The Rage Diaries

Fiscal fitness -- here's what happened after the divorce

It's one thing to get financial advice from articles, but first-person experience is equally valuable. I asked frequent commenter and longtime friend Molly about the financial challenges she faced during and after her divorce. The Q&A is after the jump.

Fiscal fitness -- are you cheating on your budget?

Marketplace has a hair-raising story about people who have racked up crazy debt -- in some cases, as much as $300,000 -- without telling their spouses. Credit counselors call this secret debt "financial infidelity." The June 27 story is here.

Of note: using "infidelity" in a financial context, as opposed to an emotional or sexual one. It makes sense -- doesn't infidelity always have a deceptive aspect? However, I am intrigued by borrowing a word from the emotional or social-contract part of marriage and bringing it into the financial arena.

Anyone here ever been a victim of financial infidelity? Or who will cop to occasionally committing a little financial fling on the side?

"The Sam's Club Agenda"

Disclosure: I read David Brooks mostly for the entertainment value; I don't really think he's the voice of conservatism or even a credible pundit. But even the most toothless prognosticator occasionally gets something right, and to my surprise, today was David Brooks' lucky day.

Not that I really thought much of "The Sam's Club Agenda" (NYT, June 27, 2008), but this section is worth ruminating upon:

Liberals write about economic inequality and conservatives about social disruption, but [Ross] Douthat and [Reithan] Salam write about the interplay between values and economics and the way virtue and economic security can reinforce each other.

In the 1950s, divorce rates were low and jobs were plentiful, but over the next few decades that broke down. The social revolutions of the 1960s and the economic revolution of the information age have emancipated the well-educated but left the Sam’s Club voters feeling insecure.

Gaps are opening between the educated and less educated. Working-class divorce rates remain high, while the mostly upper-middle-class parents of Ivy Leaguers have divorce rates of only 10 percent. Working-class kids are unlikely to complete college, affluent kids usually do.

Liberals have a way to address these inequalities — the creation of a Denmark-style welfare state. Conservatives have offered almost nothing. The G.O.P. has lost contact with its own working-class base. This is the intellectual vacuum that “Grand New Party” seeks to fill.

The party that can figure out how to use government to best boost the prospects of working-class children and adults -- without compromising their values or making wealthier people feel as though they're being penalized for being successful -- is the one that will have a lock on the nation in the next few decades.

Perhaps it's time to revive a WPA-style workforce and bolster America's greatest infrastructures -- highways, waterways, telecom networks, national parks. You could even come up with new programs devoted to national energy auditing and efficiency, high-speed network access in rural areas, victory garden-style urban and suburban gardening for food independence, etc. As a nation, we've been so factionalized for much of the decade -- perhaps what we need now is an initiative that makes us all feel as though we're invested in the country.

Fiscal fitness: What you should talk about when you talk about money

Money magazine's most recent issue has two articles that fit our June theme on partnerships and money -- "What's in Your Spouse's Wallet?" and "Get a Financial Life in 7 Weeks." The premise behind the first article: Your marriage can only improve if there are no unpleasant surprises or disconnects regarding the financial picture. The premise behind the second article: Do one simple thing a week and your household finances will more or less run themselves after two months.

What I find interesting about both articles is the implicit assumption that married people merge their financial futures, period. The second thing that piqued my attention: the premise that you run your personal finances like you run any financial portfolio -- with an eye toward reducing operating costs and boosting the bottom line. It is the refreshing opposite to Lori Gottlieb's contention that "Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business."

The third thing the two articles share: the unshakable conviction that married people need to set aside a dedicated period of time to talk about money, because doing so is vital to the partnership's longevity.

I only wish that one of the articles had included a sidebar on how to have these conversations, because I suspect that for many couples, the biggest impediment to discussing finances isn't a lack of time, but missing a vocabulary that doesn't set off emotional bombs. Money's archives aren't much help, what with the experts assuming that it's the menfolk who are more interested and advising them to "lay off the jargon and speak English" when discussing finances with the wife. I don't see why we can't compile our own tips on cultivating healthy financial dialogue.

