A meeting with the investment adviser yielded a little decent news on the pending unemployment (i.e., forced retirement) front. He figured out that $10,000 of the $25,000 sitting in the whole life insurance policy my ex- bought back in the early 1980s is not subject to taxes.
So, he proposes that I withdraw that in January 2010 and use it to pay my share of the mortgage on the investment house. This should keep taxes low and, because it’s not earned income, will not work against me in the Social Security earnings limit department. With the mortgage covered and the likelihood that the community college teaching gigs will max out the earnings limit, I may not have to take a drawdown from investments at all next year.
This, he thinks, will allow my much-battered investments to recover from the depredations of the Bush economy.
If, as planned, I add the net amount of the vacation pay GDU will owe me to the living expenses fund, I should end up with about the same monthly income that I have right now. It will delay having to raid my retirement funds for as long as a year, and meanwhile, it’ll give me a chance to apply for full-time work. The community college district has had a hiring freeze going for quite some time; that one job has opened up means the ice-pack may be melting. Between now and next fall, several more opportunities may arise.
O’course, the fly in that ointment is Medicare. Even with the inflated health-care premiums presented to us in this month’s open enrollment, the cost of cobbling together coverage comparable to my present health-care coverage will be about 10 times what I’m paying now. That’s going to be a big hit, and because of the earnings limitation, I won’t be allowed to use freelance income or take on a summer course to take up the slack.
So…2010 is gonna be a little pinched, but it should be survivable. As for 2011: it’ll just have to take care of itself.
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.
I just checked my Vanguard funds. Though they lost a little, it’s not enough to drive one out the high-rise window. Doesn’t mean things won’t be worse tomorrow, of course…still, I think it’s best not to study the day-to-day rises and falls of your investments but to keep your eye on the long view.
A pretty murky view just now, it must be admitted.
This morning I spent almost five hours on the application for the new job; still have to write the cover letter.
And I wrote a set of spreadsheets preparatory to meeting with my financial advisor about how to deal with the coming layoff. I wanted to lay out all the relevant factoids: current gross & net pay, projected Social Security entitlement, cost of Cobra ($471 a month! Up from $25), estimated unemployment payments (amazingly piddling–possibly not even worth the hassle of applying), RASL (the amount GDU has to pay for my unused sick pay, an astonishing $17,230), and the estimated amount of my total savings.
Today I learned that GDU has to pay me my hourly rate for 264 hours of unused vacation time: something over $7900. That will help!
Not only that, but I’m also owed 32 hours of use-it-or-lose-it time, for which I will not be paid. So I think I’ll take four days of vacation time starting this week…and not think about GDU even once during the entire period!
With these figures in hand, I calculated several possible scenarios, ranging from retiring today to getting some sort of job. If I can’t get work (and at my age it’s unlikely), things are going to be difficult, indeed.
Oh, well. That’s a bridge to cross later. Maybe not much later…but later.
IMHO, the current stürm und drang will take a while to come home to you and me: not until we see our jobs disappear, credit dry up, and the huge chains that have pushed out local businesses close down—shrinking supplies of food and manufactured goods. That may take some time. With a large helping of luck, it’ll never happen.
What a sad spectacle our country’s grasping, small-minded, doctrinaire partisan politics have spawned. For shame!
Rumor has it that a big announcement is coming down: along about mid-October, the PtB (Powers that Be) will announce that everyone in my job classification is to be laid off. That’s a lot of layoffs, even for a gigantic learning factory whose student body is larger than the entire populations of most of the state’s counties.
The jobs in question are so poorly paid that all Our Beloved Leader would have to do is cut the six-figure salaries of his trophy hires by 5% to make up the part of the payroll that goes to the likes of us.
The rulebook that governs the university’s operation specifies that employees in this category have to be given 90 days notice of nonrenewal or dismissal. Conveniently, if O.B.L. makes this announcement on October 15, our time will be up on the last day of the semester, December 15. This will keep the donkeys in harness until they finish their current round of plow-dragging.
I’ve already found a job to apply for: $15,000 a year less than I’m earning, but at least it’s an income, and the place is only about five or ten minutes from my house. Truth to tell, I could cheerfully forego 15 grand to be free of the hideous commute to lovely downtown Tempe. Last night the freeway was gridlocked; plodding home across the surface streets into the glare of the setting sun took well over an hour. Besides, GDU will owe me $17,500 in tax-free severance pay, to be doled out over three years. A third of that sum added to the proposed new net annual pay will add up to a larger net than I’m now taking home.
Plus the coveted new employer pays ALL your health insurance, AND it offers a “cafeteria plan” that gives you an extra $600 to put toward three pay-it-yourself plans…one of which is a flex plan. So in other words, if you want the flex plan, you don’t have to pay for it out of your regular salary. And, interestingly, instead of automatically taking 7% out of your salary (and matching it) for a 403(b), this outfit offers a simple IRA for which 3% is deducted…leaving you with dollars to put into your own Roth IRA.
So, weirdly, even though the gross pay is lower, the net may be about the same or even higher, with or without the extra income from GDU’s good-bye gift.
It remains to be seen whether this rumor is true. This evening at the Arizona Book Publishing Association shindig, we sat at the same table with a GDU colleague who was privileged to attend our Dean’s meeting with the chairs. She reported that Her Deanship announced, as she had promised to do, that our office is seeking a new client journal.
If our dean’s boss is about to can me, which will shut our office down, why is she telling the world we’ll take on new work? A very limited number of possibilities present themselves:
She hasn’t been told about the plan.
She is pretending not to have been told about the plan.
She doesn’t know what my job classification is.
They don’t plan to include me among the cannees.
None of those scenarios is out of the realm of possibility. In fact, they’re ranged in order from most likely to least likely.
WhatEVER.
Next week I’m meeting with my financial adviser to figure out how I can survive if I don’t get another job. This weekend I will fill out a job application, update the résumé, and write a cover letter, to be shipped off to the proposed new employer on Monday. And I will finish editing a freelance client’s copy, earning another $500 this month. The Copyeditor’s Desk is attracting a surprising number of clients—tonight I believe we may have picked up two or three more—and the truth is that we may manage to develop this business well enough so that neither of us will have to work for the university. Or for anyone else, besides ourselves.
