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I'm really enjoying my summer too much to think or worry about money. Even when I do, I rarely do anything practical like calculate change in my net worth or figure out how quickly I can pay off the student loans if I increase my monthlies by $100 -- more often I sit around calculating how much I would have to make so that A. could stay home with the kids yet we could still afford this house:
Answer: About $90k.
(I started this post awhile ago, and only just got back to it. Sorry that the article is behind the paywall now.)
Buried in a general "advice for grads" money column is this nugget:
As Victor Fuchs, the professor emeritus of economics and health research and policy at Stanford University, told me, money is most useful when you are old because it makes all the difference whether you wait for a bus in the rain to get to the doctor’s appointment or you ride in a cab.
“Saving for retirement may ultimately be less about the golf condo at Hilton Head and more about being able to afford wheelchair lifts, private nurses and a high-quality nursing home,” Professor Skinner said.
It also discusses this paper, the abstract of which concludes:
Of course, there are ways to economize during retirement: stepping up household production (cooking at home rather than eating out), selling one's house, or maintaining the modest individual consumption levels from when children still roamed the house. But ultimately, I argue these laudable strategies to reduce retirement expenses will be dwarfed by rapidly growing out-of-pocket medical expenses. The combination of eroding retiree health benefits and the risk of catastrophic future out-of-pocket health spending suggests that even conventional retirement planning recommendations could be too low.
As someone who has had chronic health problems since age 8, this is exactly why I'm obsessed with retirement saving, and it's why I cringe when I hear comments like "I don't want to save all my money until I'm old and too sick to enjoy it." If you're too sick to enjoy your money, then you're definitely sick enough to need piles of it if you want to live your life relatively comfortable and pain free. You never need more money than when you're too sick to enjoy it!
If I were a student in, say, sociology or cultural studies women's studies or social anthropology, you know what I'd want to research? The phenomenon of women pushing for, helping to select, and possibly even helping to pay for an engagement ring, and then concocting some elaborate scheme in which they are "surprised" by an engagement and a ring that they know very well has been sitting in the sock drawer.
Am I the only one who thinks that's fucking bizarre? It's a bit like planning your own surprise party, and then when the guests jump out from behind the couch, you all have to pretend as if you had no idea.
In other news, the job -- the one in which I'm not a sociologist -- is going wonderfully. I could not be more thrilled, and there's ample evidence that the feeling is mutual.
I've spent the past few weeks playing with a post about how being in a great marriage is changing my feelings on the institution and how it relates to personal finance. Specifically, I've become more conservative -- not in an anti-gay marriage way, and I'll certainly never be arguing for covenant marriage, but I do feel like we should either throw out the institution all together (which I'd actually be fine with) or have it mean something. Why bother going halvsies, leaving us with something that mostly means people enjoy a few legal benefits for a few years until the divorce (and then do it over again)?
But it just keeps sounding like a moralizing screed against pre-nups and women who obsess about engagement rings, which isn't quite what I feel. (Quite.) I don't know if I'll ever get it to a point where I feel comfortable publishing it, so for now I leave you with this great review from The Economist of a book that's getting a lot of press, Rebecca Mead's "One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding":
Ms Mead takes special pleasure in “traditionalesque”; commerce disguised as tradition. An example of the traditionalesque would be the “Apache wedding prayer”, read by a freelance multi-faith wedding minister called Joyce Gioia, when neither the bride nor the groom nor the prayer itself has anything to do with Apache culture (the prayer was invented for a Hollywood movie called “Broken Arrow”).
The book sounds like a more journalistic approach to Caitlin Flanagan's excellent essay "The Wedding Merchants". (Although I generally find Flanagan intolerable; talk about your moralizing screeds!)
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