Getting A Life

Various and sundry or, An Update

I apologize profusely that I have not been writing regularly. I’ve been feeling very blocked lately and it’s been something of an effort to even write in my personal blog and I’m not doing very well with that either. This represents me making a conscious effort to put something here today that is more substantive than bragging about my Google ranking or reporting how much I weigh. Hopefully the logjam will be removed soon.

Site design and content issues
I really, really need to work on these. The logo looks amateurish and the pages are outdated and the latter don’t really say what I want them to say at this point, either. I am not sure when I will be able to concentrate on working on this stuff so if the appearance of this blog annoys you, your patience will be greatly appreciated. I haven’t gotten any complaints yet, including links from other blogs saying stuff like “Wow, get a load of how much this blog sucks,” but maybe my readers are just polite.

Health issues
I still have no self-control about what I eat. OK, that’s not entirely true. I have some control, but not enough. Some days I keep my eating fairly low-carb, and others I don’t. It doesn’t help that I feel like I’m being sort of swept along with someone else’s day, like I live only to wait until they get off work and then according to their dictates. Even my grocery shopping hinges entirely on them and I’m kind of sick of it. But this is one of those aggravations I just have to live with for now, and I don’t think it entirely explains why I can’t seem to stay on plan, even a half-assed plan.

Housing issues
Still sort of apartment-hunting, although I feel as blocked about that as I do about blogging. I’m afraid I won’t be able to get a place, which makes it really dumb that I’m not trying hard enough, which guarantees I won’t get a place. However, rumors that landlords are tightening their standards around here are not helping my mood any. Yet one more reason to roll my eyes every time I hear someone complaining because they bought too much house and now they have to rent because the bank foreclosed. You’re taking my potential home, dude–I can’t buy a house at all. Cry me a river.

Money issues
I have at least caught up my cell phone bill and still have $300 in the account of the $400 I got last Wednesday, and most of the $100 decrease was due to catching up the cell phone*. I need to plow through and catch up as much else as I possibly can today, and somehow manage it without spending all my laundry money. Sigh.

I just checked out a whole bunch of library books about starting and running a home-based business. I remarked to my little girl’s dad that I don’t know why anyone buys chintzy e-books off the Internet that tell them maybe one-millionth of what they need to know for a tenth of their rent money when they can just go to the library for free. He reminded me that our library system probably ranks in the top ten of United States public libraries and maybe even in the top five. Still, there’s interlibrary loan. And of course, just because we check out books doesn’t mean we’ll learn from them. It’ll be interesting to see if I find the time to glean anything useful from these books before I have to return them.

Meanwhile I also job-hunt but… yeah. Still hung up about putting my daughter in preschool. I think at this point that if I do it, it’ll be Waldorf because at least they won’t treat her like a miniature computer on legs. And the only reason I’d do it is at least she could be around kids and get a lot of playtime in, and not be hung up on the TV all day. It wouldn’t be because I thought it was her only option for getting an education, like so many parents seem to think. But it’s my absolute last option, and I’ll hold out as long as I can. I’m also hung up about not being employable. It doesn’t really matter at this point whose fault it is; I’d be just as unemployable after four years’ unemployment due to disability as I am after four years opting to stay out after years of job-hopping and impulsive behavior. (I.e., quitting at the drop of a hat because I didn’t like working somewhere.) What matters is whether I’d be able to pick up the slack if something happened to my little girl’s dad. Yes, she’d be entitled to Social Security**, but it wouldn’t kick in immediately and we could be evicted in the meantime.

There’s also the point that I still need to pay off my debt and start working feverishly to ensure that I’m not destitute in retirement. Hello? McFly? *knocks own head*

Relationship issues
Something… interesting is happening. I do not wish to label it for fear that all is not as it seems, but there’s also the point that the last time I was this mistrustful about this particular person, I lost him for thirteen and a half years. So I’m trying to be patient and hang loose and just wait to see what happens. I’m better at this than I was even five years ago, so I suppose there is something to be said for extreme relationship adversity when it forges you and makes you stronger. But I’m still not totally OK with the way things are going. We’ll just have to see how they play out.

