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Personal Finance

Monthly budget updated; enforced “retirement” planned for

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Well, I’m managing to stay on budget, despite a $300 reduction this month. Last week’s $223 hit from the vet will be covered by the monthly savings fund, which is fairly flush now that the Renovation Loan Payoff is fully funded and the money I was embargoing for that can go elsewhere. Right this instant I’m $26 in the black—just about the price of a gas tank refill. And I just may be able to squeak by without having to buy more gas until after this week’s mini-budget cycle ends, on the 13th.

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Along about the middle of last month, I decided that I’d better start getting used to living on less than I’ve been accustomed to, just in case the rumored Christmas layoffs actually happen. So I cut my weekly allowance from $375 to $300, just to see if I could do it. In November, that worked fine: came in $2.29 in the black at the end of the third week (because I’d had an unexpected bill of $225 the previous week) and $75.19 at the end of the fourth week, for a $349 underrun of November’s$1,500 budget. This month I’ve budgeted $1,200, and it remains to be seen how that will go.

Actually, it’s going better than it looks. Tomorrow I will return a $50 space heater to Lowe’s, having found a much better model at Costco. That will put this week’s budget enough in the black to handily afford a tank of gas. And then some.

The Board of Regents met on Thursday and Friday. We are told this was the Fateful Meeting in which Our Beloved Leader was to faze his plan to declare a financial emergency past the citizen bosses. If layoffs are going to come down soon, they should be announced by the 15th. So, I figure if I still have a job by the end of this month, I’m probably good through the end of June, when my contract runs out.

One way or another, the exercise of trying to live on a reduced budget should serve me well. If I escape the predicted layoffs this time and find I can live on less without much pain, then I’ll continue to do so and bank the extra $300 a month in the emergency fund, the better to have something to fall back on if future rounds of layoffs catch me in their net. At that rate, in five months I will have set aside the equivalent of one full paycheck.

Since December of 2007, I’ve lost over $100,000 from my retirement nest egg (that I know of: I still haven’t seen my 403(b) statements). A 4 percent drawdown from what remains will generate $18,748 a year, of which $9,600 goes toward servicing a mortgage, leaving $8,878 to supplement Social Security of $12,480, for a projected post-layoff gross income of $21,258 a year. I probably wouldn’t owe much tax on that, and so we could think of that as pretty close to net.

My net income right now is about $39,700.

If I earn the highest amount allowed before Social Security starts to penalize you ($13,500), I could bring my total gross to $34,758. State and federal income taxes would take about 20 percent of that, leaving me with about $27,800 to live on: an $11,900 cut in net income!

If I succeed in reducing my budget by $3,600 a year, that will supplement the $6,888 I can cut out of the regular monthly savings set-asides I’m making now plus the $170/month I’ll recover from no longer having to pay the loan, for a total cut in spending of $10,488. So…that will cut my living standard by a de facto $1,412 a year.

And I probably can live with that. Elsewhere, I’ve estimated that the minimum annual net I’ll need for bare survival is about $25,980. It’s going to be a challenge, and it will mean that I will have to teach miserable composition courses and generate income from freelance editing until I’m 66, when I can turn back the amount I will have collected from Social Security to the feds and reset my SS payments to the “full” amount, which is about $25,128 a year.

Assuming I don’t lose an awful lot more in the market, though, these desperate straits will only last for 29 months, until I reach age 66 and am eligible for so-called “full” Social Security entitlement. At that time, I can go back and raid my savings again to repay the $30,160 I will have collected between ages 63 1/2 and 66, which will permit me to reset my Social Security payments to the “full” amount of about $2,094 a month. This will give me a $16,408 drawdown from my reduced savings plus a $25,128 annual Social Security income, for a total gross of $41,536. Suck 28 percent out of that, and you have a net of $29,905, still not a comfortable income by any means (especially given that Medicare will cost nine or ten times what I’m paying for health insurance now), but livable. There’s some chance, though, that my tax rate may not be quite that high, since Social Security is taxed with byzantine complexity—the only way to know what it will be is to have my tax lawyer figure it out, which I ain’t a-gunna pay for until the time comes. Butof course, there’s also a chance that taxes will actually be higher in two or three years, given the bailouts and other extravaganzas our nation is financing.

Time will tell.

Long-term care insurance

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Metlife sends a notice inviting me to designate someone who can be alerted if a payment on my long-term care insurance is missed. Good thought: obviously, if you get into a predicament where you need long-term care, you may not be competent to pay your bills. I have the premium, which comes to about $75 a month, paid electronically, and so its unlikely the bill will go unpaid unless M’hijito has to take over my affairs and changes things around.

