I love starting off my "weekend" with a productive spurt of stuff done, and indeed, I did do that, starting off this afternoon around 4 pm when I got home.

I wanted to transplant a "small" viburnum (about 5 feet high now, one I already transplanted once, but to the wrong spot) to the large area fronting the road where the town took down 3 humongous white pines last November. I need large shrubs that will block the view of the neighbor's house and of passing cars.

I dug the hole in front first, but had a heck of a time digging up the viburnum in the backyard. It had a pretty thick and strong root growing directly down from exact center.

I finally got it out and moved it to its new spot, then watered it well. I do hope it has enough roots to survive. I'm not 100% sure. It is still dormant, so a good time to move it.

I'll water it daily for the next 4 days and see how it does.

After I got done with that, I went to work on the storm damaged, fallen tree limbs, continuing where I left off last time, and managed to work on that for 1.5 hours before running out of steam.

But when I last left the crabapple tree, one large trunk was still upright; now that limb is also down (crashed into white pine) and so it's a total loss, which is sad, because it had such a brilliant mass of fuchsia-colored blossoms in May.

I'm going to have to hire someone with a chainsaw, but I'm doing as much as possible myself first to reduce the bill.

I rolled up 2 tarps and returned to the garage all the pots I put over the daffodils to protect them from frost. We're to have frost-free days and nights for the next few weeks and, I guess, for the rest of spring.

Unfortunately, I was so involved in the tree work that I forgot 2 meetings I was going to choose from tonight: the garden club in town and an MS dinner about a half hour from here. I didn't make either...too pooped.

Tomorrow I'll be getting my hair cut ($7 before tip with coupon from Great Clips), vacuuming, and hopefully transplanting another smallish shrub to the front roadside before rain in the afternoon.

I also want to return a Transfer on Death form for my checking account to the bank. This was one of the few very useful pieces of info I got from that class I took: you can designate beneficiaries on any kind of bank account (TOD, or Transfer on Death) and when you pass, the monies go directly to your beneficiary and bypass probate. Which saves your heirs time and money. I knew you could do this for any kind of brokerage account/mutual funds, but didn't know you could do it with banks, too. So after I do my checking account, I'll do my numerous online money market and CD accounts.

I told my dad about this too because I don't think he knows that much about estate planning stuff but I haven't known how to approach him about it to discuss these things. So I told him about the TOD thing as something I was doing myself, and then he asked me to let him know if I was able to do it, and I could see he was interested. And since my bank is also one of his bank's) and they emailed me the form, I have printed out an extra copy for him.

Now I don't mean to pry into his estate planning although I am pretty sure the 4 of us kids will be beneficiaries. He often has me write things for him, fill out forms, etc because his vision loss is so profound he has trouble writing even his signature.

So I will carefully offer to fill out the basic info part of the form for him and leave him to do the rest if that's what he wants.

Having been my mother's executor, I really do wish my father would be open about his plans with me/us because it would just make things easier when the time comes. At this point, I don't think any of us knows who will be executor, or anything else, for that matter. I am guessing the executor will be the older of my 2 younger half-brothers (and praying it's not my sister).

It being near the end of heating season, I poured the last of my kerosene in the heater, burned it til nearly empty, and then proceeded with a "dry burn" outside my front door. This helps remove the carbon build-up.

Later in the week I'll disassemble the heater, just by unscrewing and removing the top, to inspect the wick and scrape off remaining carbon so it burns well next season. In addition to the user's manual, watching a lot of You Tube videos helps.

Since I've only used it a total of 9 times this winter, I don't think it's necessary to replace the wick yet.

So of the 5 gallons I bought, I got 36.5 hours of run time. I had no power outages this winter (thank goodness) so I ended up just running it on weekends or when I was otherwise home, and it typically would keep it at a very toasty 71 to 73 degrees inside when temps outside were in the 20s, 30s or 40s.

There's really no way to regulate heat flow. It's either burning or it's not.

Familly complexities
Talked to my cousin J. in PA. He has major relationship issues with his 2 daughters. They sound like terrible human beings. They are in their 40s now (living with boyfriends, kids) and he continues to heavily contribute to their finances, paying for a house, a car (totaled, then he gave her another one), paying their cell phone bills and I'm sure there's more I don't know about. And yet they treat him terribly. Very entitled, presumptuous and demanding, not at all appreciative.

After I told him the story of how my dad told me, when I was a senior in college, that the modest child support payments he'd been making directly to me when I entered college would end when I turned 21, it inspired my cousin to stop the outflow of monies to his grown children. It's time they took responsibility for their own lives.

I suspect part of the reason for his largess is perhaps an unconscious desire to compensate for the lack of mothering his daughters got when she was still alive.

It strikes me that bad fortune, mental illness and addictions persist and continue on from one generation to the next. And I have to think back to my grandmother's sister, and what a bad choice she made in marrying my cousin's father (mental illness and alcoholism), which I think somehow influenced my cousin's choice in a wife (mental illness, painkillers and alcoholism), which in turn really messed up cousin J.'s 2 daughters' lives, finally leading to his grandson, who is now in jail after shooting at my cousin at point blank range 3 times. He would have shot a 4th time, but the gun jammed, possibly saving my cousin's life.

My grandmother and her sister could have passed for twins. They were both very pretty as young women. They didn't have to settle. But sometimes women go for the bad boys.

Although some feel we are masters of our fate, I think often there are forces at work with origins well before our time that remain invisible to the eye and beyond our grasp to change.

I'm sure my great aunt had no idea how her choices would impact her as-then unborn son, her granddaughters and even her great grandson. I hope the cycle can be broken.

Lately I'm finding more and more businesses pad their bills with all sorts of nickel and dime fees which really add up.

Today, I encountered two such fees having to do with my plumber and the local movie theater.

My plumber was here and is gone, and I have nice new shower trim in the bath/shower. I was a little perturbed about the bill. He was here exactly 1 hour and I knew their rate was $100/hr., but he wrote 1.5 hours on the bill. This is the part that really bothers me. That extra half hour appeared on the bill as if it was part of the labor they were charging me. When I brought it up, he explained that they bill for driving time.

I know their location and it's 15 minutes away. Why should I pay $100/hr for driving time? So after writing the plumber a check, I let him go and called their office, spoke to the manager there and he agreed to void the check I'd written if I paid him over the phone, and he would not charge me the $50 driving fee.

I was glad about that, but am thinking in the future I should make a point to find a plumber right in my home town and ask on the phone whether they're going to charge for the drive over. It just seems rather sneaky since the office manager did not mention this fee when I asked him about cost over the phone, and even on the invoice, it did not disclose that fee; it just indicated "1.5 hours" when I knew he'd been here exactly 1 hour.

The only time I remember ever having to pay an extra driving charge was when gas prices were really high, years ago. It just seems like another opportunity for them to pad the bill. I mean, they're going to have to drive somewhere for every customer call; it comes with the territory. What will they have customers do next, pay extra for the electricity in the office?

Today is my dad's birthday, so as a treat, I'm picking him up later today so we can catch the new Chappaquiddick movie. It wouldn't normally be my first choice, but he likes historical dramas, and this was the only thing of that genre playing at the new theater in his town.

Their new "order online" feature was available, so I thought, great. I can avoid making dad stand around when i wait in line for the tickets. But then I saw the theater charges a $1.50 "convenience charge" for each online ticket ordered, so an extra $3.

I wrote and complained about that too. You would think they would want to encourage people to order online since that lessens the needs for a live person standing behind the counter selling tickets. Perhaps with enough online orders, they could get by with 1 person selling tickets instead of 2.

I've also run into convenience fees when I pay for my heating oil with a credit card. In fact, I only accidentally discovered it would be cheaper to pay by check. So now I always ask various service providers if they offer a discount if you pay "in cash," which often includes paying by check.

Have you encountered similar kinds of fees that often fall under the radar if you're not careful?

I saw the new neurologist today and liked him well enough. I asked him how many other MS patients he has, and he said 40 or 50, so I guess he's got the experience I wanted to see. He's a solo practice...so rare these days. Not sure I'm definitely switching to generic Copaxone. He said generics are NOT identical and sometimes can be as much as 20% different ingredients.

Sure enough, I went home and found this:
http://fortune.com/2013/01/10/are-generics-really-the-same-as-branded-drugs/

However, my new insurer requires use of generics, if they're available, and I told him that. He said he'd talk to the Copaxone rep who happened to be stopping in later today to see if anything can be done. He said he's seen some patients switch to a generic and then went on to have troubling side effects. Not good.

We also agreed I'll have an MRI since it's been 13 years since my last one. It should only cost me a $75 co-payment, which to me is pretty cheap.

While in the doctor's waiting room, I couldn't help but notice how stark the walls were; no art anywhere. I got the office email from the front desk and may propose they consider purchasing some of my mother's art; I have jpgs I can send. You never know.

I hit Aldi's for their $1.19 cantaloupe (they were so sweet last week) and their .49 mangoes, among other things. Bought a birthday card for my dad next door and filled up the gas tank before dropping off some book donations at the library. Vacuumed the house. I found a FLEA on Luther. Gave him Advantage Plus yesterday.

I had another assigned survey from my local bank so went to use their teller and then filled out the survey online when I got home. Each time I do this sort of thing it's an easy $10.

Also went to the hardware store to replace 2 faucet washers as both my kitchen faucet and the downstairs bath faucet have had slow drips for ages. My local hardware store didn't have the right size so now I have to go to a plumbing supply place. My chores never seem to end. Sigh. But it's a cheap fix (.49 each) and could save on my water bill. It just was never really on my radar til now.

I went to a lot of trouble to cover up as many daffodils in my front yard as possible becus it got down into the 20s last night and many are ready to bloom. I used plastic sheets, a tarp and lots of large flower pots turned upside down.

Then this morning I had to pull all of them off and then put them all back on tonight because it will be another cold one. I'm not sure it's needed because the ones I couldn't cover look fine, but freezing weather is freezing weather, right? I have several hundred daffodils I've planted over the years and they are a cheery sight I'd rather not lose this year.

