September 25, 2012
As usual, there’s a slew of things to take care of when leaving a job. I’m reviewing the list and slowly checking things off:
1. Health care: Already transferred medical, dental and vision to PiC, so I don’t need COBRA.
2. FSA: I kept this with my own firm.
A) I’ll need to make sure that I can be added to PiC’s account as a spouse. Pretty sure it’s not under the dependent clause. The language doesn’t sound like it but there does appear to be a provision for the spouse and family to use the employee’s actual FSA account.
B) I’ve got 90 days to complete any claims against my own account. Frustratingly, even though I still have access to the account administration system, there’s no way to tell them to stop emailing my old work email address if they need to contact me through that system.
3. 401(k): Time for another rollover IRA. All of my accounts are with Vanguard, and my last rollover IRA had enough in it to be converted to Admiral Shares (woo!) so I’d like this to go right into the Admiral Shares.
However! I have a baby Rollover IRA still sitting in a STAR fund because it was only a little over $3000 so it’ll never qualify for an Admiral bump of anything.
As much as I hated the fees from this small company, we had a decent match so I contributed enough to get the full match. After 2 plus years, I have about $16,500.00 in this account. That would be more than enough to add to and convert the STAR fund into a respectable Admiral something.
4. Final Check: Last days worked and vacation are paid out. It’s standard that sick time, if separate from vacation, doesn’t get paid out. Action: Deposited that sucker, soonest.
Unlike my last job where I spent years not taking any vacation, and therefore ended up with about a month to cash out, I only had several days of vacation saved. It’s a nice extra bit of cash, I don’t need an unbudgeted cash infusion just because, and it’s not like I didn’t enjoy the vacation time I did spend!
Is that everything?
January 31, 2012
There’s a blogger who frequents another very popular PF blogger’s site and comments in a way that reminds me of another person who used to squat on generally popular blogs: All Financial Matters, Single Ma’s blog, I can’t remember where else, but definitely at least those two, named Minimum Wage. Does anyone remember MW? I can’t recall if MW was male or female but MW was a down and outer, and ze was determined to crap on everyone and everywhere. It did not matter what the conversation was, ze had something negative to say:
“I wish I had that kind of money.”
“I wish someone would give me that kind of job/salary/bonus/promotion/praise. I’ve been working for minimum wage for the past XYZ years…..”
“I wish I could have that kind of vacation. I haven’t had a day off since …..”
“I wish I could have that kind of car. I can’t even drive a working car because ….”
“I wish that was my life. Must be nice.“
“I wish I could have retirement savings – boy I wish I could even think about retiring someday, I will never get to retire because all I make is less than [wait for it] minimum wage and I will never get out of this rut and life.”
Sunny, hm? And the second anyone made the slightest move toward asking after what MW did or made in the hopes of offering any sort of suggestions that MW might use to lessen the plight, WELL. You might well have spit in MW’s face.
Eventually MW faded off the scene in some way, but today I discovered that one of our fellow PF bloggers has a rather pestilent commenter who is persistent in crapping all over his blog and while I’d noted the name once or twice before, I didn’t realize ze had a blog of zir own. Curious whether there was something more behind this person, I tarried for a moment and found that actually, this person was only a couple years younger than me and my.. my oh my oh my oh my. This was rather a prime example of the sort of personality that the older generations tut tut at and say: we’re screwed. As a dear friend said: FAIL.
So very much of the blogger’s posts were just for lack of a less kind word: whining. The blog seethed with entitlement.
For example: A very small debt had blossomed some multiples beyond the original principal because ze hadn’t paid and eventually ended up going to court and settled against zir. Ze has decided that there’s no gain to be had in paying it. So ze refuses.
Ze also refuses to work a full work week because ze “hates zir job”. Ze won’t find a better job (“can’t”), so instead presumably mopes about but defines the remaining time in the week as time for doing stuff like chores or exercise or blogging. Anything but working or going to school. Those latter two are definitely not on the list. And so ze declares zir job and loathesome bloggers who are successful in life and making any better salaries in any way, those despicable people who have found a way and means, anathema. They and the people who patronize zir job are brats. Ze cannot be one, of course, because ze has no means, the lack thereof clearly demonstrated by the poorness of which ze is plagued.
At this point, I lost my mind a little. I very nearly left a comment. Really? Ze is not a brat? REALLY?? Ze works hours that wouldn’t qualify as half a job’s time, can’t be bothered to plaster a fake smile on zir face, and openly scorns doing that much and the rest of the world that shuts up and puts up?? And has the nerve to hide behind the lesbian card? The people of color card? The woman card?
