It’s 10:35 p.m. I spent two hours plowing through an excruciatingly bad student paper, trying to make SOME sort of sense of it, assigning a score of 35/100, feeling bad, the guy’s probably dyslexic, feeling frikkin’ frustrated, sick and tired of explaining the same grade-school trivia over and over and over and over and over and over and over to adults who didn’t learn it in 13 years of K-12 schooling and certainly aren’t going to learn it now and truly I remember why I said all those years ago that I’d rather go on welfare than ever teach freshman comp again.
Then presto-changeo, the next paper is almost perfect!
What happens that some people never manage to learn the most basic writing skills? And some, stuck pointlessly in English 101/102, perform on a near-professional level?
Another 12-hour day. I’m whipped. The dog hasn’t been fed, I haven’t been fed, and it’s past bed-time if I imagine that even under the influence of a pair of Benadryl I’m gonna get more than four hours of sleep. Nose has been so stuffed up I’m not hungry, but Cassie the Corgi certainly is hungry.
Unclog the nose with a toxic medicinal spray. Realize I really should eat something. But there’s precious little, we having run out of food and out of money near the end of the budget cycle.
But…
But YES! There’s a freezer!
Dive to the bottom of the chest and resurface with a container of home-made stew, redolent of onions, carrots, celery, and wine. And a smaller plastic box containing one serving of lovely comfort food: Costco’s excellent scalloped potatoes!
And there’s exactly one glass of wine left in the bottle of plonk on the kitchen counter.
Not only did I save a great deal of money frugally building a delicious stew and squirreling away one-person portions of the lifetime supply of potatoes, last winter’s me rescued this evening’s sickly overworked little me from a miserable dinner of cheese rinds and stale crackers.
I’m wearing second-hand hats,
Second-hand clothes,
That’s why they call me
Second-hand Rose…
In the fading upscale shopping center across the street from the restaurant where my business group meets for breakfast each Thursday morning, you’ll find a wildly successful thrift shop called My Sister’s Closet. Yesterday I decided to drop in and see if I could find a decent-looking suit, of which I have had none. Not for decades.
Working at the Great Desert University’s scholarly editing office, we had no contact with the public. And before that, in the classroom…well, there’s no need to dress to the nines to teach undergraduates. So for the past 20 years, give or take, I’ve dressed like a graduate student. I live in Costco jeans. Occasionally I would go out and buy an Eileen Fisher outfit—it’s one of the few brands that fit around my fading body—but there’s not much call for clothes like that around here. However, now that Tina and I have decided we need to market The Copyeditor’s Desk aggressively as a business-to-business service, it looks like I’m going to need something acceptable to wear in public.
Problem: I can’t afford to buy expensive business suits.
As an aside, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., which receives the proceeds of Funny about Money as well as the editorial enterprise, did pretty well last month. Thanks to Funny’s new ad agent, Crystal of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, total revenues from blogging and from editing grossed about what I would earn teaching four sections. That’s still a very modest amount. But if the business made that much all the time, 12 months a year, it would come to significantly more than I earn as an adjunct, where I’m technically allowed to teach only three sections a semester—providing income only nine months a year. If we could permanently ratchet up the editorial income by landing a few business clients who would hire us on long-term contracts, I wouldn’t have to teach at all. Or, if I taught one or two classes on top of that dreamt-of income, I’d have enough to pay the bills without worrying much.
Hence the project to acquire a credible-looking business outfit. We’ll be joining more business groups and looking for other ways to peddle our wares to companies and medical practices that need business or technical editorial services. To succeed at this, we need to look like we’re already prospering.
I’ve never shopped much in second-hand stores, mostly because I truly dislike plowing through acres and acres of ugly junk clothes in a (usually futile) search for something that looks decent and fits. However, Scottsdale is filled with the sisters of Mrs. Gotrocks: ridiculously upscale or aspiring women who either have high-powered jobs themselves or who support their husbands’ careers by appearing conspicuously at public functions brought by groups of society matrons. These women wear outrageously expensive clothes, and they don’t wear them long. If you have something striking, about the third time you put it on all the other hens start to cluck, “Doesn’t she have anything else to wear?” So, I figured, a place like My Sister’s Closet, right in the heart of darkest Scottsdale, would have plenty of their leavings.
