We're having a good, old-fashioned Nor' easter now that won't wind up until tomorrow. It gives me the perfect excuse to hunker down indoors and be thankful I have heat. Wind, rain, snow, sleet.  It's really just getting started.....I was inspired to make some buckwheat pancakes for breakfast.

Speaking of breakfast, I wanted to offer a counterpoint to my last post, where I told the story of the boutique shop owner who ripped me off....twice.

This past week I took a friend to a local coffee shop/cafe for breakfast.  I've been there a few times with my father, so the cafe owner greeted me by name and said goodbye when we left. Because it was the weeekend, his girlfriend was there helping out, and her father tagged along, too. The father was the talkative type and kept up a lively conversation with us as we waited for our meal.

I had the most amazing French toast.

The cafe owner always finds a way to make you feel special, whether it's by surprising me with a chocolate-covered strawberry on Valentine's Day week or giving me a jumbo-sized meatball with sauce for my father when I picked up a non-meatball order to go.

My town has a Facebook page where diners post pix of meals they've had and generally rave about their favorite restaurants. This was one I often see others talk about. You see, Ralph, the owner, treats everyone like royalty as soon as they step in the door. It's really remarkable.

In other news, I'm almost done writing story #3 for the university.  Just waiting for the financial aid officer to get back to me for some quotes.

I had to reschedule my podiatrist appointment for another week from now on account of today's snowstorm.

I got the Conservation District's plant sale flyer in the mail yesterday and will treat myself to one or two shrubs. This is an annual fundraiser that's near and dear to my heart, since this was the first job I had when I moved to Connecticut in my 20s. I ran the tree seedling sale, which was a ton of work: ordering plants wholesale from the growers in upstate New York, recruiting boy scout troops and other volunteers to help package thousands of orders, managing incoming orders and fielding questions from the public, freezing my butt off with the volunteers on a Saturday in early April in a big, old unheated barn to fill the orders and then the mayhem of the day of the sale, when customers would pick up their orders. I was keenly aware that if anything went wrong on the day of the sale, I would be the held responsible. I reported to what we called a Board of Supervisors who all had their day jobs but met monthly to promote the work of the Conservation District. It was one of the best (but lowest paid) jobs I ever had. I also ran the trout fingerling sale later in the year. I won an award for my newsletter there.

Anyway, last year I got a buttonbush and a native honeysuckle. This year, I'm eying a Heritage river birch, northern bayberry, bottlebrush buckeye and arrowwood viburnum. I will only get 2 of them and I'm having a hard time deciding on which I'll get.

I'm happy to report that my single-premium immediate annuity is now in place and I've received my first monthly direct deposit into my checking account. They are deducting taxes for me, so my net is a bit lower than $1,000, at $932, but I'll surely appreciate it at tax time.

I am treating this like any other "paycheck," even though I am paying myself! It certainly feels like a paycheck, and I have absolutely no regrets about deciding to go this route.

Hopefully I will live a very long life (if I die, the annuity dies with me and my heirs get nothing), beating the insurance company at their game and becoming a crotchety, but rich, little old lady who spends her days lunching with her equally rich, little old lady friends, tending to her gardens, immersing herself in her hometown book club and garden club, and driving around town in her shiny new hybrid SUV.

I feel this annuity is an important part of my new retirement income strategy, and I'm just so glad I followed through with it. There have been plenty of times I had the best of intentions to do something, but then I got busy with other things. I do feel that it will give me a certain sense of security that, no matter how much s*** hits the fan, economically speaking, or how horrible the next stock market correction is, that I can rest a bit easier knowing that this money, at least, will not be affected, and I don't have to worry about its future asset allocation or anything else.  And, even if I live to 125, I will never be destitute and never run out of money.

(I do hope I don't regret not opting for the COLA adjustment, which I decided to forgo as it would have further reduced my monthly payouts. No doubt inflation will make my monthly payments smaller as time passes, but I know about that now and will just deal with it.)

I am wondering, though, how I should reflect the value of the annuity when I periodially calculate my net worth. I purchased it with a $200K lump sum; should I just use $200K? Not sure, since $200K is not what's available to me and I would never be able to access that.

When I was shopping for the annuity, I approached 2 firms: New York Life and Guardian Life. Making the decision about which firm was really very simple to me: Since the only risk to my annuity is that the issuing firm itself goes bankrupt or something, the single most important consideration was picking an issuer with the highest Fitch, Moody's and S&P ratings. That's what led me to start first with NY Life and Guardiain Life, both of whom had the highest ratings.

