Coffee heat rising

“Check’s in the Mail”: The checks that never return

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About two weeks ago, I e-mailed the credit union to ask if some franked, printed mailing envelopes I had on hand bore an address that was still correct for depositing checks by mail. Several branches had closed since the CU had given me these envelopes, and I wanted to be sure the address remained valid.

Well, no: as a matter of fact it wasn’t. The “Contact Us” people sent me a fistful of new envelopes plus a fistful of deposit slips, with no comment.

The sole convenient aspect of working on the main campus of Arizona State University was that a branch of the credit union resided in the basement of the student union. The West campus, which is closer than Main, also hosts a branch, but it’s not a lot handier to my house than Tempe. Although it’s only a 15- or 20-minute drive away there’s nothing else over in that part of town for me to do: no stores that I frequent other than a Costco that’s even further up the road, a big gasoline-gulp away from the Costco where I normally shop. By the time you’ve made a round trip to nowhere for the privilege of dropping off a few pieces of paper with a drive-up teller, you’ve killed an hour of your time to accomplish rather little. I find that frustrating.

Unfortunately, some clients cannot or will not do direct deposits. I had a check from Google—their online system through which you can request direct deposit doesn’t work any better for me than for the many other people who complain that it doesn’t work—a dividend check from a limited partnership, and a check from a publisher, amounting in total to about $500. Having many other things to do other than drive an hour to shuffle paper, I used one of the credit union’s self-addressed envelopes and a deposit slip to send them in.

Bad. Never do that.

The checks are now lost in the mail or at the credit union. It’s been two weeks, and there’s no sign of them.

Day before yesterday, I called the credit union and explained that I had dropped the envelope in the mailbox outside the local post office a long time ago and would like to know if the checks were in transit somewhere in their office. The answer was no; their customer disservice rep asked me to go to the post office and ask if they could trace the lost mail. I said I couldn’t imagine they would be able to find one piece of mail among the millions of envelopes that pass through their system. He said well, that was the policy.

So yesterday I traipsed over to the post office, waited a good 20 minutes in line, and told a P.O. customer disservice rep this story. She shrugged. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” said she, quite predictably and quite reasonably.

“Why do you suppose companies tell people to go to the post office and ask about lost mail,” said I, “when it’s pretty obvious that there’s no way you find one envelope among a zillion?”

“I don’t know,” said she, “but they do it all the time!”

So, five hundred dollars worth of checks for deposit are lost. I called the partnership and the publisher, each of whom said they’d try to stop payment on the checks. Apparently if someone has already cashed them, I’m just out the money.

Where the Google payment is concerned, I’m probably going to have to eat that. AdSense has exactly zero customer service. There’s simply no way to reach a human being. Every question is referred to Google’s uninformative website.

At that website, you find an option to cancel payment for a check that hasn’t arrived. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell them that they need to stop payment on a check that has arrived but has been damaged or lost. To put through a stop-payment order, I would have to lie and say the check never reached me. But it in fact did reach me, and I endorsed it and tried to deposit it.

Google moves with the speed of a galloping snail when it comes to dealing with customer issues. It also is notorious for canceling people’s accounts arbitrarily for any real or imagined offense. Obviously, if the check reaches the credit union before Google gets around to stopping payment on it, Google’s people (if there are any) will think I’m trying to steal $157 from them. So, rather than having the whole Google lash-up canceled just as it’s beginning to earn a little money, I guess I’m just going to have to let it go.

Makes me mad as a cat!

At any rate, the moral of the story is simple: Never send checks to the bank in the mail.

Money Happens: Planning ahead through 2011

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Reviewing the first quarter of post-Canning Day finances, I’m amazed to discover that I’ve not been spending as much money as I budgeted, and not anything near the amount that’s been flowing into the checking account. In fact, on average I’ve spent about $1,100 a month less than income!

The reason for this, of course, has been the part-time teaching, which will end in May and bring in nothing for two and a half months, when expenses rise into the stratosphere.

