A Gourmet Cooking Party: Fun, frugal, and delicious

Pasta! Make Pasta! 

Yesterday we spent the afternoon at La Maya’s house experimenting with a friend’s pasta machine. We had the idea that we wanted to actually make our own pasta (having been told that it’s much better than the dried stuff you get at the supermarket) and decorate it up with made-from-scratch sauce. 

Even with everyone helping in the kitchen (or maybe especially with everyone helping!), we expected this to be a huge honking project. But it turns out that pasta is extremely easy to make, and you don’t actually need a machine to make simple shapes-a rolling pin and a sharp knife or pizza cutter will do the job. However, pasta machines are pretty inexpensive. Amazon.com has one for as little as $19. We think our friend’s cost around $150-it appears to be the $95 Atlas shown at Amazon-but on that same site the Imperia looks similar (except it doesn’t clamp to the countertop) looks very similar and sells for $64. If you like pasta and love to play with your food, one of these could be worth the investment. 

La Maya found semolina flour in bulk at Sprouts. I scored some fresh tomatoes from M’Hijito’s backyard garden, and SDXB brought a creditable bottle of cheap red from Trader Joe’s.

Plain, unembellished pasta consists of nothing more than eggs and flour with (sometimes) a little water added. Following instructions that came with the machine, we made ours by mounding up about a cup of flour, making a little well in the middle, and breaking a couple of whole eggs into the crater. Mix it together with a fork until it holds together and then gently knead it between the palms of your hands until it’s no longer sticky. If it sticks to your hands, add a little more flour and massage the stuff until it holds together like good Play-Doh.

If you’re going to run it through a pasta machine, you don’t want it to be gooey, ’cause it’ll stick to the machine’s little blades just as it sticks to your fingers. It should be fairly firm. 

The machine has a roller that flattens the dough out. You can adjust a setting to make it come out quite thin or fairly thick. Not having a clue what we were doing, we went for a medium setting, so we had pieces of dough about 1/16 of an inch thick. These we put through a blade that disgorged fettucini-shaped strips. Once we figured out how to do it, the process was incredibly easy. 

After we saw how this worked, we realized that you could just roll out the pasta on your countertop or breadboard to whatever thickness you like and then slice it into long, thin pieces with a sharp knife. 

Tomatoes cook down into a wonderful, light sauce in a matter of minutes. La Maya had basil growing in the backyard; we could have used some Italian parsley instead of or in addition to fresh basil. We diced several tomatoes, cut up a small fistful of basil, and minced some garlic. 

I started the sauce by stirring the minced garlic around in a little hot olive oil, briefly-don’t let it brown. Then added the tomato and basil and let them cook gently until they simmered into a nice sauce. While the tomatoes were cooking down, I added a splash of wine, and at the last minute we poured in a small amount of heavy cream. If you wanted, you could use orange juice, or you could combine a little grated orange or lemon zest with the tomatoes. 

On the side, I sauteed some excellent prawns that I found at Costco, adding a little cumin for extra flavor. 

Meanwhile, SDXB made a very fine tossed green salad. 

While the sauce was cooking, we brought a large kettle of water to a rolling boil. To cook the pasta, all you have to do is drop the fresh noodles into boiling water and let’em cook for just a few minutes. As soon as they seemed to be getting just al dente (which is very fast), we lifted them out of the water and into the pan of hot sauce. Tossed them into the pan of sauce to finish cooking and to coat them with the delicious tomato mixture and then served them up. 

The result was incredibly delicious! Also, to our surprise, even though we ate ourselves stupid none of us felt uncomfortably stuffed. The noodles expand while cooking and kind of “puff up” in a way that dried store-bought pasta does not. The result is an unexpectedly light dish, compared to what we normally expect of pasta. 

The whole adventure was a lot of fun-good company, good eats-for not a lot of expense. This is a great way to enjoy yourself and stay frugal: have a cooking party with good friends.

Good ole boys

Yesterday The New York Times ran a front-page feature highlighting one of Our Beloved City’s most intractable foibles: raw sexism. The Phoenix Country Club, we are told, persists in its immemorial custom of barring women from the part of the institution where business is conducted.

