Coffee heat rising

Budgeting

Budget off the Rails

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Yuck!

Okay, I admit it: I have neglected the budget. Yea verily, I have lost the art of penny-pinching.

Result: I’m running out of money, two months before the start of my next “personal fiscal year,” which starts in September. In 2017, that’s when I took the last Required Minimum Drawdown from the 401K, which was supposed to last a year.

Didn’t.

So next year I have to figure out how to live on 21 grand plus a pittance from Social Security. Since running this house and feeding me and the dogs consume about 2 grand a month, that’s a challenge.

Just now I’m as close to broke as I can get, budget-wise, considering that I have enough cash in the bank to cover about six weeks of expenses, and it’s eight weeks before the start of September.

The other day I mentioned the “envelope method” plan I’d cooked up: fill a Costco cash card with a budgeted amount to spend there during a month, and when it runs out, stop buying. This makes some sense, though nothing is to stop me from streaking out of the Costco over to the nearest Safeway and filling out the shopping list…probably at more expense than just buying everything at whatever CC would cost. Hmmm….

Whilst staring blankly at an unfriendly spreadsheet, a little INSIGHT dawned… Don’t budget by the month. Budget by the year. And instead of using cash cards as “envelopes,” use bank accounts. I already have a checking account, which juggles cash flow; an emergency savings account (containing $4.61); and an account to hold payments from Medigap and Medicare B, preparatory to forwarding that money to the Mayo.

[The Mayo does not “take Medicare assignment.” This is a bureaucratic way of saying they don’t accept direct deposit from Medicare or your Medigap insurer. So, every goddamn time you go to the doctor or an ER or whatEVER, you have to field a blitz of ditzy little annoying checks, deposit them in your bank account, and then pay the Mayo. Right now one has been sitting on my desk for awhile, waiting for me to get around to the hassle of scanning and uploading it: $24.17. The Mayo’s outstanding bill is several hundred dollars… It is, in a word or two, a fuckin’ nuisance.]

Where were we? Yes, staring blankly, dreaming up a fresh scheme…

A little calculation showed that if I were to get a freaking grip on spending, in theory this year’s drawdown should just about cover 2018/19 expenditures, if nothing happens. By “nothing,” we mean no major car repair bills, no appliances having to be replaced, no giant vet bills, no dental work…a very big “nothing,” indeed. But let’s pretend a person could get through 12 months without having to confront any of those.

Right.

What if I kept the drawdown that just hit my checking account in my checking account, but did not keep Social Security income in checking? What if I auto-transferred each Social Security deposit over to the Emergency Savings account…. Said E.S. account is empty just now, putting me at considerable risk of future misery. Twelve hundred a month would, in theory, load that account with some 14 grand over the next year, allowing me not to have to spend crazily to keep up with routine month-to-month costs.

And instead of keeping the entire drawdown in checking, what if I transferred the $8,408 a year demanded by taxes and insurance (!!!!!!) over to the present tax & insurance savings account, now empty because the 2018 T&I bills have all been paid. What if?

What would then remain in checking would be the amount I could spend on living expenses. This would be much truncated by setting all the net Social Security income aside for emergencies. But since I now have approximately $0.00 set aside in emergency savings, the truncation would be very much worth it. And, according to my English-major calculations, if I could cut the Costco bills down from $300 a month to $200 a month, this scheme would be eminently do-able.

Why do I think it would work?

Because the AMEX billing cycle closed yesterday. I charge everything on American Express, mostly including Costco but also racking up bills at various grocery stores and other retailers. This month the tab was only $775. Basically, an AMEX bill reflects all living expenses except utilities, taxes, and insurance.

It’s usually more like $1200. That means I spent some $425 less this month than I usually do.

Well, if I can spend $425 less than normal in June, I can do it all the time, no?

Yeah: probably “no.” But what’s to stop one from trying?

So the money from Fidelity hit the credit union this morning. Here’s what we now have:

$16,644 to live on for the next year (stashed in checking)
$8,408 for taxes & insurance (stashed in T&I savings)
$14,532 incoming from Social Security over the next 12 months (routed to Emergency savings)

So even though Social security will bring the year’s total cash available to something over 31 grand, the plan is to try to live on just $16,644.

