Taxation Excess

Ahhhhh!!!! The damn laundry is like a tapeworm shedding proglottids. I wish money would do this - parasite me and then shed multiples of itself. But no. That never happens. Instead, I get an aneurysm of laundry in my room. I can't stand it. I will just go donate the entire washed laundry pile to Goodwill and be done with it.

I have mated all the miscellaneous unpartnered socks as well as I can. Now to chat about money. I haven't been online to check the bank accounts as I was busy trying to do a grunt job without impairing cash flow in. Here is the summary of this month's ills:

1) The City of Calgary has gone mad. They think my house in Calgary is worth half a million plus dollars when I was reliably told by a real estate agent just this last August that I would be lucky to get in the $300,000 range for the poor garageless bungalow. And so they upped the property taxes by almost $500? What the fuck? I now have to do that business of passive resistance and challenge City Hall. Oh, well, I love arguing but I will have to do this on paper.

2) No doubt we have a similarly overinflated estimate by the City of Edmonton for our minute MegaMansion in Samesville that has the tiniest environment footprint of all the cookie cutter house in my newly developed piece of prairie land and I will have to appeal that tax demand note as well. AHHH!!!!! First it is laundry excess and now taxation excess.

3) We have very little evidence that the tenant in Calgary has any means to pay rent for the remaining period of his tenancy. I mean the guy is nice but not working. That should mean that there is no money to pay for rent. I wonder if the world is full of nutjobs who do not understand that they cannot rent a house for free or is it just me who gets these nutjobs and has to be suffering for a year while they learn the facts of financial life? Or not?

4) I haven't found gainful employment yet. I would like to. I expect it will all work out. It generally does. Things happen, a job materializes, I get lucky and life is unfolding as it should. All thorough my life I've been visited by people who have made me just a tad kinder and yeah, I'm grateful. So soon, I expect a person will appear and make a job offer, I'll work and money will trickle in to pay for the damn mortgage that sits on our financial face and suffocates us slowly.

5) Hey, I'm grateful for the suffocating mortgage. Without it, there would be no reason for this blog as I'd have $2000 extra every month and I'd be at the beach right now instead of blogging towards financial nirvana or what approximates it in the First World (MegaMansion, overachieving husband and children, trophy wife status (hah!) and no brains).

6) Poverty is enlightening. Isn't that why Jesus was poor? To spread his poverty enlightenment more efficaciously? God, what the hell am I talking about? Poverty sucks and I know nothing of it. All I do know is this - we in the First World have no concept of poverty. Let me show you poverty. Go to my home town. Bangladesh. And meet your starving brethren and weep.

7) We have enough money for bills currently and my mother is giving me some cash in some misguided effort to ensure that I never return to the work force as a miserable and disgruntled human being but instead remain tethered to the parental financial flow of cash until they expire. What the hell? I'm an idiot. I will work for my own money thanks.

8) While I am working I have to get that respite care aide worker in. She never showed up today. Where is she? Let me again consult with home care.

9) I am back to cooking (if you can call it that) my chicken based meals. This way we do not die of pizza induced obesity related problems and I can pare down the grocery bills which are reaching $1000 (Hey, maybe it was Christmas? Can I blame my pantry building megalomania on Christmas?)

I have to go now. Younger boy just phoned for his taxi cab service from the grandparents' home. Plus I have to take them water.

I want to be rich

The fact is this - I want to be rich. Who doesn't? I hate being average to middling in income. I hate not being able to go out and buy myself a BMW. Heck, I even hate not having a diamond ring on my finger as large as the sun. Yeah, it sucks being less than rich.

Unfortunately, the only way, I'll get to being rich is by working like a madwoman day and night. Which is the problem *sigh*. I just don't want to work. I don't want to work real bad. It is so damn dull at work or at least the work I'm doing right now which is this - I go to an office, I'm a casual worker and everyone in the office swarm me like a nest of vampire bats and suck the blood out of my moo-self in a flash. Poor me. Well, I could work in another job if I go back to school but after getting those other degrees (3 in total) and sitting at home with my young sons for yup, 14 years, I would say that the rate of return on my university and graduate school education has been rather dismal. So I'm rather reluctant to float another student loan, sit with a bunch of hormonal young females and suck up a nursing degree in two years to be pawed at my decrepit physicians with a lust for older, matronly nurse types. Yeah, there is also the small fact that I hate nursing. I mean I just purely hate nursing -anyone. I hate sick people more than I hate well people. Small problem there no?

So what do I do to become rich? I guess I'll have to work here and there and just save money. I can live a pretty decent life between jobs. It is just that the time between jobs is now stretching into MONTHS. And many MONTHS. This may mean I may never get rich.

The poetry of money

Oh, lord. I have to talk about money. Why not poetry? I would like to write about the poetry of money. When you have money, you are less inclined to sniff around your money and hound dog it. You are more likely to spend your money because you have enough for essentials and therefore, you can fling some of the excess money around to have fun. If you don't have any excess, then you get to be like me - puny and tight fisted ad miserable and make your family nervous about any expenditure simply because "We have no money!"

The poetry of money is this - when you have money you have more money to spend and you can go for holidays. I like staying in comfortable hotels since I'm no longer twenty and camping hurts my behind. I like to eat in restaurants and buy junk at bakeries when I am in Jasper and do not like to cook burnt bacon and runny eggs in the rain under a tarp simply because we have no extra money.

The poetry of money is also like this - I'm not tallying up what we have in bank accounts and making like a banker every day because when you have money - enough money (whatever enough is), then you can ignore you bank accounts and play with your kids, and not use coupons and buy that new car and yes, get a hair cut without wondering if you should.

