Coffee heat rising

Retirement

Wages of Sin: Update

by

So after class this noon I schlepped over to the Social Security Administration offices with several missions in mind: First to find out what they’re going to do to me for the crime of earning yet another $2,400 over the poverty-level earned income limitation; second, to ask where to mail the Form SS-31 to ensure that this year’s RASL payment is counted as pre-2010 income; and third, to find out what to do with the couple hundred bucks that Unemployment Insurance is apparently going to send me.

Yes. Unemployment Insurance. Last week I got a $25 check and a notice saying the Feds had told the state Department of Economic Security that some of last year’s recipients were entitled to more payments than had been disbursed. No explanation of why, or of why I should be among those recipients when, say, La Maya was not so blessed. But apparently they’re going to send about a half-dozen checks. These also represent 2009 income, UI for the furlough days GDU inflicted on us in the first six months of that year.

Well. There’s no way of getting DES to fill out and send a Form SS-31. You can’t reach them on the phone—they don’t answer telephone calls, and if you manage to get through to an answering machine, they don’t return calls. They’ve barricaded the employees behind locked doors and they don’t let the public in. So how exactly to communicate to Social Security that this little chunk of illicit income—made so because it racks up still more dollars above and beyond the permitted $14,160 earned income—represents 2009  money remained to be seen.

After sitting around for an hour or so, I got to speak with a live human being, a very nice gentleman who seemed (as they all do) pretty knowledgeable.

He said that even though the amount I’ll earn as a result of taking on another class this fall will exceed the amount of a monthly benefits check, they will not withhold more than one check. So I’m only out the cash for October, not for October and November. In January, they’ll bill me for the small amount left to pay up. The missing $111 Medicare Part B premium, payable in October, will be extracted from the November check.

So, that’s not the disaster I feared.

He also pointed out that despite losing an entire month’s SS income in September, overall for 2010 I end up with more money than I would’ve had with full Social Security and only the income limit of $14,160. While that’s so, I noted, that doesn’t do me any good next month, when I need the money to live on.

Luckily, there’s an emergency fund to fall back on. But diddling it away on utility bills, gasoline, and food is not what I had in mind: that money is there to cover me if I get hurt or too sick to work. And we do know that at my age, the operative term there is not if but when.

Presumably by the middle of next semester—if the college gives me three sections in the spring semester—I’ll be able to replenish the $975 that will have to be consumed next month to meet basic expenses and the extra $111 engrossed from November’s income for October’s Medicare B payment.

It’ll all work out over the long term. It’s just annoying, because it puts the eefus on my goal of living within my monthly means. And it does bite into my emergency savings.

Meanwhile, the Social Security dude was able to enter the data from the Form 31 from the state while I was sitting there. He said that issue is now settled.

We shall see.

As for the weird burst of Unemployment Insurance, he said that UI is not regarded as earned income! And that issue is a nonissue.

So it goes. A couple of questions were clarified. It’s inconvenient and it’s going to make next month another straitened, penurious month, something I’m mightily tired of after three months without enough income to cover base expenses. But what the heck.

Not what I wanted to do with my afternoon. SDXB, who’s back in town for the nonce, had invited me over for lunch. That scheme was scotched. Tomorrow, maybe.

Shafted!

by

Remember how those two women at Social Security told me it isn’t true that when you out-earn the poverty-level earnings limitation imposed on those who are forced to take SS payments early, the government takes away an entire month’s benefit check? That instead in the following year Social Security calculates what you owe in tax (it takes back $1 for every $2 you earn over $14,160, effectively a 50% tax), and you are given the option of either having the amount prorated over a number of months and deducted from your benefits in relatively affordable chunks or of sending the government a check to cover the tax?

Well, it turns out they were wrong.

After having told “Roselyn” that I expected to earn $14,900 this year, yesterday afternoon comes a notice in the mail informing me that my September check, which is paid in October, will be withheld, fuck you very much. Any amount that remains after the government calculates and confiscates the tax it thinks it’s owed will be repaid in January.

This will leave me $551 in the hole this month.

Feeling a little skeptical about “Roselyn’s” claim, as you will recall, I telephoned Social Security a second time on September 3, reaching one “Alison.” This CSR confirmed what Roselyn said and reiterated that the government’s procedure is not to take away an entire benefits check when it finds out you will exceed the earnings limitation.