Throw ’em on the table. Throw them all on the table. Anything else you got? Oh, “lives with your parent” was the concession. Well that’s neither here nor there in the game of brattiness.
Well, here’s a little PSA. Brats come in all genders, drive all kinds of vehicles, are present in every economic band. It’s all in the attitude toward others and willingness to put everyone else down as “Other” and say that they’re just not going to put up with any kind of anything from anyone because they will be treated precisely one kind of way from only THIS sort of people.
Brats certainly are the people that you don’t like here but they are, alas, not so far away as all that from the picture you have painted of yourself. And being abusive is only half a step away from inviting and creating an abusive environment.
It’s a shame that you heap such vitriol on bootstrappers when that’s actually the way that most poor people find their way out of poverty. It may be hard to see from their positions now just because they “have so much” and maybe some of their advice rings hollow just because they have anything more than you.
I’m not going to give any advice. I’m just going to say it’s shortsighted, intentionally or not, that you’re dismissing and in fact attacking a group of people who by definition were once much like you.
I worked myself out of relative poverty working 80 and 100 hour weeks for umpteen years, and my parents took more than 20 years before me because they were strangers in a foreign land to start over. That was on top of the 15 years they’d already spent working out a living in their native land. But without fail, 365 days a year, year after year, they put a smile on their faces and went to do whatever jobs they had at the time whether it was picking up after someone else’s animals or children or land or mopping the floors or building a fence or laboring in the sun or rain.
Did they like it? Of course not. Did they want to do it? Of course not. They did it anyway.
Did I like my ridiculous hours? Heck no. Did I want to work 14 hour days? Of course not. But to make sure that the bills were paid and we didn’t carry debt forever, I did it.
And were my clients and shoppers nice to me? [Hysterical Laughter] How many diatribes did I listen to? How many insane people did I encounter? I can’t even begin to remember anymore. (I do remember having the same flipping conversation with the same old man every two weeks for five years straight because he could not remember a thing. We smiled every two weeks.) Does it matter now? No. Because it doesn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that I always did a good job, kept my eye on the important things, got through the days good or bad, and took care of my family so that my physically sick and mentally ill mother did not have to keep working with and listening to the abuse of the bullying crappy coworkers who always had poor attitudes and felt like they were always having a bad day and could take it out on the poor weakest one in the shop.
Not everything goes your way. In fact, very very little ever does without an immense amount of effort. But there is a bigger picture. Whether you can or will or want or don’t see it – that’s your call. I’m a bootstrapper whose family was poorer than dirt and we fought long and hard each and every d*mn day to win against the grind and still fight it every day because life is just not that easy.
The real lesson here isn’t who can make it in life because they worked harder or who can shout “lazy” louder or who has more money. It’s about who has the gumption to try and find the way to be happy because I’ll be darned if there’s a one of us PF bloggers trying as hard as this one to beat Minimum Wage at zir game of Misery.
March 19, 2011
It’s not going to be because of the night owl tendencies that Monday morning is going to dawn a bit more darkly than Saturday or Sunday.
Dare I cop to burnout so soon? Dare I admit that it’s been a long hard slog since landing this gig and no matter how hard I work, there’s always more piling on, more left to do, more that staff need from more, more expected of me, more, more and more?
Yes, we’ve got a vacation coming up but more often than not, the thought on my mind has been: what would I rather be doing?
And I know this has been an excellent learning experience, albeit a painful one, so it’s hard for me to say I want to do anything but this – that may just be the Tired As All Get Out speaking.
So instead, as I don’t rightly have the answer to that for myself, what would you rather be doing? Monday morning when you arise from your beauty rest, what would you ideally be getting ready to do for your daily bread?
March 9, 2011
On FB’s post, Can you survive on an extreme budget and make tough choices?, I ran across Insomniac Lab Rat’s comment that rang old bells for me:
“I didn’t find the game to be THAT realistic, because I felt that most of the times I played I had horrible “luck”, and most people won’t experience that many bad things in such a short time span.”
My response was turning into a saga so I took it back home. I understand it seems unrealistic but it is real – I’ll explain below. It is a bit of a personal bugbear, but I really like to point out the difference between luck and life happening and how they look remarkably alike.
This is what happens: When you’re in such a low or tight a situation that you have no cash flow, every single demand on your money is a choice that leaves another demand unanswered. You have all the same basic needs: food, shelter, medical, education, insurance, social obligations as others, but severely limited resources. Your daily question becomes: how do you cover six square feet of area with only three square feet of material? Everything that comes of luck, plus everything that naturally would have happened anyway and over time becomes defined as “bad luck.” That redefines your landscape.
