November 11, 2019
***FYI: I have been collecting donations for our Lakota families (will continue until Nov 17th). Details in the Giving paragraph of this post. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
I’m both thrilled to be able to do this work and sobered by it every single time. It’s most certainly an exercise in gratitude though that’s not why I do it.
I discovered the Okini last year and a group of friends pooled our money to buy holiday gifts for children who wouldn’t expect any gifts. This year, I had to start earlier in the year if I still wanted to do it, and of course I did, so I had to pace myself. It takes a lot of time and energy so I accepted that I wouldn’t be doing the holiday Okini.
Delving into this process of buying things for people who need it, I’m reminded again and again, there is so much many of us can take for granted:
- Basic clothing: Folks on the reservation don’t have seasonal clothing. Heck lots of the kids are growing fast and don’t have next size up shirts and pants, nor do they have winter coats.
- Heat: They often need warm blankets, space heaters if they have electricity to run them, and/or a hatchet to chop wood for heat.
- Light: Some families have to chop wood, or rely on space heaters if they have them and electricity, or bundle up in sweaters and blankets if they have neither.
- Some of our families can only cook food out of a can on a hot plate if they can get one. That’s assuming they have electricity.
- The ability to shop and have things shipped to your own address. For Americans, how many of us have to even think about whether a national chain store will ship basic goods to us if we’re domestically located? Hawaii and Alaska don’t always get the free shipping but it’s usually not a question of whether or not you will even be able to order at all. As I shared with the giving group, there are many stores that point blank won’t ship to PO boxes. For those that will, many items won’t be eligible for shipping to specific regions. I ran into this problem over and over, for every family. For our second family, I picked 18 items at Target. A grand whopping total of 3 of them were eligible to be shipped to their PO box. I had to start over, at least a few times, to get it right.
We have an unbelievable bounty when we think about the baseline they’re starting at.
The process of shopping was a bit of a throwback to my childhood. I lived in homemade clothing and hand me downs. We only bought clothes from yard sales for years. I didn’t know that clothes came from stores or how to shop in a store until I was 13. I certainly didn’t know how to look for things that fit! Similarly, many of these children and adults have never shopped for themselves so they didn’t really know what sizes they needed, they make do with whatever they’re given.
After determining which stores would ship to PO Boxes, I narrowed that list further to stores that have published sizing charts, free shipping and great prices. I considered shopping thrift but the cost of shipping is so high that it’s cost prohibitive, or negates the savings so we’re spending the same as you would on new things. Between the two options, I decided it would be nice for our families to receive new things. When you don’t have much, getting hand me downs is appreciated but it’s unusual to get anything new.
As money came in, I searched the sales to see which family we could best help with the essentials. I combined coupons and sales and then once orders were submitted, I updated the volunteer coordinators with every tracking number so they could confirm that the items were all received. I opted for consolidated shipments every time I could but sadly that’s not often an available option so each family’s orders ranged from 3-8 shipments each.
As of Friday November 1st, we had pooled a total of $1,141.33. I spent $5 more than we had so that was added to our personal contribution.
What did our money get?
We helped 5 separate families! I chose a variety of groups: a single adult facing homelessness, a single adult who took in an infant grandchild, a single parent with an elderly parent and young child, and a single parent with 7 children. That makes a total of 4 adults and 8 children we were able to purchase for.
Family 1: 2 pairs of sneakers, 2 pairs of jeans, 11 pairs of socks, 6 shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of pants.
Family 2: 2 giant boxes of size 2 diapers, 2 giant boxes of size 3 diapers, a giant box of wipes (800 count), shampoo, conditioner, laundry detergent, hand soap, 10 bars of soap, instant coffee, tea, sugar, salt, pancake mix, syrup, mashed potato mix, 48 packs of instant oatmeal, 12-pack of canned beef barley soup, peanut butter, strawberry jam, whole grain fruit bars, Nature Valley bars.
Family 3: Shampoo, conditioner, lotion, toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss, underwear, socks.
Family 4: Seven warm coats, eight blankets, 7 multi-packs of underwear and 15 pairs of warm socks.
