing you please and never see so much as a loose bowel, much less the rampant diarrhea that happens every time you change kibble brands. I wonder why that is?

Pissed, I head for the checkout stand, where the lines stretch halfway back to the flicking meat department. It’s ten to one on a Thursday afternoon. What are all these people doing here? And why the hell aren’t they at work?

Oh. That ‘s right. There is no work in Arizona.

I beat out an aggressive shopper who tries to cut me off at the relatively short line. He joins a comparably endless line, and we settle in to wait for our chance to get out of the hectic place. And. Yes. My checkout guy seems to have come to Costco from the Post Office.

He moves as though he were swimming through molasses. How do people do that? The arm sloooooowwwwwly moves from item to cash register. The fingers sloooooooowly punch in code. Meanwhile the guy’s mouth moves a mile a minute. He’s gabbling to the customer, an unending stream of small talk. He yaks. She yaks. They yak. He clears off half the conveyer belt but neglects to move it forward, so the guy in front of the guy in front of the guy in front of me can’t unload his cart. He yaks. She yaks. They yak.

Just as it looks as though he’s finally going to hand over the receipt and shovel this pair out the door, it becomes apparent that he’s not done. They’ve rolled up a flat cart bearing a gigantic televison. He’s delighted. They’re delighted. They discuss the glories of this particular television. He yaks. They yak.

I give up and leave.

Drive to M’hijito’s house, close enough to Costco to walk, if one so chose and didn’t mind risking one’s wallet and one’s health. Collect a few cups of dog food, head back to the Funny Farm, feed the dog.

Wasted another hour and a half in this exploit.

Fucking furious.

Tina e-mails to say she’s landed a course with the District, teaching Western Civ online. She hopes to get two more sections.

Her master’s degree earns her a tiny fraction of what waiting tables pays her.

She wishes nothing more than to find work that will let her quit waiting tables.

Adjunct teaching does not fit that description.

We must market our business. We must, must, MUST get better paying work.

The new client, the one who told me how tough things are before walking out of the restaurant where we met and climbing into a Lexus SUV, finally allows as to how he will pay our $60/hour rate. But he claims to be headed out of town and now begins a game of telephone tag. Okay. I can play that game. I’ve given him two pages of freebie edits and some advice on revision as a sample of what we can do. Sincerely do I hope this does not come to naught.

Late in the day, I hear from a headhunter.

He wants me to apply for a medical project management job in Chicago. I am not even faintly qualified for this job, but Tina is. Faintly, at any rate. I forward his e-mail to her, though I know she probably can’t leave the state because her child’s father lives here, sole custody notwithstanding.

The day wends on and I’m reminded, again, that really I need to look in to subscribing to Carbonite, an online backup system much recommended by the Web guru who haunts the very networking group with whom I started the day. This reminder comes by way of a review of the freshly launched iCloud. Reviewer says it’s great for mobile devices but “dead” for desktop machines.

Ducky.

Read reviews of Carbonite and Mozy. The reviewer raves; commenters rant. Three people report that Carbonite failed to actually save their data. Two report that it takes not hours, not days, not weeks, but months (!) to back up their data to its servers. Similar complaints are made about Mozy. The reviewer loses his temper and announces that henceforth he will screen comments and boot those he regards as gratuitously cranky.

I feel gratuitously cranky, myself.

After studying these ruminations, I decide that, since I’m going to have to pony up $30 a year to keep my business e-mail address, I might as well at least try to use iCloud for cloud storage, but remember nevertheless to manually back up key subdirectories to my hard drive. Then if and when the burglar breaks in and steals all my hardware, at least I’ll have a shot at rescuing some of my data from iCloud.

Dinnertime at last. I crack open a beer, being fresh out of wine. Hope it will soothe my crabbed nerves. Used up the last of the dog pork; forgot to defrost another container of cooked pork for the corgi. Feed her half a can of tuna. She hates canned tuna and leaves most of it in her dish, there to stink up the kitchen. Throw a piece of salmon on the grill; it cooks slowly. Assemble salmon and salad and buttered rice on a plate; take it and a mug of beer outside…there to be greeted by the roar of a FLICKING cop helicopter, come to take up residence over the neighborhood.

Curses!

Curses, curses, curses!

 

Worrying

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God, I hate waking up at quarter to four in the morning! It seems to happen every night unless I dope myself with Benadryl. And dammit, every single time I awake in the wee hours, my first conscious thought is some worry. I don’t know whether I wake myself up worrying in my sleep (in which case it’s no wonder I grind my teeth…), or whether there’s nothing else to think about in the dark and so the worrying comes naturally.