And yea verily: I was right, in spades!
The store organizes its gleanings in two categories: designer fashions and all the rest of the junk. They have entire racks of St. John separates, suits, and dresses.
St. John, for the uninitiated, designs clothing that fits women d’un certain âge: like Eileen Fisher, the company targets well-heeled women over 50.
Not many designer clothes come in size 12, today’s equivalent of a real-life size of about 14. So fat have I become! My mother wore 14s and 16s in her old age, and I’m beginning to look just like her. But lo! among the “S” and “XS” tags, I came across a gorgeous amethyst knit skirt and jacket in a fatlady size.
Normally I can’t wear knits: they display every ripple of cellulite on my body. But, drawn by the color, I hung it on the shopping cart rack anyway. Back in the “business attire” section, I found more normal manufacturers: Banana Republic, Talbot’s, and the like. Picked up a few skirts, pants, and jackets there, too.
As usual, not one of the mass-market costumes fit around my capacious rear end. They made me look like a beer barrel with feet sticking out.
(The shoulder pads don’t have bumps in them. That’s the skirt-hanger clips showing through; soon as the photo was snapped the two pieces were hung separately.)
I finally tried on the St John suit, as a last-ditch effort.
Astonishingly, the skirt fit! It hid the paunch and made me look almost human! The jacket fit pretty well, too. That’s just amazing!
The skirt and jacket came to a hundred and a quarter, more than I expected to spend on second-hand clothing, but both pieces were impeccably clean, no stains, no sign of wear—the thing looked brand new. So I grabbed that.
But that’s not all. I also stumbled across this incredible Coach bag. It really is, I think, brand-new. Not a scratch, a smudge, or a sag to be seen, anywhere! It’s exactly the right size–holds the iPad, a wallet, and a few pieces of junk with room to spare—and the handle will go over one’s shoulder. And, astonishingly, the cream color exactly matches the dressy Naot sandals I bought last spring. Voila! Shoes and a purse to go with the swell “new” suit!
So, I spent a little over $200—about what I’d spend on a normal trip to J. Jill or B’Gauze—and came away with something that looks a great deal dressier and more professional than cobbled-together sportswear coordinates. And that actually fits. And to boot, I got an apparently unused used Coach bag!
Yesterday afternoon I wore this costume to a meeting with a prospective client. Hope he was duly impressed…
A comparable bouclé knit blazer is $1,295! The skirt, a mere $375. At Nordstrom’s you can find a couple of Milano knits for an economical $995, and one bouclé jacket is marked down to $774.
Can that be? I bought $1,670 worth of overpriced clothing for $125???? Or, to put it another way, to get a suit, new, that doesn’t make me look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I have to pony up over fifteen hundred bucks?
The sales clerk told me that if you consign, they’ll give you credit toward their clothing purchases. So you could, in theory, get even better deals. Or take the money and run.
Unfortunately, they don’t accept things like Costco jeans. Except for the surviving Eileen Fisher skirt and tops (one of which, BTW, is perfect with the “new” St. John suit), I don’t own anything worthy of this outfit’s elevated taste.
But I do own the occasional discretionary $200. 😉
Lyrics: Grant Clarke, James Hanley, “Second-Hand Rose.” Performed by Fanny Brice and later by Barbra Streisand.
This morning we learn that Google hassigned up the British Library to its digitization project: holdings published between 1700 and 1870 will be added to the 13 million books Google has already scanned. Much of this stuff is available free on the iPad.
{sigh} I had decided to reward myself for the crushing amount of work I just ground through by having The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., buy me an iPad. It would be handy for editorial and teaching work (to say nothing of serving as an incredible toy!), and I figured CED could afford the $25/month ATT connection. And with Skype or some such on it, the thing would function as a cell phone, too.