This policy, which I originally bought from TIAA-CREF but was sold to Metlife, will not cover the exorbitant cost of nursing-home or nursing care 100%. However, it does cover enough that my Social Security and (if my mutual funds ever recover) a 4% drawdown from savings will take up the slack. Because my house is paid for, if the utilities are turned off the house will cost nothing while I’m incarcerated in a nursing home. Well, that’s not so: it will cost the property tax and Gerardo’s bill to come around and clean up the desert landscaping once every month or two.

The cost of nursing care in this country is just astonishing, and because much of it is delivered by minimum-wage workers laboring in extremely difficult conditions, it behooves you to get yourself into the highest-quality nursing home available. And of course, the higher the quality, the higher the cost. By 2004, the average annual cost of nursing home care was over $70,000. This amount increases at about 6% a year; the annual cost is now said to hover around $76,500. In the Phoenix area, if I get sick this year it will cost me about $76,200 to get myself cared for.

Home nursing care, which sounds ever so much more desirable if you’re lucky enough to find someone competent, honest, and caring to do the job, runs about $43,885 a year nationwide and $45,800 in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Assisted living would cost me around $29,700, significantly less than the nationwide average of $33,100.

Is there any question about why some old folks ship out on luxury liners in their sunset years?

Neither Medicare nor health insurance will cover nursing care, at least not for any length of time. In theory Medicare will cover 100 days following an acute illness, but you have to show signs of recovery to get even that much coverage—and of course if your problem is acute senility, “recovery” is not in the picture. When my mother was dying of cancer, we found that Medicare and Blue Cross did everything they could to get her off their rolls, to the extent that my husband, who was a lawyer, and I spent so much of our time and energy fighting bureaucrats that I was left with almost no time to spend with my mother in her last weeks. SDXB had to arrange to have his mother divorce his father when the old man was dying of Parkinson’s, in order to force the VA to cover the his care and avoid pauperizing her.

Medicaid will cover nursing home care, but only after you have utterly pauperized yourself. You must be left penniless, meaning you have had to sell your home, your car, and expendall other assets on medical and nursing home bills. In Arizona, if you’ve made the mistake of gifting your children, as is allowed under federal law, with a few thousand inheritance-tax-free bucks over the two years prior to your falling ill, you can be disqualified from this state’s equivalent of Medicaid on the theory that you must have been trying to cheat the system.

So as you can see, if you’re “lucky” enough to make it to advanced old age, you’d better have long-term care insurance. Fourteen percent of people over 71 suffer from dementia, and that doesn’t count strokes, broken hips, chronic heart failure, Parkinson’s disease, or any of the multitude of other causes that put the elderly out of commission.

The problems with long-term care insurance are a) there are lots of shysters out there selling products that will not provide adequate care; b) premiums are high and must include a provision to adjust upward for the skyrocketing cost of care; and c) the older you are when you buy a policy, the pricier the premiums will be.

In general, you should plan to buy long-term care insurance in your early fifties. Obviously, if you purchase a policy when you’re too young, you’ll pay premiums over a long period when your chance of needing the coverage is almost nil. If you wait until you’re too old, you may be disqualified from buying a policy or pay an exorbitant premium.

You need to investigate any insurance company carefully before buying a long-term policy from it. Be sure it is financially sound and highly rated by Moody’s and A.M. Best. In addition, it’s important to fully understand what you’re buying. Most states have an agency on aging or an insurance commission. These agencies can provide you with information on what to look for and what to avoid in long-term care coverage. AARP also offers a lot of valuable information, but you should be aware that this organization is in the business of selling long-term care insurance.

It’s never too early to look into this issue. And if your parents are baby-boomers, now is the time to find out whether they’re covered and to urge them to get coverage if they’re not. Ten million baby boomers are expected to develop Alzheimer’s disease, and as we’ve noted, that’s not the only ailment that can render an elder helpless. The cost and anguish entailed in having to care for an adult who is fully disabled by senility or other illness are devastating—you should not assume that you will be able to care for your parents in your home, especially since you and your spouse will probably have to work to keep a roof over your heads and you will be trying to deal with raising children at the same time.

My insurance covers nursing home care and in-home care. It also will pay a relative or friend a small stipend to care for me at home, and pay to have the person trained in caregiving. As I look at the budget items I can cut if I’m laid off in the next few weeks, one of the items I do not consider to be an option is the long-term care insurance.

