Category Archives: Finance

Dentist.

Finance, Health

In which I have to spend money on surgery.

Went to the periodontist last week and I need about $3k (initially) worth of surgery, including a bone graft, to help keep my teeth in my head.

Periodontal disease is bullshit. It’s basically bacteria eating your jawbones. Super fun. I used to feel so superior about never having cavities, but now I’d like to trade. A bunch of cavities would be much better than this bullshit!

Can I just fill the Waterpik with, like, something that will keep fucking bacteria out of my sockets?!

CADAVER BONE GRAFT, PEOPLE.

I’m not afraid of the surgery itself, I just don’t want to spend my savings on it and I don’t (think) I have insurance that will help.

And after the surgery, I apparently will want an additional procedure to help me not grind my back teeth out and an “appliance” to wear at night to stop the damage from bruxism.

Honestly wish I knew how long I’m going to live; it would be good information to help one decide how much to spend on keeping one’s teeth in one’s head. If I’m gonna die in a decade, I’ll spend the money on something else. If I’m gonna live ’til 80, well obviously stopping jawbone loss is a good investment.

Oh, he also thinks I’ll lose my most expensive possession, my root canal and crown. There’s bone damage so he thinks it’ll fall out somewhere between 5 and 10 years. So that’s exciting. Not.

Ugh, this small town bank is driving me NUTS

Finance

In which fuck it, I’ve opened an account at Chase after all.

I’ve been using an excellent online bank called Simple for years. They paid killer interest, the app worked flawlessly, and it’s just been really pleasant, especially considering how infuriating banking has been for me most of my adult life (primarily due to poverty, but how insanely frustrating and expensive banking is for poor people is an entirely different rant).

Like everything nice these days, the Simple product is being killed because its parent company was bought out. It was doing really well, so I assume the decision to close is just more typical corporate raider bullshit, I don’t know, and I don’t care enough about finance assholes to go find out; what I do know is that an excellent, high value service is closing because some dipshits think CEO bonuses are more important than providing an excellent product, and now I have to move my money.

Naturally, I decided to open an account at the little bank down the block from work. That’ll be nice, right? Regional bank, easy access to a branch, should be a no brainer!

It took, and I am not kidding, THREE in-person visits, three phone calls, and FIVE FUCKING DAYS to open a checking account.

The process wasn’t unpleasant, it was just ridiculously complex and took forever. I imagine they pride themselves on their homey, small town appeal, but it’s 2021. Just open the goddamned account. Do not call me and leave messages. Do not make me come over there more than once. Just take my fucking money. It’s a checking account, not an organ transplant.

And after all that, they misspelled both my name and address on the counter checks and the account itself. I had to message them through the website (which, surprise, uses security technology from the 00’s and failed to change the temporary username I was given) to get the typos fixed, and even THAT took three days.

It took something like six business days for my initial deposit to clear, which is nonsense in today’s banking world.

THEN it took just as long for my first direct deposit to show up, and it was from my employer’s account, which is AT THEIR OWN BANK. It was AN INTERNAL TRANSFER, yet it took so long I had to send a message inquiring about it before it actually showed up. (There is no fucking way an internal transfer like that should take more than three days. None. They must be doing all this shit by hand. Like, with punch cards or some shit.)

Today I decided to transfer the remaining balance out of my Simple account (it’s closing for good on the 8th, “transitioning” to another bank with ridiculous fees) so I looked up my balance, wrote myself a check, and used the new bank’s app to deposit it.

Deposit rejected. Limit exceeded. The check was for WELL under five grand, so my new-account deposit limit must be in the range of hundreds of dollars? What the fuck?

Jesus Christ. I give up.

Logged into my Amazon-branded credit card account, which is a Chase account, and opened a checking account there. It took fewer than five minutes. No fees, similar interest rate, and my Simple account was already linked (it’s what I used to pay my card each month) so I’ve already initiated a transfer.

I’ll switch direct deposit from the local bank to the Chase account this week, and then probably just ignore the local account for a few months until I’ve got the stamina for the five phone calls and three in-person visits it will UNDOUBTEDLY REQUIRE to close a checking account I will by then have only used twice: once to open it and once to close it.

I’d much rather use the friendly, small, local bank, of course, but there are reasonable expectations a customer can have, ESPECIALLY in the finance sector. IN-HOUSE direct deposits should take three days at the absolute outside limit, and making me come sit in your drive-through on my bike for twenty minutes, twice, so you can explain checking accounts to me and hand me a printed packet I could much more easily read online? Forget it. No.

