Just a little (link) love: fog edition
June 16, 2016
CAREER + MONEY THINGS
Nicole and Maggie: I think something that both Mr. Money Moustache and Laura Vanderkam miss is the security you get by having a lot of money.
I didn’t spot that with LV but I definitely agree entirely otherwise. My family lived the same principles that MMM did for years, out of necessity, not by choice. What I very quickly learned by watching all the branches as they did was you have zero room for error. There’s no buffer for long term illness, for crippling disease or injury, for family needing help to survive, for an expensive mistake. You can choose to live on the razor’s edge if you want but that’s a position of immense privilege, where both security and good health are taken for granted.
FUN THINGS
Useful dinner party tips. I’m terrible at hosting – I get all wound up about all the fancy things that need to happen but aren’t our usual speed and overcommit to the fancy so by the time it’s over you find me lurching for a shallow grave. Reminder to self: stop doing that.
The #Ham4Pamphlet is gorgeous!
INTERESTING THINGS
PiC is great at this but I am decidedly not so yay for this guide on getting kids to talk
If You’re Not Behind Amber Heard, Where the Hell Are You?: You can’t spot an abuser on the street.
How childfree adults stay friends with parent adults. I didn’t think that anything in this list should have to be said but I was wrong – “Don’t assume you’re being judged” was a huge one that got in the way of relationships with some parent-friends who thought that I was judging them as a childfree adult. I wasn’t! And I truly enjoyed spending time with them and their kids, so it was a shame that they let this preconception shade the friendship.
Portland: When the Neighborhood Gentrifies and the Elementary School Doesn’t
Thanks for the link!
Totally agree regarding the MMM thing (never heard of LV before N+M’s post). Living a pared back lifestyle out of necessity rather than choice and with such a slim margin for error is stressful af. I wish MMM would acknowledge that instead of making fun of the concept of privilege and calling all the non-six-figure earners who can’t make it to FI “complainypants”.
Yes, this. I might live the MMM principles now, sort of. I’m not living off $25k per year for a family of three – more like $48k/year for one person, but that happens to be about 30-40% of my net income and I have the buffer of not needing to support my partner at all. Doing that while that is all I can spend though is a completely different thing and I really doubt I would give up working entirely without a bit of a buffer. For example, I’ve saved enough in retirement accounts now to allow myself to spend about 15% more than my current spending level in 2016 dollars at age 60+, but I will still keep saving for retirement as long as I’m working full-time to give myself some more buffer. I love love love having this much buffer today and going from living off of 30% of my income up to 40% now – even that was a huge mindset shift that took some adjusting.
Buffers are lovely.
Thanks for the link!
LV has a big thing where basically she recommends you spend money to make money. (And she gets down on women making 6 figures who don’t, but making 100K is different than making 300K+ in terms of what you can outsource without risk.) Which is a lot easier to do when you have a buffer.
nicoleandmaggie recently posted…What is balance?: a metaphor
@nicoleandmaggie: you’re welcome!
Ahhh ok I have caught the occasional “spend money so you can have a career” thing but haven’t read closely enough to spot the rest.
@Leigh: I love watching your buffer grow, it’s awesome!
You’re very welcome! And you absolutely hit it on the head why I’ve never been drawn to MMM’s writing. Pretending that you aren’t highly privileged in health to CHOOSE to live with remarkably slim margins is not something I can get behind.
Another amazing round-up…how do you do this??? 🙂
Interesting discussion about the gentrification in Portland. When the ex- and I were young thangs, we moved into the first gentrifying neighborhood in Phoenix. At the time we didn’t have children and we didn’t plan on having any. We were known as “yuppies” in those days, not “hipsters,” but it was pretty much the same. The neighborhood became known as “the doctors’ and lawyers’ ghetto,” because a large mid-town medical center and the downtown law library and law firms called young professionals who didn’t relish commuting.
No one in their right mind would put their kid in the public school that served the area. No, it was not a black school: it was mostly poor whites. Phoenix at the time was largely a poor white and upwardly-mobile working-class Latino city — more so then than now.
Poverty is poverty: its effects are the same no matter what race or gender is involved. The school was physically dangerous — if your kid didn’t know how to use a knife or a club, s/he was at a big disadvantage. Academically it was near the bottom in a state with notoriously poor public education.
