"But at the end of the day, it’s like the difference between going to Dracula’s house empty-handed as opposed to arriving armed with a box of holy water and stakes."
I love this, and I'm stealing it and filing the serial numbers off.
I don't have the financial problems you reference to use it for, but it's a great metaphor for "this is bad, but we can make it less bad." Goes to show that the time you've put in over the years working on your writing has paid off in terms of skills, even if not directly as a job.
The job thing is weird, because writing *has* got me jobs. They aren't usually as entirely writing as I'd like, but they do represent a big change in how I live, if that makes sense.
This is a part of why I've been trying to sit down and start writing. I used to enjoy it when I was younger, and I'd like to get back into it for fun and, if it happens, a little extra dosh.
* My roommate is essentially destitute (although because she lives with me she doesn't feel it as much as she otherwise would) and it causes a real disconnect I have to be careful of when we talk. For example, she will celebrate or lament the cost of a particular kind of apple at a particular store. I know apples are cheap relative to anything else I buy/eat, so I don't know or care what they cost, generally speaking. (I mean, I know they are between $1 and $3 or so per pound. I don't think a banana costs $10.) Multiply by 1000 examples.
* When we were just coming out of being poor after college, my BFF bought a treadmill for her apartment. She spent some time fretting about how she would move this when she moved out, and then she realized that she would simply pay movers and they would take care of it. "Problems that can be solved with money are not real problems!" we marveled.
* Even though I guess you could say I "worked my way up" to my current income level, it has never not felt like a fluke. If I lost my job tomorrow, it wouldn't surprise me if my next job paid half as much.
It is really weird the first time your car breaks or your AC goes out in your house when you just, like, pay someone to fix that. Or the first time you use AAA and it just works. It's like you hacked the universe.
The apples thing is interesting because at some point all non-restaurant food feels like a negligible expense. I'm mostly OK with this; in terms of money you spend on yourself, having the food you want to eat is one of the highest ROIs.
on your asterisk: when I was writing this I considered how thin the line between the effect I was talking about and what people generically refer to as imposter syndrome is. It's really hard for me to suss out which I'm dealing with at any given time.
About a year ago I was about to leave town on vacation while we were having some AC-related flooding, so I was leaving my roommate to deal with that. She was really freaked out that they might need to shut off our AC for a while and she wouldn't know what to do with herself and, more importantly, her exotic pet who is costly to board and too loud for even a pet-friendly hotel. A long time ago I gave her my credit card - it has her name on it and everything - so I was just like, "Listen, if that happens, just use my credit card to pay for the boarding and the hotel room, it's fine," and she was...really gobsmacked. I don't think it was shocking that I would pay for that so much as that it was just shocking to consider outright solving a problem with, you know, money.
I am not, it turns out, ignorant of all grocery prices. I made gallo pinto (black beans & rice) last week and mentioned its low overall cost to the roomie (I spent less than $5 for 6 meals), and was adding up the bits I remembered. I estimated that the pound of dry beans might have been as much as $2.19 since I was at the more expensive store, and she said, "I'm sure it was more than that. Everything has really gone up," and I said, "I think I would have noticed." I checked in their app and the bag I actually bought was only $0.99. Take that! (It turns out that $2.19 is the price for the fancier kind I sometimes buy, so maybe I knew that too, somewhere in the recesses of my brain.) But yes, all grocery store food is cheap compared to eating out, which tbh is my preferred and somewhat default behavior.
Excellent essay. The tire example in particular really struck home with me. I remember having that problem during my first job out of college, trying to figure out how to patch the damned thing so I didn't have to replace all four tires a few weeks before I could afford to do so, after rent etc. I am still a little pissy about the import restrictions on tires largely because of that, despite not having to worry about that sort of expense so much anymore.
And yea, the money just disappears if you are not really careful with it. I am lucky that my wife is very cheap, but she definitely does spend money in a lot of subtle ways even still. I am probably worse. At the moment my stress is wanting to move to a lower cost of living area because I know that if I leave my job and take a lower paying but less obnoxious one money is going to be very tight. The cost of living difference being near a city and being in rural areas is really shocking.
Wait, do we make all our tires domestically? Wouldn't that make them worse? I feel like tires are like vintage guitar amp tubes in that I would expect them to be best made in a place without environmental regulations.
I always get the impression from the pictures of your forging that you live in the woods or something. Are you really that urban-adjacent?
Back in the Obama admin (2009) they put a big tariff on Chinese tires. It was 35% dropping to 25% after a few years then maybe going away, but of course it didn't go away after all. I tend to prefer Korean tires to US brands (which tend to perpetually be lower quality with higher prices) so I don't know about Chinese quality, but the prices were a lot lower. At the time, people were estimating that it was over 900,000$ per job saved in the tire industry, and even some domestic tire companies thought it was a bad idea (Cooper Tire, to the credit, pushed against it.) So while we don't make all our tires domestically, the prices for tires across the board went up a good bit when they limited foreign competition.
I wish I lived back in the woods... I am in a suburb of Philly, about 20-40 minutes from center city. We are renting a little house in next to an apartment complex, and I roll my forge out into the drive way to use it. Fortunately almost all the neighbors are old retired folks who think it is really neat, so I don't get complaints and meet the neighbors as they come over to say hi and see what's happening. I do make sure I am not banging on stuff after ~7 pm though, as even a muffled anvil going "DING DING DING" would probably make people hate me after a while :D
Someday soon I will move back out a bit and be able to have a proper shop again so I don't need portable versions of anvils and vices. Having a tiny hell mouth fired up in a structure attached to my house just doesn't sit well with me, but I would like to be inside :D
I've been out of the pit for decades yet I will never forget what it's like. I bought tires not long ago and thought about what it was like when I used to go to the junk yard and take them off cars myself and pay for them. I worked my way out of the pit and will never, for one day, forget. If you are still in the pit keep digging your way out and good luck to you.
Perhaps the same mental shift happens when one goes from labor to management? I've always worked jobs where I knew I was valuable and made good money, but there was a definite change in attitudes and expectations once I got into a supervisory role.
"When poor, I once spent about a week contemplating the impact of buying a jar of protein powder before pulling the trigger on this ostentatious luxury item"
... I thought to myself, I hope RC is buying more protein with his extra cash, since he's (ostensibly) trying to get into shape....it looks like you already had that priority.
So right at the moment I'm not doing a very good job at the getting into shape thing, so extra protein would be a bad (or neutral) thing. Hopefully it will be justified soon, though.
Yeah, it's bad if it's extra calories. It's good at driving muscle protein synthesis, though. So if you replace carb or fat calories with protein calories, you're more likely to build muscle. I'm not saying you'll be yoked if you just up your protein intake without exercise, but on balance, at any given weight, you'd rather have more lean mass than fat mass. I guess my point is you are always* better off replacing a 160-calorie handful of Skittles with a scoop of whey or pea protein from a health standpoint even though your enjoyment value will take a hit.
*I'm not a doctor so I'm not taking into account issues people may have that require them to avoid protein intake. My understanding is that for most people, more protein is better than less.
