Anticipating the sting

Normally I get a nice little bump in my last five paychecks over the calendar year because I've already maxed out my annual FICA limit. That bump allowed me to sock away some extra cash in October and I'm expecting the same for November, but it turns out that I'm not going to be able to put away as much extra as I wanted without pretty much turning into Scrooge, because I have a bunch of different expenses all hitting at the same time. They include:

Doorman tips: $400
Holiday tips for building staff are customary and expected in New York. We have a small building staff, so I give each of them a holiday card containing $40 to $100. The porter gets the most because he does a demanding job heroically; the super gets the second most because I'm secretly not very impressed with him but at the same time need to be able depend on him to be responsive when I have non-emergency repairs. The doorfolk who are nice and friendly get more than the ones who sit there sullenly and don't make eye contact.

Food bank donation: $500
I raise money for the food bank from other people during the holiday season, so it's important to put my money where my own mouth is. This is a cause that really matters to me, so I consider it one of my fixed holiday expenses.

Other donations: $200
This is also the time of year that other people are doing fundraising, so I normally cough up $50 if it's a cause I believe in, sometimes less (e.g., a token $25) if I think the organization doesn't utilize its funds efficiently.

Homeowner's insurance: $250
Self-explanatory.

Passport renewal: $75
It's only once every ten years, but my passport expires in February so I'm already in the soup if I get asked to travel for work in the next couple of months. (We have a pretty strict travel ban on at the moment, so I'm not expecting it.)

Dentist: $200
Yay, I need another crown in December! I already maxed out my flexible spending plan, but about 70% will be covered by insurance as long as I don't get whacked in the upcoming layoff. If I do, this will cost a heck of a lot more.

Christmas gifts: $350
Ugh. I was almost entirely off the Christmas gift train for years, but I always give my mom restaurant gift certificates for Christmas and birthdays because she NEVER lets me pay when we go out. Beyond that, I need to get a couple of things for my SO and his kids. SO is good about agreeing on modest gifts, but he doesn't want to waive gift-giving altogether. I don't overdo gift-giving with his kids because I don't want them to see me as a gift machine or make either parent feel like I'm trying to compete, but there's no way I'd ever not give them Christmas and birthday gifts. Finally, I need to pony up something fairly respectable for SO's brother and his partner since they always include me in the annual family Broadway musical event.

Marathon travel: $150
Car rental, gas, meals, and hotel. I'm sharing a room with one person and pooling car rental and gas with three.

That works out to just about $2000, but there's not much I can do to bring it down other than skipping the marathon (not gonna happen), going completely bare-bones on gifts and doorman tips, and cutting out charitable donations. The FICA bump covers close to everything, but even if it didn't I've made my peace with it.

Do you have any special end of year expenses? What are they and how do you plan to cover them?

The healthiest sickie around

It's annual enrollment week at work, and I finally had time to sit down and read through the plan changes. At first I was really pleased: Despite all of the horrible things I've been reading in the press about skyrocketing employee insurance costs, the monthly cost of my plan isn't changing at all. Isn't that great?

And then I got down to the details.

The cost of generic medications is remaining the same, $10 a pop for a three month supply. For non-generics, however, it's a different story. Instead of paying a flat $45 for a three-month supply, employees are now required to pay a significant percentage of the medication's retail cost.

I'm on three generic medications and four non-generics which are still under patent, so there's no generic alternative. I phoned the pharmacy that processes my prescriptions to find out what the retail cost of the four non-generics is and found that my costs are indeed going up.

The magnitude of the increase relative to what I pay today?

More than four hundred percent.

Yeah.

I'm seeing a couple of different sources of irony in this situation. First, I'm lucky because I even have insurance, even though it's costing me more than two thousand dollars extra in 2010 just to get the same medication I take today. Second, even with the de facto salary hit I'm about to take, I'm also lucky to have a job right now.

Finally, you'd think that with seven medications, I'm probably a pretty sick person. Nothing could be farther from the truth: I have two auto-immune disorders that certainly could make my life miserable (the reason for three of the medications), but they're under control and most of the time I hardly even remember they're there. I also have extraordinarily sensitive skin that looks good because a few years ago my dermatologist hit on a combination of control meds (four in total) that works for me. My heart rate is 40, my weight is perfectly normal, and I'm running a marathon in a couple of weeks. If I'm sick, I've got to be the healthiest sick person around.

