Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

It's all Go-Gos, all the time here at F.F.H.Q. Shiner and I leave at an unreasonably early hour tomorrow for a two-week vacation. I will be updating very little, if at all, until we return. But I've got it in my for one more substantive post before we leave the land of ice and snow for more hospitable climes. And more, er, cerveza.

Over the past week, as I've been delegating portions of my project tasks to my colleagues to handle in my absence and reminding others that if I have drafts out to them for review, they must speak their edits now or for two weeks hold their peace. Maybe it's because my coworkers are lawyers, and by definition a little Type A, but people could not believe that I would be gone for two weeks straight. Everybody thought it was great that I was doing it, seemed jealous, even, but most of them seemed unable imagine taking such a long vacation themselves. Some of them will spread their days out and take a few long weekends here and there, and others will just fail to max out their paid vacation this year.

Let's think about that for a second. Well-paid individuals, who as a matter of policy get between three and four weeks of paid personal vacation per year, and who could probably take more than that without anyone caring so long as they were meeting their billable hours for the year, think they cannot--not even with forethought and planning--miss ten consecutive days of work. The hell? What is the point of having all that vacation if you don't feel free to use it?

I have always thought of paid vacation days as sort of like civil rights. The "use 'em or lose 'em" principle: it's much easier for everyone if you don't rock the boat by claiming what you're entitled to, but there's no fun in that. And furthermore, you have a responsibility to exercise your rights (read: vacation) to keep the whole system from getting rusty, and to make sure your fellow citizens (read: coworkers) can continue to use theirs. Just like free speech is one of the bennies that theoretically comes with life in the US of A, your paid vacation is part of what you sign up for when you take your job. It's part of your compensation package, like a salary or 401(k) match. Not using those days is like gifting back part of your pay. Oh no, really, I have no need of this! I just couldn't possibly take it. Can you imagine someone doing that with part of their paycheck? No way! So what makes vacation so different?

I have one friend who thinks it's a function of egotism. He advised me early in my career: "Take a vacation. You're not that important." He thinks a refusal to take vacation to which you are nominally entitled is an act of person who wants to believe that without her personal expertise, the whole department will quickly go to hell. By leaving your vacation days on the table, you are refusing an opportunity to be proven wrong in that belief. Let the false sense of importance persist!

And although I think he's a bit harsh in blaming only the individual employee, I do think he's got a point. Though the atmosphere might suggest otherwise, a well-run company can handle periodic planned absences of more than a couple of days. My job might periodically feel like a tilt-a-whirl missing a couple of key bolts, in which I must hold on tightly at all times lest I be thrown in a mangled heap onto the midway, but ultimately it's just a job. My expertise is not fungible, exactly, but neither am I unique and special snowflake, whose day is filled with tasks no other mere mortal could conceive of accomplishing. My coworkers help pick up my slack, and I help pick up theirs. We all take our vacation, and we all come back ready to line up for the tilt-a-whirl again.

My dad, who travels a lot for work, can't stand the thought of using all of his vacation time in a given year for yet more travel. But he takes his days all the same. He catches up on laundry, takes long weekends with his grandson in the city, watches live broadcasts of major international track and fields events that require him to get up at absurd hours for days at a time. He savors the fact that he can wear his mangy flannels all day long and never has to even look at a pair of Dockers. Simple pleasures, simple freedoms.

Don't let lack of travel funds or energy dissuade you from taking your vacation this year. That time is yours. Use it to recharge yourself. Consider it your duty to your fellow citizens. Pretend you are French.

Lenten Check-in

When I committed to Compacting for Lent, I made a number of caveats. I was going to let myself buy a couple of beachy items I thought I would need for an upcoming Caribbean vacation: shorts, a swim suit, and a rash guard to keep my pasty skin from burning as we snorkel and surf.

As it turns out, I didn't need all those caveats. The outdoor sports store, unbeknownst to us, stops carrying sunshine gear like rash guards during snowboarding season, so buying one of those here is not even an option. And my shorts do still fit me, as does my one piece bathing suit. I have a couple of bikini bottoms that fit slick, though I could do with a slightly larger bikini top (am I a late bloomer, or just more modest than the last time I wore that thing?) But alas, REI does not sell orphaned tops for two-pieces, and all the tops at Target are those irritating halter styles that always give me a welt where the knot digs in to the back of my neck. Maybe we can find a nice nude beach an obviate my search for a top piece.

At any rate, either through lack of need or lack of opportunity, no pre-trip retail for me. Through no effort of my own, the Compact lives on.

