March 9, 2011
On FB’s post, Can you survive on an extreme budget and make tough choices?, I ran across Insomniac Lab Rat’s comment that rang old bells for me:
“I didn’t find the game to be THAT realistic, because I felt that most of the times I played I had horrible “luck”, and most people won’t experience that many bad things in such a short time span.”
My response was turning into a saga so I took it back home. I understand it seems unrealistic but it is real – I’ll explain below. It is a bit of a personal bugbear, but I really like to point out the difference between luck and life happening and how they look remarkably alike.
This is what happens: When you’re in such a low or tight a situation that you have no cash flow, every single demand on your money is a choice that leaves another demand unanswered. You have all the same basic needs: food, shelter, medical, education, insurance, social obligations as others, but severely limited resources. Your daily question becomes: how do you cover six square feet of area with only three square feet of material? Everything that comes of luck, plus everything that naturally would have happened anyway and over time becomes defined as “bad luck.” That redefines your landscape.
As a player of the game Spent, what you are exposed to is that greater frequency of what appears to be bad luck but it’s really not. You are experiencing all the demands of real life in the way that someone who has zero outside resources would experience: the illness that is inconvenient for most but disastrous for someone without sick leave and can’t afford to lose the pay, the commitment that takes away the cash you needed for that other bill, a $25 late fee because you didn’t have last month’s bill money, the extra rise in Bill C that makes Bill D impossible to meet this month. They’re annoying to the average person with an extra $100 cushion in pay per month. Impossible if you just don’t have cash or credit.
Probably the less realistic bits of the game are that it doesn’t provide any of the truly creative resources you might be able to draw upon if you could figure them in real life. And that’s about right for a majority-case sort of game.
When you have an adequate cash flow, when you have any cash flow, you can absorb some smaller needs, and then only the significantly unexpected, or the “bad luck” stands out. When you have no cash flow, every single thing is bad luck. That’s why, a few years ago, I wrote about why I didn’t attribute our family situation to luck any longer – it was choices, it was circumstances, it was short and long term developments that happens to everyone that comes up.
When we were living that way, scraping penny to penny, life really did seem to kick us, up or down, like that and I watched my mom start calling everything bad luck. In 2008, I first noticed the trend to blaming the circumstances of our lives on luck. A year later, I realized the toll that making choice after debilitating choice took on her, and our relationship. It feels like being stuck in a channeling trap to ultimate failure.
After having been a real life player in a game of Spent, I know that you take those hits, over and over and over. You make those choices and hope, you make those choices and pray that you get from point A to point B, from point B to point C and you try to find ways to do things different every time to make it better but there are constantly setbacks, every week and every month. Right here on this blog, you’ll see my commenters note that it’s like a two-step, one step forward, two steps back.
It really wasn’t luck, though.
Though there was a time it certainly felt that way after I’d finally just sold our third vehicle at a loss, and then my dad totaled the sedan. My commenters made me laugh, though. “Death, Dismemberment, Disembowelment, Dysentery” indeed.
Yes, there are times I shake my fist at luck. But Luck happens, good and bad. Just be prepared for it, no matter what it is.
December 31, 2010
but it’s a photo to hold you over ’til I can focus again.
Looks like all the poking and prodding about my being next was rather a bit more informed than my tart replies of: not anytime soon!
December 19, 2010
Apparently, the only bakeware in this place is a cookie sheet and pie tin. This fact never fails to surprise me when I desperately need a slice of cake or cupcakes. Thank goodness for the pie tin, though, it’s a fair enough substitute vessel for the following simple lemon cake recipe I stole off the internet (Yahoo Answers). It’s not a pretty picture but it fits the silliness of cake in a pie tin:
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, well beaten
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk
1/3 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup sugar
Mix together sugar and butter.
Add eggs and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice; mix well.
Add salt, flour, and baking powder to mixture.
Add milk.
Bake at 325°F in a well greased loaf pan for 1 hour or until golden brown.
Mix 1/3 cup lemon juice and 1/4 cup sugar.
Use a toothpick to poke holes in top of cake and drizzle lemon juice and sugar mixture over the top of the cake when removed from the oven.
Serve warm or cool.
Baked in a pie tin, it only took 37 minutes to reach perfection and another ten minutes of cooling while soaking in the lemon&sugar mixture. We ate half of it immediately. #pigs
It’s strange how little things like finally having enough staples on hand to bake something from scratch, despite flailing for a thing to bake it in, makes this place feel a little bit more like a home to me.
It’ll be a year in April, and it still feels like I’m a stranger in a foreign land, most days.
December 18, 2010
In any season, I think it’s appropriate to think of others, actually, but this is particularly timely for a few reasons. My good friend and fellow blogger J. Money of BudgetsAreSexy.com has been toiling long and hard on this fantastic project called LoveDrop (defunct, now).
It’s a micro-giving network intended to target people in need, one person or family per month, and surprise them with a bundle of financial gifts and other assistance. This started as very much a grassroots campaign, so although it’s not a not-for-profit organization and your contributions aren’t tax deductible, it’s for a very good cause. The project officially launches on January first, but it’s certainly open for people to purchase a subscription and get involved.
The group does have to pay taxes so the ratio of your contributions breaks down as follows: 50% to the recipients, 20% to taxes and 30% to organizational overhead.
Score one for transparency, and ten points to these guys for pursuing their passion of changing the world, one ‘drop at a time!
And to add to the mix, just as I completed the last touches on this post, I heard that LoveDrop co-founder and friend J. had been fired. Frankly, given all the projects in his head that need birthing with so few hours in the day, it couldn’t have happened to a better man. So consider supporting the cause and becoming a member because wouldn’t it be fantastic to help one of our own realize a dream of making the world a better place?
