Coffee heat rising

Budgeting

Rain!

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At last! Monsoon season is almost over, and here we get our first thunderstorm of the summer — with rain. About time, I’d say!

Ruby the Corgi is unnnerved. She contemplates jumping off the bed, but it’s a drop from the top of the mattress to the floor. Too exposed up here: she craves her den, under the toilet.

Clearly, under the toilet is the only safe place to be during a noisy storm. 🙂

And noisy it is. The light show is going on about 5 to 10 miles away, by my count. But still, a few thunderclaps are…arresting.

Amused myself this evening by starting to figure out next year’s budget, the annual required minimum withdrawal having just arrived from Fidelity. The numbers do not look good.

It appears that over the next year, I’ll have a shortfall of $12,470. This year’s RMD plus Social Security total up to $31,460, but when I set aside the amounts I paid for 2019 taxes and insurance plus the $300/month for emergency savings, the net available to live on for a year is $20,085. Meanwhile, my total average living expense per year is now $32,556, not including any little surprises like dental work and pool repair. That’s a shortfall of $12,471. If I don’t put anything aside for emergencies, we still end up with a shortfall of $8870.

I got by for about 10 or 11 months this year on the RMD and Social Security, but had to take the RMD a couple of months early. Financial Dude just transferred $16,500 from Fidelity, but after taxes & insurance, that will not cover my costs for 12 months. Or even, I’m afraid, for 10 months.

Coincidentally, we’re de-incorporating The Copyeditor’s Desk, changing it from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship. What that will mean tax-wise escapes me. But the business account has just about enough to make up the shortfall, assuming I don’t have to buy any new computer hardware. But…that’s this year.

Then what?

 

Horror$! The Cost of the Weeks from Hell…

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Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down during the past two months from Hell — week after week after week in which every single day has brought some new nightmare — that I just completely let the budget go. There’s a limit to what I can think about, and I’ve been way past that limit for a long time.

By today, though, things have been quiet long enough for me to catch my breath and try to figure out how much this has cost. And how I’m going to pay for it.

• The cost of the vet bills alone has come to just about $1,000 since September 15.
• As of October 21 — with 10 more days to run this month! — I was $575 in the red.
• I retrieved $381 from Social Security by cutting the planned monthly transfer to Emergency Savings by about 60%; this left me a mere $228 in the red.

With 10 more days to go in October.

Yeah.

And that was extremely lucky: no large bills to repair the car after the fender-bender, thanks to Chuck’s guys wrestling and bolting the thing back into place, and because by some miracle I didn’t have to replace tires.

A thousand bucks on the dog in six weeks. Think of that!

Dare one speculate that a substantial part of that resulted from a wrong diagnosis? Well…probably not. We really don’t know whether Cassie does or does not  have Valley fever. She may. But she’s one helluva lot better than she was, that’s for sure. Not back to normal. But not stepping over Death’s threshold, either.

There’s money in savings to cover a couple hundred bucks’ worth of red ink. Just. There’s no way I can sustain even one more unplanned expense. And Christmas, obviously, is now a lost cause.

God only knows what the potentially life-threatening skin cancer diagnosis will cost me. Despite the supposed joys of Medicare and Medigap, there’s always some amount that isn’t covered. Where the cash will come from to pay those bills, I do not know. Out of investments, I expect.

One message from this: unless you still have a job in “retirement,” you can’t afford to keep a pet. So forget that. After Cassie and Ruby are both gone, there’ll be no more doggy companionship.

With any luck, I won’t live that long myself…

State of the Chaos

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A little quieter here today… let’s hope it’s not the calm before the next storm. Let’s see how the various crises are doing:

1. In the department of Funny’s Money: I have no idea. I don’t even want to know, it’s such a chaotic disaster. This month I never got an untrammeled moment when I wasn’t too exhausted to sit down and work on the budget, so I’ve just been spending left and right. Financial manager sent over enough to cover the down payment on the pool rehab, which starts Monday. I reset the checking-to-emergency savings automatic transfer to move less than half of what I originally thought I could manage, so that (at least) will leave a little more basic survival money in checking.

2. Hand cancer: still waiting on the biopsy. But I’m calling the doc’s office on Monday to ask if we can accelerate the process. I want this damn thing OFF. Where they shaved off enough to send to the lab, it’s growing back with élan. Whatever it is, it’s very fast-growing and so presumably aggressive. And at times it really hurts. Hurts and itches. Turns out pain and itching are defining characteristics of squamous cell cancer. Why exactly we have to wait for biopsy results until the cows come home to cut the thing out escapes me.

3. Dog decedence*: No credible sign of croaking over yet! Matter of fact, this dog is getting much better. Just now she remembered the chicken jerky treats that reside in a jar on the kitchen counter and decided to do the Dance of the Manipulated Human, thereby eliciting a chew treat for herself and for Ruby. The cough seemed to come back a little: it had subsided to the point where she coughed only when she slurped up a lot of water (which she’s always done…corgis do that). She had stopped coughing when she barks and stopped coughing when I lifted her off the bed. So I cut back the Benadryl from 1/2 tab in the morning and 1/2 tab in the evening to just 1/2 tab at night. A-n-n-d…the cough started to come back. This morning I gave her a dose at doggy breakfast, and lo! No coughing.

