Coffee heat rising

Tiny Places of My Past

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The following is a guest post by Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Her blog covers living expenses, saving for your future, and the fun stuff along the way.

Nicole from Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured left a comment asking if I had seen this post at a new blog, Step Away from the Mall.  It boiled down to a small rant about the fact that a couple looking for a $500,000 house in Texas could possibly complain about houses that were like mansions from the point of view of a guy that recently lived in a $1700 a month, 400 sq.ft. “apartment” in NYC.

Putting aside that the cost of living between NYC and Texas is amazingly different (and I assume the salaries are as well), his description of his 400 sq.ft. space brought back my memories of dorm living and right-out-of-college housing.

The smallest space I have personally lived in was a 10 ft by 12 ft dorm room that I shared with another girl in college.  We shared the tiny bathroom with the two girls in the adjoining room.  In short, I had a 5 ft by 12 ft space to myself—60 square feet.

You want to know the weirdest thing?  I LOVED IT!  I absolutely adored dorm room living.  I loved the fact that a bunk bed and an efficient use of storage could make me feel like an adult in her own digs.  I also loved the fact that I could poke my head out the door at any time—day or night—and find someone else to hang out with.  It was awesome.

Fast forward 3 1/2 years, and the smallest space that I ever shared with Mr. BFS was our first apartment out of college.  It was technically a one-bedroom 550 sq.ft. space that really felt more like an efficiency with an extra half wall.  The kitchen was too narrow to fit 2 people into at once and the only place to put the computer was next to the bed.  My favorite feature was a built-in book shelf next to the red brick fire place.

I loved the cozy feeling of that apartment too, but there were several times I came close to committing homicide while Mr. BFS played computer games 2 feet away from my head in the wee hours of the morning.

Fast forward another 2 1/2 years, and we own our own 1750 sq.ft. house.  I have no idea if I could live in such small spaces again and be as happy as I was those few years ago.  Hubby has his own gaming area and we have an adult bedroom with actual furniture and even a Tempurpedic (non-blow up) mattress.  I am spoiled to say the least but still have very fond memories of the tiny places of my past.

What are the most cramped quarters you remember?  Did you like them as much as I liked mine or do you think I’m nuts?

Oh, and Step Away from the Mall, you will hate this, but that 550 sq.ft. apartment we had in late 2004- mid 2006 was $399 a month.  😛  Feel free to join us low cost of living folks whenever you wish.  🙂

Friday Torpor

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Well, only ten more days to go in this month’s discretionary budget cycle, and I’m well on target, for the first time in months. Now that I’m finally getting paid, now I’m staying on budget! Every single month this summer I’ve gone over budget, with too little money coming in to cover base expenses even if I could have made budget. One little calamity after another racked up one big bill after another.

It looks like I’m going to be paid about $545/pay period, about $83 a month more than I expected. If I transfer $249 a month from the summer stipend (prorated over 16 weeks), then I’ll end up with about $185 a month more than needed to cover basic expenses.

As the weather cools, the amount of play will be more than that, since the air-conditioning and water bills drop steeply during the winter months.

That, btw, is without a drawdown from the 403(b). I cut the drawdown to a dollar a month by way of preserving capital. The state requires retirees to take something out, to remain eligible for the payout for unused retirement pay, which, thanks to our leaders’ infinite wisdom, is irrationally paid out over three years. I rolled most of the money in that account over to my big IRA, where it could be invested more intelligently, but had to leave enough to cover this year, 2011, and the first two months of 2012. The last RASL payment is due in February 2012; the instant that  hits my checking account, whatever remains in the 403(b) goes straight to the IRA.

I’d left enough to cover a $500/month drawdown, since no one at GDU, the State of Arizona, or Fidelity seemed to know what was the minimum drawdown one could take and still qualify as “retired” for RASL purposes. Late last spring, some guy at Fidelity finally revealed that you could take out as little as a dollar a month. Not having enough to live on over the summer, I kept the $500 ($383 net) coming through the summer but arranged for it to drop to a net 77 cents a month starting this month.

The stock market has been so volatile—and the fact that we’re in an economic depression so obvious—that I wanted to avoid pulling out money from investments whose value probably is near their nadir. This strategy will keep $6,000/year in that account, instead of having it come to me to be frittered away on living expenses.

Nevertheless… I’m thinking that next summer I’ll draw a chunk out of that fund to make life a little less precarious.

