Last week my husband and I received a statement from Discover claiming we owed them just over $1400, which came as quite a shock since neither of us has ever had a Discover card. The first customer service rep I spoke with clearly felt sorry for me. “Is there any chance your husband might have opened the account without telling you?” I tried to stay calm. No, there was no chance of that.
She insisted their records had my husband as the primary account holder and me as an authorized borrower, and for several tense minutes I didn’t think I would be able to prove otherwise. I could feel myself edging closer and closer to panic. What if we have to pay it? I wondered. We only just paid off the debt we accumulated in grad school. What if the mysterious charges just keep coming and we have to pay all of them? What if we are victims of identity theft and we can’t prove it and this ruins our credit and we’re never able to rent a house or buy a car again? What will happen to our kids?
The rational part of me knew all of this was ridiculous. The card wasn’t ours, no matter what the statement said — of course they couldn’t make us pay $1400 plus interest if we hadn’t spent it. But I’ve never been good with money. I don’t mean I can’t earn it, or hold onto it, or value it; I mean just thinking about it makes me feel terrible, uncertain and small and afraid. I never expect good things to happen, financially speaking, and even when things are going well I expect to lose what I have.
Growing up I often had two working parents, but long periods of unemployment and medical bills meant we were only kept afloat thanks to generous relatives, and eventually they were no longer in a position to help us. Like many people, my father was denied the disability benefits he needed for years. Bills would get paid down, slowly, agonizingly, and then something else would break or someone else would get sick or someone would lose their job, and everything had to go back on yet another credit card. My parents didn’t like to talk with me about our money problems — what parent wants to have that conversation with their child? — but our house was small, and I overheard many of their anxious conversations. Sometimes they tried to portray our situation as a cautionary tale: That’s why you’re going to college. (Never mind that we didn’t know exactly how I would get there.)
Being a student on full financial aid at a very expensive school meant I was statistically likely to date someone with a lot more money than me, and my college boyfriend — who became my husband — grew up with the kind of economic security I couldn’t imagine. In so many ways, our points of reference simply didn’t overlap. He was meeting expectations by going to a good university and had two parents with advanced degrees to guide him; I would be the first person in my immediate family to graduate from college. He’d had the freedom to turn down an almost-full ride at a less prestigious school, whereas my decision was entirely ruled by competing financial aid offers. While we both worked part-time in high school, he was able to save far more, because my high school job had to cover so many expenses (clothes, car insurance and gas, school activities, music lessons, AP/SAT exams and college application fees) that his parents had paid for him. If his account was getting low, funds were always just a phone call away. His number of trips home weren’t limited by the cost of plane tickets.
He was also extremely responsible — more frugal than me, and I was not a big spender — so even though he had access to more money than I did, I didn’t feel self-conscious about it when it was just the two of us; I mostly felt it when I went home with him to see his family. But our respective backgrounds clearly influenced our decisions, our feelings about money in both lean and comfortable times, after we graduated. I didn’t expect I would feel so guilty the first time I had a job — just an entry-level position with a modest salary and benefits — that paid more per year than my parents made put together. When I eventually went to grad school, it was part-time, while I worked part-time and cared for our kids full-time; he spent six years as a full-time PhD candidate on a stipend. When I was laid off while on maternity leave, of course we were both worried, but ultimately he thought we’d be fine and I nearly had a breakdown.
I still think of economic stability as something that primarily exists for other people, and I don’t know if I’ll ever grow out of it.
While we’re usually on the same page about what and how to spend, my hangups and attitude regarding money persist to this day. I’m very good at spending when I really want something, but then I’ll choose little, unimportant things to be flinty about — not because they’re make-or-break for us, but because I feel a need to impose iron control over arbitrary spending that isn’t even out-of-control. If we’re going away for the weekend, we shouldn’t also exchange anniversary gifts. Yes, technically we can afford it, but I don’t want to pay for both Netflix and Hulu! We’ve never bought ourselves real nightstands, though I think about it a few times a year. It’s ridiculous — of course we have lots of other furniture, and nightstands would be useful — but every time it comes up I think of ten other things we could do with that money, and meanwhile the cheap folding table I currently use, the one my aunt bought for me in college, is working just fine.
Some people note that my husband is the “optimist” and I’m the “pessimist,” and it’s true that I worry more and spend more time pondering out-of-control frightening worst-case scenarios than he does. But when it comes to money matters, the “optimist vs. pessimist” framework is severely lacking. It makes it sound as though my money-related anxiety is nothing more than an unfortunate personality quirk, when in fact there’s an excellent reason why my husband generally believes things will work out, whereas I tend to imagine we are just one crisis away from financial ruin: he comes from a family for whom things do work out, and I do not.
While it’s been a source of frustration at times, I’m glad we are not much alike in this. I’m also glad he can talk me down when I’m most anxious — God knows we don’t both need to be wrecks over money, expecting the worst all the time. But I do envy him at times. I envy his faith that everything will be okay. He is far less prone to blaming himself when things are tight, whereas I spend a lot of time staring up at the ceiling at three in the morning, interrogating every decision I’ve ever made. Why wasn’t my primary goal always to earn as much money as I possibly could? Would we have been better positioned for the hundreds of dollars a month we now spend in medical copays? Would we have healthy college funds going for both our kids? Would I be able to write my parents a check every month, fully support them after everything they’ve done for me? Is the money-related stress we experience my fault? Shouldn’t I — with my upbringing, and all of the attendant worry and my worst-case imaginings — have known somehow, and planned better?
I was talking to my third Discover representative by the time my husband got home the other night. None of them could tell me anything, but even though we were just talking in circles now I couldn’t bring myself to hang up. I just wanted someone on the other end of the line to understand how big of a problem this had become for me, and promise to fix it.
My husband, “the primary account holder,” took the phone. Inside of fifteen minutes he was able to verify that we had, in fact, received the statement in error. The company had no idea why or how our information had been associated with the account, which really did belong to someone, just not us. They promised to send us something in writing verifying that we don’t owe them anything. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
I was almost surprised the matter had been resolved without us becoming $1400 poorer. My husband agreed the whole thing had been unsettling and bizarre, but, as he pointed out, “They can’t make you pay back money you never spent.” I knew that, yet I still hadn’t been able to stop myself from imagining identity theft and fraud and ruined credit and the rapid unraveling of our lives. Days later, I’m still watching the mail for written confirmation that we’re in the clear; if we don’t receive it soon I will call again.
I hate that I still slide into doubt and fear so easily when it comes to money. I hate the fact that, despite my age and everything I’ve supposedly learned and all the reasons I have to be grateful, my mind can still leap from one huge unexplained bill to the total collapse of everything we’ve worked for in ten seconds flat. I don’t feel as though my fear makes me careful, or wise, or more responsible than anyone else — even in the moment, it just seems rather silly and embarrassing. But by now that alarming whisper in my head is also an old companion, a permanent fixture; I just expect it to be there, day in and day out, whenever I have to make a plan or a big decision about money. And every time something like this happens, certainly every time we have a real setback, it hits me anew: I still think of economic stability as something that primarily exists for other people, and I don’t know if I’ll ever grow out of it.
This is worth a million of that “I made my parents pay for my daughters’ education with their savings” article in the Atlantic.
wait, what article said what?
This one: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/…
They’re both about how even Americans who appear to be doing great have different kinds of financial insecurity, but yours is lucid and touches the heart and isn’t “poor me, I made stupid choices and lied about them to my family.”
Also Nikki’s doesn’t use the phrase “financial impotence” because why would anyone do that.
For. Serious.
MEN. Why.
oh dear.
OMG, boomers.
#notallboomers
Not that I take it personally.
Right?! But we’re the spoiled fuckups.
That atlantic article was unbelievable!
Help, I can’t afford a vacation because I live in the Hamptons!
Don’t get me started- some beloved relatives live in that part of the world in kind of a similar situation: both of them have jobs where they either get a big payout all at once or months and months of nothing, and their jobs are tied to the area so they couldn’t leave even if all their friends and elderly relatives who need care didn’t live there, and of course all the prices there are artificially inflated and the lifestyle is inflated, too.
someone tweeted this article at me and said my post today has a lot in common with it? oh. agree to disagree.
HAHAHA#nopetopus.
If anything, it is the opposite.
I almost lost my shit when I read that. My parents NEVER would have done that to my grandparents.
I know- what would have happened if the parents got sick- (well, apparently they got sick enough to die and all the writer got from it was a lousy Toyota.) ETA: now I’m wondering if his parents would have lived longer if they’d had access to their savings. :/
The daughters must feel TERRIBLE.
Know I said this on Twitter before, but thanks for this, and thanks for writing it out as a post as well, Nicole.
“I feel a need to impose iron control over arbitrary spending that isn’t even out-of-control” is me to a T in everything. I don’t know how to stop it.
Ugh me too. And I think I get it from my mother. Case in point, she used to refuse to by the brand-name cereal (my beloved Wheaties!) because it was too expensive, but then she was constantly ordering clothing from random catalogs that ended up at our house.
This rang very true for me. A new way to think about something I took for granted as how I am. Thank you.
I’m very good at spending when I really want something, but then I’ll choose little, unimportant things to be flinty about — not because they’re make-or-break for us, but because I feel a need to impose iron control over arbitrary spending that isn’t even out-of-control.
Also, I am rageful for you that they needed to hear from your husband before resolving the problem in fifteen minutes. Fuck that. Just…fuck all of that.
That is the exact same thing I was thinking!!!!! Although, in fairness, if he was the one who supposedly opened the account, I guess they would need him to verify that in fact he had not.
Uhhhhhhhnnnnn this is me every day. I feel this more than I should.
And also, yeah, I try to save money on silly little things which I know don’t make a huge difference and also I am a complete hoarder of clothing which is weird, I know.
For five years I have saved a 70s maroon velvet blazer that will probably never fit me again because when will I find another.
You are like my twin. I had my mom’s leather jacket until she forcibly to it from me because it looked moldy. She bought me a replacement but it was not NEARLY as cool…. 🙁
Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT oh no no no no That white/gray suedey look from the leather being worn? THAT’S CALLED LOVE MOM. Ugh. What a heartbreak.
Ugh I am doing a massive cleanup of my wardrobe and it is so hard because a lot of the clothes I’m getting rid of I wouldn’t be able to afford to replace at this point in time if it turns out that yes I did in fact need 5 flowery sundresses despite living in the opposite of sundress country.
I just wear all my summery dresses with black belts and black tights and long black cardis and suddenly they’re Wednesday Addams Experiments With Color in the middle of the winter, which works for me.
That entire Discover story read like SO MANY moments I’ve witnessed in my mother’s life. Complete with “well, once we talk to your HUSBAND things are hunky dory.”
Also, now that I’m an adult, if I go out somewhere with my dad then male retail workers/medical workers/finance people/etc will constantly assume he is my husband. I mean, he is very much visibly much older than me. I don’t call him by his first name, I call him “Dad.” Just because we’re out running errands together or whatever doesn’t mean he’s my husband, you jerkwad guy.
I went to a family reunion this summer and was meeting HUGE swaths of the (French) family for the first time. There was an awkward moment when my papa, having introduced himself, turned to me with “and this is my” and family member was like “this MUST be your wife” and my da and I turned to each other and burst out laughing. He is still with the same woman that he was with the first time he went to France. When he was SIXTEEN.
I feel like our anecdotes say a lot about the societies that we navigate 🙁
One time in college I was home visiting my parents on break and got sick. My dad gave me a ride to the doc because I was feeling bad enough that I didn’t want to drive. While there a male nurse: gave me shit for being at the doctor on a Sunday morning and not church, claimed I was inventing all my symptoms, tried to sell me on coming back later for a flu shot (told me to “go back out there and convince your husband”), and then when I said no declared that HE was going to go out to the waiting room and convince “my husband” to buy a flu shot.
Needless to say, when I finally saw the doctor and HIS attitude was basically “you’re young so you’re probably faking sick for drugs” I was NOT a happy camper.
O_o light that office on _fire_.
This is always my fear of going to the doctor. I will put it off for a long time because I’m worried that I won’t be believed or I’ll sound like I’m whining. Which makes the problem worse and then the doctor will say ‘wow this must be tremendously painful.’ Yup.
