Coffee heat rising

Budgeting

Budget: Busted, Disgusted, and Can’t Be Trusted

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Ugh! My desk is groaning under the piles of paper that have flowed in over the past three weeks. Did most of the bookkeeping to update this month’s budget, and now, thanks to a $205 pool repair bill and the $180 for the (discounted!) air conditioning contract, I’ve got all of $140 to live on between now and the 20th.

Emergency savings, set aside to cover the constantly recurring pool bills and similar little urgencies, are down to $1,300. That account normally hovers around $2,000. So I’d like to avoid having to draw more money out of that during this budget cycle…especially since, on the 21st (first day of the March/April cycle) the car has to go in for an oil change and to figure out why it’s tweeting out of its left front wheel. That’ll be another $200 to $400, you can bet.

Power, electric, water, food, taxes, and gasoline bills are all up—yesterday a little over half a tank of gas set me back $40—but my income certainly isn’t. Social Security rose a few dollars last January, but that was it. Adjunct pay never increases.

Luckily, this week is spring break, so I won’t have to drive around very much. Enough food is stashed in the fridge and freezer to last a week or ten days (I think…). Thursday I’m driving out to Sun City to meet SDXB and drive up to meet our friend La Maya at her weekend place in Yarnell. We’ll take his car, since I’m afraid mine won’t make it up the 2,500-foot climb. I wouldn’t take it into the desert at all these days, much less up Yarnell Hill. We’ll fly up to the old mining town, schmooze with La Maya for a few hours, and then fly back down the hill to his house, where we’ll meet his friends for a dinner of pasties, which he’s been planning for some time.

And that will be my only excursion for spring break. Or for anything: it’s been months and months and months since I’ve gotten out of this place.

Dang, but I’m tired of pinching pennies! I want this job so bad, so I can have just a few more years of a normal life. So many things I can’t afford are piling up: a new(er) car, paint jobs inside and outside the house, orthodonture on the twisted teeth…just to be able to get one of those things done would help. And I’m tired of being cooped up in this house. A walk around the park a vacation does not make.

But have to be realistic about my financial future: the likelihood of the school hiring me—an old lady already on Social Security—into a handsomely paid full-time faculty position is nil.

The accountant is about done with my taxes. I’ll only get about $1,800 back, from which I’ll have to pay her bill. Usually I get around $4,000, and I was counting on that to help refill the Survival Savings account. February’s RASL payment brought it back up to where it was eight or ten months ago, but that was the last of the three annual payments the state owed me for unused sick leave. So without that and with income taxes increased by $2,200, Survival Savings will last about eight months, at which time that little fund will be drained to zero. Then I’ll have to start drawing down retirement savings to make ends meet. Social Security covers less than half my base monthly expenses—significantly less than half, with all those increased bills.

Though net worth looks pretty good, certainly compared with that of most Americans, there’s really only $546,000 to support me through my dotage. And that’s likely to be quite a while: women in my family have lived into their mid-90s—and they were Christian Scientists. They did 100% without medical care. Imagine how long someone with those genes could live into the 21st century, with passing medical care, a lifetime of good nutrition, and no really grinding work. Assuming, though, that I only live to 95, starting a drawdown now is likely to run me out of money before I die. And a 4% drawdown is about $500 a month short of the amount I need to stay in my home and cover my present pared-down expenses.

The real estate class starts next week. That’s gonna make for five weeks of Tuesdays and Thursdays from Hell, but at least it will get over quickly. Relatively. I sure don’t look forward to having to sit in a classroom taking coursework. I spend enough time in classrooms, thank you. And to have to race home from class on T-Th, bolt down dinner, and race back out there to listen to someone drone on into the night does not appeal. However…one does what one has to do. Unfortunately, the other semester of this regimen isn’t offered during the summer, at least not in the junior colleges. You can take all three courses required for a license at a propriety school, to the tune of hundreds of dollars. But since my tuition waiver gets me into each class for $15 apiece, that seems counterproductive.

On the other hand, the longer I have to string out these courses, the longer it’ll take to give myself a shot at some other job.