If I do get a summer course—or if I can find some other job—then I’ll take out enough to net about $2,000. That would allow me to run the air-conditioning enough to keep the house tolerably comfortable. I am tired, tired, tired of breaking a sweat by working my fingers on a computer keyboard! It might even provide enough, combined with whatever I’ve managed to economize over the nine-month academic year, for me to take a little vacation someplace cooler. If I don’t get a course, then I’ll need net $3225 to cover my living expenses from the end of May to mid-September: that’s a $3,970 drawdown. In that case, I won’t be living comfortably or taking any trips, but at least I’ll be able to get by.

At any rate, in theory I should be able to do OK without having to take much out of savings, as long as I’m teaching. I can improve on that theory significantly if, come next May when I reach so-called “full” retirement age (don’t you love it? at 65 you can be “fully” unemployed and unemployable, but you can’t be “fully” retired!), if next May I take my entire emergency fund and pay back the amount of SS the feds have doled out so far. This would jack up my Social Security payout to the amount it would have been had I managed to hang onto my job to age 66, a better pittance than the one I’m getting now. The amount would the more than the 4 percent drawdown one can supposedly take from investments, and so I think this would be a smart move.

It leaves nothing to buy a new car, however. The Dog Chariot won’t run forever, and so I’ll have to figure out a way to afford a replacement set of wheels sometime in the near future. Oh well…later. I’ll think about that later.

For the nonce, I’m in a daze—another 4:00 a.m. wake-up call, lhudly sing goddamn. Along about 6:00, stumbled into the kitchen to fix breakfast for me and the hound and was jolted awake by a sharp chomp on a toe: more Ondts! I think they’re coming in under the back door this time, but am not sure because I can’t find them outside. They may be entering through the woodwork. Sprayed the little gals with some more home-made window cleaner, mopped the floor, and am now waiting for the tile to dry so the dog and I can get some food.

One reader asked what’s in the window cleaner. I no longer measure, but just toss the stuff together by eyeball. It’s about half a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, to which is added about 1/8 to 1/4 cup ammonia and a like amount of vinegar. Fill to the top with tap water, and voilà! A very fine grease-cutter, glass-cleaner, and ant-killer.

Sooo much work to do today…must get moving.

Hurrah! Summer’s almost over

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The first cool morning of the fall—at last! At quarter to five, it’s 68 on the back porch.

Too bad I can’t enjoy it: in 45 minutes I have to schlep through the rush-hour traffic to Scottsdale, to a breakfast meeting of the networking group I joined.

But it’s one of various small harbingers. Not only is the heat about to break, choir is back in session. Last night we rehearsed several lovely pieces, and on Saturday we meet all day, wrapping up a “boot camp” session with a potluck dinner. Sunday the regular season of singing resumes, something that adds a great deal to life.

Check out this that I found on the Web:

Isn’t that kewl! Not only do you get the lovely choir singing, you can follow the parts! What a grand tool for practicing. YouTube has a whole series of these things.

Meanwhile, the electric bill arrived: only $207! That’s $30 less than last month’s, to my amazement. August was miserably uncomfortable, well over 100, humid, and sticky every single day. By all rights, the power bill should have been through the roof. I’m budgeted for $225 but expect July and August to be a little higher than that. Reason for the drop: unexplained.

It gets better: the water bill was only $83. That’s right: eight. three. In past years it’s been around $125 at this time of year. I think it’s because I decided to cut back the watering schedule and haul the hoses to the plants myself, by hand. Suspicions confirmed: drip systems are another scam, along with the programmable thermostat that jacks up the power bill and the water-saving toilet that forces you to flush three times for every one use. None of the plants died, and I saved over $40 on water.

At the college, my chair says I can have three sections a semester starting next spring, and he will try to get me a summer section. This will resolve my financial problems: with any luck, I’ll never have to go through another summer without enough income to cover base expenses.

My colleague has engineered another eight-week section of the magazine writing course for spring semester, so pleased are they that the current one filled to the scuppers. That means at no time will I be actually teaching three sections at once. Knowing these eight-week courses exist, I intend to proactively go after them, because it’s much easier and much more entertaining to teach accelerated sections, even of writing courses.

God is great!

Real Estate: We thought it couldn’t get worse…

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Homes in my neighborhood are now selling in the $150,000 range. I paid $232,000 for mine…before the bubble.

About 17 years ago, I bought my first house in this neighborhood—same model as the one I’m in only not updated, no pool, smaller lot, and close to two hideously noisy main drags. I paid $100,000. The seller was asking $130,000, but a recession was on, the house had been on the market for three months, and it was in an estate, so my Realtor talked him way down on the price. Except for a HUD house across the street, that was about as low as values got…I got a smokin’ deal on the place.

So. What this means is that property values in my area have dropped into the range where they were more than 15 years ago.

