No one ever called to retrieve the stray dog. One guy called to see if I’d found a basset—a pair had escaped from his friends’ yard. That was it.
Pretty clearly she was dumped in the park, probably because the humans couldn’t abide having their carpets peed on every 10 to 20 minutes. Or couldn’t afford the vet bills to treat what may very well have been diabetes.
Neither, alas, can I. Even if her problem was only (!) a urinary tract infection, at this point I can’t afford a vet bill for that, either. Nor, with a possible long-term disability coming up the pike, can I care for a large dog…I may not even be able to care for the little dog.
When I called the Humane Society to see if they could scan her for a microchip, they refused to speak to me—as it develops, they don’t deal with stray animals. There’s actually a state law that forbids the Humane Society from taking in strays! The instant I said I’d found her in the park I was transferred to County Animal Control, with no further discussion. The county pound, it develops further, is now a no-kill shelter. That’s why they have 900 animals for which they can find no homes.
The County sent a guy out to pick up the pooch. To my surprise, he didn’t act like a comic-book dogcatcher. He was very kind, and it was obvious that he loved animals. He said they would examine and treat the dog for whatever ailed her, and that the first thing they’d do is scan her for a microchip and try to find her owners.
Here’s the question: Is it better to mound up your spending money in one big pile, or does it make more sense to divide it into “piggybanks” dedicated to one purpose or another? Is it an overcomplication to dedicate x or y amount to, say, groceries or eating out? Wouldn’t it be simpler to give yourself a set amount of money to spend for a given period, and not obsess over how it’s spent?
In the envelope system, for example, you convert your month’s income to cash and literally stuff chunks of it into various paper envelopes—this much for groceries, this much for gasoline, this much for entertainment, and the like. When you run out of cash in a given envelope, you quit spending on that category until you get another paycheck.
Many of us do this in a virtual environment. A program like Excel makes it easy. I certainly do: my discretionary budget allocates specific amounts to various categories such as groceries, gasoline, etc.
Click for a larger view
The greyed-out figures are charges and returns that have been posted in the “Left from $500” column.
The nondiscretionary budget does the same, only in a different format because I have little choice over how much will be spent:
In this case, the greyed-out figures represent bills that have yet to arrive. The $130 I’ll have to spend this morning on getting the hated palm trees trimmed will come out of last month’s black ink. Next month there won’t be any residual black ink: power and water probably will exceed the budget. But that’s neither here nor there. The issue is…
Discretionary budget? Nondiscretionary budget? The first contains 11 items. The second contains 10. That’s 21 items I’m tracking in two subbudgets. But in any given month, a specific amount of cash is available for spending—in the summertime it’s $1,745. Does it really matter where the money is spent, as long as no more than $1,745 goes out the door?
Sometimes I think the business of tracking ever penny that’s spent on this or that category is just obsessive. Personally, I worry that if I don’t keep a grip on expenditures, at the end of the month there won’t be enough to buy groceries or pay the utility bills.
But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it would be simpler (and saner?) to regard the $1,745 as one big pile of dough from which little bread loaves are baked when needed. If instead you planned that all extraordinary expenses—anything other than recurring bills and bare subsistence—would be covered by savings and then stopped worrying about what you spent in any given category, would you be at any more risk of running out of money at the end of the month?
We know that last January J.D. over at Get Rich Slowly stopped tracking his spending altogether. The roof apparently hasn’t fallen in on him, because he’s still posting to his blog (unless he’s posting on his iPhone from debtor’s prison).* He compares the practice of tracking each transaction, which he had long advocated, to training wheels, and suggests that after habits of mindful spending become engrained, it’s no longer necessary to track every single penny.
I’m none too sure about that. In the first place, there have been a few times when a transaction came into question, and it sure was handy to be able to search a year’s records and find it instantly. And on occasion, various store clerks, managers, and bureaucrats have been mightily surprised when I came forth with a three- or four-month-old receipt. And third, sometimes it’s useful and convenient to be able to see at a glance how much I’ve spent and how much is left.
My thought is nowhere near as daring as JD’s. Rather than quit tracking altogether, I suggest that there may be no real reason to detail budgeting and spending. Maybe just establishing a puddle of money and staying aware of what you’ve spent overall, on everything, compared to the amount available, would suffice.
Is it enough for you simply to know you have $x,xxx this month to spend? Or do you want your budget organized into categories and subcategories?
So up at the Mayo they told me it looks like I may have to have surgery for a torn rotator cuff, in the shoulder that got dislocated when I fell on Easter.
It takes six months to recover from this. At least. One site says it takes up to a year to recover. My arm will be in a sling for four to six weeks! Think of that. My life came to a screeching halt when I had to wear a sling for just a couple of weeks. According to the University of Washington’s Orthopedics and Sports Medicine site, you have to have convalescent help for three months after the surgery, and if you have no one to help you (that would be me!), you may have to go into a nursing home.
At the very least I’ll have to hire someone to come into my home to clean and help me fix meals, and I’ll also have to hire a pool guy. And what’s going to happen to my house and my little dog if I have to go into a convalescent home?
If I can stay at home at all, I’ll have to use my emergency fund to hire help. I do have nursing home insurance, but you have to meet several requirements for it to kick in, and I don’t think not being able to use one arm will fill the bill. A year’s worth of cheapskate living expenses won’t go far to keep me in a convalescent home.