I've given polite but admittedly strained feedback about this change to my plan administrator, but I already know it's not going to do any good. In the meantime, I was looking forward to resuming online investing in 2010 after I top up the rest of my emergency fund, and I was even thinking about splurging on a little piece of jewelry if I qualify for the Boston Marathon in a couple of weeks. In the short term, I guess I'll be saving up an extra couple of thousand dollars to blow on medication instead.

For some well-reasoned and far more articulate thoughts on health care and health care reform than I can give you, I'd suggest stopping by my friend Shadox's blog. In the meantime, I don't recommend watching this if you get the vapors about crude language or gestures, but here are my thoughts on the matter, more or less:


What's your health insurance situation at the moment?

The Halloween grumpies

I loved Halloween when I was a little kid. Like many of you, I have very fond memories of trick-or-treating through the neighborhood with my dad hovering in the background, while my mom stayed home to hand out candy to kids who came to our house. As I got older and began to make the rounds with my friends instead of my dad, my parents began to gently hint that there wouldn't be that many more years of trick-or-treating left. By the time I was in eighth grade, they openly disagreed with it on the grounds that I was too old, and in fact I did feel weird about it as a thirteen-year-old. It's all lost back in the fog of time now, but I think we all felt a little strange and quit early. That was my last year trick-or-treating.

In recent years, I've handed out candy at the door. It was great for a while, but in the last couple of years the cute little Power Rangers and witches have given way to much older kids, many of whom are a lot bigger than I am and don't really bother much with costumes. I've never, ever turned a kid away on Halloween, but the biggest kids make it feel more like a shakedown than a holiday.

This year, I managed to get myself invited out to the suburbs to help take a couple of great kids out. The kids are getting a little old for trick-or-treating themselves (fifth grade and eighth grade), and I mentioned as much to their dad. He laughed and informed me that he fully expected his kids to insist on trick-or-treating for years to come. He then mentioned to the eighth grader that I figured it was her last year going out, and she was horrified at the thought.

Are you kidding me? she asked. It's FREE CANDY! Why wouldn't I go until I'm TWENTY-FIVE???

Meanwhile, this kid towers over me.

I don't really approve, but I'm not the parent here so I decided not to say anything.

The kids put on their costumes at six, and Dad and I went out to make the rounds with the neighbors and their kids. The kids ranged in age from a tiny little thing in a stroller, dressed up like a pumpkin (hilarious and very, very cute) to the oldest, both in the eighth grade and very quickly fed up with being stuck with a bunch of littler kids. At their age, my parents would have been way too embarrassed to take me around trick-or-treating on the grounds that I was too old (they only grudgingly agreed to let me go out with my friends as it was), but in this case the parents wouldn't let the oldest out of their sight.

I know, I know. The world is a more dangerous place than it used to be.

Meanwhile, nearly every parent was dressed up in a costume of his or her own, and several of them were towing wagons filled with coolers. I edged close to the wagons to see what was in them and discovered that the coolers were full of cheese, crackers, and bottles of wine. The parents themselves were clutching plastic cups filled to the brim, and several of them made repeated trips to the wagons in short succession. As we meandered through the neighborhood, I noticed that although a few of the kids said Thank you! at every house, this was by no means universal and the parents only prompted sporadically when the kids forgot. Our paths crossed several times with those of some big, rambunctious high school age kids and I wondered if the people whose bells they were ringing felt as shaken down as I think I would have.

There were also houses where no one was home but a bowl of candy was left out front. (This is what the people I was with did since no one was home while we were out.) I don't think you can really expect kids not to empty close to the entire bowl into their bags, but I saw this happen more than once right in front of the parents, and the parents didn't say anything. I didn't say anything either, because I didn't think it was my battle to fight.

I like kids. Don't want my own, but I do like them. Either I've got a serious case of memory blinders on, though, or Halloween culture has changed significantly. There's much more greed and much less courtesy than I remember, and I found it a little distasteful. It makes me not want to shell out money to participate next year.

Am I off base with my perspective here?

I'll bring home the bacon, but you have to cook it

The other day, I read an article that was in no way a surprise, but interesting nevertheless. It was about how women are increasingly becoming the primary income earners in their households.

To summarize, the number of wives earning more than their husbands has been on the increase for several years, but this trend has jumped significantly since 2007, largely as a result of the recession. One reason for this change is that men have been impacted much more than women by the waves of job losses over the past year. Women now make up half or slightly more than half of all adults employed in the United States.

So where does this leave the men?