So now I’m banking with the big assholes, but at least I didn’t have to WAIT FIVE DAYS to open a GODDAMNED CHECKING ACCOUNT. The only benefit of the small local bank is that IF there’s a problem you should, ideally, be able to go in and speak to a person and get it resolved, but we all know that’s not how it works any more. There’d be an apologetic “I’m sorry, but” and all you’d have accomplished is wasting more time, because rules are rules!

Pandemic Money

Finance, Health

In which saving teeth is far from cheap.

The pandemic started and I kept getting money. Not complaining, but it was a bit baffling: the stimulus check, then two aunts and an uncle sent cash, bless them, and then a Minnesota tax refund I’d forgotten about filing for appeared. All told, a few grand.

And then I went to the dentist and figured out what the windfall was for.

I spent about $400 on x-rays, an exam, and n really intense cleaning, then another $1,400 at the periodontist on saving an old root canal, and tomorrow another couple hundred getting the crown fixed.

Next month, another grand at the endodontist saving yet another tooth.

And after that, all my surprise pandemic money will be spent! I’m glad I could afford all this as otherwise I probably would have had two teeth pulled, and I guess having teeth is better than not having them.

Ringing out the old

Finance, Soapbox

In which we ring in the new!

In 2017, I discovered that a lot of people are racists and honestly don’t know it. They’ll say they’re not racist, and in the next breath explain that marginalized non-white communities are that way because, well, you see, that’s how “those people” are; they deserve it, it’s inherent.

And also classist: They’ll say, “the American dream lives and anyone can make it!” But show them a single fucked-up white community and they’ll dismiss them all as ignorant, low-class trash, rather than the victims of poverty and societal abandonment.

I learned that a lot of Americans who enjoy/ed luck and privilege never learned how to think about it. They believe they have what they do because of their own hard work and initiative, and never do they credit the fully-functioning society—schools, vaccines, food, healthcare, roads—that actually launched them.

If we’re lacking anything in spades, it’s compassion and humility — and the fully-functioning society created by these qualities. Nobody makes it alone, ever: everyone who succeeds does so from a platform of outside assistance. Nobody ever made it in America without using public roads, public education, public resources, entitlements paid for by ALL. But when we close libraries and national parks, and refuse to pay K-12 teachers a living wage for so long that every state in the nation is suffering a critical shortage of teachers, well, society is no longer functioning well at all.

Nobody ever makes it without knowing somebody, or knowing someone who knows somebody, who helps them. With an interview, a tip, guidance. We’re all in this together, even “them.” Because “them” are us, and pretending they’re other makes you an asshole.

You may think you’ve made it due to your hard work and initiative, but YOU HAD THE CHANCE TO WORK HARD HANDED TO YOU ON A PLATE. There are millions who work harder than you ever did, but they present at inner city ERs with late stage cancer because they couldn’t stop working and go in when it was Stage 1. Sure, maybe you studied hard, but there are millions of Americans (and billions of human beings) who would love the chance to merely study hard. Oh, to only have to worry about studying hard, and not calories, disease, war, and shelter!

Open your heart. See and acknowledge and feel suffering. Sure, beggars at intersections can be grifters, but maybe, just maybe, that sign is true? Half of America doesn’t have $400 for an emergency. That’s how we end up on the streets. FEEL THAT.

And, oh, happy New Year!

On the crushing stress of debt.

Finance, Soapbox

In which I lecture.

This article advises you to immerse yourself in all the miserable details of your debt, and feel how bad you feel for an entire week, because apparently remorse and guilt will somehow magically attract money into your life. Because your debt is the result of your own terrible emotional flaws, and not a system set up to put you in debt.

“Unconscious spending habits”? Like you’re somehow not aware your outgo is higher than your income? “Messy money practices”? How is being poor in a rich society a messy money practice? Don’t spend any money for a whole day! Fuck you, person who wrote this article who has obviously never been broke a day in her life. Poor people tend to have to buy every day, because they can’t afford to purchase in bulk.

When you’re living hand-to-mouth, you tend to buy food and gas daily, in small increments, with the ten bucks you have to your name. You can’t go buy $150 worth of sensible groceries to last you for the next three weeks of frugal meal-planning, because you don’t have $150. You can’t cross town and fill your tank at the one gas station with the lowest prices, because you don’t have enough gas to get over there, in the first place, and even if you did, you have to eat so you couldn’t even buy a quarter tank anyway.