But…but my $805/month nondiscretionary budget, which includes those soon-to-be-stratospheric utility bills, is based on the bloated summer rates. So in theory, as long as I stay within the discretionary spending budget of $800, even in the summertime I shouldn’t be spending much more than $1,600 a month. In June and July, my income will drop to about $1,390 a month (maybe less, if I put my latest scheme in action—see below). That’s about $210 short. But with $3,400 sitting there from the first-quarter budget underruns, in theory it shouldn’t matter. Those two unpaid and two underpaid months would eat up only about $420 of the three thousand bucks residing there from the first quarter.

Here’s how this shakes out:

Yipe! The average monthly net left in my checking account, income minus expenses, has exceeded $1,100 a month!

Part of this happened because Social Security has been dragging its feet on withholding income tax from the benefit it’s paying. I’ve now asked three times and am assured that in April my SS payment will be $1,008, down from $1,257.

So, in April Social Security income drops about $250; in May teaching income drops in half and in May and June drops to zero. In August teaching income starts up again, with one paycheck that month, two a month from September through November, and one again in December. Net Fidelity income is $389 a month, giving me a net income of about $1,389 in June and July. For the entire year 2010, the result looks like this:

Can that possibly be correct? This suggests that teaching 3 and 2 and collecting $385 net a month from the Fidelity 403(b) will leave me with a surplus of over $9,000 at the end of the year!

Amazing, isn’t it…

Well, the state General Accounting Office demanded that I take a drawdown from my Fidelity 403(b), lest my request to collect my RASL be rejected. This worked contrary to my purposes, because that money needed to be left in investments in hopes that during the time I still have the strength to work, it will recover some of the losses incurred during the crash of the Bush economy. So I asked for $500, the least I thought I could get away with. The net on that is $389 a month.

The fact is, now that the first of the three annual RASL payouts has been approved and transferred to my keeping, it’s unlikely the RASL administrator is going to notice what’s going on with my drawdown. So, I’m thinking I should continue to draw down $500, but have only $100 deposited in checking, rolling over the remainder to my big IRA, which is professionally managed and doing quite well. Another advantage of this strategy is that it would drop my gross income into a lower tax bracket and might insure that none of my Social Security would be taxed at all.

To get 100 after-tax dollars in my sweaty little hand, I’d have to ask for a $125 transfer to checking (i.e., $125 – 20% tax = $100). This would leave $375 a month to roll into the IRA: $4500 a year. It would look like a $500-a-month distribution, but in fact the lion’s share would be extracted from the plain-vanilla 403(b)  into my better-managed IRA with no tax consequences.

In terms of my cash flow, what would happen? Collecting $100 instead of $389 a month would remove $2,601 ($289 x the remaining 9 months) from the bottom line above for 2010:

Okay. So, what if I cut Fidelity income to $100 a month for the entire year of 2011? Could I survive? Let’s assume a 3% inflation rate for expenses, since everything but our paychecks is going up fast. In this scenario, I again teach 3 & 2 instead of 3 & 3:

Huh. Almost $5,000 left at the end of the year. These figures translate to after-tax funds I can use to pay toward my share of the mortgage ($9,000 a year) in 2011 and 2012, delaying serious drawdowns from retirement savings another two years!

So, if there’s that much play in the budget, why on earth am I working at all? What would happen if I didn’t teach in 2011 but instead collected the net $389 on a $500 monthly drawdown from Fidelity?

Yes. The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., would earn enough to cover the shortfall and more over the course of a year. As we come to the end of the first quarter, the corporation is holding $2,218, and I’m doing precious little freelance work! Net after a 20% tax payout would be $1,774. That’s for a single quarter in which I’ve made no effort to find work.

Teaching one section would net $1,920, more than enough to break even.

I have to ask you, isn’t that the most amazing thing you ever saw? I can’t believe my expenses are that low in this four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre with a big pool and a forest of fruit and ornamental trees.

And yes, it has occurred to me to wonder if I’m being too frugal here. Surely I can afford to get my hair done by a better stylist than the $30 guy—last week he left me with a tuft sticking out at the neckline and a kind of box-like cap on top. Possibly I can afford to buy some clothes somewhere other than Costco. Or, who knows? Maybe I could even afford a cell phone.

I don’t feel like my life is pinched. I still shop at AJs and Whole Foods; I still buy plants at the fanciest nurseries in town. So…is this money happening, or what?

The Three A.M. Waltz

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God, how I hate waking up in the wee hours of the morning! Is anything, anything more annoying and frustrating?