I do know that he called a week or two ago and my little girl’s dad was here and didn’t even tell me the phone rang (it was one call out of many, so ultimately it didn’t hurt anything, but still), and my little girl’s dad has said a few other things that make me wonder what his take is on this whole situation. So I may get to deal with ugliness soon. On top of that I had a mean jealous streak about five miles wide in the immediate aftermath of his and my breakup, exacerbated by post-partum depression and worry that he was going to abandon our daughter like he abandoned me. It meant that every time I saw a woman being friendly to him online, I got snarly at him about it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to hear about this any day now, even though the situation is different. (And it really is. That’s the sad part.)

It makes me think there is some wisdom after all to setting up a certain distance between unmarried parents so that each can have their own life. Although if things had gone sanely and smoothly during the pregnancy and after, even if they had still resulted in him and me not being together, I think I would feel a lot better about the traditional visitation routine. But my daughter was too young for that kind of thing anyway. Babies and toddlers need to be with their mothers, assuming no abuse or neglect is going on. They’re not ready to visit with an absent dad for more than a few hours here and there until they’re at least three years old. Still, she’s three now.

And yet I hate it when she’s not here. I feel completely wrong and lost and don’t know what to do with myself. I mean, I do find things to do, like clean house, but the place is empty and I feel empty too. And I’m hardly going to send her off just so I can date or whatever. So it’ll be interesting figuring this out.

OK, I guess I had more to say than I thought. Let’s hope it is not another week before I post again.

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*My cell phone is my primary phone and I have no landline. In fact I had my original landline number ported to my cell phone and completely switched over back in 2006. It would be a better deal to have a bare-bones landline and DSL rather than a cell phone and cable Internet–assuming I didn’t use much long distance. These days, unfortunately, I have to use long distance if I want to talk to anyone besides my little girl’s dad, because most of my loved ones and some of my best friends are not online regularly or don’t write well. So as long as most of my conversations take place on nights and weekends, I think I’m still saving money.

**Oh, but Social Security is just a failed retirement program and we should replace it with the stock market. Whatevs. *eyeroll*

Working with Quicken again

So I’ve played around with Quicken again and am happy to note that I can use their credit card category for any debt, not just a credit card. It’s very flexible that way, and each “credit card account” has a negative balance just like the Liability section in GnuCash. Good, because I’m tired of not being able to split transactions properly–it just messed me up trying to check my work.

I’m not even going to bother bringing my spending up to date in GC. I know I spent more last month than I brought in. That’s very easy to do: all you need is to spend whatever you had in savings brought over from the previous month. And I didn’t have much; there isn’t much difference between my income (just over $900) and my outlay (somewhere around $980), the difference just happens to be a negative number.

But I updated my miniature Wall Chart, which is actually a Binder Chart, with what I do have, because it is close enough. However, this month I intend to be a lot more accurate about it. No more fudging.

OK, let’s fill out NetWorthIQ and then to bed.

The problem with culture war discussions about taxing the rich

I would hazard a guess it’s not difficult to figure out the politics of AllFinancialMatters when the author posts an article about how Bush’s tax cuts for the rich supposedly favor the poor. It’s not the first time the Bushies have played the “I know you are, but what am I” game, and it probably won’t be the last; he’ll be bleating Newspeak on his way out the back door next January 20th.

Be that as it may, I have several issues with the blog article and the underlying premises.

First of all, let’s be very clear about what we’re discussing here, because AFM wasn’t. AFM wants us to believe that a tax credit is the same as a tax rate, and it isn’t. When politicians speak of tax cuts, they aren’t talking about tax credits, they’re talking about tax rates. So, claiming that the poor get more tax cuts just because they have tax credits is misleading and probably also dishonest, because as a personal finance blogger, AFM surely knows the difference between the two.