*Yes, yes, I did invent that word. Why do you ask? Etym: Late Modern English, from decedent (a deceased person)

4. Car: It seems to have survived its brush with the flatbed trailer with no very serious damage. The gouged tire is still rolling. It hasn’t blown, at least not so far…and yeah, it has been on a freeway or two. I’m trying to stay off the freeways, because I don’t trust the thing. But to get out to the new dermatologist’s office sometime before the end of my life expectancy, I pretty much have to ride the 101 for a number of miles. So far, so good.

5. Cord-cutting Cox escape: Last night La Maya and La Bethulia invited me over for dinner. In the course of conversation, I remarked that I need to get rid of the fake “land line” (Cox’s new version is really VoIP, and not very good VoIP at that), replace my extensions with cheap clamshells and get an iPhone.

“I have two old iPhones that I’m not using!” says La Bethulia. “Want one?”

Do I want one???? Grab!  Well, she quite reasonably wanted to delete all her data on the thing before I trot it over to the Apple store to get it set up. And they’ve forgotten the password for the thing. But it turns out it’s not hard to reboot the thing all by your little self. So…I may try to do that with my son’s help, or just hire an Apple tech to do it. Paying someone a hundred bucks or so would be a lot cheaper than buying a new iPhone! 🙂

6. MacMail fiasco: Still not fixed. Right now the only way I can get to my email is through the Web interface, which is less than ideal. It does allow me to access incoming mail, but all my carefully designed preferences have been screwed up. Not erased — which would have been far preferable — but all jumbled around. So it’s a mess. And I guess I’m going to end up either having to pay Cox for an email account, the bastards, or start using Gmail, which I really really REALLY do not want to do. This, I will figure out later.

7. Other little dramas: Have yet to decide whether I’m going back to choir. The associate director has kindly put me on the women’s chant choir, which I love.  She urged me to come to choir on Sunday despite having turned on my heel and marched back to my car and gone home after last Wednesday evening’s unpleasant exchange at the door (not with her but with a woman who makes no secret of her dislike of me).

I don’t know. I’d pretty well decided to quit — just never go back, that’s how disgusted I am. And besides…

Really, the only thing that keeps me from feeling a great deal more serious about moving out of Crime Central is the choir. I can’t afford any other close-in district — this neighborhood is cheap because Conduit of Blight Blvd, Gangbanger’s Way, the Blightrail, the meth clinic, and the population of bums keep the property values way down. Comparable homes anywhere else are at least a hundred grand higher, and these days more like two hundred grand.

Abandoning the choir and the church would open two housing options: Fountain Hills, wayyy on the east side of the Valley, and Sun City, wayyyy on the west side. Both have the advantages of low crime rates and pretty decent nearby shopping. They’re both quiet and peaceful, and there’s no way any politicians and their greed-driven backers are going to build a boondoggle through the middle of either one. Sun City is a ghetto for old folks, which I really do not like. Fountain Hills is one helluva long way from everything but the Mayo Clinic, a distance that I also do not like. I don’t know anyone in Fountain Hills and, because I don’t make friends easily, this would make me feel isolated and unhappy. But Fountain Hills has pretty scenery and it is close to upscale shopping and to my favorite second-hand store, My Sister’s Closet. Sun City has the advantages that it’s very cheap to live there, and that I do know some people there and so would start with a kernel of a social life. Which would be good. I guess. And the writer’s group I favor meets way on the west side, so it would be easy to cultivate more friends there. I guess.

Well, if I’m going to snab that phone, I need to get up and do it now…La Maya’s relatives are about to descend on the house. And so, away!

Stress and Budget Stress

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As you’ve no doubt noticed, stress overall that has nothing to do with finances tends to put stress on your budget. Looked at the bank balance the other day and thought hooleeee shit! Down 12 grand from last June? Really?

Well, yeah: really. And no: not exactly. But it’s still not great. When you’re stressed out with a lot of extraneous bullshit pressing in on your life, the last thing you feel like thinking about is managing your personal finances. But in fact, that is the time that you need to get a grip on the bucks and the budget. Because when you’re distracted with life’s little tragedies, you tend to throw money at your problems without even thinking about it. And because life’s little tragedies tend to get mighty pricey, throwing money away heedlessly is a less than ideal strategy.

This month, with the endless drama of the sick dog and the bashed car and the leaking roof in the biggest rainstorm we’ve had in any Millenial’s living memory and the Great Flood of incoming editorial work and the key to my office door breaking off in the lock (sealing both computers, the voicemail machine, my glasses and all my money stuff in there) and the AMEX card lost or stolen and the receptionist duty I naïvely volunteered for slicing four indispensable hours out of my week and Cassie pissing Lake Urons all over the house and Charley the Golden Retriever disappearing and a weird scary pox thing developing on the hand of the arm where I had a Shingrix shot and more drives to veterinarians through homicidal traffic than I can count and the new Medicare card (now also lost or stolen) not working when I went to get a flu shot and the stove refusing to light and the HVAC unit busting and the pool water clouding from neglect and a hummingbird getting trapped in the skylight and on and on and fuckin’ ON, I just flat gave up on tracking the budget.

