w00t! I’m never going back to work at GDU again. Over at the community college, the last of the student papers are graded, and all that remains is to meet one class this afternoon to return their papers. I’m waiting till this evening to post grades, because there’s still a shot my marvelously brilliant but distracted Asperger’s student will turn in a final draft (I gave a couple of foot-draggers until today to finish).
LOL! This kid is so amazing that even if I grade from the work-in-progress he turned in by way of proving that he is working on it, he’ll finish with a strong B.
Moving on: by this evening, I am going to be free of any sort of slave labor (except for copyediting another detective novel….heh heh heh heh!) for an ENTIRE MONTH.
Yesh.
I had forgotten how lovely winter breaks and summer vacations are. The only thing hanging over my head between now and the middle of January will be designing next semester’s courses. And I’m actually looking forward to that, because I have some highly creative new ideas.
Springing free from the Great Desert University is an enormous relief. One of the other things I’d lost sight of is how toxic that place is. I do not know one soul who works there who is happy in her or his job. At least one therapist in the city has a practice that consists almost entirely of GDU employees.
Imagine: a shrink who specializes in treating employees of a single organization. Does that tell you something, or does that tell you something?
The god of Sleep has returned to my precincts. I’m sleeping through almost every night undisturbed! It’s literally been years since I’ve had a full night’s sleep, one that wasn’t interrupted by a spate of wakefulness between 1:00 and 3:00 a.m. Matter of fact, that was the genesis of Funny about Money: nothin’ else to do in the wee hours but read blog posts and write a few of my own.
And since, for the first time since the memory of Person runneth not to the contrary, I feel rested when I wake up in the morning, I’m not irritable and on edge all day, I feel no desire for a drink every afternoon, and navigating our homicidal streets no longer reduces me to screaming rage.
Do I worry about money? A little. But I know I’ll get by at least through 2010. By this time next year, I should be well accustomed to living on a third of what I earned at GDU, and if that’s the case, I can go along forever on Social Security, part-time teaching, editing, and a very small drawdown (if any!) from savings.
Yesterday’s guest post by Revanche struck a chord, when she remarked on her surprise at realizing how much she revels in freedom from the workplace. Right on, lady!
I think a lot of wage slaves who trudge into an office, factory, or retail store stay on the gerbil wheel for one reason and one reason only: health insurance. It certainly was true for me: shortly after I divorced I realized that once the COBRA ran out (my ex- covered that, as part of the agreement), I would be uninsured and unable to afford my own insurance. That mooted the prospect of freelancing, which, in my financial naïveté at the time, I imagined would support me. Several times during my tenure at GDU, I thought I should quit the damn job and go back to freelance writing and editing, but the reality was that I could not get insurance to cover me fully and even if I could, nothing was affordable.
Insurers dream up every reason from Hell to short you on coverage. In my case, I was told that because I had a “diagnosis” that I had never heard of—something a doctor had innocently noted on my record but thought so minor he didn’t bother to tell me about it—Blue Cross would not cover any broken bones, back pain, or muscle spasms. This meant that a good car wreck would bankrupt me. And good car wrecks are commonplace around here. In any event, the cost was prohibitive. If I wanted to be able to go to a doctor, I had to keep working for GDU. Which of course was what was sending me to doctors…
Starting in January, the discounted COBRA will carry me through to Medicare. Though Medicare costs about 11 times more than GDU’s EPO does, it still is not beyond reason. The state of Arizona’s health insurance is so cheap (and you get what you pay for, BTW) that it far underprices what most Americans pay for group insurance, and so Medicare probably looks like a bargain for most folks.
Once government-provided health insurance is in place (if it ever gets past the retrograde types who are resisting it), I wonder what effect that will have on the labor force.
I suspect a lot of people figure they could get by with self-employment or in part-time jobs, but keep trudging because they can’t afford health insurance and are unwilling to go bare. How many workers who dream of jumping off the treadmill will do it, once that barrier falls?
I know I would have left GDU a long time ago if affordable public insurance had been an option. Why would anyone put herself through a lifetime of misery if there were a reasonable way to get out of it?
Maybe this is the reason the right-wingers oppose a public option: they know darned well the more self-starting wage slaves will flee if we don’t have to stay in the traces to get medical care when we’re sick.
What’s freedom worth to you? If you had access to decent, affordable health insurance and you could earn enough to cover your living costs on your own or through light part-time work, would you quit your full-time job—even if it meant cutting back on your lifestyle a bit?
Image: Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, Morpheus and Iris. Public Domain.
Today we have a guest post by Revanche, proprietor of one of my favorite PF blogs, A Gai Shan Life. Enjoy!
