Coffee heat rising

How much was that dollar worth? Interesting money tool

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In a history article for a client journal, one of our authors mentioned Measuring Worth, a nifty tool that allows you to compare a variety of money-related values over periods stretching back to 1774.  Among other things, it will calculate the relative worth of the dollar. Enter a specific sum and a year, and then ask what it would have been worth in a later  year. The engine disgorges the equivalent according to six different indicators: the consumer price index (CPI), the gross domestic product (GDP) deflator, the consumer bundle, the unskilled wage rate, the GDP per capita, and the GDP.

The first two are ways of measuring average prices. The third (consumer bundle) shows the average value of a household’s annual expenditures; the unskilled wage rate provides a way to compare wages over time. The GDP per capita is another way to compare income over time, and the GDP itself, the market value of all goods a country produces in a year, shows “how much money in the comparable year would be the same percent of all output.”

More on this feature in a minute.

First, though, let’s look at a feature of special interest to personal finance enthusiasts: Measuring Worth also has a tool that shows how much savings would have grown over time. Enter a value and a date, and then ask how much that value would be worth at another date (up to this year), and it will tell you the return on a short-term investment, a long-term investment, and a stock market investment.

So…let’s say your child is 19 years old now, and you’d like to send her to college. When she was born, in 1990, your parents gave you $1,000 to invest toward her education. If you’d put the money in an excruciatingly safe short-term asset, today it would be worth $2,060. Invested in a long-term asset with a term of 20 years, it would have yielded $4,973. And had you put it in a Dow Jones Average portfolio, you would have $4,196, a middling performance.

Well, what if your own parents gave you $1,000—say, when you were born—and now you’re about to retire? If you were 65 today, the gift would have come in 1944 (and it would have been a lot of moola in those days!). Assuming you kept that investment separate and didn’t add more cash other than reinvesting proceeds, how far would it go today toward supporting you in your old age?

• Short-term investment: $16,457.53
• Long-term investment, 30-year term: $32,816.67
• DJA portfolio: $78,449.64

Whoa! Over a really long term, the stock market beats the other two investment modes, hands-down.

I wonder how our college girl would’ve been doing before the Bushies screwed up the economy. How much would her stock portfolio have been worth a couple of years ago, when she was 17?

Ah hah! $4,918. In the stock market, her savings would have fallen off $722 over the the year between 2007 and 2008. In a long-term investment instrument, it would’ve been worth $4,549 in 2007, $424 less than the most recent value. It appears that given competent national leadership that recognized the importance of regulating financial markets and was capable of an intelligent response to 9/11, she might have been better off in stocks and bonds.

Entertaining, isn’t it?

Now for the money story:

At the time my father was born, in 1909, his mother had about $100,000. She’d inherited this small fortune from her father, who had made it freighting buffalo hides out of Oklahoma into Texas. Also at about the time my father arrived, her husband ran off. He eventually was found dead by the side of a rural Texas highway. This left her alone with an infant, a change-of-life baby. My father had two elder brothers, the youngest of whom was 18 years older than he was. By the time he was born, both men were out of the house with families of their own.

She became involved with a Christian church on the fringes of mainline Protestantism, and she also became interested in spiritualism. She donated copious amounts to both causes. By the time my father was about ten years old, these worthies had sheared her of every penny that she had. She was left destitute.

Her home was taken away for taxes. She also lost a commercial property and another house she owned. The two older brothers, who knew nothing of this until they returned home and found her on the street, fell out over the fiasco. Tom, the eldest, was a ranch foreman who, of course, lived out in the sticks. He felt his middle brother, Ed, who lived in Fort Worth where their mother lived, should have been keeping an eye on her finances. The brothers were permanently alienated as a result of the bad feelings that arose in the wake of their mother’s impoverishment.

My father also was permanently affected. He developed a lifelong hatred of organized religion (his skepticism—shall we say—is the reason that to this day I will not donate to a church), and he also conceived a passion about money. He decided that, as his life’s goal, he would earn back the hundred thousand dollars.

