Quick Hits Tuesday #3

Yes, I realize it is Thursday. Three-day weekends throw my game. Here's what we've got in this week's roundup.

Susie on Suze. Sex pioneer Susie Bright looks at what recently outed Suze Orman's sexual orientation has to do with the financial advice she doles out: "What Orman is saying, a tiny bit more openly, in her new book, is that she knows most women's money lives are defined by their dependence on men, be they husbands, lovers, or fathers. She is urging women, rhetorically, to cut it off." This was originally published at Queercents but is worth highlighting again.

At Women's eNews, Susan Feiner makes a case for Social Security, saying relying on a retirement funded exclusively by Wall Street investments puts women at a disadvantage. My take? Hello, Symptom, I'd like to introduce you to my friend Cause.

There are so many reasons I'm glad I never got a boob job. The buyer's remorse of cosmetic surgery.

Mombian Blogs For Choice: "There’s something wrong with an administration that wants to say I must carry a fetus to term if I conceive, but will not give me permission or wherewithal to raise that child in a legal relationship with the person I want, whom I know will be a responsible, loving parent." Amen.

Brooke at Dollar Frugal blogs about using personal finance to strengthen a marriage. For the most part these go for any committed relationship. I disagree pretty strongly with her statement that "even thinking about [divorce] is bad for finances." Not thinking about divorce is idiocy, financial and otherwise. Shiner and I have talked about it at some length and we'll be getting a prenup, which will allow us to decide what we think would be fair rather than defaulting to the state, which I do not fully trust in this matter. Far superior than if we blithely assumed we'd be 2gether 4ever and then turn out to be wrong, heartbroken and money-wise screwed. Better to decide how you would want to treat one another when you're still in love than wait until one or both of you wants to set the other one's personal affects ablaze. Try crafting a fair division of assets and liabilities over the smoldering ashes of your ex's mattress, suckah.

SJean over at Stacking Pennies is single, solvent, and damn proud of it. "I enjoy reading other young female bloggers, especially those who are also unmarried, and thinking how just a couple generations ago our lives would have been unthinkable. Though I admit I've had the emotional support of a relationship, I do rent my own apartment, pay my own bills, and really came into my own financially in a way that I simply wouldn't have had I been legally tied to another person." I'm right there with her. I am so glad I've had experience supporting myself, both financially and emotionally. It's amazingly freeing to know I can do that.

"Passing" as Young

Some people call it "passing;" others refer to it as "covering." It's the phenomenon of downplaying socially disfavored traits, whether they are race, religion, or sexuality, in an effort to blend in with the mainstream.

Kenji Yoshino, a professor at Yale Law School, and a gay Asian man who blends his own experiences of covering with legal analysis on the subject in his book Covering, writes:

We have not been able to see it as such because it has swaddled itself in the benign language of assimilation. But if we look closely, we will see that covering is the way many groups are being held back today. The reason racial minorities are pressured to "act white" is because of white supremacy. The reason women are told to downplay their child-care responsibilities in the workplace is because of patriarchy. And the reason gays are asked not to "flaunt" is because of homophobia. So long as such covering demands persist, American civil rights will not have completed its work.

So that's what I was thinking of today when I read Nice Resume. Have You Considered Botox? Hooray. There's another book out there telling women how not to look old. That's what it's called: How Not To Look Old. Written by a former beauty director for Glamour magazine, a jacket blurb advises, “Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore, it’s critical to every woman’s personal and financial survival.” So older women are encouraged to turn to cosmetic surgery, facial treatments, eyebrow dye, tooth bleach, hair color, clear lip gloss and more (ouch. and $$$$) to "pass" as young. Or better yet, as ageless. Everyone say thank you to that glorious intersection of sexism and ageism.

Isn't that a cute example of being damned if you do and damned if you don't? We all know we're not supposed to look too young or cute, or we will be perceived as being professionally inept and sexually inappropriate. But don't look too old or dowdy, or you'll come off as being outmoded and unsexy. Hew yourselves to that fine line of impossibility, ladies! Aerobecize your bum, but keep your sweater set buttoned.

The article notes:

Many people would shun a book if it were titled “How Not to Look Jewish” or “How Not to Look Gay” because to cater to discrimination is to capitulate to it. But the success of “How Not to Look Old” indicates that popular culture is willing to buy into ageism as an acceptable form of prejudice, even against oneself.

