Coffee heat rising

Personal Finance

Bumhood: The fruits of financial freedom

by
SDXB at “work”…

For quite some time, I’ve been threatening to interview SDXB,* my friend who retired at the age of 47 into a glorious life of what he calls “Bumhood.” He’s not an especially affluent man, nor does he live like a pauper. He chooses to live frugally, and accordingly he chooses to live off the gerbil wheel. Here’s what he has to say for himself.

FaM: What is Bumhood?

SDXB: Bumhood is the state of idleness.

To arrive at Bumhood you must start to plan early in life. It’s not something you can achieve unless you have money in the bank, unless you own your own house, and unless you own your car. And you have no bills: I always pay everything thirty days cash. That is, I pay everything in full every month.

FaM: But you didn’t own your home 20 years ago, when we first got together.

SDXB: I’d just come out of a divorce. As you’ll recall, I was able to buy a house shortly.

Once you take on Bumhood, you realize that it doesn’t take as much money as you thought to stay there, provided that you don’t go into debt.

FaM: Why did you decide to become a Bum?

SDXB: It was during the 1987–88 recession. My public relations business evaporated overnight.

I represented a $9 billion bank and several other financial institutions. They all went belly-up during the collapse of the savings and loan industry. I found myself going to an office and sitting around with nothing to do. My biggest customer kept calling and asking me to do work, but they couldn’t pay.

One fine day a friend and I—he was a securities analyst—went camping in the mountains together. We started a bonfire and drank some whiskey, and somewhere in the drunken fog we decided to wrap up our businesses and become bums.

And we did. It took me three months; he took four. I just handed over all my PR accounts to the guy I was officing with, along with the key.

FaM: Then what happened?

SDXB: Our main concern was whether we could sustain Bumhood over time. Interestingly, over the years my friend and I discovered that, without consulting one another, we arrived at the same plateaus. We discovered that…

Money happens.

Bumhood takes less money than we thought. You don’t need as much as you think you’ll need to live in retirement.

We weren’t alone. There were other people who had become Bums. Because we were Bums, we weren’t limited to loafing and traveling on the weekends. We’d go places during the week, and there were the Bums! These were first-class Bums, mind you, not park-bench bums: people who had gotten themselves set up for Bumhood and were practicing it.

We could travel at will. I went to Europe—Portugal, Spain, France. We went to Hawai’i. I’ve bummed around Alaska, Canada, Mexico, all over the United States.

Meanwhile, I learned how to cook and how to take care of myself. To make Bumhood work, you have to be independent, to be able to take care of yourself as much as possible. You can’t be dependent on restaurants for your food and on dry cleaners for your clothes.

FaM: How does money happen?

SDXB: Money just happens.

For example, after I quit working, I was still close to my profession—journalism and public relations. People would call and ask me to do some writing for them, so I’d make some extra money that way.

And I was in the active Air Force Reserve. I’d get good money from that. I was assigned to Airman, the Air Force’s international magazine. I’d volunteer for assignments that would enable me to travel on the government dime—and get paid for it. I wrote for other magazines, too.

FaM: So it wasn’t really that you weren’t working…

SDXB: No. Money happens because you make money happen. But at all times I had work under control. I ran it. It didn’t run me.

Remember that none of this came about by accident. My earliest thought about preparing for retirement occurred to me in my late 20s. It wasn’t something that just happened to me when I was 47 years old. In addition to planning, there’s a certain amount of luck involved in arriving at Bumhood.

Are you one of those people that money happens to? Probably. Most people can make money on the side. You have to be willing to make money happen: to capitalize on skills and knowledge without signing on full-time.

And you need to make your savings grow.

FaM: How?

SDXB: I placed my money in low-risk securities, and I bought and continue to own stock that’s fairly low-risk. And I bought and traded Swiss francs through two Swiss banks.

FaM: That’s a pretty high-risk enterprise.

SDXB: Yes. It’s an example of where luck worked. I happened to have money in Swiss francs at a time when the dollar was weak and francs were valuable, so I sold them and made a lot of money.