VH asked me how I’m dealing with unemployment now that I’m well in, and I had to think about it.
Most notably, believe it or not, is the fact that I was laid off almost six months ago and my head has not yet exploded.
It should have, considering the degree to which I obsessed over every possible detail of pending unemployment in the months prior to L-day (all the gory details of which you can find blogged between the dates of July 2008 and June 2009). But it didn’t.
In all my planning and calculating, plotting and planning, résumé-building and interview scheduling, I utterly underestimated the sheer freedom that comes with unemployment.
Not the freedom of just staying at home all day in my pajamas, if I please. [Don’t ask me if that’s ever happened, please. Let me have some dignity.] The kind of nearly spiritual freedom, relief really, that comes of knowing that my time shackled to that job out of a sense of responsibility to provide for my family, to do the right thing, to be grateful for the job I had in this economy, was over. Out of a job though I am, I’m also free of the company and of the kind of people who believed in lying, cheating and scamming. Not my kind of folk.
Flying utterly in the face of my workaholic tendencies, I’ve discovered an odd and unnatural secret of unemployment: if you have some financial security, it can actually be refreshing. Who knew?
Whether or not you know me, that sounds like crazy talk.
I assure you, I haven’t lost my mind. I hate not having a steady, full-fledged income, I hate not contributing to my retirement accounts, I hate that I haven’t deposited money into my savings accounts in massive chunks in oh-so-long. And this time has been filled with working on projects, seeking out challenging employment opportunities and interviewing.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t admit that I’ve also discovered the wonders of having the time to travel (New York, San Francisco, San Diego), travel (New York), and travel (Hawaii). I haven’t ever had this kind of freedom to hit the road, I could not have jumped in the car and gone to a friend in need while fully employed, and I haven’t ever been able to take classes without wedging it into 12-hour workdays (before, during or after college). These things are important to me, and without this breather, I doubt that my life plan would ever have allowed for discovering new cities, or the commitment to taking care of ill or grieving friends. And with certain health issues, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve realized I’m allowed to rest instead of forcing myself to face another 18-hour-day despite my body’s pleas for surcease.
The cost of this freedom, all the deprivations of earlier years, was completely worth it. That’s easy to say now because 1) I don’t feel them anymore, and 2) I’m practically living in the lap of luxury now thanks to how I lived before. What’s that saying, “Live like no one else will, so you can live like no one else can”? That little truism is absolutely true. It wasn’t easy being sensible about every penny I spent, and I can’t discount the unemployment income and subsidized COBRA, which have both gone a long way in stretching out my savings as well. But I’m able to look for the next best career step, pay my bills, stay out of debt, and still do good things. That is well worth the extra six to twelve months spent in the next best thing to Dante’s Inferno.
So how am I doing? Right now, though VH occasionally twits me 😉 about stacking up enough cash to be the envy of fellow unemployeds, I’m nervous about the future. I’d be a fool not to be—in this economy? With these pseudo-if-not-real hiring freezes? Since last week, I’ve seen three more friends lose their jobs and another floundering to keep his business open. Times remain very tough, economic indicators notwithstanding.
Still, I’m not allowing fear to paralyze me. I’m working hard to find my next new path and get well, and I’m also trying to stay in the moment and enjoy a little of what I’ve earned. We’ll see how I fare in the next six months as benefits start to run out. I certainly hope to have landed a job by that time.
Just updated the post on shifting financial records from Quicken to Excel, by way of making it worthy of submission to the Carnival of Personal Finance. So if you’re interested in the English-major approach to tracking income and expenses in Excel and to making the program do a rudimentary tax report, you might want to revisit that. 😉
So La Maya calls at 7:15 and announces that instead of our daily constitutional she wants to make a run on an estate sale advertised to be full of Native American crafts and Southwestern artwork. It’s in a ritzy part of town, a detail that makes the ad highly enticing.
We journey east into the rising sun and the rush-hour traffic. Takes us a half-hour to reach a hidden development nestled discreetly in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. “Ritzy” understates matters.
An enclave of large but subtly designed houses on vast lots, the place is way too classy to be gated. This evidently is where the old money fled after the parvenus moved into the Biltmore and started building hideous McMansions. The houses sprawl low to the ground: no second stories and few two-story-high cathedrals. Landscaping is what you wish you could buy with your ten or twenty grand…looks like what some designer figures the Sonoran desert would look like if only it could afford him.