“Ageism is one of the last frontiers of discrimination where people think that a way around it is not to be seen to age, but we would never say that women should try to look or act more male in order to avoid sexism,” said Molly Andrews, a psychologist who is a director of the Center for Narrative Research at the University of East London.

Which is well and good but completely elides the fact that every example given in the article is not about the impact of visible maturity per se. It's about women who are seen as old. Men become distinguished. Women get old. It's just one more way in which we are very lucky.

And of course, a woman's appearance can have a real impact on how she is perceived professionally, and in that way can impact her bottom line. It's true for men as well, but the cosmetic standards are far less exacting, less pricey, and less stringently enforced. My male colleagues can wear the same brown or gray slacks and blue or white button down shirt every day and no one would notice. It's the default business casual uniform for professional men. If I were to pull that, it would be seen as sloppy and slack-ass, because the default business casual uniform for professional women does not exist. Our looks are always open for comment. And now we can't even visibly age. Great.

Congratulations Are In Order!

In our last State Of The Union, sweetie set a goal of making $10,000 in excess of his current salary in 2008, which he will put toward his credit card debt. I am very excited to tell you he got offered a part time position at a store he enjoys and whose products he believes in. Think fanboy levels of love. I don't think this part time job will get him all the way to his $10k goal--he is still hoping to make a change in his full time work, too--but it's a great start and I am so proud of him, and really happy he's lined up a gig he thinks he will enjoy. It will cut into our time together which sucks, of course. But in the long run this is good for both of us. What the heck, maybe with him at work more I will feel compelled to buckle down and kick out some more billable hours, or work on an article. He has made some big changes in the last few months and I am so proud of him.

Oh yes, and though I will always thinks of him as sweetie, he has informed me that this psuedonym is just a little too twee. So sweetie shall be henceforth know as Shiner. Yes, as in Bock.

Blog For Choice 2008: Personal Finance and Pro-Choice Politics

A while back I had a discussion with an acquaintance of mine about what he thought was the single best poverty-alleviating measure in the history of the United States. He was a labor organizer, so I shouldn't have been surprised that he said without hesitation that unions were far and away the most important development in that respect. And probably because he was a he, and consequently he'd never had to make diligently remaining NotPregnant a big part of his adult life, he was pretty surprised when I said I suspected readily available family planning information and supplies had had an even bigger effect on the American family's ability to get ahead and stay afloat financially than the labor movement. After all, what good is making the pie bigger if it can't keep pace with the number of people eating it? The ability to decide whether and when to have children is not just a feminist issue, it is also a financial issue. In some families both here and around the world, access to information and contraceptives may be a question of financial survival. Even in my rather comfortable corner of the world, these resources have been key to planning for my future and taking control of my own economic independence.

For all of you who thought you'd never see the day when Roe v. Wade would be commemorated on a personal finance blog, think about it. Roe, and the cases that came before and after it involving contraception access, have ensured in this country a woman's right to control when they have children, or whether they have them at all. That decision is not just about childbearing, it's about a woman's ability to complete her education or to stay in the workforce, to earn a wage, to avoid economic dependence on or permanent and unwanted legal ties to any partner, to avoid substantial medical risks and the attendant healthcare costs of pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood, to provide adequately for the family she already has or hopes to have someday. Think about that the next time you are standing in line at the pharmacy to pick up your birth control prescription.

On a day-to-day basis, I take my ability to control my fertility for granted. I assume that because I do not consider myself ready to have a child that *poof!* I will not have a child. I had accurate, comprehensive sex education years before I ever had sex. I have never had sex without using at least one form of safe and effective birth control, which I have always been able to obtain for a price I was readily able to pay. I have never had an unplanned pregnancy. Because of when and where I was born, if I had unexpectedly found myself pregnant I would have had options about what to do. Once I'm married, my husband and I will be able to wait to have children until we decide our relationship and our finances are strong enough to take on those new responsibilities. In each and every one of these respects I have been spectacularly fortunate, because those are resources not every woman has, and choices not every woman gets to make. And that's just not right. Women who can't control their reproductive life can't control their economic life.

Smart Couples Finish Rich Chapter 3: Organizing and Goal Setting

Sundays are State of the Union days in our house, when sweetie and I sit down to talk about how we're doing relationship-wise. Sometimes they're quick check-ins, sometimes we get into a little more depth, depending on what we've got going on. In this year leading up to our wedding, we've decided to make finances a central part of our State of the Union talks. Over the next couple of months, sweetie and I will be reading Smart Couples Finish Rich by David Bach and discussing the latest chapter at SOTU.

