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?
June 10, 2019
As much as losing our power irks me, I remind myself that test runs are a good thing. They help you expose the flaws in your otherwise theoretical emergency planning with minimal pain.
With storm season, the winds were glad to oblige us with a couple power outages to highlight our areas of weakness.
The first: a powerful storm blew out our power for almost 2 hours. Gas and water lines were fine but we had no heat because our furnace / thermostat runs on power and didn’t have a back-up battery. I did not know this before, good to know.
We had the basics: food, water, candles and tea lights, and a long-lasting Bic lighter. I make it a habit of using and recharging my power pack regularly so we had two full charges for our phones. JB had a tiny but incredibly bright little flashlight.
I had finished cooking dinner just a few minutes before the storm knocked us offline so we had a hot meal while we dried off after walking the dogs. Had that timing not been in our favor, I know we would have struggled along a bit to get ourselves in order on the food front. I still haven’t put together a safe non-flame heating option for our food but I’m strongly considering a set of flameless heaters. If I can find a really good set that’s not an arm and a leg, that is.
We still had gas so could have cooked in the dark if we had to, but not knowing how long power would be out made me hesitate to open the fridge any more than absolutely necessary. (more…)
May 27, 2019
I told Done by Forty that I had nothing valuable to contribute to his bond swoop plan but as I was talking to Penny about her mortgage repayment, the two posts started pulling things together for me. Thanks for sharing, y’all!
I despise our mortgage. I hate that enormous looming debt that chips away at my brain every month because it’s twice the mortgage we had three years ago and I was so close to paying that one off. I hate the opportunity cost every month of the mortgage. This is nothing new.
And yes, we would have some kind of housing bill to live somewhere no matter what we had chosen and this was the most stable way to go in this area. Renting is too iffy with rent increases and comparable homes rent for the same as our mortgage + tax bill at this time. We are, of course, on the hook for maintenance in addition to that bill. We weren’t just being flippant when we bought, it was the right choice at the time.
Our priorities:
- Replace our current W-2 income with passive income through dividends. I once planned to build a real estate empire but I don’t enjoy our long distance rental ownership. Dealing with the property management and HOA is aggravating so I’m focusing future investments on index funds. That isn’t to imply I would enjoy hands on rental ownership more because I wouldn’t. I like being ethical and having a clean, safe place for people to live who then pay that mortgage but I don’t want to have to be hands on and fix things, or see people and talk to them, or screen tenants. I’m not a people person, they are exhausting.
- Retire in a reasonable time span (ideally in 7 years but I don’t have an FI date, our costs are too high at the moment).
- Have no mortgage in retirement – this is one of our biggest expenses at the moment along with childcare but I know it can easily be replaced with healthcare so I want to eliminate it.
(more…)