How to Save Money, Really (The Money, Part 2)

Swallowing the frustration and sense of powerlessness associated with this entire conversation, I'm digging one more layer into the mystery of personal finance, in search of the place where decisions are made.


I, like most of my generation, am poorly educated in financial matters. I remember my older sister, Becca, teaching me how to balance a checkbook, but when the time came, I rarely actually did it. It takes too much attention. It's too hard. Now, as I rescue stationery and birdhouses, and use Freecycle in both directions, and otherwise conserve resources in a hundred different ways, I often feel like I'm doing penance. I think of my six weeks on a pink contract for Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life, earning fifteen hundred dollars a week. Was I living rich for those six weeks? Was I living happy? And what did I do with all that money?


When you're working those hours and under that much pressure, you don't think about it. You don't have time. And if you haven't trained yourself to think about it, you don't think about it. You don't have the skills. It takes such an act of will these days, to stop the train -- to get control of your money. There are so many other forces, people, faceless people, who are offering to do it for you.


The banner on the front page of my banking website says, "Spend less time banking and more time living." Thank you very much, Mr. and Mrs. Financial Institution, but I want my banking back. I don't want it to be psychologically divided from the essence of living. I don't want to imagine that control over my finances, my livelihood -- the relationship between working and surviving -- is some kind of an inconvenience that I should get through as quickly as possible so that I can hurry back to more important matters. So I can hurry back to... to what? To spending more money? To giving more of my money to someone else? Like...you?


I think of myself at a very young age, deciding how to spend my fifteen cents, or whatever small amount I first got into my grubby little hands. Should I get two lollipops? Or one lollipop and two tootsie rolls? They were excruciating, those decisions: delightful, all consuming. At what age did the power of deciding how to spend and save my money get to be such a drag?


Well, when I lost control over it, that's when. My 18-year-old niece asked me a question about money the other day, and I found myself tumbling over my tongue to answer. Please, don't make the mistakes that I made. Don't go at it blind, the way I did, the way so many people do, the way the world expects you to. And, most of all -- I told her to call my brother -- please get your advice from someone other than me. I am utterly unqualified.

It isn't my value system that I blame. I don't regret my trips to Europe. I'm not sorry I've seen Paris. I'm not sorry about the many, many dollars in resources and time that I have donated to small theatre companies making thrilling pieces of art. Sometimes it hurts that Nick and I didn't buy property while we could, and are now looking at continuing to rent, maybe for a long time. But we did have other things to do with that money, things that were in line with our value system at the time. Why spend money on a space that you don't really live in? Because for a long time, loving what we loved, and wanting what we wanted, our house was nothing more than a place to drop our stuff.

And, seriously, we dodged a bullet. We are just the sort of people -- untrained in money matters, unsure of our long term goals, and categorically uninterested in fine print -- who would have foreclosed.

I would like to pay more attention.

I realized, recently, in the same session of banking in which I bought the checks with stubs, that my bank has provided me with an overdraft line of credit. I don't want it. I don't want my debit card to be converted into a credit card. I have credit cards. And that is, actually, the one small stroke of luck in my financial history. Even though I have been blithely clueless, I have never fallen to the credit card hatchet. I am cheap, and I am stubborn, and a hard sell is to me like a bad rhyme. It causes temporary deafness.


Is it possible to get a line of credit without being asked? No, of course I was asked. There's my signature, right there on the form in my welcome packet. I couldn't possibly have signed for something I didn't want. Milo and Stella were with me when I signed those papers, so maybe I was distracted. But Nick was there, too. In fact, it's really his bank account. One of the other dramatic changes associated with my hard swerve from career-lady to house-mom has been letting go of my individual account, which is a capitulation that tempts me right off this unyielding topic of financial responsibility, and into another post's worth of musings on gender and family and power. But yes, of course, that was exactly the distraction! Now I do remember that we discussed the overdraft line of credit. And by force of will, I bring this back to the point at hand.


Am I really this practiced in ignoring things? That I can forget a financial decision even when it was discussed in person in bright sunlight with the most relevant party and the bank officer?


I am that good at ignoring things. I have to be, in order to survive my life in the information age. I ignore hundreds of items of information every day. The billboards. The banner advertisements. The user agreement and the privacy policy. I am very, very good at ignoring things. I would like to be a little less good at ignoring my money, particularly the movement thereof from my bank account into someone else's.


As per the MasterCard slogan that is burned into all of our brains: Fulfilling basic survival needs without the internet...20 some dollars per month. Actively making decisions about how to spend and save...priceless.

How Much Does It Cost (The Money, Part 1)

My Year Without Internet is not free. I post this early cost analysis with some trepidation, because personal finance is personal, and these details reveal more about me than a hundred essays about my spiritual yearnings. But in the interest of "follow[ing] the money," here's an expanded view of the inside of Esther's cupboards. Don't get bored.

Nick and I unwittingly began this adventure by dropping our cellphones. This is the simplest math in the whole post. Within a single field of technology, if you want more, you pay for more. Our three phone lines, with internet, cost between $160 and $170 a month. One phone line, with internet, costs us $62.69 a month.