And he did.

You understand, he was not a sophisticated man. He dropped out of high school in his junior year, lied about his age, and joined the Navy. He went to sea all his adult life, ultimately became a master mariner, and retired at the age of 53, when he achieved his goal of accruing $100,000 in savings. Details like the relative value of money were largely beyond his ken. Though he understood that a hundred grand didn’t make him a wealthy man in 1962, he had no way of anticipating the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. By the time that was over, the nest egg that would have kept him comfortable wasn’t worth enough to support him through his old age in a fashion other than basic poverty.

Luckily, he was a very frugal man by nature, and so it didn’t much matter: his lifestyle wouldn’t have changed, one way or the other.

I have always wondered what that $100,000 of 1909 would be worth in today’s dollars. Let’s enter it and the date of my father’s birth into the Measuring Worth relative value calculator. Current data, we’re told, are available only up to 2008. According to the various measures, today the dollar value of her inheritance would be…

• CPI: $2,441,007.10
• GDP Deflator: $1,777,507.10
• Value of consumer bundle: $5,009,823.18
• Unskilled wage: $10,307,228.92
• Nominal GDP per capita: $13,314,632.87
• Relative share of GDP: $44,808,290.00

In terms of purchasing power, my grandmother’s hundred grand would have been worth $2,441,077.10 in 2008. LOL! Think of the McMansion I could’ve bought with that as a down payment!

What if she had put her inheritance in the stock market, instead of diddling it away on her religious delusions? Invested in a nice, balanced portfolio, by the end of 2008 it would have been worth $16,595,085.85.

Well. Any way you look at it, if she been a little smarter about money and a little less inclined to woo-woo, today I wouldn’t be worrying about how I’m going to get by in retirement!

My father hugely underestimated the amount he would need to live comfortably into his mid-80s. Of course, without his mother’s crystal ball he couldn’t have anticipated the inflation that ate up his savings…but I think, given the way the government is spending money in the wake of the crash of the Bush economy, we can expect a similar inflationary period in the near future.

How much would I need in savings to have the equivalent of the $100,000 he had managed to earn back by 1962?

• CPI:  $711,510.24
• GDP Deflator: $569,106.07
• Value of consumer bundle: $879,310.34
• Unskilled wage: $809,366.13
• Nominal GDP per capita: $1,510,749.04
• Relative share of GDP: $2,465,665.02
• Purchasing power: $711,510.24

Hm. If the least of these—$569,106.07—is what I’ll need to survive in moderate comfort (or not!), then I’m in deep trouble. Eighteen months ago, my savings were close to that. But today they sure aren’t, thank you very much, George and friends!

Welp, too late now. There’s not a thing I can do about it, so there’s no point in fretting. Tra la!

Earth to GOP: Define health-care “rationing”…rationally, please

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I see the Republicans’ latest maneuver to obstruct Obama’s health care plan is to flamboozle us senior citizens into thinking a public option for health care will mean “rationing.” It would be awfully nice if the GOP would explain, please, how it is that we don’t have health care rationing right now.

If you’ve had any ailment more dire than a runny nose, about your only option for obtaining health insurance is through a full-time job with a company large enough to afford a plan for its employees, or through marriage to someone who has access to such a plan. This lets out self-employment; it lets out buying an individual policy on the open market; it lets out working for most small businesses. Sometimes you don’t even know a “diagnosis” exists until an insurer informs you it will not cover you.

Refusing to cover people for this, that, or the other ailment—or setting up an obstacle course that causes people to avoid seeking medical care for fear of putting a metaphorical black blot on their records—amounts to health care rationing. If you can’t get insurance, you can’t get health care, because no one but the very wealthy can afford to pay out of pocket for a trip to the doctor.

A while ago, the State of Arizona offered only one health plan, which most of my doctors would not accept. Because I did not care to go to just any quack some company bureaucrat ordered me to see, I decided to buy an individual policy.

