The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Be This Way, proprietor of the bodacious blog, Are You Going to Be This Way the Rest of the Time I Know You?, e-mailed to say she’s coming back to the blogosphere. This is great news, for BTW is an entertaining writer with an ongoing story that tends to keep one’s attention.
This is another site, along with Simple Life in France, that should be in your bookmarks and on your blogroll.
Over at Everyday Tips and Thoughts, proprietor Kris expresses some shock at the idea that a family profiled on CNN Money might not be able to live on $110,000. Particularly startling is the way CNN frames the decision the couple contemplates: whether to have the mother drop to half time, at a salary of $32,600, so she can be home with their two children: “Is that enough [along with the father’s $78,000 salary] to support their lifestyle?” Readers are registering their outrage that anyone would think $110,000 is too little to support what surely must be an extravagant and spendthrift way of life.
But…but, I say, but…
It depends on where they live. “Lifestyle” may not mean a dwelling in a McMansion and tooling around town in two Mercedes SUVs. It may simply mean they want to live in a sophisticated city that offers cultural amenities unavailable in cheaper areas. Often in such cities the public schools are inadequate—well, heck…in most American cities the public schools are inadequate. If you care about your kids’ education, you send them to private schools. Tuition at the day school my son attended—in Phoenix, a low-rent town—is now $12,740 for pre-kindergarten and $15,100 for K-8. That’s per kid. Yes, per year.
In a more desirable city, you not only have the breathtaking cost of schooling, you also have the staggering cost of keeping a roof over your head. Recently I looked into returning to San Francisco, my mother’s hometown and a place that I truly wish I could live. A one-bedroom apartment in a development that is universally panned on Yelp is $2,400 a month! God only knows what it would cost to live in a better area. Studios in San Francisco typically run around $1,800 to $2,000 a month.
That’s just for starters, before you pay for the lights, commute to work, buy baby’s shoes, or put food on your table. Imagine what it would cost to raise two children under those circumstances!
Yeah. It’s true: Dad’s salary of $78,000 would provide an adequate lifestyle for a family of four in Phoenix; $110,000 would keep them in comfort. But Phoenix is a hole in the middle of a cultural desert. You can’t put your kids in public school here, and even at a $15,000/year private school, the quality of education is just OK compared to high-ranking private schools in other states. Parents who can’t afford that but are committed to educating their kids well and keeping them physically safe often home-school. You spend your summers trying to stay out of 115-degree heat. Politicians like Governor Jan Brewer and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who represent the prevailing mentality, are such crass troglodytes that when you get on an airplane and someone asks you where you’re from, you’re embarrassed to admit you live in Arizona—when traveling, many Arizonans tell strangers they come from somewhere else.
Some people prefer to live in more enlightened venues. Unfortunately places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, New York, Paris, and London cost a lot of money. In those cities, $110,000 wouldn’t go very far for a family of four.
The fact that Dad is earning 78 grand as an assistant principal and Mom is presently earning $65,200 as a literacy coach (!!) suggests they live in a high-cost-of-living city. He sure wouldn’t earn that in a right-to-work state like Arizona, where education has traditionally been short-changed. here is $65,000. And I kinda doubt anyone ever heard of a literacy coach around here. By “support their lifestyle,” they may mean living modestly in a great city with civilized amenities.
You can live lots cheaper in lesser cities. You’ll make some trade-offs, though… My college freshmen just turned in an assignment for which they were asked to tour the campus library, take notes, and write a narrative describing their experience. Several said they had not been inside a library in many years. These products of our fine school system, all them bright and hard-working young men and women, write like this:
“In the General Collection there are many books to chose from, looking in the PQ through PS one of the most famous authors was Charles Dickens. The title is The Old Curiosity Shop.”
Literacy? What’s that? We got sunshine. We don’t need no steenking books!
…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!
Well, I probably won’t be writing much here for the next week or so.
You’ll recall that I spent half the g.d. summer creating an elaborate online course in magazine writing for the college. Since I was paid to do so, I worked pretty hard at it; the job occupied end-to-end seven-day weeks of 14- to 16-hour days.
Yesterday I learned that Blackboard blocks student access to almost all of the presentations I built during all those hours of mind-numbing work. I’m going to have to take down most of the course, rebuild the presentations at a website students can access, only without voice (so everything has to be written out!), and rewrite the entire flicking course! This has to be done in six weeks, while I’m reading 75,000 words of brain-banging freshman babble, first in draft, then in progress, then in final form.
How the hell this is going to happen escapes me. There’s no way I can redo the entire course while I’m trying to handle an intense eight-week section of composition, one that’s filled with new freshmen, some of whom need a great deal of help with their writing.
I’m so angry I can barely speak. Certainly can’t sleep. Was up until 2:00 a.m. and then reawoke and started working again at 5:00.
As appealing as the idea of teaching online is, of not having to trudge out to campus and entertain a roomful of people who doze through 80 percent of what you say, you can be sure that I will never do this again.
What a flicking disaster Blackboard is! In its new Version 9, developers replaced functions that did work—such as the Digital Drop Box—with complicated systems such as “Assignments” whose benefits are outweighed by the confusion they inflict on students and the hassle they present to instructors. It has added a vast selection of features that look like they should bring real substance and versatility to the online environment. Indeed, they would…if they operated as advertised. But they don’t. We’re presented with podcast functions that offer twenty minutes of space but won’t operate if you speak longer than three minutes, carrying capacity that won’t hold video files or more than a few still images, and nonintuitive functions that require students as well as faculty to climb a learning curve the height of Mt. Everest. The result of these upgrades, such as they are, appears to be a system that is so unstable it crashes in flames the instant classes begin and students start using it.
