A Future Delayed

Life isn't as convenient as it should be and growing up has not necessarily lived up to all its potential.I remember dreaming about what adulthood would be like when I was a little girl. I remember even going so far as making statements about what I would do different than my own parents. Now that I am a "grown up" I can help but feel I am still a little girl.

I wonder if everyone feels like this? Like the little kid who snuck downstairs to observe their parents party? I wonder if I will ever truly feel grown up.

Part of my assumption of not being a grown up has to do with my inability to lay down roots. We are on a terminal hold up. We don't want kids until we have the house, we can't afford the house until we pay off the student loan debt, we can't pay off the debt while we are wasting money renting, and so on and so on.

I wonder if these things worked themselves out, would I finally feel like an adult? Would I finally feel like I had some semblance of control over my life. Or do we always feel just a little bit lost?

Smotherly Love

I am very close to my family. Some people may call that the ethnic in me, but I hold the relationship with my parents and siblings high on my priority list. Most times this benefits me. I feel I've grown a lot and am stronger for my close ties to them. I've even rubbed off on my husband, who is getting a reputation for being the thoughtful one of his brothers. I think how someone treats their family, the good and the bad of them, reflects a lot on how they will treat their spouse and even more on who they fundamentally are as a person. This extends to extended family and close friends as well.

However....

I'm beginning to feel a bit smothered. Is it just me or was there more opportunity to check out of family obligations prior to the "I do"? I don't begrudge every event, family get together, or family crisis, but lately I feel like dough that has been rolled out too thin. I can't remember the last weekend the husband and I have had to ourselves. This puts life into great perspective when I think of how bored I was as a kid when my parents didn't want to do anything "fun" over the weekends. Gosh, they must have been exhausted!

I feel like I am being run around in circles, between work and obligations, I am pretty sure I only see my husband in bed or when one or both of us is too sick to make other plans. I would like to spend weekends on just us, but inevitably,  someone will expect us over and we'll feel guilty if we put ourselves first.

Add to this my sister has been living with us, which is great and helpful, but sometimes suffocating. She has a tendency to run the house as if it were her own... Literally reprimanding me for whatever I do that doesn't meet her liking. I mean, its still my home right?

And my mom is already planning our anniversary? Not like a party, but like a family vacation. And its weird. Because, in my mind, I feel our anniversary should be a private time about us as a couple, not a big public event. I feel like I'm selfish if I want to just do something nice with the husband and I, but I also feel annoyed that we don't even get THIS day for ourselves.

Of course, one of the things I am super jealous of is not having a day for myself, I figured our anniversary can be this. My birthday is Christmas Eve, which invariably sucks because it typically means I am forgotten or that everyone is too busy to make me more than an afterthought. I figured our anniversary could be about what Hubs and I want, and we get the feel special. And while I would love a family vacation, one on our anniversary isn't about us much, is it?


The cherry on top, if you remember my taxes post, is that we want to get a house. I need my own space, and I don't want to settle for a place that doesn't fit us. So added to my brother's advice of getting a place in a less nice area is my in-laws advice and sales pitch of buying a house in the mountains (3-4 hours from work) that we can use sometimes on the weekends and the rest of the family can use when we're not.... Did I hear that right? Because this is like asking us to buy a vacation home for the family rather than-- yet again-- taking care of us.

I know what a chicken with its head cut off feels like.  So how do you learn to say no? How do you reconcile your needs with wanting to be nice and accommodating? This is my current journey.

Step 1, I am making 100 days about myself. In the next 100 days, I am going to focus on my husband and my wants and needs as a priority.  Its already a daunting task because neither of us like to disappoint anyone. So why do we keep allowing us to disregard ourselves?

The State of the Union

Nothing can put more heat into a relationship, and not in a good way, as money and politics. Whether the politics are referring to the local or national government or the politics of any typical family, it is easy to ended up jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

So its tax season. People may tell you that one of the perks of getting married is the tax break. Well, I'm sure that happens once you have a house or 2 or three kids in the picture. However, for two hard working, able bodied, child free, renting, young Californians... You might be screwed.

It seems we are. I mentioned  in a previous post that we had done everything possible to not be a burden on others and to not go into debt over our wedding.

