view from uphill ride
my city backed by mountains
night ends in laughter
You are so lucky!! I have always known this, and tried not to take advantage of your wealth. I mean it. We don’t have all the typical luxuries that many Americans have, especially in the past 9.5 years of having children and only one salary to support them, one TEACHER’S salary. But still. Now that I’ve been here, I realize day in and day out how SPOILED we are. We have a huge home with a huge yard, two cars, the ability to go anywhere at any time, and jobs that ROCK!
Let me tell you about what it’s like to be a teacher in Spain. To be a student in Spain. You will have, more or less, the same hours as in America. But the similarities end there. Students, you have to buy, and carry across town, all your textbooks. Your parents will put forward 300€-400€ every year just for this. Teachers, you can say goodbye to the dream of having your own classroom. You’ll move around all day, toting books and supplies, to white-walled, un-air-conditioned, packed-to-the-gills classrooms with teenage body odors seeping into every moment. And just when you thought you could make an amazing presentation to your students on the first day of school with the PowerPoint you spent hours preparing, filled with special effects and links to important sites crucial for their understanding? Sorry! There is not a computer here. Not a projector. Not even an old-fashioned, transparency-laden, ten-years-back projector, nor a screen! (Don’t even MENTION a document camera, please, or I might die!) A whiteboard? Please, a whiteboard? Of course not! Everyone loves the feeling of dry chalk dust on their palms for the rest of the dashing-through-hallways day! (Just in case you were under the impression that you could tote your Mac and projector from America and use Wifi to access everything you ever needed–God forbid you have such an idea!–I might add that Wifi pretty much doesn’t exist here, and if it “does” it’s a lie, sham, scam, and disappointment, because you might wait five minutes for one page to open!)
A couple of hours will pass, and it feels like it ought to be lunch time. A siren announces that it’s… not lunch time. Oh, I’m sorry, your parents can’t afford to feed you? Sucks to be you, no free-and-reduced lunch forms to fill out here! No cafeteria! Perhaps your parents packed you some pan and you can wander around the school for thirty minutes counting down till your main meal at 3:30, after the last bell.
If you’re a student and you need special services, such as, um, Spanish as a second language? Special education? A teacher might just come and pull you out of class every day with a small group of other students, a mixture of all types of needs, and you will neither know why nor have a single phone call or form sent home to your parents.
I know what you’re thinking, America. Sounds a lot easier, doesn’t it? There’s no stress about decorating classrooms, arranging desks in a special way, filling out paperwork and attending IEP/ELLP/MEETINGS! But come on! Just try it for one day, and you will be forever grateful for what you may have thought was a desperate situation, a no-respect, get-me-out-of-this-profession situation. Trust me. One day in a Spanish school, and you will learn to LOVE your job, your board of education, your rights, your Americanism!!
And that, over everything, I think, is why I’m here. 🙂
Why must travel cost such an extraordinary amount of money? We’re so fucking spoiled. All we do is decide to pile into our cheap-ass American car, load it down with clothes and food, and maneuver on interstates from one relative’s home to another, never paying high prices for hotels or exorbitant amounts for gas. What a strange world, so isolated from reality, Americans live in! How could they possibly complain about anything, I have decided, until they’ve laid down 500€ for kids’ school supplies and books, have looked at bus tickets (yes, bus!!!) that would cost almost as much as plane tickets to a place that’s half a day’s drive??
So much for seeing Spain. I mean, should I spend half a month’s salary for a three-day-weekend in Barcelona? Is it that much more amazing than where I stand at this moment, palm trees and warmth surrounding every moment?
I considered buying a car. We were walking home and I saw a compact car for 1000€. Hey that’s only a little more that our Barcelona “trip”! So I looked into it… it costs anywhere from 450€-1000€ just to get a fucking driver’s license! What a racket these Spaniards have with their fancy textbooks and driving schools. Everyone might be unemployed, but let me tell you, some of them are rolling in it!!
This is why I’m a little testy tonight. Not only does it look like we won’t be going anywhere this year, but I’m also a little tired of ringing doorbells to fancy sixteenth-floor apartments or row homes for tutoring that I was told (by the teachers at my school here) to charge only 10€ an hour for. I certainly didn’t want to overstep my bounds and take advantage of the poor Spaniards, but I sure as hell am a little fumed that, as usual, the money remains at the top, that I have to work twice as many hours to earn enough to buy groceries when they’re paying for an invaluable experience with a native English speaker from a place none of them have heard of or will ever visit!!
So not everything’s perfect on this side of the globe. Can’t a girl complain for just a moment?
sun shined on every moment
as we walked along the beach
(when life was not a beach)
money and bus schedules
weighing us under water
oblivious,
our girls swam all day,
mermaid Barbies in tow,
searching for seashells
when in one week we were filled
with a box full of activity
registering ourselves as residents
registering our girls for school
registering for a new life
this week we worked a different tack
searching for a new response
to a computer without Internet
phone conversations i couldn’t interpret
and hope for something better
in four days,
the sun sparkling on travertine tile,
the sun sparkling on long walks
between lorikeets
and Roman architecture,
we have moved from survivors
to healthily employed,
dream-fulfilled,
satisfied Spaniards!!
my moon was awake
full and bright
casting my stress
with hands of night
the breeze came out
shunning the heat
on the swing i sat
dangling my feet
my thoughts swirled round
a storm in my head
while my pup rested gently
under covers in bed
if only the screen
could wash away fears
make the work worthwhile
and cast away tears
if words could work
i could buy the right food
food to feed them
food to nurture the Earth
rather than strip her of
her natural beauty
if words would work
we could respond yes
throw our three-dollar-dinner
into the wastebasket
and forget the one week and
ten dollars left till payday
if words could cure
the tears would be smiles
and they could have
the ice cream cones of their dreams
instead of the cheap flavorless popsicles
that melt before they can get a taste
of the world with my words.
funny how you mask yourself
for their protection
and i wear the button
proudly on my jacket,
picture-whispering
my beliefs for all to see.
when your thoughts
bubble up out of you
in an eruption of disparity
from the tight-necked clothes
you’ve kept around you,
the lava stings my view
of who i thought you were.
you wait for molten rock
to form as ash settles,
but i am trapped underneath
the red flow from your mantle,
unable to break through the crack
in the crust you chose to expose,
unable to even whisper what i see.