Secondly, I find it astounding that so many PF bloggers are such experts on the supposed “fact” that taxing the rich hurts the economy and how cruel it is to punish people for succeeding–more points taken verbatim from the neoconservative Republican playbook!–when they are conflating another couple of important concepts, thereby fleecing the public. I’ll explain:

• Any PF blogger worth his salt knows you get wealthy by spending less than you earn.
• Any PF blogger worth his salt knows that your income does not determine your wealth. You could be earning $500,000 a year and be poor as a church mouse once you factor in your debt load. See point 1.
• Any PF blogger worth his salt also knows that your average wealthy person is likely to be so not because he is earning a high income but because he has leveraged his assets to earn money for him without earning wages. The concept is a familiar one, referred to as “passive income” by most PF bloggers and spoken of in tones of utmost longing–this is the Holy Grail of personal finance philosophy for many of these writers, to be able to make money in their sleep!

With these factors in mind it is just inexcusable that so many personal finance bloggers let themselves be dragged (deliberately?) into the culture wars argument that rich people are rich because they make really high wages, therefore high tax rates for higher wage brackets punish the rich for being successful. Anyone who’s read The Millionaire Next Door knows better than to make this argument. Anyone who understands the concept of net worth and who has applied it fruitfully in his own life doesn’t need to read The Millionaire Next Door to begin with.

But the point is that someone who is truly, honestly wealthy is that way because they have a high net worth, regardless of income. And if you have a high net worth and a modest or low income, you’re a rich person who is not paying high income taxes! This doesn’t even delve into all the nifty little tax shelters, exceptions, loopholes and escape clauses the rich have invented for themselves and inserted into the U.S. tax code. Ask an accountant sometime if you’re curious.

And there’s another factor in play here which makes the discussion particularly irksome. How many times have you seen PF bloggers and other people who discuss personal finance going on and on about how they can’t make ends meet because their taxes are too high? First thing you know, they’re blaming the government because they’re falling behind on their mortgage.

The amusing part is that sometimes in the same breath they will turn around and call welfare recipients lazy or shiftless or whatever because poor people may seem to expect the government to do something about the fact they’re poor. But of course it’s perfectly OK to expect the government to help higher-income people pay a mortgage they took on voluntarily in the first place–which it would be doing if it cut the highest marginal tax rates just because a bunch of higher-income people whined to their Congressmen about high mortgage payments.

And this brouhaha obscures an important consideration: That if these people were half so knowledgeable about money as they’d like everyone else to think they are, it shouldn’t make a difference how much the government is taxing them. The marginal tax rates are published on the IRS website for the whole world to see, you can also find the formula for calculating Social Security tax online, and with a little more digging you can find out how much of your income pie your home state will take from you. Mortgage calculators abound. Regular calculators exist to be used to help you figure out a household budget. Tell me again why it’s the government’s fault you can’t make ends meet.

If you really aren’t making a high income and would therefore be hurt by income taxes then that’s why the government introduced tax credits for low-wage earners. So you shouldn’t be complaining about the high marginal rates anyway, because they don’t apply to you.

So, the two faulty premises: One, that the government is “punishing the rich”–just because someone makes high wages doesn’t make them rich. Two, that the government’s taxation prevents people being able to afford necessities–if you couldn’t afford necessities, it’s likely you owe little to no tax to the government to begin with.

I don’t see this so much as the government punishing the rich. I see this as people who are wasteful with their money, blaming everyone else but themselves for their problems. If it’s not all right for someone on minimum wage to do this in the comments on personal finance blogs, I don’t see how it’s right for higher-wage earners to do this in PF blog posts.

But that’s just me, and your mileage may vary.

Money-tracking

I’m having trouble with GnuCash and money-tracking. To wit, I can’t figure out the transaction split function. I’ve read the Help file and I’ve followed the instructions the best I could but they are not very clear and the results make no sense to me. I won a copy of the most basic version of Quicken from a blog several weeks ago and it way outshines GnuCash in this regard; I had almost no trouble with it and managed to make it do what I wanted to do.

