$$$$$$$$$$$, Part 2: Spending

At the end of each shift, I add up all my credit card tips on a calculator that prints my day’s earnings onto a little slip of paper.  Most of the numbers are small:  a lot of 5’s, a few 10’s, and the occasional 20.  Each day I look forward to doing the math namely due to a large (but shrinking) number that always looms over my head:  $28,000 in student loans that I want desperately out of my life before I turn thirty, when I’ll really need some financial breathing room.  Paying off such a substantial burden with pocket-change tips seems tantamount to melting a glacier with a book of matches, but this is meant to be a long and steady race. 

I don’t know much about the stock market, nor do I have the mind for property investment.  The only financial strength of which I am confident is the ability to save money.  If this lifestyle has taught me one lesson it is how to live frugally yet fully.  As of now, I know no better strategy than to use seasonal work to save thousands of dollars each year.

When payday comes around, most of the employees go into town to celebrate this brief resurgence in their bank accounts.  This industry is known to attract a rowdy, YOLO-esque crowd with tendencies to indulge in frivolous spending that they later regret but simultaneously admit these habits will persist.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with spending money, even exorbitant amounts, to enjoy the summer while you are here.  I frequently indulge in long road-trips during the weekends and the occasional pricey meal to reawaken my taste buds after weeks of EDR fare. 

Despite this live-for-the-moment philosophy, many employees, including myself, are often disappointed by the smallness of the number on our paychecks (granted, the smallness relative to our grandiose expectations).  I call this biweekly phenomenon the post-paycheck blues, a mindset that signifies long-term financial plans and the accompanying impatience to achieve those goals.  Even if our expectations are too high, it is perfectly reasonable to wish to be paid more and to want to pay off debts sooner rather than later.

 

When you assign a monetary worth to a measurement of time (i.e. $9/hr; a $50K annual salary), mortality eventually reveals itself as the driver behind your impatience to have money now.  If we were all immortal, we’d be more content to be wage workers because time would be an unlimited resource.  Unfortunately for the living, this parking space isn’t permanent, and there’s only so many coins you can put in the meter.  This is the essential concern of parents who pressure their children to go off to college and to enter a respectable and well-paying profession.  Those children grow up implanted with a nagging penchant for progress in the name of the American dollar.  Make money while you can, before your laboring body fails and calculating mind turns to mush.

We ask kindergartners what they want to be when they grow up.  It seems irresponsible to ask any five-year-old about their possible realities in two decades.  I mean, these kids recently mastered scheduling their bowel movements to take place somewhere other than their pants, and already we’re thinking med school.  I was always being prepared for the next chapter:  from middle school to high school, from high school to college, from college finally to the real world.  Before each transition, we were asked to narrow our focus on what we wanted to be.  In all my preparation, we rarely spoke of money but it lingered underneath every lesson.  This educational template is designed, not necessarily to make you a well-rounded and contemplative human being, but to engineer you into a job-worthy applicant.  In other words, this system gives you the tools to earn enough money to feed, clothe and shelter yourself.

Those familiar with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden would recognize that those basics are really all you need to survive, and I’m talking four walls and a roof, not a two-car garage and spacious backyard with a kitchen-sink window overlooking the Atlantic.  Most seasonal employees are housed and fed by the company, so these expenses are deducted biweekly.  When we get paid, all the money is ours, so we use our paychecks to buy non-essentials and bills that we choose to accrue.  I’m talking about monthly Netflix fees, cell phone bills, credit card debt, car payments:  appendages we have grown attached to but do not require for survival.  

      

Each month I give about 20% of my monthly income to the U.S. Department of Education.  I log onto a website and watch my money vanish.  I see no physical evidence of money, only numbers on a computer screen getting bigger or smaller.  My paycheck is directly deposited into my Wells Fargo bank account.  I keep enough of a financial cushion to feed myself should I find myself unexpectedly jobless or in dire need of a costly root canal.  The rest of that money belongs to the federal government and various borrowers who possessed both the generosity and cold-heartedness to lend me such unfathomable amounts of money.

