Coffee heat rising

Personal Finance

Hotter Than the Hubs…Still

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Seven in the morning. The dog and I are back from the Morning Trudge. She’s taken up her position in the cool cave under the toilet. The human is desperately swilling iced tea.

Ugh! What an AWFUL morning! Hot and sticky and swampy…feels like hideous Saudi Arabia, there on the shore of the Persian Gulf where we lived for ten years. That was an awful place then. And this is an awful place just now.

We walked by our transplanted neighbor J’s house. It used to belong to SDXB, until he got spooked by Tony the Romanian Landlord and ran away to Sun City. In his panic, SDXB merrily sold the place for a pence to the City of Phoenix, who gave it away to a welfare case.

That lady is a sweetheart and a nice person to have as a neighbor. But she has neither the experience nor the cash to maintain an aging upper-middle-class house. Sooo…. the place has more or less gone to pot.

And of course, that affects property values for all of us.

Thank you, Big Brother! 

😀

Occasionally I think about moving down into M’hijito’s neighborhood. Centrally located, within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Store, madly gentrifying, steps from a bus line….  But…

But GAWD, do I hate moving! Even if the cost were irrelevant (which ain’t the case anymore!), packing up four bedrooms, a living room, a family room, a dining room, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a two-car garage is more than I care to contemplate. Just. Too. Much. Work!

But…hmmm….  It might be worth it.

Just depends on which way the wind blows.

If the city continues to give away houses here, property values will tank. In that case, I won’t be able to get enough for this house to move into a comparably middle-class neighborhood, and when M’Hijito inherits this place, its value will be nil. So…

Could be worth selling out now and jumping to a more stable district.

My neighborhood is “less stable,” shall we say, because we are the next one south of a dangerous slum. The low-income district to the north of us is notorious, and it took some nerve (and maybe some stupidity?) to buy into our area.

Because of that neighboring blight, I was able to afford much nicer housing than I could have hoped to buy anywhere else in the central city or the East Valley.

Our area has stayed stolidly middle-class since I moved in — a good 15 years ago. But it’s beginning to look like that may not be the case much longer. The accursed city ran a train line up Main Drag West, conveniently bringing every bum in town up to our neighborhood. The nearby grocery stores are getting old…the infrastructure is getting old…everything is getting old. So…

It may be time to start thinking about moving elsewhere. Or consigning myself now to the inevitable old folks’ prison.

At any rate: for the moment…yes. The place is still pleasantly tidy and blandly middle-class. But how long will that be the case?

Anyone’s guess…

God Bless Great Neighbors!!!

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Yeah: I mean that literally. We have THE best neighbors on this street: the nicest people, and those people are willing to help a brain-boggled old lady.

Thanks to these fine folks, our brand-new vacuum cleaner is now functional (noooo..it did NOT work right out of the box…you expected a frog?). Haven’t tried to clean house with it yet — that actually is the job for The Cleaning Lady from Heaven. But I wanted to be sure it actually works before she shows up here to wrestle with it. And yeah: looks like it’s running right.

I hope.

Meanwhile, the same fine folks are, in real life, accountants. (Not vacuum-cleaner repair techs!) They ride herd on my incompetent bookkeeping — somebody has to do it. And now it looks like they’re going to be willing to work with my son to keep my money matters in order and to keep him fully informed.

And that, my friends, is HUGE. 

No kidding! As more and more marbles roll out my ears, I get less and less competent to do even the routine daily money tracking. As you can imagine, this creates some fine headaches for my son! So…if things work out the way I hope, they may be able to relieve him from a gigantic PITA, while they help to keep the finances under control.

I sure do hope it works out that way!!!

Man!!! Don’t get old, my friends!

“SIZZLE!”

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You think I jest?

Nay, verily: it is SIZZLING hot out there, on the streets, in the park, in the grassy yards. Hoooleee maquerel!

Just staggered back in the house. Fortunately, I had enough presence of mind to NOT take the dawg with me when I left the Funny Farm a couple of hours ago.

That was because I’d planned to go by the nearby office of a lawyer-for-all-trades, as it were, and ask him to help ensure that, when I croak over, everything in my sticky little hands will transfer smoothly, quickly, and with ZERO hassle to my good son.

In theory, it should: I have no other heirs. None that I know of, anyway. But who knows? We’re talkin’ bucks here. What with the wonders of inflation, the house alone is worth in the vicinity of a million bucks. And I want every single one of those bucks to go straight to him.

Don’t you know that someone, somewhere will jump into that fray and try to rip off a chunk of that bread dough?

Yeah.

So. Get lawyer now. Get will scam-proofed. Get everything set up for my excellent son. 

Navigating to said lawyer’s office, in the absence of a car, entails traipsing through UNGAWDLY heat. And alas, at this point — a little after 4:00 in the afternoon — this old bat is in no shape to trudge over there right this minute.

Tomorrow.

Let’s hope I live until tomorrow, eh? 😀

I’ll charge over there in the morning, along about when I hope they open. Not open yet? Coffee shop lurks right next door!

My son’s father is a lawyer…of the retired variety. What I’m hoping is that I can set things up with this new guy, and then DXH can review whatever we come up with to be sure it’s OK. If not, the two can work together to make it OK.

This would evade any question of a conflict of interest. And yet still be sure someone who cares is overseeing things.

Í hope.

 

 

Sole & Separate: Keep It That Way

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Stumbling through the afternoon heat, out and about on the neighborhood streets. Not one of my brighter ideas eh?