A year or so prior to that, I had visited my doctor for a routine physical. Delivering the usual clean bill of health, he asked if anything that we hadn’t covered was bothering me. I reminded him of the supposed neuroma on my right foot and remarked that I was tired of the choice of footwear the chronic pain left me: hiking boots or Dansko clodhoppers. He sent me to an orthopedic colleague, who had the foot X-rayed, did an examination, and said there was no evidence of a neuroma, nothing that he could see was wrong, and I should just learn to live with the foot discomfort.

So, a year or two later when I went to apply for this insurance policy, Blue Cross informed me that it would not cover me for any broken bones or for any back problems of any kind.

Say what?

Asked why, their bureaucrat said it was because I had “osteopenia.” I said I’d never heard of any such thing, no one had ever made any such diagnosis, and I didn’t even know what it was. He said there it was in my records.

Looking into this, I discovered it had been stuck there by the orthopedist, who thought the X-ray of my foot showed a slight thinning of the bones. Osteopenia is considered to be a precursor to osteoporosis, although that opinion is dubious.

At this point I trotted to my gynecologist, since at the time I was premenopausal. He ordered a complete body scan. When this returned, he said I did not have osteopenia, and in fact, my bones were stronger than those of most women my age.

By then, open enrollment had passed, I’d missed the chance to get private insurance, and I was forced to buy a health plan through GDU that I did not want and that did not cover the doctors of my choice.

So what we have here is insurance companies telling you…

• you will not be covered (therefore can not have medical care) for certain issues, whether or not those issues are related to the “diagnosis” the company dislikes;
• this limitation is based on a decision made by someone outside the doctor-patient relationship; and
• you may only go to certain doctors, none of whom are doctors of your choice.

If that’s not rationing, I’d like to know what it is.

If you’re older than about 50 and lose your job or decide to start your own enterprise, you’ve got a snowball’s chance of obtaining healthcare coverage. Whatever policy you can land will except every ailment even remotely related to any symptoms that have appeared in your doctor’s records, and the cost of whatever policy you can obtain will be prohibitive. Because of the costs, you likely will be herded into an HMO, where you will have no choice of doctors, where the doc who does see you will have about 10 minutes to make a snap decision about any problem that arises, and where some bureaucrat will say what treatment options you have and don’t have and what medications you may and may not buy.

The Republicans are trying to convince us that we don’t already have health care rationing, when obviously we do. Then they’re trying to whip up hysteria by telling us that the precious full choice we supposedly have now is going to go away. Evidently they think enough of us are morons that spreading stupidity will block any progress toward meaningful health care coverage for all Americans—and given the number of people who bought into that idiot Palin’s “death panel” fantasy, they may be right.

How did the Republican Party become the party of jerks, fools, and scoundrels?

I used to be a Goldwater Girl, believe it or not. Barry Goldwater signed my first straight-A report card at the University of Arizona. I’d just received it in the mail, and as I reached the top of the stairs coming up from the Student Union’s basement mailroom, there was The Man himself, strolling through the building with only one or two sidekicks in tow. In an instant’s whim I barged up to him and asked if he’d put his autograph on it. Amazingly enough, he did.

If Barry Goldwater were alive today, he would be so revolted by the state of the party he would change his registration. Indeed, near the end of his life, he was heard to use the a****** word about the faction that was then just beginning to assume power in the party, whom he regarded as “a bunch of kooks.”

How right he was.

😀 In our hearts, we knew he was right. 😀

Of interest, along these lines
And this update

First day of class…

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So now I’ve met my first class at Paradise Valley Community College. I haven’t read their diagnostic writing yet, but on the face of it I can’t see the students are much different from the ones at GDU West. A few are a little younger: in Arizona high-school kids can take community college courses, and so ambitious university-bound young people will get the widely hated freshman comp requirement out of the way in their senior year at the lower tuition rate.

If a few are probably not university material, they appear to have redeeming qualities. Some are older returning students, retooling for new jobs after having been laid off. The latter—older students—are always the best to have.

