Coffee heat rising

Grass may be greener, but is it cheaper?

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Met my neighbor Sally in the alley this morning. She’d been slamming around trimming shrubs and cleaning up the yard. Drenched in sweat, she said she’d about had enough of the house maintenance care, and she’s fed up with the guy next door to her who’s letting his house, which he inherited from his parents, go to pot.

She said she’s thinking of putting her place on the market and downsizing. This brought to mind a remark I saw a little earlier this very morning by Duchesse, commenting on a post at Frugal Scholar, who asked, “Have you replaced a money-sucking product recently?” Said Duchesse:

But actually, it was downsizing our living space, so much less maintenance and far lower utilities bills.

Well, as you know off and on I think of moving someplace less workful and maybe less burdensome financially. Inspired by Sally’s thought that she would consider one of those loft-like apartments they’re still trying to unload downtown (now at outrageously reduced prices), I called my Realtor friend, who sent along a few listings.

Some friends moved into a two-bedroom at One East Lexington. It’s a nice shiny new(ish) high-rise, and some of the apartments have awesome views. I could imagine myself living there. Further downtown is a much prettier, midrise development on Portland. The apartment has a gas stove (infinitely preferred!), the property has green areas to walk the little dog, it’s right across the road from the lightrail, and it’s in the center of what alleges to be the arts district. It’s not the greatest part of town, but it would be reasonably safe to walk around down there in the daytime. That’s a place I definitely could picture myself and Cassie living in.

Another possibility is an aging enclave with a dozen freestanding homes not far from here, in a more solidly middle- to upper-class part of North Central. It has an HOA that covers the (lush!) landscaping, the pool, the water, and the garbage, so you don’t have to deal with the yardwork and pool care. Though it’s right up the road from my ex’s $650,000 rancher, the price is much closer to right. But you do have to cope with the usual house maintenance stuff: roof, paint, and the like.

Would it really be cheaper to live in a smaller but newer unit in a rabbit warren? One that while it has no pool also would have no beloved orange, lime, and lemon trees and no real place to sit outside and take the morning air? And how would this place compare with the nearby house in an HOA, which would relieve me of yard and pool work but still have the things I really enjoy about my home?

Well, interestingly, smaller is definitely not cheaper, at least not in Phoenix if you want to stay in your present socioeconomic class. Check it out:

How amazing is that? As much as it seems to me that this four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre of land with a big, deep pool and a forest of trees is costing, apparently it costs a lot less than a two-bedroom fake “loft” in a renovated high-rise or a new building in a sketchy neighborhood.

Two things are pushing the One Lexington and the more desirable Portland Place condos so high: taxes and HOA fees.

Now, the HOA fee does cover the roof: repairs and replacement. And it covers the water and garbage pickup and exterior maintenance.

Since reroofing this house costs about $8,000, that’s not inconsiderable. Thanks to last year’s act of God, though, it shouldn’t have to be done for another 20 years, by which time I’ll be in the old-folkerie. Another big cost that will come due in the next ten or fifteen years is replastering the pool: about $10,000. If I started saving for that now, you could add about $83 a month to my monthly costs. That still would be several hundred dollars cheaper than living in a stylish two-bedroom apartment.

The enclave on Third Place has a much, much lower HOA bill. Taxes are lower, too. So from month to month it probably would cost about $100 a month less to live there, give or take some. But it has a flat roof, which requires expensive maintenance every four or five years; it’s aging; it may have black iron plumbing; and the exterior paint and plaster have to be maintained.

Given the hassle and expense entailed in moving, is it really worth the grief to decamp to a comparable house in a roughly similar neighborhood just to get 19 blocks from the blight to the west of me? Does one really want to go from a roomy house with  shade trees, a pool, three exterior sitting areas, and lots of elbow space to a hutch in a people warren? Hm. One wonders.

For the $300 or so in added expenses, I could stay in my present home and hire a pool service.

You Don’t Always Know When You’re Lucky

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The other day I was agonizing because the county raised the taxes on my paid-off (and hugely devalued) house by $300 a year and on the even more vastly devalued, upside-down house my son and I are copurchasing by $200.

As nothing.

This weekend during the kickoff for this fall’s choir season, one of the potluck dinner guests remarked that the taxes on their house had gone up $1260.

TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS! Holy mackerel!

If a tax bill like that had arrived in the mail, my house would have gone on the market the next day. That would make my annual tax bill—on this house alone—around $3,000, almost what I pay now for taxes, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, and Medigap insurance combined!

Their house is very nice—a relatively new (10 or 12 years?) two-story place on a piece of infill next to a tiny, aging golf course), fenced off with a wall and an electrical gate—but it’s not that fancy. For heaven’s sake, there’s a trailer park across the street! And they’ve got the same slums on the other side of 19th Avenue that I’ve got.