It also means I no longer can sell my house, use the proceeds to pay off the mortgage on the downtown house, and move in there when my son is ready to move on. This uptown house is not worth enough to cover what we owe on that house.

Annoying. It cuts off a key strategy for dealing with the difficult position the crash has created for us. Even though the neighborhood is not as nice as mine, the downtown house is quite charming; I like it and was willing to move into it, because it’s easier to maintain and has no expensive pool to care for. That’s now no longer an option.

Mulling over what we’re going to do in the long term…heaven help us!

First, I’d like to get my son’s name off that mortgage. They have him on there as the primary borrower, because I’m unemployed. Next year I should be earning more than I’m making now, plus of course, my retirement savings could pay for the house in full if I were forced to use them that way. Once the government permits me to earn a living wage again, it might be good to try to engineer a sale of the house to me. At least then he won’t be stuck with a financial black hole when I die—debts aren’t inherited, and even if they were, this is a no-recourse state. So once I’m gone, he can safely let the bank take it.

It remains to be seen, however, whether anyone will let us do that. Values have dropped commensurately in the downtown neighborhood. There, houses are selling for under $100,000. We presumably would have to get a new mortgage, and of course no one is going to write a new loan for $211,000 on a house that’s worth about $130,000, if we’re lucky.

We can’t rent the house for the amount of the presently reduced mortgage’s monthly payments. However, when it comes time for him to move on, I think renting will be probably our only option, other than walking and destroying his credit as well as mine. The rent would cover enough of the mortgage to make the remainder affordable, if galling. Problem is, it wouldn’t be enough to build a repair and maintenance fund, indispensable for an old place like that. But because we’d be running at a loss, we probably would pay no taxes on the rental income. LOL! We might not pay any taxes, period, at the rate things are going!

That’s about it for our future options:

Rent it.
Default on it.

In the present, however, about all we can do is count our blessings. We have two pleasant little houses in acceptable neighborhoods. One of them is paid for. They’re both very pretty, they’re both conveniently close to work, school, and shopping, and they’re both reasonably sound. Things could be worse.

I guess…

Good-bye to the American Dream

Image: dvs’s photostream on Flickr. Creative Commons.

Ant Wars: The Battle of the Front Stoop

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Antibal the Great

Okay, the last battle may or may not have been won, but the war has yet to be lost. You’ll recall the previous foray between the human and  Armies of the Ondt, yes? The fight lasted about 24 hours, but ultimately the invaders were repelled.

The little Amazons were undefeated, though. Yesterday evening some of their cousins mounted a new attack. Instead of entering the kitchen directly under the back door, this tribe made its way through a rain-weakened patch of framing at the bottom of the front door. Once in, they marched cheerfully through the living room, jogged left at the hall, and entered the Great Restaurant that is the kitchen floor. Not at all interested in the dishwasher, this bunch descended on some microscopic specks near the dog food dish.

This invasion was particularly jarring because I’d just spent a couple of hours cleaning the kitchen and the floors. Along about 9:00 p.m., after vacuuming, dustmopping, baseboard-scrubbing, and steam-mopping, I was just about to put the gear away, stumble into the bedroom, and fall face-forward into the sack when I came upon a line of troops hiking across the living-room floor.

Damn! I thought the floor was clean. Like, really clean. Not so, though: one of the little ladies was staggering across the threshold with a morsel half her own size.

Here’s a discovery: Home-made glass cleaner, the stuff you concoct with rubbing alcohol, a dab of ammonia, a dash of vinegar, and water, kills Ondts every bit as effectively as gagging, stinking, sickening, dangerously toxic bug spray.

Determined not to go through the Raid misery again, I grabbed a squirt bottle that happened to contain my Windex knock-off brew. The plan, really, was to disrupt the ladies’ pheromone trail, confusing them as to where the grocery store might be. First thing that happened when I sprayed a squirt in the Ondts’ direction, though, was that they curled up and croaked right over, just as though I’d sprayed them with a noxious chemical.

Well, ammonia is not exactly a non-noxious chemical. Neither is rubbing alcohol. However, their fumes dissipate quickly, and the house doesn’t stink of petroleum products for days. Within an hour or so, the odor is gone.

The Ant Amazons…not so much.

Laid down a barrier of boric acid across the threshold. The Ondts joined antennae, reared up on their little hind legs, and danced a can-can, singing “nous nous en fions de toi” in a squeaky ant chorus. They strolled across the boric acid as you and I would stroll across low sand dunes. Unharmed, they proceeded to the kitchen. Meanwhile, outliers found ways to get around the barrier without having to contact the stuff and risk taking it home to the hive.

Found some old, dried-out ant baits. Dropped them right in the middle of Ondt Highway 101, shielded from doggie curiosity by an old fan cage. The raiders evinced not the slightest interest.

