Coffee heat rising

Retirement

Money Happens!

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Well…we could say it re-happens. Got a tax refund of $2300, mostly because the college withholds taxes even though I don’t earn enough to pay them.

In an anchorite’s world, that’s a very nice chunk of money. It means I’ll have to draw down nothing from retirement savings to cover Q2 living expenses, and much less than planned for Q3. All the while, m’dears, not teaching freshman comp.

mwa  ha  ha!

It also plumped the Survival Savings fund, the “pool” that’s fed quarterly from Fidelity, from The Copyeditor’s Desk, and from teaching the online magazine writing course, and from which I draw a monthly allowance to meet expenses. It’s right back up to where it was on January 1.  Before the first-quarter disbursal, that fund had about $12,600.

I couldn’t freaking believe it.

So. Barring any new windfalls, Survival Savings will end the year with a balance of about six grand, significantly better than planned.

Since I probably can dispense with the Q3 drawdown from the S-corporation of $360 (we transferred most of the planned 2013 distributions in the form of loan repayments and dividends), in 2013 earned income should come to a grand total of $4800, for the two online courses.

2013 Pool

Meanwhile, revenues are flowing in to the S-corp at an acceptable rate. I’m not working very hard — believe I’ve developed an allergy to work — but I don’t have to work very hard to earn enough to adequately supplement Social Security, a 4 percent drawdown from savings, and the most minimal teaching schedule possible.

God is great, beer is good, people are crazy.

Medicare Part D: The Biggest Rip That Ever Came Down the Pike?

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I’m beginning to think that Medicare D (which supposedly covers prescription drugs) is one of the biggest scams ever to profit the insurance industry. They’ve got old people over the barrel, they don’t cover very  much, and even the cheapest Part D plan is amazingly expensive.

The deal goes like this:

You sign up with a private insurance company to get prescription drug coverage. Premiums vary by insurer, but the cheapest is about $20 a month. The average is about $30.

If you decline coverage, you can climb onboard later…but to do so, you have to pay an extra gouge — for the rest of your life! If you don’t sign up for Part D the minute you become eligible for Medicare (at the age of 65) and you need it later, you have to pay higher premiums.

The deductible is exorbitant — mine is almost $400. If, like me, you don’t take prescription drugs every day of your life, this means you end up paying out of pocket for everything. Got that? If yours is an average premium, then you’ll shell out $600 or $700 before your coverage kicks in.

If you actually do fall ill, or if you have a very expensive chronic illness such as MS or Parkinson’s, then you will eventually hit the “doughnut hole.” After the costs of your meds hit $2,970, your insurer no longer has to cover you: you get to pay everything out of pocket.

In other words, Part D insurers collect a ton of money from you, but they really don’t have to pay out much. It’s a gold mine! Thank you very much, insurance lobby and craven elected representatives.

This is the scenario from the git-go. Then, to keep from having you cost them anything at all, Part D insurers impose all sorts of restrictions on the medications you’re allowed to use. Most companies try to keep you from buying brand-name drugs — they’ll only cover generics. For most consumers, this is probably OK, but the fact is that some generics actually are different from the brand-name versions, and for some people they don’t work as well.

Now we have this: pre-approval for prescriptions!

Yes.

When I went to the doc last week to find out why my back, leg, and foot have hurt nonstop for the past eight months, I was told nothing was broken and it appeared the issue was a stubborn muscle spasm. He prescribed a muscle relaxant.

I asked him to make the prescription for a generic. He said the stuff didn’t come in a generic.

I knew my Part D crooks wouldn’t cover a nongeneric drug but figured what the hell, I’d just pay for it out of pocket.

Not quite. When I got to the pharmacy, I was told that no indeed, Part D would not cover it. The price? A hundred and five dollars…for 24 pills! Which I was supposed to take three times a day: a week’s supply.

While there, I recalled why I was unhappy with my local Safeway’s pharmacy: they’ve hired an illiterate moron as an assistant. You can’t get past her, and after she’s greeted you with “I do got the pills but…”  you realize she’s every bit as stupid as she sounds every time she opens her mouth.

