April 9, 2011
A couple days ago, FB revived interest in my earlier post, Generational Poverty, when she wrote her own thoughts on her motivation to save.
The latest commenter, Layla, asked some practical questions that I simply had to answer in a post.
And I can’t imagine doing what you did during school. Did you fail any classes because you chose sleep over school? When did you have time to shower? Didn’t you go crazy with no time to yourself to tidy up or get yourself organized?
1. I didn’t precisely actively choose sleep over school.
My conscious priorities were school, then work, then sleep. However, I would only take the minimum number of courses per quarter full time (12 units = 3 classes) because I could do that, plus a couple summer quarters and still graduate on time in order to make sure I could also work at least 20 to 40 hours of overtime every week. That meant I was only sleeping 2-4 hours per night, depending.
An average day: up at 7 or as late as I could get up and get dressed, brush my teeth, grab my bag and get out to the car in five minutes. I was a 15 minute drive to school and a quick run to my 8 am class.
My school schedule was either a Mon/Wed/Fri block of 8a-12p days, followed by a scheduled workday (1pm – 10 pm, and stay as late as they needed me). I’d squeeze in a quick nap and make lunch for my mom (she was ill for a time) if I could in the 12-1 hour. Those quarters, I’d also be working Tues/Thurs/Sat/Sun.
During quarters when school was scheduled Tues/Thurs 8-5pm, I might have had those evenings off, and work the rest of the days of the week. I studied between classes, during work breaks, and during other classes if they were boring.
I never failed any classes, but as far as being a straight-A student went, I failed at that. The schedule on paper was perfect but I was one tired puppy all the time and the grades reflected that. I brought home a handful of Bs with my As and that was pretty disappointing considering I was slaving away for my own education.
Funny Story: I did always fall asleep in my philosophy class. And I did definitely only get a B in that class. And I didn’t know until after graduation but because I always sat at the back, behind one of my friends, he used to sell me out all the time to the professor. He’d move so the professor could see me conked out. Meanie.
2. I always showered after work no matter what time I got home – 11 pm, 12 am, 2 am. After an 8, 10, 12 hour shift, following after a day at school, you must shower. Even if you’re mostly asleep, forget if you have or haven’t shampooed and end up shampooing three times and conditioning none. (Happened many times.) But I mastered the five minute shower.
3. Go crazy? Well, not for lack of organization – I lived and breathed organization being straight out of high school so that wasn’t any cause for concern – I knew how to structure my life into a highly productive, totally efficient schedule so I did it and it felt comfortable in the sense that everything kept turning like clockwork.
I still lived the academic schedule so I always knew when I had to do that next set of planning. My time wasn’t my own. But we were all students – my entire cohort was, so that was normal.
You know … I honestly can’t even remember much other frustration. I don’t even remember if I was all that upset by my life being dominated by this grind, other than being annoyed by people who got in my way telling me not to do it. Friends who didn’t understand why I was working so hard or all the time, who wanted me to just get out and play; I can remember being aggravated by their lack of understanding. I needed to make a living to pay the bills and the simplistic outlook on life because they didn’t have any responsibilities didn’t jive with my moral compass and vision. But that was just grit in daily life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I knew why I was doing what I was doing and that was more than enough for me. And at that time, my family was still intact. I had a strong reason to believe it was all worth it. I was doing it for my family that I loved and that loved me. There was no grey area.
Ed Note: At this time, I was working to pay for:
1. Tuition and books
2. My parents’ debt, in $10k chunks
3. Household bills, I was starting to take over paying the rent and utilities because my parents weren’t making enough to pay the bills anymore.
February 21, 2011
The question of motivational staying power was raised on Twitter. @add_vodka asked:
@RevancheGS @GrlRedBalloon @serendipity85 How do you keep motivated to make sure you don’t give up?
My gut response felt too flippant to say aloud. It wasn’t meant to be but I could see how, for people who don’t know me well or haven’t read this blog, could hear it as a dismissal of their very real issue. So I dug deeper. I asked PiC how to explain how I stay motivated because it’s not something I think about. And in the asking, I realized my answer, in large part.
