choices

Invest This!

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

Sometimes I wonder if financial planners are out of touch with reality. Because I have read so many articles in magazines, online, heard it on the news—the best ways to invest, to save money, to cut back. Now I know they’re educated, I know they’ve been trained in what to say, and most of them have a good deal of experience, but I’m sick of reading the same old things.

The one that bothers me the most is: put money into savings first, and then pay off debts. That makes no sense to me. Why should we let debts add up, along with their ugly interest rates, and not eliminate them as quickly as possible? The same thing applies to their advice about mortgages (the biggest debt of all, right?). They always say to save money in Roth IRAs, 401Ks, or other retirement accounts, and then save six months’ salary, before paying extra on the mortgage.

I get the retirement thing, I do. I realize how important that savings is, and how quickly it will disappear having seen many of my grandparents’ generation foot the exorbitant bills in assisted living homes. What I don’t understand is how the average family has enough money to sock away six months’ worth of living expenses. Really?

For us, that’s $3100 a month. We can barely pay our bills after I have money set aside for retirement, let alone SAVE money. And I mean it. We don’t have many debts other than our mortgage. Every year at this time we’ve piled up some debt on our credit card that we must use the tax return to pay off. The rest of our tax return goes into savings, but it quickly depletes in the ensuing months. Can we live a little, just a little, please?

I have figured this out time and again. It would take us, saving every remaining penny from our tax return, more than six years to save six months’ worth of living expenses. That is absurd. Are we supposed to stay locked at home, never take our kids swimming or roller-skating or on the inexpensive family-visit road trips our family takes, just to have this little safety net?

What makes more sense to me, and what I have seen both sets of grandparents and my parents do, is to pay extra on the mortgage. We may not be able to pay that much (only $50 for us right now), but I bet it will add up. The previous generations of my family may not have been highly educated financial planners, but they all paid their mortgages off early and reaped exemplary rewards from this: early retirement for one set, selling one house and paying cash for another for the other two sets. Doesn’t that make more sense than socking all your money away? Your home is the most accessible investment of all.

It’s not that I spend all my time reading financial advice from people I usually don’t agree with. But as a one-income family in a world of doubles, I’m a “frugalista” who’s always looking for another way to pinch pennies. The way I see it, I’ll stick with what I know we can afford, and what I have seen firsthand success with, rather than “investing” in the advice of strangers who seem to have no idea how anyone could actually live on what we live on. (Side note: the one time a financial planner did come to our house, he about shit his pants, after driving up in his Mercedes, when we told him we had no car payments. Is this really the person I need to be listening to?)

Heart

/ lovizmytrio / 4 Comments

out on her sleeve,
plain as day on her face
she wears her heart
torn into bits
that spatter him with
the love she craves

but oblivion blinds him
from what he can’t understand
(she can’t understand)
and the salty droplets
mix with the blood
(the love?)
so that she can’t wash it away

his obsession preoccupies
the heart that he should hand over
and though she tries
to bait her hook
with the right words,
he doesn’t bite
(oh but he bites)

and she pines,
pieces sliding down her cheeks,
sleeve shredded,
for him to
spread open his lids,
catch her wounded words,
and restore her heart.

Parent/Teacher Conferences

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

here we sit waiting for you
your kids’ grades in the queue
but you’re not here, you’ve disappeared
for your kids’ future we’ve volunteered
our time, our work, our care, our love
for them we strive to go above
whatever task you require of us
we throw ourselves in front of the bus
but when we make this time for you
there are other things that you pursue

and yet when it is time to blame
you seek us out with your flame
“scores are low, kids are dumb”
as if we are the lowest scum

but I do not see you here tonight
making our kids’ futures bright
so hush your song and close the lid
on every word that you once hid

I don’t want to see in tomorrow’s news
the disgraceful lies that you accuse
because we are here now, you are not
let’s hope their future doesn’t rot

Consumerism on Presidents’ Day

/ lovizmytrio / 1 Comment

We went to the mall today. Packed with shoppers. We almost never buy anything there other than a shake that we all share from Chik-Fil-A. We take the girls to play on the little play area and peruse the puppies in Pet City and to kill an afternoon without spending more than $5. Isabella had to go to the bathroom and suddenly we were in the back of Macy’s when we started looking at all the nice leather sectionals that were $2000. “When we get our tax return,” Bruce joked. Who has $2000 to spend on one piece of furniture? And that was the sale price, the Presidents’ Day sale.

We started walking out and the girls examined the plate sets, the men’s shirts, the towels and sheets. “Hey, this isn’t the mall, this is like a regular store!” Isabella announced, having never really been inside one there before. Everything was on sale, we could have got some real deals, $20 dress shirts instead of $40, a $15 lingerie Valentine set, already marked down the day after. All because… because why?

Why do we have the day off today? Have we all forgotten? Here we are stuffing ourselves with fast food concoctions and filling our shopping bags with sale items and doing anything but taking a moment to realize why this is a federal holiday. This is the typical American interpretation of a holiday: consumerism.