Based on these two assurances, which were repeated several times by each woman during those conversations, I accepted a third course this fall, to run in the second eight-week session of the semester.

The pay for that contract will push my income high enough that Social Security will withhold not one but two benefits checks!

And that will put me $551 in the hole for September and for October or November, whenever they next get around to raping my income.

For God’s sake!

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t get out of the course the chair offered to me and I accepted. Piss these guys off, and they won’t hire you again. So, I’m going to have to eat an $1100 shortfall. I certainly won’t be eating food, since at that rate I can’t pay the utility bills and buy groceries.

There are two choices:

1. Withdraw enough from The Copyeditor’s Desk as dividends to cover the shortfall. Actually, the S-corporation will have to pay me a few hundred bucks as “salary” in December, anyway. A $500 salary amounts to about $600 taken out of the corporate coffers, because as my “employer” CE Desk has to pay its half of FICA and some other taxes. For me as an individual, the net comes to about $375. So to make up a net of $1100, I will have to withdraw about $2,000 from CE Desk, in combined salary and dividends. That’s about half the corporation’s present cash holdings.

or

2. Raid savings set aside for an extreme emergency in which I would not be able to work at all. The emergency savings fund is still in an after-tax bank account, and so no tax consequences would occur if I steal from it.

However, if I get sick or hurt so I can’t work—and we’ve already seen that, as possibilities go, this is not as remote as one might think—then I will have that much less to cover my needs. As it is, emergency savings combined with Social Security would just barely cover expenses for one year. Take $1,100 out of it, and it’ll cover a helluva lot less than that: maybe 10 months.

God. What a mess!

Why did those two women tell me a phony story? Did they lie on purpose? Did they think it was funny to deliberately mislead some old lady and plunge her even deeper into poverty? I’m quite sure of what they said, because I asked both of them to confirm it, and I wrote it down as they were speaking: I have almost verbatim notes of our conversations.

Here’s how this shakes out, projected dollar by projected dollar:

Because the community colleges, like GDU, outsource their payroll to PeopleSoft, paychecks come in at cockamamie times. My second paycheck in October, when the third class kicks in, will only cover one week, and so I won’t have enough to cover my expenses that month, either. Apparently I’ll make it up in November (this assumes they rape me in September, which they’ve announced they’re doing, and then again in October, not in September and November). But meanwhile, between now and the middle of November I have to cope with a shortfall of over $1,000!

While it looks as though I’ll be flush as Croesus in November and December, that extra money has to be saved to cover the month-long winter break, when I’ll have no pay, and the penurious summer, when there’s a good chance I’ll have no teaching income.

{sigh}

What on earth to do?

Probably it would be better to take the $500 annual “salary” from the S-corporation in September or October; this nets about $375. It’s required, but there’s apparently you can pay it to yourself whenever you please.

Defraying the shortfall with a CE Desk “paycheck” would leave $725 to to make up out of savings, but with no tax consequences. That much remains in the S-corporation’s account, and so if a really dire emergency came up, the money would still be there. It’s your basic theft from Peter to pay Paul.

Assuming, though, that nothing awful happens over the next year, because property taxes have dropped a bit, I should be able to use that savings to help replace the $725 raided from the emergency savings fund. If I drop the umbrella on my car & homeowner’s insurance, the two cost reductions combined could be put toward the lost $725.

If the gods smile and I get three sections a semester next year, I should be OK. A summer-session course would guarantee OK.

But it looks like we’re talking just OK here. Short of taking a large drawdown from long-term savings that are still struggling to recover from the crash, we can forget any fantasies about vacations next year. 🙄

On the other hand…it’s a nice opportunity to go back on the half-off diet!

w00t! Murphy’s Law frenzy is over!

by

…I hope!

Just talked to one honey-voiced Roselyn at Social Security. About what happens when you commit the crime of earning more than $14,160, she told me an entirely different story from the one I’ve heard from three prior CSRs.

Three people at Social Security—one face-to-face and two over the phone—said that if you earn even a dollar over the prescribed limit, SS stops payment on an entire benefits check. What you owe for your overweening ambition—one dollar for every two dollars you earn—is then subtracted from your benefit that month. But you don’t get the remainder of the benefit check back until the following January. If you over-earn by more than the amount of a single benefit check, then they take two checks away from you. The one I spoke to a month or two ago explained that because your Medicare Part B premium is paid out of your gross benefit, you have to pay that out of pocket, since obviously if you’re not getting your premium check your Medicare B would go unpaid. In other words, not only do you lose the net income from your Social Security check, you also have to beg, borrow, or steal another $111 to pay the Medicare bill!

