The City of Phoenix, strapped to the point of having to lay off firefighters and police officers, has decided to institute a sales tax on food sold in grocery stores, which we’ve never had before. The new bite will be 2 percent, added on top of the existing 8.3 percent tax we pay on every other retail item.
This will raise our retail tax, effectively, to 10.3 percent.
Doesn’t stop there, though: the state is about to float a referendum asking taxpayers to approve a “temporary” (har har!) 3 percent sales tax. This would raise our extra gouge in the grocery store to 15.3 percent!!!!
Holy mackerel.
It could pose a bit of a problem for me. Depending on how you look at the post-canning finances, over the course of a year, either I have almost no wriggle room or I have a fair amount of budgetary play. Because I don’t know which and will not know until a year passes and I see what happens, the only responsible tack I can take is to assume the worst: a very tight budget, indeed. In that case, an abrupt jump in costs for food and daily necessities could be a headache of marathon migraine proportions.
The only way for me to cope with an increase like that will be to ask SDXB to buy my food and household goods at the commissary and base exchange, where he pays no taxes.
This will be extremely inconvenient, because it will mean a) I will have to wait on his convenience, and he only shops about once a month; and b) I’ll have to drive way to Hell and gone out to Sun City to pick up my groceries. There’s also the issue that SDXB, being the extremely manly sort, doesn’t pay any excess of attention to what the Little Woman wants. I can ask him to get X and only X, and I’ll end up with Y because he decides to substitute something he thinks is just as good or to buy me something that I explicitly say I don’t want. He doesn’t see any reason, for example, why anyone needs soft toilet paper and absorbent paper towels, and so when I ask for Charmin’ and Viva I get cheap TP in short rolls with the texture of newsprint and cheap paper towels perforated every six inches that are about as absorbent as wax paper.
While he can get me into the BX if he’s not dragging New Girlfriend around, he can only take a certifiable wife into the commissary. Fortunately, NG has a place in Colorado and so is gone a lot. Also, these serial girlfriends never last very long, so I don’t expect she’ll be barring the door to the BX forever. In theory, I could go out to the base with him and buy household goods in the BX and then send him to the commissary to pick up food.
First crack out of the box this morning, it was off to the credit union at the (relatively) nearby West campus, there to hand-deliver 15 pages of paperwork.
Well over a month ago, M’Hijito and I had asked to negotiate a loan modification of the downtown house’s mortgage. They asked for evidence of every deep breath we’d taken within the prior 30 days, which after much thrashing around we scraped together into a big digital pile and e-mailed to them.
Well, this mound of debris reached the loan lady one day after the credit union outsourced its loan management. So now, instead of the six-day turnaround on a decision we had been promised, we were told there would be a one-week “blackout” on all information coming from this outfit, and that after that…they had no idea what would happen.
Weeks went by: nothing.
So I called Loan Lady the day before yesterday and asked her voicemail if I was correct in assuming that silence means “no deal,” since we would need to figure out how to pay the mortgage or decide whether we should take a walk, given last month’s munificent earned income of $161.
Within hours, comes a call from Higher-Up Loan Lady, who says that the credit union is “taking some loans back in-house,” among them ours, and would we please send the entire mound over again, only add written proof that I actually was canned and update several other documents, now gone stale. Translation: “we lost your documents.”
Of course, the fuck-you-very-much announcement on ASU letterhead was not in digital form. The new printer/scanner refused to scan it. So that made it impossible to e-mail the new pile of junk, which took a good half-day in the collecting and updating. The new printer/scanner doesn’t have a FAX, and even the old printer/scanner/FAX machine would not talk to Cox’s modem and so would not have sent a FAX anyway. She suggested I either mail it (about $2.00 worth of postage) or take it to the credit union and get them to FAX it.
I chose the latter. This ensured that someone there actually saw to it that the documents went through, and they gave me the printout of confirmation showing the stuff reached Higher-Up Loan Lady. The cost of the gas to drive over there—about $2.53—was probably as much as or more than the cost of postage, but at least it ensured that the pile of paper didn’t disappear again.
Despite the annoying waste of time and gasoline, this junketdid allow me to take advantage of a serendipitous occurrence of the Money Happens phenomenon.
A few weeks ago, a client gave me a $25 gift card to Fry’s grocery stores, a nice little under-the-table lagniappe. I never shop at Fry’s, because the two stores in my general vicinity are located in pretty threatening neighborhoods. After the manager of the restaurant in the Fry’s shopping center at 19th and Glendale was murdered by thieves, I quit going there. On the way to ASU West, though, I passed a store in a working-class neighborhood that looked pretty safe, and so decided to spend the money there.
Not bad. For $20 I nabbed milk and eggs with which to make some excellent biscuits for breakfast, a small stoneware bowl of the sort I’ve been needing for a while, a bag of chunk hardwood charcoal, and some produce. The pork, much needed for Cassie, was ten cents a pound higher than Safeway’s, so I passed on that. But I did find a pair of kitchen tongs with handles, not those chopsticks on a spring that are currently popular. Real tongs have have turned into a hard-to-to-find item, as I discovered when my ancient pair wore out.