But when I went over to the Apple store on Saturday, they didn’t have the model I want, and their manager seemed less than enthusiastic about selling one to me. Basically he said that you have to keep coming back to the store to see if they have the desired iPad in—often to nail what you want, you have to go back several times a day! He suggested ordering it online.
Well. I don’t want to order it online. I want to see what I’m getting and ask questions of real human beings and read the paperwork before I walk off with it.
So, I guess I don’t really need that thing. I’ve managed to stumble through 66 years without it, and I expect I’ll live another 20 or 30 years without it.
The interruption in the drive to buy an iPad was just enough to raise the question: Is this a need or a want? And more to the point, can CED really afford the thing?
Answer to the first question: want.
Answer to the second: apparently not.
The delay in gratifying that want gave me time to reconsider the S-corp’s performance. And I see that because Adsense has been underperforming over the past few months, CE Desk is just barely earning enough to pay my sidekicks and cover the operating costs I’ve recently shifted onto its books.
Fortunately, a couple of new clients recently appeared at the door. And we’re supposed to start a big project management account in July. If we perform decently on that, there’s a good shot the project management thing will develop into steady, long-term work.
Tina is extremely good at project management—that is, as a matter of fact, what she does on her day job. She’s so good at it that the Chinese government is going to keep her on contract as managing editor of the huge international business management journal she runs through the Great Desert University, even after the GDU gives her its second shafting (they’re laying her off again). So, I’m expecting that she will take over management of this huge client and farm out the grunt work to me and our other sidekick. But…it could be awhile before we see actual work and pay come in from this enterprise.
At any rate, when you run a business you have to apply the same frugalist principles as you do in operating your personal finances. To wit: always ask if it’s a need or a want!
But darn. I really did want that gadget. Way to market a product, Apple!
We’ll revisit this question later in the year, when we see how 2011 shakes out. Which leads us to another rule in common between business and personal finance: never bet on the come. 😉
Image: Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad. Evan-Amos. Public domain.
Chintzinesses? How d’you like that word? I can’t think of a word parallel to “frugality” (n) that means “an act of cheapskatishness.” Nor can I think of a word meaning “the state of being a cheapskate.” Cheapskatitude?
At any rate, our subject is that perennial favorite: When does one cross the line from frugality to chintziness?
This weekend I happened to mention to M’hijito that when La Maya and I were out and about in pursuit of a distant estate sale, we stopped at a Starbucks, where I ordered a café Americano. He allowed as how the only way to get a decent cup of black coffee at that chain is to ask for the café Americano, as their ordinary drip coffee is battery acid, fit for nothing other than as a cheap medium for sugar, artificially flavored syrup, and milk or cream. Café Americano is dilute espresso. The reason it tastes better than Starbucks’s normal drip coffee is that espresso beans are higher quality than the schlock used to make the battery acid.
Then he remarked that he highly resented paying $4.30 for an iced coffee (the price being the same, whether you take your coffee hot or cold).
This remark caused me to reflect that yes, I had paid $4.30 for a medium-sized café Americano. Uhm…yes. Four dollars and thirty cents for a cup of coffee.
I mean, really. Four and a half bucks for 50 cents worth of ingredients and three minutes’ worth of a minimum-wage slave’s time? Does that make sense?
Well, it wasn’t the coffee we were buying so much as the moment to pause and socialize—and to get someone else to provide the social lubricant of a hot, caffeine-laced beverage. Could we have gone to one of our homes and fixed our own coffee, saving about $8 on the $8.60 the two of us spent at Starbucks? Of course. But it wouldn’t have been the same.
As a practical matter, once we got back to our neighborhood, we each would have figured it was time to go on about our daily business, and we probably wouldn’t have taken the time to fix coffee. Or, if we had, we would have diddled away too much time in one living room or the other, and then we each would have felt put upon by the many tasks that awaited us in our respective days.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m not way too tight about things like this.
Take, for example, the cell phone issue. I’ve resisted getting a cell phone because I think I already spend too much on connectivity—$78 a month to keep my computer online and the landlines running is too darned much for phone service. More to the point, in my mind I can’t afford another $80 to $120 for an electronic tether.
