Retirement | Funny about Money

Life, the universe, and all that money

August 10, 2009July 21, 2009 by funny

This morning Cassie the Corgi and I awoke to a cityscape imbued with a strange yellow light. You couldn’t call it “golden.” Jaundiced fit better. Off in the distance occasional rolls of thunder rumbled across the sky, sounding for all the world like well-aimed bowling balls shooting up a wooden alley. To the south and west, a dark blue-gray storm drifted our way.

Last night’s windstorm blew a bushel of debris into the pool. After fishing the bonnet cleaner’s net off the bottom of the deep end, I decided to let the leaves and twigs sit until after the pump comes on and pushes them into one or two mounds, discretion being the better part. Standing in the back yard waving a metal pole around might tempt fate a little too far, given the flickers of lightning drawing ever nearer and the rain-fat clouds already overhead.

Most amazing: the air was almost cool! With temps low enough to shut off the air conditioner, we opened up the house and let some fresh air in for the first time in weeks. It’s quarter to eight and the thermometer still reads in the mid-eighties. At last! I’m sitting on the deck watching a gentle rain and enjoying my home—for the first time in many a moon.

This is the way central Arizona used to be, back in the Cretaceous before humans came along and wrecked the place. The hideous Phoenix metropolitan area—and believe me, this town is an aesthetic truck wreck, the city parents having studied everything Southern California did wrong and decided to do exactly that—has created a “heat island,” a thermal bubble arising from our having paved over mile after endless square mile with asphalt, concrete, and fake-tile roofs. Where water is no longer affordable (that is, in all of the newer development), the bladed desert floor has been covered with sizzling crushed granite and rock.

All of Arizona, including the low desert where Phoenix resides, used to experience daily thunderstorms and rain throughout the summer, starting about the end of June and lasting until the middle of August. Along about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m., the rains would drop temperatures about 20 degrees, from the low 100s to the low 80s or even the 70s.

Summers were hot, but nothing like what we see today. A 115-degree day was a rarity; it might have occurred once every three years or so, and heat like that didn’t last longer than a day or two. Now, 115 is pretty normal for July, and 118 is commonplace. In Sun City last week, SDXB recorded a temperature of 121 on his shaded back porch. That’s right: one hundred and twenty-one degrees. In the shade.

The cause of this change is supposedly the heat island: as the summer storms approach the urban area, they’re bounced back when they hit the wall of heat reflecting off the paved surfaces. And it’s true, you can see the clouds ringing the valley, see them approach, then part and go around us. Personally, I think climate change has something to do with it, too, but that’s neither here nor there. Whatever the cause, the phenomenon is real: the Valley is significantly hotter and significantly drier than it has been in European memory.

What does all this have to do with money? Well, the usual: reeel estate!

La Maya and La Bethulia have been seriously considering the upland town of Prescott as a retirement venue. Since GDU has exhibited an enthusiasm for online courses, La Maya has realized that if she could teach all her classes online, she would not be married to the Valley. La Bethulia, a psychiatric nurse practitioner with a significant reputation, has already been offered work in Prescott. So, they could reasonably move there before either of them quits working.

And since I’m about to quit working with a vengeance, I could in theory retire there, if I could find a decent house that I could afford. With real estate values depressed, usually pricey property is about within reach, especially if I could sell my house by-owner and save the 6 to 8 percent Realtor’s fee.

This summer has been about the worst in my memory. I’ve never seen it stay so oppressively hot for so long. We’ve had day after day after day of 115-degree-plus temperatures, and nights that don’t cool down: it’s routine to walk outside at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. into 100-degree darkness.

IMHO, that’s not livable. Like snowbound northerners, you avoid going outdoors unless you’re forced to. A drive over almost-melting streets is miserable and dangerous—everyone’s tempers are short, people do crazy things, and nastiness is the standard mood of fellow drivers on streets and in the parking lots. When you come out of the grocery store, having left your car locked up for 20 minutes or so, the steering wheel is so hot it will burn your hands, and if your car has vinyl seats, you’d better not be wearing shorts. Literally: people have sustained second-degree burns from sitting on hot car seats.

