I am in full vent mode today, so if I sound crazy it’s because my plans have been tossed aside by that bitch named Murphy. Regular readers know I am struggling to reduce my debt and live a more frugal life. It’s been going fairly well despite falling off the no Starbucks wagon. It’s those damn Peppermint Mochas that come out only in winter, they are so good and work is so stressful and well after work I like to unwind with a hot beverage. Yeah, I can make a Chai at home but damn those Peppermint Mochas are great. Thankfully I have been keeping to the budget in every other way so I am trying not to feel too guilty.
Well December in addition to being Christmas which we celebrate and generally requires me to spend some cash, it’s also car inspection time for us. What that means is we take the car to the mechanic and he determines whether or not we get the state required sticker that legally allows us to drive our car. Now being the good planner I strive to be these days, I had planned for this event using last year’s repair costs as the gauge for how much cash to save for this blessed little event. Turns out I got it wrong….very very wrong.
To repair our 12-year-old car and keep her on the road legally is going to cost a minimum of almost $1300 and I say minimum because there is one repair that Mechanic Man says he can’t give us the price on until he starts doing the work. Um….to say I was stunned and pissed is an understatement. Now we bought ole Bessie from a friend several years ago after our other car died after a very long stint with us. When we bought this car, it was a good alternative to going into debt since we had gone that route before and frankly I have decided I hate car payments. Getting a car on a 5 year loan seems like a great idea but for us it sucked. Problem is the cash car has been a bit of a money pit and now I am trying to plan our next steps.
Part of me wants to just pay the cash and fix ole Bessie but not having an exact price makes me very skittish, there is also the fact this car is as comfortable as a Cracker Jack box and is really too small for our family. On the other hand, I only have about 2G’s to buy a car in cash and at the moment, I am not running across a great deal of selection since thanks to the lovely Cash for Clunkers program, a lot of really decent used cars got taken out of circulation. So whereas at the beginning of the year I saw some decent cars for a couple grand, now that is not the case. Which leaves option three, go to a dealer and get a car and a car payment. Now as a member of the less than stellar credit club that means I will get a shitty deal as far as financing and as a member of the get the fuck out of debt club that pains me.
Problem is I live in Maine, a place with not a great deal of options when it comes to getting around sans a car. It’s possible but not really. I mean this ain’t NYC, Boston or Chicago. Plus I have a job, so as you can see I have a problem. The only upside is I have until the end of the month to solve it so I have time to explore my options but really barring a fabulous used car made in this decade, that is available for 2G’s, my options are not great.
So trusty reader, I ask you, what would you do in this situation? Do you take a chance and keep ole Bessie and sink a ton of cash into a 12 yo old car or do you decide enough is enough. Is this a good case for incurring some debt for a ride? Decisions….
I have been doing this blog well over a year now, a year and some change. I have talked about a fair amount of topics. It’s been a while but if you are a regular reader, you know I like food…a lot. I like good food and when the spirit moves me, I like, no love to cook. Sadly the spirit has not been moving me since my ass is struggling to just get past this month. I swear December is the culmination of all that plagues those living on the financial edge and yours truly gets to hear it all. By the time I get home, I have no energy to even think of providing nourishment to my family…thank goodness for a freezer stuffed with soups! As well as a few trusty inexpensive places to eat at when I need to eat out!
Anyhoo, in all the talk of good food, organic food, healthy food, it might be easy to assume that I fall into the food snob category. Well, it’s an easy mistake to make since it seems anyone who fits a certain criteria clearly would never eat junk food or feed it to their kid. Um….not at all.
In fact I was happy after a conversation with a local friend the other day where we were discussing the merits of chili dogs and it turned out we had both grown up eating chili dogs made with Hormel canned chili with no beans. Even now as adults, a proper chili dog at home needs to have Hormel’s canned chili at least for me. Yeah, I know how to make chili from scratch and in the cold weather months, I do it often. But when I feel the urge for a chili gog, I reach for the canned chili.
