Net worth report, Sept 2008

It's not too bad, actually.

I forgot to do my August net worth report (too much work, too much traveling), but my numbers haven't slipped too badly from the July report, especially considering the stock market's recent shenanigans.

See the details here.

My cash savings are creeping up slowly, which is good, because we are still looking at some major expenditures this year when we will hopefully get around to buying a new-to-us car and finish some home repairs that got interrupted in early summer when we fired our contractor mid-job.

Also, has anybody else noticed that ING direct now points out that you are making a FREE transfer when you move money around? This makes me nervous. Are they about to start charging for transferring money? I hope not. I move money to and from various ING accounts very often. Money comes in from freelance work, and I move this chunk to the account where I save for taxes, this chunk to the emergency fund, this chunk over here to split between our Roth IRAs, and this chunk to be use to pay bills. If I had to pay for all these transfers, I'd have to totally change how I manage my money.

Philadelphia city wage tax LOWERED

In this time of financial meltdown, I just got some good news.

The Philadelphia city wage tax was lowered effective July 1, 2008.

The old rates were 4.219% for residents and 3.7242% for non-residents who work in the city but live outside. New rates are 3.98% for residents and 3.5392% for non-residents.

Okay, it's less than a quarter of a percent change for me as a resident, but still! Come on, I'm trying to be upbeat about something here. I know it's falling a little flat.

Excuse me while I go play the shell game with my bills to try to pay my October COBRA premium and my mortgage out of a $600 paycheck....

What a week!

Jeez, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, what next?

But don't worry. I'm taking measures. Tomorrow I am liquidating all my assets, including my retirement accounts (darn that early withdrawal penalty) and putting it all in cash. Actually, I think I'll buy gold bullion and bury it under my basement floor. I'm also stockpiling gasoline in giant drums, and planting a massive food crop under growlights in the house. I'm buying a handgun and I have forty 5-gallon bottles of water. I have ordered my own personal windmill to generate electricity.

Not really.

What I'm really doing is working, and being glad I have a job. I'm trying not to look at my retirement account balances very often, and I'm making my regular account contributions. I'm watching local businesses close, four in the last few weeks that I know of. I'm fairly sure I have the money to pay my son's preschool tuition tomorrow, but I don't think I'll be able to cover the mortgage this month without dipping into savings. I am, as always, grateful that I have savings to dip into. Basically I'm trying not to freak out.

What are you doing this week? Are you glued to the news? Are you checking your account balances every two hours? Are you buying stocks at bargain prices? Are you closing your bank accounts and sewing bundles of cash into your mattress? Please, tell me you're not doing that last thing.

This too shall pass.

Right?

Should I pay more for health insurance, voluntarily?

I'm trying to decide between two different employer health insurance plans, and it's proving to be a difficult decision.

For the past 15 months, I've been had COBRA coverage, which has kept me on the health insurance plan of my former employer. Let me just take a moment to enjoy, yet again, the fact that I don't work there any more. Good riddance, old job.

I've been paying $425 a month for COBRA coverage, but it hasn't hurt too much because my other employer, where I work part-time, reimburses almost $300 of my premiums. So my actual out-of-pocket cost has been about $125 per month. Not too bad.

My COBRA coverage runs out in a few months, and I need to decide between going on my partner's workplace plan, or going with the plan offered by my part-time employer. Both plans have the same health insurance carrier I have now, so I won't have to change doctors.

1. For my partner's plan, the cost for my premiums is $350 per month, but once again, my employer will reimburse about $300 of that. This brings my monthly outlay down to about $50 per month. The catch is that that plan has astronomical co-pays. Since I am a person who tends to need a lot of specialized medical care, and has a greater than average chance of having really crazy medical adventures, co-pays are a big deal for me.

2. The premiums on my employer's plan are a bit more. I'd be spending about $150 per month, and obviously there would be no reimbursements because I'd be using their plan. The good thing is the co-pays are extremely low. And I wouldn't have to send in those annoying forms every month to get my premiums reimbursed.


So why am I even considering paying $100 more per month to be on my employer's plan instead of my partner's plan? He couldn't believe it when I told him I might not use his plan, so I've been doing some soul-searching to figure out why I'm thinking of spending an extra $1200 per year. The difference in co-pays will probably bring the cost difference down to about $900 per year.

There are two main reasons.