That’s not how any of that works!!! Arrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhh!!!!!
Husband was primary account holder though! You REALLY cannot do anything without the primary account holder.
That phrase explained SO MUCH to me about why GentlemanX will buy the cheap yogurt but not tell me not to spend hundreds of dollars on records when we already have more than we can keep track of.
I am a giant fan of music (and I envy your record collection), but someday, maybe, spring for the expensive yogurt. Cream Top Brown Cow yogurt is a revelation.
Come visit! We will spin records and eat yogurt until we cannot see straight. The expensive stuff here is Liberté organic yogurt – 14% milk fat baby. It’s like eating froyo in non-frozen form.
WHERE ARE OUR STAR TREK TRANSPORTERS
RIGHT?!? 2016: The year made out of disappointment.
Once when my mother was in the process of buying a car, the dealership tried to put the title in my dad’s name.
And that’s why my family doesn’t drive hondas!
I just got married, and paid the officiant, and the Minister of Finance cashed my cheque, and the fucking Ministry of Vital Statistics mailed the marriage certificate to my husband only. Like, I paid for this fucking thing and also I keep the goddamn files, he’s basically arm candy, wtf.
Well, once you’re married, you’re not allowed to get mail!
But seriously, that is revolting.
During my most recent car purchase 3 or 4 years ago, Mr Rose had to tell the salesdouches at least 5 times, “Why are you addressing me? This is *her* car you’re talking about.”
OMG the car thing. I am much more knowledgeable about cars than Señor Negroni, but when we went to buy a car, they would ALWAYS talk to him. I was looking under the hood of this one SUV and there was literally a plastic bottle of motor oil wedged in there and the dealer tried to do some bitches-be-trippin’ nonsense and tell me it wasn’t. I had to literally take him by the arm and poke the bottle with the tip of my parasol (I am allergic to the sun) to get him to believe I was capable of processing visual information despite being crippled with ladyparts.
So I already have warm and fuzzy feelings towards our local SPCA (*bad joke dog face*), but when I went to get my cat a few years ago, my boyfriend went with me, and all mail to my house has, from that point, been addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. UnreadAethel,” and it makes me so damn happy.
They tried to do that when my mom bought a car a few years ago.
Also, when we were negotiating the price they brought in a sheet of paper with payment amounts and number of months. No actual total price of the car, not even interest rates associated with their payment plans. We had already secured financing through her bank.
I was pleased when GM shut down Pontiac.
To be fair, they play the “what do you want your payment to be?” game with EVERYONE. It’s just a car dealer scam.
When it comes to things that are expensive, I will do the research, pick out the thing I want, spend the damn money, and then use it forever and ever amen, figuring I can amortize the cost because it lasted so long. (I’m already eyeing a third and maybe fourth use for my wedding dress, for cry-ai.) With little things, however, it is only very recently that I started to let myself spend more. Part of that was due to having several years where the closest grocery store was the organic-friendly co-op. So I *do* get the Brown Cop Cream Top instead of the Yoplait or store brand now. But even now, I have twinges of guilt about this. “This yogurt cost more than a dollar! That yogurt is $.70! You should just buy in bulk! Or make your own.” It is going to take longer for those voices to chill.
NGL, I do miss the yogurt I used to make (I’ve developed a dairy allergy, thanks life). I honestly don’t know that it was better than Brown Cow, though. Brown Cow yogurt is so good and I still buy it for the Burgomaster.
(OT but I read this comment, thought “OH YEAH” and added Brown Cow to my grocery list.)
Me too and IT’S THE WORST.
RIGHT? I get that it was supposedly in his name, but I gave them his SSN, and still they would not reassure me!
* last four digits only, that was all they asked for
I bought a condo in 2014. I was 21. I am a lady-presenting person. (Full disclosure because I am privileged but not “parents bought me a house” privileged: I had personal loans from my now ex bf [paid off] and my dad [in the process], the down payment was 5k and I ate stale ramen to save up for it. I was also a full-time college student.)
You should have seeeeeen the closing, oh my lands. I asked my dad to go with me because he works in the business and, you know, sexism and ageism and stuff. Despite the fact that I 1) did not have a co-signer or co-borrower and 2) my first name is generally considered very feminine, the attorney came out of his office and made a beeline for my father as we made small talk with the buying and selling agents and my lender dude (who I had worked with nonstop for months). “Congrats!” Lawyer Guy says to my dad, shaking his hand.
“Don’t look at me,” Dad says, snorting. “It’s her house.”
Cue gaping disbelief from Lawyer Guy and Lady Selling Agent, who had to go back to her client after closing and admit she’d gotten lowballed and out-negotiated by a kid (assisted by two veritable real estate sharks of parents) who was two months out from graduating college. Cue massive smirk from Lender Dude and Lady Buying Agent, because by our powers combined, we had outsmarted the patriarchy of the Greater Atlanta Area, or something.
Anyway, I <3 my dad 4 eva for 1) making clear it was MY HOUSE and 2) making it clear that he found Lawyer Guy’s assumption risible.
Your dad is awesome.
Yeah that I don’t read as a sexism thing- a former boss of mine who had been laid off wanted me to cancel a bunch of accounts for him. If you are not the primary account holder, it’s REALLY IMPOSSIBLE to do anything.
What I’ve always found weird about that is: over the phone they don’t know if you are who you say you are! I had trouble cancelling some stuff that was in my dad’s name before, and I had ALL the details, and it occurred to me that I could literally just drag a random man off the street, give him a script and bingo! Like, it’s not like they have developed phone voice fingerprints (yet)
Related: a couple I knew used to deal with each other’s banking, bills etc when the other couldn’t for whatever reason, and it was always completely easy, because they were both women. THE PHONE DOESN’T KNOW.
It’s CYA on their part. If they know you’re someone else and give you the information, then they can get in trouble for breaking confidentiality. But if you lie and say you are that person, then you’re the one who would get in trouble for some type of fraud.
I think another layer I’d add to my feelings about this is– I believed when I was studying and going to school, even when I got my first few jobs, that I would eventually earn enough to make sure I could drag my immediate family out of poverty. Now I am grappling with the reality that hey maybe I will not really be middle class. Lower middle class maybe. I didn’t marry “well” and I don’t do lucrative work. This is it for me…?
It’s hard when you can’t help your family — like you, I really thought if I made it, they would too. The fact that I cannot support them the way I always assumed I would is something I think about all the time.
This has been super hard for me to deal with too. I graduated in December of 2008 (great student, had at least some kind of job since age 14, blahblahblah) and very luckily landed a $10/hr contract secretarial job a few months later. It’s been one terrible secretarial job after the other and I’m starting feel that cold grasp of *This is it! No interesting brain job for you! Just a bunch of waiting hand-and-foot on spoiled children of good fortune until the robots replace you!*
I’m so glad the “It Gets Better” campaign has sort of passed out of popularity. Not because I don’t support its aims whole-heartedly. But because it always triggered this inner monologue of “It doesn’t have to. Things could get worse. They always do for you.”
But, hey! Harriet Tubman on the $20, so there’s that.
“I’m starting feel that cold grasp of *This is it! No interesting brain job for you! Just a bunch of waiting hand-and-foot on spoiled children of good fortune until the robots replace you!* ”
Imaginary Heroine, you just summarized the overwhelming existential terror that has been plaguing me these last few weeks. What if this *is* it? What if it doesn’t get better, only worse? My loudest brainweasels say, “OldGirl, you are now old, girl, and you have no money and few prospects of building the life you’d been naively counting on”. I…don’t know how to respond to that? Is blankly staring into space while being engulfed by flames an acceptable response?
Oh hey. I also graduated in 12/08, am smart and from a middle class, educated parents background, and have totally failed to make anything of myself. I tried grad school and finished 2 and a half years ago–no job in my field and it’s probably never going to happen. I’m a part time cook who makes just under 20k a year, and I keep wishing I’d skipped the whole college thing, because my coworkers who don’t have student debt are doing way better than me.
I am really, really aware of time passing, and my life staying the same. It’s not fun.
I think a lot of people from the more recent generations (lol, millennials) will be dealing with this. I certainly will; the expectation was always that I’d do as well or better than my mom. But ten years later, I make $1.50/hour more than my first job out of college.
“there’s an excellent reason why my husband generally believes things will work out, whereas I tend to imagine we are just one crisis away from financial ruin: he comes from a family for whom things do work out, and I do not.”
Oh, this could be about my parents, pretty much verbatim. Thank you for writing it.
Also about me and my ex. Fun times.
Ditto. Or tritto.
It is eerie how much that sounds like them.
&& also my “financial strategy” == veering wildly between those two options, like “oh I’m sure I’ll make do, even if something happens, I can see the money in my bank account, and I might suffer but I’ll be okay” and then the next day it’s all “but wait.. WHAT IF IT’S NOT OKAY, I SHOULDN’T HAVE DONE X OR Y OR Z”
While my economic background was far from flash (upper-working class, if that’s a thing?), the difference between how you and your husband deal with money is very similar to the difference between how my wife and I do, for very similar reasons. It was so helpful for me to read your story. Thank you.
Fwoof this hit me right in the guts.
Me too. I had a wave of nausea sweep through me just reading the title, but I persevered and read it and I’m so glad I did; but WOW am I having feelings because of how much this resonates.
THANK YOU NICOLE – because you’ve articulated feelings and thought processes that are hard for me to articulate because I get so swamped in fear and emotion.
I am so grateful for this article, because it makes me feel so much less alone.
It seems like every other adult I know Has It Together, even though OBVIOUSLY that’s not true But my parents didn’t have it together. They told me from the time I was 6 years old that I had to get a college scholarship…or else. My dad once lectured me for half an hour about my 3.97 GPA, saying I wasn’t caring about my future.
So now I’m doing work-study, and literally 20 minutes ago I got informed by my manager that he forgot to put my raise request in by the HR-mandated deadline, meaning that the funds increase that could mean not freaking out about car repairs or unexpected medical bills or not wanting to murder my sister for deciding to get married in a month so I have to buy really expensive plane tickets….will not come until next October.
I have difficulty throwing away clothes I don’t like, because every item is like a ticker against my bank account balance. “If only I hadn’t been so foolish. I’d be exactly $10 richer. I’d be bootstrapping my media business. Why am I so frivolous?”
And still, even though I’m living on the edge of solvency, I literally have 5 times more in my savings account than my parents do.
My fellow-graduate student boyfriend, whose parents ALSO have advanced degrees, literally tell him things like, “Hey, if you want to stop teaching this semester and focus on your dissertation, we’ll bankroll you.”
I cannot imagine what that is like, but it sounds like you can. Thanks for helping me feel like less of an outsider weirdo.
“I got informed by my manager that he forgot to put my raise request”
brb printing out photos so I can do just that!
Okay, but your manager needs to make up that pay difference out of his own damn pocket, because wtf.
oh god, I’m so sorry about your manager’s total lapse in managerial duties/BASIC HUMANITY. There’s nothing at all he can do to fix this for you now??
Thanks, the commiseration also helps.
He’s going to try to see if he can get an exception for me via HR. But if he can’t, he says, then I’m a shoo-in for a raise in October of next year!
…by which time BF will have graduated and we will theoretically be elsewhere. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
augghhhhhhhhhh I’m not saying he’s a bad man or anything, but to just “oops” BLANK on something of such importance to you would seem to indicate that he does not understand your situation or empathize. which is shitty, even if that is not a boss’s job. BUT. Fingers crossed for you that the exception goes through!
when my husband was in year 3 or 4 of his doctorate, his (rich, tenured, company-founding) advisor said at a lab meeting one day, “I don’t know why you all are so obsessed with money!” HELLO, IT’S BECAUSE NONE OF THEM WERE MAKING ANY MONEY, AND IT WAS NOT AN “OBSESSION” IT WAS FEAR. I don’t know how you just SAY something like that to people. Nor do I get how anyone could “forget” to ensure someone else’s crucial pay raise.
hahahahah, “I don’t know why you all are so obsessed with money!”
My boyfriend’s advisor says the same thing to him. “Why won’t you stay and do (unpaid) research?”
I think you’ve pegged it – your husband’s advisor and my manager seem to have somehow become fear-proof or comfortable enough to have their normal-life situational empathy dulled.
