As my beloved dean and her crafty colleagues were feting me for my alleged 15th year of labor at the Great Desert University, it occurred to me to wonder, again, why they think I’ve been there 15 years when I think I’ve been there 16 years. If they’re right, then my CV is wrong. If they’re wrong, then I’m about to get shorted a significant amount of severance pay. Luckily, I keep every shred of paper that even vaguely resembles financial records.
Yesterday afternoon, I got into the dusty old file cabinet that resides in the garage. What should I find but a tax return strongly suggesting that GDU paid me for a lot more than one adjunct section! A little more excavation, and up came a file folder packed with old pay statements.
And yea, verily. My first full-time paycheck was issued in August 1993: sixteen long years ago.
This means HR is either one semester or one full year off in its records. That error is worth either $720 or $1,440 to me. When employees have been with the state for a while, their sick leave accrues. At 500 hours, it’s worth 1/3 of your hourly rate when you leave your job for whatever reason; at 1,000 hours it’s worth 1/2 your hourly rate. I have almost 1,200 hours.
At the time, sick leave was accruing at the rate of 4 hours a paycheck, adding as much as 96 hours to my present accrual (assuming HR’s records are a full year off). At $15 per hour, that totes up to a nice sum, even if they’re only off a half-year.
Keep your financial records! Store them in a safe place, and keep them forever, not for the seven years recommended by tax experts. If I hadn’t squirreled all my old paychecks away, I would have no way of proving when I really started full-time at GDU.
I learned this trick from my ex-husband, a corporate lawyer. He kept every scrap of paper that had anything to do with anything. He was so extreme that he had all our canceled checks returned to us, and he stored them tidily in a bureau drawer. Year after year after year of canceled checks, all lined up like little micron-thick soldiers…
Well, I’m don’t go that far, but I do keep my pay statements, my tax returns, and receipts for major purchases such as the roof job, appliances, and computers. Anything that’s tax-related probably should be stored permanently. Clutter? Yes. It’s a nuisance to find room for a four-drawer file cabinet and stash all this junk in it.
But. The squirreling habit paid off for me yesterday.
Over at Get Rich Slowly, J.D.’s wife Kris has posted this month’s report on the great gardening experiment. I love these posts! It’s such a hoot to watch their progress and to view all the photos Kris and J.D. put online. One of the insights their experience (and, thanks to their inspiration, my own) has brought is that a garden, properly managed, amounts to a de facto income stream. Yea, verily: an under-the-radar, nontaxable income stream!
This winter (the best growing time in Arizona), I’ve managed to grow a surprising amount of food in a very small space. The only places I have to grow vegetables are a small flowerbed next to the pool and a half-dozen big pots set in the few backyard spots that get direct sun most of the day. But I’ve been harvesting chard and beet greens all winter. The carrots are now ready to eat, and the beets, while less than perfectly successful, will suffice for a few meals.
The trees also qualify as garden citizens. I’ve been scarfing candy-sweet oranges—six to ten of them a day—since last January, and some fruit still remains. The Meyer lemon bore amazing juicy lemons the size of grapefruits, a bunch of which remain to be squeezed and frozen. The lime tree bears almost year-round.
Think of it: one dinky little lemon costs 50 or 60 cents. I’ll have enough juice in the freezer to stock the kitchen until the tree comes back into fruit. Though the freezer is full of grocery-store frozen veggies, I hardly eat the stuff, because I have so much fresh produce growing in the backyard.
Preparing garden vegetables for the freezer is surprisingly easy. The other day I put up a passel of beets and beet greens for future use.
Wash the fresh-picked vegetables well.
1. Bring a big pot of water to the boil. 2. Meanwhile, fill the sink with cold water and add a bunch of ice to make it really cold. 3. Dip the clean vegetables into the boiling water. 4. Watch closely. Let them seethe just long enough for leafy things to turn bright green, or for a couple minutes for things like beets and carrots. Don’t overcook. 5. Using a slotted spoon or strainer, dip the vegetables out of the hot water and quickly plunge them into the icy water. 6. As soon as the heat is chilled out of them, lay them out on paper or fabric towels. Cover with more toweling. Pat dry. 7. When the produce is as dry as you can get it, divide it into storage bags, label the bags with the contents and date, and stash them in the freezer.
Some foods may be better cooked before freezing. For example, a fair amount of butternut squash, baked with honey and sweet spices, resides in the freezer just now. Ditto scalloped potatoes. The beauty of fully cooking the produce is that all you have to do is defrost the stuff and it’s ready to eat. The upside of blanching and freezing it is that you have produce ready to prepare in any number of different recipes.
