Coffee heat rising

w00t! Money happens!

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American Express has emitted this year’s rebate: $334 back in my pocket! Took it direct to the credit union after having cashed the voucher at Costco.

Despite the new regime of penury, I decided to try to continue putting $200 a month into a savings account for indulgences and emergencies. This will jack the $400 accrued in January and February up to $734.

I do hope that American Express doesn’t pull the widely favored stunt of instituting an annual fee. I doubt that they will, because this card doubles as a Costco membership card. I think it’s more likely that they’ll get their pound of flesh by persuading Costco to raise  membership fees and then kick the increase back to AMEX.

If they put an annual fee on the charge card itself, then I’ll drop it. If they increase the Costco membership…hmmm. That’s another matter. I do almost all my shopping at Costco. It’s extremely convenient, the gas is cheaper than anyplace else around, and the meat is very high in quality. Plus they sell a brand of jeans that actually fit around my capacious rear end.

All of which could be said to fall under the heading of “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” Why would you drop a rebate card that returns $300 or $400 because the lender starts soaking you for $15? It is kind of stupid, isn’t it…

Well, it’s the principle of the thing: we’re already paying for these cards in the form of increased prices, since the banks charge retailers a stiff transaction fee for the privilege of taking payment in the form of a credit card. The cost is passed along to every consumer, whether or not that consumer pays with a card.

So I think the banks are earning quite enough without adding an extra gouge. If they want to charge users a fee for carrying a piece of plastic around, then they need to remove the transaction fee levied against retailers.

For the nonce, though, money has just happened. And I’m glad enough for that.

🙂

Consumer-Proof Packaging? Make the retailer open it!

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So while I was visiting Costco to collect the AMEX rebate and get some gas, I also picked up some RoC Retinol Correxion Deep Wrinkle Fancy Flashing Lights and Mirrors Face Cream. I’d wanted to get some AlphaHydrox, which (as one might suspect) contains a stiff dose of alpha hydroxyls and did indeed make my ruggedly seasoned face look much better when last I used it. But couldn’t find the stuff at the drugstore on the way from the college to the Costco, so settled for the RoC, which boasts not only alpha hydroxyls but also a retinoid compound. It comes highly recommended by those who claim to be in the know. And it’s made in France. Oooooo! Must be good!

Like the mineral make-up, this set of three small tubes of overpriced face goop also came encased in steely hardened cardboard and impenetrable plastic.

Grrrrr…. To make a point, I asked the check-out dude if someone at the store would please cut the consumer-proof package open, since the last time I bought a package of make-up there I wondered if I was going to slice off a finger before I could get at the stuff.

To my amazement, he whipped out a box cutter and cheerfully sliced all the individual components free from their plastic prison!

Clearly, he was not dealing with the first person to make this demandrequest.

So. Now we know: whenever you are forced to buy items sealed in wretched impossible-to-open packages, ask the store’s staff to open them!

Costco Gas Pumps: Not all created equal

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Good grief! As all of us who live in cities large enough to support two or more Costco stores know, individual outlets of that worthy retailer tailor the merchandise to their surrounding demographics. Although basic supplies stay the same from store to store, the blandishments do not: the fancier the neighborhood, the more variety in choices.

Inside the stores, when any two Costco outlets offer the same products, the prices are the same. But outside? Not so much!

I dropped by the Costco near the college today, partly to cash in this year’s AMEX rebate and partly to see if I could pick a few things missing at own much more downscale store. Yes indeed, they did have the lifetime supply of sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil, MIA here in the ghetto. Not only that, but I picked up a pair of periwinkle blue jeans, unheard of among the working classes.

On the way out, I drove through the gas station. “Through” is the operative word: they wanted $2.55 a gallon, not significantly different from the street price and altogether, IMHO, too much.

From there I had to drive to the credit union at the West campus of GDU, there to deposit the $334 rebate (!) in my savings account. Another Costco outlet is located right on the way, and that one resides in a much scruffier area. Whip into the gas line there, and what do I find on the pump but a price of $2.43!

That’s a twelve-cent-a-gallon difference!

Since I bought 6.355 gallons, I saved almost a dollar (well…76 cents) by moving on down the road a couple of miles. The car was about a third of a tank down, so had I done a complete refill, the savings would have been over two dollah.

All that no-penny-pinching bravura aside…

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Despite imagining that this morning brought some sort of Insight to the effect that I need to quit hanging on to pennies and try to invest something in building my little business enterprises…Jayzus!