I called the Mayo, asked for a different prescription, and told them to please send it to the Walgreen’s, not the Safeway pharmacy. They jumped through the hoops required for that: this involved calling the insurance company and asking what muscle relaxant they would cover. Once they knew that, they called Walgreen’s and ordered it up.

The woman I spoke with at the Mayo said the price would be about $17, so even if it wasn’t covered, I could afford it. The multisyllabic name of this drug went right past me, so I couldn’t look it up online at that moment.

Before long, Walgreen’s machine called to say there was a problem. I drove over there to see WTF, and was told Part D wouldn’t cover the stuff because it wasn’t pre-approved!

How, exactly, are you supposed to get “pre-approval” — presumably before you even go to the doctor — for a medication you don’t know you’re going to need?

I paid for this generic concoction out of pocket. Remember, this is my doctor’s third choice: the first was rejected because it was not generic. The second, a generic, was not on their “formulary” — a list of the meds they will pay for. The third is something called cyclobenzaprine.

Once at home with the spelling of this chemical in hand, I sit down to read the package insert and look it up online.

And what do I learn?

It’s contraindicated for older adults! Yes, it says right here in their handout “CAUTION IS ADVISED WHEN USING THIS  MEDICINE IN THE ELDERLY because they may be more sensitive to the effects…especially confusion, hallucinations, and fast or irregular heartbeat.” That’s their all-caps, not mine.

Think of that.

I’m here by myself, all alone. The last time I needed help late at night, my son wouldn’t answer the phone and neither would anyone else. And the medication I’ve got here is likely to cause “confusion” and “hallucinations”? And it’s the only medication that my insurer, on a policy designed for the elderly, will cover?

So I’ve spent $17 on a bottle of 24 pills that I can’t use. And BTW I still hurt from stem to stern.

I’m really very angry about this. Seventeen bucks I can sustain, but that’s not what it’s costing me. This year I’ve still ponied up $240 in premiums, almost $400 in deductibles, plus whatever amounts Part D won’t pay toward meds that are covered.

Because 2012 has been The Year from Hell in the health department, with one ailment coming right on the heels of the last for the past 18 months, I in fact burned through the deductible, along about the start of November. The last Rx I ordered indeed was…uhm…”covered”: it cost $16, of which Part D paid two dollars.

What a rip-off.

I’m beginning to suspect that if you have no chronic ailment that requires you to take medications all the time, you might be better off not to buy Part D at all. Take a look at what this guy has to say:

The trick here is to add up your TOTAL cost, including premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, and see if that’s more than you’d pay out-of-pocket for your meds.

He wrote that in 2006, when the magic number was about $2,250. He figured, at the time, that if your predictable costs for medication are under $2,250 a year, Part D may make no sense. And if you take no regular drugs at all, this “insurance” makes no sense, period.

As for the premium penalty, he pointed out (again: six years ago) that the gouge is a 1 percent increase for every month you’re not on this exorbitant scam, and at that rate it would take eight years for your premium to double.

Another writer points out that if you’re on Part D, you may end up paying more for drugs out of pocket, for no other reason than that your pharmacist has your Part D card. If you have no coverage, it’s possible to negotiate lower prices; plus big-box stores like Walmart and Costco are now offering dramatically lower prices, as are stand-alone pharmacies with “membership” plans. In addition, even though buying prescription meds from Canadian and Mexican suppliers is technically illegal, Americans are still doing it — and contrary to Big Pharma’s protestations, Canada is not exactly a Third-World country.

What happens if you get cancer and need expensive chemotherapy?

Well, you certainly could be up the creek.

Maybe.

As it develops, Medicare Part B actually does cover certain drugs: injectable prescription drugs, which is how most chemotherapy is delivered. It also covers the pill form of certain cancer drugs, as long as they also are available in injectable form. Here’s a PDF describing these quirks. And Medicare B covers a bunch of outpatient drugs, such as oral anti-nausea drugs used in connection with chemotherapy, injectable osteoporosis treatments, immunosuppressive drugs for transplant patients, and oral drugs for end-care renal disease.

If you have a heart attack or develop high blood pressure, you’re out of luck: apparently the take-’em-forever drugs needed for those ailments are not covered.

