On budgets

At JPU, Spring 2009 ends neatly with the cruelest month. Fearful symmetry, that. You know what else is fearful? Well, that would be me, contemplating my American Express statement. Though a mere thirty days hath April, I blew the crap out of my budget last month. By the time my statement cuts some time next week (and the shifting closing dates are yet another reason I hate Amex), I will owe $638.47.

That sum may not seem like much, but if I pay it in full—and because I hate Amex, I refuse to revolve a balance—I may not be able to pay off Sallie Mae once and for all in June, as I have been planning to do for the past three years.

As my choice of profession might suggest, I’ve never been great at handling money, but one of my dumbest financial decisions, spread out over four years, was to take out student loans. While my program did fund me, our funding was risible. Most of us took jobs in addition to our TA or RA stipends. Others were supported by significant others who earned decent incomes. Well into their thirties, many were accepting money from their parents. All three of these options would have been so distracting to me that I suspect I would never have finished had I accepted any of them.

Cue Aunt Sallie. I guess I was somewhat conscious of the rule about not taking out more in loans than you expect to earn in your first year on the job, because across the four years, I took out “only” $34,000. With fees and interest, this number blossomed miraculously into almost $45,000. (I kept all my documents, do not fear math, and am therefore convinced there was an error in calculating the balance, but no one will cooperate with me—and now that I’m so close to paying it off, there’s no incentive to cooperate with me.) The latter number was, in fact, only a little more than my gross income as a VAP at Notwilliams, but moving twice more; furnishing new apartments with non-studenty furniture; buying clothes for different climates; and going on exotic vacations each winter to San Diego, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC (that’s MLA, for those of you playing the home game) swelled my credit card balances to five digits, which I did not pay off until a little over a year ago.

Since then I have been running every possible expense through American Express, just for the cash back, even though I know I’ll never earn back the interest I’ve paid those fuckers. (It would have been Citibank, but I never felt right about them; I wasn’t surprised that they failed their stress test.) I’ve also been paying every spare penny to Sallie Mae, who according to my spreadsheet should be out of my life on June 1, which is a vast improvement over my original spreadsheet years ago, which had forecast my extrication from debt in 2010.

In the mean time, I have secretly become one of those smug frugalistas who are now exploiting their fifteen minutes on every talk show and blog. I seldom drive; I don’t eat meat and seldom eat out unless the meal is somehow subsidized; I grow my own herbs, frequent farmers’ markets, and split a share in a CSA; I replaced all my light bulbs with CFLs; I clip coupons for things like shampoo and toilet paper, for which I pay pennies on the dollar, if I pay for them at all (the last time I “bought” shampoo, I was paid 49¢ before tax to take two bottles of Garnier Fructis out of the store); and, as I’ve blogged often, I live in a crappy apartment. For my troubles, I am closing in on the freedom not to send each paycheck to someone else.

This regimen worked well enough for three years. However, April found me restless. Like a weary dieter, I just let myself go. For a couple of weeks, the only way I could get any work done was to make myself a spectacle (in my own mind) at the local coffee shop. I also seem to have become a magical fairy of love and fertility, because I’m suddenly surrounded by people celebrating weddings and babies, and accordingly have spent the month buying gifts. May promises to be more of the same.

Just as there are budgets for money, so there are budgets for time, and mine has just quit working. In April I have crossed little off my longer-term and even some of the short-term to-do lists. Not that I’m that surprised: I’ve had this problem since January if I’m being honest. They say that debt is slavery, but I find that metaphor more than a bit melodramatic, though I can relate. Still, debt is certainly a drain on one’s finances. For me, stress has been the drain on my time. My third-year review was such a stressful experience that I would come home after my classes and spend the evening scrubbing out the grout in my kitchen when I had planned to revise a gnarly chapter whose argument I just couldn’t put in order. Manual work was somehow therapeutic, whereas writing just convinced me I was a fraud, the silliness of whose “research” would be exposed by committee-wide scrutiny. Clean grout is a tangible, visible outcome; a less-atrocious paragraph is a result visible but unseen by me. Besides, part of me really believed that the university would find some reason to can my ass—we’re in recession, dude; bureaucratic procedure be damned!—and I’d better get used to manual work.

I needn’t have worried, having sailed through my review, but I haven’t accomplished what I had intended, and now I’ve run clean out of April. It’s just as well. I’ve been ready to shake the dust of April off my heels for some time now. Get ready, May. Here I come.