Money Hoops

I'm sitting here rubbing the scar from some old acid wound on my leg, where I'd spilled printer's ink on my pants and decided to apply the ink remover directly to the pant leg without taking them off first. I've just completed transferring money to my bank account; it should go through in one business day, but the fact that these things take time wound up a friend of mine in this process. I'm $9.73 the poorer for the measures I had to take, still not entirely sure if it was worth it, but at least it's for the most part over and I can rest easy.

The process was a complicated one, full of mistakes and course correction, and also puzzles on the level of some puzzle-heavy computer games like Myst or Portal. My end goal was to pay both my tithing and my tuition fee, and though there are still one or two hurdles left to jump through (over?), I'm far enough through the process that I believe I'm in a position to tell you about it.

[Inhales deeply.]

So I've several years of tithes I haven't been paying, though still considering myself a full tithe payer in the interim; let's start with that. Goes on this wise, when my few thousand dollars of Pell grant money first came in, I decided to pay tithing on it, before I realized that since the money would be going directly toward tuition it was never really mine in the first place and that maybe I shouldn't have paid that 10% on it. So, having it all retroactively (proactively??) paid, I went without paying tithing for a bit. Too long, turns out. 

After making an exhaustive spreadsheet of all the money that had passed through my hands for a period of one or two years, and calculating the tithing I'd paid throughout my schooling, I could pinpoint exactly when my prior tithing extension ceased, and what money I had to tithe from then out.

It actually took a while to get to the point where I could pay tithing, though, living from, well not quite hand-to-mouth, but... Okay, this is actually important for later on, but remember that basically my sole income stream is through blood plasma donation, which money gets put into its own separate account. In order to make money on plasma, I have to go through something of a health examination before each donation, which requires my blood protein levels to be a certain minimum. So I have to spend money on, not just any groceries, but specifically groceries that have protein in them, so that I can eat regularly and have a high protein level in my blood. It makes saving up money slightly slower.

Another thing that slows down the savings process is how much money I don't save; I mean I don't go around on shopping sprees or anything (though maybe I could after this, unfortunately a tad too late) but I do enjoy supporting causes on Patreon and Kickstarter. (Speaking of, may I interest you in some Elementis? A third of the way funded, and one month to go...!)

I actually did have enough money two months ago, but that was December which means I had to go Christmas shopping so I actually did go on a shopping spree or something...

But finally this month I managed to recoup everything enough, so that my plasma money finally surpassed my due tithing.

And so here comes the tuition story...

Heck I'm gonna go take a break for a bit and get back to writing this for ya; I've got an opera on DVD I've had paused, plus I'm feeling kind of peckish....

During the opening reception of a new art exhibit at the Spori Building, I got a chance to talk to Kody and tell him I wanted to speak with him; he gave me his office hours (1:00-3:00.) This would have been Thursday. I woke up at 1:00 pm on Friday, and spaced the fact that he would have been in his office starting then; Saturday nobody's in their office, nor Sunday, and Monday was Presidents' Day. So it wasn't until Tuesday that I could talk to him, and he would tell me that the Travel Study in the Arts program had yet to do their field trip this semester. 

I could talk to Carla on Wednesday art night, one week ago, and there she said there was still a spot open on her trip at least. She told me to meet her Friday, during her office hours (11:00-2:00,) only she turned out not to be there, with a meeting going on unexpectedly long it turned out. After a few hours of sitting around, going out and checking back in, I decided to do the thing a normal person would have done in the first place, and left a sticky note with my cell number on it. She texted me Monday morning to talk to Kathy at the art office, to remove the late registration hold (Kody, Carla and Kathy; Orson Scott Card would be displeased with all these similar-sounding names, but at least their last names all sound different, and I've just got this weird affect where I refer to professors by their first names if I consider them friends.)

Kathy removed the hold; I went home to register for the trip.

The course details page says that the class is full already, and with my joining there are now -1 out of 8 seats available. Hope that the humans are right and the computers are in error on this one, because otherwise I did all this money stuff for nothing.

