So on Sunday I went over to the Safeway after the churchfest. Needed to pick up some meat for Cassie, since we’re going to run out of chicken before I can make another big grocery run.
Didn’t expect to find any bargains, it being a weekend, but was pleased to discover $1.79 chuck steaks, very fatty, just the ticket for a dog. Plus I get the bones to make the next pot of stock, which I’m about to do with the carcass of the chicken she and I have finished off. While I’m standing there, the PA system delivers a pitch for the shingles shots Safeway has been peddling for the past while.
Hm.
I’ve been eying the shingles shot for quite a while. Last time I asked, they said Medicare Part D wouldn’t cover enough of the $250 fare to matter—I would’ve had to pay around $200. But my doc at the Mayo has been urging me to get one…only not at the Mayo, where they charge over $300 for a shot.
Well, I thought, as long as I’m having to pony up $1,200 for a new crown, I might as well use up some more of the tax refund that bill is decimating. So I sidled up to the pharmacist’s counter and inquired.
It took the better part of an hour for the pharmacist’s sidekick to navigate Wellcare’s and Walgreen’s bureaucracies, which initially denied me. But finally, after I stood and stood and stood and stood, he extracted the deal: a $138 bill to me to cover the $250 immunization.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? Charge as much as an entire month’s grocery budget for a shot targeted at people living on limited, fixed incomes. Great humanitarian impulse there, Big Pharma!
I haven’t wanted to be forced to pay such a ridiculous charge for a few grams of immune serum. However… Shingles is not something you want to enjoy. It is extremely painful. If it gets into your eyes, it can actually blind you.
If you’ve ever had chicken-pox, you’re at risk of getting shingles, which is really just a relapse of the same virus, which takes up permanent residence in your system. The older you get, the higher your chances of getting it. And the older you are, the harder it’s likely to hit you. It can lead to encephalitis, facial paralysis, and hearing or balance problems. It is extremely painful, and the pain, called postherpetic neuralgia, can last for many months, even years. I knew a woman who came down with shingles in her late 70s. Two years later, she was still in so much agony she was incapacitated. This had been a very active woman—she and her husband owned a bird sanctuary covering several acres in the Chiricahua mountains, not a pursuit for the idle.
Every year about a million Americans develop shingles; of them, 20% are affected by postherpetic neuralgia. After a bout with the virus, forty percent of patients over 60 develop this excruciating chronic pain.
So, even though I suspect the price is a huge rip, no one wants to go through what shingles victims commonly experience—described by one sufferer as “as a very bad burn being stuck with needles and spikes.” So I went ahead and coughed up the $138. I’m never going to be any more able to afford it.
So far, no untoward side effects. We’re told the vaccine is only about 50% effective. You still can get shingles, but supposedly the infection will be relatively mild. However, it reduces the risk of the horrific postherpetic neuralgia by about 67%. And that’s big.
What the heck. After the pharmacist poked me, she handed me a 10% off coupon for my next purchase in the store!
So, to the two big packages of meat, which the butcher had converted to hamburger and soup bones while I was hanging around the pharmacy, I promptly added an eight-pack of foamy-delicious canned Guinness draught! And threw in a big $10 canister of roasted cashews.
Anybody who thinks Medicare is some sort of a bargain and that all us old folks are sucking off the public teat either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or is just batshit crazy.
Just paid my annual Medigap premium: it rose by $277! That was after the Part D, which covers nothing because I don’t take any meds, went up by $60 a year. Part D is provided by a private insurer, but Medicare recipients are required to subscribe to it on pain of a penalty that amounts to a heavy, recurring fine. Part B also rose this year, but Social Security rises to cover Part B increases even in years when there’s no COLA increase (we’re now in the second year with no Social Security COLA, because after all there’s no inflation. :roll:).
Not anticipating such a large jack-up, I failed to self-escrow enough to cover the increase, so I had to raid my regular savings to pay the bill. Another two months with no clothes! Guess I’ll be wearing black Costco jeans all summer. Damn!
Medicare now costs some 15 times what I was paying for similar coverage at the Great Desert University. And of course it doesn’t cover everything. The Mayo keeps sending me incomprehensible bills, and the various Medicare providers keep sending me incomprehensible statements. Piles of paper are swelling my file folders, and I have no idea what any of it means…it’s just impossible to parse it out.
