The cost of a weekend in the Catskills

You've probably caught on my now to the fact that I like to visit the Catskills for hiking. I am planning to go again in a week and a half to get another couple of peaks in. Well, maybe I am. I finally sat down and did the math on what a trip costs me, comparing summer and winter:

As you can see in my incredibly fancy graphic, that's relatively pricey for two days of hiking. Obviously, this chart reflects my costs; it would be quite different for someone who owned their own car.

Food costs are an estimate and are higher in the winter because I am more likely to eat at a restaurant than I am in the summer when camping. Camping can also be brought down to $0 by staying at one of the free sites, but that means no showers. (I always feel bad for my fellow Metro-North passengers on the way home.) And before you ask, yes, yes, yes, I've done price comparisons with Zipcar as well as renting a car in Manhattan rather than Poughkeepsie, and they are both more expensive.

Going for a few more days becomes more efficient by dint of spreading the Metro-North fare out. Even more efficient is traveling up with friends who can split some costs.

By the time I finish my Catskills 3500 patch, it will be the most expensive patch on my blanket, I think. Given that I've done some peaks in pairs (even six in one day), plus some where I didn't rent a car, let's say it's $100/peak for 39 peaks. That's about $4,000!

And maybe now that I look at this, I won't go up in March as I had planned. All my necessary winter peaks are done, and it's $100 cheaper in summer than winter. Right now I'm saving money because I may have some big expenses coming up, and it's probably not fiscally wise.

Finally debt-free

In April 2012, I decided I had to get serious about paying off my credit card debt. I'd been in New York City for eight months and paid off my moving costs, and I was finally making a real salary after eight years in grad school. Total credit card debt? $22,510.57.

This week, I finally paid the end of it off.

I didn't do anything fancy. I simply put a large chunk of my income towards the bills every month. First, I paid off the smaller of my two cards, then tackled the larger card. (The psychology of having a card paid off was more important than tackling the higher interest rate card.) Finally, about a year ago, I transferred what was left to a new 0% APR card.

I haven't totally sworn off credit cards. One card I've had for nearly two decades has a high credit limit that is good for my credit rating. That is linked to my iTunes account - it keeps it active, and it means my checking account isn't cluttered up with $1.29 charges. It gets paid off every month. The other card I use for purchases that are more secure on credit cards, such as airplane tickets. It gets paid off as well. The third card will be closed soon.

A huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders, but of course there were trade-offs. My savings account is practically empty. In fact, I have a negative net worth overall. My student loans aren't huge (although morbid as this sounds, at least if I die, my family won't have to pay them), but my 401(k) and rollover IRA will let me retire around age 70, if I plan to make it to 70 and a half. I've increased my 401(k) contribution - it should be higher, but first I need a savings buffer. That comes before paying off any student loans or maxing the 401(k).

This is the first time in my adult life I haven't had credit card debt. You know, that's pretty exciting.

A tiny bit less debt

Cats and kittens, I am pleased to announce that my credit card debt is now below $20,000.

That may not sound impressive (because that's still WAY too much credit card debt), but it does represent a concerted effort the last few months to pay these things down.

The unfuture of work

These days, Slavoj Zizek is required reading if you have any pretensions of being on the left, and this article is a cogent piece on why "middle-class" jobs are becoming less and less so. But as someone less comfortable with reality than the imagination, today's economy reminds me of one of the big predictions from science fiction's "golden era" that has not - and likely will not - come to pass.

No, not personal jetpacks; the one-day work-week.

See, the idea was that automation, robots, etc. would improve productivity, a prediction that has come to pass. Therefore, we'd all need to work fewer hours, without any reduction in the standard of living. We would enter a golden era of human flourishing. (Strangely, in these futures, people used their spare time to master playing the lute or become tenth-degree black belts rather than using it to watch television.) But that last oddity aside - we've seen the productivity, but no real reduction in work time. If a job used to take two people working a 40-hour week, and now it's twice as productive, they lay off one of the employees; they don't have two part-time employees paid for full-time work. What happened?