The course page says it costs $500 to go on the trip; I'd thought it was at $250 for Santa Fe but I guess that price must be for the Salt Lake trip instead? (There are, of course, varying prices depending on how expensive the trip might be.)

I had $250 to cover it easy, all part of my Pell grant money this semester (taking fewer than 14 credits, and having a GPA a hair lower than the B average required, I'd thought that I wouldn't get a grant this semester, but I guess I was wrong.) (Of course, the grant this semester was, like, a quarter of what I'd usually get, so it might have something to do with that.) $500 was a bit more of a stretch, but luckily near the end of every month my parents send money to cover rent. $300+$300=$600, no problem.

Only, the cost when I looked on the finances page wasn't $500. It was $667.

Not sure what's up with that, but I have a possible explanation: the fee name listed on the website was "tuition," and tuition is always due by the beginning of the semester, with late fees following. Since I only signed up for this halfway through the semester, I've got half a semester's worth of late fees. Late fees being only 6%, though, to my knowledge, that doesn't cover everything. Maybe it covers lunch, though, IDK.

I hope it covers lunch though actually, because after all this I'm down to, not enough to go on that spree I mentioned above.

Here's how I decided to pay for everything, and here's where it gets puzzly. 

First, I asked my mom to cover the rest of the balance; let's estimate that I now had $700 in the bank, and further estimate $350 on my plasma-only debit card.

In order to pay tithing online, you need to connect your bank account; I have my bank account already connected to my school account; my plasma card, with the tithing money on it, is just a debit card with no real bank attached, just the account, that only the donation people are allowed to load, but it is attached to my PayPal so I can pay for things online that way (neither the school payment nor the tithing payment systems accept PayPal though.)

You can pay for things on your school account with a card, but there's a 2.75% service fee. Didn't want to have to pay that. And payments due on school fees are due the end of the month, whenever they show up, or else you're hit with the above-mentioned late fees. 

With $350~ on my plasma money card to cover tithing, but tithing only being able to be covered by a bank account (even if not paying online, it'd be through check) I paid for half of the Travel Studies using my bank, figuring I could then use the other half of the bank balance to cover tithing, and use all my plasma money to cover the rest of the travel studies trip. This was yesterday; 10:55 last night. How I'd actually go about using my plasma debit card to pay for the rest, I put off till today.

One thing I did know though for sure, and which I also did yesterday, was that I would have to freeze my Patreon support for March, because I'd be just barely covering the rest as it was.

That was yesterday. Today, since bank balance transactions like that don't show up for 24 hours, my bank account still appears to have all the money in it, but it'll drop by half soon, and tomorrow by more than half. Later rather than sooner I hope.

(Sidequest time though; before paying, I went to go get a burrito from Ramires', "best Mexican food downtown," half past 9:00 last night; thinking and puzzling over how I'd pay for everything and being extremely hungry and deciding to think it out over a Carne Asada and Fries burrito. But my plasma card was in my wallet and my wallet was left at home. I had to pay with my bank card, and thus this morning had to transfer over a little bit of money from my savings to my checking to bring it all back to snuff to cover both halves of the equation.)

This morning, I set out trying to find how to get money from my debit card to my i-card, so that I could pay the school balance via my i-account. (i-Cards are the school's identity cards, used for checking out books and things, which you can also load with money for your school account. You need money on your i-card to print things out, for example, which fact has been detrimental to my ability to do homework.) Setting out to the library to see if I'd be able to use plastic to load my student account... turns out you can't, as the cashier's desk only accepts checks and cash. They told me to do it online. As long as I was at the library, though, I used that opportunity to check out a couple of operas on DVD, as I've made reference to above. (Janacek's Cunning Little Vixen, and Britten's Peter Grimes. If you must know.)

