Number Crunching

The average household credit card debt is $14,750. 

Ours is, give or take fifty dollars, $4,000* as of the beginning of February.

*I’m not including student loans.  That’s a totally different discussion, and one I don’t really mind paying. 

For some of you, that might sound like a ton.  For others, it might be nothing.  For me, it’s the average.  I feel like we’ve been paying down cards for a long time, and for the past six months or so we’ve been sitting right at around that $4K.

I want to pay these all off by the end of the year.  My original goal was by July, but with the fun news of my pending unemployment, I’m going to give us an added six months.  I feel like putting this out there is going to keep me honest.

How did we get that much?  I’ve thought about it, and it all comes down to one thing:  transportation.  Any of you who remember my car remember how much of a money suck it was.  I probably had to put in $500-$750 to fix it every year in college.  College, where you don’t really have a job except for pocket money, so those repairs were charged every time.  The day before we moved to Chicago, I literally gave my car away, realizing that it wasn’t even worth trying to get money for it.  I signed the title over to a tow truck driver in the parking lot of our apartment complex in Atlanta.  My credit card had a $3000 balance, due in large part to that dumb car.

I’ve paid that card down to practically nothing.  It took me many years of steady payments, but now it’s got a manageable balance.  I’m pretty proud of it. Then we get to the second part of the transportation question:  plane tickets.  Most of the debt on Andrew’s two credit cards, other than the replacement wedding ring he just had to buy, is due to plane tickets.  And then lately we've gotten things like an overcoat for him - that I think he'll be able to wear for a decade, easily - and a suit for me, which should come into good use when I start to get all those people banging my door down for job interviews.  We don't use credit cards for small purchases.  We never buy groceries on credit, or shoes, or whatever.  We only use them for big ticket items, and it feels like lately those big tickets have gotten bigger.

None of this is unmanageable.  In fact, before I found out that I was definitely losing my job, I had a plan for it.  Which included a chart.  I made a chart with each card we have, and put spaces in it for each month.  I realized that we can afford to pay $800 a month on the various bills.  Each month, I was going to write in the squares what the balance is on each card, and total it up so I saw the ebb and flow.   Once we paid something off, I was going to up the amount I paid for bills that we still owed.

I still plan on doing that, at that rate, until I’m officially out of a job.  Hopefully I’ll find something new before then so I don’t have to stop our rate.  We’ll see.  If I actually do go through a period of unemployment, I’ll ration out what we can afford.  Hopefully by then it won’t be that hard because we’ll have paid it down enough.

I put this out here so that everyone can hold me to it.  At the end of each month, I’m going to put in my new total.  And we’ll see if I actually keep myself on track.

Liquidity

I'm crying right now.  It's the second time I've cried since I found out about all of this.  The first time was Friday, when I found out I wasn't going to get any kind of severance.  Those were angry tears.  This time, though, I'm having actual weak-chin-water-streaming-down-my-face tears.

I want to stay positive, but it's very hard right now.  I'm sorry if this is going to depress anyone to read, but I think I just need to write it down so I don't have to hold it in.  It will probably be very personal, but I can't help it.

Yesterday was the worst day of my working life.  It was a day of hundred-deep lines.  It was a day where you couldn't pick up the stacks of recovery (code word for Shit Other People Can't Be Bothered to Put Away) before you found another six stacks.  It was a day where I told a good friend of mine that I felt like I was running the whole damn place by myself, only to have him say simply, "Because you are."  I had to hold it together for a staff of underpaid, definitely unappreciated people, and though there was a time or two where I definitely didn't act as professionally as I could have - and definitely not as professionally as I should have - I did my job.  I spent my lunch break talking on the phone to a fellow manager who had the good luck to be off and he had to remind me that there is no reason to stress out anymore.   I just need to keep punching a clock until this is all over.

The real reason I'm crying, though, is not about the loss of the store or my job.  It's about the loss of that rarified, wonderful thing that working in bookstores since I was seventeen gave me: the relationships.