Yesterday I had a meeting that took place after I finished teachingin the middle of the afternoon. Because I couldn’t afford to have lunch out even if there were something available on the campus that I’d want to eat, by the time I stumbled in the door I was dead starved. It was evening by the time I’d fed myself and the dog taken the dog for the required doggy-walk and added more acid to the pool. Then I had to wrestle with the mountain of paperwork (above). After that was ready to go, I
was sooo tired I sat down to relax by working on a pencil drawing I started yesterday. The next time I lifted my head, it was quarter to eight and I was an hour late to choir practice.
Started to climb into the car to race down to the Cult Headquarters, but with the garage door open and the engine on, I realized I just couldn’t do it. So went back in the house and missed practice. Now I’ll be in the doghouse again. Oh well.
My beleaguered former RA, who lives just a few blocks from me, was burgled last Sunday. They stole all her jewelry—most of it sentimental gifts from her mother with little monetary value—and her husband’s laptop. {sigh} This neighborhood is under siege from the cockroaches who inhabit the tenements across 19th Avenue. Burglaries are as common as falling leaves around here. I’m almost inclined to go back up to the pound and see if that fake “bloodhound” is still there. Whatever he was, he was no bloodhound. Neither did he appear to have any pit bull in him. But he was big enough to mean business, or at least to look like he might.
I don’t know. I can’t afford another dog. Just feeding me and little 25-pound Cassie is a challenge. On the other hand, I can’t afford to be burglarized, either.
Speaking of the neighborhood, when I got home late yesterday afternoon a carpet cleaning crew was over at Biker Boob and Bobbie McGee’s house, overseen by a hulking bruiser of a man swaggering around in a wife-beater. Turns out said bruiser was a great big, charming gay guy who is a Realtor. He strolled over to introduce himself and say Boob and Bobbie are history and he’s putting the house on the market. He’s asking $239,000, substantially less per square foot than the $285,000 our local Real Estate Empress is trying to get for the same model two blocks to the north and west. He said the place is in pretty bad shape and needs a lot of fix-up.
Not surprising.
As sweet as Queer John was, at one point he had five men living in there with him. (QJ was the original renter, an affable little guy but pretty nuts.) After QJ was chased down in a dramatic pursuit through the neighborhood and hauled off by a team of five cruisersful of cops, he was replaced by Biker Boob and his lady, Bobbie McGee, a raunchy cowgirl given to dumping car trunkloads full of mystery garbage in the big trash bin behind my house and Sally’s. We figured if whatever she was stuffing in there (neither of us cared to tear open the bags to see what it was) couldn’t go into the bin behind her house, it probably wasn’t supposed to go into the city garbage bins at all.
According to Zillow, $239,900 is what the present owner, who lives in upstate New York, paid for that house in 2004. He must figure the market has recovered enough to unload an ill-advised investment. Let’s hope he’s right!
While fooling with the Excel files yesterday by way of cranking the new reports the CU wanted, I made an interesting little discovery.
In January, I only spent $1,698. Multiply that by 12 and you get an estimated 2010 expenditure of $20,376. Optimistic, to be sure—summer power bills will raise that by about $200 a month, adding approximately $800 to the projected total: $21,176.
But if you include the tiny drawdown I’m taking from ASU’s 403(b) plan so as to qualify for the state’s sick leave payment (the net is only $385 a month), you come up with this net income:
“Pension” net: $385 x 12 = $4,620
Social Security net: $1,000 x 12 = $12,000
Net teaching income: $14,400 – 25% = $10,800
$4,620 + $12,000 + $10,800 = $27,420, projected net income
$27,420 – $21,176 = $6,244 positive cash flow for 2010
That’s a far cry from the $1,400 year-end balance I estimated by manually adding up all my projected costs, month by month, and subtracting them, month by month, from projected income (and, during the summer, nonincome).
So far I haven’t been able to account for the difference. I think I’ve included all predictable costs. The $1,698 January expenditure includes the $314 I had to cough up for COBRA, significantly more than either COBRA or Medicare will cost after this. The only thing I can imagine is that my month-by-month estimates of what the community college will pay must be wrong. But they couldn’t possibly be wrong by $4800…that doesn’t make sense.
Time will tell. If the shorthand calculation turns out to be correct, maybe I won’t have to teach three-and-three!
So, in the first month of unemployment, how did the budget fare?
Net income was $550.32.
Net outgo (including $325 to the self-escrow account for homeowner’s insurance, auto insurance, and property taxes, and $200 to monthly savings) was $1,636. Since that $200 to savings didn’t actually go away, we could say net outgo was really $1,436.
January’s cash flow: –$886
{sigh}
Well, it’s not as dire as it looks. First, I have a $10,000 cushion, so I’m not bouncing any checks yet. Second, I started with $$4,500, the amount accrued by December 31 from my last paycheck and vacation pay. So in terms of dollars that were actually in the account, we have $4500 + 550 – 1436, allowing us to argue with some plausibility that the actual cash flow was a positive $2,514.