However…one could take one’s chances. You can sign up for Part D during the month-long annual open-enrollment period, and they can’t turn you down. So, the longest you’d have to wait for coverage would be 11 months. It could be the longest 11 months of your financial life, of course…but then again, maybe not. Going bare would mean taking the chance that you would not run up more than about $2,250 in drug costs over any 11-month period, a period that shrinks steadily as each month passes.

The writer who posits that Medicare is a rip best avoided by people in good health is a little suspect as a source: he presents his theory at a single-post Blogger site. On the other hand, anyone can do the math, and so presumably with some research you could prove or disprove what he says. The second post, comparing the costs of drugs bought through Part D with those purchased on one’s own, appears at something called “The Hillbilly Report,” a title that, while cute, does render its contents questionable. But there, too: it’s easy enough to confirm or de-confirm the claims for yourself.

Be that as it may, I’ve paid $240 in premiums this year plus around $400 in deductibles, and my Part D still won’t cover the meds my doctor recommends.  And not only that, the Part D insurance is arrogantly telling my doctor what he can and cannot prescribe. Had I gone bare in 2012, during a period when I’ve been down with something almost nonstop, the cost for all my meds would have come to around $420: that’s $220 less than I actually have paid for prescriptions plus the fake “coverage” this year.

Would I be better off, assuming one day I get past this endless string of back-to-back complaints, to simply self-escrow about $100 a month for prescription meds, taking a chance that the really big stuff will be covered by Medicare B? I probably could afford it, since some months I’ve paid that much (between the Part D premiums and the meds Part D didn’t even touch). That would come to $1,200 a year. If I make it through, say, another three years without being stuck on some permanent, swallow-it-for-the-rest-of-your-life nostrum, I’d have $3,600 that could be used to cover prescriptions.

It wouldn’t go far in the event of a catastrophic illness. But then…neither would I. 😉

Telephone Predators on the Elderly

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Yech! A particularly creepy telemarketing sleaze just called. When I picked up the phone, a live human spoke, not an infuriating robo-marketer recording. He sounded like an older man — just my age, lots of common with me, right?

Right away he started in on a pitch for some sort of “emergency call” system. He was peddling those gadgets you wear around your neck that are supposed to summon help when you fall or have a stroke over your fried eggs or whatever. He didn’t get far enough to tell me exactly what gadgets or how overpriced they were, because before he could draw a breath I was telling him my number is on the National Do-Not-Call list, he should be ashamed of himself for harassing old ladies with nuisance phone calls, and he ought to get himself an honest job. He was protesting that he had an “honest job” as I hung up on him.

Honest job, my ass.

If your parents are getting on in years, or if you yourself are elderly, you should be keeping an eye out for scammers who call old people on the phone.

It was clear this guy knew my age and he probably knew I live alone. His MO was to scare me, and if I had been just a little less cagey, he would’ve had an easy time of it.

Last week I did fall, in the middle of the night, and I did hurt myself. I hit my head going down and smacked my knee so hard it was awhile before I could get to my feet.

And yes. This is exactly the kind of thing that scares the bedoodles out of me. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to whether I come or go. I could lay on the floor with a broken hip until I died of thirst, and no one would notice.

Fortunately, I’m clever enough to have put three of the house’s five land-line phones in places that can be reached from the floor. And yes again: that’s why I have a land line: so I can have an extension in every room. A cell phone allows for one, maybe two phones, at an elevated price, and with just two of them, neither is likely to be sitting someplace where I could reach it if I were on the floor and hurt.

I dragged myself to the nightstand and pulled down the phone. Called my son. It was midnight. He didn’t answer.

About to dial 9-1-1, I realized that emergency workers couldn’t get in through the special hardened locks I’d put on the security doors after the late, great garage invasion, and since I’d had to smash the secret key hidey-hole with a hammer the last time I needed to raid the key stash, there are no keys to the house hidden outside. Soooo…it wasn’t going to do much good to call the rescue squad, unless I really, really wanted to have one of those expensive new low-E windows busted in.