My short answer was: Generational Poverty. I’m never going back and neither are my parents.
My long answer? In my matriarchial line, I need to break the cycle of poorness. You see, as much as I carry my patriarchal grandmother in my spine, I carry my mother in my soul.
Mom grew up, impoverished, in the depths of rural Vietnam. Her father was a schoolteacher who earned just enough to feed his family for a number of years, but not much better than that. I expect they married too young, had her – the first – too young; had too many children, period. Month to month, their family stretched a single small sack of rice bought on credit against the next month’s paycheck. They ate rice porridge, supplemented by some fish if the kids could catch any, flavored with nuoc nam (fish sauce) if they couldn’t. She was cooking, cleaning and raising her three younger siblings by the age of 8, and more kids were always on the way. There was love and support from her grandparents but nothing in the way of money.
As the oldest, she was expected to fend for herself. Needed a new pair of pants? She had to raise a chicken, sell the eggs, and save the money long enough to buy cloth and sew it herself. The same went for school supplies, or any other needs. Not wants, needs. But, if a sibling needed something before she could make her clothes, she had to give it up for him or her. The family was utterly poor, and she was expected to bear the heaviest burden. The burden wasn’t just in taking care of herself far too early, it was to provide for her siblings, and that lasted well into adulthood. While she shouldered it without question, she was bound and determined never to struggle at that level again.
Fast forward about forty years, she’d worked herself to the bone running two small businesses with my dad only to find her health declining, her son a mess, and no trace left of what was meant to be our family fortune. A modest fortune it would have been, but sufficient to buy a home, send two kids to college, and keep my parents through their retirement. Business hadn’t been awful but life happens, as it does, and she found herself both in the same place she’d sworn never to be again, the place she said we would never be exposed to, this time without the ability to bootstrap her way out of it as she had always done. Her parents and siblings were fine, but in the process, she had sacrificed herself.
It tore my heart to see her struggling, helpless, against the twin depredations of disease and remembered and oncoming poverty. The first preceded the other, as is so often the case with many stories of financial ruin, but not by much. It wasn’t just the disease. It was the combination of family illnesses, debts, and lack of informed financial planning that meant she couldn’t simply seek treatment and recuperate. Financial instability added anxiety and depression to the toxic mix of medical conditions complicating her health.
Had they planned for the future better, had they saved more carefully instead of taking care of her myriad family to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, had they been more cognizant of all the emergencies that could and would arise: all the if onlys, we should haves, they could haves intertwined and spiraled into the mom I know now.
Personally, I never want to go back to my college days. Working 80-100 hour weeks, school 40 hours a week, sleeping a few hours a night, and still slaving over a checkbook scraping the pennies together at the end of every pay period, under a tiny lamp light. That was miserable. But memories of personal misery fade.
The memories of my mom and all she’s sacrificed for me. The memories of how hard she worked, how determined she was to lift herself and her family out of their dirt-grubbing poverty. Those ghosts are in my marrow, my tissue, the air I breathe.
So when someone asks me about my motivation, about how I keep going, how do I not give up, the simplest answer is: I don’t know how.
When I took over for her, it began as a fight for survival. Now, it’s fully ingrained. The responsibilities and emergencies will only grow in greater proportion with time. I have my parents to take care of. I have myself to take care of. I may have future generations to educate and support for some time. And the only way to do it is very careful and diligent financial planning. That’s how my motivation is sustained.
It’s a very different answer, I think, than the one that @add_vodka was looking for, which was more practical stuff, so I saved this longer answer for the blog.
The more practical simple answer is, of course, to set goals and align your goals to your values. But there’s value in knowing why you’d want to do any of that in the first place. The Great Big Why of it, if you will.
Thanks to AddVodka, Serendipity and Red for starting the conversation!