And the real beauty of it: the freshest of all possible food sitting in the backyard at all times!
To expand on the idea of garden as income stream, I’d like to suggest that to make this work, we need to keep the basic cost of the garden under control. It’s easy for the cost of a backyard garden to outstrip the cost of the best organic produce from Whole Foods. This winter’s farming project points to a few guidelines:
1. Avoid gardening in pots, if at all possible. If you have a patch of ground, use it.
In the first place, most plants prefer to grow in the ground. But more to the frugalist’s point, even if you can get the pot on the cheap, you still have to fill it with dirt. In my part of the country, soil is clayey (sometimes concrete-like…) and doesn’t drain well in a pot. Because potted plants need excellent drainage, you either have to fill the pot with store-bought potting soil (!! expensive) or mix potting soil, home-made compost, and dirt from the ground about a third/a third/a third. The ground is happy if you just spade in some compost or manure.
2. Use seeds.
Plant sets are expensive. Seeds are cheap.
If you live in a place where winters are cold, start your own plant sets in the house before the ground warms up. No fancy equipment is needed for this project: visit Simply Forties and check out Mary’s idea of using TP rolls as plant pots for baby veggies.
You can buy seeds for neat varieties of many vegetables. And in many cases you can get seeds from grocery-store vegetables to grow. Out in the back yard just now, a horde of green things that came out of a Safeway butternut squash are hollering “Feed me, Seymour!” With any luck, these and the cantaloupe plants growing next to them will provide a fine harvest later in the summer.
3.Make friends with other gardeners.
Not only will you learn a lot about growing plants, gardeners often share extra plants with their friends. This is a great way to get free plants (free food!) and a great way to find new homes for extra little critters that grow from seeds or tubers in your own garden.
4. Make your own compost.
After the demise of my composter, I started a new batch in an aged plastic plant pot, which provides drainage for extra moisture. Putting an old plastic pot saucer over the top keeps it warm, fosters anaerobes, and allows me to flip compost over once every week or two. It already has is almost ready to use in the ground. You don’t need to buy an expensive lash-up for composting. A hole in the ground and a pitchfork make a fine low-tech composting system.
Faced with penury, my plan now is to use some space in the Investment House’s backyard to enlarge the agricultural enterprise. M’hijito, a talented gardener, has agreed that this will be OK, and so I hope to get some beans and melons going over there this summer. And with any luck, the Funny Farm here at my house will produce carrots, tomatoes, butternut squash, cantaloupe, basil, onions, and the usual parsley, thyme, sage, mint, tarragon, and marjoram.
Every bite that we don’t have to buy at a market represents a savings ranging from a few cents to a few dollars. This savings is accentuated if you incline to buy organic. So, if you can keep the cost of operating the garden within reason, over time the garden itself creates an in-kind income stream.
Affording COBRA, the plan that allows workers to extend their health insurance benefits as much as 18 months after a job loss, is a stretch for most of us and impossible for many. After I’m canned, for example, the cost of my EPO will go from $13 a month to $485—and that’s to insure just one person!
We’ve known that the government’s stimulus plan will pick up a chunk of this for a period of nine months, but the university’s HR department refuses to provide the details. Thanks to the miracle of the Internet, though, an enterprising soon-to-be-bag lady can dig up the story on her own.
It looks like The Kid and I will fall into the eligible category. You have to meet these guidelines:
-Canned between September 1, 2008 and December 31, 2009
-Laid off or involuntarily let go (if you walked or you were canned for misconduct, you don’t qualify)
-Subscribed toyour employer’s health-care plan before you lost your job
-Had an adjusted gross income of less than $125,000 if you’re single or $250,000 if you’re married and file jointly (the subsidy phases out at higher rates as you approach $145,000/$290,000)
If you can make the cut, you get a 65% reduction in COBRA for nine months. For me, that means premiums of $169.75 a month, instead of the present $485. Since I’ve already set aside the money to cover the five months between layoff day and my 65th birthday (Medicare day), that would put a lot more in the proposed survival pool: about $1,575!
Don’t know how this will work for The Kid. She would have to insure herself and her child—until her recent divorce, they were on her (now ex-)husband’s insurance. He just lost his job. The cost of insuring more than one person on the university’s plans is pretty high, and she may not be able to afford it on her grandiose $16,000 salary.