These sorts of articles about debt, about writing it all down in excruciating detail, living cash-only, really getting a handle on it… they’re all bullshit. You fuckheads have literally no idea what you’re talking about.

To fix debt, you need money. That’s it. Emotionally torturing yourself with your poverty, in minute detail? For an entire week? Is just weird. You already know you own more than you can pay. You’ve already tried to earn more. This isn’t psycho-fucking-therapy, it’s math.

I repeat: only money fixes debt. Nothing else. Not guilt, not self-recrimination, not even more austerity. Just money.

Odds are you’re not in debt for making extravagant decisions. You’re probably in debt because you were given a line of credit you could not support, by a greedy corporation eager to exploit human nature, were or are un- or underemployed through no fault of your own, or went to college to get a degree that doesn’t boost your earning capability (because that’s what they said you were supposed to do and you were compliant).

Very, very few people live beyond their means in the sense of buying too many extravagant things. Paying rent and bills, buying food and clothes, and having the same sorts of extras everybody else in your class has (like vacations and iPhones) is not extravagant.

Most people in debt are in debt because their employers don’t pay them enough to live like the rest of their class lives, or because they can’t get any or enough work. Not because they’re greedy or lazy. The numbers show most poor people actually work more than full-time.

Wages have remained stagnant for the past thirty years. You’re not earning what your parents earned at your age, and yet society expects you to do what they did and buy a house, get married, have two cars so you can both get to work, have new cell phones every two years, own a sufficiency of linens and dishes and furniture and be able to afford hobbies and toys.

Having to choose between groceries and the dentist is bullshit, but being told to take better notes and avoid spending for an entire day to get out of debt isn’t advice, it’s abuse.

It’s now the middle of the week after the week they said they’d call me.

Finance, Work

In which I don’t think I got the job.

Well, it’s Wednesday afternoon, and I haven’t heard back from the CU. Pretty sure they offered both of their lovely P/T teller positions to other applicants. I’m sad, because I really wanted to be able to live and work 600 feet apart, and have regular hours, and spend my work time in a quiet building.

I opened an account there anyway, because being 600 feet away it’ll be the only convenient place to buy quarters for laundry.

Oh, well. Guess I’ll call the other place back, even though I don’t really want to do full-time helpdesk, but maybe it’ll work out.1

I suppose I could apply at the Cub grocery store a few blocks from here, but that’s basically just like the last job, what with the industrial lighting and the standing up and, probably, the random scheduling.

So, the ideal little job I want being pretty much off the table, I responsibly paid my Chase rewards card off (like I do every month) and it took almost half of my remaining funds. As wonderful as it is to sleep in and cook Scott’s dinners and shop online for shoe racks, I guess I really need a job now.

Ugh. Job hunting. So hard. Especially considering that the comfortable, reasonable part-time job seems to be a thing of the past. Retail offers nothing but part-time so they don’t have to pay bennies but it’s really much closer to full-time hours because they’re always understaffed, and ‘real’ business offers nothing but full-time because apparently there’s no such thing as a qualified applicant who will accept part-time employment anymore.

After much consideration, I’ve determined that in order to finish unpacking the last few boxes, we need a little rolling rack for the bathroom, a shoe rack for the closet, and possibly a small shelving unit for the bedroom. I also continue to want-but-not-need an old fashioned coat rack to put by the door for umbrellas and jackets and bags and crap. Even with that many purchases, I still wouldn’t have any place for the officey/desk box of stuff that you’d normally store in your desk but Scott’s desk doesn’t have any drawers or storage or anything, so where the hell are the checks and staplers and mail-that-needs-to-be-saved-for-awhile supposed to go?

Anyway, after staring at stuff a lot, that’s where I’m at. Everything’s full but I still have more stuff to put away. Ergo, we need to obtain things to put said things away in.

I’m going to go throw the bedding in the wash, and then go get milk and eggs. Everything is humid (68%) and hot (81F) and I’m miserable because in my old age I no longer tolerate heat well, but at least it’s overcast so the temperature has stayed down. Sorta. But not really, because HUMID. Even with two fans going in a tiny apartment it still manages to feel stuffy in here; guess I better fire up the A/C.

