Coffee heat rising

Recovery? Will even part-time work be there in 2011?

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The county community college district continues to brace for further budget cuts. Enrollment is up 11 percent, since people tend to go back to school when they’re out of work. But that notwithstanding, the state and the counties don’t have enough money to fund basic services. Like education.

By way of enlightenment, we are told by the college’s interim president:

Since FY07 sales tax collections have declined 22%, and personal income tax collections have declined 38%. And since 2004, 144,000 new students have entered the K – 12 system and 475,000 new members have joined AHCCS. On top of this, since 2007, the State has lost 280,000 jobs.

AHCSS is Arizona’s answer to Medicaid; you have to be destitute to qualify. Think of that: well over a quarter of a million jobs lost; almost half a million newly poor.

The state government lives largely on sales tax, which adds about 10 percent to every purchase you make, except for most foods. And except for gasoline and booze: those are even more heavily taxed. Income taxes here are relatively low, but when you add up all the small bites that come from all directions, taxation in general is fairly high. Thus when sales taxes drop by a fifth, that takes away a substantial part of the state’s operating budget, and the loss of almost three hundred thousand salaries since 2007 sure doesn’t help.

About $45 million of the Maricopa County Community College District’s funding comes from the state; that’s about 8 percent. At this point, no one knows what the effect on the district will be. The interim president, who has been attending talks on this issue for the past several days, reports:

Over the last three days, I’ve learned of a range of possibilities including: the district being held harmless (in terms of any reductions) for FY10 and FY11 to the other extreme that if new revenue is not generated (through the planned special election in May), MCCD’s reduction could be as much as $22.5 million.

The “planned special election” asks voters to decide whether taxes should be temporarily increased. Well…all very nice, but if no one has an income and no one’s buying anything, there’s nothing to tax. Also, of course, Arizonans like all Americans know there’s no such thing as a “temporary” tax increase. Once a new tax is in place, it will stay in place. So it’s highly unlikely that this referendum will succeed. They’re also talking about putting a sales tax on food, which apparently does not require a vote of the citizens; that will jack up everyone’s basic survival budget, a politick move, indeed, with hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

So…IMHO, it remains to be seen whether this part-time job I’ve picked up, teaching adjunct at the community colleges, is going to last. Although something like 80 percent of the district’s faculty is part-time, most full-time faculty are tenured. It’s difficult to get rid of tenured full-timers; nothing to get rid of adjuncts. A huge budget cut will result in cuts in the number of classes, increases in class size, and elimination of part-time positions.

The stock market, if no one has noticed, has entered another slow slide. We’re headed back into the 9000s, from what I can tell. If the market doesn’t stay above 10,000 and continue to climb modestly through 2010, my chances of recovering a respectable amount of the money lost in the Bush crash are nil.

It doesn’t bode well.

More Kitchenry

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Frugal Scholar continues her discussion of kitchen renovation with tales of cabinetry discovery.

And check out Hostess of the Humble Bungalow‘s amazing remake, with pictures of the beautiful cabinetry her husband custom-built.

It’s all very  interesting. One commenter at FS remarks on her pleasure at having substituted drawers for all the lower cabinets. I have to say that sure sounds like a great idea. My kitchen has two big lower-cabinet drawers. Because Satan and Proserpine took out about half of the wall cabinets to open up the space between the kitchen and the family room, the remaining upper cabinets are not large enough to to hold my Heath dinnerware. Even though the cabinetry was fairly expensive semicustom Kraftmaid stuff, they just aren’t deep enough to hold a 1970s dinner plate.

But a single big drawer not only holds the plates, it holds two stacks of bowls, the salad plates, and the bread plates: the entire set fits inside one drawer! I’d love to have drawers for the pots and pans, too.

Gas prices edging upward

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Sunday afternoon I dropped by the Costco near M’hijito’s house. The lines at the gas pumps backed up almost to the entrance—a half-dozen waiting customers at every single pump. Sat around for 15 minutes or so (why do I always pick the guy with a megamonster truck who has to refill two extra-large tanks or the old lady who, after pumping gas and paying, has to replace every single item in her capacious purse with engineering precision before she can drive away?), I couldn’t get the damn pump to work, so left without gas.

This didn’t bother me much, because there’s a Costco on the way home from the community college. I figured to fill up on the way home yesterday.

Apparently the reason for the feeding frenzy at the downtown store was the $2.53/gallon price. At the 101 and Cave Creek, Costco was selling gas for $2.59…and that was a dime a gallon below the going price at surrounding gas stations.

Welp. In the new $800/month budget regime, gas purchases are limited to $60 a month, and we’ve seen that can be tight. So instead of filling up, I cut off the pump flow at $30.

