Monday, April 25, 2011

Financial Emancipation at 15: Not

My first official job, landed when I was fifteen and two days old, was washing dishes at a local restaurant. I considered myself financially emancipated the first day I walked through the back door entry of that establishment, tied a huge white apron clumsily around my skinny midriff and stuck my hands in a deep basin reeking of clorox. Slowly as I proved I wasn’t too scrawny and/or weak to do the job (a contention that both my employer and my mother later admitted they believed might be the case) my hours were increased.  First, it was three hours during the Sunday dinner rush, then three hours during Friday night fish-fry madness. Later, four hours on Saturday night were added to my shift. It was 1968 and minimum wage was $1.50 per hour. Employers were allowed to pay “student wages”, which were about forty cents less than the official minimum wage. By the official start of summer in June of 1968, I was taking home between $10 and $12 weekly.

I determined that I was going to save almost all my paycheck, available in cash every Wednesday afternoon, for new school clothes in the fall. I further determined that I would have complete control over these purchases since it was my own money! The purchasing of school clothes was always a source of conflict because of my mother’s drive toward practicality and thrift, and my wish to look good and have clothes that others admired. Every week after collecting my pay, ten dollars went immediately to an envelope labeled “school clothes” that was carefully hidden away in my top dresser drawer. Anything over and above the $10, I allowed myself to spend on an occasional ice cream or 45 rpm record.

Right before Labor Day, with $100 accumulated through heavy sweating in that steamy kitchen without air conditioning, mom dropped me off downtown in our small town for my first solo shopping expedition. I know she was nervous about leaving me alone downtown unsupervised with $100, an amount at least five times more than I’d ever had in my possession at one time. Me? I was delirious with a delight that would be short-lived.

Even though I was determined to make my own decisions, I wanted to act responsibly.  I knew that even though it was my own money, if I didn’t spend wisely my mother would never permit me to do it again, at least not as long as I lived under her roof.  First I needed shoes. If I didn’t go home with shoes, I sensed I would be in trouble. I might add here that I HATE spending money on shoes. And coats. And underwear.  I submit my apologies to my daughter, nieces, best friend, and anyone else who is likely to feel apoplectic and need to sit down while absorbing that statement. I know I am in the minority here. But I hate spending discretionary money on non-discretionary items. Did then, do now.

Shoes were a never-ending source of disagreement between my mother and me. There was something “wrong” with my feet that made my mother (with the shoe salesman's support) always insist that I get “correction shoes.” Translation: ugly saddle shoes that tied, and not the pretty, feminine patent leather Mary Jane’s with buckles my peers wore. But I was heading toward 10th grade. It was my money. They were my feet. Still, my mother’s voice was firmly situated in my head. I sat in a stiff chair in Cultrara’s Shoe Store, where I was fitted year after year since Kindergarten for ugly Buster Brown’s, and debated what to do. In the end, I left the store with a compromise pair of shoes. They did sport shoe laces, so uncool, but they were softer material than saddle shoes, and they were a solid light brown color, not the tell-tale black/white or dark brown/white that cried “baby shoe” with every step. Sigh. I was also set back over $20 for those shoes, which distressed me no end. I really resented spending my hard-earned cash for things I needed.

Next stop, C.L. Carr Co., a locally-owned department store, and their “junior” department. Carr’s was an upscale shop, one in which we sometimes browsed longingly, but rarely bought. My mother determined that their merchandise was too expensive. My clothing was more likely to be purchased from the Surprise Store, also locally owned, which mom deemed more reasonable, or through Montgomery Ward’s or Sears’ mail order. C.L. Carr Co., however, carried beautiful clothing, and I aspired to be their customer.  I wasted probably 45 minutes of precious time in Carr’s dressing room, trying on several items of clothing, before deciding on a lined wool red, black and white plaid jumper with a pleated skirt. I knew when I walked out of the store, my stash $30 lighter, that I had made a mistake with the assistance of an over-involved salesperson whose goal was to score a sale. [I believe this is the genesis of my aversion to all salespeople. To this day, “Can I help you” turns my stomach inside out, and activates my “Keep away from me, I bite” scowl.] My mother was right – it was too expensive. And she would later scold me for having bought something that needed – heaven forbid – DRY CLEANING. Adding insult to injury, Carr’s had a “credit voucher” only return policy. Getting my money back for this frivolous purchase was not an option.  