Quick Hits Tuesday #6

Gender neutral baby clothing can save you money, keep your kid looking damn cute, and help you fight the power all at once. As someone who was raised in mustard yellow and brown striped unisex playsuits as a kid (and hey, I turned out OK. Stylish, even!), I can wholeheartedly amen Jennifer over at Queercents.

Guest poster Ginger at Consumerism Commentary asserts that smart women hook up with financially savvy partners. By her definition I may not be a smart woman, but Shiner's learning fast. And she's right on the fact that if he weren't, we shouldn't be getting married. But hilarious (and satirical) counterpoint at Feministing: Marrying anti-feminist "Take Back The Date" campaigns with Lori Gottleib's recently published and much discussed "I should have made babies with anyone who would have me, so don't you make the same mistakes!" piece, Ann proposes a new "Take Back The Loser" ad, featuring Barney Gumble of Moe's Tavern/The Simpsons fame.

Interesting disucssion in the comments of this post at Boston Gal's Open Wallet. College grad Adam Shephard began playing at poverty for the sake of the great American nonfiction book and he managed to wageslave his way to modest assets in eleven months time. At that point the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune became too much to bear, and Shephard wanted out, so he claimed victory over poverty before non-ironically accessing his middle class family's safety net and opting out of foodstamps, day labor, and beater trucks for good. But how might Shephard's bootstrap narrative have been different if he'd been a woman?

Feministe's Jill on the Lady Tax: a luxury tax targeting services used almost exclusively by women.

The Dratted Engagement Ring

Living Almost Large theorizes today that her friends don't mean it when they say they would accept an inexpensive engagement ring. I don't know her friends to know whether she's right or not, but her post does remind me that man, I really hate the emphasis Americans put on their engagement rings. Haaaate it. Hate the obsession with "needing" to have them at all, having them large enough, sparkly enough, expensive enough. Diamond-y enough.

But the way I feel about the institution of the engagement ring--and we'll get to my problems with them in a minute--is nothing compared to the pissed off feeling I get when some tangential acquaintance looks at me with pity when they ask about my engagement and then notice my diamond-less finger. So consider this the monologue I am too polite (or too pressed for time as we ride in the elevator between floors 22 and 26) to give in those moments.

I don't have an engagement ring. At least, I don't wear anything that "reads" socially as an engagement ring but, yes, I nevertheless am sure that he does still want to marry me. No, thank you, I do not need your hugs or a sympathetic ear. I am quite happy to not have a golf ball strapped awkwardly to my ring finger or to have "insurance" in case he backs out. And by the way, eeeew to that last part. You must be very embarassed to have said that out loud.

Not having an engagement ring has saved us at least a thousand dollars that we can invest in our life together rather than in a geologically freakish piece of carbon set in a glassy chemical configuration that has never, since I was the smallest girl, given me any amount of aesthetic joy.

Not having an engagement ring has kept me from having to spend mental and karmic real estate fretting over whether some kid in Sierra Leone is short one leg, or whether some watershed in Central America is running with diluted cyanide, so that I could have a sparkly and immediately depreciating asset on my finger.

Not having an engagement ring allows me to opt out of sexist notions of man as provider and woman as passive ornament, and the sexist custom that publicly marks a woman as having been purchased and thus "off the market" while requiring no such public statement of relational or sexual non-availability by her male partner.

Not having an engagement ring prevents Shiner from having to display his masculinity and creditworthiness for scrutiny and comment by whoever happens to sit next to me on the train.

And not having an engagement ring leaves room on my finger, as well as Shiner's, for my dead grandparents' wedding bands, which each of us are wearing during our engagement because frankly, the hope that we can sustain the kind of relationship that wore this slim band skinny over 43 years of dedicated wear is more compelling than the most well-funded DeBeers ad campaign.

So you've really got to stop feeling sorry for me. Your superficial is showing.

Smart Couples Finish Rich Chapters 6 & 7: Boring Money and Awesome Money

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.

OK, so David Bach does not call them "boring money" and "awesome money," those are just the helpful captions I have appended to Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 covers boring money: emergency funds, life insurance, health insurance, disability insurance, and wills (your security basket, in DB's terms). Chapter 7 (your dream basket) covers awesome money: anything your little heart could desire.