A dear friend is having some health problems. It’s potentially very serious. I can’t imagine how she’s going to cope…her job is running out and so she’ll soon be without health insurance. I think she figured she could just put her six-year-old on COBRA and try to get on our state’s miserly equivalent of Medicaid herself. But clearly she’ll have to buy COBRA for herself, which will be financially crippling. Awful.

Damned Republicans, getting us into this financial mire.

Speaking of financial mires, our clever right-wing leaders crow that they cut our taxes here in lovely uptown Arizona. To accomplish this, they’re shutting down schools, laying off teachers, closing school libraries, cramming kids into classrooms like sardines, trying to crush the police and fire unions, laying off city, state, and university employees.

Well, my property tax bill arrived yesterday. The county  has devalued my home by over $20,000. And my “reduced” taxes have gone up by three hundred dollars!

Of course, because we were told our taxes not only would not rise, they would drop, I kept the self-escrow for property taxes at the same level as they were last year. So I haven’t set aside enough to cover this bill, nor have I set aside enough to cover the taxes for the downtown house, which we pay ourselves. Son of a bitch.

So that money will have to come out of the money budgeted for me to live on. Which means, effectively, it comes out of grocery money.

If they continue to raise the taxes at that rate—$300 a year—I won’t be able to stay in my home. In two more years, that will amount to a $900 increase. I already set aside $375 a month to cover property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and insurance on an 11-year-old junker. That is right at the limit of what I can afford, even working the equivalent of full time (which is what I’m doing when I’m teaching four sections—this year I’ve taught as many classes as I ever did when I was paid a full-time wage at GDU, and I’m doing it for less than half of what I earned there.)

In April, the city raised water rates 7 percent. That came on top of the 40 percent increase they’d already enacted. So there’s where the $170 water bill came from. Power bills are also beyond the pale: sweltering in an 88-degree kitchen leaves me owing $228 to the Salt River Project.

So I’m going to have to start thinking more seriously about moving.

I can’t sell my house for anything like what I paid for it. The value of this house has dropped to what it was about 15 or 20 years ago.

If I’m going to move into an apartment or patio home, it needs to be in a reasonably safe part of town. That means Scottsdale, probably, which is out of my price range. So my price range leaves me with Sun City. And, god damn it, I don’t want to live in Sun City.

Nor, come to think of it, do I want to spend the rest of my life teaching freshman composition. When I got out of graduate school, which I largely financed by teaching comp as a slave, I vowed that even if I had to go on welfare, I would never teach freshman comp again. But here I am, looking at spending the last functional years of my life teaching freshman comp.

I don’t hate it as much as I used to. And because community college courses, especially during economic hard times, are liberally sprinkled with adult students, teaching at Paradise Valley is a LOT less obnoxious than teaching at the Great Desert University. But it’s still a grind that requires you to spend most of your waking hours reading drivel and feeling that you waste your time trying to teach people in one semester what they failed to learn in 12 or 14 years of grade- and high-school miseducation. If they haven’t got it by the time they reach college, they’re not going to get it. And if they do have it (as some do), they’re wasting their time in your course.

Given this basic fact, teaching freshman comp is a profoundly frustrating activity.

Well, it’s finally dawn. I’d better get up and get going.

Looks like it must be overcast out there. By this hour the sky should be a little brighter. Goody! A hundred and twelve degrees predicted…and cloudy.

{ugh}

 

Whoa! Money happens!!

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Criminey, I go from feeling poor as a church mouse to rich as Croesus. My life is a symphony of clichés.

My precious....

The community college district extruded a paycheck today: $1348.75 that I don’t need to live on this month or next  month. According to my excruciating calculations, all the bills for this month are now covered, barring another colorful exploit by the Gods of Summer Expenses. If nothing else goes wrong, every penny of that 13.5 hundred dollah is mine, all mine!

ohhhh cash it out in one-dollar bills, strew it across the floor, and roll around in it!

Well, actually: Transfer it over to long-term survival savings. Hot dang! That’s over a month of living expense money.

Last December, acting on the advice of financial counsel, I made the decision to use the rest of the post-tax emergency savings that, on Canning Day, resided in my bank account to defer the need to draw down from pre-tax brokerage and IRA accounts. According to this logic, the longer I could avoid drawing from the pre-tax funds, which represent  my true retirement savings, the better. At the time, enough remained in what’s now dubbed the Survival Savings account to cover about ten months. This September was the tenth month. Last December, I figured that fund would run out on September 1.

But nay!