Excess protein, esp sources with more methionine, is associated with higher mortality. Pea protein has lower methionine than most so is likely still healthier than skittles
If I learned anything over the years of dealing with my health, calories don't matter (it's a myth propagated to sell fitness equipment, dieting books and meds).
It's not about the calories, it's what your body decides to do with them. It's about the the signaling within the body: leptin + insulin + thyroid etc.
If a healthy person happens to eat "too many calories" (again, no such thing), this person can expense some of the energy in thermogenesis (feeling warm) or in movement without adding to the waistline, unless this individual's hormones or mitochondria are out of whack (I'm simplifying, but you get the idea).
If you listen to mainstream advice, you get mainstream results.... That's why no one can slim down AND then maintain a lean body listening to mainstream advice. It just won't work. Tweak the signaling (by eating and NOT eating wisely) and if you are otherwise healthy, the problem goes away. It did for me and many others who saw the truth for what it is.
Protein intake activates the mToR pathway. You want to keep it in check. When you cross a threshold, you start burning it *instead* of fat, while storing fat.
Metabolizing protein for energy is very unhealthy, it teaches the body to eat its own muscle.
That's why many people after 40 lose muscle mass rapidly. They can't metabolize ketones (fats) and are insulin resistant, so can't handle carbs well.
The mainstream has it backwards and many people suffer as a result.
What your body needs are amino acids (the basic building blocks of protein), not protein. Some amino acids are essential, some are not. If your gut doesn't work properly or you eat malformed protein, you may eat all the protein you want and still be deficient in essential amino acids.
Then, you need a proper amount of protein (digested into amino acids), but NOT more than that. You need it for the immune system to work correctly and also repair or build muscle. How much you need depends on your lean body mass (the weight of muscle + bone), and in some cases activity level (illness, injury, sport, etc.).
1 gram protein per 2 pounds of lean body mass is the current consensus. Anything more than that and you activate toxic metabolic pathways for no good reason, and teach the body to metabolize its own muscle. This tends to generate advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) and eat away at your muscle mass the moment your regular protein intake falls or your testosterone/activity level drops. Hope this makes sense.
As I understand it, the 1.1 g/kg or 1g/2lb protein is the current consensus, which is based on empirical research. It seems like everything after your sentence on 1 gram per 2 pounds bw, however, is theorized based on a certain mechanism. I'm wondering if any research has been done on that. Would be interested to read it.
This resonates. My family made the transition you are describing when I was a child, and more gradually than you, via the now old-fashioned technique of getting a union job and holding on to it for decades, accumulating seniority. It's unlikely I was aware of half the issues my parents dealt with, but I remember enough of them to know how well off I am, and how much better things were for them by the time we were teenagers.
"Consider that the average person has never done an oil change themselves, much less fixed a car problem with their own hands. I was watching a show the other day where someone knew how to change a tire and everyone else was amazed. These are real people that exist."
This comes off as a value judgment about people, but I think it's just illuminating the fact that on average, people value time over money (in the sense they are willing to trade the money to not have to spend the time). They just need to have the money to be able to trade it for the time, at which point the preference reveals itself.
Right. Nobody (or almost nobody) loves to change tires; very few people want to work on a car if they don't have to. I'm in agreement on that. The amazement is more "this is a person who legitimately doesn't know how to do this; it's never once been necessary for them".
The amplifier on that is that, like, a lot of dads will tell you how to change a tire even if it doesn't come up - they want you to be prepared. I suspect not knowing even on top of that is partially showing that you come from intergenerational middle-or-better wealth; like, your dad didn't know either, or at least didn't think of it as important.
My dad was definitely this dad, but with a catch. My mom was and is a striver from a lower-middle-class background with a high-paying white-collar-but-not-prestigious job who always wanted to be something more (at least I got that impression). My dad is from a similar background, but kept a manual-labor job his entire life (while turning down white-collar supervisor promotions). He seems to almost completely not care about social status, mobility, or material goods. He would be completely happy with a lifetime supply of canned chili, one pair of jeans, a hoodie to last his entire lifetime, an AM/FM radio, and a couple of WWII picture books. (He's also probably the most intelligent person in my family.)
Anyway, as a little kid, when I went out to the garage to ask him how to do the things he was doing (e.g. changing the oil), he would kind of explain how it conceptually worked, but wouldn't show me how or let me help. I have the sneaking feeling (though cannot confirm) that either my mom pressured him to steer me away from that kind of thing or he sensed that I was destined for "bigger and better things" (being good in school and going to college). Anyway, my point is that I am from a family where both of my parents were intimately familiar with the poor-ish lifestyle you've described, but tried desperately to insulate their kids from that type of lifestyle. All of this is to say that I should know how to change the oil, but I don't.
(All of the above could just be the story I tell myself. Reality might be 180 degrees different.)
Also I'm jealous of your Honda Odyssey. Minivans are dope.
Oh, I don't have a Honda Odyssey. I just really really want one. Even just considering the cupholders alone I want one.
I feel compelled to tell you how to change the oil on a car, knowing full well it doesn't make sense for you to actually do it:
Somewhere under your car near the front, there's a big bump that goes lower than almost anything else on the underside of the car. It's generally black and roundish, like a slightly more square watermelon size of thing.
On that thing there's a bolt. You take an appropriately sized wrench and take that bolt out, and very quickly find it's the only thing holding in oil on the car. One is well advised to have something to catch the oil.
Once all the oil is out, you (carefully) handthread the bolt back in (never use a wrench to tighten something unless you have verified it's partially and smoothly threaded by hand, otherwise you can mess up the threads with the excess force and cause much more expensive damage).
Now you want to find the oil filter. It's either somewhere near the oil pan (the thing you drained) or up top near where you filled the oil. It's about the size and shape of a can of soda - just a little thicker and a little shorter.
Sometimes you can get these off by hand, sometimes you can't. If you can't, you either want a chain-wrench (which is the right tool) or to stab a screwdriver all the way through the thing and use it as a lever to spin it off. Then put a new oil filter on (with your hands, as tight as you can get it; you don't use the wrench to get it back on and you certainly don't use the screwdriver).
Now you put the oil back in. Different cars are specced for different kinds of oil. Look up what yours wants on the internet, or sometimes it says on the oil-fill cap. Now add oil back in while checking the dipstick often to see if you are at the right level.
That's it. It's pretty much a "drain the oil, change the oil filter, and put back in oil" type of job - super easy. But now that you know, also know that it is a job that's right on the margin of being worth it even for poor people - oil changes are really cheap and they get oil cheaper than you can, so it often is a difference of a few dollars, especially if you buy oil changes on groupon or something.
I have the Honda Odyssey. It's nice. And having come from poor-ish to middle/upper middle class-ish, based on my experience you may choose to someday walk in to the dealer and buy one but you may not. Here's what we did:
When we got to the point where we realized we could actually afford a car payment, we opened a separate bank account and began making equivalent payments into it. We limped our old beater along until we had about 18K in the account, then found a four year old Odyssey on craigslist and bought it in cash, thus avoiding interest payments and the loss you take from depreciation in the first three years of a new car, plus saving a few thousand by not buying through a dealer. (Because we were used to making these "car payments", we keep them going perpetually. The account gradually refills until it has enough to buy the next car when that becomes necessary - which for us is when it isn't economical to repair the old one anymore, usually around 250k miles for a Honda. Meanwhile, the account serves as an emergency fund for repairs.)