This was discouraging. I worked so hard for my money and after 90 minutes and two purchases, half of it was gone. The rest of my shopping trip is less clear, although I know that I bought a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar to wear under the jumper. I also remember that the more economical W.T. Grant’s clothing department also played a role in the rest of my shopping that day. For those too young to remember Grant’s, think K-Mart on a smaller scale. When my mom picked me up at the end of the afternoon, I wasn’t feeling any of the elation I had expected to feel. Instead I felt discouraged that I had little to show for my summer of labor. If I worked that hard and got so little in return, well….It was clear to me that I was going nowhere.

As we drove silently out of town on the way home for dinner, I contemplated the events of the afternoon, and determined that it was going to be impossible to get what I wanted in life.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Money - The Greatest Taboo

People are usually more willing to talk about sex, politics, and religion than they are about their personal relationships with money. How much we make and how much we spend are often considered top secret affairs, as well as a subject of speculation by others, usually those who suspect that they have less than those about whom they speculate.

Many work places have company policies against revealing one’s salary to others, guarding I suppose against the mass uproar that would result from people finding out their relative worth due to others in similar positions or with similar longevity or output. On public opinion surveys, the one question more people refuse to answer over all others is related to their income.

Freud (1908) equated money with feces and wrote about our unconscious connection of money with sex, babies, and gifts. Other major theorists (Fenichel, 1945; Ferenczi, 1952; Turkel, 1988) have expanded on this, viewing money as representative of all things (material and emotional) that can be given or withheld, as well as a symbol of personal worth, competence, control, and security. When I think about my own history and relationship to money, I agree that they were on to something.

When I was in private practice, I often felt embarrassed when clients inquired about my fee, not quite feeling like it was within my rights to collect one. If they showed signs of leaving the session without payment, it was next to impossible for me to remind them of it. In my own analysis, fee increases have often felt like serious narcissistic injuries. As clients, we do not want to be reminded that we are paying for the “love” of those who would help us. I had a therapist once who was constantly changing her individual and group fee, struggling no doubt among her personal politics, her need to support her family, and her own money demons.

I know people who threaten, sometimes overtly, that insufficient attention paid to them (sufficient being a constantly changing concept) will result in rewrites of wills. Others find it impossible to be happy for someone else’s good fortune – whether it be a completed home renovation, a trip-of-a-lifetime, or an early retirement. They can only see other’s good fortune in relation to what they don’t have or feel they can’t get. I’m not saying that I’ve never felt that way either. I’ve written before about feeling envious of others (see How much is enough? 8/20/10) and stuck in a life trajectory that I perceived led nowhere (see If I just worked harder, 9/6/10). I am still mystified by how some people manage to maintain spacious (and I assume expensive) NYC apartments and just cannot figure out how they do it (and wish I could).

After I wrote my blog entry about paying off credit cards, my sister commented that she was surprised as she never knew I had a balance. And I was surprised that she was surprised. She and her husband, she informed me, make it a practice to pay their credit cards completely every month, even if it is a stretch. My best friend does that too. What’s funny to me is that all those months (perhaps years) of carrying a balance, of getting almost to zero and binging out on something, I could have paid it off in one swoop. I don’t live month to month, hand to mouth. I haven’t robbed Peter to pay Paul since my thirties. My credit score is stellar. So what kept me from just writing a check and being done with it? Everything is in one’s history, as my “heart mother” would say.

My mother sat my sister and me down at our green-topped kitchen table one Saturday when I was about 8 years old. She had four small round Tupperware containers big enough to fit maybe a serving of pudding or jello. She had turned each one into a bank by cutting a narrow slot in the lids, and her mission was to teach her daughters fiscal responsibility. She laid down thick magic markers, one black, one red, one green, and said that we could decorate our banks any way we wanted. One container would be designated for savings; the other was for spending.

Then she said we would each receive a weekly allowance of 75 cents. Three quarters. “How much goes in each one?” I wondered. Three quarters, two containers. “Well, what do you think you should do?” she asked. “Fifty cents to spend and twenty-five to save, or twenty-five to spend and fifty to save?” I knew instinctively the right answer to the question. There was that word “should.” Dutifully, I said we should save fifty cents and keep twenty-five for spending. Mom looked pleased. I reluctantly dropped two quarters into the savings container on which I had drawn flowers and a house, and one into the spending container decorated with stick people with skirts and ponytails. Mentally I was already calculating how many weeks it would take me to accumulate $1.59, which was what a new doll outfit cost in the second floor toy department of W.T. Grant’s in town. Forever.

