Tunnel at the end of the light
Sunday, July 20, 2008


You know what is hard? Making money with money. Cheese and rice on Friday, as my non-swearing grandmother used to say. Where and how can one plant a savings where it will grow? The stock market? Yikes! Real estate? Arrg.
In the last eight years, both of those options took turns collapsing and siphoning off all the equity we poured into them. What’s left? The mattress? Idle money shrinks with inflation and the dying US dollar.
I don’t have much spare money to plant, so I can’t be investing in art. We must be discerning.
Susan and I recently visited a financial planner. We spent two hours hemming, hawing and strategizing. We came out with a ragged plan, but a plan nonetheless.
Here are the three key options considered: (1) pay off high-interest loans, (2) avoid taxes by deferring salaries, (3) budget expenses by dropping our standard of living. Any money left over goes into a money market or other low-return financial service that forever scrambles to catch up to inflation.
Here are the three key obstacles we discovered: (1) our high-interest loans are not credit cards, but mortgages for hundreds of thousands of dollars that are not easy to pay off and nearly impossible to sell off, (2) avoiding taxes by deferring salaries involves investing in the volatile stock market in 403 and 401 plans, (3) our standard of living already has us growing our own vegetables, watching movies at home, and abandoning our roles as community fashion icons. Any money left over goes to prop up a leg on our kitchen table that wobbles.
With humility I admit many others are worse off. Many have lost their homes to foreclosure, their jobs to outsourcing, their entire standard of living to support the war and the plethora of corporate and upper-class tax breaks.
If misery truly loves company, then we should all be happy and in love because these financial woes are nationwide and involve just about every low- and middle-class person. I recently read an AARP article called “Oops! I retired too soon.” It tells of the hardships of retirees and how many are being forced back into the job market, if only to cover their health needs, which deteriorate more quickly because of the renewed work load on their weary bones.
At least we aren’t retired, lucky us. Those poor, poor people . At least we get to work every day, and accept side jobs, and push out our projected retirement dates into our late 60s. At least we have that luxury to comfort us.
At least we don’t have our youth. Woe to the young people just starting out, looking for a job that offers a living wage, benefits, and security. Those poor, poor people. Many are being funneled toward one of the only job opportunities left for today’s youth that offers perks and a pension plan – military service.
One pathetic piece of advice we got was to sell our losing stocks and take the $3,000 annual maximum tax write off. That should only take us a decade or so to clear up, barring any more of my crazy investment schemes like buying phone company stock in Qwest Communications and alternative energy shares.
The alternative energy play has me seriously perplexed. We’re into hydrogen, solar, bio-fuel, coal-to-liquid, even plug-in hybrid, and we bought in long ago, and still the stocks languish like high-hanging fruit. We’ve mitigated our risk with clean-energy RTFs and we’re still losing ground. How can these stocks not go up? I guess we will mass produce electric alternatives as soon as electricity cost as much as gas.
So how can money make money? The system obviously works. I guess we’re just not smart enough to be rich. We chose rewarding, secure careers as teachers, but that income ceiling is too low to ever work ourselves into wealth through labor. We could have been captains of industry or chosen high-paying fields in specialized medicine, but that often takes a century of breeding, grooming, networking, or being born as a mutant genius.
This is America. We are limited only by our dreams, our aspirations and government regulations. With one down and two to go, we should be able to realize our gray lives in some sort of comfort that allows us to sleep at night.
I suspect hanky-panky is the ultimate culprit.
Best-case scenario: we hit the lotto and pay all our debts. That is the desperate dream. Then where do we store the remaining cash? The stock market? Yikes! Real estate? Arrg. Bonds? Zzzz. Venture capitalism? There’s a black hole that sucks up even millionaires and billionaires.
Having money is like having water on a hot day. It’s vital to life, but prone to rapid evaporation when exposed. If you swim in it, you can’t drink it, and if you drink it, it turns to blood, sweat, and tears.