My manager is part of the Southern landed gentry. There are streets in this town named after his family. He takes off work to go tinker with his yacht.
It’s not to say he doesn’t have problems, but they’re definitely not the same as my problems.
see, maybe it isn’t so TERRIBLE that we have what appear to be LIFELONG HANGUPS about money, if it means we won’t say shitty things to broke graduate students someday or casually sabotage their ability to make a living!! silver lining?
yes!!!! Constant anxiety as a virtue, I love it!
In fact, I really should be thanking this dude for keeping me grounded.
But in all seriousness, I WOULD like to thank you again for both writing this article, and for chatting with me while I sat here at work, trying hard to resist the urge to flip the desk.
It means a lot.
thank YOU for chatting with me! hugs and SOLIDARITY.
My raise request has been ‘with the CEO’ for six months now. Wankers. And I’ve won them a huge fucking award in the mean time! It’s fine, its only my life and financial security, its not like that’s important or anything.
WORD.
Anyway to parley that huge award into a job offer at another compamy for more $$$? Because 6 months of fluffing around is not cool.
(I was once promised a raise when I changed roles, then got professionally certified, then after annual reviews were complete still got screwed and yet the company was ASTOUNDED when I left them to go get paid what the market rate for my job was)
I’m on the hunt for a new job! But I’ve been looking for awhile and not really getting anywhere 🙁
Even if this raise does ever materialise it will almost definitely be insultingly low and no where near what I’ll get in a new company. I can’t wait to mic drop the fuck outta here (I doubt my managers will be surprised, they’d have to be pretty dense not to notice all the recruiter calls I’m taking.)
Theyre not bad people, just the leadership are cheapskates so the only real way to get a raise it to bring a competing offer into the room. And I’m so done working here that if i manage to get another offer I’ll just take it!
I have my fingers crossed for you. True story: I was on one of those Developing Talent programs that businesses send you on instead of giving you a raise and the first workshop was about hiring internally vs externally. The professionals running this were pro internal hires because “it takes 2 yrs for external hires to have the same level of organisational knowledge as internals while it takes internal hires SEVEN YEARS (my caps) to get to the same income as external hires” I.E. HIRE INTERNALLY IT’S CHEAPER AND BETTER and I was on my way out so DGAF and pointed out that they were telling us to brush up our CVs and look externally for a new job. This had not occurred to them.
This is sideways-relevant, but: this is one of the reasons I shoehorn the statistics on median household income into every conversation I can. It has been know to cause gasps of disbelief among the lawyers/bureaucrats who make up most of my social group, but I’m hoping that through sheer force of repetition, I can bring them to understand, well, stuff…
(I am, obviously, a total hoot at dinner parties. Social housing policy always goes down well in a society obsessed with property investment. Yay Australia!)
Nice work!
This is so, so relatable for me. Thank you for putting into words my…well, basically my entire outlook on finances! HA. It’s such a hard mindset to work around sometimes, but I agree, it seems like it’s not going anywhere. I just have to learn to recognize when I’m feeling anxious because of something “real,” and when I’m feeling anxious because of my past/upbringing.
Oh, this piece, Nicole. I grew up under similar circumstances and feel so many of these worries–and occupy a similar role in my marriage. The fear never really goes away. Just yesterday, I checked AGAIN to make sure the erroneous hospital bill we received 4 years ago hadn’t resurfaced. (It hadn’t.)
<3
I am STILL not 100% okay with this, Mindy. I’m going to be on pins and needles until the thing in writing shows up saying we don’t owe Discover anything. Need to check our credit scores, too.
“Why wasn’t my primary goal always to earn as much money as I possibly could?”
I would like to know this about myself also.
This is something I also struggle with. It is fact NEVER my motivation to earn as much money as possible. I grew up comfortable and upper middle class–closer to Nicole’s husband’s family’s situation–but I know that my parents have less saved for retirement because of the amount of money they’ve put into me and my brother and I feel terrible about that. Especially because plenty of that money has come in my post-college years.
well, hey, as someone in a lucrative but pretty sucky job, I can tell you why. I mean, sort of.
Support from one of my friends, who literally never gets to leave the office:
“In another update, I’m seriously questioning my decision making paradigm. While in Florida, I discovered that I have apparently avoided our Sun and daylight for so long, that I have developed a literal allergic reaction to sunlight. No – not a sunburn. An actual allergic reaction. I’m allergic to sunlight. I didn’t even know that was possible. But I did it. What every investment banker strives for.
Yeah so, something called PMLE and I essentially have been conditioned to reject the sun with headaches and a painful cursing upon my skin. It is apparently most common amongst young females that go sunbathing a lot, so I can see how I fall into that category. (?) The doctor thinks my “record low” vitamin D levels and “employment” are basically making me unsuitable for planet Earth outside of my safe office habitat.
So if you ever wanted to be a vampire, without the gift of immortality, superhuman strength or teenage heartthrob movies, we should chat. This could work for you.
Maybe Bernie’s right and investment banking really is evil…”
Holy hand grenades…that is insane.
My mom once said to me, “your dad and I tried to raise you kids to believe that money wasn’t important, and it worked, and it turned out we were wrong.” They raised 2 teachers and a National Park Service employee.
Oh, Nikki. I get this big time. My husband and I are both chronically worried about what’s going to happen when our parents retire. My parents didn’t involve us in any of their money conversations, but when people come to shut off utilities, or when your home is finally foreclosed on, it becomes intensely hard to pretend that everything is going to be ok. I worry that my mother and her sister will bankrupt my grandfather. I worry that I won’t be able to help people when they truly need it. My husband and I both have jobs that are near impossible to lay off, because we both grew up with real concerns about financial instability. I am a bad saver, but that’s why I ended up in one of the few jobs that still has a guaranteed pension, but if I leave because he gets his dream job, what does that mean for my retirement? I put up a brave front about it working out, but really, I’m terrified all the time.
My husband’s parents are planners, well off, and the WORLD’s most frugal people, so we know they are going to be fine. I have tried so many times to talk to MY parents about The Future, and the refrain is always “we don’t want you to worry about us” or sometimes even “it’s none of your business” (mmm beg to differ, I am your only child and you will be my responsibility!). I seriously have no idea what they will do when my mom can’t work anymore; I know they haven’t got retirement savings, and my dad is on disability. No one but me will be in any position to do anything for them, and I can’t even get them to have a conversation with me about it.
I’m working my ass off to try to land a job with a pension. Not because I’m a bad saver, I’m a good saver I’m just terrified. My parents refuse to talk about money and are both self-employed in fields that require them to be able-bodied. The time is coming (or possibly has come) when one or both of them will be physically unable to work and I don’t know what will happen. I’m sorry that this is so common, I wish it wasn’t.
I completely empathise. I hope so much that financial security will be something that we can achieve, but I grew up in a farming family where debt was a constant, and our finances varied from year to year, to the point that I always, always felt guilty about asking for anything (even when I needed it). My parents were always as generous as they could be, always… but it was that spectre in the background.
And now — even though at the moment we’re doing well enough that we can do things like get new shoes for the children when they need them, without having to postpone the power bill — it’s still in the background. I still worry that we’ll lose everything.
Really glad to hear the account got sorted. So stressful, even when you know, intellectually, that it’s not your debt. That gut reaction is hard to suppress.
“…when in fact there’s an excellent reason why my husband generally believes things will work out, whereas I tend to imagine we are just one crisis away from financial ruin: he comes from a family for whom things do work out, and I do not.”
This so much, although I think there can be another dimension to this same thing — at least in my case, because he is from a family that is relatively well-off, they would step in and help prevent a crisis. So in some sense, the crisis is never as possible for him — there’s an extra safety net that he has never done without, and that I’m still unsure about.
WELL, without going into a ton of details about our personal experience (any more than I already have, lol), I think there’s often a bootstrapping mentality in successful families (I WOULD NOT KNOW PERSONALLY) that means there isn’t necessarily a safety net just because there’s a great deal of privilege.
My parents, who cannot afford it, are constantly trying to offer us money and it drives me bananas.
I think it does correlate to a point – when you’ve lived that hardship yourself, you know how hideous it is and you want to help because of the personal-ness of it. When you haven’t, perhaps it’s less of a priority?
So true – my parents are always trying to make sure we’re paid back for anything, even just buying groceries when we visit, because they remember their parents not being able to.
I haven’t seen what actually happens with us in a crisis, but I’ll definitely be rethinking this.
The bootstrapping mentality is I think more common in families where they’ve had money for a few generations at least. I’m in a very fortunate position given that my parents were always reasonably financially secure, and then became quite well off in my teens. They come from families where there was never enough money (especially on my mum’s side). As such, if I had a financial crisis they would offer me support in a heartbeat because they’ve never really stopped worrying about money in the way that you describe.
My parents and grandmother also marvel at my ability to save money, but I think I’m only good at saving because, like your husband, when I first got a part time job I didn’t have to spend it on essentials, so I got used to squirrelling it away.
I went back and forth about whether or not to comment on this because I almost sent it to my partner as a way of explaining a lot of the problems I have with talking about money. I’m no good at communicating how I feel about financial disparities between the two of us. We were raised in households with only moderately different financial security, but for various reasons related to our families we are each in very different financial places as adults. When we’re making joint purchases/generally making financial plans/individual purchases I can never really articulate that I’m really envious of his financial situation and general feeling of trust in the system without sounding like I’m accusing him of something or asking him for money, both of which I’m not trying to do.
This is a long-winded, not eloquent way of saying thank you for describing feelings close to my own much better than I can.
I am so sending this to my partner. This is very much what we’re going through, right now, because we’re wedding planning and I’m like “oh let’s just to go City Hall and then have a BBQ because spending 20K on one day of your life is unthinkable” and that opinion is not shared.
We ended up splitting the difference and having a tiny elopement for me and a big family wedding for him.
We paid for a lot, though not all, of the expenses. I think it was maximum $10K with about 100 attendees. It was really important to him, but I haven’t been able to hide how much trying to host our far wealthier families and friends on a shoestring budget and pretend we’re throwing a very personal and joyful event took out of me. Everything seemed like a shadowy compromise of how I would have wanted it to be if I were “really” planning my wedding.
It took me three years to look at the wedding photos (and that was a full 10% of our budget) and I still haven’t made any prints. The woman’s portfolio was all natural shots and candids and all our pictures are stiff, posed, and JCPenney’s in the 90’s-esque. I say this as a not un-fond former employee of JCP.
I’m sure your not as ungrateful and maladjusted about it as I am, but man if you really do feel like a wedding is going to kill your soul *SAY SOMETHING NOW*
“I’m very good at spending when I really want something, but then I’ll choose little, unimportant things to be flinty about — not because they’re make-or-break for us, but because I feel a need to impose iron control over arbitrary spending that isn’t even out-of-control.”
THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT.
Can I save? No. But I carry items priced under $5 all around the grocery store with me before putting them in a discard cart once I can’t take the guilt anymore.
Well said Nikki.
I am like this in ALL stores. Bargain bins and sale racks are my DOWNFALL. Except unlike you I do not put all the things back and then we end up with lots of crap we don’t really need. This is why I only shop online now.
Thank you for writing this.
Oh, yes yes yes. I have more to say, but no time, but YES.
Nikki I understand how you feel. My parents once had a business partner abscond with all of their money and we had some lean times for a while. We shopped at Goodwill or the Salvation Army thrift shops, cut coupons, held after school jobs. This sort of thing marks you for life.
My husband OTOH grew up at the beach in a mansion his parents built overlooking the Pacific. He had his own sports car. His attitude about money is completely different than mine.
My attitude: CONSTANT VIGILANCE
His: Money? I can make more. It will work out
Well, you’re not my sister’s username, and you’re not me, but hello life twin! Rubbish, wasn’t it.
It IS rubbish. I expect everything I have to be snatched away with no warning and my husband never worries about this stuff at all.
OMG THAT IS SO HORRIFYING. 🙁
Dan did not grow up in a mansion (though, I mean, it was a pretty large 5-bedroom house in an affluent suburb in Connecticut, soooo it kind of was to me) and definitely did not drive a sports car/does not have a casual attitude about money. He just really believes we’ll be okay, like our situation will actually IMPROVE as time…goes…on? — and I just never expect that to happen. I’m GLAD he’s not like me. It would be such a mess if he were. But I wish I felt the way he did about things! I think this is just HOW I AM.