With today’s transfer, the fund contains enough to last for another eight and a half months! A miracle!

So, thanks to my having stashed every windfall and every snowflake into Survival Savings, this means a fund I thought would help support me for ten months is actually going to do the job for eighteen months.

In fact, it very probably will last longer than that. Because…

Until the end of spring semester, I was dumping my entire paycheck into M’hijito’s and my joint account for paying the underwater mortgage. This was significantly more than my share in any given month, but I wanted to be sure we had enough to cover the summer, when I needed to use my pay to cover the higher cost of living. In September, I’ll begin paying back into that kitty, but instead of forking over every penny, I’ll deposit only my share—$717. About eight months out of twelve, that’s less than I actually earn.

I’d originally thought, well, I’ll just spend the leftover on myself, since I do tend to feel pretty pinched, especially when unplanned expenses arise. However, I’ve now decided that instead of doing that, I’ll shovel every extra dollar into the Survival Savings account and then, from that kitty, dole out a slightly larger amount than I’ve been giving myself. This will provide a few extra dollars for small indulgences but still slow the depletion of that account to some extent.

So, it looks like…I think…that fund will end up lasting even longer than another eight months, because I’ll be adding two or three hundred dollars a month to it, offsetting the $1,100 a month drawdown that helps cover living expenses. Plus next February’s RASL payment (about four grand) and any tax refund will go into the survival fund, too.

That’s reassuring. Makes me feel a lot better than I did two days ago, when I wrote the post that went live earlier this morning!

Image: Graffiti depiction of Gollum on the East Side Gallery of the Berlin Wall. Gorgalore. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

Summer Budget Overruns: When that sneaking feeling is right…

by

This summer I’ve had the same feeling that I had last summer: as soon as the weather gets ultrahot and the power and water bills head for the stratosphere, that’s when everything goes expensively wrong and you get a hailstorm of unplanned bills.

Last summer I spend $3,348 on unexpected costs after all was said and done—not counting indulgences, of which there were precious few. In fact, there was only one: about $230 worth of artsy-looking clothes at the Yarnell Emporium, outfits that I’m still wearing this summer. So total unplanned and unnecessary expenditures last summer came to about $3,580.

I’ve felt a little more flush this summer, what with the summer classes, and so have imagined I could go out to eat now and again and also buy some clothing and shoes. Over the same span of months, I’ve coughed up $2,951 to cover surprise expenses—virtually all dental and medical bills, car repair bills, and pool maintenance and repair costs. Because getting two summer courses to teach made me feel more confident, I lost control in the self-indulgence department, going out to eat with friends and blithely spending on clothing, jewelry (well…street fair craft jewelry, but still: baubles), and shoes. These extravagances have added up to $1,094 so far, for a total of $4,684 in unplanned and unnecessary spending over the summer.

No wonder I feel broke!

This slide toward ruin started in the late spring, when during the March/April budget cycle I dropped $120 on the amber craft-fair jewelry and $201 on pain-free shoes. It went downhill from then on.

It appears that the reason I don’t run in the red in the winter is because my bills are so low I can afford to eat out two or three times a month and even indulge some other whims. In the winter, there’s about $300 of play in the budget, because year-round the budget assumes summer-level utility expenses. But it also appears that in the winter, nothing happens! The pool does not crap out (it’s not working very hard). The car runs like a top. The dog would never think of ingesting any suspect substances. The teeth wait until the weather warms before they crumble out of my mouth.

Come the summer, though…

This summer, overspending on optional things, like socializing with friends in restaurants and buying clothing, shoes, and baubles, has averaged $283 a month. Average forced overspending on things that can’t be put off, such as dental procedures and car repairs, has been $622  a month. Think of that: on average, I’ve run $905 over budget, all summer long.

{ugh}

Welp, I think the twin messages are

a) during the summer, I must—absolutely must—stay out of restaurants; and
b) I simply can not buy clothes during the summer sales, or under any other circumstances between April and the end of September.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether I’m earning a few pennies extra by slaving away in the classroom all through the 115-degree summer: I certainly am not netting $900 a month!

I’ve had to make up the difference by raiding various cookie-jar savings accounts: monthly savings slated for indulgences like clothing; tax & insurance savings;…and then the base survival savings account, from which I’ve now drawn two months’ worth of living expenses to pay the dentist. There’s no way to replenish that account, and so thanks to my teeth falling apart, I’m short the money planned to support me for two months in 2011/12. Instead of running out in November, I’ll run out of cash at the end of August…just, as we know, when expenses will be highest. 🙄

Gotta quit spending!