I don’t recommend it. In my ignorance, I lucked out. But I almost took a bath—it was a losing proposition throughout the Carter Administration. Not until Reagan came in and the dollar strengthened was I able to make money.

“Money happening” means making money happen. One reason I wanted to keep my hand in journalism was so I could deduct equipment, some travel expenses, and a portion of my house as office space. The Air Force Reserve could be considered a part-time job, but writing cannot be considered steady work. The Air Force gig wasn’t hard work, and it was good pay because as a chief master sergeant I was a high-ranking noncom. Basically, working for the Air Force meant I got paid to travel.

Everybody has some talent they can use to make money happen, whether it’s handyman work, professional consulting, military reserve work, substitute teaching, selling things on E-bay, yard saling.

FaM: So what were you doing before you became a bum?

SDXB: I served my time in journalism: I was broadcast editor in Utah and Idaho for the Associated Press. For about eight years I was an investigative reporter for the Arizona Repubic, and later for the Phoenix New Times. After that I was editor of Phoenix Business Journal, then a Scripps-Howard newspaper.

My first taste of Bumhood came when I quit PBJ. I told the company I was leaving and gave them four weeks notice. Two weeks later I called and asked if they had a replacement for me. No, they didn’t. With one week to go, they still said no, they didn’t have anyone to take my place. They apparently didn’t believe I was really quitting.

On the day I said I was leaving, they still had no replacement. The next day I left for Europe. I bummed around Europe for two months with a lady friend. She was a hotel executive. We visited England, Ireland, Scotland, France.

When I came back, I did a little freelance writing. So I was sitting in my home office and calculating what would be my maximum income if I worked six days a week as a freelance, when the phone rang. It was one of the largest advertising companies in Arizona. They represented the largest savings and loan in Arizona. Could I handle the PR for First Federal Savings?

I said, “Sure!”

He said, “What’s your rate?”

I had no idea what PR people charged. At this time, I was a pure journalist. “I’ll cost it out,” I said. “I’ll get right back to you.”

I immediately called an old friend who was an old-line Arizona PR guy and asked him the going rate: $90 an hour. Remember, this is in ’88 or ’89—that was a lot of money then.

I said, “My god, Charley! That’s stealing!”

He said, “Don’t ask for any anything less, because if you do you’ll be undercutting everyone else.”

I call the ad guy back and say $90 an hour.

He says, “Can you start tomorrow?”

I learned they’d just fired their vice-president of public relations and needed someone to start immediately. When I hung up I thought, “I don’t know squat about PR!”

So I went down to the main library and checked out books written by top New York City PR people, and that night I started reading. Next day, I met with the bank executives and told them what I could do for them. I was reciting stuff I’d just read. In the ensuing months, I kept coming up with ideas based on what the New York City PR guys wrote. In those days, that kind of stuff was unheard-of in the Arizona market. I kept the bank executives out of trouble and ushered in a name change. In the process, I made a lot of money.

I never knew why they called me or who recommended me. I was probably the top journalist in the community at the time. I’d won the first Don Bolles Investigative Reporting Award, the Virg Hill Award. And I won the Arizona Press Club’s First-Place Investigative Reporting Award four consecutive years.

FaM: How long have you been a Bum?

SDXB: I retired at the age of 47. [SDXB is now 69.] I bummed around in the Air Force part-time. Freelanced for magazines off and on. In 2000, I retired from the Air Force Reserve, providing myself with a nice pension. I continued to freelance off and on for another six years. In 2006 or so, I just quit writing altogether.

FaM: What did you do about health insurance?

SDXB: Well, I was in good health and I took a chance that I’d stay that way. At age 60, I got military health care, and now I have Medicare. But before that, the only time I was covered was when I was on active Air Force duty. Fortunately, I never had any serious health problems.

Luck is part of Bumhood.

FaM: You live pretty well, for a person with no visible means of support.

