2021 in Review Part I: Thinking Outside the Boxing Day
Five days remain of this year, which began, more or less, with an insurrection and will end, more or less, with some trepidation. Every day now seems to bring word of somebody we know, or at least somebody they know, being laid up with COVID- and that's even before the latest variant has really taken hold here. Even more scary, it's kids- daughters of a friend and a fellow lawyer are down for the count at the moment.
But I'm at the office, and at it for most of those remaining four days. Looks like next week will be VERY busy in the one case I filed a few weeks ago and in another I have a meeting for Wednesday to confirm I'm getting into, as well. Fortunately, the next four workdays look quiet, and the phones and inboxes are quiet to match.
So here, I guess, I'll review the Business and Finance sections of the year almost ended, which have been full of changes but overall good ones.
Work for me has settled into a New Normal of sorts. My travel is way down, as almost all things I used to drive to in downtowns and farflung places are now done by phone or virtual video. I have a half-suit of sorts that hangs behind my office door, which I throw on from the waist up for the Teams sessions that most state courts have gone to. Bankruptcy is entirely telephonic, with confirming documents uploaded ahead of time; clients are usually with me for those, but they don't have to be. Since the shutdown in March 2020, I have only stopped in or driven through eight counties of Western New York and only made it to the easternmost a few weeks ago. That's cut down on gas and maintenance expense on the car, and on a lot of stress on me. The moratoriums here on finalizing evictions and foreclosures are scheduled to end in a few weeks, and while I don't do much work in those areas myself, we expect those may unleash a major backlog of bankruptcy filings that has been a relative trickle the past two years overall.
Unless there's a major filing rush this week, 2021 will end with fewer than 2,000 cases filed in the entire Buffalo/Rochester district where I do almost all my work. In contrast, in one of my first years practicing, there were exactly 2,000 cases filed in the smaller Rochester division alone, a figure way below the 10,000-plus filed in the year of the Credit Card Company Protection Act of 2005. Of the not quite 2,000 filed in 2021, I filed 16 of them and may be taking over a 17th filed in November. That's a little lower than last year for me, but way below my record year of 2019 when I put my imprimatur on 27 of them that year. They've been a mix of easy and hard, of consumer and business. If both of this month's new-to-me filings carry on through the new year, I expect that hours will exceed even the record year, and the total number may come close to the record as well. I've got at least a half dozen clients who I started preparing papers for in 2021 who have indicated they are still interested in proceeding. Many of them have legal plan coverage where all they have to pay upfront is the filing fee, and at least one or two of those already have paid that. They just haven't gotten off the pot yet.
That legal plan also brings a steady stream of will and similar preparations, traffic matters and smaller state court cases. I've been getting picker about turning down some that are outside what I do best and most often, are likely to be sinkholes of my effort, or are where the client just didn't connect with me in one respect or another. Who needs the aggravation? With still four more days to put in the books here, I've already put in more than 100 hours in 2021 than I did in all of 2020 on my own practice side; Rochester is more hit-or-miss, but that's about 50 more hours than a year ago. Granted, we lost a lot of 2020 time to the pandemic's first adjustments, but it's good to see recovery there.
----
The year also brought big changes with the other half of the mawwiage eqwaztion. Eleanor was able to cut her hours at the end of last year once her medical insurance coverage through Wegmans was locked in from October 2020 to September 2021, and then even more so when she no longer needed that coverage after turning 65 in July. Medicare is by no means a financial panacea, especially for her coming from a fairly generous employer plan, but it has helped with costs a little, and she's been lucky in not really incurring all that much in out of pocket either before or after the July change. As of this month, she's back on disability due to pains aggravated by the demands of retail, but her Social Security has replaced most of those funds. It's more affected her in missing the social interactions and work's opportunities to fill her inborn need to keep busy.
We're also ending the year in better financial shape than we started. We refinanced out of a low-interest but bad-for-credit type of mortgage and also replaced the last of our solar panel loan with a second home equity loan that also covered our upgrades to furnace, air conditioning and insulation. We've managed to sock away a lot more towards taxes than I'd managed to do in previous years, and we just got another three month reprieve on resuming the payments on our parent loans for Emily's college. As much as it's nice to go without that, I'm also preparing to resume it, because the sooner we start up again, the sooner the damn thing will be gone for good. I have no expectation that the Joe in Charge (Manchin, not Biden) will ever offer any relief to us or anyone on the payment obligation itself, and I don't want to be paying on that while I'm drooling and in diapers.
We have the same phones as ever but significantly cut our monthly expense for them by taking a stupid old burner phone off our wireless plan; our computers have finally been upgraded; there's plenty of home entertainment to keep us out of the virus pits of indoor cinemas; and the cars are in good shape (mine will be paid for in 2022 and I hope to go as long as I can with the little guy after that).
Oh, and not for financial reasons or any other outside pressures, but we both stopped drinking at the end of October. It's remarkable how much discretionary cash THAT frees up, and how much better we're sleeping and interacting as a result.
