Finally—finally, finally, finally—the state sent out a booklet showing the medical benefits offered during this fall’s annual enrollment period. We’re a week in to the normal open enrollment period and have had no information. GDU was supposed to have posted this stuff today, but at last look had not. The state, however, has known the facts long enough to print out and mail a 69-page document to every employee.
We still have an EPO, through the very iffy Cigna but at least an EPO, and my doc at the Mayo accepts it. Thank God! And according to the CSR I just spoke to, it will cover care at any emergency room, including the pricey Mayo. Premium is only $39 a month.
The total monthly premium is $523. According to this document, those of us who are to be canned between now and December 31 will be entitled to the COBRA discount and so will have to pay only 35 percent of the usual outrageous COBRA premium. For the EPO, then, my cost will be $183 a month—significantly less than I’ve budgeted for Medicare Part B + Medicare Part D + Medigap.
Hallelujah! Now…if I can just manage to not get sick between now and my 65th birthday, I’ll be golden.
Richard’s men are almost done with the big landscaping job at the downtown house. We’d hired his company, Dick’s Landscaping, to xeriscape both the front and back yards, huge plots of land compared to modern tract lots.
They’ve ripped out a decrepit walkway, built a front courtyard and new brick walkway, installed an automatic watering system (front and back), laid three brick patios, planted eight trees and a bunch of ornamental grasses and shrubs, laid weed fabric over the bermudagrass-infested ground, and spread 75 tons of quarter-minus crushed granite. And the place is looking a lot better!
Here’s a “before” view of the backyard:
For a good view, click on the images
And an after:
We’re looking at a lemon tree, a lime tree, a Texas ebony, deer grass, a Mexican bird of paradise. Both the Lisbon lemon and the Mexican lime will get to be good-sized trees. Texas ebony is slow-growing, but over time it develops into a very handsome xeric tree. Not much we can do about the overhead wires, which actually are over the alley, other than consider them quaint characteristics of a character-filled antique bungalow.
Work in progress in front:
And here’s the result:
The little tree is a multi-trunked desert willow, which grows to a medium height and bears lovely deep purple flowers for many months during the late winter and spring. In a year or two, it should shade the front window and, with the mature carob tree just to its west, cool and shade the new courtyard.
More to come: We just had Richard’s crew do the heavy lifting for us. After the worst of the heat passes, M’hijito will plant more ornamentals and set various potted plants around the yard. And in back, we’ll lay flagstone stepping stones to build a pathway from the covered patio to the new sitting area in back.
The 1,450 bricks that came from the estate sale sufficed to build most of the three patios, and we still have a few left. Amazing buy!
Our project inspired the down-at-the-heels neighbor across the street to do a little keeping-up-with-the-jonesing: he snagged our workmen and hired them to lay a wide driveway in his front yard. Maybe some of the rolling stock will get moved off the lawn!
Well, if there ever was any question about who holds sway in the halls of Congress, the outcome of the effort to regulate the credit-card industry to provide a little consumer protection. Who owns Congress? Big industries with deep enough pockets to hire persistent, heavy-hitting lobbyists, that’s who.
Have you received your notice from American Express yet? Mine came a couple days ago: a flatly worded announcement that late fees and interest rates are going up.
Not that I care: I don’t carry a balance on any credit card, and though I charge almost every purchase as a matter of convenience, I make it a point to pay well in advance of the due date.
Betcha this isn’t the last we’ll hear from AMEX on the subject. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that American Express and other major card issuers are canceling hundreds of cardholders’ accounts without explanation and without notice. In many cases, the canceled accounts are deemed inactive because the cardholders haven’t used them in some months. But at least a few accounts, including one reported in that W. St. J. article, belong to people who use their cards, never miss a payment, and pay off balances monthly.
Over at Freep, commentator Brian Dickerson calls the new legislation “regulation a regulated industry can love.” He points out that Congress rejected the only provision that would have given consumers any meaningful protection—a cap on the already usurious interest rates card issuers can charge. Says Dickerson:
In the end, card issuers preserved both their right to charge whatever the market will bear and their right to abruptly cancel a cardholder’s credit without advance notice.
Uh huh. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:
Several days late and who knows how many dollars short, Bosch is blitzing the purchasers in its records with recorded telephone calls to let them know their fancy dishwashers may set fire to the house. An overheating part has caused something upwards of 50 incidents, of which 30 (or more) have caused property damage. Well…those figures are as of last January, when the recall went out.
Because I let my subscription to Consumer Reports lapse, I didn’t hear about this until the company’s phone robot occupied some space on my voicemail.
Naturally, not only do I have one of those in my house, M’hijito and I bought one for the downtown house. Both of machines seem to have been recalled.
Yesterday I called the toll-free number and was told to quit using the machine (yeah. right!), to wait until they get around to sending the part, and then call Sears and wait until they get around to sending someone to repair the thing. Of course, I didn’t have the model and serial numbers for M’hijito’s dishwasher, so that means I’m now sitting interminably on the Bosch’s hold button. At least they pump classical music into your ear, instead of the usual drech.
What’s annoying about this is not that they installed a defective part in God only knows how many units but that they waited until mid-August to blanket the country with phone calls. It means both my son and I (among who knows how many other hapless consumers) have been using a hazardous appliance for at least eight months. Don’t know about you, but I often turn on the dishwasher and then leave the house, or turn it on right before I go to bed. To frost that cookie, this could not be a worse time to have to deal with Sears’s often rude and usually difficult service department! Classes start the week after next; I’ve got to go to six meetings next week, plus of course I’m supposed to show up at work, of all the ridiculous things!
So I’m less than perfectly thrilled at the prospect of waiting around from 8:00 to noon or 1:00 to 5:00 for some Sears guy to show up, knowing he probably won’t show up in that window.