SDXB: As a Bum, you learn to keep your costs under control by living within your means. Bums always buy vehicles outright, in cash, and we keep them until they’re ready to fall apart. You don’t buy anything on time. And buy your house outright. The monthly payment you might have been making is your return on investment. So if you would have been paying $1,000 or $1,200 a month on a mortgage, paying it off means you have that much virtual income in your pocket. When you own the roof over your head, you’re paying the amount of the mortgage payment to yourself, not to the bank.

One reason I moved to a retirement community is that it’s much cheaper to live here. Sun City has no municipal school taxes, and insurance is lower. After I moved here from mid-town Phoenix, I estimated I saved $1,500 a year on insurance and tax alone.

FaM: I know people have wondered if you didn’t get bored, having quit working at the height of your career.

SDXB: I’m a pretty organized person. I took that organization into retirement. I maintain a daily to-do list that keeps me moving forward.

And I sat down and made a list of everything I could think of that was recreational—there must be a hundred items on it, from shooting pool to going to museums (on bum’s night, of course, when admission is free). I hike every day to get exercise. I ride bicycles. I got into ballroom dancing and ice skating. I entertain friends with gourmet dinners.

There’s a lot to do in Bumhood.

*SDXB: Semi-demi-exboyfriend

This interview led to a series on ways to achieve financial freedom:

• An Overview
• Education
• Work
• Debt
• The health insurance hurdle
The roof over your head

Surviving in penury

by

Wow, did I get these figures wrong! My take-home salary is far more than what appeared in the original of this post…I don’t know where I came up with a figure of $32,900. I was even sober when I wrote this! Corrected figures appear in boldface next to my original wrong calculations.

Well, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. In 2010, my gross income will be significantly less than half of what I earn today. Assuming state and federal taxes total no more than 20 percent (a big assumption!), the combined net of Social Security and teaching will be $9,700 ($17,710) less than I net from my salary today. That doesn’t count what I make freelancing, because next year I will not be allowed to earn freelance income. Since Social Security’s rules will limit me from earning a living wage, 2010 will be a year of real penury. It remains to be seen whether I can survive under those circumstances.

By “survive” I mean “stay in my home, eat, keep my dog, and live through a 118-degree summer.”

There are a couple of extenuating circumstances.

I’ll get a chunk of vacation pay that should net out to about $3,965 (assuming GDU doesn’t pull another of its numbers on me, another Big Assumption).

About $1,900 remains in the S-Corporation, after paying for the MacBook. If I can finish the page proofs I’m reading before Christmas, I could in theory push the 2009 drawdown to about $2,200. It probably would be better, though, to delay that job to 2010, so as to leave its payment in the corporate account to cover things like printer ink and computer repairs with nontaxable money. So, let’s say I net about $1,500 from what remains of freelance income.

This will give me a grand total of $28,985 (net, if taxes are not too extortionate) to live on next year. Compare that to my present net of $32,900 ($41,210).

Two strategies may enhance things a bit:

Even though I hope to avoid drawing anything from retirement savings in 2010 (so as to wait and see if investments continue to recover from the crash of the Bush economy), to have the state consider me “retired” so that it will disgorge the $19,000 it owes me for unused vacation time, I will have to draw a few bucks from my 403(b) until such time as the bureaucrat in charge of that program approves me. So the plan now is to draw down $500 a month until we know the sick-leave payment has been approved. That process can take as long as three months, and so I’ll probably have to pull out about $1,500, adding (optimistically speaking) another $1,200 net to the 28 grand.

Now we’re approaching a net of $29,200 ($30,185), which is $3,700 ($11,025) less than I bring home today.

My share of the mortgage on the Luke house will be paid with $10,000 worth of tax-free dividends from an antique whole life policy, giving me a year’s reprieve on having to draw those payments down from savings.

Still…where is that $3,700 ($11,025) shortfall gunna come from?

Well, I put $573 a month into savings right now. That adds up to $6,800 a year. Of that, only $3,900 is nonnegotiable: I have to self-escrow that much to cover the property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. So if that’s the only money I set aside, in 2010 I can devote $2,900 to living expenses that I used to put into savings.

