No Place Like Home

I talked to someone at my credit union yesterday. As it turns out, I owe less than I thought on all of my (both of them) accounts. I can slap the HELOC together with the mortgage and end up saving $300 / month. Right now, cash flow is the problem. My credit score astounds me. It's nearly off the top of the charts.

Ma Maisonette will have to undergo the indignity of a full appraisal. I know that I can deal with most of the clutter, but the deep down cleaning is going to be left to professionals. Back in the day, I could just call Annushka and crew and they would come over en masse to see to things. Now I'll just call the same cleaning service that mucked out the house after Irene. I know it won't be cheap but I do have some emergency money tucked away.

Plus there won't be all that bloody angst to deal with.

I'm drawing up a mighty list.

Oh, hey - I need to have the front door painted. What do you think for color? The siding is beigey-gray, the shutters and trim barn red. Once upon a time, the door was barn red, too, but it's faded over the last, um, twelve years. What color do you think? Stick with the barn red? Brown? I can't think beyond that. I remember loving the doors and houses in Ireland. In Galway, there's a beautiful stucco building painted a deep and vivid purple with golden yellow trim and door. I don't think the good people on my street would take kindly to that.

Any suggestions for the door?

If you were going for a refi appraisal, other than cleanliness, what would be your main area of concern?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Snorkeling Mortgages

Whenever my financial situation threatens to overwhelm me (about every 3 - 6 years), I refinance the house.

This plan isn't working anymore. Ma Maisonette is estimated not to be worth the 20% down it would take for the refinancing.

I also believe that home prices have not bottomed out yet.

I don't want to have an underwater mortgage. I don't want to scuba dive to my front door. Even snorkeling (which I never have been able to do without getting a snootful of salt water) is beyond my capacity.  So this leaves me with the obvious:

- Spend less (a lot less, somehow)
- Try to find a way to make more money without abandoning the very sweet position I'm in right now.

Dr. A said take a vacation? I say, "Fie!" As I usually do when faced with my less-than-joyful financial situation, this morning I made lists of things I can do for free.

• I still have plenty of yarn.
• I recently bought some art supplies. Time to make use of them.
• The bike rack for my car works just fine. And when I inflate the tires on my bike, they'll work fine, too. I just need to hie me to a nearby park and go for a pleasant ramble. Yes, I know it seems silly to drive my bike someplace, but this is Jersey and the roads I would take to a park might prove my undoing.
• The cats! Play with them, groom them, pet them. Hug them and call them George.
• Um...I do write. So write I shall.
• The house! The freaking house! Still not set to rights eleven months after Irene. It. Is. Time.

See? Plenty to do. No, it isn't going to the Borgata and it isn't going to Happy Valley, but it should be recreational. Something to take my mind off my financial difficulties of the moment.

And life goes on.

No Room at the Inn

It looks like Cousin Karen won't be coming up for the weekend.

She had the flu last week. And you've heard way too much about the state of my buttocks.

I paid the rest of the bill for the bug exterminator. $$$. I have to pay half a year's car insurance. $$$. There are some other triple digit expenses in there. Right now, I don't have the change to show her a nice time.

If it was just her, I would still feel obligated to pay for her bus ticket and any meals we went out for. I know I could just drag her down Oak Tree Road in Edison and she'd be thrilled half to death.  If it was Cousin Danny, I would feel obligated to pay for more than that - he's never been to NYC. I don't think a dirt water dog is what he had in mind for fine dining.

And - oh, yeah. I still haven't touched the house.

I'm going to call her tonight and ask if we can postpone it. Maybe 4th of July. Maybe Labor Day.

So. It's going to be one of those "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" weekends. Any suggestions? How weird is it to go on a picnic by yourself? I think I can safely sit through a movie in a theater. Ideas? Thoughts? I'll think up some things, some cheap things.

I'm sorry the cousins aren't coming but I just don't think I can hack it right now.

Like It Hasn't Happened Before

This morning I realized

1. Yesterday flipped me over to depression. I am on turtle on its back.
2. This was further added to by more financial chickens coming to roost.
3. I have to buy cat food.
4. I let the calendar get away from me again and have been tripped up on my meds.
5. All of my meds need to be refilled. $$$.

For some reason, it always seems to be money and lack thereof that gets me.

I'm sorry, buy-nothing-ers, but I must buy some things today. And I have to get out of the house before I go more bonkers.