I didn't blog last week about boring money because frankly, it's boring. But here's the quick and dirty summary: by the time we get married we will have (unless things go very awry) over three months of expenses in an emergency fund. I'd saved that before the end of 2007 and then had (surprise!) an emergency. And of course, our shared expenses will be higher than mine are alone, with two cars to insure, two sets of student loans, his credit card payments... Both of us have life insurance through work, and some cash value policies that were bought for us by family members when we were kids--not a choice I would have made myself, but also not my money. We both have health insurance through work, and we've got plenty of time to figure out whether we'll consolidate that after the wedding. I have long-term disability insurance (though I could use more), and Shiner doesn't--not something I'm concerned about, though, since I'm the primary wage earner. We need to figure out what we're doing for a will, but I'm willing to wait on that for a few months or a year. Put that on the to do list along with the health care directive.

Now for the awesome money! Awesome money is for all the fun things that aren't strictly necessary but that you want just the same. First on the list is the wedding, probably because we're in the thick of it and it's easy to see the light at the end of that tunnel. Man, it will be nice to acheive a goal. Some of the others are standard: travel, house remodeling projects, certain specific toys like Shiner's dream motorcycle and my dream Vespa, or his ever-expanding homebrew setup that produces delicious things I like to drink.

The one I am most excited about, though, is the cabin. For years, my earth nerd long-term dream has been to buy a piece of land in the woods and build my own small straw bale house to be a vacation home and family retreat, and possibly in time a primary home. Luckily, Shiner is on board with this goal, and bonus points because he's handy, too. First steps will be to buy the land and volunteer one one or two stale bale house-raisings, and then to try it for ourselves. It's a very long-term goal--the biggest, most expensive, and most daunting goal on the list--but one I'm so excited about.

One thing this chapter doesn't do a very good job of addressing is how to balance the competing interests inherent in saving simultaneously for multiple goals. I have been keeping two awesome money goals in the air at the same time: wedding savings and travel savings. I'm also saving for emergency money and retirement, and paying down debt as well, but add in many more goals and all of a sudden it becomes too diffuse. There's so much less money to go around, and progress on any one of them seems so slow. Personally, I do much better focusing hard on a couple of goals in sequence rather than consistently putting smaller amounts of money in lots of little pots. But I have a feeling that's not going to get me my cabin.

Wedding As Status Symbol

This week, I put down the deposits on our ceremony venue and stationery, and bought my dress and shoes (both vintage, per the Compact, and both amazingly beautiful). So I have got wedding on the brain.

One thing that's been very clear from the beginning of our planning is that it would be very easy to spend ungodly amounts of money on this thing, and there seems to be an assumption even from the most well-meaning quarters that we will do so. People have this idea that "the average American wedding costs $28,000!" or they have a certain vision of how a wedding ought to be, and once you have that number or that picture in your head, it's difficult to talk yourself down to something that doesn't involve a down payment.

But the $28k figure is suspicious, at best. First, the survey pegging that as the average cost was conducted by the Conde Nast Bridal Group, publishers of Brides, Modern Bride, and Elegant Bride. Notice a theme? That's right, all of their publications depend on an audience of engaged women willing to spend about $10 per magazine for hundreds of pages of ads showing them how to spend $3,000 or more on a dress. So let's just say they have an interest in skewing that "average" number high. Really, really high.

Second, what does that number do? As Rebecca Mead points out in her book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, publicizing the $28k cost as "average" means plying couples (and their parents, who frequently have deeper pockets and are paying for some portion of the tab) with the idea that if they spend less than $28k, their wedding will be below average. We can't have a below average wedding! We might have a below average marriage! Clever trick, that.

And all these movies and TV shows and magazines that show the "normal" wedding as involving a huge frothy dress, a sweeping entrance, a grand reception with sitdown meal? The idea that this is the most specialest day of your life, that it has to be perfect, that the bride is a princess and her groom a dashing prince? They reinforce the idea that this is the way things are supposed to be done, and if the way it's supposed to be done costs bank, you've got to suck it up and make bank or You. Are. Doing. It. Wrong.

Those expectations make it easier for even conscientious couples to overspend: if that's what you've seen at every wedding you've ever been to, if that's what your parents are pressuring you to have, if you feel like you can't legitimately ask far-flung family and friends to travel a long distance at great expense without at least feeding them steak and whiskey, for godsake, it takes a steel spine to say No, we do not choose to spend money in a way that is so out of step with our everyday life.

My question to people with longer memories than mine: when did this come to be? I don't doubt that there have always been people who spent lavishly on their (or their children's) weddings. But for a very long time, those people weren't normal, economically speaking: royals, nobles, wealthy merchants, the idle rich. Normal people, the middle class and poorer folk alike, got married in ways that resembled every other day of their lives. A more dressed up, joyful, public day, for sure, but my understanding is that getting married didn't used to mean pretending you were Anastasia Romanov or Miss America. At least in my family, it meant wearing your nice clothes, exchanging some touching words and a simple band, and afterwards having cake and punch and finger sandwiches in the church basement or your great auntie's living room. Decidedly not bank.

