Squash that advice

Every once in a while, I get to see the financial world through other people's eyes -- that is, the eyes of people who think of shopping as entertainment, who confuse spending with wealth, and who think of debt as not only normal but also necessary.  I sort of like being in my own frugal bubble most of the time, but  I also don't mind emerging every once in a while to rub elbows with non-frugalists (if that's a word).  I know that those people are out there.   I know that they mostly get along fine in their non-frugal lives.   But I didn't think that those people would masquerade as financial advisors for young adults.

And yet, I was wrong.  Last fall, N-son's squash team coach decided to do the very admirable thing (I thought) of bringing in an "expert" from a local Credit Union to give a presentation to the players on the team and their families. We got to have pizza, we "learned" about finances, and we had a Q&A at the end.  I was totally jazzed for this event, figuring it would be great to have my kids hear about the importance of financial prudence from someone other than me, for a change.  But sheesh!   If you're going to teach kids to be responsible with money, maybe you ought to have the teacher be someone who is actually responsible with money, y'know?

The "teacher" in this scenario was a relatively young person who worked at a nearby Credit Union.  She'd been provided with a script and a power point presentation, but it was clear that she didn't entirely understand the script she'd been given, especially when it came to debt.  For example, here are some of the notes I jotted down, once I realized (to my horror) what she was telling these middle/high school kids and their parents.

• The only way to get a car is with debt, she implied. She and her husband bought a car with a 5-year loan, and her car died after three years.  “Oh well, that’s what happens!”
• "You want to have a little bit of debt so you build up your credit card rating."
• "Debt is just a fact of life.    Everybody has debt; I do, too!  Life happens."
• "The average American has $40,000 of credit card debt."    (How she came up with that number, I do not know.  Nerd wallet says the average debt is $16K, but that's among American households -- not individuals -- and even then, it's only among households that have debt in the first place.  PR newswire says that, contrary to what our presenter said, one in four Americans is debt free.) 

It was not surprising, then then the rest of her presentation was . . . well . . . not exactly the kind of a presentation a Miser Mom would have given.   Her power point said that people should have an emergency account, which she translated as 

• Get a 3-months-of-expenses savings account in place before you attack debt.

(I know that there are other reasonable people who would agree with her; I just think that attacking high-interest credit card debt is probably more urgent than putting money into a low-interest-bearing savings account, especially if building up that much of a cushion is going to take you a year or more).

Her power point presentation told her that she should urge people to think about long-term financial goals.  This advice, she translated into the following example:

• "Our long-term goal: My husband and I want to buy a house in five years. "

(I'd have said that a 5-year plan is a medium-term goal; "long-term" goals would be more along the lines of retirement, or children's college funds, or other goals for 10+ years into the future.  If you buy a house but don't have a longer-term savings plan that includes maintenance and upkeep, you're in for a rude awakening when you start getting those repair bills).

Speaking of retirement and long-term savings, she had this to say:  

• "They say 'Invest with mutual funds', and I guess that’s not a bad thing to do.  It’s okay to invest your money."

Ummm . . .  it's "okay" to invest money?  It's "not bad"?!?!??   This, from the person who works at a credit union?!?  

Sheesh.  What I will say about this presentation is that, when the speaker was done, the other parents started speaking up.  They emphatically told the kids that "if you rack up debt, you'll find out that there are lots of things you want to do in life that become way more expensive, or even impossible".  One of the moms told heartfelt stories about the dangers of credit card debt leading to difficulties renting a decent apartment.  I was worried that if I said anything I'd be too strident, but the other parents had no problem jumping in and starting a bit of a rant.  It was nice to find that I had compadres in the room, after all.

Miser Family update: birthday and chores edition

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household.

We celebrated several birthdays this week.  My husband hummed his way through his "Beatles Birthday" -- apparently, I will still need him and I will still feed him when he's 64.  But our Senator Toomey, whom my guy attempts to engage with every Tuesday, did not come out of his office to give my husband a big birthday hug.

Later in the week, we celebrated I-daughter's birthday with even more singing; I-daughter and N-son and a friend and I went to a performance of "Always Patsy Cline", a great show featuring a really good Patsy Cline impersonator who could belt out those songs.  N-son mostly noticed the drummer, who I'll admit was really good, too.  

We got to train up our family for new household jobs.  J-son has long been helping to trim N-son's hair, but this week for the first time he assisted in giving his dad's head a trim. 

And in other training arenas, as we were getting the garden carts ready for service in our college's upcoming yard sale, Baby-A did her best to help pump up the tires.  My guess is she'll need another year or two before she can be truly effective at that job.

As for me, in addition to making chocolate cake and singing songs about going walking after midnight (out in the moonlight) and having Sweet Dreams, I also gave my students their exams, and then I graded the exams, and now I'm done for the semester and looking forward to transitioning into spending my days working on my research.  