1. Forget about owning a new car. If you can’t forget it, stop reading now. You can eliminate up to $800 a month in payments if you don’t have a car payment and its ensuing expensive insurance.
2. Buy the minimum coverage for car insurance. Take a risk. It’s worth it.
3. Pay off all your debts (other than mortgage) before you consider it.
4. Save for retirement in a 401K, 403b, or whatever you can. It may be the only money you save for a while. But it’s something.
5. Take advantage of refinancing when the interest rates are at their lowest.
6. Eat at home 90% of the time.
7. Bike or carpool to work.
8. Use your tax returns wisely: pay off debts, save a little, use the rest for a small vacation.
9. Speaking of vacations: drive. It’s better for the environment, less scheduled, and more up to you. Have kids? Drive at night. They’ll sleep, you’ll be happy.
10. Buy used. Buy used. Buy used. I just bought three sweaters, a hat, and two nice pairs of pants for work at the Goodwill for $22. Brand-name products that look brand new. Craigslist is a great place to find virtually anything you need, from kids’ toys to bikes.
11. Create a monthly budget. Stick to it as much as possible.
12. Expect the unexpected. Cars (especially the old one you’re driving) will break down. It’s better to put it on a credit card you can pay off in a few months than to pay a car payment.
13. Do a babysitting exchange with another family. Enjoy an occasional night out without the extra cost.
14. Look for sale items at the grocery store and stock up.
15. Cancel your cable. You can watch a variety of things on the Internet, and Netflix is much more affordable. There’s nothing on TV anyway.
16. Get books and audiobooks from the library. Music too.
17. For gift giving, take advantage of after-Christmas sales and stock up on kids’ toys and Christmas wrapping paper. Flip the wrapping paper inside out to wrap gifts for every occasion.
18. Give up hair dyeing, manicures, pedicures, and salons. You’re beautiful the way you are.
19. Weather-proof your house as much as possible to save money on energy costs. Use cold water for washing clothes.
20. Decide what you really need to buy versus what you want to buy. Make sound choices, and you’ll have extra money (occasionally) to blow on fun items.
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?)
Without a doubt, living on one salary has its challenges, and by far the biggest one for us, or anyone, is health insurance. This is tricky. We have dealt with health insurance over the years using many different methods, none of which are ideal. When I stayed home with the girls and Bruce didn’t have health insurance through his employer, we bought independent health insurance that covered NOTHING. I mean, we were paying almost $400 a month and every time we went to the doctor we had to pay towards our deductible, meaning the full bill. We finally just gave up, because all we were doing was paying, paying, paying, and receiving no benefits.
So when I returned to work as a teacher, I received full benefits, but the costs for the family were exorbitant: upwards of $500 per month. We knew that there was no way we could afford it, so we didn’t even consider it. I know what you’re thinking: what would we do if something tragic happened? Is it worth the risk? No one can answer that question for us; it was a risk we were willing to take at the time.
Luck plays a hand when you are making good choices for your family, I think. Just a few weeks into teaching I came across a flyer that advertised CHP+, the state-funded health care program for children. Of course, with my minuscule salary at the time, we qualified! So since we put our kids on that health insurance, we have an annual bill of a whopping $35 and co-pays of just $5.
Unfortunately, we could not afford to have Bruce on any health insurance until I had been working for more than two years and I received a couple of raises. Even then, it was a struggle to afford, but we managed until they changed the insurance. Now we are back in the same boat, risking the possibility of injury or illness to save money… but what can we do? What else can we cut? It is a terrible choice for a family to have to make, but it is our choice.
Back to our remaining $350… that easily covered the trash, about $20 per month, $80 for the phone bill, $150 for gas, and just a measly $100 for EVERYTHING else. I’m not going to lie. It wasn’t always easy. When we had to get the car fixed, when pipes froze, or when some other emergency happened, we had to put everything on a credit card, which I hate to do. But another huge benefit of having one income is a large tax return every year, so whenever we have to use the credit card, we are always able to pay it off with a portion of our tax return. And we never, in the four and a half years of living on one salary, have had to pay off more than $1500 on our credit card, leaving us with spending money!!
Yes, spending money! We have actually been able to take at least two vacations every year since this shift in salaries. One year, when I gave birth to baby number three and had an enormous amount of medical bills related to this, our tax return was so generous that we were able to take the whole family to Mexico for a week.
Vacations aside, what we have truly purchased with our one income is priceless. With a full time dad taking care of the children and the home, the errands, the grocery shopping, the cleaning, and cooking dinner every night, I do not endure the harried existence of many working mothers. And because of the multiple weeks of vacation time and holidays a teacher has, we have more family time than almost any other family I know. So, despite all the sacrifices and stresses we have faced over the years, it has been worth every minute of worry and every penny not received. We have a stronger, calmer, healthier, happier family, and no one could ever put a price on that.
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