Plumber coming tomorrow bright and early, 8 am.

Roth IRA withdrawals are not counted as (MAGI) income when withdrawn.

I have been so focused on treatment of Roth IRA CONTRIBUTIONS, and how that affects your current year's taxes, that somehow I overlooked this important point. I mean, I knew the withdrawals would be tax-free, but I did not consider exactly how that would work in practice.

This would make it even easier to remain within a lower tax bracket in retirement. And regardless of how big your retirement kitty is, you could really wind up paying much higher taxes if you're not careful how you withdraw.

For instance, let's say you know you'll need $42,000 a year in retirement. And you also know that the 12% federal tax bracket is for incomes between $9,526 and $38,700. So you could simply withdraw:

1. $38,699 from your traditional IRAs, and
2. $3,301 from your Roth IRA

This totals $42,000.

In this way, you'd pay just 12% federal income taxes on the first $38,699 and $0 on the $3,301 (if you're single).

But if you weren't paying attention and simply withdrew all $42,000 from your traditional IRA accounts, you'd pay 22% tax on a portion of your withdrawals, or $5,369 total (an extra $726), just for withdrawing from the wrong accounts.

Conversely, if you chose to withdraw $42,000 from only your Roth IRA accounts, you'd pay no tax this year but, unless you have ALL your retirement funds in Roth IRA accounts, you'd wind up paying the piper in higher taxes come RMD time because the only way you'd be able to remain submerged like a contented frog in the depths of the 12% tax bracket would be by lowering your standard of living. (Don't know where that frog metaphor came from, but let's go with it.)

Your Roth monies could do much more good, taxwise, if you conserved them and doled them out to top off your income needs year in and year out rather than shooting your wad after a couple of $0 tax years.

Happy Easter and Happy Passover to all my SA friends.

I went to see my friend R. yesterday. He was supposed to go for his 4th chemo treatment this past week but the doctor thought his tumors were getting bigger after 9 weeks of treatment. If he confirms this on Monday, he'll be switched immediately to a different chemo drug. Apparently, roughly half of cancer patients don't respond to the first chemo drugs and have to go on the next one.

All things considered, R. is probably doing as well (mentally) as could be expected. His focus is very much on wrapping things up, decluttering his condo so his family doesn't have to do as much. He shared with me earlier this week his very irreverent obituary, which he wrote himself. He has lost most of his hair, and what he has left has gone completely white. That was a little bit of a shock to me.

He said it's still possible the 2nd cancer drug could put the cancer in remission and he could live another 5 years. Or he could die within the year.

Plumbing woes...
The other day I cleaned the bathtub, and to rinse it out, I pushed the lever on the tub valve down to get water from the lower faucet.

That lever has been very stiff and hard to move for a while (it's about 20 years old) and when I went to take a shower that night, I couldn't pull it up. Wonderful. I was thinking I would have to call a plumber and replace the fixtures, paying probably $200 for the plumber's time and another $200 for a very nice fixture I picked out at Lowe's.



But I'd rather defer replacement for as long as possible, so I researched stuck shower/tub valves and decided to try soaking the tub valve in vinegar, contained in a plastic bag with rubber bands to secure it, overnight.

It worked!

I was able to pull up the lever so I get water coming out of the shower head. However, it was still hard to pull up, so I'm going to try never pushing it back down again.

Now, amazingly, I have a second plumbing challenge.

I came home yesterday to hear loud banging noises and sputtering when I turned any of my faucets on/flushed the toilets, and the water was brown. Kind of alarming. Like there was air in the pipes. I doubt the water company was doing any work on them on a Saturday.

After a few minutes of running the water, it turned clear and stopped the banging noises. However, I still had a significant loss of water pressure in the bathroom faucet, which could mean some corroded bits of old galvanized pipe could have broken loose and created a clog. I also tried to check the aerator on the bathroom faucet but it didn't seem to be the type that you can pry off or remove. I soaked it overnight in vinegar anyway.

Then after reading more online, I went to look at the faucet again, and this time I realized what looked to be one piece was in fact not, and I could unscrew the aerator off. It was clogged with sediment and very rusty. I tried turning on the water with the aerator off and lots of rusty water splashed out. At least I solved the low flow problem! I cleaned up the aerator and put it back on. Problem solved.

Smugly, feeling I had now resolved TWO problems which could easily have led to a call to the plumber, I decided I wanted to try flushing out my electric hot water heater, which I know you're supposed to do once a year, but haven't in the 5 years I've had it.

I printed out instructions from online although I "generally" knew what to do. First step, shutting off power at the circuit breaker. Check. Next, shut off the cold water inlet valve at top of heater. As soon as I did that, I noticed it leaking water right from the shut off valve. Great. I tried to shut it off more tightly, still leaking. I used a set of pliers to try to tighten the nut and that did help a little and it's now a very slow leak, but i had to shut off the water entirely or it leaked more.

So i think that's a temporary fix (i have a glass under the valve and will monitor how quickly it fills up) and I will still have to call a plumber, I think. An easy fix for a plumber to replace the valve, but not for me.

If I call a plumber just to replace that valve, I'll be billed for the service call, probably the full hour, even if it takes him 10 minutes to replace. So now I'm thinking maybe I should go ahead and replace the shower/tub fixtures since he's going to be here anyway.

It's in the low 50s today. So I put on some light-colored clothing, work gloves and a baseball cap to start cutting up some tree branches that came down in the last snow storm.

I went straight for the biggest mess, a crabapple mostly taken down by a fallen locust tree branch. I will have to pay someone to do the big logs, but I'm "cleaning up" the many smaller branches with my loppers and bow saw. I worked til I was tired, 1.5 hours, slowly and methodically cutting whatever branches I could, then dragging them to the brushy area where I flung the branches as far in as I could.

There is much, much more work to do, but at least I got a start on it. There were many piles of deer turds around thee tree mess as they're drawn to sheltered areas. So I need to be careful not to brush up against stuff.

Oh, in my younger days I could work all day. I am really noticing the difference.

In fact, tomorrow, I'm thinking instead of paying $5 for an hour of yoga, why not actually put my exercise to practical use, and continue working in the yard?

I'll do the yardwork for another hour or so in the morning, rest, have lunch with dad and then visit my friend R., who just had his 4th chemo session this week. He has written his own, very irreverent obituary, which he has shared with me.

Last night was my 3rd and final class in the financial retirement strategies class I took. In my evaluation of his class, I wrote that the title of the class didn't really seem to accurately reflect the contents...meaning, most of the time was spent on defining very basic concepts, like what are stocks, what are bonds, what is life insurance, estate planning, etc., in very broad brushstrokes. So it wasn't much in the way of strategies, though we spent a small amount of time talking about how helpful Roth IRA conversions can be for early retirees, a topic I am newly fascinated by. I asked a lot of questions.

Probably the best part of the class is that we can each meet one on one with the instructor (a CFP) if we so wish, after having turned in very detailed forms revealing our assets, liabilities, income, etc. I expect to be hearing from him within a week. I guess for this complementary consultation alone, the $40 I spent was worth it, especially if he can give me personalized recommendations.

I cleaned the bathtub today and did a 35-minute walk. I re-registered with a focus group company since I now have more free time. Sure, if I wanted to make more $$, I'd could do better by working f/t, but it's all or nothing at my office and I'm good with the new schedule. I find doing one off things like the focus groups fun.

My "weekend" starts today (hooray!), and as usual, I have no shortage of things to do.

I work just a half day today, so on the way home I can hit Trader Joe's (I'll be bringing some ice paks in a cooler since it'll be a 40-minute ride home); it's easier doing this than going to my usual Trader Joe's from home, a 20-minute ride out of the way.

There are always lots of products I want to try after seeing them on the Trader Joe's Facebook page I subscribe to, but I can never seem to find them.

I'll also be making a stop at the dump on the way in to work and bringing in some Easter candy for my coworkers.

So now that I am on the healthcare exchange as of March 1, I needed to find a new neurologist since my old one is not in network on my new plan.

Another neurologist I met at an MS lunch recommended a certain doctor, so I called his office to schedule an appointment. His staff wouldn't do that until I had my medical records transferred, so I dutifully did that, waited over a week, and then confirmed with my current doc's office that it was done.

I didn't know it at the time, but just reaching the new doc's office that one time was a fluke, because I have been unable to reach them again since that first phone call, regardless of what time of day I call!! I even tried pushing the extension intended for physicians's offices calling in, and still I got the recording!

They never called me back, and I don't have a lot of time to waste since I'll want to renew my meds prescription fairly soon. I just couldn't believe that no matter how many times I called and left messages, I got no callback. How can you respond to patients' needs if you don't answer the phone? What would happen if I had an exacerbation of my MS and needed prompt medical attention?

So I picked the only other neurologist who's in network and in my immediate area; I had passed him up initially because he's a solo practice. The woman answering the phone said he did have other MS patients, but I'm going to have to "interview" him when I see him as I want to make sure he's up to date on MS drugs, research, treatments, etc. Certain neurologists specialize in certain things, like migraines, for instance.

But I did feel grateful that when I called his office, a woman answered promptly, she was very nice and didn't require the medical record transfer before I made an appointment. This will save me time, and the appointment is for next week. I had been expecting I'd have to book the appointment at least a month in advance. I do hope his availability is no reflection on his general expertise.

I'll bring my MS journal with me and I already mailed the form to old doc to have my official medical records transferred. And I do believe I have a CD with my last MRI images on it.

My main goal in seeing the new doc, as mentioned, is to switch to the new generic Copaxone, made by a different pharma company, and get a year's prescription. My new plan requires use of generics if they're available. When you're on a specialty drug, this all takes extra time to set up. (In fact today I also want to call Accredo and the pharma company.)

