February 10, 2020

Are you a (financial) optimist or pessimist?

If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?

Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.

Or somewhere in between?

Myself, I’m a chronic pessimist in all ways. That means that I’m highly risk averse. However, risk aversion doesn’t mean hiding my head in the sand, though sometime that’s really tempting.

We still invest in the stock market, real estate, and operate on the assumption that we CAN affect change in our financial lives.

But I periodically see people share these demoralized takes on their futures, and the futility of saving, and piles of people leaping in to agree. Maybe I AM a financial optimist. At least by comparison.

Public sentiment like this makes me wonder how far we PF people are from the norm and how or if we can change that.

Which isn’t to say I don’t think the world may be a hopeless hellscape by 2030. Between the governments in power, the climate crisis, and where the world is going, our planet may well be toast in less than a decade and that cheery thought keeps me awake at night.

But if it isn’t, if we (by that I mean, the WORLD and world leaders because individual efforts alone simply aren’t enough to change anything) actually step up in a way that turns the corner then I have a lot more hope for our financial future than when things looked awfully bleak. That was all of … 2006-2013? Longer, possibly. I didn’t start feeling, what’s the word, good? better? yes, better, about our financial position until very recently.

I went through the wringer so many times. A few little highlights:

• • We couldn’t afford health insurance so my daily chronic pain that started when I was 13 went undiagnosed for more than a decade.
  • Mom’s illnesses were poorly managed until her untimely death because the quality of Medicaid care was dismal.
  • The family car was reposssessed.
  • I was pressured to finance vehicles for my family members whose credit wouldn’t qualify for a loan and then had to sell one of them at a loss because the family member failed to keep up with payments.

I paid the poverty tax over and over and over for years. It was a horrible demoralizing grind.

So, I recognize and remember that hopelessness.

It makes me wonder … How did any of us coming from those conditions even see clawing our way out as a possibility to begin with?

I don’t think there’s anything special about me. My best superpower is I was a natural saver (harsher truth: I had hoarder tendencies and that extended to money) but I came from a poor family. We didn’t have money for any extras beyond food and shelter, we got our clothes from yard sales. My mom grew up in dire poverty so she only knew how to manage money as a poor person would: short term thinking and buying both wants and needs when you had it because you’ll just be wiped out in some other way later. My dad had a period of working hard when it was on his terms but his entire life apparently revolved around finding a way to get other people to pay his shot. He was basically primed to be a grifter. While he did work very hard, he didn’t work smart or strategically, and he took risks that he had other people pay to fix. For his whole life, he skated by on charm and his family covering up his mistakes.

Seemingly small decisions turned out to be a huge influence on us. (Well, me. My sibling turned out to be worse than my dad, so I’m the only one who made good.) The choice to raise us in the largely white suburbs, for example.

Part of this was because it was close to the Catholic families who sponsored our family and helped them adjust to life in America. Partly it was intentional immersion.

The net effect of growing up in a majority white suburb instead of the more popular metro area where refugees and immigrants typically moved meant we were forced to follow the more American ways rather than insulating ourselves in our immigrant culture. We spoke two languages and observed cultural customs but our lives outside the home were about assimilation and that was good for us. Er, me. I can’t see that it made any difference for my brother, in the end.

On the one hand…

Those tweets are from a random selection of random people, so it includes folks who lack education, some are ruled by fear or a refusal to take responsibility for their own actions. So this reaction is very apt:

I can’t imagine deciding that since I don’t understand how the “game” is played or since I hate the game, I just won’t participate and choose to ignore the cost of inflation, or refuse to even try to save. I can’t imagine choosing to give up before even starting to try. I can’t imagine refusing to try to educate myself. I don’t say that because things have gone well for me, they certainly haven’t always done. I say that because I’ve always been too flerken stubborn to give up before I’ve fought the fight. I was a literal fighter as a kid. My brother and I fought tooth and nail, actual fisticuffs, brawling, from the time I was a small child. He was bigger and stronger and faster, but I always fought him to a standstill. I would die trying to bet him and this is how I looked at life in general: angry, fists up, I would beat the system.

Even if I’m not doing nearly as much as I did ten years ago to make a penny, even if I choose to narrow my investing focus instead of widening it as I had originally planned, those are conscious decisions to allocate my mental resources.

It’s not giving up on a broken system. I will both fight to do well for ourselves in a broken system and to fix that system.

My point is: we’ve done really well in the past decade and even I can still feel that hopelessness in the big picture from personal experience. The aftereffects of the Great Recession on my psyche is not to be underestimated.

But we won’t let that despair drive the car.

On the other hand…

There are people I respect, who are doing their very best and make the best choices they can with a limited set of choices, and still feel this way.

Related: Done By Forty has numbers on the subject of the wealth inequality in the country.

I see a lot of gallows humor. They have struggled for the past decade, same as I have, but didn’t have their hard work pay off or good health. Poor health is a huge problem! I’ve been battling chronic pain and fatigue and depression since long before I was an adult.

My mom went through that despair. (At the time I wrote that post, I didn’t know she was also suffering from severe depression and anxiety so I was not as gracious as I should have been.) She put in 15 hard years of simultaneous parenting and entrepreneurship, only to see a combination of Dad’s overreach and a serious market downturn in their industry wipe out their livelihood. She wanted to turn to MLMs, after that, desperately seeking any semblance of control over a downward spiraling financial situation.

Or my friend Andrea, who has had even more challenges than I have and is still fighting to improve her circumstances, a little bit at a time. I don’t fault her for advocating “eat the rich” even if I am, by comparison, the rich. Because it’s obscene to see what billionaires are doing out here on the backs of individuals, it’s depressing to see the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of a small group of people while there’s still childhood hunger, no clean water in Flint, abuse goes unchecked, and labor conditions in those billionaires’ factories and warehouses grow more dismal.

Diana put it so aptly here: I believe that material success is much, much more determined by external, random factors (parental income, location of birth, health conditions, etc.) than personal qualities, although personal improvements and education can help individuals rise to their most glorious humanity. 

As hard as we work, we are also incredibly fortunate that we have PiC’s health, that I still have any mental fortitude after 20+ years of ill health, that we have both maintained steady employment with relatively stable companies since my long stint out of work. It wasn’t easy, that was the hard work portion.  But there were absolutely larger issues at play like managers who saw our value and advocated for us, which you can only hope for. It could easily have gone the other way. My early career was marked with toxic abusive terrible employers, I could have continued that streak and failed to win my raises and promotions and had my health fail entirely due to the stress.

There are also huge systemic issues and a lot of people were impacted by the Great Recession in ways they may never be able to fully recover from. There are a lot of people who aren’t just foolish or ignorant or practicing learned helplessness. They’re facing real challenges and I understand their despairing laughter. I was there, too.

Abby made the case for hope in her post.

Where is that balance between acknowledging harsh realities and still focusing on what you can do personally?

I do much better with that balance financially than in any other part of life. I can only do my part to fight the ills of capitalism, to be a good landlord who cares about people as much as the ROI, to do my best to succeed in a broken system to protect myself and my family while also fighting to change that broken system.

I have these conflicted feelings about the climate crisis that people have about their money. It feels like I have to do everything I can but also that it’s hopeless if there isn’t change on a global and governmental level.

:: Do you have hope? What is it that gives you hope? What gives you the motivation to keep moving forward, even when you hit obstacles and challenges? Have you seen more growth than setbacks in the past decade? Did you feel like being part of this community, if you feel part of it, had anything to do with that? Has anything we’ve done here in the community that has helped you in some way?