That works out to $1,387 a month. So far in the current year, the one that is driving me to the metaphorical poorhouse, I’ve spent an average of $1,750 a month, a difference of $363.

So to live on this proposed new budget, I’ll have to cut spending by about $365 a month.

However, a backup fund will be growing at the rate of about $1200+ a month. If need be, I can draw down from Emergency Savings to make up the difference. So even if I regularly went over budget by some $363 every month, the red ink would only amount to about $4355. That would still leave something like 10 grand in Emergency Savings at the end of a year.

How to cut $363 a month out of normal spending?

Well, obviously:

• Don’t go to dentists.
• Don’t go to vets.
• Don’t drive the car any more than absolutely necessary (so as not to run up repair bills).
• Don’t buy clothes.
• Don’t buy shoes.
• Don’t go out to eat.
• Don’t go to shows or movies or musical events.
• Cling to every goddamn red penny.

It’s going to be a mighty dull year, I’m afraid. But I can’t be running out of cash two months before the end of every 12-month cycle. Something has to be done to get caught up with the spending

Budgeting: Back to the Envelope Method

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And, for a change: back to Funny about Money’s long-defunct theme: personal finance. You’ll recall, those of you who are Dave Ramsey fans, that one strategy for keeping yourself on budget is called the “envelope method.” In that scheme, you cash out a month’s worth of dollars and fill a separate envelope with the amount designated for each budget item. So, $200 for groceries in one envelope; $100 for gasoline in another, $30 for dog food…and so on, ad ditzy nauseam.

Well, some of us have neither the patience for that kind of ditz nor the stomach for putting an entire month’s worth of funding at risk of being heisted by some enterprising burglar or dropped unnoticed on the pavement. I use credit cards and electronic payment to minimize loss from theft and incompetence.

Conveniently, though, if you happen to bank at a credit union, you have an easy route to create electronic “envelopes.” My CU allows members to add any number of savings accounts. So right now, for example, I have one to collect the constant dustfall of tiny checks from Medicare and the Medigap insuror — whenever a couple hundred bucks accrues, I fork it over to the Mayo. And one for emergency savings. And one to hold enough to cover income tax, accounting bills, property tax, homeowner’s insurance, Medigap insurance, and car insurance, all set aside at the beginning of my personal “fiscal” year, when I have to take an RMD from my 401(k).

This allows you to earmark and set aside specific amounts for specific purposes, placing them where they’re unlikely to get diddled away in day-to-day spending.

Now we have this question: in the absence of a desirable Visa credit card, how — really — am I going to continue to shop at Costco? I haven’t cut up the credit card or closed the account — it’s never a good idea to close a credit account in good standing — but because I don’t do business with outfits that treat me like sh!t, I will never use the card again.

I do have a debit card. But for a variety of reasons, I prefer not to use it. For one thing, there’s not a chance on God’s Green Earth I’m gonna put the thing in a gas station pump — certainly not at the Costco where I shop, which is flanked to the south and the west by dangerous slums and a park that has been taken over by bums. But I do prefer to buy Costco gas, because it’s the cheapest deal in the city. And there’s always an attendant — invariably a large, imposing male — standing around that Costco gas station, so I don’t feel so much at risk as I do at the rip-off QTs within reasonable driving distance of the ‘hood.

So. Here’s my plan:

Create a new savings account to hold money budgeted to spend at Costco. That would be an entire year’s worth of money budgeted for Costco ventures: shopping and gasoline, combined. So let’s say on average I spend, maybe…what? $340 on food, clothing, household goods, dog treats, personal products, impulse buys, and gasoline. When the 2019 RMD comes in — which will be about in September — I set aside $4,080 (= $340 x 12 months) in this account.

Then I trot in to Costco and buy a cash card for the amount I imagine I’ll spend at Costco, both inside the store and at the pumps, over a month. That would be around $340. That is what I carry to the store to make purchases. Each month I pay for it out of the Costco Envelope savings account.

I spend no more than that in any given month. Run out of money: quit shopping at Costco. How hard is that?

If money is left over at the end of the month, the next month’s cash card is loaded with accordingly fewer dollars. So, say, in March I spend $250, leaving $90 unspent; the April card has $340 − $90 on it: $250. Thus whenever I spend less than $340 over a month, the overage stays in the bank account.