First, the idea of uniformly marching productivity has always been nonsense. Some jobs are easier to automate than others, such as manufacturing. Others aren't easy to automate but theoretically we could spread their hours out among the workers who used to be in now-automated fields. For example, I could easily imagine a waiter working one day a week. But other jobs can't be made more productive or reduced. Probably my favorite academic paper of all times discusses why service-intensive work becomes relatively more expensive when other sectors become more productive. Baumol and Bowen used the example of string quartets; it takes the same amount of labor to produce a concert today as 100 years ago. And you simply can't be a concert-quality violinist on eight hours of playing a week. Still, the total number of labor hours could still go down, even if not evenly.

More importantly, that's not how capitalism works. Owners of capital, in the aggregate, are trying to maximize their profits. They pay enough to get skilled workers to work for them, and that's it. Why would they pay someone for a full week when they work only one day? As long as there is a surplus of labor, wages are driven down (see Grapes of Wrath, The). Under productivity increases, jobs are conglomerated or become piece-rate freelance gigs. This isn't meant as a slur on capitalism; it's basic economics. Occasionally a Henry Ford tries paying employees more, but much more often wages are artificially increased only by government via mechanisms such as minimum wages. So, could we posit government mandates at work in these sci-fi futures?

Don't be silly! Remember, we're talking golden era sci-fi writers! These guys were bullish on American capitalism in the middle of the Cold War. They were libertarians before libertarians were cool. (Well, lukewarm, anyway.) According to them, the new work order would come about strictly via the invisible hand.

In retrospect, it all seems a little naive.

First-world money problems

I've been trying a horrible new plan lately called living within my means. It's quite barbarous; I only buy goods or services if I have the money in my checking account. Not if I'll get the money next week, or if it's in savings, or if I can put it on a credit card.*

It's all part of my master plan to pay off my credit cards, but it sucks. I need a haircut, but I don't have the money. (No way can I afford a new dye job, too.) I'm even feeling too broke to do real grocery shopping.

Now, I know this is only a tough moment. It's part of the incredible suckitude of being paid every two weeks. I hate being paid biweekly. Bills don't come that way; they arrive monthly, which is not the same as every two paychecks. You can only avoid temporary shortfalls by having a considerable cushion in checking. People like me, who tend to spend what we have, don't leave cushions.

So, for example, my most recent paycheck went to rent. Which meant the one before it had to go to my April bills. Oh, the money is technically still in checking, but it has a big old target painted on it. In two weeks I'll get another paycheck, and it will look like whee-it's-Christmas money, but it isn't.

It shouldn't be like this. With my income, no kids or dependents, and no insane bills**, I shouldn't be living paycheck to paycheck. But the only way to stop living like that is, ironically, to really commit to it for a time so I can get ahead. 

*Naturally, there are (thus far theoretical) exceptions for actual emergencies. I'm not going to die for a balanced budget.
**Yes, I have credit cards. But I don't have unbelievable amounts of student debt or heavy medical bills.

Where my income goes, assuming I pay the minimum on my credit cards

Boy are my arms tired

There is this great Cracked article that everyone has been reading called "6 Things Rich People Need to Stop Saying." #6 is "Well, $500,000 a Year Might Sound Like a Lot, but I'm Hardly Rich."

I can promise you I'm making nowhere near half a mil. My income is five digits, unless you count the cents. Or the dollar sign. But even so, I felt guilty the other day when I complained that despite having a real, adult job with a real, adult paycheck, I still feel broke.

Before I get to the guilt, the complaint. A real job in a new state means I am paying state income tax and student loans, which I didn't before. I've also been hit by, for the first time, being paid biweekly instead of on a monthly basis. I calculated my budget based on a monthly basis, although in fact I get several hundred less a month that that, except the two months in which I get three paychecks. That's messing with me. Food and yoga cost a little more, but transportation and capoeira cost less.

The biggest difference, the one that takes half my income, is rent. And, yeah, I could pay less - I could live on my own somewhere in Queens, or get a roommate situation somewhere in Manhattan. Ironically, I can't easily afford to move, not having a broker's fee or first/last. And I adore my apartment.

The overall effect is that I'm consuming about the same amount of goods and services now that I did a year ago as a student.

However, and this is where the guilt comes in, I know I could live on less. I know people in New York who do. I might find moving out of my apartment unbearable, but it is still more feasible than saving money by becoming a breatharian. I'm making what is to a lot of people good money. To them, my complaints are going to fall on deaf ears.