That's what my grandparents did. Theirs were weddings that were congruent with their means and their lifestyles. But we don't need to go back two generations to see that the outsized expectations people have of weddings are a new phenomenon. The Conde Nast shows an increase of 100% in wedding-related spending between 2006 and a decade previous.

It's not just that the traditional line items are getting more expensive, though they are. There is also a whole new set of norms compared to the conventional wedding of the pre-war era: the all-day photography coverage rather than the standard portraiture shots, the wear-only-once dress rather than the nice outfit--maybe new, maybe not--that could be worn again, the DJ plus the band, the sit-down meal for hundreds of guests, the favors, the limo, the "destination wedding," the "black tie" dress code, the gift bags to be placed in the hotel rooms of out-of-town guests. These are not just things hocked in the pages of advertiser-driven wedding magazines to women who (hooray!) get to feel inadequate and expectation-saddled in a whole new way. Of course not everyone who gets married these days does all of these things, but not a single one of these items would be commonly seen as outre, and doing all of these things would not be remotely conspicuous or noteworthy. What is up with that?

I am not interested in criticizing people who make these sorts of choices. How hypocritical would that be, with us hiring a photographer with assistant for eight hours of coverage? But I do think it's worth it to criticize the way in which couples are pushed to make those choices unthinkingly, and also worth it to think of whether the expectations we might have as guests are fair or warranted. There is something wrong with the fact that these costs are seen as across-the-board normal, rather than as indulgences to be chosen with care based on one's priorities and means.

I got a panicked email from a friend of mine a few months ago, asking me to look at an online retail listing for a suit and tell him if that was OK for a "black tie" wedding he'd been invited to. The guy didn't know how to dress for a black tie event because newsflash! Unless he is a Gatsby enthusiast or the son of a socialite, no contemporary twenty-something man is likely to have ready access to a tuxedo. At root, it's very costly play acting of an imagined social status to throw a "black tie" wedding when the couple getting married have never before had a "black tie" occasion save their senior prom.

Maybe I will go down as the world's ultimate wet blanket for saying so, but weddings that are so astronomically out of alignment with a couple's normal life are cheesy and grasping. I don't care if your parents are paying for it, I don't care if it's what you've always wanted. I don't care that, theoretically, you are only going to do this once and you don't want to feel like you missed out on any aspect of the fairy tale party. If saying so makes me mean, I don't care about that, either. A wedding can be a status symbol, just like owning the McMansion or tooling around in the leased Jag. And it's no more admirable or wise to have a status symbol wedding you can't yourself afford than to have a status symbol house or a status symbol car that is beyond your means.

So what are we doing about it, Shiner and me?

First and not at all intuitively, we're giving in. There are going to be a number of things that, while not legally, religiously, or ritually neccesary we are going to want to have. That's OK, we're products of our culture. But we are giving in selectively, based on what we most value and based on what we can afford. So jewel-encrusted engagement ring, no. Scads of photography, yes. Bouquets and attendants, no. Fancy, delicious cake, yes.

Second, we are paying for everything ourselves, based on what we can comfortably afford. Not accepting money from our parents has a number of pleasant side effects, among them making sure they we're not inflating this event beyond what is really important to us just because we suddenly have more "free money" available to spend. Our budget allows us to have plenty of indulgences, but we cannot have them all. If we could afford less, we would spend less, and we would still end up just as married and ultimately just as happy. Our families and friends have made numerous suggestions and voiced several expectations about what we will or will not be doing, but we cannot afford to do everything they want. That's fine. It's thoughtful of them to try to be helpful, but it's our responsibility to commit to no more than we can afford.

Third, the rule of the day is What Would Grandma and Grandpa Do ("WWGGD?"). We're focusing on the ceremony, and as a result we're deliberately keeping the reception low-key and relatively inexpensive. Shiner is wearing a nice suit he can wear again and again. My dress could also be reworn, though honestly I'm more likely to save it for eventual donation to a vintage textile or fashion history collection--it's really that amazing. We're having blank letterhead stationery made so we can handwrite our invitations and thank you notes and use any extras for everyday notes and letters (we are both paper nerds). We're not doing anything that feels unimportant to us, and we're being very deliberate in sussing out exactly what is important to us--and why.