Time Flies...

I have been insanely busy lately. Work and personal obligations seem to keep me running from one thing to the rest. When I get crazed like this, I always find myself wondering how people manage when they have kids-- as a single woman, I feel I hardly deserve to complain! But I guess life just fills up with whatever you have to fill it with-- family, a significant other, creative activities, exercise, and necessities like eating, sleeping and earning money.
For most of us, earning money is what takes up the biggest chunk of our day, and it's usually less fun than all the other stuff! So many of us find ourselves wondering about that trade-off: you have to earn money to support the other things in your life, but could there be a better balancing point between money and free time?
I knew someone who took a 20% pay cut in order to cut back to working only 4 days a week. She wanted more time to devote to writing. The writing did earn her a few dollars here and there, but nowhere near what she gave up in salary. It was hard for her to make ends meet, and she sacrificed things that other people probably wouldn't give up, but the choice was worthwhile for her.
For me, working part time isn't an option right now. I could perhaps make a case for it with my boss, and I think I'm valued enough here that they'd consider it if the alternative was me quitting. But I feel like I need every penny I'm currently earning in order to meet my long-term financial goals. I'd like to think I could use any extra "free" time to generate income in other ways, but it doesn't seem like a good gamble to me. The kind of blogging I'm willing to do is never going to turn into a big money-maker, though I'm always impressed that other finance bloggers have managed to go pro. And though I think I have a great idea for a book, which is almost entirely fleshed out in an outline, I know too much about the publishing business to think that it would be likely to make me much money, even IF I could get it published, after the even bigger IF of actually getting it all down on paper!
All this is not to say that I'll give up on these projects-- just that I need to find a way to fit them in while still working at a full-time job. And that means I have to be more efficient!

Since time is money, I'm thinking about lots of ways to waste less of it. I'm not sure how many of these things will make a meaningful difference, but maybe they'll help:

Less media-- I have to do so much reading already, blogs make it even more difficult. I've really cut back on my RSS feeds, and am more selective on what I click through to. I'm also trying to be more ruthless about magazine articles, podcasts, books, etc. If I'm not getting enough out of it, I have to just move on to something else rather than trying to finish it anyway!

More automation-- I've been putting more bills on auto-pay, and letting go of more paper statements. I've always found certain things to be easier with a piece of paper in front of me, but I'm going to try to act on email reminders, and save paper only when I think it's really necessary for tax purposes.

Multi-tasking-- Can I read while exercising? Can I work on the subway? Can I blog at my desk during lunchtime? This is a tricky one-- sometimes I think trying to do too much at once actually ends up wasting time rather than saving it. Therefore:

Concentration-- I'm trying to be less distracted at work so I can finish what I need to do and not have to stay late in the office or be catching up on emails outside the office. The only problem with this is worrying that I'll look like a slacker when I am working within an office culture where few people walk out the door at 5pm! I also need to apply this to other parts of my day: sometimes I get home from work and realize I've just waffled around for a couple of hours without accomplishing much of anything.

Time Off-- I can't just turn myself into a task-churning robot either. I need to allow myself some down time too, and fully enjoy it. Snuggle time with Sweetie shouldn't be cause for anxiety about all the other things that aren't being accomplished during those moments!

Does anyone else have any good tips to share on how to make the most of your time? Have you ever traded money for time?

Finances and the Family: The Earlier Generations

Thank you all for your advice and kind wishes after reading my last post. Obviously the family finance issue is on my mind a lot, and one of the aspects I was mulling over last night was how these things slide from one generation to the next: my mother's finances will affect mine, and mine could affect my niece and nephew. But what about the earlier generations? How did my grandparents' finances affect my mom and dad?

I've mentioned before that my mother grew up quite poor, with parents who divorced when she was a teenager. Her father was a barber-- he died a while back, and I never knew him well enough to know anything about how he spent what little money he made. Her mother is still alive, and seems to live very simply on a small income, I guess from Social Security, plus occasional checks sent by my mother and her 3 siblings. She is remarried, and lives in a small house that her husband bought. The mortgage is paid off. My step-grandfather supposedly has a few thousand dollars saved, but he won't tell anyone where it is-- as in, it's not in a bank, it's just in a coffee can buried in a closet or something. I don't think my mother's parents ever had much spare cash-- but nor did they have debts, as far as I know.

As for my father's parents, I don't think I've ever gotten around to writing much about them, and they are quite a different story.