The poetry of money is this - you can send gifts to people at Christmas time without wondering if you can afford to and you are able to have parties without worrying if the credit card bill is too pregnant (although once it is pregnant, it is too late anyway) and you can sit on the money and be calm.

The poetry of money is this - peacefulness and detachment when the flood of snowflake credit card bills start to come down on you in January and then the property taxes are due and you want to repair the front door and you can because, you have money.

The poetry of money is that when you have enough money (whatever enough is to you, which I haven't ascertained yet because I never seem to get to enough), you do not write about money. You use it.

Money for emergency fund

I have been reviewing our money stores daily and I find that the first of the month is always rather traumatic because we have most of our bills paid within the first few days of the month. My husband fortunately gets paid at the end of the month and so we have the money to pay the bills for the next month but I wonder what would happen if we did not get regular paychecks. What would happen would be this - we would be unable to pay our bills within a period of one month. Yes, that is right. We have enough money to pay our bills for one month in our accounts.

What would we do if my husband lost his job? I would have to go into our RRSPs and take money out of retirement funds. We have never had to do this since I've generally gone back to work when we had a close encounter with a negative account situation and my husband has been fully employed but I know if we had no money from jobs, we would have to go to the retirement funds. I have no other place where I put our money.

Our emergency account has been used to pay for expenses for the rental property - the furnace replacement, the toilet, the other expenses. I thought I could redo the emergency account but the new tenants are nuts and it is hard to get the money each month. I therefore do not depend on them anymore. They are in the house until they run out of money and then I'm back to renting to students. At least with students, we have never had money problems. They generally have money for the school year.

Right now I have a bit of cash at home for emergencies but the main emergency fund is going to be me. I'm going to be the earner who has the wages that will become our new emergency fund. It is time to stop depending on others and start depending on myself to get the money. I would like to have at least a year in savings in the bank.

Forget

I don't even want to think about the tenant and how long he is going to stay in our house in Calgary. So this is what I am going to do. I am not going to think about it. I am going to pretend we do not have a house in Calgary. I am going to do this until he runs away like the two other tenants have disappeared.

Right now, I am going to sleep. I am going to put myself into the shower. I am going to believe that I have that single job I applied for and that it was mine as soon as I decided to apply for it. I am going to be sure that this year - 2009, is going to be the year where I gel in all areas of my life.

What do I mean by gelling? I think I mean, that I am myself, nearly all the time without creating problems in all sectors of my life.

But right now, I'm even forgetting about gelling, or money or that tenant problem and I am going into the water to wash away the secrets of my heart.

A new myth

I've applied for one job. I know that isn't great. I should apply for as many jobs as I can. But I want to do a reasonable job. Not a grunt job. I do not want to sit like a stone in a catapult, about to be aimed at a target and flung at will. I want some control over my work environment and in order to get this - I will have to do more than grunt work.

I don't know why I haven't come out of the home nest earlier. Why was I at home? I know. To bring up my children. But also perhaps to reform myself after the split from the myth I was living before my near death experience.

We all have a myth about ourselves. When we are unable to live up to the myth we can either adopt a new myth or retreat to home. I did the later. Now it is time for me to adopt a new myth.

What is this new myth? I do not know. All I know is this. I cannot stay in the home any more. It isn't good for me. I want to exercise my mind. I want to do what I can to write and use my craft. I want to be used up at the end of my life. I do not want to be stored oil in a flagon that is put in a dark pantry for use one day and that day never comes.

And so I applied for one job that I wanted to do. If I see ony one job a month that I want to do - then so be it. One job is all it takes to start a new life, a new episode and a new myth.

No more bailouts

The economy in 2009. I've scanned the Internet for news and no one knows the future and yet they are all believing that it will get better. I'm not in the camp that believes that things will get better. Unless ordinary citizens learn to manage their money, why would our governments be well regulated by their constituents?

They won't be. Our governments will waste money because it isn't their money. It comes from us. And we are stupid.

If we are stupid, we will spend more of what we earn, not save a cent, be short of cash to pay bills, bounce cheques and generally have to look for work on a regular basis because the work we do is so vulnerable to economic downturns that we are the most expendable commodity for an industry to get rid of in order to survive.

Most of us do not have the skills or plain guts to survive in the current economy. Most of us do not understand how to manage our money (simple though this practice is). Most of us are married to our wants. Most us cannot defer our wants and would rather be babies and suck on the nipple of our wants for the rest of our fricking lives than grow up and become responsible adults.

Yeah, it is no fun being an adult. It might mean giving up on the work I currently do in order to return to school to train for more demanding but more stable work. It might mean selling the house (if I can) and getting rid of stuff that can bring in some cash now. It might mean being poor for a period of time so that I can pay off credit card bills. It might mean "gasp" deferring gratification.

Unless the ordinary citizen can manage his money well, our governments will never be directed by us. They will follow their own agenda. They will be out of our control. It is only when citizens are fiscally responsible that governments are created made up of these fiscally responsible citizens who do not treat tax dollars as play money. It is only then that governments stop bailing out big business and banks and masses of ordinary folks and ask them to take responsibility for the messes they themselves have created.

I'm fiscally responsible. And yet, I am expected to get these other messed up folks and corporate entities into solvency. Why? Because the economy will deteriorate further? Well folks, I don't see any improvements despite the fact we have pumped taxpayer dollars like gasoline at a gas station into the dying SUVs of the financially illiterate. It is not enough that we are being asked to compromise our own financial futures but we are being asked to compromise that of our children as well and maybe even further generations along. It is simply too much to ask. I don't believe the government. I don't believe we should pay businesses to do business. I say it is time to cut the gas flow off.