Storing valuable objects where they're valued

Last week, I was honored at my college with what my husband calls a "sustained breathing" award.  I've been at my college for 25 years.  As a result, my provost stood up on stage and said laudatory things about me, and I got a valuable present.

In past years, 25-year veterans had gotten a clock.  (I am a tad wistful for that; I would have loved to get a clock.)  This year, we old-timers got crystal bowls.  To be more specific, we got Waterford crystal bowls, engraved with the name of our college. This is a pricy, momentous gift.

Sigh.

A gift like this is valuable in the sense that it cost my college a wad of dough to get it for me.  But the gift loses a bunch of value in being transferred to me.  In some homes, a bowl like this would grace the place, and make the place more beautiful.   But in my home, with a bunch of ADHD teenagers and a highly active 2-year old grandchild, caring for this bowl means finding protective storage space.  That is, the gift imposes a burden.  If I'd gotten a bowl we could toss in the dishwasher and/or the microwave, we'd have probably figured out a way to incorporate this into our lives, but Waterford crystal . . . not so much.

Ironically, the extra expense that my college incurred by engraving their name on the bowl makes the gift even less valuable, in the sense of being harder to sell -- assuming that I wanted to sell it, which actually, I don't.  I love the place I work, and I'm glad for this token of appreciation that they've given me.  I just want to make sure that the gift can be used in a way it's appreciated.  I want to place this valuable item in a place where it's valued.

So, huzzah for elegant friends. At the reception that followed the Sustained Breathing Acknowledgment Ceremony, I huddled up with some of my college employee buddies.  Some of my buddies are actually pretty classy people, and bowl that was such a storage-encumbrance to me wowed some of them.

And so I'm keeping my bowl --- permanently --- at the home of C, a childless and tasteful person I happen to like having lunch with occasionally.  C and her wife can store the bowl out in plain view, where it can be appreciated without the danger of tennis balls or wrestle-mania endangering it.  I told her that whenever she looks at the bowl, she can think of me.

The Waterford Crystal Bowl
on C's dining room table. Lovely.

This is why it's so danged hard to buy gifts for people, right?  I grew up with Waterford crystal at my parent's home; we used it for special occasions, and I have super-fond memories of carrying it up from its safe place in the basement, unwrapping the goblets from their protective tissue in their carefully divided cardboard boxes.  I loved the after-dinner ritual of hand-washing the glasses in soapy water, rinsing them carefully and setting them on soft towels to dry, and then repackaging them in their tissue-paper-and-boxes for storage again.  I loved these glasses so much, that at my first wedding, I asked for Waterford goblets, in the same pattern as my parents'.

But a dozen years later, I gave the crystal away.   The fact that something is valuable doesn't mean that it's valuable to me.  And in my own version of my own adult life, these goblets were either in storage or at risk of breakage, but they were never part of an elegant and appreciated ritual in my new, grown-up life.  It was better to hand them along to my sister, who could use them at her home.

So this gift that I got from my employer, it actually made me feel a bit guilty.  Like, I ought to be the kind of person who could appreciate this crystal bowl, but instead I'm just too crass for it.  I know that's not what they wanted to say -- that instead they were saying that a pricey gift like this symbolizes the value of the recipient of the gift.

So that's why I'm "keeping" the bowl by gifting it to another person's home.  The college I love, it appreciates me enough that it gives me way more than I could ever want or need, enough that I enjoy it best when I share with others.

But maybe I'll keep my eyes open this yard sale season for a nice clock, just because.

How much money is too much money?

There's a huge difference between "income" and "wealth".   That's the main financial lessons I want my sons to understand right now.

Although I understand the spiritual dangers of having too much money (wealth), with my sons I've lately been dancing the Worry Dance about getting too much money (income).  J-son in particular has found himself persecuted by abundance lately, and the results aren't happy.

Even prudent people have anxiety over what to do with a windfall -- an unexpected tax return, an inheritance.  It's hard to be responsible with a lot of money at once: much, much  harder than being responsible with getting the same amount of money in small increments over the span of many years.  An extreme example that might be familiar would be winning the lottery, or perhaps the example of starring in the NFL. Many tales abound of people in these situations being showered briefly with more money than they know what to do with, and then (because they -- literally, honestly -- do not know what to do with so gosh-darned much money) going broke or even into debt in future years.

Another related example (one that's probably familiar to only the smaller group of personal finance aficionados) is the Millionaire Next Door  concept of "Economic Outpatient Care", the paradox that says that the more money that parents give to their children, the less wealth the children end up accumulating.  The authors of that iconic book argue that encouraging children to be entirely responsible for their own economic outlook leads to greater financial stability than jumping in to help fill gaps.  In particular, the authors give some evidence that giving your kids too much money sets them up for financial ruin.