Turning what you love to do into a second income stream

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Well, no: not THAT what you love to do!

My late friend Jerri, about whose shopping hobby you read recently, had an incredible eye for clothing. She owned racks and racks of really cute clothing, much of it designer-label and most of it purchased on sale. She absolutely loved to shop, and she was very good at it.

Right now I have on a beautiful silk shirt that her daughter gave me. It’s a couple of sizes too large—Jerri was a bit portly in her old age—but worn over a coordinating shirt, it works to create an awesome, arty-looking tunic. The effect is really nifty.

If I had known that Jerri could do this—find amazingly cute clothing in stores where I never shop at prices I never manage to extract from retailers—I would cheerfully have paid her to help me shop.

I’m no good at shopping. When I go into a clothing store, what I see is a jillion square feet of look-alike clothing that
a. doesn’t fit me;
b. by and large is ugly;
c. looks like it was designed for or by a teenaged hooker; and
d. is hugely overpriced.
It’s a real struggle to force myself to paw through rack after rack after endless rack of this stuff searching for something that fits, that looks OK on me, and that I can afford. To me, shopping isn’t fun; it’s a pain in the tuchus.

Jerri’s shape was even less like a 17-year-old babe’s than mine is, and she managed to find a boutique’s worth of clothing that looked good on her. Two or three sizes smaller, and it all would have looked good on me, too. She had a real skill. IMHO, it was a salable skill.

I know I’m far from the only woman who views shopping for clothes as an unpleasant chore—several of my friends have expressed the same sentiment, including one with a real flair for style. It seems to me that Jerri could have made herself a nice sidestream income by hiring out as…what? A shopping coach! She could have indulged her joy in shopping by selling her time as a shopping consultant to women who don’t enjoy searching for that one thing that works among the acres of chaff. Because she had a wonderful and funny personality, she could make a shopping trudge into a fun outing. I’ll bet she could have found enough women who would have paid her to help them buy clothing to supplement her Walmart salary pretty handsomely.

On the other hand…

Some years ago a friend of mine was left penniless during a divorce. Literally, for two or three weeks she ate nothing but zucchini out of a backyard garden, while she used the few dollars she had to feed her two small children. She let the dog run loose to forage out of the neighbors’ garbage cans. She took a miserable job waiting tables, an occupation for which she was decidedly not suited—this was in the days when coffeeshop owners felt free to order their waitresses to wear skimpy costumes and bone-crushing shoes (sex sells hamburgers, too), and so you can imagine what the job was like.

This friend had studied photography on the college level for several years and had quite a gift for it. She had an acquaintance who owned a major portrait studio in the city. I asked her why she didn’t try to get a job there or at least see if this person could help her get in with some other studio.

She said she didn’t want to spoil something that she loved to do by having to make a living at it. Since she didn’t last long at waitressing, apparently she felt strongly enough about this that she was willing to go hungry rather than turn a pleasurable pursuit to profit.

What say you? Given that it’s a good idea to establish more than one stream of income, is turning a hobby into an income-generating occupation out of bounds? Would you convert your favorite pastime into paying work?[polldaddy poll=1169792]

Is frugality unAmerican?

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One narrative subplot in the ever-escalating media buzz over the economy is that the new fad for frugality, for paying off debts, and for living within one’s means is bad for America and bad for the global economy. When people stop buying, the story goes, retailers stop selling, lenders stop lending, importers stop importing, and manufacturers stop manufacturing. All the worthies in these sectors then close stores, go belly-up, and lay off employees, who are forced to behave frugally, pay off their debts, and live within their means, causing more retailers to stop retailing, more lenders to stop lending, more importers…and so on to infinity.

So it is that seedy characters like you and me, eccentrics who subscribe to the wacky theory that we should spend no more than we earn, refrain from buying every piece of junk set under our noses, and maybe even put some of what we earn into savings, are responsible for bringing this country to the brink of depression.

Yes. That’s you and me, fellow PF blogger: our little terrorist coterie has darn near brought about THE FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE! Worse! THE COLLAPSE OF THE ENTIRE PLANET’S ECONOMY!

Think of that.

Well, I am thinking of that. And I think not.

The way I see this, we’ve arrived in our present predicament not because consumers stopped spending but because they spent so much, so profligately, and so stupidly. Consider: If over the past two decades 80 percent (say) of Americans had been living within their means—if they had been educated adequately on personal finance matters and understood the basics of lending, saving, budgeting, and investing—we would not be in the mess we’re in.