Thank you for this article! It made me think about the reticence to discuss money (especially in U.S culture). I think because of this one’s view on money is often really closely tied to or shaped by how your family did money growing up. Unlike politics, religion or other topics I never remember discussing money with my peers growing up and I rarely discuss it now, certainly never in a detailed way. Discussing financial expectations and views was probably the most important and awkward (for me) conversations I had with my partner and in looking back that seems so odd.
I often think of that scene in ‘Mad Men’ where Betty says to Don ‘I’ve seen how you are around money. You don’t understand it’, which is a harsh and devastatingly well-written (and performed) line, because it sums up so much of the specific characters, their relationship and the wider social assumptions about money and class that silently permeate our lives and ‘tell’ in strange and surprising ways.
ETA obviously it was a super-horrible thing to say, but it is Betty Draper after all!
Like many things Betty said I think yeah part of that was horribly classist but it also showed her strength (she knew how to do family finances) and had an element of truth and revealed one of Don’s many many flaws. He was bad at money and he didn’t really give Betty enough credit to deal with it.
I still distinctly remember one low stress, open and pretty frank discussion my coworkers had at my first job out of college about how they dealt with money in their relationships. It was incredibly helpful- one of the men had had to deal with a big income discrepancy between him and his partner when they first started dating, and he shared how he’d finally brought it up and how simply they’d been able to solve it. It made it sooooo much easier when I needed to have a similar conversation with my now-husband (which went as easily as my coworker’s had). Knowing that conversations about money in relationships didn’t have to be dramatic and that simple, non-emotional solutions were at least possible made it soooo much easier.
Now my husband and I both talk pretty openly about how we manage our money as a couple (if not in specifics about the dollar amounts), and I hope it’s helpful to other people- it’s been much easier for us than is probably even possible for a lot of couples, but having a low-stress model helped me a ton, so I hope I’m at least a little bit helpful for other people.
“he comes from a family for whom things do work out, and I do not.”
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
This. So much this.
Yeah, that so describes my family compared to so many others — things just never broke our way. My husband’s family is similar in outlook though with fewer periods of unemployment and disability, so we’re still both pretty frugal.
oh, and also, re: not buying nightstands – I do this SO MUCH, put off a purchase that makes sense but I can probably do without, to the point where it’s farcical.
And it’s not like I’m saving that money or repurposing it wisely! I put off spending on certain things but then turn around and make dumb impulse buys, and arrrgghghakdfjgh it’s nothing that’s going to make or break me, but I frustrate myself so much.
ME TOO. I’m currently looking at buying a bike for the first time in years and am working really hard to get past the habit of buying the cheaper option and regretting it long term. I can afford it, but it’s hard to kick the pattern of spend on dumb impulse buys vs cheap out on quality goods when you always feel that ten seconds from total economic collapse.
Yeah, I’m still in the process of internalizing the fact that more expensive things are sometimes actually worth the money. And that I don’t *always* and to compromise and get the thing that’s a better deal, but I don’t actually like. Yeah, sure, the hideous neon sneakers are on discount, but it’s not a terrible thing to pay more for colors I will enjoy!
Used bikes can be an awesome deal. Just sayin. If you’re gonna spend time agonizing about a bike, look for a used one on craigslist or a local facebook free and for sale page (or ask relatives/friends if they have one you can buy off of them for cheap). I bought a bike from my aunt a few years ago for $20 then took it to a bike shop and had it fixed up for another $50. I got a nice bike for $70 and my aunt loves that I’m using her old stuff.
THIS.
This piece is giving me all kinds of feels and nausea and I was literally about to write a comment exactly like this. I spend ages putting off spending money on things I need and then crack and spend money badly to make myself feel better (£100 on a pair of jeans that actually fit? hell no. £100 on shit rags from primark that I will get one wear out of, if I ever actually wear them? all the time)
hahahaha we just got a Primark in Boston, and yeah, that’s real. I toy around upgrading my wardrobe and getting it properly tailored, but no, spending more than $20 on any piece of clothing gives me real anxiety, even if it would save me $$ in the long run and that $8 shirt I just bought doesn’t even fit.
I am functionally incapable of paying full price for clothes. Like, cannot do it, no how, no way. If it isn’t on sale (at least 30% off), I cannot hand over money for it. I could be stark nekkid and it wouldn’t matter.
I do this SO MUCH. Certain things tend to sneak their way into the “oh we don’t actually NEED that” category, and it’s hard to put my finger on why. But I cannot tell you how many impulse Sephora purchases I have made in the past six months, whereas god forbid I drop $85 on a new food processor.
I do too! My boyfriend has occasionally pointed out that I often say I want (or sometimes need) some relatively inexpensive item and then won’t buy it. I’m the oldest child from a family that skated very close to the edge financially until I was in college and I have internalized a lot of my parents’ worries about money from those years because I had to make choices and pay my own way for certain items when my younger siblings never had to worry that my parents would cover them.
But speaking as someone who also used tables from my grandmother’s house as nightstands until I bought a set cheap from a friend who was moving – a nightstand with a drawer and lower shelf has changed my life and meant a lot less noisy fumbling in the middle of the night.
Ha, yes, I am putting off the DENTIST to fill cavities because I am still paying off our last impulse travel.
Do I have proper hand soap instead of awkwardly perching a Dove bar on the sink? No. Did I go out to buy a soap dispenser yesterday and walk out with no soap, but the sparkliest fuschia lipstick in the store? Yes. What the fuck are priorities?
Drawing from my own experience, I think you might feel possessive about money in the short-term but helpless about it in the long-term.
Holy Fuck, ladies, this. All of this.
There are two kind of big purchases I want/need to make in the next few months:
1. A new mattress, because after sleeping on my girlfriend’s “not a 10 year old on-sale Beautyrest that has been abused via moving a bunch of times, being put on IKEA bedframes without proper support, and slept on by some heavy partners” bed, I realized that a lot of my hip/back problems are a result of sleeping on what amounts to a puffy hammock.
Problem: I want a Queen, because I’m a grown-ass woman and I fucking hate touching people when I sleep. And even though I want a $900 mattress, I’m like “fuck now I have to buy a new bedframe too, well fuuuuuuck me.” Even though once the bed and mattress are purchased, I will be SO. FUCKING. HAPPY.
This has been A Thing on my mind for a year.
2. A bike. A simple, normal, Public bike, the Mixte model. It’s on sale. I could literally go into town, pick out a color, get a helmet, and ride the thing to a Passover seder RIGHT NOW. Do I? NO. Because …. because… because….. what if it gets stolen? What if I don’t ride it enough? What if I get hit by a car? Even though I 100% know that it will make my life easier considering I live on an island and need it to get to the ferry because ferry parking is a grade-A bitch.
My husband and I both came from similar financial backgrounds (lower/middle/working class), but his parents buried their heads in the sand and ignored their debts, and mine basically tread water and penny-pinched every step of the way. And that’s exactly what we had become, in our own ways.
Weirdly, it took me fixing and managing my husband’s financial problems (maxed out credit cards, dying car, hadn’t filed back taxes) that made me straighten my own shit out. I would jokingly say, “I know I’ll never have money” and shrug it off like money wasn’t important to me, but holy shit, what a sad outlook.
I still can’t fully shake off the chip on my shoulder about wealth though.
Oh my god, yes, yes so much. I was not horrible but not great with money until I got married to a head-in-the-sand type. Nothing like getting a notice that a bill is going to collections… a bill for which the first notice is still sitting, unopened, on the kitchen table.
The plus side: I got really good at tracking bills, managing money, and budgeting out the week down to the last five dollars in order to make sure we could pay rent and eat food with our minimum-wage paychecks.
The down side: I got tired of being financial manager, emotional babysitter, and all-around mother to a grown-ass adult male man, and he is now my ex-husband.
The other up side: He is now my ex-husband.
Ooof, yeah I can see how it could quickly become a situation where you feel like you’re pulling around dead weight. It’s a fine line.
This! I got myself out of horrible head-in-the-sand debt with the foresight that maybe now that I have a partner we would some day start a family, buy a home, etc… only to realize said partner had waaaay more debt than I thought and was also struggling hard. I was able to use my own experience to get him on a reasonable repayment plan and help him with it so we can pay it all off faster but the carrot of financial security keeps moving farther and farther out. Especially with the two of us working hourly wage clerical/manual labor jobs (yes, with college degrees) in an expensive city. We both do the “oh well money isn’t everything I guess ho hum” but like…that sucks. So much.
I was definitely raised with the “let’s not think about or talk about money, money is scary and nervous-making and we have enough today so why talk about it?” mentality. Luckily, that mentality was also accompanied by a stern warning to never get in with credit card debt, so I pretty much always stayed within my means (without any savings to speak of, though).
Once I got married and wanted to actually manage our money and know wth was going on with those scary numbers, I did some research and figured out a system that works for me. Yes, it is incredibly time consuming, but I know exactly how much money we have to the cent and that knowledge goes a long way to assuage my anxiety and fear.
All that said, taking an intimately close look at your finances is so much easier when you have a little more than enough. I don’t know if I ever would have made that leap if I was still as close to the edge of insolvency as I used to be.
My grandmother used to send birthday checks to all her grandchildren, and at some point she wrote to us all and said she was going to stop doing that, and here was one larger check as a sort of last hurrah. I immediately got a no-fee bank account with a minimum deposit (instead of getting bilked X dollars a month on my tiny college student budget), and I have never paid a bank fee since. That tiny cushion made SO. MUCH. DIFFERENCE. — not just in how much money it actually saved me, but how it made me feel.
Yep my family did money the same way and it made those initial financial discussions I had with my spouse difficult because I was sooooooooooooo uncomfortable talking about money.
Would you mind sharing a little bit about your system? I am trying to figure out a system for myself and I would love to hear what other people are doing that works.
(this is my nerd, so warning for lots of info below)
I use an excel spreadsheet that I majorly adapted from a template I found online and I track every single transaction we make, in and out, if it goes through our bank account or credit cards. I don’t keep track of cash, partially because we put everything on credit cards that are paid off every month to earn points for travel and partially because we don’t deal much in cash anyway. Once I got the spreadsheet set up to my liking, I take a couple minutes almost everyday to enter in transactions and it really isn’t that burdensome.
The main theory behind our system is that everything is done on a monthly basis. At the end of the month, any money that we have left over goes into savings (which we do our best not to touch) and we end with a zero dollar balance in checking. That zero dollar balance is only based on what we earned within that month and I always wait until we’ve been paid and all expenses are taken out before zeroing out the month–so our checking account is never actually at zero. I also always keep about a month’s worth of rent in checking that I call a buffer, so we can eat into that if we have to over-spend that month and not worry about overdrafting or having to take money out of savings. Our rent isn’t much, so it’s just a cushion. Using credit cards that are paid in full every month also helps keep away the overdraft fees. If we need to buy something that we can’t cover with our income for that month, we can take it out of savings.
There’s loads of advice out there for people just starting out budgeting. Usually you need to start by just watching your spending for about three months to get a feel for what is normal and then use that to set your spending goals. And when I say goals, I mean something more along the lines of spending within what I feel is appropriate–like trying to spend more on groceries that we do eating out, but still within a reasonable range. I don’t get too bent out of shape if I go over budget, it’s more like a data point. As far as services go, I know a lot of people like Mint, but it wasn’t for me. I like that I can have access to all my data for the year in one excel workbook and make fun charts and things to help me visualize our spending. I like to see how our savings has grown over the years and how much we spend on certain things on average.
As far as places to go for information, be skeptical cat with almost everything. I like getrichslowly.com, especially for info on investing. Identify your priorities and then figure out what you need to do to make those real. Save when you can, as much as you can, and for what you want (we have a separate savings account for this). Don’t pay stupid fees. Don’t pay interest, unless it is absolutely unavoidable (like student loans). START AN IRA ASAP. EVEN IF YOU ALREADY CONTRIBUTE TO RETIREMENT. Compounding interest is your friend! Find high-yield savings accounts if that’s what your jam. Make capitalism work for you (as much as you can!). It’s your dang money!