Well, Roselyn calls bullshit.

She says that is not true at all. When I told her I thought I would earn about $14,900, she said that they would not withhold a month’s benefit check. She said that because of the two for one deal, whatever I would owe would be “not very much.” Furthermore, the fact that I did not work for anyone for two full months this summer counts in my favor. She thinks it’s even possible I will owe nothing.

In any event, says she, you’re not billed for the amount you owe until the following year’s tax returns come in, because the government cannot be certain of what you earned until all your W-2s come in. Once they figure that out, they let you know. You can pay your fine in any of several ways: by simply forking over a check or by having an amount withheld from your benefits check until it’s paid off.

If that’s true…thank you, God!

Of course, there’s no way to be certain that what she says is true. It’s odd that her version would be so radically at odds with what not one, not two, but three other Social Security reps said. And what those three said is different from the variant that you get online: Ehow tells us that if you earn more than $14,160, your benefits will be reduced accordingly throughout the following year. Go to this government site and you get a head-spinning patter of gobbledygook that, to me at least, is utterly incomprehensible: you can work but you can’t and if you do you’ll get more money later and maybe you’ll get some money now and there’s a special rule for if you’re working but also retired and…and…huh? Move on to a government page that tries to explain how they engineer paying off your debt, and you get the explanation that they take half of your overage (i.e., I earn $14,900 in 2010 so have earned $740 over the income limit, so the operative figure is $370) and subtract that from your total year’s Social Security benefit, arriving at a reduced SS benefit. They then divide that by 12 to decide your gross monthly pay.

If that’s accurate, then it would drop my net benefit by $36 a month. More than that, really, because the cost of Medicare will inevitably rise, and with a depression on, you can be sure there won’t be a cost of living increase next year, any more than there was this year.

But as I was speaking with each of the three previous CSRs, I repeatedly asked if even one dollar over the allowed amount meant an entire benefit check would be estopped, and each one assured me that was the case. Each time, I remarked that it didn’t seem fair that a person should lose an entire month’s benefit for earning what I thought at the time would be about $200 over the limit. Each time, the person said, in effect, “Them’s the rules, lady!”

Roselyn told me something else that is directly at odds with what I’ve been told by others and at odds with the language on an official Social Security form. I mentioned that because of PeopleSoft’s lagging pay scheme, GDU paid me in January for work that was done in 2009; that even though my last day was December 31 and I’m on record as having retired on December 31, this payment came in 2010. She said if it was paid in 2010, it would be counted against SS as 2010 income, no matter that my last day on the job was December 31, 2009. Other CSRs have said that money earned in 2009 is counted as 2009 income, and that this also applied to the RASL (unused sick leave pay doled out to state retirees over a three-year period). Thus the $6,800 of RASL paid to me this year would be seen as 2009 income and not counted against my Social Security.

I just downloaded form SSA-131, which contains this language:

Employees are sometimes paid wages in a year subsequent to the year that the wages were earned. The most common types of payments are accumulated vacation pay or sick pay paid after retirement…. Wages which are earned in a year prior to the year the are paid usually do not affect benefits payable under the Social Security annual earnings test.

So, obviously, Roselyn misunderstood this issue. And that makes me doubt everything she says.

Hmmmm….. I’d better jump through another 20 minutes of phone nuisance hoops and call those people back…

• • • • • • • • • •

Hallelujah!

A really knowledgeable-sounding, professional-sounding rep got on the phone this time. She put me on hold while she personally looked up the question to get a definitive answer. And the answer is….

Yes! Roselyn is right!

Social Security’s Bizarre Rules

by

Well, I got screwed royally by Social Security. Five ways from Sunday!

In the first place, on Friday I checked and learned it really is true that when you’re taking so-called “early” Social Security, if you go even a dollar over the $14,160 allowance for earned income, they take away an entire month’s check. Not only that, but because they pay your Medicare Part B out of the monthly check, you get to come up with $111 out of pocket to cover that, too!

You get the money back the following January. But until then, you just go hungry.