Chapter 3 Summary
Chapter 3 breaks down into two different sections. The first section lays out Bach's system for getting your financial files in order. When I read Smart Women Finish Rich a couple of years ago, I set up Bach's filing system as my own, and it's served me well. It sometimes takes me longer than I should to get new papers filed. Instead, I stack them on top of the lid of the file box. But my time management shortcomings aside, the system works well for me. I can always find what I need fairly quickly. Doing my taxes the last two years has been a breeze, with all the receipts for charitable deductions, W-2s, interest earnings statements, and energy tax credit receipts all in one place. When sweetie moved in, I shared my filing system with him, so his financial files are all in this system, too. After reading Chapter 3, it was a good reminder to file the items I've been procrastinating on.

The second section (which should probably be a separate chapter) is about setting goals based on the values we each identified last week with Chapter 2. For each value, this chapter asks us to establish a goal with a twelve-month timeframe that in service of that value. Goals with a longer timeframes (retirement, a vacation home, an around-the-world vacation) get addressed in later chapters, which I find to be an artificial distinction. I would love to see more integration of the goal-setting material in Chapter 3 the chapters on retirement, security, and dreams. Because I tend to think big-picture, I had a hard time settling on goals that could be attained within the next twelve months. It was much easier when I thought about my big-picture goals and broke them down into smaller steps and thought about which of those steps I could take in the next year. Bach doesn't address this, though, he seems to assume that his readers are such financial neophytes that their initial set of goals will be simplistic, short-term, and attainable in a short period of time.

It's not all irritating, though. When I read this chapter last time, I was struck by the steps Bach encourages readers to take in order to make their goals specific and actionable. Those were very helpful components for me in setting my last set of goals, and considerations that I've continued to use as my goals have evolved.

What Are My 1-Year Goals?
Before sweetie and I met up to talk about what goals we should set as a couple, I sat down to figure out what goals I would set as an individual in service of my individual values. Since sweetie's and my values are so similar, I thought that we would have a good jumping off point if we each took a stab at it individually.

1) Stability/security: Save three months living expenses in my HSBC account. I had nearly achieved this goal at the end of 2007 when I had to replace my furnace. I chose to replace the air conditioner at the same time, since it was also nearly 20 years old. The energy savings and tax credit (which expired at the end of last year) make it worth it, but it took a bite out of my savings, and I need to replenish my emergency fund. Eventually, I will probably want to save more, five or six months of living expenses. But I can't save that much this year, with wedding expenses, a home equity loan still in repayment, and a other targeted savings goals to reconcile. Three months is a realistic amount. The direct deposit to my HSBC account will probably need some tweaking later this year when I am able to project my after-tax monthly takehome pay for 2008. But for right now, I don't need to do anything to my direct deposit to make progress toward this goal.

2) Flexibility: I can't pay off the balance of my home equity loan this year, but I can get close. I think I can get it down to 25% of its original balance, maybe even a little lower than that, and then knock it out in 2009, well before the balloon payment comes due. Reducing my monthly debt load will give me more flexibility in my current budget, more flexibility in terms of future job options and the ability to absorb a pay cut, and will have a psychological benefit, too, of helping me feel more free. Those first two benefits won't kick in until the whole thing is paid off, but seeing that monthly balance shrink each month always gives me a psychological boost even if the monthly minimum payments stay the same.

3) Marriage/Primary Partnership: This one is a no brainer. Get married! In just under a year! And don't go over budget in the process!

4) Fun: Sweetie and I are taking a big vacation this year. We kind of did it backwards, buying plane tickets for a beachy getaway before deciding to get married. So basically we are taking the honeymoon before the wedding. We both love to travel, though, so we'll probably find a way to take Honeymoon 2.0 in 2009, but right now we have just the one trip planned. The goal is to stay on budget. Speaking of which, we need to make accommodations reservations today.

5) Giving Back: This is a hard one for me to monetize. I have committed to pretty sizable volunteer responsibilities with two different organizations whose work I admire. Of course I plan to continue my donations to those organizations, and to a few others that I've been giving to for a while, but for this year, my focus will be on my time commitments because those are the new, squeaky wheels. I'm going to serve on at least one sub-committee for each group in addition to the steering committee positions I've accepted, with the goal of improving the youth outreach for each organization. Sorry, folks, don't expect to hear much about this goal this year. This is an anonymous blog, after all, and I don't think I can say much more without getting dangerously specific.