So what does this all have to do with J-son?

A year or so ago, my husband signed up to start collecting Social Security.  Part of the reason that my guy said "yes" to the SS agent was that he was told our "special needs" children bring us extra money if he started collecting money right away.  The problem with what he was told is that the SS agent was not being entirely forthcoming: the money does not come to "us", and certainly does not come without strings.   We've since gotten dire warnings about the need to return any money that was not devoted to enhancing the lives of our darling adopted sons.  And once the boys turn 18, the money goes not to our checking accounts, but rather directly to our sons.

Last September, J-son turned 18.  And from that day until the day he turns 19-and-two-months, thanks to the Social Security Administration, our government sends him the princely sum of a-bit-more-than-$800 each month.  This money that J-son gets is a huge problem.

Why is it a problem? For one thing, J-son does not need this money.  He doesn't pay us rent or utilities; he doesn't buy groceries.  And if he moves out of our house, he stops getting the money.  This means that a kid with huge impulse-control problems has access to huge amounts of money exactly when he does not need the money.  And once he turns 19 and graduates from high school, he stops getting money.  We have a recipe for disaster on our hands: this money totally gives him everything he needs to develop overwhelming "needs" for money, without any of the structure for promoting financially responsible habits.

I admit that I freaked out when I realized that this situation would be coming down the road toward us.  My freaking resulted in a conversation between the three of us (me, my husband, and J-son) that resulted in agreement that looked like this:

J-son gets to "keep" (= spend) $80 per month, and we'll put the other money into two-year CDs that J-son will be able to access only after he graduates from high school and moves out of the house -- that is, when he really needs the money.

Here was the simple, two-step plan:

1. Each month J-son gets his check, and deposits it into his credit union, putting $80 into checking and the rest into savings, and then somehow miraculously spends only the money from the checking account.
2. My husband helps J-son use the money from the savings account to buy two-year CDs which not only yield higher interest rates, but also protect the money from impulse spending.

But an agreement, no matter how fervently agreed to, doesn't necessarily automatically become reality.  And in this case, reality and aspiration diverged pretty quickly.  CDs have minimum purchase prices, and user ID and passwords sometimes become an overwhelming challenge for some people, and so we ended up leaving some of the money in J-son's savings account for a month or so, waiting for the money to pile up into large enough accounts to sock it away.

But the money in the savings account calls to J-son like sirens called to Odysseus, and J-son's mom (me) just isn't as good at bondage as Odysseus's crews.  Also, J-son's dad isn't as anal as I am about getting money into high-yielding CDs as quickly as possible.  As a result, about two months ago, J-son went to a boxing match with his debit card. What started as the simple task of purchasing food for lunch turned into a shoe-buying spree, and $500 later, his savings account had been decimated.

J-son voluntarily gave up his ATM card after that . . . for two months.  But then he snuck into my sewing room to take it back, and he indulged himself in a 7-day, $290 spree of buying snacks for his buddies.   The snack spree came on top of a cell-phone data spree that had reduced his checking account from a high of $48.94 to its current sorry state of $0.88.

I don't have an elegant solution to this impulse-driven, money-fueled problem.  J-son is definitely learning a lot about impulse control (mostly, that he doesn't have it) and about the value of external control (he actually sort of likes it when I take his debit card away).  What he's not learning to do is to spend small amounts of money at a reasonable pace.  He still has no idea of how to budget.  We're going to work on that in the future, but that's an ongoing effort.

But the fact that he has more money than he needs doesn't help.  There really is such a thing as too much money, and that's what J-son has.    Poor, rich kid.

Miser Family update, earthquake edition

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household.

Perhaps the biggest news this week is that an earthquake struck nearby; this is the third largest quake since I moved here 25 years ago.  It was initially reported as 2.7 on the Richter scale, but later downgraded to 2.3.  

We have earthquakes seldom enough that the tremors caused some consternation.  There were multiple calls to 911, with people worried that the rumble/boom they'd heard was North Korea bombing us. (This makes perfect sense, if you think that  a likely strategic target of the North Koreans would be a small inland city surrounded by Amish farmland).  The local newspaper later carried reports that objects on the top of people's dressers in nearby Millersville, the center of the earthquake, had been knocked over.  Fortunately, recovery and rescue efforts all seem to have gone smoothly, and life here in our little city seems to be returning to normal.