What this means is that I have no idea what I need to pay my doctors out of pocket. And that means I can’t really ever get out of debt to them, because I don’t know what to pay. Even if I could afford to do so, I can’t pay the full amount of each statement and then pocket the amounts coming in from Medicare/Medigap, because the clinic’s bills don’t reflect all the pending charges; if I spend the Medicare checks on groceries, I won’t have anything to cover the new little surprises that keep coming in the mail.
Complicating matters, Medicare will not pay the Mayo directly, advertisements to the contrary notwithstanding. The Part B coverage is supposed to direct-deposit payments to the Mayo, but for some reason because it’s the Mayo they won’t do that. Hell, no! Instead, they dribble out checks to me by snail-mail, which I have to deposit and then disburse to the Mayo myself.
Needless to say, the potential for snafu is huge. There’s always the chance that some check will be lost in the mail or in the piles of paper in my house—because a blizzard of trash paper is always coming in from these insurance companies, it’s easy to lose an envelope with an actual check in it.
Mercifully, I can now scan checks and deposit them electronically. It’s almost as much of a nuisance as physically driving to the credit union, because my scanner is excruciatingly slow. And of course, it draws so much memory or power or whatever it’s doing, I can’t do anything else on my computer while I’m waiting for it to plod through the process. The CU’s system won’t accept color scans, but my scanner defaults to color. Sometimes even when I set it to scan greyscale, it defaults right back to color. So then I have to do the whole scan over again. One time it took over half an hour just to scan in one check so the system would take it—I could have traipsed to the credit union on the way home from campus in that time!
Dealing with this bureaucratic BS is a difficult nuisance now, while I have most of my marbles. I can’t even begin to imagine how the elderly frail cope with this tsunami of confusing, complicated, demanding crapola. If you don’t have someone in your life to help out with it, you’re SOL. And you can be sure you’re getting ripped off seven ways from Sunday.
There’s just no excuse for America’s healthcare system.
So I dropped by thegood Dr. Davis’s office yesterday afternoon, parking illegally in the menacingly signed parking lot of the mall across the street.
He opined that there is no reason to replace the ancient crown in the lower jaw. The chip on it, as he has opined several times in the past, is cosmetic and in no way affects the crown’s functionality.
The newly busted tooth in the upper jaw, however, does need a crown. He says it’s broken down to the dentin and should be fixed before anything else happens to it.
He proposes to charge $1,246 for the crown and a new night guard. That is less than half the $2,695 the other dentist wants to charge for two crowns and no night guard.
At first he couldn’t figure out why the guy wanted to install two crowns. When I said Other Dentist’s preference is for gold crowns, Doc Davis said a gold crown in the upper jaw would do in the porcelain crown in the lower jaw; that would explain the plan to replace the old crown when the new one goes in.
I will say I’ve had better luck, in the comfort department, with gold, and they’re likely to last the rest of my lifetime. However, I’ve already got two gold crowns; two more will make me look like some bizarre character out of a Batman movie.
Given the cost of this adventure, it seems to make sense to go with a porcelain crown on top and use a night guard to protect them both against my gnashing habit. Then take the rest of the tax refund that Other Dentist proposed to consume—$1,750 saved! more than that, actually, because O.D. would have charged another $350 to make a night guard—and turn it into a sinking fund for future restoration work. If I start adding the equivalent of a monthly Delta Dental premium to that stash, by the time one or both of these white crowns need to be replaced (which they certainly will), the money should be there to cover it.
So, here I am, back at the dentist’s office, cooling my heels until he can squeeze me in to deal with the latest little emergency. God only knows how much this will cost. Nothing, I hope. But we don’t bank on hope, do we?
Saturday night the filling he installed a month ago—less than a month ago—crumbled and fell out. with any luck, he’ll stand behind his work, since I haven’t been chewing ice or cracking walnuts with my molars.
However, in all honesty, I suspect he can’t be blamed. The pain from the torn rib muscle has revived my bruxing habit. Well, the bruxing probably never goes away: I’m sure I still clench my teeth on the rare occasions when I’m sleeping. But in the past week, when every minor task like lifting the dog’s dish off the floor has brought a surge of agony, I catch myself clenching my teeth to force myself to keep moving through the pain. When you unconsciously clench, your bite can exert a pressure of 140 pounds per square inch, which no doubt doesn’t help a filling compound.