I think this is not what Bach had in mind with Chapter 3, but it's the way of looking at it that makes the most sense to me.

What Are Our 1-Year Goals?
Since our values are so in synch, we had a lot of overlap in our goals section, too.
1) Stability/security: We are each going to focus on savings, me on replenishing the emergency fund and him on--ahem--having an emergency fund, and on starting a Roth IRA. This may be his last year eligible to contribute to one because after we get married in 2009 we will probably be over the income limits. Sweetie, god love him, has saved crap for retirement, so I think he put this on his list largely to ease my worried mind. He may not be able to fully fund it with his debt repayment program (see below) but something is better than nothing.

2) Flexibility: We are both going to focus on debt repayment, me on my home equity loan and him on credit card debt. My goal is to pay off $10k of the home equity loan. His goal is to make $10k beyond his normal salary, either by taking on a second job or by changing jobs and taking a higher paid position. He's actively interviewing on both fronts and has a couple of good leads, though the economic downturn is not doing him any favors, unfortunately. The $10k he's shooting for is in addition to the debt repayment money he can squeeze out of his regular paycheck, and would be huge help in helping him get it all paid off.

3) Marriage/Primary Partnership: Married, check. Also, continue to work on our communication skills. This includes the SOTU. We were remarking tonight that being so deliberate about this time has been nice, giving us a chance to reconnect and check in about lots of things, financial and not.

4) Fun: We are going to spend more time outside this year. This includes our upcoming vacation, working on the pergola and the yard, going on walks and "local vacations" around the city and surrounding areas. And although he is skeptical we will do it more often than not, I would like us to have more TV-free nights than TV-watching nights. I hardly watched any TV before I got together with him, and through the dual miracles of reduced time spent watching crap and the DVR (what? watching a Tuesday night show on a Wednesday?) I think this should be totally reasonable.

5) Career: Astute readers will notice that this is from his value list and not mine. Here's the thing. Sweetie's job sucks. He's very good at it, but it's a difficult working environment in which his division doesn't get a lot of support from management, and he's not paid well. That comes with the territory when you work for a nonprofit, but for a lot of people working in the nonprofit world the low pay is made up for the warm fuzzy feelings they get working for a cause they believe in. Sweetie doesn't get warm fuzzies. His nonprofit doesn't save the world or feed hungry people or de-mine regions of the world recently terrorized by military or para-military mercenaries. It doesn't arm children, either, it's not like he's working for NAMBLA; they're inoffensive and in the aggregate a social good, but hard to get misty-eyed about, and the organizational mission does not speak to his heart. Think: The National Alliance for Show Choirs or Friends Of Anachronistic Colloquialisms. So anyway, it's a bad fit, and he's trying to transition to a position like his current job, but in a for-profit company where presumably the huge efficiency gains and triple-digit productivity increases he's eked out (on a contracting budget!) will be better appreciated.

A new job for him would be a good thing for the both of us. He gets a better job and makes more money, and I get a happier partner and less Playstation/decompression happening in the living room on the weeknights when I would prefer a conversation or some smooching.

So his goal is to get a job in the for-profit world. As first steps, he's going to try to find a mentor and learn a new set of skills, most likely through a relevant certificate program he can do in the evenings. That most likely won't happen until the Fall '08 semester, given the timing considerations involved. I'm not yet sure how I can be maximally supportive except by keeping him in hot meals on the nights he has class, but I'm sure we'll figure that out as we muddle along.

But the thing about talking about a big change like this in the context of joint goal setting is that it gives us space to talk about all the weird underlying issues that can be so unhappy to talk about. Things like I feel like I wouldn't be pulling my weight around here without a job and Being depressed and pissed off about your job but in paychecks is far worse than being on student loans and excited about your career again and I feel like I have so many responsibilities and no choices. And sometimes talking about the unhappy bits leads to much nicer things, like We are in this together and We may have to take turns carrying each other, and that's OK and We will be all right and things will get better. So all things considered, the goal setting has been a success. Next up: goal achievement.

MLK Day

In honor of martin Luther King Jr. Day, I encourage you to head over to Money and Values and check out Martin Luther King on Economic Justice.

Also worth a thoughtful read is Martin Luther King On Frugality on the same site.

Carnival Love: Carnival of 20-Something Personal Finance

Dollar Frugal has posted the Carnival of 20-Something Personal Finance and included my post Wells Fargo Take... Four? Five? Ten?. Check it out, the whole thing is done in a haiku theme!