Life as I know it...and having faith.

Two or so years ago my wife and I made a decision.   Up until that time, we had been living the dream.  Whatever we wanted. Whenever we wanted it. And it did not matter what it cost.

The decision that we made back then was to be debt-free by 40.  It gave us 7 years to get there.

When you owe as much as we did, and still do, that is one hell of a challenge.  At the time, we owed on two cars. A boat. Our house (twice). Student loans. on and on and on. We were making plenty of payments.

So we decided to spend the next 7 years incurring no new un-needed debt.  We also decided to eliminate as much of what we owed as quickly as we could.  Not one of these things was easy to do.  I really liked my boat.  We had to either find a way to make extra payments and pay it off, or to sell the thing.  I dont have that boat anymore.  Same with my truck.  Never in my life had I driven something with more than a couple miles on it. Suddenly I owned something with over 200,000 on it. We used our tax return to pay off my student loans.  We stopped buying anything that didnt resemble groceries.

What I didnt realize was that everybody we knew was about to be doing the same thing.

In the last two years, the economy of this country has take a big hit.  While I dont really know very many people who have lost jobs during this, I do know an awful lot who are worse off than they were when we made our changes.

And it makes me feel very fortunate to have made the decision that we made at the time that we did.  Granted, we still have 5 years left in this endeavor, but we are seemingly way ahead of the curve right now.  I have seen so many of my friends make similar decisions since then.   And we have the proverbial jump on them.

That is not the wild part.  What is funny about my current thought process is that our parents never had to make this decision.  Part of what caused the whole thing is that we were able to borrow money that we could never afford to pay back.  When my parents were young, there was no such thing as 12 months no interest or payments.  You could not buy a car that you couldnt afford; especially at 3% interest.  It just wasnt going to happen.

What is crazy to me is the amount that we as a people have come to rely on debt.  We have forgotten how to save, and worse, most of us havent forgotten, we have never learned in the first place,  We live paycheck to paycheck, and if something happens that costs more than our payments will allow us to give cash for, we use plastic to cover it (ie more debt)

This is a slippery slope.  Because it is just way to easy to slide down.  And it is fun by the way.  I defer again to a country song, there is a line about  "i learned credit cards dont mean you're rich"  True Dat.

SO it has been a tough two years.  I was fortunate recently to work my way into a new position which should make it a lot less tough.

And then, in the last few weeks, the reality of the real world set in.  Turns out I'm still really glad for the decisions that we have made as a couple in the last two years.  Because the extra pay that I am able to earn could very well be negated by some of the things that will likely happen to Babe's paycheck. And the price of fuel, and soooo many other things that this country is about to have to go without.  I never thought that I would even think about examining the health insurance available through my employer. Her insurance basically made the idea laughable. But Today, Today I asked for the information.

When I was in school, when I was young, I grew up watching the Cleavers.  Full House.  The Brady Bunch.  The images presented were of what I used to believe is the American Dream.  Upper middle class families who wanted for nothing.  Work hours were short.  Family time was high quality and high quantity. And damn if I didnt grow up thinking that this was how life should be.

And Then.  This show came out called "That 70's show"  And the dad gets layed off.  And loses his job. And there is some struggle.  And countless other shows come along with the same theme.  Two of the biggest mfr's in my town shut down and leave hundreds, almost thousands of people out of work. And you hear so much of it that you dont even notice anymore.

Now we are afraid for Babe's job. A schoolteacher.  How can a schoolteacher have to worry about work?  Its un-american right?  But we are worried.  We have, for the first time in our lives, a lot of apprehension about the next few years of her career.


Why is this happening?  It is all about the almighty dollar.  For forty or so years, our country has had this huge group of people called the baby boomers to rely on. They are a really large number of people.  And they pay taxes.  Unfortunately, they are starting to retire as quickly as they started paying taxes.  And, unfortunately, they didnt have enough kids to replace themselves.   So our tax dollars in total are declining.  Which leads to lots of really really bad things.

But I will leave you tonight with a dash of hope. There were roughly 79 million baby-boomers. and although they didnt replace themselves right away, meaning with generation "X"  they did do so later in life, and then the early gen x's, in turn had the early generation "Y"   And at last count, there were 80 million of those Y's.  That fact, in turn, means that over time our tax base will get back where it has been.  And in the meantime, maybe we can balance a budget or two.  It isnt going to be fun, because we will not be able to support the sorts of programs and fun stuff that we have all gotten used to, like my wife's current benefits package, but we might even learn how to save some of our money.  The problem with the 80 million strong generation Y is that they do not subscribe to the line of reasoning that we have all gotten used to. They question everything, which is going to produce either a lot of bums, or a lot of hyper successful people. I'm hoping for the latter.

I hate to say it, but over time I think this will lead to a very healthy tax base.  And frankly, that is what this country needs right now.  So where are we headed? have faith. It might suck for a while, but sooner or later, things will be good again.  If we can just get those 20-somethings off their skateboards.