The easiest thing I can do for my budget is get rid of my credit card debt. (I'm not going to tell you how much it is, but it's … a lot.) If I wasn't paying that every month, I could breathe more freely. Heck, I could bathe in gold doubloons every morning. (Kidding.) I've been trying to do that since I arrived. I've made some progress, but glacial. Still, progress. Better than regress.

I just bought a plane ticket yesterday for my grandma's memorial service this summer. I don't regret buying it, but as I was doing so, I realized I do travel a lot. This year's Brazil trip is off, so I was thinking of going to Denver instead. That would be several hundred dollars, though. And from NYC, I could instead take an $8 Megabus to DC or Philly.

So, I have a new resolution: I'm not buying any plane tickets until the smaller of my two credit cards is paid off. Which, my parents fervently hope, will be before Christmas. To do this, I'll need to focus on paying it off instead of trying to save, and I'll need to cut back on a few things - goodbye handstand class. But I hope it will be the incentive I need.

Then I can stop complaining about being broke, and start complaining about the shoddy quality of modern gold doubloons.

Disappearing middle class

This: "We’re trying to generate a middle class for a country that no longer really wants one."

I have noticed a real strain of this in our discussions about work and life. Read any article of career advice online, and then read the comments. There will be a heavy dose of, "Well, if you don't like working 80 hours a week, you should't have gone into x. And if you aren't working 80 hours at it, you deserve to be fired." There's some merit to the base form of the argument (i.e, you should know that some fields require more of you than others.), but it gets applied to anything that's a Career rather than a Job. Are you a professor? Accountant? Graphic designer? Electrical engineer? Kindergarten teacher? You didn't expect putting food on the table would be easy, did you?

When someone confesses that, really, they went to college expecting to find a job they like moderately well, but more importantly can make a middle-class living at working 40 hours a week, they're jumped on like "welfare queens" of a previous political generation. You're lazy; your job deserves to be taken away by someone who works more; it's attitudes like yours that are going to make America lose to competition from hard-working Chinese.

Never mind that the reward for devoting everything may be a pitiful teacher's salary, or a pink slip from general downsizing, or a career that disappears in the face or technological and economic change; if you can't invest your entire self in it, go get a job at McDonald's and be poor. Go big or go home.

It's all very Ayn Randian, although I'm pretty sure most the general zeitgeist is being expressed by a lot of folks who haven't even read Atlas Shrugged. It also seems to be part of the anti-sociological thinking in this country. I don't mean that everyone should have read Talcott Parsons, but that the solution to any problem, even if it affects 95 percent of a population, is, "Individuals should work harder." There's no acknowledgement of structural forces shaping society. Attempts to changes the structure are met with cries of, "You're taking away people's freedom to choose," as if our choices aren't already shaped and constrained by our current structure. And failure and success are de facto proof that one deserved to succeed or fail, because, hey, you should have known the rules.

No, the middle class is for lazy folks, those who want a house and job security, who think that four years of college is enough, or if it isn't it's their company's responsibility to provide further training, who think maybe we should have unions and federal regulations intervening in the market, who want to have time to live some very modest version of the American dream after work and on the weekends. We don't need that here: This is America.

Looking for financial advice

I wanted financial advice.

So I went to some websites like CNN that offered it, and I found nothing.

Now, understand, these websites had content. Well-written content. Possibly even helpful content, for someone else. But for me? Nothing.

I don't have a 401(k). I am not remodeling my home. I don't itemize my taxes. I'm not investing. I don't have children to co-sign a loan for.

I get that wealthier people are more likely to pay for financial advice, so if gurus are writing books, they would want to target that market. But on free websites? What's up with that?

Apparently, for folks like me (and remember, I have the median income for single people, so there's a lot of people at least as broke as me), there is no advice. Oh, wait, I forgot, we are told to "budget." But if we spend more than we earn? We should get rid of our luxury vehicles, stop buying season tickets, avoid buying full-price furniture, and stop paying someone to mow our lawns.* Ha ha ha, they weren't actually talking about me! Oops!