Not that there’s much promise in those precincts. My mother had a real estate license. She sold exactly zero houses and earned exactly zero dollars. In the course of this career, she sandblasted the paint off the Mercury, driving through windstorms between Long Beach and the Salton Sea. God only knows how much she spent on gasoline to get back and forth between those two armpits. And she spent untold numbers of hours sitting in open houses, bored stiff.

So. I don’t have much hope for this endeavor. But…nothing ventured (etc)…

Garden spot at Salton Sea

Image: Abandoned, salt-encrusted structures on the East shore of the Salton Sea. GregManninLB. Wikipedia Project. Public Domain.

Breakin’ Even!

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Well! After teaching four sections this semester (one more than the District permits adjuncts to carry, and anything but a part-time workload), I almost exactly broke even!

That is amazing.

I’ve been drawing about $2,150 a month out of what remains of the emergency savings fund to supplement Social Security, so as to have enough to live on. This fund amounted to about $28,000 when I was laid off from GDU, at the end of 2009. It’s now at about $13,300.

Previously, I was putting everything I earned from the community college into a joint fund to pay the mortgage on the downtown house, until such time as my share for the entire year was covered; then I would give myself the rest. This usually amounted to a month or two of salary that I got to spend on my own living expenses.

This proving too nerve-wracking (I simply could not draw down enough from savings to pay my base expenses), along about the end of the summer, I decided to move my money out of the joint account and back into what I call the “survival savings” fund. Starting in August, I began withdrawing $2100 a month to cover a) my share of that month’s PITI payment and b) living expenses; and instead of paying into the joint fund, I started paying my salary into “Survival Savings.”

This in effect turned Survival Savings into a gigantic sinking fund, holding all income for the purpose of paying the mortgage and my bills.

I engaged this scheme with some trepidation, having no idea how well it would work. But I figured if I went broke, I was gonna go broke anyway. This system is more transparent and simpler than the previous one, which was involved to start with and then complicated further by the dizzying transactions caused by the insurance payments and payouts to contractors for the hail damage.

So. In August, as the fall semester opened, I started with $13,279.99. Today, as the year ends, I finish with $13,301.94, a shortfall of just $21.95.

That means, in effect, that even after paying into the mortgage and refilling the pool and having the oven fixed and buying some kewl outdoor furniture from Pier 1 and double-paying Gerardo one month for a staggering amount of extra month and then again this month for Christmas and buying a $140 crate for Charley, I still just about broke even!

It’s a miracle.

Can I keep it up? Not over the long term.

Next semester I’ll have only three sections. However, I’ll net about $3740 from the state’s last RASL (unpaid sick leave) installment, which will more than make up for the extra class. And I’ll get a kickback from American Express of about $150. That will about cover my expenses between now and May 10, including the unpaid month of January.

Then the gravy train reaches the end of the line. RASL is tapped out in 2012. And the District is cracking down on overloads. Next summer I will get one, count it, (1), $2,400 class to help me through the most expensive season of the year. That will cover expenses for one of three months. The remaining $4,800 will have to come out of my pocket.

After this, if the chair obeys the District’s rules (and he probably will: he’s a pretty straight arrow), I’ll be teaching three and three in the academic year and one section in the summer. And that returns far from enough to pay my bills.

Unless I get the full-time teaching job I’ve applied for (highly unlikely, given my age!), I’ll have to come up with an income stream that will bring in another $6,000 to $10,000 a year. Soon. Very soon.

Whether the plan to make The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc. return enough to support both me and Tina will pan out remains to be seen. It will have to earn a lot more than the 10 grand it made this year to do much more than pay its own overhead. In addition to paying for office supplies, computers, networking expenses, and subcontractors’ fees, it will have to net enough to pay me about $4,000 to $6,000 in salary and dividends.

For this summer, we can subtract the net on the course I’m scheduled to teach, requiring the S-corp to earn only enough to pay me $1,960 to $$3,960 this summer.

Interestingly, that may not be as impossible as it sounds. Funny about Money has started to earn a profit. It’s not much. But then…$1,960 isn’t much, either.

Heh…unless you can’t pay your bills without it….

