January 23, 2017
It might surprise you, with the not-exaggerated idyllic (for us) descriptions of our marriage, but PiC and I truly struggle to internalize each other’s perspectives on certain aspects of money.
When we talk about planning for the future, he rightly pointed out that I plan for the future as if I were an island, as if no one would be there to help.
Friends, I laughed and cried at the same time. Well, yeah!
My family had nothing. They were almost the personifications of the rags to riches trope, arriving at the Los Angeles embassy with just the clothes on their backs, striking out on the entrepreneurial road, and managing to earn enough of a living to get by for long enough we even thought we’d buy a house someday. They paid our bills and helped their siblings who didn’t strike out on their own. Unfortunately, in the course of doing business, and helping family, they also amassed quite a lot of debt.
The biggest lesson I learned from that point on was never rely on anyone. When the chips were down, I was mostly alone. Not entirely – relatives who cared didn’t have money, but they would help out by spotting the occasional bargain on groceries and bringing us some extra produce. Sage friends mentored me so I could build my career and blogging friends pitched in to tide me over a particularly rough spot in the year I spent job-hunting during the Great Recession.
Otherwise… My sibling was a hopeless case. My parents were reeling with the loss of their business and their health issues, and my entire extended family that had benefited so long from my parents’ labor had no use for us if we were no longer useful to them. Once we didn’t have money (to give them), they made sure we knew we weren’t welcome to drop in for a cup of tea, or a visit over a meal. Not that I had time to eat but it makes quite an impression to have my grandmother, who my parents had supported for longer than I’d been alive, sneer in my face about the family’s misfortunes, deciding that made me a worthless human. (I never spoke to her again after that day.) ((Yes, I hold grudges.))
Over the fifteen years during which my parents lost their livelihoods, their savings, and their health, after I buried a grandparent, my mom, and destroyed my health taking care of my family, I thought about what they could have done to help. It’s not that I expected them to support us until we got back on our feet, or even to lend us money, or put us up if we couldn’t make rent. It’s that I expected them not to spit in our faces while we struggled but that was too much to ask.
Naturally, I learned to rely on no one, for anything.
It was a great triumph of hope and human spirit that I decided to learn to trust PiC and I’ve never regretted that decision.
But. It’s as hard for me to imagine believing that if I need it, someone will help, as it is for him to imagine living with the knowledge that no one will be there to lend a hand if we fall down.
Maybe it’s a difference in perspective.
Maybe he thinks of “needing help” as a single bill that’s just too heavy to shift on our own. In that case, he’s right. One-off expenses tend to generate sympathy or empathy and it’s relatively easy for people to find a few dollars to help out.
But in my view, if anything went so wrong as to need help, it’s not going to be a single bill that we can’t quite manage whether it’s $1,000 or $10,000. Leave aside from the fact that I’m unlikely to ask for help with a single bill, the deeper issue is this: If we can’t absorb that bill, by dipping into savings or doing without luxuries for a while, it means that something catastrophic has happened to our financial system or is about to happen. We couldn’t cash flow a $250,000 medical bill for example. If something that bad has happened, I’m dropping my towel and I’m panicking. Why? One, we’re much older. I’m 40% as capable as I once was at 18 years and we’re both nearing the peaks of our earning ability. If we’re talking about a full system meltdown that our salaries and/or savings can’t cover, we are not at the point in our lives where we can double our hours and earn overtime to cover it, even assuming that both of us are still fully capable of working our normal jobs and they exist. Two, if our entire financial system has gone down the drain, which presupposes that we’ve already gone to bare bones on our necessary expenses and also that our savings and assets are gone, who on earth can give us the help we need to recover from that? There aren’t grants for People Who Worked Really Hard and Tried Really Hard but OUCH Life Happened. I would like to fund such grants, but they do not exist. In which case, it’s utterly beyond my comprehension to believe that “someone would help” if we suddenly became poor.
Also I cannot bear the thought of being poor again. But that’s a topic for another day.
I’m not trying to prove either one of us right or wrong here, obviously, I feel right and he feels right. In the long run, as the financial planner, I’m much more comfortable planning my way – assuming that we are on our own except for infrastructure issues which should mostly be covered by our taxes – so I will. It’s just such a fundamental difference in thinking that neither of us are yet able to find a spot in the middle to meet. It would really help if we could.