This evening at Compline I was reminded that tomorrow we’re supposed to be doing a potluck surprise party for one of the veteran choir members. Oh god. I don’t have any party food and I don’t have any time to fix stuff like that, so that means I’m going to have to go out and buy something, and my grocery budget for this week is spent and then some, since I blew most of my food budget restocking my much-depleted Hoard. By the 21st, when the new February-March discretionary budget cycle started, I was out of everything from beans to toilet paper and so spent two hours at Costco buying everything in sight. Ohhhkayy…

Then I was told that afterward we’re all supposed to go down to Trinity Cathedral to continue the celebration at the concert that’s going on there tomorrow evening.

These concerts happen continuously, and you have to be fairly affluent to be able to drop $20 here, $30 there, and more every time you turn around. I can’t afford to go out to lunch, for godsake, much less trot around town to expensive evenings in performance halls.

{sigh} I was dismayed enough to blurt out that I just couldn’t afford to do that, and I got a look like I was a man-eating whale that had just flopped up the sidewalk on the lam from Sea World.

Well, said they, the cost has been reduced to ten dollars.

Yeah.

And that amount the COBRA bureaucrats told me I’d be paying each month? Wrong! After I went down to the COBRA office and forked over the $313 they announced I was to pay at first of this month, this week they served me with a past due notice for another big chunk of dough and then demanded over $200 for next month’s premium!

That alone might have been manageable, but combine it with the grocery restocking mission and you have…yes! Penury!

Everybody’s got their hand in your pocket. And that also would be OK, if there were something in the pocket for them to lift. But right now they’re scraping out the lint.

What concerns me is that if I take $2,400 out of the money I squirreled away to carry me through this year and to serve as a stopgap when (not if) expensive emergency bills arise, there won’t be enough to protect me.

All it will take is one huge veterinary bill, one spate of dental work, one car accident, one transmission failure, one small housefire, one good storm that blows the devil-pod tree onto the roof and I’ll be screwed. Screwed, screwed, ge-screwèd!

Speaking of dental work, one reason the COBRA bill is so high is that they didn’t cancel the Delta Dental, as I’d asked them to do (because I knew I couldn’t afford it…). Confronted with this little surprise, I decided to keep the coverage—only another two months remain, and I may be fixin’ to extract a fair amount of benefits from that outfit.

They will cover half the cost of a crown. That’s still not enough to keep the dentist from bankrupting you: half the cost of a crown is still $400 or more. But it’s better than the full freight.

I’m still grinding my teeth. Damn it. I thought the tooth-grinding would stop once I got free of the University from Hell. But noooo. Two more molars are cracked, and a crown that was put on another of the molars I split in my exuberant jaw-clenching is broken. So that’s three new crowns I need.

That’s $1500 or $2000 right there, and we’re only in February.

How do I get off this train, anyway?

w00t! March Madness win!

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Hey! Funny about Money won in its first round at Free Money Finance‘s March Madness Competition!

Thanks so much to all of you who voted for Truth, the Highest Thing. This is a great first step toward winning the $500 donation (I hope!) for All Saints.

FMF’s second round is now under way. I’m sure when you consider the sheer number of “games” in each March Madness round, you can extrapolate how much work this project entails. So I hope you’ll participate in each round! The current ones are here.

I have no idea when Funny’s round two entry will come up, but I’ll let you know when it does…and then will hope fervently that you’ll kindly vote again.

🙂

Big-picture thinking and the penny-pincher

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This morning a fresh experience led me to realize that I spend way too much time on penny-pinching and way too little on focusing on the big picture that is my life—or more to the point, that is my earning potential.

Yesterday one of my former students sent me a LinkedIn invite. This caused me to return to that much-neglected site, where I was reminded that an old friend, a graphic artist with whom I worked at Arizona Highways and later through a talent agency I ran, had made himself one of my “contacts.” When I dropped him an e-mail to ask how things were going and mentioned that I’m now free of the Great Desert University, he invited me to join him for breakfast today with a business networking group he frequents. So, as dawn first colored the sky, I was shooting across the city to a Good Egg restaurant in one of Scottsdale’s toniest strip malls.

I arrived early, and since I didn’t want to be first at the trough, I spent 15 minutes or so window-shopping.

In more halcyon times, a colleague and I used to meet about once a month for lunch at the expensive trattoria that forms one of the small gems in this iridescent commercial strip. She has since moved to a historic whaling village in Massachusetts, and I have since taken to clinging to every penny that comes my way, and so I haven’t been back there in a long time. As I strolled past the elegant interior design stores, clothing boutiques, and gift shops, I thought, “Imagine what it would be like to be able to shop in one of these places whenever you feel like it!”

