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Well, we had quite an evening last night. It was the largest dinner party I’ve ever hosted! We ended up with 13 people, and it was a lot of fun.

M’hijito gave me a new digital camera, since the beloved antique Kodak is slowly giving up the ghost. The fancy new ones are significantly more complicated, so I have a lot to learn… People grabbed it and shot photos of the party last night:

And happy holidays to all of you!

Funny about Money was born two years ago today, as an idle hobby to while away the hours as its proprietor wasted the evenings in front of the television set. Apple’s iLife came with the iMac I’d bought; part of that program was a lightweight blogging platform. Thought I’d try it to see if I could do it. So I was amazed when it was still online a year later, and even more amazed that some people were actually reading it. And now, by golly, Funny has made it through a second year!

And what a year it’s been! We’ve replaced the worst U.S. president since Herbert Hoover with our country’s first African American president, an articulate dynamo who has yet to show whether he can rescue us from the greatest economic fiasco the world has seen since the Great Depression. Indications are mixed: we’re getting ourselves mired deeper in Afghanistan, a sinkhole that will make Vietnam look like a garden party, but our Congressional leaders, despite knee-jerk partisanship on both sides, are nearing agreement on some sort of national healthcare plan.

On Funny’s micro-level, it’s been quite a year, too: furloughs and unemployment insurance, getting canned along with my entire staff, taking a part-time job before the full-time job ends, setting up Social Security way sooner than planned, nailing a discount on COBRA, finding a way to pay next year’s mortgage without touching investments, dealing with enough bureaucrats to populate a giant ant colony, migrating Funny about Money to Bluehost and monetizing it (thank you, Mrs. Micah!), worrying a lot about survival, and finally realizing that the past twenty years of frugal habits and steady savings will make “early retirement” the best thing that ever happened to me. M’hijito’s mellowing relationship with me and going back to sing in the choir have gone a long way to make this rocky time not only tolerable but often filled with joy.

Here are my ten favorite posts from Funny’s second year, in no particular order:

Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep
Revanche on The Secret Joy of Unemployment
25 Awesome Sites for Personal Finance Buffs
Do You Have to Be Wealthy to Be Financially Independent?
What IS Frugality?
Living within Your Means Is Good for the Economy
How Much Financial Help to Give a Family Member?
Debt to Income Ratio: Frugalist Begs to Differ
Garden as Income Stream
Early Social Security: A Way around the Earnings Limit

And then we have the three most hilarious posts (well, at least, intentionally hilarious…) that went up this year:

When Real Estate Is Funnier than Real Life
What’s More Important than a Costco Card?
Best Phone Solicitor Story of All Time

Free Money Finance e-mailed yesterday to say Funny’s “Truth, the Highest Thing” post has been selected to compete in this year’s March Madness competition. If it wins or places, I’ve asked to have the money donated to All Saints Episcopal Church, which not only sponsors the greatest choir on the planet but supports Hospice, Habitat for Humanity, a soup kitchen, outreach to the homeless, a ministry to a nursing home, a caregiver program to help the elderly and infirm remain in their homes, and many other worthy projects made even more crucial in these difficult times. Because of the recession, All Saints was unable to make its pledge goal this year, and so a March Madness gift will help a great deal.

Happy holidays to everyone and best wishes for glorious New Year!

Image: Kris De Curtis, Christmas Tree Bauble, http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisdecurtis/313881077/ , Free content licence. Wikimedia Commons.

Monday marked the end of the last budget cycle of my employed life. My budgets run from the 20th to the 20th, timed to follow American Express’s billing cycle, since I charge everything other than recurring monthly bills and then pay it in full each month. This provides a nice annual kickback, usually around $250 of “free” money that goes direct to savings.

Knowing that my base net income of Social Security and part-time teaching will come to about 57 percent of my current net—and that from net I’ll have to pay eleven times for Medicare what I’m now paying from gross for comparable healthcare coverage—I’ve been cutting the discretionary budget a little at a time. It’s gone from $1,500 a month to $1,200, then to $1,000, and it now stands at $800, about as low as I can manage and still eat.

(And as I write this, I realize the figures I posted yesterday were bizarrely wrong! If you believe what I wrote then, you’d come up with a net unemployment income of 70 percent of my present net salary, which is dead wrong. Where on earth did I come up with a figure of $32,900 for my present net income?)

