Money Makes the World Go Around

Have you ever noticed that the people who tell you that money can't buy happiness always have more money than they could possibly spend? I swear it's their way of keeping the hoi polloi from revolting. Sure, money can't solve other problems you may have, but think about it---even problems like being sick are made easier with money. At least you can buy the best medical care there is without having to take up a collection. And people swallow it---"Oh, I lost my job and the electricity is going to be shut off, but look at poor Sandra Bullock. Money can't buy happiness." No, but it sure makes unhappiness easier to bear. Your husband may be stepping out on you, too, and having the lights turned off won't make it any easier. Sandy can go to Canyon Ranch to forget about her troubles for a month if she wants.

Steve and I came into this relationship from very different places, moneywise. At one time, I was doing OK. I was never going to be CEO of a company, but I was making a good living and I had a fair amount of money in my 401K and savings plan. I took nice trips and went to the ballet. I bought my co-op in Brooklyn Heights (supposedly at the bottom of the market, but real estate bottoms always occur when a McMahon is trying to sell). Then I married Mark. When we met, as I've said, he was making substantially less than I. But he really liked the business world and I didn't, and he was getting his MBA. By the time I got pregnant, Mark had moved on to a better job, still making slightly less than I was, but he had a future. We were living in my co-op and things were comfortable. We had money (OK, I had money) saved up. There were warning signs. When we were planning the wedding, I kept putting the brakes on and he kept wanting to spend more. I thought it was nice that he wanted a big wedding, so I relented and dipped into my savings to pay for it. I paid for the honeymoon, too. It never really occurred to me that this spending habit of Mark's might get us into trouble.

A bunch of things happened that started getting us a little more behind: first, Mark really wanted to move to the suburbs. I loved Brooklyn, but the co-op was really not big enough once Tom started growing. Well, as I said, the bottom of the market can pretty much be determined by when I decide to sell. We couldn't sell and rented it out, but our co-op board decided somewhat capriciously not to let us continue to rent, even though our neighbors were renting. We sold at a slight loss about six months before the market started to take off. Two years after we'd sold, we could have made three or four times the price I'd paid. Still, things were not bad, we still had some money, and we bought a modest house in the same town I'd grown up in. What I didn't know was that the schools in the town I'd grown up in had changed from mediocre to really, really bad. I was working part-time from home at this point and Mark was still doing well at work. My first clue that the schools were not that great was when I took a job teaching test prep at the school and found out that they'd taken the doors off the toilet stalls so that teachers could always see what the kids were doing. Then Jenna's son got beaten up on a school bus and the bus driver did nothing. We decided to send Tom to private school.

Then the s- started hitting the proverbial fan. First, I lost my part-time job; they decided they wanted someone to be in the office, first one day a week (OK), then full-time. The office I would have to be in was 60 miles from the house. Mark was working in New York, so it didn't seem like a good idea to be working that far from Tom, and to be honest, I didn't want to be away from Tom all day. At this point, I should probably have figured out a way to make a comparable salary close to home, but I didn't. Instead, I started being a part-time everything. I did some work putting PowerPoint presentations together for people, I taught some classes, I tutored. We were still OK, but I was starting to notice Mark's bad habit of earmarking every $500 for $1500 worth of purchases. You know what I mean: he gets told he's getting a $10K bonus. He tells me he "deserves" a trip because he's been working hard, so even though I just wanted to pay off bills, we go to Italy (we don't spend much on these trips, but still ...). I don't feel like I can say anything because I am not making most of the money. This will become a common theme. You'd think it would have occurred to me that maybe I should figure out how to make more money. Anyway, remember, it's a $10K bonus. That means roughly $7K after taxes. So we take the $3K vacation. Then he decides he needs more of a wardrobe to "present the correct image." He goes out and buys two suits and about 10 Ralph Lauren $85 shirts. There goes another couple of thousand. What does he do next? Decide he needs a new car. By the time he's finished, his $10K bonus has added another $2K to our debt. Plus a lease payment every month.

Meanwhile, while I didn't spend money on myself, I did spend it on Tom. There are very few relatives on both sides and the grandparents who were there didn't lavish Tom with gifts the way some grandparents do. So I tried to make up for it. I admit it, I spent too much there, but when it's your first child, no matter how many people tell you, you don't realize that by the time you pay off his "Thomas the Tank Engine" train set, he will have long since outgrown it. Besides, at that point, I was still optimistically thinking there would be more kids. After all, I'd gotten pregnant with Tom immediately, so I'd have only needed one or two more 5-minute bouts of passion to create a sibling for Tom. Well, I have no way of knowing if that would have been the case, but if I had had another child, things would be even more complicated.

Anyway, we were hobbling along, not paying off our credit cards, but doing all right. We enrolled Tom in a private school. I went back to school to get my certification to teach. Mark found a new expensive hobby---digital photography. Then he lost his job. Five times in about seven years. As I write this, he has been out of work since last May. That didn't stop him from taking Tom on a great trip last June, but it means he is $15K behind on alimony and child support. Every time he loses his job, he calls it a layoff, but he is the only one laid off. And it takes him the better part of a year to find a new job.

I quit school without finishing and started taking more adjunct teaching jobs. And in case you're wondering why he was paying me alimony anyway, it's pretend alimony. By the time we split up, he'd incurred about $50K of credit card debt. He kept refinancing the house, so that there is now a $260K mortgage on a house we paid $160K for. The market crashed; we can't sell the house or even fix it up a little. He is still living there. I agreed to let him pay me $2000 a month in "pretend" alimony and I would pay the credit cards off ($1000 a month on a debt-management plan) and pay for Tom's tuition, or at least a substantial portion of it. He would get the tax write-off. So now, he's long-term unemployed (again), not paying me anything (asks me to give Tom food money when he goes to visit him), and I am stuck with the credit card payments. The school has been very nice and patient about the tuition. I'm making more money now, but Steve is pretty much paying for me (and Tom) to live. And that's where the problem is. I pay as much as I possibly can for groceries, etc., but after the credit card payment and all the expenses that go with raising a teenager, that's not all that much. I tried for quite a while to get a full-time with-benefits job, even one way below what I'd been making 15 years ago, and could not even get a call back. If I'd actually been on interviews, I'd think I was doing something wrong. What I'm doing wrong, it seems, is trying to find a job after the age of 50.

As you can imagine, this has caused a lot of stress in our relationship. I feel constantly like I'm not contributing enough. Steve, at times, feels ill-used. And Mark? Well, Mark thinks he needs a vacation. Thank heavens, he'd just bought himself a brand new luxury car before he lost his job, or he'd need a new car, too.