About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
It dawned on me that no matter how well meaning or well written or persuasive, to an unhearing mind, my words would mean nothing. I had seen how little any kindly meant words were getting through to her both on PopularBlogger’s blog and on her own. And the reason I found my way there in the first place was because of the unrelenting negativity and sometimes abuse she showered on PopularBlogger’s site on him and his commenters so, even though he and I are incredibly different, I just don’t have time for her to bring that into my blog life should she follow my comment back.
So I took my comment, and some grumpitude for the rudeness and assumptions she was spewing, back here to my own blog.
I didn’t link to her because I had no intention of giving her publicity by naming her, nor did she have a clue who I was so I didn’t intend to open the door for her into my space here. Also, I think it’s rude and unprofessional, journalistically speaking, to cite someone’s words and name them without linking to them on the Internet. So I avoided identifying someone that, as it turns out, is much more well known than I expected. To be honest, I hadn’t heard from RachH and Tom before this post, evidently MW’s prodigy is more well known than I am! 😉
You know what they say, controversy sells!
In any case, I’d like to turn this to a more positive light.
After reading more comments, particularly StackingPennies’s about the fact that we don’t cashier for FUN, I started to laugh. Because you know what?
I used to. I started working at a very young age to help out but also because I thought it was fun, and as it turned out, cashiering was one of those jobs.
And that reminded me of something important about work. At least it’s important to me. There is much of the Puritan work ethic in what some of us (me included) do and say in real life and online about money and paying down debt and reaching goals that I think it’s really not easy for the average person to see that we enjoyed the work we do, took satisfaction in a job well done or had pure joy of learning. It somehow is perceived as the seemingly righteous tone of trying to reach the goal.
I never thought that most of us were self-righteous, mind, but I do understand the feeling of singlemindedness or focus which I personally take a lot of joy in. Conversely, I understand that feeling stuck produces a serious sense of frustration, and when you can’t find the joy in the work, well, feeling stuck and then watching people succeed through perseverance and the idea that working for the sake of the goal is not a horrible idea probably evokes something akin to an allergic reaction. (Solution: stop watching)
I remember being that kid who always thought there was something a bit more to do. I actually wasn’t the smartest kid in the class, ever. Just the boredest. Which meant I learned a lot, but not because I was gifted. Just because I was curious enough to want to learn, bored enough with the usual stuff to learn it and just bright enough to eventually grasp it. Not even all the time, though, I was pretty bad in a couple subject areas and just had to keep hacking away at it to keep my grades up because average grades weren’t acceptable. But the work itself was satisfying. I liked winning over the material, I liked reading any book I could get my hands on, I liked getting my homework done first.
My self assigned homework incentives were based on reading: two chapters for every homework assignment completed. Bonus: I could finish the whole book if I completed all homework by a certain time. I gamified before gamification was cool.
A shame I didn’t figure out this could work on other people. See? I wasn’t really a smart kid. But I learned to enjoy certain kinds of work, I learned I didn’t like other kinds of work but I could do it and it wouldn’t kill me and I learned that you have to work no matter what to make a living. So I worked, and I made a living, and at the end of the day?
I had earned a paycheck by the sweat of my own brow and tired as I was, deep down, I had pride and satisfaction in doing a job well. That meant something to me. I did it myself, I made the best decisions I could, I learned something if it was good day and if I didn’t, tomorrow was another day.
And that’s just something, isn’t it?
Maybe this is just the whole Kid of an Immigrant thing – be glad you can get a job, any job, and be glad you can get paid a wage kind of thing. Maybe it is, but I sort of doubt it.
Bootstrapping lore goes back a long ways, Joyce described bootstrappers as those (perhaps a bit more grandiosely than necessary for our purposes): “who had forced their way to the top from the lowest rung by the aid of their bootstraps. Sheer force of natural genius, that. With brains, sir.”
The West wasn’t populated by weenies, either, especially not weenies who didn’t appreciate the opportunities they were afforded when they tilled the land or ventured further into the wild unknown.