Belatedly, I should say that this isn’t a cause for strife, it’s just a Really Big Something we have to take into consideration when we’re not seeing eye to eye on how we expect to accomplish our desired goals.
:: Do you sympathize with one or the other perspective more? Do you have similar, seriously different, perspectives with your family members?
January 16, 2017
[Background post] Some of you who follow me on Twitter will have seen some bits about this already, but I thought I’d share the unpleasant experience that derailed my last week. You know the horrible neighbor who escalated to making threats? He came back. Yes, that’s AFTER the police told him that we hadn’t done anything wrong and that he needed to stay away from us.
Utterly exasperated by his increasingly aggressive behavior, I called the police again, and on that visit they strongly recommended that I visit the superior court to file for a civil harassment restraining order. They told me that they would again advise him to leave us alone. If we file that order and he harasses us again, he’s subject to arrest.
I tried searching online but the only information that I could find on the process was the Clerk’s office hours, so I packed my bags and headed out, much to Seamus’s concern and dismay. He doesn’t like it when I abandon him immediately after his breakfast, it disrupts our whole routine. I don’t like it either, pup! So here’s how the day went…
Step one: Get the paperwork
My first visit to the Hall of Justice took an hour and all I was able to do was pick up a quarter-inch thick stack of paperwork. The very bored clerk instructed me to fill out 15 pages, then return at 2 pm to see the judge. Totally inefficient! I could have just downloaded this paperwork online and saved myself a trip! But that would mean someone would have had to organize the documents with instructions, and put in updates for the judge’s court house. Somehow I doubt anyone’s inspired to make life easier that way.
But paging through the documents, I could see there was information that would be easier to provide from the comfort of home, so off I headed to get a few hours of work done and complete the packet.
There was a lot of repetition as I filled out the confidential information with my personal information, and the restrained person’s information that I knew, then transferred much of that to the three documents that would go to the court, one of which would go to the restrained person informing him that he was under a temporary restraining order. They asked for an extraordinary amount of information: his height, weight, hair color, eye color, date of birth, full name, phone number, email address, place of business, hours of work, type of car, license plates. I understand why they want to be as detailed as possible to be sure they’re identifying the right person but who asks their harasser for their birth date? I don’t even give that out to colleagues I like.
They asked about the latest incident, then for the history of the incidents. This is where my experience as a manager, or watching way too many episodes of Bones, NCIS, and courtroom dramas, came into play. As much as I wanted to shred all physical evidence of his attacks on us, feeling like they were a contaminant in our home, I filed them away. The ones that I did discard were documented in emails, so we had dated documentation, as well as physical evidence of his escalations, and I didn’t involve the police until a clear threat was made. That made it easy to carefully, and as dispassionately as possible, describe the incidents for the filing, taking extra pages as allowed, to clearly establish the pattern.
The keys the judge needed to file in our favor was a clear or compelling threat of violence or harm, or a history of harassment, both of which I was able to provide with my records at my fingertips. The threat of harm was also the reason that both the filing and the service of the restraining order by the sheriff were free.
Step two: See the judge
Back I went to court for the 2 pm courtroom hearing. I didn’t know what to expect so I’d come prepared with the filing, my written proof, a battery pack for my phone, and a book. The judge stayed in chambers the entire time, and a lawyer would present each case to her for a decision. It was a relatively efficient way to process the dozen cases presented in the 90 minutes allotted for “ex parte” cases. Mine was dead last so I waited for an hour and 20 minutes before the attorney came to ask some clarification questions.
I had to explain our neighborhood geography and the timing of the threatening note, but otherwise the judge was satisfied to grant a temporary restraining order good until we have a formal hearing at the end of the month. I can’t tell you what a huge sigh of relief that was, at least for a few weeks, to know that we have *some* recourse if he comes to harass us again.
Step three: File the paperwork
With the signed paperwork in hand, I had three more destinations. If only I’d known, I might have worn my running shoes!