A Little History 

The Phoenix Country Club was for many years the only golf course in the city and the only exclusive club for the elite. The city was run by this elite, which for some time called itself the Phoenix Forty. Any business that got done was done by or through the Phoenix Forty. Over time, of course, the Forty expanded; it established Valley Forward, an ancillary group designed to mentor and bring up a new generation of city fathers, and COMPAS, an arts group founded to irrigate a very arid cultural desert.  Anyone who was anyone-that is, anyone who wanted to make money in business or the professions-had to do business with these men. 

And a Little Today 

Such business generally took place in an informal setting, often on the golf course and often at a small watering hole inside the Phoenix Country Club called the Men’s Grill. If you had the right connections and the right anatomical equipment, you, too, could do business in one the most wildly booming cities in the nation. But only if you had the key to the executive washroom. 

These facts still hold true, even though the city now has more than one stupidly expensive private club and more golf courses per capita than anyplace in the world. The real business of this city takes place at the Phoenix Country Club. And no girls are allowed. 

That’s right. Women are not permitted to set a dainty little foot inside the Men’s Grill, despite years of campaigning to make ambition an equal-opportunity enterprise. 

Why Does It Matter 

Understand: business does not take place in the PCC’s dining room, a white-linen-tablecloth establishment that, last time I was there, remained as untouched by the concept of “cuisine” as the rest of the place was by the concept of equitable treatment. Food was plain and dreary, service was just OK, and the place still isn’t open for afternoon drinks. There was a dank little hole in the basement where girls could gather, and I have been there to meet with budding groups of would-be female movers and shakers. But no one in power ever stuck his nose in that room, and so little ever came of those groups. That is because the adage about selecting a mentor is true: you don’t want a mentor who is like you; you want a mentor who is in power. For this reason, business and professional women in my generation sought out established men as mentors, not other striving women. 

Historically, women have not been the only target of discrimination at the Phoenix Country Club. To this day, it’s a rare dusky face you’ll see in those precincts. And when I was young, Jews were strictly verboten. In the mid-1960s-that’s how late this was happening-a friend whose parents had a membership used to invite our Jewish pal to spend days at the pool, as much as a gesture of rebellion as of friendship. Not until years later were the strictures against Jews and blacks lifted. 

Those against women, however, have never been removed. If I wished to associate with the Phoenix Country Club set-and were I in business or politics I would have to-I could pay many thousands of dollars a year to buy and maintain a membership, but I would not be permitted to enter the locus of power. When men walked on the moon for the first time, women members were not allowed into this site or into a similar den at the Arizona Club to watch the historic event on the clubs’ television sets. 

When people have objected to these policies, the elite members have shown themselves to be exactly the kind of pigs one would expect. Proving that boys will always be boys, they went after one member who challenged their habits, Logan Van Sittert, and “hooted and hollered at him and called his wife a whore.”  Women who have protested the blatant discrimination have seen their names and telephone numbers listed on a Web site titled “Femi Nazis here in Phoenix.” One recalcitrant member, who owns one of the stunningly expensive historic homes on the golf course, looked up to find club members “hopping off their carts” to pee on her pecan tree.

Why, one asks, would anyone want to have anything to do with such morons? Because these morons run the city and to a large extent they run the state. You obtain Power (and the money that comes with it) by rubbing shoulders with Power: part of building a heavy-hitting career in this state is seeing and being seen by the people who are already in power. 

And Why We Should Never Forget…

This “custom” is a vestige of a time when women, blacks, Latinos, and Jews were barred from full citizenship in our country. Today we tend to forget the fact that equal access to business, the professions, and the seats of power is a very recent phenomenon. And it is something that should not be forgotten. 

Young women in particular need to bear in mind just how new and how precarious their rights as full, adult human beings really are. Let us remember that the the movers and shakers behind the political party currently in power desire, with all their hearts and allegedly religious souls, to limit all women’s right to decide what to do with their bodies-part and parcel of the control that until recently barred women from unfettered participation in business, the professions, and politics. 

To insist that all Americans have full access to America’s opportunities and be free to enjoy them to the extent of their abilities is not “feminazism.” It’s common decency.

Estate Sales: The canary in the mine?

