One of the worst periods of my life was when I first returned to the U.S. after living abroad for several years. During the two-year period that followed, I spent more time unemployed than employed. Even worse, after I found a job after seven months of looking, I was laid off after a few months because it was a poor fit.
Being so financially insecure was devastating. Even though I had the benefit of staying with my parents, I spiraled into depression. I cried constantly. I was in my 30s, college-educated, and had never spent more than a month without a job. I called suicide hotlines, only to have them turn me away because I wasn’t going to kill myself right then and there. Didn’t it matter that I thought about it all the time? That I was a useless person who didn’t deserve to live because I couldn’t find a job?
My parents were actually pretty great. My mom always told me and tells me now, “Your generation suffers.”
Eventually, I did find a permanent job again in 2013. At that time, my savings account was bleak, and I was living off my credit cards.
But ever since my employment stabilized, I’ve been obsessively saving. Personal finance is my hobby. Even in expensive San Francisco, I live very frugally, and I love it. I changed my 401K deduction so that I would max it out. I got my tax refund and threw it into my Roth IRA, because guess what?—I’m maxing that out too.
This year, I’m aiming for a grand total of $100K in my savings account. I’m $23K short right now, but I’m confident I can reach my goal.
But even with that big round number, I don’t feel safe. I’m scared that one day, I’ll find myself facing the demon of depression again because of financial insecurity. So I’m doing everything I can to keep the demon away while I can.
Speaking of extreme savings, this email from Brian Surratt is really helpful:
Neal Gabler’s article was a bracing spotlight on the problem of middle-class financial insecurity. His candid account of his own financial history was a brave and important act. I hope it serves as a catalyst to change the financial habits of Americans for the better.
His story presents an opportunity to highlight the exact opposite of financial illiteracy: the small but growing financial independence, or FI, movement. (The movement is also known as financial independence/retire early (FIRE) or early retirement extreme (ERE).) It’s best known proponent is Mr. Money Mustache, who has been widely profiled in magazines such as The New Yorker. The movement appears to be growing. For example, the Reddit FI forum has been steadily growing in popularity and there seem to be new FI bloggers every day.
The central tenet of FI is to strive for a very, very high savings rate, essentially saving between 30 and 70% of income. This both encourages household frugality while increasing savings to a point where it is no longer necessary to work as a paid employee well before traditional retirement age.
The FI culture has much to offer those who are financially insecure. First of all, the time to become financially literate is now. It is never too late. As Megan McArdle has pointed out, if you are an older worker with insufficient savings, FI is a great way to ensure you save something for retirement.
Second, even if you simply don’t have enough income to achieve a 50% savings rate, by adopting some of the principles of FI, you may achieve at least a reasonable (say, 20%) savings rate.
Third, the broad range of incomes of FI adherents shows it is possible for the majority of Americans to save some amount. After all, whatever one’s income level, other households are getting by on less. It will require a change in lifestyle, but the FI movement shows that it is possible.
Over the past year, for the first time in my life, I’ve been saving, and saving aggressively—35 percent of my paycheck. Fifty percent is an appealing goal, especially after reading Gabler’s piece the other night and now absorbing all the emails coming in from readers who fell on really hard times. Having a significant savings account for the first time in my life is an extreme boon psychologically. (Still paying off those undergraduate loans, though, 12 years out.) If you happen to be part of the Financial Independence movement and want to offer any specific advice or tips to our readers, drop us an email.
A ton of reader emails have already come in responding to Becca’s callout for “true money stories.” The first one comes from a reader who prefers to stay anonymous. Her story of financial struggle is set in the mid-’90s, when the U.S. was having an economic boom:
In October, we had a very cheap wedding and put a down payment on a house instead of going on a honeymoon. We were in our mid-20s and both had college degrees. My husband had two part-time jobs. I had a full-time job with health insurance and a part-time job for Christmas money. What could go wrong?
In November, my company went under, leaving me with the 15-hour-a-week bookstore job. Luckily they took me on full-time for the holiday season.
In December, one of my husband’s part-time jobs went on hiatus for three weeks. The refrigerator quit. We turned the furnace down to 56, blocked the vents, and unplugged everything in all but our bedroom, the kitchen, and the basement (which luckily had a full bathroom). I returned for cash all the wedding gifts we hadn’t used. There were no Christmas gifts that year, of course. My dad sold some stock and gave us $400 so we could buy a cheap fridge. I cried.
Our food for the next year was from the damaged rack, and we ate quick-sale meat and dairy. We racked up $7,000 in credit card debt, trying to keep ourselves above water.
We’ve now been married 21 years, have two kids, and two more degrees. But I still shop from the damaged food section.
This next reader discloses how “my worst moments of financial insecurity, as a young husband, both involved food”:
The first happened at a grocery store in 1976. My bride and I were shopping for groceries, in the days before we had credit cards, and we realized that we didn’t have enough cash to pay for the pitifully few groceries we had put in the cart. Deciding what to put back was a combination of embarrassment and a feeling of impotence (of the “not man enough” variety).
The second was worse. Mary was cooking pasta and trying to drain it without a strainer. The lid slipped and the pasta went into the sink, some down the drain. She broke into tears because she had to fish our dinner out of the sink. We had nothing else to eat, and no money to eat out.
I was in graduate school at the time, on a fellowship that almost paid our rent. She had a BFA to teach, but jobs were nonexistent. We both had good prospects for the future, but a feeling of “we won’t survive to get there.”
I have friends whose fertility I know more about than their finances. Money—what we make, how we spend it, how much we owe—is perhaps the most personal information of all. And we’d like to ask you to share that information with The Atlantic and your fellow readers.
For me, the few times I have had open conversations about money with anyone besides my spouse, I have benefitted immensely.I have sorted out spending priorities, thought more deeply about charitable giving, and received crucial career advice. More than anything, it was just good to talk about it: Money is something that many (most?) of us think about all the time. Talking about it with friends normalized that fact, and made financial worries something we shared. I’m lucky that I’ve had even these few conversations—many people navigate their financial lives more or less entirely alone.
Neal Gabler, the author of our new cover story, has for a long time been in that camp. “To struggle financially is a source of shame, a daily humiliation—even a form of social suicide,”Gabler writes. “Silence is the only protection.” But this isolation did him little good. He floats through his financial troubles without the stories of friends—without their mistakes to learn from, their smart decisions to imitate, their counsel to guide him.
There’s a lot to be gained from these stories, and we’d like to hear them. Write to us with yours at hello@theatlantic.com. Tell us about the things you did right and the things you did wrong; tell us the disadvantages you faced, the advantages you had, and those you wished you’d had; tell us if, like Gabler, you emptied your retirement accounts to fund tuition or a wedding; tell us your money stories. Over the next few weeks, we’ll post them here in Notes. Please let us know if you'd like to use your full name, first name, or remain completely anonymous.