Devil-pod tree, a.k.a. acacia salacina — Devil-pod tree, a.k.a. acacia salicina

Meanwhile, every plant on my considerable piece of property has to be watered EVERY DAY. The potted tomatoes, herbs, squash, and cantaloupe are wilting by 8:00 or 9:00 a.m., and if I had the temerity to take a weekend’s vacation in cooler climes, every plant would be dead by 5:00 p.m. on the day I left. Even in full shade, some plants’ leaves are burned. Because of the hot, dusty winds and the fact that Satan and Proserpine (previous owners of the House from Hell) planted the devil-pod tree next to the pool directly in the flow of the prevailing summer winds, the damned pool is chuckablock full of cleaner-choking pods and straplike leaves, all of which have to be fished out of the pool before the system comes on. The tiles have to be cleaned every day, the walls scrubbed down every morning, the pool refilled (it loses about an inch a day to evaporation) every morning.

These outdoor chores take about two to three hours. Every. Single. Day. Miss a day, and you get a green pool and a yardful of dead plants. All this work gets done in 100-degree heat, starting at about 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. It means I get to put in two hours of physical labor in crushing heat under a searing sun before I can feed the dog or have my own breakfast.

And the dog, the one that refuses to use a doggy door and regards the out of doors with horror? She has to be walked before the sun comes up and again after the sun goes down. Otherwise, the pavement will burn her feet.

Know what? I’m bloody sick of it.

So, once again, I’m seriously considering selling the house and moving someplace more habitable.

La Maya’s online property searches have found a number of very nice homes in Prescott in the $300,000 to $400,000 range. I can’t afford that. My house is only worth about $280,000, max. If I have to fork over a Realtor’s commission and assorted rips to the various other characters that have their fingers in every realty transaction, the best I can expect to net on the sale of this house is about $263,000. There are a few places in that price range in and around Prescott. Most of them are tract houses that look cheaply built. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about moving into one of those. But every now and then something like this little historic house pops up: looks like a shotgun house on the outside and appears to be surrounded by newer construction, but all the interior pictures look make it look very charming.

Then there’s the actual cost of moving to be kept in mind. It’s not cheap to pack up a four-bedroom house and haul it to another city. Although I don’t have a lot of furniture, what I do have is stuff I’m not getting rid of—solid birch casework that my mother bought when we came back to this country in the late 1950s, and some leather pieces I couldn’t begin to replace on the nonsalary that will be my income after December 31.

And finally, there’s the question of whether Prescott can provide me a job to earn the required $14,100 to supplement Social Security and retirement income, money that will just barely keep me out of poverty. I’m not at all sure about that. Prescott has only two colleges, and neither of them pays what the Maricopa County Community College District pays adjunct faculty. I’m afraid I’d have to wait tables to keep the coyote from the door. And…well, I don’t want to.

Those are the financial issues. Others: I don’t know anyone up there. And a check of the Weather Underground shows lows of 16 degrees during December 2008 and January 2009. Daytime temperatures are balmy enough…but I’m not at all sure I want to deal with subfreezing nights and the attendant ice on the roads, frozen pipes, and high heating bills.

Nice grass over there, but maybe that green effect is some sort of illusion.

My house is too big for me, and the pool is an ungodly amount of work that’s turned into quite a grind. Maybe what I need to do is look for a smaller place here in town—maybe even a cheaper one, and use the profit to rent a place in the north country during the summers.

One way or another, the weather issue > a livability issue > a real estate issue > a money matter. How is it that everything eventually boils down to money?

Images:
The Sun, Lykaestria, Wikipedia Commons
Devil-pod tree (Acacia salacina), Ethel Aardvark, Wikipedia Commons
Prescott real estate images: Shameless ripoffs

Update: How deferred compensation works with Social Security

July 17, 2009 by funny

It’s 115 degrees out there, and I’ve driven from pillar to post through it. First went over to GDU’s deferred compensation provider. Turns out this is a benefit available to government employees, which you can add to your 403(b) or state retirement plan, allowing you to shelter more of your money than the modest amount most states match. When the employer emits a piece of compensation that you’d like to defer, the employer has to withhold and pay FICA and Medicare. The guy I talked with said I could indeed defer payment of my $5,300 worth of vacation pay and the first payment toward the $19,000 GDU owes me for unpaid sick leave. However, he did not know whether deferring these chunks of compensation would protect me from having Social Security benefits docked in 2010, a buck for every two bucks of unapproved income.

So, it was off to the Social Security Administration, a hefty drive from the mid-town offices of the insurance company that handles the State of Arizona’s deferred compensation scheme.

There a Social Security CSR, the first person I’ve spoken to about this who seemed to know what he was talking about, said that even though FICA and Medicare are withheld by the employer, deferring the pay does cause Social Security to ignore it when figuring that year’s Social Security benefit.