{————Carnivals————}
My thanks …..
to Ben at moneysmartlife for hosting this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance and for picking my post Parents: The top bread slice to be an Editor’s Pick! Be sure to submit to next week’s Carnival.
October 12, 2010
For the longest time, I’ve been converted to a wholly electronic tracking system for all my transactions and cashflow monitoring. It seemed to be the best option for my highly mobile life, but of late, I’ve neglected the Excel sheets so shamefully that I have whole two-week chunks missing from my financial life.
In terms of my spending, that’s bad enough, but as payments due to me slow to a crawl, they’re likely to be forgotten and fall off the radar. We can’t have that happening now!
I’ve dusted off the trusty old notebook and started scrawling notes of every transaction for which I expect payment so that I can follow up again. And again. And again.
[Yes, this was in part motivated by the horrified fascination of watching money flow out on recent travels.]
I often find that I revert to pen and paper is like the mac and cheese of my finances, the favorite blanky a kid snuggles in. It’s comforting stuff, pen and paper financials.
August 10, 2010
While washing dishes, or really just scrubbing at the balsamic vinegar charcoal that PiC managed to burn into my new Corningware Simply Lite, I ruminated on the differences in our buying habits. This was prompted by the new tiny bottle of dishwashing liquid he set out last week to replace the last bottle of three he’d purchased while moving into his last abode more than 4 years ago.
I remember, faintly, taking him to the store and teaching him about doubling and stacking coupons, those many years ago. We bought those three small bottles for pennies on the dollar and I proudly sent him on his way with newfound knowledge of coupon clipping. I had no clue that, as a basically single person (we were LD at the time), he would not finish the stash until I moved up years later.
In total contrast, I’ve always shopped in bulk for household goods. Toilet tissue, any kind of cleaning supplies, detergents, Q-tips: anything that could be used up had to be bought in bulk because 4 people would go through the stash like nobody’s business. I reflexively calculate how many coupons I can gather before a grocery or household run, and figure out how to store it later.
The mentality was that if I was out of something, I had to buy enough for the whole household – never just that I had to replace my own. Besides, anyone with siblings knows that once the irresponsible sibling runs out of stuff, your stuff is toast. It was some form of self-preservation. (So was my well developed habit of hoarding and hiding the stashes so that said sibling couldn’t use it up when I wasn’t looking. MY root beer, dammit!)
It’s a bit disconcerting now when I shop with PiC. In a full-size household, I thought, you buy whenever the prices are excellent because you will need and use it. In a this-size household, I’m having to hold back a bit** and realize that we actually might not use three tubs of detergent before Christmas and that it’s not actually necessary to stock up quite as much as I used to.
**Except when it comes to canned tomatos and cereal. The man consumes as much cereal in a week as I do regular food. If he keeps eating at a 1 (my) bowl to 1 (his) box ratio, I’m going to have to start hiding a stash!
Just another oddity of this stage of my life! Watch, when I finally adjust, we’ll add more mouths to feed. Furry, slobbery, doggery mouths.
July 8, 2010
I was semi-stranded the other day with only ten dollars in cash and my trusty credit cards. The combination of poor planning, getting stuck in meetings at work, and my public transportation melange resulted in my having to grab a cab for a less than 3 mile hop. Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled about the extra cost but had no intention of stiffing the cabbie. I asked him, before getting into the cab, if he accepted credit cards.
“Only for a $15 fare or more.”
“Ok, I either have a credit card or I have $10 in cash, and I only have to go 3 miles, will that be enough cash or enough to meet the credit card minimum?”
“Well, it’s like a $12, $13 ride but … just get in, we’ll see.”
We chatted, I asked about his day, and after a few minutes he said over his shoulder, “you only have $10 in cash? Ok. Ok, I’ll just take ten dollars. It’ll be easier and you’re nice. You’re my last fare, my wife called asking when I’d be home, it’s a short ride. And after a shift, sometimes, the nice people are more important, it’s so little difference in money.”
I protested, but he insisted that he didn’t feel taken advantage of and that he was fine with it.