Blackboard is largely bloatware. If the school is to offer online courses at all, it needs a software infrastructure that can support online instruction. It can’t be a system that appears to offer this resource and that resource, only to yank the rug out from under the instructor, who belatedly discovers that none of those resources can handle so much as a 20-minute lecture or the briefest of PowerPoint presentations. If you’re a college instructor and your institution is trying to woo you to put part or all of your course online through Blackboard, RUN AWAY!
Run away as fast as you can! Do not convert your courses to this system in its current incarnation. It is a huge, bloated tick on the corpus of higher education.
{sigh} If anyone would like to contribute another guest post, it would be nice to keep this site going while I’m working on something else 18 or 20 hours a day…
This week Funny didn’t enter any carnivals, the proprietor having been somewhat overwhelmed with quotidian concerns. However, a new carnival with a somewhat slower-than-usual calendar picked up a post I sent in two or three weeks ago:
The Bellringers
Education Buzz
Student Performance: Is There Any Question?
This is an interesting carnival. If you’d like to know what teachers are thinking (and if you have kids, you should…), pay a visit!
Going into this summer, the longest period I’ve ever faced without enough income to make ends meet, a thought entered my little pea brain:
If anything can go wrong, this is the time it will go wrong. Expensively wrong.
It’s Funny’s Corollary to Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will always go wrong at the worst possible moment.
Now it can be reported: Murphy’s Law is a true law of Nature, and Funny’s Corollary is dead right. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a long series of expensive fiascos and missteps, all of them happening when there’s not enough cash flowing in to cover my ordinary expenses, much less unplanned-for costs.
Check it out:
Holy mackerel! Over $2000 in little surprises and extravagances! Income for a whole month was only $1,475. Unplanned expenses occurring over the three months of Penury Summer amounted to more than a month’s worth of summer income.
Granted, a few of these things—the clothing, the gas grill, the vacuum cleaner—were covered by savings. The palm tree trimming misery came out of cash flow. But all the rest of it: one nasty little surprise after another.
Entertainingly enough, the $1,475 monthly summer income in the absence of teaching is $565 less than normal, ordinary budgeted expenses.
Well, it’s a good thing I had a substantial emergency fund. Two funds, actually: $2,000± of ordinary diddle-it-away savings, plus the original $14,500 that I’d accrued by the time unemployment struck. The diddle-it-away savings accrue with a monthly contribution from cash flow, and it usually will cover modest wants and needs. The grill is not what I would describe as “modest,” but it did turn out to be a good buy.
So far I haven’t had to dip into the savings set aside for a real catastrophe. It’s close, though: At the moment I have $225 in the credit-card budget to last me until September 20 and $664 in cash to last till September 30. I don’t get paid until September 15, and I have no idea how much that paycheck will be. Those morons at Fidelity screwed up the August drawdown, so that’s $385 disappeared into the ether. If or when that will rematerialize, I don’t know.
To put the frosting on the cake, Wellcare, the privatized provider of Medicare Part B, has screwed up its billing and is demanding that I pay twice for this month’s premium, which I’ve already paid. Call to inquire and you get somebody with a Bangladeshi accent telling you their computer system is down so she has no idea what to say about it, and asking you to call back at 10:00 at night. Why the righties want to hand over all of Medicare to those sleazy insurance corporations beats me!
More huge bills are pending. The power bill this month is going to be astonishing: August’s heat and humidity had the AC unit pounding away almost nonstop, in spite of my setting the thermostat at 85 degrees during the daytime. Water bills are always high in the summer, although the unusually wet summer meant I didn’t have to add a lot of extra water to the regular drip watering schedule.
The college has not paid me the second part of the stipend owed for developing the online magazine writing course. This appears to have happened because no one has reported to the dean that I completed jumping through all the required hoops. Paradoxically, it’s a good thing.
Yes. Getting shorted on money earned is good. Why? Because Social Security is poised to shaft me big time. That stipend, if it’s ever paid in full, will put me $240 over the 2010 Social Security earnings limit of $14,160. As a result, Social Security will confiscate an entire month’s benefit check: $1,275. And make me come up with $111 out of pocket to pay for Medicare Part B. So the punishment for earning $240 “too much” is a fine of $1,275.
The fact is, if the school forgets to pay the rest of the stipend, I’ll be better off, even though I will have to take money out of the S-corporation to survive. If Social Security shorts me $1,275 this fall, then I’ll be forced to dip into my catastrophic emergency fund, just to buy groceries.
Things will be extremely tight this fall. Because I’m only teaching one class per eight-week session, total monthly income will be just $100 more than budgeted expenses…assuming I’m estimating my projected paychecks correctly, which is not a safe assumption. Expenses will start to go down in October when the weather cools a bit, but September’s utility bills will max out my $2,040 budget, and October’s will come close.
Sure do hope I can get a fistful of teaching assignments next spring, when at last I’ll be free of Social Security’s enforced poverty. I’ll need to teach three-and-three in both semesters and try to pick up at least one summer course. Or another stipend for developing an online course…
And I now have a plan for surviving next summer. This fall, with teaching income piddling in, I’ve had the state’s Fidelity plan cut my distribution to the minimum required to keep my RASL payments: that’s one buck, or 77 cents after tax. Down from $500. That will save $6,000 of the $11,000 I left in that account to cover me until the last RASL payment is disbursed in 2011. If I were to take $3,000 of that money out next summer, it would still preserve some capital but it would provide the equivalent of a monthly net from teaching three sections! And that would be plenty for me to live on.
If I can get one course next summer, it even would provide enough to take a vacation!!!!!
Wow. I haven’t been on a vacation in eight or ten years. That would be cool. Literally…you can be sure it’d be far away from this place!