March 23, 2011
My part of Tax Season came and went with surprisingly little fanfare, after a fashion.
I used a free code for TurboTax to file my federal tax return online after finding out that there were several complications with my family’s information that has effectively left me out in the cold. I was hugely frustrated, enough so that I couldn’t even really talk about it.
It will cost a substantial refund but there is nothing to be done about it and dwelling on the lost saving or buying power does no one any good.
March 9th and 12th welcomed early, modest, refunds from both federal and state, and that whopping $700 will go toward the wedding and insurance payments, by halves.
Nothing like the lovely mistake Stacking Pennies made but survivable.
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.
August 1, 2010
Katamari Accounting: I think it’s time to roll as many accounts into one as possible.
- 1. The Retirement Funds are now spawning a 4th account due to the rollover I initiated a couple days ago. Let’s make that one Roth and one “massive” IRA.
- 2. The e-fund is spread across CDs, and savings accounts in two different banks. I’d like to have two big honkin’ CDs: One is already a $15K 5-year term CD, the other might well encompass the rest of the cash as well as the soon-to-mature Prosperish Loan.
- 3. Pin Money, Moving and School just can’t make up their minds what they really want to be so they should just become Parental Medical Funds.
Financial Planning: Once I reorganize my finances, I need to help a friend structure some investments from an inheritance. We’re talking multiples of what I have personally, but not so much more I couldn’t create a cohesive plan.
Progress: It’s been a niggling thing in the back of my head that I haven’t been paying my fair share OR saving. This month’s increase, even after I paid a great deal of credit card bills off, is both surprising and puzzling. I’ve now redirected a small chunk of the direct deposit, previously all toward the expense account, to actual savings starting this month. Which brings me to ….
Urges and Splurges: In the spirit of absolute honesty, seeing my number go up when I don’t have a specific account that looks like it’s going begging makes me want want want. But ……..
Spending: As usual, binging and purging. By which I mean, I don’t get nice new clothes, underthings, hair ties, new phone, new anything that’s not strictly necessary so that I can spend several thousand dollars on my parents. They have both woefully neglected their dental care and I had no idea how bad it was until recently. I knew my dad needed dentures soon but just found out that many of his teeth are bad and so are Mom’s. I estimate that the costs will start around $10,000 for basic care.
Freelancing: If I want any extras in my life, I’m gonna have to work for it! Time to go hunting for more work.
Reality Check: Beyond that, in less than five years, I’m sure that Mom will need more assistance than Dad can provide. Heck, in two years, she could require a full scale assisted living situation and I don’t have anything near enough saved for that. Looking above, a whole $107K looks like a really tidy start until you realize that I may soon have to spend $60K/year on assisted living for my parent(s). Then I’m nowhere near ready for the future.
July 28, 2010
I’m barely mentally unpacked from San Diego Comic Con, and I’m looking up another itinerary to go back down to SoCal. I haven’t been *home* since May but this is another quick round trip. Possibly even a same day trip.
In a couple months, we’ll be memorializing the passing of my dear friend’s beloved father. We lost him exactly midway between my birthday and his – we were four days apart and he always joked that I was four days older than him. Growing up, I hated my birthdays because they were always strangely lonely, now I don’t know how to feel about it.
Every year that passes and takes with it another loved one makes every memory and tradition that much more poignant.
I’m considering using my Southwest award tickets for this trip. Between the recent vacation spending, the purchase of tickets for next year’s vacation, the upcoming dental expenses for both my parents, it behooves me to stop bleeding cash.
July 14, 2010
Continued from the last post …
For the last ten years, I learned painfully, repeatedly, not to trust anyone about money. My family’s track record meant that I had to take control or lose my mind. Or the house. I was darned if I’d let any more bad things happen to me again. *shakes fist a la Scarlett O’Hara (Did she shake her fist? Or is that unladylike?)* Since then, it was always my effort that put food on the table, kept the lights on, the water running. Not for me the bad roommates, dealing with shared rent and bills, cleaning up after people, or any of those popular horror stories.
More importantly, while I don’t judge anyone else for their choices to or not to cohab, I can and do judge myself. For many years, cohabbing was never on the table and it’s been distinctly weird saying that… I … live … with … PiC.
But while this choice, more unguided than misguided, went against my decision never to live with a significant other before marriage, it cut to the bone of my philosophy about trust and people. Namely the part where they don’t go together.
By choosing to cohabitate, I depend on PiC. I rely on him to pay his bills, to provide my home, to support me. (Heartburn.) It’s not that he doesn’t earn a decent income or that he’s a bill-evader, he’s just not deathly allergic to debt like I am. Oh, and he’s a spender. (Aneurysm.) I’ve always known that about him but figured that by the time marriage was on the table, which was the only time I’d allow myself to enter into financial co-dependence, we’d have found a compromise.
