Spent

Spent is not a reflection of  how I am feeling these days. Nor is it an analysis of my purchasing habits.

No, Spent is a computer exercise in poverty created by Urban Ministries of Durham. I first learned about it on Nola Akiwowo's blog at Feeding America. It is a thoughtful and provocative tool to raise awareness of what the Great Recession has done to the lives of so many Americans.

Its premise is that you have lost your job and your home. Your savings are gone and you are down to your last $1000.  Spent challenges you to making it through one month without running out of money.

If you choose to play, you are guided through a series of choices, starting with finding a low-income job as a waitress, a warehouse worker, or an office temp. (I flunked the speed test so could not get a temp job, taking instead the $9/hour warehouse job.) From there, the choices come thick and fast. Do you pay your car insurance this month or not? Do you allow your child to play sports when it will cost $50? Do you go to a free concert with friends if the babysitter is going to cost $30?

As you make each choice, your balance account fluctuates and you are given a fact about what your choice represents in the real world. (Opt not to go to the free concert to save money on babysitting? Be aware that "everyone needs a break but not everyone can afford" one and that may be a contributing factor to higher levels of stress among low-income families.)

I have taken the Spent challenge four times. Each time I have "won" in that I made it to the end of the month with money left over. But when you "succeed" by reaching month's end, the program reminds you that rent is now due.

I have yet to finish the exercise with enough money to pay the next month's rent.

Spent is not a fun or easy romp. I found myself getting a knot in my stomach as I agonized over which utility bill to pay. I chose to pay the electric, so my gas was shut off, which meant I could no longer fix economical meals at home. I lost my job in one round because I took a pamphlet from a union organizer in the company parking lot. In another, I chose not to renew my car registration, hoping I would not be stopped by law enforcement before I pulled together enough funds, including late reinstatement fees, to be legal again. I accepted a coat from a neighbor because mine was worn out. I refused to let my children opt out of the free lunch program, even though that meant they might not eat because of the stigma of getting free lunches.

After I finished (forget "won"), I went to the kitchen for a glass of water. I stood for a long time looking into the backyard, grateful for what Warren and I have. Finances are always tight around here, but we are blessed with so much relative to so many others. Spent reminded me of that.

My friend Sharon has been blogging about her No Spend February. Last week she had some unexpected expenses arise and speculated how to treat the hit to the dollars she had limited herself to spending this month. Sharon wrote:  

Even though I didn't expect some of these expenses, they are still misc. items that need to be counted.  I thought about this for quite a while.  If I counted them, it would make the rest of the month very hard, but isn't that the point of a challenge??  These types of expenses will crop up every month.  If I only had $750.00 a month to pay for food, gas etc. then I would have to make it work.  So, that is what I've decided to do.  Make it work.

I commented back: "We have all sat there, small scrap of paper at hand, noting expenses, prioritizing what we really need to get through to the next payday, the next whatever..."

Take the Spent challenge and see how you do.

Spent reminds us that millions of us are faced with economic choices that do not lead to better times, but are instead desperate attempts to keep the wolf from the door for just a day or two more. For far too many of us, the wolf is already inside the house and we are standing on chairs with a battered broom in hand, hoping to keep it from eating us alive.

Letting Go

Sometimes you just gotta let the ghosts go.

The last 15 or so hours have been an unexpected walk down Painful Memory Lane, with side trips down Sad Memory Lane. It started when I stopped at the library yesterday and checked out Shadow Tag, Louise Erdrich's latest novel.

Shadow Tag is a novel of a marriage gone badly awry. Some reviewers are speculating whether it is an autobiographical rehash of scenes from Erdrich's marriage to Michael Dorris, who committed suicide twelve years ago during that marriage's disintegration.

I don't know if it is. But I do know that several pages into the novel, I had the distinct feeling that Erdrich had somehow been a spectator to the end stages of my marriage almost a decade ago. Had she been sitting in the bedroom closet scratching notes? Did she watch me from afar? I winced as I read last night, almost gasping for air as I finished each page.

And then I woke up this morning to emails from my ex regarding our younger son's plans to attend college in the fall. He wrote in one: "At some point, you and I have to discuss how to pay for this. My preference is to split our contributions 50-50."

Without going into details, let me just say he makes over twice what I do a year, with benefits, which I lack. I emailed back an overview of my financial situation, feeling violated as I typed away. I then hit "send."

This was all before breakfast, and while Warren worried as he watched my fingers fly on the keyboard, he kept his thoughts to himself. When we sat down to eat, I recapped what I had written, then explained what emotions and painful memories that email triggered in me. I stopped talking abruptly and leaned my head on my palm, waiting while the tears flooded my eyes. I did not burst out crying, but there was a long, quiet pause. Warren reached over and held my other hand while I collected myself.

After Warren left for work, I sent a follow up note to my ex: I just want you to know the landscape of my finances. I am not comfortable letting you know that landscape, but I think it is fairer to you that you do now rather than for you to assume things about me and my capacity to pay, then find out I cannot. Your email and my response have brought up lots of painful memories that I would rather not focus on right now.

I ended it by suggesting we revisit the topic closer in time to the start of college.