Family 5: Warm slipper socks, 2 pairs of warm pants, 2 warm shirts, 1 warm sweatshirt.
Why do this?
I suppose someone is going to ask this question, if only in their head.
Short answer: because I can.
Longer answer: Because we are so incredibly blessed to have enough good health to fend for ourselves. (Even though I’m not religious, I do feel that blessed is the right word.) We have love, we have the means to take care of each other in our little family, and we do that well enough to think beyond our own noses. We have enough to give to others without hurting ourselves.
I don’t expect to see any return on this. I do believe this is an investment in making life a little bit better for people in our global community, though. When I die, I won’t regret working hard to try leaving the world just a little bit better than I found it, in some small way.
Last and most importantly: thank you.
I’m so grateful for having this community where you felt moved to be part of this work.
I’m so grateful for having enough, every day, so that I could put my time and energy into this. I’m so proud of our group of friends who give to help others be warmer, be fed, be a little less uncomfortable, without expecting anything in return. Thank you for caring. Thank you for coming together and making this possible.
Together, we made a difference.
October 21, 2019
***FYI: I will be collecting donations for our Lakota families until Nov 17th. Details in the Giving paragraph. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
I often grumble at myself that our monthly expenditures are too high – what are we spending on?? Where can we cut costs? Shouldn’t I be having so much more fun with our income level??
Oh yes, right, we made terrible choices. We live in the Bay Area with a mortgage (renting would save not much, if anything), a kid who needs childcare and therapy, and we take very good care of our dogs. Dogs and children are luxuries we chose.
I remind myself regularly that we aren’t carelessly throwing money out the window. That’s always my immediate assumption when bills are too high – we were reckless with spending somewhere. In reality, those reckless spends are always on the small scale. $5 or $10, maybe. By and large, we are making spending choices consistent with our values: taking care of each other, health, education. We are also making savings choices consistent with our values: we must have a very healthy portfolio of assets so we can retire with some level of income security, some day. Probably not early, but some day. It must be particularly robust to account for known and unpredictable health issues.
This was all by choice. I’m not failing to do money responsibly just because I feel squeezed as costs rise every month. I may always work on adding to our income and cutting our spending but all of these are part of our active choices in what we prioritize in life.
While filling out a survey, I was struck by how my answers about our finances don’t convey an accurate picture, and get to what I assume the researchers actually mean because of lack of context.
How would you answer these three questions?
1. During the last calendar year, how often did you put off buying something you needed – such as food, clothing, medical care, or housing – because you need the money? Would you say:
Never / Rarely / Occasionally / Frequently / All the Time / Don’t Know
2. During the last calendar year, how much difficulty did you have paying bills? Would you say:
No difficulty at all / A little difficulty / Some difficulty / Quite a bit of difficulty / A great deal of difficulty / Don’t know.
3. Thinking about the end of each month in the last calendar year, did you generally end up with …
More than enough money left over / Some money left over / just enough to make ends meet / not enough to make ends meet / Don’t know (more…)
September 30, 2019
I started blogging before the Great Recession and as I prepare for the next one, whenever it may finally touch down, I’m thinking about all the ways we’ve evolved since then.
1. I am a reformed workaholic.
This is huge. I didn’t think I’d ever stop being a work junkie, or stop chasing the highs of earning money and overtime and achieving. I never dreamed of wanting to let go of all that because it’s what paid off debts, paid bills, built up our savings and saved my bacon.
via GIPHY
After the Great Recession, I clung to that even harder because I got a sense of how much worse it could have been if I hadn’t been addicted to earning.
Cliched as it may sound, getting pregnant changed all that. It didn’t come in a dramatic blinding revelation or the glow of motherhood (I never got the glow, I feel cheated). It came, as most things do, in a flash of logic.
I thought about all the choices we were getting ready to make, all the sacrifices, and how it just didn’t make any sense to do any and all of those things if we were not actively choosing to be present for zir life as well. At the rate that I used to work, I would miss every second of it. It felt right to actively make the choice to shift my mindset from a woman for whom a career was everything to a woman who had chosen to embrace a career and a family with a whole heart. (more…)
September 9, 2019
So much of this article resonated with me: Why Does It Feel Like Everyone Has More Money Than You?