I know it’s not a huge amount, but I also know that cab drivers don’t have an easy job and even though I don’t know how well they’re paid, I believe in giving a fair tip. In this case, I would have tipped $3 on a $13 fare. He basically gave me a 50% discount.
Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever been the “cab driver”? Is niceness important enough to give up some money? Or do you think, as PiC would jokingly rib, it was because I’m a giiiiirl?
May 26, 2010
Watching MythBusters, I wondered if any or all of the hosts are actually as mechanically, engineerically or otherwise functionally ingenious enough to independently conceive, develop and execute their experiments that they demonstrate for the benefit of the masses. Like Zach and Hodgens from Bones, y’know?
Naturally, that led to wondering if mutual friends who are engineers or mechanical genii (genius, plural) would view this show with rather more skepticism than I, and then, of course, I start wondering what I’ve done with my life since high school.
That path of inquiry has been grooved deeply into my musings, though rather subsumed by the more immediate and urgent call of living life, as I approach a milestone graduation anniversary.
As it happens, I’m not attending this event because….
A) they’re charging more than $100 for admission per ticket (plus flight),
B) I already keep in touch with 90% of the friends I wanted to stay in touch with,
C) In addition to running into 30% of the people I’d be quite happier never seeing again,
D) With no doubt that the 10% I DO want to see won’t actually be there.
Despite my resolution to save both time and money, the event itself continues to engenders these musings.
It’s a perplexing sense of insecurity, or a close cousin thereof, that leads me to question why I’ve not yet become an expert martial artist, developed a craft, attained mastery of some incredibly useful survivalist training in the event of near-complete global disaster. (And yet, I’ve had no interest in that show, Survivor.) Or at least completed graduate education.
Now, I’ve been kicking about the PF blogosphere for years, bouncing around among some major achievers whose blogs have grown exponentially, admiring personalities glowing through the internets garnering praise, media attention, and financial success both related and not to their blogs. From time to time, I turn over the same mental stones about the path to blogger success that Funny about Money articulates in her A PF Blogger’s Glass Ceiling? That doesn’t make me feel smaller than I am, nor do I feel compelled to compare myself to bigger and better blogs to my detriment.
Why then does the memory of high school and the person I thought I’d be by now (delusional teenager that I was) make me step back and wonder: What have I done with myself?
I think it’s something to do with the habit of competing against myself. Perhaps there’s also a touch of competing with others but at the end of the day, when you’re laboring to achieve as much as you once dreamed, you’ve set up a tough crowd to impress.
My voice of reason finally pipes up with admonishments that competing with anyone, including yourself, for the sake of winning at life is sheer foolishness. Living life well and happily is all one needs.
It’s just disconcerting that that memory of high school can so viscerally project itself over the panarama of my real life.
Wise Words
The grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s greener where you water it.
Stacking Pennies
“…it’s just that the things I’ve accomplished haven’t really been plans, just things I fell into.”
Mrs. Micah
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning
May 17, 2010
Crystal of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff and Simple Life in France recently imagined their lives without debt. Having spent a full quarter of my life in the state of debt repayment, I’d like to point out some potential lingering effects you might observe after you bid adieu to your personal interest-sucking leech.
Facial tics: when people who brag about taking on unnecessary debt. As witness, Jersey Mom’s overheard conversation by the Woman Who Wants to Wear Her House.
More severe side effects may include the barely suppressed urge to slap the person in question, or a totally reasonable rage.
Ulcers: when a loved one reveals plans to embark on a fantastic unfunded business venture. Without funding. Or a business plan. Or an exit plan. Or anything except blind optimism.
Migraines: when you discover someone deep in debt or without sufficient cash flow has purchased Yet Another Gadget.
I take a few pills of Mind Yer Own Derned Business every morning now, to offset those ingrained reactions. That and a pair of earplugs means much less stress and (verbal) slappin’ all around, at least for the people I’m not related to.
Do these sound familiar to anyone or is it just me?