Even if you don’t do all the extra stuff I do, just keeping close track of what and how you spend is a big step towards taking control of your finances. Hope some of this was helpful!
Thanks! I’m intrigued by your idea of zeroing things out – I don’t think that would *literally* work for me in quite the same way, but figuring out where/when I have “extra” and finding a way to translate that to savings is definitely something I want to do. And thanks also for the recommendation on where to go for investment advice, because I find that totally overwhelming (not that I have much I could invest at the moment anyway. But I’d like to know!). I’ll check out that website.
I started using YNAB recently and that has helped a lot with tracking what I’m spending. I’m still working on translating that information into making better spending decisions, but it already feels so much better just to know I’m keeping an accurate record.
This matters immensely to me.
My partner is more financially savvy than I am, despite making about one-fourth of what I do, and I find it incredibly frustrating that he always has money to take care of whatever he needs, while I feel like I am always scrambling.
This article perfectly articulated why that likely is. My family was always scrambling, no matter how much we had. We were scrambling when we bought Goodwill and accepted charity from local shops, and we were scrambling at every rung of the financial ladder my folks climbed over my childhood. They’re still scrambling now, and my mother is in her fourth position as CEO of a major company.
His mother has lived off of a trust fund her entire life. It gives her a solid middle-class income, and she lived comfortably within it, and they always had money for things like going on trips or staying in hotels when the house needed repairs. He learned how to be moderate with spending because he never had the panic of not having enough. He had the time to consider how a certain amount of money ought be spent over a period of time.
I was always rushing to pay this bill, and then this one – my family was never able to look more than a month ahead. And those habits stay with us even as my income grows and his has shrunk. He still looks carefully ahead. I still panic every time a bill comes up. I’m finally making enough money that I *can* pay my bills, and I still freak out a little bit on the due date, because I’m so certain I’ll have forgotten some expense that cleaned me out, that I’ll look in my bank account and it’ll say $17.51 when I need it to say $220.
I don’t know how you get past that. Or if you do.
Unsolicited advice: lots of people recommend You Need A Budget as a tool for getting a handle on finances and building in a buffer. Maybe it could help?
It took me 10 years of earning decent money before I really got a feeling that I didn’t need to spend it all before it disappeared and that I could trust that there would be more money in the future. Building up FU money was the first step to removing the panic for me.
One thing that helped me deal with the constant anxiety that I wouldn’t have enough money in the bank to pay my bills was to actually get two checking accounts at the same bank and designate one as the ‘Bills’ account and one as the ‘Everything Else’ account.
Then I calculated what bills I needed to cover for the month and made sure there was always that amount in the ‘Bills’ account. I also spaced my bills out over the month so that some fell in the beginning and some in the end of the month*, so that my two paychecks per month could cover my expenses in the earlier and later weeks. Everything else goes in the other account, and that way, I never have to feel that panic sloshing around in my head every time I pay for something, doing the frantic mental math of wondering whether or not I’ll have enough to cover the rent.
*I know it’s not possible to dictate the due dates of all bills, but many bills (especially credit card companies) will let you select your own due date.
Having multiple accounts, each with its own purpose (I.e., short-term savings, long-term savings, car, clothes, vacation etc) is a great idea! For us, when each pay cheque is received, funds are transferred automatically into each account. This makes it waaaay easier to manage fay-to-day and emergencies as well as to plan for the future (I.e. vacations are relaxing knowing that they are already paid for).
Nikki omg you put the thing into words.
Had a boyfriend who had a quarter of a million dollars in mutual funds in his name by the time he graduated college. Meanwhile, I hadn’t seen a dentist in 10 years, because the cost of a checkup is one thing, but how much do fillings cost? What about crowns? EXTRACTIONS AND IMPLANTS? Every twinge in my mouth was Impending Doom because oh my God, all my income was the overflow on my student loans and I held on to as much of it as I could because what if I needed a plane ticket to visit a dying family member or my laptop exploded or or or or ???
Meanwhile, he thought I was insane, because in his world…you just go to the dentist. What’s the big deal?
We broke up and I got a good job with dental insurance (WHAT IS THIS MAGICAL THING THAT PAYS FOR ME?) and discovered that after 10 years without even a fluoride rinse and no history of flossing…I had three shallow cavities.
Even my mouth bacteria is frugal, I guess.
(Now I make good money and I recently had to get a root canal and crown done, because…I don’t even know at this point. Perhaps my teeth are as upwardly mobile as the rest of me!)
I have considered placing a framed dental bill near my bathroom sink as a reminder to floss regularly.
Genius.
I’ve gone so many years without dental, and am RELIGIOUS about flossing/antibacterial mouthwash for this reason. I’m sure that’s kept me from lots of expensive problems.
Being without dental care is something so many people don’t think about, like it’s just not where the brain immediately leaps when you think about being poor, but there are people in my immediate family who desperately need a LOT of dental work they can’t afford and it’s become a legit medical issue on its own. It’s thousands of dollars, and I can’t afford to give them thousands of dollars, but I wish I could. It’s getting to a scary point. 🙁
Hi Nikki,
I’m so sorry to hear about your family member’s dental problems. 🙁 I’m not sure where they are living, but it’s totally possible there is a low-cost, sliding-scale dental clinic in the area. The dentists were really great and highly skilled and were donating their time to the community.
After grad school and before I got dental insurance they helped me out with a root canal.
Another resource: Dental schools (though they may have significant wait times). Another resource: Your state dental association. They will know of resources that may not be as publicized, but may be just what you are looking for.
Google “low cost dental clinic [Your Area]”
HTH 🙂
Thank you so much for this comment. <3 I did help them find a low-cost dental clinic, but the earliest they could see my dad is August. They expect payment up front, too, but it is sliding-scale, which is good. I’m not sure if my dad can actually get all the dental work he needs done at a normal dental clinic — I have a feeling it’s bad enough that he might need to go to the oral surgeon — but maybe they can at least handle some of it. August is so far away, though.
Also, can we just acknowledge or discuss the enormity of helping (and/or enabling) parents or in-laws financially, and the strain it can put on your own marriage?
It’s so naïve to admit, but you want our parents to be PARENTS. You don’t want to worry about your own future, let alone theirs (whether it’s their fault or not). It’s such an awful fucking feeling.
I’ve had to loan my mom money 2 times now (she has paid me back both times) while my in-laws send us gifts of money. I worry so much that I’m going to have to bail her out because of so many things (her generation didn’t realize they’d need to save for retirement, she took time off when she had me so her earnings/savings probably aren’t what they could have been, she is single and living alone, etc) and it’s so hard to see how the mother/daughter relationship almost turns on its head for this.
Oh, god, oh god – so the comment about “Why wasn’t my primary goal always to earn as much money as I possibly could?” is ALL about this for me!! I started worrying about my mom’s financial situation when I was a teenager and I spent SO MUCH TIME AND ENERGY over the years trying to talk to her about money, trying to get her to save, trying trying trying, basically, to make her into a different person. And it was only at the very end of her life (which, as these things go, I didn’t realize was the end of her life – she died pretty suddenly) when all my fears had come to pass, and we had to go to extended family (thank GOD for them!) to ask for help that I just KICKED myself because I could have spent all that time and energy just MAKING MORE MONEY and putting it away against the inevitable day that she would need it. But that would have required the insight, from about the age of 16, to realize that my mom would never change. Ever.
So much of the rest of this resonates for me, too. I went to a prestigious school on scholarship. I covered the amount the financial aid office asked my mom to pay. I have been putting off buying myself a nice pair of slippers for MONTHS even though I’ve paid a hell of a lot more than that for arguably less or equally necessary things, like acupuncture…. the list goes on.
so much. Not necessarily in a marriage for me (although my brother does have this struggle), but my mother is terrible with money and has next to no income and I feel so guilty about having money now because I can’t support her in any meaningful way beyond the odd bit of money here and there (and in some ways I don’t want to help her, I resent how terrible she is with money and how painful it was for me growing up. Children should not have to worry about buying food or paying rent when the parent is spending money on crystals or some other new age cult trend)
Argh this. I helped my mother with money for the 10 years when she had to live on Social Security alone. When she got her inheritance did she even offer to pay me back? Paid her brother back and told everyone that I was lying about having paid her bills all those years. The thing was, I didn’t even want to be paid back, I was proud I could help her, but that she felt entitled that way, was beyond upsetting. I had another uncle who was horrified when he found out I was giving her money. “You can’t do that!” he said. “She’ll take everything you have.” We’re speaking again, but she’s cut off financially …
My husband just found out that his parents’ divorce agreement includes a provision for my financially insolvent and irresponsible father-in-law to get a chunk of my mother-in-law’s pension every month after she retires in a few years. I sort of wish we had known this YEARS ago because it has been a source of anticipated stress for a long time. My father-in-law is terrible at being “a parent” (or even being “a grownup”) but at least we know we’ll have some buffer against the financial repercussions of his choices.
I never thought I’d say these exact words, but I feel you on the nightstand issue. It took my boyfriend MONTHS to talk me into buying some. And I use the hell out of it now, it’s so useful! But I DRAAAAAAAAAAGGED my feet on saying yes. For no reason other than I had never before in my adult life been able to afford a nightstand.
Funny story – when I moved in with the guy I’d eventually marry, he had a couch that was literally held together with duct tape. He thought, if I was going to live there, we should have something nicer. I had never bought a piece of furniture that wasn’t from “as is” at Ikea at that point (my mom used to joke that our designer was named “Asis” and had signed all of our furniture). Anyhow, we went to, I think, Jennifer Convertibles to browse for couches, and it nearly drove me to panic. (Partly because, even though he was older and made more money, I had a POSITION about splitting costs). I called him that night, in tears, saying “I don’t WANNA buy an L!” He liked the L-shaped sofas, which were much more expensive, whereas I was having flashes of – how are we going to work this out if we ever break up!!??
Long story short, we bought a cheapie from Ikea, which is now slipcovered in the kids’ room, and we now have a very nice leather L from Ikea, and the whole family occasionally teases me for crying “I don’t WANNA buy an L!” But secretly I’m glad I stuck to my guns and didn’t spend more than I was comfortable spending at the time.
YES. I also attended a very expensive university on full financial aid/scholarship. My parents have never had to pay a cent for any of my degrees, for which I’m incredibly grateful.
One weird side effect: Because my fin aid was so extensive, I didn’t HAVE to work my freshman year of college because dorms and meal plans were all covered and I didn’t tend to spend money. (I lasted an entire semester with less than $30 in my bank account.) However, my friends would often complain about how jealous they were of me because I didn’t have to do a work study, so I had so much less stress than them. I never really knew how to respond to this. Yes, I was incredibly fortunate that I didn’t have to spend extra hours at a job. Yes, I was lucky that I didn’t have any outside expenses that I needed to work to cover (although neither did the friends who were making these statements.) Yes, their schedules were therefore busier and it was certainly a stress for them. But also their parents paid for everything, and most of their financial insecurities involved something along the lines of “my mom told me I have to earn my own spending money this semester” while mine were “my parents literally do not have money to spare, so when the cafeteria closes down over spring break I’m going to live off of tortillas and peanut butter for a week because that’s what I can afford.”
Basically, I was privileged in odd ways BECAUSE of my financial situation, but the overall circumstances that led me to be in that situation were by no means pleasant. Strangely, my parents have always viewed me and my siblings as incredibly privileged because we got so many things waived—school lunch prices, AP fees, SAT fees, college application fees, college tuition—and as a result, it took me until well into college to realize that we were actually pretty definitively poor. Like, we lived below the poverty line. That’s a literal definition of being poor. And yet my parents will still talk about how we totally gamed the system. (I think my mom especially feels kind of guilty because she’s a staunch Republican who never even considered going on food stamps.)
As an adult, things are still complicated. I went into a first-year teaching job immediately out of college and instantly made more money than my parents combined had ever made, so I was able to help pay some of my sister’s college tuition and my brother’s extracurricular expenses. It wasn’t a lot, but it felt GOOD to help provide stability. Now I’m freelancing so income is much less stable. I still feel incredibly lucky to have the resources that I have, but every once in a while I get the flip side to that, which is the guilt-trippy “how dare you be stressed about finances when it could be so much worse!” Also, I’m only three years out of college, so I’m sure this will continue to evolve as I work more or go back to school or enter a relationship or start a family or buy a house or any of those other “adulting” milestones.