La Maya and I drove out to Scottsdale this morning, at the crack of proverbial dawn, to attend an estate sale that looked pretty enticing. Pictured on the organizer’s site was a bedroom set in the mode that M’hijito has described as desirable, plus various other interesting-looking loot. 

When we got there, we found a half-renovated house in a (relatively!) downscale neighborhood of a ritzy part of town, the pool green and the pickin’s slim. The kitchen was devoid of valuable finds; the tools were old and worn; the bedstead was the wrong size and the bedroom set was cheaply made junk. 

That notwithstanding, La Maya is not called the Queen of Estate Sales for nothing. Her discerning eye spotted a handsome loveseat, chair, and ottoman in butter-colored leather. After some study, we decided it probably was a quality product. She nailed all three pieces for $425, a fine 20 percent off the marked price. Not only that, but the estate sale organizer ate the tax. 

Although we were numbers 24 and 25 in line to get in the door, no more than ten or twelve people were ahead of us. Evidently the ticket number they started with was higher than 1. It took two trips to haul the furniture. The second time we arrived out there, the furniture-lifting person had gone off for a break, and so we sat with the estate sale company’s owner for a while, helping to calculate tax and hand out bags to the few buyers. 

And “few” was the operative word. Over the past several weeks, we’ve found ourselves at the head of the estate-sale line, even when we arrived after a sale was slated to open. This is in vast contrast to the normal experience, where you may arrive a half-hour or an hour early and still wait to get in the door through three or four rafts of people who got there first. 

Gina, the estate sale proprietor, echoed other organizers in saying that business was very slow: plenty of sellers but few buyers. She was practically giving things away-name a price for a piece of loot and you could walk with it. Gina said people are not buying, and that times are tough in the estate sale biz. What she does is considered effectively wholesaling. “Retailers”-read dealers in antiques and used furniture-are really suffering. She said her biggest buyers, who indeed are dealers, are in deep trouble. 

So, we might add, was her client. They evidently had purchased the house speculatively, figuring to fix it up and turn it around for a profit. Before they were done, though, they fell into bankruptcy. They had completed maybe half their renovation work on the unimpressive little tract house. In one bathroom, blue masking tape around the paint job was still in place, only half-pulled off. A sloppy plaster repair stood out on the ceiling where some defunct fixture had been removed to make way for recessed lighting. The pool water was green, slimy, and evaporated several inches below the tile line. Old dirty carpet remained on the floor.

Understand, an estate sale is a gold mine for two sets of people: 

1. those who are in the business of reselling “antiques” and used furniture (in general, one and the same thing); and
2. frugalists, folks like you and me looking to furnish our homes and our lives with nearly new, upscale products at second-hand prices. 

When neither of these are in evidence, well…it’s not a good sign. It means consumers are not buying. They’re not buying from businesses that sell second-hand goods and genuine antiques, and they’re not buying yard-sale items. When bargain-hunters quit looking for bargains, IMHO, it indicates people are either really hurting or really scared. 

 

Well, at any rate, La Maya scored a lovely pair of luxurious leather seating pieces. They transform her family room, and she is very pleased.

  

Nevertheless, we worry. We worry.

Cheap Eats: Easy, yummy cabbage

A couple of months ago, a commenter on one of the many PF blogs I read-believe it was The Simple Dollar-asked how you make cabbage. This elicited several recipes for boiled cabbage and hot dishes. All of these are delicious. But I didn’t see any that resembled my favorite. Here it is.

 To make a side dish of two to four servings, you need:

1/2 head of cabbage (I happen to like red, but green is just as good)
1 apple
1/2 onion
about a tablespoon dill weed or dill seed
about 2 teaspoons fennel seed, or more, to taste
a little cumin, about ¼ to ½ teaspoon, to taste (optional)
a dash of cinnamon or nutmeg, if desired (highly optional)
a little dried or fresh thyme, if desired (optional)
small amount beef broth or water
splash of red or white wine, if available
dash of vinegar (add to taste)
Tabasco sauce (add to taste; very optional)
|salt and pepper to taste.
olive oil or butter
frying pan

Cut a head of cabbage in half. Put one half back in the refrigerator for future use. Take the other half and slice it thinly, crosswise, to create a “shredded” effect. Chop the onion coarsely. Cut the apple in quarters; cut out and discard the core. Chop the apple coarsely (no need to peel it, but you can if desired).