If it turns out I don't like the new doc, I have the option of going back to my current doc in a few months time. He is supposedly starting a new practice in a different city in May at a clinic that is under construction, and will be in network at that location. But there seems to be a lot of iffy things attached to this and it's very difficult to get information from office staff. (In fact, they knew nothing about it.) I don't want to take the risk of just waiting for him in case there are delays. Hence the runaround to find a new doc who may or may not be temporary.

Otherwise, things are going fine. My work hours have been a cause of some concern because we're entering my employer's slow season, so instead of putting in the 20 to 25 hours weekly I determined was needed to cover my ongoing expenses, my manager is letting me go an hour or so early each day, so thus far I've been working more like 17 hours a week.

But because I was still working full time for the 1st 2 months of this year, i don't think this unexpected further cutback in hours will affect my bottom line. It irks me that while I thought we agreed on my work hours, the "schedule" apparently only pertains to how LATE I'll work, but is not binding on how EARLY I may leave. I can't do anything else about it. My boss says he does feel some obligation to make sure me and other contractors get in a certain minimal amount of work time, but he also has been tasked by the company owner to not keep us there all day if there's nothing to do.

So this year my gross income should fall pretty much where I projected it would, but next year may be different. The slow season runs from roughly March through October but then gets busy again from November thru February. So hopefully the busy 4th quarter will make up for shorter work hours in spring/summer. I keep doing a lot of guessing but will just have to be patient and see how it plays out. I'm not too worried but I definitely monitor my YTD gross.

I was in a decluttering mood yesterday, maybe partly because it was a little too chilly to do much outside.

I decided to go through the messy pile of loose recipes I've torn out of magazines, gotten from friends or printed from online. The vast majority of these recipes, mind you, I have never gotten around to trying. And some of them are 6 to 8 years old!

So I threw out some that no longer interested me and started making category piles of the rest so I could more easily find them if I was looking for something.

I decided to try one recipe for a vegan "cheese" sauce that I was very happy with. It's easy to make: just blend together cooked potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic powder, paprika, those fortified yeast flakes and raw unsalted cashews. It looks very much like a creamy cheese sauce and it was great poured over broccoli. Would also go well with other veggies or pasta. It's a keeper.

Trying out more of my recipes is one of my goals in semi-retirement.

The other decluttering activity I started was cleaning up in the attic. I had been collecting empty cardboard boxes for years in anticipation of the day I would move, but I've sort of decided I'm staying put. So I carried out most of those boxes, which took up a lot of room, and put them in my car so I can drop them off for recycling later in the week.

I organized some other stuff, but really just scratched the surface. It needs a vacuuming of there too, and there are lots of dead insects. It's a finished attic, so it could look a lot tidier once I commit to spending some time, but at this point, I'm not ready to part with old love letters, cards from friends and family or the several filing cabinets full of writing samples from a 30+ year career as a writer. They're not really needed now but it's hard to let go....it's part of my identity.

I came across a note scribbled in pencil from a torn sheet of paper. It was from my mother, and upon reading it, I instantly realized she left this note for me when she was midway in painting a large wall mural in my home. That was in 2001. She was letting me know it would look different later when she had a chance to do some highlights and add some colors and so on. Couldn't throw that away, either. Imagine...if she had been Picasso talking about La Vie, that note would have been worth a million. Mom's note is priceless to me.

While in the attic I came across a beautiful pen stand my grandfather made for me 35 years ago. It was meant to be a gift upon my graduation from law school, but I dropped out after finishing one year.

I remember my grandfather as a very taciturn, grumpy old man and I can't remember a single time when we even had a real conversation. At the time I announced I was headed to law school in Boston, he didn't really say much at all. I think he said, "Really?" in a surprised kind of way.

There were multiple reasons why I didn't continue with law school, but one problem is I really didn't have my family's support.

On the day I announced I had dropped out of law school, my grandfather asked why, I responded, and that was that. It was never really discussed. My grandfather still gave me this beautiful desk set done in marquetry; he was a master craftsman.



It was only in hindsight, many years later and with the benefit of further reflection, that I realized that my grandfather was disappointed I didn't continue in school.

If he could have just said a few words of encouragement, it would have made a big difference, but he was not a talkative man. My father was not in my life at the time. I have a few old photos (2, to be precise) of grandpa and grandma together and smiling. I don't know if he wasn't happy in the marriage or what, but during my entire childhood he was a cross old man who spent most of his retired life in the basement, creating his marquetry.

My grandmother tried to shield us as children against his irritability by shushing him and saying "not in front of the children." A shy kid, I was always a little afraid of him.

I believe he was a good man (despite my genealogy work revealing he spent time in state prison in the 1930s and was basically a gangster in his younger days), but he just didn't know how to express his feelings.

This is why decluttering can be such a painful process for me; it stirs up old memories that have no resolution.

I've now run the kerosene heater for 19 hours, and am pretty sure I'll get 24 hours out of it when the can is empty. Still, power outages around here can extend far longer than that, which means if the kerosene heater is really to serve its purpose, then I'd be having to run around to find kerosene (which could be iffy in a widespread outage) just to keep the thing going for longer than a day. So it's still an imperfect solution.

Hmm, what else? I've identified a velvet pillow in need of a hand wash. The bath tub still needs a good scrub.

I joined the March for Our Lives today, not in New York City, Washington, D.C. or any other large American city, but in bucolic Roxbury, Connecticut (pop. 2,136). I think it says a lot that even in a sleepy rural community, known mostly for its annual pickin' and fiddlin' contest, a lot of people have had it with the death and violence caused by paramilitary firearms.



We sang, we chanted and we created a traffic jam. A snow plow truck drove by with the Easter Bunny giving us the thumbs up. I saw many marchers in their 60s and 70s. I spoke with an 80-year-old woman who spoke passionately about lax gun control laws. We may not make the evening news, but maybe we'll make a difference.





In other news...

1. I cleaned the windows in my sunroom and wiped down the window sills (the space between the window and the screen), which always gets so dirty over the winter. I decided I will do a fresh coat of floor paint in there before I move all the furniture back in because I dinged up the floor with my lounge chair.

2. Washed the salt off my car.

3. Went to lunch with dad at the Chinese place after discovering our intended destination, the German restaurant, has closed. Bummer!

4. I vacuumed the whole house.

5. I walked on the walking trail.

6. I did my food shopping at Aldi's and filled up the gas tank. I am sort of waffling about my expired BJs membership. I MAY renew it because there are certain items I buy there all the time and they really have the best prices on those items, but I'm not sure my walnuts/organic frozen fruit/cat litter/macadamian nuts/Bai/unsweetened cocoa/Vermont Farm applesauce alone is worth the $50 membership fee.

I kick myself because I discovered a half-price special deal on their memberships which expired March 7. I hope to find another similar deal in the next month or so.

OK, so the 1st 2 classes of this 3-part program have been reviewing very basic concepts (dollar cost averaging, asset allocation, diversification, etc). Here and there are glimmers of things that interest me but he's got so much ground to cover we haven't lingered on any one thing too long.

Surprisingly, our instructor is not a big fan of annuities, immediate or variable (or insurance products in general), because you hand over control over a large chunk of money, on the insurer's terms, and they are, after all, in the business of making money. So I considered this a good sign.

He is, of course, emphasizing that tax-free money is the best kind of money, and so he likes Roth IRAs and muni bonds.

Our "homework" assignment in the 1st class was completing an extensive survey of our current assets/investments and when we plan to retire, etc. I turned it in today. He said each of us would get a free 1-hour consultation with him, so I will be very curious what recommendations he may have for me. I have no muni bonds in my portfolio.

I probably should investigate ETFs, which we talked about in passing.

I guess the final class will be most interesting.

We're supposed to be in the grips of a nor'easter right now but nothing's come down out of the sky for several hours.

We were all told we could work from home today. I just finished up so I'm free until Monday.

The oil delivery guy called and wants to deliver tomorrow instead of Friday, so more pressure on me to have the driveway shoveled.

Dad wants to come over tomorrow so we can place the order for his new adjustable bed together. He thought we'd have to drive back to the store (45 min). I don't think we need to; we can just pay by credit card over the phone and schedule the delivery. I'm happy he's buying it, and I hope it will result in a better night's sleep.

Also tomorrow, I am scheduled to have my tires rotated at BJs at noon, and tomorrow night I have part II of my retirement strategies class. I just hope the snow isn't so bad that I have trouble clearing the driveway for all these events.

A small herd of 6 deer passed through the backyard a little while ago: some does and older fawns. Can't imagine what they find to eat this time of year (besides my rhododendron bush).

I'm doing my 2nd load of laundry and am hang-drying it indoors.

I'm going to have a very small paycheck for last week; I only worked about 12 hours, and this week, 18.5 hours. I'm not too concerned; I'm still ahead of where I should be for March because I worked full-time for the 1st 2 months of the year. Things will no doubt even out by year's end. Like the story of the 3 bears, I need to earn "not too much" and "not too little." The sweet spot will be between $36K and $42K.

Yesterday they said there was a chance the storm would pass far enough south of us that we wouldn't see any snow. This morning they're telling us we'll get up to a foot.

I happened to notice recently that my hometown newspaper, which I love and read cover to cover, is looking for a copy editor.

I would have a good shot at the job if I wanted it. Since they cover only my town, they'd want someone who lives in town, and there are a limited number of qualified candidates.

It would be a less-than-5-minute commute and the job offers full benefits, which I presume includes private health insurance and a 401k, 2 things I'm lacking now.

While tempting, I decided I would be better off remaining where I am, even though it's a 40-minute commute and the hours are still irregular and unpredictable. The deciding factor is, I'm working 2.5 days a week now but at the new job I'd be working 5.

The newspaper job would pay very minimally, probably in the low 30s, so I'd be working much longer for a little less money, although I would have the security of private health insurance and wouldn't have to worry about what's going to happen to Obamacare availability or rates in future years.

On a related note, I did a bit of research and discovered that per the IRS, part-time employees CAN contribute to their employer's 401k plan, subject to any plan-specific minimum hours and/or time period worked, but these requirements cannot exceed 1,000 hours a year (that's just 19 hours a week) and/or up to a 1-year wait time before participation. But p/t employees cannot be excluded en masse from participation.

I made it to Saturday morning yoga class, the first time back in several years time.



I thought since I was walking an hour a day, 5 days a week, I was in pretty good shape. Wrong, very wrong. Yoga was exhausting...way too many downward facing dogs for my taste. It's basically a modified push-up.

Oh, my. I shall return. The stretching is badly needed. I Thought my balance was pretty good because I sometimes randomly stand on one leg for minutes at a time, but it just wasn't working at the class.

I ran into someone I used to work with; she was laid off a few months ago from where we both used to work. This was a p/t job I had before the bank job.

I felt like a nap when I got home, but the good thing is, the drive home was about one-third of a mile!

The electrician has arrived

When I got home, my electrician was already here and starting to do some rewiring for me in the garage, replacing some old fabric-type wiring that was in deteriorated condition and replacing a 2 outlet thing with 4 outlets, for my many electric or battery landscaping tools. It should be about $242, not exactly in this month's budget but a small enough amount that I can maybe eat out of the pantry most of this month and not notice the added expense.

No long-term care for me

I've known for a while that one big gap in my overall financial planning is the lack of any coverage for long term care. So yesterday I randomly called Mutual of Omaha after reading their premium rates online. They didn't seem that bad.

I learned I'm not eligible for long-term care insurance because of my MS. It doesn't matter that I've missed MAYBE 2 days of work over the course of nearly 30 years living with it. Nope, nada, no how.

It's a little unsettling, but I will have to self-fund.

I think the electrician will be done in the garage around noon, and once I pay him and see him off, I'll be able to head to dad's for lunch, to take a photo of his mattress label to send to mattress store and also to go to library to get them to sign a form so dad is eligible to borrow reading materials from the state library for the blind and physically handicapped.

Those are the sum total of my responsibilities for the rest of the weekend; after lunch, I'll return home and just try to recover from the yoga and enjoy the day close to home.

Other items on the weekend agenda:
1. Make split pea soup for the work week.
2. Run my kerosene heater to burn down more fuel as we approach the end of the heating season.

Tonight was the first of 3 classes for the above-named program, which meets at our local high school. There were just 6 people in the class, which was good since we could feel free to get our questions answered. The instructor is a CFP.

I regretted paying $30 for the workbook, because like the class, it was very, very basic. I suspected it might be too basic for me, but I didn't realize I didn't have to purchase the workbook. I noticed another woman there also didn't want to buy it, but ended up doing so anyway.

Our homework assignment was filling out an extensive questionnaire which disclosed our assets, investments, planned retirement age and so on. I know very well they'll be pitching me on their advisory services (2.50%) but I am curious to see what recommendations they might make to me.

I'm hoping the 2nd class will get into discussions that will actually teach me something.

I was finally able to schedule an appointment to have my new tires rotated at BJs. For weeks I've been calling (you can't schedule maintenance online) and no one ever answers. I finally got Members Services to use the intercom to let them know the phone was ringing. I would think they should have someone at the customer service desk in tire center, but no, they all work in the garage on the cars.

I took my dad mattress shopping yesterday. He'd seen commercials on TV for a specific furniture store so we drove into New Haven. The store is enormous and gigantic. Dad was quite surprised, but the salesperson immediately led us to try out an adjustable bed that I have to admit we both liked quite a bit. I don't need one for myself and prefer the foam, but I told dad I thought this bed would be perfect for him, relieving pressure on his artificial hips, helping blood circulate in his legs better and even helping him get out of bed cus you can raise yourself to a sitting position. It has a 10-year warranty, and dad noted the bed will probably outlive him.

I have to go to dad's tomorrow and take a picture of the label on his current mattress, which he doesn't think is that old, and then email it to the salesperson to make sure his mattress is compatible with the adjustable bed. If the mattress is older than dad thinks, he may just end up buying both a new mattress and the adjustable bed, which together would be $1400 ($800 for the adjustable bed alone). It's a big expense, but dad can afford it and it really would be helpful to him.

The new proofreader sharing my job today emailed me to complain that he was told by T. not to come in 2 days in a row this week becus there was no work. The person he reports to (my manager) is traveling this week, so T., a longtime employee there, ends up as de facto person in charge, but I doubt she is aware the new proofreader was told by recruiter he'd have 20 to 25 hours a week.

So he is understandably upset, told me he and his wife need to buy 2 new cars and were counting on his income to do this, etc. This was the problem that always made me bonkers: I never knew what my work hours would be and it was hard to count on anything.

I wrote back and explained that it's a small agency and the work really fluctuates, that he just happened to start at a very slow time and that it will pick up again and it all evens out in the end. He just needs to be patient.

I realize the proofreader may speak to our manager when he returns, but i think it would be better if he didn't, because if this job-sharing thing becomes too much of a hassle, with people complaining about their hours worked, either too little or much, he might decide it's not worth it. Hopefully it's just a bump in the road. The problem I see is that my manager just doesn't clearly communicate things to T.

T. had also told me 1 day last week not to work when we had a snowstorm. This was upsetting to me because I've already cut my hours back to 20 to 25 hours weekly and don't want to cut more. She, on the other hand, is used to having contract workers at their beck and call, telling them to leave early in the day if there's no work or stay til 9 or 10 pm at night if that's what's needed. I don't know of many workers who would tolerate that, and I don't think it's fair to the worker.

I've been balking against this since day 1 and I did tell T. next day that my agreement with my manager is such and such. Which I had told her before. I also emailed my manager to let him know and correct me if I misunderstood something.

3 Options
So I did mention, in passing, in an earlier post, that I've been given a chance to decide, or at least weigh in, on:

1. Moving from the payroll of Agency A to moving to the payroll of Agency B, OR
2. Moving to the payroll of my current employer
3. Or even doing nothing and staying with Agency A.

This question came up shortly after my manager and I worked out my new shortened work week schedule. My friend, J., the recruiter, approached me about how he'd like to have me move onto his payroll.

The backstory, or why J. wants "revenge"

He found this job for me, when he worked for recruiter A. Recruiter A firm later laid him off. He found a new job at recruiter B. firm, and that's where he'd like to move me to. He admitted feeling a little like he'd like to get revenge on recruiter A, and he also felt they shouldn't continue to benefit from his having placed me and a designer in the jobs we hold now.

So initially when J. broached the subject to me, I didn't think it would matter one way or the other whose payroll I'd be on since my rate of pay wouldn't change during the switch-over. I told him I'd be happy to try and help him out (financially) because he's been helpful in helping me get jobs (2 contract jobs, including this one).

J. is very, very eager to have this done becus it would be quite a coup for him and I don't know exactly how he's compensated, but it would help him and his new firm quite a bit.

I don't think J. anticipated that my manager, would give me a chance to choose, or at least weigh in on the subject. I told my manager 2 weeks ago it probably didn't make much difference to me but that I'd rather be with J.'s new firm than J.'s old firm becus I have the relationship with J., not his old firm.

My manager said there were various things he had to consider:
1. He offered me the option of going on my company's payroll directly, entirely cutting out both recruiter firms.

2. He'd have to check his contract with recruiter firm A to see if there's a buy-out clause that would require him to pay a lump sum of cash to recruiter firm A. to hire me on directly.

3. He said if i worked for my company directly, he might be able to give me a raise (which I totally didn't ask for), with the money saved from what he pays recruiter firm A, which he said is 25% of my pay (so $8 an hour goes to recruiter for every hour I work). Interestingly, my manager said he didn't know what my current rate of pay was through recruiter firm A.

4. If he moved me to recruiter firm B's payroll, he'd want to move the other worker at the same time, for ease of administration and to keep things simple.

My manager said let's talk about it again when he gets back from his travels. That will be this Monday.

Long-term considerations

The more I think about it, the more I realize there ARE major ramifications depending on whose payroll I go on. For instance, I think if I was on my company's payroll, they would be far more generous with me when it came time for a performance review and annual raise than any agency would. Because they know and like me. My friend J. the recruiter does not control the purse strings at his place, after all, and nobody else knows me at recruiter firm B, so it could be totally impersonal over there and I'm sure they'd want to minimize any raises to absolute minimal. And now that I'm working p/t, I'm even less important to them. I am just one of many different contract workers they employ.

For my employer, I sense the overall perspective of my employment is very different. My manager is extremely busy, and I think he values consistency and reliability of employees over time, and knowing the job's going to get done. I think he likes me, and, important to my manager, I get along well with my coworkers and "fit" with the company and its general culture.

The company is also doing quite well, as far as I can tell, and money has never appeared to be an issue to them. They are willing to pay a proofreader pretty well, who throughout the day has frequent downtime with nothing to do, just to ensure that nothing leaves the building that has not been examined carefully for human errors.

If I tell my manager next week I've had more time to think about our talk and do have concerns about moving to J's firm, I do run the risk of totally pissing off J.

Lovin' the new work schedule

I worked a half-day today at the office, as per my new schedule. I met the new proofreader who is sharing my job. He seemed pretty nice and I sense he knows what he's doing. I talked to him about the many different style guides we use, and a few of my firm's idiosyncrasies.

So I'm having a conversation with another co-worker as I'm packing up my things to leave. After she left and I have my coat on, someone else who sits near me said oh, PatientSaver, I just sent you 2 PowerPoints to proof.

This is typical, getting work when you're ready to leave. This time, though, I explained that I could not do it, based on my new FIXED work hours (which I previously told him about). I suggested he give the work to the new guy...that's what he's there for. Old habits are hard to break. Sigh.

After work, I decided to stop at a Trader Joe's in the town where I work...very convenient, more so than if I went to the TJs I usually go to, a 20-minute drive from home. This one's more or less on my way home. I think I will make this a habit.

Planning a trip to the land of your ancestors

Tonight I went to an interesting genealogy club meeting (not possible under my former f/t schedule) with a speaker talking about a genealogy tour she went on with extended family of 20 cousins to their ancestors' birthplace in Poland. Apparently, you can hire a genealogist, give them all the relevant research you've done, she will travel to the destination ahead of you and plan the whole itinerary, have you meet any family there, go to key sites, burial grounds, churches, etc., and then travel WITH you to serve as interpreter and accompany you on the tour.

She paid $2,000 to the genealogist, who spoke fluent Polish and acted as translator on the whole 10-day trip, and another $1400 for the trip itself. I think she said airfare was $975 and I guess that must've been separate, so the $1400 covered food, lodging, tours and everything else. She said the $2,000 was SOOOO worth it because her family in Poland supplied a lot of missing names and other info on the family tree, they got a hundred backup documents from the genealogist they hired, etc. etc.

I would love to do something like this, can you tell?

New health insurer = new doc + new meds
So I need to do something about my MS meds. Good thing I have a stockpile, but since going on my new health plan effective March 1, I knew I'd need to find a new neurologist since my current longstanding one isn't in network on the new plan.

Last week I went to an MS lunch and after the talk, I approached the doctor who spoke and asked her for a recommendation, explaining the issue. She said oh, your Dr. so and so will actually begin practice in W city in May, and it will be covered by your health plan.

I wasn't sure at the time I definitely would want to stay with him as he usually is so low key about things and I want more of a definitive opinion, you know, like he cares. So at the time I was talking to this other doctor, I thought this might be a good time to find a doc I like more.

She did also recommend another neurologist, but when I called his office, they said they require a referral and I of course have to have all my records transferred. Kind of a pain.

I thought it might save time not to deal with that and just stick with my existing doctor for now, except that when I called both my health insurer and my current doc's office, they both said my current doc was NOT in network and seemed to know nothing about something "happening in May."

I spent a lot of time making phone calls, including a 2nd one back to the doc who said it was happening in May but it was clear from what the assistant told me in that 2nd call that the doc didn't want to be bothered by this particular matter anymore.

Then I suddenly recalled that my current doc has an online "portal" you can communicate through, so I sent a note to him today asking him to clarify whether or not he's doing something in May that would make it possible for me to keep seeing him as I have for the past 20 years.

He replied to tell me he would be working at a new MS center at a certain hospital, and to "watch" for news on that.

I googled it and sure enough, the new center is now under construction, but I'm not sure I have the luxury of just waiting for 2 months on the hope they'll open it on time. I only have so many months' worth of meds in my fridge.

And to be honest, I was a little disappointed in my doc's ho hum response, like he really didn't care that much whether a longtime patient stuck with him or not.

So I think I will just cut the cord. I have the form filled out which i have to mail to current doc's office to transfer my records over to the new doc. Hopefully the online reviews of new doc's office aren't accurate, as a few people specifically complained about the office staff taking their time on doing stuff and not really doing their job.

So I'll mail the form, wait a week or so before calling, and hope 1st doc mails my records to 2nd doc in a timely fashion, and then I can make an appointment, just to be able to renew my meds, or rather, switch over to the generic version of my drug, since that's what insurer requires.

The whole thing is such a hassle, but what are you gonna do? So glad I'm not in danger of running out of meds; that would be very stressful and no one else would really care.

It's been snowing since around 4 am and we're expecting 10 inches by the time it ends tonight. Boston, where I used to work, and the Cape, where I used to live, will be getting much more.

Hopefully no one at work will blame me for staying home today.

No doubt my shrubs and small trees will be bowed down again by the snow. I hope no more white pine branches come down, and I hope I keep my power on.

2018 Home improvement project: The patio

My mason agreed to return to remeasure the back patio redo. He suggested I call him when I was headed home from work, which I did at 6:45 pm. It was dark, but with a flashlight we did the remeasurement.

While the patio is about 650 square feet compared to the 1,000-foot paver driveway he did for me 2 years ago, he explained his various reasons why the price he gave me for the patio was not correspondingly less: a somewhat less accessible worksite (the backyard), the need to pull up the old bricks and dispose of them, etc. I'm not sure I fully bought that as a reason for the price, but I sensed he had pretty much given me all the discounts he was going to give me, and I know he does a great job.

He did come down a bit more on his original price of $8900, to $8400, and I've agreed to move forward with it. I felt it had to be done at some point, and probably better now than later. It will clean up an eyesore (disintegrating bricks with profusion of weeds growing in between them) and save me countless hours of weeding this summer and beyond.

The price includes a new paver patio that extends from one edge of the house (in backyard) to the other, with a wide walkway that then connects to a set of stone stairs leading up from my driveway to the backyard, as well as a circular path around my cement well cap. It also includes redoing and enlarging the stoop outside the kitchen door with bluestone, to match the stoop outside my sun room door, and they agreed to dig up 2 shrubs and a small half-dead evergreen. Plus they'll do a little surround thing where I have a basement window, and the entire patio will have a slight tilt away from the house so rain doesn't flow toward the house.

I am eliminating multiple largish perennial beds, so that means I need to find a home for the plants now there. I have a lot of ground phlox in there, plus sedums, a ton of coral bells, lungwort and a few other things.

Since I'm wanting to reduce areas I need to mulch (to control weeds) and/or weed, it doesn't make sense to create new beds for them somewhere else, so I'll have to either sell some plants on FaceBook or squeeze them in existing beds. Probably a combination of both.

He won't be here til late April or early May.

I need to find ways to fit this in my budget. I think it's important to abide by the new budget in this, the first year of being semi-retired.

I had allowed $5,000 for major home improvements this year, so this obviously exceeds that. But I did get a $1300 tax refund this year and I set aside $1,000 for vacations which I know I won't use. So that could pay for $7,300 of the patio, but I'm still short $1,100.

Well, I am determined not to buy any clothes this year, or any stuff PERIOD that I don't really need.

I tried a new recipe for workweek lunches yesterday: a chickpea tahini casserole. It was pretty good, though I think I'll add peas next time I make it.

I also made a chocolate chia seed pudding. It's so easy since it requires no cooking, only mixing, and it has the same velvety smooth texture as a tapioca pudding.

Back to work today, after 4.5 days off, feels like I'm returning after a long vacation.

And tomorrow we are bracing for yet another nor'easter. Spring, wherefore art thou? My bulbs are emerging and well on their way!

I walked on the trails yesterday but much of them were slushy/snowy as the town doesn't plow them. There were still a lot of people, particularly dog walkers, out. I love seeing people with their dogs. They often resemble each other.

Today I'm wrapping up my 1st week with the new work schedule, and I'm luvin' my newfound time, even if I am not 100% productive all of the time.

The snowstorm on Wednesday and the dig-out the following day sort of messed up some shopping plans.

Trader Joe's, foiled again
I had a leisurely morning at home on Friday, then went to the lunch at Italian place. I had moved my planned visit to Trader Joe's from Wednesday, then to Thursday, and finally to Friday after the lunch, looking forward to shopping when it wasn't mobbed (Sat/Sun), but I unexpectedly got a call from a gallery asking me to pick up some art that hadn't sold.

So I went to do that first, and then decided to visit a certain gold/jewelry buyer right next door, about something I wanted to sell. He gave me a very low price on it, and so I left not selling anything.

By the time I was done with that, it was 3 pm, and I knew if i headed to Trader Joe's I'd be hitting rush hour traffic coming home. So I just headed home and figured I could wait another week for the Trader Joe's trip.

Subscription longings
I've been toying with getting a weekend-only subscription to the New York Times. I used to love lounging around reading the Sunday Times in my 20s and 30s (before I had the responsibilities of my house), but I'm still wondering if I'll have the time to read it all. Plus I don't like adding a regularly recurring expense to my budget, although it's not that much. Sure, I could buy it at the newsstand, but then I never do.

At some point I would also like to restart my Ancestry subscription.

Yoga no-go
I've been wanting to get back to Saturday morning yoga for weeks now, but more urgent chores always got in the way. I had every intention of going today. It took some time to finally figure out that they moved the location of the classes from the old town hall, about a half mile from my house, to a church...on my street!

Now I have no excuses. Except that, after getting dressed and being ready to go, I decided to do a quick check of the church's website to make sure it was going on, and I saw that they also moved the TIME of the classes up, from 9 am to 8:30 am. So the class was already halfway over when I read that. (I thought 9 am was early enough.)

Sigh. Will shoot for this next Saturday. No excuses! The classes are a bargain, at just $5 each, and proceeds go to benefit a non-profit health center for low-income families.

This could be shocking!
My electrician's coming by for a check today, in advance of finishing up some work he started in my garage. Namely, removing an old, rusty fluorescent bulb lamp over the workbench there, along with some old fabric wiring. It was an eyesore, I don't think the old wiring was safe and I'm not crazy about having fluorescent lighting with mercury in the home.

So he's getting rid of it (there's a huge window in the garage so I won't replace the lamp), and he's putting in a new outlet/switch as I have a lot of power tools and battery chargers (lawn mower, electric trimmer, weed whacker, blower, snow blower).

This wasn't on my list, but I wound up spending time shredding old bills and other paperwork. I just got tired of opening a file drawer and having it be so jam packed, so making the time to thin it out was time well spent. Decluttering in any way I can is something I want to continue doing, but I have a hard time getting rid of things.

Picking up dad for dinner later.

Tomorrow is a historical society program at the library.

I spent an hour freeing up branches of shrubs weighed down by the snow to ground level. The sooner I do that, the better, and less chance the shrubs will be permanently misshapen; I noticed it took a full day for the birch branches to pop back up. My rhodie branches are protected by the snow from deer browsing, but again, I don't want the shrubs to be ruined by the now encrusted snow pack.

Plus, the plastic fencing I put around some shrubs favored by the deer was also flattened by the snow, so I pulled all those up again.

I'm psyched that daylight savings time is tomorrow. It means I may be able to drive home in partial daylight even on my 2 long workdays, Monday and Tuesday.

We got about a foot of wet, heavy but beautiful snow.

I shoveled the driveway in two stages, knowing there would be a lot. Last night I shoveled about 5 inches, and this morning I shoveled another 7 inches.

As I shoveled, I watched as some very large white pine branches tumbled down from the tree in my yard.

The white birch near the foot of my driveway was completely bowed over by the weight of the snow, blocking my path.



I'd rather not cut down the tree if I don't have to, so for now I just trimmed the branches that would otherwise scrape the top of the car.



Maybe when all the snow melts, it will bounce back up. I have 2 other birch trees; one is fine and the other is also bowed down to the ground. I walked around the one to shake off as much snow as possible and it popped up a little, but not totally. I did the same to the branches of a large nannyberry (viburnum). If they remain misshapen, I will have to cut them back.

There was severe damage done to a large, old crabapple in the front yard.



This was bound to happen; there was a very large branch growing at an odd horizontal angle, and that's the one that came down. When the snow melts, I will try to handle cleanup of this tree myself. We'll see.



This is a view of the backyard, from my upstairs bathroom. In the lower left is a really pretty rhododendron which is absolutely covered with blossoms in May. Unfortunately, it suffered some major damage in yesterday's storm. It may take a year or more for it to recover; there are some broken branches.



Here's an old bluebird box in back.



Here's another shot of the driveway (to the right) before I shoveled.

This is another showing the driveway shoveled.



Between last night and this morning, I shoveled for about 2.5 hours.


The view to the north, where a giant hemlock stands. It lost its crown several years ago in another storm. I thought it might die, but so far it's hanging in there. It's a favorite spot for the deer to hang out.


Home sweet home.

Snow day
We all got the go-ahead to work from home today on account of the snow. We're expecting a possible foot of snow.

I only need to work a 4 or 5-hour day today, anyway. After that, I'll attempt to shovel out my driveway, although the snow won't stop til late tonight.

More time for reading...at the office!
I'm in a situation many people would love to be in....Reading is a big part of my workday at the office since there are frequent downtime periods when I have no work. There are 4 or 5 people who feed work to me, and it can often get busy, but not til later in the day, around 5 or 6 pm. So yesterday, for instance, I began at my usual later start time of 10:30 am but then didn't leave the office until 9:15 pm.

So they pay me pretty well (and let me do things like read a book), just to have me on hand when something needs to be proofed on a very tight deadline. So I'm free to catch up on my reading, and while I always surf the web and check the DJIA daily (and recently began playing free Luminosity games), I also like to have some "light" reading in the form of a real book on hand as well.

As mentioned on someone's blog post here, I recently finished a sweet book called Merle's Door by outdoor writer Ted Kerasote. Merle was a homeless golden retriever who adopted Ted when he was on a rafting trip in Colorado. Unlike most pet owners who dominate their animals with a life full of rules, the author was big on letting the dog make his own decisions, and it leads to some entertaining and interesting reading about canine intelligence and emotion.

I don't want to start spending money again on brand new books, so I'm glad I picked up a used $4 book at a local book sale last weekend. That will be the next thing I read, and I will try to make book sales more of a regular habit to feed my workday habit. I may even do something I haven't done for years: browse my local library.

I had a hard time selecting something to read, because all of what they had was fiction and I tend to go for non-fiction, and I'm never really sure what will sustain my interest in terms of a story. I don't like sad stories filled with heartache or dysfunctional families. I'd go for something more uplifting.

I enjoy biographies of people I admire, certain self-improvement books, and of course, anything related to personal finance and retirement planning. (If you have anything you'd recommend, let me know.)

Deciding on whose payroll I should be on
Earlier this week my boss talked to me about whose payroll I might like to be on, moving forward. J., my friend and the recruiter who found me this job when he was working for a different recruitment firm that laid him off, was urging me to talk to my boss about moving me from the previous recruiting firm's payroll to his new firm, because he would make some money that way.

My boss asked me if I had any thoughts/preferences about either going on my company's payroll, going on my friend's new recruiting company payroll, or staying on the payroll of the original recruiting firm.

I don't see any clear advantages for me either way, as long as taxes are deducted from my check by whoever. I already have the health insurance and the plans offered by both recruiting firms are really sub-par.

Some agencies also offer a 401k to longtime workers, but I highly doubt I'll have anything left over to contribute on my new part-time hours. Unless I started withdrawing money I might need for living expenses from my taxable accounts, in order to have earned income withdrawn from my paychecks and directed to a tax-deferred 401k.

Hmmm. Would that be worth doing?

Did you say a raise??
My boss said if I went on my friend's payroll, he's have to pay 25% of my earnings to the recruiter. If I worked for my company directly, he said he could even give me a raise because he wouldn't be paying that extra 25%! He said he had to check my contract with the original firm to see if there was a buyout clause where he would have to pay a hefty, but gradually lowered sum, to hire me directly.

When he mentioned a possible raise, of course my ears perked up (I've only been there 5 months), but at the same time, it could put me in a very strange position of having to turn it down. Unless the raise was a really big one, a few extra thousand dollars could cause more problems for me in terms of continued eligibility for lower cost health insurance, and might not be worth it.

Without the subsidies, I'd pay an extra $5,500 a year, or $458 more a month. Based on my current work hours, I'd have to get a raise of more than $18.32 an hour just to equal what I'm saving on healthcare. So I don't think it would be worth it, and I doubt any raise he might have in mind would approach $18.32.

My mason called me before 8 am today saying he could be here in about 40 minutes, at the start of a major nor'easter, but I told him not to come and it could wait. So maybe next week then, he said.

Timing IRA contributions
I like to make my IRA contributions early in the year, as they have more impact that way, but given th fact my income could be just under or just over the income limit for healthcare subsidies, I'm going to play it safe and wait til late in the year to decide what kind of IRA contribution I can make. Most likely, I'll be making traditional IRA contributions which will lower my taxable income.

Which means my hope of doing at least some Roth IRA conversions will have to wait until, I guess, I'm not on the healthcare exchange, assuming it still exists, since a Roth conversion is a taxable event.

If I actually keep this part-time job til age 65, get on Medicare and then quit this job entirely, then maybe that would be the best time to do some Roth conversions in what I anticipate could be fairly low income years.

This is suddenly of heightened interest to me after Dido spoke about how the relatively low tax years of early retirement eventually become high tax years for many seniors after age 70.5, when required minimum distributions begin. If all your $$ is in traditional IRAs, you have less flexibility to manage withdrawals in such a way as to minimize taxes. Combined withdrawals from both traditional and Roth IRAS, or traditional and taxable monies, offer the best low-tax approach.

The online forecast for my town says 3 to 6" while my local TV weather report is for up to 14". Tomorrow is my half day; I think I will work from home.

I got 2 class action settlement checks recently that were fairly significant. One was for a Kombucha drink I tried and the check was for $20; the other was for a supplement and was for $62.

This week I want to hit Trader Joe's on Thursday. (Was going to do it Wednesday, but the snow will make that impossible.) It's always mobbed on a weekend and it's definitely the kind of store you want to linger in the aisles and check out their many different food items. There's always something interesting to "discover."

I also have tentative plans to take my father shopping for a new mattress Thursday, but it's all dependent on how much digging out we have to do. The snow won't end til about 1 am Thursday morning.

On Friday I'll enjoy a complimentary lunch with my MS friends, hosted by Teva Neuroscience. It's at a nice Italian restaurant right here in town.

Now that a generic Copaxone is available, Teva is really losing customers and the company is taking a big hit. I have no sympathy since they hiked the price to an insane degree in earlier years.

In an all too common practice with high-priced drugs, the company made the med available to patients with private health insurance at a $0 copay, but the health insurance companies still get stuck paying their very high prices.

Medicare and govt health plans do not allow such discount programs, so when I turn 65 and need the meds, I guess I'll have to pay through that donut hole.

And with the generic now available, Teva will lose even more customers because health insurers like mine are now saying if there's a generic available, you have to take it, if you want coverage.

In the meantime, my mason wants to come back to remeasure my back patio, possibly Wednesday morning while the snow is still "light." I would like to redo the patio in new pavers; it's not just a cosmetic thing, as every year, all summer long, weeds sprout in between the old red bricks there now, which are disintegrating and in poor shape. It's a huge maintenance issue, especially after it rains, and I no longer want to spend time weeding my large perennial beds in back, either. So I'd have the pavers come right up to the house and out about 14 feet in a large rectangle.

I had originally thought that a ground level Trex deck would be cheaper than masonry, but actually it's not.

The masonry price was a little less than what he charged me to do the driveway/courtyard, but after I paced my driveway, I roughly calculated the driveway was 25% bigger than the patio, so the patio price should be 25% less than what I paid for the driveway. It wasn't. I was surprised the mason said he'd like to come back and remeasure. I had assumed he was just padding the estimate. We'll see.

This is the most expensive home improvement project currently on my radar, and it would be nice to get it out of the way now rather than later, when I am perhaps feeling squeezed with my p/t income and more reluctant to do it.

That's my thinking, anyway.

I came across a Dr. Mark Hyman on PBS espousing yet another diet plan. It was similar in many ways to my vegan diet a la Dr. Greger, but it did differ in some important respects.

Both diets emphasized vegetables, fruits, seeds and nuts as 75 to 80% of the diet, mostly organic, emphasis on whole foods, and recommend avoiding sugars, refined vegetable oils (Dr. Hyman says olive oil is fine, but Dr. Greger doesn't), all flours, including wheat flour, and dairy.

However, Dr. Hyman's diet supports eating whole eggs and grass-fed meat and butter and says to eat beans only as a side dish (compared to vegans who rely on beans to a greater extent as a protein source).

I am currently following a modified version of Dr. Greger's diet. The main modification is that I am eating wild sockeye salmon one or two times a week. Partly because omega 3s are so important for brain health and for those with MS.