- Clerk’s office for filing. Quick pause for me to drop off the papers and run out into the cold, pay the meter, and run back in and go back through security for the third time that day. The clerk took 20 minutes to process my paperwork
- Then off to the Sheriff’s office for another 40 minutes of paperwork and filing so that they’ll actually serve the orders.
- You’d think I’d be done, having hit every floor of the courthouse, but no, I had to then drive to our local PD and give them the paperwork to file as well.
Temporary restraining orders are only effective after the restrained person has been served so you have three choices: pay a process server ($20-100) to serve them, have the sheriff serve them (free if there’s threat of violence), or ask any adult over the age of 18 to serve them. That last was a new one on me – as long as the adult isn’t a named protected person in the paperwork, and are willing to fill out the proof of service form which you also have to schlep to the police department, you can just ask a friend to do it.
Alas, I have no friends in the area that I would be willing to ask to serve in this capacity and I wasn’t about to involve either set of coworkers’ in our home issues, so I had to leave it up to the sheriff.
The frustrating thing about that is that the sheriff’s office prefers to wait 1-2 weeks to even try to serve the papers so the neighbor still doesn’t know he’s subject to a restraining order right now. Thankfully, the police department informed me that should he harass us again, they will serve the papers while they respond to the call. They won’t take the initiative to serve the papers since that’s rightfully the county sheriff’s job, but they have a copy of the paperwork in case they have to respond to a call in the meantime.
Step four: Go home and collapse
The entire ordeal, from the morning visit to the last visit to the police department, involved 75 miles of driving and 7 hours of my day.
The courthouse is only open between Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm. Between the business hours, and all time required to pass each hurdle, the process of getting even sketchy legal protection is incredible. When I worked the night shift, I would have been hard-pressed to be able to manage this. I was able to take the time to deal with it but I paid a huge physical toll the following several days, in exhaustion and pain, which I’m still reeling from. Hiring a lawyer to deal with all of this was an option, according to the paperwork, that just emphasizes how money buys you privilege.
Step five: Go to the actual hearing (pending)
This happens in three weeks.
This is where the judge decides whether to keep the restraining order and for how long it stands. I don’t know how this part will go, I’m unhappy at the prospect that he’s going to show up to the hearing and I’ll have to deal with him there. The filing states he’s not allowed to communicate to me there, and I’m not precisely afraid of him but I’m highly concerned because we’re fully cognizant that he is not operating within the bounds of civility and has been happy to defy authority to continue to harass us. He may escalate as a result of the hearing or after the hearing. Fat lot of comfort it’ll be that he can be arrested if he manages to hurt one of us or damage our property.
It makes me wonder how people who are subjected to less clear-cut harassment manage to get any protection. And so far, our harasser has not been the brightest bulb in the lot. Most harassers are smarter than to be writing up their intentions and literally handing them to their targets, and most are smarter than to admit to the police that they ARE doing the harassment they’re accused of. He actually tried to justify it!
It seemed more prudent to wait until this was all over, or at least the hearing is, before posting about it but I really could use all the good positive thoughts because the fact that this isn’t going to be over for a long time keeps repeating in my head.
The judge could rule to discontinue the restraining order, and he would feel emboldened to escalate further. The judge could rule to keep it in place, and he could choose to violate it. Whatever happens, the headache continues.
We’re thinking about security systems but this mess honestly made me go look at homes online again and debate whether it’s worth spending the kind of money we’d have to spend to put miles between us and this guy.
The fact that nothing guarantees our next neighbors won’t be just as bad is holding me back, along with the horror of a new mortgage, but it’s coming down to a matter of safety.
Update to add step six: realize that a restraining order isn’t protection
Four days after he was told to leave us alone and that a restraining order was forthcoming, he left another threatening note hinting that the officers have to go on vacation “anytime now.” He’s so fixated on his revenge and bullying – as if we live in Mayberry and we only have one sheriff and deputy, and boy howdy when they go on vacation the rest of us citizens should quake in our boots because he’s coming after us! There ARE other police officers.
He’s been served with the order as a result of that note. The next time he approaches us, or attempts to contact us, he’ll be arrested.
Nevertheless, I don’t take any confidence from that because a) I doubt he’s going to be prosecuted unless he does something egregious that we can prove was him. We’re working on that, but b) he’s clearly flung all common sense to the winds and I’m not about to become a statistic.
