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“Follow Your Bliss”…REALLY?

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Have you read this exceptionally fine post at I Pick Up Pennies? If not, you absolutely should. It’s the most articulate rant I’ve seen yet on an idiotic idea that permeates the American middle class. As Abby encapsulates it: “I’m sick unto death of hearing, ‘Do what you love, and the money will follow.'”

Amen, sister!

The truth of the matter is, there’s a reason we call our jobs “work.” We’re not supposed to think of them as defining our lives. Work is what you do to put food on the table and a roof over your head. Fun, fulfillment, and all that good stuff is what you do outside of work. Nowhere is it written that you have to “follow your bliss” to make a living.

Well. Nowhere credible, anyway.

While there certainly are jobs that are fun and fulfilling for people with a cast of  mind that fits said work, there aren’t enough such jobs to go around. Even those of us who have the skills to become, say, a forest ranger, a handsomely paid travel writer for the New York Times, a rock guitarist, a mightily marketed dog trainer, or an artisanal bread baker are unlikely to find that kind of work, because lots of other folks, most of them with more talent, better training, and more experience than ours, want those jobs, too.

Abby managed to survive a life-threatening illness that very nearly spirited her away and that left her with some long-term disabilities, which she has described at her blog. Now that she can return to the workplace, she has a decidedly pragmatic view of work:

Now, each time I get a paycheck, I’m flooded with an emotion that I can only describe as equal parts pride and greed. Well, 60/40 tops.

Maybe the ability to work — or, more realistically, the paycheck — should be a passion in and of itself. Whether due to unemployment or physical limitations, there are a lot of folks who wouldn’t care what they did, just that they could do it.

I, on the other hand, have been amazingly lucky in the health department and uncommonly privileged in other ways. These circumstances have made it possible for me, over the years, indeed to “follow my bliss.” Several “dream” jobs have come my way, and every time I’ve settled in to a desk at a workplace where some people would kill to be, I’ve thought, “Gee! I could do this forever! I’m going to hang onto this job for as long as I live.”

Uh huh.

I’ve been a freelance writer. I’ve been a magazine editor for the largest regional in the United States. I’ve been a full-time faculty member at a large research university, teaching writing and editing to upper-division and graduate students. I founded and directed a nonfiction writing program at that university. For the same vast learning factory, I founded and directed a scholarly publishing office that was unique in the land, possibly in the world. Today I’m a contract editor and I teach an online course in magazine writing, from home. All in all, these were (and are) pretty fun jobs.

But lemme tellya something: the money does not follow.

When you get a raise after ten years at your job and then you learn that a cashier at Costco earns as much as you do but she doesn’t have to take work home with her, she doesn’t put in hours of unpaid overtime with no comp time, she isn’t expected to spend her weekends and vacation time working for no pay…well. It does something to your “bliss.”

At one point I learned Costco was paying its forklift operators more than I was earning.

For this I got a Ph.D.? For this I cranked out a string of books through major publishers and more articles than you or I can count? For this I ended up with Social Security benefits that are a fraction of SDXB’s, who never finished a bachelor’s degree?

Okay, okay. No, money isn’t everything. But it sure as hell beats whatever’s in second place. When you realize you have significant talents, finely honed skills, and can do a job that benefits the society at large and that you’re earning less than a janitor for the City of Phoenix earns, you realize that your “bliss” is simply not valued. And the “bliss” part of the job slips away — imperceptibly at first, but over time the slippage becomes noticeable.

When you’re working every weekend, most evenings, and every holiday for nothing, the bliss starts to show some tarnish.

When you’re paid nine months of the year but are expected to spend your summers in meetings, teacher training,  and course prep — free of pay of course — “bliss” gets tired.

When a former student of yours who’s doing public relations declines to apply for the job you had at the regional magazine (which circulates in every country in the world!) because it pays nowhere near enough — nothing like what she earns in her 9-to-5, paid-overtime job — the blissful bubble in which you dwell gets a hole in it.

