Almostgotit.com

Good news!  The utility company has given us a couple months off its billing cycle.  The poor thing still can’t decide how to bill the Almostgotits, as our low meter readings always make it suspicious (we heat with wood).   

The only thing is, we got our woodstove a couple years too early to qualify for Obama’s 30% tax credit for energy efficiency.    Ah well, we ALMOST got it!!

Saving money and saving the planet make wonderful bedfellows, so here’s six ways you can do both, just for today:

1. Hang your laundry out to dry.  If you don’t have a clothes line, buy one or just tie a rope between a couple of trees.  Clothes dryers are one of the biggest consumers of a home’s total energy use.  And yes, you can even hang your clothes up indoors!
2. Skip Starbucks for a day and find an Earth Day event to do instead  (or)
3. Do a fun Earth Day project with your kids at home.
4. Plant a vegetable garden!  Tomatoes and beans are the easiest of all, grow practically anywhere, and your own, home-grown vegetable plants are so gorgeous and satisfying.  Plus also, you’ll have great tasting food for much less than what you’d pay at the store!
5. Stock your freezer.  You’ll save money and energy by reducing your trips to the grocery store.  You’ll also reduce the temptation to eat out (more car trips, more money spent) because you’ll have things to eat at home.  And finally, freezers use less energy when they’re full, too. 
6. Plug your TV into a power bar.  Many appliances draw electricity even when they are turned off, so using a power bar can make a real difference in energy savings.

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Related posts:

5 Ways to work greener & cheaper 

11 Ways to be cheap in honor of Earth Day

Laundry and spring break and blogging: oh my!

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January has drizzled and dripped into the Almostgotit home. 

Knoxville’s paper announced today that several hundred more people in our city are about to lose their jobs as more companies go under. 

Tennessee’s economy gets worse and worse, as does the nation’s economy in general, while outside it rains and rains and RAINS.

We were so fortunate to be able to travel West to spend a long holiday with family, though, and have been so blessed to spend many recent evenings in front of the fire here, as well, with good friends. 

I still don’t have a JOB-job, though this month I do have some editing work.  My husband’s job is reasonably secure.  We have enough to eat, and the world’s most wonderful woodstove to keep us warm. 

Plus also a loveable, very naughty dog who WILL not stay off the furniture.

No, we haven’t decided yet.

We’re back, and we’re a mess. But while the decision of whether or not to relocate for a job may seem impossibly complicated, it’s really not.

Therefore, I’m putting the exhausted, emotional -wreck -of -an -Almostgotit in a chair and giving her a giant margarita: we’ll get back to her later.

While our guts may be working overtime as they churn through the many intangibles, there are some basic numbers we need to crunch first. Numbers are our friends. They give us the power we need to finish our negotiations. 

Gathering information also is a straight-forward, centering process that cools our heads and distracts our stomaches.  So we’ve got out our pads of paper and started our lists:

1. Cost of living differentials
Our money is only as good as what it will buy, and a salary’s buying power varies enormously depending on where one lives. Therefore, the very first thing we did with our job offer from the new location was to plug our current income into a “cost of living” calculator to see how the two numbers compare in real money.

Fortunately this was fast and easy to do online.

• Bankrate.com’s cost of living calculator takes into consideration “dozens of items in six broad categories — groceries, housing, utilities, transportation, health care and miscellaneous goods and services. It does not include the effects of state and local taxes.“ 
• CNNMoney.com’s salary comparison calculator  compiles data using key expenses in area of housing, utilities, transportation and health care costs.  This calculator also displayed a helpful chart comparing major costs in the two cities, showing us (for instance) that we should expect to pay 30% more for a similar house in the new city. While CNNMoney did not explicitly mention taxes, the calculation was so similar to Bankrate.com’s that I assume CNN also left out any tax consideration.
• Salary.com’s Cost of Living Wizard produced the narrowest gap between our two numbers, and also had the option of adding additional cities to the equation if one’s residence will be in a different city than one’s place of work. 

The next step, of course, is to refine these generic numbers according to our more particular circumstances.

2. Costs to the “trailing spouse”
Most families make relocation decisions based on the career of the family’s highest wage-earner, but there is usually a second wage-earner whose income (or lack thereof) needs to be calculated as well. Can the family finances manage if the “trailing spouse” (e.g., me) doesn’t find a job right away? How much weight should the “trailing spouse” numbers carry? 

While in the past my husband’s income has always been the deciding factor, in this case we actually have a viable financial choice for him either way: therefore, we’ve decided to put my own employment prospects near the top of our list this time.

3. Taxes
We pay an astronomical sales tax on everything in Tennessee, including food, but we have no state income tax. If it hadn’t been for a chance remark by one of our interviewers, I may have forgotten to check – but yes, the new state has an income tax. This got me on the right track, and I got out last year’s 1040 and plugged some of those numbers into an online tax calculator for our new location, remembering that many taxes can be partially deducted from federal taxes.

Don’t forget property taxes, annual motor vehicle taxes, etc – again, these vary widely, and usually can be found online.