Man! Speakin’ of stupid ideas: as my brain cooked, my mind wandered to my father’s ill-fated marriage to the hair-raising Helen: the woman he took up with after my mother died.

You wanna talk about mistakes? Lemme tellya MISTAKE!

Couldn’t have been much better for Helen, either: the two of them must have been magnificently miserable after they moved in together. But him? My gawd! What a dragon lady that woman was! 

He had been unendingly happy with my mother: for decades. They were deeply in love. She was a compliant and loving woman. And they tended to think along the same lines…or at least, if they didn’t, she stifled her thoughts and made herself agree with him.

Helen, au contraire, was a woman of strong will and her own opinions. No one told her what to think, and no one told her what to do. Particularly not some guy. 😀

He was utterly bereft after my mother died. The result: after he met Helen at the old-folkerie where he moved, he stupidly proposed marriage.

Guess he imagined one woman was much like another. That, as we know, is far from true. The result: several years of utter misery for my father.

He refused to divorce her, because — wailed he — “she’ll get all my money!”

I was too stupid to come up with a counter to that. I should’ve said Daddy! Your daughter is married to one of the most powerful lawyers in the Southwest. She’s not gonna get all your money…or any of it! 

But no: nary a word from me.

That, to produce an excuse for me, came after years of having had the sh!t beat out of me. True: I was kinda afraid of my father, even as an adult. So I wasn’t inclined to gainsay him. If he thought she’d get all his money, well…no doubt she’d get all his money. Right?

Big mistake. I should have advanced my dainty little foot and spoken up. But…well…I figured that even if he heard a word I said, he wouldn’t be swayed. He would do what he would do because…that was what he did.

As a practical matter, with that lawyer in the offing he probably would have listened to me. Or at least have taken an afternoon to meet with said lawyer and discussed the matter. So…because I kept my mouth shut, he lost a substantial part of his shirt. My bad, eh?

Well, anyway: after decades of prior marriage for each of them, they didn’t think of looking at new  matrimonial arrangements in any unconventional way. So…off they went to the altar in the typical manner: blending all their worldly goods as community property.

Don’t do that, folks.

What you want in a second (or later) marriage is sole and separate property. And you want to keep it that way!  Talk with a lawyer BEFORE you tie the knot; understand what you’re doing and be sure your lawyer reviews things properly.

If my father had done that — well, to be fair: if the two of them had done that — their lives would have been a lot happier and a lot calmer than they turned out to be. And they could have untied the knot fairly easily, with lots less pain. 

UN-Be-LIEV-able!

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Literally unbelievable, as it happens today.

This afternoon, in came a hustling piece of snail-mail, trying to get me to Send Money Now and HURRY to sign up for that wondrous product. It looked like BS to me…sort of. But..but…sort of NOT.

Actually, it seemed to be trying to say my homeowner’s insurance is expiring and I need to renew a policy…right now!

Fortunately, the WonderAccountants were home. They live right across the street.

So I took the wad of paper over there. They looked at it and shortly decided it was a scam. Out with it!

Actually, it took them a few minutes of studying the thing to come to that conclusion. You can be sure that if they were given pause, I would never have been able to figure out that it was a scam.

Lordie! This stuff just comes avalanching in on us! When you need a professional to assess the validity of a piece of junk mail…ohhhh gawd! What kind of world DO we live in???

What incredible luck that those two wonderful folks moved into the house across the road! They’ve saved my tail feathers more than once!

Work Life: Movin’ On

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A middle-aged man of my acquaintance — early middle age, but still: no kid — recently lost his job. Canned for no great fault of his, but you may be sure the ex-employer will try to foist blame on him by way of minimizing post-employment payments.

{sigh} I think what would I do if I were in his work boots? 

Well: obviously, my goal would be to move on in the most efficient and effective way: a) to get into a new job ASAP, and  b) to land a salary that would be as much as I was earning in the former salt mine — and preferably more.

Whew! We don’t ask much, eh? /eyeroll/

First thing to do, IMHO, would be to give myself a couple weeks of vacation time, simply to decompress. And during that time, think about what I’d really like to do and how to pull it off. Continue in the same line of work? Change careers? Go back to school for a degree that might open new doors? Apply for a job as a dog-catcher? Or…what?

This would be the time to look carefully at what’s out there: what kinds of jobs are available in your area, what openings exist, and what qualifications do you need. Also it may be a good time to consider whether you want to get a new degree or course of vocational training that would aim you in a new direction.

Next would be to network…network…network. Let all your friends know you’re in the market for a new job. But also join trade and professional groups (if you’re not already in at least a couple of them), show up at their meetings, and let those folks know you’re looking for fresh work, too.

Neither of these strategies, of course, guarantees that you’ll get any new opportunities…but sitting on your hands certainly will guarantee that.

Another avenue might be to go back to school: get into a graduate program or sign up for a new vocational training course. Several obvious advantages here, above and beyond keeping yourself busy: strong potential for networking opportunities, easy way to spiff up the résumé, and something constructive to keep your mind off your troubles.

Then…just keep on keepin’ on!

If you’re wanting to get hired by a new employer, start applying for jobs and keep on applying.

If you think you might like to start your own business, join a couple of networking and business groups. Show up: make friends, tell them what you can do for them, follow any leads they give you.

If you want to change careers, figure out what you think you want to do next, learn how to establish your qualifications for it, and dive in!

As you might have guessed, none of the options will be easy. But all of them are better than sitting on your hands. So…  Forward! Head on down that lonesome road…