Hallelujah!

This will allow me to teach as much as I need to without losing a large chunk of Social Security. It means I will not have to use the back vacation pay and the first installment of RASL (unpaid sick leave is paid out over three years) to live on. Though I may not be able to invest the money optimally, at least it won’t go away and it can be folded into retirement savings to help support me through my dotage.

GDU, a.k.a. Our Beloved Employer, has to sign off on Form SSA 131, which states that the RASL and vacation pay is pre-2010 income. Knowing GDU, I will have to find the form, track down someone over there with measurable IQ, and then raise hell and put a block under it to get them to do this. No one at GDU seems to know the answers to these questions; the university has laid off so many people at HR that the survivors have no idea what they’re doing. Sometimes when they don’t know the answer to a question, they’ll guess and tell you something that’s dead wrong. Sometimes they’ll frankly tell you they haven’t a clue.

More about deferred compensation: I learned you can open an account and just have it sit there as a vessel, waiting for the RASL and vacation pay. That is, you don’t have to contribute anything out of your paycheck. That’s a relief! With a major life change looming, one has other things to do with a paycheck than to let it sit for a couple of years. Management costs, BTW, are nominal and in some cases nothing.

So: if anyone reading this is in the same boat…

A government employee faced with early retirement, when the amount you can earn and still receive Social Security benefits is strictly limited, can shelter severance pay with a maneuver like this:

• Open a deferred compensation account, if you don’t already have it.
• Have your employer sign and submit Form SSA 131, which certifies that your severance pay represents payment for work performed before you start receiving Social Security.
• Have the severance pay rolled over into the deferred compensation account, realizing that FICA and Medicare will be withheld.
• Let it sit there until you reach “full” Social Security age.

At that point you can withdraw part or all of it, as you please, without affecting your Social Security benefits. You will have to pay regular income tax on it when you draw it out of the deferred compensation plan, but by then your income will be so penurious the taxes likely won’t matter much.

Breaking up is hard to do…

July 16, 2009July 16, 2009 by funny

Getting disentangled from the Great Desert University and onto Social Security is a nightmare hassle! Right now I have an inch-thick folder of information, instructions, and policies about retirement, and it’s growing. There’s another folder full of paperwork specific to Social Security and Medicare.

Today I learned that when the state of Arizona pays me the first of three payments for my accrued sick leave (known appropriately as “RASL,” as in “you get to rassle around trying to collect this”), I will owe FICA and Medicare taxes on it. And, even though it represents money earned in 2009, it will not be paid until 30 to 90 days after my job is terminated.

Canning Day is December 31. That means the RASL will come in 2010, after I’ve started collecting Social Security. And that means the $6,355 payment will count as part of the maximum $14,100 I will be allowed to earn in 2010.

This will mean that in order not to have my Social Security benefits docked, I will have to refrain from teaching three of the six community-college classes planned for 2010. And that will mean I will have to use the RASL to live on, rather than putting it into retirement savings, as planned.

Item: I can’t afford to stand down from teaching next year. When you do that, you drop off the departmental chair’s radar, and you may find yourself never being hired again. I know: this has happened to me before. Next year I will need to teach as many sections as I can get, so as to build a track record that will get me hired in the future for as long as I can dodder into a classroom.

Item: I need to put that RASL money in savings!!!!! My investments are down more than $120,000 from where they were a year or so ago, and they certainly aren’t going to regain that in the six months I have left to work at GDU. I just can’t afford to substitute RASL for teaching income.

The university will owe me a little over $19,000 in RASL. This amount will be paid in three annual $6,355 installments: in 2010, in 2011, and in 2012. I will reach age 66 in May of 2011; after that, the dock-your-Social-Security trick stops.

Plowing through the stack of policy statements on RASL, I see that a) you can delay applying for RASL as long as 180 days after you’re terminated, and b) you can defer the first year’s payment (and only the first year’s payment) by rolling it into a deferred compensation plan. And c) the second and third annual payments are disbursed on the anniversaries of your first year’s payment, which comes 30 to 90 days after the state receives your application.

So, to avoid having my Social Security benefits dinged by the RASL and to avoid being forced to use the RASL for living expenses, I’ll have to put two maneuvers into play.