Wasn’t any point to it. Money was flying out my door and into the vet’s at the rate of $1200 a hit, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. So it seemed, anyway.

But really, when money is pouring out like water through a hole in the side of a kiddy pool…that’s the time to keep track of what’s going on.

Having failed to do that, I almost fainted when I saw the bank account’s bottom line, since it looked like there was no way the remaining money was going to see me through to time for the next Required Minimum Drawdown (RMD). Social Security just supplements my RMD; the truth is, there’s no way in Hell I can live on Social Security. But I seemed to be looking at a drop of $12,000 in the bank balance from the end of June, 2018. Four grand (plus!) a month????

Given this moment of panic, it took some study to remind myself that I’d set aside several thousand dollars to pay for the property tax, the car registration (which because the dented Venza is much newer than the long-lamented Dog Chariot, is damned bracing), and the homeowner’s and car insurance. Okay, that was mildly reassuring. But we still had the fact that there simply isn’t enough left in cash flow money to cover another nine months. It might last five…if I’m careful. WTF?

Okay: the issue is, I finally realize, that I’ve been setting aside an optimistic $681 a month from Social Security into emergency savings. This was good: much of the expenses I’ve run up will be covered by the amount I’d already managed to squirrel aside before the current Shakespearean tragedy (comedy??) launched. But bad: it doesn’t leave enough in cash flow to cover regular expenses.

So today on the way home from visiting Young Dr. Kildare (yes, goddamn it: another doctor’s visit!!!!!), I’ll need to drop by the credit union and have them adjust the automatic transfer down to $300 a month. I could try to do that online, but since my propensity for screwing up online transactions has given staff there a flinch reflex every time they see me stumbling toward their door, I don’t think that would be wise. Better to get a grown-up who knows what she’s doing to perform this trick, so she doesn’t have to do gymnastics to fix whatever screw-up I create.

If I change the monthly emergency-fund contribution to $300, that will leave an extra $381 in the checking account, which I sincerely hope will help to cover routine expenses for the rest of the year. Kinda doubt it, frankly. But hope springs eternal.

The point is, though: when a barrage of incoming flack has got you stressed out, prioritize managing the budget. Set aside an hour or so a week to keep tabs on what’s going on financially, even if it means you have to roll out of the sack early once a week. This can spare you from a lot more stress on down the line.

All-Time RECORD LOW on AMEX! Woo hooo!

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The American Express bills came in yesterday, for both the personal and the business cards. The tab for personal spending?

$207.35

Whoa!!!!! That is an all time low! Literally true: I’ve never had an American Express bill come in under about $850. It’s usually around $1200.

To what can we attribute this miracle?

Well, I’ll tellya: I think it’s the Costco “envelope” budgeting scheme. Apparently, that strategy is influencing other kinds of spending. Because of course, since Costco dumped AMEX for Citibank’s Visa (I refuse to do business with Citibank ever again — period!), I haven’t been able to use the AMEX card at Costco. So…

????

Why on earth would putting all my Costco purchases on a pre-purchased cash card affect expenses normally racked up on AMEX?

Obviously, it’s a psychological thing.

I think it works like this: Making a list near the beginning of the month of everything that I know I need, including the estimated prices of those items, and trying to keep the total cost to $300 or less forces me to think carefully about what I really do need.

That is, the envelope method causes you to plan for purchasing. And when you plan, you get a grip on spending.

By thinking ahead a full month, I’ve been able to restrict almost all my household and food purchases to Costco, and that seems to limit impulse buys at other venues. In other words, I don’t have to run to a grocery store to buy, say, a can of Comet, and so I do not buy a bunch of other stuff while I’m there. Ultimately, I buy only the things I really need; not the things I imagine, on the run, that I can’t live without.

Yes, there was one impulse buy at Costco last month: I bought a pair of black pants, because our choir director asked us to wear black this year under our robes. Did I have a pair of black jeans? Yup. At least two of them. Did I need a pair of black pants? Nope. But they did not push spending past the $300 limit on the cash card. And they do look a lot dressier for church, and unlike other stretchy pants, they do have pockets to carry credit cards and the emergency phone (which can’t be left in the car at this time of year).

What happened, it appears, is that because of that careful plan-ahead, I bought almost everything I needed at Costco, within the $300 budget (plus the $60 for gasoline). Not feeling any crying need to buy much else, the result was that I simply stayed out of other stores.

{chortle!} I’d seen that $207 balance in the online accounting, but didn’t believe it. Thought it must have been a mistake (mine, no doubt: if it’s online, I’m unlikely to get it straight). But NOOOOO!

Who’d’ve thunk it?