I’m sure Lincoln and Washington are turning over in their graves right now. What were they fighting for anyway? What have we forgotten in the course of 230 years? Is this really what freedom and equal rights and human sacrifice have all amounted to? A winter clearance of coats and boots in every store countrywide?

Sometimes I ask myself, what has this country come to? How is it that the things that sustain us—the buying and selling of goods—are the same things that destroy us? How can we simultaneously prevent and prepare for a recession, just as Einstein once asked the same question about war?

When I buy anything, I am wrought with guilt. I think about the person in China who made my product and a hundred others like it for a dollar a day. Instantaneously, I think of the store-owners and employees who will be out of work if I don’t buy more. I think of the destruction of natural resources from the production of each item. And I think of how spoiled we all are, how we think we need more than what we need, and how my children’s future will be impacted by this.

But today, as I witnessed sale after sale in honor of Presidents’ Day, all I could think about were arguably the two most influential presidents of all time and their idea of the American Dream. Did Washington read the Declaration of Independence to his suffering troops during the winter at Valley Forge, did Lincoln sign the Emancipation Proclamation and take the first step towards equality, for us to save a few bucks and add to the debt and environmental nightmare that we’ve been swimming in for years? And if this is how we honor our presidents, the leaders of this great nation, where is our country headed?

I can’t answer that question. I can only reach out and take my girls’ hands and lead them out of the mall. Perhaps this is the first and most important step to guiding the next generation in the direction of the real American Dream: the dream our presidents had, once. The one about freedom. Not consumerism.

My Stunning Flowers

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

I carry inside myself the desire to be better,
to always sit with you and help you find every
place where your puzzle pieces go,
to tell you, yes, forty minus three is thirty-seven,
to play family while I hold the piggy and you hold the koala

and not to wash these dishes
not to gather my breakfast ingredients
or set up my morning coffee,
not to look at the computer for just one moment

I think how you will be as women
falling in love
going off to college
calling to tell me about your first real jobs
and I both despise and relish these thoughts

I look forward to that time, to sharing
my life with you in a different way,
to see how you’ve blossomed
from the beauty of your youth into the
three unique flowers that I know you will become.

but now I struggle with my evenings,
my tense moments of tomorrow’s prep work,
my need to have a break when you are sleeping
in the brief time between your bedtime and mine

and I know that what I sacrifice is my vision of your future
and the interminable guilt that will mingle
with the sadness you will carry in your hearts,
the longing all of us will have for these moments,
these precious moments without which
you will never be the stunning flowers I have imagined.

Running

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

I find myself always running
always trying to be stunning
dashing from place to place
at a speed-demon pace
but when I need to take some time
I lose myself, forget the rhyme
I need to stop and look things over
evaluate and take it slower

slow and steady is the pace
that never comes across my face
because if I don’t beat my time
I fear that I will lose my prime
I’ll have to give up part of me
and never see the real beauty
of what it takes to truly stop
put my mind on my spinning top
and realize that fastest isn’t best
that sometimes what I need is rest.

Filter

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

Am I too much like my father,
words spilling out of my mouth
as if a dam has broken at the
back of my throat,
flooding onlookers with whatever comes,
whether they want to listen
or would rather dash away,
scrambling for their own dignity
amidst the inundation?

Instead I criticize those who
keep their reservoirs behind bricks,
letting loose only small streams,
maintaining the walls
and freezing their vibrantly harsh
thoughts, never once
letting them pour out
for the rest of us to wade through.

But if I build it back, brick by brick,
trapping the intense waves
as the wind slaps and stings them,
as the rivers of my mind
pour deeper, darker water into the lake,
I know the dam will burst again
and I will gush through, swimming
with the words that make me who I am,
inviting whoever dares to join me.

How to Live on ONE Salary in Today’s World, Day One

/ lovizmytrio / 2 Comments

I am going to write for several days about a question that I often encounter from many people who tell me, time and again, that they think it is impossible for their families to live on one salary. To me, after so many years of hearing this, I find it almost offensive when I hear people say that. If it is possible for us, why can’t it be possible for other people? We are certainly not wealthy by any means. I make $50,000, but when we started doing this, my salary was just $37,800.

So many people are losing their jobs now that this might be something they not only have to consider, but have to live with. So these few blog posts will be about how we do it.

In 2005 I was happily staying home with my two young children and taking care of another little girl for $550 a month while my husband worked full time earning about $40,000 per year. We had a comfortable life, filled with vacations, and were able to save a little money every month. Then he received the news that his job would be coming to an end within six months, and I knew what I was going to have to do: go back to work. As much as I hated the idea of working and leaving my then-two-and-a-half-year-old and nine-month-old at home without me, I didn’t want to lose everything we had. Part of that everything, as a personal and VERY important choice for us, was keeping our kids out of daycare. Bruce never went to daycare growing up and had a very close relationship with his mother. I, on the other hand, spent my childhood with various babysitters, and have too many negative experiences to count (nothing horrific—just neglectful). So that was one of the many priorities we had in mind when we were faced with this challenge.