So this whole moving in thing? Can we say whole system meltdown?
Funny thing, though. After three weeks of (mostly repressing) angst/anxiety about it, I began to discover that it can work.
I wrung some concessions out of him for my own sanity. We keep spreadsheets on the things that my living here will increase like groceries, eating out, utilities and roughly split those. I pay for groceries because my credit card gets better grocery cashback. He pays for gas because he gets better prices (Costco). I get to manage the monthly spending limits and I cook a LOT to keep bills down. After three months, we’ll sit down and review our spending together and decide how to build a reasonable side by side budget. I’d like to contribute more one way or another. We’re not combining finances, but we’ll make them cohabitable.
We compromise a lot. We’ve had our spats but they were mostly about misunderstanding the other person’s motives. We step on each others’ toes because we try not to. Once we talk it through, it’s fine.
He’s been amazingly supportive about my health issues. (Though, his supportiveness isn’t really amazing for him. If you knew him, you’d know that’s just the way he is.) We giggle a lot. We have the dumbest jokes and snipe at each other until it gets so ridiculous that we crack up. He lets me grouse; I nudge him when he’s winding himself up. I can’t recall why I thought cohabitation was such a horrible idea now that I’ve experienced it.
Not only am I out of a toxically worrying environment, I can just sit in the living room and relax. In my entire adult life, I’ve never done that. Not in a safe, my-home kind of place, and definitely not with any sense that I can trust someone else to take care of me if I need help. How luxurious!
And because of all this weird and good stuff, the thought of marriage no longer causes anxiety. That’s some serious progress. Yes, my family still needs my help and yes, I still feel very responsible for their health and safety. No, I have no idea where I can afford to move them and no, I don’t feel at peace about them. But I can, for the first time, look at the future and think about making plans with a sense of purpose instead of panic.
Perhaps I need to start a courthouse fund. Because I still think eloping’s the way to go. 🙂
July 12, 2010
Within reason, I share quite a lot of my life here on this blog. That’s why I keep it anonymous – between the financial soul-baring and the occasional emoting, it’s somehow less embarrassing if people who know me don’t know me.
Still, there’s this thing I’ve been keeping this under my hat for some time. For lots of reasons.
I wasn’t sure it was the right decision. I hadn’t taken all the prudent, protective steps beforehand. I wasn’t sure that I was even ready to do this so if it blew up in my face, I kind of wanted to go hide in a corner and not talk about it. But most importantly, because my family couldn’t know. In a bigger way than they can’t know that I’ve been saving for their later years, or that it’s been an incredible struggle with my own health and happiness to provide for them. More than all that guilt-related sort of stuff, they couldn’t know this because I can’t trust my sibling with this knowledge.
As you well know, my sibling is my polar opposite: where I’m responsible, he’s footloose and fancy-free. Where I’m cautious, he’s reckless, where I’m a saver, he’s a spender. Most importantly, when I’m on my own, I take care of business. When he doesn’t have someone to answer to, he’s destructive. And my moving out had to be kept a secret for that reason.
But the other thing that I kept even more under my hat was that I moved in with PiC.
It felt like a cheat.
He refused to talk rent, he refused to talk bills, he refused to talk 50/50 anything. As far as he was concerned, it made the most sense for us to be living in the same place (literally, not just in the same city) at the same time, he was already paying a mortgage regardless of where I was or what I was doing, I needed time to get back on my feet and settled, and I already had too many expenses. Never no mind that the responsible thing to do was to talk out our expectations, household duties and I always always pay my way.
It drove me nuts. But I had two weeks to find a place, my family’s expenses eat up at least 70% of my take home salary and that’s before I’d factored in personal living expenses. It was really hard to make any sort of functional budget including rent, food, insurance. So, uncharacteristically, irresponsibly, I took a leap of faith and moved in with him.
Stay tuned….
July 3, 2010
One of the hardest things about having moved away from family and friends is that there’s no way I can swoop in and visit whenever someone’s ill, depressed or distressed. That was probably the best thing about being unemployed/freelancing: when situations came up, I could be there for people.
In fact, the way people tend to hermitize when they’re going through rough times (which I’ve been doing myself for three months, so I’m not throwing stones), I’m not even likely to know that they’re having a bad time of it until well afterward.
I’m attending an old friend’s wedding this weekend and it happened to put us in the right place for once. PiC’s sibs were expecting and their wee one was born early in an emergency situation. We’ll be able to visit them in the hospital and help out over the weekend if there’s anything they need.
My fingers are crossed that the health situation resolves soon and they can enjoy their new addition without this extra concern soon.
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and an extra day off for those who have Monday off.