Anyway, all this (yikes it got long) to say that this majorly resonated with me, and I’m sure it’s resonating many of the rest of you guys in different ways. Finances are weird and incredibly personal, and no one can really fully understand anyone else’s specific story and situation. Thanks for telling yours, Nicole!
god, yeah. my family was in a better position than yours- but every time my friends from (expensive liberal arts college) complained about/compared their student loans I was in the severely awkward position of being like- “oh, I don’t… really have loans? because my parents… have little enough that I’m almost fully covered by financial aid and scholarships?”
I ended up graduating with one $5,000 federal loan from my final year. Which is SO much less than any of my more “well-off” friends from school are facing that I still feel vaguely guilty about it, and then vaguely resentful about feeling guilty about it.
The system worked the way it was supposed to for you. You shouldn’t feel guilty about that, any more than someone who didn’t get cheated at the store should feel guilty because their friend *was* cheated. (And of course by “shouldn’t feel guilty” I don’t mean to police what you actually do feel. I just can’t think of a clearer way to put it.)
oh, of course! I guess the thing with student loans, specifically, is that it is still suuuper broken for a lot of other people – even if their parents had a higher income than mine, it doesn’t mean the vagaries of FAFSA should condemn them to be in debt for the rest of their lives!
I guess also instead of guilt/resentment it might more accurately be frustration that I’m still so uncomfortable talking about it at all. Eurgh.
We also ended up with far less debt than people who’s parents made the same as ours, because our parents combined not making much money with being very savvy about how the system works. I do try not to feel guilty, but while in absolute dollar terms we didn’t grow up with that much (though we never went without, in any way) but our parents have advanced degrees and could navigate college applications and stuff.
Life is confusing.
oh, yeah, for sure! knowing which schools would give good aid, all those weird little scholarships Dad found for us to apply for, his absolute control over our FAFSA applications. They were in a position to do a lot non-monetarily to get us a less-debt education, for sure.
something I think about a lot is how we also benefited from that social safety net/accrued wealth that gets talked about- that our working-class grandfather could buy a house in 1963 in a white suburb with decent schools, & I could still move back there now if I had to – that made a huge difference in how we grew up, that we WEREN’T paycheck to paycheck even when their hard-dollar-amount of income was “waiting months on end for the state budget to pass”
oh lord, rich kids in undergrad AND their parents were always talking about how ‘lucky’ I was for getting what was essentially a full ride, and every. time. I had to bite my tongue. Yes, as you acknowledge, we were lucky our schools were generous! (Not that it’s charity, it’s clearly in a school’s best interest to use financial aid to get the students they want.) But there’s a REASON some people get financial aid and others don’t, and it’s generally not because their families had all the luck.
I used to get upset every time my in-laws complained about writing enormous full tuition checks when I couldn’t even afford to fly home to Oregon to see my parents, who would have given anything to be able to pay for my college education. I think my husband might’ve finally asked them not to say stuff like that around me anymore, I really don’t know, but it was triggering af.
Just joining the chorus of “this is me, too!” although it makes no rational sense. My childhood experience sounds like it was much more like Nicole’s husband’s. My mother always talked and acted like we were on the cusp of financial disaster (thanks to my father of course) but I don’t recall any actual events or hardships that supported that.
Oh my god, this is intimately familiar. Not with a partner (because most queers in my area tend to be all sorts of broke, like me) but with friends. Specifically Facebook friends, from the college I went to on scholarship. One of these people just wrote a long post about getting laid off where she was all like, “Oh, it’s all going to be fine! This is a Big Life Lesson! God will provide!” And of course “God” is basically her wealthy family, who have the ability to “provide” in her time of trouble.
I won’t even talk about the endless parade of photos of fancy weddings, first days at jobs I know they didn’t earn, and exotic travel. Meanwhile I basically shit my pants over finances every week of my life and when I lost my job two years ago, the only “providing” God or anyone did for me was “providing” me with the opportunity to experience a Midwestern winter without heat for six weeks!
I’m only halfway through this and I’m not sure I can finish right now, because you are me, and my husband is your husband and we are buying a house this month and I am in the middle of a several-month-long mental breakdown about it. I may have to attack this slowly. Thank you so much for writing it.
Best of luck. The 2 week closing on our house was one of the worst experiences of my life. I turned into a hyper, tooth-grinding, off-the-walls-bouncing impression of a cocaine addict. That’s in addition to the gut punch of massive amounts of money suddenly GONE from your account.
“I didn’t expect I would feel so guilty the first time I had a job — just an entry-level position with a modest salary and benefits — that paid more per year than my parents made put together.”
Thank you for saying this. It is such a strange and powerful guilt, but I’ve never heard someone else talk about it. When I got my first “real” job post-college, my friends would balk at how little I was being paid for my position, which baffled me, because all I could think was, “This is more than my family makes! And I have HEALTH INSURANCE!”
I still feel guilty now whenever I’m broke, because my parents raised kids on less money than I have, so I must be terribly irresponsibly or wasteful or ungrateful. All I’m raising is a cat. Shouldn’t I have more in savings? Shouldn’t I budget more carefully? Shouldn’t I have enough? But “enough” is an ever-moving target.
Am running out the door and will be replying to comments later, but: I love you, Toast, and anyone should feel free to email me any time if you want to chat or vent about this subject.
“I didn’t expect I would feel so guilty the first time I had a job — just an entry-level position with a modest salary and benefits — that paid more per year than my parents made put together.”
Yep.
My husband’s parents were not well-off when he was growing up but they have always been willing and able to step in and bail out their adult children, whereas mine…are not able to do so. There were times when our power or phone got shut off because we couldn’t pay the bill.
I now make more than my parents ever made combined plus I have excellent benefits (government employee) and I still stress about not being able to pay the bills. Plus I am shit at managing money, partly because I never had a model for anything other than living paycheck to paycheck. I am terrified of the day my husband finishes his residency and we have to figure out financial planning for realz.
I have so many thoughts about this that I can’t even begin to get them all out. It’s only in the recent past that I’ve become more comfortable talking about money and all the ways it affects literally everything. It makes me want to have all the conversations, especially somewhere like here where we can have those conversations without the grossness that comes with talking about money on other parts of the internet.
it me
too real
no
okay i’m just going to crawl under my desk and think about my life for awhile.
This piece and the comments are really bringing up a lot of stuff for me. I keep trying to think of how to articulate my feelings and then I read a comment where someone has already articulated a feeling I have.
For the first time in my life I’m not worried about money all the time. I have enough that I know my bills and rent are covered each month. But I’m also terrible with spending money frivolously to make myself feel better, so although I’m not stressed as much about bills, I spend money in stupid ways to deal with the other stresses in my life.
In the grand scheme of things its probably not too bad, its things like shopping in the corner shop 3 times a week instead of doing one big shop at the weekend in the much cheaper shop that I have to get a bus too, and buying lunches at work instead of making things at home because I cannot get my shit together to cook regularly right now. And saying fuck it and buying the extra chocolate, or clothes for work (which I do actually need, but still feels frivolous.).
I’m not in debt (apart from a tiny student loan) and my expenses are at a minimum, but I still feel guilty because I don’t save more, I don’t send my mother money regularly, I keep buying shoes when I’m depressed that I’ll never wear. But then I still feel like I’m playing catch up from when I was really, really, broke, and thats why I’m not saving, like I finally bought a new phone, and a good coat, after years of shitty coats that fall apart and a phone that has been useless for well over a year.
guh. Money is hard guys and I’m making it up as I go along.
(we are all making it up as we go along)
(or at least I am)
Thank you Nicole. This couldn’t be more timely. Just received news I will be getting a raise this summer and I am already paralyzed with how this new money is going to *just* be able to provide us an emergency fund, so that in theory, I will no longer be staring at the ceiling at 3 am worried about co-pays and leaky tubs and hurricanes. But I know in my heart of heart, I will still do this, because well, it is how I understand money – as the daughter of luck, which is always in danger of running out.
My mother keeps hand written double entry accounts of everything in nice hardbound paper notebooks. She draws the tables in colored pencil and fills the numbers in with a black ink fountain pen.
Reading this, I think this is how she knows she’s in control, and knows what she has: those tables, calculated by her, drawn by her, in heavy books, are more real than any printed bank balance could be.
This is exactly how I am, except with spreadsheets. Whenever I’m stressed about money, I’ll find myself looking at my finances sheets and making them more complicated and prettier and adding colors and formulas and whatever, because at least that way it feels like I’m Doing Something About Money.
Me! Any time a financial situation comes up, the first thing I do is create a spreadsheet. I still have my financial tracker from college, which at this point uses nearly every color as an index, and has only gotten more complex as I’ve learned VLOOKUPS and INDEX and pivot tables. I’ve come to realize it completely is a sense of control thing, as I really don’t need a 12 color table with double-check references to confirm that yes I paid the cable bill.
Oh. Wow. Thank you. My mother’s been really distressed lately over her inability to balance her checkbook after taking finances back after my dad’s recent hospitalization, and I’ve been trying to assure her that everything’s fine and that she can always just go through a printed bank statement to confirm income and expenditures. Reading your comment, I wonder if acknowledging on my part it as an issue of control might not be more helpful to her.
I am weirdly comforted by seeing that so many of you feel the same way I do (although I wish we all didn’t)! Like so many others I can only say that this describes my relationship with my partner and with money to a T. Thinking about my own financial security, and my guilt for not being able to provide for my parents, keeps me up at night pretty regularly.
I feel this so much. Growing up, we had enough money (& went through better/worse times, as families tend to), but I was definitely aware that “enough” was not “a lot.” I will never forget the feeling of embarrassed awe when I went out to dinner with my freshman college roommate & her family (the first day we met; I was alone because it didn’t make financial sense for my parents to fly out and drop me off) and they told us to order an appetizer, and I thought (& maybe said out loud): “We can order appetizers? Just for no reason?”
Right? “No dessert, we have ice cream at home”
EXACTLY.
“No soda, you can buy a 2L for what they charge for a glass.”
I still get a little mad at my kids when they order sodas but don’t take the free refills. One kid in particular is always, “no, just some water now would be great” and I’m like, “we’re paying $2 and you’re too healthy for a second glass?”
I’m a messed up mom. (in that we have enough money for the soda, I don’t prevent them from ordering it, and I certainly never convey my childhood-based reactions to their perfectly reasonable requests for a glass of water.)
Though my family is far from struggling, my mom is super stingy about eating out and that’s definitely rubbed off on me. When we go to restaurants we will often split a side salad and an entree. We will maybe split one appetizer meant for 2 among 6 people and no one ever gets a second beer. I honestly think it’s a pretty good way to approach overpriced restaurant food/drinks.
I feel uncomfortable if I order a drink that’s not tap water. Soft drinks are expensive and unncessary; why bother? Ever though I could perfectly easily afford to spend an extra few pounds on a drink (especially as I hardly ever eat out). But it feels so weird.
Oh Nikki–I am feeling this SO HARD. There is so much here that I feel could have come right out of my mouth.
My mom and dad came from disparate socio-economic backgrounds, and so my mom believed that as long as we got as much schooling as possible, we would all be ok. Flash forward a few decades, and this my humanities phd has done nothing for me, and I’m working a low-paying (albeit cool and fun) retail job, while my husband brings in the money that pays for bills and health insurance. And the older my mom gets, the more I think, in your words: “Why wasn’t my primary goal always to earn as much money as I possibly could?”
That is all to say, this is tough stuff, and I’m so glad you wrote about it, because I know how hard it is to vocalize things that feel much more comfortable to never say out loud–much less put on the internet.
I recently a panic attack because my health insurance was, for complicated moving-states reasons, billing me double, and also charging me late fees on top of that, and I had no idea how I was going to be able to pay that plus my rent for the month. I knew something was off with the amount of money I owed them, but the stress was so intense that I just wanted to throw money at it and make it go away because like, I owe everyone in the world money, it seems like, so why wouldn’t I owe them? My boyfriend very kindly was like “do you need me to cover rent this moth?” after I nearly had another panic attack on the bus because he literally said the word “rent” to me, and I think he was bemused as to why I wouldn’t just ASK for his help. I just don’t want him to know that I’m as incompetent at money management as I actually am, and admitting that is really scary, because my normal tactic is to bury my head in the sand and never think about it until it’s turned into a crisis. Yay anxiety!