I know some people are very leery of buying a used car from a private owner, and rightly so when you are buying an aging, ugly high mileage car for a thousand dollars or so, which I've done more than once. I bought them because that's what I could afford, and I bought them from people who couldn't afford better, and they had plenty of problems both known and unknown because they were old and because the need for the seller to squeeze every dollar out of the sale made them reluctant to disclose any problems even if known or suspected. But my experience with just-a-few-years-off new cars has been universally good. I'm usually buying them from people who bought them new and now three/four years later are upgrading to the latest and greatest. The cars have been in good condition, the owner could afford to do good maintenance and they run well.
I think another reason why people who come from poor-ish don't want used cars is because you think, I don't want something that breaks down, or even might break down, because that usually means disaster. I wont be able to get to work, I could lose my job, I might not be able to afford the repair and then the car just sits on my driveway or at the shop. But this is where the middle-class part comes in - as we were doing better off, we could actually "afford" to buy used. "Afford" it in terms of affording the risk - if my car does break down, I have the money to repair it, and if it is in the shop I work with people with reliable cars who will give me a ride, or I can uber it for a week, or rent a car, or come up with some other option.
So yes on the Odyssey, but I haven't broken my frugal mindset enough to want to buy new. And in addition to hauling kids and soccer teams and boy scout troops and such, we also use the minivan to achieve other cost savings which weren't so easy when we were broke - for one, I still use craigslist all the time and haul all kinds of used furniture, etc in it. When I was driving a busted up Nissan Sentra I had no way to buy a dining table on craigslist, even if I found a bargain, because I couldn't get it home. We use it to go camping, and have vacations that are both fun and low cost. And then there's this: before COVID, my work had me going to a conference twice a year about an hour and a half/two hours from home. The distance wasn't considered far enough for my work to cover a hotel, although most people came from farther and did stay overnight. They do a lot of networking in the evening, and it's useful to participate. So even though I certainly could have paid for my own hotel, I just don't like to spend the money. I just put an air mattress in the back of the van (in our older model the third row flips down and then you have to temporarily remove the second row of seats) and sleep in the hotel parking lot for a few days (carefully). I don't tell my colleagues this, as I'm pretty sure they'd be horrified, and it's pretty funny to be lying in the back of the van in the morning wrestling into a blouse, nice pair of slacks and heels for the conference breakfast. But the money saved in these little ways goes into savings that continue to build a buffer from the stress of wondering what will happen if I lose my job, etc.
I guess my point is, I hope you can find a way to use the best strategies from both the poor-ish mindset and the middle class mindset to optimize your current situation.
I think I'd definitely buy recent-year used if I bought one, like you say. I think that's true whether or not I was buying with cash - it's just too much cheaper (at least in a normal market, maybe not as much now) to not do.
One nice thing for us now is I have enough experience being poor that a lot of repairs are either things I can do, or that I know how to get done pretty cheaply. Coupling that with the Odyssey's pretty dang good reliability (or the Sienna's slow-and-plodding-ultra-durability) and once we get to that point I'm guessing it will go pretty well.
I have only owned cars built in the 2000s or early 2010s. My rental-car experiences recently suggest to me that there was a quantum leap in the quality of "regular" cars, starting around 2017. My 2000ish Honda had no cruise control. My 2010ish Toyota has cruise control, but you have to tap the lever all the time to change speeds when you hit traffic. The cars I've rented recently (some of which are lower-tier models than my current car) have cruise control that acts as a virtual autopilot in terms of accelerating and braking (not steering). You set it and forget it. A 2018 Odyssey with adaptive cruise control--now you're talking!
What puts me off as a non poor person from doing this isn't the time or the effort, it's the risk. Trying to do something like that for the first time there's a pretty non-trivial chance that I'm going to screw it up in some way. Maybe I spill oil everywhere. Maybe I get crushed to death by a falling car. I'm sure that the tenth time I do it would be a breeze, but I worry I won't get there without spending at least one afternoon cleaning up spilled oil.
I’ve been curious what the job was that you got - started reading with the original article you are riffing on and was always curious. Glad to hear you are doing well and yes mo money no problems was not far off, yet wildly overstated at the same time.
Basically right after that article went up, I got contacted by a handful of people adjacent to tech/startup/crypto interests. I think it was probably about half charity and half the idea that I actually can write - there is some limited need for that.
I basically went with the first one who contacted me, which also looked like the best one at the time. A few months later someone offered me much more money, and I went to the bosses and basically said "hey, listen, I like this job, but I can't not take what amounts to a 66% raise.", and they then matched *that*, which put me at what, to me, is crazy money.
The only real downside to how this happened is I'm enormously overpaid for a writer, and the company itself doesn't necessarily want/know how to use a writer, so things often feel a bit tenuous. I'm a bit paranoid in general, so I'm not sure how much of that impression is accurate.
To follow on, find someone in the company that is a high performer and ask to work with them. Just telling someone you are excited about working with them on something (it really can be simply saying you want to) is encouraged at some places. Ymmv
Thanks for this - a lot of it really hit home as I've wobbled back and forth across 'the line' several times in my working life, rarely doing much better than 'OK' but doing OK now.
Knowing my budget will allow for new tires on the pickup between now and when winter starts (not that far off now, here in northern MN) is a stressor nice to not have.
Yeah it's weird, I grew up super duper wealthy and then when I went to college and had to pay my way through things I barely noticed. My expenses were roughly
Rent+Utiltiies (Power/Internet/Water/heat) - $1k /month (This was the bay area and I was living with 3 other people in a 4 bedroom house)
Food+some kitchen supplies- $150
Transportation- $100 (busses/trains mostly+my bike repair)
misc (repairs, books) - $200
Health insurance - $250
Dental Care (amortized) - $50
Savings - $200 (though tuition ends up eating 80% of that)
So being single is obviously a lot cheaper than raising a family of 4, I figure that "living comfortably" requires a post tax income of 20k/person you live with. But the lifestyle of an omega rich person who finds themselves temporarily "poor" (20k /year expenses is definitely not living small) and a person on 35k/year with a family of 4 are basically existing in different universes.
I personally felt no notable change to lifestyle entering college, and felt like I was still living like a multi-millionaire.
Sadly there aren't many stories about riches to rags, what do lives of Museum curators look like? I often found that the people at my university who grew up poor had completely different spending habits than myself.
Going from poor>rich you find yourself rapidly changing lifestyle in a large number of small subtle ways which massively inflate spending. It's surprisingly hard to notice unless you know what to look for.
I was making good money at one time and then went to grad school for six years, where I made under $20K per year. It was easy! But part of why it was easy (besides that I was single and in a low-COL area) was that I had had money, which meant I already had a newish car that would run for several more years, a good coat, and just lots of other "stuff" that I wouldn't have to replace for a while. Eventually the stuff runs out and you need money again.
