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Things To Say Good-Bye To

December 30, 2011 By
'Good Bye . . . Pick up your crazy heart & give it one more try' photo (c) 2010, Nishanth Jois - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Here’s this week’s!

Time is supposed to pass more quickly as one ages, but I never really believed them until this year. I’m now old enough that I’m telling my age in terms of decades: “I’m in my forties”. Last week my husband and I also celebrated our twentieth anniversary. Yet it is not just advancing age and milestones that make time pass quickly for me today. It’s also this feeling I have that life is spinning out of control in a new way, and that the things which once anchored us are slipping away.

Europe is in an economic and democratic crisis. The euphoria of the Arab Spring has turned to despair as fundamentalists have won elections. History seems to be accelerating.

And yet, as Obama’s right hand man said, “we should never let an opportunity go to waste”. Perhaps that’s how we should approach the chaos in our world: it is an opportunity to put first things first again.

At this opening of a chaotic 2012, then, why don’t we say good-bye to too much debt. This whole financial crisis was caused by everybody living above their means—even governments. People borrowed too much. Banks lent too much. And governments threw money around as if rules didn’t apply to them.

Maybe in 2012 people will realize that we need to cut back and—gasp!—not buy stuff we can’t afford. With all the uncertainty about stock markets and currencies and recessions, all of which could throw the job market into a tailspin, maybe people will realize we should actually be responsible.

I’m hoping we can also say good-bye to the Kardashians, though I don’t wish them actual harm. I just don’t have a clue who they are, though they seem to grace every magazine cover. I don’t care who is getting married or divorced or having implants. Today too many people today are famous for no good reason. It’s all so meaningless.

Maybe in times of great uncertainty we need something silly to distract us, but I hope that the opposite proves true. I hope that uncertainty means that we realize we don’t have time for stupidity, and instead we should invest our time in what really matters, so that we have a foundation to weather whatever storms are coming.

That’s why I also hope we’ll say good-bye to this preoccupation our society seems to have with self-fulfillment. I’ll only do something if it makes me happy—and I’ll stop doing it as soon as it doesn’t make me happy. Therefore, I can’t commit to a marriage, and I can’t stay in a marriage, in case I’m not happy. I can’t put my kids first because that would cramp my dreams. If you’re waiting to be happy, you likely never will be, because true happiness comes when we learn how to give, not just when we try to get.

So many families are floundering, which is personally traumatic, but it’s also detrimental to society. Family breakdown is a surefire way to keep poverty entrenched. Marrying wisely and staying married, on the other hand, is one of the best predictors of moving up the income ladder.

In times of economic uncertainty, the last thing we need is family instability. I hope our society realizes that we’ve had a holiday from reality for the last forty years. We haven’t had world wars—though our military has been busy. We haven’t had depressions. We’ve made incredible economic gains. So people could stop doing what was expected and just do what they wanted.

Where has that gotten us? We’re heavily in debt, with broken families and a ridiculously silly culture. It’s time to say good-bye to silly. Let’s do that in 2012.

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Filed Under: columns, divorce, finances, marriage 5 Comments

How to Avoid Poverty

August 30, 2011 By

'178/365 - Don't Be Blinded' photo (c) 2010, Courtney Carmody - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/Every Friday my syndicated column appears in a bunch of newspapers in southeastern Ontario. Back in 2006, I wrote this column about poverty, and a reader recently emailed and asked me to repost it. So here it is, fresh from 5 years ago! I still like it, too:

With the new government now in place, the demands are sure to start coming soon that Harper tackle the persistent problem of poverty. And there’s no dearth of suggestions of how to “make poverty history”: increase the minimum wage, increase welfare payments, create more make work projects, and let’s get more rent control.

When we talk about poverty like this, though, we’re talking about it as if it’s a virus, lurking around a corner, ready to randomly infect whomever happens to saunter by. But poverty is not random. I know it’s not socially acceptable to say it, but poverty tends to stalk those people who have behaved in ways that make earning a good living more difficult.

Obviously there will always be factors beyond our control, and I hope that Harper implements good economic policies that will relieve the kind of poverty that stalks communities when industry dries up. Too often, though, we’re scared to talk about the personal factors in poverty because it sounds like we’re blaming people. But we have to talk about it if we want to help young people steer clear of poverty’s pitfalls. Those of us who are parents can and should focus on poverty prevention among our kids, since we may hold the keys that the government can’t reach.

William Galston, a University of Maryland Professor of Public Policy, found that following these steps gives you almost a 90% chance of avoiding long-term poverty. First, graduate from high school. Then, if you don’t want to go on to higher education, take a job right away. Any job. Don’t wait for your dream job, but get the experience that Wal-Mart or McDonald’s offers. Minimum wage jobs may not be fun, but they’re usually short-term and can lead to better jobs in the future. Those who are willing to work, even for less money than they would like, find themselves more employable down the road.