The resulting savings, of $100 per month, would not have been available to us if I hadn't stopped working. As a freelance artist, lost calls are lost money. In order to compete with other freelance artists, you need to be at least as easily reachable as they are: therefore, carrying a cell phone was my job. The same has been true for my husband, who has had a salaried job but only recently stopping taking freelance gigs as well. This is an equation pair that appears frequently to the parents of small children: Not Working = 0; Working = x - Py, where "x" is the additional income, "y" is the additional expense, and "P" is the variable factor of Poor Decision Making, because you are crazed by your busy, busy life and don't have time to think about it.

At least for the moment, I am Not Working. And that's the end of the easy part.

I had very much hoped that I could tell you that dropping our internet service, opposed by a few incidental costs of life without internet, would result in a net balance. Wouldn't that be pretty?

Going without internet in our house saves us $15 per month. I could get the monthly cost down further by changing service providers, but would then have to pay fees associated with the change. I could cut out or restrict long distance service -- Nick and I have not been, historically, in the habit of calling people anyway -- but then I truly do risk isolation, and that isn't the point.

$15 it is. That buys 34 stamps. A whole lot of you would have to write to me to cause me to need more than 34 stamps in a month.

It seems tidy, and somehow scientific, to draw the relationship above, in which I equate the information transfer cost of Internet with the information transfer cost of direct mail. $15 each way. Done deal. But it's completely fictional. The internet brings a million more things into my home than direct mail ever did. Cutting out the internet creates the impulse to replace all those things. That cost is potentially infinite.

The bad news, I'm discovering, is that there is a cost to rejecting the dominant technology. Or you could say, I am punished for rejecting the dominant technology. The good news is that my husband and I have total individual control over that cost. And we have to think about it, which is healthful, like drinking castor oil is healthful.

Here are some of the things we've had to think about:

News:

I know I said that thing, about the dark wood and no path, but in the light of day I have no intention of completely depriving myself of news articles. A subscription to the New York Times, 7 days, is almost $15 per week, although they entice you by offering you half price for the first three months. At the other end of the spectrum, there are local free papers. There's a commuter paper that Nick reads on the way home from work. I bet Jacob could supply me with yummy day-old papers from the Harvard campus -- and by yummy I do mean doughnut stained. Or, in the spirit of humility, I could ask Marcella and Melissa and Terri and Kirsten -- the Facebook friends whose article links I read every day -- to occasionally hit "print" instead of "link." Small print, double sided to save on postage cost? I could send SASE's.

With the assumption that I will find other ways to supplement my diet of topical nonfiction, Nick and I are going Boston Globe, Sundays only, for $3.50 a week, half price for the first 12 weeks. This gives us a fat pile of news articles, the Sunday Opinion section, the coupons, and the classifieds, for $13.42 per month over a year.

Personal Finance:

Checks. I had to buy checks. I have used online banking for years, so this is a change. I got the kind with stubs, so basically I write the check twice: once to inform the entity receiving my money, and once to inform myself. This is all related to a concerted effort on my part to be more mindful of my spending, which impulse came originally out of necessity -- from two incomes to one income is a harsh drop -- but is now becoming a preciously guarded choice. We are realizing that we can live on less. Less money. Less stuff. Less trash. Less anxiety.

I spent $34.31 on 150 checks with stubs. It's reasonably a year's worth of checks, since I only have to use them to send money to places I can't go in person. And there are fewer of those transactions than you might think. Fudging a little because I can't currently find my crystal ball, the cost of personal finance by mail can be estimated at $2.94 in checks plus $2.64 in stamps, or $5.58 per month.

Entertainment:

If I were a single woman, this category would be a very round and attractive little zero. My entertainment is covered by reading, writing, baking, long walks on the beach...etc, etc. (And bird watching.) My husband, however, likes a little small screen entertainment, and going without that is a lifestyle change he doesn't want to make. We discussed the possibility of reinstating our Netflix, which we cancelled because I always felt bad about so rarely wanting to watch anything, and Nick was satisfied with Hulu. Reverting to Netflix, one movie at a time, would be only $8.99, and Nick could update his cue using the internet at work.

But so far we don't seem to be choosing to go that way. Instead, we've decided to use the libraries. Boston is a reader's paradise, and all the libraries are huge. I go to the library at least once a week because I love my son and he loves books. (Do you know that he actually sleeps with his books? Like the upstairs neighbor's kid sleeps with stuffed animals?) Nick has access to the Harvard libraries as well, so if we feel like it, we can get really obscure movies. We can even get obscure, educational movies, which Esther might actually watch.

In the end we did get our attractive little zero: replacement entertainment cost, $0.00 per month.

Correspondence:

With stamps at $0.44 per letter, and rescued stationery at $0.10 per letter (as long as the 10 for a dollar bin at Boomerangs can keep up with my habit), fudging again because of that constantly misplaced crystal ball, I might expect to write thirty letters a month, approximately one a day. That's $16.20 per month. My plan is not free.

Summary:

This little scheme will cost us, at this very conservative estimate, $20.20 per month. Depending on whether you are of the mountain school or the molehill school, this could be negative, or it could be negligible.

Or it could be that I need an entire additional post to address it. See Part 2.