Would I care to be a janitor at the City of Phoenix? No. Would I like to be a Costco cashier? Maybe — maybe not. Do I want to be a forklift operator? Mmmm…I think I could do that job. Would I like to work in the PR department of a huge utility producing its light-weight in-house newsletter, tweeting messages from Management over the company’s intranet, and serving on the outfit’s Dilbertish cheerleading team, nine to five, no weekend work, no evening work, full benefits, a defined pension plan and Social Security? Damn right I would.

Just imagine having a life outside of work!

When you “follow your bliss” (heaven help us 🙄 ), what happens is that work merges with life. And when that happens, there is no life outside of work. All of your life is your work.

And that is why, IMHO, it’s not only foolish to go around trumpeting that people should make their living at something that makes them “passionate,” it’s probably dangerous. When you identify yourself with your work, you have no escape from work. And ultimately, you feel you have no worth outside of work.

Seriously. I had an editor who talked about having been out of work for three months after being laid off a job. The words he used in describing that period in his life were “I felt like I wasn’t worth anything.” This was a guy who wasn’t a worker with a fungible job. He was an editor.

That was his identity. No identity, no personhood. No personhood, no value.

From the vantage point of two careers started, built, and (mostly) wrapped up, I’d say the healthy approach is to think of work as separate from self. Work is something you do to support yourself and your children. If you enjoy it, bully for you. If you don’t, try to find a new trade or a new employer.

Either way, build a life outside of work, and seek your “bliss” there.

Is a Business Lunch with a Friend Deductible?

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Well. Technically, it is. Let’s say you have a friend with whom you also do business. You go out to lunch, and while munching your tacos you happen to talk about the project the two of you are working on, for which your friend/client is paying you — or, more specifically, your S-corporation. 😉 Let’s take this a little further and posit that you actually come to a decision, over lunch, about some tiny element in the project. In theory, that conversation magically turns a social event into a business lunch, and so in principle the cost of the lunch could be tax-deductible or chargeable to your business’s credit card.

How do you feel about that?

Saturday evening Wonder-Accountant and I went off to a choral concert (we both sing on choirs), and beforehand went to dinner. On Friday, I had engineered the planned bank-account consolidation maneuver, reducing the number of accounts and their associated complicated transactions from four to two, only one of which will ever see much activity. As a bonus, I arranged for Fidelity to deposit the funds for my share of the mortgage on a house my son and I co-own directly to our joint account, rather than bouncing the money first into my checking account and then into the joint account (my son pays the mortgage bill from that account and also uses it to accrue savings for maintenance & repairs).

As you might imagine, W-A was most pleased, since this strategy acts as aspirin to a headache, where she’s concerned. So we toasted our mutual genius over dinner and spent some time discussing it.

Presto-changeo! A business meal, right?

Possibly. But personally, I don’t feel comfortable with it, as a general practice, and so paid for my dinner out of personal cash. Ex-DH, who was a corporate lawyer, always said that any time you talk business over a meal out, even briefly, the tab becomes a business expense. W-A says that if you’re talking business over a restaurant meal, you can pay for the client’s (or vendor’s) meal with corporate money but you should pay for your own with personal funds. If that’s the case, I could have paid for hers and she could have paid for mine and thereby charged the entire meal to our respective businesses.

To my mind, the technicalities of it are beside the point. It seems to me what matters is the primary reason for the meal. If you’ve arranged with a client or vendor to meet over breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the specific purpose of discussing business, then what you have, obviously, is a business meeting. In that case, all the costs associated with it, including the tab and the mileage, should be tax-related.

However, if the people involved are friends who also do business together but they’re out on the town to have a good time, then it seems to me that the meal is a social occasion — even if business matters come up in conversation — and deducting it is fundamentally unethical.

The only person who knows that would be you. The IRS can’t know or confirm whether you organized dinner out specifically to talk business.