So, now I’m only $800 ($8,125) short of the amount I actually spend on living expenses. That, I’m sure, can be managed through frugality and tight budgeting. (Yeah, right! Only if I sell my home and take up residence under the Seventh Avenue Underpass!)

This scenario applies only to 2010. If I have to continue refraining from drawing down savings in 2011, then things will look different. I can earn about $10,000 a year freelancing—in a good year. So the net of teaching three-and-three will come to $11,520 (in the unlikely event that taxes don’t rise  much); the net of Social Security is about $12,000. Add net freelance income of around $8,000, and you get $31,250 ($31,520) as the base net income, not counting savings drawdown, in 2011.

On the surface, that’s not too bad—pretty close to what I’m earning now. (Holy Hell, it’s over ten grand less than what I take home now!) But it doesn’t count the cost of Medicare, eleven times what I’m paying for health insurance today; and it doesn’t count the cost of the mortgage, which on its own represents about 1 percent of my total savings. (I am screwed, screwed, ge-screwed!)

And we have to remember that taxes and insurance will not stay the same. On the federal level, sooner than later we’ll have to pay the cost of repairing the damage done by the past decades of ill-advised leadership. Locally, the state is still a phenomenal $1.4 billion short, even after the Draconian budget just passed by the legislature. If the most basic services are to stay in place—firefighting, police protection (forget services to the sick and elderly poor)—then our dim-bulb legislators must face the fact that they will have to raise taxes. Homeowner’s insurance, too, never goes down; and when I reach the point where I’m forced to replace my 10-year-old car with a newer model, taxes and insurance on that will increase, too.

If my investment advisers are right that my savings will return to something resembling their former glory after a year or so, then I should be able to get by on a 4 percent drawdown…as long as I can dodder into a classroom. (Dream on!) That, of course, will not be forever.

But the day after tomorrow will have to take care of itself. (By then I’ll have starved to death, so someone else can figure out what to do with the day after tomorrow.)

I must have figuredmy income on a 24-period basis rather than the actual 26 pay periods created by PeopleSoft’s hideous biweekly pay scheme, since I bank the so-called “extra” paychecks in savings. Even that is wrong, though: the annual total would be $38,040. What hat the $32,900 figure came out of, I can’t imagine!

Image: Men being served at a soup kitchen. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

Budget: Positive news

by

Well! Only six more days till the end of the current budget cycle, and an amazing $352 is left in the kitty. Not, we might add, through any extreme deprivation: I’ve gone out to eat with friends four times in the past three weeks; bought $38 worth of scrumptious wine at Costco (some of which I enjoyed last night with steak, asparagus, and a mighty tasty avocado salad); spent over $80 on gasoline; and had my hair done. Two women have even asked who does my hair! Since I cut the budget to $1,000 preparatory to canning day, having some $350 left with a less than a week to go is a very positive development, indeed.

How is this happening? Since January, on a $1,200 kitty I’ve run over budget five months out of nine. Of the four months in the black, only one of them came in with expenditures of less than $1,000; a second was close, but no cigar.

One explanation, I think, is stockpiling: at the start of this cycle, the freezer held plenty of food. Yet I’ve spent about $317 at Costco, much (but not all) of it on food. There have been no extraordinary bills (yet): no vet bills, no car repairs, no plum…oh, wait: there was a plumbing bill. Hmmm…

The big change is that I decided to abandon microbudgeting and see what would happen if I set up virtual “envelopes” for the month instead. In microbudgeting, the budgeted amount for the month is divided in four and allocated to four periods of roughly a week each. With the envelope system, you establish an amount to spend on each of several categories, and then quit spending on a given category when you reach its limit.

Presently, the result looks like this:

In this first experiment, it appears I’ve overbudgeted for Costco and underbudgeted for gasoline and hair. Since I don’t get my hair cut every month, I figured I could think of $20 as a kind of “average,” but maybe it would be better simply not to have a “hair” budget in the months when I don’t need a trim. No law says you have to have the same budget categories, month in and month out.

I hardly ever go out to eat—really, it’s a rare month when I spend as much as $50 in restaurants. For some reason, this month all my friends have been asking me to join them, and since I have precious few friends, I incline not to turn them down. At any rate, it’s covered by the savings from the pool and Cost Plus categories.

