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If Every Day Is a Rainy Day, What Am I Saving For?
The only time I ever saw my mother in an actual bank was the day my parents sat down at the kitchen table and decided, much to the relief of every family within earshot of our suburban home, to finally get a divorce. They shook hands amicably, and Mom excused herself, then drove us both straight to the bank to withdraw all but one dollar from my parents’ joint account.
Shortly after my fourth birthday, we moved out of the house into one cramped apartment after another. The important business of my early life was negotiated at currency exchanges (where you could pay the bill for whatever utility was about to be shut off), Social Security offices and food pantries run out of church basements, and transacted in WIC vouchers and money orders and rolls of quarters for the laundromat. I had no idea what a credit card was. I thought rich people just dove headfirst into the piles of gold coins in their money rooms like Scrooge McDuck.
I grew up without money, but adjacent to the kind of wealth that afforded my classmates cars with electronic windows and multiple pairs of quality jeans. It never occurred to me that once I got ahold of even the littlest bit of money myself, I should carefully ration it.
I know I should have invested in a sturdy pair of those bootstraps people who speak at graduation ceremonies are always talking about, but what does that even mean? Pay the rent, throw some cash at the phone bill, sprinkle a little change on the light bill, divide the remaining 20 bucks between the laundromat and a stock portfolio? It all seemed so unmanageable. And the years of being deprived or feeling stressed about money didn’t make me want to save; they made me want to spend, to immediately enjoy the fruits of the $7.25 an hour I made listening to people talk down to me in a customer service job.
My first handful of jobs in high school were babysitting gigs, and let’s be 100 percent clear about what I spent that money on: many issues of Sassy magazine; Sarah McLachlan’s “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” and Bjork’s “Post” on cassette; every brown and maroon drugstore lipstick I could get my hands on; and steel-toed Doc Martens. Not once did it occur to me that I should be saving for a rainy day.
To me, the first 15 miserable years of my life had been one great big rainy day during which I gazed longingly at the material possessions of my classmates. As soon as I got my first envelope of $20 bills for chasing babies named Tommy and Caroline around playrooms big enough to dwarf our entire apartment, I started plotting all the ways I was going to waste it, like trading my nondescript blue backpack for one from Eddie Bauer. (It was the ’90s. Give me a break.)
When I got my first real paycheck, I opened a checking account at the bank across the street from my workplace, and I didn’t even consider opening a savings account or learning about investments. That kind of stuff was for adults, adults who didn’t have years of deprivation to undo.
I was trying to fill this gaping hole inside me with “stuff I couldn’t have when I was a little kid,” and I assumed that one day, when I had finally bought enough magazines and name-brand snack foods, the feeling would go away. But it hasn’t. And because I know the value of a dollar, when I get one I want to buy the nicest thing I can with it.
I’m still like this: Still buying hardcover books with no discount, still daydreaming about what I’m going to spend my 401(k) on when I withdraw it early, because who are we kidding, I’m not trying to live to 65, are you nuts? I don’t have any debt because I’ve never owned anything and I dropped out of college before my loans got unmanageable. I pay for everything in cash because I don’t understand A.P.R.s. My credit file was so thin from so many years of living pretty much off the grid that when I finally got around to applying for a Discover card, Experian thought I might be dead.
Will my yawning internal pit of desire ever be full? Is there any amount of cash that’s enough to fully satiate this ravenous beast? Will Netflix and Spotify and HBO ever stop providing me with unlimited access to hours upon hours of entertainment to distract from the ennui that awaits me in real life? How many lipsticks is too many?
I was feeling bad about my shoes at a fancy cocktail lounge the other night while talking to a woman I know. She is, I am pretty sure, greater-than-slash-equal to me in terms of poverty. She made an elaborate show of heaving her giant designer purse onto the bar so that she could dig through it to find the laundry money she was going to use to pay for her Sazerac. “That’s a really nice bag,” I said, taking a sip of my light bill. “Did you recently receive a settlement of some kind?” She laughed heartily and poured her Obamacare deductible down her throat in one long swallow. “Girl, naw, I bought this with money I should’ve spent on my car payment.” I clinked the ice in my checking account overdraft fees and nodded solemnly in agreement.
A lot of us are living like this, right? How does anyone do the stuff they want to do with their money while they’re doing the stuff they need to do? It’s easy to make fun of people for buying avocado toast with precious take-home pay, but what if what I’m spending isn’t my mom’s money? What if there’s no clear path from $0 in your checking account to a down payment on a house that’s fit to live in? I am sure there’s a financial adviser somewhere who could use trigonometry to explain how to whittle a three-car garage out of $20,000 a year, but since I can’t afford his services, I’ll just be over here in the bottomless-mimosa brunch line.
What I need to be, clearly, is rich. I need to invent an app or get hit by a city bus. I gotta start playing the lottery. Except, if I win, I definitely need a trustee or Britney Spears’s dad to dispense a weekly allowance because I am not to be trusted. I would buy half a dozen pairs of glasses and legally download a bunch of movies I don’t even like before the check even cleared. I would buy that Rainbow Brite doll I never got for Christmas 1986 and drive her around in my new car full of gasoline with my windows electronically rolled down and the air conditioner blasting, eating fistfuls of name-brand cereal and sipping an actual Capri Sun.
Samantha Irby is the author, most recently, of “We Are Never Meeting in Real Life,” from which this essay is adapted.
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