Life lessons
Every month it's the same; we breathe a sigh of relief come payday, grateful for the regular source of hard-earned income that eradicates the slowly creeping overdraft, happily restoring our balance to the right colour.
I aim, with unrealistic optimism, to keep the balances in the black. I can't remember a time when we've done that, and so the cycle continues, a sizeable chunk of the income being syphoned off to cover last month's over-expenditure, thereby reducing the pot for this month and ensuring the same will happen again next month.
Days on from payday I check back into the newly-swelled accounts to ensure all is order, but every time I do so my reaction is the same too; deluded disbelief that our money can disappear so quickly, dismay that we fall back into the overdraft so soon after payday, with no conscious sense of having spent beyond the basics.
See that; even that I say 'our money can disappear' gives away the unreal perspective that I have. It goes nowhere unless we tell it to, of course. And yet I have that disappointed sense that it ought to last longer, go further, that we've not splashed out on anything indulgent, so why is there so little left, why the need to count every penny and delete every tempting email that offers me a new Spring wardrobe?
Ok; there was the biggish household shop for groceries, but it was carefully planned so as to maximise every penny, and carried out in the cheapest supermarket instead of the one we'd naturally default to if we could. And yes, £100 disappeared (that word again) in Ikea but really we were restrained and only went for essentials in a bid to make our house a home. I run through these mental lists, struggling to work out whether we're guilty of living thoughtlessly beyond our means. I conclude that's not the real issue.
We're ostensibly paying off our debts, bringing credit card expenditure to a standstill and maximising the opportunities to repay as cheaply as possible. And yet a scan through the statement for the credit card that sees little in the way of frivolous action still makes my heart pound a little. Just numbers but in part an explanation for some of that baffling disappearing. Necessary unavoidable expenses in my head. I suppose we could say 'No' more often but there's no avoiding the frightening cost of oil to heat the house or fuel to run the car. But I suppose that's it; there's always something that we rationalise. Some part of life that comes with a price tag that we justify as somehow being a basic part of the cost of living. I confess; last month I 'needed' a desk. This month it was the lamps and rug and more picture frames that I never get round to filling because printing photos seems like a frivolous expense....?!
Sigh. Trying to make the numbers work makes me both tired of being a grown up... and yet grateful for the soul stretch that it brings; the urge to get my house in order, to correct bad habits from days before, and to learn how to handle these things well, so that I can teach my boys to understand them too.
The experts would simply say I need to get a job. Earning another £xxx a month would make all the difference. Funny, but that's the amount we're funnelling into paying off our debts. And I think it counts for something that we've faced up to that, put plans in place to wriggle out of the debt spiral that we walked into with our eyes closed. So I remind myself of that, when wondering if an online Top Shop fix would be so wrong. I tell myself I've already spent that money this month and instead of buying me more clothes that I can fall out of love with in a month or two, it's gone on bringing down the slightly scary numbers that will eventually turn to big fat juicy zeros.
I wonder what it's like for other people. I find it so easy to assume most other people don't even have an overdraft facility, to imagine they get to spend without thinking and never have to juggle different balances to make the numbers stack up. In truth I suspect what comes across as apparent financial stability in so many other people is just denial.
My laptop's dying. We look at each aghast, irritated that the possibility of not being able to have a crack at being paid to write might be thwarted now by technology as well as everything else. I spec out a Macbook on the Apple site, thinking What's another £700 or so, we neeeeed this.... there it is again, that stupid justification thing.
Another part of me flirts with the oddly-tempting possibility of a more radical approach. No gadgets. No internet. No TV. No expense beyond the cost of buying food and a roof over our head and maybe even then we could eat the things we grow. But even seeds cost money.
No, I resolve to just keep juggling the figures. To shuggle the laptop as many times as it takes to get the screen to fizz reluctantly back into life. I actually really want to embrace this season in our lives, one of so much plenty in so many ways, and though the reality of our financial life is a little uninspiring, the fact is it has been SO much worse than this, to the point that we just refused to look. So really we're in better shape than we have ever been. We'll learn to love our overdraft facility, get used to delving into it each month. We'll keep reaching for the things that could stand to make the monthly difference. We'll forego the dinners and the shoes and gadgets that we're drawn to, and look a little deeper down for the more satisfying things. We'll learn this lesson, and we'll learn it well, and that will hold more value than anything we could buy.
But I do resent the culture that we've bought into so very blindly. It strikes me as ironic that the numbers on the weighing scale matter more to most than those on the bank statements. That we're taught Pythagoras Rule and how to work out the hypotenuse of a triangle, but not how to live by a budget or avoid getting into debt. It seems all wrong. "We were so poor we didn't even have chairs to sit on," said relatives from a different day. We might be just as poor but thanks to the trusty evil credit card and the going view that acquiring things is somehow necessary, you certainly wouldn't know it based on our furniture or lack thereof. How and when did I buy so wholeheartedly into the view that things matter, that I need more of them, and that my perceived lack of them constitutes some kind of deprivation? My own unthinking attitude appalls me sometimes, and so I skim through the list of things we've successfully paid for this month, and instead of dismissing the utilities bills and focusing on all the things we haven't bought, the sense of going without, instead I count each paid bill as a sweet blessing of some small kind until they stack up all around me, and I tell Dada once again how much I appreciate the provision that he makes for his little family.