It utterly upends our saving and retirement planning but our family’s safety is most important so we’re moving up our timeline on moving. If it were for any other reason, we’d tough it out, but it’s now about the safety of our family. How many times have you heard people say, “I knew he was mad but I didn’t think he’d go that far”?
Folks, I believe he would go every bit as far as you can imagine if he can find a way. He’s got all hours of the day free to plot, and he’s obviously using them to do so, so we’re marshaling our resources and making plans.
I hate this utter derailment of our financial plans.
My next few months: security and finding a home we can afford.
Naturally, it’s taking a very long time for my latest severe fibro flare to calm down, it’s being fed by several forms of stress. I haven’t taken time off since 2014 and I’ve had to take several days off just to recover. Seamus senses my feelings but thinks that all I need is a 100 lb dog on my lap. Thanks, dog.
:: Have you ever used a home surveillance system with cameras and recorded footage? Something like Ring? Recommendations are welcome. Positive wishes for both a good result at the hearing and our decamping safely are also greatly appreciated.
December 27, 2016
Sunday morning, after the first half of the morning shift, I prodded PiC to go off and do his thing – gym, run outside, whatever. I would occupy JuggerBaby. Ze and I unloaded the dryer together: I pulled out a tiny person’s armload at a time, ze ran it to push each load onto the bed. By the time we were done, there were eight molehills of clothing all along the bed’s perimeter.
We sat down on the bed together, sorting and folding, quietly reading. PiC stretched out on the floor, “for just a minute”, then dozed off. JB and I read several pages, folded half the laundry, and then ze ran for another book. We finished folding the rest of the piles while we read Stomp! six times in a row, always ending with a satisfying ROAR on the last page. It’s a great book. Ze slid off the bed and fetched an alphabet puzzle, and proceeded to identify the animals on the letters. We clearly have some work to do:
Baaa! – the sheep
Moo! – sorry, hippo, you’re a cow now.
RAHHH! – this one is true, lions do ROAR.
Roaring is such great fun that ze had to slide down to share with the now deep in sleep PiC. Standing over his head, ze stretched out zir arms and quietly whispered “raaaahhhh!” Three times, each time more quietly but somehow more emphatically, while I stifled my laughter and carried zir back to the bed: “no roaring at Dad right now, he’s sleeping!”
Ze was so very worried about leaving dad out of the revelation that lions go ROAR that I had to propose a game of Caps for Sale to distract zir wherein you try to stack as many caps on your head at a time as you can.
It was a great weekend. I want more of that goodness, not just on the weekends.
I don’t want to be a SAHM, I don’t have the energy for that, but I do want to have more of those moments.
It’s no secret that I’m building wealth for our future, and lately I’ve been thinking about what and why I’m building towards. Or rather, I’m absorbing there’s more than just the standard “before I become crippled” reason.
For more than half my life, I’ve battled chronic illness twins of pain and fatigue. At 21, I was already exhausted by being exhausted every day of the past 8 years and predicted that my decline could leave me crippled by my 30s. While things aren’t that dire yet, today’s bad days are a few steps up on the Richter scale than a bad day 13 years ago. The consequences are more dire, too. This affects everything.
But more than that, having a great career to support my family just isn’t good enough. Creating a power career, making the money, saving the money, investing the money, making sure we have enough to live til 80 or 90 with adequate care – that was all dreamed of. The bounty of these past few years reminds me there’s more to the journey. There’s joy, and food, and travel. There’s being present in the moment, along with ensuring we’re ok in our old age.
Maybe it’s all the memories of lonely Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks where my family didn’t have time or energy to celebrate, lonely weekends where I volunteered to help friends with their chores so that I wouldn’t be home alone. I was lonely whenever I wasn’t helping my parents work. Now it’s my turn in the parenting seat, and I don’t want to just survive. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful to have survived this long. But despite the constant setbacks, the tumult of life, I still find myself wanting more for us. I find myself wanting early retirement so PiC and I can enjoy as much life together as we can.
I only just read Ms. ONL’s posts on why they’re aiming to retire early this week, and this resonates deeply with me. In my case, while my parents were forced into early retirement as well, I’m the one with the disease and no certainty that I’ll have many good years ahead of us. Nothing is promised, so it’s more important to me than ever before that I find a way for us to enjoy as much of our lives as we do have.