The sad truth of the matter is that, once you get down to a certain income, there is only one way to spend less: Cut back on necessities. Buy unhealthy food, forego seeing the doctor, let your phone get cut off … Now, I'm not there yet. I could get a cheaper living situation (which would mean a roommate, realistically - anything else would burn as much gas as I'm saving in rent). But for all the folks out there who are poorer than me - who wants to give them that kind of depressing advice? Who wouldn't rather say, "Oh, just give up your daily latte," than "Yeah, sorry, you're going to have to give up fresh fruits and vegetables"?

Money III of III: Trust fall

The first rule of writing is "Don't use too many exclamation points." The second is, "Show, don't tell":

I had a friend in college who worked on the paper with me. He wanted to be a fashion designer, but his parents wanted him to pursue something that reliably paid well, so he was majoring in one of the many flavors of engineering we offered.

A couple of years after graduation, he was working in Detroit in the business that made the city famous. That would have been a decade ago; I don't know what he's up to today. I don't know if he ever made a leap to something else. And I don't know how reliably Detroit is paying him now.

***

At Kroger, there is one clerk that I usually stop and chat with when he's working. This gentleman is probably a decade older than I am. The last time I was in there, he told me this:

Last year, he was bit by a brown recluse spider. While this is never a pleasant experience, his was worse than most. He was in a coma for five weeks, nearly losing his leg.

But he saw the upside in this; during his six-month convalescence, he was able to finish writing three novels and a lot of short stories. (He writes science fiction. Not the kind with zombies or vampires , he says, and no soft-core paranormal porn.) He's in the process of revising the first book to submit it to publishers.

***

My yoga teacher can testify that it took a long time before I got over my fear of handstands enough to even try them against a wall.

Now that I study capoeira, nearly every class brings me face to face with something I would be terrified to try on my own. Walking in a handstand. One-armed cartwheels. Rolling somebody over my back. Now I'm being threatened with backflips.

Capoeira is the first time I've had to face some of my fears in an ongoing, sustained way. It's a very particular set of fears; nobody asks me to battle spiders or jump off a ski lift. Nobody asks me to go up for tenure.

But capoeira is supposed to be a way of life both in and out of the game. It's not just that there is a lot to learn and that one's fellow capoeristas are a family. It's that the lessons you learn in the roda are also supposed to carry over to your life. This is one of the reasons that in Brazil it's used as a lifeline for kids growing up in less than ideal circumstances, just as team sports are in Anglo culture.

My capoeira lineage is Capoeira Angola Palmares, and it is based on four pillars: Safety. Respect. Responsibility. Liberation.

Money II of III: Being average

I call myself poor.

My income last year was almost smack-dab on the median single-person household income in this country.

I have all of the following:

• A car that runs
• Credit cards
• A checking account
• Clothes for fancy occasions and job interviews
• No roommates
• The expensive granola bars
• A new laptop
• Contact lenses
• Frequent flier miles
• An iPod
• Yoga classes
• Francine the pretty cruiser bicycle.

I don't have:

• Dependents.

We have administrative assistants in my department that make less than some of the PhD students do.

I have friends who have never had a checking account. I have friends with no credit cards.

I have friends without cars, although for most of them it is a lifestyle choice.

There is a student in my department whom I believe subsists entirely on free food.

I need my laptop to do my job, and the old one was nearly inoperable. I couldn't justify selling my interview clothes or my iPod in a cost-benefit analysis.

I could get a roommate, wear glasses, and buy the cheap granola bars.

I could eat out less.

I could get a job doing research for six figures annually. No, really, I could, although none of those jobs are in cheap places to live.

I could hold my breath and put my new clutch on a credit card.

I could quit whining.

Money I of III: Eight years on a grad-student stipend

I am tired of being poor.

If I wasn't poor, when my friends said, "You should come to Brazil," or Costa Rica, or Italy, I could say, "Yes." Not, "The only reason I can afford to go home for Christmas is because the plane ticket is my parents' Christmas gift to me."

If I wasn't poor, I wouldn't feel guilty because I could only afford to buy eggs laid by hens raised in cages under inhumane conditions. I could buy the Dagoba cocoa powder and unsweetened chocolate for these cupcakes I'm making instead of getting the Kroger cocoa and wishing there was a house brand for the unsweetened chocolate instead of just Baker's.

If I wasn't poor, I could say, "I'm excited about trailbuilding this weekend, because I'll have fun with my friends while doing good," and not add, "And get fed for free."