People the world over are making their lives by sheer force of will, determination, genius, curiosity, need, desire, joy, delight, creativity, or innovation. Whatever it is that makes them tick, they’re driven to do something about it, and I think it’s gorgeous. People would do well to know why we did it all in the first place and get back to that, or find our way to that place, whatever it is.
I’m lucky that a big part of my (happy) place is general and a little bit is found everywhere: I like getting things done. And I like doing things better, more organized and smarter, every time, every day.
There’s a blogger who frequents another very popular PF blogger’s site and comments in a way that reminds me of another person who used to squat on generally popular blogs: All Financial Matters, Single Ma’s blog, I can’t remember where else, but definitely at least those two, named Minimum Wage. Does anyone remember MW? I can’t recall if MW was male or female but MW was a down and outer, and ze was determined to crap on everyone and everywhere. It did not matter what the conversation was, ze had something negative to say:
“I wish I had that kind of money.” “I wish someone would give me that kind of job/salary/bonus/promotion/praise. I’ve been working for minimum wage for the past XYZ years…..” “I wish I could have that kind of vacation. I haven’t had a day off since …..” “I wish I could have that kind of car. I can’t even drive a working car because ….” “I wish that was my life. Must be nice.“ “I wish I could have retirement savings – boy I wish I could even think about retiring someday, I will never get to retire because all I make is less than [wait for it] minimum wage and I will never get out of this rut and life.”
Sunny, hm? And the second anyone made the slightest move toward asking after what MW did or made in the hopes of offering any sort of suggestions that MW might use to lessen the plight, WELL. You might well have spit in MW’s face.
Eventually MW faded off the scene in some way, but today I discovered that one of our fellow PF bloggers has a rather pestilent commenter who is persistent in crapping all over his blog and while I’d noted the name once or twice before, I didn’t realize ze had a blog of zir own. Curious whether there was something more behind this person, I tarried for a moment and found that actually, this person was only a couple years younger than me and my.. my oh my oh my oh my. This was rather a prime example of the sort of personality that the older generations tut tut at and say: we’re screwed. As a dear friend said: FAIL.
So very much of the blogger’s posts were just for lack of a less kind word: whining. The blog seethed with entitlement.
For example: A very small debt had blossomed some multiples beyond the original principal because ze hadn’t paid and eventually ended up going to court and settled against zir. Ze has decided that there’s no gain to be had in paying it. So ze refuses.
Ze also refuses to work a full work week because ze “hates zir job”. Ze won’t find a better job (“can’t”), so instead presumably mopes about but defines the remaining time in the week as time for doing stuff like chores or exercise or blogging. Anything but working or going to school. Those latter two are definitely not on the list. And so ze declares zir job and loathesome bloggers who are successful in life and making any better salaries in any way, those despicable people who have found a way and means, anathema. They and the people who patronize zir job are brats. Ze cannot be one, of course, because ze has no means, the lack thereof clearly demonstrated by the poorness of which ze is plagued.
At this point, I lost my mind a little. I very nearly left a comment. Really? Ze is not a brat? REALLY?? Ze works hours that wouldn’t qualify as half a job’s time, can’t be bothered to plaster a fake smile on zir face, and openly scorns doing that much and the rest of the world that shuts up and puts up?? And has the nerve to hide behind the lesbian card? The people of color card? The woman card?
Throw ’em on the table. Throw them all on the table. Anything else you got? Oh, “lives with your parent” was the concession. Well that’s neither here nor there in the game of brattiness.
Well, here’s a little PSA. Brats come in all genders, drive all kinds of vehicles, are present in every economic band. It’s all in the attitude toward others and willingness to put everyone else down as “Other” and say that they’re just not going to put up with any kind of anything from anyone because they will be treated precisely one kind of way from only THIS sort of people.
Brats certainly are the people that you don’t like here but they are, alas, not so far away as all that from the picture you have painted of yourself. And being abusive is only half a step away from inviting and creating an abusive environment.
