Tomorrow I’m meeting with the editor of a small local press about a freelance job. It’s low-paid, but one of my RAs is freelancing for this outfit and says the work is steady.
For the time being, I don’t need much pay. The amount I’d make in a year would be about 1.5 times the amount I’d earn teaching one course, and the work is a lot easier and a lot less annoying. Two gigs of this nature would out-earn the equivalent of teaching a course a semester, a reasonable load in addition to a full-time job.
I also hope to let her know I’m open for other work and may soon be in the market for a full-time job.
My boss has had my annual review materials for three weeks. All I’ve heard from her is silence.
Meanwhile, today the legislature is expected to cut the Great Desert University’s budget by $50.4 million. My college alone is millions of dollars in the hole, far deeper in the red than at any time in the university’s history. And my job? By no stretch of the imagination can it be seen as “essential.” It supports the university’s mission, but only if you understand that a university has a mission to do research and scholarship as well as to teach. And our state’s legislators and regents never have fully grasped that point.
So I worry: Is the dean silent because she’s waiting to see if my contract will be among those to be canceled? Is she already mulling over ways to show me the door?
This is a recurring worry for me, since I work on a year-to-year contract that can be canceled at will. Under normal circumstances, it’s not much of a worry, because of institutional inertia: replacing me would be a hassle, and so it would take quite a dramatic circumstance to move the administration to do that. However, in the face of gigantic budget cuts, another possibility arises: get rid of me and all my staff. Closing down my entire office would not be a hassle. My RAs’ contracts end at the semester and mine ends on June 30. To get rid of us all, the university simply has to let our contracts lapse.
That strikes me as not unlikely. Experience has shown that silence from the dean’s quarters is often a bad sign.
So it behooves me to start looking around for other work, even it it’s just freelance stuff.
It has to be possible to get by on the reduced collect-at-age-62 Social Security and the proceeds from my retirement savings. My income would drop from $61,000 to $37,760, of which $12,000 has to go to pay the mortgage on the Investment House. I can’t even begin to imagine how I would live on $25,760-pretax! With no health insurance! Health insurance alone, through ASU’s retiree system, would consume another $7,200. How on earth would I eat, to say nothing of support a house?
Be This Way describes how she and her husband arranged to make it possible for her to knock off work. On the other hand: she has a spouse who’s earning a living. I have no one. And SDXB has been insisting for years that Bumhood is feasible for anyone who’s determined to make it work. But: he has a military pension and gets twice as much SS as I will get, on top of his savings. He lives in Sun City, where housing costs are a fraction of mine, taxes are a third as much as mine, and insurance is half of mine. And his idea of “normal” is most people’s idea of “ascetic”—he lives an Extreme Frugal lifestyle as a matter of course.
I don’t want to live like that, and I don’t want to live in Sun City. But if I lose my job, that’s pretty much how it’ll have to be.
Comments from the iWeb site:
This is very stressful stuff.You’re right in that my situation is very different, and I’m lucky that we have no debt besides my small (under $600 a month) mortgage.
I don’teven knoe you but I have every confidence that IF they close tyour department or don’t renew your contract that you will manage.You’re capable and not afraid to work, and work hard.
Keep us posted!