Another person who lives down near M’hijito’s house said their taxes had also gone up, to a lesser extent—something like $600.

So, I guess I’m lucky that I can still afford to live here this year.

And I’d better face the fact that sooner or later the taxes will outstrip what I can afford to pay on a limited income. This house will have to go—when SDXB moved to Sun City, his insurance dropped by 50% and his tax bill was a third of what he was paying here, on a comparable house. (Comparable, except for its being in dreary Sun City…). Since property values were even more severely trashed out there than here in town, I should be able to sell my house here, pick up a place there that doesn’t require a lot of fix-up, and still have money in my pocket. Well, in the car salesman’s pocket: I’d have to buy a lower-mpg car so I could drive into town.

The only other possibility would be to invest the proceeds from this house and use it to rent an apartment. I don’t at all care for apartment living. Well, let’s put it more accurately: I loathe living in apartments. But if I want to keep going to choir and live near my son and my friends, that would be the only option. With a 6 percent drawdown from the most optimistic guess at what I’d clear on the sale of the house, I could afford about $950 a  month. At 4 percent, the affordable rental would be around $790. That won’t get you much around this place, especially with half the population displaced from their houses and trying to rent.

As for the downtown house…I don’t know what we’d do if they raised the taxes that high. Default, probably. We’re already at the limit of what we’re willing to pay on a worthless piece of property.

Well, it’s off and running. After an incredibly hectic week, a relatively normal one is coming up…but before it starts I have to manually vacuum the storm debris out of the pool, and it’s already 6:20 in the morning.

Entrepreneurship: How much time should I spend on…?

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The other day I remarked that contract teaching is by far the most reliable source of income among my various little enterprises.

Editorial work, however, pays better by the hour, is less taxing, and requires little or no driving around.

Blogging is entertaining and a nice sop for one’s ego but does almost nothing for the bottom line.

Thinking about how Tina and I might market and grow our editorial business, it crossed my mind to block out a certain percentage of the day or the week for each activity, thereby allowing me to schedule in a regular slot for marketing and networking. And this led straight to the question of how much is a reasonable amount of time to allot to one’s various money-making activities?

“Reasonable” aside, how much am I already allotting to this, that, and the other exploit? I spend rather more time on the blog than I should, given the tiny amount of revenues it represents. Really, until recently FaM has been the only one of the three enterprises that I’ve worked on every single day.

Exclusive of Social Security, teaching generates about 64% of my income. Editorial accounts for about 26%, and Funny about Money, about 8%. So, it would make sense for about 2/3 of my working time to be spent on teaching, about 1/4 of my time on editing, and less than 1/10 of it on blogging.

Because so much teaching work is done up-front in the form of course preparation that happens before a paycheck comes in (and therefore represents unpaid labor), it’s difficult to estimate how much of my time actually is spent on that endeavor. I spend about 9 hours a week in class, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in course preparation, and to grade a single set of papers can take anywhere from 6 2/3 hours to 20 hours. One of my courses is online, requiring zero hours of class time. In a 16-week semester, not counting drafts, I collect about 15 sets of papers. So it would make sense to approximate an average of 6 to 8 hours a week grading papers. That’s approximately 15 to 17 hours a week, not counting the extensive course prep time. Figure about 100 hours for that, and you can add another 6.25 hours a week, for about 23 hours a week on teaching.

That’s more than 50% of a normal work week.

Editorial? Depends on what’s in house. On any given day, I can spend anything from 30 minutes to 16 hours on editing. It probably averages around 8 or 10 hours a week.

And as for blogging, I average about two hours a day on it; 14 hours a week.

So we have 23 + 8 + 14 = 45  hours of paying work a week.

If that’s accurate, then right now I’m spending about 51% of my work time on teaching, 17% of it on editorial work, and 31% of it on blogging.

What that adds up to is this: the smallest amount of my working time is spent on the best paying work. The second-largest slab of my time is spent on work that pays, at most, about $20 an hour—probably considerably less. And almost a third of my working hours are spent on an activity that brings in a laughable $200 a month.

Well. There’s a little insight, in the “what’s wrong with this picture” department!

If one is to work smarter instead of harder, it would make sense for the largest portion of working hours to be spent on the highest-earning activity, no? That would be…yes! Editorial.

I think we (by that I mean me and my associate editor) could do far better by targeting commercial enterprises—more plumbing/HVAC contractors!—than by working with individual writers and vanity presses. We need to go out into the world and meet the people who bring you all that obnoxious advertising and who blanket the Internet with “information” about their products and services. One thing that’s clear: business executives expect to pay other businesses a fair rate. Too often, individuals do not.

And if we want to earn more from better-paying work, then we need to devote more time, proportionately, to the better-paying work.

Duh!

I should probably try to up the proportion of working hours spent on The Copyeditor’s Desk from around 15% to 20% to something more like 40% to 50%.