Skim the bottom of the pan with olive oil or melt a pat of butter in the pan. Place the chopped onion in the pan and cook, stirring occasionally, over medium-high heat. Cook the onion until softened. Personally, I like to turn the heat down to medium and allow the onion to cook until it’s slightly caramelized — this makes the onions nice and sweet.

When the onions are cooked to your taste, add the sliced-up cabbage. Stir this around to start softening it. Add the cut-up apple and the spices of your choice. Stir to mix well. As the cabbage gets to the point where it’s softening, add a little water or beef broth; if you have it, splash in a little wine. Turn the heat to low, cover the pan, and allow the cabbage to simmer gently until it is cooked to your taste. I prefer not to overcook mine; this takes about 20 minutes, but it can sit on the stove for a fair time without harm.

I like to grind the fennel, dill, and cumin seeds in a molcajete -- a mortar & pestle — but this is not necessary. You can use ground cumin that comes in a jar or whole cumin seeds, if you choose to add cumin at all. As you can see by all the optional ingredients, this is a very forgiving dish. You can pretty much combine anything that makes you happy and still come out with a tasty product.

 

Last time I cooked cabbage — and took this picture right after adding the cabbage to the pan — I sliced the onions instead of chopping them. Onion rings are a little unwieldy for this dish. I think cutting the onion into chunks is better. 

Just before serving, adjust the seasoning by adding a light splash of vinegar and a little salt and pepper. Taste it. Add more vinegar and, if desired, a few drops of hot sauce for zing.

 Serve this with a mess of grilled sausages and some crispy French or Italian bread for a great summer meal. It’s also really good with roast, grilled, or fried chicken; awesome with roast pork or with grilled or fried pork chops; and good to eat on its own.

Real Life: Funnier than the comic strips

Speaking of the vagaries of megalithic bureaucracies (as we were yesterday), get an eyeful of what visitors see when they park at the Great Desert University, self-styled “gold standard” of our state’s public education system. 

Photo by Todd Halvorsen

The photographer reports that every “compagt” space in the parking garage is so marked. He has yet to discover whether this holds true in all the many newly cleaned and restriped parking garages on the campus. 

What are they trying to say to us?

The joy of megacorporations

Months have gone by, and I’m still trying to extract statements from TIAA-CREF and Fidelity for my retirement plan. I can’t access their websites because neither outfit has given me a PIN or a password. The most recent statements arrived in spring of 2007.

 After trying to call and being repelled by impenetrable telephone run-around mazes at both entities, I sent them snail-mail requests in March. Nothing. Then I sent e-mail requests through their “Contact” links at their websites. Not a word from Fidelity. I complained to HR through PeopleSoft’s new impenetrable “please do not bother us” electronic maze. Nothing.

TIAA-CREF did manage to respond to the e-mail request, addressed to “Dr. Hay” as follows (in ordinary correspondence, I never append “Ph.D.” to my name):

We will be happy to answer your account specific questions, however, I am unable to provide this information via email as your email was sent non-secure.  Emails sent non-secure are for general inquiries only.  This measure is in place to protect your personal information and privacy, which we take very seriously.

Because you are not able to log into your accounts, you may obtain the information by calling our National Contact Center at the  telephone number listed below.

Foolishly, the person who sent this did so from an e-mail address that would accept a response. Hence, me to Faceless Corporation:

It is not possible to get through to a human being on these telephone numbers. I have tried. Please give me a phone number that will reach a person. If you can’t do that, please provide a way to communicate over a secure e-mail connection.

 Clearly, if you know I have a Ph.D., something that was not mentioned in my e-mail, you know who I am and you know how to access  my account. Why, then, is it not possible simply to send me a statement at the address your organization has?

This elicited a message from a new person at TIAA-CREF, who introduced herself as my “case manager” and said,

I am researching this matter and will reply to you in writing as soon as possible within the next 30 days.  I will contact you if we require additional time or need further information.

Think of that: 30 days to figure out how to send a statement. How hard can this be?

As we know, bureaucracy exists to serve itself. Apparently there’s a corollary to that famous law of nature: the larger the bureaucracy, the less effectively it can serve itself or anyone else.