Eventually I managed to get up off the floor. But not knowing what effect a whack on the head was likely to have on an old bat, I limped out front, stashed a couple of keys under the Burglars Welcome mat, e-mailed La Maya and M’hijito to suggest that if they hadn’t heard from me by 7 or 8 a.m., they should call 9-1-1 and tell the dispatcher how to get into the house.

The moral of the story is that today’s smarmy chucklehead on the other end of the phone line called at just the right time, and that’s what he was counting on. I’m always subliminally worried about being here by myself. But the recent fall had crystallized the obvious risk.

Meanwhile, researchers have recently discovered that people’s natural wariness of the smarmy and the untrustworthy weakens with age. This explains the ease with which con artists scam the elderly, often cleaning out Granma’s bank account.

I suppose my profound hatred for telephone solicitors serves like a flu shot against the creeps. But if I’d been another ten years older, who knows? Maybe the immunity would have worn off.

If you’re in that sandwich generation, keep an eye on the old folks. Ask them how they’re handling their money or if they’ve decided to make any changes in their investments. Keep your ears open for any sudden decisions to renovate the house or buy a time-share in an RV park.

And if you’re already an old folk? Hang up instantly on all phone solicitors. Do not speak with them, and do not be polite to them. Remember, they have already been rude to you by intruding on your privacy, so you have no obligation to speak courteously to them — nor should you. Do not open junkmail, and never respond to an unsolicited offer that comes in the mail.  And always consult with a trusted adviser before making any major decisions pertaining to money, your estate planning, and healthcare.

Is it only me, or is everyone else getting inundated with scammy phone solicitations — three or four hustles a day now?

Life Looks Brighter at One in the Morning

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So, the money situation is looking a lot better. Just paid a couple of AMEX bills. Have a stack of incoming checks to scan and deposit electronically, with two more editorial jobs in progress.

One of those jobs has GOT to get finished tomorrow, and another, quite the tangle, will need to be dealt with within the week.

Yesterday I met with the financial adviser to discuss how I’m going to get through next year without teaching f2f courses. It actually looks surprisingly doable.

For 2013, The Copyeditor’s Desk has enough to carry me through if it doesn’t earn a dime. The amount I’ll have to draw down from retirement savings next year represents 3% of the total, so principal should continue to grow next year. Barring any more radical stupidity from our elected representatives.

OK. That one’s not a foregone conclusion. But we can hope.

For the 2014 plan, I’ve made the assumption that Copyeditor’s Desk will earn nothing. This is highly unlikely, but why not plan for the worst, eh?

If nothing — zero point zero-zero dollars — comes in from the S-corporation in 2014, I’ll have to make a 5% drawdown from savings. That’s actually an overestimate, because I’m assuming a 20% tax, which the financial guru says is far too high.

When I reach the point in my dotage that I can no longer teach even one online course and I can’t earn anything by editing, I will need a 5.39% drawdown to live in the ascetic style to which I have become accustomed. That figure will drop to 3.46% if and when the mortgage on the Downtown House goes away.

Financial Guru believes 5.39% is within a safe range, the upper end of which he pegs at 6%. Once M’jito is either able to take over the mortgage or walks away from it, the amount I’ll need to live on will drop to a level that will preserve capital until I topple over into the grave.

I hope.

Meanwhile, SDXB’s axiom that money happens continues to prove true. A fair amount  of money is happening in connection with the jewelry endeavor — I just sold another piece, a rather ingenious idea requested by a customer. Will show you that whenever I’m up for fiddling with the camera and iPhoto.

His claim that one needs a great deal less to live in Bumhood than one expects also appears to be true. My savings amounts to about half the $1 million I believe one needs to sustain a middle-class lifestyle in retirement. However, I seem to be getting by on a drawdown that should preserve capital into advanced old age, without feeling unduly deprived. The keys appear to be…

• Pay off your mortgage before you quit working
• Pay off your car, too.
• Get out of all revolving debt and stay out of it — never charge anything that you can’t pay for that month.
• Develop a side gig that can be used to bring in pin money. It would especially good if said p/t gig could earn a little more than bare pin money.

