Does junk reproduce inside closets, the same way wire coat-hangers spawn in the dark? How does so much JUNK accumulate, after you think you’ve shoveled out every drawer, closet, and cabinet in the house? Where does this stuff come from?
Well, some of it just blew in from the Great Desert University: a week or ten days ago I hauled the last of the junk out of my office and deposited it in the storeroom, where it filled countertops and shelves, waiting for me to find a place to put it away. About half of it, I should’ve thrown out without ever letting it escape the campus. However, I figured if I get the Glendale job, I’ll need the yard-sale lamps, the battery-run clocks, the odd little Mexican mirror, the useless books, the sweet little fan that fits on a bookshelf, oh god what to do with all this junk?
That’s easy: dispose of the unused junk that’s already in the closets and cabinets to make room for the transplanted unused junk.
This inspiration led to half an afternoon’s worth of winnowing out junk, cleaning out drawers to accommodate shifted valuables, wistfully going through beautiful old linens made by or belonging to my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, folding them back up, finding a new place for them… Oh, well.
Tomorrow St. Vincent de Paul will get…
• a DVD player • an AM-FM radio & CD player that runs on batteries or electricity • a set of electric curlers • an old smoke alarm • two decorative ceramic dustcatchers jars • a Braun electric coffeemaker • 4 books • a Bissell hand-held carpet spot cleaner gadget
And as I was about to sit down to tap out this post on the keyboard, I could hear the muted mating calls of the creatures still hidden in the closets:
• an old VCR player • a keyboard so old it connected to a now-defunct computer with a pair of plugs, one purple, one yellow • an ancient Toshiba laptop incapable of running any current software of any kind • a straw basketful of old electronic hoodahs and doodahs • a plastic basketful of old PC and Mac software • the Evan Mecham television • an old Mac keyboard • an ancient flatbed scanner • busted JBL speakers still sitting nonfunctionally on my desk • two empty straw basketweave things for holding magazines
Where did this stuff come from? How did it get here? What is it trying to do?
Next time you walk up a busy sidewalk or drive down a crowded street, consider this: twelve in every one hundred people around you may be going hungry because of the recession. Yes. That would be three in every twenty-five of your fellow townspeople.
That’s if you’re in one of America’s more privileged regions, somewhere in the Northeast. If you live in the Southeast, something like fifteen in one hundred of your fellow pedestrians or drivers is hungry. And not because they’re on the Atkins diet. Three in twenty wonder where their next meal will come from.
As President Obama reported recently, “food stamp applications are surging and food pantry shelves are emptying.”
That sure is true here in lovely uptown Arizona. And we’re not even in the areas alleged to be the hardest bit.
Got a package of spaghetti, a box of rice, a can of soup, a bottle of baby food? If you’re not going hungry yourself, why don’t you take that stuff to your nearest food bank. Now. Right this minute. Get up, drop the chow in a bag, and get yourself and the bag of loot to the food bank. Don’t wait.
No time to write this morning: overslept and so have only 45 minutes before the morning constitutional with La Maya. Then must get back to indexing medieval and Renaissance history.
And in the “only” department: only about 130 pages left to go on that: then the task of typing it all up. This will be the last major project I need to do for the Great Desert University.
Once it’s done, I’m outta there. The State of Arizona owes me almost 352 hours of unused vacation time. The most the state will pay for is 176 hours (although I noticed on my latest paycheck that they’re getting set to try to short me. Hallelujah! Another fight with HR comin’ up!). So what one does, I’m given to understand, is to take all the use-it-or-lose-it time at the end one one’s tenure, by way of moving the exit day forward.
If my math is right, that will put me out the door on November 30. The Thanksgiving holiday will add another two workdays to that, meaning I turn in my keys on November 25.
Folks. That is eight workdays from now. I’ve hauled all my junk home, and turning in the keys is literally all that remains to be done, other than finishing the index.
