Warning: This blog post will be filled with a long rambling, obviously bitter rant filled with resententment, frustration, desperation and maybe a little too much of the whiny Why Me attitude.
However, in my defense, I suspect that I’m not the only one feeling this way and I’d like to just use my blog to vent for a moment and express my general discontent. In fact, my blog coverage has such small readership numbers that this is merely therapeutic. So, on we go!
I went to college, I continued to receive my graduate degree, I bought a house. I followed the rules, I bought a house that I could afford. While I paid $220k for it 5 years ago, unfortunately it is now worth only about $135k and I still owe $200k. I keep my a/c set at a reasonable 74 – 76 and my heat set at 62 at night and 68 during the day. I haven’t purchased any furniture. My daughter uses my old bed, and my husband and I share his that he received bought in college nearly 20 years ago. Our sofa was given to us and we buy our clothes at Goodwill. We both own new cars, but that’s because we actually saved money by trading in my husband’s old Jeep for our new Honda Fit. The monthly payment is less and the gas mileage is far less expensive because it doubles the mpg rating of the previous car. My previous VW GTI was a fun car, but the gas mileage was terrible and it was beginning to require a lot of maintenance and I was still making car payments. I traded it in on my Nissan pickup truck because I wanted what I thought would be a practical family vehicle. I could haul around mulch and plants, bicycles and junk to the landfill. However, it turns out that the gas mileage is terrible and the maintenance more expensive than I could have imagined because I live in the city. At 36k miles I find myself needing new brake pads and rotors and four new tires. Ouch! I started taking public transportation to cut down on maintenance and save on gasoline. I only work 3-5 miles from where I live, but the $3.50 day pass for the metro bus is still cheaper each week. This week I’ll be either selling it outright or trading it in for an affordable subcompact if I can find a good deal. Luckily there seems to be a convergence of low interest rate options and incentives. I could always lease, I’ll continue to take the bus anyway.
I cook dinner at home nearly every night of the week. I don’t buy meat for a variety of reasons, but I cook mostly fresh produce and dried grains. I don’t buy or use a lot of the expensive meat substitutes. We were celebrating Taco Tuesday at our favorite local restaurant for a few weeks, but that will be short lived as even a $30 meal once per week doesn’t fit in the budget anymore. I pack my lunch of leftovers most days as does my daughter and husband.
I work a second job to help pay for the little extras, like mountain biking that we both enjoy. In fact we were both doing extremely well (I was in contention for first place in the Gravity East Series), but now we can’t afford to compete any longer.
We have burned through our savings because we live paycheck to paycheck; literally. A plumbing leak, a new roof and other unexpected expenses like medical bills and car maintenance and the savings quickly dried up. We didn’t save a great deal to begin wtih because we were committed to pay off the credit card debt that we had and not generate any more ever. In fact, it used to be that I received the low balance alert on the Wednesday or Thursday on the Friday before we got paid, and now it’s coming 2 days after the paycheck hits. The costs of everything seem to be sky rocketing, but I haven’t had a raise in 5 years. I’m not complaining though, because it’s a good job and I’m lucky to be employed. These are tough times for everyone and I know people who have been out of work for months on months. If that happened to us, we could be homeless after just a few pay periods. I mentioned that I graduated with my Master’s. Congrats! Now I have $70k in student loans to payback. The lowest monthly charges possible rival my mortgage. They will increase over time because I should be making more money right? Our credit card debt remains from filling the gap with my college expenses (books, etc). Uniforms and school supplies, high school field trips for my daughter. I mention that we live in the city and I was forced to send her to private Catholic school for her middle school years to ensure that she received a quality education. I’m fortunate that we have a good high school that she was accepted to attend. She’s extremely bright, so the engineering and math high school is now free. It seems that the cost of the private school tuition may have been worth it at least. We also used credit to pay for a portion of our wedding two years ago. It was fairly modest, although we did celebrate in Las Vegas, NV. That was our honeymoon included though. We had about 50 guests and spent 5 days enjoying the celebration with friends and family. We didn’t gamble and we didn’t see any shows. We did splurge and go out for a celebratory dinner with just the two of us, for sushi. We send most of our money to our debt and have paid off a considerable amount, but we aren’t in the clear yet.
My husband’s job has informed him that they can’t afford to pay him for the next 3 or 4 pay periods and if their income doesn’t improve he’ll be out of work. We teeter on the edge of calamity every day. His parents are elderly and on a fixed income. My parents have divorced and each remarried. Neither of them are able to support us financially. My husband and I are both only children. We have my daughter from a previous relationship. Her father provides the minimum amount of support each month $170; not really enough to be even statistically relevant in our monthly expenses, but it’s better than nothing. He was court ordered to provide health care and pay for half of her out of pocket expenses, but that has never happened and it’s impossible to enforce.
So here I am, I find myself, like many others, over-educated, underpaid. Overwhelmed and overstressed. I played by the rules and made “smart” choices. How is it that two college educated, experienced professional can’t afford to get by and can’t even possibly entertain the thought of having a family of our own? I see plenty of people with designer bags and clothes that cost as much as my monthly mortgage payment. I have friends and family members who never went to college making more than my husband and I combined. I have coworkers with a high school education that own houses, boats, cars, gym memberships and go on all-inclusive vacations several times each year. It seems that I am surrounded by an incredible amount of wealth and poverty at the same time and there doesn’t seem to be a formula that can definitively lead to one or the other. I often sit and wonder, what happened? I regret my degrees, I regret purchasing a house. In the end, I feel like I was misled, and I fell for some big farce hook, line and sinker. Somewhere as a result of my “smart” decisions, someone is leading a better life, but unfortunately it isn’t me. I keep hoping that our political leaders will do something to ease the burden on folks like myself. My husband and I combined make over $100k so technically we are middle class. Somehow though I find myself hoping to be able to buy groceries this week and all of my change is going to pay my bus fare.
So, now that I’ve finished bitching and moaning, what’s your experience these days?
and a few apps for my iPhone. I purchased the scale because it measures more than just my weight. It also measures my body fat percentage (most important) and my body water percentage. These are important because while I want to reduce my weight, I want to do it by reducing my body fat percentage, not my muscle or water. I’ve been working out on average 3 days per week doing a video in my workout space. The two that I use most frequently are 
and 
. I used two apps for about 2 weeks to compare and then selected the one that I found the most convenient and easy to use. 