This morning I ordered a vast pile of beads and supplies from Fire Mountain. The wholesale deal meant a $48 savings at checkout, significantly less than the amount I’d added up in Excel, even after the shipping charge. I think this purchase will make about a half-dozen lariats, one of which is already sold.

Welp, now that some of the banking & bookkeeping is done, a paper is graded, many hundreds of beads have been ordered, and the dog has been played with, I’m going back to bed.

Later!

Freedom Remorse? Short-Timer’s Syndrome and Second Thoughts

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Only about two weeks left in this semester, thank God. That’s five more meetings of each class, and two weeks of interaction with the apparently comatose magazine-writing students. I’m going to be so, so glad to be free of ever having to teach freshman comp again (…i hope). You ain’t seen short-timer’s syndrome until you’ve come to the end of a semester of wrangling freshmen. But as you can imagine, I’ve had predictable second thoughts about walking away from my only steady source of earned income. Well…sporadically steady.

Oddly, though, I haven’t felt as jittery about it as I’d expected. The truth is, over the past few months, I’ve pretty much stopped obsessing about money. Once or twice a month, I go into Quickbooks to log my credit-card charges and the very few checks I write, and that’s about the last of think of it. I expect it’s because living on $26,820 a year, net Social Security and teaching pay, has demonstrated that I really can live on very little money. And my gross annual teaching pay is only about 3 percent of retirement savings. So the truth is, even in the unlikely event that The Copyeditor’s Desk never makes another dime, there’s plenty for me to live on. Modestly, but adequately.

Too, the little revelation that came to me earlier this year, when ex-DH underwent quadruple bypass surgery at about the same time a Mayo doctor was speculating that I had a gastric cancer, has made me care a great deal more about enjoying life and a great deal less about pinching pennies.

In the Insight! department, another little revelation occurred to me this morning. A lovely person purchased the latest of those pretty necklaces I cooked up, and so I set to constructing a third one. It takes about three hours to arrange and string those tiny little beads into a 40-inch “lariat.” That’s exclusive of running around the city in search of the beads, of course.

So let’s say I manage to net $90 on a sale (that would be extremely good, but it could be done if one were making enough of them to buy the parts wholesale). You realize, that’s $30 an hour: exactly what I earned at the Great Desert University when I worked there full-time in a managerial position. Exclusive of the two hours a day, ten hours a week, of commute time.

Yes. I can earn as much as a Ph.D. in an administrative job informed by 15 years of academic experience, 10 years of journalistic experience, and 25 concurrent years of editorial experience…by stringing beads.

{Sumbiche!}

Several small changes will help as things get tighter, if in fact they do get tighter.

Not buying gas to drive from pillar to post four days a week. This month I spent two hundred forty-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents on gasoline!!!  That’s $90 more than in August, when I wasn’t driving to campus.

Not paying the Underlings to provide teaching assistance.

Not passing by an upscale Costco outlet on the way home from campus.

Then there’s the turkey roasting on the grill for Cassie the Corgi, as we scribble. Safeway was peddling the things for 79 cents a pound. It certainly isn’t premium meat — it’s pumped full of saline solution and chemicals — but last year when I got one for her, the meat wasn’t inedible. She can’t tell the difference, anyway, and the meat from one of the things will keep her in food for a good month.

To make things better, one of my friends on the choir qualified for Safeway’s turkey giveaway. They foisted it on her even as she protested that she had no use for yet another turkey. She was trying to find a home for it, and I talked her into giving it to me. That will provide at least two, maybe three months of meat for Cassie.

Meat has become so expensive I no longer can buy  hamburger for Cassie, and the Safeway has stopped putting cheap cuts of beef on sale at affordable prices. Since about half of her diet consists of animal protein (and it probably should be more than that), the cost of feeding her has gone way up. For the short-term future, then, the meat from two fourteen-pound turkeys represents a significant savings.

So, I don’t seriously think things are going to get any worse, financially, than they are. Barring a miracle, they won’t get any better. But with the money situation already about as bad as it’s ever likely to get, I don’t believe I have much to fear.

Life Is Short. Eternity Is Long.