It gets better. If your greed exceeds the amount of one month’s gross check—even by a dollar—they take away another whole month’s benefit.

In other words, over the entire 12 months of 2010, if I earn $1,276 more than $14,160, I lose $2,550—two entire months’ of income—and I have to come up with $222 out of savings to pay for Medicare.

If I earn $2,551 too much, then they take three months’ of payments away, and I have to come up with $333 for Medicare. And so on to infinity.

In other words, if you have the temerity to earn more than a poverty income, they break your back financially.

Because the college (unexpectedly) paid me a stipend to develop the online course equivalent to the amount of teaching a three-credit course, I’m already over the $14,160 limit: three and three at Maricopa County pays you $14,400. I figured I would report this near the end of the year—legitimately, I won’t truly know that much is coming in until we see whether the online course makes, and it doesn’t start until late October. That stipend paradoxically means next fall will be extremely tight, but I’d figured I could make it, probably, because I’d get the post-tax-gouge money back in January.

But because they starve your bank account more and more for each chunk of earnings that equates to a month’s Social Security check, it means I could not apply for the excellent opportunity that recently came up: One of the other colleges was looking for someone to teach American literature and, better yet because it only meets once a week, mythology. I really want to get my foot in the door to teach something other than composition. These courses require a LOT less work, because you’re not having to grade student writing every time you turn around, nor are you required to grade on the basis of their writing skills—all you really have to do is look to see if they more or less did the assignment.

If I had landed even one of those two sections, the extra pay plus the $500 “salary” I have to draw from the S-corp would have caused Social Security to withhold not one, not two, but three checks and gouge me $333 for Medicare. I would net less than the amount I would earn by taking on extra work to help make ends meet.

So, this is intensely frustrating.

It feels like a kind of punishment for doing what Americans are supposed to do: be entrepreneurial. Dare to earn something more than bare poverty wages, dare to get off your duff and do some productive work, and we’ll wallop you upside the head.

I can’t even begin to live on the piddling net from a $14,160 gross. The Social Security income is what’s making it possible for me to survive at all in underemployment. But the $15,000 from Social Security is no more a living wage than is the dinky amount they limit you to earning.

Six sections a year is half-time work. It’s so part-time you don’t even get benefits. To add to the annoyance, an adjunct’s position is extremely ambiguous. My pay statements explicitly say the pay is for contract work. But the district will not pay my S-corporation, which they should do if indeed I’m a contractor and which would resolve the whole issue with Social Security. And my tax lawyer insists I’m not a contractor for the district, I’m an employee.

What’s especially annoying about this is that I had no intention of starting Social Security at age 64. After the crash of the Bush economy, I figured to work until I was 70, since that’s how long it would have taken for my investments to recover their former glory, with regular employer-matched contributions to my 403(b). The only reason I’m taking it now is that I was forced to do so by the destruction of the U.S. and the world economy, something that came about directly from federal government policy and the mismanagement of government policy by elected representatives. It’s not my fault I’m out of work, and it’s not my fault there are no jobs for aged female Ph.D.’s. Or, in Arizona, for anyone else.

So. The hard times—and they have been hard—are will not end when this penurious summer ends. In the fall, I’m going to be $1,275 short of the amount I need to get by. This afternoon I’ll return the curtains I bought to help black out the bedroom so I can sleep past the first crack of dawn; that’ll put a few bucks back in my account. The iMac is showing signs of hard drive failure; the repair job will far exceed anything I can get back from returning the curtains.

Sure do wish I could’ve made something on that yard sale yesterday…

And there’ll be no new dryer, even from Craig’s List, when the junior-college pay starts to roll in next month. Thank goodness most of my stuff can be line-dried. The comforter, when it needs to be washed, will just have to be done at M’hijto’s house.

Yes, I do have emergency savings to fall back on for a month—and yes, I’ll have to use those to get by this fall. But the point is, I shouldn’t have to use emergency savings when I could earn enough, combined with Social Security, to live on. The point is, when you’re earning this little, there’s nothing left to put back into savings. So when I use up that emergency fund, it’s just gone. It won’t be there when a real emergency happens. And with my arm out the way it is, it will only take one more fall, one car accident, one minor injury to make it impossible for me to work…and then I’ll really need that fund.