May 19, 2010
It’s amazing how much you can get done without a regular 9 to 5 taking up most of your day. Your day can start as, well-rested and refreshed, you have that leisurely cup of coffee or tea, basking in the morning sun with the paper. Work and errands are queued up, run on your schedule and so much more gets done.
Or does it?
Sometimes, after a round of several appointments and errands I’d feel terribly accomplished, but there was a sneaking suspicion that it simply wasn’t sustainable productivity. After all, it was rarely producing any income. On the flip side, getting up pre-dawn for work five days a week and squeezing in the personal stuff when and if you can feels so constrictive that the lure of the open schedule is a siren song. Of course, that alone is hardly good reason to stop working full time and I’d be unhappy if I weren’t being productive and earning money to hoard like a treasure-loving dragon.
There are days, though, that the idea of building an empire of something that is nearly self-sustaining, doesn’t require endless meetings to keep alive or keep moving, and doesn’t rely on the vagaries of a single entity for survival is awfully enticing. That and all the new Dr. Who and Caprica episodes that I know I’m missing are nibbling away at my patience. Ok, again, I know, not a valid reason. As a reforming workaholic, I claim right of not yet knowing how to balance work and play.
Have you considered the merits and drawbacks of being your own boss? If you could make an honest and respectable (however you define that number) wage, would you?
Mrs Micah recently asked Are You Ready to Become Your Own Boss?
I know that’s Nicole of RainyDaySaver‘s goal;
VH of Funny About Money is doing quite well sort of running her own show between the CopyEditor’s Desk and her community college classes;
Mrs. Money’s really liking the idea of ditching her full time position because she’s not happy with her job, thence to perhaps become a SAHM for at least a year;
On the other side of the fence, Paranoid Asteroid has no intentions of going freelance or entrepreneurial, and several people agree with her. Unfortunately I can’t find that post!
Which side of the fence do you prefer?
May 15, 2010
It’s been long enough since any graduations of my own that graduation ceremonies are now utterly unmotivating. Or so I say now. May is a bit early for my taste, but maybe around June I’ll feel the energy from Pomp and Circumstance!
In the meantime, there’s something about a) coming back to my old room and b) traveling on a Saturday that makes me just want to hole up like a hermit and so that’s what I’ve done today.
I’ve emerged to spend $30 in pursuit of grooming and feeding. Both were good.
The latter was a catch-me-up session with a dear friend whose family news left me stunned and wandering the mall with unseeing eyes for half an hour until my brain cleared. While there were no deaths, there was a close call, and several other life events as defined by say, your health care provider for qualification to change your plan have or will occur. None of the good ones, though. The best I could do with give great big hugs and wish things would improve, rapidly. Y’know the weird thing? I felt guilty. It all happened after I moved, and I thought, “well crap, my world didn’t completely fall apart aside from that one really tough week, but your family took the hit.”
It felt like the odd void of disaster in my family was moved to someone else I love. Crazy, I know.
In any case, I’ll be writing the usual cousin check for a graduation and another four years completed. As always, I’m inmensely proud and scrambling for an appropriate card to tuck it into because darned if I didn’t take the box of cards up north with me when I moved!
And can I say? I’ve missed this crazy SoCal sun!! I’ll have to remember how not to get sunburned tomorrow.
March 22, 2010
“Finite means, and deciding how to spend them, has a delicious tension that infinite means can’t supply.”
– From Carla Power’s The Pleasure of Pinching Pennies on Oprah.com
I can’t tell you know much I love that sentiment. The paragraph continues …
“If the lamp’s genie had granted Aladdin limitless wishes instead of just three, where would the fun be in that? The link between thrift and being fully engaged with life’s possibilities was recently noted by Barbra Streisand, of all people. Back before she got famous, she had to stretch her $45 clerk’s salary all week. “Those were amazing times,” she told a talk-show host, “when you have your future ahead of you, and the challenges of making that $45 last, and appreciating every penny.
Spoken like a true multimillionairess, you may scoff. The glamour of making ends meet frays pretty fast when you’re worried about losing your house or going without health benefits. There’s thrift, and then there’s fear, and nobody should confuse the two. But for those fortunate enough not to want for basics, there is a glorious discipline in trying to stretch your money to fit your vision of the world. Like a good workout, or great sex, weighing up how you spend your money recenters you, allowing you to feel the reach and heft of yourself moving through the world.”
The distinction made here between thrift and penury is critical — there was absolutely nothing fun about working 80 hours a week, trying to make decent grades in college, all the while wondering if I was going to bring home enough to pay both the rent and utility bills. There was nothing glamorous about dropping silent tears over my checkbook, willing the numbers to match up and stay in the black.
But years after that was over, when I graduated and started making a little more money, I made choices for myself. I started to appreciate what was truly important and why they meant more to me than eating out or buying Stuff. My parents’ choices made more sense: buying used clothes; handing clothes down through four cousins; only allowing me to borrow, not buy, books; and helping displaced family with comparative luxuries like take-out food, money and shelter. It took some years before I realized that they were making perfectly acceptable sacrifices for their kids to provide basic necessities to our extended family.
When you have just enough to get by, your choices are your values. Your lifestyle brings out the grit and creativity that usually hides deep in your bones.
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My post on buying a car (should I or shun’t I?) was included in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance! ’twas rough times out there, the Carnival is overrun by the classic ninja vs. pirates vs. nuns vs. fighting robots vs. real estate agents vs. zombies!