Shortly we found the estate sale. Apparently the property was owned by an artist, or by someone who fancied him- or herself an artist and had plenty of money to indulge that conceit. Unbelievable. All of the walls were hand-painted with sepia-toned murals in cowboy themes. Someone had plastered river rocks around the base of a set of clerestory windows and painted the surrounding wall a brilliant cobalt blue. Windows and walls were festooned with Indian and cowboy objets: feathers and spurs and cowboy hats and silver medallions encrusted with turquoise.
Whoever lived there had interesting taste and plenty of cash to spend on it. With the exception of a couple of custom-upholstered Ethan Allen chairs and a pair of gorgeous tan leather sofas, none of the furniture was mass-produced. Everything was one-of-a-kind, either artisan-made or antique, and most of it was very handsome. The view out the back: astonishing! Camelback mountain close-up filled the sky over the backyard.
The sale featured a lot of Indianoid pottery and small tourist-size rugs. I don’t know enough about Navajo rugs to recognize the genuine article at a glance, but I do know that bright colors are questionable…and too many of them featured splashy reds and blues. As for the pottery: the glaze designs were a bit crude for authenticity. Of my pots, the ones I know are real (from New Mexico and Peru) are signed; the one I know is a knock-off is unsigned. None of the estate-sale “Indian” pots were signed. I guessed they were high-quality tourist stuff. Prices ranging from $30 to $95 suggested the same: estate sale operators usually know what they’re looking at, and they set prices accordingly.
La Maya picked up a large Talavera pot, very pretty. But as we drew near to the cash register, she realized that what she thought was a $15 price tag actually read “As IS.” They wanted $50 for it, crack and all. She decided not.
Though we came away empty-handed, we had a good time exploring the ways our betters live. As we were standing in the backyard gazing at the landmark mountain, La Maya remarked on what I thought was the neighbor’s expansive Santa Fe-style house.
“That’s not the neighbor’s place,” said she, “that’s on this piece of property. Look: the cabana and patio extend back to it—it opens onto them.”
Holy mackerel. These people had two full-sized houses on a gigantic slab of prime real estate, one of them eccentrically decorated in late Southwestern artiste and the other a quieter and more conventional dwelling.
I think the house that hosted the sale, whose layout was open and whose decor was artsy-fartsy to the nth degree, served discreetly as the artist’s studio and gallery. Unlikely anyone would want to live in it: really, it was pretty bizarre. But if your clientele was very upscale and your product wildly expensive, chances are your business would attract so little traffic that the neighbors wouldn’t complain much.
In another two weeks, I’m jumping Intuit’s ship, diving off the side of the SS Quicken into the cool waters of Excel.
Over the past five years as a program administrator, I’ve learned just enough about how Excel works to set up a spreadsheet to operate as a checkbook. Using very basic skills (indeed), I’ve figured out not only how to create a running balance but also how to make Excel reconcile a checkbook against a bank statement. None of this is rocket science. What’s new is realizing I can make a generic program like Excel or its open-source equivalents do all I need Quicken to do.
Because I don’t use Quicken for online banking, my needs for the program are pretty plain-vanilla: keep track of expenses and income, categorize them, create an annual tax report, and reconcile bank accounts. Quicken’s various planning calculators, especially the ones related to loans, come in handy, but similar calculators are all over the Internet.
Nor do I use Turbotax, Intuit’s companion to Quicken, billed as the answer to all your income-tax reporting problems.
Why, you ask, do I eschew Quicken’s whiz-bang online features? Simple: I don’t trust Intuit, a corporation that issues ever-more-bloated versions of its program each year and then forces consumers to buy them by jimmying the code to render data entered in “older” programs unreadable. I can’t say how much I resent that. Also, customer service is nonexistent. It’s a consumer-unfriendly product manufactured by a consumer-unfriendly corporation. There is no way I’m going to put my personal data online through that outfit’s tentacles.
I do my online banking directly with the credit union, thank you. Every financial institution that does business with me makes online transactions and statements readily available. All I need to do that is a reasonably secure browser, say…Firefox running on a Mac, for example.
My taxes are so complicated, there is no chance on God’s green earth I could do them myself, nor would I trust Turbotax to stuff all my square pegs into its round holes. Income has, over the years, derived from salary, contract work, limited partnerships, securities investments, nontaxable bonds, mutual funds, a 403(b), an annuity, a whole life policy, alimony, Social Security, unemployment insurance, sales of real estate, a C-corporation, a sole proprietorship, an S-corporation…it goes on and on. A vast array of laws and loopholes applies to these things, none of them even faintly comprehensible to the amateur.
It’s also very frustrating that Quicken data will convert from PC format to Mac format, but not back. This means that when the day comes that I no longer can afford Macintosh computers—and that day arrived on Tuesday, after I bought the MacBook—to continue using Quicken I will have to start completely anew, losing all historical data. Excel operates smoothly on both platforms, and so I can move between the PC and the Mac with no problem.
