Coffee heat rising

California Dreamin’

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LOL! Check out the comments, below, especially from Deflating Dreams. 😀 English-major math strikes again! Gotta race to meetings just now, but will be back with an update.

Could I afford to live in San Francisco? Offhand, you’d think the answer would be no way, eh?

Well.

M’hijito is angling to get himself into a master’s program that would train him to be a physician’s assistant. Pay for such work is passing decent…good enough to get him back to San Francisco, where he craves to live. If he takes off for the Bay Area again, there won’t be so much reason for me to hang around this big old expensive house in a city not likely to shake off its economic depression any time in the near future.

Yeah, I know: California’s economy is in bad trouble, too. But Arizona’s nasty little secret is that we’re even worse off than California, second only to Michigan in unemployment. and thanks to the demagogues in the legislature, we’ve shot ourselves in the economic foot with SB 1070. That actually isn’t the half of it, to tell the truth. Arizona, I’m afraid, is about worn out as a place to live, certainly for anyone who aspires to the middle class.

I’d be sorry to leave the choir…but frankly, San Francisco has plenty of high Episcopal churches; surely one of them has a decent choir. And I really would regret leaving my best friends behind. But still, it’s something to think about. Blood being thicker than water, after all.

Let’s suppose I could sell my house and clear two hundred grand on it. Remains to be seen: prices are below pre-bubble prices here, but it’s a nice house in the quietest part of the neighborhood, and just this minute no obviously run-down houses directly abut it.

And let’s suppose M’hijito and I can unload the downtown house with a loss of no more than $52,000. I dispose of all but the most basic of my possessions, so it takes about $3,000 to move me up to the City. I’m left with net cash and retirement savings of $653,810. Not counting the remaining $10,000 of RASL supposedly coming my way, or the $14,000 emergency fund in the bank.

A 4 percent annual drawdown from this nest egg would come to $41,153; 5 percent would yield $47,690. My financial advisor says I have more than enough to last the rest of my life, even at a 6 percent drawdown, though that’s something I view with skepticism. So let’s work with 4 percent and 5 percent; add $15,000 of Social Security to those and you get a gross income ranging from $56,153 to $62,690. Subtract 23 percent for taxes, and you get a net of $42,237 to $48,270.

That just might provide enough to pay rent and buy food. Let’s check it out…

For the 4 percent drawdown, I posit a rent of $2,000 a month, which would get me into a studio or maybe a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco proper. If we subtract that rent from net monthly income and then deduct the expenses I can’t get out of—Medicare Part D, Medigap, and long-term care insurance—and then we subtract the estimated costs of utilities, does enough remain to live on?

That’s fifty bucks more than than I allow myself now!

Realistically, one isn’t likely to find a good apartment in San Francisco for much less than $2,500. That would require a larger drawdown from savings. At 5 percent with a $2,500 rent payment:

Think of that! I could probably do it. The place where I want to live includes basic cable service, so I might be able to engineer the DSL and phone through that. And given that most months I don’t spend $800, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there’s enough play to cover unexpected expenses.

And that’s without any side income: no teaching gigs, no freelance assignments, no blog income.

It will take M’hijito two or three years to pick up the undergraduate requirements for a science degree and then get through the master’s. By then I will have established myself as the master of online courses at Paradise Valley Community College. If they’ll let me keep on teaching online no matter where I live, just that little bit of extra change would keep me quite comfortable in San Francisco.

And I know exactly where I want to live: in a historic national park. Yes. The San Francisco Presidio, an old military base, has been converted into a sprawling residential area, run by the National Parks Service. I would kill to live at the Presidio! O… M… G… I’ve loved that place since I was 12 years old!

The section called the Quarry has single-story two-bedroom apartments, wheelchair-accessible, for $2,425. The interiors are a bit on the military side, but with some adept decorating you could make it pleasant enough.

On Ruckman Avenue, you can rent in one of these places, with hardwood floors, remodeled kitchen, enclosed sunporches or verandas… A one-bedroom is $1,795, but the site says the apartments have basements, which presumably would give you room for office space or storage.

To die for. The Sanches neighborhood has two-bedroom apartments for $2,350. They look like regular old apartment buildings. But the price is right, and so is the size.

I dunno. I’d probably sacrifice size for charm, given a choice. The area where I’d really like to live is Baker Beach: $1,795 for a two-bedroom; and even a three-bedroom for $2,100. It’s directly across the street from the ocean, and the interiors are much nicer than any of the other affordable places. Unfortunately, they won’t let me keep Cassie in that part of the park, so that’s out.

