A Monstrous Bet. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako



It takes a while, and a bit of thinking before things sink in, sometimes. It’s about that ‘new’, good used vehicle sitting out in the parking lot.

So, I called up and took Balance Protection off my loan, to the tune of eighteen dollars a month. That's $864.00 over four years. Then I put collision on the vehicle insurance, to the tune of thirty-three a month.

This does not save money, but we must bear in mind all insurance represents a bet—a monstrous bet if you think about it. I'm betting that I am going to die in my bed, (in which case the vehicle could still be sold off to pay the loan), or I am betting that I will get in an accident, (and the insurance people are betting against me, odd as that seems.)

Yeah, it’s funny—the insurance people are betting that I won’t get into an accident. And they know us pretty well, don’t they?

If you want to be anal-retentive about it, you can take collision insurance off for summer and put it back on for winter, for example. You could take it off when the balance on the loan is paid down, and you can see your way to the next vehicle—perhaps your cash reserves are building up again.

But the odds of me dying in my bed, or becoming incapacitated (in terms of loan balance protection), would appear to be far slimmer than the odds of me being in an at-fault accident, or going off the road in a single-vehicle accident. (Which is always your fault, right?)

I noticed last winter that a minivan is not good on ice in a crosswind, not that I had any real problem...one way or another, I have to cover my ass. It is true I have a spare vehicle, and that a shit vehicle might cost three or four grand—however, I also have that fucking four-year loan to consider.

#financial_literacy #money #theory

So, for thirty-three bucks a month, if we wipe it out, we get a replacement vehicle, minus the deductible, and just keep on making them loan payments. #essentially

The deductible, well, I already have that in the bank—

With balance protection, I'm dead or incapacitated, and only the bank is happy, 'cause they got all their money back, including anticipated interest.

...and my fucking heirs squabbling over what's left...

It’s okay, ladies and gentlemen, the nephews are pretty good boys and they’ll work it out.

***

Sometimes I wish my math was better, and sometimes the financial literacy isn't what it should be. On the Ontario Disability Support Program, you never have any real money.

In some weird sense, we don't know what things cost. I'm luckier than some, in that I did buy a small house once, and while the mortgage payments were fairly small—less than $300.00 per month, all of those other costs, taxes, water, gas and electricity, insurance, brought it up so that I figured, on an average monthly basis, it would cost something like $765.00 per month to keep that two-bedroom, $50,000.00 house. And I was still lining up at food banks, riding a crummy old bicycle and going over to my dad's house most days to scrounge a meal and bum a few smokes...

Just to put that in perspective, it was 1999 and the pension was a whopping $930.00 per month.

When I sold it four years later, I only had about fifteen hundred in equity built up,

However, the market value had gone up, as well as the fact that I'd cleaned it up considerably, taking out an old oil tank, an antenna tower, rotten old rugs on top of some pretty nice, old style maple floors. When I sold it for $72,000.00, that $23,000.00+ was the most money I'd ever had in my entire life.

#ODSP #financial_literacy #money

Okay, I have lowered the payments on the four-year, ten fucking thousand dollar loan from about $266.00 per month, down to $248.00 per month. From the sounds of things, my car insurance will be about a hundred a month, but I sort of forgot to ask about tenant’s insurance. 

With my prior bundle, car insurance (on a vehicle worth about three grand and no comp, no collision) was maybe $67.00 per month and tenant’s insurance another $23.00 or so.

A quick rundown on the vehicle. It’s a 2010 minivan, with about 209,000 kilometres on it. 

The price after knocking him down about $700.00 was $7,795.00, and tax and some small fees, new plates for example, bumped that up to $8,928.25.

That leaves eleven hundred in the bank. While it’s tempting to just throw that back and pay down the outstanding balance right from the outset, experience teaches us that something always comes up—and if nothing else, I have the first two or three months of loan and insurance payments already covered. I suppose I wouldn’t have, or couldn’t have, done this unless my job seemed fairly secure, part-time as it is. The ODSP pension at least provides some basic income in an emergency…fingers crossed.

Wish me luck, because we’re probably going to need it.


END

Images. Zach Neal.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories available, many of them free, from Amazon.

Thank you for reading.


 

Double Your Income, Pay Off Your Debt On ODSP/OW. Louis Shalako

Louis Shalako

Over the last three years, I have almost doubled my income. Without being facetious, I can honestly say I’m getting up near the poverty line. This is by taking a part-time gig and working it, semi-scientifically, as a business. After so many years on ODSP, this is a remarkable achievement, as the basic provincial disability pension runs about thirty-five to forty percent below the poverty line.