Oof, this anxiety. I know it, but it’s weird because I’m more of the Nikki’s husband in my relationship – money wasn’t exactly flowing like water, but I grew up comfortable and stable. My husband, on the other hand, grew up in a much more up-and-down scenario. His dad consulted for many years so their income would fluctuate wildly and they had some precarious times. However, he’s the one who is much more rational about money, whereas I am the one who fears it and thinks it’s going to vanish like a puff of smoke.
I mentioned this already today in the Link Roundup discussion of that Atlantic article, but I think in my case it had a lot to do with openness about money. My parents were very frugal, and they did a good job of passing on the micro stuff by giving me an allowance I had to budget, for example. But they were secretive about how much money my dad made, how much our house cost, etc — and I really feel like I went out into the real world without a good sense of what’s reasonable to take on as far as debt, what salary affords what sort of lifestyle, that sort of thing. My husband, in contrast, knew everything about his family’s finances and that made him a lot more functional.
TLDR; talk to your kids openly about money, probably.
This is me, too, in a lot of ways. My parents thought it was gauche, I guess, to talk about money, even though I KNEW they didn’t come from much, growing up, and worked their asses off to get where they are now (like, dude, I’ve seen my extended family, there’s no generational wealth we need to be secretive about)… so I had no sense for the longest time of what was and wasn’t appropriate? I just hoarded all the money I ever got for birthdays and Christmas and whatever because ‘well, I don’t want x thing THAT much, what if there is something else I need more some day?’
And then life happened and I have no savings anyway, and there are a lot of strings tied to my parents’ financial assistance, still, and guilt, and terms and conditions, and also the threat hanging over my head ‘when will they get angry at me and take it away again’, because they’ve done that. Repeatedly. So I dunno. Between that and being poor myself with my partner, like, we have been together for 6+ years and still aren’t engaged because…that’s a dumb thing to spend money on?
Every time there’s a brief flicker of the lights we have PTSD over whether or not we paid our electric bill, because we’ve had it shut off before, and we’ve had to make $5 stretch an entire weeks worth of food (pizza. It was pizza. Really cheap-ass pizza purchased in bulk, basically)…
and my parents don’t get that. And even though my partner is like ‘cut the financial strings, we can make it without their help’, I think ‘yes, but…then where are x y and z bills going to come from, and what happens if someone gets sick’…and I’m grateful that they ARE covering a few small bills sometimes but there’s a lot of shame in that too b/c their attitude is ‘you should prefer to be homeless under a bridge and independent rather than ask for help from someone else or move back in with your parents’…
Ugh, I don’t know. I have a lot of feelings about this. Halp wat do.
Ugh, I don’t know what you should do either, but I’m very sorry your parents are like that. You seem to know this already, but sometimes it helps to hear it from a third party: Their attitude toward you is not healthy. I hope you’re able to find a way to disentangle (at least emotionally, if not financially).
Tangentially related:
Things not to say when your kids ask you for things, “*heavy sigh* children are so expensive.”
We apparently did not grow up in dire financial straits, I just thought we did because my father made this funny joke when it was time to buy groceries. I mean, he didn’t intend it to scar me emotionally, but yeah.
This speaks to me so much. As someone who graduated with an MFA in friggin’ poetry right at the beginning of the Recession, I spent years teetering on severe poverty–too poor to move out of New York City, one month even living on someone’s couch, renting an eventual apartment bedroom that was just a repurposed storage room with my closet built over my frameless bed. I get anxious getting phone calls to this day because I’m terrified they’re debt collectors, even though I’ve been debt-free now for years. My family had money once, but my mom’s seizures and my dad’s unemployment meant by the time i’d graduated I didn’t have a single safety net. So yeah, I get this–who needs a nightstand really!?!!?
MA in English & Medieval Studies over here, also in 2009. God, those were some shitty times. I still have to remind myself that I can go to the doctor, even if there’s a copay.
Oh, man, this is so good. I find similar threads in my marriage even though I think objectively we didn’t grow up *that* far apart in income (I think my family would’ve been considered middle class, and relatively well-educated; his was upper-middle). But, like, I actually worked during high school and college, and he did enrichment-type stuff, etc. I realize now that, while neither of us is particularly spendy, we do have a difference of opinion on what constitutes a vacation, or the fact that we are still using the same Ikea bed frame we bought in 2006 even though the drawers are falling apart, etc., despite the fact that we are now both relatively high-earning professionals. Suffice it to say, those nightstands really spoke to me.
I feel like my parents each have certain things they feel it’s “ok” to spend money on. For my mom, it’s organic and healthy food. For my dad, it’s electronics. Other than that, cars, furniture, and furnishings were run into the ground. Clothes were whatever was on sale, bought from Goodwill, or hand-me-downs from when my mom and her brothers were younger. I’m still dealing with that mindset. I don’t have anything decorating the walls of my apartment because it’s not necessary. I don’t have much furniture in the living room (and half of what I do have is stuff my friends/family were getting rid of) because it’s not necessary.
I’m also well enough off on my own to accumulate savings, but I get so worried about investing it somewhere because what if something happens and I suddenly need the money? Growing up, it felt like my parents were always girding their loins for the next time something happened–an appliance died, a car died, water damage, a hospital bill–and they’d need to suddenly come up with money they didn’t have.
And then when it comes time to spend those savings, I don’t want to, because my mindset is still set to “build savings” rather than “this is money to use for unexpected events (or fun things like travel, even)” which misses the entire point of savings. I kept almost beating myself up for spending a big chunk of my savings last year on medical bills, when in fact the entire point of having savings is so you can pay things like unexpected medical bills.
…my mindset is still set to “build savings” rather than “this is money to use for unexpected events (or fun things like travel, even)” which misses the entire point of savings.
I feel this so hard.
I have been saving very aggressively over the past few years for nursing school. This money will be the money that I live on while I am in my extremely intense, no-seriously-you-cannot-have-a-job-while-doing-this program.
The other day, I was talking to my roommate about my savings (we talk about money! one of just one MEELLION reasons why i love her!) and was like “Yeah, I mean, I have X amount, but soon I’m just going to ~*~blow it all~*~ [embarrassed hand-waving] on school” and she was like “Ummmm, spending money on your education for a much better-paying job than you have right now is not “blowing your money”. You know that, right?”.
………..
oh.
……….but that’s what it feels like. :-/ I’ve never had this much money in my life, and spending it “all in one go”, so to speak, feels super wasteful and wrong, even if I’m going to use it for the exact purpose for which I started saving.
I guess what I’m saying is, I get why dragons hoard.
I did this when I went to grad school. I pretty much had to just straight up stop managing my money to the every penny like I did pre-grad school and just turn a blind eye to the diminishing bank account/ increasing student loans. I’d check in on things once a quarter and make sure I paid my bills every month, but that was pretty much all I could manage without sending myself into an extreme stress spiral. I could get away with it because my default money spending nature is basically “dragon”- I don’t think any of this is so much advice as it is commiseration. It was really hard, but I did survive, so it is probably possible that you will also.
It was really hard, but I did survive, so it is probably possible that you will also.
Thank you. ^_^
And I am super glad that you survived! You are an inspiring tale I shall tell myself when I am deep in the weeds next year.
The school part was actually pretty great- I got to learn all sorts of things I wanted to learn around people I really liked and wound up being able to turn my degree & new location into a significant pay increase. Plus having spent time working full time really helped me with time management since I knew what I could get done in 40 hours and could put myself on a work schedule rather than the all hours approach that was popular with my peers.
The money part was probably the most stressful part by a long shot. I hope you enjoy your program!
Soooo much of this is my mother and father. My mother’s parents divorced when she was in college, and her father was a war refugee who saved literally everything as well as witholding any money from the rest of the family as a form of financial abuse. Her mother has never been financially secure. My father’s parents were firmly upper middle class and came from money, as well as having loads of cultural capital
Now they both have great jobs with the government, were able to put both us through private school (with hefty scholarships, but still paying a significant amount), eat out and travel fairly regularly, and pay half my rent each month while I work a crappy entry level political job. However, almost every time my mother sees me she tells me that they’re going to die in poverty in a shack somewhere, and is always always worried about money and the fact that I won’t have enough of it. I don’t know that there’s a point at which she would ever feel secure.
(The other fun wrinkle is that there seems to be an expectation that my mother, rather than her multi-millionaire brother, will support my grandmother because fucked up gendered attitudes about money and responsiblity absolutely travel down the generations.)
Thank you for writing this. Though my family situation growing up was very different from yours, I have extremely intense anxiety and guilt around money. I honestly wish I could say that reading this and the other commenters makes me feel comforted/less alone, but I just feel sad and angry for all of us instead.
Oh the money feelings. I’m always surprised by how powerful they are.
I still remember that there was a food bank me and all the families in our neighborhood (cult) got stuff from and sometimes we would get like huge boxes of store samples, so we got this one flavor of like watermelon trident and it was the only gum anyone had for like 6 months – so everyone got super tired of it and never wanted to see this gum again. I thought it was a funny story and told it to some other kids, who were like “wow you must be really poor” and I was “no not really I mean this is normal right? It’s just like funny.” Also our cult was a strange financial environment because I grew up being like “no one buys new clothes all the time! who are you talking about?”
I grew up poor, I think poor, I’m still poor. Sometimes I think maybe I’m broke instead, but neither of us went into lucrative careers* and we’ve never been solvent other than two years out of college, when we owned a car worth about $4k and had credit debt on one blessed card of about $300, but lived paycheck to tiny paycheck.
(*I should have had a lucrative career but law school was a disaster for me in every possible way, and the debt effectively finished off my middle class aspirations. The idea of the striving poor student building a new life through education leaves out the lack of connections, practical knowledge, funds for business suits and unpaid internships, confidence around one’s peers…)
I worry constantly. My husband grew up secure and just tries not to think about it. I track every purchase obsessively on Mint now and try desperately to budget, cutting out every small expense (“let’s cancel Netflix if we’re upping our cable for the sports package, let’s not get a new phone now my contract is up and save $15 a month, let’s unplug all the appliances and put on an extra sweater and not do laundry this week and squeeze every drop out of the shampoo”) and it’s shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic to meet the Micawber Rule.
If you’re good that long, you eventually crack. You eat out, you buy the thing, you get something extra at Trader Joe’s instead of doing all your shopping at the discount grocery. You get a new iPad because your old one was from 2011 and it’s your one source of entertainment and social connection and then you’re one of Those Poor People, who spent their money on a shiny toy instead of giving it to a credit card company or setting up your child’s college fund. You buy a plane ticket from California to New York because your friend offered you a Hamilton ticket at face value, and you put it on the credit card. You know you’ll never buy a house. You know there might never be a college fund. You think, I can’t live like this forever, bounded in by the walls of perfect financial prudence, eternal thrift.
My mom was on disability most of my childhood, and my dad got the child support cut back over the years, accelerated when he remarried and had two more kids. I didn’t work a job in high school because I was necessary, free childcare for my sister until I was 17. I handled everything college-related on my own, and went to a mediocre school because I was scared to apply anywhere else and they gave me a full ride. We had Goodwill Christmases and drank milk we mixed from a big box of powder. I was the child of a spendthrift and a cheapskate, and neither of them ever told me anything about money.
I don’t know how to help my kids avoid this. I don’t even know if there will be kids, plural, because the prospect of educating just one is stressful enough. But I know that being poor feels like a crisis that’s never ending, like you can never get your head enough above water to feel ok for long, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The worry doesn’t help, but it’s something that’s hard to help, because this is my life.
I have such a weird relationship with finances. Like, I also grew up in a financially anxious household, and my husband is super frugal. I spent a few years very broke while unemployed and underemployed, and pared my spending down to almost nothing. Then I got some good jobs and I was like I WANT TO BUY SHIT. I am not in debt other than student loans, but I am so tired of feeling like I can’t have nice things. And yet I am afraid of a disaster because of the way I grew up, and even though we have a ridiculous and amazingly big emergency fund. So like I said…weird.
