My (current) weird money things
July 18, 2023
JB and I were discussing spending habits and inclinations. I shared that I’m happiest when I preserve half of my spending budget. Even if that money was earmarked for spending specifically, I like coming home with half of it still in my pocket. Budget. Whichever.
They like to leave it all out on the field, so to speak.
It occurs to me that when I think of spending in retirement, I get nervous because it feels more constrained. It worries me to have a ceiling on what we can spend. But even if I didn’t set a ceiling on our spending, our incomes necessarily provide a ceiling. We don’t have a money tree to harvest when we’ve spent all available income. We have to stop spending sometime. Doesn’t matter if it’s an artificial or real ceiling that we’re choosing to stop at, we have to stop.
So what’s different about having a set budget in retirement?
Is it because artificial ceilings feel safer, knowing I COULD dig into the allocated savings if I want to? Or is it because we’d presumably be only spending and not saving in retirement, and the mode of “not saving” is only associated with bad memories because the only times I wasn’t saving in the past were for bad reasons?
Maybe it’s a spicy cornucopia of everything. But I should spend some time thinking about this and how to adjust my attitude a little over the coming years. I can’t be in Prepper (Chaos and Emergencies are Imminent!) mode for the rest of our lives.
Related to this:
Maggie tipped me to this podcast interview with Mindy and Carl of 1500Days. I mainly know Carl through his blog and mutual friends, Mindy has supported a number of my initiatives in the past. I know them but don’t know-know them.
There was a LOT of food for thought in that episode. It’s really interesting to hear how two people, one of whom retired early and the other of whom still earns money, view their money and their spending habits.
I had to laugh at how many habits we share, how many times I nodded in agreement with something Mindy or Carl said, even as I recognized our shared irrational fears. My need for control, and my fear of lack of control, have always played a huge role in how I handled our money and it’s a slow process in undoing those fears and worries.
Carl said: “My money hoarding tendencies were borne out of trauma and insecurity.” While this is still true for me, I am working on it.
Much like the issues I have with my dad, my deep-seated insecurities born from a childhood where people I trusted betrayed me repeatedly, I’m identifying where those issues drive fear responses and am slowly unraveling those tight reactionary cords twisted around my heart.
I don’t have half as much fear as I used to about money. We save a lot for the future and we also spend on huge ticket necessities like childcare, camp, my therapist, some extracurriculars, take out to make our lives easier, convenience foods also to make our lives easier. If we had lower incomes, I would have much higher anxiety and feel the need to spend less. Making more money absolutely enables me to relax more than ever before because I can save and spend on the income we have.
The x-factor for me feeling comfortable with spending and retiring, always, is the healthcare question. Our employer-sponsored healthcare plan is the next to cheapest one offered and it’s still excellent and it’s still very expensive. We pay about $4000 in premiums, annually. The employer pays $19,000! That’s $23,000 for a year of premiums. Granted, we have really excellent coverage.
We haven’t needed very extensive care, the worst has been my labor and delivery x 2, but my doctor orders labs and x-rays and other things as needed just to rule out more serious ailments whenever my body does the weird things that my body does. I’ve never once had to argue with them about covering anything, or get pre-approval, or been retroactively billed for anything they retroactively decided not to cover. That last part is almost priceless.
When I see horror stories, which are all too common, of folks who have necessary procedures and treatments denied, I can easily imagine the hours of fear and stress of fighting with the horrible healthcare companies which only care about making a profit. We know they automatically reject claims with the knowledge that some people will be too sick or too tired or not knowledgeable enough or don’t have enough time to fight back. We know they don’t give half a hoot about people’s health if they can generate higher profits or instant savings. The vast majority of healthcare companies are absolutely nefarious.
I’m not sure those fears are irrational, at least for me. Because, like you, I *have* loosened up as my financial position has gotten less precarious. And now that we could retire someplace (not where we want, necessarily) without additional income, I feel so relaxed about money. It’s just that it took/takes a LOT of savings to get to that point. Yes, most high income people don’t have those fears, but they also have more of a safety net to fall back on– it isn’t all on them. And yes, many will never have a major financial emergency so it will have seemed rational to be chill the entire time, but some of them will have that financial emergency and won’t be prepared. I’d rather be prepared just in case. Now that we can weather job loss in a great recession and while the ACA is still a thing and we’ve saved for college etc. etc. etc…