Got a new book from Amazon today, and the damned thing was mis-bound, with the cover a good quarter inch or more off from where it was supposed to be. Ultimately it’s no big deal, because I can just exchange it, but I’ve never seen this in a new book before. (Entirely possible that this is because Amazon specifically has never sent me one; no brick and mortar bookstore would even let these make it out to the floor; they’d have been damaged out immediately once they came out of the box.)
I survived my first day back, although I do mean “survived” in the most specific meaning of the term, certainly not one that implies any teaching took place. I foolishly neglected to take any drugs before leaving the house other than my antibiotics, which meant that the first thing I did when I left work was go to a drugstore and buy the methy kind of Sudafed, the one you have to ask for and have your ID scanned. I do actually have an ear infection, according to my school nurse, but she says the antibiotics I’m already on will take care of it. We’ll see!
Let’s see, what else? Spent the evening fighting off the urge to buy another fountain pen or two. My rapid cycling through obsessions and hobbies is fucking breathtaking, y’all. I need to become obsessed with saving money for a while. The world economy is about to tank (mental note: save $1,000 as quickly as possible, withdraw it in cash, and keep it in the house) and even if that wasn’t the case (or if I wasn’t already first against the wall as an atheist, outspokenly liberal teacher running the gay kids’ club in a rural area of a red state) my kid is gonna be driving in a couple of years. You’d think I’d at least be able to sock money away for a car.
Alternatively, we’ll be scrounging the wastelands for food in a couple of years, so why not buy fountain pens now while they’re still being manufactured?
Dan Ford may have slightly too much influence over my life decisions for someone I’ve never met, but those five words more or less talked me out of Adventures with Bitcoin, and realizing that this weekend is a Lego Insiders weekend and that they have a model of the HMS Endurance coming at the end of the month sealed the deal; I’m not destroying the environment and I get (sorta) free Legos? Yeah, fuck money get Legos.
I think that’s the phrase, at least.
MEANWHILE! Kendrick Lamar has a new album out! He didn’t tell anyone it was coming before he released it. I’m listening to it right now and it might be his best album yet. I never really vibed with Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, so it’s good to see a return to form.
Let’s see. What else? I feel like something happened at work today that I really want to talk about, but hell if I can remember what it is. I decided today that I have what I’m calling a Shitty White Boy problem with my sixth hour, but that’s not the story.
… Goddammit, it’s gone. I’m gonna go play Veilguard and if I remember what the hell I wanted to talk about I’ll come back.
A couple of months ago, more or less on a whim, I started sinking $50 a week into Bitcoin.
Yeah, I know. Stay with me here.
You are not reading that incorrectly.
That is up nearly five percent today, nearly twelve percent this week, and nearly fifty percent in a month. Those are fucking insane numbers. Ridiculous numbers. Stupid numbers. “That can’t be right” numbers.
I have actually invested $342.16. My personal actual rate of return over the last seven weeks or so is 40.9%. I assume there would be some transaction fees or something and taxes to set aside once I sell, but that’s ludicrous.
I am seriously and genuinely considering getting a zero-APR advance from one of my credit cards to sink into Bitcoin for a month, at which point I’ll sell off whatever the advance was, pay it off, and let the profits coast for a little longer. I’m not talking about an enormous amount of money, relatively speaking; nothing that would bankrupt me or even put me into real trouble if the market crashes, and one way or another I probably want out of this (or do I?) before Trump takes office and wrecks the economy. But 40% of, say, $5000 is two thousand dollars in a month. Even if the rate of return drops by half that’s still a thousand dollars for doing nothing. When I started thinking about this a week or so ago, the one-month number was around thirty percent.
There’s got to be a correction of some sort coming soon, right? Nothing stays on this high of a trajectory for long, and Bitcoin is proof positive that money (and the investment market) is nearly entirely fake anyway. But … shit.
Am I gonna end up $2,000,000 in debt in two years, and this is the post that led to my downfall?
Somebody tell my wife about this post so she can forbid me to invest in this stupid, imaginary product, please.
Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.
He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.
Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that hewas still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.
The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.
Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:
I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)
Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.
68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.
I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.
(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)
I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.