What stands in our way: family and uncertain health
I’ve been taking a vacation from my responsibilities as a daughter and maybe some responsibilities as a sibling. The bills are still getting paid but I needed to deal with my feelings about Dad, and how to move forward.
The jury is still out on any responsibilities I have as a sibling. My brother has been nothing but harmful to me, both directly and indirectly when I had to clean up his messes or live with the consequences, except for a very few times he wasn’t. But even if a broken clock is right sometimes, those times don’t mean it’s not broken, right? Bad analogies aside, I needed some emotional distance for a while.
It’s been months and I’m just at the point of accepting that this is the situation. I need to reduce their reliance on my income, and I need Dad to be in a safe situation where his basic needs are met. Whether he decides to meet us halfway so he can be in JuggerBaby’s life or not is up to him. That’s not up to me, and I don’t need to take that on myself anymore.
What I have to decide is what to do now. It should start with moving him to a new place but the rent at the current home is lower than rents for apartments a third that size. He doesn’t need the size but I don’t need the expenses to go up. That’s a huge barrier – his living expenses, and potentially health care costs. I have no intention of planning an exit from the workplace only to find ourselves depleted if he has a long illness like Mom did.
On that health note …
Our ending to 2016 is a jab-to-the-ribs reminder that health costs are neither fun nor small, non-catastrophic costs of elective but not so elective care get serious fast. I don’t expect we’ll keep having expensive “elective” care every year, but it’s not safe to assume we’d want to have the choice should the situation arise. Plus we have a kid who is somewhat accident prone and it’s our responsibility to ensure to the best of our ability that ze gets the best care ze needs.
We have great insurance now, but I have to do research and guesswork to estimate what it could cost us in retirement, assuming another ten years in the workplace.
If I had to say, I’m probably less than optimistic about our future goals, though not deep into pessimism territory. This isn’t a bad thing – it keeps me driving forward, it keeps me from feeling complacent and being complacent.
:: What are your thoughts on your eventual retirement? Do you have a good idea of how you’d like it to look? How are you planning for it?
*Part of Financially Savvy Saturdays on brokeGIRLrich. *
December 21, 2016
2016 was terrible for unplanned expenses, to the tune of $20,000, and I soothed myself with hopes for recouping losses and building wealth in 2017.
Now? I’m twitchy.
We only have the one FSA account between us since my company discontinued theirs so our family is only eligible for $2600 in tax-free medical expenses each year. This is usually not a problem. We can manage my therapy-massages, medications, and their odds and ends of medical supplies or visits well under that amount but this year we are looking at another set of unusual expenses and I’m antsy.
Usually I don’t stress (much) about unusual one-time expenses, but we’ve had them three years in a row now and that constitutes a pattern for which I have to budget.
In 2014, we got pregnant and traveled internationally. The former was unplanned insofar as you can’t ever know when or if you’re going to be able to conceive, the latter was planned without the kind of notice I prefer for a big trip (2 years because I’m a Type A planner) so it felt unplanned.
In 2015, I paid legal fees to organize our estate and trust (which only took a YEAR to complete), and I started my life insurance policy. Total, $6000 over budget.
In 2016, tax issues, car problems, and something else I can’t remember right this second racked up $20,000 in bills and losses.
Now we’re looking at a very expensive procedure for PiC, and a TBD amount for my teeth that are being diagnosed with something potentially serious. The bill for PiC lands in 2016, thus continuing the “2016 is not awesome for my country and my finances” theme, while my dental mystery won’t be diagnosed until January.
None of this, the bills or the realization, does an iota to induce the good holiday cheer I was determined to ring the new year in with.
I had been considering some orthodontia for a couple of teeth that are misaligned and bothering me, but with these expenses, that’ll have to wait.
I’m trying hard not to be pessimistic about it all but these super-sized expenses turned me into Grumpy. Even while I’m working hard at reducing our everyday expenses, and generated extra income, that savings is just being eaten up and therefore isn’t savings at all! And that’s intensely frustrating.
:: Have you had any trouble with unexpected medical expenses lately?
