July 14, 2010
Continued from the last post …
For the last ten years, I learned painfully, repeatedly, not to trust anyone about money. My family’s track record meant that I had to take control or lose my mind. Or the house. I was darned if I’d let any more bad things happen to me again. *shakes fist a la Scarlett O’Hara (Did she shake her fist? Or is that unladylike?)* Since then, it was always my effort that put food on the table, kept the lights on, the water running. Not for me the bad roommates, dealing with shared rent and bills, cleaning up after people, or any of those popular horror stories.
More importantly, while I don’t judge anyone else for their choices to or not to cohab, I can and do judge myself. For many years, cohabbing was never on the table and it’s been distinctly weird saying that… I … live … with … PiC.
But while this choice, more unguided than misguided, went against my decision never to live with a significant other before marriage, it cut to the bone of my philosophy about trust and people. Namely the part where they don’t go together.
By choosing to cohabitate, I depend on PiC. I rely on him to pay his bills, to provide my home, to support me. (Heartburn.) It’s not that he doesn’t earn a decent income or that he’s a bill-evader, he’s just not deathly allergic to debt like I am. Oh, and he’s a spender. (Aneurysm.) I’ve always known that about him but figured that by the time marriage was on the table, which was the only time I’d allow myself to enter into financial co-dependence, we’d have found a compromise.
So this whole moving in thing? Can we say whole system meltdown?
Funny thing, though. After three weeks of (mostly repressing) angst/anxiety about it, I began to discover that it can work.
I wrung some concessions out of him for my own sanity. We keep spreadsheets on the things that my living here will increase like groceries, eating out, utilities and roughly split those. I pay for groceries because my credit card gets better grocery cashback. He pays for gas because he gets better prices (Costco). I get to manage the monthly spending limits and I cook a LOT to keep bills down. After three months, we’ll sit down and review our spending together and decide how to build a reasonable side by side budget. I’d like to contribute more one way or another. We’re not combining finances, but we’ll make them cohabitable.
We compromise a lot. We’ve had our spats but they were mostly about misunderstanding the other person’s motives. We step on each others’ toes because we try not to. Once we talk it through, it’s fine.
He’s been amazingly supportive about my health issues. (Though, his supportiveness isn’t really amazing for him. If you knew him, you’d know that’s just the way he is.) We giggle a lot. We have the dumbest jokes and snipe at each other until it gets so ridiculous that we crack up. He lets me grouse; I nudge him when he’s winding himself up. I can’t recall why I thought cohabitation was such a horrible idea now that I’ve experienced it.
Not only am I out of a toxically worrying environment, I can just sit in the living room and relax. In my entire adult life, I’ve never done that. Not in a safe, my-home kind of place, and definitely not with any sense that I can trust someone else to take care of me if I need help. How luxurious!
And because of all this weird and good stuff, the thought of marriage no longer causes anxiety. That’s some serious progress. Yes, my family still needs my help and yes, I still feel very responsible for their health and safety. No, I have no idea where I can afford to move them and no, I don’t feel at peace about them. But I can, for the first time, look at the future and think about making plans with a sense of purpose instead of panic.
Perhaps I need to start a courthouse fund. Because I still think eloping’s the way to go. 🙂
July 12, 2010
Within reason, I share quite a lot of my life here on this blog. That’s why I keep it anonymous – between the financial soul-baring and the occasional emoting, it’s somehow less embarrassing if people who know me don’t know me.
Still, there’s this thing I’ve been keeping this under my hat for some time. For lots of reasons.
I wasn’t sure it was the right decision. I hadn’t taken all the prudent, protective steps beforehand. I wasn’t sure that I was even ready to do this so if it blew up in my face, I kind of wanted to go hide in a corner and not talk about it. But most importantly, because my family couldn’t know. In a bigger way than they can’t know that I’ve been saving for their later years, or that it’s been an incredible struggle with my own health and happiness to provide for them. More than all that guilt-related sort of stuff, they couldn’t know this because I can’t trust my sibling with this knowledge.
As you well know, my sibling is my polar opposite: where I’m responsible, he’s footloose and fancy-free. Where I’m cautious, he’s reckless, where I’m a saver, he’s a spender. Most importantly, when I’m on my own, I take care of business. When he doesn’t have someone to answer to, he’s destructive. And my moving out had to be kept a secret for that reason.
But the other thing that I kept even more under my hat was that I moved in with PiC.
It felt like a cheat.
He refused to talk rent, he refused to talk bills, he refused to talk 50/50 anything. As far as he was concerned, it made the most sense for us to be living in the same place (literally, not just in the same city) at the same time, he was already paying a mortgage regardless of where I was or what I was doing, I needed time to get back on my feet and settled, and I already had too many expenses. Never no mind that the responsible thing to do was to talk out our expectations, household duties and I always always pay my way.