Thirty bucks bought exactly one-half tank of gas. The gauge was at 1/4 tank when I pulled up to the pumps. Thirty dollars worth of gasoline filled it to the 3/4 mark.

So, I guess it’s back to hypermiling for moi.

I’m going to try to keep the gasoline expenditures to no more than sixty bucks, which at current prices is one, count it, (1) tankful of gas. This month it ought to be doable, since last week I spent almost all of my Costco budget in restocking my hoard and so I won’t be making any more trips to that place for the next three or four weeks. Still, teaching at Paradise Valley requires three 24-mile round trips a week—almost 75 miles!—and there are no affordable grocery stores on the direct route. To get to a Safeway or a Food City, I have to go a mile out of the way, adding two miles to the homeward trip.

Contemplated whether I could bicycle to Safeway. That would be a six-mile round trip, most of it across hectic main drags populated by homicidal drivers. And I couldn’t carry any more than I could stuff in a backpack. I certainly could walk or bicycle to the Albertson’s or Sprouts, but I don’t feel safe in those stores’ parking lots when I have a layer of steel between me and the aggressive panhandlers and the young thugs with their pants down around their crotches, their gang colors shining loud and clear. The nearest Food City is populated by families, but it also requires four miles of navigating dangerous streets through questionable neighborhoods.

{sigh} Conserving gas ain’t easy when the nearest subsistence shopping isn’t safe for old ladies.

Financial Freedom: Work

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This is the third post in a series about aspiring to Bumhood—that is, achieving financial freedom so you can get off the day-job treadmill and gain control over the way you spend your life. Today let’s talk about gainful employment.

One of my editors at Arizona Highways told me about the anguish he felt during a three- or four-month period of unemployment after he’d been laid off a job. His wife earned a good salary, so it wasn’t that they didn’t have enough to live on. But he felt devalued as a human being. The words he used—I remember them to this day—were “If you don’t have a job, you’re nothing.”

Well, no.

Paid work exists for one reason and one reason only: to put food on the table and a roof over your head. You are not your job!

Some of us feel a calling for certain kinds of work. From the time I was about six years old, I wanted to be an academic, for example (having no clue what that really meant); my ex- always wanted to be a lawyer. Many of these callings are none too profitable: teaching, for example, is poorly paid in relation to the actual number of hours a good teacher puts into the job, and I don’t imagine many clergy or social workers earn much. Some of us still have no idea what we want to do when we grow up, and so have to take whatever job comes along.

Truth to tell, unless we fall into a large inheritance or win the lottery, to achieve financial independence most of us will have to pass part of our adult lives in a day job. We need to earn enough to provide for our children and to establish our own permanent financial security. This will likely entail holding a job for at least 15 or 20 years while at the same time practicing some basic money management.

So…what to do to make a living? Whatever brings in some cash.

Do you need to earn a six-figure income to break free from wage slavery? I don’t think so. Certainly SDXB did not: he was a reporter, and although The Arizona Republic paid a decent wage compared to other publications in this right-to-work state, it still wasn’t great. The period in which he made good pay as a freelance PR man was brief, during the bubble that occurred right before the savings and loan crash, which led to a recession almost on a par with the one we’re seeing now. But he did have an income, and by dint of frugal living and steady investment, he managed to step off the treadmill at 47.

Similarly, the Adirondack Chimney Sweep passed most of his adult life in modestly paid work, but because he lived within his means and had built a small sideline, when the city offered him a buyout long before he’d reached retirement age, he was in a position to accept. A friend of mine cleaned carpets for a living. He retired a millionaire, gave the business to his son, built a beautiful house in the woods, and went fishing.

I believe if you live sensibly, stay out of debt, save regularly, and invest your savings, you can build financial freedom no matter what you earn. I know a corporate lawyer who earns a fine income, but because he never put a high priority on managing his money, he’s still trudging to an office every day—and he’ll be 70 next fall. Others who have held lower-paying jobs as teachers, tradesmen, nurses, or, like my father, merchant seamen have been able to quit working altogether or to start new careers that pay less or interest them more.

There are three tricks to converting a job, any job, into financial independence:

1. Live below your means.
2. Develop more than one income stream.
3. Save and invest all funds not needed to cover living expenses.

Living below your means is going “live within your means” one better: the trick here is to stay out of debt and to live sensibly enough that you don’t spend all your income. Then use your unspent income to build savings. If you have a 401(k) or 403(b) to which your employer is contributing, be sure to take advantage of that. But save more, above and beyond pre-tax contributions from your salary.