December 19, 2016
I’m not big on Christmas gifts like I used to be. I used to overcompensate for loneliness and being poor by trying to give as many gifts as I could, wrapped and tied up with a nice bow.
These days, I have as healthy and happy a family life here in the Bay Area as I could hope for, and supportive friends all over.
I still love giving gifts but only when they’re truly meaningful, usually practical, and serve a purpose in the lives of the recipients rather than taking up room, gathering dust, or being regifted because who needs a fourth coffeemaker in their kitchen? I know some people have go-to gifts they give everyone for simplicity’s sake – I give books, for example, but can it please not be a huge, clunky, appliance that only one person in the family can actually use?
At this point in life, my money wants to go toward retirement investing, building our real estate empire, and helping people and animals.
Fantasy gifts: if money and space were no object
$290: Seamus would get the 93-inch plush bear from Costco. Currently on sale for $260. It’s a tossup whether he would sleep on it or tear it apart. Probably both.
$70: JuggerBaby would get this magnetic tiles set. But ze would have to donate or pass along at least three other toys.
$290: I would get this Kindle Oasis. Just kidding, I don’t need all that flash. I’d get the Paperwhite for a third of the price. (But the Oasis is so LIGHT.)
$5000: PiC would get that super fancy bike he admires from afar and we’d get a sitter twice a month so he could go on super long rides on the weekend.
$2000: We have five favorite daycare full time teachers, and five part time teachers or support staff, who have been amazing with JuggerBaby. They’re warm, caring, attentive, all things that make it possible for us to leave zir and work on the weekdays. We’d love to be able to give them each a substantial thanks.
$5000: There are several charities I’d like to support with more than just a small bit of cash.
Reality gifts: because money does matter
$250: Family gifts. I think all but $50 of this is frivolous and we should skip doing it altogether but we have yet to convince the family of this so here it is. The remaining $50 goes towards clothing for the kids so I don’t mind that, since we all pool the clothes we use and pass them along.
At least $100 of that $250 will be gift cards that I purchased at a 4% discount, using GiftCardGranny. The second $100 will mostly be covered by a gift card we received, and the last $50 was covered by gift cards that I earned through Swagbucks and the Carter’s Rewards from last year’s gift purchases. Most of these gifts won’t cost much out of pocket at all, I’ll just have to wrap them.
$75 + $100: The daycare organizes gifts for the center by way of contributions from parents, requesting $60-75 per child, per family. They pool it, then split it across all the teachers and staff at the center. We give the $75, which works out to about a dollar per person, but we’re also going to give some small token of appreciation to our favorites. A card, and perhaps a small gift card? I’m not sure yet but we have about a day to figure this out.
Making new traditions
While I work towards a gift-free holiday season, PiC and I splurged on our own Christmas tree for our home. We went with an artificial tree, to my inner sadness because I miss the smell of a fresh new tree, but the deal was good enough for what we were looking for. We found it at Target, originally $67, marked down to $42 which was covered with a gift card. Add a couple strings of lights and a few ornaments, and voila, 4 weeks of wintery, Christmassy cheer in our living room.
It feels very splurgey, we don’t typically spend money on decor, but it’s a long term happiness thing.
:: What are your favorite winter holiday traditions? Do you typically exchange holiday gifts? What’s your perfect gift to give or receive?
November 30, 2016
A More than Minor Injury was sustained by JuggerBaby.
We shared many moments of toddler distress, and equal parental distress for the pain ze was experiencing. Zir whimpers of pain were pathetic, especially for a kid who shakes off bleeding wounds if there’s something better to pay attention to, and heartrending when it escalated into cries of distress.
After a worried hour of coddling, icing, comforting and feeding but no resolution, we ended up at the ER. They were, despite zir panicked screams and tears, caring and efficient, trying their best to put zir at ease and bribing with many many stickers. Despite their best efforts, we ended up back in the hospital doing follow-ups when that treatment didn’t resolve the issue, and then several more hours picking up medical supplies.
Prognosis? About three weeks of healing.