—
1 It didn’t. I called the HR lady and she told me that the entire bank is moving to Plymouth in October, abandoning their downtown tower. WHO KNEW. Bus ride from Uptown to Plymouth? An hour and twenty-four minutes. Each way. And I happen to know from my adventures last week that cab fare is forty bucks. So no jobs in Plymouth, that’s for sure.

Money and credit, poverty and fees

Finance

In which I have rejoined the regular people.

Once upon a time, I was married.

My spouse, who said, “You don’t have to worry about money. We can always get more money,” and whom I believed, talked me into quitting my job. And then he quit working himself, so we lived on my credit cards for awhile (because he didn’t have any credit to live on, because he’d never filed taxes and basically didn’t exist).

Then, because there wasn’t any money coming in, well, some bills stopped getting paid. And some nasty collections agency took fifteen hundred bucks out of my checking account [illegally] and there was nothing I could do about it because I was broke and legal counsel ain’t free.

Shortly after, for various reasons, the marriage ended. Interestingly enough, although money is one of the top reasons for failed marriages, it was buried pretty far down on my list of reasons for leaving. I was exhausted by being miserable; being broke was merely icing on the cake. It’s not like I hadn’t been poor before. Only this time my debt was actually the debt of two people, one of which wasn’t going to help me pay it off.

I cashed out my tiny little 401k and drank heavily for a year.

When I surfaced, I tried to open a checking account. Nope, you’re listed at TeleCheck. Can I open a savings account? No, no, you can’t.

So I got a pre-paid debit card. It cost $1 to $2 per transaction to use it, but you can’t survive without some sort of bank account. Eventually I started paying the $69 annual fee instead of the per-transaction fees. And I just resigned myself to being poor forever.

Because when you’re below a certain line financially, everything costs money. Far more than it should. It costs money to use a debit card, it costs money to cash checks, it costs money to pay bills. Once you’re a certain level of poor, you pretty much stay there unless someone pulls you out of it, because you’re charged for transactions that are free for everyone else simply because you’re poor. I’ve paid hundreds if not thousands in “poverty fees” in my life and I know that being poor is expensive.

Well, that $1,500 judgement that overdrew my checking account and basically destroyed me financially was over seven years ago now, and I’ve paid off most if not all of those bills. So on a lark I applied for an Amazon Rewards card. And I was approved! AND the card came in the mail with my credit score, which is now, mysteriously, almost 700 printed on the letter.

Which means I now have a free checking account with free bill pay, and a VISA card that pays me from 1 to 5% just for using it. In short, I no longer have to pay for the right to use my own money. I get paid for using my money. Even though I’m no different today than I was two years ago, except I actually have less income.

I’m now one of them; and the only reason for this is that I haven’t had to pay rent since 2005. All those years of paying off my marriage’s debt and having zero revolving credit has made me a good credit risk again, even though I have very little income, and have historically earned very little. Which is to say, companies that extend credit? After all this? Still don’t give a shit if they ruin you by giving you too much rope as long as they get their fucking fees out of you.

Luckily I’m old enough now to have conquered most of my avarice; I won’t be buying things I can’t afford with my nifty new credit card. And I’m glad that using my own money is not not only free but earns me rewards, but I think it’s fucked that I spent most of the last decade paying for the right to spend my own paycheck.

Charging the poor for being poor is nothing short of evil. Especially since most of the poor are there not because they deserve to be, not because they’re ignorant or lazy or sub-par, but because they just don’t have someone to help them up over that invisible line.

Greed, I believe, is absolutely the worst of sins because of the endless misery it causes in the world.

I had such a super-great interview yesterday!

Finance, Work

In which I got to see the view from the 27th floor.

When I told people I was moving to Minneapolis, they invariably responded, “Oh, for work?” and I kept having to say, “No, for love. I think I’ll temp or something,” because apparently grown people don’t just move two thousand miles unless it’s for a job.

Then I got here and sort of looked around, became mildly overwhelmed (remember, I haven’t lived in a real city in a long time), and thought it would be better to work in the neighborhood, maybe someplace I could get to on my bike? You know, nearby?

Except that, well, the bulk of jobs nearby are retail and pay eight bucks an hour or are in obscure businesses in big buildings I have no easy way of finding anyway.

EIGHT BUCKS AN HOUR. Jeez! I can’t even get out of bed for that, let alone dressed.

So another week went by, I got a better handle on the area, and I returned to the temping idea. I freakin’ LOVE temping. So I applied at three temp agencies… and Friday, one of them called!