So…how would you regard the deductability of a meeting with a vendor or client in the privacy of a public place?

ha-HAAA! Bank Account Simpification Accomplished!

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The MAD BUDGETEER has done made budgeting and bill paying one whole lot easier. The bookkeeping simplification I first proposed in a scheme to synch credit-card charge cycles with real-world monthly income cycles worked — I’ve now learned that it’s possible and not at all difficult to use my beloved American Express charge card, with its generous kickbacks and its near universal acceptance, between the first of the month (when my actual budget cycle begins) and the 20th (when American Express’s billing cycle ends and a new cycle begins), and then cover the remaining ten or eleven days with cash dollars.

We have established, in response to commenters’ queries, that for reasons that make no sense to real-world humans, American Express will not change its billing cycle on my credit card to match my personal income-dictated budgeting cycle, which runs from the first to the thirty-first. AMEX’s billing cycle runs from the twenty-first to the twentieth. This means that charges made between about the twentieth of a given month and the first of the following month actually amount to loans against the presumed income of the following month.

And between  you and me, with the Congress we have in office just now, I presume nothing, certainly not where Social Security and investment drawdowns are concerned. I do not want to borrow against next month’s income to pay this month’s costs. Ergo: the strategy of using cash during the ten-day period when AMEX suggests that I take on exactly that kind of loan.

To my mild surprise, it worked. Last month, instead of an $1100 AMEX bill (the amount budgeted for discretionary spending), I ended up with a $950 bill, having paid the difference with pieces of paper dyed green and marked in various symbolic denominations. Paying with a finite amount of cash, surprisingly (considering my profligate habits), worked to limit the amount of spending that happened during that last ten days of the month.

Very nice.

Somewhere in the sporadic discussion of the proposed simplification of my exotic bookkeeping and budgeting habits, Frugal Scholar wondered why I don’t lump all the little “cookie-jar” bank accounts — the one holding money to pay property taxes, car insurance, homeowner’s insurance, Medicare D insurance, and Medigap insurance; the one holding emergency & diddle-it-away savings; the one to pay month-to-month nondiscretionary and routine discretionary costs — into one single no-nonsense account and just stop worrying about whether there was enough, at any given time, to pay the bills. After all, if one ran into the red, one could always pull some more leaves off the money tree over at Fidelity.

Well, thought I: Well, but…but…but?

But why not?

The cookie-jar approach worked well when I had a job and a healthy income was flowing in. Given that healthy income, I inclined to spend pretty much at will. If I really wanted something, what the hell? I’d just buy it! But to be sure enough money was stashed to cover taxes and other crucial bills, I set up an account at the credit union to hold monthly set-asides that would accumulate, over 12 months, enough to pay the property tax, the car tax, the homeowner’s insurance, and the car insurance, all pretty hefty bills. Each month $445 went into that account. To cover surprise bills and whims I couldn’t live without, I opened a second savings account, which collected $200 a month.

Because I didn’t overspend often, at any given time the diddle-it-away short-term emergency account held $1500 to $2500.

Knowing nothing better at the time I was laid off my job, my solution to the need to cover all the regular bills plus Medigap plus Medicare Part D and to disburse income from coming from not one, not two, not three, but four sources was to open yet another account. Of course! A “pool” account to hold all incoming and from which to disburse monthly allowances for living and annual, semiannual, or quarterly bill-paying.

Now we had…what? checking (1), “pool” (2), tax & insurance (3), emergency savings (4)…yes! FOUR FREAKING BANK ACCOUNTS TO KEEP TRACK OF AND RECONCILE! Plus the monthly American Express bill and the monthly Mastercard bill. And of course the accounts for the S-corp. And the Fidelity statements for the regular IRA and the Roth IRA and the brokerage account and the Vanguard funds. And the statements from Northwestern Mutual for….

To coin a phrase: argh.

The credit-card cycle now adjusted to fit my whim, I finally had time to consider this other craziness. It struck me that, where the credit union is concerned, all that’s really needed is a checking account to hold all incoming cash, from which to disgorge money to pay routine bills, and a savings account to hold funds for small emergencies and indulgences.