So at any given time, the Costco cash card never has more than a month’s budget on it. If I don’t spend the entire budgeted amount, then whatever is not diddled away stays in that savings account.

I figure at the end of the year, anything that’s left can be transferred to the Emergency Savings account, and the Costco Budget account can start over from zero at the start of the new “fiscal year.”

When you know there’s an upper limit on what you can spend, you find yourself feeling a lot more cautious about your spending.

Therein lies the threat of Costco, the Mother of All Impulse Buy Hells. When the budget is open-ended — in your mind you think you have plenty to live on (which you do, if you don’t run amok) — you go “oh, it’s only $20…no problem, I can afford that.” And you could, if you just didn’t keep doing it over and over…

But if you’re thinking, “Helles Belles, I’ve only got x number of dollars to spend today,” then you realize the $20 doo-dad is not a life-or-death purchase. The beauty of the Envelope Method is that it sets a limit on what you’re willing to diddle away.

So, what started out as an annoyance — yet another stupid faceless bureaucratic hassle — may work out to my advantage. Not so much to Costco’s advantage, but certainly to mine: by getting the Costco spending under control, this new, enforced budgeting strategy will let me stay within the annual RMD for another year or two, despite soaring health insurance and property tax rates.

After that, it’s anyone’s guess. I may have to think more seriously about moving out of the country, to some venue where I can stay in the middle class on the retirement income. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

How’s That [fill-in-the-blank] Workin’ for Ya?

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Thankee, that [hand-wash the dishes scheme] is workin’ surprisingly well. Who’d’ve thunk it?

LOL! Have been banging around since the hounds and I rolled out of the sack at 4:30 a.m. The mile-long dawg walk is done. Pool maintenance: done. Yard maintenance: done. Three loads of laundry: done. Shitload of housework: done. Trash hauling: done. And it’s only 11:00 in the morning!

Interestingly, it turns out that washing dishes by hand is nowhere near as annoying as I remember it from my misspent youth, when my mother used to make me wash all the damn dishes. In the first place, there’s only one person dirtying up dishes here (well…not counting the pooches). In the second, I cook almost exclusively on the grill (especially in the summertime!), and so there are no pots and pans to scrub. And finally, because in diet mode I eat only twice a day, stacks of dirty dishes fail to materialize.

If I set my own and the pooches’ plates in a sink filled with soapy water, whenever I get around to sponging and rinsing them, it takes less than three minutes to wash them and drop them in the washer’s dishrack to drain. Exactly zero electric power is consumed (the water heater runs on gas). Compare that with the two-hour power- and water-consuming cycle to wash the same number of dishes & utensils!

Think of that. If I washed dishes twice a day, every day, that would be six minutes times seven, or 42 minutes a week. Less than half the time it takes to run one dishwasher load!

Normally I run the washer about once every second or third day. So that would mean in a week I would run it twice or three times: four to six hours of electric use!

Compare that with zero hours of electric consumption, and maybe three gallons of water per day, heated with gas.

My kitchen sports a huge double sink. I mean, huge. This makes it possible to fill one sink with richly Dawn-enhanced water. Then, whenever the dogs or I finish eating something, I set the dishes in the water and leave them to soak (having wiped the food into the trash first, of course). Later in the day: sponge down the collected pottery, glass, and stainless, rack it, drain and rinse the sink, and forget it.

It’s no exaggeration to say this takes about three minutes.

Maybe SDXB wasn’t as crazy as I thought.

He hates dishwashers and refuses to use them. When he lived with me, he tried to force me to abjure the use of my Kitchenaid. It was one of several constant sources of conflict.

On the other hand, SDXB did love to cook. And what a mess that man could make! The result would always be piles of sticky, greasy pans, mountains of bowls and platters and plates, knives and spoons and forks and peelers and mixers and…ugh!!! Washing all that stuff by hand was, in fact, one bitch of a chore.

That’s not how I prepare food these days. Almost everything that I cook goes on the grill. Most veggies can be grilled on one of those barbecue pan things with the little holes in it. Meat, of course, goes right over the fire. Even pasta (for example) doesn’t get a cooking pot very dirty. So with few pots and pans — and almost never a frying or sauté pan — the dishes you eat off of are pretty easy to soak clean.