As part of his strategy to quit his job at the earliest possible moment, my father never went into debt. Any debt. All the time I was growing up, we lived in rentals. He didn’t buy a house until he had the cash to pay for it in full. Now…he had some ugly reasons for this that had nothing to do with personal finance—I’m not giving his bigoted thinking enough credit to describe it here, except to say it was a symptom of the times in which he grew up—but the practical effect was that all the money that might have gone into house maintenance and mortgage insurance went into his savings, which he invested for the long term. The less debt you carry, so-called “good” debt included, the more you can save.

From my own experience, I can see that having a side income stream is crucial, especially if your day job is modestly paid. Teaching on the side allowed me to pay off the second mortgage on my home a year before the Great Desert University canned me. And, when my beloved employer kindly delivered six months’ notice that my office was to be shut down and I and all my staff thrown into the street, I landed a noonlighting job that allowed me to rack up a $10,000 cushion. It will keep the wolf from the door during this difficult 2010, when Social Security rules will bar me from earning more than a subsistence wage.

I feel extremely lucky (or maybe smart?) that over the years I’ve developed more than one set of marketable skills: I write, I edit, and I teach. Today the three of those allow me to earn salaried income and self-employed income: blogging, freelance editing, and part-time teaching in the community colleges. These will carry me over the period required for my investments to recover the $180,000 lost in the crash of the Bush economy.

At this point, I’m free of the day job, light part-time work will support me without having to draw down my savings, and I have enough independent income to deal with the other baleful result of the late, great economic mirage, an upside-down mortgage on a house my son and I mistakenly thought had fallen in value as far as it would fall at the time we bought it.

Things could be better: to be fully confident of having enough to carry me through old age, I would have preferred to work, save, and invest for another five or six years. But because I’ve lived below my means, invested everything in sight, and cranked extra money on the side, I’m far better off than most single women my age, and I’m clearly in a position to enjoy life without ever having to take on another full-time job.

Financial Freedom

• An Overview
• Education
• Work
• Debt
• The health insurance hurdle
The roof over your head

All Alone and Amok in the Kitchen

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It’s Saturday night and a great deal of work has been done: Blog post written; a jungle of obscure paperwork shoveled off desk, dining-room table, kitchen counter and into wastebaskets or file folders; furniture dusted; floors vacuumed, then floors dustmopped, then floors steam-cleaned; bathrooms cleaned; jeans ironed (yeah…, I know!); stained clothing destained and laundered; dog hair shaken out of bedding; bed made; dog, terrorized by vacuum cleaner and floor steamer, lured back into the house and fed; Mrs. Micah’s miracles observed in awe from afar…ahhh, it’s gone on and on.

So here I am in glorious solitude and ravenous.

The other day I picked up a bag of wild-caught mahi-mahi at the Costco, and that’s what I’ve been craving all through the past workful few hours. Scrounged in the fridge, the freezer, and the backyard: found a little basil, a little tomato, a pile of rice, a bag of peas, a container of blackberries, and w00t! a lifetime supply of pitted kalamati olives. Here’s what came down:

Greek-style Hawaian Fish Filet for One:

You need:

one piece of fish, defrosted
a handful of fresh basil, chopped
one large tomato or about three or four Campari tomatoes, coarsely cut up
about a half-dozen pitted kalamati olives, coarsely chopped
sprinkling of feta cheese

1 cup uncooked converted rice
2 1/2 cups water
butter

frozen peas
more butter

Put the rice on to cook: bring the water to a boil; then add the rice and turn the heat to medium-low. Allow to simmer about 20 minutes, or until the water is absorbed. Then add a blob of butter, enough to make you happy.

Meanwhile,  preheat the oven to 420 or 425 degrees.

Toss the chopped tomato, basil, and olives together. If desired, sprinkle a small amount of salt over this and mix in; but remember that the olives and the feta are salty and so take it easy with this!

Place the fish filet on a baking pan (lazy housecleaners should line the pan with aluminum foil or baking parchment).

Smother the fish with the tomato-olive mix.

Sprinkle some feta cheese over the top. Drizzle some olive oil—about a tablespoon or two—over the entire affair.

Place the fish in the oven and allow to cook until gently done through. No need to overcook.

As the fish comes close to being done, zap the peas and butter in the microwave for about a minute (or less, depending on amount) to defrost and warm.

Arrange these wonderful things attractively on a plate, take to the dinner table, and enjoy!

After gorging on this, prepare dessert:

Incredibly Bad for You Blackberry Delight

a handful of fresh blackberries
turbinado sugar
heavy cream
nutmeg

Place blackberries in a small bowl. Sprinkle crunchy sugar (turbinado sugar) over the top. Pour a generous amount of heavy cream over this. Sprinkle more crunchy sugar over the top, and then sprinkle some nutmeg on top of that. Serve with whatever remains of the wine in your glass or, if you must, a cup of tea or coffee.

Salut!