The experiment didn’t last very long, a few months at most. Sometimes she didn’t have the quarters to give us, sometimes she was busy and said she’d give them to us later. I never forgot when it was allowance time, but I learned to gauge when it was ok to remind her and when it was best to let it go. The Tupperware banks became repositories for the occasional dollar we’d get in a greeting card for a birthday or holiday or a 50-cent piece from my grandfather. 

Several years later, somewhere around 14, when I was too young for working papers and hadn’t yet convinced anyone with little children that I was a viable babysitter, tired of asking my parents for money and eager to be independent, I brought up the concept of an allowance again. I made my case carefully. They could give me a set amount that I would use to buy lunch at school, to go to the movies or bowling with my friends, to buy candy and pop from the corner mini-market, and keep myself in Dippity-do and Noxema. Then I wouldn’t have to keep asking them for money. How much did I think I needed, they wanted to know. I low-balled it, believing that I didn’t have a chance in hell of getting a “yes” but not wanting to completely sabotage my chances. I was stunned when they considered my figure, and said ok to my proposal.

I felt so grown-up when mom counted out one and five dollar bills into my waiting hands, and I rushed up to my pink bedroom to create envelopes I would label “Lunch,” “Fun,” “Candy,” and “Personal.”  But this didn’t last long either. Mom didn’t always have the money to give me every week, and I felt guilty asking her for it. But my desire to compartmentalize my money, designating “funds” for this need or that want was established.

To be continued……


References:
Fenichel, O. (1945). The drive to amass wealth. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7, 69-95.
Ferenczi, S. (1952). First Contributions to Psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Brunner/Mazel Publishers.
Freud, S. (1908). Character and anal erotism. Standard Edition, Volume 10. London, England: Hogarth Press.
Turkel, R.A. (1988). Money as a mirror of marriage. Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanaysis, 16, 525-535.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Financial Fantasies and Realities

I took a two-session class on retirement planning at a local university in late March. I’m one of those people who heretofore didn’t want to know if I was saving enough for retirement. I have no idea if not-wanting-to-know is the public norm or not. I only know that my not-wanting-to-know was a function of the fact that even if I wasn’t saving enough, it didn’t matter – I had no more to save. It was what it was, regardless of the sufficiency factor.

The reason I decided to attend the course was two-fold. One is that I have been so stressed at work the last couple of years that for the first time in my life, I have begun to dream about just stopping. I wanted to find out if, in fact, it might be possible. The second reason evolved out of my no-shopping commitment and my determined paying off of credit cards. Put that in the category of the realigning of values.

One of the instructors at this workshop reiterated how emotionally laden the issue of money is. As I listened to other people talk about their individual circumstances, similar themes emerged. Giving. Getting. Saving. Having. Not having. Deserving. Undeserving.   Lots of feelings.

When I opened my first IRA, I had lived in New York City for only a couple of years. I was in my early 30s, and I wasn’t making enough money to get by. I had been lucky enough to get a couple of freelance jobs that paid some lump sums, but with no taxes withheld. Being naïve and grateful for the extra cash, I had no idea about the tax implications – what it meant to be self-employed. So when April 15 came around and the bookkeeper where I worked helped me with my income taxes, for the first time in my life, I owed the government money. Lots of money. Of course, ‘lots of money’ is a relative concept, but when you don’t have it, owing anything is a serious blow. The bookkeeper suggested that if I opened an IRA, it would cut down on my debt. Well, I did have $2000 which represented payment from one of those freelance jobs. I had been hoarding it for months as my first-ever safety net and NOBODY was going to take it away from me. I remember standing in the usual long line at my bank during a lunch hour, ready to open an IRA account with that money, and thinking (in almost a panic) that this was like a commitment to LIVE until at least age 59-1/2 to get my money back. Now approaching 58, almost the age I couldn’t imagine being, I laugh at the memory.

Feelings indeed. I think about my beloved mom who worried about paying her heating bill every winter and who took in college kids in order to pay the mortgage long after it was paid the first time (a long story, but totally due to my father and his financial indiscretions). She had an insufficient pension and social security check as a result of having stayed home to raise the children, after which she was abandoned for a younger model. She went to work in low-wage jobs since she was education-less and stayed long past the usual age of retirement until illness forced her to stop.  

I think about my dad who thought the orchard that surrounded my childhood home bore dollar bills instead of wormy sour apples. He was always spending money he did not have, not little bits --  big bits on new business ventures and other projects that kept my mother worried and busy juggling funds. When he passed away, he had nothing. He never planned ahead for anything.  He never really grew up.