The three quotes that had me nodding:
“Regardless of how much privilege you have, if you don’t do the work, it’s not gonna happen,” Cowles says, “but having the privilege to direct your work into what’s going to pay off for you in the future, that’s a lot of privilege.”
My thoughts: It’s so true. You have got to be willing to make the most of whatever you have, or it’s just wasted.
I never had a penny of help with my expenses, from the cusp of adulthood, from my parents. They paid for food and a roof over my head until I graduated from high school. Then I nabbed my first full time job at 17. Then I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and living expenses for them over the two decades that I supported them. For a lot of years my privilege was being able-bodied enough to work those years and make my way.
Conversely, I can’t even begin to calculate the opportunity costs because I don’t know the impact of what I missed. I couldn’t study abroad, couldn’t afford the trips or the lost income. I couldn’t afford to do internships, try different jobs, or even socialize. I have no clue what value those lost relationships might have held. I wondered, often, what I could have been doing instead but I continued to work my butt off anyway even if I wasn’t making the right connections. I wouldn’t have anything that I have today if I hadn’t made the most of what I did have, instead of focusing solely on everything I was missing.
The combination of her parents’ help and her own work ethic meant “I ended up being able to really get ahead in my life,” says Torabi. “You have to be comfortable with the beginning, middle, and end of that story.”
My thoughts: Self reliance became my story, my identity. It actually became a bit of a problem!
I was so deeply centered in pursuing my self-made financial independence that when PiC’s family became part of the story, and the occasional cash gift occurred as would have been normal even in my own family, I was no longer equipped to handle it. If I recall correctly, it was somewhere along the lines of:
It took me years to stop seeing such gifts, no matter how moderate the size, frequency or reason, however normal, as an area of deceit if I didn’t mention it here because I didn’t view the gifts as legitimately mine if I didn’t earn it. I did not feel that way about non-monetary gifts but those aren’t the norm in our family cultures – money is.
Regardless of my relationship with the gifter, I viewed money gifts that should have been the norm in my family culture (red envelopes for birthdays, Christmas, Lunar New Year, and any gifting occasion) as something to be batted away with both paws. I’d so firmly set in my mind that I had to earn every single penny my own self that it’s a wonder I didn’t mortally offend anyone.
I wasn’t comfortable with any deviations from my own story, and I had to learn to be.
As Caroline Moss tells me, “I think it’s more of a question of, are people who are afforded the privilege of getting help going to help others? … If you have the privilege of not having to pay 50 percent of your rent because your parents are paying, how can you advocate for interns to make a decent-enough salary, or for scholarships to support an intern or fellow? That’s where the change comes in.”
My thoughts: Though I’ve always been financially responsible for other humans and in my entire adult life, though I’ve never been able to budget for myself first and others only as a just in case, I never forget that I didn’t get here alone so it’s important to me to pay it forward.
I paid all my own bills from college tuition to gas, clothes, food, and utilities and that was a lonely path among friends who all had familial support but I was lovingly welcomed into my chosen families.
They welcomed me into their homes, hearts, and families, hosted with meals and given a bed when I traveled to see them or to attend Comic Con. Those seemed like small gifts to them but they were enormous in my world where every single penny counted and had to stretch as far as it could go. Each meal was a little shot of love that would bolster me greatly when the time came for me to cut ties with Dad.
An old friend with no financial obligations and a big heart would occasionally pay my way in order for me to join him and his SO on little outings because he valued my friendship and company more than the money it cost him.
A very budget vacation with a dear friend was made possible by chosen family because I could not afford the price tag and missing work at the same time. Even though we stayed in hostels and traveled ever so frugally, I couldn’t have managed the cost of that ten day trip without a big helping hand.
When we were deep in renovations with the house, my chosen family offered us a significant short-term loan to bridge a gap in the budget that – no hyperbole – saved my sanity. The loan allowed work to continue on the new place seamlessly and literally bought us some time to put off the sale of the old place for a few weeks until we could handle listing it. I paid that money back the millisecond that we had the cash in the bank a couple months later, but we were astronomically lucky to have the help in the first place. Most people don’t have that.