On other fronts: Did I fix the link in yesterday’s Complete Writer post? No. My patience is still too short to address that issue. Gimme a break, Lord!

Am I going to make it to the end of my personal “fiscal” year in September, when the annual required minimum drawdown from the IRA is slated? No. I have $4,000 in the checking account. Talked the Mayo into reducing its bill by $305, the amount Medicare and Medigap refused to cover for the stupid “annual checkup” that I should have turned down, but that was a drop in the bucket. Yesterday in the mail came a bill for something over $2,000 for next year’s Medigap coverage. That is a huge increase. Obviously, since it costs about $2,000/month to run this house and feed me and the dogs and operate the car and fill the various hands reaching into my pocketbook — exclusive of tax and insurance bills — I am not going to make it to September on what remains in the bank.

I’m told long-term care coverage is also going way up.

Obviously, I can’t continue to live on the RMD plus Social Security at this rate. Possibly I’ll have to consider canceling the long-term care coverage. That is a HUGE risk. If I don’t die quickly but instead land in some nursing home, the cost will drain savings fast, impoverishing me and eliminating any chance of leaving enough to my son to matter.

My plan is to exit stage left if it looks like any such thing is coming down the pike. If one were to succeed in that strategy, it would render the long-term care insurance massively redundant. On the other hand, there’s always the chance that — say you had a stroke or you fell and hurt yourself bad enough that you couldn’t move around — one might not be able to reach the tools set aside for the purpose.

I’d rather not have to pay that accursed insurance bill. But on the other hand, I sure don’t want everything I hope to leave to my son taken away…for what? To keep me pointlessly alive?

And finally, remember the Vicks VapoRub Quack Cure for supposed toenail fungus? How did that work? Mixed. After the initial six-week experiment, I continued to use it for a several months. But it must be said that the stuff does stink. One does tire of going to bed smelling like a chemical factory. So eventually I gave it up.

And, as expected, eventually the dry hide/possible fungus was back to business as usual.

My friend VickyC reported that tea tree oil had worked for her. Look it up, and you find that it does work, sometimes: in 10% to 14% of cases. The other option is a very expensive topical fungicide whose results are similarly weak, or anti-fungicidal pills that can make you good and sick. Thanks: I’ll take the toenails as they are.

So the other day I picked up a tea tree oil concoction (woo-wooooo!) at Whole Foods and tried it.

Damned if it doesn’t make a difference!

However: I suspect that’s because this is probably not a fungal infection. At first glance, Derma-Doc pronounced the thick skin and raggedy nail ends on the right foot (not on the left one) to be “dry skin.” He recommended massaging a whole lotta Eucerin into the toes. And the rest of the foot. And the other foot.

Side note: for years a neuroma caused so much pain in the ball of that foot that I would curl my toes under when walking, to relieve the pressure on the spot that hurt. That caused extensive callusing on the ends of the toes…which, we might add, coincide with the tips of one’s toenails. Thus Derma-Doc’s off-the-cuff diagnosis had some credibility.

Later, also on the fly, he remarked that it was a fungus. So: WTF. Who knows?

This time, though, unlike past episodes of fretting, one of the nails had developed a  brown spot.

Side note: however, awhile back I whacked my foot good and bruised the toes. The dark spot could have been a little blood seeping under the nail, which would not be the first time that’s happened.

So, following the quack instructions, I went to file the surface of the nail a bit, and lo! that lifted the discolored area right off. Clearly, whatever it is does not dwell under the nail, as we’re told is the case with a nail infection.

Tea tree oil has its own annoying New-Agey perfume, but it dissipates quickly. Put it on an hour or two before bed-time, and it does not accompany you between the sheets. Nor does it fill the air around you with a nose-crinkling stink.

I’ve been brushing this stuff on each night and then covering the feet with peds… After just a few days, the rhino-hide effect has much improved. The brown spot remains gone. And I suspect that if a person continued this “regimen” (heh) over a period of weeks or months, eventually the road-worn toes would assume a normal appearance.

We shall see. This is so easy, there’s no reason not to try it.