In the last year, I have reduced my credit card debt down to approximately zero. Last year, at about this time, I exceeded my $1500.00 credit limit by a couple of dollars. Basically, you check the balance online…see that yesterday’s purchase at the liquor store hasn’t gone through yet…nip down there and grab another pile of booze while you still can. The same goes for smokes and gas as well—

Groceries, even, if you’re not getting too many hours at work. And let’s be honest, that happens sometimes.

There is a $25.00 penalty for that, so that I owed, at that time, about $1,527.00. Now, even on that debt, at 28 % APR, the monthly interest doesn’t seem too bad. At the time of the monthly statement, it’s twenty-five, thirty bucks, forty dollars at most. What’s forty dollars times twelve? Multiply that by twelve months and it seems a bit more significant.

That’s a half a thousand bucks, real money when you’re lining up at food banks and wearing God-damned rags all the time.

Now, in order to avoid ‘overpayments’, due to the fact that on ODSP, one can only earn up to $200.00 per month without penalty, I have reinvested ‘excess profits’ back into my business. 

This is money you cannot live on, presumably, this is why the ODSP accepts it.

This involves the purchase of anything from new keyboards, a new monitor, or a reconditioned computer. So, each and every month, I was jamming some new purchase (hopefully a reasonable one in the sense of developing a business), onto the credit card.

At the end of the month, I paid as much as I could scrape up. Even so, somehow, I must have been chipping away at that balance. Two days before the end of the month, (March), I owe $148.00 on the credit card balance. The other factor is the fact that I did not buy anything for the office, for the business, during the months of January, February and March. On ODSP, the guidelines state that all expenses are to be charged to the month in which the purchase was made—it’s not a year-end sort of deduction, such as any other business in Canada might enjoy. A regular human business person could buy a case of toilet paper for the business, and the revenue people really don’t care in which month the purchase was made.

I actually went a bit over the allowable limit for those three months, a calculated gamble.

I have a reason for taking that risk—

So, in the course of about one year, I will have taken my credit card balance down to zero. I will be paying that last bit off Friday morning, a little after dawn, in other words.

What an interesting feeling it surely is—

To have actual control over one’s finances. To have mastered something. Maybe that’s what it is.

Okay, the monthly interest on $148.00 is not much, a couple or three bucks. It’s not going to make a big difference in my life, however, once the balance is down to zero, I can make a major purchase. I want a drafting table for the business. The base might cost $184.00 and the top, a separate item, $132.00. I can make that purchase over two months, use it as an allowable business deduction, and avoid ‘overpayments’ or charges against my Ontario Disability Support Program benefits. Which, after all, is still the major source of my income. 

If I pay off one hundred percent of the charge at the end of any given month, then there is no interest due at all. This is the ideal, and what every first-time credit-card holder brags about, after all.

So, as things presently stand, clients may earn up to $200.00 per month, after allowable deductions. The new provincial government has announced that in future, clients will be able to earn up to $6,000.00 per year, i.e. $500.00 per month. For Ontario Works, clients will be able to earn up to $300.00 (OW means welfare), the rate of claw-back after that will be seventy-five percent. Presumably the same goes for ODSP. I just haven’t seen that in writing. 

I haven’t been able to find anything as to when that takes effect.

In terms of business planning, it’s still up in the air.

Assuming November 1, just as an example, then the first ten months of the year represents $2,000.00 in allowable income, and the last two months of the year another $1,000.00 of allowable income. This seems like a fair way to deal with a transition year, going from one set of guidelines to another as it were.

I could earn up to three grand, and never have to keep a receipt, mileage log or anything.

Thank you for reading.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Amazon.

END

On Agents and Traditional Publishing.

Louis Shalako

When writing a new book, I will often post a few excerpts, fairly substantial ones, as I go along.

It tends to pique readers’ curiosity and it might even help sell a few copies. Excerpts from my mystery novels sold at least a handful of already-published mysteries. Those links were on the page. People could read a sample of a work in progress and then click through and buy a book.

I really can’t claim much more than that. Many traditionally-published authors cringe when they see that. It’s considered unprofessional, and according to them, if it has been ‘published’, no reputable publisher would ever be interested.

From their perspective, you have pissed in your own well. From their perspective, they’re absolutely right, too.

For my new book I haven’t done that, except for a couple of extremely short snippets posted on Facebook. This leaves all of the options open. For a first-time author, (which is exactly how I will be perceived), potential deals don’t look all that sweet, and that’s just gut instinct. Five or ten grand in advance sounds like a lot of money, (after twenty-one years on a disability pension). Another person’s perspective will be different. A print run of a thousand hardcovers and three or four thousand paperbacks isn’t nearly so impressive. It gets your foot in the door. That’s not enough of a print run to become a bestseller, and it won’t be marketed as if it stood any chance of becoming a bestseller and it is best to accept that going in.