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So another attention-getting life-shaker just happened. M’hijito called to report that his dad was going in for an angioplasty Thursday evening. Forthwith, though, they decided he needed a quadruple bypass and scheduled him into an operating room the first crack out of the box Friday.

Needless to say, my son was (and remains) alarmed. To say nothing about how ex-DH and his present wife must be feeling. Apparently the surgery went well. But it’s disturbing. Very disturbing.

For one thing, no one expected XDH ever to be anything other than extremely long-lived and healthy. His mother is still living—she’s pushing 100, and the only physical issues she has are macular degeneration that has made her blind and a lifelong hearing problem that has left her stone deaf. Her father lived to the age of 96, quite well all the way to the end. XDH is only 72, same age as SDXB, who underwent the same experience a couple of years ago. Whether XDH recovers as quickly and as completely remains to be seen: he’s nowhere near as fit as SDXB—never has been a fan of strenuous exercise—but he sure does enjoy good food and wine. And he has some pesty ailments that do not afflict SDXB, two of them potentially life-threatening over the long haul.

We are nearing the end of our journey, we who are on the leading edge of the baby boom. Most bypass veterans survive at least five years; the 15-year survival rate is about 55 percent. That, of course, means 45 percent reach the end before then.

And y’know…the perspective from here sure is different from what it was, even five or ten years ago!

Yesterday I shocked a few readers by proposing to spend an outrageous amount on some overpriced dishes. And by admitting this was a want, not a need…but still persisting in a plan to diddle away money on the junk, anyway.

It’s an apparent about-face, of course. This scheme contradicts everything I’ve advocated at Funny about Money. But it’s a manifestation of a new line of thinking that’s been ticking away in the back of my mind ever since that Mayo doc suggested that the current bellyache could very well be a symptom of a cancer that will carry me away in about six months. Should it really be that.

As I was driving away from that meeting, a haunting thought came to mind, one I haven’t been able to shove back under the rug:

I am making myself miserable trying to preserve capital so that I can support myself during some future time when I expect to be miserable.

Over and over, the same question returns: WTF am I doing????? Making myself miserable so I can be miserable? What is that?

I hate teaching freshman comp with every fiber of my being. After I’d taught two sections a semester (just two sections!) for about four years in graduate school, I walked away with the Ph.D. in hand and this vow in my heart: “I will go on welfare before I ever teach composition again.”

And now here I am, approaching the end of my life, and I am on welfare—collecting Social Security. And I’m spending these last few reasonably viable years doing just that: teaching freshman comp.

I loathe it more than I can express. It’s such a waste of time and energy, such a pointless exercise, and so intensely frustrating that it makes you feel every moment you spend on it is simply wasted. And wasted in ways that are not fun. This is not playing World of Warcraft here. It’s not diddling away your time in front of a movie screen. It’s far from playing with New Yorker jigsaw puzzles. It is hard goddamn work, and it is stupefyingly underpaid.

Time wasted: students’ and instructors’.

• The students have been over all this ground many, many times. We misapprehend when we assume they can’t write a simple sentence or a coherent paragraph, and they can’t formulate a topic for a diddly little 750-word essay because they were never taught this stuff. Trust me: they have been told this stuff. Time and time again. Among the fine young nimrods who couldn’t even begin to come up with a focused idea for the next 102 essay were two students who have been in my 101 classes…and I know I taught the 101s how to focus an essay topic. You wanna know something? If they haven’t learned this grade-school stuff after thirteen years of K-12 education, they are never going to learn it. It is an utter waste of their time to make them spend another year going over the same old stuff they’ve ignored all their lives.

• The instructor spends hour after hour, many of them unpaid hours, devising original and engaging strategies to instill grade-school knowledge and skills into young adults, to no avail. Many more hours are pointlessly spent reading, commenting upon, and assessing piles of student papers equivalent in mass to Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. All of that person’s time, all of that person’s effort, and all of that person’s creativity are just wasted.

So why am I doing this?

Because I’m scared? I am. I’m scared unto paralysis by the prospect of living to advanced old age, utterly alone, and not having enough to provide even halfway decent dotage care for myself.

But of course, there’s no guarantee—or even great likelihood—that I will live into decrepitude. None at all.