Also, when you're young and your family has money, you tend to get a lot of things as gifts or help that would otherwise be killer one-time expenses. I mean things like a phone or a laptop or a Christmas vacation.
I estimate that I got around $2k of "misc durable things" (bike/clothing/shoes/phone/computer ect.) which probably would have eaten up a lot of the early savings category.
The one thing I'd question here is rent - almost every place is going to have a cheaper option than that time-adjusted 4k a month for a 4 bedroom. But I think overall this is probably pretty close, especially since your transportation costs were so low.
100% on the poor-to-rich spending inflation stuff. It's especially so if you are "catching up". We had things that hadn't been replaced in a decade and a half - our mattress and boxsprings weren't new when we got them, and we had them from the time we got married until about a year ago. Big, big upgrade but those kinds of catch-up purchases add up quick.
I think living in a super nice house was part of the "no lifestyle change" since the landowner included some major appliances (a dishwasher, a clotheswasher, a dishwaster, ect) in the "rent".
I actually really enjoyed reading this. I'm in the UK. Money is a little different here, but the essence is the same.
My mother raised 5 of us mostly alone (she married our father twice over the years), and welfare was our biggest income.
Having my own business as a teenager took me to London... where for a few years I scraped by, but generally in bars spending my income. Kindness of strangers played a big part.
Then suddenly I found myself earning an bizarrely high income. Each year I paid more in taxes than my mother ever received from the state over the entire term.
Now, things have cooled. But I don't feel the same stress any longer. I know HOW to make money now. But, I also, don't NEED to make that now.
I was widowed, which may have changed my goals. But, I know that what I have should keep me in good stead. I've never been flashy with materialistic things... always enjoyed a good meal. But. I can happily enjoy a slower pace.
For me now, it's primarily about avoiding all the stress of life.
I've often contemplated that if I was not a family man I could probably get by in a very small studio apartment - one person needs less than half the space of two, as it were. What you say about sacrificing income for stress reduction makes a lot of sense to me for the situation you are in, and I'd probably do about the same.
After reading this, I can't tell if I'm middle class or poor.... and that makes sense, I guess , since my income is pretty much in the middle of your various hypotheticals.
Oddly, there are people who consider even where I'm at poor - if you work with a lot of bay area people, your Phoenix-high pay doesn't register as much to them.
Housing costs in the Bay Area are ridiculous. Like, $4000/month for a 1 bedroom apartment ridiculous... it's literally the most expensive housing market in the United States - worse than Manhattan, even!
"Middle-class-or-better people don’t like to talk about money, something that always confused me when I was broke. Poor people talk about money constantly; since mine was the more embarrassing situation, why should I be the one who was comfortable if they weren’t?"
This is kind of like being effortlessly thin during a discussion of obesity. Of course, in either instance, there are plenty of people who aren't uncomfortable talking about it.
As someone who went from "too broke to qualify for cheap healthcare and food stamps" to rich-ish, this article is very relatable. (Though I was still privileged in many ways when I was broke. At least I was single and didn't have to raise a family.)
It's been a full 5 years since I had financial worries, and I've finally starting to feel rich-ish. But wow did it take a while before I was willing to do "rich people" things. Like throwing away potentially moldy food instead of risking it, or buying the fancy $6 cookie box because I really want to try them, or buying a $300 robot vacuum that prevents me from having excruciating back pain every time I have to vacuum the house.
My husband had to berate me to go to doctors. I was used to avoiding doctor visits. "What hasn't killed you probably won't kill you. Doctors are expensive, so just live with it," and all that. (Except the dentist. I have never slacked on going to the dentist because that way lies root canals.) I spent a truly ridiculous amount of money on physical therapy last year. It still makes me cringe when I think of it. And yet, I'm not in pain anymore, for the first time in years. Whether it was worth the cost is debatable, but I'm still amazed by the fact that I was able to throw money at my chronic pain and make it go away!
Honestly, the weirdest part for me has been the "time is money" claim. I used to think this was obvious bullshit. Money was money, and my money was more limited than my time, so OF COURSE the right choice was to do time-consuming tasks that saved money. This included things like coupon-clipping, driving further to save money on groceries, and spending 4 hours to list things on ebay and make 30 bucks. Now that I have a highly paid engineering job, I suddenly find myself with more than enough money to buy (or do) almost anything I want, but not enough time. I'm currently considering hiring a weekly cleaning service because I despise cleaning. I'm very inefficient at it too; 2-3 times slower than my husband, and probably 5 times slower than a professional. The thought of paying someone a couple hundred dollars to free up my weekend is honestly starting to sound like a good trade. That is not a level of rich I ever thought I would be. It's crazy!
What, if anything, did you have to forego to pay for the physical therapy? Would you rather have that, or have ongoing absence of pain? If the answer is that you prefer absence of pain - which is your revealed preference - then it was worth it. And if you have to think really hard to find something you gave up, then it was definitely worth it.
I didn't have to forego anything to pay for physical therapy because I've been very blessed financially for the last few years. However, I grew up in a family of cheapskates that pinched pennies, so spending that kind of money tends to be psychologically painful for me. This is particularly true for things like healthcare where I don't trade my money for a physical object. Expensive physical purchases, like furniture and cars, are easier to justify because I remember why the cost is worth it every time I use the object.
I feel like getting the cleaners is a good call for you, from what you are saying - cleaning is miserable. I think if we were two-income we'd probably do something like that; the only reason we don't now is because one-income doesn't quite justify it and we can pretend that one of us has time, even though she doesn't. But it's hard - I'd say do it.
Same situation for me with spouse forcing me to go to the doctor. The other day I stepped on a dead pigeon in a parking lot (not a metaphor) and hurt my ankle pretty good; it was the wife who made me go in and get it x-rayed.
Wow. I think you may have beaten my record for "dumbest way to get an ankle injury". Mine was slipping in mud, after which I needed crutches for almost three weeks.
It was actually really bad, because you can't tell *whose bones made the breaking noise* which confounded how bad we thought it was quite a bit. It's still not quite right, but I'm not 20 anymore so that's to be expected.
"Not going to doctors" can make some problems get much, much worse. My wife stopped treating her diabetes when she was a teenager and it was with great difficulty that I got her to start seeing doctors again in her mid to late 20s. Now she's 31 and needs a kidney transplant.
"But at the end of the day, it’s like the difference between going to Dracula’s house empty-handed as opposed to arriving armed with a box of holy water and stakes."
I love this, and I'm stealing it and filing the serial numbers off.
I don't have the financial problems you reference to use it for, but it's a great metaphor for "this is bad, but we can make it less bad." Goes to show that the time you've put in over the years working on your writing has paid off in terms of skills, even if not directly as a job.
The job thing is weird, because writing *has* got me jobs. They aren't usually as entirely writing as I'd like, but they do represent a big change in how I live, if that makes sense.
This is a part of why I've been trying to sit down and start writing. I used to enjoy it when I was younger, and I'd like to get back into it for fun and, if it happens, a little extra dosh.
