Hallelujah! For the first time all winter (and..hmmm…as I recall, all last fall and summer), I came out in the black this month. The AMEX bill came in at only $844!!!! That is incredible, since it covers all nonessential spending (food, gasoline, clothing, dog, garden, pool, household goods, eating out, doodads, kitsch, hoodoos, and whatnot). That’s an $1100 budget, which I’ve overspent every month since my limited memory runneth not to the contrary, as unexpected gouge after surprise expense after inexcusable indulgence has tumbled down on the bank account.
The reason for this little triumph, of course, is that for the past two months I’ve been too sick to crawl out of the house. That means I’ve stayed away from Costco.
Ah yes. Costco. A giant drain into which to pour dollars.
Haven’t bought meat in over a month, except for a couple packages of cheap chicken thighs for the dog. The gigantic haul of produce from Market on the Move, once it was cooked up into various scrumptuosities, has filled the freezer. Except for one Costco run early in the budget cycle (it is my favorite purveyor of wine and lifetime supplies of cheese), almost all this month’s groceries came from Safeway and the ethnic market on the corner.
That may be the secret to staying on budget (other than “don’t let your car break down” and “evade all encounters with doctors”): stay away from Costco. Or more to the point, stay out of stores in general.
A little over $4400 came in from the state for the last payment owed for unused sick-leave time. That brings the “survival” pool back up to where it was at the beginning of the summer. That should stretch the survival fund’s lifetime about another year, by which time I’d better have a real job or I’ll have to start drawing down retirement savings to put food on the table. Unless I get a tax refund (which, with $8000 worth of deductible medical expenses, I probably will), the survival fund will run out about this time next year, maybe sooner. Taxes and utilities have risen high enough that what I earn no longer suffices to make ends meet, and so I’m having to pull down more from survival savings than I net on teaching.
Anyway. Tomorrow’s another day…I’ll worry about it when it gets here. For the nonce, things are pretty calm.
Moments of Fame:
The Carnival of Financial Camaraderie is up at My University Money, whose proprietor kindly included Funny’s squib on the cost-effectiveness of a AAA membership.
This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted at Well-Heeled Blog, included FaM’s rumination on the (rather few) advantages of hanging on to financial records forever and a day.
Sounds like a good month! Windfalls can be “spending less than usual” as well as “receiving extra funds” — you’re still benefiting because of unusual circumstances.
I think I missed the explanation of unused sick leave. What’s the story there?
@ Remy: The state of Arizona pays retirees a portion of their hourly pay rate (as of the retirement date) for the unused hours of sick leave that accrue during their career with the state. The portion rises according to the number of hours you’ve accrued; in my case, I had over 1,000 hours of unused leave, and so I got paid 50% of my hourly rate for each of those hours. It came to about $18,000.
Alas, they don’t fork it out in one payment. They string it out over three years; you’re not allowed to move your retirement funds out of your ORP or the state pension fund until all the money has been disbursed. And you are required to take a drawdown. I took a dollar a month (net 77 cents), after I finally extracted from someone who knew what he was talking about that there really was no minimum monthly drawdown.
Now that I have all the RASL payout, I’ll roll over the state funds into my big IRA, which is more professionally managed and so depends less on serendipity for growth and relative stability.
I see! Well, it must be nice to have that chunk of cash ready for the IRA — even if you haven’t been able to touch it. But, gosh, that is a LOT of unused time – more than six months’ worth??
@ Remy: unfortunately, the unused sick leave is not going into the IRA. It’s going into the survival fund, as after-tax cash that I’ve got to try to live on as long as possible. What remains in my 403(b) will be rolled over, about 13 grand (I rolled over most of it when I realized I only had to leave enough in the university’s plan to cover contingencies for three years, and that I didn’t have to draw down more than a buck a month for the withdrawal to be counted as a “pension”).
Ain’t bureaucracy amazing?
For the first 8 or 9 years I was teaching, the university was (wrongly, it develops) not granting sick leave to faculty members. Apparently it was thought that if you were on a 9-month contract you didn’t get to get sick. Also, most people just walk from their classes when they’re sick or traveling, and nothing is said.
Then a lawsuit was filed, God Bless the Class Action Set! And a court decided it was illegal to withhold sick leave from some state employees while giving it to others. So the state was forced to credit every university faculty member retroactively with the number of sick leave hours they would have earned had they been treated fairly.
(Quaint idea, isn’t it? Imagine: treat teachers like human beings!)
So suddenly one day each of us looked at our pay stubs and saw hundreds and hundreds of hours credited to our accounts.
Few of us understood what that meant. But eventually the light dawned. We all came to understand that it was better to remain silent when we were sick a day or two, and to say nothing unless something was so serious we actually couldn’t continue the course.
So when I was moved into a 12-month administrative position, I quickly learned that to use vacation time to cover absences rather than to expend sick leave, since one wanted to accrue as many unused sick-leave hours as possible…as a sort of rainy-day fund. Faculty do not get vacation time, but people in 12-month contracts most certainly do: vacation time is separate from sick time, and it’s pretty generous. In spite of stretching every three-day weekend into a five-day weekend and stacking weekends and vacation days to arrange lengthy off periods, I still had many weeks of vacation time coming to me when I was laid off. By staying on the job until lay-off day, I engineered a payout that helped to carry me through the first months of unemployment.
There aren’t a lot of advantages to working in underpaid government jobs. But the benefits are among them.
Ahhhhhhhh. Wow.
I’m still fairly new to the professional world — as in, I can still vividly remember my wonder and glee the first time I found myself sitting by the pool in Palm Springs and realizing that my paycheck was being directly deposited into my bank account that day, and I WAS BEING PAID FOR BEING ON VACATION. Wheeeee!
In my job, I haven’t got defined sick leave; we’re advised on one hand to “take it if we need it”, but then there’s almost always too much work for me to feel comfortable doing that unless I’m DYING — and apparently I’m not the only one who feels that way, because people in HR take turns hacking up a lung in the office. :/ I think if I knew what the “average” sick leave was, or if an expectation was set with a certain number of days/year, I’d take it more often. I think HR knows that, too.
We do have a finite amount of vacation time, and I’m getting close to my cap. I have to take some of that time off before it stops accruing! (But then I also want a full week off after my October wedding and maybe a day or two beforehand as well, so the schedule-juggling now is important.)
A lot of people stay away from Costco and similar stores. We belong to Sam’s (not very good) because our daughter has a student membership. We only go about 3x/year.
Grocery sales are cheaper than Costco and co imo.