Now I can’t figure out what I did with tracking my checking account in GC. I’m off by thirty bucks and I have no idea how. This is only true in GC, as my paper checkbook register jives with the balance on Kemba’s website. I have no idea what’s going on and every time I remember to look into it, I’m too tired for my brain to track numbers very well. Also, I’ve tried printing off the register from GC and got this weird bug where the printout is backwards and possibly upside-down. I don’t remember; I took one look at it, got disgusted and threw it away. (I don’t keep account numbers in GC so there wasn’t any risk.)

The one area in which I think GC is more useful to me than Quicken is that it maintains liability accounts for me which makes it easier to track debt reduction. But I can just as easily keep those written down somewhere and consult my written records when it’s time to update NetWorthIQ.

So I’m thinking I should probably take a few minutes tomorrow, count up my cash and make sure that number’s current, uninstall GC and re-install Quicken and just be done with it. That’s assuming I find a few minutes, as I’ll be tired and Thea has her speech therapy, but we’ll see, won’t we?

Good thing I wasn’t counting on the money…

A while back I noticed I had no copy of a tax return for the tax year 2004. Since I would have had to file in early 2005 and since that was a fairly drama-riddled time for me, I guessed I had forgotten to file because of all the stress. Accordingly, I sent in a paper return. I wasn’t sure I would get any money back because of issues with my defaulted student loan, but I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I got a notice back from the IRS today. As it turns out I had already filed for 2004. Oops! They were actually pretty gracious about it, if a bit absent-minded; they included tax return material for tax year 2007, in which I had not actually earned anything taxable. It’s probably something they throw in with all their written correspondence to taxpayers.

Ah well. There is no point getting hysterical about it, I suppose. The money would have been nice but I was already living without it, know what I mean? Still… It would have been nice to have had some way to catch up.

So this has been my evening…

First there was this…

I miss sushi rolls like crazy, even though I have found I can eat some rice through the day and not knock myself out of ketosis–why risk it? So sashimi is an acceptable substitute, and how! I got this while I was picking up shirataki noodles at the Japanese grocery, which is what my little girl and her dad and I all went there to get in the first place. When I read about these noodles Friday night on Sugar-Free Sheila’s website, I knew I had to try them. We haven’t opened them yet, as we’re all kind of moping around because my little girl has caught a cold or something, but we probably will later on today. Too bad; they probably would have gone well with the squishy fish. Oh, and my daughter loves sashimi now, which is hilarious, because she wouldn’t touch the fish in the center of my sushi rolls in the past.

Anyway, then I went on to this:

Disregard the toys in the background. I only just rearranged this section of my living room yesterday and already it is disappearing under a three-year-old’s clutter.

However, the computer screen in the background is of interest. That’s GnuCash running on my computer; you can see the lines in the “ledger” onscreen.

I just got done doing a massive catch-up of my financial tracking for the month of May; I’d seriously fallen behind on everything, and in particular my cash. Probably explains how I shot through most of $400 without actually paying any of my regular household bills. I am feeling really stupid right now. And this just points up the necessity of tracking your spending DAILY before you overshoot and wind up broke with people threatening to shut things off. Not that that is happening yet, but I need to get my butt moving on catching up.

At least the single biggest category was groceries and not, say, pig snout futures. I also have to give myself kudos about my cash balance because I knew I’d be off and it turned out I was only fifty-two cents short. However, I have no idea what the heck I did in inputting my checking account stuff into GnuCash because it’s seriously misbalanced, and I know I have the correct balance in my register (rather than drive myself nuts, I finally just adjusted up for that eight cents so it matches the balance on my credit union’s website now). But my brains are just about run out of my ears, so I’ll figure that one out later. It doesn’t help that GnuCash’s one major flaw seems to be the difficulty involved in entering split transactions. Grumble.