It drove me nuts. But I had two weeks to find a place, my family’s expenses eat up at least 70% of my take home salary and that’s before I’d factored in personal living expenses. It was really hard to make any sort of functional budget including rent, food, insurance. So, uncharacteristically, irresponsibly, I took a leap of faith and moved in with him.
Stay tuned….
July 3, 2010
One of the hardest things about having moved away from family and friends is that there’s no way I can swoop in and visit whenever someone’s ill, depressed or distressed. That was probably the best thing about being unemployed/freelancing: when situations came up, I could be there for people.
In fact, the way people tend to hermitize when they’re going through rough times (which I’ve been doing myself for three months, so I’m not throwing stones), I’m not even likely to know that they’re having a bad time of it until well afterward.
I’m attending an old friend’s wedding this weekend and it happened to put us in the right place for once. PiC’s sibs were expecting and their wee one was born early in an emergency situation. We’ll be able to visit them in the hospital and help out over the weekend if there’s anything they need.
My fingers are crossed that the health situation resolves soon and they can enjoy their new addition without this extra concern soon.
Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and an extra day off for those who have Monday off.
May 15, 2010
It’s been long enough since any graduations of my own that graduation ceremonies are now utterly unmotivating. Or so I say now. May is a bit early for my taste, but maybe around June I’ll feel the energy from Pomp and Circumstance!
In the meantime, there’s something about a) coming back to my old room and b) traveling on a Saturday that makes me just want to hole up like a hermit and so that’s what I’ve done today.
I’ve emerged to spend $30 in pursuit of grooming and feeding. Both were good.
The latter was a catch-me-up session with a dear friend whose family news left me stunned and wandering the mall with unseeing eyes for half an hour until my brain cleared. While there were no deaths, there was a close call, and several other life events as defined by say, your health care provider for qualification to change your plan have or will occur. None of the good ones, though. The best I could do with give great big hugs and wish things would improve, rapidly. Y’know the weird thing? I felt guilty. It all happened after I moved, and I thought, “well crap, my world didn’t completely fall apart aside from that one really tough week, but your family took the hit.”
It felt like the odd void of disaster in my family was moved to someone else I love. Crazy, I know.
In any case, I’ll be writing the usual cousin check for a graduation and another four years completed. As always, I’m inmensely proud and scrambling for an appropriate card to tuck it into because darned if I didn’t take the box of cards up north with me when I moved!
And can I say? I’ve missed this crazy SoCal sun!! I’ll have to remember how not to get sunburned tomorrow.
March 29, 2010
Writing about thrift and the essence of making the best of your life reminded me that it’s been two years and two months since my grandma died. She couldn’t be a physical presence in my childhood but she represented incredible strength and integrity that informed my developing character.
Seventy-five years ago, my beloved grandmother married into a wealthy (in name only, at that point) family with only her bridal money, wedding clothes and her wedding ring. Her father-in-law, a landowner, had gambled away the family fortune, and the clock was ticking on the call date from his last throw of the die. At the time of their wedding, he had less than three years to pay the price of the final debt or forfeit thousands of acres of unworked lands. His children despaired and gave up the land as lost.
Armed with no more than an 8th-grade education and the instinctive determination to reclaim her new family’s property, she rolled up her sleeves and set about creating wealth from the lands. She directed my grandfather in his new duties, walking out the land each day until she was fully satisfied that she knew the terrain down to the last bit of soil, and made her plans.
She contracted out one-half of the land to farmers who could only afford to rent the use of the land, third world sharecropping, with specific terms – they were responsible for their own equipment and maintenance and in return for the use of the land, pay a set percentage of their yield. Her personal cash was strictly budgeted for her own operations on the rest of the land and storage facilities. Not only did she intend to make an income from the land, she meant to keep the entire operation a secret from the debt-holder hundreds of miles away. Her family knew but expected little result. “Too much work, too little time,” they said.
She didn’t just pay people to work the land, she worked it herself every single day. Growing, processing and storing rice over the course of multiple growing seasons, she guarded against word getting out that she would have rice to sell, and sent Grandpa to keep up the ruse by asking for short extensions on the final loan due date whenever he paid an installment.
When the deadline loomed, she sold all the stored and newly harvested rice.
On the final day, my grandpa’s eldest brother sat down with the banker to whom they owed the debt for the formal title transfer. Instead, Great-Uncle unpacked a suitcase of cash. The man was stunned. After his departure, she turned around and handed the title and deed to her equally shocked father-in-law.
To his credit, he tried to make her take the title. As far as he was concerned, she had rightfully earned every penny that bought back the land, and he insisted she was the new owner. And as was typical of her, she refused, agreeing only to take an appropriate fraction of the land if the rest was parceled out evenly among all his children.
