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My Profile
Retro-retrospection - 2008-10-06
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1:03 p.m. - 2003-05-21
A lot of people on my buddy list are having money troubles right now. Things are tight for them or one half of the couple is a grasshopper and the other is an ant or they are trying to dig out of credit card hell. And I realized that for the first time in my life, money isn't a huge problem. I am very, very, very grateful for this. As I was de-tagging and hanging up my purchases yesterday I got bowled over by the knowledge of just how far we've come. 19 years ago Mike and I were living in a tiny cockroach infested converted garden shed, owned one pair of shoes a piece, and were LITERALLY eating out of dumpsters to survive. We had no phone, let alone cable. We had 3 vehicles, but all of them were at least 25 years old. They broke down on a daily basis and we'd rotate them on and off the road by going with whichever was the least expensive to fix. We had a baby on the way and I used to cry and cry because I couldn't bear the idea of cockroaches crawling around on my baby and I didn't know how we'd ever be able to afford to move to a better place. My maternity "wardrobe" was a pair of baggy overalls and whatever t-shirt I could stretch over my ever burgeoning stomach. Mike was in school full time and hustling through 3 different part time jobs. He slept about 3 hours a day. It never occurred to us to apply for Welfare or Food Stamps until after the baby was born. Welfare was a horror to us, but we did apply for Food Stamps. The process was so degrading I feel nauseous just thinking about it. But we did what we had to to make sure our baby had the proper food. I just get furious when politicos make sweeping and sneering generalizations about the 'lazy bums and career Welfare recipients'. Taking charity was the bitterest thing you can imagine and the people who work at the Food Stamp office make you pay and pay and pay with humiliation by making you feel like scum. And using the Food Stamps at the grocery wasn't much better. The checkers would look at me like I was something they scraped off the bottom of their shoe. Exactly eleven days after Alex was born I started applying for jobs. Employers were power mad, there were so many people looking for work and so few jobs to be had. I shagged around with my pen and my list of references for 3 weeks before I snagged a job. All I can say is God bless Minimum Wage. If it weren't for the legal lowball limits, I'm sure most places would have offered less. A lot less. As it was that whopping $2.35 an hour didn't put us on Easy Street, but try telling a Republican that. We did manage to find a slightly better slum to live in and thanks to the Food Stamps we weren't eating from dumpsters anymore, but we still had no phone, drove our ancient creaky vehicles praying aloud that they'd get us to and from our jobs just one more time, and Alex slept in a wooden apple box at the foot of our bed for his first 2 months until Mike's folks gifted us with a garage sale crib and a brand new mattress for it. Slowly, oh so slowly we got ahead. There were plenty of times when a PB&J looked like a steak to us and I still remember the exact date I bought a brand new piece of clothing for myself instead of buying used clothes at the Goodwill. April 14, 1987. A pretty white blouse from Wal-mart. Like just about everyone else we met a Waterloo with the damn credit cards. At one point our debt was so staggering the balance on our monthly statement was bigger than the GNP of many small countries. We didn't mean for it to happen, credit debt is a stealthy and insidious thing. But... We paid them off. We were experts on living cheap and pretended we were back in our slummy apartment and making a week's worth of dinners from half a pound of ground meat and a 5lb sack of potatoes. Every dime not needed to cover our minimalistic everyday needs went to the credit cards until those suckers were paid off. It was a proud and happy day when I sent that very last payment. 22 months now we’ve been living la vida cashola and it feels pretty great. Okay, there’s the mortgage, but all the experts say a mortgage debt is the right kind of debt. Doesn’t stop Mike and I from planning how to pay it off in a hell of a lot less time than 30 years. We like living debt free, we don’t care about the tax advantage. The recent furnishing of the house feels like a reward for all our hard work. The new couch, the new chairs, Wolf new bedroom set were paid for in cash on the spot. And the couple clearance rack sprees recently? Well, can you blame me? It wasn’t so very long ago all I had was that one lonely pair of overalls and a single pair of ratty shoes. Love from a grateful and slightly weepy, ~LA
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