Thoughts:
* My roommate is essentially destitute (although because she lives with me she doesn't feel it as much as she otherwise would) and it causes a real disconnect I have to be careful of when we talk. For example, she will celebrate or lament the cost of a particular kind of apple at a particular store. I know apples are cheap relative to anything else I buy/eat, so I don't know or care what they cost, generally speaking. (I mean, I know they are between $1 and $3 or so per pound. I don't think a banana costs $10.) Multiply by 1000 examples.
* When we were just coming out of being poor after college, my BFF bought a treadmill for her apartment. She spent some time fretting about how she would move this when she moved out, and then she realized that she would simply pay movers and they would take care of it. "Problems that can be solved with money are not real problems!" we marveled.
* Even though I guess you could say I "worked my way up" to my current income level, it has never not felt like a fluke. If I lost my job tomorrow, it wouldn't surprise me if my next job paid half as much.
It is really weird the first time your car breaks or your AC goes out in your house when you just, like, pay someone to fix that. Or the first time you use AAA and it just works. It's like you hacked the universe.
The apples thing is interesting because at some point all non-restaurant food feels like a negligible expense. I'm mostly OK with this; in terms of money you spend on yourself, having the food you want to eat is one of the highest ROIs.
on your asterisk: when I was writing this I considered how thin the line between the effect I was talking about and what people generically refer to as imposter syndrome is. It's really hard for me to suss out which I'm dealing with at any given time.
About a year ago I was about to leave town on vacation while we were having some AC-related flooding, so I was leaving my roommate to deal with that. She was really freaked out that they might need to shut off our AC for a while and she wouldn't know what to do with herself and, more importantly, her exotic pet who is costly to board and too loud for even a pet-friendly hotel. A long time ago I gave her my credit card - it has her name on it and everything - so I was just like, "Listen, if that happens, just use my credit card to pay for the boarding and the hotel room, it's fine," and she was...really gobsmacked. I don't think it was shocking that I would pay for that so much as that it was just shocking to consider outright solving a problem with, you know, money.
I am not, it turns out, ignorant of all grocery prices. I made gallo pinto (black beans & rice) last week and mentioned its low overall cost to the roomie (I spent less than $5 for 6 meals), and was adding up the bits I remembered. I estimated that the pound of dry beans might have been as much as $2.19 since I was at the more expensive store, and she said, "I'm sure it was more than that. Everything has really gone up," and I said, "I think I would have noticed." I checked in their app and the bag I actually bought was only $0.99. Take that! (It turns out that $2.19 is the price for the fancier kind I sometimes buy, so maybe I knew that too, somewhere in the recesses of my brain.) But yes, all grocery store food is cheap compared to eating out, which tbh is my preferred and somewhat default behavior.
Excellent essay. The tire example in particular really struck home with me. I remember having that problem during my first job out of college, trying to figure out how to patch the damned thing so I didn't have to replace all four tires a few weeks before I could afford to do so, after rent etc. I am still a little pissy about the import restrictions on tires largely because of that, despite not having to worry about that sort of expense so much anymore.
And yea, the money just disappears if you are not really careful with it. I am lucky that my wife is very cheap, but she definitely does spend money in a lot of subtle ways even still. I am probably worse. At the moment my stress is wanting to move to a lower cost of living area because I know that if I leave my job and take a lower paying but less obnoxious one money is going to be very tight. The cost of living difference being near a city and being in rural areas is really shocking.
Wait, do we make all our tires domestically? Wouldn't that make them worse? I feel like tires are like vintage guitar amp tubes in that I would expect them to be best made in a place without environmental regulations.
I always get the impression from the pictures of your forging that you live in the woods or something. Are you really that urban-adjacent?
Back in the Obama admin (2009) they put a big tariff on Chinese tires. It was 35% dropping to 25% after a few years then maybe going away, but of course it didn't go away after all. I tend to prefer Korean tires to US brands (which tend to perpetually be lower quality with higher prices) so I don't know about Chinese quality, but the prices were a lot lower. At the time, people were estimating that it was over 900,000$ per job saved in the tire industry, and even some domestic tire companies thought it was a bad idea (Cooper Tire, to the credit, pushed against it.) So while we don't make all our tires domestically, the prices for tires across the board went up a good bit when they limited foreign competition.
I wish I lived back in the woods... I am in a suburb of Philly, about 20-40 minutes from center city. We are renting a little house in next to an apartment complex, and I roll my forge out into the drive way to use it. Fortunately almost all the neighbors are old retired folks who think it is really neat, so I don't get complaints and meet the neighbors as they come over to say hi and see what's happening. I do make sure I am not banging on stuff after ~7 pm though, as even a muffled anvil going "DING DING DING" would probably make people hate me after a while :D
Someday soon I will move back out a bit and be able to have a proper shop again so I don't need portable versions of anvils and vices. Having a tiny hell mouth fired up in a structure attached to my house just doesn't sit well with me, but I would like to be inside :D
I've been out of the pit for decades yet I will never forget what it's like. I bought tires not long ago and thought about what it was like when I used to go to the junk yard and take them off cars myself and pay for them. I worked my way out of the pit and will never, for one day, forget. If you are still in the pit keep digging your way out and good luck to you.
Same page.
Perhaps the same mental shift happens when one goes from labor to management? I've always worked jobs where I knew I was valuable and made good money, but there was a definite change in attitudes and expectations once I got into a supervisory role.
I am not sure I follow - what mental shift? From poor to rich, or from not a lot to lose to much to lose?
Before getting to this part of your article:
"When poor, I once spent about a week contemplating the impact of buying a jar of protein powder before pulling the trigger on this ostentatious luxury item"
... I thought to myself, I hope RC is buying more protein with his extra cash, since he's (ostensibly) trying to get into shape....it looks like you already had that priority.
So right at the moment I'm not doing a very good job at the getting into shape thing, so extra protein would be a bad (or neutral) thing. Hopefully it will be justified soon, though.
Yeah, it's bad if it's extra calories. It's good at driving muscle protein synthesis, though. So if you replace carb or fat calories with protein calories, you're more likely to build muscle. I'm not saying you'll be yoked if you just up your protein intake without exercise, but on balance, at any given weight, you'd rather have more lean mass than fat mass. I guess my point is you are always* better off replacing a 160-calorie handful of Skittles with a scoop of whey or pea protein from a health standpoint even though your enjoyment value will take a hit.
*I'm not a doctor so I'm not taking into account issues people may have that require them to avoid protein intake. My understanding is that for most people, more protein is better than less.
Excess protein, esp sources with more methionine, is associated with higher mortality. Pea protein has lower methionine than most so is likely still healthier than skittles
If I learned anything over the years of dealing with my health, calories don't matter (it's a myth propagated to sell fitness equipment, dieting books and meds).
It's not about the calories, it's what your body decides to do with them. It's about the the signaling within the body: leptin + insulin + thyroid etc.
If a healthy person happens to eat "too many calories" (again, no such thing), this person can expense some of the energy in thermogenesis (feeling warm) or in movement without adding to the waistline, unless this individual's hormones or mitochondria are out of whack (I'm simplifying, but you get the idea).