Now, that may not happen in eight days. It takes a good week of 12-hour days to compile a decent index of this book-length annual, and that’s without working around two freshman comp classes. I haven’t even looked at the student papers that came in on Friday, and another raft is due from the Monday class today. At the time I agreed to take on the community college classes, I knew it meant an avalanche of work would crash down on me at the end of the semester. What we’re hearing is the rumble of rock beginning to slide downhill.
It’ll be worth it, though. GDU drives Indians mad, and they’ve done a fair job of it with me. Will tell you all about it once I’m safely out of the white man’s camp.
Well! Only six more days till the end of the current budget cycle, and an amazing $352 is left in the kitty. Not, we might add, through any extreme deprivation: I’ve gone out to eat with friends four times in the past three weeks; bought $38 worth of scrumptious wine at Costco (some of which I enjoyed last night with steak, asparagus, and a mighty tasty avocado salad); spent over $80 on gasoline; and had my hair done. Two women have even asked who does my hair! Since I cut the budget to $1,000 preparatory to canning day, having some $350 left with a less than a week to go is a very positive development, indeed.
How is this happening? Since January, on a $1,200 kitty I’ve run over budget five months out of nine. Of the four months in the black, only one of them came in with expenditures of less than $1,000; a second was close, but no cigar.
One explanation, I think, is stockpiling: at the start of this cycle, the freezer held plenty of food. Yet I’ve spent about $317 at Costco, much (but not all) of it on food. There have been no extraordinary bills (yet): no vet bills, no car repairs, no plum…oh, wait: there was a plumbing bill. Hmmm…
The big change is that I decided to abandon microbudgeting and see what would happen if I set up virtual “envelopes” for the month instead. In microbudgeting, the budgeted amount for the month is divided in four and allocated to four periods of roughly a week each. With the envelope system, you establish an amount to spend on each of several categories, and then quit spending on a given category when you reach its limit.
Presently, the result looks like this:
In this first experiment, it appears I’ve overbudgeted for Costco and underbudgeted for gasoline and hair. Since I don’t get my hair cut every month, I figured I could think of $20 as a kind of “average,” but maybe it would be better simply not to have a “hair” budget in the months when I don’t need a trim. No law says you have to have the same budget categories, month in and month out.
I hardly ever go out to eat—really, it’s a rare month when I spend as much as $50 in restaurants. For some reason, this month all my friends have been asking me to join them, and since I have precious few friends, I incline not to turn them down. At any rate, it’s covered by the savings from the pool and Cost Plus categories.
So the question is: Does a virtual “envelope” system, even when the proprietor cheats here and there, work better than microbudgeting?
Psychologically, it may: with the weekly microbudget, one feels it’s OK to spend all the way to the hilt. In fact, when the overall monthly budget gets tight, it’s difficult not to spend the entire week’s microbudget: $250 is not much to cover all one’s bills, from food and gasoline to pet care and property maintenance. One $200 run on Costco plus a tank of gas and you’re over budget…and how often can you get out of Costco for under $200?
With the envelope system, you don’t feel so constrained: you have all month in which to spend the money allocated for groceries, clothing, gasoline, and the like. One $150 trip to Costco came nowhere near running me into the red, but if I’d spent that much out of a one-week microbudget and then had to spend $35 on gas and $30 on the hairstylist, I’d have had $35 left to last the rest of the week. One trip to Safeway would have blown it. With the virtual envelopes, it’s easy to see what remains in the budget for specific purposes, making it easy to back off some expenditures as needed.
Clearly I’m going to have to reallocate allowances for some of the categories: less on Costco and more on gas, for example. But if I’m right that this approach works better than microbudgeting, the implication is huge.
Huge.
It means that next year I should easily be able to live within my much constrained means, without having to hold a fulltime job and without even having to crank any freelance work. Combined income from Social Security and part-time teaching should more than cover my needs!
$14,400 SS + $14,160 teaching – 20% tax = $22,848 net income
$565 monthly recurring costs + $1,000 discretionary budget x 12 = $18,780 routine expenses
That leaves me almost $4,070 to the good. From what I can tell, that extra amount will just cover the cost of Medicare, which should run around $300 a month, by the time I’ve cobbled together all the aspects that go to creating full coverage. It doesn’t leave anything for emergency savings, but I have $10,000 in that fund to cover 2010; in the following year I’ll be allowed to earn more money.