It’s a shame that you heap such vitriol on bootstrappers when that’s actually the way that most poor people find their way out of poverty. It may be hard to see from their positions now just because they “have so much” and maybe some of their advice rings hollow just because they have anything more than you.
I’m not going to give any advice. I’m just going to say it’s shortsighted, intentionally or not, that you’re dismissing and in fact attacking a group of people who by definition were once much like you.
I worked myself out of relative poverty working 80 and 100 hour weeks for umpteen years, and my parents took more than 20 years before me because they were strangers in a foreign land to start over. That was on top of the 15 years they’d already spent working out a living in their native land. But without fail, 365 days a year, year after year, they put a smile on their faces and went to do whatever jobs they had at the time whether it was picking up after someone else’s animals or children or land or mopping the floors or building a fence or laboring in the sun or rain.
Did they like it? Of course not. Did they want to do it? Of course not. They did it anyway.
Did I like my ridiculous hours? Heck no. Did I want to work 14 hour days? Of course not. But to make sure that the bills were paid and we didn’t carry debt forever, I did it.
And were my clients and shoppers nice to me? [Hysterical Laughter] How many diatribes did I listen to? How many insane people did I encounter? I can’t even begin to remember anymore. (I do remember having the same flipping conversation with the same old man every two weeks for five years straight because he could not remember a thing. We smiled every two weeks.) Does it matter now? No. Because it doesn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that I always did a good job, kept my eye on the important things, got through the days good or bad, and took care of my family so that my physically sick and mentally ill mother did not have to keep working with and listening to the abuse of the bullying crappy coworkers who always had poor attitudes and felt like they were always having a bad day and could take it out on the poor weakest one in the shop.
Not everything goes your way. In fact, very very little ever does without an immense amount of effort. But there is a bigger picture. Whether you can or will or want or don’t see it – that’s your call. I’m a bootstrapper whose family was poorer than dirt and we fought long and hard each and every d*mn day to win against the grind and still fight it every day because life is just not that easy.
The real lesson here isn’t who can make it in life because they worked harder or who can shout “lazy” louder or who has more money. It’s about who has the gumption to try and find the way to be happy because I’ll be darned if there’s a one of us PF bloggers trying as hard as this one to beat Minimum Wage at zir game of Misery.
It’s been weeks of waiting, though not with bated breath which brings back memories of an awful man who punned “baited breath har har” and thought he was terribly funny when he was only terrible.
Waiting for the next shoe to drop ….
Waiting for decisions to be made ….
Waiting to make my next move….
Waiting….
There was life to live these many weeks, one day after the next, and so much to do in the name of survival but most of the time it all felt very much a hidden game of suspense. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but I was, the whole time, admonishing myself not to play to any perceived or imagined result during this waiting game.
Just a week and some days ago, one of the few people I felt free to speak to in some way about this asked after my progress when I had reached my Zen state and he was astonished that I wasn’t fretting over the length of time I’d spent waiting.
But having progressed to the next stage of waiting, I’m sharing the fact that I’m waiting. For a thing. I can’t say for what publicly until I have a result – that’s just my rule, I can only say that I am.
I’m not worried, precisely. I’m not afraid of the results whichever way they go, I’m just waiting to see what develops from here. It’s a strange place, this.
The first phones we picked were PiC’s G2s but I absolutely hated mind and swapped it for a MyTouch just in time before the month was up.
It was much lighter and the functions were a little smarter: it had copy and paste, the text messaging function showed time and date, unlike the G2, and some of the apps were more useful.
Using non-Gmail email clients is a pain, though, as this phone doesn’t allow you to respond in-line; you can only write completely new emails that include the previous message when you like it or not and the web browser is incredibly clunky. It doesn’t accommodate multiple tabs or windows very well at all, it loses the open windows or freezes up.
In general, it still handled fairly nicely at first.
Seven months later, the thing is like a half functioning brick. The phone itself freezes up regularly – the touchscreen becomes non-responsive so I have to plug it into the charger, unplug it, repeat several times, etc.