On Monday morning, I broke a tooth.  My dentist was very busy and finally saw me late in the day; she said that three different people had broken teeth that day.  (I told her I blamed the Sunday earthquake). It looks like I'll need "crown enhancement" before I can actually get my new crown, although I won't know for sure for a little while. My dentist referred me to an oral surgeon who will see me next week; the surgeon has been out of the office this week, probably rearranging objects on the top of his dresser.  Although it was disconcerting to break a tooth, I'm rather comforted by the nonchalance and lack of sense of urgency of my dentist and oral surgeon.

N-son  played drums in church on Sunday; then later in the day both he and I-daughter sang in a beautiful local concert. N-son's ROTC commander was at the concert, and was impressed enough that he asked if N-son would sing the national anthem at the upcoming end-of-year ceremony.  N-son has been avidly practicing the anthem around the house ever since. Sometimes I ask him to practice a little more quietly.

J-son had an impromptu boxing match on Monday, which had the effect of prodding his coach to prod J-son to start running again (which he'd cut back on) and to train even harder.  So all this week, J-son has been coming home from the gym very sore and very tired.  I love it.

K-daughter has been looking for jobs, and in the process has started helping the boys to look for summer jobs. (Thank you, K-daughter!)  Right now it seems like N-son is aiming for food service jobs, and J-son thinks he'd be perfect for a job where he'd clean fish tanks.  Let's cross fingers that they get hooked up (or cooked up, depending) with steady work!

My husband's classes finished up this week (oh, I suppose mine did, too, now that I come to think of it!). He gave a presentation downtown at our local CS Lewis group.  He's spending Saturday (today) in Philadelphia at the Climate march, while I spent Saturday downtown at our local market doing voter registration. This was too late for our municipal primaries (which are coming up on May 16) and probably too early for the midterm elections, but it was a good practice run for a bunch of novice activists.

Loveliest of streets

About a hundred and fifty years ago, A.E. Housman wrote a poem about my front yard.  He wrote,

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
is hung with bloom along the bough,
and stands along the woodland ride
Wearing white for Easter-tide.

Okay, maybe this poem wasn't about my particular street, because Housman lived in Bromsgrove England, not in central Pennsylvania.  But this time of year, my street really is about the most beautiful street in my city.  The whole street is full of flowering trees that pop into bloom come the end of April.  Both sides of the road, plus a grassy median divider down the middle of the road, are all awash with cherry blossom trees as well as dogwoods.  They're wearing white and pink for Easter-tide, and it's just about the most amazingly wonderful place to be.

In fact, this is a view from my bedroom window earlier this week. There are dogwood blossoms, and there's a squatting dude.

The squatting dude was taking pictures of the trees as well as pictures of a young couple standing in the grassy median, surrounded by the trees.

I'm guessing that this couple had just gotten engaged, and that this was their professional engagement picture.  And of all the beautiful places in world they might want to have this moment commemorated, they chose the street in front of my home.

It's a picture of loveliness.  Or of loveliest.  It's a reminder to me to be grateful for what I get when I just walk out the door.

Housman's poem is about gratitude, too, as well as about how we can apply mathematical insights that enhance our gratitude, insights that allow us to make the most of the time we have amid beautiful places.  The people out my window were young, like Housman.  He computes the years remaining to him, and uses his meditation on time to think about the trees even more,

Now of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
and take from seventy years a score,
that leaves me only fifty more. 

And since, to look at trees in bloom,
fifty springs are little room,
along the woodland I will go
to see the cherry hung with snow.  

Me, of my three score years and ten and possibly more, fifty one will not come again.  But still, I'm heading out to see the cherry hung with bloom.  Life is good.

Miser Family Update, Easter-Tax Day version

Life continues to be rich and full in the Miser Mom household

We began the week celebrating Easter, both in the Christian and in the secular sense.  Last week, I'd bought my candy from our local farmer's market, handing the canning jars to the woman behind the counter and asking her to fill them up. Even though I hadn't bought candy from her since a year ago, she recognized me and asked, "Are you the woman that only puts out one trash can a year?"  (I told her no, I actually put out 9 trash cans last year, so she must have me confused with someone else).  So we had our usual easter baskets with canning-jar-eggs, and our next door neighbor hid plastic eggs in the back yard for N-son and J-son to find, and we had a sweet morning, in many senses of the word "sweet".

Later in the week, on Tuesday, we celebrated Tax Day with our annual family "Money Dinner".  We invited a couple of guests over to share the wealth, and we served dollar-shaped soft pretzels, ("bringin' home the") Bacon, green tortilla quesadillas cut into dollar shapes, and lettuce that the older people saw as metaphorical for money but the younger people thought of as confusing.  Oh, and gold-foil-covered chocolate coins.

N-son played squash against his coach.  J-son visited his foster mom.  My husband went to the Earth Day protest in Philly.  I picked up an extra calculus class, because one of our department's mathematicians got sick suddenly at the end of the semester.  Baby-A can count backwards from 4.