I’m so tired I’m almost sick, and I can. not. sleep. Part of it is worrying about losing a chunk of cash in the mail just when I have to get a new crown…that money would have about paid for the dental work. Now I’ll have to raid savings to cover it. Part of it is worrying about how I’m going to get another raft of papers graded around the mass of choir rehearsals and performances that will occupy the rest of this week. Part of it is being pissed at having to get my teeth crowned as a result of all the bruxing I do out of stress and frustration. (LOL! “Why do the heathen grind their teeth?”) Part of it is worrying whether the IRS got my tax payment, since that went out in the same mail as the lost checks. Part of it is annoyance that Fidelity’s online statements are not current and that there’s no way to figure out which of the several accounts they’ve got up there corresponds to the money fund for which I have a book of checks, one of which I used to pay my taxes. Part of it is that it’s going to rain again, so the air is a little humid and vaguely uncomfortable. Part of it is disappointment that (I think) Funny lost the current March Madness round at Free Money Finance. Part of it is hunger. And part of it is just old-lady insomnia.

Yesh. At 9:30 this morning—now only five hours away—another mountain of muzzy student papers will come to light on my desk. The day will be occupied with classes through 1:45, at which point I have to drive to Costco for gasoline. Then it’s off to rehearsal.

This week the choir had rehearsals last night and has another rehearsal tonight, a performance tomorrow night, rehearsals and performance Friday, rehearsal and performance Saturday, rehearsal and two performances Sunday. When exactly I’m going to find time to read the mountain of student papers, to say nothing of my client’s first two draft chapters, I do. not. know!

Yesterday I didn’t get to his dissertation because I spent the most of the day writing the post that will come online in about two hours and arguing with the credit union and the post office. This morning at three o’clock I was in no condition to edit copy. And still am not: I’ve killed the last hour and forty-five minutes writing posts to cover the next two days.

Let’s see… 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., that’s four hours. It’s now  almost 5 o’clock. If by some miracle I can get back to sleep until seven, maybe I could eke a full six hours out of the night before I have to go to class.

And so, to bed…

Vote now if you haven’t yet!

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FMF reports that he will name a winner of the current round tomorrow, Wednesday. If Funny makes it through this one, then we’ll be at the final, championship round! So that would give us a nice chance at winning $500 and clinch a $300 donation for the All Saints Choir.

If you haven’t voted in this round, it would be mighty lovely if you would. Just go here and, to vote for Funny, enter the word “Truth” in a Comment.

🙂

General quotidian miseries

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{grump!} It’s not like I didn’t have enough screwing around to have to do…

Apparently the Post Office lost an envelope sent to the credit union containing three checks, one for my personal account and two for the Copyeditor’s Desk account. It was a printed envelope from the credit union, so the address was correct, and I distinctly remember checking to be sure each item in the the fistful of mail I stuffed in the mailbox had a stamp on it. So I guess all those checks are just gone. Today I’ll have to call the issuers and tell them to stop payment and send me new checks.

Problem is, one of them came from Google Adsense, where it is dead impossible to reach a human being. The only way to make Google reissue a check will be to go to a particularly annoying, frustrating website and claim never to have seen the thing. Doing that will mean

a) I’ll have to lie, because I most certainly have seen and endorsed the damn thing, and
b) it will be another two months before I get another payment.

Problem with using the Google web annoyance is that if I claim not to have received the check and then it arrives at the CU and gets deposited, then it will look like I’m trying to steal from Adsense. Google is notoriously inclined to simply cut off customers it thinks aren’t dealing straight with Adsense. So, I guess the better part of valor is just to eat the $157.

Damn it. The specific reason I did this was that it is a freaking hassle to drive way to hell and gone to the West campus just to deposit a couple of checks. It consumes gas unnecessarily, and it expends pretty close to an hour of my time. The West campus stands in the middle of a down-at-the-heels bedroom community with no commerce where I might get any other errands done while I’m over there. I take that back: there’s a Costco in that general direction, but it’s an extra stretch and more wasted gasoline up the freeway, and a Lowe’s and a Home Depot at the freeway intersection. Not that I shop at either of those places much anymore.

So, to avoid hassle I’ve brought a basketful of extra hassle down on my head.