We have discovered that certain potential clients do not blink at our proposed $60/hour rate. If we can find the clients, The Copyeditor’s Desk may actually be able to support the two of us this year. It won’t make enough to buy health insurance for Tina and the kidlet. But her ex- finally got another job and has put the kidlet on his insurance; and Tina is an artist at fending for herself.

Anyway. For the nonce, at least, it cost me just about $26 from savings to get through the fall semester. Not all hope is lost. Not by a long shot.

🙂

Miraculous sunrise image: Sun Rise at CuaLo. Handyhuy. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Keepin’ the Books, Keepin’ the House

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This weekend updating Quickbooks Online occupied a full afternoon. As with everything else of late, I’ve gone totally lâche with that project. Not, in this case, out of raw laziness but because Intuit seems to discourage users from backing up Cloud-based data onto local computers. Because I couldn’t find instructions for any back-up other than one that would download to an installed Quickbooks program, I’d decided I would enter transactions first in Excel and then, when time allowed, re-key them into QB Online so as to simplify my accountant’s life.

Well. As usual, time did not allow.

So I ended up entering transactions dating back to last May, for The Copyeditor’s Desk’s checking account and for its credit-card transactions. This of course entails creating new “client” and “vendor” entries and a number of other antics. Time-consuming but not at all difficult. The only annoyance is that my iMac is soooooo old it runs at the speed of a galloping snail. Having to wait anywhere from 30 seconds to two minutes for each plug of data to upload eventually will drive you to tear your hair.

At any rate, moments after I contrived a workaround for the download issue (in Firefox right-click to “print frame”, then print to PDF; this will store the entire page—not just a screenshot), what should I find hidden away in an obscure corner but a way to download to Excel (create a Journal report, pulling all your data into one place; then on that page you’ll have an option to download to any of several formats, one of which is Excel).

w00t!

This will obviate the double-dose of work.

I’m pretty pleased with QB Online. That, I suppose, is because I don’t allow Intuit to reach out to my credit union and brokerage accounts. As long as all it’s doing is tracking data, you don’t enter any sensitive passwords. Thus the risk of hacking is low. About all a hacker can do is scramble your data, and if you’re backing up to Excel every time you go online, the world will not end if that happens.

This year I used QB Online only for the corporation’s account, and that at my accountant’s request. It’s very orderly, and because it standardizes the way everything is entered, it allows none of my creative schemes for entering various reminders and comments in Excel. This is good for the accountant, very good. And she can run her software on the data from the Cloud, hugely reducing the cost of tax preparation.

Because my personal accounts are fairly complex—counting the joint account into which M’hijito and I pour cash for the accursed mortgage, I ride herd on five checking and savings accounts and two credit card accounts—in 2011 I decided to try QB only on the relatively simple corporate books. But starting in January, I’m definitely going to take out a second subscription for the personal books. This will hugely simplify the bookkeeping, and especially the tax accounting.

Speaking of the books, despite a budget overrun in discretionary spending (yasss…in exactly the amount of the dentist’s bill for cleaning my teeth), I’ll still come in with $166 to spare this month. This is because nondiscretionary bills drop radically in the winter. Water and electric each dropped almost $100 in November. Lhudly sing huzzah.

If these bills rise much higher, though, I can’t imagine how I’ll get through the summers. One utility company in the West Valley has announced a scheme to raise customer’s water bills by 83 percent!!! That’s a private water company, but I’m sure if it gets away with that, the municipalities will soon follow suit.

LOL! That “$166 to spare” is a relative term: I’m having to draw down $2000± from savings each month to make ends meet. Some of it is reimbursed during the eight months the community colleges pay me an adjunct’s pittance, but that amount is nowhere near two grand and it doesn’t come in when bills are at their highest. So the truth is, every month I’m running in the red, since I can’t afford to use savings while the stock market is jerking around like a weather balloon in a hurricane.

Junk heap, tidied

In the catching up department, I finally got around to cleaning out the storage shed and the hidden corner behind it where pots and junk reside on brick-and-board shelves. What a mess! It took all morning of one day plus half the afternoon on another day to shovel through the debris, clean up the wads of composting leaves, and haul the junk to the garbage can in the alley.