However.

It legitimizes you, to the extent you might be invited to sit on a panel at a convention, etc. The local paper will interview you. Your books might appear in small numbers, on brick-and-mortar bookstore shelves from coast to coast. And you may never see another dime from it. It’s a question of what you want and whether it’s ultimately worth it to you.

Theoretically, it helps you to make the next deal, build readership, and get some experience.

For a first book, yes, it has to be a good story. But the publisher is more concerned with the sales potential of an unknown author. It is not the reader, but the buyer who determines perceived value and the desirability of a product. Before readers can buy your book, a publisher sort of has to buy it first. And they’re in business to make money.

It would be wonderful not to have to format my own books, design my own covers, and write my own product descriptions. It might be wonderful to find a really good editor, and to see some really professional work with my name on the cover on the shelves in a national chain bookstore.

There is a lot more to it than that, isn’t there?

To be forewarned is forearmed. For myself, assuming I could get such a contract, I might want to retain ebook rights and just let the publisher have a hard-copy license. I might want a strict end date with no exceptions. I might want to know exactly when those print rights revert to me, how much creative control I have over the work and the process. I might want to see it spelled out exactly how much promotion the publisher would give such a work, and how much promotion at my own time and expense I would be contractually-obligated to do.

I’m not a starry-eyed twenty year-old anymore. I’m a fifty-six year-old, getting a small pension, one with some pretty severe restrictions as to what I can and cannot do financially.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch is quite correct when she says that a professional writer can simply go on to the next book. It’s what I do anyways. We’re not talking about the writing.

We’re talking about the money—the business side of it from a writer’s perspective.

Her thoughts on literary agents are quite strong. The question is, is the information reasonable?

It’s probably true that you don’t really need an agent in the age of the internet. You submit a book. If you get some interest, some follow-up request for a partial or complete manuscript, it’s perfectly plausible that an author might get on the horn real quick and try to engage an IP (intellectual property) lawyer.

At that point you have entered the waters, thoroughly chummed by the blood of a million other authors before you. You are now swimming with the sharks. Ah, but on disability, that lawyer would have to be working on a contingency basis. That’s because I can’t afford much of a retainer, although a one-hour consultation at $250 to $500 an hour might be doable. Those costs must be borne by the project in hand, and yet it’s all up-front, speculative money where we might not even end up with a deal.

Assuming we’re running our writing as a business, there are some cost-benefit analyses that must be done. Perhaps it’s better not to sign a deal, hoping that a better deal will come down the road. Some other publisher might offer a deal which seems better to the inexperienced author/businessman.

At which point, we’re going to need to call our IP guy again.

It takes money to make money. That is an unfortunate truism. When we submit a book to a publisher, we are asking them to invest in our works, and that’s fair enough so far as it goes. Selling books is their specialty, far more than it is mine or the average reader who might have some interest in this process.

There is always going to be that time element. At my age, playing catch-up with successful authors who have been around for thirty or forty years seems pretty unrealistic.

Buying into a myth is just dumb.

That’s not to say that I can’t write some good books over the next fifteen or twenty years, because that’s what I’m going to do. However, we also want to make some money.

That is an entirely different kettle of fish.

A lot of authors make multiple submissions, and as long as the publishers don’t mind that, I don’t see anything wrong with it. For myself, I’ve always liked to keep it simple, submitting to one high-profile publisher at a time. One in particular sticks in my mind.

That was the publisher who sent a rejection slip two years after my submission.

Honestly, that book was self-published six months or a year before I got the slip in the mail.

At that rate, you really don’t stand much of a chance—I mean the publisher, and the author as well.

I’m not going to sit here and bitch about the industry and how it has to change. Frankly, I don’t know much about it, and I’m certainly not all up-in-arms about it.

If we don’t like the alternatives, we can always choose not to submit.

Some of the stories I’ve published were never going to fly anywhere else. There isn’t much market for westerns, not at five bucks a story, or military fiction, or some other genres. I’m not going to write a novel and let some guy serialize it for twenty bucks on his website. I can do that myself and build up my own traffic and readership.

If there is nowhere credible to submit it, then publish it yourself. Keep the cost down.

Take what sales you get and learn from it.

I’m in no position to give advice, but we all do, don’t we?

However, for my nineteenth novel, I can set that one aside, submit it a few places, and start writing the next book, novel number twenty.

It really only takes a couple of months for the books I’ve been doing lately. And it’s nice to have something to do when I wake up in the morning.

END