♦ ♦ ♦
Just got through on the phone to one Chris, a CSR of considerable charm. Mercifully, the second dishwasher is not on the recall list. Good: only one round of the Workman Waltz, not two.
Well, I’m glad to know about the hazard and glad to have them fix it for free. But I sure do wish they’d clued me when it came up…eight months ago! If you have a Bosch and haven’t heard about this, better check out the recall notice. The phone number to call, if you think your model might be among the recalled, is 1-800-856-9226.
Interestingly, I found a table on the Social Security Administration’s site that calculates how much your “full” retirement age SS benefit is reduced according to the number of months you retire “early.” GDU is closing our office and canning me a year and four months before I reach so-called “full” retirement age.
This has caused many hours of worried number-crunching, because you can’t earn more than $14,160 in a year without incurring a 50% surtax on the amount you earn above that threshold. If you have the temerity to overstep that boundary by a few dollars, Social Security withholds not just the amount you owe, but an entire month’s benefit! (Or more, depending on how gravely you’ve sinned.) You get it back, minus the amounted owed, the following January! That’s assuming, of course, that you haven’t starved to death by then.
It’s a real problem for me, because my savings, formerly adequate to support me in retirement, have been so dessicated by the crash of the Bush-Cheney economy that today a reasonable 4 percent drawdown plus Social Security plus the allowed $14,160 in part-time earnings will not yield enough to support me.
My financial counselor, however, advises me that my savings probably will outlast my lifetime even at a 6 percent drawdown, though he’s not happy at the prospect. On their own, the net of Social Security plus a 6 percent draw would leave my Ultimate Belt-Tightened Budget $5,544 in the red at the end of 2010.
Obviously, I’ll have to teach, do freelance editing, or some combination thereof as long as I’m splitting the cost of the downtown house with M’hijito. When that obligation goes away, I may just barely get by on Social Security and investment income. And of course…I can’t work forever—sooner or later the day will come when I can’t earn anything.
At the Social Security page above, I discovered that in January 2010 I’ll be “entitled” to 91.1% of my “full” retirement benefit. This comes to $16,026, about $2082 more than I’d been figuring.
Well. Every little bit helps.
It also occurred to me that I don’t have to put the $3,168 that I think I’ll net on the $5,280 GDU will owe me for unused vacation time, come next December, directly into savings. Instead, I could use it to live on in 2010.
In 2011, because I reach 66 that year, I’ll be allowed to earn something over $37,000 between January and my birthday in May (capricious as hell, isn’t it? the rules must have been written by a committee of asylum inmates!). This means that in 2010, I don’t have to worry about limiting earned income.
Taking the new Social Security estimate and adding estimated net vacation pay plus a 6 percent investment drawdown, I come up with a somewhat brighter estimate of 2010 income.
Without teaching at all, apparently I would end up only $2,376 in the hole at the end of the year. Since I will probably net about $1,920 for one community college course, this would mean I would have to teach only two sections a year to break even. That assumes that my estimate of the tax bite is correct, and that, at $39,672, I have not grossly underestimated my annual expenses.
However, if I chose to get off my duff and actually work, taking a 6 percent drawdown and applying the vacation pay to 2010 living expenses would provide a pretty generous income, without drawing any Social Security:
Teaching 5 & 5 (for a total of 4 GDU courses and 6 community college courses over a year), an unholy teaching overload, would give me plenty of money to live on in this first, terrifying year of unemployment. Even teaching a more reasonable load of 4 & 4 would provide an adequate cushion, assuming no really major expenses come up. The middle column in this table would have me teaching three sections a semester at GDU, which I think is disallowed—more than two would make you benefits-eligible, which of course is exactly what universities and colleges are trying to avoid by hiring adjunct faculty.
Advantages: It would free me from a lot of bureaucratic complications, and it would allow me to earn as much as I can.
Disadvantage: The massive workload would allow no time for freelancing, and over a year, I would lose my freelance clients.
A far better course load of 3 & 3 at the community colleges, combined with Social Security, vacation pay, and a 6 percent drawdown, also would keep me comfortably in the black. In fact, the result would be significantly better than working myself into an early grave:
Hot dang! In this scenario (if it’s accurate), I actually could bank the $3,168 vacation pay and still get by just fine.
Advantages: Though I still have to work, I don’t have to kill myself at it. The amount left here suggests I will have no problem covering expenditures, even if a large unexpected expense arises. There should still be time for freelance work, and every $2,400 earned there is one composition course I don’t have to teach!
Disadvantage: I’ll have to draw more than is desirable from savings.
Dropping the drawdown to 5 percent would reduce the total annual net to $45,170, cutting the year-end black ink to $5,500. Even at 4 percent, I stay in the black, but with a much smaller margin: about $1,950 at the end of the year.
What I ultimately do depends on what Social Security actually pays me, which will be different from my guesses. They’re missing two years of income that I can prove I had; though it’s not much, it may increase the benefits a little. More likely, though, benefits will be less than I estimate. That’s just the way my karma goes.
It also depends on the tax load: I’m estimating 20% based on the facts that not all your SS is taxed and that I will deduct everything I can think of from all this contract income. With any luck, the taxes won’t bankrupt me—but again, we’re depending on luck, and the way things have gone over the past year, it looks like the luck well is running a bit dry.
The safest course, it appears, will be to take a 5 percent or a 6 percent drawdown in 2010, start Social Security in January, and sign up for three community college sections in the spring semester. Then, in the fall, reduce the teaching load according to the amount freelancing brings in during the spring and early summer. Then in 2010 I can drop the drawdown to 5 percent or maybe even 4 percent, depending on how much freelance income is happening.