The battery life is nearly non-existent. Without use, the phone lasts on stand-by no more than 6 hours (if that) – and only 1-2 hours with any use so that it’s often completely drained to the dregs before the end of a workday. I can’t ever go to work without a charger. Same for overnights: it can’t last overnight even after being fully charged without discharging itself entirely.
The visual voicemail function is pretty much a joke – it only works part of the time, it may or may not actually convert messages to the visual function but it also duplicates voicemails to the dial-in version and the notifications for the dial-in portion will go off constantly. And I don’t know about you but I’ve gotten to the point where I am completely over receiving and checking voicemails the traditional way – I hate hate hate dialing in and listening to the messages and having to use the menu to save/delete/skip/etc.
We had a relatively decent plan but it rather got my goat that I couldn’t cancel my mom’s line after she passed. Evidently, it just doesn’t matter who the phone line was intended for – because I was taking responsibility for the plan with all the lines, the death of the user of a line counts for nothing so far as the phone company is concerned. I suppose I should have known that would be the case, it’s just another thing that’s draining a resource that could be better used some other way. I’m considering taking the issue up with them again through corporate but haven’t had time.
It’s all a bit disappointing really. We haven’t saved much money (if any) since switching to T-Mobile and it’s been one annoyance after another with the less than smooth transition, the poor quality phones and the rapidly deteriorating performance. The decision was made knowing that the switch was going to be a bit inconvenient but I figured it’d just be a month or two of transition. This seems like it’s going to be a rough year and a half to ride out the rest of the contract.
This time, the “smart” financial decision feels pretty dumb.
A reader story on Get Rich Slowly was the most impressive set up of an estate for an executor I have ever seen.
Her father familiarized her with all of his key financial people, negotiated legal and funeral fees, made all the funeral arrangements that he could prepay himself, keeping all the necessary copies of records for her, and settled his money on the children in such a way that accounted for the extra work that she’d be doing as the executor.
He outlined and folder-tabbed the process of settling all the major and most of the minor aspects of the impact of his death on their lives long before he passed. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
~~~
For my side of the family, I had nothing but the funeral to settle and pay for when Mom passed, because I had long taken financial responsibility for just about everything else. The funeral arrangements still cost a fair amount of money, not to mention the travel and other costs.
Dad is now free to earn a bit of a living for himself, and is doing so, but there is no expectation on my part that his efforts will yield more than enough to pay for his basic needs, and just some of them at that.
I’m the first in my family to worry about any kind of estate planning and while I have the framework mentally shaped, it is nowhere near the level of organization that I know a true, developed estate will one day require. And for the moment, that’s ok. My own finances weren’t there yet a few years ago when I started the process, and neither are ours right now. I will be taking the post shared by Jody as a blueprint.
For PiC’s side of the family, we have no clue what the estate plan looks like. As they actually have some sort of family money, that scares me at least a little bit. I have no interest in the money or the estate itself. Marrying into money of any kind was the last thing this Make-it-Entirely-on-Your-Own girl wanted, but I do have concerns as a principle.
Handling any estate is a fair job and handling one with any real value well requires time and diligence that I just don’t see at anyone’s disposal. And by George, I can only imagine the mess of sorting an unfamiliar estate when you haven’t got any of the groundwork laid. Because of this, I’ve long encouraged PiC to have a conversation with his parent and siblings. They should have a clue about where to begin, end, and how the middle bits join up.
~~~
One good friend’s elderly mother, now in her mid 90s, is comfortably well off but frets over saving her pennies. There’s no good reason to, my friend scolds, her children most certainly don’t need, want or expect any money from her so she shouldn’t have to worry about anything but keeping her health and enjoying her days.
Another friend is into her 70s and is hale and hearty but is still working. Partly because of a late in her years divorce which left her financially stranded, partly because it keeps her busy. I don’t know if she’s also trying to leave something to her children.
Friends in our cohort who are just starting out with young families are just saving or new to investing and haven’t really begun “disaster” planning yet. To my mind, though, anyone with dependents really has to get that set down on paper. I would never want to assume that my children would automatically go to the surrogate parent or family of my choice without making certain of it and be raised or supported in the way I hoped. There’s no guarantee that an estate plan wouldn’t going to be needed until the children were well into their adult lives and were ready to assume the relevant duties of executor or help as necessary.