And yes, I have retirement savings. But I’m not retired. I’m not retired—no, indeed; I’m working 16 and 18 hours a day, seven days a week—thanks to the economic collapse. That money has to sit there without being drawn down until the market recovers enough to rebuild at least some of the outrageous losses that occurred during the crash and that continue to occur because the continuing slide in real estate values here in Arizona continues to sap equity from investments in two very modest houses.

Meanwhile, Congress fiddles as Rome burns…

Blissful fantasies, early-morning daydreams

by

Some people have enough courage to follow their bliss: we all remember when Mary of Simply Forties sold her house and all her belongings in Texas and took off for a gig as a caretaker for a gorgeous farm in Virginia. Another woman blogger is up to something similar: she chucked the day job, found ways to earn by working out of her home, and has taken off for the Ozarks, where she dreams of finding a house and building a home, never to have to plod off to the salt mines again.

If I were brave enough to do that, well… I’d want to live here:

Yesh. “Here” is a little house in Langue d’Oc, in the south of France.

It’s $202,877. Not totally unaffordable if I could get my price for my house. At 180 square meters it’s larger than what I’m living in, so there’d be a fair amount of space to furnish… What’s living with packing crates if you’re living in the south of France, anyway? If you’re interested in joining this daydream, you can convert square meters to square feet here and euros to dollars here.

Frugal Scholar has been looking in to this sort of shenanigan. She just reviewed Kathleen Peddicord’s How to Retire Overseas and has come to the conclusion that an American could live in Langue d’Oc for $1,495 a month…including $650/month for rent. That is significantly less than it’s costing me to live in my paid-off house in a place where summer temperatures regularly reach 115 and sometimes go as high as 120 degrees.

I wonder if the French will allow me to bring Cassie into their country?

About 95% of the properties under $400,000 are nothing I’d want to live in. In the four hundred grand range, there are some beauties. If I had only a half-million to drop, I guess I could force myself to live here. Blogger friends could come and rent the second house for their vacations. One might not suffer too much in this place, or here, or here. If you’d like to try to earn a living while you’re semi-retired in the south of France, for only $445,625 you could pick up a B&B. Not bad, compared to the cool million the inn owner in Flagstaff proposed when I inquired about buying his B&B.

All out of the question, of course. But…be patient, mes amies. Drop into the under-$300,000 range,  and you can live in a former winegrower’s cave, renovated into an interesting village house. Or picture this place with a little less clutter on the inside—it’s only slightly beyond in my price range

Assuming I could sell my house for what Zillow says it’s worth, this one is eminently affordable. And for the price, I could move here and have enough left to finance the move and buy furniture in France.

Or here…

Don’t you love the bathroom?

Je t’adore!

Charmante, except for the ladder-like staircase.

Wouldn’t it be loverly?

It’s fun to daydream, but you have to snap back to reality sooner or later. For one thing, there’s the matter of French taxes. Their system is even more byzantine than ours, from what I can tell. Apparently they may not double-tax your federal pension—i.e., Social Security, on which you’re already paying a hefty tax in the U.S. But they do charge a stiff tax on dividend income. So that would mean you’d pay two taxes on income from your retirement savings, one in the U.S. and one in France. Assuming your expenses really were limited to $1,495 a month, that might be all you could afford.

Medicare doesn’t pay for healthcare outside the country, and so you’d have to buy into France’s medical system…who knows how much that would cost? The French healthcare system is suffering in the global recession; among other things, some hospitals in the provinces have been shuttered, making access to an ER or a doctor even more problematic there than it is here.

For some folks, the language difference could pose a problem; I majored in French so could probably adapt quick enough. However, living in France is not the same as living in the United States; there are some major cultural differences that could require some serious psychological, social, and financial adjustment.

Starts to make the Ozarks look pretty good, eh?

The Next Inn on the Journey of Life

by

Lately I’ve been considering where I’m going to live during the next and presumably last stage of my life.

It’s a question that was brought into sharper focus when I fell and hurt myself badly enough that I couldn’t easily take care of my home or myself. The shoulder still isn’t healed—but even though it hurts quite a lot, on and off, all the physical work around this house still has to be done. Caring for the pool (a daily project), dealing with the quarter-acre yard, cleaning and maintaining a four-bedroom house…they all represent physical labor. And there’s no one here to help. Just now I ache all over my body, as though the shoulder pain spread to every other joint all the way down to the toes. But none of the work can be put off just because my back hurts.

Clearly, I’m not going to be able to care for this house for many more years.

