Plastic bags and their replacement

Sometimes, I have to wonder about my ability to think. A couple of months ago I was working on the idea of replacing plastic with reusable bags but found myself stymied by the cost factor. Plastic $.03, reusable $.90. No contest right? But last night T. and I were discussing the costs of something or other and it dawned on my that I had been missing the forest because I was looking at the tree. We use 40 cases of plastic bags a month at a cost of $600. Used and gone, I suddenly realized. Replaceable bags however will last years.

If the above post interested you:

Wow! Things are moving now
Paperless?
Some sense, cents, scents . . .

Still the Flow . . .

Did I say double? I meant to say, since that was the beginning of something that was out of control, my credit debt began to grow exponentially. I had married this time to have peace in my life. Which translated into whatever it took to make her happy is what we did. New car, buy a house, three times a year trips to visit her folks in Canada or Florida,dance conventions several weekends a year,too. Not that I didn't enjoy it. I love to travel. I like the west coast of Florida in April and the snow in Canada on temporary basis. I liked feeling that I was a part of something besides my work which suddenly came to a screeching halt when I decided to retire early and get out on my own. But something had to pay for all this, even when your credit limit is $35K per card. One day I realized I was borrowing money to pay monthly minimums of $650. I was maxed out and so was she apparently. I discovered that she was more interested in her newly acquired inhertitance than in staying married. The credit debt was in my name. So long, sayanarra, and by the way, have you ever heard of bankruptcy?

Going With the Flow, continued . . .

At the time it seemed like the best plan. I had been living alone for years. My son grown enough to know what he wanted at 18 had moved to Santa Barbara several years before. And finally, I had packed up all my books and left the noise of the city for a small town on the edge of the ocean. I needed a change I guess. I needed something emotional maybe. I needed, at the bottom of it to be in something that mattered. Anyway, those turned out to be the wrong kind of reasons. I bought a car. I began to remember how a car actually owns you. Maintenance, repair, insurance, gas, parking fees . . . I hated it. I let my wife drive it while I still rode my bike to work 20 miles each way. But we had to have a house to live in. I'd always rented, like the main character in the John Barth's The Floating Opera, preferring to pay as I went rather counting on a future.

But rent for a two bedroom house is three times the cost of a studio. Furniture, hell, I'd done with just a bed, table and chairs, board and brick book shelves for years. Now we needed a couch, refrigerator, washer, dryer, things and more things, a second car. Then she didn't like her job primarily because she had to work during the summer while I still, now with the use of credit, hit the beach. By the time we split, I was $10,000 in debt and totally stressed. At least she took one car and most of the furniture, and of course my favorite albums.

I began a single life again with an extra room to rent and a futon to sleep on. Luckily, I had always ridden my bike so I found myself slowly finding my old level of comfort but with one significant change. I had gotten used to using credit to pay for things. While I wasn't paying attention, I had moved into a social world that necessitated clothes of a certain style. No more sandals and bare feet. I found that if I wanted I could maintain this life style and take my summers off too. Just use credit cards and pay the minimum. What was worse was in a couple of years I married for the third time. And all my expenses more than doubled.

Twenty Dollar Bill

John heard her voice before he saw her but the picture that flashed into his mind wasn't of her but of what had happened last night. The fire had burned down and the coffee was heating. The large ground level billboard they sat behind screened them from the passing traffic though the sound of it washed around them with an ocean like roar.

"I'm thinking it's time I headed out." May said.

"What you mean, back to Texas?" John mumbled before he could stop himself.

"No, I heard there was work in San Diego. Friend of mine left me a message at the church to come on down. Said the job could be permanent and I could be doing code."

"But, . . ." he had started to say and then stopped because he knew how she loved to work code, solving problems and setting up programs was what made her happy. "So when?" is what he asked instead.

"Probably this Friday. That'll give me time to finish up here and still have time to fine a place down there to stay."

Shit, he thought, as he looked down the library hallway, of all people this was the one he wanted to avoid. His feet however kept him moving toward her voice and now he could see her smile as she looked up from the comfortable leather reading chair she liked and waved hello.

This week I plan . . .

to go with the flow. I liked what I was doing and thinking about last week so much that I am going to keep looking at it this week too. But first I need to explain why I am taking this approach to Personal Finance blogging. I am never very comfortable telling people what to think or what to do. I can give advice but I'd much rather listen and then feed back questions that can help see the topic more clearly.

I don't can food, nor go out of the way to put together recipes, though I am an excellent cook. I prefer to keep things simple. Steamed veggies, I fill the pot and then eat the leftovers for lunch or dinner until they're gone. The same with pasta or with a beef stew in a crock pot. But here's the thing. I could pretend that you've never heard of this stuff and write about like Oh here's a great idea. But it would be a pretense. In life and in my cooking, I season to taste, my taste. I laugh when people ask me how I cooked such a great meal because for me everything is based in experience. First hand.

I read a lot of fiction, and, since T. and I started investing, I am discovering that non fiction writers have become much more literary in their style. Possibly because first person writing has, since the 1990's, been what has been taught in the public school English classes. Or maybe it's because memoir writing has become so popular. But I have found over the years that the more often I recommend a book the less often it gets read. I think its because most people don't like to be told what they should like. Either way, I prefer to tell people about what I'm reading if I am asked or if I feel the need to understand it better myself by writing about it here. Then people can take it or leave it be.