If that’s all it is, and I’m hoping and praying that’s all it is, then it could have been a lot worse. JuggerBaby left a trail of snot and tears streaked across a few of my shirts so ze might have a different opinion, but I’ve tended to far worse wounds in my day. For now, ze isn’t an unhappy camper, ze is more comfortable and is coping bravely.
There were a lot of moments when I didn’t feel anything in particular. It wasn’t panic numbness or guilt-spacing out, it was knowing that this was painful and inconvenient and difficult, and just plain awful as parents seeing their child in pain. But foremost in my mind was thanks for our good fortune in life right now, because even as we tackled one hurdle after another, it was entirely manageable. Tiring, even exhausting, hauling many pounds of distressed child, trying not to jostle zir, but as long as ze comes out of it fine in the end, that’s all we have to really care about.
We are so fortunate that we have good health care and insurance.
The ER visit copay was $100, our followup copay was $20. Our FSA covers that with ease. The five x-rays were torturous, and the casting was worse, but we didn’t have to ask how much every single test or exam cost. I know exactly how much it costs to take X-rays for dogs and I swallow hard whenever we have to take Seamus back for another $200-400 visit – human medicine is multiple times more expensive. Part of this is because we chose an HMO, part of this is because the level of plan we have in the HMO is really good. Our premiums are relatively high, but the tradeoff was not having to think and worry about the cost of every item.
Intertwined with that lack of worry was the level of care we got. When I wanted an extra x-ray to be absolutely sure there wasn’t a third problem lurking, we had already been surprised twice, the technician got right on the phone to request it, and made sure that we got authorized for exactly what we asked for.
In my decades-long history with medical care, I’ve been seen by grossly incompetent doctors, strings and scads of them, who dismissed my pain as imaginary or in my head. I was prepared to go to war for my child, but I didn’t have to. They accepted that zir pain was legitimate and treated it as such.
We are so fortunate to have money.
We’re not rich, hence my iron-clad rule that we always save first and never spend more than we make. That means that we have reserves in case of emergencies.
That means that cost didn’t determine if we would get the medical supplies and clothing ze needed to be warm and comfortable.
We can afford ten dollars for a cast cover for daycare, since they won’t be able to take the same caution we do to keep zir cast dry. When it became clear that zir arm wouldn’t fit into any sleeves, I had a hoarded gift card to cover the cost of a warm coat – 50% off, a bargain hunter never quits!
We are so fortunate to have the mental space to plan ahead.
I always keep an eye out for clothing 6-12 month sizes larger than ze is currently wearing, gathering them piece by piece so that when ze has a growth spurt, we’re not scrambling to keep zir dressed. Ze needs looser, roomier clothes for a month? No problem, I dug out the little stash of larger clothes. We’ll have enough clothes to last a week.
We are so fortunate that our jobs aren’t run by tyrannical nincompoops.
When we had to drop everything and go back to the hospital, without a question we both got ready to go. We spent the time we needed taking care of our child with a second thought. The nurse asked us if we needed doctor’s notes during one of the visits and we both just looked at her blankly for a couple minutes before realizing why she asked.
What an utterly upper middle class reaction.
It’s been a decade since that was my life but I remember shift work. I remember not being able to make a doctor’s appointment without finding a replacement to cover for me. (My managers never used to find coverage for us so, sick or bleeding, you had to cover your shift. They sucked.)
I remember that I couldn’t afford to lose the wages by being out sick, so I worked through illness, and pain, and without a doubt exacerbated my fibro. I had to suck it up, I didn’t see a doctor.
(And that’s when I was lucky enough to have health insurance. In the year before I was working a full time job, in the early days of my fibro, we couldn’t afford health insurance. I didn’t know what the “oh, self-insured” comments meant for years but opted out of the repeat humiliation of trying to be seen at the local clinic. When I did get an appointment, without fail, a mid-50s male doctor would look at my x-rays and tell me that my pain was in my head. There’s a reason I look at male doctors sideways to this day.)
I hate that this happened but …
Comparing this ordeal with when I had to deal with Mom’s illnesses, the near-hyperventilating math trying to figure out where the money was going to come from, while navigating the near impossible, many hours-long waits in the Medicaid-accepting medical offices – it’s just no comparison at all.
Money and good care makes life a thousand times easier. I cannot be more grateful that while I couldn’t provide the care that Mom deserved, we can now for JuggerBaby.