What with the cost of gas and the ever-rising grocery bills, I no longer can stay on budget. Over the past few months, I’ve run $200 to $320 over budget every month, at first because of the occasional extravagance like the shoes and the cheap jewelry and now simply because it’s costing every penny budgeted just to live. One modest extraordinary expense puts me in the red—and since the budget includes $100 to $150 for unplanned expenses, that means the base cost of living has risen about $100 to $170 a month.
To make up the difference, I’ve been raiding monthly savings (a.k.a. “diddle-it-away money”). But that is a very finite source. If the overspending continues at that rate, my little mini-emergency fund soon will be gone…and then what?
I can use my tax refund, I suppose, but that also is finite.
Welp, it looks like this is what’s gonna have to happen here:
1. Must replenish that short-term emergency savings account; and 2. Must get spending under control.
Putting money back into savings turns out to be relatively easy: instead of transferring a paycheck over to the joint mortgage payment account, I just moved it into the ravished savings account.
I’ve been putting all my community college pay into a joint account with M’hijito, which holds money to cover current and future mortgage payments. Since my share is $8,604 a year and I net $10,800 when I’m teaching three sections a semester, obviously I’m earning more than enough to cover that bill.
Yes. The operative phrase there is when I’m teaching three sections. There’s no guarantee that I’ll always be able to teach three-and-three. First, the school has no obligation to hire me to teach the maximum number of sections available to adjuncts; and second, even when the chair assigns me to teach three sections, if one class doesn’t make, then I don’t get paid for it. The magazine-writing section is particularly iffy. Each semester we’ve watched with bated breath, expecting it to crash in flames. So far it’s always filled at the last minute, but in any given semester there’s a good chance it won’t make. A course load of three-and-two would net $9,000, a scant $400 more than the amount needed to pay my share of the mortgage.
So…as you can see, raiding my pay for $916, the amount I grabbed last week, is ill-advised.
I will use my summer pay (net $3,840) to live on while the extreme heat here pushes living costs to extreme heights. But that won’t begin to materialize before mid-July. In the interim, the horse starves while the grass grows. During the second half of May, all of June, and the first half of July, I’ll have exactly zero income other than Social Security, and so will have to live on savings. And that means I can’t be running over the budget.
So. “Must get spending under control” surfaces as the most important part of the two strategies, and the most difficult.
These budget overruns have been happening while utility bills are very low. I’ve hardly run the heat all winter, and in the past couple of weeks only turned the AC on a few times to knock the heat in the house down enough to sleep at night. Air-conditioning bills will add about $140 a month to the power bill and about $50 a month to the water bill.
How to make $190 materialize out of a budget that’s stretched to the max? Well…not sure.
• Avoid driving, to the extent possible.
All the extra cost here is coming from gasoline. As much as I try to keep it down, what was an $80/month bill just a few weeks ago has jumped to $120+ per month. The weekly trips to the Scottsdale Business Association’s breakfast meetings will end when summer school starts in July, since I’ll have to be in front of a classroom by 7:00 a.m. four days a week. I may have to weasel out of those sooner, though. It’s a wash, though: the school’s about as far away as the restaurant where SBA meets. All errands will need to be folded in with trips to campus, and shopping will have to take place along that route.
What this means in practical terms: I can not drive anyplace for socializing, curiosity, or fun.
• Cheapie down the food bill
More beans, less meat. Unfortunately we’re coming to the end of the season when veggies will grow in my meager garden, so lettuce and other veggies will have to come from the grocery store. I’ll need to buy produce of lesser quality from cheaper stores than Safeway.
• Quit drinking all beer and wine.
That one’s a no-brainer.
• Short the dog on the quality of her food
Watch the ethnic stores, which sometimes run a little cheaper, for inexpensive chicken and pork.
• Let the hair grow out.
Gonna have to give up on the short hairstyle, I’m afraid. Long hair doesn’t have to be cut every four to six weeks.
• Reinstitute the detailed, tightly categorized budgeting system for discretionary spending.