While you’re busy looking for those jobs, there’s something you shouldn’t be doing: having a baby. Wait until you are married. Single parenthood is the biggest ticket to poverty there is. Marriage, on the other hand, often acts as a “get out of poverty free” card. Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, in a large-scale study of marriage, found that marriage itself tends to boost one’s income potential. So if you can, steer clear of losers and abusers, find someone stable and kind to marry (I know that’s the hard part), stay married, and wait until you’re married to become a parent.

Finally, stay out of trouble. If you’re in jail, it’s hard to feed your family, and it’s hard to get a job afterwards.

Do these things work? Galston says they do. Only 8% of families who have followed these rules are poor, compared to 80% of families who have not. This doesn’t mean you won’t face occasional lean years, as my mother did after my father left, or as most of us face as we try to get on our feet. But these will tend to be the exception, rather than the rule.

These steps aren’t rocket science, and on the surface they aren’t that difficult. But they’re not that fun, and that’s probably why this advice is often spurned. Many young people suffer from what Galston calls a “magical outlook”: ask them what they’ll be doing ten years from now, and they talk about having a nice house, a great entertainment system, a fancy car, trips to the Caribbean, and more, but they don’t do anything in the here and now to give this a chance of happening. Our kids are taught to dream, but not to do.

Let’s teach them to do. It’s not hard, so let’s say it together: finish high school. Take a job. Don’t have a baby without getting married. Marry wisely. Stay out of trouble. And that’s it. Of course, you probably will still experience rough times, and there are no guarantees. People you love can leave you. You still have to be careful with credit cards, with savings, with spending. But these steps offer you as close to a clear future as anything else we’ve come up with. So don’t ridicule it. Just do it, and make poverty history.

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Living Below Your Means Increases Your Means

April 19, 2011 By

 

Piggy-bank
Photo by Futurilla

I know many of my faithful readers could probably give us all lessons on frugality! Many of you are just so good at making a dollar stretch. I sometimes find it hard to talk about this issue because most of you know that my husband is a doctor. Money just isn’t a concern for us like it is for many others, and everytime I write about how we should spend less I get nasty emails telling me that I don’t know what I’m talking about and I should just shut up. So I often steer clear of the subject.

But I’d like to add my thoughts anyway today, and please don’t send me nasty emails!

First, a little context. I grew up to a single mother in a lower-middle class home for most of my life. Her jobs got better as time went on, but we were never well off. So I learned the importance of working and saving as a teen, and I knew that if I wanted to go somewhere on a trip or if I wanted to buy something big I’d have to pay for it myself. And I did.

When we married, and started having children, Keith was still in residency and making hardly anything at all. The banks were willing to lend us tons of money based on future earnings, but we didn’t take out loans. We lived in an apartment (many of his classmates bought houses with no money down), and we didn’t have a car. I shopped at second hand stores. And during those years of his residency we managed to save a fair amount for a downpayment, so that when we bought our first house we didn’t borrow the whole amount.

The banks would give us $450,000 for a house based on his projected earnings, but we bought one that was 1/4 of that in a regular middle class neighbourhood with lots of kids. It was marvelous! We lived there for nine years until we paid it off and bought a slightly larger home, still in a primarily middle class neighbourhood. Very few doctors live around here.

I’m not saying this to toot my own horn; I’m just saying this because I do believe we’ve practiced what we preach in this area, at least. The one area we spend too much on is travel, having taken the kids on a whole bunch of missions trips, but I think that has lasting impact.

Anyway, here’s the other reason I’m saying this: because we have consistently lived below our means, we’ve managed to save a lot of money so that my husband can conceivably cut back on work in the near future and we could potentially go overseas for a few years for ministry. I still don’t know if that’s where God will lead us, but the main thing for us is that we have the option.

And that’s what living below one’s means does for you: it gives you options. You aren’t tied to a job you hate in the same way because you have a buffer. You can pursue more dreams. You can take some time off. You can give more away.

And living below one’s means has very little to do with income and a lot to do with attitude. You wouldn’t believe the number of physicians in our social circle who are close to bankruptcy. They make a ton of money and they’re not saving it or treating it responsibly. Just because one makes a good income does not mean that one spends it well.

I ran across a few statistics a while ago that I think are quite interesting about the difference between millionaires and non-millionaires. The long shot? Most millionaires don’t buy really expensive things. They’re millionaires because they buy regular stuff. The people who buy the expensive stuff are people who are trying to LOOK like millionaires, not people who actually are.

* Eighty-six percent of all prestige or luxury makes of motor vehicles are driven by people who are not millionaires.
* Typically, millionaires pay about $16 (including tip) for a haircut. (this must be for guys!)
* Nearly four in 10 millionaires buy wine that costs about $10.
* In the United States, there are nearly three times as many millionaires living in homes with a market value of less than $300,000 than there are living in homes valued at $1 million or more.

When we live below our means, we’re able to save more and eventually be worth more, which gives us options. When you live beyond your means, then you’re committing yourself to having to earn a whole lot of money to pay off that debt. You’re limiting your options.

So wherever you find yourself today, with whatever income, remember to live below your means. If you do so, you’ll be acting more like a millionaire than you think! And you’ll be helping yourself immeasurably!

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