Honor, Duty, Family, Birthright.
She lived her entire life by those watchwords. She raised nine children, fostered dozens of relatives, stood firm when her family and neighbors were caught in the middle of the war, buried a son, supported a son-in-law imprisoned for 15 years after the war, buried her husband, and continued to farm well into her 80s. The woman never blinked in the face of adversity; she served it hot tea and a freshly cooked meal. And a well deserved lecture, if need be.
Fun side note: when she was 82, she ambushed the wildcat who’d been raiding her outdoor kitchen in the middle of the night. She might have been 80 pounds soaking wet, but that never stopped discipline in her house. A whack across the nose, a firm tie-up in the corner of the kitchen so he’d keep until morning, and her poor housekeeper nearly had a heart attack when she inspected the “stray dog” that Grandma had captured. So her eyesight wasn’t great anymore at that age, but is it any wonder no one ever sassed her twice?
Sometimes I wonder what she would have been like in our modern world.
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March 25, 2010
I’ve had excellent dental care over the years courtesy of employer-sponsored benefits, and then thanks to COBRA, so my dental woes have been routinely resolved. My parents, however, have had some dental issues I wasn’t aware of until recently, and I feel guilty about not providing more thoroughly for them since I discovered all was not fine and dandy in their world of teeth. It’s nothing emergent, but I think my dad may need some fairly major work done and I wanted to budget for that ASAP.
My first thought was to get them insured. Naturally, right? It turns out that dental insurance isn’t such a great deal.
A quick review of ehealthinsurance.com showed that I might just be better off self-insuring them.
At an annual cost of $444 plus a yearly deductible of $25 for the cheaper of the only two plans available for this zip code, the policy yields a princely benefit of $500 per person. That’s not all! They’ll offer a grand coinsurance of 0-50% so at times that $500 won’t even be participating in payment of the bills. When it does, it covers no more than 50% of the bill. Essentially I’m paying for the privilege of a partial, sometimes, discount.
The math is only marginally better for the “Enhanced” Plan carrying an annual bill of $1032 with a $150 family deductible. Same lousy excuse for a “coinsurance” and I find myself utterly disgusted. I’d probably be better off saving the cash and sending them to my old (current) dentist with a request for a cash and senior discount.
There’s also a reputable School of Dentistry within 50 miles. An old friend may be able to fill me in on their services or direct me to someone in the know. It’s not a convenient drive, but I’ve heard that they do good work so perhaps on one of the days that he’s free of mom, my dad could get his teeth examined. Their online quote ranges from $50-$88 for an initial exam, all necessary x-rays, study models and a treatment plan. That’s a heck of a lot better than my dentist’s quote of $60 for an exam and additional $35 per x-ray (usually about 4-6 films taken) for a total of $250 for them to tell us what they’re going to do and how much that’ll cost.
Lastly, I should check with my dentist friend about a personal referral. He’s got relatives in the field, they might be more affordable than the local dentist and worth adding to the list of errands they run out in that area.
September 25, 2009
For the first time in years, I got birthday money! Yay! My cousin claims it’s from my aunt, but I suspect they colluded because cousin is younger than I and there’s an unspoken rule that money only flows down the age stream. Also my unemployment status probably has something to do with it.
This happy circumstance was marred by the discovery that my dad has been hiding over $500 in traffic fines from me.
Injured pride is one thing. Making foolish short term decisions that have negative long term consequences to protect that pride is another entirely and I can’t tolerate it anymore. I’m not one to talk back to my parents, I believe in maintaining a respectful, adult relationship, but darned if I let him get away with this lightly. I resent the fact that I have to lecture him for lying to me. If he’d just been honest with me in the first place, we’d be a team, not this unnatural reversal of parent-child roles.
It’s less that I’m now out another unbudgeted $500, and more that I was raised never to lie and yet here I am, 27 years old and unable to trust my own father. I have to weigh the likelihood that he’s just covering up another wrong. Is this what having bad kids is like??? What would you do if you could no longer trust your parent(s)? Or your entire family? Never in my life have I wanted to run away more.
*aggravated*
But you know. Birthday money. It’d cover the careless forgetting to pack funeral clothes thing, if I’d remembered to bring the gift card with me. As it is, I’m going to have to make an emergency trip to H&M for some suitable pants or a skirt because I was in a hurry to return with the family to the hospital. Also, I had no idea we’d be having the service within two days of his passing. So if I spend about $20, it’ll be cheaper than driving 4 hours round trip to pick up what I have at home. To make up for it, I’ll use the GC to pay the electric bill.
Forgot my pants, forgot my gift card, next thing you know, I’ll be forgetting my own head!