4. Family-unique financials
We need to further adjust our relocation costs up or down depending on our particular financial circumstances.

This is the time to think of the permanent and long-term costs of a move, rather than the one-time costs of house-hunting or renting a moving truck, which are likely to be reimbursed.

In our case, we have several years’s worth of free winter heat stacked in our current back yard and expect that arrangement to continue indefinitely, a utility cost savings that will be hard to beat anywhere else. Our son currently qualifies for in-state university tuition, which we’ve been able to determine would continue; however, the additional faculty tuition discount he receives would not. We live where we only need one car, and face either the additional cost for a second vehicle or the (possible) additional cost of living in a similarly-convenience neighborhood in the new location.

Other families may have relatives who help care for their children, reducing the need to for expensive daycare. How many years do you have left on your current mortgage, what’s your current rate, and how much home equity do you currently have to invest in a new home? How would your commuting costs increase, or decrease? Would you have to drive your child to school in the new location, or pay private tuition? How much more, or less, would you need to spend on visits to extended family members? These are the sorts of things that should go on any “relocation financials”  list.

Numbers put a floor, ceiling, and walls on this enormous decision, and hopefullywill give that margarita-chugging gal and her companion the traction they’ll need to finish the job.

Any wisdom to add, readers?

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Additional relocation resources

Comprehensive List of Margarita Recipes:  Don’t even look at the low-calorie one.

Relocation Decision: Very helpful summary of the financials involved in a job relocation

Relocation Decision Wizard: Though aimed at retirees, this site has a number of helpful worksheets that guide rating communities, dealing with worries, making an action plan, etc.

Very few of us will do the right thing, economically, unless we have to do it.

Doing the right thing because we have to do it still can be a positive experience.

Both Republicans (situationally) and Democrats (legislatively) believe in forcing people to do the right thing.

Republicans and Democrats take turns being right — and catastrophically wrong.

Maybe there are few definitive solutions at all.

Maybe there are more solutions than we can imagine.

Maybe most of us are getting poorer.

Maybe that doesn’t matter as much as we think it does.

Maybe we can’t make money doing the things that we love.

Maybe that will break our hearts.

Or maybe that will force us to discover how to love what we do, instead.

Maybe we’ll do everything right and still  fail.

Maybe we’ll make one mistake after another and turn out just fine.

Maybe life eventually will confound us all.

‘I’m thinking of leaving my husband,’ complained the broker’s wife. ‘All he ever does is stand at the end of the bed and tell me how good things are going to be.’

Were you one of the lucky ones who bought stocks last Friday?  If so, maybe you can tell the rest of us what being solvent again is actually like.

We can take comfort, however.  Several of my favorite bloggy friends have been pointing out the benefits to be had in an economic downturn. 

•  Working Girl  recently got ten meals out of a four-pound chicken.

Holy Poultry, Batman! 

She also mentioned an article in the NY Times outlining the many health benefits of a recession:  people tend to eat less fast food and more home-cooked meals, get more exercise, spend more time with their families, and have far less heart disease.

•  The Career Encourager pointed out an article in Newsweek about the opportunities the U.S. now has to correct some bad economic habits .  She also recommends  Your Money or Your Life,  a book that she says

steers clear of the “frugality” mindset (which unfortunately comes across as cheap and stingy all too often) and instead presented a philosophy of “enoughness” as a saner practice for individuals, communities and nations.   It’s a recipe for living a sound, peaceful life based on a strong foundation. 

•  Finally, it’s Korrektiv to the rescue, proving definitively that the best investment advice of all is to drink heavily and recycle.

My delightfully irreverent friend at Punk Rock HR , however,  takes issue with Jeffrey Strain’s article, Ten (more) Reasons You’re Not Rich.  To paraphrase:

It’s because we have no money, stupid!

While I agree with Laurie’s punky assessment that lower- and middle- class paychecks are demonstrably losing their buying power, I also must agree with Strain.   While many of us are indeed losing financial ground,  most of us are also failing to maximize what we’ve got. 

We’ve all read about the minimum -wage -janitor -who -dies -leaving -millions -of -dollars -under -his -mattress.  It can be done. 

It’s just that, for the most part, no one wants to do it.

I’m still amazed to think what my husband and I lived on in an expensive big city while he was in grad school.    We had mice everywhere, and cockroaches everywhere we didn’t have mice.  There was no floor in our bathroom, and no wall in part of our kitchen.  We couldn’t afford fresh vegetables, or a television, or furniture, or even subway fare (we’d walk for miles, instead.)  But we had “enough.”  We also had some terrific friends with whom to share our homemade “Moosewood Cookbook” food, including one who lent us a shockingly-pink couch. My husband finally built us a bed, too.

Mostly on account of the cockroaches.

I will treasure those years forever.

Had I known, then, what we’d be living on in 2008,  while *still* struggling to pay all our bills, I’d have been appalled. 

