2019: A Crucible Beyond Meat

     For ten years I worked at a company because my mom got me the job.  She faxed my resume on a whim.  Five months shy of a decade, the company was sold to a new owner.  I continued to work for this new guy, navigating his ejection of almost all the original employees, his bouncing checks, his refusal to pay the leases on some of his stores, his partner sexually assaulting some female employees, and his hiring of a couple of homeless guys, one who lived in one store and another who had a teenaged employee live with him.  You know, the usual stuff.  For three months shy of three years, they ran the company like drug addled lunatics, finally shutting it down.  I began the following week working at another store he had already owned way up in north Denver, and I made the two bus + a bike ride, 1/2 - 2 hour journey each way for another year and three months.  He had also purchased a couple of new businesses, one of which was in Florida.  The owner sent his alleged sexually assaulting partner down there to run it.  That's the last anyone heard of the partner, and the owner had to make an extended trip to Florida, in court.  That didn't bother his wife, who discovered he was on a previous trip to a nude beach with a young woman.  I'm not making this up.  Then he decided to put his store, where I was working, up for sale.  You see, his office manager got it into her head to, on her own, hire a construction company to knock down walls inside another one of his plants.  He, being someone who no one could ever get ahold of, left his management to figure out without his input what he wanted.  As usual, when he found out, he told her he no longer needed her services.  In revenge, she let us know that he had our store on the market.  So, the dominoes began to fall.  I gave notice, began to look for a new job, found one, and ended up with a new commute to downtown which took less than an hour.  And I no longer needed a monthly transit system pass, now more than $100 per month.  I had a new gym at a fraction of the cost of my old one.  I lost my beloved investment advisor, and hooked up with another one across the street from where I was now working.
     The four years which I spent working for the lunatics are now water under the bridge.  Five months into it and four into 2019, my mom went into the hospital before being sent to physical therapy with undetected cancer.  After three days, someone noticed one morning before she awoke that her color was grey.  Unsure whether she would survive by the time she was returned to the hospital, yes eventually to be diagnosed with large tumors around her stomach and elsewhere but carrying with her assurance that her muscles were making improvement.  From her admission into the hospital, to her stay at a physical therapy center and back again, the bizarre journey to her death took a total of six days.  I think she would appreciate my complaining for her.  The nice thing is, I was now working much closer to her hospital and was able to visit with her shortly before she passed.
     This is to say that I no longer have the money she insisted on giving me each month.  It took me the rest of 2019 to attempt to figure out which changes I had to make to live without it.  I knew I had a handful of expenses coming up at the end of the year and into the beginning of the next.  Before this, my initial meeting with my new investment broker inadvertently conclude that she was attempting to hustle me.  It would not be until the middle of January of 2020 that I would realize this was the direct result of a complete misunderstanding beyond the control of either of us.  She was asking me to make a larger monthly contribution to my retirement investment account.  I spent the better part of a year wondering if I should find a different advisor within the same brokerage house, find another investment company, or cash out my investments and put everything under the mattress.  In the autumn, I did contact the next closest advisor for the same house.  I laid down my cards and told her I thought my current advisor was scamming me.  This other advisor told me that she knew my advisor, and coldly related that her opinion of my current advisor was that she "is just fantastic."  What I stumbled onto in a following meeting with my advisor, in 2019,  is that none of my information was transferred from my previous and beloved advisor's office to hers.  Why?  It remains a mystery.  During our next meeting, in the first month of 2020, I again stumbled onto the fact that she thought I had been contributing a monthly amount less than a fifth of what I have actually been contributing to my account.  The figure my advisor had somehow came from before I ever joined her brokerage firm, and from my previous beloved advisor.  It was an amount I had been paying into a single mutual fund before I signed up with my current firm.  I suspect that, with none of my information with this firm transferring to my new advisor's hard drive, the only investing info available was this figure.  Rather than suggesting I increase my monthly payment beyond what I am actually paying, my new advisor was making her recommendation from this obsolete figure.
     The good news is, I did make use of one suggestion from my new advisor, and I actually increased my personal savings, which is how I covered my biggest annual expense; my annual dental insurance premium.  The month during which my mom passed also began a dental ordeal.  I have crowns so old that they are wearing out.  My dentist wanted to replace a back molar which is next to a buried wisdom tooth.  He told me that the wisdoms could possibly degrade the integrity of a new crown, and wanted me to consult with his oral surgeon, all the way across at the opposite end of the greater metro area.  I used to work out that way on occasion.  I found my own oral surgeon, downtown on the way to work.  He did x-rays, and when he came in to discuss them, he took one look at them and it almost appeared as if he was backing away.  He advised me, if they ain't bothering you, leave them where they are.  I debated what to do and how I was going to pay for oral surgery.  I had my first ever consultation with the dentist I have been going to for a couple of decades.  I told him what my oral surgeon said about the issue, and he wanted me to get a second opinion from his oral surgeon.  After that meeting, we had a second consultation, where I told him that my oral surgeon convinced me.  This is the first time I've ever broken with his advice.  After a summer of worrying what his reaction was going to be, he appeared to be just fine with it.
     Over the first full year at my new job, I've consistently had raise after raise.  But I recently updated my income info with the state healthcare exchange, for the first time ever.  As a result, my monthly health care premium almost tripled, in spite of my sister's claim that our new governor told us our monthly premiums would go down by two thirds.  And I had both Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve off, neither of which I was paid for.  This is reflected in my first paycheck for 2020.  Though employees working in Denver County, which includes downtown Denver, will beginning in 2020 have a new raised minimum wage; this will be reflected not until the second paycheck of 2020.  In my ongoing quest to determine how all this shakes out, the first two weeks of 2020 are where I've bottomed out, coming as close to being over budget as I can remember.  My good bike, the one I ride to work, has dirty disc brake pads.  This means a couple of things.  It's the same as having no brakes, and it's $50 or $60 to get them cleaned.  And I never know what else the shop will find wrong with my bike.  With my luck, they will probably have gone out of business, complete with some goof out on the street just waiting to tell me, "I can't believe you didn't know they closed up dude!"  Ironically, my second bike ("from the department store" as techs are so fond of pointing out) has one mechanical disc brake and one with standard brake shoes, instead of discs operated with brake fluid.  I'll never forget, some 15 years ago, when I was coming home from the very part of town where my dentist has his oral surgeon.  One of my brake cables on a "department store quality" bike had snapped along a busy highway.  I made it to a little bike shop run by some 40-year-old guy with frosted hair.  he refused to even work on my bike.  Well, this other bike appears to have suffered no such brake pad maladies, and it's the bike I will be riding to work this week.  As for the rec center where I've been working out for the past year, the lady in charge I have become friends with.  In spite of the ridiculously low amount, I have yet to come up with the money for my new annual membership; perhaps this coming heck will provide the funds.  She has been telling me not to even worry about it.  Hers is one welcome I don't want to wear out.
     This is the confluence of all the disasters which I can recall during the fateful year of 2019.  During my first meeting with my current investment advisor this year, she does what she appears to enjoy doing at every meeting.  She goes over more details than I will ever have the time to think about.  We hung out for an hour and a half, and among my diverse portfolio, she mentioned a group of individual international companies.  I was curious what the typical publicly traded international company looked like.  So she read a short list of company names.  In the middle of the list was something called Beyond Meat.  "What the hell is Beyond Meat?" I inquired.  As I suspected, they produce vegetarian meat products.  I think I will keep this new year's resolution simple: get beyond 2019.