I made it entirely on my own for the essentials of life but loved ones helped me with the spice of life that I couldn’t afford. That was incredibly meaningful. Given my personality of being purely practical, those gifts were more meaningful than help with a bill or three. I probably would have forgotten how to live life entirely without them.
Money can be such a complex thing.
As a natural hoarder, my relationship with money wasn’t always healthy, particularly when money was especially tight. I’ve had to consciously teach myself to be open to positivity, to wean myself off the scarcity mentality. Not to fear the dips but to look for opportunity in them, not to let the fear of the future waste my present. It’s not all learned behavior, I always had a tendency to be that person as a pessimist, so I’m fighting against nature and nurture.
If you asked me ten years ago if I was more right about money or if PiC was more right, I bet you $10 that I would have said that I was. But over the years, I’ve come to realize we both are equally right, and thankfully, we’ve grown to meet each other in the middle.
I hope we’ll continue to evolve our relationship with money in a healthy way.
:: What’s your relationship with money?
August 12, 2019
Nicole and Maggie’s post stirred up so many feelings for me about family and money requests. My parents were able to keep a roof over our heads until about 1999, then Mom got horribly sick: diabetes, high blood pressure, TIA, early onset dementia, heart problems, severe dental problems, you name it, we had it. (A related APW post that also stirred up my blood and made me yelling NOOO)
I was already working to pay for college. That morphed into paying rent and everything else. It wasn’t easy on minimum wage, but much like that metaphorical frog, I didn’t notice because it was gradual. It started with covering part of rent one month, a utility bill another month, then a car payment, then more and more.
The money requests weren’t just from my parents. As soon as it seemed like I was flush – signaled by my paying all the household bills in full, on time which wasn’t really normal for our family circles – the requests started coming from all kinds of extended family. Word must have gotten around that I was a community bank without red tape. Wow, my naivete! For all my savvy about making and saving money, I sure didn’t have any about protecting my money from family.
Requests I’ve fielded over the past 20+ years (more…)
July 15, 2019
Walking the dogs, I see a lot of open garage doors. Sometimes, there’s a whole living room set up in there. People hang out enjoying the breeze (or the fog). The rest of time, the garages are storage units. Once in a long while, I spot a car parked, and it might be covered with stuff too, but mostly they’re packed to the gills with boxes and piles and more piles.
It’s positively nerve-wracking to see people threading their way through the 6 inch path left between stacks piled right up to the ceiling. It looks like the whole thing is going to come tumbling down and crush them. It very nearly did, last week. The stacks of stuff atop the boat that clearly hasn’t been out on the water for quite some time because it couldn’t possibly be extracted from the garage were teetering precariously as the lady reached for something just beyond her fingertips. I didn’t want to be a creepy stranger though, since we don’t know each other, so I walked on, holding my breath for her.
It made me reflect.
That’s so much time and money sitting there. Time digging through your piles. Money re-buying things you can’t find and probably already have. Energy and psychic energy. I feel like that stuff preys on your mind. It does on mine, at least. Every time I look at something not being used, the money we paid flashes before my eyes: $100 for that bike we don’t use, $200 for that camera lens, $300 for my bike I’ve never ridden. It’s not a huge list but each thing and the associated opportunity cost makes me batty. One Frugal Girl did this to herself on purpose to train herself out of buying things, it really works!
And yet, we all have a tendency to hoard here. I’m as guilty as anyone else, with my obsession with reusing containers (and really nice note cards and really nice pens and a really good zipper pouch). Some of it stems from not having stuff when I was younger, I keep wanting to fill all the needs. Luckily, I also don’t want to feel crushed under the weight of my belongings, wasting time and money on storing things that just sit there moldering away. I want to feel free and enjoy our space. Emphasis on having space. So I embrace that feeling as much as I can.
Generally, we hold the clutter to a static volume so it’s not growing by much but that’s not good enough. Seeing what can happen if we don’t keep working at this decluttering, relentlessly, is a heck of a kick in the pants to get back on it.