This, in light of the possibility that I might put the house on the market.

As it develops, Gerardo and his sidekick haven’t been doing such a hot job on cleaning up the leaves and pods that sift down there every day from the devil-pod tree. They can’t be too severely blamed—I’ve left a great collection of broken pottery and other priceless collectibles laying around out there, to the extent that the place had begun to look like Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. Old leaves and bougainvillea flowers were packed tight under the boards that form the lowest b&b “shelves,” partly because you couldn’t easily walk around the junk back there to get at the mess.

Six years of dust had accrued inside the shed, which I haven’t seriously cleaned since I moved into this house. Think I breathed most of it in while sweeping it off the shelves in there—this morning the throat still feels like it’s made of sandpaper, and I’m still coughing. Should get up and drop a Sudafed, I suppose. Yuch.

Now, consider this: What happens when you begin to think seriously about putting your house on the market?

Yes. Everything breaks!

Saturday I turned on the oven’s self-clean cycle. Leapt back a half-foot when the thing emitted a jackhammer-decibel BDRDRDRDRDRDRDR! Dayum!

So now I’ll have to get a workman in here to see if that can be fixed. There’s an outside chance it’s a fan. But if its not…well. Satan and Proserpine, in the course of renovating the kitchen, installed a freaking double oven in there. They come as part of a single unit. You can’t just replace one oven. You have to replace them both!

Joy. A comparable 27-inch unit will run around $2,000, plus delivery plus installation plus the 10% sales tax. So we’re lookin’ at a $2,500 hit here.

And where is that hit gonna come from? Yup. Out of retirement savings. Just now monthly disposable/short-term emergency savings contains all of $1,379. So having to buy a new oven will clean that out completely and drain survival savings by another thousand bucks.

The inside of the house will need at least some paint, too. The white trim is filthy and dinged up, the door I put on my office so I could lock it securely never did get painted, and that terra-cotta orange hallway is going to have to be painted a subtler color. Ditto the puce orange accent wall in my office that never got painted over because it’s too much hassle to drag the heavy furniture and navigate the tangle of computer cables. God knows what that’s going to cost.

I…need…a…JOB!

 

“Now Matters”: Balancing frugality with life

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Trying again to get this post online. Looks like the WP glitch is now fixed; it was apparently a bug in Akismet. But now I’m having a heck of a time getting it to post at all. Have a bad feeling this thing has gone out to subscribers two or three times, but when and in what form, I don’t know. My apologies if you’ve received one or more versions of this already! 🙄

Spent the past hour or so stealing a few minutes to cruise my favorite blogs, which I’ve neglected shamelessly over the summer. At A Gai Shan Life, what should I come across but a rumination on the psychology of frugality—of the tendency to hoard, actually—and of Revanche’s fairly recent revelation:

…the idea that Now Matters has sunk in.

Yeah. Revanche attributes this insight to the maturing relationship with PiC, now her fiancé.

I’m slowly beginning to get the picture, too, though it may never come in clearly without some degree of “snow.”

LOL! Revanche describes not Seven Kinds of Ambiguity but Seven Kinds of Hoarding: saving the best food for last, so that you can enjoy the good stuff after you’ve polished off the required vegetables and stuff your mom made that you’d better not complain about. Racing through all your chores so as to collect up plenty of “free” (you thought) time. Stashing the candy, so you’d always have some for later. And of course, squirreling away every g.d. penny toward some uncertain “future.”

To this day, I always carve out the heart out of a piece of watermelon and set it aside, so as to eat the sweetest, most delicious part at my leisure: later. And indeed I do try to get all the sh!twork out of the way so as to have more time later, either to work on more productive things or just to loaf. As for money…well, you know, I am “a little funny about money.” 😉

I believe this tendency is in the genes. It’s hard-wired. I got mine from my father, and my poor son, who is even more miserly than I, inherited a double-whammy from his grand-dad and from me.

But like Revanche, I also am beginning to suspect that we need to invest something in the Here and Now, and we need to do it…well, now, not later.