As far as personal finance goes, I know what happened to me as I grew older. There was a time when money was scarce and we ate a lot of potatoes. That was when my family was a wife, a new son, then a new daughter and I was really stretching myself thin between trying to support us and finish college. Then we added a third son. I walked to work, we used the bus if we needed to travel around town, and lived with the entertainment of the radio. Luckily, for us, radio was really good in those days, with jazz hours and radio plays and sports announcers who could let you see the game through their words. And then we had FM before it went commercial. Just about the time I finished my schooling we got a car but I had learned a powerful lesson. You can do what you have to do especially if you are willing to finance it with your own sweat equity. Though I would have laughed in those days if anyone would have suggested such a term for what I was doing working three jobs and going to grad school too.

But though I learned that banks don't help poor people, credit lending companies do, I didn't learn the big lesson about finance all at once. I learned that something in my upbringing taught me to better myself, though I can't really pin down what the something was. After ten years of marriage, we decided that we had different plans, my wife and I, and we went our separate but equal ways. That's when I began to discover what kind of a parent I was, as one son, the oldest, stayed with me and the other two came to visit on the weekends and during the summers.

I grew up mentally in the 70's. I learned that I liked letting people make their own decisions as a teacher and as a parent. I learned that living with the consquences was the best way for independence to develop for all concerned.

Meanwhile, I began living a life from day to day. I worked ten months of the year so I could spend my summers on the beach. I fell back on the old days of no car, no tv, no phone. I rode a 10 speed bike or walked or hitched. I used Grey Hound. But I didn't save for the future beyond each year. I spent it all. Alimony, child support, rent, food and 20% of each monthly check into a savings account for the summer months. Carpe Diem!

Of course, that all ended when I decided to remarry.
To be continued . . .

The Man with the $20 Bill, pt. 2

But now that he'd thought about May, he couldn't get her out of his mind. He knew where he'd find her that's for sure. Down at the Mission, waiting in line for lunch that's where.

When he got to the corner, he deliberated for minute and then began the short trip up to the library. He always went there when he needed to think. Besides, it was as far away from the Mission and May as he could get.

Ms. Turner smiled when she saw the lanky older man pushing the door open and walking towards her counter. He always acts as though he's just here for the books but somehow he always found the comfortable reading chair section first. I wonder if he knows his friend May is already here, she wondered.

Wrap of the Week

A history of money, the topic of middle class salaries, and money and politics have been our talking points this week.



Lets just say we might have gotten sidetracked in our study of money. Somehow, we ended up looking at paper money's beginnings in China. And that left us without too much to say about money and what has happened to it historically. One thing is clear, money is only as valuable as its rate of exchange. Apparently, the first money was metal, presumably iron or copper, both of which were valuable to the warriors of the times. That would be in Greece. Money has changed form over time from metal to paper backed by metal (gold) to paper backed by its printing government's GNP to today's most popular material - plastic. (Oh he was right Benjamin.) It's a VISA world now with the national American debt at Nine Trillion and growing according to the latest govt. statistics. Meanwhile, the middle class may be in the process of being phased out. Recession is rearing its gorgon head, while the Pres and the Fed seem set to lower the interest rate in hopes on stemming the tide. Unfortunately, that wave has already formed and is on the move.


Meanwhile, labor department statics show a consistent decline in employment figures. Out of a job, foreclosed, and being taxed to support a war on just about everything, terror, healthcare, drugs, immigration and their children's obesity, middle class america seems destined to stay in denial while the candidates roam the land with more and more promises and accusations. For years, the middle class has supported their keeping up with the Jones lifestyle by cashing in their equity. Now their equity is dried up like a subprime lender in California. Moreover, the politicians appear to believe that the best solution to everything is to keep on blaming the other side and to keep on politicizing every issue.

"Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money." A Cree proverb that is seeming to be more and more prophetic.

One of my searches into money, brought me to the archives of the Context Institute. In an article first published in 1990 by Alan Atkisson, I found this answer to the question What is Money?

In his search for an answer he first sites

Former astrophysicist Robert Gilman - who for the past dozen years has been pointing his telescope at environmental and cultural systems instead of star systems - noted that money is "a convenient way to lose a lot of information." When you buy a new shirt, you have no way of seeing the cotton fields, oil wells, plastics factories, and impoverished Asian laborers who contributed to its production, because the money effectively hides all that."

This reminds me of the travails of several celebrities who have discovered to their dismay that their famous name was being used to sell sweat shop products. Anyway Atkisson went on to quote another source for a definition.

"Money is just life-energy," says Joe Dominguez, a former Wall Street analyst who writes and teaches about personal economics.. We each have only so much lifetime, and we seem to spend about a third of it converting it into money, usually through jobs. We spend another third of our lives spending the money, and another third tossing and turning in our sleep because we're worried about money."

I began to see that Joe's definition could have a revolutionary impact on one's attitude toward money and work - but I wanted something still deeper. When pressed, Joe told me a story about a remote Mexican village where, periodically, there was no money - not a single peso in the whole town. Under those conditions, Joe reported, people still invent money: "I'll give you three hours of my time for a couple of those fish," they might say.

I was puzzled. Why didn't they just give the fish, and their time, to each other? That's when it hit me: the dangerous truth about money. It's the opposite of a gift. A gift is an expression of love and trust and community. Money, therefore, is an expression of our distrust and fear, and our basic separation from each other. It's not a "measure of value." It's a measure of our lack of love.
They say that money is the root of all evil. But maybe that's backwards: maybe evil is the root of all money.

Atkisson's article was preceded by another even more interesting but I'll let you read it on your own.