First, I’ll need to delay applying for RASL until the middle of April, so that the soonest possible time it would be paid is mid-May, after my 66th birthday. If I fail to do that, then the second RASL payment will also arrive before I reach the “full” retirement age of 66, and I’ll be dinged for that one, too. If I time my application so that the first RASL payment arrives after May 7, 2010, then the second RASL payment will not arrive until I’m 66, at which time I can earn as much as I want (or can) without affecting Social Security income.

Second, I’ll need to establish a deferred compensation plan before my job ends. This is required. That may mean that even though the damned furloughs just ended, I’ll have to continue having my pay docked. That I will get the money back sometime in the remote future is irrelevant to the fact that I need all my paycheck to stash savings to live on after I’m fired.

The deferred compensation plan is managed by a private provider. That means, of course, that there’ll be fees involved. So I’m going to have to pay someone for the privilege of letting them take my money away from me. Isn’t that sweet?

That’s just the start of it. Then there’s the realization that because I’m being canned in December I have to apply for Social Security in October in order to get the payments started in January. But I will not get my last paycheck until after January 1, because of PeopleSoft’s obnoxious lagging pay scheme. Furthermore, because of the furloughs, the gross amount on an October paycheck will not reflect accurately what GDU will pay me over 2009’s twenty-six pay periods. Nor will I have statements from my freelance clients, nor will I have any clue how much my S-corporation will pay me between September and December 31.

So, how will the Social Security Administration calculate my benefits, when no accurate statement of my 2009 pay will be available until after those benefits are supposed to start?

Then there’s the business of all the vacation pay the SOBs owe me: $5,287 worth. This payment also will come forth in January, 2009.

Will that be held against my Social Security earnings, even though it represents pre-2010 income? Can that amount be rolled over into this deferred compensation plan?

And if I have to roll it over…my GOD! I intended to use that money to cover COBRA. If I have to roll it over into deferred compensation, I won’t have anything budgeted to pay for health insurance between January 1 and May 7, 2010. I’ll have to dig into my retirement savings to cover that.

The more I look into this stuff, the more questions come up and the more unfair the whole mess looks. No wonder I grind my teeth all the time!

Money happens…

July 17, 2009July 12, 2009 by funny

SDXB, a fellow who found his way clear to jump off the hamster wheel in his late 40s and never went back to the workplace, is fond of saying that “money happens.” By that he means that he never seems to lack for money (and it’s true he lives well, despite having little or no visible means of support) and that occasionally unexpected little windfalls happen.

Truth to tell, he has always made money happen. Until he reached retirement age, he supported his bumhood habit by occasionally volunteering to go TDY with the active-duty Air Force Reserve, in which he was the highest-ranking non-com in his job classification. The military pays certain people who are effectively temp workers pretty well, and reservists who stick with it get a nice pension and health care, plus access to commissaries and base exchanges around the world. He also did a fair amount of freelance journalism, especially travel writing, which underwrote trips you and I would regard as vacations and provided some nice tax write-offs.

He insists that a person who is willing to live frugally, who has even minimal resources, and who makes bumhood (read “permanent unemployment”) a priority can live comfortably without having to labor in the salt mines. And for him it’s worked: he’s almost 70, and he hasn’t held a steady job since the day he got up from the editor’s chair at a Scripps-Howard newspaper and walked out the door. He climbed on a plane, flew to Hawai’i, and camped on the beach for a month, where no one could reach him by telephone. He’s bought two houses in cash and he buys his cars in cash; he travels, he never wants for entertainment…and he doesn’t go to work.

Well, I’ve always been too cowardly to pull that one off, even though he kept assuring me that I had more than enough to live on and that money happens.

Now that I’m about to be forced to get out of the editor’s chair myself, though, I’m discovering that the guy may be right. In the past couple of days, money has happened three times.

Two happenings occurred yesterday. First, a client from bygone days resurfaced to ask if I’d edit a new project he’s cooked up. It was short and easy—I got through it in just a few hours and will bill about two hundred bucks. While I was playing with that, the phone rang, and lo! There was the chair of the English and Humanities department of Phoenix College, an inner-city branch of the community college district, conveniently located about eight minutes from my house.

Asked she, would I take on, at the last minute, a 200-level course in journalism?

Happy to, said I, but I’m already signed up to teach the maximum number of credit hours the district will permit.

No problem, quoth she! Because it’s an emergency hire, she can get an override.

You’re on! said I.