Wonders Never Cease

Guess who's bipolar?

Me! Little ol' me.

Dr. Yeow didn't say it. He just accepted it when I said I was cycling pretty high these days and in a way that has nothing to do with a peloton. Or Lance Armstrong. I described my symptoms and my shockingly shameful behavior lately, which I have been too ashamed to blog, on my farewell tour or not.

He changed my medication. Dr. Yeow is always very careful in changing my medication. He also knows that I am not always a compliant patient. If it's a complicated dosing regimen, I usually manage the morning but the rest of the day is lost.

One thing I have realized about this blog is that I use it as an emotional crutch. Personally, I think it's a good thing. Especially since I've come home every day this week and gobbled everything edible in sight (excluding the cats and their food).

Maybe I'm like Cher - taking another farewell tour? Too hard to say goodbye?

Because right now, I'm thinking maybe I don't want to make a whole lot of changes at once.

My head hurts.

Oh - Mark - email me.

Victory is Mine!

Have I mentioned that I'm tapped out financially? Well, I am. I realized with a very unpleasant start a few days ago that I am living paycheck to paycheck.

This morning, I tried to log on to my contracting company's time reporting website and got a message along the lines of "There are no current work assignments for you." My heart stopped. Just for a little. It started up again. But in the meantime I sent a text message to my recruiter

amy i cant get to my timesheet on the stupid system. it says i dont have a work assgnmnt. does this mean i have to go back to selling my plasma?

She said, no, don't be silly, we'll look into it, of course you're still working at Big Finance.

Being jettisoned from Big Finance just like that would cause my world to collapse. And I don't think I'm exaggerating. Much.

What I've decided that I want to do is first of all, stop the hemorrhaging. This weekend, I went to the library. I went to chapel. I spent not one thin dime.

I did, however, pay my bills.

This morning, I allowed myself one coffee on my way to work. It was nectar.

And victory is mine. I haven't spent one unplanned cent for 72 hours. I hope I can make it another day.

There's Got to be a Morning After

Without the aid of clonazepam, alcohol, or anything more destructive than cream cheese, I managed to settle myself down last night.

I watched two episodes of "Lost" on Netflix, but before I did that I came to a very obvious realization.

I need to find a better-paying job. I know. Duh.

Although I agreed to stay at this job for six months - and who knows, I may have to - I just have to get back into job search mode and keep on looking.

And find other ways to increase my income and reduce my expenses. The latter should be interesting, since I feel pretty much to the bone these days.

And one day, have the enormous satisfaction of telling Wells Fargo to go screw themselves.

Because honestly, I did a calculation on how much house I could afford on my current salary. It turns out to be a whopping $391 / month. A house that costs $80,000, which are scarce in New Jersey and scary when you find them.

This situation cannot hold for long, so must be changed.

On thinking about it, I'm surprised there haven't been more meltdowns over the past year. I count maybe three and think my quota could easily be one a month.

So. Up. Moving. Going. And pay a call to the nice folks on Dice.com.

A New Cool

So, how good is Lexapro?

This is how good it is.

I just paid most of my outstanding bills:

- Mortgage
- Gas & electric
- Phone
- Garbage collection
- Car insurance

And today when I got home from work, I found in my mailbox a bill for $1,000 to Hoity Toity Medical Group. $100 of that has been hanging around forever, but the $900 was for the CT scan of my mighty brain.

Normally, it would have me shrieking and crying and running to my bed to cover up my head.

But no. I looked at it. Thought a distant, wow, that's expensive. And then I put it in my purse, thinking, hm, guess I better call them tomorrow.

Part of it's the Lexapro.

Most of it is having this happen so many times over the past nine months that it barely rattles a window and hardly shakes the foundations of Ma Maisonette as it would have a year ago.

Stand in line, I think to HTMG. You'll get your chance. Everybody will. Even if it's just $50 at a time, you'll get it.

In the meantime, it's not worth hysteria or tears. Just a resigned shrug, a quick raise of the eyebrows, and into the purse it goes, so I can call HTMG at lunchtime tomorrow.

Ho hum.

Poor on $6.50 an hour

There was an article on MSN Money written by a woman who is 52 years old and is now making $6.50 an hour. She has fallen from clinging to the edge of middle-class respectability to unoffical poverty. Because she's still hanging on valiantly to her 401k from her old job and she owns what sounds like a tiny house in Montana, she is still not officially poor.