If you listen to mainstream advice, you get mainstream results.... That's why no one can slim down AND then maintain a lean body listening to mainstream advice. It just won't work. Tweak the signaling (by eating and NOT eating wisely) and if you are otherwise healthy, the problem goes away. It did for me and many others who saw the truth for what it is.
Protein intake activates the mToR pathway. You want to keep it in check. When you cross a threshold, you start burning it *instead* of fat, while storing fat.
Metabolizing protein for energy is very unhealthy, it teaches the body to eat its own muscle.
That's why many people after 40 lose muscle mass rapidly. They can't metabolize ketones (fats) and are insulin resistant, so can't handle carbs well.
The mainstream has it backwards and many people suffer as a result.
Are you saying don't eat protein so your body doesn't eat your muscles? How are you going to build muscles without eating protein?
This is a very good question.
What your body needs are amino acids (the basic building blocks of protein), not protein. Some amino acids are essential, some are not. If your gut doesn't work properly or you eat malformed protein, you may eat all the protein you want and still be deficient in essential amino acids.
Then, you need a proper amount of protein (digested into amino acids), but NOT more than that. You need it for the immune system to work correctly and also repair or build muscle. How much you need depends on your lean body mass (the weight of muscle + bone), and in some cases activity level (illness, injury, sport, etc.).
1 gram protein per 2 pounds of lean body mass is the current consensus. Anything more than that and you activate toxic metabolic pathways for no good reason, and teach the body to metabolize its own muscle. This tends to generate advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) and eat away at your muscle mass the moment your regular protein intake falls or your testosterone/activity level drops. Hope this makes sense.
As I understand it, the 1.1 g/kg or 1g/2lb protein is the current consensus, which is based on empirical research. It seems like everything after your sentence on 1 gram per 2 pounds bw, however, is theorized based on a certain mechanism. I'm wondering if any research has been done on that. Would be interested to read it.
This resonates. My family made the transition you are describing when I was a child, and more gradually than you, via the now old-fashioned technique of getting a union job and holding on to it for decades, accumulating seniority. It's unlikely I was aware of half the issues my parents dealt with, but I remember enough of them to know how well off I am, and how much better things were for them by the time we were teenagers.
Sounds like good parents. Insulating my kids from that kind of thing was always one of my top priorities, but it's tough.
"Consider that the average person has never done an oil change themselves, much less fixed a car problem with their own hands. I was watching a show the other day where someone knew how to change a tire and everyone else was amazed. These are real people that exist."
This comes off as a value judgment about people, but I think it's just illuminating the fact that on average, people value time over money (in the sense they are willing to trade the money to not have to spend the time). They just need to have the money to be able to trade it for the time, at which point the preference reveals itself.
Right. Nobody (or almost nobody) loves to change tires; very few people want to work on a car if they don't have to. I'm in agreement on that. The amazement is more "this is a person who legitimately doesn't know how to do this; it's never once been necessary for them".
The amplifier on that is that, like, a lot of dads will tell you how to change a tire even if it doesn't come up - they want you to be prepared. I suspect not knowing even on top of that is partially showing that you come from intergenerational middle-or-better wealth; like, your dad didn't know either, or at least didn't think of it as important.
My dad was definitely this dad, but with a catch. My mom was and is a striver from a lower-middle-class background with a high-paying white-collar-but-not-prestigious job who always wanted to be something more (at least I got that impression). My dad is from a similar background, but kept a manual-labor job his entire life (while turning down white-collar supervisor promotions). He seems to almost completely not care about social status, mobility, or material goods. He would be completely happy with a lifetime supply of canned chili, one pair of jeans, a hoodie to last his entire lifetime, an AM/FM radio, and a couple of WWII picture books. (He's also probably the most intelligent person in my family.)
Anyway, as a little kid, when I went out to the garage to ask him how to do the things he was doing (e.g. changing the oil), he would kind of explain how it conceptually worked, but wouldn't show me how or let me help. I have the sneaking feeling (though cannot confirm) that either my mom pressured him to steer me away from that kind of thing or he sensed that I was destined for "bigger and better things" (being good in school and going to college). Anyway, my point is that I am from a family where both of my parents were intimately familiar with the poor-ish lifestyle you've described, but tried desperately to insulate their kids from that type of lifestyle. All of this is to say that I should know how to change the oil, but I don't.
(All of the above could just be the story I tell myself. Reality might be 180 degrees different.)
Also I'm jealous of your Honda Odyssey. Minivans are dope.
Oh, I don't have a Honda Odyssey. I just really really want one. Even just considering the cupholders alone I want one.
I feel compelled to tell you how to change the oil on a car, knowing full well it doesn't make sense for you to actually do it:
Somewhere under your car near the front, there's a big bump that goes lower than almost anything else on the underside of the car. It's generally black and roundish, like a slightly more square watermelon size of thing.
On that thing there's a bolt. You take an appropriately sized wrench and take that bolt out, and very quickly find it's the only thing holding in oil on the car. One is well advised to have something to catch the oil.
Once all the oil is out, you (carefully) handthread the bolt back in (never use a wrench to tighten something unless you have verified it's partially and smoothly threaded by hand, otherwise you can mess up the threads with the excess force and cause much more expensive damage).
Now you want to find the oil filter. It's either somewhere near the oil pan (the thing you drained) or up top near where you filled the oil. It's about the size and shape of a can of soda - just a little thicker and a little shorter.
Sometimes you can get these off by hand, sometimes you can't. If you can't, you either want a chain-wrench (which is the right tool) or to stab a screwdriver all the way through the thing and use it as a lever to spin it off. Then put a new oil filter on (with your hands, as tight as you can get it; you don't use the wrench to get it back on and you certainly don't use the screwdriver).
Now you put the oil back in. Different cars are specced for different kinds of oil. Look up what yours wants on the internet, or sometimes it says on the oil-fill cap. Now add oil back in while checking the dipstick often to see if you are at the right level.
That's it. It's pretty much a "drain the oil, change the oil filter, and put back in oil" type of job - super easy. But now that you know, also know that it is a job that's right on the margin of being worth it even for poor people - oil changes are really cheap and they get oil cheaper than you can, so it often is a difference of a few dollars, especially if you buy oil changes on groupon or something.
Thanks!
p.s. congrats on the life promotion. Great job on this article.
Thank you!
I have the Honda Odyssey. It's nice. And having come from poor-ish to middle/upper middle class-ish, based on my experience you may choose to someday walk in to the dealer and buy one but you may not. Here's what we did:
When we got to the point where we realized we could actually afford a car payment, we opened a separate bank account and began making equivalent payments into it. We limped our old beater along until we had about 18K in the account, then found a four year old Odyssey on craigslist and bought it in cash, thus avoiding interest payments and the loss you take from depreciation in the first three years of a new car, plus saving a few thousand by not buying through a dealer. (Because we were used to making these "car payments", we keep them going perpetually. The account gradually refills until it has enough to buy the next car when that becomes necessary - which for us is when it isn't economical to repair the old one anymore, usually around 250k miles for a Honda. Meanwhile, the account serves as an emergency fund for repairs.)
