Stayin’ Afloat
Like this year, thirty years ago through the holidays I was also unemployed. It was at the beginning of my career — actually more like -before- the beginning. We had few reserves, though few giant obligations either — no student loans, car loans, mortgage or credit card debt. We paid $225 a month in rent (or thereabouts) and this included heat. We had no real estate taxes to pay and I don’t remember paying for health insurance — we had it because I know we’ve never gone without — maybe through Sue’s job. There were no internet fees, or cable TV, or personal computers to own. There simply weren’t many ways to burn money like today.
Looking at the current situation, Sue works out the detailed budget (I pay most of the bills) and clearly we are losing ground bit by bit. It won’t put us on the street any time soon, but we don’t like the feeling. My unemployment insurance claim is running out, so the ‘bit by bit’ is like the crumbling bits of dirt at the edge of a precipice.
At least it feels that way.
Even as such, with college tuition payments winding down and our Blue Cross Blue Shield family plan still less than $1,000 a month, there’s little to complain about. Key items such as food, water, and housing aren’t sending us to the poor house any faster than 30 years ago. It’s the new ways to spend money that are eating around the edges, though we’re pushing back, like producing less trash now that the Town of Ashland charges by the bag to haul it away.
By trimming here and there and pleading a bit of financial hardship, this morning Sue renegotiated our FIOS contract for the trash delivered via fiber optic cables (down from $172 to $116). When it comes to arguing over arbitrary prices, being officially unemployed helps, and I suppose from the perspective of FIOS and their telesales department $116 is better than something less than $116 – like watching us heading back to Comcast. In effect, we’re giving up HDTV – regular digital TV being good enough, and our Internet speed is back to 5Mbs up / 15Mbs down. I was ready to toss TV out altogether, since we can fins most of what we watch online — maybe the next time they try to raise prices. It’s crazy to run one fiber optic line into our house and then charge us three different ways for using it (TV, Internet and Telephone), and then to boot call it a ‘special deal’ to combine these three charges into a slight price reduction. In another ten years such nonsense will go the way of the rotary dial desktop handset. If satellite uplink speeds were faster, I’d giving up on land wires for good.
At this point I’m not sure where else to save money. I’ve engineered our home heating to get this under $1,000 for the winter — and -no- I’m not hauling firewood. We live in a well-insulated home with no odd spaces to heat, and I’ve designed a way to mostly eliminate window loses. Anyone can do this — yet everyone I’ve talked to about the process looks at me like I have two heads, and I realize now that most people would much rather pay extra for heat than lift a finger. I’ve stopped listening to people complaining about their heating bills. Maybe people prefer to complain — raising their howls of protest like a red herring distracting themselves from the more obvious point that those people owning a house are the ones using and (potentially) wasting resources — and it ain’t OPEC or NSTAR’s fault, it ain’t Bush’s or Obama’s fault, it certainly ain’t some Liberal or Conservative conspiracy. With two minutes effort each day our house feels noticeably warmer, holds humidity better, cuts down on cold drafts, and is quieter at night. But nobody outside of our house will see the value of my design (not for lack of trying on my part), and like many of my better ideas, I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on — since it ain’t my fault either.
Parked in the driveway we have a newish Toyota Prius – cheap on gas, though more than three years to go in car payments. My old Maxima is getting close to where maintenance isn’t making much sense unless I drove it more often (to justify the repair dollars-per-mile). If I ever get a job in western Cambridge (interviewed in November and still pending on the cusp of year 2010), I suspect the Max would be an ideal commuter box. If I end up riding the train again to some other job, keeping the Max may not be such a great idea. For now, stuck in limbo, I’ll keep it ‘just-in-case‘ — like so many other obligations in life kept and paid for for ‘just in case.’
As a common of metric, I hear about the ‘cost of living.’ It is not just a statistical metric. It is real. Life costs. But,m the cost is skewed and when I look at what I might need for living right this moment – just for today – it seems most money budgeted and spent buys very little directly (‘directly’ as in cash forked to a checkout person for a loaf of bread).
Instead, our money mostly buys insurance and police protection and the sounds of snowplows in the night. It buys wars and pathetic efforts for peace and a woeful health care ‘system’ for older people — many of whom with more money than us, and cool stuff like money spent on telescopes searching out rouge asteroids and ways to shoot them down. Beyond this (perhaps the best example of wasted money) it also pays politicians to figure out ways to spend it (my own money) to keep me happy and themselves in office.
More than half my lifetime income has gone into paying for ideas and promises like this. Almost nothing by comparison is spent on keeping us warm, fed, and breathing right this moment.
I need to work on that.