  • Most Americans, having navigated clear of the shoals of unmanageable debt, would have plenty of money to spend on the things they need and—yes!—want.
  • Few people would have been naïve enough to get themselves into booby-trapped mortgages for absurd amounts of money that King Croesus himself couldn’t afford.
  • Most people would have had a fair idea of what a house is really worth. Because the public in general would have resisted buying at absurdly inflated prices, real estate prices would never have blown out of control, and so no housing crisis would have occurred.
  • Retailers would still be selling products at a steady pace.
  • Manufacturers would still be making products at a steady pace.
  • Layoffs would not be occurring.
  • The President of the United States would never have thought of responding to the horror of 9-11 by telling Americans to go out and spend themselves silly. (Who knows? Maybe his speechwriters would have been forced to come up with something more worthy of a world leader, like “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”)

Nope. We ants are not responsible for the collapse of the economy, nor are we the ones who are digging its grave. The grasshoppers did it. The grasshoppers and all the greedy little critters who got rich off them.

The newfound penchant for frugality that the newspapers and broadcasters tell us is now the hot fashion will no doubt pass. But if it doesn’t, that won’t be a bad thing. We will have hard times—we’re going to have hard times whether we all go out and load up our credit cards or not. But if members of the American public learn to get a grip on their spending and figure out how to manage their money so they can have what they want without getting themselves over their heads in debt (or if, more amazing still, they figure out what’s really important in life), in the long run the economy will be healthier and stronger. And the world will be a better place.

A New Plan: Retirement

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Over the past few days, I’ve about made up my mind that if I get laid off after the Board of Regents meets in December, I will not try to get another full-time job at all. Nor will I take regular draw-downs from my much-stressed retirement savings.

No.

Yes. I think I can live on a combination of Social Security and freelance editing, if I can earn a minimum of $1,000 a month. This would allow me to do the following things:

1. Quit. Yes!!!! Quit, quit, quit!
2. Leave the planned 4 percent retirement drawdown invested until the market turns around.
3. When I reach 66, return the money I’ve drawn from Social Security to the government and reset my payments to the “full retirement” level, substantially increasing my monthly income and collecting a chunk of tax refunds for the Social Security grab I paid at ages 63, 64, and 65.

Life would be very pinched for the next 2 1/2 years, until I reach 66. However, at 66, the increased Social Security payments would put me back in the middle class, and, with any luck at all, my savings will have recovered enough that I can safely draw down 4 percent. These two factors would make the rest of my life tolerable. When M’hijito and I sell or rent the Renovation House, I would then have enough income that I wouldn’t have to do any paid work at all to maintain a reasonable lifestyle.

Here’s how I see this:

Health Insurance: I will be eligible for Medicare in 18 months. COBRA lasts 18 months. The cost is $475 a month, but most of that will be covered by the amount GDU will owe me for accrued vacation pay. Thus that amount will not have to come out of month-to-month cash flow.

Renovation Loan: I will pay that off, using the money I have earned and squirreled away for the purpose. This will save the $170 payment and the $204 a month I pay toward principal, cutting my monthly expenses by $374. The amount of the loan, it is to be hoped, will be returned in a few years, after M’hijito and I sell the Investment House, on which I spent the funds.

Emergency and unexpected expenses: The amount I can generate from freelancing and Social Security will cover only routine costs. It will not cover a plumber’s bill, a car repair, a veterinary visit. However, I have about $18,000 saved up to buy my next car; this amount doubles as an emergency fund. I can use some of that to cover surprise expenses, or make an occasional drawdown from the big IRA.

Routine savings: The $200 a month I normally set aside to buy such things as clothes and other little indulgences will go away. The only way I can survive on freelance income plus Social Security is to dispense with regular savings. I am, however, allowed to earn as much as $1,125 a month without having Social Security taken away from me (isn’t THAT generous?). My plan assumes a regular freelance income of $1,000. Any amount more than that can go into a savings account. I hope.

Budgeting: In addition to foregoing the routine $200/month savings deposit, I will have to cut $300 a month off my living expenses budget. That means, basically, that $300 will have to come out of the grocery budget. Since there’s a little play in that budget anyway, this probably can be done simply by changing the way I eat and by purchasing nonfood goods second-hand at thrift shops and yard sales, rather than buying everything new.

If I do these things and they work (second part of that is the big IF), I will be OK in the winter months when utility bills are low. During the summer, when temperatures exceed 110 degrees day after day, staying out of the red will be difficult, but I think it can be done. I will start with a cushion of about $900, back-up money that’s already sitting in the credit union. That will rise to around $1085 by the end of June, as budget underruns stack up. As utility bills bloat, my cushion will drop to a low of about $815 in October. In November, though, it will begin to grow.