Meanwhile, I’ll lose my teaching gigs. Adjuncts have no sick leave, and no slack is cut: you’re there or you’re not. If you’re not, you don’t get paid. I won’t be able to drive for quite some time after the surgery, and of course, I can’t teach an online course if I can’t type. Funny will go dark, so even the tiny pittance I’m making from Adsense will go away.
They’re going to do an MRI on Friday to see how much damage has been done. There’s only one tiny sliver of hope: the P.A. said sometimes ongoing pain is caused by tendonitis, and if that’s the case, a steroid shot may bring down the inflammation. And that possibility is not out of the questions: the symptoms do resemble impingement syndrome, which is apparently a combination of tendonitis and bursitis, also brought on by an injury. This can respond to nonsurgical treatments, and if you do need surgery, the recovery period is shorter and not so drastic.
If the rotator cuff tear is small, he said, some people choose to just learn to live with the pain. In that case, it will never go away—the pain will be permanent. But at least I wouldn’t lose what little remains of my livelihood.
Very nice. But I can barely take care of my house and yard with the arm hurting the way it does. If I choose not to have the surgery—if the injury is minor enough that I can get away with that—I’ll have to sell this place and move someplace that doesn’t require so much work to maintain. And presumably over time I’ll lose more and more function. You can already see the difference between the two arms in the muscle size and tone. If this continues for years, eventually the left arm won’t be good for much.
This morning in the park, Cassie and I picked up a hanger-on:
Very thirsty and very hungry, she followed us home. She has no collar and no tags, but she’s been spayed quite recently. This leads me to suspect she was just sprung from the Sunnyslope Humane Society, which microchips adopted dogs unless you tell them not to. So I figure if I take her up there, they probably can find her humans.
Or not.
It’s not a no-kill shelter, and so I hesitate to take her there. The staff can be pretty officious, and they could demand that I leave her even if all I do is go in and ask them to check if she’s been microchipped. And it’s entirely possible that the present set of humans took her to the park and dumped her: she’s not house-trained, and her idea of the loo is wherever she happens to be standing. I’ve cleaned up after her three times in the past two hours.
She’s a mellow dog, probably six or seven years old. Claws need to be clipped. She may still have stitches. And she has a spot on one ear that looks suspiciously like the mange.
Her skin is black and her hair is coyote-dust tan. Probably weighs 45 or 50 pounds. She has long, slender legs reminiscent of a coyote’s, too. In fact, when I first saw her wandering in the park looking confused and lost, I thought she was a small coyote, but then quickly saw she was all doggus domesticus. The blue tongue suggests she has a fair amount of chow in her, but her hair is not even faintly chow-like—her coat is so coarse as to be almost wire-like.
What she looks like, to my eye, is a reservation dog. She looks exactly like the mixed, mixed, and remixed mutts that roam the rez in hordes.
She’s a nice dog. Cassie’s not nuts about her—mostly ignores her except for a little competition over the dog chew toys, and except for a few moments of putting her in her place. Oddly, for a female, she’s pretty submissive and permits herself to be cowed by Cassie’s threats. Or at least, so far she has: she hasn’t growled back. Yet.
So I’m not real sure what to do with her. I’m sure the Humane Society isn’t open today. We are totally out of food. Tomorrow is the first day of the new budget cycle, and because I have to spend the entire afternoon tomorrow getting the damaged shoulder examined again, I’ll have to spend the whole morning running after groceries. I’m not comfortable with leaving her outside (although I suspect she’s been an outdoor dog all her life, given her toilet habits)—yesterday the thermometer in back read 110 degrees. It’s 94 now; supposed to be cooler today, only 104. She probably will get the gollywobbles from the human food she had, which I’d just as soon not have to clean up off the floor. It was clear from her mound that she’s been eating an inexpensive dog food. No doubt the switch from kibble to grain, veggies, and meat will give her a passing case of enteritis. In fact, I can hear her gut rumbling now. 🙄
So, I guess my choices are to lock her in a bedroom while I’m gone, so that I won’t have to search all over the house for puddles, or to leave her in the backyard and try to get home as quick as can be.
Actually, Anna’s old crate is still out in back. It’s been sitting out there rusting and collecting leaf litter for the past 10 or 12 years, so it would take some doing to clean it up. Probably not worth the effort, without knowing whether this dog will go in a crate.
Meanwhile, I’m printing up a few flyers to tack up around the park. Don’t have much hope that whoever she belongs to will respond…people dump dogs in this neighborhood all the time. They think because the place is affluent, some rich person will take the dog in and give it a good home. In fact, the rich persons just call Animal Control and have the critters hauled away.
If nobody claims her in a day or so, I guess I’ll have to take her up to the Humane Society. {sigh}
Cary Lockwood, proprietor of Your Auto Network and host of his own radio show on Phoenix’s KXXT, kindly invited Funny to do a segment on his program, Calling All Cars. It aired yesterday, June 19. You can listen to it by clicking here… Or check out Cary’s podcasts over here.
Cary, as you’ll recall, was Funny about Money’s first interviewee for the Entrepreneurs series. That post went over so well it eventually surfaced at the Wall Street Journal site, mostly because Cary’s enterprise and energy are so creative.
It was great fun talking with him. I hope you’ll enjoy the podcast and check out his show.
Hello! If you came here fromCary Lockwood‘s Your Auto Network Calling All Cars, welcome to Funny about Money.
Funny is about Life, the Universe, and All That Money. We talk about subjects having to do with frugality, personal money management, and the real values that matter in life. You might enjoy these posts:
