Use it up, wear it out

When I step down from administration in a couple of months, I'll be taking a pay cut. That wasn't the hardest part of contemplating the decision, strangely enough. But it's a somewhat unprecedented event in my career. I've actually been very lucky in the past five years; faculty at many institutions lost their jobs or had their pay slashed or benefits cut during the recession, and all that happened to me and my colleagues was no raises. (Which actually dated to years before the recession because of financial mismanagement, so we were used to it.) So facing a future with fewer dollars in the paycheck isn't something I really know how to do.

It's spooked me a little. There's no logical reason for this. We're just a few mortgage payments away from being completely debt-free, and we have plenty of resources to draw upon in case of need. But I'm used to having more than enough, and those resources aren't currently liquid.

So right now I'm holding off on some purchases that, to be frank, would be smarter to make today. Since before we renovated the kitchen, our decades-old washing machine has been steadily deteriorating. Currently the wash selector knob is held together with duct tape, and the push-pull functionality that stops the cycle no longer works. So when it buzzes for an unbalanced load, I can't pull to stop it and rearrange the clothes; I have to turn it past the spin cycle and rearrange while it's filling or draining or whatever, a disconcerting race against time until I can turn it all the way back around to spin. And after the kitchen was finished and we put the dryer back in the laundry room, it's never worked right; the air doesn't seem to blow on most cycles, and I have to put it on high heat to get any drying at all. It takes three or four cycles to get a load of clothes dry. Given that and given the age of the washer, I'm throwing money down the drain every time I use them. But the new washer and dryer I want are expensive, and there's that pay cut looming. I can't afford to keep using these, but it's scary to contemplate the hit on the checking account from a huge purchase, given how slowly that account is recovering from the renovation costs, and how much more slowly it will grow once the new year starts and my paychecks are smaller by almost twenty percent.

If that were all ... but it's not, of course. We know that our wonderful plasma TV is on its last legs. I've needed a new Macbook for some time. Each of those purchases, if we did them right, would be four figures. We could do them cheaper, of course, but I resist that solution. You'd be amazed at how much of my happiness is bound up in things that work right and do what they're supposed to, and how much of my joy is sapped, on a daily basis, by things that don't. If we're going to replace stuff, I want to invest in the good stuff, not the as-good-as-we-can-afford stuff.

So ironically, I keep on making do with stuff that barely works at all. The great, in this case, is the enemy of the good. My comfort level with spending a lot of money has never been high, but I could always talk myself into it when I knew from experience that my account balance would bounce back within a few months, and when I knew what I wanted. Now I have an additional mental barrier: the uncertainty of what it will feel like to have less money coming in. It's not an objectively significant problem, compared to people who have actual financial issues. It's just my personal problem, rooted in my personal emotional history with money. But there it is, nagging at me every time I walk back to the dryer, check to see if the clothes are still damp, and start another cycle.

Summer's end

Labor Day weekend is the unofficial end of summer, but the weather has picked this moment to give us a last blast of heat and humidity. In the wake of Tropical Depression Isaac, which brought us some much-appreciated rain, the heat index is soaring into the triple digits again. Regardless of how it feels, though, some things are coming to an end, and other things are beginning, just as they do every year.

I'm focusing on the things that are ending. It's not just nostalgia or regret; some of those things I'm glad to see end, at least temporarily. Two of my major summer writing projects, the TV Club Classic coverage of Sports Night and the regular coverage of Breaking Bad, are going on hiatus until next year, and it's a relief. Those pieces take a lot of concentration, time, and anxiety every week, and it will be nice to have them off my plate for a while. Sports Night's last season 1 post went up this past Wednesday, and Breaking Bad's last episode of the current half-season is tonight. It's still a couple of weeks until the other shows I cover regularly (How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family) start their seasons, so I've got a nice break coming up.

It's also pleasant to have the kids' birthday party and the Ravellenics behind me. Last week I went to the Rhea Lana sale and bought most of the clothes they'll need until next spring (I hope). I still haven't cleaned out their closets of too-small items, or unpacked the bags of jeans and jackets I hauled home from that sale, but at least I'm more than halfway ready for colder weather. And with all the Ravellenic administration in the past, I've gleefully started what I hope is a binge of knitting things to keep other people warm, whether they are friends or strangers in need.

We've been having our master bathroom remodeled this summer, and that's nearly done, too. The pace would be considered too leisurely for people more outcome-focused than ourselves, or for a room where the loss of function is more disruptive. But we're just proud that we've gotten the process underway after years of knowing it needed to be done.

That's also the way I feel about starting a conversation with a financial planner this summer. We haven't finalized much yet, but stuff is in the works: more life insurance, rearranging some assets to provide more focused retirement funds, college savings, and an easier way to keep track of it all. I'm so pleased with myself for finally moving in this direction after living so long with the uneasy feeling that I wasn't properly taking care of business, that I'm not in too much of a hurry to get everything signed and squared away; it's enough that the ball is rolling.

Maybe this change of seasons isn't really about things ending, or about us moving on. It's about not having wasted the time we've been spending. And that goes for time with the kids, too, which right now is not a matter of long looks backward, but lovely moments that still linger in the now.

The new normal

Like most universities around the country, my institution is facing a fiscal crisis. But unlike those other universities, we are not being hit by the worldwide recession. It's not a matter of our endowment losing its value. It's not a result of state budgets in freefall. No, our financial troubles come from years of mismanagement, obfuscation, and minor lawbreaking here and there.

But it's real nonetheless. And this week my unit found out what it meant for us: a cut in scholarship dollars that will force us to move some of the funds we've managed to squirrel away in our salad days into student programs.

It could have been a lot worse. But fortunately for us, it's just bad enough to force a complete re-evaluation of our priorities. No longer will we be able to support every faculty or administration proposal that simply sounds like a good idea. Now we will have to choose between good ideas. And the basis for that choice must be our mission. Becoming more conscious of our mission is a good consequence of not having money to throw around.

We'll also have to make more thorough use of the time-, labor-, and money-saving technologies that are available to us. When there's excess cash and capacity, employees and faculty, to some extent, can choose how they want to work. Not everyone has to work at maximum efficiency; if some have ways of teaching or mentoring that they prefer, they can be accommodated. Not anymore. Because now, we need everyone's full productivity. If they used to spend 85% of their time on classroom processes and 15% on other kinds of work in the unit, we need them to use the tools available to cut down on that classroom time, because we need more of their workday to be spent on the other things we do, the things that make us different from the rest of the departments on campus -- where an 85-15 ratio might be perfectly acceptable.

These changes won't be easy. Some projects and principles that are important to individual members of the department will probably go by the wayside. We will end up spending time on things that are low priorities for us personally, because the unit as a whole needs our energies there. Over time, we'll each end up re-evaluating our individual relationships to the college and its goals.

And that's a chance for clarity. Despite the pain it entails, I think we need to seize it.

Hard labor

Anybody who is a member of a board of directors or occupies an administrative position in almost any organization these days is in the same boat. It's time to face fiscal realities but at the same time try to move forward into the future.

This weekend, that's what we'll be trying to do in Montreal. In this opulent hotel, surrounded by a beautiful city and an attentive staff, we're looking at very difficult decisions.

Yet at the same time, they're very easy. Because first, there are really no alternatives to them, besides mortgaging our future and crippling our mission. We're in the fortunate situation, actually, of having a few places to go where making changes means enhancing the long-term health of the organization, because they are changes that are going to be made at some point anyway -- and the sooner the better.

And second, they're easy because without them, we're spending money on plugging a hole rather than investing to meet the needs of the new reality. Each decision, considered by itself, is painful. Each decision, though, considered in terms of our responsibility to the organization's viability, is easy. And as soon as people see that, the unanimity is quite remarkable.

I'm no financial wizard. I'm indifferent at balancing my own checkbook (now that online banking does it for me). I wouldn't know a net unrealized gain or loss from a hole in the ground. So I'm so fortunate to have the opportunity to be tutored by people not only of great expertise, but of uncommon wisdom. My confidence in the plan we on the Finance Committee are recommending tomorrow is solid. Best of all, it seems to be a way, at least in some areas, to turn a crisis into an opening for needed change -- and exciting opportunity. So even though there might be some fireworks when people are brought face to face with the stark numbers (especially the ones in parentheses), I'm looking forward to seeing the nods around the table as what we can see -- ten and twenty years down the road, that is, not just the roadkill at our feet -- becomes visible to everyone.