Should I sell my house and move to Sun City, where real estate and living expenses allegedly are cheaper?

Hell, no! First, after the foreclosure across the street, my paid-off house is now worth less than I paid for it BEFORE the bubble. My house is very pleasant, it’s centrally located, and it’s paid off. I did a little math and discovered that it costs me about $93 a month more to live here than it would to live in Sun City, assuming I do not engage in full Scrooge McDuck lifestyle. I believe that after commissions and closing costs, I could net—if I’m lucky—about $258,000 on the sale of my present house. In Sun City, I could buy a house for around $200,000.

Such a place would need about $10,000 worth of upgrades and renovation to bring it more or less up to date and make it into something I’d want to live in. Consider: My house is pretty nice, with a big lot, a beautiful pool, wonderful bearing citrus trees, a private front courtyard, skylights in three rooms (real skylights, not aluminum tubes), a new roof, expensive tiling throughout, an updated kitchen, and a spiffy gas stove. For $200,000, what you get in Sun City is a 30- to 40-year-old tract house whose quality and style come under the heading of “better than living in a trailer…just.” Cabinetry and trim are veneered in plastic; there’s no gas service, so you have to use an electric stove; landscaping is gray, green, or (worse!) white pebbles; and the general atmosphere is Early Mausoleum. Spare me, God!

Well, my friends, I think She will. Spare me Sun City, that is. I really do believe I can hop off the treadmill, delay drawing down savings until the market turns around, and live on Social Security and freelance earnings for the next three years.

Now. All we need is for President Raven to croak “Nevermore” come the first part of December: declare a state of financial emergency at GDU and lay me off. Ohhh please, Mr. Raven: d-o-o-o-o-n’t throw me in the briar patch!
😉

Battening down in the hurricane

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It’s probably a bit late to batten down the hatches, since the perfect storm has already made landfall. On the other hand, I wasn’t really expecting to get laid off, and now that looks like a strong possibility. So, today I’m taking a series of steps to help weather bad times. Some of these, I think, apply to just about anyone in most situations. Here’s some plywood to nail over the windows:

1. Pay off or be in a position to pay off debt

My strategy: Prepare to pay off $21,000 Renovation Loan

This is a second mortgage, not an equity loan, but because it is a loan against my house it does put me at risk of foreclosure if I can’t make the payments, which I will not be able to do if and when I lose my job. I already have $11,000 in cash savings snowflaked for this purpose. Along these lines, I moved $5,500 out of short-term corporate bonds and $5,000 out of Vanguard’s Wellington fund, the two non-retirement funds that are losing the least.

2. Identify all potential cuts in budget and prepare to implement them.

My strategies:

• Pay off the Renovation Loan, to save $374/month (the regular payment plus payments toward principal made to eliminate the loan by the time I intended to retire).
• Cancel the newspaper, cell phone, DSL (good-bye Funny about Money!), long distance service, and monthly yard clean-up. Savings: $139/month.
• Cash out the whole life policy. Savings: $30/month. This also yields $23,000 less 28% tax = $16,560 in cash, about six months’ worth of living expenses.
• Quit putting $200/month into a savings account for casual expenditures. Cut all indulgences to zero.
• Cut back budget for all other living expenses that are not regularly recurring bills.

These maneuvers will cut my monthly recurring bills from $821 to $482 a month:
1010DepressionStrategy1
As a practical matter, I probably will not cancel the DSL, since I need it for my freelance editorial business. Also, Funny is now getting about 6,000 hits a month. It may be worth monetizing it. If I did that, I would have a good argument for deducting the cost of DSL from my income taxes. It’s not much, but every little bit helps.

I could, in theory, cancel my homeowner’s insurance, saving about $65 a month. However, that’s a risky move. We’ve already seen that the minute I jacked up the deductible I darned near set fire to the kitchen. Murphy’s Law suggests that if I cancel the $780/year hit for homeowner’s insurance, a gigantic storm will come through, blow off the roof and, in a single lightning strike, burn down whatever remains.

With the monthly self-escrowing for principal payments and the monthly $200 general savings gone, monthly savings set-asides drop from $704 to $300.
I budget $1,500 a month for nonrecurring living expenses. If I’m very careful, do not indulge myself in anything, have no vet bills, and have no repair bills for the house or car, this amount can be as much as $300 more than needed. So, I’m figuring about $1,200 is what I will need each month to live on, above and beyond the costs of running the house.