One of my plans of action was, unsurprisingly, to work my butt off. In addition to my normal day job, I freelance as a production designer and as a writer.  In order to defer the cost of our wedding, I freelanced a lot. Way more than usual. I ended up earning an extra $11,000 last year, which in turn was a magic number for a wedding and a nice honeymoon. The trouble with this type of work is taxes are taken on the back end and I could not anticipate jumping tax brackets so severely that the government would ask for 10k of that back at the end of the year.  With that extra 11K my taxes quintupled. How do you plan for that? How do you set aside that large of an increase? Well, it wasn't simply tax brackets, it was also joint property, more stringent rules for claiming student loan interest. This weekend we ran into the a+b+c = us being screwed.

This of course is not the end, we need to go to a tax guy (or gal) to work things out better. Maybe turbo tax was on crack. I had let my husband fill out the documents initially and he drastically underestimates our expenses, including what I can and should deduct for basically owning my own business. I wanted to set his mind at ease by seeing what numbers would come up if we filed married but separate. This is when panic set in. Because suddenly my standard deductions disappeared. I was staring at the horrid red numbers thinking, "where did I go wrong?" The answer was, we got married.

Lets face it, our American government is not exactly the most accommodating to people of my generation. Student loan debt is drowning many of those who might be our future leaders. People are failing to put down roots or get married because we just can't afford to. And the government wonders why the nation is in crisis. The education system has basically created a generation without hope, a dwindling middle class trying to keep its head above the water. Add to that, if you dare to brave a forward path, you will be given little to no assistance. It really makes you wonder why you work so hard. Suddenly, you have a lot more sympathy for those relying on welfare, because it seems the American economy would prefer its citizens to embrace that lifestyle.

I wonder, 100 years in the future, if the history books will talk about the American generation that stopped being. The ones who chose or were forced to revert to a child like existence. To move home in their 20's and 30's. The ones who could not afford to "have a life" so instead reverted to safer places like video games and Facebook. These are the people who might have magnified hope and lead progress. But instead, they have been crippled. Their path ripped out from under them.

You can probably guess I am frustrated. I think I went into a debt coma when I saw those numbers. I know once I recover I can be more proactive, but for the moment I am wallowing.

I know one of the reasons we waited as long as we did to get married was because of debt. I'm a good girl, my only debt is my student loan, but damn is it a whopper. Now, my scrimping and saving and working 12 hour days to make things a little easier for us had apparently been a trap waiting to be deployed.

All I could think about was my poor husband, and how are we going to get through this if we can't find ways to lower it? Well, I could empty out my piggy bank, so much for traveling to Poland to see his brother or having a down payment for a house in the near future. Thank you America for dooming us to stagnancy.

I told my brother, hoping for advice on a tax guy. Instead we got lectured about how we're doing "it" wrong. "It" being life. He told us we needed to buy a house, as though we didn't already know this. But where would the money come from? I mean the government wants my nest egg back. He suggested we find a cheap home in a bad neighborhood. I wondered if my safety would be a smart compromise for my financial well being. I mean, who wants to live in a neighborhood where they aren't happy to go outside for a walk. He suggested if not the "not so good" neighborhoods locally, perhaps we should move 2 hours away from our work to where prices are more reasonable. Again, I couldn't imagine much joy in a 4 hour a day commute to our offices. Jobs, I might add, that we love.

I expected my hubby to be grumpy. I sure was. I apologized to my parents in advance for being short and to friends and family for not driving to watch the Superbowl with them as gas is expensive. But Scott simply held me and told me its okay, we'll figure it out. Now, we'll scale back and take care of ourselves, rather than working to pay off loans that refuse to go down. He promised he'd find some way to keep my nest egg and coaxed me to put down my work for the night and instead play some video games and relax. Work will still be there tomorrow. He calmed me down, and hopefully, my creative thinking will kick in, and we can move past this bump. But I really cannot deny that  I have a wonderful husband.

On the upside, this learning experience has taught us, not to kill ourselves over repaying our debt, because all that hard work will come to bite us. All advances will be nullified. So simply. lets enjoy what time we have. Let take those 4 extra hours of work and make them 4 extra hours of play instead.  Maybe it doesn't matter how hard you work or how many extra hours you give to paying back your perceived debt. Maybe the most important thing our generation has left to cling to is our joy. Lets not let anything take that away from us.