Losing the Visa Card but Keeping Costco

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You may recall that when Costco dropped American Express and switched all its customers over to Citibank’s Visa card, I demurred — having enjoyed Citibank’s customer disservice in the past and had a bellyful. Instead, I decided to opt the wondrous benefits that attach to the Costco Visa card (which, it must be allowed, are considerable) and stick with a Visa card issued through my credit union.

This has worked OK. The CU’s Visa card even offers a few kickbacks, though of course nothing as generous as the Costco card provides.

But there have been a few problems. The biggest one has been getting the bills paid on time.

Item: When you use the credit union’s online bill-pay service — which should be transferring the payment electronically — the CU in fact pays Visa with a freaking paper check sent by snail-mail!!

This means it takes some ten days to arrive in Visa’s precincts. And then it takes another day or two for the check(!) to clear Visa’s bank. So if, say, the due date is April 10 and the check arrives there on April 10, payment is considered late!

The envelopes in which the CU-branded bills arrive are so discreet as to be practically incognito. It’s not obvious at first glance that a Visa statement (or any financial document) is inside. So it’s possible to simply miss an incoming statement, if you’re not paying attention.

I have paper statements sent as signals that it’s time to pony up some cash. This I favor over electronic statements, because a) my incoming email is a freaking NONSTOP tsunami, and sooner or later an electronic blat will get lost; and b) things computer make me tear my hair out. I do not want to deal with any more than I’ve already got, thank you.

So, if a statement doesn’t get here, chances are I will miss a payment.

This happened last month. The May statement seems to have been lost in the mail, and I never noticed that it hadn’t come and so hadn’t been paid.

This week, in comes a snarling wallop upside the head from Visa, saying they not only are gouging me $25 as a late payment penalty, they also are reporting me to all three credit bureaus as delinquent.

This morning I call and ask to get this reversed, which you usually can do if you don’t try it very often. WonderAccountant says most credit-card vendors will forgive one lapse a year.

Not so this outfit. The guy I reached, who sounded like a sweet enough young fella, said there was not a thing he could do about it. He pretended to absent himself long enough to make it look like he was talking to a boss, then came back on the line and said there was nothing they could do to reverse or undo the black blot with the credit bureau.

So I had to get in the car, traipse across the city to the credit union, and talk with the manager in person.

Forthwith, she got the late charge reversed and arranged to pay the bill in full. I said I wanted to close the account. She suggested not doing that. And yeah, I do know you really shouldn’t close a credit card account, because just closing it — whether or not a dispute is involved — will ding your credit rating. She did say that the credit ding was not slated to go through until the 22nd, and since we’re a long way from that date, there should be no report to the damned credit bureaus.

Okay. Well, that’s fine: I still have an active card. But there’s no way they can make me use it. It’s now in a file folder, hidden in a drawer.

In passing, I considered opening a Citibank Costco card, which after all would provide some rich kickbacks. But that is going to be a major hassle, with all the freezes on the three credit bureaus. When I talked with Citibank over the phone yesterday, their rep said they could not know which of the three credit bureaus they would use — apparently their software rotates among them  at random. So this would mean I would have to apply; then sit by the phone till I got a call from Citibank; then call the specified credit bureau; then demand a temporary lift of the freeze.

Yeah. Right.

Well, to start with, I have only one phone number that reaches a human (or did, the last time I called), and that’s with Experian. Trying to get through to those people is a headache of migraine intensity; as for the others…don’t even ask.

So. That leaves me with a Visa debit card, which I decidedly do not want to use at Costco’s gas pumps (or anyone else’s) and would prefer not to use at all.

Hm.

I spend way too much money at Costco, AKA “Impulse Buy Hell.” Matter of fact, over the past six months, I’ve averaged $332 a month in store purchases and $36 a month in gasoline.

Really, that’s not all that terrible when you realize I buy most of my clothing there, most of my food (I don’t eat out, so this is significantly less than $10/day), ingredients for the dog’s spectacularly expensive DIY food, all my personal products, and most of my household goods. And a fair amount of the S-corp’s office supplies.

Still. I suspect that if I weren’t packing a credit card every time I shop there, I could cut the spending. A lot.

Sure don’t want to write checks, and I sure don’t want to have that much cash around.

