Coffee heat rising

Charging Costs to Your In-Home Business

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So over at the Depot I got these nifty (read “cheap”) motion-sensitive coach lights for the front of the house. Yesterday Dave the Electrician came over, hard-wired them, and got them working right. The equally cheap nifty lights I installed when I moved in here five years ago are crumbling away under the radioactive Arizona sunlight.

But more to the point, the  house has been rewired by some moronic former owner so that two of the three lights in front have to be turned on from inside the garage. When the house was built, one switch next to the front door turned them all on. Why anyone would change this escapes me. I suspect it was Satan and Proserpine‘s idea. “Green” was their affectation, and one way they liked to manifest that was with few and dim lights. As long as he was dorking with the electric (for reasons unknown, Satan imagined he was a great electrical handyman) (don’t ask about the DIY 220-volt outlet!), he probably figured he could save electricity by wiring two of the lights into the garage, thereby allowing him to turn on only one light to cut down lawsuits from evening guests tripping over the threshold.

Which brings us to the day’s point: Can I get away with having the S-corporation pay for the new fixtures?

I believe I can. Here’s why:

1. The office, which has a hardened lock on a solid-core door, is now accessible by burglars only through a front window. This window is lighted solely by the front lights. The nearest street lamp is on the other side of the house, and the trees in the front yard shelter the office window from easy view. Thus at night access to the office is facilitated by darkness.

2. The only things of value in the building are inside the office, which, in my absence, is otherwise locked behind a contraption designed to break a burglar’s drill bit—or his foot, should he try to kick his way in.

• I have no jewelry of any note. My baubles by and large come from the craft store.
• The sound system is an ancient stereo that no one would pay money for today.
• The television is an old TV/computer monitor my son had in San Francisco, tiny and antique. At a yard sale it would bring about ten bucks.
• The furniture is 50 years old. It does not qualify as “antique.” It qualifies as “used furniture.”

3. Besides the fact that the only marketable goods in the house are inside the office, the entire value of my business consists of the data stored on its computer, external hard drive, and flash drives. The very existence of the S-corp would be put at risk if someone came in the office’s window and cleaned out all the electronic gear.

4. The neighborhood is under siege from burglars and home invaders. I can prove this by the constant stream of alerts, warnings, and reports from the police and the head of the neighborhood association.

5. Therefore, installing security lights on the front of the house is crucial to maintaining the security and integrity of the business.

These little lights, which probably will last about as long as the crumbling cheapies they replaced, are great. If anybody comes up to the front of the house, they pop on, so that I can look out a window and actually see who or what is out there.

In the previous regime, if I heard something in the night I could only turn on one light, which did not illuminate the courtyard. There’s no way I’m going to walk into the garage to turn on the other two lights, not if there’s even the remotest possibility that someone’s prowling around outside. The garage has a side door. Even though I put a security door over it, I have to go in and out that side very morning to water the plants, and half the time I forget to flip the deadbolt shut when I come back in. Sometimes I re-enter the house through the back door and forget to close the security door altogether. So, in the middle of the night, opening the door from the kitchen to the garage is an invitation for the burglar to come right in.

Lights that come on automatically if there’s anyone sneaking around out there will allow me to see the person and call 911. And they should deter burglars from breaking in the office window when I’m out.

I like these, because they’re open on the bottom, allowing me to change the bulb without having to deconstruct the whole fixture. Amazon has a cheaper motion-sensitive coach light, but you have to take it apart to change the bulb. That entails work, which goes against my principles.

Now, while it’s true that the new fixtures light the residential part of the house as well as the room devoted to the office, the fact is the only things of any value inside the house are in the office, and if those things are lost, the corporation goes bust. So, I think it’s reasonable to argue that the fixtures can be expensed through the corporation.

How volunteering can help your business

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Little knowing what I was getting into, a while back I agreed to help with the program for the Arizona Bach Festival, a new musical series featuring internationally known classical musicians and the Grammy Award-winning Phoenix Chorale. When I said “help,” I was thinking “editorial help.” But what really happened was that I got volunteered to sell ad space for the program.

Well, of course, I don’t know the first thing about ad sales. But we just made our first sale! w00t!

In theory I’ve been offered a small commission on each sale, but in fact I plan to donate the proceeds back to the festival or to All Saints, whose music director is one of the moving forces behind this event.

Even though I’m just getting started, it’s already easy to see that I’m getting a great deal more benefit from this experience than a 15 to 25 percent commission. In fact, it’s forcing me to go out into the community and meet people—businessmen and women who can use my services and are likely to actually pay for them. How will this help The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.?

Let me count the ways:

• Renew and re-establish old business relationships
• Join or rejoin trade groups I’d allowed to languish
• Take time to talk with people whose friendships I’ve neglected
• Remind old friends that I’m still looking for business
• Find new opportunities to market my business as well as theirs

Just about any time you get out of your cave, it’s good for business. A couple of months ago, I volunteered to edit the Arizona Book Publishers Association newsletter. When the group announced on its website that I’ll be taking over with this issue, right off the bat someone e-mailed me asking if we would do editorial work for an offshore fulfillment house.