She said she’d have to be sure the course actually makes before forking over a contract, but it only needs 18 students. It’s a hybrid course that meets once a week, and when I looked over the district’s requirements, I realized it’s much the same course I’ve taught several times at Scottsdale!

So. This fall, in the four months running up to Canning Day, I will gross ninety-six hundred extra dollars with this side job as a community college teacher. Since our office is winding down, I doubt if this will cause much strain; after all, the “two” GDU courses I signed on to teach in the spring of 2008 morphed into four, and I survived.

Meanwhile, an hour ago I finished reading another detective novel for pay. A pretty darned good one, too: well written and clean. Another $250 in the busker’s hat.

Money happens, but money unhappens, too. A few mutual fund, IRA, and 403(b) statements materialized toward the end of the week, showing that my devastated investments are reviving a little. Since reaching their April 2009 nadir, they’ve climbed about $9,000—and that’s after I took out about $15,000 to pay off the Renovation Loan. Still, the total of retirement savings is down $126,792 from the high balance in May of 2008: thanks so much to the greedy bastards and misguided dogmatists who’ve run the country and the economy this past decade or so.

Think of that: a hundred and twenty-seven grand lost in the collapse of the Bush economy. If that money hadn’t unhappened, I’d have plenty to retire on without a worry in the world. On the other hand…if the economy hadn’t crashed, I’d stick with a boring job for the next three years and not be about to embark on the grand adventure of bumhood.

Win some, lose some. Maybe being pushed to quit working, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, is worth a little money unhappening.

Images:
Hamster and hamster wheel, Dimitar Popovsky, Wikipedia Commons
U.S. Dollar Bill, public domain

The high cost of Medicare

June 21, 2009June 21, 2009 by funny

In a comment to my recent post about planning for the pending layoff/retirement/whatever-we’re-calling-it, Abigail asks about the costs of Medicare, which I estimate will be around $300. I’ll be eligible for Medicare in May of 2010. So, between the December 31 canning date and May I’ll have to take COBRA, which will cost about $480 a month.

Medicare alone doesn’t cover all your costs: it’s an 80-20 plan. The older you get, the shorter the odds that you’ll suffer a catastrophically expensive illness. Heart bypass surgery, for example, can cost $170,000; 20 percent of that would be $34,000, which you have to pay out of pocket. Cancer treatment can quickly mount into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Clearly, if you have to pay 20 percent of costs like that, a major illness—almost inevitable in old age—will pauperize you.

To protect yourself, you have to buy a supplemental policy called “Medigap” insurance. You also are required—it’s not an option—to take and pay for prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D. By law, Medicare Part B and Medigap insurance provide no prescription coverage. If you decline to sign up for Part D when you start Medicare and then later change your mind, you are gouged royally for the privilege of signing up later.

To be fully covered, you have to cobble together coverage with the standard Medicare Part A (which is free), Medicare Part B (which costs about $100 a month), Medicare Part D (which evidently runs about $30 to $65 a month but which, if you suffer an illness that requires expensive drug therapy, will leave you holding the bag for upwards of $4,350), and Medigap insurance (provided by private insurers, apparently ranging in cost from an average of about $100 to about $285 a month—it’s next to impossible to find out what the actual costs are). By the time you’ve added up Part B, Part D, and Medigap, you end up with a monthly cost of about $300 a month. That amount will never go down, and you can be sure that like every other cost else in life, it will continue to rise.

At this time, the combined cost of full Medicare coverage is about 12 times what I pay for my employer’s EPO plan, which covers my doctor of 30 years. Since 1987, he has practiced at the Mayo. The Mayo Clinic, because of Medicare’s low reimbursement rates, now refuses to accept new patients who are covered by Medicare. They will keep you if you’re already an active patient, but if you walk in off the street and you’re covered by Medicare, they won’t take you.

You can opt out of the public system and instead buy private insurance through Medicare Part C. These plans are basically HMOs, and they are dangerous. They’re extremely restrictive—you have little or no choice as to which doctors you see, and like all HMOs they’re not in business to take care of you; they’re in business to make a profit. Consequently, it’s in their interest to limit the amount and quality of healthcare you get and to direct you to the cheapest providers.

Now, the problem is that hospitals in Arizona are about as good as schools in Arizona, which is to say “not very.” It was at one of our major regional health centers where I waited over four hours with acute appendicitis and never saw so much as a triage nurse. When I finally got to the Mayo’s ER, they slapped me into surgery instantly. In another major hospital, my mother-in-sin underwent successful aortic surgery but almost died because, while recuperating in a hospital room, she had a heart attack that went unnoticed by anyone but a CLEANING LADY! Her life was saved because a maid happened to wander into the room and figured something was wrong.