Now I know for some of my readers as well as some in my personal circle that probably sounds like a gross admission. I mean let’s face it canned foods really have a pretty bad reputation. Maybe it’s because of my work but I have to admit the growing trend towards food snobbery at times gets on my nerves. Yeah, its nice to have a lovely home cooked meal made from scratch with wholesome foods but in a time when so many are struggling to just put food in their bellies, I can’t get worked up on what people eat. Let’s face it sometimes it’s just not financially feasible for some to eat healthy. It’s funny because we live in a time when it’s frankly more costly to eat healthy than it is to simply eat. As I have developed my own cooking skills, while I find cooking to be relaxing at times, fact is it often requires more, not just in cash, but in time and tools, things that some lack.
Recently I was in a discussion where someone asked why would anyone use creamed soups when they can make them? Good question. My guess is because it’s a time-consuming endeavor, I like creamed soups and make them often, but if I was making a meal that required a creamed soup, I’d probably use a canned soup instead of making it from scratch. Unless I had one already in my freezer, leftover from a previous meal.
I am a big believer in moderation. Now a steady diet of canned unwholesome foods is bad for you, yet at times it seems that those of us who admit to liking less than healthy foods tend to be seen an unenlightened bunch. The fact is anything can be bad for you, I have met too many vegetarians who frankly were not healthy eaters.
The thing is when you look down or make judgements on folks based off what they eat, what purpose does it serve? Food is a deeply personal thing, many of our attitudes and thoughts on food are shaped by our childhood and while many of us may change the way we eat as adults (hello…I am a Black woman with southern roots, fried chicken, fried fish, collard greens cooked in pork products anyone?), sometimes even the healthiest, most organic eating folks still have appetites for things based off our youth.
While I have no problem with anyone eating a certain way, it’s when we use food as a means to judge and look down at others which is not cool.
Today’s post is personal and written from my lens as a Black woman in America, so if it seems there are generalizations in what I am about to say, it’s because this is my personal truth. Can I just say that I am going through some shit that has me wondering how come I wasn’t born white? Look, I am not a self loathing Negro who hates my race, nah…went that route 20 years ago, been there, done that, got the t-shirt as Dave Ramsey would say.
Instead I wonder how come in this so-called post racial era of Obama it seems life has gotten a lot harder for all us Black folks who are not connected in someway to the great Black hope that currently resides in the White House. (Damn, if only I had been able to afford the better hairdresser back in Chicago, maybe I could have met Michelle O and got a job….I used to go to the same hair salon as the First Lady, but she saw the pricier stylist and I saw the cheapest one in the already overpriced salon but I digress).
Folks like to say but we have Obama, racism is dead. Really? Well according to this lovely article which reflects a lot of what I am dealing with right now. It seems you can be a Black person who follows the societal approved path for success, college, etc and still end up underemployed or unemployed. Yes, I know many whites are facing the same fate but the unemployment rates for Blacks are well above that of whites so we really cannot compare the two races in this matter. See, in America most Black folks would agree that our path to success and creating wealth since most of us do not have generational wealth already built up, depends on us going to college and getting a good job. Problem is getting a good job is a lot harder than one would imagine.
See, in America, you can be a Black person with multiple degrees from good schools and sadly you still might not earn as much as a white guy who didn’t finish college. Shit, you might even realize Mister No Degrees is your boss? How about that? Now on a practical note, it helps to have the ability to earn a living sans a job, in other words by marketing your own skills directly to folks in need. I have done this in the past, working with small non-profits giving advice and assisting with grants. It was a life saver a while ago, and I highly encourage everyone to work on their hustle skills…never know when you will need them.
Yet if you are a Black person who still believes in the American dream and that you too can have a slice of the pie. Well the answer is screw a college education, read books, go to museums on your own. No, what you really need is a white suit, or maybe some of Sammy Sosa’s skin rejuvenation treatments. I was trying to figure out how much whiteness could I have bought with the amount spent on my degrees? Let’s see at last check with interest it seems my undergrad and graduate degrees cost $112,000. I think for that kind of loot, there is someone out there would have at least turned me into a Jennifer Lopez colored babe.
Look, I know I am taking a joking approach to a rather unpleasant situation but sometimes I think we have to find the humor in these moments or else we will snap.