I spend way, way too much time and energy depriving myself. As Frugal Scholar observes wryly about herself, “I do have a tendency to be a little too hair shirt in the frugality department.” She has decided to make a conscious effort to “loosen up,” as she puts it, by way of observing a few small milestones in life.

The women are right. It’s time to get a life. You can’t keep saving life for a rainy day.

In keeping with this impulse and my existing scheme to simplify my finances, I decided that I needed to find the single simplest way to regard income and outgo and then arrange the money management along those lines.

The biggest and best (I hope) manifestation of said impulse is that I’ve determined to stop worrying about every penny that comes and goes month by month—a stressful exercise, given the irregularity of adjunct income—and instead take a big-picture view of the budget and living expenses. Every winter break and all summer long, I chew my nails and tear my hair because I think “Oh GOD! I don’t have enough to pay the bills.”

Well, yes I do. Over the course of an entire year, I have more than enough to pay the bills. Between Social Security and the income from teaching three sections a semester, enough comes in to cover regular bills, pay for necessities, and leave a little to spare. You don’t see that when you look at month-to-month income. But if you back up and look at annual income, it comes into focus.

Videlicet: A year’s worth of income and outgo looks like this:

If I budget $1300 a month to supplement Social Security in covering discretionary and nondiscretionary costs, I just about break even, assuming I teach only three-and-three. But in fact, this year I’ve taught not six sections but nine, adding another $5,428 net to the bottom line. Thirteen hundred dollars is $200 a month more than I’ve been budgeting; it represents a more realistic figure in light of recent inflation. The income figures don’t include the $4,400 of RASL still owed to me in 2012, or the $2,000 or $3,000 income tax refund, or the annual American Express kickback, and so giving myself a little raise should be within reason.

Clearly, if I quit hoarding, I could afford to parcel out enough, month by month, to cover the bills. Occasionally there might even be enough to go out to dinner now and again.

One thing that’s made this not so obvious is that, in my terror that there just would not be enough to cover my share of the underwater mortgage on the downtown house, I started shoveling every penny of my salary directly into the joint account my son and I established to pay that mortgage. Over the summer, I had to stop doing that, because I needed the income from my summer classes to pay the exorbitant hot-weather utility bills. By the end of spring semester, however, I’d stashed enough in there to cover not only the three summer months but the entire year’s worth of mortgage payments.

This exercise made it clear that if I stopped doing that and instead transferred only enough to cover my part of the bargain, quite a bit of money would remain in my hands. Enough, indeed, to ensure that as long as I can dodder into a classroom, I’ll never have to draw down from retirement savings to put food on the table and a roof over my head.

Hmh.

If I were to put all my salary into Survival Savings (a money market account containing the fund of cash I had at the time I was laid off, which I’ve been slowly consuming by way of delaying drawdowns from IRAs and brokerage accounts), I could transfer $717 a month to the joint mortgage-paying account and $1300 to my checking account…and come out smelling like roses! Survival Savings has a balance of $9,464, so if this scheme begins on September 1, the numbers fall out like this:

So what happens if I keep doing this in 2012? Again assuming I teach only three sections a semester, with no summer courses and no overload:

Yup, $288 to the good, not counting tax refund, 2012 RASL, the American Express card kickback, and the various other little windfalls that come my way. And that’s without having to teach in the summer! One summer course would cover emergency costs or keep me firmly in the black from now until Doomsday.

This zen-like strategy is made possible by the fact that I’d managed to squirrel away a substantial emergency fund while I was working full-time. After over 18 months, I still haven’t gone through it, despite a number of unpleasant financial surprises, like the $1500 on the teeth and the $800 on the car and the water bill of almost $200 and the power bill pushing $300.

So I can’t say that hoarding is a bad thing. Obviously, having built this stash by making myself think I was barely scraping by on $65,000 a year worked to my benefit.

However: it’s probably time to recognize that “Now Matters.”

MORE Money Happens!

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It gets better and better. Yesterday afternoon the division chair’s redoubtable admin called and asked if I’d take on another course this fall! He’d already given me the maximum allowable number of courses—though the magazine writing course doesn’t start till mid-October and right now has only three students—and so this in theory makes four sections.