Something for nothing

I have an aversion, instilled at some point deep in the recesses of my upbringing, against tying myself down to subscriptions or services. Monthly fees give me the willies. Debt terrifies me. I choose paying up front over paying on time for nearly everything; on our two TiVos, for example, I insisted we buy the lifetime service plan for a one-time fee rather than taking on the monthly charge. Both of our cars were bought with cash. I was taught to pay off my credit card every month, and I've never deviated from that plan, even in my leanest years. The only debt we have is our mortgage, and that will be paid off in six years.

So I tend to see products and services in terms of how much they're trying to bleed from me. I assume that everybody with something to give away is trying to sell me the razor blades, as it were.

With that in mind, one of the features of our modern age that continually delights me is free software updates. Noel just pulled out our Flip Mino to upload a bunch of videos from the past few months, and when he plugged it into his computer, he was prompted to install a new version of the software that allows you to do rudimentary editing and YouTube uploading directly from the camera. For nothing, we got new capacities -- transitions, audio controls, credits, a better uploading interface.

Free updates have become the rule rather than the exception. To me, that's an amazing fact in a world where we've been conditioned to think that nothing comes without a price.

Sign that kid up

Cassandra Lives, 2006-2007. In this video, doomsayer Peter Schiff is openly mocked -- laughed out of the room -- by the other financial analysts on Neil Cavuto's Fox News show, all because he says tougher economic times are coming. Talk about being vindicated by history.

Adulthood: Financial edition

One of the stranger side effects of growing older and becoming more involved in various organizations is being asked to oversee the financial affairs of such groups. I'm currently serving on the vestry at my church and on the finance subcommittee of the Board of Directors of the American Academy of Religion.

Now my dad is a CPA and a longtime small business owner, who for as long as I can remember kept the books for the churches we attended, big and small. I don't know if he naturally has a head for figures; his heart was always in the humanities, but he did the money stuff to make a living. I think sometimes he found it fascinating to know the ins and outs, the financial complexities.

As do I. I've always wanted to be an insider and see how the sausage is made. But I've never sought out positions that require me to understand balance sheets, because other than "debits on the left, credits on the right," I don't have that expertise.

So how I got into a position of approving budgets and so forth for multi-million dollar operations, I'm not at all sure. (The fact that it happened should make you feel a little uneasy about those large associations to which you belong.) I think I can see when expenses are rising and revenues are falling, and I even manage to listen closely enough to understand explanations of line items like "Net Revenue From Temporarily Restricted Funds." Maybe it's enough to be able to pay attention in short bursts, long enough to comprehend the big picture and its component pieces. But I sure am glad that there are people with better heads for numbers than mine minding the store the other 364 days of the year.

The ol' six hundo

My favorite webcomic Achewood* dropped a casual moment of brilliance into this strip: the concept of the relationship mistake that will cost about six hundred dollars to set right. Lost your wedding ring? That'll be six hundred. Put a ding in the car you borrowed from the college buddy you're in town to see? About a sixer. Inadvertently destroyed a neighbor's cherished piece of childhood memorabilia? Expect to spend about six c-notes.

Specific, yet round, dollar amounts are comedy gold. It's been years since I heard the Bottle Rockets' song "Thousand Dollar Car," but every time I pass a used car lot or a clunker wheezing down the street, I sing it to myself and chuckle. That price tag has a lot of truth in it, much like the six hundred.

And since you're not queuing (that's how the British say it!) for Harry Potter And The Blankety-Blank tonight, nor reading it in the cold light of a new dawn, but are instead racking your brains thinking of more funny currency amounts from popular culture, I invite you to share your examples in the comments.

*Noel fulfilled one of my career goals for him when he interviewed Achewood creator Chris Onstad earlier this week. Now if he can find a way to get the editors to agree to a Joel McHale feature, I'll be in the proverbial catbird seat.