So the question is: Does a virtual “envelope” system, even when the proprietor cheats here and there, work better than microbudgeting?

Psychologically, it may: with the weekly microbudget, one feels it’s OK to spend all the way to the hilt. In fact, when the overall monthly budget gets tight, it’s difficult not to spend the entire week’s microbudget: $250 is not much to cover all one’s bills, from food and gasoline to pet care and property maintenance. One $200 run on Costco plus a tank of gas and you’re over budget…and how often can you get out of Costco for under $200?

With the envelope system, you don’t feel so constrained: you have all month in which to spend the money allocated for groceries, clothing, gasoline, and the like. One $150 trip to Costco came nowhere near running me into the red, but if I’d spent that much out of a one-week microbudget and then had to spend $35 on gas and $30 on the hairstylist, I’d have had $35 left to last the rest of the week. One trip to Safeway would have blown it. With the virtual envelopes, it’s easy to see what remains in the budget for specific purposes, making it easy to back off some expenditures as needed.

Clearly I’m going to have to reallocate allowances for some of the categories: less on Costco and more on gas, for example. But if I’m right that this approach works better than microbudgeting, the implication is huge.

Huge.

It means that next year I should easily be able to live within my much constrained means, without having to hold a fulltime job and without even having to crank any freelance work. Combined income from Social Security and part-time teaching should more than cover my needs!

$14,400 SS + $14,160 teaching – 20% tax = $22,848 net income
$565 monthly recurring costs + $1,000 discretionary budget x 12 = $18,780 routine expenses

That leaves me almost $4,070 to the good. From what I can tell, that extra amount will just cover the cost of Medicare, which should run around $300 a month, by the time I’ve cobbled together all the aspects that go to creating full coverage. It doesn’t leave anything for emergency savings, but I have $10,000 in that fund to cover 2010; in the following year I’ll be allowed to earn more money.

So, if I don’t get the Glendale Community College job, it won’t much matter: as long as I can keep discretionary spending to around $1,000 a month, I should be fine.

And in the unlikely event that I do get the job, it would make sense to stay on this budget and save all the unspent net income, thereby making it possible not only to buy a car in cash but also to replenish savings with new earnings.

Either way, the new budget is a winner!

Ads: Credit report monitoring scam

by

A reader e-mailed to say he had come across an ad on Funny for one of those outfits that proposes to provide free credit reports from all three reporting agencies, but which hooks you in to a subscription whereby you end up paying a monthly fee for “credit rating monitoring.” Please be careful. Do not order “free” credit reports from any such lash-up: it’s a scam. While you do get the free credit reports—which you can get for yourself online very easily—paying someone to monitor your credit reports is unnecessary.

Here’s why: By law, each of the three credit reporting agencies, Experian, Equifax and Transunion, is required to give you a free credit report once a year. Because there are three agencies, you can monitor your own status, for free, simply by asking for a report from one of them every four months. If you then  review your bills and checking account statements each month, you will protect yourself just fine against identity theft. For free.

To get free credit reports without anyone trying to lure you into an expensive scam, go to AnnualCreditReport.com. This site was commissioned by the three credit reporting companies to provide the three annual credit reports mandated by law. You can request your report online, by phone, or by snail-mail.

You don’t have to ask for all three at once. So, if you order one in January, one in April, and one in August, you can cause the system to monitor your credit rating, allowing you to check for anything strange on a regular basis. It’s easy to put reminders in Outlook, iCal, or even Quicken to tell yourself when to call up a new report and which agency to ask.

Apparently different ads come up on different computers. I haven’t seen any such advertisement on my Mac; otherwise I’d get AdSense to block it.

How does your (financial) garden grow?

by

Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche has been contemplating the degree to which her investments have recovered from the late, great economic crash. In comparison to the pickle we were in just a few months ago, even “not great” returns look good!

Coincidentally, just a few days ago I happened to take a look at my own funds’ performance over the past year or so…the first time I’ve had the heart to do so in a long time.