Business—that is, making money—is about getting to know people. So is volunteering. The two work hand-in-hand.

Student Performance: Is there any question?

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Lordie! Yesterday I went to a workshop on how to identify students who are high or drunk in class, and what to do about it.

Thought I was pretty wise to the use of dope and booze among the kiddies. Wrong!

One side makes you bigger...

Some of the stuff people ingest for “fun” defies belief. A psychologist who specializes in drugs and a counselor who also has worked in caring for people with substance abuse issues—both full-time employees of the college!—gave quite an eye-opening presentation, complete with three pages of drug images and descriptions and an explicit PowerPoint presentation (refreshing well done, for a change) on the symptoms of the various kinds of drugs and combinations thereof.

Combination is the operative term. They said few people use just one drug; most combine their dope of choice with alcohol. Indeed, the specific reason I selected this workshop was that last semester a kid who was occasionally given to belligerence showed up in my classroom at 9:30 in the morning reeking of beer.

Asked how many students in a community college classroom, at any given time, are likely to be abusing some kind of drug, legally purchased or not, they said the figure is about 50 percent.

Fifty percent of students in a college classroom are using something, often more than one something. Think of that. Substances range from meth to over-the-counter cold pills and nostrums.

Among the newer fads, we learned, is a hallucinogen called ayahuasca, a brain-banger from South America.

And, my friends, damned if on the way home I didn’t tune in NPR and hear an adulatory story about some troubled soul who found spiritual peace and enlightenment by trotting down to Peru and ingesting ayahuasca to the beat of a chanting “shaman.”

Says the fool, “I thought something was missing in my life, in walking through the world. I have this job I hate. I feel miserable all the time. Everything is small and just how I related to people, everything was very superficial.” After a lengthy course of mind-bending herbs under the tutelage of a self-styled “shaman” from Los Angeles, who has set up a curative “center” (no doubt highly profitable) near Iquitos, our hero finds enlightenment: “There’s not this gigantic weight on my shoulders anymore, and I can sit up straight and breathe normally and just be alive,” he says. “The world is a significantly brighter and more beautiful place now.”

Tra-la-la la-la!

This  medicament causes you to vomit violently while you squirt diarrhea out the other end. Indigenous people use one of its two ingredients to rid themselves of intestinal worms. It induces hallucinations that can leave you screaming for hours.

Google ayahuasca and what comes up is page after page of woo-woo, replete with terms like “sacred vine,” “enlightenment,” “spirit vine,” “extraordinary healing plant,” “consciousness expanding,” and similar bullsh!t. We are told that worthies such as Sting, David Icke, Tori Amos, and Paul Simon have held forth on the glories of this magical potion.

Heaven help us. Is it any wonder that half the kids sitting in a classroom are busy frying their brains with drugs? Is it any wonder university juniors and seniors think Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain State?

What became of common sense in this country?

Image: Psilocybe Cubensis by Rohan523. GNU Free Documentation License.

Wake up from that dream!

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So a couple of readers pointed out that something was wrong with the math that suggested I just might manage an apartment in San Francisco for myself, if and when M’hijito makes his escape from Phoenix. Dead right: the problem was that the figure I was using for the 4% and 5% drawdowns, which I had lifted from another column, actually represented the drawdowns plus Social Security. Having blithely forgotten that small detail, I added Social Security in on top of those, for a net income whose optimism exceeded rosey.

Remove the extra Social Security contribution and you get figures that look like these:

Even if I could find a comfortable place for $2,000 a month—a highly unlikely proposition—nothing even vaguely like enough to live on would remain after the inescapable costs. Realistically, I’m finding that I can’t get by with much less than $700 for monthly discretionary expenses, because there’s always some repair bill or unexpected cost to be paid. Even if I put nothing into the monthly diddle-it-away fund (from which I buy clothing, an item that I really can’t do without…especially in San Francisco ;-)), there’s simply  not enough left after rent, health insurance, long-term care insurance, and utilities.

And the fact is that even in the make-believe scenario, my figures didn’t take into account the higher tax rates, nor did they anticipate the inevitability that rents will increase when the economy improves and demand for housing increases. Right now, rents are low in the City, but as soon as commerce heats up and more people migrate to San Francisco, landlords raise their rent rates accordingly.

As for moving to some other venue in California: really, there’s no place else in that state that I want to live. San Francisco has a special allure—it’s a one-of-a-kind city. But the whole state is overrun with people, most of them living in Southern California-style ticky-tacky. I already live in Southern California East; why would I want to spend more to live in the same conditions there?

I guess if M’hijito moves back to San Francisco, I’ll just decamp to Prescott, which at least is a little cooler than the Valley. It used to be a little more urbane, too, in a funny way, a little more resident-friendly—but that’s less so today.