Look, I know it sounds crazy, but imagine if someone created a realistic white suit? Too dark to get a foot in the door, no problem. Slip into your handy dandy white suit. b
As further proof that I need to rename this blog old black chick in Maine, I have only recently learned about the Kindle reading device. I had heard about it a while back and knew that it was a reading device but after hearing a few folks recently debate the merits of the Kindle versus the Nook, I figured I would find out what the hype was all about.
Let me state for the record that I am a voracious reader, I love books, I love to read. Never am I reading less than 2-3 books at a time. We as a family are on a first name basis with the library, going at least 2-3 times a week. I admit there was a time when I used to pass by the library instead to spend money at bookstores. Yet in 2007 when our financial tide shifted I was reintroduced to the joys of the library and have been a fan ever since. I will buy a book, but generally only if it’s a very specific book that I will either use as a reference guide or something I really want to own.
Yet as someone who always travels with a book in my bag, I thought maybe it would be great to have less weight in my bag, which is why I was checking out the Kindle. So if I have done my reasearch right, it appears that the starting price is $259 for the basic device, and then I have to start buying something to read on my device. Now I admit the magazine subscription prices seemed reasonable, I love magazine but I canceled almost all my subscriptions instead choosing to borrow them from the library. The few publications I still buy are quarterly so the cost isn’t too bad especially if I find a friend willing to loan me their copy.
What got me though was the cost of New York Times bestsellers, they were going for $9.99, I saw a few for $14.99 but I was told you can find inexpensive stuff to buy as well. Oh really? Once I started adding up how much my reading habit would cost to go Kindle, let’s just say I had a laugh and decided I will be sticking with the local library and the occasional visit to the local booksellers.
I think for folks making a comfy financial existence, who travel a bit and love to read, the Kindle might be a good idea. However for most of us regular Jane and Joe’s, I am not sure its a great idea. From a purely financial standpoint, it’s definitely not a great idea, after all in most places access to the library is free or there is only a very minimal cost to check out items.
No, the Kindle like so many other gadgets that we think we must have, seems to be another scheme to part us from our money.
One in eight Americans are currently using food stamps to eat. Let me repeat that figure, one in eight Americans are using food stamp benefits, with one in four kids receiving these benefits. This was the story that caught my attention this morning as I read the NY Times. To be honest I am not even surprised at that figure, I could have told you that months ago based off my line of work. I talk with the folks at our local food pantry on a regular basis and they have told me that weekly they are swamped with new faces. Faces of folks who use to bring in food or cash who are now on the receiving line.
Those of us in the direct aid business have noticed the new faces of those seeking help, in many cases the folks we now see look a lot like us. Poverty is a funny thing, we can wax poetically about helping “those” people…yet it’s funny when we start to realize that those people are a lot like us. It can become rather uncomfortable.
Think about it, if one in 8 Americans is dealing with food insecurity to the point of seeking assistance, that means there is a good chance that right now as you read this, there is someone in your inner circle struggling to survive. Oh they may still live in their middle class house and still have the Subaru/Volvo (insert car of choice) and have all the trappings of middle class success. But they may be cutting back on eating so the kids can eat, they are the ones I notice in the store who no longer have full carts and often look pained at the checkout line.
I talk a lot about money and my own mistakes with money so much that I think that there are those in my personal circle who think I am really bad off. Nah, I am in debt but I haven’t faced food insecurity since I was a kid. I may owe Visa, MasterCard and Discover card but thankfully we have not fought over a can of beans. I don’t even say this to be funny it’s just that the way I was raised and the work I do allow me to realize that while being in debt sucks, there is a wide road between being in debt and working to get out of it versus not being able to literally put the food on the table. It’s a distinction I remind the Spousal Unit of often when he gets down about our situation. Yes, I need to be out of debt but it’s a lot worse to be in debt and hungry.
I decided to write this today because the story stayed in my mind as our family went out to breakfast today, I generally prefer to save money by eating in but hey I am human and was simply tired. I thought about how fortunate I felt that I could make that choice. I started to think what could I do other than my professional work to help someone? If I knew someone personally I could help, I would and I will. I ask you dear reader that as we start this season of consumption, perhaps you can look around and see who in your circle needs help. Maybe you can buy one less gift and instead do something for someone else.