Oh, and one more thing: I got mentioned at Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb! AAAAGH! I feel like some famous person just came over to my apartment and it’s… well… it looks like it does now. Um… hi? *waves*

Some progress, some setbacks, some tentative plans

Well, I survived my first day back low-carbing. I even got a handheld mixer so that I could make oopsie rolls (see The Lighter Side of Low-Carb in my blogroll for details), so that I don’t have the excuse that I miss bread. Hahaha. I always seem to have eggs and cream cheese around and we discovered a sale on cream of tartar at Kroger a while back (a big deal, as it’s usually pretty pricey), so I’m set. I am not in ketosis yet and I have no idea when it will happen; if I hit the three-day mark and the ketostix aren’t changing color, I’ll move more in the direction of a “fat fast” to see if I can kick things into gear. I have macadamia nuts, cream cheese, eggs, and mayo, and I can get avocados cheap. Bring it.

I will also be on the lookout for frozen cauliflower, and possibly stocking up on zucchini at the end of the summer because it can be frozen and both make good pizza crusts and all manner of other things. Veggie pizza crusts? Yes, and far healthier than the wheat variety.

My spending, though… is entirely too far out of control. It’s been so bad I am afraid to tabulate everything up into GnuCash. I already know I started out with $400 on Wednesday and now am down to below $200, actually closer to $100. Not a one of my regular bills has been paid yet. I didn’t even put any of it into my checking account yet. WTH? I know I am living close to the bone, I know I have a moving day coming up soon, and here we are. Some of it was buying fast food. Some of it was the sushi I got Saturday, knowing I would be low-carbing yesterday. And some of it was supplies to deal with the stupid cat’s peeing on my carpet. And it doesn’t help that my little girl’s dad has not taken us grocerying, nor that now he has to replace his passenger-side front car window because one of the downstairs neighbor’s idiot friends broke it. (That’s our guess based on events Saturday night, but I’d also guess we have a 99.9 percent chance of being correct.) But the whole situation is just making me nuts. I can do better than this, so what happened?

However, I got a piece of mail from Chase Friday or Saturday inviting me to start a checking account with them for a $100 bonus. And I may just take them up on it. I am also supposedly going to get a $200-plus refund from the IRS from 2004. (Now all of a sudden I’m incredibly paranoid that I actually did file that year but didn’t print out the return. I’d been doing them through H&R Block’s free online service for a few years there. Aaaaargh…) But the thing is that both of those would be extra money. I am not supposed to be looking forward to possibly getting them now to make up my stupid shortfall.

And it just goes to show that conventional wisdom does not always apply. Some of us find it far too easy to spend money whether it’s cash or plastic. Not to be totally flippant, I’m just trying not to spiral into beating myself up unproductively.

I’m still poking around, as I always do, trying to figure out increasing my income. eBay is still pretty much a wash. I need to find books through the library to figure out how to do it better if I’m going to try and make it a decent income stream. I found a great one at Barnes & Noble but couldn’t justify the price. Trying to get it used might be a mistake as well because eBay is constantly changing how they do things. We’ll see.

I might start making art trading cards out of some of my photos and selling them on eBay or Etsy. If they’re meant to be sold they are technically referred to as ACEOs or Art Cards, Editions and Originals–ATCs are supposed to be for trading only. Anyway, I found a photofinisher that does wallets in 2.5″x3.5″ instead of 2″x3″, and for dirt cheap. I can pick them up at Target, so I’m going to try that pretty soon. Worst case scenario, I’m out less than five bucks. Best case scenario, I can have a lot of fun and make some decent money while I’m at it.

Otherwise, there are several places around tha intarwebs that I’ve picked up a few cents here, a few cents there, and I need to buckle down over the next several weeks, get each account up to the minimum dispersal balance, get my money out of them, and shut them down. It is just too much time and energy sucked up for too little reward. Amazon’s MTurk program is one example; Helium is another. I simply do not have the time to sit around typing and clicking and hoping to be paid well, only to find I earned pocket change.

As for a certain person that I wasn’t sure I wanted to communicate with again, I’m thinking we’ll try a phone call, if he’s still amenable, and we’ll see what happens from there. I have misgivings about being anything but a long-distance old Army buddy to him, but if that is all there is and it goes well, I would rather have one more person in the world wishing me well than one fewer. And if I had lived by that philosophy all along I might be a much happier person today.