Saturday, we took the bus to St. Paul for a Cinco de Mayo street festival, which was fun, but mostly the day’s experience gave me a better handle on public transportation here. There’s a rush hour bus stop on the corner, and, for non-peak times there’s a park ‘n’ ride eight-tenths of a mile away with a bike rack for me to chain the Raleigh to, and the 9 bus goes right to downtown Minneapolis in ten minutes.

My interview at Robert Half went well over an hour, and I got to speak with three different recruiters! They were all really nice, and the meeting was in a conference room on the 27th floor of the US Bankcorp building with an amazing sunny-day view of Minneapolis. I wanted to take a picture, but was afraid it would be tacky to get caught with my cell phone out in an interview.

Now I’m glad that home improvement place didn’t call me back, because I’d much rather temp — I love the variety — than run a cash register for $8.20 an hour, even if it is in the neighborhood! Based on the things the various recruiters said in yesterday’s interview, this company really sounds promising, and I could do both those sudden “Can you cover reception for three days while the employee is out sick, starting in one hour!?” assignments and, apparently, the occasional three month-long project gig. With a bit of time off afterward I’d be quite happy.

So. Very. Excited! Even bought myself a metro transit card!

Doing it wrong.

Admissions, Finance

In which I wonder what my old age will be like.

Yesterday, I read an opinion piece in the New York Times. It was a good man’s story: older, loyal, secure; then his company “restructured.” Now he’s been unemployed for years. He’s too old to get a job; he has a preexisting condition so he’s unable to get insurance; he “always did the right thing,” and is now facing abject destitution.

He’s not much older than I am.

I have not done the right things.

I went to college, yes, but I didn’t have any discipline. I took classes that interested me, dropped out of those that didn’t, and in six years of higher education came away with substantial and still growing debt and no marketable degrees.

I got married, yes, but I chose badly. I didn’t choose someone who would make a good helpmeet and life partner. I chose someone who, at first, rocked my socks off in bed and who, unlike anyone else, actually asked me to marry him. But that was it, there really weren’t any other important qualities there between us, not the kinds of qualities that get you through your working years and safely into your dotage with your needs modestly taken care of. So naturally we divorced, and that left me with no equity and even more debt.

Now I’m of an age where I should be investing and building my retirement. Instead, I have no savings and no insurance. For the next few months, I’m giving 30% of my monthly income to my dentist so I can keep a tooth. As soon as the root canal and crown are paid off, I’ll do the same thing for my eyes, because I really need my prescriptions updated. After that’s paid off, no doubt, something else will happen, and I’ll pay that off too.

But eventually something might happen that I can’t make payments on. What if I get hurt, or need medicine? I’m employed, so I’m not eligible for many types of relief, but I earn too little to, say, be able to spend a bunch of money on meds every month.

I’ve been insured fewer than four years since I started working.

I’m not borrowing trouble. I’m stating that it is statistically likely that I will need something I won’t be able to to afford.

Which means I have failed my end of the social covenant. I should have educated myself more carefully and made myself more employable, no? I should have chosen a decent partner1, and together we should have earned and saved enough to pay for ourselves. I should have taken steps all my life not to be a burden on anyone, right?

I mean, isn’t that the social covenant?

Continue reading Doing it wrong. →

OMG OMG OMG I HAVE A JOB

Finance, Work

In which I rejoin the workforce!

Last night I took myself out for dinner and drank a lot of wine (because that’s what you do when you’re damn near broke and the check you’ve been expecting for weeks still hasn’t shown up, right? RIGHT?), which means I was still in bed at 10:30 this morning when G’ma called up the stairs, “Shelly! There’s a man from BMI here to see you!”

A what from what? Did she say BMI? “Um, okay. I’m not dressed! Tell him I’ll be down in a minute!”

I grabbed some clothes from the floor and put them on, found my glasses, put my messy hair up in a pony tail and stumbled downstairs.

The man turned out to be RB, my old boss from BMI… with a job offer! Their network engineer has taken a position elsewhere, and since they really weren’t excited at the prospect of running ads and doing interviews and background checks and calling references and finding someone with the right personality for their small office, they thought of me! (I left because I wanted more responsibility and there was, at the time, no room for growth.) Then they checked my blog and saw the job hunting post, realized I was still available, and started trying to hunt me down. Since I hadn’t answered my phone, RB decided to jump in his car and come find me. Continue reading OMG OMG OMG I HAVE A JOB →