In this country of supposed wealth the fact that so many of our fellow citizens are struggling with basic needs such as food is wrong. We need to do something, what are your thoughts? Clearly what we need are jobs so that folks can get back to work yet that clearly is not happening at a rate fast enough to help folks, so instead we need to help our fellow-man/woman/child.
People tease me about my constant discussion of getting old, my oldest and dearest friend in the universe is fond of telling me, we are not old. Yet like many folks, getting old doesn’t bother me and on some level I totally embrace it. See, for many of us getting old means not making the same foolish mistakes we made when we were young and dumb. I see it as obtaining a certain level of wisdom by the virtue of the fact that we have been there, done that and got the t-shirt.
Which brings me to today’s post Thanksgiving rant. First up what the fuck is wrong with people? So a couple of wanna be reality stars thought it would be a groovy idea to crash President Obama’s first state dinner. Um….what is it about reality tv that makes folks lose their ever-loving minds? Now looking at the couple in question, they seem old enough to know right from wrong so clearly they missed the get wisdom as you get older bit. First we had balloon boy’s crazy parents and now this! Really, we need to pass some common sense drinks or joints out to folks, cuz some ideas are really bad and never need to leave the privacy of your thoughts.
Which brings me to the next point, what the fuck is up with the Secret Service ? Yeah, I heard…the O- man and his peeps were never in any danger. Um, considering that Obama gets ways more threats than any other president including his predecessor, might we want to take the security of the first Black President very seriously. The fact that this couple of wanna be reality stars were able to roll up to the party and even take pictures with ole crazy Joe Biden is scary.
Hello!!!! The enemies might be thinking right now, hey let’s look for some idiots we can promise a reality show with if they can do XYZ. I know that sounds crazy but look, Al Qaeda doesn’t need to go far to recruit they can just look for the next dumb ass America who wants fame and fortune. Shit, look what Richard Heene and his wife did, I am sure if they had realized how quickly they were going to be found out, poor Falcon might have really been in that balloon. By the way, if you do crash a party at the White House and are successful, maybe putting the pictures up on Facebook is a bad idea. since if I understand correctly this couple was found out after they posted pics on Facebook.
Nah…people are stupid and they confuse me.
Next up, the lure of Black Friday shopping. When I was a kid, I don’t recall anyone getting up at midnight or 2 am to go shopping after Thanksgiving. Call me crazy but it’s 9 am and my ass it still stuffed and the idea of going some place after eating a feast is something I have a hard time grasping. An old childhood friend mentioned she was going to be up at 4:30 am to shop today. I wished her good luck. Only way I could imagine getting up that early is if I were getting paid to shop, even then I might say no.
So if one of my readers can share with me what makes shopping today so great, I would love to know why so that I can expand my brain and attempt to be a tad less judgemental. As for me, I am doing some cooking and going to view some pretty trees this evening.
As you can see, I survived yet another holiday with minimal tears and down moments. Have a great weekend!
There a few things that I can always depend on as long as I live…I am going to be Black until I die (unless I get some of Sammy Sosa’s skin rejuvenation treatments), that I will owe the IRS money and that come holiday season I can expect to get hit with a dose of the blahs.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with the holiday season. Growing up with eccentric hippy like parents who thought poverty was noble, they pretty much did everything to ensure that my only sibling and I would become huge consumers by being very anti-consumption themselves. I have joked over the time I have blogged that one thing you could count on with my folks is that if you asked for a specific item, you could expect not to get it.
Both the former Spousal Unit and the current Spousal Unit have gone out of their ways to make holidays a brighter event for me. Despite the issues I had with the ex, I will say he and his family really helped me to not see holidays as weeks of torture but as a joyous occasion. The current Spousal Unit took it even further, truly getting me to learn to like the holidays.
Well in 2003 that all came to a crashing halt when Momma Bear, my beloved Mama was battling cancer and while she was still assumed to be recovering from chemo and radiation, Thanksgiving of 2003 it appeared we had so much to be thankful for as we all and that included her physicians thought she was good to go. Ha, ha, ha, fate intervened and on Christmas Day we got the shock of our lives…that bastard cancer had spread to her brain and it was downhill.