I think about my best friend who, as a result of her childhood experience, grew up determined to have/save enough so she never ever had to ask anybody for anything. She sleeps at night knowing that she has two pensions to assist her in her old age, that is, if the pension funds supporting them remain solvent.

Another friend with a Ph.D., approaching 80 years old, went back into the classroom this year to teach after decades away because she needs the money to live. And old and dear friend, a waitress her whole life, also almost 80, recently lost her [second] husband of thirty years. She faces the possibility of having to sell their home because her husband’s lucrative pension died along with him.  Still another acquaintance in his late 60s  - a man literally still stuck in the sixties - has absolutely nothing put away for his future – and he actually makes enough that he could be doing so. He’s suffering from a combination of denial and magical thinking.

There was an article on Yahoo! News a couple of weeks back featuring a 70-year-old woman who has no savings. She once owned a fashion design business that never became as successful as she’d hoped and now sews little girls’ clothing to supplement her small social security income. She laments that she’ll have to work until she dies. The responses to that article are stunning – everything from anger at her Berkeley education, snarky comments that she should sell her property (she has some), suggestions to get some alimony out of one of her two ex-husbands, and chides that she is just a whiny old privileged white woman. Others commented that her story serves as a warning to others that entrepreneurs should never plow all their income from business ventures back into their businesses (as she did). Granted, she is not without choices, as many (if not most) are. She’s not in danger of having to eat pet food. [Introduce me to someone who is, and my check is in the mail!]   

I went back to the article because I had forgotten some of the details – what I recalled were the things that push my buttons… old & no money. The vehemence in the public’s responses to her underscore just how emotionally laden the issue of money is. I’ll come back to this subject again.  In the meantime, the bad news is that barring some unforeseen intervening variable, good or ill, an early retirement is not in my future (bleagh!). The good news is that I should be able to stop working at the age my cohort is projected to receive full social security payments --  66. That is, of course, if social security is still around. I can't even think about that!

Sunday, April 3, 2011

The Truth of Two Women


This is how I feel most days.

Remember the Flaying of Marsyas? This is a painting that horrified and intrigued me when I first saw it in a textbook as a child. I couldn’t believe people actually did that to each other but now I do. I suppose the imagery is a little drastic. Forgive me for that.
It’s just that somebody is always at me for something. I sit and talk with my “heart mother”.  I lament that I feel unprotected from the elements (those elements being other humans) and they are picking away at me like vultures might the carcass of an unlucky woodchuck. She nods toward my ever-in-motion hands to draw my attention to the fact that I am, as I speak, ripping away bits of my cuticles with a vengeance. (Johnson & Johnson – they love me.)

My daughter forwarded me an email not long ago, saying that it reminded her of me and she wanted to share it. The email was written by a young (compared to me anyway) woman, Meredith Levick, who sends a daily missive to readers, called Morning Love Letter. As I’ve received several of these “love letters” over time, my impression is that they are largely reflections, memories, challenges, and musings that inspire and provoke her readers to be who they are without apology. Something I’m still learning to do.

This one came shortly after I had written about feeling pressured to perform in ways that pleased others (Exposed: Being Seen & Heard, 2/23/11). I reprint it with her permission.

Truth.

People have told me that I should change the name of this mission to Daily Love Letter because I rarely send it in the morning,
but I don't want to
because the essence of it is morning, a consciousness of starting over,
and if I can't make it happen until 1:14 p.m. then so be it.

So I won't (change it).
Truth.

People have asked me when my next workshop is,
and why I haven't been advertising it lately,
but I'm making space for myself to explore what's right in terms of what's next,
and the rushing seems like it would be sloppy and disadvantageous for all.

So I won't (rush this).
Truth.

People have judged my choices,
mocked me up close and from a distance,
and I do consider lashing back because I'm enraged (if but only for a brief period of time).
They have talked smack behind my back and to my face,
and the daggers only cut as painfully as the original wounds which I'm working on healing.
I don't know it all, but I do know that I am more certain than the anger of another.

So I won't (lash back).
Truth.
  
There is a world of people out there
wondering why, what, how, where, and when.

But the clock is mine, and so is this keyboard,
and my heart, my purpose, my decisions, my integrity,
these cannot be compromised by what others do and don't like.

Bending to your whims,
rushing for the comfort of others,
attacking to become another boxer in the ring of hatred,

that can be your lifetime.

Because it certainly isn't going to be how I spend mine.

*****************************************
Thank you, Meredith. Perfect.