Leaks in spending from April

I can’t sleep right now anyway (and can you believe I’m craving more Diet Mountain Dew?), so while I’m thinking about it, and if I’m not interrupted by a restless 3.5-year-old, let me go over some places in my spending last month where I could have done better. This month is more than half over but the more I drill this stuff into my head, perhaps the smarter I will be about my spending.

Food categories (junk or otherwise)
I spent over seven dollars on vending machine snacks. In a way, that is part of our routine when I take my little girl to her weekly speech therapy appointments; she looks forward to her granola bar or animal crackers or whatever, and I enjoy treating her. On the other hand, it’s seven dollars that might have been better spent elsewhere. Still, I’m not sure how I could substitute for this and still make it into a special treat for her. Get her something from the grocery store that I then only give to her on Tuesdays? No idea. Will have to think about this some more. Compared to the other not-real-food categories this one’s pretty low on the spending totem pole, anyway.

I also spent over twelve bucks on soda. If I would just do what I posted about a while back, keep a cleaned-out 20oz soda bottle around the apartment for taking to the hospital with me and refill it from a two-liter bottle here at home, I’d slash the soda budget like crazy.

Now here’s a humdinger for you: I spent twice as much on fast food as I did on regular groceries! That’s not quite as bad as it sounds; my little girl’s dad buys most of them. But $55 in fast food versus $25 in groceries is just stupid. I could have covered at least a quarter of our grocery budget for the month by myself if I hadn’t spent it on edible crap. And that’s not getting into another almost thirty bucks on regular restaurant food (I think from our trip to China Buffet the weekend before a payday).

Transportation
If I am going to keep buying gasoline for my little girl’s dad’s car anyway when we go to her speech therapy appointments, I might as well keep a little money aside for bus fare; it’d be cheaper. Twenty-eight dollars for gas and four weeks’ worth of parking tokens ($2 each) versus twelve dollars for all four weeks going to and from on the bus? No contest. OK, we’d have to be quicker getting out the door, the trip would take longer, and I’d have to keep on top of my child to make sure she behaves, but I have to think about whether the added convenience is really worth sixteen dollars. It might be, and it might not.

Hobbies
A little over twenty dollars for my photography hobby, or at least that’s how I have it labeled. However, that’s intentional; I’m getting a whole bunch of old rolls of film developed right now. I aim for at least four rolls a month if not four every two weeks. When I get done dealing with that, my cost should go way down for a while. (I still want to develop a lot of photos but I’ll be doing my best to take advantage of discounts and that kind of thing, and they’ll be from digital so maybe not so expensive. And I’m using a cheap developer right now, is the sad part.)

I don’t remember what the “reading” and “computer” categories were. If they weren’t important enough to remember, I shouldn’t have spent on them.

Fees
The bank fees are stupid. I could avoid them by keeping some cash around at all times; getting cash back on a debit card transaction is free. The library fines are also stupid, but at least I’m not paying as much as I used to. Total so far: $8. I also have to pay PayPal transaction fees because I have a Premier account and I can no longer get it reverted back to Basic. I would like to get to the point that people pay me via RevolutionMoneyExchange but I’m not sure if eBay would put up with it. We’ll have to find out. Meanwhile, that’s four bucks gone because I sold things on eBay.

Online games
Just one, actually: I’ve gotten a bit addicted to Travian lately. The trouble is, I keep buying gold (game, not real). Grand total for April: $30.42. It would be cheaper to get a paid account at Second Life, and I would stand a chance in hell of getting that money back. Note to self: Delete your freaking accounts off the server if you are ever tempted to buy gold again. That five dollars here and five dollars there add up!

Toys
I spent a bit over eleven bucks for toys for Thea and another ten for supplies so I can work on a puzzle. Thea does not need me to keep buying her toys unless I purge what she already has. Happily a move is coming up soon and I have a feeling that at least half of her toys are not going to make the journey with us to the new place. It’s just as well because most of them are junk.