I went out after work and made some bad decisions, so if anyone wants to recommend a part-time job I can do from home over the summer, it would be appreciated. 🙂
Sometime in February of 2020– I could have sworn I posted about it, but hell if I can find it– I applied for a $30,000, six-year personal loan through Discover. I used the funds to pay off about 90% or so of my credit cards– so, to be clear, someone handed me thirty grand and that wasn’t enough money to pay off all of my credit cards. The payments on the loan were considerably less than the combined payments on the cards, by around $300 a month, if I remember correctly.
In September of 2021, I got that last piece of credit card debt paid off, giving me a $0 credit card balance for the first time since my freshman year of college. It probably put around $150-200 a month back into my pocket.
Two years later, aided by that extra $300 and a few stimulus payments from the government that I didn’t need because I’d been able to keep my job and work from home, I paid off my car, a full year early. Another $237 a month went back into my pocket.
On May 9th, 2022, my student loans– nearly $70,000 worth– were forgiven through the Biden administration’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. Another $545 a month went back into my pocket. I started paying a thousand dollars a month, sometimes more if I could afford it, on the personal loan, which had a monthly payment of $607. The entire time I was paying off the loan, I never made a single payment for just the amount that was due.
I have been watching a little bar crawl across the screen of my phone over the last four years as that personal loan got slowly whittled down. Last Saturday, I made my final payment of $756, and then reloaded the app about a dozen times an hour for the next few days, waiting for it to update and show me that the loan was 100% paid off. I was looking forward to the screenshot.
Turns out when you pay off a personal loan, which I did almost two full years early, they just … close the account, which feels kind of anticlimactic.
Other than a small installment loan through Apple that I will pay off on the paycheck after next, my mortgage, and a home equity loan that we used to remodel the bathroom– and to be honest, for some reason I don’t even feel like the home loans count, I am now completely debt-free.
No student loans.
No credit cards.
No personal loans.
No car payment.
A thousand bucks a month now back in my pocket.
If I was a Republican, I’d already be writing my personal finance book, talking about how my good financial decisions and iron self-control led me to shake off a lifetime of bad habits and Get Out of Debt.
That is not what happened.
The fact is I’ve been incredibly lucky.
I was lucky enough to be back in education when Covid hit. If I’d still been a furniture salesman, I’d have been fucked.
I was lucky enough to be married to someone who both handles her money better and makes more than me, so I wasn’t trying to pay for my entire household on my salary and could devote large chunks of it to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that the government sent me Covid relief checks that I didn’t really need and could devote to debt relief.
I was lucky enough to qualify for President Biden’s improvements to the PSLF program, which I had tried to take advantage of several times before and hadn’t been able to for one reason or another.
I was lucky enough to have a good-paying union job that provided me with a steady paycheck and yearly raises that, for the most part, I also didn’t really need, and lucky enough to get hired by a higher-paying district when I left South Bend schools. Most of that extra money went to debt relief.
I was lucky enough that my family has largely avoided any sort of financial crises over the past four years– no sudden illnesses or injuries, no major accidents, no natural disasters, fires, thefts, or anything else that could have suddenly laid claim to who knows how much of my money. One bad car accident and I could be millions of dollars deep into medical debt instead of being practically free of it.
I have been very, very lucky. And while I’m not going to sit here and tell you I’m never using a credit card again– they’re fucking useful, that’s why they exist– I’m hoping to never have to dig myself out of that hole again.
But one way or another, this week, I’m celebrating. Celebrating, and trying my damnedest to not run out like an idiot and spend myself right back into a hole again. I’m not buying a car until the boy turns 16 and gets his license, and provided that nothing stupid has happened in the meantime, he’ll inherit my current car at that time. So I’ve got four years– three and a half, really– to take that surplus and invest the shit out of it. If I stay lucky, the market will continue on its current trajectory, and maybe I’ll get to retire before I die.
Okay, let’s put this right out there for everybody: I’m about to gripe about getting handed a whole pile of money, and we’re all just going to have to figure out how to live with that, okay? This is probably a pretty good stroke of fortune, but I’m still less than completely happy about it. Just prepare yourself, I guess.