LOL! Yes, I do know about gethuman.com. At this point, I just wanna see what happens next!

Moments of Fame

W00t! Mrs. Micah selected Funny’s scheme to convert biweekly pay to fit bimonthly life as an editor’s choice in the 158th Carnival of Personal Finance. This cleverly themed “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” edition is not to be missed, with its hilariously apt quotations and its excellent contributions. At Value for Your Life, Amanda has posted an extraordinary rumination about what she has learned in her first years as a veterinary surgeon, applying some of the discoveries to personal finance issues. In another thoughtful piece, BluntMoney reflects on the importance of one’s definition of “normal” when it comes to borrowing and spending. And Tight-Fisted Miser offers an interesting story on his experience with food stamps. These are only a few of the really great entries in this week’s large carnival. 

Broke Grad Student presents the 131st Festival of Frugality with handfuls of ways to save in the summer. Funny’s post on the free services that come with adopting a pet from the Humane Society appears among many very interesting ideas and reflections. Check out Money Ning’s ideas on how to restrain yourself from impulse buying and Rather Be Shopping’s excellent ways to save when you go camping. At Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, Jim suggests ten frugal hobbies-one of which, “geocaching,” is new to me. Given my tendency to keep cans and bottles (inherited from my great-grandmother, whose garage had so many old National Geographic magazines it was pushing the earth out of its orbit), I had to avert my eyes from the Good Human’s wonderful list of 25 ways to reuse everyday items-awesome! And The Purloined Letter has come up with an ingenious idea for how to make your own kitchen scrub pads out of a common throw-away.

1 Comment left on iWeb site:

Value For Your LIfe

Thanks for the mention!  While it’s a bit scary revealing your personal stuff to the whole world, it’s kind of theraputic–I just read your Personal Finance Confession Project–congrats on getting it out!  You should be very proud of what you’ve accomplished so far. I’m looking forward to reading more about your journey over the next few months and years.
Sincerely,
Amanda

Monday, June 23, 2008 – 04:32 PM

Throwing money in the trash

Nope. That is not a metaphor. 

Yesterday I was at a certain dear person’s home, where I spotted a shiny new penny on the floor. When I picked it up and handed it to him, he carried it over to the kitchen trash can and threw it out.

Eeek!

I’ve heard that some people think pennies are so worthless they’re litter, but never watched anyone actually do that. When I remarked on this, he said the copper in the coin is worth more than the coin itself. I suggested he drop them in a can and take them to the bank now and again to be converted into paper money.

“Do you do that?” he asked.

“Sure. One time I took my change to the bank and got ten bucks back.”

 ”How long did it take to accumulate that much?”

 Ahem! “Well, quite a while.”

 Point made, in his book.

 But well, no. I don’t think so. In what way is letting a container of loose change collect dust eliciting any effort? It just sits there, not asking you to do any work while it quietly accumulates cash. In a way, it’s (chortle!) passive income!

I have two containers. One holds pennies and dimes and one holds nickels, quarters, and the occasional piece of paper money that comes my way. Because I no longer carry cash (I use a credit card to make all transactions electronic), I no longer accumulate much loose change. But back in the day when I did use analog money, I would keep the amount of change I had to haul around to a minimum by depositing all but a few pieces in the change collection a couple times a week. Then every few months, while I was sitting in front of the television in the evening I would organize them into those paper rolls you get for free at the bank or credit union. At my convenience, I would carry them to the bank to convert to paper money or simply deposit them in savings.

 A penny saved is a penny earned!

The Personal Finance Confession Project: Do as I say…

Yesterday Be This Way issued a challenge to confess our financial sins, and I have a big one. It involves huge stupidity, vast hypocrisy, and unfathomable mystery. It goes like this: 

All the time I was married-25 years, give or take a few months-I earnestly advised women friends whose marriages were stressed that they must establish their own credit, have credit cards and bank accounts in their own names, understand where their money came from and where it went, know how it was invested and why, and keep property that they had when they came in to the union sole and separate.

Meanwhile, during the entire time I was dispensing these edifying lectures, I had no clue about my own marriage’s finances. Not one single clue.