Conclusion:
I spent enough money in April that I could have paid off at least one debt on my liabilities list. This is stupid. It’s all well and good to want to have a good time every now and again but it’s not doing me any favors if I have no savings and can’t pay down debt as a result.

Now if somebody knows where I can purchase a good night’s sleep, some quality time to myself every day so I don’t feel I have to stay up until 5am, and some way to split myself into two people so I can simultaneously clean house and take my child to the playground, THAT might be worth me blowing money left and right. Alas, it is not to be.

Friday Roundup

I’ve seriously been slacking off on my Friday Roundups. Furthermore I was kind of lazy about it, because I usually linked to people I had in my blogroll anyway. So here are some new pieces from new sources to shake things up a bit.

• Introduction: Muslim’s Guide to Money Management. If you’ve ever wondered about how Muslims do personal finance since charging interest (riba) is not allowed, this is a great resource. There’s lots of good advice here for unbelievers as well.
• Part 1: Debt perceptions and consumer culture.
• Part 2: Debt perceptions and the Islamic view of debt.
• Part 3: Americans in debt. (Let me point out here, even though I shouldn’t have to, that people exist who are both Muslim and American. Both Muslims and non-Muslim Americans fall into the trap of thinking of it as either/or, almost out of habit.)
• Part 4: Why Muslims are in debt/Money myths!
• Part 5: Debt freedom!
• Part 6: Cars, houses, and… oh yes… STUDENT LOANS. Long-time PF writers and bloggers who haven’t before encountered the Muslim perspective on personal finance will be pleasantly surprised to see their beliefs echoed here.
• And finally, from a different website by a (presumably) non-Muslim Asian, a surprising take on yet another way the American way of life takes advantage of every other culture: Saving is Sin, Spending is Virtue. Sustainable-living advocates already know that we Americans only have our high standard of living because we live it at everyone else’s expense in the form of externalizing environmental (pollution), economic (forcing people to live on slave wages in Third World nations), and social (destroying cultures) costs. I guess it never occurred to me that we siphon off financial resources directly too, while not giving nearly enough back. And by spending instead of saving, we are hurting ourselves directly as well.

My little girl’s dad makes fun of me for WILFing*, but it’s amazing what I find sometimes.

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*Mindless web-surfing or, What was I Looking For?

Language of the personal finance bully

Frugal Dad wrote an interesting post about language typically used by the “perpetually poor”, as he calls them. And, well, he’s got a point that oftentimes we argue for our own limitations. (I’ve read Richard Bach’s Illusions and got a lot out of it–if you haven’t read it, you should. Famous proverb from the book: “Argue for your limitations and they are yours.”) However, once again the vultures came out of the woodwork to prance about showing off how enlightened and special they are while tearing down anyone they perceive as inferior to themselves.

The sad part is I don’t think they even know what the hell they are talking about. The truth is they’re coming off as bullies, and since they presumably are writing to help others navigate the world of personal finance, I think “bully” is the last impression anyone wants to give if their self-image is that of a helper.

What do I mean by “coming off as bullies”? Hm. Let’s see.

Criticizing others for complaining. In my observations and my own personal experience, when someone complains, it is because they either can’t do anything about their problem or they don’t know what to do about their problem. I have noted that when someone knows they are capable of solving a problem, they go ahead and solve it rather than waste time whining about it. This is true even of people typically branded as whiners.

Take me, I’m the world’s biggest crybaby sometimes when things go wrong in my life–but if I’m hungry and there’s food in the pantry, gosh-darn it, I eat! If I’m cold, I put on a sweater or turn on the heat. If my child has hurt herself I comfort her. I don’t just sit around going, “I’m hungry… I’m cold… My baby just hurt herself…” and do nothing about it.

Heck, I just had a migraine for most of yesterday. What did I do? Took some medicine and got on with my day. I still complained about it because all I can do is take meds–I have no control over whether they always work perfectly, and this time they didn’t, so I was still hurting. But I had taken some small action to do something about the problem as well.