The problem with that argument, of course, is that we now have used up almost half the original bankroll, and we still don’t know whether enough cash will come in to cover expenses.
I have yet to see a Social Security check. Because I have no accurate way of knowing what the tax gouge will be, I can only estimate that it will be around $1,000. But in every other case so far, the estimated tax bite of 20% has been a bit on the optimistic side.
And I still have no idea what a full paycheck from the community colleges will look like. January’s munificent net of $161 (!!) was for only two sections, since one started “late”—a week after the first day of classes. And it was, I think, for only one or two days of each section. I had hoped that the fare for three sections would be around $800 to $900. Two of those a month would keep the wolf from the door, and if I actually manage to keep my expenses around $1,400 to $1,600, during the few months when the college is disbursing two full paychecks, it would cover almost all my expenses. The Social Security money, then, could go into savings to cover the high-cost summer months and the six-week winter break.
In the fall, one of my classes is an eight-week session. This means that for half the semester, I will be paid for only two sections; in the other half, I’ll be paid for three sections, with one at an accelerated schedule. Net pay over 16 weeks will be the same, but for half the 16 weeks, I’ll be just barely scraping by.
Clearly, the strategy of cobbling together a living from several piddly sources is not something that can be done without a substantial base to use as a cash cushion. If no major expenses happen, at the end of the year I’ll probably come out about even, maybe as much as a thousand dollars ahead. But it’s going to be close. Very close.
And the car, house, and pool had better keep running without a hitch…
So, after class yesterday afternoon it was off to the downtown offices of the Arizona Department of Administration, there to try to unknot the COBRA mess. This racked up an extra 28 miles on the car’s odometer, draining the gas tank to the point where I needed a refill.
A very nice representative greeted me at the desk. She again informed me I was not registered for COBRA, and after some discussion we ascertained that yes, I am trying to get the hell onto the COBRA rolls. Somehow. Anyhow. Please. With no more runarounds.
She decided that the amount I owed was not $334 but a mere $313. That was nice, since it will cover me through January to the end of February. Earlier reports suggested that I’d be paying $185 a month to continue in my $36/month EPO and continue Delta Dental’s coverage.
The reason for the apparent discount, it develops, is PeopleSoft’s having kept me on the payroll (without pay) until January 10. Since I remained in the records as an ASU employee into January, ASU’s regular healthcare policy covered me until then. So I got 10 days off the fee for January.
The new $186/month premium will cover health insurance only. After January’s $161 paycheck from the community colleges, obviously I can’t afford the extra $12/month to continue the dental care coverage.
Did I get a receipt for the check I forked over? No.
Did I get a contract or a policy in exchange for the check I forked over? No.
Did I get any evidence whatsoever that I’m enrolled in this program? Not exactly.
She xeroxed the dear-sir-you-cur letter I’d written describing the endless runarounds I’ve been given and asking to be enrolled with no further contradictory stories, appending the check to the bottom the copy of page 2. At the bottom of the page 2-&-check photocopy, she wrote “paid” and the amounts that were owing for January and February.
Whether that will hold any water if push ever comes to shove, I do not know. Whether I will ever see a policy, an insurance card, or any other evidence that I’m actually covered, I do not know.
When I remarked, in summary of the dear-sir-you-cur, that no two of the many people I’d spoken to had given me the same story, she replied, sweetly, that I seemed to be a great deal less confused than most folks who came into the office.
On my old street, just two blocks north of the present palatial dwelling, five houses have gone up for sale. One is my favorite model in this development, and it’s offered through the dominant Realtor in our area.
She was having an open house yesterday, so I dropped by to say hello and check out the place…and, of course, to find out how much she thought she could get for it.
It is a beautiful house. She said the sellers are the original owners, but it sure didn’t have that stale original-owner look to it. All the cabinetry has been replaced with high-quality new cabinets, the expansive countertops (this model has a huge kitchen) remade in granite, the floors paved with a particularly handsome hard-fired tile. The yard is very attractive; a bay window was added to the breakfast room, a new master bedroom extends into the huge backyard, and the pool has been “dry-docked”; i.e., put to sleep and covered with a large, expensive-looking deck. All in all, to die for.
Asking price is $285,000. The Realtor said that works out to $117 per square foot.
Out comes the calculator!
That model was SDXB’s. Without the extra bedroom, his house was 2,100 square feet. In the same year I bought my present home, he sold his for $229,00. That was just at the start of the bubble, long before anyone realized how fast prices were about to run up.
At $117 a square foot, his house would theoretically be worth $245,700 today. Not bad.
My house, however, would only be worth $217,620; I paid $232,000 for it. So it’s still down $14,380 off its proto-bubble price. Better than it was—for a while, the house’s value had dropped to around $180,000. Today Zillow prices it at $236,000, but IMHO a house, like any object, is worth what someone will pay for it. If our Realtor’s estimate is right (she does tend to underprice, but she’s been around for a long time), then at a 3% per year increase, the house’s value will come back to what I paid for it in a little over two years.