In many cases, still job-hunting. Other men are starting their own businesses. Some men are embracing domestic duties, taking a leading role in chores and childcare. Although the situation of wives stepping up to be the primary income earner doesn't necessarily sit well with everyone, poll evidence suggests that more and more couples are becoming increasingly accustomed to and comfortable with the idea of women being the family breadwinner.

One reason why women may be impacted less by layoffs than men in the United States is that women still earn less on average. One unintended consequence of women being the family breadwinner is that many families are making do with less income, leaving them more vulnerable to financial disaster if something happens to Mom's job.

Personally, I haven't seen this situation much in either my work life or among my friends. I work predominantly with men, most of whom either have wives who work part-time or stay home with the kids. Among my married and cohabitating friends, both partners generally work and I don't have a clear idea of who makes more. In the rare cases where one partner works part-time or is out of work altogether, it's usually the woman. (For what it's worth, I'm only referring to straight friends in this last instance. I haven't seen this situation with my gay friends to date.) According to some of my friends, however, many of their colleagues are women with male partners who are stay-at-home dads, to everyone's apparent satisfaction.

If you're married or living with someone, who is the primary income earner in your household? Are you happy with the way things are, or would you rather change? Why?

We have a winner!

Thanks to the good people at Random.org, we now have a winner for the UPrinting Postcard Giveaway. The drawing went like this:

I assigned a number to each comment, where the first comment = 1 and the last comment = 7. I then used a random number generator to produce a random number between 1 and 7, inclusive. This was the result:



Comment #3 belonged to Songbird. Songbird, please email me as soon as you can and I'll hook you up with your prize.

Check back tomorrow for a new post. In the meantime, I hope to have another giveaway up in the next couple of weeks.

There's gold in them thar beads

This weekend, a Michael's craft store (the only one, as far as I'm aware) opened in Manhattan. I had heard about Michael's from other bloggers and was curious to have a look, so I scooted on over late in the afternoon.

The place was a madhouse, which I suppose is more or less status quo for opening day, but I noticed a few things:

1. The place was full of all kinds of craft supplies, from framing to scrapbooking, knitting, baking, candlemaking, beading, flower arranging, and jewelry-making, including pendants to celebrate just about everything (nothing for running or marathons, though).

2. Everything was really, really cheap.

3. Stuff of every kind was flying off the shelves. I never knew there were so many people in New York who are into crafts!

I couldn't believe the prices. They must depend on being a volume business. I mean, what serious crafting person stops at five dollars' worth of ribbon and beads? I know I wouldn't.

I deliberately didn't take any money or credit cards with me when I went because there's not a thing I need, but as I walked through aisles and aisles of domestic arts, my nesting instincts kicked in big-time. There's a big part of me that is very home-oriented, and I'd like to be the kind of person who could make nice wedding favors or fancy cakes.

The only problem is that I'd be buying things for a life I don't live.

I can knit well but I don't have the time to do it, or the patience anymore. I studied Japanese flower arranging for two years, but fresh flowers aren't on my shopping list right now and won't be until I'm a little more certain about my job situation. I can sling a pretty good dinner on the table for friends, but I only manage to pull that together once every six months if I'm lucky. In a perfect world, I'd do all of those things and more, all the time. In real life, it's not going to happen very often. As far as other crafty things go, I pretty much suck at it. Learning them would be fun, but it's not a priority at this point in my life.

At least accepting that I can't do it all helps money stay in my pocket.

What do you want to do in future that doesn't fit into your life or budget today?

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Want free postcards printed with the design of your choice? Enter the drawing here by noon EST on October 29 for your chance to win!

More free stuff, for one week only

The good people at UPrinting are back with some more neat stuff to give away. One lucky reader will receive one hundred free postcards in the design of his or her choice with free ground shipping in the US. (Canadian residents, you are also eligible to win but unfortunately you will need to pony up for shipping and taxes.)

The postcards are size 4x6 on 14pt cardstock gloss with full color on both sides, and you can use them to advertise your business or anything else you like. I'm receiving a batch for posting this offer, and I'm planning to get them printed with either a picture of a flower I took at a famous West Coast rose garden this summer, or possibly a monkey. I'll send them out to friends and family over the coming months, and hopefully they'll bring a smile or two to the recipients.

This contest expires at noon EST on October 29, so if you want a chance to win, please leave a G-rated comment below detailing what you would do with a hundred free postcards. If you post this link on your own blog, drop a comment to let me know and I'll give you a second entry.

Good luck, and I'm looking forward to seeing your ideas.