3. Figure how much will be needed to live in reduced circumstances.

My strategy: Add up projected reduced savings, monthly bills, and budgeted “other” living expenses.

1010DepressionStrategy3Okay. That’s better than the $3,000 a month I’m spending now. Over a thousand bucks a month better.

4. Try to figure out where the money will come from.
At the rate the market is going, I’m assuming there will be nothing left in my retirement savings. If I use the $23,000 that will come from cashing out my whole life insurance policy as an emergency fund to cover such things as veterinary, car, and house repair bills and to cover the $5,050 a year cost of COBRA, then I’m left with this:

My strategy: add up the next year’s sources of spendable income.
1010DepressionStrategy4

This assumes the tax on Social Security will only be around 20%, but it may be significantly higher, since I will have earned my regular salary for ten months of the 2008.

The RASL (amount GDU has to pay me for accrued sick leave) and vacation pay figures are net.

As you can see, even with the RASL pay and the one-time vacation time payment, I’ll come up short at least $6,600 in my first year of enforced retirement. It’s possible that I might be able to net that much with freelance income—a typical freelancer earns about $10,000 a year, working full-time.

If I don’t get a job, I am going to be in deep trouble. But I probably can get something working at a WalMart or even cleaning house. The rich will always be with us, and they’re always in the market for servants to do their menial work.

5. Consider whether there are any other options

My strategy: Figure what happens if I try to live on cash savings for the next couple of years.

If I don’t pay off the Renovation Loan but instead use the $21,000 cash savings and the $23,000 that will come from cashing out my whole life insurance policy, then we come up with a survival fund of $44,000. We have to add $170 a month back into the monthly cost of living. RASL is good for three years. The vacation pay is a one-time thing, affecting income in only one year. Without vacation pay, my shortfall will be around $10,000; without RASL and vacation pay, it will come to around $14,000.

1010DepressionStrategy5
As strategies go, living on principal is less than ideal. I suppose I could do it if I were pushed to the wall. But selling the house and living out of the back of the van would keep me going longer.

6. Count blessings.

My strategy: Quit focusing on the tsunami’s roar and pick flowers by the roadside.

• At least I have a roof over my head and the resources to pay it off
• No mortgager will be able to evict me from my home.
• It will take the county tax assessor two or three years to put me out after I begin to default on taxes.
• M’jihito has a job and is young enough to recover from whatever happens to this country, assuming anyone in the sub-Richistan classes can recover.
• I have a nice paid-off van with plenty of room to sleep in.
• I know how to cook from scratch.
• Beans are delicious and I know lots of ways to cook them.
• The veggies I planted have started to sprout.
• My health is good and so I at least can work, if I manage to overcome the prevailing cultural bias against older people.
• The Copyeditor’s Desk is getting steady work and could (maybe) crank $10,000 or $12,000 a year for each of its principals.
• They haven’t canned me yet.
• It’s fall and so I won’t have to run the HVAC system for another six or seven months.
• The weather is drop-down dead gorgeous.
• The dog is unfailingly cute.

P1010572

Update, December 2013: As it developed, my estimates of the taxes were overblown. My job lasted until December 31, 2009, and so salary from GDU did not trigger a tax on Social Security, which I started drawing in 2010. Only a portion of one’s Social Security is taxed, and that’s only if you earn more than a certain minimal figure. As it developed, forming an S-corporation ensured that would not happen and sheltered most of my freelance income and all Social Security income from taxes.

After the layoff finally came, more than a year after this post appeared, it proved impossible to find another job. Even had the job market not dried up in the Great Recession, my age worked against me — employers wouldn’t give an old lady a second look for positions that read like they were written with my skills and experience in mind. By that time, though, I had already paid off the loan, cut my living expenses significantly, and made arrangements with a community college to teach the maximum allowable number of courses on an adjunct basis. Although adjunct pay works out to something less than minimum wage, between that and Social Security I managed to stretch a $14,000 emergency fund to cover five years, and then some.

By staying put in the market, I eventually managed to recover most of the losses in retirement funds. Five years later, total savings (including the whole life policy, which I never did cash out) are about where they were before the crash of the Bush economy. My son and I spent several years underwater on the house he and I copurchased, while he worked a miserable job at a company that overtly abused and grossly underpaid its workers. Today his house is worth what we owe on it and mine is worth what I paid for it. He has a better job and hopes for a promotion. I will never work for The Man again, and am glad of it.

1010Obamanos