I know some people are very leery of buying a used car from a private owner, and rightly so when you are buying an aging, ugly high mileage car for a thousand dollars or so, which I've done more than once. I bought them because that's what I could afford, and I bought them from people who couldn't afford better, and they had plenty of problems both known and unknown because they were old and because the need for the seller to squeeze every dollar out of the sale made them reluctant to disclose any problems even if known or suspected. But my experience with just-a-few-years-off new cars has been universally good. I'm usually buying them from people who bought them new and now three/four years later are upgrading to the latest and greatest. The cars have been in good condition, the owner could afford to do good maintenance and they run well.
I think another reason why people who come from poor-ish don't want used cars is because you think, I don't want something that breaks down, or even might break down, because that usually means disaster. I wont be able to get to work, I could lose my job, I might not be able to afford the repair and then the car just sits on my driveway or at the shop. But this is where the middle-class part comes in - as we were doing better off, we could actually "afford" to buy used. "Afford" it in terms of affording the risk - if my car does break down, I have the money to repair it, and if it is in the shop I work with people with reliable cars who will give me a ride, or I can uber it for a week, or rent a car, or come up with some other option.
So yes on the Odyssey, but I haven't broken my frugal mindset enough to want to buy new. And in addition to hauling kids and soccer teams and boy scout troops and such, we also use the minivan to achieve other cost savings which weren't so easy when we were broke - for one, I still use craigslist all the time and haul all kinds of used furniture, etc in it. When I was driving a busted up Nissan Sentra I had no way to buy a dining table on craigslist, even if I found a bargain, because I couldn't get it home. We use it to go camping, and have vacations that are both fun and low cost. And then there's this: before COVID, my work had me going to a conference twice a year about an hour and a half/two hours from home. The distance wasn't considered far enough for my work to cover a hotel, although most people came from farther and did stay overnight. They do a lot of networking in the evening, and it's useful to participate. So even though I certainly could have paid for my own hotel, I just don't like to spend the money. I just put an air mattress in the back of the van (in our older model the third row flips down and then you have to temporarily remove the second row of seats) and sleep in the hotel parking lot for a few days (carefully). I don't tell my colleagues this, as I'm pretty sure they'd be horrified, and it's pretty funny to be lying in the back of the van in the morning wrestling into a blouse, nice pair of slacks and heels for the conference breakfast. But the money saved in these little ways goes into savings that continue to build a buffer from the stress of wondering what will happen if I lose my job, etc.
I guess my point is, I hope you can find a way to use the best strategies from both the poor-ish mindset and the middle class mindset to optimize your current situation.
Our vans have come from Enterprise used car sales, at least around here good prices on decently in shape cars only a few years old.
And yes, saving a head of time so you can mostly pay in cash is a very efficient way to do it.
I'll check that out when we get ready to do it for sure.
I think I'd definitely buy recent-year used if I bought one, like you say. I think that's true whether or not I was buying with cash - it's just too much cheaper (at least in a normal market, maybe not as much now) to not do.
One nice thing for us now is I have enough experience being poor that a lot of repairs are either things I can do, or that I know how to get done pretty cheaply. Coupling that with the Odyssey's pretty dang good reliability (or the Sienna's slow-and-plodding-ultra-durability) and once we get to that point I'm guessing it will go pretty well.
I have only owned cars built in the 2000s or early 2010s. My rental-car experiences recently suggest to me that there was a quantum leap in the quality of "regular" cars, starting around 2017. My 2000ish Honda had no cruise control. My 2010ish Toyota has cruise control, but you have to tap the lever all the time to change speeds when you hit traffic. The cars I've rented recently (some of which are lower-tier models than my current car) have cruise control that acts as a virtual autopilot in terms of accelerating and braking (not steering). You set it and forget it. A 2018 Odyssey with adaptive cruise control--now you're talking!
What puts me off as a non poor person from doing this isn't the time or the effort, it's the risk. Trying to do something like that for the first time there's a pretty non-trivial chance that I'm going to screw it up in some way. Maybe I spill oil everywhere. Maybe I get crushed to death by a falling car. I'm sure that the tenth time I do it would be a breeze, but I worry I won't get there without spending at least one afternoon cleaning up spilled oil.
I pay to take away risk, not just to save time.
Youtube can do a lot to reduce risk with common jobs like this. Just find one specific to your car and every step is shown in detail.
I’ve been curious what the job was that you got - started reading with the original article you are riffing on and was always curious. Glad to hear you are doing well and yes mo money no problems was not far off, yet wildly overstated at the same time.
Basically right after that article went up, I got contacted by a handful of people adjacent to tech/startup/crypto interests. I think it was probably about half charity and half the idea that I actually can write - there is some limited need for that.
I basically went with the first one who contacted me, which also looked like the best one at the time. A few months later someone offered me much more money, and I went to the bosses and basically said "hey, listen, I like this job, but I can't not take what amounts to a 66% raise.", and they then matched *that*, which put me at what, to me, is crazy money.
The only real downside to how this happened is I'm enormously overpaid for a writer, and the company itself doesn't necessarily want/know how to use a writer, so things often feel a bit tenuous. I'm a bit paranoid in general, so I'm not sure how much of that impression is accurate.
Sounds like you aren’t a writer to them, you are someone who can communicate thoughtfully. It’s the basis of all high paid service jobs.
To follow on, find someone in the company that is a high performer and ask to work with them. Just telling someone you are excited about working with them on something (it really can be simply saying you want to) is encouraged at some places. Ymmv
Thanks for this - a lot of it really hit home as I've wobbled back and forth across 'the line' several times in my working life, rarely doing much better than 'OK' but doing OK now.
Knowing my budget will allow for new tires on the pickup between now and when winter starts (not that far off now, here in northern MN) is a stressor nice to not have.
Yeah, I can imagine - I've never lived a place that gets snow or ice, and I'd be terrified to handle that with worn tread.
Side note: does your screen name mean "Meth of the Wild"?
Bald tires in winter are indeed the wrong sort of exciting!
Ha, no - it's derivative of an old H.S. nickname - "man of the world" - my friends thought me wiser than I actually am.
Ahh, gotcha. It was gonna be a funny nerd-pun the other way, but this is good too.
I read it as "Master of the Double-Universe".
Yeah it's weird, I grew up super duper wealthy and then when I went to college and had to pay my way through things I barely noticed. My expenses were roughly
Rent+Utiltiies (Power/Internet/Water/heat) - $1k /month (This was the bay area and I was living with 3 other people in a 4 bedroom house)
Food+some kitchen supplies- $150
Transportation- $100 (busses/trains mostly+my bike repair)
misc (repairs, books) - $200
Health insurance - $250
Dental Care (amortized) - $50
Savings - $200 (though tuition ends up eating 80% of that)
So being single is obviously a lot cheaper than raising a family of 4, I figure that "living comfortably" requires a post tax income of 20k/person you live with. But the lifestyle of an omega rich person who finds themselves temporarily "poor" (20k /year expenses is definitely not living small) and a person on 35k/year with a family of 4 are basically existing in different universes.