So. I think what I’m going to do is this:

Figure out what would be a reasonable monthly budget for all those necessaries, absent the impulse buys. Let’s say about $275, maybe $300 at the outside. Add on enough to cover gasoline — around $40 just now, but rising fast. Then go into the store at the start of the month and buy a Costco cash card in the amount of, say, $340.

Be more careful about purchases…knowing there’s a palpable upper limit will help a lot with that. Use it till it’s gone, and then stop buying there until the next month. Or if push comes to shove, pay for any serious necessaries with the debit card.

I refuse to put a debit card into a gas pump, nor will I use one at a restaurant — there just aren’t enough consumer protections against theft. But the occasional restaurants I visit always accept AMEX, and if the tank runs dry after I run out of dollars on the cash card, I’ll just pay a couple bucks more to buy at a gas station that takes AMEX.

It’s really not that much hassle. If memory serves, the last time I bought a cash card I was able to get it at the regular checkout register, rather than having to stand in a different line. But even if you do have to buy from the customer service desk, so what? It’s not that big a deal.

I guess…

Why Do Americans Have Such a Hard Time Living within Their Means?

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Some of the answers to that one are obvious:

  • The best cities in America are bloody expensive to live in.
  • We eat out all the time, which costs about four times as much as cooking your own.
  • Pay does not keep up with inflation.
  • The cost of a car has gone through the roof.
  • Insurance–especially health insurance, but other varieties, too–has become obscenely expensive.
  • Owning a pet became an expensive obsession as pet food manufacturers, veterinarians, trainers, and a host of others in the “pet industry” realized that pet lovers are the biggest cash cow ever to come their way.
  • Entertainment is through the roof: to go to a baseball game, you need to take out a bank loan.

You no doubt can come up with others. But I’d suggest something more subtle is going on. To wit:

We are being nickeled and dimed toward penury with the repeating costs of subscriptions, gadgets, doodads, and hoodoos. Half of Americans live beyond their means, and many don’t even know it. The most effective and possibly the most profitable way to extract money from consumers is to lock them into a monthly payment. And so much the better if you can persuade them to auto-pay those charges on a credit card.

Resisting this trend is well-nigh impossible, because so much of what undergirds a 21st-century lifestyle is paid for on a monthly basis.

Consider:

  • You pretty much need a wireless connection to live in our current culture. I pay $90 a month for the privilege of using the Internet.
  • You need a phone. Still resisting the $50-$150/month cost of a smartphone, I pay a measly $30 ($15 plus that much again in alleged taxes and fees) a month for a land line. But that can’t continue much longer…sooner or later I’m going to be forced to give up and buy into a smartphone plan.
  • You need health insurance. God only knows what that costs younger people. I pay about $230 a month, give or take, for Medicare, Medigap, and Part D.
  • You need transportation. That’ll be $380 a month for a late-model second-hand car.
  • You need car insurance. You need homeowner’s insurance. If you’re not crazy, you have umbrella insurance. If you are crazy, you have health insurance for your dog or cat.
  • And then you have the various monthly dings: electric, gas, water, sewer, trash pickup, and on and on.
  • And the annual gouges: property taxes, state income taxes, federal income taxes, and in some parts of the country even city income taxes.

Have you noticed that of late the pressure to sign up for repeating charges has escalated? For example, if you get your news on the Net, as I do, about a third of your sources are now stashing content behind paywalls. A few, like the Washington Post, will let you read an article if you linked to it from Google, but you get only ONE article. Wanna read something else, you have to pay for it. Others will let you read a limited number of articles per month — three, say, or maybe even ten — and then demand that you sign up for a paid subscription.

For the Post, that’s $195 a year — $16.25 a month, or $4 a month if you’re an Amazon Prime customer. But to get that bargain rate, you have to pay Amazon another $100 a year for its “Prime” come-on. For the Times, it’s $1.88 a week (bare minimum), or $7.52 a month or $97.76 a year.

When people demand my cell phone number these days, I now just frankly say outright, “Sorry, but I can’t afford a cell phone.” That’s more polite, I suppose, than announcing “I wouldn’t give out a cell phone number on a bet,” but it still takes people aback.