All this to say, holidays leave me now with a permanent sense of dread, if I could fast forward to New Years Day I would but with kids and my work I have everyone and their Mama reminding me of the holidays. Go to the office and I have folks driving me mad with holiday issues, go home and the kidlet is geeked up about Christmas…it’s enough to make a gal want to curl into fetal ball and pull the covers over her head.
However despite the blahs that seem to be making me a rather unpleasant person to be around, I am thankful for dear local friends who invite us over for Thanksgiving. Last year they invited us and it was truly the best turkey day I have had in years, we have also been invited over again this year and are looking forward to another great holiday with them.
I had been holding out hope for a family reunion this Thanksgiving but neither of the last two members of my family of origin were able to fly up here which I suspect is another reason for the current blahs.
Anyhoo, I suspect I will be light in posting this week as I attempt to be among the living since despite my desires to hide under the bed , it seems no one will give me enough privacy to make that happen. Instead I wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving and advise you to be careful if Black Friday shopping is your thing. I would hate to end up writing about you…let’s just hope no one gets stomped to death this week.
Well it’s that time of year, at the end of the week prime shopping season officially kicks off with the masses tearing the doors off stores on Black Friday. Let’s just hope that no one gets stomped to death this year as the masses go off in search of the biggest and cheapest tv their money can buy!
Now, for those of us struggling to stay the course and not give into the God of consumption, I wonder what you have planned? See, I set a holiday budget and was excited about it until it dawned on me that the amount I had budgeted really was too much money. See, with elder boy living out in the Midwest and his flying in for both Thanksgiving and Christmas that already sets me back a bit before we even think about things like the gifts and the food.
I have to confess, I have issues around holidays and have a tendency to over-shop in part because I often felt deprived as a kid. Yet as I try to reevaluate my relationship to money, its starting to dawn on me that my kids have never been deprived in the ways that I was as a kid and instead my behavior has just done a great job of creating consumption behavior in both my kids. I am not mad at them though, they have merely been the recipients of my past issues but as I told the Spousal Unit, no more.
So now I am looking at ways to retool the holidays so that there is less emphasis on the gift aspect and more emphasis on the spirit of the holidays. So dear reader, I want to hear from you…what do you during the holidays? Do you buy the kidlets a boatload of gifts or do you only give 1-2 highly wanted items? Or do you bypass gift giving all together?
My goal this year is to stay below the budget I set and ideally use that extra cash to fund our mid winter trips we have planned. So hit me with your holiday shopping ideas for not breaking the bank and I especially want to hear from you if you have teens or young adults. One area I really struggle with is now that elder boy is almost an adult, it seems like gifts are so much more costly. My son is a bit of a clothes horse and the stores he likes are not terribly cheap, of course he now has his own car so that too is costly. With this also being the beginning of college application season, I am trying to balance the real need for me to assist his father in paying for these costs with my desire to not just give practical gifts. (college application money, gas money, etc)
So as you can see any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.
Snark alert….I am working on day two of minimal sleep. My old friend insomnia has decided to visit again, despite my use of melatonin and herbal tea in the evening. So I am letting you know ahead of time I am in a bitchy mood, and lately these are some of the thoughts floating around in my head.
I have spent most of my of my professional life working with people living with financial scarcity, also known as living in poverty. Now most days I feel deeply for the folks I work with, even now I still remember clients I worked with over a decade ago. Most folks I meet are decent folks dealing with fucked up circumstances but I have to be honest and say about 15% of the folks I deal with are knuckleheads. No, I really mean that. People who just need to be hit by a cosmic two by four. This post is for them.
Why is my life so hard? Why am I poor? Why won’t people help me? Notice a pattern? It sounds like a fucking wine fest, all we need is the cheese to go with all that damn whine? Look, the best way to stop being poor is to make decisions that would help change your life for the better.
Number one thing you can do, stop making babies! Kids are a blessing but if your housing situation is precarious, you are not quite sure how you are even going to eat say next week…then this really maybe a bad time to have a baby. At the very least when you have a baby, you want to know you can handle the essentials. Which brings me to another point around kids, why have so many? Seriously, they get real fucking expensive as they get older. Um…its hard to dress a teenage boy with clothes at the thrift store. Kids really do cost money, yes babies can be cheap but teens are not.
