Playing Poor

I just finished a book called Two Dollars a Day.  It's part of the Prime reading library.  I highly recommend it.  Honestly, it wasn't what I was expecting it to be, but it was fairly eye-opening.  The book follows the experiences of a handful of families in the United States living on $2.00 per day per person.  For the record, that is the threshold that the World Bank uses to classify someone as living in "extreme poverty."  It’s the kind of poverty that you don't expect in the modern US, but exists in shadow economies in big cities and small towns and rural areas.

It kind of hit home for me because I’m only maybe two generations out from that kind of life.  My grandfather told stories of life as a boy on the farm during the Great Depression and how it didn’t matter because they were poor before the Depression, they were poor during it, and they were poor afterwards.  He did manage to work his way out of that and into a decent mid-century, middle-class life.  I wish I’d paid more attention to some of the skills that my grandparents tried to teach me instead of having to learn them from YouTube videos.  I live in one of the 10 poorest states in the country, so the kind of rural poverty that the book talks about is something that I’ve grown up seeing in the countryside.  

That got me thinking about how I'm handling my finances.  I've been following the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) movement for a while now.  I don't know that I'll ever have the RE part down, unless I am offered an early out, but the FI part intrigues me.  I think it’s a natural extension of budgeting, especially for a numbers geek that enjoys budgeting and playing with my money.  

If you only count what I spend on non-savings expenses (i.e. don't count what I save each month even though those are listed as expenses in my budget), I'm spending about 75% of what is considered average in my state and only a few hundred dollars a year beyond what the expanded Medicaid cutoff would be if my state had opted in.  All that is to say that I live quite a bit under my means.  I was a broke college kid for basically my entire 20s, and I never really grew out of it.

But I'm just playing poor.  What does that mean?  It means that while I often feel and live like I'm living paycheck to paycheck, an unexpected emergency is not going to send my life into a tailspin because my entire paycheck isn’t being eaten by the daily necessities.  It means that I don't have to sit up at night and worry about money, and when I do it's because I'm trying to squeeze another 1% into savings.  It means that my kid won't have to suffer because he's sick, but the only pediatrician in town that takes his insurance is closed and I can't afford to private pay anywhere else.  I will price compare everything to get the best deal, but he will have all the school supplies on his list.  His clothes might have been bought at thrift stores and consignment sales, but he will have an overabundance of them and they will be clean.  It means that I will have what is apparently a tiny grocery budget and eat out very, very little.  But there will be more than just ramen noodles and beans and rice.  For that matter, I'm able to do that because I can afford a working fridge and freezer and stove.  And if one of those goes out, we can buy a new one, but I can guarantee that we will do everything we can to fix the old one first.  

Privilege is a hell of a thing.  For some reason, a lot of people have an almost visceral reaction when it's pointed out that they benefited from it.  Like, we get it, you work hard, but so do plenty of other people who are simply trying to keep their head above water.  They might even be working harder than you are because being poor, truly poor, is HARD.  It's expensive.  Simply acknowledging that you have been lucky doesn't take away from your accomplishments.  I fully admit that I am lucky enough to have a ton of advantages that make FI, and maybe even RE, a realistic and achievable goal.  It's great that you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, but please acknowledge that you were lucky enough to have shoes to begin with.  

Confession Time

As much as I'd like to pretend that I've always had my financial shit together, I'm here today to confess that that's not really the case.  Now, I've always kind of been a saver. As a kid, I saved my allowance for months to buy the Super Nintendo and was livid when my mom made me share it with my brother who had spent all of his allowance. By college, I had managed to put up a small savings account, which came in handy when the store I worked at closed and I didn't have a job for awhile.

Then, because I was young and stupid, I married a man who was terrible with money.  There would have been fewer red flags in Soviet Russia than what he was waving.  He came from Old Money.  The kind that had long since dried up in his family line, but because he still carried the name he felt like he had to keep up with his cousins.  He thought that as long as there was money in the checking account, it was free game to be spent.  I went from having no credit cards and some savings to having no savings and a couple of thousand in CC debt.  I'm not blameless in this.  I didn't have the lady balls to stand up to him.  Any time I did, it turned into a full-on manchild tantrum and for awhile it just wasn't worth it.  

I learned a lot about budgeting and being frugal during this time.  I pretty much had to be frugal at this point in my life just to keep the balancing act going. I learned how to use coupons and stretch a grocery budget.  I knew how to work the CVS system because it was the only way I could afford milk every week.  I tweaked the budget spreadsheet into an early iteration of what became the cashflow tool.  It was the only way to juggle bills and make sure that nothing got cut off and that the mortgage got paid.

When I was 26 I left him and moved back home.  I walked walked away from the house, the mortgage, his car loan.  I figured that in seven years I could have a chance to be happier and have terrible credit that was getting better or I could be miserable and have terrible credit that was getting worse.  I knew that he wouldn't pay them and I was mostly right.  The mortgage payment I made before I left was the last one that ever got made.  The house was gone before the divorce was even finalized.  Luckily, this was at the very beginning of the housing crisis, so the bank was still issuing full-credit bids on foreclosures so there was no deficiency on it.  I suspect that things would have been much worse just a few months later.  

At that point, we had about $10k in credit card debt.  Half of it was on cards that were in my name with him named as the authorized user and half in his name with me as an AU.  The first draft of the divorce decree that his attorney sent over demanded that I cut a check for "my half" of the credit card bills and he would take care of paying them.  I'm not sure my attorney has ever seen someone laugh that hard in his office before.  Even if I could have conjured that kind of money out of my ass, I trusted him to pay my bills about as much as I trust gas-station egg-salad sandwiches.  In the end, we each got the ones in our respective names.  I had some late (very late) payments on them, but eventually got them paid off about four years later.   

He managed to keep his car for about 8 months, but it eventually went too.  It sold at auction and there was a deficiency, but I was never contacted about it.  He filed for bankruptcy a few days after the car was picked up, so it's likely that that helped me out.  I also spent several years under the radar.  On paper, I owned nothing.  I sold my car to my dad.  I lived with my parents or in my grandparents' house.  I had a checking account that was always empty because I went back to school.

I'm on the other side now.  My credit is awesome again.  I'm remarried with a kiddo.  My new husband is...better....with money.  But we still have separate finances.  He does have some issues with impulse spending that can be serious if not kept in check.  I know that if shit hits the fan that I can take care of myself and my son.  Life is good and getting better.  I'm never going back there again.