We made a plan. The first part, as difficult as this was to accept at the time, was to eliminate all debts other than our mortgage. Unfortunately, the only way for us to do this was to completely drain our $12,000 in savings. We paid off the rest of my small student loans, our credit card debt, and a loan we had taken to put siding on our house. This brought our bills down by $230 a month, which may not sound like a lot, but it can make a huge difference.

One thing that we did not have, which most people do, was a car payment. Both of us had cars and both were long paid off. I think this is the single most important factor determining a family’s ability to live on one salary. In my opinion, there is almost NO reason to ever have a car payment. What is the purpose of a car? It is to get you where you need to go. There is no reason that I can imagine why anyone should ever buy a new car. And if you need to upgrade to a larger car, as we found out later that same year, expecting baby number three, that we would need to do, find a way to make it work! We used our tax refund ($4000) and sold our old Explorer ($3000) and bought a minivan with cash.

So, to return to my story, the only debt we had, and more or less still have, is our mortgage, which in my mind hardly counts as debt. Another thing to consider is where you live. We certainly don’t live in a fancy house in the most beautiful neighborhood around. We live in, gasp, Aurora!! Ghetto central, right? Come on, your home is what you make it. We have never experienced any crime that I know of. We don’t lock our doors—car or house. We live in a quiet cul-de-sac that our kids play out in with the neighbors’ kids just about every day of the year—similar to any other cul-de-sac in any other suburb, but without the fancy HOA or whatever it is that makes people feel so special about where they live. That being said, our house payment is around $1400 a month.

When I first started working, I was bringing home $2600. Ouch. Do the math. That left us just $1200 for all the rest of our bills. Much higher than the 51% or less of the take-home income that you would get approved for if you were applying for a mortgage… But we did it… and if you read tomorrow’s blog post, I will tell you how.

Friend Divorce

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

We are adults now, though you always said we wouldn’t be. It’s not like I don’t think of you now—you know I always will. But it isn’t the same as before. It is not a longing that haunts me, a need for you, unfulfilled, that I had for so many years. It is a vacuous space in the crevices of my brain, at the back of my day, behind picking Isabella up from school, behind folding the laundry, grading papers, hearing the latest gossip at school, trying to have a conversation with Bruce… you are still there, on the edge of my thoughts.

You creep in a bit more when I am having a problem. I think about the long pages of words we have exchanged over the years, and sometimes I can still bring tears to the edges of my lids when I think, Oh, I cannot write this email… and when I try to replace you in my mind with another person to consult, I will admit that I still have trouble. But in a way, even this wordy absence is a blessing, though you probably wouldn’t see it that way. It forces me to reach out, to reach beyond my usual circle, and seek the advice of others, open my heart, my soul, to other friends, and realize that it is possible to move on.

Sometimes I think about all the coping books and media out there, the large section of self-help books, conferences, television specials, the availability of couples therapy, everything geared toward self-improvement or marital bliss. And I wonder, where did we go wrong? Not you and I, in particular, but our society. We are so centered on our families that we forget the importance of friendships. And what is out there to help people cope with the loss of a friend? What self-help book discusses friend divorce, or even attempts to explain it? Just as marriages fail at a fifty percent rate, I think friendships slip away, sometimes quietly with the passing of time, years, marriages, children, sometimes abruptly with an incalculable explosion of anger, at a much higher rate.

I know I am not the only one who has lost a friend—in fact, just the opposite. It seems that the more people I speak to of you (I am allowed to do that now, you know), the more I realize that we are all going through the same thing. And I stand by my original ground, the ground I defend so adamantly with my stubborn ass, that I think this is all plain ridiculous, and there is no goddamn reason in the world why people just “grow apart.” Everything is a choice in life, and you did not choose me.

We were at the zoo today and ran into an old friend of Bruce’s… his friend divorce. Not exactly the same situation as you and I, but right beside it. It’s like seeing an ex. There he was, wife and kids, there with another couple and their little boy, smiling and cracking jokes just like always… But it’ll never be just like always, because he chose them over him, over us, over all those times we went snowshoeing or hiking or hung out in bars on Friday nights… and no matter how many times we try to explain to ourselves that it’s not our fault, we’re always going to think it’s our fault.

I’m telling you, someone ought to write a book about it. Friend Divorce: How to Cope, How to Move On, How to Make New Friends. Because we aren’t on the playground anymore. We don’t have the social appetite of teenagers wanting to escape their parents. We have jobs and children and bills and aging parents and the general heaviness of adulthood weighing us down, keeping us back from the risks we were willing to take as young children or adolescents. We need skills, new methods of meeting people, of opening up ourselves in a way that will lead to the strong friendships we were once so fearless to develop.

It’s funny how I write to you, to you of all people, the one person in my life (my former life) who will never read this. Our friend divorce has been final for six months now, I think. And I am still working on moving on.