(Another sidequest; I'd been meaning to check both of them out for a while but I could never locate the Janacek one; the website always said it was checked in but it was never on the shelf where it should have been. The way DVD checkouts work here is, two day checkout, and what's on the shelf is just the empty case; you bring the case up to the desk and they go back to this shelf thing, like that of the archives at the Family History Library, all these shelves squished together to save space and you have to roll them apart to access anything, only having access to the one shelf at a time that isn't rolled together with the other shelves. Turns out that the DVD was there, case and all, but in a weird spot, educational use only section or something.)

I'd figured that there was an office somewhere, like the financial aid center or something, where you'd be able to load plastic directly onto your i-Card, but if the cashier desk referred me to the website instead, that must have been it.

(Another sidequest, this one failed: as long as I was on campus, I hit the lost and found center to see if anybody had finally located this hat I lost this one time last semester, which I may have told you about because it had been such a merry chase. Nobody had, still; it's probably never going to show up.)

Maybe I'd be able to pay for the tuition thing by loading my i-card? But no, loading my i-card online, just to pay for the tuition thing, would be redundant, since I'd be paying for the tuition thing online anyway, and there'd still be that 2.75% fee.

I just covered the rest of it. And then, two seconds after it was too late, I realized my mistake.

There's a bar where you can type in the amount you want to pay for tuition; there's a bar where you can type in the amount you want to put on your i-card, there are bars for numerous numerous things. It's how I paid yesterday for only half of what was due.

Only this morning, with the full amount of money left written in the bar for fees, I'd forgotten to delete the amount from the bar where I'd been considering loading my i-card. I paid $325 more than necessary-- and that was $325 more than I had. There was still a 24-hour period before that showed up though, so I had to act fast. And at least my hand had been forced, so I could get it over with quicker.

You can't pay money to yourself on Paypal... but you can pay money to others and have them pay you back. I sent $325 to Ryan over Paypal, to get him to send it back to my account, from whence I'd be able to transfer it to my bank account. PayPal's service fee for non-bank-attached cards is a bit steeper than the school's, at 3%, so maybe I should have gone with the first option, but whatever. Once he was awake from his nap, and before he went to his class, I got him to transfer me the funds, which (being directly from his Paypal balance, did not cost him a fee) and I could send that from my Paypal balance to my bank balance (also fee-less.)

The way to claim the money was through a link in this text they sent me, which link I followed an hour after I got the text, which was itself sent after Ryan paid me back, an hour after I paid him. Which was after I screwed up and had to act fast. So we're getting out of this okay under the following condition: if the Paypal goes through to my bank BEFORE the school fee goes through to my bank. We'll find out how exactly within that 24 hour period the school's transfers go through, 10:55ish tonight.

Can't say it's not exciting.

Actually you totally could say that.

And once that dust has settled anyway, maybe I'll be able to get a refund on my student balance... into my bank account hopefully of course... and THEN finally be able to pay my tithing, coming on all these years.

Hold on... Yes, that's it; I went under my finances tab and that confirmed my suspicions. The course fee is indeed only $500, but the course still counts as a course, 1 credit hour per week, and that means $167 of tuition for that credit hour, as per the tuition rate. No late fees involved after all.

Which means lunch isn't covered. I mean, maybe it is, I don't know. But now is I feel a really good time to tell you about the shopping spree I've mentioned.

Porter's is closing down. Tomorrow. They've been doing good business and everything, but the owners (Chuck and Linda Porter) have decided to up and retire, which means that EVERYTHING MUST GO. Crazy steep discounts on all these art supplies. It's gonna be a frenzy. Doors open at 9:00 am tomorrow, and close... once the bones have been picked clean, I guess.

That place is/was already paradise, the people there MY people, like at Hobby Lobby or Office Max, but just a couple of blocks down from my door. And everything so much off, it'd be like, double paradise, by the dashboard light and with an extra-rich fudge ripple. Only... I don't have money, anymore. Alright, like, $11.73, on the plasma card, and however few much left in my savings account. $11.79. But that's really not enough to go off of, in such a momentous shopping spree, is it.

Art night's in an hour; I'll see if I can collect some money for the cause, from like-minded individuals.