The first, and most complicated, is that I resent the hell out of M's employer. It's a little irrational, but it's true. He has worked there for almost 8 years, and he's pretty happy there. He has held four different positions there, or is it five? In the early years he was on soft money, which meant he was paid through grant funding and didn't have a guarantee of permanent employment. They did a great job of scrambling to find enough money to keep him on. At this point he has a permanent job in management, and works closely with other leaders in the field all over the Philadelphia area. That's great, I'm proud of him, and I appreciate the fact that his bosses recognize his worth. They have also reorganized their staff twice in the years he has been there to allow him to work part-time because of our family's needs. They even changed their policy to give part-timers benefits in order to give him a reason to stay.

But there are some little things that drive me crazy. For one thing, they treat their professional employees like hourly employees. In his field, it is pretty common for professionals to work 35 hour weeks, but M's workplace has a 40-hour work week a mandatory half-hour lunch break, so he has to spend 8.5 hours at the office every day. If he needs to leave 15 minutes early, he has to make up the time in the same pay period, even though he often works extra hours in the evenings at home. I know in many fields managers work much longer hours than he does, but his field is incredibly low-paying, and his employer is on the low end of the range. With all his years of experience and his level of responsibility, he makes only about 10-20 percent more than many entry-level people do at other similar institutions. His benefits, too, are crappy. The retirement contributions are meager, and although they pay his entire health insurance premium as long as he works full time, the co-pays are astronomical and we pay through the nose for our son to be on his plan. If I was on his plan, it would cost us even more. His take-home pay in that case would be well under $1000 per month, after his 15% retirement contribution and the $100 he has taken out each month to pay for public transit. The only reason we can even contemplate having me on his plan is because my employer will reimburse us for part of our premiums.

Another gripe--after all this time he does have 3 weeks of vacation, finally, but he still only gets 6 sick days per year. SIX. Have you ever had a young child in preschool? Our son doesn't get sick much any more, but he does have pediatrician appointments, and he sees a specialist for a minor but chronic health problem, and and and. Throw in my visits to the oncologist every 3 months, not to mention my long hospital stay last year, and the upshot is that M rarely gets to use his sick days for himself. If he's sick, he goes to work or takes unpaid leave. In a pinch his employer will let him go into the red in terms of sick time, but I still resent that they think this is a reasonable amount of sick time for anyone, especially an employee with a family.

So I know that if I'm on his plan, every time I go to the doctor, I'm going to resent the hell out of those high co-pays, which will remind me of all the other ways his employer bugs me. It's going to rankle. I have enough anxiety and stress about going to the doctor. In addition to my oncology visits 4 times a year, I have to get CT scans twice a year, blood tests every 3 months, and that's not even counting visits to my primary care physician for things like allergy meds. If I have another recurrence of cancer, I'm going to wish I had stayed on my own plan, because the hospital co-pays will very quickly eat up the money we'd be saving on the premiums.


The other reason I don't want to go on his plan is even less rational. It's a desire to be totally self-reliant. My employer, my health insurance. It's pretty silly, because M and I are financially interconnected in many ways. I'm not really independent, and neither is he. We both work, and some years one of us makes more money than the other, but it usually balances out. We own a house together, and we pay a mortgage together. We share a car, we share bank accounts, and we share credit cards. Oh, and we share the kid, of course. We each have some liquid savings that we've kept separate, maybe about $10,000 each. And our retirement accounts are separate, too. If we were to split up, which is very unlikely, we'd have to unravel all those financial ties, and it wouldn't be a big deal for me to get on my employer's plan at that point.

But I was raised by a woman who didn't maintain her financial independence from her man, and I am a bit fanatical about ending up the same way.

I think in the end I'm going to suck it up and go with M's plan, because when I lay them all out my reasons for not going on that plan are pretty ridiculous. I don't like his employer. Well, that doesn't much matter, because he likes it there. He doesn't feel underpaid or exploited. And really, I should be enough of a grownup that when I go to the doctor and pay those high co-pays, it shouldn't send me into a tizzy because it reminds me of all the negative aspects of M's workplace. I should be able to separate the issues, right? The co-pays are high but the coverage is good, so I should just be grateful. And this strangely fierce independent streak that has cropped up also seems ridiculous to me. I could always go on my own plan later if I needed to, and there are worse things than having the entire family on one plan.

Okay, I've talked myself into it. I will go on M's plan, continue to submit the forms to get reimbursed by my employer, and try to remember how lucky I am to have not one but two sources of affordable health insurance.