Interestingly, you can get an employee’s discount if you work for any of the businesses on the grounds. So presumably once you got there, you could get in line to be considered for any openings that you could weasel your way into, thereby cutting the rent nicely.

In theory, if you lived in San Francisco you could probably dispense with the car. But I think out in the Presidio, you probably would need one. The Dog Chariot is a little big to maneuver in the City…but one could replace it with a Smart Car. The price is about what I’d get for my aging Sienna.

Boyoboy.

Get that degree, son, while I still have enough life in me to enjoy San Francisco!

Funny Launches a New Blog!

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It’s up! It lives!

With considerable help from Evan of My Journey to Millions, I’ve started a new site: The Half-Off Diet™. I probably should’ve called it The Half-Off Diet Challenge™, because that’s what it’s all about: a challenge to reach a goal simply by cutting the amount of what you regularly eat and drink by 50 percent.

This self-indulgent practice aims to bring us back down to our normal weight without depriving ourselves. The idea is not to do without the things you love to eat. Instead, the theory is that if you eat about half of what you’re accustomed to scarfing down—no matter what those delectables are—you should lose weight.

The ground rules are not very limiting:

• Eat half of your normal servings for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks desserts, and any drinks with calories.

• Try to stick with minimally processed, whole foods, avoiding junk food to the extent possible.

• Prefer fruit juices to soda pop, on the theory that soda provides no nutrition (you’ll need that if you’re going to drop to half-rations!). But if you can’t do without soda, drink half as much as usual.

• Pursue balanced meals: meat, vegetable (including salads), starch. If you’re a veggie, obtain your protein through healthy combinations of appropriate foods. Try to get green, yellow, and red veggies every day.

• Prefer fresh fruits to sugary desserts and snacks. But if you’re going to indulge, eat just half a portion of the sweet goodie.

• Never starve yourself. Eat at least three square meals a day.

What could be simpler?

Each Friday, I’ll remind readers to report their progress, which I’ll post on The Half-Off Challenge page. Then we’ll be able to see how this works.

The site is intended to be a community effort. I hope readers will share recipes, stories of their success (how did you do it? and what challenges did you overcome?), and anecdotes about their dieting adventures. Guest posts are invited!

🙂

Social Security’s Bizarre Rules

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Well, I got screwed royally by Social Security. Five ways from Sunday!

In the first place, on Friday I checked and learned it really is true that when you’re taking so-called “early” Social Security, if you go even a dollar over the $14,160 allowance for earned income, they take away an entire month’s check. Not only that, but because they pay your Medicare Part B out of the monthly check, you get to come up with $111 out of pocket to cover that, too!

You get the money back the following January. But until then, you just go hungry.

It gets better. If your greed exceeds the amount of one month’s gross check—even by a dollar—they take away another whole month’s benefit.

In other words, over the entire 12 months of 2010, if I earn $1,276 more than $14,160, I lose $2,550—two entire months’ of income—and I have to come up with $222 out of savings to pay for Medicare.

If I earn $2,551 too much, then they take three months’ of payments away, and I have to come up with $333 for Medicare. And so on to infinity.

In other words, if you have the temerity to earn more than a poverty income, they break your back financially.

Because the college (unexpectedly) paid me a stipend to develop the online course equivalent to the amount of teaching a three-credit course, I’m already over the $14,160 limit: three and three at Maricopa County pays you $14,400. I figured I would report this near the end of the year—legitimately, I won’t truly know that much is coming in until we see whether the online course makes, and it doesn’t start until late October. That stipend paradoxically means next fall will be extremely tight, but I’d figured I could make it, probably, because I’d get the post-tax-gouge money back in January.

But because they starve your bank account more and more for each chunk of earnings that equates to a month’s Social Security check, it means I could not apply for the excellent opportunity that recently came up: One of the other colleges was looking for someone to teach American literature and, better yet because it only meets once a week, mythology. I really want to get my foot in the door to teach something other than composition. These courses require a LOT less work, because you’re not having to grade student writing every time you turn around, nor are you required to grade on the basis of their writing skills—all you really have to do is look to see if they more or less did the assignment.

If I had landed even one of those two sections, the extra pay plus the $500 “salary” I have to draw from the S-corp would have caused Social Security to withhold not one, not two, but three checks and gouge me $333 for Medicare. I would net less than the amount I would earn by taking on extra work to help make ends meet.