We did not have a budget, because my husband felt that was for poor people. He took charge of the finances and kept charge of them. Credit card in my own name? Not a chance! I carried a fistful of joint cards in my purse. Bank account of my own? N/A. I had no idea what was in our joint checking account, no idea if we even had a savings account or if we did, what it contained. I knew he had a pension fund through his firm, only because the law required employers that offered pension funds for some employees to provide them for all employees, and I knew he borrowed against it with some frequency. But I did not know how much he was contributing to the fund or how much it had accrued.

Nor did I have any idea that we were up to our hairlines in debt. I charged up a $200 silk shirt (in 1991, that was a lot to spend on one piece of clothing), never realizing that my husband couldn’t pay the credit card bills and was making only minimum payments on the $30,000 we had racked up on the plastic. Operating as though it was his job to earn the money (he made something over 10 grand a month) and mine to spend it, I insisted that we buy a new Toyota Land Cruiser, little knowing we were sinking into a million dollars worth of debt.

When I inherited $40,000 from an aunt, a nagging feeling that one day I might want to fly the coop pushed me to keep the money separate from the community property. When I asked what I should do with such a large chunk of cash, he had me talk with his personal banker, who advised me to put it in one-week CDs!

Think of that. It sat in those things for a good year, rolling over once a week and earning nothing, because I didn’t know any better.

By the time I decided to leave, he had paid the million dollars of debt down to three-quarters of a million. That was when I learned he had two bank accounts and a credit card in his name only, about which I knew nothing. I had no credit in my own name-after the divorce, my favorite department store would do business with me on a cash basis only (which may have been for the best). I hadn’t handled a checking or savings account in 25 years, not since we were married. I imagined I could make a living as a freelance writer (!), and that the modest investments I’d cobbled together from the inheritance and my half of the pension fund would support me in this folly. Accordingly, the spousal support I accepted was a fraction of what my lawyer and my more knowledgeable friends thought was enough

Why? I was not a child-I married at 23 and was 46 when I left. Evidently I knew better, since I was advising my friends to think clearly about money and protect their own interests. Why did I behave like a child?

Beats me. Maybe it had to do with the way I was raised, but I doubt it. My father went to sea most of his life, and my mother handled their affairs, finances included, during his lengthy absences. I was on autopilot throughout most of the marriage, not fully conscious of anything that was going on around me. Once my ex- mentioned a trip we had taken, one that apparently was pretty interesting; I can’t remember a thing about it. I don’t even remember having made the trip at all. Strange.

Whatever. Do as I say, not as I do.

If next payday doesn’t come…

Oh, but of COURSE our esteemed elected representatives will pass the state budget before the whole joint has to be shut down, right?

Right. Well, come July 3rd, we shall see.

While we wait, let’s consider an important question: Are you prepared if your employer can’t pay your next check? Are you prepared for a lay-off? Are you prepared to be canned outright? Not to harp on this issue (well, yes, to harp): emergency fund, emergency fund, EMERGENCY FUND!

There are only two ways to prepare yourself financially for hard times: one is to get out of debt as fast as you can, and the other, IMHO the most important, is to lay in enough money to tide you over a spell of unemployment or disability. I say building an emergency fund is more important than getting out of debt because you have to eat. If you quit paying credit card and student loan bills, all that will happen is your credit will tank and you’ll have nuisance bill collectors nagging you. If you quit paying on your car, it’ll be repossessed, but there’s always the bus, a bike, or Shank’s mare. If you quit paying your rent or mortgage, eventually you’ll be evicted, but it takes a long time to evict someone. But if you can’t buy food, you’ll starve before the landlord or the bank can toss you into the street.

In good times, the strategy should be to build the emergency fund and pay down principal, dividing snowflakes and snowballs between the two goals until you have at least six months’ worth of living expenses stashed in the bank. As the economic clouds roll in, focus on the emergency fund. Make your regular debt payments; quit charging on the cards, so as to avoid running up any more debt; but put all of your spare cash or sidestream income into accumulating enough cash to keep you going through a really bad stretch.

How much should you set aside for the proposed rainy day?

Opinions vary, from three months to a year or more. Personally, I think an emergency fund should cover at least six months of net pay. If you’re out of work, your income tax will drop to zilch, and so you ought not to need six months’ worth of gross pay.