But the big concern about this is that when I drove over to the nearby post office and dropped that envelope in the mailbox, I also mailed my tax returns. Yesh. Both the personal and the corporate returns. For both the state and the feds. And I sent Tax Lady her payment in the same outgoing mail drop.

It looks like TL cashed at least one of her checks, the one I wrote on the corporate checking account; the second was written on a Fidelity money market account, along with the check to cover the federal tax. So if she got her envelope, presumably the Post Office didn’t lose everything I tried to send that day. I’ll have to get into the Fidelity account online—another fine little hassle—to see if the feds have cashed the check for their pound of flesh.

Where the PO is concerned, I’m afraid I can’t call any kettles black. I add my own extravagant incompetence to everyone else’s. It’s a wonder the human race gets anywhere at all.

Yesterday in my senility I utterly FORGOT that the 101 students were supposed to be at the library hearing a talk from our most accomplished and lively librarian! We blew away an hour and a half chatting about research methods in the classroom, and none of  us, not a one, remembered that we were supposed to be elsewhere. That was because…

a) I had totally spaced any memory of this appointment; and
b) When I posted an announcement to the young things in BlackBoard, I forgot to hit “e-mail to all recipients,” and, as usual, none of them checked the class announcements board.

So, this truly wonderful librarian showed up in the computer classroom and stood around for half an hour wondering where the hell we were.

Arghhhh!

Yesterday, too, I had such a blinding headache I began to wonder if I was having a stroke. It actually made me dizzy…felt like I was listing to the right as I was trying to drive and walk. Wasn’t, though; it just felt that way.

And of course in this general state of misery I had a meeting before classes and then had to drive from North Phoenix to South Scottsdale after spending four hours in front of classrooms full of late-stage adolescents. There Poisoned Pen Press gratefully accepted the novel I’d just finished editing but had no new work for me.

Fortunately I have some paying work to do today…though I will say, I don’t feel like doing any work, much less of the paying variety.

Driving from pillar to post yesterday, I was regaled by Tony Judt’s unholy tale of his trials with ALS on NPR’s Fresh Air. It’s a gut-wrenching story. You’d like to say you can’t even imagine what it would be like to live through such a horror and then die of it. But you can: Judt describes it with vivid clarity.

It’s one of those moments that brings to mind one’s own mortality. Please, God, let me drive my car off a cliff, let me die in a plane crash, let me drop dead of a heart attack. I think if I received a diagnosis like that, the first thing I’d do is pick up my father’s pistol and blow my brains out. Judt at least has his family around him and apparently has the resources to hire in-home nursing care. I have no one but my son, who has to work and could not devote three to ten years to caring for a dying woman. He would have to leave me to waste away alone in a nursing home.

Having chosen not to exit pursued by a bear, Judt—an eminent historian—has written a new book addressed largely to young people, Ill Fares the Land. The NPR site features an interesting out-take from its introduction. Says he:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears ‘natural’ today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

Just so.

The news of the day continued with reports of crazed right-wingers planning to murder police officers and foment a rebellion against the federal government. That, to my mind, is far scarier than anything our enemies among the fundamentalist Moslems can do. IMHO, unless something is done about the growing schism in this country, within 20 to 50 years we will be looking at civil war.

To top it all off, I got a truly nasty e-mail from someone on the choir informing me she doesn’t know who I am and does not care to hear anything from me. F*** you very much.

Sometimes I get out of patience with life.

w00t! We’re at the FINAL FOUR round!

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Wow! Thanks to the kindness of Funny’s readers, a great raft of choir members, and every friend new and old I can pester, we’ve reached the “Final Four” round of Free Money Finance’s March Madness contest!

This means that Funny is getting very close to winning $300 or $500 for All Saints’ wonderful choir! I wish you could all be here to enjoy the amazing music that has graced the Lenten and holy week season. This church’s music program is one of the city’s most radiant cultural gems. And the church itself engages in a wide span of good works that care for people from childhood through old age.

So, please be sure to go to the current FMF March Madness round and vote for Funny’s post, “Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep.” Every vote for “Truth” is a vote to keep music a vibrant part of our cultural lives.

Here’s a video of Karl Jenkins speaking about his Stabat Mater, which we’ll will be singing for Easter. You can get a flavor here of this amazing vocal tour de force.

Vote!