I am tempted to eat organic eggs again. My neighbors behind me raise chickens, so there's a ready source of eggs if I wanted them. I would rather give up bread than eggs, to be honest. Dr. Greger's diet does not include eggs because of their high choline content.

From his website: "Maybe that’s why meat, milk, and eggs have all been associated, at one time or another, with advanced prostate cancer—because of the choline. In fact, choline is so concentrated in cancer cells, if you follow choline uptake, you can track the spread of cancer through the body. "

"Remember, dietary choline is converted in the gut into trimethylamine. And so, the Harvard researchers speculated that the TMAO “from the high dietary choline [intake] may increase inflammation, and this may promote progression of prostate cancer to lethal disease.”

"n 2009, Harvard researchers found that a single egg a day or more was associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes in men and women, and that finding has since also been confirmed in other populations—Asia in 2011, and Europe in 2012."

"As I noted last year, the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study found that the daily consumption of the amount of cholesterol found in just a single egg appeared to cut a woman’s life short as much as smoking 25,000 cigarettes—five cigarettes a day, for fifteen years. Following up on that research, a study in the journal Atherosclerosis found that just three eggs or more a week was associated with a significant increase in artery-clogging plaque buildup in people’s carotid arteries, going to their brain—a strong predictor of stroke, heart attack, and death."

"In fact, they found a similar exponential increase in arterial plaque buildup for smokers and egg-eaters. Those that ate the most eggs had as much as two-thirds the risk of those that smoked the most—the equivalent of a pack-a-day habit for 40 years or more.

"This did not go over easy with the egg industry. As revealed in a series of internal memos about this group of researchers, retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act, the American Egg Board discussed the “wisdom of making industry responses when the public knows there is a vested interest….”

It's toasty warm here as I'm running my kerosene heater in the kitchen. I decided that as we approach the end of the heating season, I could begin to "run down" my 5-gallon supply of kerosene, since it can't be stored from one season to the next.

It's just the 2nd time I've used it. I cracked open a window for ventilation.

I turned the furnace off when it was 68 and I see that in about an hour, the kerosene heater has raised it to 70 degrees.

The woman at the company said don't expect it to heat your entire house if the heater is in the basement and you have insulation in the ceiling. (I do.) So I filled it to nearly full outside and was able to carry it up my outdoor stairs where I lit it (there can be a small amount of smoking when it's first lit), and from there I carried it into my kitchen.

It's about 37 degrees outside; I'll be interested to see how well the heater maintains indoor temps as the temps fall outside.

I went to an interesting program at the town hall on our regional recycling program. It's actually rather complicated what you can and can't recycle. When it comes to plastic bags, I was recycling the bags you buy frozen produce in, and these actually cannot be recycled; you can only recycle soft plastics like bread bags, supermarket produce bags and the like. I also learned that small items like metal bottle caps or other small items cannot be recycled either because they fall through the whole assembly line all the trash is sorted through.

All of my state's trash goes to an incinerator that produces electricity from the burning and supposedly filters out harmful emissions, particulates and mercury, although high asthma rates are reported in the city where the incinerator is located. All of our state's landfills were closed 25 years ago.

They place a lot of emphasis on recycling, particularly organic (kitchen) waste which takes up 25% of overall household waste.

I made a wheat berry salad with chopped green and red apple, celery, golden raisins and currants, walnuts and a bit of orange juice.

Tomorrow's my first 10-hour day at work under my new schedule. I usually take my lunchtime walk between 2 and 3 pm; maybe I'll move it to 4 or 5 pm to break up the day better.

All day, that is. With a little snow/sleet and power outages thrown in, perhaps.

I decided to drive to work today and am hoping I don't run into any major problems. I'll have to skip my 2 walks today, darn.

The co-owner wife and I had a nice talk about our parents yesterday at the office. I had asked if I could bring in some artwork to hang on the walls. I'll wait til Monday to do that as I don't want it to get wet today.

After my manager and I agreed on my new 3-day work schedule, I realized the Tax-Free Retirement Income Strategies class I signed up for won't work, since it's on a night when I'll be working late. I called and was able to cancel my registration and apply the fee ($26, which included a 10% discount for registering early) to a different class that takes place on a free night for me. The new class meets 3 times and is $39 for the class and another $30 for materials, but the woman on the phone gave me a $10 break on the class cost itself, for no particular reason. Maybe to save herself some paperwork, I don't know.

The new class is on Financial Strategies for Successful Retirement. I was more specifically interested in the tax-free income strategies class, but this one should still be interesting too. It starts this month.

And in the meantime, I found the website of the planner who is instructor for the 1st workshop, and it looks like they regularly do the tax-free program in different towns, so while there's nothing in March set up right now, I should be able to eventually take that class too.

I have gradually been unsubscribing to the many different job/career website auto alerts I've been signed up for, virtually uninterrupted for years. If I didn't have a job, I was looking for one, if I had a job, I was always looking for a better one. How wonderful it will be to declutter my email inbox of irrelevant jobs spit out by not-so-good search engines. (Like, because I often search for "writer," I always get jobs for insurance underwriters.)

So today is the final day of my final week on my full-time work schedule (and full-time pay). I'm excited to begin a new chapter in my life. Next week, on my 1st day off in the new schedule, I'll be driving dad to a certain store where he wants to shop for adjustable mattresses.

Today, in short succession, my manager interviewed 3 candidates to share my job with me. Two males and a female.

At day's end, I peeked in his office and asked if he'd found someone. He shared some of the pros and cons of each: one had a nearly 2-hour commute, and another had a background as a marketing writer, not a proofreader (that was actually my situation, but perhaps he's afraid they might consider proofing a step down from copywriting and not stay long).

Bottom line, he wasn't thrilled with any of them but said he decided to take one of them on for an interim period, allowing me to begin my abbreviated work weeks, and tell the recruiter to keep looking.

He asked me what my preferences are in terms of my new work hours, and we agreed:
1. I will start the new hours next week.
2. I will work a full day Monday and Tuesday and a half day Wednesday. The full days would be 10:30 to 7 pm, OR, if things are busy, up to a 10-hour day, or 9 pm.

The schedule is actually a little different than what I anticipated, but in some ways it's better. I had been thinking I'd be working 3 full 8 hour days. But by working later for the 1st 2 days, I can work just a half day on the third day, giving me even greater flexibility with my time off.

The 2 longer days will be harder to do, but just knowing I'm only doing that for 2 days will probably help a lot.

The new person will have the same schedule, except he'd work a half day Wednesday and all day Thursday/Friday. There will be some overlap in our hours on Wednesdays and my manager is expecting me to train the new person in my company's style. We follow each pharma company's style, but absent that, we go by AMA style, but even then, the company's own style does at times veer from AMA, so it takes some time to get used to the idiosyncracies.

So if things were always maximally busy and I always worked 10:30 am to 9 pm (with a half hour for lunch), I'd get in a 25-hour work week, which is the most I'd want to work. At the least, I'll get in 20 hours, which is also acceptable to me.

Depending on whether I can take a week or two (unpaid) vacation, I'll be grossing somewhere between $32,000 and $40,800 (with the net ranging from $26,000 to $32,250), which should cover most of my annual living expenses, so my retirement nest egg can continue to grow.

I calculate that by working p/t, depending on the exact number of hours I work, I can cover between 70% and 86% of my average annual expenses this year. (My average annual expenses are based on my last 5 years.) Next year, the percentage of covered expenses should be 80% to 98% as I have just one remaining pricey home improvement I'm thinking of doing this spring (redoing my back patio).

Another thing to consider is needing to bring in enough food to keep me going for lunch AND dinner on Mondays/Tuesdays.

I'm sooooo excited, and I feel so much better about having a pretty well-paying p/t job I can keep for the next few years, if all goes well (and importantly, spend little to none of my retirement nest egg on my ongoing expenses), rather than trying to "retire cold turkey," in the face of a rather turbulent stock market.

This particular job is much easier and less stressful working as a proofreader than what I did all of my career, working as a copywriter. It's just the kind of job I was hoping to have toward the end of my career. I have no responsibility other than ensuring that everything we write/create is PERFECT. Meaning, No frequent, long or boring meetings, no phone calls and relatively little office politics. Yet the rate of pay is respectable and quite a bit more than I would have ever thought I could find if I were looking for part-time work on my own.

So I've succeeded in considerably shortening the amount of time I must spend at work, making more room for my dad, my friends and hopefully, letting me become more involved in different community groups, something I've wanted to do for a long time.

None of this would be possible if I hadn't so zealously prepaid my mortgage all these years, and then paid it off, because with a mortgage, my monthly expenses would be so much higher and probably make it impossible to even consider getting by on a part-time income.

I really wasn't sure I could make this happen, and I think I owe my success at least partially to my manager, who in the short time I've worked here, has always treated me fairly, and is a real straight-shooter, meaning, he says what he means and means what he says.

My dad will be thrilled.

A local high school kid here in Connecticut was arrested after he was overheard making another mass shooting threat. The school was closed. The cops found weapons at his home.

Meanwhile, in Parkland, Florida, one kid's mom is shopping for bullet-proof backpacks.

Insanity.

The stock market
I took a little peek at my investments, the first time since the correction. Things have recovered since then, anyway, so the drop was not too bad. Not enough to change any of my plans, although I heard at least one pundit, generational author Harry Dent, predicted the Dow would drop big:

"I think this is going to be a stock market peak of a lifetime followed by a crash very similar to the early 1930s. This happens once in a lifetime," Dent Research Founder Harry Dent recently told CNBC's "Futures Now."

He added: "I think this is the last rally in this bull market."

Work
Every week my dad asks me if I'm still working. Supposedly 3 interviews are happening this week; I haven't seen any candidates walk in though.

Otherwise, the beat goes on.

Food
I made an excellent mushroom soup, which I'll be finishing up today at lunch. I think the big key is using top quality broth and a variety of mushrooms.

I also made a quick apple crisp, modified from my grandmother's recipe with a great deal less butter and sugar, to use up some old apples that were well past their prime.