That said, my emergency fund actually represents a year’s net income. In the first place, at my age I don’t have a snowball’s chance of getting a job comparable to the one I’m in. And in the second, it won’t be that long before I can collect full Social Security. I’m eligible for less-than-full SS right now, so if push came to shove, I could start collecting early. In effect, at age 62 Social Security itself becomes a kind of emergency fund for those of us who persist in doddering in to the office. For you younger pups, remember this rule of thumb: a laid-off executive can expect to spend a month searching for a new job for every year of job experience she or he has.

Alternative Emergency Funds

If saving extra cash is difficult or you don’t think you can stash enough before you’re likely to be laid off, here’s a secondary strategy: get check-bouncing protection from your bank or credit union. This is actually a line of credit. If you overdraw your account, the institution lends you the amount of the overdraft, protecting you from bounced check charges. The interest isn’t cheap. However, it’s less than a credit card costs and it could save you in a pinch. I have overdraft protection in the amount of one month’s net income.

Another strategy is to start developing other income streams now, while you’re still employed. If you have a hobby that can be monetized, start monetizing. If you have a skill you can ply as a side job, start finding customers now. If you’re thinking of starting a service business, consider whether you can begin offering the service in a small way, on a moonlight basis. While this income may not support you, it certainly will help, and often such work can be expanded to full-time equivalent when you can devote 40 or 60 hours a week to build it.

If you’re fairly confident you’re going to be laid off, then in addition to starting the job search right now, here are some things you can do to prepare:

• Apply for credit now, since no one will lend you a dime while you’re unemployed. Get a line of credit at the bank; get another credit card. Don’t use either of these instruments, but have them at the ready in case they’re needed.
• Pare back your spending. Streamline your budget so that you’re living much as you would if you were out of work. Put the savings into the emergency fund.
• If you have a freezer, fill it with food.
• If you don’t have a freezer, lay in extra nonperishable items such as beans, rice, flour, and canned goods. (Remember that whole-wheat flour must be refrigerated  — it will go rancid if left for a long period at room temperature.) Clean out your refrigerator’s freezer and organize its contents so you can max out the space. Buy meat and frozen products to fill it up.
• Plant a garden. Squash and tomatoes grow handsomely and cheaply in the summertime. If you live in a temperate climate, you can grow lettuce, kale, carrots, and beets during the summer. Least expensive strategy: grow from seeds. Learn how to can, preserve, or freeze vegetables and fruits.
• Keep your gas tank full. At four or five bucks a gallon, it’s a lot better to buy gas while you’re earning than after you’re laid off.
• Consider how you will get around with minimal use of your car. Know the bus routes, and if your area is safe for bicyclists, get a bike at a yard sale, thrift shop, or sheriff’s sale and fix it up so you can bicycle to nearby destinations.
• On paper or on disk, prioritize your spending obligations. Write down the things you will need to spend on, in descending order from the most to the least important. Consider how you will cover these expenditures with the emergency funds or side income you already have in place.
• Find out how to apply for unemployment benefits and food stamps, and see if you will be eligible for other forms of public assistance. Don’t get “proud” about this: you’ve paid for it with your taxes, and you get to use it when you need it.

None of us is ever fully prepared for an unplanned job loss. Expect to be psychologically stressed and possibly depressed, no matter how carefully you’ve laid plans and stashed emergency money. Knowing how you will feel (it doesn’t take much imagination), think in advance about morale-building activities to fill your suddenly free time. Scheduling a block of time for exercise will help your outlook a great deal, as will volunteering a few hours a week for a charitable cause.  Also plan to attend meetings of trade groups or professional groups-join now, especially if you can get your employer to pay the dues. Regular exercise such as walking, running, or work-outs will protect your physical and psychological health, and activities that bring you into contact with people will raise your spirits and build business and job-searching contacts. 

1 Comment left on iWeb site:

Anand Dhillon

Keeping an emergency fund is always a good idea. I also advise that people have multiple streams of income so that if  they do lose their job, it’s not totally the end of the world.  They take a lot of work to setup but extra streams can provide much needed financial security.

Thursday, July 3, 2008 – 10:27 AM

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