The next most important thing in my mind was the amount of the monthly payout, which is fixed for your lifetime.  A good friend of mine works at NY Life, so I thought I would be partial to that firm, but as it turned out, Guardian Life offered a slightly higher monthly payout. It wasn't much on a monthly basis, but it would work out to an extra $10,000 over the next 20 years.

Also, I had a Zoom meeting with 2 agents from NY Life, and during the meeting, they gave me a brochure with lots of charts showing how much income you could expect, etc., but, umm, they gave me a brochure that prominently said in diagonal shadow type, "Not for use with clients."

When I worked in the business, the demarcation between client-approved materials and broker/dealer materials was very clear, and you could get in a lot of trouble if you showed b/d materials to a client. Why? Well, if fund performance was on the brochure, the b/d version would show higher performance because you weren't required to deduct all the various fees and expenses incurred by the client; those numbers were what we called "non-standardized performance." But you were absolutely required to deduct fees ("standardized performance")  from returns shown in client materials, so the numbers always looked less rosy.

Now with an immediate annuity there is no underlying stock market performance involved, so I'd  have to do a side-by-side comparison to see what the difference was between NY Life's b/d and client sales brochures. But I didn't like that they used the b/d version with me so openly, and I did mean to question them on that, just to see how they'd respond, but by that time I'd decided to get the ball rolling with Guardian, so I just cancelled the 2nd meeting with NY Life.

I've begun work on my 2nd story for the university on a tuition-related topic. Like riding a bicycle, I'm glad writing still comes naturally to me after a five-year hiatus in favor of editing. I put in 3 hours yesterday and I'd say it's 60% written, but have to wait til next week to interview 2 different people at the school that my manager asked me to talk to. They all work together. Quite honestly, that's the biggest hassle as they all seem so busy and kind of make our conversation a bigger deal than it is. I told her I just needed a few quotes from her about such-and-such, and now she's set up a zoom meeting and invited 2 other people from the school. Sigh. It's only a 1,000-word story, so I don't want to devote too much real estate to her perspective, just a nod and a mention.

I calculated how much time I spent on the first story, and figured I earned $91/hr based on the flat fee they paid me. Nice. After a while, I won't bother tracking my time spent, but I wanted to get an idea. I wasn't rushing anything, either, but I do have like 40 years of experience writing and interviewing people, so that background continues to serve me well.

Consider that, aside from my writing abilities, I don't have any specific talents and got a liberal arts education. Even by the time I graduated, I didn't have a job lined up and was still casting about for direction. My writing proclivities, which were apparent when my age was just a single digit, have served me well and gifted me with a pretty good living.

I had one job 15 years ago (which I still remember fondly) where I did the exact same thing that I'm doing  now except that the subject matter was different (personal finances) and I was the in-house writer assigning stories to a team of freelance writers; now, I am the freelance writer but otherwise, everything I'm doing feels very familiar: coming up with story topics, the word length, doing my own research and interviewing a few subject matter experts, sprinkling keywords in the story, even getting my byline, photo and bio, too, and of course online publication on the university's blog.

It was interesting to me how quickly the hundreds of stories and blog posts I'd written back then disappeared from any online searches. After my layoff, and the layoffs of many others there, the company went belly up and they took down the website itself, and for a while, if you did a search of my name, you'd come up with dozens and dozens of my stories that were circulated by news aggregation sites. But after a few years, they mostly disappeared; I guess more current news just displaced them?

So the annuity is all set, and the job will soon become a routine. What next? I think I should spend some time planning how to have some fun! In the near term, I'm going over to my friend's place (around the corner) for dinner tomorrow night. She's divorced and just got laid off from her job; she really doesn't want to work at all, but she's 4 years younger than me and still has a mortgage. Her options are limited due to her skill set.

Another friend and I have plans to visit the Bronx Botanical Gardens this spring, along with a trip to a rescue organization for horses in Litchfield County; since my friend is a retired vet and even has supplies he wants to donate, this is the perfect field trip for him.

My kitchen renovations begin in late April and I will also be in need of an elecrician and plumber for various small jobs.

To all of you experiencing the horrible winter weather out west, stay safe and you have my sympathies.