Number two, choice of mate. I swear but white/black/latino, I have seen women make the worse choices when it comes to mates. May I delicately suggest that if he has no job or resources when you were dating, sexing or whatever you did before you became an official unit. What makes you think he will change when the babies come? I have seen women lament the fact that their loves did not provide but damn, you had a road map…. there were signs and you chose to ignore them.
Number three, not working. It is great if you can be a stay at home parent but generally that requires that someone else in the family is working to provide the cash to keep the family going. Now I have had way too many women tell me but I can only get a minimum wage paying job and after childcare I won’t make any money, what’s the point? The point is you get experience. I hate to break it to you but no one is going to hire you for a professional good paying gig with no experience. It ain’t happening. First job I had in my field, back before I went back to school, paid minimum wage, and I had to work the worst shift. Yet I really wanted to work at this agency so I did it, in less than a year I was promoted to a full-time salaried position, it was still a low-level position but it was light years away from the initial position. My point is you have to start somewhere and you generally have to prove yourself.
Number four, wasting money on dumb shit. Check this out but if you liveon a fixed income of government assistance, I don’t mean to be a bitch but you should not be spending what money you have on trinkets like iPhones and big ass televisions. I have had clients over the year, one almost 10 years ago so I don’t feel bad about sharing the story. He was living in the shelter that I was working at and he had a job and was trying to get back on his feet. Well for Christmas he wanted to buy his kid an American Girl Doll. Those things were an easy hundred bucks back then…and I am sorry but if your home is a shelter with 39 other people, maybe it is not the time to buy your kid a pricey doll.
Hell, this is a common issue with the folks I work with and as a person who grew up with little I really understand the mindset but if you want to not be poor, ya gotta change your mind. In my area we commonly deal with folks who spend the bill money on lil Timmy’s birthday and now they need help with the lights. Taking your bill or grocery money to spend on non-essential shit is just bad.
I am going to stop now since I know I am cranky but the point of this post is the fact that some folks stay poor and in bad financial shape is no mystery. You make bad choices and bad shit happen, it’s really that simple.
I’m a strange bird and I accept that. At this point in life, I am knocking on 40’s door sooner rather than later and its safe to say I am set in my ways. I have a confession to make, I really don’t like flying. I will fly if I have to and have in the past but generally speaking, it’s just not my cup of tea. Over the years, I worked through my fear of flying to the point that gone are the days when I need to stop at the bar before I hit the plane. No longer do I need to be tanked up to tolerate a flight, instead I get on and sit so somber I am sure the folks near me wonder whose side I am on. (sorry bad joke, but I admit I get in my seat, pop in my ear buds, close my eyes and make no conversation at all)
So as I start making preparations to visit family in a few months, I realized that I would prefer to take the train (Amtrak) rather than flying to get home to Chicago. Now it’s a 22 hour train ride and I planned on getting a room on the train, so that way I can have some peace and quiet. Bring the netbook, mp3 player (no IPod for Mama…just a lil MP3 player) some books and kick back and relax. Now I admit I tend to enjoy train travel, especially the more scenic routes out west. I also have enjoyed the fact that in past train adventures and I have taken many, that train travel forces you to surrender and live in the moment. As a train rider, it’s a lot more laid back than taking a plane, after all you never know exactly when you are going to arrive at your destination, once I leave my room, it forces a level of interaction that you don’t get on a plane. If you choose to eat in the dining car, you are sitting at a table with strangers which seems strange but I have met some of the most fascinating folks that way.
Anyhoo, I ended up discussing my dislike of flying with a few folks and everyone who I talked to with the exception of maybe 1-2 folks said, they could not stand to take the train even if they hated to fly because they wanted to get to their destination. Now there is nothing wrong with that but as Americans we spend so little time relaxing, in some ways I feel the folks I encountered are examples of how Americans by and large don’t relax. We spend a lot of money on activities and devices that are supposed to help us relax, but for many of us the idea of spending almost a day doing nothing while we travel to our fun place is unimaginable.
See, for me I see train travel as a transition tool. It allows me the time needed to get rid of one set of baggage and swap it out for another. As a wife, Mama and worker, its rare to get almost a complete day when I am not needed in any capacity, where I just surrender to the rhythms around me and allow them to guide me.
So I ask why are we all in such a rush?
