I haven’t fretted about money for years. It’s just something that happens to a lot of pre-retirees: you have all those cost-of-living raises to your credit just at the same time things get paid off. I’m sure that after I retire things will get tight again.
Somehow, in a strange confluence over these last few months, I was hit with thousands of dollars of unexpected bills, primarily in lawyer retainers. (I’m not suing anyone. I just need to continue with probate at the same time I needed to draw up all the end-of-life documents that they would have called “a will” in my generation.) On top of that I transferred some cash to a different account in anticipation of a big bill, and then the state tax debt hit before the federal refund, and I paid the Mastercard bill without checking the bank balance first, and suffice it to say: I was scrabbling for money for the first time in years.
After transferring from the TeddyJ account, and shifting money from savings, I was still $100 shy, so I set a reminder to do some more machinations the next morning before the bank opened and then I’d be covered. Whew.
My subconscious woke me up at 3 a.m and said, “You have evidently forgotten you have an overdraft account, dumbass.” Amazing, given how much I leaned on that account when I was just ten years younger.
Like I say, I’m sure that familiarity with the overdraft account will return someday, but for now it was nice to have forgotten about it.
7 responses to “Money”
Not scrabbling for money is *glorious* and I am glad you had such a long vacation from it and also that this was only a brief situation!
Also, interesting re: overdraft. Does it have fees? and if so, how killer are the fees?
(also, the amount of mental real estate not-having-quite-enough takes up is something I think most comfortably-off people who judge poor people really just don’t *get* – there is all the math and all the juggling, and then all the fees/extra-costs whenever things *don’t* quite match up, and it is a *ton* of mental effort that you then don’t have available for all the other things that might be able to improve your situation – learning new skills to be eligible for a better job, the time and energy to cook from scratch, etc. Decision fatigue is real; not being able to just buy automatically the things you need at the grocery store but instead keep a running total and do cost/benefit analysis between two things when you kinda actually need both is *exhausting*; trying to mentally juggle bills and payments and account shuffling and temporary loans is a huge time and energy sink. They’re *doing more work* not just because they’re juggling multiple minimum-wage part-time jobs to come up with enough money to pay rent [aka: not unlikely to be multiple commutes per day but also not unlikely to be more than 40 hours] but also because it is technically *harder* and *more tiring* and *more time consuming* and in many ways *more expensive* to exist at the unsafe margins and yet people need security deposits for more stable, less expensive housing, and enough money to *buy* the cheaper-per-unit family-size packs of things, and all that. and then when you’re exhausted and it feels like you’re getting nowhere, it’s also simply psychologically much harder to resist short-term enjoyments that aren’t cost-effective in the long run.. So I get cranky about “people are poor because they make bad choices” – if most of the people who say that were *in* a no-safety-net, not-quite-enough, trying to remember everything, exhausted pinch, they would *also* experience a drop in the technical economic rationality of their choices.)(I mean, then there’s also all the people who are disabled, or who are caregivers, and it ignores that a lot of jobs don’t pay a living wage. Totally possible that some people are poor exclusively because of bad decisions that they really *did* have a decent chance of making the better choice on! But… definitely not all of them, and even those who made one bad financial choice shouldn’t be doomed to a poverty loop for it, and pretending the poverty pit is just ankle-deep and easy to get out of instead of taller than most peoples’ heads is just really annoying to me, because this stuff is *real* and dragging, not a minimal load.)
KC – oh no, it’s not bad choices. Being poor is very expensive. A new $15 blender every year for 5 years is eventually more expensive than an $80 blender for a lifetime. The overdraft has no fees, but it does charge 20% interest, and if you aren’t aware you’re on the edge then it gets pricey.
20% interest is pricey, but yeah, if you can pay it off fast, likely cheaper than $20-per-item-that-goes-overdraft, esp. if you’ve got a lot of tiny recurring subscription-y things. (we do not, but in this age of streaming et al, many people do)
(and yes, buying the cheap version of things adds up, and yet if you buy the expensive version, it usually means credit card debt [expensive in itself] *and* the expensive version of things usually has resale value, which means it’s more likely to be stolen, and if you are living in a poor-ish neighborhood, police care a lot less about crime that happens there as well. It just… all piles up.)
KC – Well, that’s a good point. i did just notice Amazon lets you send deliveries to lockers they maintain. I dont know if they do that everywhere.
It’s just bonkers, how many things are harder the poorer you are, and how many things are more expensive the poorer you are. I wish we had better safety nets.
KC – seems like sliding-scale penalties and fees would be a way to start.