So, this is intensely frustrating.

It feels like a kind of punishment for doing what Americans are supposed to do: be entrepreneurial. Dare to earn something more than bare poverty wages, dare to get off your duff and do some productive work, and we’ll wallop you upside the head.

I can’t even begin to live on the piddling net from a $14,160 gross. The Social Security income is what’s making it possible for me to survive at all in underemployment. But the $15,000 from Social Security is no more a living wage than is the dinky amount they limit you to earning.

Six sections a year is half-time work. It’s so part-time you don’t even get benefits. To add to the annoyance, an adjunct’s position is extremely ambiguous. My pay statements explicitly say the pay is for contract work. But the district will not pay my S-corporation, which they should do if indeed I’m a contractor and which would resolve the whole issue with Social Security. And my tax lawyer insists I’m not a contractor for the district, I’m an employee.

What’s especially annoying about this is that I had no intention of starting Social Security at age 64. After the crash of the Bush economy, I figured to work until I was 70, since that’s how long it would have taken for my investments to recover their former glory, with regular employer-matched contributions to my 403(b). The only reason I’m taking it now is that I was forced to do so by the destruction of the U.S. and the world economy, something that came about directly from federal government policy and the mismanagement of government policy by elected representatives. It’s not my fault I’m out of work, and it’s not my fault there are no jobs for aged female Ph.D.’s. Or, in Arizona, for anyone else.

So. The hard times—and they have been hard—are will not end when this penurious summer ends. In the fall, I’m going to be $1,275 short of the amount I need to get by. This afternoon I’ll return the curtains I bought to help black out the bedroom so I can sleep past the first crack of dawn; that’ll put a few bucks back in my account. The iMac is showing signs of hard drive failure; the repair job will far exceed anything I can get back from returning the curtains.

Sure do wish I could’ve made something on that yard sale yesterday…

And there’ll be no new dryer, even from Craig’s List, when the junior-college pay starts to roll in next month. Thank goodness most of my stuff can be line-dried. The comforter, when it needs to be washed, will just have to be done at M’hijto’s house.

Yes, I do have emergency savings to fall back on for a month—and yes, I’ll have to use those to get by this fall. But the point is, I shouldn’t have to use emergency savings when I could earn enough, combined with Social Security, to live on. The point is, when you’re earning this little, there’s nothing left to put back into savings. So when I use up that emergency fund, it’s just gone. It won’t be there when a real emergency happens. And with my arm out the way it is, it will only take one more fall, one car accident, one minor injury to make it impossible for me to work…and then I’ll really need that fund.

And yes, I have retirement savings. But I’m not retired. I’m not retired—no, indeed; I’m working 16 and 18 hours a day, seven days a week—thanks to the economic collapse. That money has to sit there without being drawn down until the market recovers enough to rebuild at least some of the outrageous losses that occurred during the crash and that continue to occur because the continuing slide in real estate values here in Arizona continues to sap equity from investments in two very modest houses.

Meanwhile, Congress fiddles as Rome burns…

Yard Sale FAIL!

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We thought we’d make a few bucks for groceries. Empty out the closets, haul the most egregious dust-catchers out to the driveway, and watch the junk fly out the door and the dollars fly into our pockets.

Down at the store

So KJG made the long trip in from the White Tanks with a carful of valuable, priceless discards. Given the number of burglaries and break-ins we’ve had here in the neighborhood, I asked her to bring and display her doberman pinscher, the mellow but amazingly scary-looking Holly, who happens to enjoy the presence of Cassie the Corgi.

Shortly after the crack of dawn we stuck up our signs along the main drags bordering the neighborhood and planted more signs on the feeder streets directing the hordes of buyers to the site of the Big Sale. Before I could get back to the house, KJG was already entertaining buyers. This looked promising.

Promises, promises…

Those were the first of three or four rafts of lookers, one of whom was the neighbor across the street. Almost no one showed up.

It might have been that a 110-degree day was dawning. Or it might have been that not one dusky face appeared among the throngs of potential buyers. The reign of terror emanating from the nastiness that pervades Arizona politics has cleared out and frightened away the working-class Latino population who made up the majority of yard-sale shoppers here. Demographics in the tenements across the road have shifted from mostly poor-white and Hispanic to mostly poor-white and African American. Yard saling in these parts is a cultural thing, not much shared by the latter two groups.