If you’re about to be laid off or if you were laid off after last August and turned down COBRA because you couldn’t afford it, look into this. The government is giving people who rejected COBRA a second chance to sign up. They say it will take most employers a couple of months to send out letters to eligible ex-employees. Obviously, though, if you’ve moved and your employer doesn’t have your current address (is there mail delivery under the Seventh Avenue Overpass?), you’ll need to be proactive.
There just may be a way to survive post-layoff with little risk and not too much fear and loathing. A drawdown of 4 percent from retirement savings plus early Social Security plus a modest hand-to-mouth income would support my current lifestyle. Here’s how:
If I move my plan to create a large cash-flow pool from savings in 2010 forward to, say, today, I could pay for the Investment House mortgage out of cash flow + non-tax-deferred savings (thereby preserving tax-deferred savings, if the market improves over the rest of 2009). Assuming I pick up two junior-college classes in the fall and thereafter engineer three a semester, I could continue to carry the mortgage with no problem whatsoever. In fact, not only can I continue to pay the mortgage and live in my wonted style, at the end of 2010 I could be some $3,200 ahead of the game.
And that’s not counting revenues from freelancing and not counting whatever little bit Funny about Money might generate once it’s monetized. It also is figuring the highest monthly expenses year-round: utility costs represent summer expenses, twice the winter rates.
This is a function of longstanding frugality. Because I put about $400 a month into casual savings, plus all the after-tax revenues from freelancing, a fair amount of cash has gathered in the credit union’s money market account. So…next time someone tells you frugality is bad for your psyche and bad for the economy, tell them to think again.
Now, I allow as to how I have indeed said I’d rather eat worms than teach one more section of freshman comp. However, when you come right down to it, we’re talking about a grand total of eight months’ labor a year. Around here, you get about a month off over winter break and three months over the summer.
To make a long spreadsheet short, if I gather all the savings now in the credit union and add the coming federal tax refund, I could “grubstake” a “pool” account with $11,448. By December 31, after paying my $800/month share of the mortgage bill, that base amount will have grown to $14,788, assuming I take on two community college courses in the fall.
The point of this “grubstake” or “cushion” would be to keep from overdrawing my checking account in months when expenses outrun revenues.
So, in January, when I have to start drawing Social Security and 4 percent of what little remains of my retirement savings, I would start with $14,788 plus $1,162 of Social Security and $1,333 of investment proceeds, plus net monthly pay from the community colleges, which is about $500 per course.
If I teach two sections, at the end of 2010 I end up $1,276 in the hole.
But three sections produce $3201 worth of black ink.
The fly in the proverbial ointment, however, is income taxes. While the $500/community college course represents net pay, the amounts for Social Security and investment income are gross figures. Assuming just 18 percent (an optimistic guess if ever there was one), taxes on investments and Social Security combined would come to around $5,400. So the truth is, the reward for teaching three courses could be a $2,190 annual deficit. I’d probably have to make around $4,000 in freelance income to pay for that. Impossible to tell, though: taxation in this country is so frigging complicated there’s no way an ordinary taxpayer can make any such projection without professional help.
Well, the taxes come under the heading of “tomorrow’s another day.” Money happens: I’ll find a way to cover it.
In a deliciously Kafkaesque moment,yesterday noon I was fêted for my fifteen-year longevity at Our Beloved Employer: lunch out; a fine piece of paper with maroon and gold print on it, suitable for framing; and another cheap maroon-and-gold pin with a chip of a semiprecious stone in it.
LOL! I could hock my whole collection of cheap GDU pins for enough to buy about an ounce of Starbuck’s coffee.
What the heck. I ordered the most expensive meal on the menu: three sea scallops and a spinach salad.
w. 0. 0. t.
Next door to the overpriced restaurant, however, is an overpriced shoe store, the one whose clutches I evaded when Frugal Scholar clued me to Footprints. That outfit carries some very fine purses, none of which I have found for sale on the Web. Of late, I’ve been carrying a canvas shopping bagas a purse(a nice canvas shopping bag…). It’s getting a bit tatty. I really needed a new purse, all my old ones having surpassed the shopping bag’s state of tattiness. Realizing that after I’m laid off, a plasticene-leather tote from Target will be about the best I can afford, I ran in there and grabbed a mighty fine piece of style. Two hundred fifty buckolas! But I’ve got it in savings, set aside for exactly this sort of indulgence. And since the budget is $425 to the good, anyway, I can afford it out of cash flow.
Having that little gem sitting on the floor next to me was a bit of a comfort as I was pretending to be polite while sandwiched between Her Deanship and two of the institution’s most ruthless vice-presidents.