So. Today the deed was done.

Because I couldn’t figure out how to actually close close an account at the credit union online, and because one of the four freaking bank accounts was a money market account (effort to maximize “dividends”) — which would incur penalties if its balance dropped below a certain threshold — I took the time to drive to the CU and get an employee to help consolidate accounts and close The Deceased.

Good thing, too: A savings account I thought was the main, root account for the credit union membership was really something else, and the savings account I wanted to close was the actual, real root account. Had I tried to do this on my own, I would’ve made another fine mess of things! Even with the CU’s rep riding herd, moving non-emergency funds into a single account while keeping the emergency finds intact turned into a production.

Naturally.

🙄

Lest you think I’m unique in my craziness, the credit union’s teller remarked that a lot of people set up cookie-jar accounts with names like “tax savings” and “emergency savings” and “new car savings” and “pay off loan.” She said some people have a half-dozen such pokes. Here I thought I’d come up with something original…. 🙂

At any rate, the originality or whatever it was is now gone, and as of today I’ve got two, count-’em, (2) accounts: one to hold all incoming funds and disburse money to pay bills, and one to accrue funds to cover unexpected and short-term emergency expenses. The bottom line in the first account becomes irrelevant, at least until it approaches zero: month-to-month budgets will be tracked exclusively in Excel, with little concern to what’s in the bank.

That’s because what will go into the bank on January 1 will be drawdowns from Fidelity and the S-corp sufficient to cover, when supplemented by Social Security, all routine bills for 2014. Teaching income will also go into that account. In lieu of the $200-a-month stash for extraordinary expenses, that $2400 per annum will stay at Fidelity, and the teaching income — which averages out to $320/month when prorated over a full year — will substitute. This actually gives me about $120 a month more in extra spending money than I have now, while reducing drawdowns from retirement savings.

So. Life is simpler. And life is better. Money-wise, that is.

Yet Another Reason to Feed Your Dog Real Food

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Cassie the CorgiLordie. The FDA is still going on and on about the chicken jerky dog treats thought to be sickening thousands of pet dogs and cats and to have killed several hundred. If in fact the Chinese-made treats are the cause of whatever ails the beasts, the researchers can’t even figure out what’s in the things that’s making the animals sick.

We used to give Charley and Cassie this particular variety of treats. I think Costco hadn’t marked them as coming from China — after the great melamine flap, I absolutely will not give my dog anything that came from China, and I try to avoid eating Chinese products myself.

Normally I wouldn’t give Cassie treats at all, but with the puppy around the house, I couldn’t give him anything without giving the same to the Queen of the Universe, too. Not and continue living, anyway… 🙄

Cassie gets real food. It’s actually very easy to prepare a balanced diet for a dog, right in  your kitchen: combine 1/4 starch, 1/4 vegetables (not corn, not onion, not grapes, not avocadoes), and 1/2 cooked meat, and voilà! You’ve got a healthy, happy dog and you’ve freed yourself from these recurring flaps over the commercial foodoids. The cost is not significantly more than a high-end commercial dog food — and those fancy foods are produced in the same factories with the same ingredients as the cheapest Ole Yaller chow you can find at a discount mart. All of the major brands in all price ranges outsource ingredients to China.

Treats? She likes pieces of inexpensive cheese, bits of apple, carrot, cabbage, pear, melon (dogs love melon), potato, bread…whatever. In the doggy  mind, whatever the human is eating must be good. You can give a dog just about anything you eat with the exception of onions, garlic, chocolate, corn, and anything containing caffeine or alcohol, all of which are toxic to canids. Grapes and avocado are also said to disagree with dogs. Refined sugar and heavily salted foodoids are bad for dogs for the same reason they’re bad for you. Otherwise, anything goes.

If you feel your life will be stunted if you can’t give the dog something that looks like cookies, it’s pretty easy to make dog treats. Just google “homemade dog treats” and up will come a bonanza of recipes.