Anyway. Because I'm fond of you, my readers, I've broken out all the useful information in the articles. Check after the jump.

Fiscal fitness -- download today or lose it forever

Quamut.com is one of those "How to do [X]" sites, and their revenue model is predicated on the idea that eventually, you'll get tired of clicking through page after page of "How to do [Y]" and just pay to download a PDF. One of the things the site does is to offer a free PDF of the day -- sort of a "First one's free" thing, eh?

Anyway, today's free PDF is on prenuptial agreements. That seems like a useful freebie for anyone who's been following along with the love-and-money theme this month.

The most exhilarating 4:15 I've spent today

I watched "Where the Hell is Matt? (2008)" and came away loving all of our planet and most of humanity. It'll probably take the remainder of the afternoon to wipe the smile off my mug. Getting paid to wander around the planet and dance with random people in beautiful places seems like an awesome gig.

One year down

On Saturday, June 23, 2007, I finished a cup of coffee around 10 a.m., left Ole's and got into a car accident. It was a heck of a way to say goodbye to caffeine.

 I've gone a year without caffeine -- no pick-me-ups after red-eye flights, no heart-starting beverage first thing in the morning, no cold and fizzy fountain drinks on hot road trips, no after-dinner cappuccinos in the dim and luxurious quiet of a good restaurant. In return: I sleep better, my dentist no longer sighs when she sees me, my heartburn's diminished, I rest reassured that I don't depend on something to feel like I'm working at the top of my faculties.

That's why I quit: I got tired of being the woman with a Diet Coke can permanently welded to her hand. I wanted to see if I had the willpower to walk away from something I had leaned on a little too much; I wanted to see what, if any changes, I'd have to make for the better.

The flip side, of course, is that I really have a hard time when I'm physically bushwhacked. It's like the sleepytime version of Flowers for Algernon: I can feel my problem-solving skills and emotional resilience diminishing with each yawn. This has made me much more sympathetic to toddlers, what with their own need for regular sleep and typical abstention from caffeine. I just wish meltdowns weren't so damned undignified for the over-3 set.

There is unrest in the forest, there is trouble in the trees

The New Republic posts a movie review that is so funny, I had to actually open another application to give myself time to calm down. Christopher Orr's spoiler-rich "Movie Review: The Happening" (June 13, 08) successfully replicates the experience of watching a bad movie solely for comedic value.

I have a weird, weird relationship with the M. Night Shyamalan oevre. I don't find his movies particularly spooky or twisty, in part because the twists are usually broadcast from miles away, and tha's insulting. It's as if he's saying, "Ha ha! I'm leaving clues but you won't guess until the moment I reveal all!" Wrong, jackass. I usually have the ending pegged in the first act, which leaves me the remaining two for heckling. But let's not diminish the entertainment value in that. Phil and I have an entire song about Lady in the Water, which we sing to "Angel of Music," a daft duet from the fatuous Phantom of the Opera. The lyrics usually begin with Who is that lady in waaaa-ter? Why is she dripping on me? and degenerate from there. It's great fun.

Clearly, the folks at Videogum also have a weird relationship with the filmmaker vis a vis his capacity for inadvertent entertainment. Check out their M. Night Shyamalan archive, and today's offering on the RiffTrax'd best of The Sixth Sense.

Hwæt! Behold the saga of the Googlemesh!

In the fall of 1995, I took a class on the technological history of communication. I didn't particularly care for the professor -- we got off to a bad start because he preferred his students to join his cult of personality, and I don't do culty -- but I did end up loving the subject, appreciating the insights he patiently guided us toward, and giving reluctant props for how he launched us there: with a reading of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Lessons from my father

Mom got her tribute last month. Dad gets his due today.