I Got No Money, Honey

Or when being broke feels like freedom versus scary and how to tell the difference

You can’t see it, but the grand total cost for this six-week trip was about $2,800 — a steal, but it was a good thing my parents paid because I had like $50, maybe.

Twice in my adult life, I have been close to penniless.

Both times, I had a sense of…dare I say, glee? There is something freeing about having nothing, at least the sort of nothing I had both of those times. Which is to say, I did have some things.

When I graduated from college in 1997, my parents paid for me to go to Europe for six weeks with friends. We traveled on a shoestring budget, sleeping in hostels for six dollars a night and bunked in with bunches of strangers from all over the world. We paid the equivalent of fifty cents for five-minute cold showers. We’d buy a baguette and a wheel of camembert for a couple of bucks, and that would be food for the day. We traveled by rail and walked a lot.

I remember it fondly, and I’m so glad I went when I did, with that set of friends, as it wouldn’t be the same experience today. My 47-year-old ass is not sleeping in a top bunk over some drunk, snoring Australian I met in the middle of the night when he stumbled into the room of four other boys and me and yelled, “Blimey, there’s a girl in here!” (Nor would a twenty-two-year-old Australian be so excited to find me there today.)

Not having a lot to spend, made us creative and provided some colorful experiences we would not have had if we’d been staying in nice hotel rooms with hot showers.

This was the best of all situations. I had graduated college and had secured a job I’d start in August, so I was free to go galavanting off, fully on vacation, without financial worries. When I returned, I had less than $100 in my bank account. But I had an apartment, a car and a job, so that situation was quickly remedied. When, about a year later, the boy who would become my husband and then my ex-husband wrecked the 1986 Nissan Stanza I was driving, I was able to buy a shiny red Dodge Stratus to replace it.

Nine years later, I would find myself in a similar monetary situation.

I was getting divorced, and Jason and I were moving into a 500-square-foot apartment together. We walked into the empty space, he set down one cardboard box, we looked around, and J said, “Well, let’s go shopping.” This time, I had eighteen dollars in my bank account, having left most of my funds and furniture with the ex. Again, it felt more exciting than scary.

I’d been living with my parents for about a month, but now I had an apartment, a car and a job teaching school. I also had someone to help pay the bills. So when, months later, my not-so-shiny-anymore Dodge decided to disgorge all of its oil in the middle of Mopac one early morning on the way to work — an act of suicide by bent engine rod — I had the funds to pay cash for a new Nissan Altima.

There was a simplicity to both of these times.

I had no money, but the future was full of opportunity. And I had no debt and no dependents. When all your soon-to-be earnings can go to you, the utility bill and savings, things are easy. Choices are easy, at least they were for me. No, I’m not going out to eat; I’m saving money. Yes, I’m buying a new car; the old one’s dead, and I need it to drive to work.

Can I point to these nostalgic scenarios as proof I can “pull myself up by my bootstraps” and tighten my financial belt when necessary? Sure. I am proud of myself for both my confidence and my ability to follow through. AND…

It was not lost on me, even at the naive age of 21, that I had a certain platform from which to climb. Though I worked some throughout college and went to summer school so I could graduate in four years, my parents paid for the vast majority of my education, so I got out with no debt. That faithful 1987 Nissan Stanza was handed down, for no charge, from my parents. And you can only go to Europe with double digits in your bank account if someone else is paying.

I financed that lemon of a Dodge through my parents at a low-interest rate, as I did a portion of the loans for my first two houses. When I left my first husband, I went straight to my parents’ place. I lived with them, rent-free, and ate the food that they bought for four weeks while I got my shit together. And when Jason and I moved in, we had two incomes with which to pay our minimal bills.

I am privileged to have had loving parents of financial means to support me throughout my childhood and into my forays as a young adult. Even today, at 47, I have the security of knowing they are there for me, should my family fall on hard times.

I don’t feel guilty about this; I feel fortunate.