After Canning Day, my banking strategy will be much simplified. Instead of disbursing paychecks into various piggybanks (one to cover the monthly credit-card bills; one to “escrow” the annual property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance; one for monthly savings; one for monthly nondiscretionary bills; one to pool all income; one for the S-corporation; a joint checking account with M’hijito to handle the mortgage payments…and so on ad infinitum), all incoming money will go into one checking account, which will have a $10,000 cushion to back up the poverty-level wages I’ll be making. Most expenses will be paid from this account. The self-escrow account will stay in business, since the only way I can be sure to have enough to cover those breathtaking bills is to set aside $325 a month, every month. I will try to set something aside each month in a savings account to cover budget overruns and buy occasional indulgences like clothing. And of course the joint checking account will have to stay.
That will cut the number of credit-union accounts from eleven to four, not counting the redundant savings accounts, which sit dormant and so really don’t need to be reconciled anyway.
Further simplifying matters is the S-corporation itself. When The Copyeditor’s Desk was a sole proprietorship, I ran business income and expenses through my personal checking and credit-card accounts. This meant I had to run a category report for the tax lawyer. Now all tax-related items except the mortgage interest and medical costs will go through CE Desk’s dedicated checking account. This will make it very easy to run out a report: everything related to FaM and CE Desk is gathered in one account. Mortgage interest is reported on a yearly form from the lender. That leaves only one category, “medical,” in my personal accounts to report on…and that’s easy.
Reconciling an account against a bank statement is also pretty easy in Excel. Just translate the instructions on the back of your statement into Excel actions:
First check off all the cleared transactions in your checkbook spreadsheet; changing their font color makes it easy to spot uncleared entries. Then enter your current bank balance, subtract uncleared debits (checks and EFTs) and add uncleared credits (deposits). Click AutoSum (Σ) to total these figures. Next, enter your bank statement’s ending balance, add any deposits made after the ending date, and subtract uncleared debits. Click AutoSum again to tote up those figures. Now compare the two totals: if you haven’t missed entering anything, then the two should be the same. If they’re different, you’ve made a mistake and need to recheck the figures in your checkbook spreadsheet.
So, how will this work with day-to-day bank and credit-card transactions? It’s easy to track credits (deposits) and debits (checks and electronic payments) in an ordinary spreadsheet. However, because I charge all my grocery and other discretionary spending on credit cards, paying them off in full at the end of each month, the single payment to American Express or Visa doesn’t show what, specifically, that payment covered. In Quicken, this failing can be addressed with split transactions. Since I don’t know how to enter a Quicken-style split transaction in Excel (or even if that can be done), I believe one would need a separate spreadsheet to track credit-card charges. In my case, this represents no extra work: I already do that in Quicken, because I make too many charges each month to stuff into a single split transaction.
So, we first set up a spreadsheet for the checking account:
To explain how Excel builds the figures in the “Balance” column, in the “Cleared” column I’ve noted the commands I entered in “Balance.” For those who are even less conversant with Excel than I am, here’s what I did: Place the cursor in the target cell; type the = sign and then click on the cells you want Excel to total; after each cell, enter a + sign. In my first row, I’ve asked Excel to take the next cell under “Credit, “$10,000, and add it to the figure under “Debit,” which is blank, giving an opening balance of $10,000. That little green triangle on the opening balance is Excel complaining that no value appears in the second (“Debit”) cell. This is just whining—you can either ignore it or quiet the program down by entering a 0 in those blank cells.
This establishes the opening balance. To figure the running balance, remember that you have to include deposits as well as checks and electronic payments. So, I’ve gone to the second row, placed my cursor in the second cell under “Balance,” and asked Excel to take the previous figure under “credit” and add it to “debit” and then add these to the previous figure under “balance.” Because the debits are entered with minus signs (i.e., as negative numbers), using the + sign will cause Excel to subtract that figure from the series’ total. That is, you’re getting x + (-y) + (z).
(And yes, Virginia: that’s why we take algebra in high school or college!)