Fifty or a hundred bucks a month sounds like small change. But think about it: if  your monthly income is pretty much fully dedicated to buying gasoline, a car, lodging, food, clothing, utilities, insurance, and other necessaries, you don’t have a lot of wiggle room. Small change adds up…

Let’s suppose, for example, that I decide to pay for the Washington Post and the New York Times, both of which are publications of record and pretty much indispensable for anyone who wants to keep up with non-fake news. I keep the New York Review of Books and The Economist, both of which keep me amused and informed in the absence of cable television, movie-going, and very much restaurant-going. I add Forbes — in reality, I would write that off through the business because it would provide a lot of fodder for the profit-making blogsite that you’re reading as we scribble. But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine I run it through my personal books instead. And let us assume I decide to join the herd and sign up for a smartphone. And let’s also imagine I get suckered into buying pet insurance — not a realistic assumption about yours truly, but one that applies to a large number of otherwise sensible pet owners.

None of these costs, at first glance, appears to be very much. However:

This figure is exactly the amount of my entire Social Security check! And it doesn’t even count utilities and gasoline.

Obviously, to stay within my budget I cannot have all these things. To have item a, I have to give up item b. So, I can’t read say, both the NYRofB and the Washington Post. I can’t have Amazon Prime and Costco. I can’t have Netflix and Amazon Prime.

As a practical matter, I don’t have Netflix…but I’d like to re-up to Netflix because its choices are better. To get Netflix, I’ll have to drop Amazon Prime, which will mean a lot less shopping on Amazon, because it’s cheaper for me to buy stuff locally than to pay the same or more on Amazon and cover shipping.

These little monthly dings look so piddling that many people don’t realize the little stuff is the reason they can’t stay on budget.

So…what would you give up to get a Smartphone?

Thing$ are turning up ro$e$

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So yesterday I finally felt well enough to update the bookkeeping. Jeez. It’s too, too good to be true.

Got $4500 back from the feds. That will be enough to cover the remaining 2017 car payments, and then some. It also may mean that at the end of the year there’ll be enough left to replaster and update the pool.

Then we have the stock market. Holy mackerel! That thing has returned $92,254.72 since February 2016. Which is cheering, since I’m required by law to withdraw about $40,000 from the IRA every year, most of which I use to live on, shore up the shack, and keep the car rolling. It means that this year (barring a stock market crash…), the RMD will not cause investments to run at a loss. For a change.

Meanwhile, the editing business is running amok. Since January 25, The Copyeditor’s Desk has earned almost as much as it normally earns in a year.

Mercifully, a lull in the editorial workflow developed just as I was coming down with the present epizoötic. I can’t imagine what I would’ve done if I’d had a lot of work and a deadline. Would have had to farm it out, I guess. But a week of quietus coincided, by miraculous good luck, with the week of lying semi-conscious under the covers.

The proposed new client, a fiction writer, just resurfaced this morning. I expect she’ll send her MS over later today or this evening, and by tomorrow a.m. I should be well enough (I hope) to start working on that.

Watch. What this means is that by Friday three indexes will drop on my desk and another author with 98,000 tangled words will surface. Or three new Chinese mathematicians will lob marginally intelligible inquiries across the Pacific.

😀

Back on the personal finance side of the ledger, between the outrageous workload and the outrageous bug, I am not spending much. Charges to AMEX and Visa have been so modest that even with the occasional extraordinary bill — cleaning and repairing the propane grill, for example — personal spending has stayed on budget.

Now, it must be said: no diddling money away makes Jill a very dull girl… And sooner or later I am going to have to buy some clothes. In fact, if I were functional today, I’d use this slow morning to run out to Scottsdale, where the better Nordstrom’s Rack resides.

In fact, though, there’s a shop in Glendale — somewhat closer — that carries uniquely cute clothing (at uniquely eye-glazing prices…). I may go out there instead, since I know I can always get something there that will knock your proverbial socks off, whereas at Nordstrom’s Rack it’s catch as catch can. There’s something to be said for spending more to save time (now that the time is actually worth something…) and to get an especially desirable product that will last.

Welp, I must go stand in the shower and inhale steam until the hot water runs out; then go buy some dog & human food. And Kleenex. A  lot of Kleenex. And so, away!