One righteous couple sent their little boy to the neighborhood school. About the end of the first grade, they realized that even though he seemed to be reading the kiddy books he was bringing home from school, he couldn’t read street signs and billboards! Puzzled, they discovered that his teacher would read each book to the kids in class. The little boy, being a bright fellow, was memorizing them as she read aloud. When he brought them home to “read” to his parents as homework, he was simply parroting what the teacher had read — but he had no idea how to read on his own.
Needless to say, they took their kid out of the school.
Few parents feel we can afford to risk our children’s future on a principle. Of course we’d like the public schools to be better, for everyone. But we can’t make that happen all by ourselves. When other children’s parents don’t read and don’t know how to foster learning in their homes, when the legislature and taxpayers repeatedly refuse to fund public education, when schoolgrounds are violent places, when teachers are hideously underpaid and the best flee to private schools or manage to get themselves assigned to affluent suburbs, you would fail your child to put her or him in an inner-city school.
Most couples who moved into this gentrifying neighborhood either did not have children or already had them in private school. Those who planned to have kids planned financially to put them in private or parochial schools. It was the era of bussing, a well-intentioned scheme that harmed the already weak quality of public education here and resulted in what we might call segregation-within-integration — schools tracked kids by purported ability, meaning the white kids were all in AP sections and the black kids were left afloat in a pool of mediocrity. So if you wanted to put your kid in a decent public school, you had to move to a far-flung suburb outside the city limits; if you wanted to live centrally, you pretty much had to put your kid in private schools.
I don’t think you can pass judgment on parents who want the best for their children and who recognize they can’t solve the problems of the world. If we want American cities to revive and we hope to build vibrant city cores, then we have to provide decent education in the central cities — that is not something an individual can do. It’s a matter of public policy, and it entails tackling a great deal more than education. It entails eradicating poverty. Good luck with that!
In Arizona — and, I’ll bet, in most states across the land — our elected officials and public leaders have neither the will nor the competence to accomplish those tasks. Blaming parents who want the best for their kids doesn’t help the situation.
Funny about Money recently posted…Orlando: What to think?
I didn’t see the Portland article passing judgement, I read it as pointing out the very complex issue with multiple heads and no simple answers but also observing where parents could make a difference. I think that parents actively participating in their school districts and as taxpayers can make a difference but obviously they’re not the only ones who need to participate.
As far as “Poverty is poverty: its effects are the same no matter what race or gender is involved.” I have to disagree. Far better minds than I can articulate this better but to say the least, racism and sexism have very real systemic and institutionalized effects that compounds poverty.
All other things being equal, being a poor white male still holds more advantages over being a poor black, Asian, or Hispanic male. Add in female to that and now you really have a party.
Evidence shows that, in hiring, black-sounding names are discriminated against in favor of white-sounding names. Women are, all other things being equal, judged far more harshly than men with the same resumes and the same negotiations – by both men and women based on female-sounding names.
I’ll point at the better minds than mine now because I have total brain fog! I know there were some pretty great pieces on it but I can’t recall the links for most of them this week.
On Gentrification: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/32511-gentrification-is-a-feminist-issue-a-discussion-on-the-intersection-of-class-race-gender-and-housing
Scalzi on the lowest difficulty setting: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/
How privilege isn’t just about having money or not: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.html
In comic form: http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/09/white-privilege-explained/
http://www.upworthy.com/a-short-comic-gives-the-simplest-most-perfect-explanation-of-privilege-ive-ever-seen
On the poverty is poverty issue: for sure in this country racism is a central part of the issue. I know that Phoenix has vast swaths of low-income neighborhoods — far, far more low-income than what we might call affluent. And large parts of the low-income areas are occupied by mostly Latino/a and African-American populations. However, some of them are mostly poor white — that’s not to say the groups are well integrated: only that people of all three groups are equally disadvantaged because of their poverty.
There’s an area south of the dry river and the airport that is truly Third-World. When you drive through there, it’s hard to believe you’re in the United States. For generations, this was an African-American area — made that way by banks’ redlining during the Depression — but today it’s mostly Mexican and Central American.