My big IRA, which is professionally managed, has been doing a lot better the past couple of months. Between mid-September and mid-October, it increased by a healthy $4,288. The taxable Vanguard funds increased $1,623 over the same period.

The high point reached by all my scattered investment holdings (not counting real estate) occurred in April of 2008. As of about three days ago, the value of all my non-realty investments had dropped by $110,470 off that high. However, I used about $20,000 to pay off a small second mortgage on my home, and so the real difference in value is about –$90,470.

The low point occurred in March 2009. The most recent figures show a gain of about $49,145 from the low point. Again, we need to remember that I made that $20,000 withdrawal in May 2009, and that some of the gain consisted of contributions to the 403(b).

The total package of investments, then, has a ways to go before my illusory riches come back. I certainly don’t expect to regain the remaining $90,470 of the retirement savings that evaporated in the economic meltdown anytime during 2010, even if I succeed in leaving the funds untouched. Really, I’m pleased just to recover that $49,000.

What a ride we’ve had, eh? How are your investments doing? Are you seeing any sign of life yet?

Reprojecting next year’s income

by

Obsessive again, I spent another day and a half rehashing, in a desultory way, next year’s income and outgo. And worrying. Worrying worrying worrying: can I make it?

It appeared very much as though I could not. In 2010, projected discretionary and monthly unavoidable expenses, all told, will run about $30,075. Net income from Social Security, teaching, and GDU’s one-time payout for unused vacation time would come to about $26,200. The problem is, the $14,160 that Social Security will allow me to earn in 2010 before a 50% penalty kicks in is just too little for me to live on.

Cutting costs every which way from Sunday (my expenses have already been cut significantly, preparatory to unemployment) brings the estimated outgo down to $27,675, still more than projected income.

The goal, BTW, is to avoid taking a drawdown from savings next year, so as to allow the investments in my major savings instruments to recover from the crash of the Bush economy. With that constraint, there was no way income was gunna exceed or equal outgo, no matter how many numbers I crunched.

Dang!

Well, this morning a dim light dawned. The community college district issued my first full paycheck, which for the first time showed state and federal tax withholding. A little English-major math revealed that the total gouge, for everything, is only about 14 percent. I’d been estimating a 20 percent tax bill.

That 6 percent difference will make it possible for me to live on Social Security, my net vacation time payout, and teaching income next year! My share of the Investment House mortgage will be paid from a separate little windfall, and without that $800 a month hit, I should be able to live in something slightly more luxurious than full-out anchorite style.

Without cutting my current $1,200 a month budget for discretionary expenses (some of which are only nominally “discretionary”), I still run in the red, as you can see from the first four columns on the left. However, as a practical matter discretionary expenditures have averaged about $1,000 for the first nine months of 2009, despite several months with large budget overruns. Assuming straitened circumstances will lead me to keep those costs at or below $1,000 a month, I end up just within my 2010 net income—as shown on the right.

Add a $2,500 drawdown from the S-corporation, which I plan to take this December and stash in next year’s survival fund, and the picture looks even better:

In this scenario, if I manage to keep discretionary expenses around $1,000 a month (on average), I should have about $2,740 of play over the course of the year.

So, if no really huge unexpected expenses strike next year, I should survive the tight times of 2010 without undue suffering. It won’t be luxurious, but neither will I have to set up a campsite under the Seventh Avenue Overpass.

Whether 14 percent withholding for taxes will suffice remains to be seen. But that problem will have to take care of itself in April 2011.

By 2011, my investments should have recovered enough to justify a 4 percent drawdown. And the onerous restriction on the amount of earned income Social Security imposes will expire (for me) in 2011, so I can put all of my contract and blog income into the pot. As a practical matter, the combination of teaching, Social Security, and S-corporation income may be enough that I won’t have to draw down anything like 4 percent. I’ll need $800 to cover my share of the Investment House, and that’s only 2 percent of the present investment total. If, as my financial managers think, investments will have recovered substantially by 2011, it may be even less than that.

Hallelujah!