Really?
My gross income, if you include the $1,025/month coming from savings, is $7,000 a year more than my son’s. If, rather than setting aside my entire teaching salary, I self-escrowed only enough to cover my share of the mortgage (and let the future take care of itself, even that means the future surely will include a foreclosure), what remains of my gross would only be about $1,525 less than my son earns.
And he can afford an iPhone. Keeping that thing online costs $120 a month!
So why couldn’t I afford, say, a Droid, at $80/month to Verizon?
Surely I could at least afford an iPad. That costs only $15 or $25 to connect. And despite the fact that the way-cool iPad isn’t designed as a phone, an easily accessible app will give you free phone service through the thing! With that, I could have my cake and eat it, too: get the coveted electronic gadget, use it as a cell, and not even have to cancel the landline.
M’hijito never has paid for a land line. He uses only his cell phone. IMHO, this is something of an inconvenience, because he’s always misplacing the thing and not answering calls when he can’t find the phone.
SDXB recently canceled his land line service. He also is now using a cell only. He claims he doesn’t lose it because he carries it around with him everywhere, and because he has a single place in the house to keep it when he’s not using it.
Right. I had a single place to keep the $725 pair of glasses I just lost.
Still. If I canceled the landline, all that would remain of the Cox bill would be $50 a month for the computer connection (SDXB says he’s only paying $30 a month, presumably because he has a slower service).
My S-corp could pay for the iPad connection to AT&T—it’s only about $25 a month. If I could use that with Google’s Talkatone to make free phone calls, the worry about calling for help when my car craps out on the freeway would go away. And that concern is the only real reason I want a cell phone. If the S-corp were footing the bill for the mobile phone connection, there would really be no reason to cancel the land line, which allows for a telephone in every room in the house—no chasing around every time the phone jangles.
Canceling the landlines and having the S-Corp pay for the iPad would cut my personal nondiscretionary budget by almost $30 a month.
Here’s the question: Am I frugal or am I cheap to keep resisting the mobile phone?
For that matter, is it frugal or is it cheap to consider adapting the reasonably priced iPad (reasonably priced considering what it is!) for use with Google’s free voice app and calling that a “cell phone”?
Is it frugal or is it cheap to consider canceling the land line if I could get the iPad to actually function as a telephone?
Is it frugal or is it cheap to think coffee should be purchased at Starbuck’s only on special occasions—or preferably, not at all?
A couple on the choir drives a Prius around town. They live on the west side—in Sun City West, which is quite a ways to the west—and so to get to the activities they enjoy in their retirement, they have to do a substantial amount of driving.
Yesterday evening at choir they reported that the Prius’s batteries died, to the tune of thirty-three hundred dollars! Yes. That’s $3,300 for new Prius batteries. The batteries were warranteed for five years, and our friends have had the car a few months longer than that.
Wow! That about made up my mind about the Prius. I don’t think these are wealthy folks—before they retired, she was a teacher and he a minister. From things she’s said, I gather they live frugally.
I sure couldn’t afford $3,300 to replace a car’s batteries, and I’ll bet it’s a stretch for them, too. At least they have two Social Security checks coming in…but they also have to buy food, clothing, and meds for two.
We’re told that, other than the batteries, the Prius is cheaper to maintain than a conventional gasoline-operated vehicle. Let’s think that through.
If it gets 40 mpg, it achieves approximately twice the mileage my Sienna does. I’m now paying about $110 a month for gas, or $1,320 a year. Because a Prius is a hybrid with a gasoline engine as well as the electrical component, the cost of routine maintenance is about the same. Some insurers will give Prius owners a little discount; others charge more—so we could call that a draw, too.
So, all told, if the mileage is twice as good as a fairly clunky gasoline-only vehicle, one would pay about $660/year for a modest amount of driving (I average about 10,000 miles a year).
Meanwhile, since few of us have $3,300 sitting around the house waiting to be spent on a new battery pack, the average frugalist suffering from a chronic aversion to debt would want to self-escrow enough to cover the cost when, after about five years, it comes up. How much would that come to? Well, $3,300 ÷ 5 years = $660 a year.