I’d thought I could get rid of the OCD stuff and just keep a running tab: $800 – x, y, and z as the costs came along. But apparently that’s giving me a false sense of confidence. I need to know, at any given time, how much I’ve spent on items like gas, food, clothing, and the like, and how much is available to spend. This does allow me to shift spending in response to unplanned expenses and increased costs.
I figure I drink three bottles of wine a month and maybe three four- or six-packs of extremely fancy beer. At $10/bottle, the wine is running $30 a month, and the $9 packs of beer would add up to $27 a month, for a total, with tax, of $62.35. No haircut represents a saving of $50 a month. We’re at $112 right there. Since gas prices sure aren’t gonna go down and I’m already restricting my driving as much as possible, about the best we can hope for is to keep the monthly gasoline bill stable. That’s leaves $78 a month that will have to come out of groceries, at least until my summer pay starts. But let’s remember that, absent unplanned expenses, I’m already running as much as $170 over budget, before the summer bills hit. So the real amount that needs to be economized, with sumer y-cumin’ in, could be somewhere between $178 and $248. A month.
Wow! That’s a lot of beans, eh?
§ § §
Update
Well, no. That wasn’t the new filling that crumbled and fell out of my mouth two days ago. It was the tooth itself.
That’s right. About a quarter of the tooth just fell apart and broke off, for no good reason other than old age and probable bruxism.
So. Instead of one new crown, to replace the chipped crown I’ve been delaying fixing because it’s not doing any harm, now I need two new crowns. The broken molar is in the upper jaw directly above the crown. If my jaws are going to fit together right, both crowns need to be fixed. Now, not later.
For the crowns alone, not counting a new $350 night guard, the tab will be $2,695! And now I’ll have four gold teeth glinting in the sun every time I smile or open my mouth to speak. Lovely.
That’s my entire tax refund!
I’d planned to use that to help me get by during the two months when no pay will be coming in, and then use whatever remained to further delay the time that I’ll have to take a drawdown from my brokerage and IRA accounts.
It’ll have to be done as soon as they can get me in. With the sharp edges smoothed off, my teeth no longer fit together evenly, so my bite is lopsided. Just imagine the headache, jaw pain, and ear-buzzing that will cause.
Oh well.
It’ll certainly make this year’s medical bills tax-deductible, too, just like 2010’s.
Staying healthy pays in the obvious way—lower healthcare premiums and fewer sick days—and it returns cash in less self-evident ways, too. It’s not just that you save you, your employer, and your health insurer money on doctor bills and absences. When you’re feeling even the slightest bit off, as a small entrepreneur you’re less able to function profitably. This is true of anyone who earns money through several income streams, from IT consulting to yard-saling. When you don’t feel like working, you don’t; and when you’re not working, you’re not earning.
Yesterday was the first full day that I’ve felt pretty good since I caught the cold that’s been going around town. After a decent night’s sleep, the energy levels were almost back to normal, and I got a lot done, from housecleaning to paying work.
Even a minor ailment can leave you so wrung out you just don’t feel like doing anything: not cleaning, not cooking food for yourself, not shopping for food, and most certainly not actually working. I’ve managed to hold my own in the work arena only in the most tenuous way. A newsletter that I do on a volunteer basis didn’t get published at all (and in fact, now a new month’s issue needs to be done tomorrow!), student papers didn’t get graded on time, and some papers classmates claim to have submitted got lost in the shuffle. A woman I would like to interview for Funny’s “Entrpreneurs” series has never been called (gotta do that today, when I get home from class!).
I should have been more careful about protecting myself from a severe cold that everyone knew was making the rounds. Of course, it’s hard to avoid these bugs, especially when you’re in the classroom with hordes of people carrying hordes of germs. But I did run out of the hand wipes I like to carry in the car, which meant that every time I walked out of a grocery store, climbed behind the steering wheel, and rubbed my itchy nose, I dosed myself with whatever viruses were on the shopping cart handle. And rubbed them all over the steering wheel.
You can’t walk around in a bubble all the time. But you can do a few things to protect yourself:
• Eat well. That means plenty of veggies and fresh fruit, as well as those fine greasy hamburgers we all secretly love.
• During the cold and flu season, when you dine in restaurants, eat only hot foods. Because restaurant workers may not get sick leave, the person preparing your salad in the kitchen could be shedding viruses into it. Heat kills germs, and so it makes sense to stick to hot foods and drinks.