Comments
Even with two incomes and no children we hid the red every month. I have absolutely no idea how you guys manage! One day I will have to find out and so the boy and I are desperately clearing credit cards that consist of chinese meals that I ate when I was a student and too drunk/long ago to remember and bottles of champage from nightclubs when I was too dumb to realise that being 24 didn't last forever.
One of my pet gripes is that they never taught us to manage money in school, rather preferring for us to spend hours and hours on long useless sums that I have totally forgotten.
I didn't know whether to comment on this as I'm terribly afraid of coming over either a) smug or b) rich. But, although our income on paper is certainly good, our income once we've paid mortgage/tax/insurance/work-related-stuff is not as great as all that.....
When we first got married we lived in central London on (again after mortgage but not after other bills) a really genuinely tiny income. I was still a student and hubby working for a church at an income which now would be way less than the minimum wage. We didn't get a credit card and shopped at Kwiksave (8p a loaf of bread!) with cash and never went out (for 2 loooooong years; we even lost friends over that but our true friends understood where we were at financially and just agreed to come around for plates of baked potato and ratatouille) and once our cash for that month was gone we spent zero. Both of us were brought up viewing debt as the ultimate in evil and I guess it stuck.
As we've grown older we have had more income and also more expenses but we've never been in debt; we do have a credit card for ease of use but pay it off monthly; we save up for everything including cars and big things, we go shopping for the household incidentals when we can afford them. At the moment our sofas are disgusting - huge great stains over them, they were bought pre-children when we didn't understand that plain yellow non-washable covers were plain STUPID - but when we sat down and budgeted recently we realised that a) we couldn't afford new ones and b) there are things we are saving for that we want more in the future so we'll carry on with them for the timebeing.
I do feel that we are not living the lifestyle that loads of my contemporaries are - for example we haven't paid for a holiday for the past 5 years though we have been away with my parents; this year we are paying for flights to the US so I am working 4 evenings a month to pay for them - but I feel comfortable with the fact that we don't have the stress of being in debt. i don't even know if my friends are in debt but I certainly don't understand how they can afford holidays and new cars if they're not...
Does this sound smug? I really don't mean it to. I know I am lucky, I have a lovely house and I can afford to walk around tesco and put a vase in my trolley if I really want to or buy a frivolous bunch of flowers or bottles of wine (but that's because I won't buy things like magazines - if I started I would want to buy more - and I buy my kids' clothes from ebay) and I know that other people can't do that as that would push them more into debt.
I think one of my terrors of getting into debt is the nightmare of getting out again. I can't imagine how one does that. Also I should add that I do no financial things at all at home. hubby does them all - he's methodical and a planner, i'm chaotic and not a planner. Left to me we would have run up huge debts because I wouldn't look after things properly at all. So, although I feel strongly that his is the right way for us to live, left to myself I would not manage to keep us in this position. Often he will come to me and tell me I can't spend any more money till the end of the month...
Stopping now. ignore this if it sounds smug and irrelevant. i didn't mean it to....
geepeemum - I don't think that this sounds smug at all, infact I really appreciate the perspectives that you've shared. I think the way a person is brought up to understand debt and money is a huge factor, which you've shown, and that really motivates me to want to make sure my children understand these things. 3 years old isn't too young to learn that you have to choose which toy car to buy based on the pennies in your purse, not the one you most like the look of. But my instinct is not to do that - it's to splurge, splash out, 'treat' and rationalise away the consequences. Which is partly why we're in this boat. I think I'm adjusting to the realisation that we need to live much more like you guys did in the early days of your married life. I'm ok with that. Our debt is by no means crippling but it's there, and I don't want it to be, so I'm embracing doing what it takes to bring it down, bit by bit. I think the truth is it partly it gets my goat because of the bigger things it represents - ideas we believed in, decisions we felt were 'right' at the time, which now seem to have been misguided - I could say that all we have to show for 10 years of certain kinds of sacrifice is a pile of debt, and that's just disheartening on so many levels, tho I accept WE spent that money so the only person I can blame is US. this is turning into a whole extra blog post so i'll stop waffling but THANKS for commenting despite your hesitation.
daisy - i am sooo with you on the why-don't-they-teach-this-stuff-at-school thing. grrr. maybe you could pioneer an educational reform?
jando - i know you're right and i am embracing my inner budget-shopper. it's like dieting really. i look at a chocolate digestive and ask myself which i want more - the biscuit with the free extra thigh-dimple, or thinner thighs. same goes for spending now - do i want this book / pair of shoes / sirloin steak and the extra burden it will add to my efforts to get debt-free, or do i want to read the unread ones on my shelves / wear the ones that do just fine / eat beans on toast and see those numbers going down, down, down. easy!
I totally relate to the need to get your spending under control so that you can model good money management to your kids. I do think that is important.