Only one hospital in Arizona consistently gets top national ratings, and it’s the Mayo. That’s why you need to retain your choice of doctors and medical facilities, no matter how much that privilege costs you.

Planning for layoff-induced “retirement”

June 18, 2009June 18, 2009 by funny

In a moment of lucidity, I realized that of course if my basic survival account is padded with a five- or ten thousand-dollar cushion, what will matter in “retirement” is not month-by-month income (earnings will fluctuate wildly because teaching money will come only in spring and fall), but how much I will earn on average. That is, after the layoff, I won’t be living on bimonthly paychecks. I’ll be living on a fund of money that is restocked once a month from a variety of sources.

When income from these sources runs low, I’ll have to use some of the cushion to live on. But when income rises while community college classes are in session, the cushion should be replenished, assuming my average costs don’t overrun average income.

Thinking about this the other day, I realized to my amazement that—any way you look at it!—my income in forced retirement will be higher than my salary. Unfortunately, the changed circumstances of retirement will make that irrelevant, because costs will rise significantly. However…there it is.

When GDU is paying my full salary, the net is $3,044. The pay cut created by two furlough days a month has reduced my take-home pay to $2,836.

My financial advisor says that with a 5 percent drawdown, my savings will last 100 years. At 7% the money would last 50 years. A 5 percent drawdown plus Social Security plus teaching income should create a net of $3,288, assuming the total tax gouge is around 20 percent.

This looks wonderful, eh? Well…not so fast.

Even though my net monthly expenses will drop because I’ve paid off the second mortgage on my house and because I will cash in the whole life insurance policy as soon as this tax year ends, it still won’t be enough.

Right now I’m paying my share of the mortgage on the downtown house with a small drawdown from my largest IRA. In other words, I’m not paying the mortgage out of my salary. That cost will have to be folded in to the 5 percent survival drawdown—in fake “retirement,” I will have to help pay the mortgage out of money I would ordinarily use to live on.

Even that would be manageable…except for Medicare.

Medicare, Medicare Part D, and Medigap insurance will cost twelve times what I’m paying for health insurance now! And that will run my average costs over $3,288 a month.

Freelance income might take up the slack, but it’s so sporadic and so unreliable, I’m not including it as a source of average monthly income. As we’ve seen, the likelihood that I can keep my credit card charges down to $1,200 is slim, and so overruns of this tight little budget are probable and may be frequent. All it will take is one vet bill or one repair bill to run the thing deep into the red.

It looks like I’ll be forced to take a 6 percent drawdown, even though I don’t want to and even though I think it’s highly ill-advised.

One pool repair bill runs upwards of $115. You can’t walk into the vet’s office for less than $100. A pair of glasses costs $300. As you can see, then, at 6 percent I’ll get by…but it’ll be tight. Very, very tight.

Probably some freelance money will continue to flow in, maybe as much as two or three hundred dollars a month. whoop-de-doo!

Yesterday I dropped by the college, where the departmental chairman was hanging out with the secretary. They said not to worry about enrollments: because the college nullifies unpaid early enrollments and community college students are just as broke as the rest of us, most people wait until the week before classes start to sign up for classes. The chair was confident all three classes would make, but, he said, even if they don’t, he still has several unstaffed sections. He said he was sure I would end up, willy-nilly, with three sections.

So that will help to fill up the fund that I’ll be living on after December.

And it’s pretty clear there’ll be no problem landing three sections a semester as long as I can dodder onto a college campus. GDU has so massively shot itself in the foot—in both feet!—by jacking up tuition, adding a per-credit surcharge to the inflated tuition, and by generally mistreating students that vast numbers of students who would qualify to get into the university are going to the community colleges for their first two years.

It will be a very long time before the university recovers from its own missteps and from our right-wing legislators’ fierce, vengeful animosity toward higher education, set loose by the departure of Governor Janet Napolitano, who was able to keep the kookocracy under control to some degree. The universities in this state, especially GDU, have been permanently damaged by the crash of the Bush economy and actions of the surviving extremists in our elected offices.

It’s too bad—a disaster, really, for our state—but on a selfish, personal level…what redounds to the junior colleges’ benefit may redound to mine.

Projected cash flow at 5% drawdown; red = outgo