As a player of the game Spent, what you are exposed to is that greater frequency of what appears to be bad luck but it’s really not. You are experiencing all the demands of real life in the way that someone who has zero outside resources would experience: the illness that is inconvenient for most but disastrous for someone without sick leave and can’t afford to lose the pay, the commitment that takes away the cash you needed for that other bill, a $25 late fee because you didn’t have last month’s bill money, the extra rise in Bill C that makes Bill D impossible to meet this month. They’re annoying to the average person with an extra $100 cushion in pay per month. Impossible if you just don’t have cash or credit.
Probably the less realistic bits of the game are that it doesn’t provide any of the truly creative resources you might be able to draw upon if you could figure them in real life. And that’s about right for a majority-case sort of game.
When you have an adequate cash flow, when you have any cash flow, you can absorb some smaller needs, and then only the significantly unexpected, or the “bad luck” stands out. When you have no cash flow, every single thing is bad luck. That’s why, a few years ago, I wrote about why I didn’t attribute our family situation to luck any longer – it was choices, it was circumstances, it was short and long term developments that happens to everyone that comes up.
When we were living that way, scraping penny to penny, life really did seem to kick us, up or down, like that and I watched my mom start calling everything bad luck. In 2008, I first noticed the trend to blaming the circumstances of our lives on luck. A year later, I realized the toll that making choice after debilitating choice took on her, and our relationship. It feels like being stuck in a channeling trap to ultimate failure.
After having been a real life player in a game of Spent, I know that you take those hits, over and over and over. You make those choices and hope, you make those choices and pray that you get from point A to point B, from point B to point C and you try to find ways to do things different every time to make it better but there are constantly setbacks, every week and every month. Right here on this blog, you’ll see my commenters note that it’s like a two-step, one step forward, two steps back.
It really wasn’t luck, though.
Though there was a time it certainly felt that way after I’d finally just sold our third vehicle at a loss, and then my dad totaled the sedan. My commenters made me laugh, though. “Death, Dismemberment, Disembowelment, Dysentery” indeed.
Yes, there are times I shake my fist at luck. But Luck happens, good and bad. Just be prepared for it, no matter what it is.
December 31, 2010
but it’s a photo to hold you over ’til I can focus again.
Looks like all the poking and prodding about my being next was rather a bit more informed than my tart replies of: not anytime soon!
December 19, 2010
Apparently, the only bakeware in this place is a cookie sheet and pie tin. This fact never fails to surprise me when I desperately need a slice of cake or cupcakes. Thank goodness for the pie tin, though, it’s a fair enough substitute vessel for the following simple lemon cake recipe I stole off the internet (Yahoo Answers). It’s not a pretty picture but it fits the silliness of cake in a pie tin:
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, well beaten
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup sugar
Mix together sugar and butter.
Add eggs and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice; mix well.
Add salt, flour, and baking powder to mixture.
Add milk.
Bake at 325°F in a well greased loaf pan for 1 hour or until golden brown.
Mix 1/3 cup lemon juice and 1/4 cup sugar.
Use a toothpick to poke holes in top of cake and drizzle lemon juice and sugar mixture over the top of the cake when removed from the oven.
Serve warm or cool.
Baked in a pie tin, it only took 37 minutes to reach perfection and another ten minutes of cooling while soaking in the lemon&sugar mixture. We ate half of it immediately. #pigs
It’s strange how little things like finally having enough staples on hand to bake something from scratch, despite flailing for a thing to bake it in, makes this place feel a little bit more like a home to me.
It’ll be a year in April, and it still feels like I’m a stranger in a foreign land, most days.
December 18, 2010
In any season, I think it’s appropriate to think of others, actually, but this is particularly timely for a few reasons. My good friend and fellow blogger J. Money of BudgetsAreSexy.com has been toiling long and hard on this fantastic project called LoveDrop (defunct, now).
It’s a micro-giving network intended to target people in need, one person or family per month, and surprise them with a bundle of financial gifts and other assistance. This started as very much a grassroots campaign, so although it’s not a not-for-profit organization and your contributions aren’t tax deductible, it’s for a very good cause. The project officially launches on January first, but it’s certainly open for people to purchase a subscription and get involved.
The group does have to pay taxes so the ratio of your contributions breaks down as follows: 50% to the recipients, 20% to taxes and 30% to organizational overhead.
Score one for transparency, and ten points to these guys for pursuing their passion of changing the world, one ‘drop at a time!
And to add to the mix, just as I completed the last touches on this post, I heard that LoveDrop co-founder and friend J. had been fired. Frankly, given all the projects in his head that need birthing with so few hours in the day, it couldn’t have happened to a better man. So consider supporting the cause and becoming a member because wouldn’t it be fantastic to help one of our own realize a dream of making the world a better place?