Just hearing of an expected nor'easter on Friday. High winds, tons of rain, snow, power outages. Maybe a good day to work at home.

Health insurance
Well, it's official. I'm on the healthcare exchange now....or more correctly, my state's exchange, known as Access Health. I got my ID card yesterday and paid for the first month of coverage.

I'm considerably worried about how long it may last, given the most recent lawsuit by 20 western states led by Texas to do away with Obamacare.

On my list of things to do this weekend is researching and then selecting a new neurologist and scheduling an appointment, a necessary step to switch my MS meds to a generic drug. I planned to do this anyway but I remember someone from my new health insurer (Conncecticare) saying if a generic drug was available, I'm required to take it if I want to be covered. So, yeah, once I pick a new doctor (my old one is not in network with my new plan) and schedule the appointment, I'll have to arrange for all my medical records to be transferred to the new doc.

This will all take some time. Luckily, I've been deliberately stockpiling my meds for just this kind of scenario, temporarily caught in between health plans, and it was actually during times like this when I was able to stockpile the med. I believe I have about 5 months of meds in the fridge.

Retirement planning
I went ahead and registered for the continuing ed class on tax-effective income strategies in retirement. It will be in early March, and I'm looking forward to it. I also registered for a free class on things happening in my town of interest to boomers and seniors. They are building a new senior center with a big pool and all, and there's also some national initiative the town has just joined that's supposed to focus on quality of life issues and support/resources for older people. Again, an interesting subject as I march toward my 6th decade.

Life advice from a dear friend
My oldest friend has started chemo treatments for his prostate cancer. He told me the other day he has detected a pattern, where on about the 5th day following the treatment (once every 3 weeks) he is incredibly exhausted and can barely drag himself out of bed. So he plans to rearrange his p/t work schedule around those bad days. He still wants to work p/t as a driving instructor for teens.

My friend is rather stoic about it all. He'll tell me very frankly and in detail what is going on at any given time, but he has no self-pity and doesn't dwell on it. It breaks my heart. He often urges me forward toward my semi-retirement, telling me it's time to smell the roses and enjoy life more. This, while he's facing his own mortality.

It's just part of a continuum of financial and life advice he's given me during the past 30 years. For many years, his advice was usually, "Save your money." "Don't waste your money on frivolous things." He was the most frugal person I know. I thought he would always say those things to me, but now, during the past year, he has encouraged me to start the new chapter in my life that is less involved with work and more about pursuing my personal interests and happiness. I am sure his cancer has something to do with that, but fortunately, he has lived a full life, fuller than mine. He says he has no regrets, just as my father says.

I'm feeling so thankful. I was almost involved in an accident last night, but I avoided it. I credit my Michelin tires and my antilock brakes for avoiding it.

I was driving home from work around 7 pm on a local highway known as Rt. 58. It's a two-lane road (one lane in either direction) and it twists and turns and is really pitch black.

I was making my way north doing about 40 mph. During the day, I do drive on it faster, but at night I worry about hitting deer all the time so I tend to go slower.

I saw the headlights of a car in the opposite lane, so I had my low beams on. I didn't know it yet, but it had come to a complete stop.

My eyes are on the road in front of me, and all of a sudden, my headlights pick up the glint of metal, and I realize, there's a car directly in front of me. But it was nearly invisible. It was almost disorienting, because I couldn't figure out why I did not see it until I was practically on top of it. I realized it was sitting perpendicular to the roadway, so I couldn't see the taillights, nor the headlights.

My first thought was that there had been an accident. And I was about ready to plow into it and make it worse. These were all my thoughts in just a few seconds' time.

I swerved to the left and jammed on the brakes. I was sure I was going to hit the car's back fender, but amazingly, my car came to a stop just INCHES from the other car, without hitting it.

I was so stunned. The 3 of us drivers, all sat there in silence for about 30 seconds. (This was also not a good idea, as I had put myself in the same position as the other car; now we were 2 cars, side by side and both of us perpendicular...and invisible... blocking both sides of the highway.) I was just trying to recover from the shock. Then the other driver pulled out, and I followed.

I realize now what happened. The other driver had backed out of a residential driveway onto the highway. Really not a smart move at any time, and much less so in the dark, on a rural highway with no streetlights.

Inexplicably, the car had stopped in the middle of the road and was blocking both lanes. Maybe they weren't familiar with the driveway or couldn't see where it ended in the dark, but instead of turning the wheel as they backed out, they just pulled straight out. Then maybe when they saw my headlights approach, they stopped. Which IMO, was really stupid, because as mentioned, they were practically invisible in that position on the road.

Aside from really wanting to know what caused the driver to do this (was it a teenager? An older driver? Something else?) I am so relieved I'm okay. I actually wrenched my shoulder just from yanking the wheel left as quickly as I did. Even going just 40 mph.

If I had been driving any faster, I doubt I would have been able to stop.

In other news, the IRS deposited my $1484 refund in my checking account...nice.

I've been feeling so impatient waiting for the wheels to churn with my pull-back in work hours. I raised the subject with my manager late January, and they finally will be discussing candidates, and who to call in for interviews, no doubt, this Wednesday. I had hoped to begin abbreviated work hours sometime in February.

I suppose it's still possible if they meet on Wednesday, schedule interviews Thurs/Fri, and have someone start on Monday.

I've recalculated some numbers to make sure I could still safely work full-time into March without exceeding the $45,000 cutoff for healthcare exchange subsidies. I think I can.

There are things I want to help my dad with. He's been talking about getting one of those mattresses where you can adjust the height and he saw TV commercials for a certain store that seemed to have a lot of these. It's in New Haven, and I don't want him driving there alone.

My friend R. had his 2nd chemo treatment. I have not seen him lately, but he said probably 25% of his hair is falling out and he is feeling more fatigued. I feel so bad for him, and I started calling him more often, just to talk and be a support if I could, but he seemed to not want that. I don't think he wants any pity. He actually asked me why I called him last time when we had exchanged emails that morning. So I guess I need to back off a little.

I have not checked my portfolio balances since the market downturn, and I'm glad it's recovered somewhat since then.

We had a 4 or 5-inch snowfall on Saturday but it was in the 40s yesterday and much of it has melted. I took the occasion of warmer temps to do some winter pruning of a large azalea bush I have in the backyard.

The weekend, especially Sunday, was pretty nice. Dad and I went out to lunch at our new favorite haunt, Connecticut's oldest inn. I also squeezed in some more buys at BJs in advance of my membership expiring at the end of the month. I filled up the gas tank, shoveled the driveway Sunday morning, did my state taxes (I owed about $185, only because they eliminated the property tax deduction for residents under age 65!) and I caught up on the last episode of Victoria on PBS after the Winter Olympics displaced it.

In the past, the maximum deduction for property taxes (which here in CT includes your home and car, which is taxed) was $200.

There was part of the Victoria episode i really loved, where Victoria and Prince Albert take a trip to Scotland to get away from all their worries at home, and they accidentally get lost traveling the countryside on horseback, relishing their time alone, away from their guards/militia.

While the palace mounts a search party, Victoria and Albert stumble upon a small cottage at nightfall and ask to spend the night there. The old couple living there have no idea they are entertaining the Queen of England and her husband, but the queen and prince are delighted at the simple fish dinner and sitting by the fireside as Victoria learns how to darn socks.

Somehow, I could really relate to the whole experience of wanting to get away from life's responsibilities and to reacquaint myself with life's simpler pleasures.

The forecast is calling for warm temps in the 40, 50s and 60s this week and next, so I'll have great walking weather. I do a half-hour before work and another half-hour at lunchtime.

When it comes to cost savings, I like to focus on the big ticket items like home mortgages, car and homeowners insurance and so on, rather than spending too much time on the little stuff. People like to say well, it all adds up, which technically may be true, but in the long term, you're better off focusing on your biggest expenses. We all have limited time to spend on this stuff, so might as well make it count.

Now that my mortgage is paid off, I'm applying the same logic to areas where i see potential for substantial savings in retirement, and the other day I pulled together the details of several opportunities I can take advantage of now, and in retirement. All 4 of these are income-based programs that either provide a generous tax credit, rebate or just plain NO tax if you meet the income guidelines.

Now until age 65:

Less than $38,600: 0% long-term cap gains tax
Less than $47,520: Healthcare exchange subsidy

From age 65 on:

Less than $35,300: State of CT property tax credit of up to $1,000
Less than $38,600: 0% long-term cap gains tax
Less than $45,000: Maximum town property tax credit of $2,525; income up to $55,000 = $1,750

The most stringent income guideline is the property tax credit offered by the state of CT which provides an additional $1,000 in property tax credit on top of what my local municipality offers.

These look like awfully low income guidelines. Can I do it? Yes, I'm actually pretty sure I can.

Here's a look at my actual annual expenses for each of the 5 last years:

Historical Total Expenses

2017 $35,994
2016 $42,972 ($30,305 w/out new driveway)
2015 $40,866 ($31,066 w/out front entry redo)
2014 $28,918
2013 $37,832

If you don't include a very large capital expenditure I had in 2015 and again in 2016, I never spent over $38,000 in the past 5 years.

Just organizing the info together in one place helps organize my thoughts and makes it easier to consider aiming for a low income specifically to take advantage of these savings.

See, this is just another reason to track your expenses every year, all year long...I'd never be able to project my expenses nearly as accurately if I hadn't been tracking my expenses all along. Once it becomes a habit, it's easy to do.

I've created a simple spreadsheet to do that so I can see YTD income in any given month.

There will be a few unknown sources of income, of course. Job income is the easiest to predict, but I will also build in possible income of let's say $1500 in any given year due to art sales.

In addition, I have just 2 taxable mutual funds; one reports its capital gains distributions in December, the other one, quarterly. But I can still estimate them based on what cap gains/dividends were in previous years.

If I get too close to the income threshold for any given tax credit program, I can also leverage my ability to lower my reportable income by making $6500 in traditional IRA distributions.