My father's father was a lawyer. His parents were poor immigrants so he put himself through college and law school. He may have been the only one of their 9 children who got an advanced degree, though one of his older brothers was also successful and was actually in the House of Representatives for a term or two back in the 1930s. Probably because of this government connection, my grandfather ended up working for the Veteran's Administration. I don't know how much money he made-- a decent amount, I'm sure, but nothing like what we hear about corporate lawyers making today. My father has expressed some resentment about the fact that my grandfather volunteered for the Navy during World War II despite being well over the age where he'd have been drafted-- if he'd stayed home, his political connections might have led to an appointment as a judge, but by the time the war was over, his brother was out of office and had no strings to pull.
My father's mother also came from immigrant parents of what I guess you'd call a white-collar working class background (her father was a machinist but became some sort of supervisor). My grandmother graduated from high school but never attended college. She never worked until after my grandfather retired, when she did some part-time clerical work for her sister (who has an interesting story herself, which I'll have to tell later.)

But here's the kicker: my grandparents had 6 children, my dad and 5 sisters. They put them all through college and may have made some contribution to graduate school/law school costs for at least one or two of them. (3 of my father's sisters have advanced degrees.) Can you imagine paying for all that in today's world, on a middle-class government lawyer's salary? Education just cost less back then, and though all the kids went to Ivy League/Seven Sisters colleges, most of them were able to live at home while going to school, which must have been a big savings. And I suppose my grandfather would have paid for some weddings too, though I imagine they'd have been small.

How else did they make ends meet? My grandparents definitely had a depression mentality, and never threw out a scrap of food. But they weren't crazily frugal-- my grandfather gave my grandmother plenty of jewelry, and he played golf (though at a public course, not as a member of a private country club), and they had a comfortable house in an expensive area. They didn't really travel much, but I remember them taking a couple of winter vacations. I'm sure there were many years when money was tight, but by the time they were retired, they had a nice life.

My grandfather went into a nursing home and lived there for a few years til he died at the age of 90. My grandmother continued to live at home for about 13 more years, with part-time care from an aide for about 2 or 3 of those years. Then she went into a nursing home for about 9 months before dying at the age of 94. In the later years of her life, she gave each of the 6 children a few thousand dollars a year, and after she died, they each got a share of the proceeds from the house-- it sold for about $500,000 at the top of the real estate market, so each of the kids ended up getting over $80,000 in the end. (This inheritance makes up almost 1/3 of my father's current net worth.)

It just boggles my mind that they managed to raise so many kids and live so long and pay for nursing home care yet still not run out of money. My grandfather may have had a really good government pension. Maybe he invested well. He definitely left everything set up for my grandmother after he died, with some kind of annuity in her name. I would not say my grandparents were wealthy, but they were definitely prosperous.

The "American Dream" is for that kind of prosperity to increase in each succeeding generation, not evaporate. Yet that evaporation is what seems to be happening in my family. My parents have savings now, but they'll likely be gone well before they're even in their 80s, and then they'll have to tap the equity in the house. My sister and her husband are in their mid-30s with credit card debt and have probably barely made a dent in retirement savings or college funds for their kids. Our family's situation could be far worse-- some of stories told by commenters on this site make me feel like I have no right to complain. I guess it's just sad to look back at those early generations, on both sides of the family: their hard work after starting from nothing, their frugality, their willingness to live with less. They passed on an amazing gift to us, a gift that went well beyond money itself. I think they'd be sad to see that gift wasted.

Respect for Money

One theme that emerged in the comments on my "Money Neurosis of the Week" post was that waiting for change of even one penny indicates that you have respect for your money. From the comments:

... he credits that respectful approach to money as one of the reasons he is wealthy...

... the penny probably doesn't matter much... but the stewardship attitude pays off on a larger scale because it affects every part of your life...

I think this is very true and very important. It's an idea I've gotten at a little in previous posts-- sometimes a penny is not just a penny, it's symbolic of your larger relationship to money.

It's easy to make fun of frugality-- it can seem absurd to worry about saving tiny amounts of money that even when you total up their effect over the course of the year, do not represent a large portion of your total budget. Sometimes people want to ignore trying to save pennies, preferring to instead focus on earning more dollars. But the two should not be mutually exclusive, and in some ways, saving pennies may be more important-- it's all about attitude.

Money is a powerful thing. We can do so much with it when we have it, and a lack of it can be so devastating. Most of us also spend a huge amount of our time working hard to get it! We all spend a good portion of our lives using money, and worrying about money. Even those who are born independently wealthy aren't immune to this.

If money is so important and so woven into our lives, we should respect it. Respecting your money means respecting yourself, your time, and the loved ones who may depend on you, or help you in hard times. It means respecting the freedom money can give you, and the power money can give you to help others. If I pick up a penny off the street, it's not about needing that particular penny-- it's about trying to value all money for what it can achieve. It's about remembering that I am not above having to be concerned about money.

You could take this too far-- this doesn't mean we should worship money, or see money as the only important thing in life. And it doesn't mean money can never be spent on frivolous pleasures. But by saving a few pennies, we can "practice" a mindful, respectful attitude towards taking care of our money, and hopefully it will help us take care of our dollars just as well!

What does respecting your money mean to you?