Executive office

Whatever. By the time it got hot enough to close up shop we each had sold almost nothing. I made $6; KJG made a few bucks more than that. We piled all the unsold merchandise (34 shirts, 5 pairs of pants, 3 sweaters, 2 skirts, 3 pairs of shorts, 1 dress, 12 glasses, 2 mugs, 2 picture rames, 3 seat cushions, 1 Hoover Floormate, 1 shark floor sweeper, assorted motorcycle parts and tools) into the Dog Chariot and carted it off to St. Vincent de Paul. Good-bye to all that!

Afterward, we went to lunch.

I made six bucks on the sale and paid ten bucks for a very nice small meal. Net profit: -$4.00.

Clear the Fridge Soup: Roasted Red Bell Pepper Version

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Nothing would do the other day but what I had to shovel out the fridge and use some of the lifetime supplies of Costco produce before it spoiled. Three and a half bright red bell peppers and one cob of fresh sweet corn surfaced among the loot. Out of curiosity, I decided to try making a red bell pepper soup.

It turned out so well that now I’m craving some more, having finished it off at last night’s dinner. Here’s how it came down:

You need:

• an onion
• several ripe, red bell peppers
• small amount of good vinaigrette dressing (bottled or home-made*)
• one or more cobs of corn
• one or two cloves of garlic, chopped
• broth or water (I had about two cups of duck broth)
• small amount of olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• for garnish: yogurt or sour cream; fresh or dried herbs

How to put it together:

Preheat a backyard grill or the broiler in your oven.

Coarsely chop the onion and sauté it gently in the olive oil until it is nicely soft and caramelized. Near the end of this process, add the chopped garlic. Cooking the onions should be a fairly slow process; this releases their sugars and makes them quite delicious.

With a sharp paring knife, slice the corn off the cob. Set aside.

Remove the stem from each pepper by slicing around the stem’s circumference and gently pulling out the stem and seeds. Try not to poke a hole in the sides of the pepper while doing this. Rinse out the seeds and drain the water out of the peppers. Now pour a few drops of vinaigrette into each pepper and gently swish around to coat the inside.

While the onion is cooking, place the bell peppers over a hot grill or run them under the broiler. If you’re using your oven broiler, put the rack down about a third of the way, so the peppers won’t be too close to the heat. You’d like them to cook a little while singeing.

Occasionally stir the onions. Keep an eye on the peppers. When the skin begins to blacken, remove from the heat. While the peppers are hot, peel off the blackened skin. You can facilitate this by putting the peppers inside a paper or plastic bag (personally, I would avoid plastic, but each to his own) and letting them sit for a while. In this instance, I had no problem peeling off most of the skin without that step.

Coarsely cut up the peppers and add them to the browned onions. Add broth or water to cover. I used about two cups; the amount is not set in stone.

I happened to have some duck broth in the freezer, left over from last December’s Christmas feast. Because we smoked the duck, the broth was smokey-flavored. This created an interesting effect. Next time, though, I’d probably use chicken broth or, maybe better, just plain water. The roasted peppers have a distinctive, appealing flavor that should be allowed to shine through. If you wanted some extra flavor in the liquid, you could add a little sherry or white wine to the water.

Allow the peppers, onions, and liquid to simmer together in the pan for a while, until any crispness is cooked out of the peppers. This, too, is a forgiving process. You could let it simmer for a half-hour or so.

Now run the cooked ingredients through a blender. I have an immersion blender, which worked perfectly for the purpose. Purée to make a lovely hot chowder. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Finally, add the corn to the hot purée. Let this sit for a few moments; the residual heat from the soup will cook the corn a little without overcooking it. If you like your corn really soft, either use canned corn or put the purée back on the heat and simmer the corn in it for a few minutes.

And that’s it. To serve, add a spoonful of yogurt. If desired, sprinkle with fresh or dried herbs, such as chives, tarragon, or herbes de Provence, or fines herbes.

* How to make vinaigrette dressing

The classic “Italian” or vinaigrette dressing consists of one part tart stuff (vinegar, lemon juice, or lime juice) and three parts oil (I prefer olive oil, but any good vegetable oil will work). To suit your taste, add herbs and a minced clove of garlic. Whip or blend. Here, too, I use the immersion blender, obviating the need to chop the garlic finely and creating a rich, creamy dressing. But you can put the ingredients in a jar with a lid and shake them together, or you can just whap them up with a fork or wire whisk.