Second Thoughts: The Benefits (uhm, I think…) of Waiting before Buying

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Good old SDXB loves to shop, but given that he’s a confirmed cheapskate his shopping habits are…well, interesting. He’ll go to the Base Exchange — cheap as you can get, right? K-Mart prices with no local tax. There he’ll amble contentedly up and down the aisles, gazing at all the Man Stuff (he loves tools….he loves camping gear…he loves fishing lures…he loves weapons…and because he cooks like a dream, he even loves pots and pans!). He picks up an item. He examines it. He studies it. He contemplates it. Then he puts it back on the shelf.

“If you want it,” you say, “why don’t you just go ahead and get it?”

“Maybe I will,” he says. “But whenever I find something on a shelf that I imagine I want, I pick it up, think about it, then put it back down. Then on the way out, I come back and look at it again. Sometimes by the time I get back, I’ve realized I don’t really need it.”

Saves a lot of money with that strategy. 🙂

Seriously, what it does is control impulse buys in a big way. It also prevents build-up of clutter around the house. Best of all, it forces you to think about each purchase and consider a) whether you really do need it and b) whether the specific object under consideration is the best choice.

Where big-ticket items are concerned, it’s a particularly useful technique. After you’ve examined the [car, boat, motorcycle, fridge, stove, dishwasher, spectacularly overpriced clothes washer] and heard the sales pitches and read the consumer reviews, wait! It’ll still be there in a few days. But your ardor to buy it may have cooled off enough to let you think about it more objectively.

By the middle of last week, M’hijito had made up his mind to buy the top-of-the-line Honda CRV. I really liked the vehicle, too, and had pretty well decided I would buy one — even started the process to extract funds from an old whole life policy to pay for it.

A day or so later, though, he announced that he’d changed his mind: decided to keep the junker and continue saving the equivalent of a car payment for another couple of years, so he could either pay for a new vehicle outright or have such a small loan it would take little effort to pay the thing off.

Understand: my son HATES the junker. It’s going to cost him $1700 to keep it running. That’s seventeen hundred dollars that will be dumped into a rustbucket that he loathes every time he has to get into it.

This is a man who makes SDXB look profligate.

I said, “Well, life is short, you know. It won’t hurt anything for you to get a better vehicle, and if it makes your life better, it may be worth it.”

He said he was going to look at Ford crossovers. 🙄

So the paperwork came from the insurance company — it’s going to take a week or two to disengage the cash from that outfit, and once I’ve closed out the cash value, presumably the $40,000 death benefit will go away, too.

Do I really want to get rid of an insurance policy that will pay my son 40 grand? Accountant says it’s irrelevant: he’ll inherit enough from me that he won’t need $40,000. But between you ’n’ me, I think 40 grand tax-free is not a bad little good-bye gift.

At any rate, the bureaucratic tergiversations delayed the purchase from the git-go, and then my son’s back-peddling gave me serious pause. My car is running well, should run for another 30,000 to 80,000 miles, and I don’t hate it. Hm.

Then a day or so later, my friend KJG and I get on the phone for a lengthy yakfest. One of the required topics of any conversation between old bats is the soap opera of our adult children’s lives. I brought up the automotive chapter and remarked that even though he had decided not to buy the CR-V, I still coveted one of the things. With leather seats. And lumbar support(!). And…gadgets whose purpose I have yet to understand!

She said that her daughter and son-in-law had bought a CR-V and soon traded it in. They felt it was too underpowered to meet their needs — which, since they live in a far-flung suburb, entail a lot of freeway driving.

Izzat so?

The CR-V comes with a four-banger and has no option to upgrade the engine. It’s a fairly large vehicle, and you can’t get a V-6 for it! It supposedly has a turbo-charged four, but…well. When you go back and read the Edmunds, Consumer Reports, and Car & Driver reports closely, you find every one of the reviewers remarks on the wimpy engine, every one of them complains that Honda offers no upgrade, and they all say that if a plush interior with many alluring amenities is more important than adequate power, this is the car for you.

