Sixty Percent of My Pay -- Cutting the Fat

I had knee surgery in December. That in itself is not good column fodder because everyone's knee surgery story is the same. They knocked me unconscious, cut my knee open and fixed the damage. It hurt. I can't walk for a while. They want me to go to rehab. Big, big deal.

But until I shuffle back to my reporter job on a daily newspaper, I have to live on disability pay, which is 60 percent of my regular salary.

That's not as bad as you might think.

For one thing, I normally save nearly 30 percent of my salary. I'm not smart, either. I'm just cheap. I can read my bankbook like some people read a novel. In fact, when one of my banks stopped using bankbooks, I moved my account. I like to see myself saving money.

The 60 percent will just about cover basic expenses, though I won't be able to put any money in savings until I go back to work.

Fortunately, I've paid down a lot of debt in the last couple years, so basic expenses aren't as high as they used to be — and, of course, there's money in savings.

What's gonna have to get whacked is personal expenses. I can't walk very well, so it'll be easy to give up my ritual Friday night tavern visit, and I won't be going out to dinner with my wife for a couple months.

I like to buy ebooks for my Kindle. Five bucks here, $18.99 there. That's gone. I'll read books I've already read. I'll re-read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I do that once a year anyway, usually in the winter. Music for my iPod? That's gone, too. I'll listen to what I already have.

I smoke a pipe, and that's so inexpensive, I don't have to stop.

Cigars, though, cigars are definitely on hold until I walk back into the newspaper office. I'm not a smoker of rare and elegant cigars. I smoke $5-a-pop Mexican cigars, maybe three a week, but a man making 60 percent of his regular pay has no business smoking $15 worth of cigars a week.

Liquor? No. When I first came home from the hospital, I was taking Vicodin, so liquor was out of the question. I've been off the painkillers for about two weeks, but I'm still not drinking. You take a pay cut, you have no right to drink.

My family lived through some uncertain economic times when I was a little kid. My dad bounced from job to job for a while. When he lost a job, he would take his last drink on the day he got laid off and his next drink when he got a new job.

"I'm not buying a drink with my unemployment check," he used to say. "What do I look like, a bum?"

But think: If I spent every penny of my pay, if I had a huge amount of personal debt, a 40 percent pay cut would send me to the soup kitchen.

When times are good, you pay down debt and you pile up savings, even if you have to go without a few things. Money in the bank is a warm blanket, and having it means your boss has a lot less power over your life.

When times are bad, set yourself and take the punch. Pipe tobacco costs me $5 a week, and it's the only luxury I'm not giving up during my time on disability.

And this is how America would be run if the people in charge were not dishonorable dimwits.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.

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