Don’t assume that just because someone’s complaining, they’re being lazy and unproductive about their problem. For all you know they have exhausted their own resources and the complaining is a cry for help and/or advice. Which leads me to:

Assuming that because someone is worse off than you, it’s because they’re lazy. It must take some staggering amount of arrogance to come to this conclusion about someone about which you know nothing, someone whom you’ve only encountered through a news story (yeah, we all know reporters are completely fair and unbiased, and even if they’re not, their editors surely are!) or a blog comment on the Internet. If you’ve never met a certain poor person in person, you don’t know jack about their situation and are certainly not qualified to comment on their character.

Even if you know the person and see them every day, it is amazing the amount of denial people will indulge in rather than admit that a friend or family member of theirs is grappling with a serious problem such as mental illness or addiction. While there is a certain amount of personal autonomy involved in both these conditions, there is also a certain amount of involuntary behavior involved. Speaking as someone who has suffered varying degrees of mental illness, I can attest to this. Sometimes you just go through motions and you don’t really understand why.

Furthermore, laziness should not be confused with lack of productivity. There are lots of productive people out there who take the lazy route and try to figure out the easiest, most efficient way to do something. This is normal human behavior. (For that matter, it’s standard practice in nature–look up the principles of permaculture sometime.) And sometimes a person just can’t figure out what to do with themselves–possibly due to mental illness or addiction, possibly due to some other factor–and they’re trying to get along in life with as little hassle as possible. If their behavior isn’t affecting you, don’t worry about it. If it is, seek help. Don’t just sit around complaining about them being lazy, which is really funny coming from someone who doesn’t like complainers in the first place!

Pulling the “welfare queen” card. What in the world is it about women below a certain income threshold who stay home to take care of their kids that arouses the ire of just about every personal finance blogger in the Western hemisphere? These same people often write about how great it would be if they (if they’re moms) or their wives (if they’re the dads) could afford to stay home with their own kids. Why do we believe it’s a good thing to stay home with the kids? Because we love our kids and we want to do our jobs as parents and help them grow up right. What makes you think a low-income mom doesn’t have the same desire for her own children?

“But this welfare mother I know just sits around on her butt watching soap operas and letting her kids run wild,” you sputter. You know what you sound like? People who criticize middle-class stay-at-home moms for supposedly… sitting around on their butts eating bonbons, watching soap operas, and letting their kids run wild. It’s the oldest propaganda game in the book. OK, I’m exaggerating a little bit, but I really am tired of hearing it. Even Betty Friedan, bless her heart–and I’m a feminist–once claimed that boys turned homosexual because their mothers stayed home. People love to slam stay-at-home moms. Toss in the fact they’re being supported by tax dollars instead of men’s paychecks and you have quite the volatile mix for a socio-economic rant-fest.

The best part is when people say welfare moms should “get a job” or “go to work,” as though raising children were no trouble or work whatsoever. I think any personal finance blogger who utters this drivel should be sentenced to six months at hard labor chasing two-year-old triplets around the house while keeping it clean enough that, should Child Protective Services be dispatched to the residence due to unusual noises, they will not immediately remove the children from the home. And I wish you the best of luck.

Setting themselves up as representative of the universal human experience. I don’t think I even need to elaborate on this one; we’ve all seen it. “I’ve worked my way out of a homeless shelter in less than six months with my parents’ credit card in my back pocket and good college English at my disposal, so nobody should be homeless!” This is like the ultimate distillation of every other bullying tactic I’ve gone over here. If you’ve ever uttered any variation on “I’ve done X so anyone can do it,” you are immediately disqualified as a personal finance blogger and you may feel free to go work triple shifts at McDonald’s under an irate welfare-to-work mother who hasn’t seen her kids in two weeks.

If you are in the blogosphere to help people, you are not about to accomplish that mission by being a condescending jerk. If your fans step up and defend you by claiming that you have helped them, they probably didn’t need the help to begin with. Or not your kind anyway; I can’t speak to their possible need for intensive intervention before they lose any chance they have left at developing a conscience and a sense of empathy.

The blogosphere can do so much better than this. I know it. You know it. Let’s make it happen.