Why then aren’t the Almostgotits ”rich?”  Because we eat out now.   We still only have one car, but we often drive it instead of taking a bus or walking, now.  We buy airplane tickets so we can visit our parents sometimes.  We eat salads.  And desserts!  We now use a credit card.  We no longer buy all our clothes at thrift stores.  We buy wine, and good coffee.  We even own our own couch — two of them, in fact. 

We are definitely fatter, too.

Image

And are we substantially better off for all the money we spend now?  Not really.  We’ve simply upgraded our definition of “enough” so that it now requires five or six times as much money as it once did to pay for it.

Almostgotit says: drink heavily, and recycle.  But do it with good friends around you, and you might end up even richer than you were before.   

What says you?

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Humor for the Newly-Bankrupt:

More stock market jokes

Craig Ferguson and Tim Meadows on the Economy Meltdown 

Free Government Publication: 66 ways to save money (this one is NOT a joke)

My “Writing Humor” class in Iowa bonded deeply with each other last summer.  There’s something about writing, laughing, and almost drowning together that will do that to people, I suppose.

One of my classmates was a banjo-playing lawyer named Sheila Simon, who published an article promoting the use of clotheslines in the Chicago Tribune not long after our stint together in Iowa City.  Here’s what Sheila and I have both discovered about hanging up our laundry:

1. Save a hundred dollars on your electric bill every month.
2. Keep your house cooler in the summer, and save on your AC bill, too.
3. Hanging laundry takes much less time than you think.
4. Line-dried laundry smells wonderful.
5. You paid for that yard and all that landscaping, so why not enjoy it?
6. Get to know your neighbors, too.
7. Help humidify your house in the winter.
8. Join virtually every other modern country on the planet.
9. Get your daily ration of Vitamin “D.”
10. You can still use your clothes dryer for emergencies.

A little more about humble Sheila.  We particularly enjoyed a story she shared about her father driving the entire family to MacDonalds, where he gravely recited their lengthy take-out order…  to a concrete traffic post. 

Eventually, we learned that Sheila’s family is from Illinois.  Later still, we learned that the take-out order had been delivered in the familiar, sonorous voice of a certain former Illinois legislator and presidential candidate. 

Yeah, THAT Simon.

Nor did Sheila tell us that she was a politician herself, having just completed a (sadly unsuccessful) run for Carbondale mayor last Spring – with a little help from another Illinois senator, last name of “Obama.”

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More about clotheslines:

• Project Laundry List: everything you need for air-drying (and for low-energy clothes washing, too)
• Vermont Clothes Line Company: more air-drying supplies and ideas
• Clothesline rule creates flap: Boston Globe article on states which are once again embracing “The Right to Dry.”
• Do clotheslines really lower property values? Discussion, with many good links
• A Line in the Yard: The Battle over the Right To Dry Outside New York Times article on the world-wide resurgence of clotheslines

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Cross posted at Blogher.com

Ann at Compensation Force mentions a number of articles today that highlight the impact of rising fuel prices on employment relations, with particular focus on how much employers can do, or should do, to mitigate the effect of these costs for their employees.  The most provocative question these days seems to be, ‘What happens when gasoline reaches $7 per gallon?’

Answer:  we’ll deal with it.  Both because we can, and because we’ll have to.   Ultimately, though, we can’t just leave matters to our employers, or to the government either. 

Nor will it hurt nearly as much as we think.

Eventually, we each have to come to terms with our own appetites, or learn how to change them.  One has only to live for a while in any country but ours to see the changes that very high fuel prices have already wrought.   We were amazed at how quickly we adapted in both England and Canada – two countries very like our own, but which have been living with high fuel costs for years.

Revelations: Everyone, even old ladies, can ride bicycles!  Bicycles work with dresses, and even when it rains (fenders, plastic bags, and general good cheer are the secret)!  Buses aren’t just for poor or crazy people!  Finding a parking place can take just as long as walking to a bus stop! Life without a car payment (or insurance payments, or repair bills, or gas charges either) is quite a marvelous thing!  Walking to and from a job is a wonderful way to clear the head, think things through,  and watch the seasons change!  Commuting without also having to drive is a great time to read, catch up on work, or just people watch!

Ours is a country built for the automobile, with subdivisions to go along with our SUV’s.  We need to build more livable cities so people will choose to live in them.  More of us should try to live where we work.  It’s good to live where we shop, too.  We need to build sidewalks again. 

Public transport must be part of the solution, of course, and yes it usually requires public subsidies.  However,  many Americans don’t realize we’ve already been subsidizing private and commercial transport for years – massive amounts of public funds have built and maintained our highways rather than our buses and trains, though the latter are a much more efficient way of transporting both goods and people.  And of course we have enjoyed artificially-low gasoline costs for years as well, also thanks to heavy subsidies.  A ready supply of cheap fuel has contributed to our preference for ever-larger vehicles, a preference which has persisted thus far even in the face of rising fuel costs.  (read this!)

Sigh.  We are yet a young and stubborn people.  

Fortunately, we are also a resilient people.  We will manage higher fuel costs, and we will manage even better if each of us carries our own bit of the load. 

Creative Commons image by iirraa