Well. But I want both of those things.

I tend to be an assertive driver. Rarely do I rise to the level of “aggressive,” but I insist on being able to hold my own on freeways populated by homicidal maniacs. In Arizona, you need engine power for two purposes, neither of which is an option: To get yourself out of dangerous situations in high-speed traffic, and to haul your vehicle up steep grades.

The road to Yarnell is very steep, though it has a 25 mph speed limit (read “about 40 mph” if you want not to be pushed off the side by frustrated tailgaters). The freeway up the Mogollon Rim also has some pretty steep stretches, and if you can’t go at least 70 mph up the thing, you are a menace to navigation. If the point of getting a new car is so I can drive it out of town (wouldn’t think of taking the Dog Chariot up Yarnell Hill these days, nor do I relish getting stuck on the side of the I-17 halfway to Flagstaff), then I’ve gotta have a car that can make it up a steep grade with power to spare.

The Chariot does not have an especially plush interior, but it does have a 6-banger. When some bastard tries to pass me on the right on a one-lane freeway on-ramp, he gets a real surprise. The thing takes off like a rocket from a standing start and when it’s rolling, it can hold its own against anything that’s not a BMW or a Mercedes Benz.

It’s paid for.

If it runs for as many miles as Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic thinks, it will last another three to eight years.

Every year that I delay buying a new car makes it that much more likely that the next car will be the last car I’ll ever have to buy.

And if I want to scale the Mogollon Rim, renting a late-model car for a day trip would cost one helluva lot less than ponying up 25 or 30 grand to have the same vehicle take up residence in my garage.

Come to think of it, for 25 or 30 grand, I could buy a double-cab Dodge pickup, appointed like your living-room and den, with the engine of a Saturn rocket and the carrying capacity of two cross-over fake SUVs. Edmunds seems to like the Dodge better than any of its competitors.

Holeee sh!t. Lookit this beast! The damn thing has even got a file cabinet… Why on earth would anyone want a fake SUV when they could have the real McCoy, plus a place to hang the gun rack?

122 Unread Messages…

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Ugh! MacMail reports that 122 unread e-mail messages reside on the server. Actually, only about 30 of those are significant. But then there’s all the stuff sitting on the Canvas server, from 20 students in one course and 30 in the other.

Ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!!

Sitting in front of the computer causes physical pain. Not sitting in front of it alleviates said pain. Day before yesterday and yesterday I managed to avoid the desktop. What little, absolutely unavoidably necessary work that got done happened on the laptop, in a relatively low-pain chair — hence 122+ unanswered e-mails — and by yesterday afternoon the back and hip didn’t hurt too much.

This subjective discovery, it develops, is objectively true: one study showed just 90 minutes of sitting in front of a computer induced hypersensitivity to pain in deep tissues. Ninety minutes, eh? I’ve been known to sit mesmerized in front of this thing for eleven hours straight, getting up only briefly to grab a few bites to eat and go to the bathroom.

That tends to confirm my growing suspicion that if I’m  ever going to get over this — unlikely, after two years of unremitting pain — I’ve got to get away from the computer.

How exactly to accomplish such a thing baffles me. I make my living on the computer. Really: at this age I can’t be depending solely on Social Security and drawdowns from savings to live…that will pretty much ensure that I run out of money before I die.

On the other hand, I suppose, one could accelerate that latter proposition. There’s hardly any point in living when you’re in agony all the time. And another 15 or 20 years in the present state strikes one as less than desirable.

Oh well.

At the end of the semester, I think I’m going to engineer a two-week break from blogging, writing, editing, indexing, bookkeeping, and anything else that requires extended periods of sitting and staring at a screen. I’ll probably resurrect a dozen “best of Funny” posts to keep the blog alive.

If anyone would like to contribute the occasional guest post, that would be welcome.