Now, to keep track of what that $800 paid to American Express was actually spent on, we have a second spreadsheet:
In this spreadsheet, I would like to know not only what specifically I’m diddling away money on, but also how much is left out of each month’s $800 credit-card spending budget. So under “credit” I enter the amount budgeted. This spreadsheet doesn’t represent a bank account and so never has to be reconciled. Consequently I can be a bit more casual here. I create the opening balance simply by copying the first make-believe “credit” into the “Balance” column. Now to make Excel do a running balance, all I have to do is ask it to subtract each debit from the preceding balance. I do this by entering an = sign in the first cell below the opening balance, then clicking on the first debit (notice that it also has a minus sign in front of it, making it a negative number), then entering a + sign, then clicking on the number right above, in the “Balance” column. This subtracted $86.50 from $800, showing $713.50 was left in the monthly budget. Now click on that “$713.50” cell, notice the little “knob” in the cell’s lower right-hand corner; grab that with the cursor and pull the cursor down the column. Every cell the cursor has swooped over will perform the same function as new values are entered in “credit” and “debit,” neatly keeping a running balance for you.
Nifty, eh?
Excel will default to show negative numbers in red, in parentheses—accountant-style. It also probably will default to give you plain-vanilla figures with only one decimal place, as it has done here. To adjust these formats to fit your taste, go to Format > cells and explore around…that’s about the only self-explanatory part of this program.
Come April, I’ll want to send a report on tax-related expenditures to my tax lawyer. It is possible to make Excel do reports, but I’ve never figured out how. The online “Help” manual is utterly incomprehensible to the English major’s mind, and the reports chapter in Excel for Dummies is also over my head. However, it’s easy to generate an English-major report by using the “sort” function. Here, I’m pasting entries from the check-register spreadsheet and entries from the credit-card spreadsheet into a single new spreadsheet and running a “sort” on them:
To sort a spreadsheet, highlight the data you want to sort and then go to Data > Sort. Here I’ve asked Excel to sort first by Category, then by Income, then by Expenses. The result appears above.
As I mentioned above, most tax-related transactions will now occur in the S-corporation. However, it develops that COBRA, Medicare, and long-term care premiums are tax-deductible, and of course these will be paid from personal checking. So I’ve created a category, TR, to flag tax-related items. Sorting the data first by categories gathers transactions by category. From there, it’s easy to tote up the expenses or income in each category. To arrive at $388.09 worth of tax-related transactions, I clicked in a cell next to where those transactions are grouped, and entered the = sign + each figure in the TR category.
In this sheet, as you can see, it’s also very easy, to arrive at a whole year’s income and expenses: just put your cursor in the cell at the bottom of “Income” or of “Expenses” and click the AutoSum icon (looks like a Greek letter Σ).
Excel is easier than it looks. Describing these maneuvers, even in plain English, makes them look harder than they are.
So! Yesterday I scored a new 15-inch MacBook from the Apple store, at an educator’s discount slightly lower than the one offered at GDU’s computer store. Not only that, but they threw in a wireless Epson printer, free!
Actually, I upgraded the freebie to a printer/scanner. I’m interested to see how the Epson does: it appears to be much better made than the HP, less flimsy and far more elegant in design. It was only $50 more; I figure I can resell my hulking HP on Craig’s List for that much.
They also threw in a 50% discount on next year’s Mobile Me subscription, a little extravagance that I figure The Copyeditor’s Desk will have to pay for, assuming it earns that much in the future.
In addition, I got a year’s worth of one-on-one coaching. First thing they’ll do for me, they said, is synch up my iMac with the laptop and, if I wish (for a slight extra fee), they will upgrade the iMac to Snow Leopard. The salesman claimed they also would load the $65(!) MS Office for Mac I bought at the GDU bookstore, though I doubt that: normally anything with the letters MS attached to it is as water to oil for the Apple Genius crew.
Snow Leopard is really inexpensive, especially compared to other operating systems. It’s supposed to be the wave of the future, so I think I may spring for the modest cost to do that.
What a beautiful and elegant machine it is! Smooth, rounded, pretty…just like its operating system.
The Mac is such a creature of the Internet! The instant an infant Mac breaks out of the egg, it wants to get online. It’s chirping to be connected to the cable router, but since I don’t know how to accomplish that, it’ll have to wait till M’hijito can come over and set it up. {sigh} Much as I want to play with it, I have no idea which of the half-dozen potential connections that come up is mine. It “sees” all the neighbors’ wireless stuff, but without a little encouragement, it doesn’t see the router. At least, I don’t think it does. If it does, I don’t recognize it.
For $150, I can get an AirPort Extreme, which is said to be superior to the cheapie we bought at Fry’s Electronics. I suppose I can afford it, although we’re pushing the limits of what CE Desk can pay. And anything that’s not sitting in the corporate account is money I’ll have to use for groceries and running the house.
However, it looks like I’m going to spring free of Quicken, whose onerous requirements for upgrades are past due for me. So that will save seventy or eighty bucks.
Uh-oh! La Maya on the phone with an intelligence alert: Estate sale in Richistan!w00t!
