responsibilities

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

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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.

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

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So, $1200 per month to pay the remainder of the bills for a family of four with two stubborn girls still in diapers? Well, it’s not so hard really if you’re willing to sacrifice a few things. For one, neither of us had a cell phone, gasp! I mean, what is the purpose of a cell phone, really? It’s to communicate during emergencies, and in that case, Bruce could just call me at work. Since then, we have purchased cell phones, but even now, we only use pay-as-you-go phones, paying probably less than $10 a month, TOTAL.

Also, we were not paying for cable TV and at that time had dial-up Internet, which I know isn’t the greatest, but it still worked. These are all simple ways to cut costs: think about what you REALLY need. MUST you watch HGTV or have the highest connectivity, or can you make some sacrifices?

Without those expenses, we still easily spent $500-$600 per month on groceries, but cut our food expenses tremendously by almost never going out to eat, a habit that was admittedly difficult to drop, as we had been accustomed to that lifestyle for six years of marriage. But you have to do what you have to do. Part of that also includes switching stores, though it’s tough to give in to this, and primarily shopping at Wal-mart. Their prices are easily half, and at the very least thirty percent, less than a typical grocery store. Once I discovered this, I knew we had to make that choice, grievances aside.

Back to the diapers… we used cloth diapers, so we weren’t spending $60 a month on diapers. Our water bill may have been a bit higher, but it has always hovered around $60 a month.

So where does that leave us: $540-640… Because of our good driving records and having old cars (yet another benefit of not buying a new car), our car insurance is less than $40 a month. Yes, that’s right people: LESS THAN $40 a month!! Some things, however, are out of our control, such as the energy bill, which can easily rise to $240 in winter months. We have always tried to balance this out by paying $150 every month, therefore crediting our account, even when the bill in the spring or summer is as low as $80. This is just another simple way to cut costs: look at the whole picture and make it work by balancing things out.

Assuming that we had an expensive grocery month, that leaves us with $350 for everything else: phone, clothing, trash, gas, insurance… and tomorrow, the great insurance debate… in my words and ever-so-bold opinions…

Friend Divorce

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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.