I'm sure that I'll keep in touch with people, but it won't be the same as walking in and seeing them every day.  I'll make new friends wherever I'll end up, but I don't see ever finding myself working in a place where practically every person I meet has at least one shared interest: the love of reading.

I met my best friend, the man of honor at my wedding, at a bookstore.  We didn't like each other at first, because we were both way too outspoken and full of it back then (altogether now: back then?), but then we realized that we had an almost perfect ability to speak our minds to one another without fear and an almost uncanny shared love of the same things in pop culture.

I met someone who is among my oldest, longest-lasting friends at a bookstore.  He is my literary soulmate, someone who I have never lived in the same city with for longer than three months but who I've shared more with than just about anyone.  The fact that he and I are still in close contact almost a decade after we first became friends gives me hope for the friends I'm about to lose daily contact with.

I met a writer who makes me laugh and who gets weirdly - and probably only jokingly - scandalized by my comments at a bookstore.  If I didn't have coffee dates with her every week or two, I'd never get anything written these days.

I met a fellow book nerd, a person who makes me eternally optimistic about my ability to read Ulysses one day, at a book store.  To him I say this: our staff pick endcaps are already empty, even at just 20% off.  That proves that we have good choices and that there are people out there who value our thoughts.  We did everything we could, sir.  Keep up the fight.

And I met my husband, my favorite person in the world, at a bookstore.  If I didn't have him to come home to right now, and if I didn't have him to clean up the apartment unprovoked so I would have a day to do nothing but cry and write cover letters, I don't know how I would make it through this.

There are others - so many others - who I will miss seeing every day.  On Friday I played what I called a Fantasy Draft of People We'll Never Have to Talk to Again with a few of these friends.  We laughed so hard I almost peed my pants, just making me realize that I need to have another fantasy draft where I list all those that I'll miss oh so much.

I'm still crying.  Damn it.

Prophecy fulfillment

I was planning on writing about debt today, about where we are and my plan to get us out of it.  But then I woke up this morning and found out that yep, it’s official: within the next month or so, I will be out of a job.  Debt talk pushed aside for next time.

What’s amazing about this development is how many condolences I’ve been hearing.  I’m not ungrateful for everyone’s well wishes, but I also don’t know how to say that I’m fine with this development.  Borders has given me nothing in the past few years to make me feel sad about losing this job, other than the paycheck. 

I’m not going to wax poetic about the loss of all these bricks and mortar bookstores.  The fact is, it hasn’t felt like the Borders that I fell in love with for a long time.  I remember being shocked when I was in college by the selection of critical works or obscure fiction that I could find on the shelves at Borders that I could never find at Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million.  Having worked at Books-a-Million for most and high school and college, moving on to Borders and the up-to-date inventory system was a revelation. 

But that was eight years ago.  I feel like Borders has been losing those things that made me love it so slowly but steadily throughout those years, and within the past year I saw it all pretty much disappear.  I’m not going to mourn the loss of something if it’s been gone for a long time.

When Andrew lost his job last year, I could tell he felt like it was a little bit of a slam on his self worth.  Even though it was an across the board slash of his position, he felt like it was something he should have been able to prevent.  I know at least one other coworker who feels that way now, and to those people I just have to remind them:  no matter how many copies of “The Help” we could handsell, no matter how precise our inventory processing was, and no matter how beautiful our displays might be, you and I weren’t going to be able to turn this place around.  I am not the problem, and none of my coworkers are the problem.  Once you realize that you’re just a pawn in the middle of bad business practices, it’s pretty easy to shrug and say, “Eh.”

I found out about it this morning, and I spent most of the morning texting furiously with people who wanted to know answers or wondered if I knew anything more than they did.  I don’t really know anything other than that I’m going to have some free time in my future.  I’m ecstatic about that idea.  As long as it’s a short term proposition.  If we get into the three month range I might start to freak out a little bit, but for now I’m completely okay.

It’s kick in the pants time, people.  I know that it’s going to be hard to find another job.  I also know that I was never going to put in the effort to find one while I had steady employment to fall back upon.  Having the time to put in the energy and brainpower into finding something else is exciting. 