I’ve been staring down (errrrr…. ignoring) my own piles in the garage and the office because a) I keep running out of time and energy and b) it’s really hard to get rid of things with a preschooler running around trying to reclaim everything. I need to tackle at least a box a week if I want to get on top of this but I’ve got to squeeze it into daycare hours.
Stress cleaning works well for me and I put it to good use last week: framed photos that I’m not ready to put up were all piled into one place, two boxes were emptied, piles of magazines were recycled, and a handful of books were set aside for donation. There are seven more boxes in the office and seven more boxes in the garage but two boxes and random floor clutter eliminated is progress!
We’re not trying to be totally minimalist. I remember someone tweeting that their house could burn down and they wouldn’t replace most of what they owned. That’s not us or how we think of comfort. We’re striving for a happy medium of having most of the things we need plus a few things we want.
Speaking of wants, S’s career break post brought up my list of wants. I don’t think it’s a secret that despite all the work I do to reduce clutter, I still crave things like a magpie. Not a thieving one. But definitely an avaricious one. It’s nice to get it out of my system because most of these wants boil down to money and having a nearly endless supply of it, set against my desire not to be found buried under my things like the worst episode of hoarders.
- This adorable Captain Marvel tutu dress. I barely ever wear dresses and I have never in my life owned a tutu but here I am, wanting one because this is so awesome. (This only comes in kid’s sizes)
- Refills for my Uni-Ball Signo 207 Retractable Gel Pen, 0.38mm Ultra-Micro Point. They don’t seem to sell refills anywhere. I hate the waste of just tossing pens when they run out of ink.
- A new ultralight laptop.
- A new backpack.
- Two beautiful brightly colored tablecloths for both the regular and expanded-with-a-leaf sizes.
- A water pitcher for serving guests so I don’t have to walk back and forth to the kitchen filling two glasses at a time over and over. I will have already put miles in cooking and serving before we sit down.
- A better organizational set of baskets for my office. I bought several baskets on sale from Michael’s dirt cheap two Christmases ago but they’re not quite enough for my needs once I gave some to JB and the dogs for their toys.
- A digital piano (which isn’t allowed until I have cleared my entire office of all unnecessary things. So maybe never.)
- All of the books: Seanan McGuire’s, Sabaa Tahir’s, Daniel Jose Older’s, Terry Pratchett’s, Cassandra Khaw’s, N.K. Jemisin’s, Nnedi Okarafor’s, Zen Cho’s. All of them. A glorious library full of books that won’t hurt my hands, a hammock, and a fabulous cushy chair in which to read.
- A group vacation with my closest friends where I’m actually on vacation.
- A three week vacation in Japan with people we enjoy and that are good with JB.
I’m working on channeling my wanting for things into only very useful things we’ll use for many years but it needs some work.
:: Are you comfortable with how much you own?
June 17, 2019
A twitter friend asked some questions about knowing when your parents had money and that got me thinking. How young were you when you started becoming aware of money as a child? Did you know anything about your family’s financial situation? Did you know when your parents got paid by changes in their behavior?
My answers: I was pretty young when I started writing the checks for our bills, around 8 or 9? And even then it stood out to me that I had to post-date our checks for after the due date because we wouldn’t have money until then. That seemed wrong and precarious to me, the rule-abiding child, to not have the money to pay bills when they were due. At the same time, I didn’t have the imagination or the context to figure out what that meant overall for the scope of our family finances.
I didn’t know when money would become available outside of those bill paying periods because my parents were self employed and didn’t have regular paydays. Their spending behaviors also didn’t seem to be calibrated to any particular time of the month.
From the parenting perspective: We’re the adults now!
JB doesn’t know anything about our bills because though I discuss them in the abstract while teaching philosophy about money, ze doesn’t see physical bills or see us paying them. Our spending also doesn’t really revolve around paydays because we put everything on credit cards and I sync up our income to our bills online a few times a month. Or more than a few times, depending on how neurotic I’m feeling.
I don’t want to pass on my neuroticism but I do want to pass on a healthy self awareness around and critical thinking about money, and I’m trying to find the right balance of transparency and sharing for that kind of education.
:: What did you grow up knowing about money? Were your parents forthcoming about your family situation?