It would be possible to do that simply by setting aside an hour or two a day to work on marketing the little business, and then intensifying that effort during the winter and summer breaks—using time that would be spent on teaching to network and market to businesses. It might require me to spend less time on teaching, and it certainly would cut into the time available for poking at a keyboard to produce blog posts.

At $50 an hour, an editor working 15 billable hours a week should earn about $750 a week, or about $37,500 a year, given a two-week break. Double the number of billable hours for marketing: 30 hours a week, and you come up with exactly the number of hours/week I’m working right now. $37,500 is about $7,950 more than projected earnings from all three enterprises in a typical year. Helle’s belles: I just got a paycheck from the community colleges for two weeks of teaching three sections.

Is that a reasonable allocation of working vs. marketing hours: 66% in peddling the business and 33% in actual work? Various self-styled experts vary, recommending that the small business entrepreneur devote between 20% and 60% of one’s working time to marketing. So if I were spending “only” 60% of my time at hustling business from other businesses, I’d have 18 hours a week to devote to actual paid editorial work, amounting to $900 a week or $45,000 a year. At 20%, I’d be pulling in $1,800 a week, or $90,000 per 50-week year.

Now that’s working smarter!

There’s another model, of course: videlicet, I do most or all of the marketing and Tina does most or all of the editing. In this scenario, I earn a salary from the S-corporation for my services and Tina gets paid an hourly contract rate.

So let’s say I manage to bring in 40 hours a week worth of work. That’s $2,000 a week, or $100,000 in a 50-week year. We split the income 50-50, and we each earn 50 grand a year.

LOL! Not likely that I could corral that much paying work at $50/hour. But anything’s possible. One never knows until one tries, does one?

😉

Benefits of Joining a Business Group

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Thursday: another early-morning trek across the Valley to the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association.

When I was invited to join this group, I privately thought it was going to be more hassle than it was worth. Because eggs make me upchuck unless they’re well diluted with flour and sugar (as in chocolate cake…), it’s always difficult for me to find something to eat for breakfast in an American restaurant. The group’s venue, the Good Egg, sounded especially unpromising {urk!}. And having to dive into the rush-hour traffic at quarter to seven was only slightly less unappealing.

However, I’ve found it really has been a very useful thing.

The benefits have extended far beyond the occasional job lead. For those of us who operate out of home offices, belonging to a local business group has the sterling quality of getting the entrepreneur away from the keyboard and out into the world. If I weren’t teaching, the only time I’d see another human being would be in choir and during shopping trips. Meeting weekly with a dozen other business people means I get to talk with professionals about topics that matter and enjoy the friendly company of a diverse and lively bunch of people.

More concrete benefits have included leads to useful business tools, such Carbonite’s cloud-based backup service, and presentations describing how various financial instruments and business-related strategies work. To those we might add practical advice: last week my dog-&-pony show was a discussion of how my associate editor and I are planning to step up marketing for our editorial business, The Copyeditor’s Desk. In response, practically everyone in the group had some idea or advice to contribute, and this morning they all wanted to know what progress we’d made on our plan.

On the other hand, except for a small local group of women bloggers, I don’t belong to associations of bloggers. Not because I don’t want to and not because I don’t see the value in linking with others who are trying to monetize their sites, but because an online network doesn’t serve the purpose of getting me out of my garret. Virtual socializing, while it has its purposes, is not the same as meeting people face to face. And it doesn’t take you off your chair and out from in front of your computer.

Too, Funny about Money doesn’t provide enough of my little corporation’s total revenue to make it worth spending a lot more time on it than I already do. One half-way decent editorial assignment returns two or three months’ worth of Adsense revenues; the recent two-week plumbing company gig paid more than seven times the amount FaM earns on Adsense in a month. Given that disparity, it makes sense to spend a lot more time on marketing the editorial business than it does to try to further monetize the blog. Really, if I spent as much time every day marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk as I do writing blog posts (hmm…like this one…), it would be earning as much as or more than I earn teaching, which other than Social Security is my only moderately reliable source of income.

Probably one doesn’t need to rub elbows with other business owners to arrive at revelations like this. But it helps.

Pound-wise, Penny-foolish?

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A new J. Jill catalogue arrived the other day. I’ve been planning to buy another of their sleeveless short dresses in the “Wearever” line, since they’ve finally come out with an actual color—blue. Well, they had an actual color last year—old-lady mulberry—and I bought one of those. So now I have two: the regulation black and the mulberry number.

They’re incredible pieces for women who resent having to have decent-looking clothes dry-cleaned and who also resent having to spend an hour fiddling with their grooming before they can get out the door. All you have to do is pull the thing over your head, throw on some jewelry and a decent pair of shoes, and voila! You’re dressed!