Then there’s the issue of the costs. Property taxes can go nowhere but up, and at $2,000 a year they’re already at the border of what I can afford. Because I have retirement savings, I don’t qualify for the cap on taxes for the elderly. Though the new AC repairman clearly was trying to scam me, the truth is that sooner or later the HVAC unit will have to be replaced, to the tune of around $6,000. The interior needs a paint touch-up, and the exterior will have to be repainted sometime in the next five years. There’s a crack in the living-room tiles, an ominous development. In another five years, too, the pool will need to be replastered, a $7,000 job. Power and water bills keep going up and up. With no credible source of steady income, where on earth is the money going to come from to cover those expenses?

And who is going to take care of me when I can no longer care for myself?

This train of thought brings me to consider the best thing my father ever did for me: he moved himself into a life-care community. After my mother died, he sold his house in Sun City, divested himself of his possessions, and used the money to buy into a Baptist-run independent living community. This gave him (and later, his new bride) a garden apartment, access to hobby and meeting rooms, two meals a day in a central dining hall, and guaranteed access to nursing care.

For me as his daughter, it meant I didn’t have to take care of him as he grew older and more infirm. When he had a heart attack and triple-bypass surgery, the institution moved him temporarily to a studio apartment next to the nursing home, where an RN checked on him several times a day to be sure he was taking his meds and to coax him to eat. And after he had a stroke, the only medical practitioners who would care for him and respect the wishes he had expressed in his living will were the staff of nursing home at the life-care community.

It wasn’t ideal. The food was awful. The doctor on the staff was ripping off Medicare right and left. The institutional setting was depressing—at least, I found it so. But it probably was better than the situation he would have faced had he tried to stay in the Sun City house for the rest of his life.

After he died, I discovered the staff had provided him with a lot more care than he had contracted to receive. A woman in the central office spent a fair amount of her time running interference with the various bureaucracies the elderly have to negotiate. As he grew more confused in age, he would occasionally mess up his checkbook; someone at the office went through and corrected his figures, balancing and reconciling them against the bank’s statements. So. He got his money’s worth, and then some.

I wouldn’t care to live where he was. They’ve torn down the garden apartments and replaced them with massive people warrens. I’m not a rabbit or a caged chicken, and I don’t want to live like one. However. There are alternatives.

My great-aunt was the one who turned my father on to life-care communities. She came to Arizona one year to visit several such outfits, which at the time were a new development. She sold her house in Sausalito and ended up in a place in Oakland—I believe it probably was this one. From what I understand, it was very pleasant. One could find worse places than the Bay Area to live out one’s last years.

Interestingly, it’s run by my correligionists, the Episcopals. Not that it matters. The Baptists were no less craven than any for-profit outfit about extracting funds from the inmates where my father lived, and I can’t imagine that would differ according to the proprietors.

The Episcopals run a number of life-care communities in northern California. There’s this rather amazing place in San Francisco, for example. I’m sure I can’t afford to live in the City, of course…hell, I can barely afford to live in Phoenix! Here’s a place in the Santa Cruz area that might be less extravagant than living in the heart of San Francisco. One in Pacific Grove, which is near Monterey, probably costs no less than the place in the City. More promising, possibly, is this one near Santa Rosa.

My aunt had enough money to be comfortably set. She and my uncle married in middle age, neither of them with children. They both worked for the California Academy of Sciences their entire adult lives, and my uncle invented the precursor to the Kodak Carousel slide projector. As you can imagine, even a small royalty would have allowed them to buy the architect-designed house in the Sausalito hills where they lived all the time I knew them.

Chances are I can’t afford any of these places. My father and his wife were paying, for a three-room apartment and two meals a day, more than my ex- and I paid for a 3,000-square-foot ranch house with a pool on a third of an acre of prime North Central real estate. On the other hand, most of their food, their utilities, transportation (to a degree), property taxes, insurance, semiweekly housecleaning, landscape care, and nursing home insurance were included in the cost.

I already have nursing home insurance, though I suppose I could stop paying on that. But even with the long-term care insurance, my total monthly bills come to less than my father paid for his dim little apartment. And that was for a not-very-appealing place in Phoenix, Arizona. The cost of living in northern California is so much higher that you likely have to be a dot-com millionaire to live in one of those places.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, though: I’m sending away for their propaganda packages.