Last week we had to fire a permanent substitute for several of our Social Studies classes. We never found a full-time teacher for that class, but this guy was showing up to work every day so he may as well have been the “real” teacher. I am not privy to the reasons for the firing, although I have reason to believe that they were of the “you aren’t very good at this” variety and possibly also the “you are not getting along with the other adults, who are better at their jobs than you” variety, but not anything more nefarious than that. At any rate, since I’m certified to teach middle school social studies, I spent some time thinking about whether I wanted to volunteer to pick up one of this guy’s sections and ended up deciding against it. The group he had during my prep period seemed like a pretty decent group of kids, but it would mean a whole lot of extra prep time for just one extra section of kids, and, well, it would eat my one prep period. That would mean teaching from 8:15 to 3:20 every day with nothing but a half hour break for lunch. I didn’t exactly turn it down, because it wasn’t offered to me, but I did decide I wasn’t going to put my name forward for it.
So naturally today one of our math teachers resigned, and while I could still turn down an overload, it feels a lot sketchier to refuse to teach an extra section of the course I’m already teaching, and I’ve covered her class before and it’s a reasonably easy group of kids. But it means, again, no preps ever, and less time for a bathroom break– and you’d best believe my bowels have gotten used to being evacuated promptly at 10:08 every morning when I send second hour away– and I can’t run out for lunch any longer.
My biggest complaint, though, is the notion that I have to bring my lunch every day for the rest of the year. The thought is crushing. I mean, I can order Jimmy John’s once in a while, and I can probably afford to Doordash every now and again, but that shit adds up quick and I don’t want to spend money on food all the Goddamn time, especially since if the delivery person is even a little late I’m racing through my lunch even faster than usual, which is deeply fucking annoying.
On the other hand, depending on exactly how they run the numbers I’m going to make somewhere between eight and eleven thousand dollars extra for covering the class. I get my hourly rate, so basically 3/4 of an extra 1/6 of my salary over the course of the year, although that sixth may be a little smaller than that because I’m not sure if Advisory counts as instructional time or they just divide my day into six classes or what.
One way or another, it’s a whole Goddamn lot of money. I have this plan going right now where other than the house I’m going to be completely out of debt by the end of this school year. Completely out. An extra nine grand– the most likely figure is roughly $8900 if you want specificity– over the course of the rest of the school year would move that timetable up pretty considerably. How much can I really gripe about doing a little bit more of something I was already doing when it has that level of compensation attached to it? But the fucking lunch thing has me all twisted up about it for some reason.
One of my students asked me today how much I hated paying taxes, and I think I slightly blew the kid’s mind when I told him that I don’t mind paying taxes at all, because I enjoy living in a society and paying taxes helps ensure that. He didn’t press for additional details, but had he done so I’d have pointed out that there were probably examples of specific taxes that I wouldn’t be especially fond of, or taxing systems that I had preferences on, but the concept of paying taxes itself? No, I’m fine with that, and there are any number of reasons why I might, in theory, advocate increasing my tax burden with no argument. In fact, having voted for a tax referendum for our local public school system in the last couple of years, I have already done that.
Anyway. This is leading toward a humblebrag, so brace yourself as necessary. My tire pressure sensors have been acting concerning lately, and I have three road trips planned in the next three days, so rather than adding air to my tires for the second time in eight days and crossing my fingers I decided to swing by the local tire shack and have someone take a closer look at them.
And that ended up costing me $650 for four new tires. And that’s after a visit to the comic shop, and buying myself dinner, and a visit to CVS for certain supplies that cost me $60, meaning that I left work and looked at my bank account and thought damn, I did pretty well keeping my spending down this week, and then dropped eight hundred dollars in a little over an hour and a half.
This is where the humblebrag comes in: for the first time in my life, I don’t mind the tires at all— to be honest, I wasn’t surprised when the diagnosis was “Well, you’ve got this giant screw in your tire here, so that’s the specific problem, but you’ve had this car since 2017. Have you ever put new tires on it?” I wasn’t certain that was what was going to happen, and I probably could have waited a few months if necessary, but I was able to look at a fairly substantial unplanned-for car expense and just shrug and pay for it because the money wasn’t going to kill me. Now, don’t get me wrong (he said, fending off the forces of karma), I don’t want any more unexpected $650 expenses anytime soon, but being able to just pay for that shit was nice.
The next couple of days are going to be busy– my wife’s aunt passed away and her funeral is in Michigan tomorrow, and then my nephew’s birthday party is in Chicago on Saturday, and we’re staying overnight for that so there’s a (shit!) hotel bill to pay for, but my classroom was a hundred and thirty degrees today so I’m happy to not be there for a couple of days. Hopefully Sunday will be relaxing enough by itself to get me through next week.