The real reason I live like an anchorite, trying to scrabble together enough to barely live on so that I can avoid drawing down a very modest 4 percent of retirement savings, is that I’m in the habit of crimping my life for no other reason than to admire the bottom line in a spreadsheet.

In a word, I’m a tightwad.

I allow my life to be constrained to the point of entropy because I don’t want to spend any of my precious dollars. And yes: I am making myself miserable at a joke of a “job” (which is what adjunct teaching is: a cruel, exploitive joke) so that I can live on something well under $30,000 a year so that I won’t have to spend any part of $550,000 sitting in brokerage accounts and mutual funds, which are merrily averaging 6 percent to 8 percent per annum. For chrissake, the big IRA earned ten grand last month! That’s well over half, in one month, of what I earn in an entire year of making myself miserable in the classroom.

This returns us to that question: WTF am I doing?

Maybe I abuse the whole idea of money. Maybe my ex- is right: Money is to be spent. Not admired.

Hence, dear readers, the impulse to spend a little something on myself. On a want, not a need.

Yesterday, more or less in response to Remy’s and Frugal Scholar’s and Mrs. POP’s surprised comments, this whole train of thought came into sharper focus for me. And I realized: I have simply got to stop teaching composition. As endeavors go, it is just too crushing. It’s interfering with my life and blocking me from being able to build a business that I actually do like and that does not feel futile.

But how?

Well, the train of thought continues.

About 18 months ago, a friend in a business group suggested, with a straight face, that I quit teaching altogether for a year or at least for a semester and spend all the time thereby rescued on developing and marketing my editorial enterprise. Naturally, I smiled; murmured sure, sure; and went on about my misbegotten business. I was dead certain that I couldn’t earn enough at editing and ghostwriting alone to make put food on the table.

Recent developments, however, suggest that is no longer true. With a very minimal amount of marketing, a small but steady stream of commerce has come our way.

If I were not distracted with teaching—if I were not preoccupied with wasting the remaining hours of my life—but instead spent those hours on making my business visible to the kinds of people who would hire us and on persuading said people that they need us more than they need whole-wheat bread and sex, we would have more work than Tina and I could handle together. I don’t think that’s a “maybe.” I think that’s an “absolutely so.”

But even if it were a “maybe,” the truth is, at what we’ve learned is the fair rate for our services, I would not have to work anything like full time to earn enough to make up for the absence of teaching income.

Let’s say, for example, I keep the magazine writing courses, which are easy to prep, easy to teach, relatively low in enrollment, and mounted 100 percent online. I dump the spring and fall comp courses. And during the summer, when more skilled and motivated students show up, I teach one composition section. In that scenario, assuming blog income stays steady and my one regular customer keeps paying me to read detective novels(!), I would have to earn only $700 a month to make up the loss of the composition income.

At $60 an hour, $700 represents 11.67 hours of work. A month.

A single customer routinely gives us more work than that.

And does it or does it not bring us back to the eternal question: WTF am I doing?

Before the end of this semester (only 13 weeks to go!), I am going to tell my honored chair that I would like to keep the magazine writing course but drop the spring comp courses. And I will ask him if he would be kind enough to allow me to teach one or maybe two comp sections in the summer. Then I’m going to work on building The Copyeditor’s Desk:

• Attend at least two CofC meetings a month.
• Take full advantage of all the Chamber’s many marketing and advertising opportunities.
• Volunteer with charitable groups that are favored by the local movers & shakers. Get to know these folks.
• Join the Better Business Bureau.
• Join Local Arizona, a coalition of locally owned businesses.
• Start an advertising & PR campaign.
• Step up the communication with former clients.
• Approach major textbook publishers for project management contracts.
• Approach genre publishers in an attempt to get more of them to pay us to read light fiction.

And if that doesn’t generate seven hundred bucks a month? Welp…$700 a month is 2 percent of retirement savings. Somehow I think I can afford it.

Somehow, I think I can afford to have a life.

Images:

Still Life with a Skull. Philippe de Champaigne. Public domain.
Proto-composition paper: shamelessly ripped off the Web.