No matter which way you look in ANY of these sprawling areas, the schools are pretty darned gawdawful. Arizona’s public schools consistently rank us among the lowest three states in the nation. One of the several reasons for this: so many of our schools are in high-poverty areas, where kids who grow up in poverty are terribly disadvantaged educationally. Move out into the suburbs (so you’re no longer in the city of Phoenix) or put your kids in private school, and you can get reasonably decent education. But in general, most of the public schools are in low-SES districts, and quality education is a rare commodity there.
Mind you, that’s not to blame the kids or their parents…the point here is that economic poverty fosters educational poverty because poverty is in itself a social evil.
I think you’re right that racism, too, is a systemic evil that drags our kids down. But alone, it doesn’t explain why kids in poor white areas are as disadvantaged educationally as any other poor kids. It is, as you point out, an extremely complex problem. Because of that complexity, IMHO dealing with poverty is a crucial part of dealing with racism. I fear we’ll never be free of racism until we can free ourselves from economic inequality. And the other way around: we may never be free of economic inequality until we can fully transcend racism.
When I was a kid in San Francisco, I went to a school that was a third white, a third Latino, and a third Black. Unfortunately for us students, you could count the Asian kids on the fingers of one hand. The quality of education in the school was excellent, and every kid in that school had the same access to it — there was no B.S. “tracking” that segregated Black and Latino kids from white and Asian kids. The school fed into Lowell HS, which I hear is still regarded highly. At that time, racism was still openly avowed and neighborhoods were sharply segregated. But that didn’t seem to stop the school from offering very good educational opportunities to all its students.
We moved to Long Beach, where I felt like I had been put back about three years. The 100% lily-white schools I attended there were very weak — academically dumbed-down. There were no black or Asian or Latino students — in fact, parents nearly rioted when told a Congolese exchange student would attend the school for a semester (horrors!). Yet the quality of education was very poor.
All of which, I suppose, suggests that more than one retrograde issue is at work in our public schools and in the culture at large. Was then. Probably still is. 🙁
Once again, I’m awed at the amazingly wonderful and interesting articles you find online. I wonder if they could be collected somehow in a single work, or maybe a kind of online digest. one would have to pay for the privilege, of course…but what a treasure that would be!
About the Charleswell piece: it seems kind of self-evident to me. Poverty indeed is a disproportionately female issue because so many women who live in poverty are single with children. And because any woman who finds herself single with children is inherently in a financially precarious position — one misfortune can send even the most solidly middle-class single parent into penury. And sure, women are poor because of discriminatory trends that work against them. A huge proportion of elderly women fall into the “poverty” category, even though they made middle-class incomes or were married to men who did…that happens because of hiring, pay, and social policies that work against women.
Crosley-Corcoran’s piece does a nice job of explicating and expanding on the nuances of discriminatory practices and thinking. It makes some assumptions, though: I also was a first-generation college student…LOL! When my horrid stepmother went to Texas and met my father’s relatives, she returned in a state of permanent abhorrence: “They’re not OUR kind of people,” she whispered to me once. Well. Maybe not hers…but WT absolutely were my kind of people. And I was then and am today fully cognizant of the privilege I enjoy by dint of my (mostly) white hide. And I expect the reason my half-breed father and his half-breed brothers passed for white was that they were equally aware of the facts.
Scalzi’s game metaphor is cool. It also worked to push his readers’ buttons! Is SWM the least difficult setting in the game of Life? I dunno…I suspect being male (of any persuasion) is a lot more difficult than it looks.
Morris’s comic strip is pretty much right on. Kapp’s, in my opinion, is flawed (like much of this type of argumentation) by generalizations and assumptions that are not necessarily so.
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I’m so glad you liked and linked to my post. I’m the same as you when it comes to having people over for dinner. I get way to anxious about it. I think it’s just part of my nature, but I am trying to work on it. “No, I won’t over-clean,” I declare boldly. But then when the company arrives, I start things off by saying, “Sorry everything is so messy.” Ugh! I’ll get there, as I’m sure you will too.
I keep SAYING no one will care and yet as soon as we get into that hour before someone arrives, I go into overdrive Picking Up mode. We’ll get there 🙂
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