Yesterday I applied for the full-time position that came up at one of the colleges relatively close to my home, a day late and many dollars short. Probably won’t get it, but a friend at Paradise Valley says an opening may come up there. That would be a highly desirable place to work, and the commute would be easier because it’s a straight shot up the freeway, not ten or twelve miles across crowded, hectic surface streets.

This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to get a real job with the district. Back when things were beginning to get truly grim fin the morale department for everyone at GDU, I applied for several openings at colleges where the drive didn’t seem too awful (some of the schools are in far-flung suburbs).  As you can imagine, everybody and her little sister wants one of those jobs. A friend at Phoenix College told me her hiring committee got some 300 applications for a position I applied for there. Because these jobs are exceptionally well paid, for teaching—especially in the minds of liberal arts graduates, who perceive their prospects as dismal—the colleges often see applicants with Ivy-League degrees. This stiff competition is complicated by the politics of race: one job I tried to get was withdrawn when a faction on the hiring committee held out for a minority hire, and, because the job was not advertised as a targeted hire, the rest of the committee wouldn’t go along with it.

The closest I came to success with that endeavor occurred when a college that really was beyond reasonable driving distance called at the tag end of a semester and asked me to appear the following day prepared to deliver a PowerPoint presentation on a subject of their choice. The university had a strict deadline for when you could file your grades, and I still had fifty or a hundred papers to read and semester grades to assess, justify, confirm, and post. The deadline was the same day as the proposed PP pitch. I suggested they let me give a presentation on a composition-related subject that I had in the can; they wouldn’t accept that.

Weighing the probability that I wouldn’t get the job vs. the certainty that filing grades late would result in a black blot on my personnel file, I declined the privilege. Just as well: I hate driving around the Valley, and getting to that school would have entailed an endless drive over a freeway that seems to jam up every day.

After those two episodes, I got discouraged—one might say “sank into the morass of depression that afflicted all of my colleagues”—and stopped applying.

Obviously, given the possibility of earning $20,000 or $30,000 a year more for the same amount and kind of work I was doing at our supposedly more august university, I should’ve kept trying!

The district has three colleges within reasonable driving distance of home. I’m going to start applying for every single full-time opening that comes up in those three venues. Because of the recession, there won’t be many. But thankfully, Obama recognizes the importance of community colleges, and so some funding is being directed thataway. That a single full-time position came up at all is a good sign. There’ll be quite a backlog of people applying, and because many will be adjunct faculty already working there, I don’t have a snowball’s chance. But…

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

No wonder community college faculty women dress like a million bucks

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The other day while I was attending the Paradise Valley and Phoenix College adjunct orientation meetings, I felt like a country bumpkin, in my Costco jeans and old B’Gauze no-iron cotton tunic. The faculty women there were dressed to the nines, in expensive-looking suits and separates with notably handsome shirts, and sporting pricey-looking haircuts and dye jobs. I was dressed to work in the garden.

Well. There’s a reason for that. Sunday I came across an ad for a new hire in English at Glendale Community College. Starting pay for someone like me—with a Ph.D. and 15 years of teaching experience (to say nothing of 20 years of real-world experience)—is $80,631. Yeah: starting pay. On a nine-month contract. Today I earn 15 grand less than that on a twelve-month contract. On her nine-month contract, La Maya, who is tenured and one of her college’s heaviest-hitting grant-grabbers, earns about $2,500 more than I do.

And when I was teaching at GDU, I earned about $43,500. If you prorated my present hourly pay over 9 months instead of 12, I’d be earning a grandiose $48,750, which is about what I’d be earning if I’d stayed as a full-time nontenure-track lecturer at the West campus instead of moving into a 12-month quasi-administrative position on the Main campus.

It’s not like the teaching load was any different. GDU’s full-time adjunct slaves teach 4 and 4, with writing courses capped at 30 (although one semester the department gave overrides behind my back and I ended up with 42 students in a technical writing course). Full-time community college faculty teach 5 and 5, but at PVCC (for example) writing classes are capped at 25.