This is one of about a half-dozen items that need to get done or purchased while I still have some money. Videlicet:
-New close-up glasses
-Composter
-Security door for back entrance (or at least a decent screen door)
-Solid-core door for office, with strong deadbolt
-Painting the Investment House
-Resuscitating the yard at the Investment House
Glasses:In August we’ll have an open enrollment. At that time I could sign up for the university’s vision plan (assuming it’s still offered). If I delay getting glasses till fall, this would allow me to pick up a cheap pair before I’m canned in December. They use one of those nationwide chains of optical stores, which has a bad reputation. In Arizona you’re prohibited from buying a pair of glasses without getting an eye exam, which is not covered by health insurance and which I can’t afford just now (read, “because I highly resent that!”). All I need is a back-up pair, so I suppose they don’t have to be the best in the world.
Composter: I dearly miss the wonderful composter drum La Bethulia gave me. Smith & Hawkin has a similar bin, only it’s on wheels. That would be convenient. The one drawback to the deceased was that getting the compost out and hauling it across the yard to the various gardens and gigantic pots could be a chore. Problem: Smith & Hawkin wants more than $200 for this wonder.
Security: The kitchen door is the most vulnerable entrance to the house. To break in, all you need to do is tap out a glass pane, reach in, and unlock the door. The vinyl screen door is a flimsy piece of junk that won’t even keep out the flies. The locksmith suggested that if you use a room as an office, you can keep all your computer gear in there plus a safe with other valuables, and then put a deadbolt on that room’s door. Every time you leave the house, lock the door. Since the Mac is the only thing I own of any real value, that strikes me as a good idea. The interior door, however, is an airy thing that I could punch through myself with one swift kick, and so it will have to be replaced with a sturdier model.
Paint: I probably could paint part of the investment house myself. But I don’t have the physical strength to do the eaves and back patio. Greg the Handyman wants $1,500 to do the job, about $600 more than Bila the Bosnian Painter’s bid. I’m thinking we need to call Bila and get that done while we can afford it.
Yard: With Gerardo’s help, I probably could do a fair amount of upgrade to the Investment House’s wrecked landscaping myself. Gerardo would need to regrade the driveway and lay new gravel. Ideally, we should jackhammer up the pathetic walkway, but I think I can pretty that up simply by laying a bed of river rock next to it. For not very much, Gerardo would till and seed the front lawn, a major improvement. I think some blue fescue or something along those lines would grow under the carob tree, and a second tree strategically planted near the unhappy walkway would cast enough shade on the front window to save a few air-conditioning dollars. In the back, I intend to build another vegetable garden for my use, since I’ve run out of growing space at my own house. As long as I’m gardening back there, I might as well build a couple of brick-on-sand or flag-on-sand patios, too.
Taken together, these will add up to some bucks. But if I string them out over the next few months, I should be able to afford most of it without having to raid savings. Especially if, as hoped, Scottsdale and Paradise Valley community colleges hire me and max out the number of courses I can teach for the district next fall: the net of about five grand will go directly into savings, easing the need for me to pinch pennies between now and the New Year’s Eve layoff.
w00t! My plan to stockpile food, thereby limiting trips to grocery and big-box stores, is already paying for itself. Ten days into the current budget cycle, I’m $425 in the black (!!!!!). Last week I spent a grand total of $55 on a few catch-up items. This week, I’ve spent $120, of which $13 went to gasoline. About $40 went to food; the rest covered OTC meds and household goods. There’s plenty of food in the house, and fresh veggies thriving in the garden.
Normally, the first week of a budget cycle would go right straight into the red. In the pre-stockpiling regime, I would regularly run out of food (and everything else) near the end of the month. So, in the first week of each cycle I would have to make a gigantic Costco/Safeway/Target run, because the cupboard would be bare. Last month, before the stockpiling strategy kicked in, I was $75 in the hole against my first week’s microbudget; the preceding month’s first week, 36 cents in the black; in December’s, $270 in the red.
Now what I’m doing is keeping a running record of things that are starting to run low. Because there’s no hurry to restock, I can wait until these items come on sale, or until I have time to drive across the city to a cheaper emporium.
A fresh set of grocery-store and big-box ads came in the mail yesterday evening. Taking advantage of the sales, I expect, will allow me to expand on the hoard without having to devote cash in savings accounts to the project.
Goal:Have six months’ worth of food and household supplies in the house by Layoff Day, December 31, 2009.