Yeah, this is pretty much where I am. Money was always tight when I was a kid, and when I got my first full-time job as an adult I kind of didn’t know what to do. I suddenly didn’t have to worry about every dollar, and started splurging, sometimes recklessly. I’m figuring out how to be more thoughtful and careful with my money now, but I hate thinking too hard about it because all that childhood anxiety comes up again.
I spent a good 10 years Buying Stuff after leaving uni and getting a job, like I was testing the boundaries of this is what not having to darn your one pair of woollen tights for the third winter in a row feels like. And it took ages for me to trust that this money wouldn’t just *disappear* so spend it now! Before it’s mysteriously gone!
It’s been nice finally getting to a brainspace where I know Things Are Going to be OK but it also took waaaay longer than I would have ever guessed.
I have typed so many responses to so many comments here and then deleted them before posting, because it makes me that uncomfortable just to see things laid bare like that.
Yeah, it was hard for me to be honest and I almost deleted my comment right away. Being poor has so much shame attached to it.
The weird thing is it isn’t just limited to being poor. I grew up solidly middle-class–from before I was born, my parents owned the house we lived in, they both had masters-degree-requiring jobs, they both worked full-time with the exception of maybe six months when my dad was between jobs, they bought cars new, etc.–but they both grew up on the narrow edge of not-quite-there. My dad in particular will still tell you that buying generic groceries and reusing tea bags makes you a good person, with the obvious implications about anyone who does not. And don’t get him started on the frivolity and waste of getting anything other than water to drink in a restaurant.
Wow, I know I’m echoing a lot of people here, but this really resonated with me and with some of the problems with money in my marriage. Except–TWIST–I’m the tight-fisted one but also the one who grew up in an upper-middle class financially stable family, where my husband has the “it’s gonna be OK, don’t worry about it” attitude and he grew up in a financially insecure family. And it’s hitting especially hard now because I just got laid off from my first really well-paying job that finally gave us a feeling of financial freedom. Now all the old anxieties from the lean times in the past are creeping back in.
Thanks for expressing all this, and starting a very thought-provoking and sincere conversation here.
Y’all are my parents, back before my parents bootstrapped themselves into being rich. (Dad took over his dad’s in-the-red business and made it a success, even more so once all us kids were in school so Mom could do the finances.) (And even more so once I & then my sis went to work for them.) Now retired, they take fabulous trips and keep building more houses and whatever on their land because building things is their hobby, but they buy everything in bulk / on sale, and pinch pennies in not-always-explicable ways.
For the longest time, because by the time I was really aware of money they were secure and passed that security on to us all, I didn’t understand why Mom always had to tell us the story of saving up for months in order to buy a new lipstick, or why Dad spent hours each weekend clipping and sorting his coupons and reading the circulars to see if the double coupons at Kroger were a better bet than the ground beef sale at Safeway.
That mindset is never going to leave them, nor should it have to, and I’m glad I’m mature enough now to understand it and appreciate the ways they worked to give their kids a less adversarial relationship to money. It can’t have been easy.
Money stuff can be so consuming. I am probably more on your husband’s side of things – I do assume, mostly, that everything will be basically okay – but I still feel such an aversion to spending money. I grew up in a household where money wasn’t a major worry (we always had what we needed), but my parents had had debt problems before I was born, and possibly as a result were pretty frugal. Loads of my toys and clothes were hand-me-downs from friends and relatives, all food containers had to be scraped out for the last remnants before throwing away, putting a light on or putting clothes in the wash when it wasn’t strictly necessary was frowned upon for being wasteful. I now really struggle with the idea of spending money on certain things, even though I could probably afford it – I don’t have a smartphone, I haven’t had a haircut in three years, the thought of taking a taxi instead of walking or taking public transport is completely alien to me. My partner just convinced me to buy first-class train tickets for an upcoming holiday and I feel vaguely guilty about it.
I didn’t expect I would feel so guilty the first time I had a job — just an entry-level position with a modest salary and benefits — that paid more per year than my parents made put together.
Slightly related – I feel such rage that my partner, only a few years into a job that required no special experience or professional degrees, already earns more than my mother, who works extremely hard at a much more socially-useful job (and more than I can hope to earn for years, even though my field required me to get an MA). I know this is partly to do with the types of work (public sector v private and/or predominently female fields v predominently male) and it’s not something he’s doing on purpose, but it makes me so angry.
So this is why in the middle of buying a house, I want to sob with guilt/fear, and my husband keeps looking at all confused, because buying a house is just what people do in his world.
I still don’t think I will ever be able to emotionally handle nightstands.
I’ve always had a great deal of free-floating anxiety about money. I’m getting laid off soon, and that anxiety is now distilled to a point that I would describe as next door to real panic, even though I have a partner with a full-time job and enough savings (from working since I was 15) that we are not going to get evicted (this year. probably. but oh, the scenarios that I run through at 3am). I asked my husband the other day how much money he would need to feel really secure. Of course, I didn’t let him answer before snapping, “None. There is no amount of money in the bank that will ever make me feel safe.”
I have so many feelings about money. I was one of a large family where there was No Money ad I don’t even remember how I knew there was No Money without even asking but it just floated in the air. My mum made the majority of our clothes and it was all handmedowns through the siblings until it fell to pieces and buying bread at the end of the day when it was marked down and all the vegetables we ate were from the garden. My dad earned decent money but he was also a spender and left my mother to work out how to manage what he left to feed and clothe the family. I always knew how to scrimp but never knew how to invest or even how to deal with the rebound impulse from Being Frugal too long.
And after years of earning good money (more than most of my siblings which no one ever foresaw) and finally feeling confident that there will be More Money in The Future, I am suddenly flung back into a rising surge of OMG i am going to starve in a gutter if i don’t get another job soon! Even as I know I still have runway in my savings and a partner who will support me if required. Money panic- I thought I had got over it but it was just lurking in the basement waiting for its chance.
HAHAHA#nopetopus.
This hits so hard I can’t bear to read the other comments, I’m at work and shaking a little.
My situation is better in some ways (no kids to worry about) and much worse in others: I do not have a degree, I have only made a middle-class wage for one year of my adult life (and lost that job) and I’m 36. That I have never been homeless is entirely due to the kindness of friends and family.
Money situations make me so anxious that I just avoid them. It’s entirely maladaptive–my panicky avoidance of dealing with money has cost me rather sizable chunks of cash on more occasions than I can bear to think about. (Did you know that after three years you can’t get federal tax refunds back? I do now!)
And just to make things worse, I’m just bad with money. If I have it, I spend it. I refuse to have a credit card because the one time I did I racked it up and then never paid it; and I still haven’t, ten years later.
Grad student here. Won a prestigious national fellowship that no one in my university had ever won before, so I could go do fieldwork in a different country. Meanwhile my department funding would be frozen and would resume once I returned to the US–or so I was told.
I come back, am told, “OOOPS, we made a mistake telling you that! Because you weren’t registered all that time you were abroad doing fieldwork, you lost the $5000 fellowship we normally give you and there is no way you can get it back!”
I am an international student, with severe work restrictions as per my student visa (can’t work outside the university, can’t work more than X hours a week, etc). That $5000 makes the difference between living with a bit of comfort and being able to visit home annually in another fucking continent, or not.
All I got was the , “Ooops, we messed up.” Not even an apology. These assholes have forgotten what it means to be poor and on the brink and desperate to get by on a daily basis. And the best part, the professor who fucked up and did not apologise or make amends IS A PROMINENT MARXIST SCHOLAR. Fuck you and your theories of labour and exploitation–you wouldn’t know a marxist if you ran smack dab into them.
Uh, as someone who dealt with a LOT of Stupid Funding Shenanigans while I was in grad school, my advice is: Go and physically stand in the office of graduate studies at your university until someone fixes this. Ask which forms they need to fill out and who needs to sign them to grant an exception or whatever they call it to amend the situation. “OOOPS we made a mistake, we can’t pay you a $5000 fellowship we promised you after all” is not OK. The university has $5000 *somewhere* that they can give you to compensate for the faculty screw-up. DO NOT FEEL GUILTY ABOUT INSISTING THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF GRADUATE STUDIES STEP IN AND FIX THE SITUATION. Approach the university ombudsman for advice if you have to. (When I went through a version of this, i felt sooooo guilty about asking to be paid the money the university had agreed to pay me. So guilty. My husband finally said “You HAVE to insist, in person, that they sort this out.” He was right.)
What Ellabee said, with the additional note that depending on how your fellowship is paid (through Payroll?), you may also want to get Human Resources on board. Your fellowship may more properly qualify as an employment contract, depending on how it’s disbursed, and HR needs to know if people aren’t getting paid what they’re contractually owed.
Thank you Toasties! You guys are the BEST. I wish I’d had this advice when the incident actually happened two years ago. I went to my department chair (who is also my own dissertation director and an absolute angel, normally), but he too merely expressed regret, and asked me to drop the matter. So I did. I was even a little happy that someone apologised (though it wasn’t directly his fault.)
However, since then, I’ve sorely regretted not making a fuss, but at the time I was naive enough to respect the advice of someone I really almost blindly trust otherwise in all matters professional. :-/
All of which goes to say, grad students/contingent faculty etc. need better representation and information resources. Mine is a huge flagship state university, and the bureaucracy is complicated and hard to navigate. And frankly, I was lost and timid enough not to challenge the crap I was told by senior professors and admin in my department. I know better now, but yeah. I am the sucker who did not challenge the fucked up system.
It sounds like she's getting by, so make it a point NOT to support her — as you mention, it's her fault she's scraping by. Instead save the money you'd have given her so that when she truly NEEDS it (illness, etc) you can support her.
This is a very belated comment because I somehow missed this post last week (maybe deliberately glossed over because it had the word “marriage” in the title and being firmly un-partnered is one of the things that makes me most anxious about money). Wanted to say thank you, Nicole, for expressing feelings and opening up a forum so many people clearly wanted/needed! Including me.
I grew up with a poor-but-educated single mother (my father was in prison, my mom was on welfare) who eventually remarried and moved into middle-class-dom but we always had a wealthy extended family which caused a lot of strange and conflicting feelings of luck/guilt/fear/lack of fear. I went to college with a lot of rich kids basically for free but graduated with no money and no ability to count on parental support and lived with so much anxiety for years even though looking back I was incredibly privileged and did have a safety net (grandparents who would loan me money, friends and family with work connections that got me good jobs, etc.) even if it didn’t feel like it.
Now, ten years after graduating college I have a great job I love which pays really well (I make more than my parents combined income as well, which is totally weird feeling), an emergency fund, and am saving money to have a baby on my own if it comes to that… and I still feel anxiety about money every day. I check Mint sometimes twice a day, just to make sure my money is still there. I’m about to move from a roommate situation with super cheap rent (for the area) into my own apartment, and I feel horribly guilty and anxious about the rent increase even though I have the money to cover it and I’ve wanted to do this for years.
Even though I don’t have a partner to compare to, I have recently had to work on a similar set of issues with a good friend (and former roommate) — when we lived together 6 or 7 years ago she and I made the exact same salary but our attitudes toward money were totally different. Now she has become genuinely rich and we had to have an uncomfortable but eventually so-productive conversation about the fact that my frugality is not judgment on her spending, and that our conflicts about what’s appropriate or reasonable to spend on things are way more rooted in how we grew up than our current financial circumstances. Clearing the air (and understanding how we were (mis)interpreting each other) was so helpful, even though it was hard. Good luck to everyone out there struggling with this with a partner, friend, or family member.
“I’m very good at spending when I really want something, but then I’ll choose little, unimportant things to be flinty about — not because they’re make-or-break for us, but because I feel a need to impose iron control over arbitrary spending that isn’t even out-of-control.”
Goodness, this feels so familiar. I remember grocery shopping with my partner some years ago, and she selected something – I can’t remember what the item was – that cost double the price of a different, perfectly reasonable alternative. I was aghast, and felt myself getting angry that she clearly didn’t take our financial needs seriously enough.
The cost difference, in actual terms: $1.25. But, see, the PERCENTAGE difference…yeah. I got angry – actually angry – over a buck and a quarter, when we *have the buck and a quarter*. I am clearly carrying around some pretty deeply held beliefs about scarcity, and no number of years of relative financial stability seem to fix that feeling on their own.