• Drink plenty of water. You can be a little dehydrated even if you’re not thirsty, and dehydration can leave you open to any number of ailments.
• Get some exercise every day—outdoors if it’s not snowing and blustering, indoors if the weather is inclement.
• Try not to hang around people who are coughing and snorting.
• But if you have to, wash your hands frequently and be careful not to eat or drink out of utensils the sick person has handled.
• Keep your hands away from your face! Cold and flu viruses are commonly transmitted when people rub their eyes, scratch their nose, or put their hands in or near their mouths.
• Away from home, carry a package of antiseptic hand wipes in your car and in your purse. As soon as you leave a public place, immediately wipe your hands with one of these.
• Wash produce well. This not only will help to remove chemicals and microbes picked up in the field and at packing plants, it also will eliminate viruses that land on food while it’s sitting in grocery bins.
• Get a flu shot every year. I used to get sick as a dog every winter. Since I started taking flu shots, I haven’t been seriously ill with a respiratory virus once, and I rarely even catch colds.
If you do get sick, stay home as much as possible. Please don’t spread the misery. Drink plenty of liquids, try to eat something, and go to bed.
So the Republicans are getting ready to go after Social Security and Medicare. Some of their followers don’t even seem to be rational. Here’s one who remarks that if Social Security goes, “no one is going to be hurt by it.”
Yeah. No one but the kids.
You know, if it were not for Social Security, I could not stay in my home. I wouldn’t be able to pay the property taxes, and pretty soon the County would come and evict me. I would be living on the streets right now, today. The house my son is living in would have been foreclosed by now, since without my salary and Social Security, we wouldn’t have a hope of making payments on the upside-down mortgage. And that is with a retirement nest egg that’s 3.3 times larger than the average 50- to 60-year-old’s.
In a culture where families fly apart as the kids reach adulthood, where the elderly are objects of disdain and discrimination, where you’ll have a tough time getting a job if you’re laid off at 45 and no chance at all if you’re in your 60s, where a man is considered not a man if his mother lives with him, where the elderly are expected to live on their own until they’re sent off to a nursing home, who exactly is going to take care of the old folks when they can no longer work?
Without Social Security and Medicare, my choices would be to depend on my son to house me, feed me, and cover my healthcare costs or to live on the street until I die, which would happen in short order. Ours is not a culture like Revanche’s, where young people expect to care for their parents no matter how much strain it puts on their own lives. Most Americans would expect their parents and troublesome siblings to fend for themselves.
This is true for a large portion of the elderly in our country. Get rid of the so-called “entitlement” programs—into which we have paid all our lives—and you’ll end up consigning huge numbers of older Americans to dire poverty. Responsibility for supporting them will fall to their adult children, who don’t have the resources to care for elderly, unemployable parents.
Will you be willing to take your parents in after they can no longer work? Oh, you say you don’t want Mom and Dad living in your spare bedroom? You don’t want them in your face all day, every day, telling you how to raise your kids and how to live your life. Well, then, are you prepared to pay their rent? Can you cover the property taxes on their paid-off home?
And when you discover the cat food in the pantry (they don’t have a cat, interestingly enough), will you shell out a couple hundred a month to buy groceries for them? When you find out that they’re too frail to get groceries for themselves, will you run to the grocery store once or twice a week and stock up on microwavable food for them?
Are you willing to pay for your parents’ healthcare? Sure you are. But can you? Can you afford to buy insurance for an elderly person who already has chronic health problems? And if they can’t get insurance at all (which they can’t, because of the chronic health issues), are you in a position to pay for their health care out of pocket? You do know, no doubt, how much treatment for a heart condition costs?
How many of you who are younger and midlife adults see yourselves, seriously, as willing and able to care for your parents when they get too old work? Take a look at these excellent young people who are coming up behind you…see any of them planning to support Mom and Dad in old age?
In the post linked above, Revanche asks readers if they have a plan for taking care of their parents when the old folks can no longer care for themselves. Do you? If you’re under about 35 or 40, you’d better get one.
And by the way, who’s going to support you when you get too old or sick to work, and the stock market crashes right at the moment when you can no longer hold down a job?