As a naïve eighteen-year-old who had one supermarket job under his belt and paid zero dollars in rent his entire life, a $50,000 education was intimidating only if you considered how you’d eventually earn that much money.  But if you continuously pushed that thought to the back of your mind and procrastinated a concrete plan for about five years, then the whole matter was quite approachable.  It was only last year (two years after graduating) that I aggressively threw all my paychecks at the four loans I owed for college.  This new methodology was inspired after I read Ken Ilgunas’ Walden on Wheels, a memoir about using seasonal jobs in Alaska to pay off his Bachelor’s degree ASAP. 

Ken started out as a dishwasher in a trucker’s rest-stop restaurant in the boonies of Alaska and worked his way up to a park ranger at the Gates of the Arctic National Park.  He devoted entire paychecks toward his loans until he stared at a zero balance.  When he was granted admission to Duke University for his Master’s, he vowed never to go into debt again.  To keep his expenses low, he lived in his van while attending school.

The bottom line is: if you want more money but are stuck with the figures you are making, you have to make sacrifices of personal comfort.  I’ve opted for sleeping in many Walmart parking lots rather than spend even $49 for a night in a Motel 6.  I’ve lived several years without a car when a bike would get me around well enough.  And when I did buy a car, I found one on Craigslist for $900, and that P.O.S. got me around the country thrice with over 30,000 miles accrued in 1.5 years.  It was not pretty and had no air conditioning and was scarred with a crack in the windshield, but the car functioned. 

While working in Bryce Canyon last year, I drove a Turkish friend of mine to the bank about an hour away, and she asked why I didn’t buy a nicer car.  She worked in the same restaurant as me and knew about how much money I made.  I tried to explain my philosophy of frugality:  that the money I have isn’t exactly mine, especially when you consider all that interest accruing daily.  Long-term-wise, it is smarter for me to save money when I don’t need it when I am single, childless, and in strong physical condition.  This lean financial diet will pay off eventually, hopefully, but if I bought a nicer car now I’d still be logging onto that website and watching my money vanish when I am 40, a decade in which I’ll be more concerned about my blood-pressure and my biological clock regarding the proper cut-off age to have children so I can be active during their youths and play football with them in the yard without my knees giving out.  Of course, I couldn’t explain all this to a Turkish woman with limited English skills regarding the future tense, so I told her I drive a shitty car with a cracked windshield so I can use my money to have fun in other ways like buying trans-Atlantic flights, sixty cappuccinos and sixty nights in European hostels, and enough left over to get me home. 

All this forward-thinking makes me wonder why we don’t work toward a future in which we need less and less money.  I anticipate paying off all my student loans by the year 2019, after which all my earnings will belong solely to me.  Nearly every job-seeking decision has been made to diminish this beast of a number.  Not a day goes by where I don’t think of this $28,000 figure.  This three-years-in-the-making goal has been a huge fixture of my life, so where will my existence be directed once I’ve paid off this debt?  How will it feel to be the sole proprietor of my income?  I imagine the outcome will necessitate a proper celebration, which will be followed by several moments of insignificance and many what-do-I-do-now ponderings. 

The natural course of action would be to go back to school and accrue even more debt, but what if I didn’t?  What if I took a job with less pay because I liked the work?  Surely paying off such a tremendous debt should be a lesson in managing money wisely, so continuing to live within my financial comfort zone seems responsible.  What if I tried to live in such a way where I didn’t need much money? 

I would need no more than a couple hundred dollars for a small place where I could stay warm in the winter and cook my meals.  I could get a job at the library and sit on a chair and read books most of the day.  That kind of life wouldn’t be deserving of a phallic-shape memorial that pierces the sky, but maybe I don’t need to shoot so high.  If my life were less career- and money-centric, my desire for consumerism would all but disappear, and I would have more time to think about all the things I don’t need to be happy.

Until that day comes, I am shooting for $300 days, churning my legs, burning x number of calories, sweating x number of beads, forcing x number of fake smiles to get this monkey off my back.  I'll take your picture with the pond in the background, run back to the kitchen to get an extra ramekin of Ranch dressing, and then when you leave I'll pick up all the macaroni noodles that your child threw on the floor.  Anything to claw my way out of debt.  Even when I'm not at work, I often think about money and how I can get more of it.  Likewise, I envision a future when this thought never needs to cross my mind, but I wouldn’t bet on that any time soon.