So while I was leafing through the catalog, I came across this hobo bag:

Exactly what I’ve been looking for to replace the pricey bag I bought in a fit of depression, when my dear boss invited me to an expensive luncheon to celebrate my longevity at the Great Desert University a few days after she informed me that I and all five of my staff were to be canned. I’ve been carrying that purse about every day for almost two and a half years, and it’s only just beginning to look a little tired.

The red bag I picked up in Yarnell earlier this year, which was relatively cheap, is already acting like it’s about seen its duty, and I’ve only carried it a dozen times—if that much. The faux leather is starting to sag, and where the purse is supposed to stand up, it flops over. Still fine for casual wear, but it’s not a purse you can carry with you everywhere, in every venue but the ballroom.

Well, so I filed the existence of the J. Jill purse away in the labyrinth of my mind, figuring that if I went out to Fashion Square in hopes of finding a sale there over the Labor Day weekend, maybe I’d buy the purse along with the dress. Especially if they’d give me a break on the price.

But…fortunately before I could get myself to a brick-and-mortar store, I made a little discovery.

Poking around a closet in search of a light bed throw that might be a little less linty than the one I’m using just now, what should I come across but this:

CoachBagWhaa? I’d forgotten I still had the thing. It’s amazingly aged. But y’know what? It’s a Coach bag.

It was covered in dust. I’d stashed it on the top closet shelf because its rolled edges were getting a little worn, and as I recall I’d decided to switch over to another purse. Yea verily, probably the exit-party purse.

After a good dusting and thorough oiling with leather conditioner, what you see above is what I got. Looks an awful lot like that J. Jill bag, doesn’t it? Matter of fact, I like the design a lot better.

I think I paid about $200 for it, so long ago that the Memory of Person does not stretch back that far. Quite some time ago I quit buying Coach bags, to my regret. They got rid of their beautiful classic styles—no doubt because when you have a classic purse that never wears out, you don’t keep coming back to buy more purses. They started plastering their logo, Gucci-bag style, all over their products. And I just hate that. My feeling is that if you expect me to be your walking billboard, you pay me, not the other way around. But they think otherwise: in exchange for the privilege of hauling the Coach corporate logo everywhere you go, they expected customers to pay even higher prices.

Nine West, Fossil, and J. Jill produce comparable bags for a lot less money, without the requirement that you provide free advertising, so I said good-bye to Coach.

Luckily, though, I hadn’t said good-bye to this particular pricey Coach bag. That’s $149 that I will not have to pay to J. Jill for a new purse.

My point here, money-wise, is that sometimes it’s worth spending what seems like a lot to get an item that you use all the time and that will hold up under that kind of wear. The purse I bought over two years ago has been dragged from pillar to post and back again. It’s been used to carry computer gear. It’s been sat upon. It’s been rained upon. It’s been threatened by a chewing puppy. It’s been hauled through the desert. It’s been set on the floor in public bathroom stalls where the management has removed the coat hooks. It’s been searched by security guards time and again. And when I put it away and forget about it, two or three years from now it will be resuscitated and hauled around for another two years.

Same thing with the dresses. J. Jill’s Wearever line is not cheap, and the stuff hardly ever comes on sale. However, the little dresses in that line cover my paunch so I look nowhere near as fat as I am. They’re easy to wear. They wash like a charm and come out looking brand-new. They’re ideal for church, they’re perfect for teaching, and—accessorized properly—they’d probably work for a job interview. I wear one of them at least once a week.

When you’re going to get a lot of use out of something, in my opinion it’s worth the extra money to get something that will last. Cheap junk, like the red purse from Yarnell, wears out long before its time. If you have to replace a $60 item in a year or less, you’re a lot better off paying $200 for something that will last longer than three years.

 

Cherry-picking the Looniness

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🙂  E. Murphy, one of my favorite commenters, engages the discussion that stemmed from a post of a couple of days ago. Says E.:

Okay, you can cherry pick some looniness within the Republican party. But you can also cherry pick some looniness within the Democrats also.

For godssakes women, the world is NOT black and white.

In the wee hours of this morning I was mulling over the issue: what are the roots of our present calamity? I do not see the basis of the irrecoverable disaster toward which we’re sliding on a skateboard as stemming from “looniness,” in the sense of isolated incidents of irrationality or stupidity. I see it as rooted in a deep, intransigent ideology that brooks no dissent from its dogma.

Here’s a little table showing the big missteps we’ve taken since the Reagan era. Let’s remember, too, that today Reagan would be considered “moderate” and Barry Goldwater, regarded as a right-wing loon in his day, would be trending to the left.

I submit that one does not “cherry-pick” right-wing lunacy. The crop of cherries is so thick and so ripe that all one has to do is stand under the tree, hold out a basket, and watch it fill.

Happy Labor Day, for those of you who still have a job. As for those who don’t and those who are marginally employed at a fraction of what you earned when you had a real job: go fish!