4 classes x 30 students = 120 students
5 classes x 25 students = 125 students

Huh. So five more students means a $31,881 raise in pay, eh?

No wonder those women dress like a million dollars. They don’t have to wear dungarees and washable pullovers from Costco! They can afford to buy decent clothes.

I feel like a chump. I should have applied for every. single. opening the District advertised from the day I walked onto the West campus, punch-drunk from a divorce and thrilled to have a job, any job.

Takeaway message: Never consider your job permanent. Start looking for something better from the moment you’re hired. LOL! Especially if it looks like the competition’s people dress better than you do!

😛

Preparing for the worst

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If you were killed or incapacitated in a car accident, if you had a stroke or heart attack that put you out of commission, would the people who had to take over your affairs know where to start?

Would they know where your bank accounts are? What insurance you have? Where your paycheck is deposited? What bills have to be paid? And if you have minor children, will friends, relatives, or the authorities know where you want the kids to stay?

If the answer to any or all of those questions is either “no” or “I dunno,” now is as good a time as any to start writing down the answers. I’m in the process of compiling a complete record of all the things my son will need to know if anything happens to me. It’s a pretty big job, one that will take several days to complete. The product will be two three-ring binders, one to keep at his house and one to keep at mine.

Here’s what’s going into it:

1. My employer

Healthcare card (whereabouts; ID number, group number)
…..User names and passwords*
…..URL of page to access pay information*
Amount of my salary
Benefits
COBRA and how to get it

2. Community colleges

Salary for adjunct teaching
…..User names and passwords*
…..URL of page to access pay information*

3. Insurance: vendors, policy  numbers, and telephone numbers

Health
Life
…..Including credit union & other groups with membership policies
Homeowner’s
Automobile

4. Credit union

Accounts
…..Direct deposits
…..Automatic transfers
…..Location of statements
…..User name, password, & URL for online access*
Automatic bill payments
Hard-copy bill payment
Credit-card payments

5. Credit cards

List of credit-card vendors and customer service numbers
Photocopies of cards, front & back

6. Social Security

List of necessary documents, and where to find them
Instructions for how to get SS started
Phone number and address of local SS Administration office

7. Medicare

Documents needed to start Medicare; location of originals
Information on how it works
Instructions for what is desired

8. Investments

Whereabouts of statements
Contact and phone number at management firm
Usernames, passwords, and URLs to for online access*

9. Financial records

Personal
…..Quicken
…..Excel
Corporate
…..Excel
…..Quicken
How to generate tax reports in Quicken & Excel

10. Lawyer/tax preparer

Name, phone number, e-mail, & address

11. Taxes

Whereabouts of past income tax returns
Taxes for S-corporation
Property taxes; fund for paying

13. Deed to house

14. Will

15. Living Will

16. Doctor

Name, phone number, and address

17. Dog

Feeding, care, eccentricities
Veterinarian’s name, phone number, and address

18. Downtown house

Loan documents
Homeowner’s insurance policy
Legal documents

19. Blog

Username, password, & URL for dashboard*
Adsense
…..Username, password, URL*
…..Arrangements for pay
Bluehost
…..Username, password, URL*
Name & contact of tech consultant

20. Freelance clients

Names, phone numbers, e-mails
Instructions to advise that deadlines will be missed
Where to find work in progress
Name & e-mail for subcontractor(s)

21. Final arrangements

How to dispose of the remains

* Important: Don’t save any pages with this information to a computer or a flashdrive. As soon as I finish typing a section, I print two copies for the two binders and then close the file without saving. Another strategy: simply delete the sensitive information before saving to disk…but be sure you’ve erased every reference to a Social Security number, user name, password, or any other vulnerable data.

Kids

If you have minor children, you should make arrangements for someone to care for them should both parents be killed or incapacitated—something that could easily happen in a car wreck. Decide who should be the caretakers and discuss it with them. Once they’ve agreed to take responsibility for your children in an emergency, put it in writing. Have them sign it and you sign it in front of a notary public. Give them a copy and keep a copy for your own records. If the person who will take charge of your affairs is different from the person or couple who will care for the kids, be sure that person also has a copy.

