There's a Notrious B.I.G. song "Mo Money Mo Problems" that you've probably heard even if you can't place it right now. It's very much an Oh, that song song. It's an okay tune, though not something I'm adding to a playlist anytime soon, and the message has never resonated with me. I suppose at some point you can reach a level of wealth at which it really does cause more problems in your life than you would have otherwise, but I certainly haven't gotten to that point yet. In my experience, life is almost the exact opposite of "Mo Money Mo Problems." Being able to spend money on problems makes you have fewer problems not more.
I mean, to be clear, money alone doesn't make you happier or more fulfilled or more satisfied with your life. And it's also true that I have many more problems now than I did when I had much less money, but that's just correlation. The equation isn't high income equals more problems; it's getting older equals more problems. It's getting married. It's having kids. It's your body slowly withering away to nothing. It's having to take care of yourself and provide for others with increasingly bad eyesight, decreasing levels of energy, and an arthritic shoulder.* That's what causes problems, not money. On the contrary, having a much higher income now than I did as a carefree young man is one of the few good things about getting older. If I had all the problems I have now on my salary from 25 years ago, I would be much worse off than I am now.
*But it's worth it, because the thing that does make you happy, more fulfilled, and more satisfied with your life, in my experience, is developing meaningful loving connections with other people.
I've been thinking about this lately because a bunch of things have come up that we need to spend money on, and it's starting to get quite expensive. And this is coming on the heels of our unexpected budget-busting detour through Europe. It's really eating into our savings, which I hate because the instability of the job market right now makes me apprehensive, and our savings is what assuages my nerves in this regard.
Of course, the flip-side of this coin is that we have savings to tap into. A lot of families don't. I am aware of that, and I acknowledge it. I'm just not going to write much about it. The purpose of this blog, after all, is not to check my privilege--nobody actually wants to read that, and I don't want to write it. The purpose of this blog is for me to write about what I feel like writing about, and at the moment I want to grouse about all the money we're spending.
The first expensive thing we need to do is get our trees serviced. That's the biggest and steepest thing. A storm ripped through DC the other night--it's a semi-regular occurrence, unfortunately--and it took down a couple of massive limbs from trees in our backyard. One landed on our lawn, thankfully causing no damage, and the other landed on our neighbors' roof, bending their gutter a little bit.* The size of the branch that fell in our yard makes me very uneasy--had it landed somewhere other than an empty patch of ground, it could've caused serious damage to person or property--so I called the tree people right away to schedule an appointment to have them come out and clear away all the dead branches and debris in all the trees in our backyard. And we got the estimate yesterday: $3,000.
Ffffuuuck.
But we gotta pay it. If our roof caves in because lightning strikes a tree and splits it in two and half of it falls onto our house, that's on God. If the same thing happens because a stiff wind blows down a dead limb that's been dangling by a thread for years, that's on me.
*I've done extensive research on this--well, as extensive as somebody with no legal training can do using the internet--and from everything I've read our neighbors are responsible for any damage caused by branches that hang over into their yard, even if they come from a tree in our yard. They are also free to remove or trim these branches, if they wish. I've been in contact with them, and I think they know this (I mentioned it to them the other day in a hopefully tactful way), so presumably we are cool with them.
Also, our dryer broke. It's a cheap dryer that I never liked, so I'm not that broken up about it, but I do wish we could have milked another year out of it or so. The same thing happened at our old house, so we bought a nice new washer-dryer set, and then when we moved, we had to downgrade to the clunkers in our new house, because the company who flipped our house cut corners on a bunch of stuff, and we didn't realize it until after we moved in. Actually, I noticed the cheapy washer and dryer before we moved in, and I complained about it to our Realtor,* and he was like, "Just go get the ones from you old house and switch them." And I said, "You can do that?" And he replied, "Why not? We never agreed to anything with the washer and dryer one way or the other." But I didn't do it because I didn't have a vehicle to move them in and renting one, or hiring a mover, would have been moderately expensive, and it seemed more cost efficient to use the bad appliances until they break, and then just buy new ones then.
*I just learned, after typing "realtor" with a lower case 'r' and getting the squiggly red line, that Realtor in a proper noun for a real estate agent who is a member of the National Association of Realtors. Huh, how about that?
It was a sound plan, but now we've gotten to the part where we have to buy new ones. Well, new one, anyway. The washing machine is still working. So, we did buy a new dryer, and it is coming on Tuesday. That's another multi-$1000 hit, and a few days of old-fashioned air-drying, for the G & G household.
Then, on top of all this, we have to buy plane tickets to visit our families (S' for Thanksgiving; mine for Xmas), and I just spent a few hundred dollars to cover the deductible for a dental deep cleaning. That one I was able to pay for with money in my HSA, so it doesn't feel like a big expense, but it's basically the same as if it came from our primary checking account. It's psychologically cheaper to use the HSA, because it's money in a different pot, but it's not logically cheaper to use, because all the pots belong to me (and S) and are essentially just one big pot.
So, we have a lot of expenses at moment, but we do have one thing that has recently broken our way financially, and it's a very big thing: Lil' S1 decided to go back to public school. Unfortunately, he decided this after we had already paid the first installment at his old private school and the refund deadline had lapsed, so it doesn't help us too much this year.* In fact, it's an enormous waste of money this year. We basically gave a massive donation to a school our kid no longer attends and that I never liked that much even while he was there. We spent a large amount of money on nothing. That's absolutely one way to look at it.
*We didn't have to pay quite the full yearly amount, but we had to pay an embarrassing large percentage of it.
Another way to look at it--and this is the way I'm looking at it--is that we will save nearly four times over what we paid this year, expenditures we already had budgeted, by Lil' S1 not going to private school for the rest of his high school years. Keeping him in private school, just because we already paid for most of a year of it, would be penny wise and pound foolish. It would also be a classic application of the sunk-cost fallacy. The money is gone either way, so we should make the best decision for Lil' S1, regardless, and the best decision is for him to go to public school. It's what I wanted all along (I just got outvoted on the matter), so I'm not even that annoyed that he changed his mind so late in the game, and cost us a bunch of money. It's like when a sports team buys out an underperforming player. Sometimes you just gotta take the L, cut your losses, and get on with this nonsense we call life.
Alright, that's enough money talk for today and probably for quite a while after today.
Until next time...
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