At this moment in time, even with all the worry, numbness, anxiety, and wondering what the heck is going to happen, we are in an incredibly good place for this and I cannot help being grateful. I cannot let it go without passing on some of our good fortune when there are so many in the world doing without, or suffering terribly.
There are so many, but right now I’m thinking of Aleppo. I’m thinking of the X Clinics and especially the one in Texas serving rural populations who have the least access to reproductive healthcare.
:: Who would you support when your cup runneth over? What are you grateful for today? Have you ever broken a bone?
November 28, 2016
I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I never have to TRY to be pessimistic, I was born expecting the glass to be empty and missing if I turned my back on it. This explains why I’m prepared for most wound care up to a broken bone.
Naturally that means I’m concerned about the state of the nation but also leaves me at a bit of a crossroads with our money.
I’ve got the usual conflicting goals of needing to secure stable income and preserving capital versus needing to use our capital to invest aggressively to grow our wealth while time is still on our side.
This is further complicated further by my family. No matter how much I resent the situation they’ve created, I can’t find it in myself to pretend I won’t care if and when Dad gets sick and needs better care than he can get from Medicare. I know Medicaid care. Mom had it and it was point blank terrible. She was miserable for far longer than she needed to be because they weren’t that interested in finding a diagnosis nor were they interested in treating her. They really just wanted to get her out of the office at each visit and didn’t ask even the most basic questions about how she was coping. She didn’t help matters by putting on a brave front trying to pretend she was fine but someone who is fine doesn’t have blackouts, six accidents in as many months because their vision blurred out or greyed out, or forget where they’ve lived for the past 15 years.
Needless to say, I expect Medicaid to be not much better for Dad.
Ponderable 1: This year I started moving a lot of cash into our investment accounts. I was also hoarding cash because I’ve been looking for another rental property. But with all the I don’t knowness in the world today, I’m not sure that committing us to a third mortgage sits comfortably. How much of a mortgage debt:cash ratio am I comfortable having? Not counting our brokerage account which I consider a long term investment, we’re at about 2.3:1 mortgage:cash right now. If I take on a third mortgage it would feel like a fairly large imbalance. Maybe the more important questions are whether the income that it will generate long term is worth taking on the debt, and whether we could bear up to a year of expenses (repairs, vacancy) without income in case of a job loss.
Ponderable 2: apocalyptic planning – as I’ve said before, I’ve friends who grew up in internment camps. This has and can happen again. With that in mind as a possible worst case scenario, it’s hard not to want to plan for losing everything including freedom despite it being such an major set of unknowns.
Ponderable 3: I have no idea how much I need to save in case of a serious illness and any long term care Dad might require. Maybe $250k? Should that just be considered a cost we deduct from our cash and non-retirement accounts? Probably yes.
Ponderable 4: How aggressively must I invest, and spread out risk, to achieve income replacement in ten years, given the other likely demands on our money? How comfortable can I get with that? And how likely is it that this Presidency will result in one or both of us losing our jobs? I think mine is more at risk but PiC’s industry isn’t invulnerable and our fields are small enough that a sharp contraction would leave a whole lot of us out in the cold.
Ponderable 5: Can we afford to add to our family any time soon? Going by JB’s costs, if we were to add naturally (if we could, and wanted to), childcare would add about $20k to our annual expenses, before food and anything else. If we were to adopt, those costs would be so variable it’s probably not worth guesstimating right now. Either way, probably no. And, dare I? It terrifies me even more now to imagine how we’d protect THIS child, if things go Deep South, and that’s with a two to one adult-child ratio. I had protective worries when I was pregnant before but they were run of the mill compared to now. I’m watching this irrepressible child and thinking back to the Diary of Anne Frank and shudder to think how impossible it would be to hide zir if it came down to that.
I have more questions but these are top of mind as I try to make sense of the hate and ugliness. A Jewish friend has had her car vandalized twice now since the election with swastikas and “Hitler” among other vile things scrawled across it. DT hasn’t even been sworn in yet and the repercussions of his hate rhetoric are affecting real people deeply.
:: What’s on your mind, money or otherwise? Do you see a clear or murky path ahead?