You should also name the desired child caretakers in your will. The person who is to take charge of your affairs should be named as your will’s executor, unless your lawyer advises otherwise.

If you have sole custody of children from a divorce and you do not want the child’s other parent to assume custody in an emergency, you should state the specific reason that this is undesirable (abusive? drug user? alcoholic?) in the document that designates the emergency caretaker.

Security

By the time you finish, this binder will contain some very sensitive information. You don’t want it to fall into the wrong hands. My son is very responsible, and so I feel comfortable about giving him a binder full of printouts containing my Social Security number, usernames, and passwords; however, my name and address will not appear in the thing. If your adult children can’t be trusted, consider hiring a lawyer to handle your personal affairs and storing the information at her or his office. Alternatively, choose a trustworthy friend or relative, ask him or her to take charge in an emergency, and give that person the information.

Surprising, isn’t it, how much a person needs to know if she or he is to take over your personal affairs in a pinch? My life is quite simple: no minor children, no child custody decrees, no alimony or child support, uncomplicated investments, no special healthcare issues, no homeowner’s association, no mortgage or rent, no employees, no vacation home, or the like. A young or middle-aged couple or a single parent’s data would be considerably more involved.

As circumstances change, you’ll need to remember to update certain pages. If you’ve saved those pages that contain no sensitive information, this task should be fairly easy. If not, you’ll have to retype entire pages…a hassle, but better than having them reside on a computer that could be hacked or stolen.

Plan to spend several days to a week thinking through and compiling the information another party would need to access important accounts, pay your bills, get  your insurance to cover your costs or collect life insurance; deal with doctors, lawyers, and your employer; care for your property; and find accommodations for your children and pets. With any luck, it won’t be needed. But if it ever is needed, someone will thank you.

The perils of adjunct faculty

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Alas, the first-semester freshman comp course I was scheduled to teach at Paradise Valley Community College this fall didn’t make. The other two sections—both second-semester comp courses—will fly, though.

The chair called and offered to substitute a Wednesday evening course. This presented a choice between collecting $2,400 this fall and rejoining the choir, which holds rehearsals on Sunday evenings.

Hmmm…

money – choir
choir – money

Well, I do need the money. We could go so far as to say I need the money a lot. On the other hand, I also  need my sanity.  Singing contributes mightily to sanity, whereas teaching tends to leach sanity from one’s life. Didn’t take much to come up with an answer for the chair: “no, thanks.”

Really, it’s a bit of a relief. I was starting to worry about how I was going to handle three sections, potentially as many as 90 students in two courses, while holding down a putatively full-time job and writing this blog and pursuing freelance editing work. I can teach two sections of the same course with my eyes closed. So this really will be a better arrangement.

How will I get by, after having diddled away seven grand of my back-up savings on the landscaping project? Remains to be seen, eh?

😉

Truth to tell, there’s plenty stashed in the credit union to serve as a cushion…something over 14 grand. As long as I don’t get sick, I should be OK. Obviously, if I thought I’d starve without that third section, I would have foregone the choir and applied my nose to the proverbial grindstone. But really, I think it will all work out.

Editorial work will not go far to replace this bit of the projected community college income: at the new client’s rate, to make up for this one section I would have to copyedit 480 pages of dense scientific writing between now and December 31. Obviously, that’s not going to happen.

However, we just learned that in January we will pick up a contract with a university press that publishes one of our GDU client journals. This press has a large book list, and it puts out a lot of scholarly periodicals, so I’m hoping we’ll soon be working on more than just the journal that has carried us in like so much flotsam on tide.

In the spring semester, no scheduling issues (except for choir) will prevent me from teaching sections that meet two or three times a week. Between the recession (Arizona’s jobless rate is now well over 9 percent) and GDU’s tuition increases and per-credit-hour surcharges, the community colleges are overrun with students. So there should be no problem filling the teaching dance card come next January.