But when my friend and I were hanging out there, I used to shop in those glittery stores every now and again. And before then, when I was married to the corporate lawyer, I could indeed have shopped there any time I felt like it. Yes, it is true that even when my husband was bringing home a generous six-figure salary, I would never have purchased the luminous bedding set, redolent with satin and hand embroidery (if you have to ask, you can’t afford it…but you can be sure it’s more than my entire month’s discretionary budget). However, on my Great Desert University salary I did buy smaller items, which today I would not buy because I wouldn’t spend that much on, say, bubble bath or bathroom towels.

Can’t say I feel any great loss in the absence of these things, but still…the point is, I’ve taken to denying myself a lovely venue to hang out in and also small, not very expensive luxuries.

The meeting soon got under way: about a dozen small-business owners meet once a week to socialize and trade leads. I enjoyed these guys very much (the group was all-male, though they swore a couple of women belonged). They seemed like pretty nice gents, all of them fully engaged in their businesses and their lives. The group offered a number of ideas for expanding and improving on the enterprises I have in hand just now, and believe it or not, I got a lead to a full-time job. My old Arizona Highways pal has become a successful web design artist, and another member bills himself as “The PC Magician.” These two got me thinking about ways to improve and grow FaM.

At the end of the get-together, the group’s president suggested I apply for membership. Dues are $110 upfront and $50 a month, for which you get the pleasure of their company and breakfast every Thursday.

Gulp! thought I: Where the hell am I gonna come up with fifty bucks a month?

The money would have to come out of the S-corp’s checking account. The corporation actually has enough to cover that. But…it only just recently accrued enough to get me out of teaching one section of freshman comp next fall. And oboyoboy, do I want to get out of teaching one section of freshman comp! If I spend the money on socializing, I’ll be stuck with three sections next fall. And that, in addition to adding to the misery quotient, will put me over Social Security’s penurious earnings limit.

However, I did feel the group delivered more than that much in value received. And it really would take only one assignment to pay for it. Or one full-time job, eh?

Driving home, it dawned on me how ridiculous it is to feel I can’t spend $600 a year to belong to a trade group.

And, like the morning star sitting in that early dawn light, the thought also struck me that I don’t need to draw down money from the S-corp to get out of teaching one section of composition. In fact, I would do a great deal better not to do so! It would be far better to use $2,400 of the $10,000 emergency savings cushion, and to use the pretax money in the S-corp to pay for business expenses.

Duh!

The savings fund has already had the tax gouged out of it. The community college is withholding 15 percent of the $2,400 I earn per class, so that third section is actually worth only $2,040. Using after-tax funds I already have would provide an extra $360 to live on. Meanwhile, The Copyeditor’s Desk can pay for anything that’s even vaguely presentable as a business expense with revenues that are effectively tax-free.

This strategy has two other sterling advantages:

• By pushing my earned income below $14,000 in 2010, it would ensure that that I absolutely would not exceed the subsistence wage Social Security allows.

• It would cut my taxes significantly, since my total taxable income would drop well below $30,000.

I came away from the meeting feeling energized and excited about building Funny about Money and The Copyeditor’s Desk into serious money-making operations that might, in the future, support me in the manner to which I wish to become reaccustomed. And in that flush of ambition, I realized that I spend too much energy and time figuring out how I can live on next to nothing, and way too little time developing assets that I already have and that could do a great deal more for me.

Case in point: sitting here in front of the computer shivering with cold because I’ve calculated, penny by penny, how much I need to save on utilities in the winter to pay the exorbitant air-conditioning and water bills next summer.

Why have I spent all that time counting little pieces of copper? Wouldn’t I be a lot better off to invest some money in living normally and to devote that time to marketing FaM, spinning off a book from it, and hustling some more editorial clients?

And why am I wasting my time teaching time-consuming, exploitively underpaid junior-college courses when I can live on cash I already have and use that time to develop the two far more interesting enterprises that have already shown they can generate income?

Why? Because I’ve been obsessively focused on pinching pennies, at the expense of thinking about the big picture!

What’s the big picture? It’s life. And it’s how I can make life in Bumhood comfortable without having to accept insulting wages and without having to deny myself little luxuries like central heat.

And so, my friends, to work. It’s time to jump-start that old entrepreneurial engine and get it running again!