How is anyone affording life right now?
This week I talk about money, because the only way I was able to leave my career was to change my relationship with it.
Let’s talk about money. I know it’s considered somewhat impolite and bad social form, but let’s go there for a minute. Aside from the obvious, like being nosy about other people’s salaries and personal wealth (I am not that uncouth, I promise) I never really understood why it’s something people don’t discuss more openly. I’m not talking about the gossip fueled curiosities of how your neighbor is affording their lifestyle (believe me, I come from Korean culture so I understand this). What I am talking about is the kind of transparency and knowledge sharing that we can benefit and learn from.
Or how about even just venting how insanely expensive life is right now because I know you’re feeling it too.
I have a friend who I text with back and forth about the volatility of crypto and the stock market. We talk about our investment gains and losses, ageism in our industry, and retirement goals. We trade stories of good and bad stock picks and offer honest advice on whether a project is worth the hourly rate. When he texts, panicking about a stock that’s sliding, I text back an immediate “noooooo step away from that sell button!!” with lots of emojis because I know how much of an emotional investor he is and he’ll regret it later.
We laugh at how we’ve become like two old folks gabbing away at very adult things like property taxes, capital gains, and tax loss harvesting, and how we might as well set up lawn chairs on a front yard so we can yell at neighbor kids to “get off my lawn!” It’s really refreshing to talk about money with a friend without risk of judgment, comparisons of social status, or envy. I highly recommend it.
If you don’t have a friend like that in your life, maybe this can be a safe place for you to vent it out because it seems like every time I step outside my door I have become that cranky old person who is constantly squinting at prices through my triple progressive lenses and yelling,“why is this so expensive??”
$7 for a scoop of ice cream?
$6.50 for a latte?
$120 for a pancake and Eggs Benedict brunch for my family of four?
$4.99 for a bag of Doritos??
Last year, I saw a head of cauliflower ring up for ten bucks at the supermarket checkout. Shellshocked, I sheepishly told the cashier to take it off our bill because I didn’t want to come home with a $10 head of precious cauliflower only to just unceremoniously dump it in the air fryer. I discovered later that there was a cauliflower shortage at the time, but $10 feels like dystopian levels of scarcity pricing.
If you know me in real life, then you already know that we drastically cut eating out when we had kids and especially when Mark exited the restaurant industry. If you’ve ever worked with me, you already know that I always brought my lunch to the office every single day. Restaurants have gotten so prohibitively expensive in the last few years that we can’t even really justify it anymore outside of birthdays and special celebrations.
I understand why restaurant bills are what they are right now; I have a spouse who’s worked in food his entire life and we ran a bakery for 12 years so we’re familiar with low profit margins and rising costs. I hope I’m not coming off like a cheap curmudgeon who’s sacrificing life’s pleasures just to save a few dollars. I don’t mind paying for something if I enjoy the experience—I would be happy to! What really gets my goat (did I really just say ‘gets my goat?’ Who even talks like this?) is spending $20 for a very mediocre sandwich at a restaurant that I could have made equally as mediocre at home.
I recently saw a news segment about how food prices have gone up more than 20% since 2021. This is a huge jump relative to past years. And it’s not just food and housing, everything has increased: Amazon Prime, Netflix, airfare, subway fare, prescriptions, AirBNB cleaning fees, internet, insurance, college tuition! Cat food!! Stamps!!!
Inflation is a fundamental part of economics, but this much inflation is dizzying, especially since incomes aren’t keeping up for many of us even with yearly cost-of-living raises if you’re fortunate to get even that. And if you’re like my household, your income might be stagnant or even decreasing over the years.
But this is what happens sometimes when you find yourself starting over farming lettuce, as Mark does now.
At least Mark and I can laugh about it (and we do).
Because the other alternative would be getting depressed about it. Making less than what we did 10 years ago while inflation stays elevated at astronomical levels is pretty deflating no matter how you spin it.
But let me take a step back and tell you a little story about how I was recently able to break the cycle of chasing paychecks. This is a question that I have been asked. When I look around and ask myself, how are we even affording life right now, the only way I was able to leave behind a breadwinning career was to change my relationship with money.
Paid subscribers, read on about coast fire and a blog reader named “Betty.”
Free subscribers, I will see you next week. Thank you for reading.
