Forgive us our Debts
The current economic conditions are such that most people I know, me included are trying to put judicious financial practices into place. Anyone looking at me from afar probably wouldn’t notice the two inches of root growth streaked with grey but it costs well over $100 to have my hair cut and colored and in the context of my company having RIFs yesterday, it doesn’t seem like an appropriate spend.
Not everyone gets regular pedicures but this is something that I’ve consistently done for years but again, I shouldn’t be spending money on something so self indulgent . My feet seem gnarled and unkempt, at least by my standards and the pedicure I’ll eventually get in Kansas City is still more than a month away.
Then there are things that I continue to spend money on. Like Starbucks, at least once a week. And a certain piece of jewelry that I’m hiding, thrilled to own, ashamed for having purchased, my judgment notoriously poor between the 3rd and 4th glass of anything.
The point I’m getting to is that everyone cuts corners a bit differently as priorities shift and realign. Suze Orman might applaud my decision to forgo by bi-weekly pedicures but when enough people do this, the Korean-run salon in Falls Church, the American small business we hear so much about, can’t afford to stay open.
Ditto for the hair salon.
And the biggest travesty of all, fewer Starbucks. I happen to like the 1-on-every-corner business model.
On the other hand, a friend of mine and I met at Tiffany’s over the weekend so that she could shop for a gift for herself from her parents. Tiffany’s was packed with people gathered around every display case, the registers chirping away.
Either things aren’t that bad or they are that bad and we’re in national denial.
False Auntie will be moving her mother, whom I call Grandmummy into assisted living in December at a rate of more than $3000 per month of which insurance covers $1300. The delta must be paid for by False Auntie and her brothers and sister all of whom have financial commitments to their children and in some instances, grandchildren. They will walk a tightrope in the coming months that balances Grandmummy’s $700 monthly medication against LizBeth’s school expenses against their own monthly right to live.
My mom has always been on the precipice of financial ruin having been raised in a household whose depression-era mentality was so extreme that once my mom had a dollar to her name, the urge to spend it would prove overwhelming. She now lives in a darling condo that she bought at the top of the market and juggles bills in order to make ends meet. I vacillate between supporting an ideology that you can’t in fact , take it with you and the wish that her existence wasn’t hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck.
In an audacity filled conversation with my dad last week when he asked me if my mom was getting ready to retire, I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle him (sorry T$BD). No dad, my single mother who didn’t get a dollar of child support from you in the 18 years it took to raise to me relative independence, no she won’t be retiring. We are together focused on keeping a roof over her head, food in that of her and her dogs’ belly so no, there will be no wintering in Palm Springs this year, only the promise of a cruise in 2110 that with any luck we can take when the one we took this year is paid for. Note that I don’t begrudge he or my stepmom for their retirement of which they are deserving. They worked their 30+ years, made prudent financial savings and sound judgment that funds their lifestyle today. It just irks me than in Suze Orman-style, my father thinks that everyone, my mom in particular are just calendar days away from retirement.
We each live in our own financial reality. For some, that means returning a pair of $700 Christian Dior shoes for others it mean substituting pork where you might have served steak. Putting water in your paint to make it stretch farther, fixing things that just a few months ago you would have been inclined to replace.
And I am reminded this Thanksgiving that I have it so much better than most.
Embarrassingly so.
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