After I sent the second message, I turned my attention to my day. A major winter storm is moving across the face of Ohio, so that canceled my one outside appointment. The United Way allocation season is about to begin; Tracy and I have already exchanged several emails today on that topic. There is laundry going.

I turned my attention to these other things, grounding myself again in the quiet pace of today. While I worked, I thought back through the emotional walk I have been on since last night.

Then the thought came.

"Just let it go."

Just let it go. I don't need to rehash every penny spent and every wrong handed out during my prior marriage. I don't need to replay the "Worst of" highlights on a big screen TV. Ralph Edwards is not going to pop out of the closet and say "remember this moment, April?"

Just let it go. When Sam heads to school this fall, then his dad and I can reevaluate where we are financially and what each of us can do to help our son tackle his future.

Just let it go. I did. I felt the pain and the sadness lift from my shoulders and dissolve in the air.

As I was finishing up this post, I received an email from my ex that was such a considerate response that tears flooded my eyes for a second time this morning. This time, though, they were tears of appreciation that, despite the painful past, he and I did not tumble headlong into a cycle of ranting emails and flying accusations for the day.

Just let it go. I already had and, thanks to his response, it will stay gone.

Clicking Through Life

Personal Finance (PF) blogs fascinate me. The ones I read regularly, all written by women, tackle on a small and daily level the multitude of ways one can live more cost-effectively and conscientiously in our consumerist society.

(I am not a PF blogger for lots of reasons, including that I could not stick to one topic if I tried. My writing is more akin to walking on the beach: I write about whatever flotsam and jetsam I come across.)

An event that often pops up in the PF world is the "no-spend" event, be it a day, week, or month. A no-spend whatever means exactly that: do not spend money. On a monthly scale, it means setting a specific level of spending (not counting housing and utilities) to cover whatever crosses the threshold for the month - gas, food, entertainment, clothing, gifts - and sticking to that amount. A number of PF bloggers have also joined "the compact," a San Francisco based movement whose members agree not to buy new products of any kind for a one-year period (most after setting out certain personalized exemptions).

No-spend events are fun to watch from the peanut gallery and that is exactly where I intend to stay. While I have many no-spend days in any given month, I doubt I'd do well with an "official" no-spend event for the same reason that I avoid any diet involving counting calories - my mind doesn't work that way. Set me a daily caloric limit and I will find five ways to amortize a Snickers bar into the calorie count. I have a feeling I'd approach a no-spend event with the same spirit.

Some PFers appear to pull off these events effortlessly. They write of being energized by the creative ways in which they feed their families, have fun outings, decorate their homes, and give to their favorite charitable causes, all without spending. Others admit to weariness at times - of hitting the frugal wall, so to speak. Sometimes creativity wanes when faced with beans and rice for the fifth night in a row or the whiny child who wants "just one little candy bar, mom! Just one!"

Sometimes the bloggers' efforts recall the words of poet Langston Hughes:

It's such a bore
Being always poor.

The bloggers I read are not poor, but at times their self-imposed limitations weigh them down as if they were.

One of my favorite bloggers, Sharon at "Musings of a Midlife Mom," recently tried a no-spend June. Last night she wrote of spending above and beyond her goal, then said:

I haven't added everything up yet, but I can tell you I don't regret any of the purchases I made today. I needed it. Yes, that's right, I needed it...I needed to do something fun, and in this case, it cost some money.

I've reached my goal of paying for a lake house this month. I sent the last check on the 15th. So, I've decided to officially end my No Spend month today, after only three weeks. Not that I'm going to go into a spending frenzy on the last week, I simply can't because there aren't enough funds in my checking account to do that. But the stress of worrying about going over a certain amount has taken it's toll.

What came to mind reading Sharon was Jane O'Reilly's essays about clicks and clunks in the feminist movement.

O'Reilly, a founder of Ms. magazine, is the essayist who identified the click, that moment in a woman's life when she was radicalized by experiencing gender inequality. Several years later, she wrote a follow up essay in which she talked about being tired, of being tired of doing it all, and of being afraid that being tired meant she wasn't a feminist. Those were clunks. After recalling that clicks were "engaging and stimulating and tend to strengthen," clunks were when one "got unreasonably dispirited and embarrassed by minor failures."

After chewing on the problem, O'Reilly concluded that the antidote for clunks included imagination and laughter.

I agree. I think Sharon would also agree; her sense of humor is one of the reasons I enjoy her blog. Certainly from what I can read, she is not letting her early termination of her no-spend experiment dampen her life.

Life is full of clicks and clunks, and not just in the feminist movement. Clicks are energizing, regardless of where and when they occur. Often they are the laughter-filled moments that dispel the clunks. The small moments I celebrate are clicks of the first order of magnitude.

That is a good thing, because my life has a few clunks in it. Right now my garden has a couple of clunks posing as pepper plants in it. The car transmission is making clunking sounds, and that could be a major clunk. This coming week will be unusually busy and it is too early to tell whether that will be a click or a clunk, or both.

But the tomatoes are blossoming, we just finished a great week with Warren's daughter, and the fireflies are back.

Click, click, click.