California Dreamin’

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LOL! Check out the comments, below, especially from Deflating Dreams. 😀 English-major math strikes again! Gotta race to meetings just now, but will be back with an update.

Could I afford to live in San Francisco? Offhand, you’d think the answer would be no way, eh?

Well.

M’hijito is angling to get himself into a master’s program that would train him to be a physician’s assistant. Pay for such work is passing decent…good enough to get him back to San Francisco, where he craves to live. If he takes off for the Bay Area again, there won’t be so much reason for me to hang around this big old expensive house in a city not likely to shake off its economic depression any time in the near future.

Yeah, I know: California’s economy is in bad trouble, too. But Arizona’s nasty little secret is that we’re even worse off than California, second only to Michigan in unemployment. and thanks to the demagogues in the legislature, we’ve shot ourselves in the economic foot with SB 1070. That actually isn’t the half of it, to tell the truth. Arizona, I’m afraid, is about worn out as a place to live, certainly for anyone who aspires to the middle class.

I’d be sorry to leave the choir…but frankly, San Francisco has plenty of high Episcopal churches; surely one of them has a decent choir. And I really would regret leaving my best friends behind. But still, it’s something to think about. Blood being thicker than water, after all.

Let’s suppose I could sell my house and clear two hundred grand on it. Remains to be seen: prices are below pre-bubble prices here, but it’s a nice house in the quietest part of the neighborhood, and just this minute no obviously run-down houses directly abut it.

And let’s suppose M’hijito and I can unload the downtown house with a loss of no more than $52,000. I dispose of all but the most basic of my possessions, so it takes about $3,000 to move me up to the City. I’m left with net cash and retirement savings of $653,810. Not counting the remaining $10,000 of RASL supposedly coming my way, or the $14,000 emergency fund in the bank.

A 4 percent annual drawdown from this nest egg would come to $41,153; 5 percent would yield $47,690. My financial advisor says I have more than enough to last the rest of my life, even at a 6 percent drawdown, though that’s something I view with skepticism. So let’s work with 4 percent and 5 percent; add $15,000 of Social Security to those and you get a gross income ranging from $56,153 to $62,690. Subtract 23 percent for taxes, and you get a net of $42,237 to $48,270.

That just might provide enough to pay rent and buy food. Let’s check it out…

For the 4 percent drawdown, I posit a rent of $2,000 a month, which would get me into a studio or maybe a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco proper. If we subtract that rent from net monthly income and then deduct the expenses I can’t get out of—Medicare Part D, Medigap, and long-term care insurance—and then we subtract the estimated costs of utilities, does enough remain to live on?

That’s fifty bucks more than than I allow myself now!

Realistically, one isn’t likely to find a good apartment in San Francisco for much less than $2,500. That would require a larger drawdown from savings. At 5 percent with a $2,500 rent payment:

Think of that! I could probably do it. The place where I want to live includes basic cable service, so I might be able to engineer the DSL and phone through that. And given that most months I don’t spend $800, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that there’s enough play to cover unexpected expenses.

And that’s without any side income: no teaching gigs, no freelance assignments, no blog income.

It will take M’hijito two or three years to pick up the undergraduate requirements for a science degree and then get through the master’s. By then I will have established myself as the master of online courses at Paradise Valley Community College. If they’ll let me keep on teaching online no matter where I live, just that little bit of extra change would keep me quite comfortable in San Francisco.

And I know exactly where I want to live: in a historic national park. Yes. The San Francisco Presidio, an old military base, has been converted into a sprawling residential area, run by the National Parks Service. I would kill to live at the Presidio! O… M… G… I’ve loved that place since I was 12 years old!

The section called the Quarry has single-story two-bedroom apartments, wheelchair-accessible, for $2,425. The interiors are a bit on the military side, but with some adept decorating you could make it pleasant enough.

On Ruckman Avenue, you can rent in one of these places, with hardwood floors, remodeled kitchen, enclosed sunporches or verandas… A one-bedroom is $1,795, but the site says the apartments have basements, which presumably would give you room for office space or storage.

To die for. The Sanches neighborhood has two-bedroom apartments for $2,350. They look like regular old apartment buildings. But the price is right, and so is the size.

I dunno. I’d probably sacrifice size for charm, given a choice. The area where I’d really like to live is Baker Beach: $1,795 for a two-bedroom; and even a three-bedroom for $2,100. It’s directly across the street from the ocean, and the interiors are much nicer than any of the other affordable places. Unfortunately, they won’t let me keep Cassie in that part of the park, so that’s out.

Interestingly, you can get an employee’s discount if you work for any of the businesses on the grounds. So presumably once you got there, you could get in line to be considered for any openings that you could weasel your way into, thereby cutting the rent nicely.

In theory, if you lived in San Francisco you could probably dispense with the car. But I think out in the Presidio, you probably would need one. The Dog Chariot is a little big to maneuver in the City…but one could replace it with a Smart Car. The price is about what I’d get for my aging Sienna.

Boyoboy.

Get that degree, son, while I still have enough life in me to enjoy San Francisco!