If I wasn't poor, when I complained about my finances I would feel guilty for being okay in this recession, instead of feeling guilty because I have friends making the same money as me and supporting dependents.

If I wasn't poor, I'd have a savings account, not nearly five digits of credit card debt.

If I wasn't poor, I'd buy a pair of black pants that fit me. I wouldn't wonder if a slip and tights are actually in my clothing budget.

If I wasn't poor, using up my prescription benefit before the end of the year wouldn't send me into a panic.

If I wasn't poor, I wouldn't have to budget to afford that new $150 part for my car. Instead, I would get a new clutch when they tell me to.

If I wasn't poor, unexpectedly going out to dinner with friends wouldn't blow my budget; I would actually have a budget to blow.

If I wasn't poor, "sprucing up my apartment" would mean "replacing my decade-old sheets" instead of "taking out the recycling."

If I wasn't poor, when I went into campus to work, I wouldn't think, "Well, I'm spending money on gas, but I'll run my laptop with free electricity once I'm there."

If I wasn't poor, I wouldn't wonder if I can afford to do what I want with my life.

Tax time

I was prepared to begin my taxes, I thought, and was looking forward to an easy time of it - all I did in 2009 was work for Vanderbilt, and I keep my Bolivian tin mine investing under the table.* Then a form 1099-MISC came in the mail for some income I had forgotten. (Hey, I was paid in early 2009 - for work done in mid 2008. Was it any wonder it had receded into the mists of time?)

The form itself fascinates me. Some of the categories on it are straightforward, such as "1 Rents" and "4 Federal income tax withheld." Others are much more interesting: "5 Fishing boat proceeds" - "10 Crop insurance proceeds" - and (my favorite) "13 Excess golden parachute payments." Alas, I have nothing in any of these categories.

*Dear IRS: I don't actually invest in Bolivian tin mines. Please don't audit me.

Savings

I went to a thrift store in the neighborhood today, looking for retro Tupperware and random household goods, but instead found a book I should really read for my dissertation - at the low, low price of $1.49. Hooray for good deals.

Lesson learned

April is indeed the cruelest month, and I have learned that fiscal responsibility is not responsible. From now on, I'm going to be an impulse shopper, no matter what the cost.

Near the end of last month I found two things I wanted to buy. I had been looking for a fun summer purse for over a year - a year! - and I finally found a cute one at a boutique. It was only $45, which is within even my price range. My momma didn't raise no fool, so normally I would have purchased it on the spot. But I had just paid my taxes and gotten a new clutch, and on top of that I was about to leave town for a wedding. My bank account was running on empty. In fact, I was only in the store at all because I had lost my sunglasses, and for me sunglasses are an essential ranking right up there with, say, underwear. In fact, they're probably ahead. For the same reason I passed on buying a tube of "Rocking Chick" lipstick at M.A.C. It was from their Barbie line of all things and was a ludicrous plastic shade of hot pink that looked fabulous on me. It would have been great for those days when I wanted a little more panache or for evenings, because the typical deep red isn't really me. But I held off.

I went back to the boutique as soon as I got paid and the purse was sold. Being a boutique, they weren't going to have another one. I didn't make it back to the mall until today, and to my horror they told me the lipstick was available for a limited time, and that time was up. I was too despondent to even look for another fun color.

So here I am with no purse, with boring everyday lips, and a completely demolished shopping vibe.

Update: Thank goodness for eBay. I was able to find a tube for sale (for twice the M.A.C. price of course). A girl's gotta have priorities.

It'll knock you out

Taxes, my clutch - just when I'm tired of spending money on boring things, I had to go out and buy ... antivirus software. There aren't any viruses for the Mac OS, so I didn't have any. There are, however, Microsoft Word viruses that you can catch. Apparently I caught one that doesn't do much to Macs themselves but can spread to anyone you share Word docs with. If you have it, come Dec. 13 it tries to wipe your C drive. I only caught it when gmail would not email an attachment, saying it had a virus. So if I've sent you any Word documents recently, you might want to check your own status.

The software spent most of the evening running - I did the whole hard drive, because I wasn't sure that Word docs weren'e lurking in unlikely folders - and of course I didn't want to reopen Word until everything was disinfected, so there went my plans to get work done last night.

Still recovering from paying taxes and ...

48,000 miles on the car = time for the third clutch to be put in.