:: Have you got an estate plan in place? Do you feel any need for one or do you expect to spend down your money by the end of your lives?
A little over a year ago, I got engaged and promptly shut down the news cycle on my side of the family beyond my parents lest the wedding juggernaut roll over my intended and me and leave just two imprints in the cement. The tradition, it is that strong.
With plenty of angst and worry over defying my cultural tradition, depriving my parents of the last rites of parenthood, I fled to Meg’s domain (literally), A Practical Wedding, to discover that other brides, to be, had been, years past, had shared the same need for a simpler?quieter?less “but everyone says” wedding. There I found that so many similar issues were being discussed and debated in a warm and welcoming forum that the wedding thing seemed just a little less daunting. Bridal parties, stage fright, budgets, families, oh families.
Not less so that I didn’t end up running off to fauxlope. I’m still me, after all. And to date, that’s been the toughest decision to live with. I remember being so happy but the memory of the day is layered with so much sadness now that it’s defined as the last time I ever saw my mom. That’s always going to be part of that day. And whether she was fully there for that day, well, that’s another thing.
Reading A Practical Wedding the website as a survival guide up until I actually got married, and now reading the book as a survival guide until we celebrate the marriage has been nothing short of a lifeline.
I was sure it would be, so I bought five copies. Selfishly, I’m keeping one for myself. The other four? I can bring myself to share some of them with you good people.
Enter using the Rafflecopter submission form below for each type of entry. Javascript is required to see it, I’m sure, but it’s dead useful for organization.
Note: Please don’t use the Facebook login – I don’t use Facebook and won’t be able to contact you via FB if you do, but didn’t have any way of removing that option.
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PiC’s part of a old friend’s wedding party scheduled for this spring and it’s now time for him to don the planning gloves.
There are 6 groomsmen plus a potential guest list of almost 20 names for the bachelor party. All told, we’re looking at 25 possible attendees. (I say we because I’ve done the planning thing many times and PiC …1? None? So I’m helping. But I don’t get to go. Because, he says, I don’t know which strippers they want. Neither does he, I say. Har har, we’re a riot.)
There’s only the stag party for the men unlike for the women with both a bridal shower and a bachelorette party, but PiC’s still looking at spending a pretty penny. At their age (mid thirties and up) and with everyone in far-flung locations, whoever is going to travel will be wanting to do a weekend or at least an overnight, not just an afternoon or a day trip. And los hombres, they like doing interesting things so the list of adventures, well …..
The groom’s very outdoorsy so we brainstormed:
Driving (on tracks, travel required)
Hiking (mountains preferred to … anything else?)
Skiing/Snowboarding/Snow-type stuff (out of state travel required for everyone)
Fishing
Biking (Utah?)
Rock Climbing
Happily, Vegas was vetoed early on. While it’s logistically easy, drunken debauchery just wasn’t the weekend either of us cared to coordinate, and especially not with that many people.
He’s starting coordination with the core group of the groomsmen. He wondered where he should set the budget for the activity and I advised him to aim to keep as low as possible because he can’t control the additional costs of airfare, hotel, food and drink for all. At least a few of them like to eat and drink really well (read: expensively) which frightens me/the budget.
So once he’s got a location, I can start researching travel options. I’ll be looking out for a good sale to keep the round trip airfare below $200, and then we have the hotel to deal with. Unless we get a great package deal and sales on everything else, I suspect this will total in the neighborhood of $800-1000. One of the fellas has a connection to one of places they may go, and I’ll be whipping out my bargaining voice once they make a decision.
The time commitment isn’t as heavy; there won’t be multiple weekends of shopping or crafting or whatnot. But at a certain point, being a groomsmen can become just as expensive for men as it is for women. Good-o.
After this, tuxes, speeches, and the wedding itself! (Add: Cost of airfare for two, rental car, and gifts.)