I am at that stage of life when I normally should be actively making plans for retirement in a few years, and yet our circumstances are such that I am instead losing sleep over our current financial situation. But I am very aware that poverty is relative, and that by most metrics, we are not poor. The metrics don't lessen the worry, but a bit of reflection helps.
(I beg the admins' indulgence: I'm writing this under a new user name because my husband is subscribed to my usual diaries, and I don't want him to know how I'm feeling about all of this. He's already got enough on his plate, working from early in the morning to late at night every day and on weekends, to try to make this latest venture the success that we've been betting our lives that it will be.)
We haven't been this financially precarious since grad school: my husband has spent the past two years working without pay for startups that we hope(d) will be our ticket to if not wealth, at least a comfortable early retirement. After two outright failures, the current startup has gotten some early-round funding, so he's started getting paid again, thank God, but not even half of what he could be earning at a "regular" job.
For as much as I moaned and bitched about working as a contractor for a Great Big Impersonal Business Behemoth, I've been missing the income ever since the aforementioned Behemoth decided it would only hire contractors from certain countries so that they can pay them less. (There is a certain irony that the same Behemoth has since learned that there can be expensive consequences for trying to do things on the cheap… but I digress.) I still have fairly steady work, but it is nowhere near full-time. We have been getting by on my earnings these past two years, along with an unexpected tax refund windfall… and thanks to our savings, which we have nearly depleted.
It is not fun to feel poor, to feel like one is in precarious circumstances. And yet we are much better off than the truly poor. I have never yet gone through what John Scanzi described in his classic blogpost, Being Poor, nor what hundreds of commenters added in the extended comments on that post. Reading through them was heartrending, made all the more so because I know that there are so many Americans, so many Kossacks, even, whose stories they are.
If the current startup fizzles and dies, which it might, then my husband and his business partners will have no choice but to go seek employment elsewhere. But all of them have the skills and experience that make them eminently employable. (By contrast, though I am highly skilled and experienced in my field, my age is frankly against me, so the search for more clients, or for a permanent position someplace, has not been very productive thus far.) Further, in the semi-worst case, we have family to fall back on — hell, we can even borrow money from two (out of three) grown children if we really had to, and from our parents and at least some of our siblings.
We don't ever want to have to. But we could. And we could sell our paid-for car (since public transportation where we currently live is great). And we could sell our little house and live in a decent apartment. We even still have money in the bank.
Yet the fear persists. And I'm still stewing in the uncomfortable knowledge that no, we didn't pay for our middle daughter's wedding late last year — in fact, we didn't even get them a wedding present (yet), except to show up (transportation and lodging nearly wiped us out). And we probably won't be able to pay for a gift, let alone the wedding, of our oldest daughter at some indeterminate point this fall.
…Such first-world and privileged concerns. For us this evening, dinner is in the oven — it is cheap, but it is tasty and nourishing. I've just invoiced my principal client for the month and I think we won't have to take anything out of savings this time around to cover next month's expenses — although perhaps I have spoken too soon, given that our youngest child needs new contacts and thus there will be bills coming in that we will need to pay to cover her medical and other expenses. But still. We will not go hungry. We will not become homeless anytime soon. We may yet avoid asking family for help.
— But we have family to turn to, no matter how galling it may be to have to swallow our pride. And while we may have to keep working until we drop, we are thus far healthy enough to plan on that kind of contingency. That doesn't make us rich, but it makes us luckier than many. I'm not sure I can replace all of my worry with gratitude, but that does not make the gratitude I feel any less sincere.
I do vow, however, that if we ever do get out of the economic doldrums, that we will (once again) contribute as much as we possibly can to helping people who are less fortunate than we are — giving people a hand up, and working to elect politicians who will never, ever vote to make people hungrier, who will never, ever shred America's already stingy safety net even more.