So, if I don’t get the Glendale Community College job, it won’t much matter: as long as I can keep discretionary spending to around $1,000 a month, I should be fine.
And in the unlikely event that I do get the job, it would make sense to stay on this budget and save all the unspent net income, thereby making it possible not only to buy a car in cash but also to replenish savings with new earnings.
Among the dusty books and junk I brought home from the office is an anthology of essays that some publisher donated to me, in hopes that I would adopt it for one of the many classes I used to teach at the Great Desert University. In an idle moment yesterday, I happened to pick it up. It fell open to one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, and this incredible passage from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw some hue arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.
It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got greater plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
Five-Cent Nickel features a nice guest post by Craig Ford, proprietor of Money Help for Christians. Craig holds forth on ways and places to find a good deal, among them yard sales. Just last night, I was congratulating myself for having found one of my all-time best buys—a deluxe “Rabbit” wine opener that normally sells for as much as a hundred bucks—at an estate sale. I picked it up for five bucks.
Estate sales are different from yard sales in several big ways.
• A true estate sale is organized by professionals. Estate sale operators are companies and so must charge sales tax. They have a good feel for what things are worth (usually less than the homeowner thinks), and they usually do a nice job of organizing the merchandise.
• Estate sales are generally held inside the house and in the back yard, so you get to see how other people live.
• And some of the other people live mighty high off the hog. Estate sales often take place in multimillion-dollar homes, sometimes owned by people who can afford to maintain several places and who, when selling a house, simply dispose of all the designer furnishings and redecorate the next place from scratch.
• Estate sales may take place in gated communities and HOAs where ordinary yard sales are not permitted.
• Nine times out of ten, the offerings at an estate sale are much, much nicer than anything you find at a yard sale. Often you’ll find expensive items that are barely used or even brand-new.
In addition to the Rabbit, which I use a couple of times a week, I’ve bought high-quality cutlery, a beautiful set of coveted Tonalaware, a matching red leather sofa and recliner for M’hijito’s house, a fun leather ottoman for my own place, a gorgeous custom-made library table, upscale cookbooks, and any number of tschotchkies, yard items, and household gadgets.
The trick to estate sales is finding out about them and then getting there before they open. An easy way to find an estate sale in your area is to go to Estatesales.net and subscribe. At the site, you can click on your state and then your city to find a list of nearby sales. It’s even easier to subscribe; this will elicit a weekly e-mail listing of upcoming events, and the e-mail generally tells you whether and where the estate-sale company has posted photos.
A listing with photos is especially useful, because you get a feel for whether a given sale has goods that may interest you, and you waste a lot less time than you do wandering from yard sale to yard sale.
Remember, though, that you will be competing with antique and second-hand dealers. This means you need to get there early! Be there a half-hour before the door opens, and be prepared to stand in line. If a sale is really hot, the organizers will let only 15 or 20 people in at a time, for safety and for the sake of maintaining order. The dealers are always there as dawn cracks, and they go straight to the best stuff.
It’s smart to bring a basket, box, or shopping bag, so you’re not having to balance things in one hand while you inspect the merchandise. Also, some people will bring their own tags marked with their name and SOLD. Usually you claim an item by removing the tag or picking it up and carrying it over to the cashier’s table, but not everyone knows an untagged item is considered “sold.”
Estate sales are a lot of fun, not only because you sometimes score a fantastic deal but because you get to see some amazing real estate, some interesting antiques, and some expensive designer furniture. La Maya even found her house in our neighborhood at an estate sale. She visited the estate sale, having found it in a weekly e-mail notice, and once inside she realized she loved the beautiful house. When she asked the estate-sale organizer if the owners were planning to sell, the answer was yes! Instantly she called her partner, who agreed that it was a perfect place for them, and before long they were living around the corner from me. Now there’s an estate-sale triumph!