It doesn’t diminish my accomplishments. I worked hard in school and in my early jobs. I made sound financial decisions. My parents’ money didn’t teach school for ten years, navigate the emotional upheaval of five miscarriages and a messy divorce or write the book that took me four years to complete. But their support — both financial and emotional — eased those difficulties to an extent. Things would have been different if I were still carrying around college debt in my late twenties, if they hadn’t been there to take me in after I left my first marriage or if they hadn’t helped finance my first car and houses.

Would I still be okay?

I don’t know. Probably. I’m pretty tough, but I get that from my parents, too. It partially depends on your definition of “okay.” I wouldn’t be dead. I would probably have housing, a job and a family, but I don’t actually know that. It’s just hard for me to imagine it any other way. At the very least, it would have been a harder road to get here. I’d be financially less well off, and maybe I wouldn’t have gotten here at all. Maybe I’d be somewhere completely different with an entirely different set of circumstances. Best consult the alternate timelines on that one.

The point is, I am proud of my hard work and the sound decisions I’ve made, but I did not do it alone by sheer will and gumption. This gives me empathy for people who struggle to keep themselves housed, to support their young families — those whose parents were unable to pay for higher education or who didn’t have a family member they could turn to when their relationship went sour. I have a safety net; not everyone does. It isn’t just a matter of hard work and sacrifice. There’s a significant element of luck.

The “American Dream” is a myth now, if it ever was a reality.

My parents also worked hard. My dad put himself through college at UT Austin, working the whole time. That is pretty much an impossible scenario today. My parents had no health insurance (which wasn’t uncommon in 1975) and paid the hospital cash for my birth. Again, just about impossible today for most.

This is on my mind now because of where I am.

Overall, I have a deep feeling of satisfaction about my life. Yes, there are regrets, but they are relatively few, and I have learned from them. I don’t regret the lessons.

I have many more dollars in my bank account than I did as a college grad in 1997 or a newly divorced person in 2006, and my feelings are more complex than the simple enthusiasm for a cashless state of being that will shortly be remedied.

Jason and I decided recently I need a full-time job as opposed to what I have now: a part-time job plus freelance work, which results in my working very hard but not making anything like a full-time income. You can read “decided recently” as “argued about on and off for several years.” For the first time in my life, though, I am in a position of wanting more money — this time for my kids and their future plans — and being unable to make it.

I have been unable to secure a full-time job. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m too old, maybe my salary requirements are too high, maybe it’s just that the job market is shitty, and I’m competing with hundreds of other people for each position. Maybe it’s that I don’t, really don’t, want to go back to teaching. Either way, I am getting a tiny window into what that is like — what it is like to want to work, to be willing to work but not be given the opportunity.

This is not nearly as dire for me as for some, but as a writer, I have a good imagination.

It doesn’t take much for me to realize I could feel this way, this frustration of not being allowed to participate in the capitalism that confines me, and instead of just worrying about financing kids’ college in several years, be worried about how we’re going to eat next week. I believe most people want to work and support themselves, rather than a handout. Don’t get me wrong; we’d all take a big wad of cash, no strings attached, as long as it wasn’t blood money, or fuck, probably even if it were. But that is not what people are looking for and certainly not what I or anyone else thinks we are somehow owed.

This piece is both a “thank you” to my Mom and Dad for always being there for me, and a call for you, the reader, to look at your own life. Whatever your struggles, what were you given that allowed you to get where you are that other people may not have had? Conversely, can you look around at people who have had more advantages than you? (Oh, I don’t know, like connections in the publishing world, just for a completely random example off the top of my head) And can you admit that had you had what they have, you’d have used it, too? This is a tool to get past resentment you may be feeling about them, not that I’ve ever had to do that, of course.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this because “grateful” is a minor trigger word for me, but be grateful, not guilty, for your advantages. Then use it to increase your empathy for others and perhaps do something to help — I mean something beyond writing a rambling sappy newsletter about it. That’s my schtick; get your own.