The article first came out on December 28, 2006. Three weeks later, I'm still thinking about it and the responses she's gotten.

People have said she's obviously stupid because she has three dogs and she hasn't gotten rid of them. Well, I have twelve cats and I haven't gotten rid of them. There have been months when the cats have eaten a more balanced diet than I have. There have been months when the cats have gotten better medical care than I have. To me, that was part of the contract I made when I took them in, that they would not want, that they would be cared for, and that they would never, ever wind up again in the hellhole where I found them.

The woman tried to relocate for her a new job, but couldn't find housing that would accept her three dogs. She ended up losing the job and moving back to Montana.

People have accused her of being a new Barbara Ehrenreich. I read "Nickel and Dimed" and it steamed me more at her than at anyone else. Whenever Babs got tired of pretending like she was poor, she ran back home and soaked in the Jacuzzi.

The $6.50 chick and I lived it. We know what we need to do to survive.

Outside your house, you never eat or drink anything you haven't brought along with you. You make coffee at home (whatever's on sale at Big Lots). You make huge pots of minestrone. You eat a lot of pasta or rice. With careful planning, you can buy a week's worth of groceries for less than ten dollars.

You learn how to cut your own hair. You learn how to color it. You find the real factory outlets and buy a bottle of nail polish for fifty cents, hair color for less than three dollars a box. It may seem frivolous, but you work in an industry where appearances matter. You can't be seen as shabby or desperate. You faithfully polish your shoes and make sure your clothes are clean and ironed.

On the weekends, in the dark, you Dumpster dive. Carefully.

You walk or ride your bike or you don't go, except to work. There's a listing of free stuff in my Friday newspaper, but the irony was that I was afraid to use the gasoline to get there.

You give up cable. You give up high-speed Internet access. (True confessions time - I'd rather go without food than not have Internet access. Besides, I got some freelance writing gigs over the Internet.) You use the library for the Internet, checking out books, magazines, music, and videos.

You make it a game, seeing what kinds of meals you can come up with using whatever is in the pantry and freezer.

When you come into a windfall, you spend it on more stuff to stockpile in your pantry. Indian groceries are great for staples. And if a nation of a hundreds of millions of people can get by on legumes and rice, so can you.

Cell phone? Gone. Security system? What on earth do you need it for?

You sell books on half.com. You sell your jewelry on eBay. You are humbly grateful for gifts of food or gift cards that mean you can buy new underwear.

You buy any 'new' clothes at the Goodwill or Salvation Army. (For some unknown reason, I have a horror of buying used shoes. I wore all my shoes to pieces or bought them when Payless had a twofer sale.) Even poor people wouldn't want your old clothes, so you use them for rags.

You use kitchen towels instead of paper towels. You use cloth hankies instead of Kleenex. People think you are adorably quaint.

You start a pet sitting business.

You investigate any kind of programs you can get for job retraining. I didn't qualify for any of them, so I paid for the project management and technical writing certificates out of my own pocket. I used my last savings bonds to do that, but it was money well spent.

I did not borrow money from anyone. Regrettably, I did get into credit card debt. I'm working now on paying that off.

You get a roommate. Twice, I was not so lucky. Once, I could not have been any luckier.

You start a price book. If you don't know what that is, you go to the library and check out The Tightwad Gazette.

You hand-make gifts. Eventually, you start to wish other people would hand-make their gifts, too, because they mean something more than whatever bauble catches your eye at Macy's.

You never let anyone know exactly how close to the edge you are. Still, one or two guess and it terrifies them.

I know exactly where this woman has been.

I rejoice that I now have only one job. There were times when I had four. Possibly five, since I stopped counting at four.

What prompted all this was that fifteen minutes ago, the UPS guy came to my door with my order from Land's End. I have a new coat. I have a new pair of shoes. The coat is not elegant or beautiful. You would never mistake it for something Givenchy stitched together for Miss Hepburn. But to me, it's beautiful. It's warm and elegant. It isn't ripped or torn and the buttons aren't falling off. The shoes are black suede and very functional.

In a way, this coat and these shoes mean more to me than a Fender guitar. This means to me that it's done. That the horror and the fear are over for now.

I'm through it. I have kept not just my cats, but my house and my health. It was three very long years, but I lived through them and I'm not poor anymore.

For that matter, I don't know if I ever really was.