Spraying the bedoodles out of them with the imitation Windex, however, eventually beat them back. By the time I stumbled off to bed, not a wandering ant was to be seen.

Probably that’s because it was Ondt Bedtime, too.

This morning, an elegant line strung from the front door through the living room and hall into the kitchen, where the troops were chowing down on two spots flavored invisibly with something.

Sprayed the ladies with more DIY glass cleaner, inflicting vast casualties. Poured a quarter gallon of vinegar into a bucket and topped it off with the hottest water I could extract from the water heater. Mopped the kitchen, hall and living room with that.

Chugged down to the Ace to resupply the ant bait arsenal. Dropped a new brand down in front of a roaming scout. She ignored it. Placed a few more outdoors, near the army’s points of entrance.

All’s quiet on the Living Room Front just now. But it’s very hot outside, 105 as the early autumn sun settles into the west and a bank of cumulonimbus rises above the northeastern horizon. What reason is there to believe that Ondts are any more given to trotting around in the noonday sun than the rest of us?

Lordie! This woman can write!

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You should ramble on over to Surviving and Thriving, where Donna Friedman has written another of her amazing posts. Every now and again, she gets on a roll that won’t quit. This is one of the best posts I’ve read in any blog, anywhere.

In passing that along to you, it occurs to me that I haven’t done a link-love round-up in a long time, mostly because the darned things are time-consuming and time has been in short supply the past few weeks. So…

Out and About in the Blogosphere

Evan, my fave conservative PF blogger, stirred up 24 people enough to respond to his rumination on the question of whether money buys happiness.

No doubt you’ve been hearing all the clichés about the Millennial Generation and how 20-somethings are delaying adulthood and all that. Whether you buy into this particular brand of sociobabble or not, you have to be amazed at Revanche, whose figures at A Gai Shan Life reveal that, while yet to break the big Three-O, she has accumulated an enviable pile of savings and supports her parents, in spite of a spate of unemployment and a move to a new city.

Dr. Dean at Millionaire Nurse is given to writing thoughtful posts. This week my attention is drawn by a discussion of the economics of divorce, particularly in the context of the present recession.

Hang onto your hat! Financial Samurai has got up to some mischief with “Don’t Have Children If You Can’t Take Care of Yourself.” Heh heh heh heh! You’re gonna love this! Reminds me of SDXB‘s plan to make prospective parents buy licenses for child-bearing.

Has your credit-card company stroked your ego by promoting you from your day job as a burger-flipper to a “professional”? Before you accept the lender’s flattering offer of a shiny new “professional” card, better take a look at Karen Datko’s eye-opener at MSN Smart Spending. These outfits always find a way around whatever consumer protection laws Congress can dream up.

Little House in the Valley has a nice post full of wit and wisdom on thinking about your future retirement. Wait! What? You mean I can’t move in with my son and his future wife, who of course will be thrilled to take care of a cranky old bat?

Frugal Scholar posted a neat idea for a new budget category. It’s an interesting strategy for promoting social responsibility in our own small way. If we all did it, we could change the commercial landscape in our towns and cities.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability offers a number of good suggestions for ways to save on your electric bill.

It’s still not too late for a short warm-weather vacation. Eliminate the Muda has a nice article on ways to travel economically and well.

Bucksome Boomer has an interesting rumination about the relationship of affluence or poverty to life skills. Readers chime in with reflections that development of certain life skills is also influenced by geographical region and ethnicity.

OMG! Don’t miss this attention-getting post at Get Rich Slowly! JD relates what happened when a Canadian newspaper reporter offered a number of panhandlers free money in the form of prepaid Mastercard and Visa gift cards. Weirdly, it confirms and de-confirms one’s suspicions.

Simply Forties has really been on a roll this week. I don’t know which of three delightful posts to share with you, so I’m sharing all three: Drinkers Live Longer (yeah! pass the wine, please), a tempting round-up of wonderful reading selections illustrated by a very cool painting, and (gasp! swoon!) a recipe for cherry soup.

If you’re at the point of making the leap from hobby blogging to problogging, check out Budgeting in the Fun Stuff’s comparison of Blogger and WordPress. IMHO, she’s right on about this: if you’re just starting up, even if you don’t think you’ll monetize your site, go with WordPress from the outset.

Over at Bargaineering, Jim has been running a series of “What Is a…” posts, in which he defines and explains, in plain English, various arcane financial terms. One of my favorites is What Is a Ten-Bagger? 😀

Welp, I’ve got to get off the Internet now and clean up the house. This should be enough to keep you busy for a few minutes. Enjoy!