So, back to the budget: I’m reducing discretionary spending by 53 percent, which, because there’s not a thing I can do about regular monthly costs such as utilities (cut as low as they’ll go right now), taxes, and insurance, will cut my living standard significantly but still not cut the mustard. Oh well…

This month being Christmastime, as usual I’m over budget, though not as seriously as it looks.

Not realizing that M’hijito was taking two days of vacation time this week, I went with him to Costco on Sunday, by way of stocking up for the big bash we’re throwing on Christmas day.  As a result, I charged up $133 at Costco and another $35 at Costco’s gas pumps, pushing me way over budget. If I’d waited until yesterday, I would’ve finished the November/December budget cycle $10 in the black. Instead, I’m $158 in the red, against the $800 “practice” budget:

Fortunately, I didn’t change the credit union’s automatic transfers of $1,500 a month into my credit-card budget piggy-bank, and so the truth is that account holds not $800, not $1,000, nay not even $1,200 but a whole $1,500.  This means that in spite of the extra cost of the glasses I also purchased this month, I’ll have plenty to cover the total amount charged up on the American Express card.

But next month…  Next month the New Regime starts in earnest. And given the revelation that my figures for net income were way too optimistic, obviously I’m going to have to stay within the $800 budget, and probably well within it.

Given the costs of running the house and owning a dog, that’s an unreasonably constrained budget. It looks likely that, unless a miracle happens, within the year I will have to sell my house and move out to Sun City, where taxes are 50 percent lower and insurance is about 30 percent lower. May have to find a new home for the dog, too.

{sigh} Ain’t the golden years golden?

Check out this clever idea for a year-end blog post at Spend on Life.

🙂 Comes under the heading of “wish I’d thought of that”…and wish I had enough enterprise to actually do it.

Well, this is going to be a busy weekend! We have 15 people coming for Christmas dinner, with another three tenuously invited (they’ll come for wine and hors d’oeuvres, at least). So this weekend M’hijito and I need to get together, buy food and choreograph a strategy for cooking and serving a mountain of food around all the other things going on.

He, of course, also has to attend his father’s Christmas. I was surprised to learn that his dad didn’t know about the jamboree casa mia, and so evidently M’hijito plans to show up there with as little fanfare as possible.

Complicating matters, SDXB is driving into town to attend the midnight service  at the Cult Headquarters, where I will be singing for two chivarees, one earlier in the evening and one in the middle of the night. He’s planning to stay overnight and then join us for the dinner party.

To my great delight, we’ll be singing the Biebl Ave Maria on Christmas. We did it for the Lessons and Carols service a week or so ago, and so I thought our director wasn’t planning to have us do it for the midnight service. It is beautiful beyond belief, and so I’m pleased SDXB will be able to hear it. As a crazed right-wing aging RC, he still pines for the Latin mass. He should enjoy the midnight chivaree, which is about as high church as American Anglicans can get. Our pastor like to chant the Eucharist, and when you combine that with the best music the choir director can pull together (and he being who he is, that’s pretty amazing) and with censers censing and bells ringing, SDXB should feel right at home.

At any rate, after singing until after midnight, I’ll have to get up early and fix something for him to eat for breakfast, since he won’t go out to eat. Then race to prepare the house for the shindig. Meanwhile the choir director is having an open house that we could (read “should”) appear at, and one of my RAs may show up here with her two little girls for wine and snacks. Hm…this means we’ll need to have something for the girls to drink…maybe I’ll make that pineapple punch, which everyone loves and can be spiked with rum one glass at a time for the grown-ups.

Darn! I thought I’d posted that but can’t find it. I’ll try to find time to put that recipe up between now and Christmas.

Other alternatives for the small fry and the young mother With Twins: fizzy lemonade, virgin English majors (is there such a thing?), frescas made with frozen raspberries or cherries. Hmmm…  We could make any of those things, really, as punch for everyone, and then add booze to individual swiggles for those who want it.

😀  We are gunna have fun!

Just updated the post on shifting financial records from Quicken to Excel, by way of making it worthy of submission to the Carnival of Personal Finance. So if you’re interested in the English-major approach to tracking income and expenses in Excel and to making the program do a rudimentary tax report, you might want to revisit that. 😉