So what’s my plan for the next few weeks?  I’ll go into work.  See how much longer I’m going to be there and if I’m getting severance (God, give me severance – only thing I’m stressed about).  I’m going to go to all the doctors I can while I’m still insured.  I picked out a new pair of glasses today while I still could – and they’re purple, because God knows that I wanted something funny and frivolous on a day like today.

I also bought a suit, a really cute and modern suit that cost a little more than I planned on spending.  But I’ve watched enough "What Not to Wear" to know that it’s an investment, and each of the three pieces can be worn alone.  At the end of each episode, Stacy and Clinton try to pull a fast one on you and say that the participant can make 72 outfits out of 15 articles of clothing, but I feel like this particular suit comes with endless possibilities.  I put it on a credit card, which leads me back to my original thought about what I was going to write about today. 

I’ll talk about debt in the next post, and about how it’s the only part of my plan that I actually had a plan for… before I found out I’m going to get laid off.  Time to restructure the plan!  But for today, I think I’m going to go admire my pretty pretty suit.

I Need a Plan

I am going to lose my job.

Now, before people get all up in a tizzy over me making that statement, I should clarify that I don’t know this for sure.  I still go to work every day, like the rest of my coworkers, under the wary impression that we’re trying to work things out.  Hell, they might work things out.  Who knows? 

But the cold hard truth of it is that the odds are pretty good that I’m going to lose my job.

And you know what?  I’m okay with that.  The fact is that I was going to come up with a list of reasons why I was upset about it, and all I came up with is this:  I don’t want to be left without income in this economy.  That’s all I’ve got.  Maybe I don’t want to lose out on discounts on books.  But… that’s all I’ve got.

Otherwise, I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of excited about the idea of being forced to make a change.  The fact is that I’ve been complacent for a very long time, and I’m not just talking about my job. 

So that’s where this blog comes in.  I need a plan.  I’m a planner at heart, someone who makes lists for my lists.  Someone whose mother gave her an actual pro/con list notepad for Christmas, just because she knows that I never feel confident in a decision unless I see it written out. 

I’m hoping that putting my plan out there will keep me honest.  Resolutions fail most of the time, but it’s a proven fact that having a goal and putting it out for others to see makes you more likely to follow through.  

So here I am, writing out what I hope to accomplish, in black and white, in concrete terms.  Let’s see how it goes.

I need to find a job.  But most importantly, I need to remember that the job doesn’t have to define me.  I think that’s how I got to this point in my current job, years after I expected to move on:  I never realized that for me, there isn’t a perfect job out there that will lead to perfect contentment.  Which leads to the second part of this, the thing that will lead me to perfect contentment…

I need to get focused on writing again.  I’ve been half assing if for a while now.  It’s very hard for me to say out loud, without feeling like a cliche or without rolling my eyes, that all I really want to do is write.  And to write well.  I want to get back to the place that I was at ten years ago, where I would stay up all night writing and crash at six a.m., never even turning the computer off because rebooting it would take too long when I popped back up four hours later.  I want that spark to come back.  I need it to.  But more importantly, I need to make sure that I focus myself better, so that the crash at the end of the night doesn’t lead to the inevitable burn.

I need to stop buying magazines and books and newspapers that I don’t read.  I need to put into place a strategy so that I have time to read more methodically, with more joy, and with more diligence.  I read more than most people, but lately I’ve managed to overwhelm myself.  Weirdly enough, the only way I’m going to read more productively is if I reign it in a little bit.

And finally, on a practical level, I need to put into place the tools to get my husband and me into a better financial place.  We’re not poor, and we definitely are better off than some, but I want to make it so that we have a plan to get out of our debt and reverse the cycle.  And you know what?  That’s where charts come in.  Hooray for charts. 

It’ll be hard, but last year at this time my husband lost his job – the same job that I have, only with a different title.  In his case, he had no warning, but his experience gave us a blueprint of how we could manage if it happens again.  We got through it.  We are for the most part living out our dreams, living in a great city where we can go out to museums and restaurants and author readings.  We have great friends and family all over the country.  We are happy. 

This blog is about making us happier.