I personally felt no notable change to lifestyle entering college, and felt like I was still living like a multi-millionaire.
Sadly there aren't many stories about riches to rags, what do lives of Museum curators look like? I often found that the people at my university who grew up poor had completely different spending habits than myself.
Going from poor>rich you find yourself rapidly changing lifestyle in a large number of small subtle ways which massively inflate spending. It's surprisingly hard to notice unless you know what to look for.
I was making good money at one time and then went to grad school for six years, where I made under $20K per year. It was easy! But part of why it was easy (besides that I was single and in a low-COL area) was that I had had money, which meant I already had a newish car that would run for several more years, a good coat, and just lots of other "stuff" that I wouldn't have to replace for a while. Eventually the stuff runs out and you need money again.
Also, when you're young and your family has money, you tend to get a lot of things as gifts or help that would otherwise be killer one-time expenses. I mean things like a phone or a laptop or a Christmas vacation.
I estimate that I got around $2k of "misc durable things" (bike/clothing/shoes/phone/computer ect.) which probably would have eaten up a lot of the early savings category.
The one thing I'd question here is rent - almost every place is going to have a cheaper option than that time-adjusted 4k a month for a 4 bedroom. But I think overall this is probably pretty close, especially since your transportation costs were so low.
100% on the poor-to-rich spending inflation stuff. It's especially so if you are "catching up". We had things that hadn't been replaced in a decade and a half - our mattress and boxsprings weren't new when we got them, and we had them from the time we got married until about a year ago. Big, big upgrade but those kinds of catch-up purchases add up quick.
I think living in a super nice house was part of the "no lifestyle change" since the landowner included some major appliances (a dishwasher, a clotheswasher, a dishwaster, ect) in the "rent".
I actually really enjoyed reading this. I'm in the UK. Money is a little different here, but the essence is the same.
My mother raised 5 of us mostly alone (she married our father twice over the years), and welfare was our biggest income.
Having my own business as a teenager took me to London... where for a few years I scraped by, but generally in bars spending my income. Kindness of strangers played a big part.
Then suddenly I found myself earning an bizarrely high income. Each year I paid more in taxes than my mother ever received from the state over the entire term.
Now, things have cooled. But I don't feel the same stress any longer. I know HOW to make money now. But, I also, don't NEED to make that now.
I was widowed, which may have changed my goals. But, I know that what I have should keep me in good stead. I've never been flashy with materialistic things... always enjoyed a good meal. But. I can happily enjoy a slower pace.
For me now, it's primarily about avoiding all the stress of life.
Thanks for your story.
X
My condolences on your loss.
I've often contemplated that if I was not a family man I could probably get by in a very small studio apartment - one person needs less than half the space of two, as it were. What you say about sacrificing income for stress reduction makes a lot of sense to me for the situation you are in, and I'd probably do about the same.
After reading this, I can't tell if I'm middle class or poor.... and that makes sense, I guess , since my income is pretty much in the middle of your various hypotheticals.
Oddly, there are people who consider even where I'm at poor - if you work with a lot of bay area people, your Phoenix-high pay doesn't register as much to them.
Housing costs in the Bay Area are ridiculous. Like, $4000/month for a 1 bedroom apartment ridiculous... it's literally the most expensive housing market in the United States - worse than Manhattan, even!
"Middle-class-or-better people don’t like to talk about money, something that always confused me when I was broke. Poor people talk about money constantly; since mine was the more embarrassing situation, why should I be the one who was comfortable if they weren’t?"
This is kind of like being effortlessly thin during a discussion of obesity. Of course, in either instance, there are plenty of people who aren't uncomfortable talking about it.
This is a great article, spot on.
Thank you!
As someone who went from "too broke to qualify for cheap healthcare and food stamps" to rich-ish, this article is very relatable. (Though I was still privileged in many ways when I was broke. At least I was single and didn't have to raise a family.)
It's been a full 5 years since I had financial worries, and I've finally starting to feel rich-ish. But wow did it take a while before I was willing to do "rich people" things. Like throwing away potentially moldy food instead of risking it, or buying the fancy $6 cookie box because I really want to try them, or buying a $300 robot vacuum that prevents me from having excruciating back pain every time I have to vacuum the house.
My husband had to berate me to go to doctors. I was used to avoiding doctor visits. "What hasn't killed you probably won't kill you. Doctors are expensive, so just live with it," and all that. (Except the dentist. I have never slacked on going to the dentist because that way lies root canals.) I spent a truly ridiculous amount of money on physical therapy last year. It still makes me cringe when I think of it. And yet, I'm not in pain anymore, for the first time in years. Whether it was worth the cost is debatable, but I'm still amazed by the fact that I was able to throw money at my chronic pain and make it go away!
Honestly, the weirdest part for me has been the "time is money" claim. I used to think this was obvious bullshit. Money was money, and my money was more limited than my time, so OF COURSE the right choice was to do time-consuming tasks that saved money. This included things like coupon-clipping, driving further to save money on groceries, and spending 4 hours to list things on ebay and make 30 bucks. Now that I have a highly paid engineering job, I suddenly find myself with more than enough money to buy (or do) almost anything I want, but not enough time. I'm currently considering hiring a weekly cleaning service because I despise cleaning. I'm very inefficient at it too; 2-3 times slower than my husband, and probably 5 times slower than a professional. The thought of paying someone a couple hundred dollars to free up my weekend is honestly starting to sound like a good trade. That is not a level of rich I ever thought I would be. It's crazy!
What, if anything, did you have to forego to pay for the physical therapy? Would you rather have that, or have ongoing absence of pain? If the answer is that you prefer absence of pain - which is your revealed preference - then it was worth it. And if you have to think really hard to find something you gave up, then it was definitely worth it.
I didn't have to forego anything to pay for physical therapy because I've been very blessed financially for the last few years. However, I grew up in a family of cheapskates that pinched pennies, so spending that kind of money tends to be psychologically painful for me. This is particularly true for things like healthcare where I don't trade my money for a physical object. Expensive physical purchases, like furniture and cars, are easier to justify because I remember why the cost is worth it every time I use the object.
I feel like getting the cleaners is a good call for you, from what you are saying - cleaning is miserable. I think if we were two-income we'd probably do something like that; the only reason we don't now is because one-income doesn't quite justify it and we can pretend that one of us has time, even though she doesn't. But it's hard - I'd say do it.
Same situation for me with spouse forcing me to go to the doctor. The other day I stepped on a dead pigeon in a parking lot (not a metaphor) and hurt my ankle pretty good; it was the wife who made me go in and get it x-rayed.
Wow. I think you may have beaten my record for "dumbest way to get an ankle injury". Mine was slipping in mud, after which I needed crutches for almost three weeks.
It was actually really bad, because you can't tell *whose bones made the breaking noise* which confounded how bad we thought it was quite a bit. It's still not quite right, but I'm not 20 anymore so that's to be expected.
"Not going to doctors" can make some problems get much, much worse. My wife stopped treating her diabetes when she was a teenager and it was with great difficulty that I got her to start seeing doctors again in her mid to late 20s. Now she's 31 and needs a kidney transplant.