I’ll be surprised if the magazine writing thing makes—but then, so far I’ve been surprised every semester. It’s akin to taking a course in buggy-whip design. Wish they’d build a course in blog writing and management into their course bank. Since some punkins we know are actually making a living at this, it seems to me to fit right into the community-college mandate: pragmatic education that fosters life-long learning and serves nontraditional students.

Oh well. With or without Buggy Whip Design 201, three sections of composition will save my bedraggled tailfeathers again! 🙂

Though it’s been a busy summer, I’ve really enjoyed teaching the two comp sections that came my way in the second session. Both were really good classes, but the 102 class was one of the best bunches I’ve ever had the privilege of pretending to teach. Smart, highly motivated, and focused, they worked together well and almost all of them responded to the assignments with a high degree of success. It’s been quite a pleasure to work with them.

I think these short courses attract students who are already pretty confident in their abilities, usually with good reason. It would make sense for a student who worries about her or his English skills to enroll in a 16-week course, providing more time to wrestle with the assignments and more chances to get help at the learning center. So apparently the five- and eight-week courses self-select into pools of fluent writers with good study skills. The only serious exception was a lovely young woman who had to deal with some ESL issues in her written (not spoken) English, and she, too, had good reason to expect to succeed: she’s only 16 and is enrolled this fall in AP calculus. Math and science are her strong fields, and she’s evidently so good at them that a grade below an “A” doesn’t register in her consciousness.

Well, back to the subject at hand, our favorite topic, money. This development will make it possible for me to revamp the cash flow scheme along the lines that Frugal Scholar has suggested in many of her comments here: simplifying toward minimalism.

The issue is how to survive on a variable income, one that can produce some paychecks as low as a couple hundred bucks and some upwards of seventeen hundred dollah. For the staid at heart, this does nothing to foster a state of zen calm.

My plan now is to make Survival Savings a kind of “pool” account. All money other than Social Security will go into this fund, whether it’s teaching income, RASL, income tax refunds, insurance reimbursements, or the annual Costco AMEX rebate.

Social Security lands in my checking account whenever the government feels like sending it—deposit dates this year have ranged from  the 7th to the 13th of the month. So that plug of income will form the base income for the month. On the first of each month I’ll transfer the rest of what I need to pay the bills from Survival Savings, which will now hold every penny of income other than Social Security. The first-of-the-month transfer will tide me over until Social Security is finally deposited. Because Social Security is a fixed payment, the amount I need to come up with from other sources is pretty much the same from month to month: about $1300, up from $1100 because of the not-really-inflationary increases in grocery and power costs.

Unfortunately, I’ll have to keep the self-escrow account to hold each month’s dribbles toward the annual property tax, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, and Medigap insurance. Given my colorful arithmetic skills, I can’t afford to take a chance of accidentally spending so much that I can’t cover one or more of those costs. So there’s a bookkeeping complication that, alas, can’t go away.

And I’ll keep the emergency/diddle-it-away savings account, which helped a great deal with this summer’s dental and automotive exploits. It gets $200 a month.

Because of the rules about the number of transfers you can make from a money market or savings account, I guess those automatic transfers (for tax & insurance self-escrow and for the extraneous spending) will still have to come out of checking, rather than going direct from Survival Savings, which resides in the money market. To be safe, I think it would be better to make one transfer a month from that and then disburse the monthly self-escrow transfers from checking, which has no limit on the number of withdrawals one can make. That way, if a really big expense comes up, there’ll still be a few allowable transfers left on the money market account.

Burdensome banking rules notwithstanding, though, this scheme will fill in the potholes on the road to solvency. Despite the irregular income, the fact is if I’m teaching three & three plus anything else that comes my way, enough comes in over the course of a year to cover the bills—it’s just that in some months nothing comes in, and given my peculiar psychology, I find that unnerving. In a way, turning Survival Savings into a pool that collects the springwater of my on-again off-again income will make the variability of the income irrelevant. As long as Survival Savings lasts (probably another 18 months to two years), I’ll withdraw a steady, unchanging figure from it.

When it’s gone…well, then I’ll just have to come up with some new scheme.

Susan-B.-Anthony-Dollar

 

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.