Yes. Exactly the gas savings engendered by owning a hybrid vehicle.
In other words, every penny the car saves you in gasoline will have to be set aside to pay for new batteries! Unless, of course, you buy into the idea that you should get a new car about every three years. Calculating that cost is more than my feeble brain can contemplate.
Image: 2004-2008 Toyota Prius. IFCAR. Public domain.
So late last week I schlepped to Tempe, there to meet with my friend Tina for lunch and then to get my hair done by a reasonably trustworthy stylist. What I hadn’t counted on: The Mill Avenue Crafts Fair.
Augh! This annual event has bloated into a huge affair that calls vendors from all over the country and shoppers from all over the state, to say nothing of every tourist who’s in town during the high season. Driving around it and getting a place to park is a freaking nightmare.
However…it is kinda fun to stroll around. I like to buy my jewelry (when I buy it, rather than making it myself) from crafters who show up at these fairs, and yea verily! Who should I stumble across but a couple of Polish jewelry-makers who specialize in amber and silver. Aren’t these pretty?
Photo’s not too great—my camera was running out of juice and I got in a hurry. Oh well. Anyway, I needed a new li’l cross for choir, since I gave my good silver and topaz cross to my best friend on the choir at the time I walked away after a visiting cleric remarked that if we didn’t support George Bush’s war in the Middle East and the Israeli agenda, we weren’t good Christians.
Love the design of the earrings, and the cross is kind of unusual but not strange.
These little fellows set me back about $120, which was not a problem because I have plenty in diddle-it-away savings to cover that. Indulgences like this are exactly what the diddle-it-away sinking fund is for. So, no, the baubles are not the issue.
The issue is these…
Yes. I’m afraid so. As long as I was wandering around Mill Avenue, I could hardly not pay a visit to my favorite purveyor of pain-free shoes, the cutesily named Shoe Mill, especially since I happened to have a $20 off coupon. Lo! They were having a 50% off sale!
Nothing that anyone would like to wear in public was part of this sale, and the Naots pictured above were decidedly not on sale. Nooo…. With the $20 off, the tab came to around $160.
Good God! So now I’ve spent something in excess of $300, by the time you figure in the bottle of leather lotion I picked up to treat the outrageously expensive purse I bought there shortly after Canning Day.
Still. I can afford it. Despite last month’s excesses and unexpected expenses, it looks like I’ll end this month about $350 in the black, an amazing feat made possible by a state income tax refund. That money would normally go into the diddle-it-away fund, easily making up for these two little extravagances.
However… My son’s birthday happens in a few days. I would like either to buy him an expensive electronic doodad or to give him the amount it would cost and let him buy whatever doodads he pleases. Or just cash the check as ones, scatter them across the living room floor, and roll in them.
If I keep the shoes, forking over several hundred bucks for a birthday present is going to be a stretch. The Shoe Mill has a generous return policy, and so I could burn a quarter-tank of gas to trek back out to Tempe and get my money back. On the other hand, I need a pair of summer shoes. My favorite summery shoes are an old pair of Naots whose cork soles are crumbling and shedding little pieces. And the new Naots would look awesome with this dress from J. Jill:
I want that dress. I don’t have any light-colored shoes to go with it. So of course I need the silver Naot sandals. Don’t I?
I could take the shoes back, refrain from buying the linen summer dress, and save about $280, which could then be expended upon my son. Or not.
It should be borne in mind that the feds owe me $3004 for the 2010 tax refund, which should be dropping out of the ether into my checking account pretty quick now. So really, I could pay for all of this out of savings and the refund without draining diddle-away savings to naught. On the other hand, that would leave significantly less than $3000 to put into the short-term survival fund, which is supposed to carry me through until the end of 2012 without taxable drawdowns from investments.
Realistically, between now and then I probably could scrounge $280 from various frugalities to replace the money in the survival fund. Assuming I remember to do so, and assuming I work that hard at pinching pennies. Or maybe not so realistically: pretty soon the Dog Chariot will need a new timing belt: $340.