So it may not be all "all good," but we're happy with it. This entry was originally posted at https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1680721.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.
But I'm at the office, and at it for most of those remaining four days. Looks like next week will be VERY busy in the one case I filed a few weeks ago and in another I have a meeting for Wednesday to confirm I'm getting into, as well. Fortunately, the next four workdays look quiet, and the phones and inboxes are quiet to match.
So here, I guess, I'll review the Business and Finance sections of the year almost ended, which have been full of changes but overall good ones.
Work for me has settled into a New Normal of sorts. My travel is way down, as almost all things I used to drive to in downtowns and farflung places are now done by phone or virtual video. I have a half-suit of sorts that hangs behind my office door, which I throw on from the waist up for the Teams sessions that most state courts have gone to. Bankruptcy is entirely telephonic, with confirming documents uploaded ahead of time; clients are usually with me for those, but they don't have to be. Since the shutdown in March 2020, I have only stopped in or driven through eight counties of Western New York and only made it to the easternmost a few weeks ago. That's cut down on gas and maintenance expense on the car, and on a lot of stress on me. The moratoriums here on finalizing evictions and foreclosures are scheduled to end in a few weeks, and while I don't do much work in those areas myself, we expect those may unleash a major backlog of bankruptcy filings that has been a relative trickle the past two years overall.
Unless there's a major filing rush this week, 2021 will end with fewer than 2,000 cases filed in the entire Buffalo/Rochester district where I do almost all my work. In contrast, in one of my first years practicing, there were exactly 2,000 cases filed in the smaller Rochester division alone, a figure way below the 10,000-plus filed in the year of the Credit Card Company Protection Act of 2005. Of the not quite 2,000 filed in 2021, I filed 16 of them and may be taking over a 17th filed in November. That's a little lower than last year for me, but way below my record year of 2019 when I put my imprimatur on 27 of them that year. They've been a mix of easy and hard, of consumer and business. If both of this month's new-to-me filings carry on through the new year, I expect that hours will exceed even the record year, and the total number may come close to the record as well. I've got at least a half dozen clients who I started preparing papers for in 2021 who have indicated they are still interested in proceeding. Many of them have legal plan coverage where all they have to pay upfront is the filing fee, and at least one or two of those already have paid that. They just haven't gotten off the pot yet.
That legal plan also brings a steady stream of will and similar preparations, traffic matters and smaller state court cases. I've been getting picker about turning down some that are outside what I do best and most often, are likely to be sinkholes of my effort, or are where the client just didn't connect with me in one respect or another. Who needs the aggravation? With still four more days to put in the books here, I've already put in more than 100 hours in 2021 than I did in all of 2020 on my own practice side; Rochester is more hit-or-miss, but that's about 50 more hours than a year ago. Granted, we lost a lot of 2020 time to the pandemic's first adjustments, but it's good to see recovery there.
----
The year also brought big changes with the other half of the mawwiage eqwaztion. Eleanor was able to cut her hours at the end of last year once her medical insurance coverage through Wegmans was locked in from October 2020 to September 2021, and then even more so when she no longer needed that coverage after turning 65 in July. Medicare is by no means a financial panacea, especially for her coming from a fairly generous employer plan, but it has helped with costs a little, and she's been lucky in not really incurring all that much in out of pocket either before or after the July change. As of this month, she's back on disability due to pains aggravated by the demands of retail, but her Social Security has replaced most of those funds. It's more affected her in missing the social interactions and work's opportunities to fill her inborn need to keep busy.
We're also ending the year in better financial shape than we started. We refinanced out of a low-interest but bad-for-credit type of mortgage and also replaced the last of our solar panel loan with a second home equity loan that also covered our upgrades to furnace, air conditioning and insulation. We've managed to sock away a lot more towards taxes than I'd managed to do in previous years, and we just got another three month reprieve on resuming the payments on our parent loans for Emily's college. As much as it's nice to go without that, I'm also preparing to resume it, because the sooner we start up again, the sooner the damn thing will be gone for good. I have no expectation that the Joe in Charge (Manchin, not Biden) will ever offer any relief to us or anyone on the payment obligation itself, and I don't want to be paying on that while I'm drooling and in diapers.
We have the same phones as ever but significantly cut our monthly expense for them by taking a stupid old burner phone off our wireless plan; our computers have finally been upgraded; there's plenty of home entertainment to keep us out of the virus pits of indoor cinemas; and the cars are in good shape (mine will be paid for in 2022 and I hope to go as long as I can with the little guy after that).
Oh, and not for financial reasons or any other outside pressures, but we both stopped drinking at the end of October. It's remarkable how much discretionary cash THAT frees up, and how much better we're sleeping and interacting as a result.
So it may not be all "all good," but we're happy with it. This entry was originally posted at https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1680721.html. Please comment here, or there using OpenID.