the bottom line

(Because I need reminding. If I repeat this to myself enough, i just might believe it.)

Have you read Guy de Maupassant's short story "The Necklace"? Well, I feel like we've wasted five years of our lives paying for someone else's necklace. We didn't even dance with it.

We are 26 years old, live paycheck-to-paycheck, and have $15,000 in unsecured debt. We have been married for almost five years. We have no savings, other than my 401(k) plan, and it is hard not to feel envious of others.

I seem to forget, probably because I do not want to remember, that we were used for years, to the tune of $30,000 in money we didn't have. That we emerged with only $15k in debt and a car that is fully paid for, is something to be proud of. I guess.

It was hard, and it was humiliating, living under the in-laws' roof, all their friends (and people in general) under the assumption that we're living off of *them* (HA!) and the in-laws of course not correcting that assumption. It's ironic that our rent payment every month is exactly the same as the check we used to issue to them: $830 a month.

The ugliest part of "helping out" someone else financially whilst living under the same roof, is trying to ignore their spending habits. The Kirby vacuum -- who the fuck needs a $2000 vacuum? The new $800 sofa "because that room looks so empty, and anyway there are no payments until 2006". The weekend shopping sprees. ("Alam mo ba sale ngayon?") Why do they need a Wolfgang puck dinnerware set or Henckels cutlery? She doesn't even like to cook. She cooks maybe once or twice a week. And of course there was the big white elephant staring us in the face: the necessary expense of a $385,000 house (5 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 3 car garage) with plenty of extra rooms for out-of-town guests to stay in as they admire the beautiful house.

For illustrative purposes: my mom is a nurse, my dad is a realtor and receives a pension from the Navy. My father-in-law has not held a job in over a decade, the mother-in-law makes a third what my mom does. And yet on one-sixth the income, with no money down, the in-laws purchased a house that costs four times what my parents paid for their home. Guess who picks up the slack? The kids, of course, because "we're all in this together".

And so we would nod sympathetically when asked to loan $20 gas money now and then, or buy rice or groceries because it isn't quite payday yet and of course, farah works in a store.

We do not shop, we do not travel, we do not party. We love Japanese food, sashimi in particular. We eat out once every three months, always during lunchtime on weekdays, when the buffet is half-price. $33 after tax, once every three months.

We do not have a land-based phone or cable/satellite TV. The last time we went to the movies was last month, and only because i'd won free tickets from Fandango.com. Normally we wait until a movie comes out on DVD, and just rent it from Netflix. The Netflix subscription? Won in a contest. Same goes for the portable DVD player, iPod photo, and monthly fruit box from Harry and David.

We used to share a prepaid phone, which we'd recharge with a $25 card every 2 months. I won the phone in a contest too. When we moved into this apartment, our usage went up considerably, and so we decided that it was cheaper and less restrictive to share a wireless family plan ($60 a month) versus a landline ($45 a month, i think) plus prepaid at $25 a month.

Our big splurge was the cable internet connection: $53 a month. Digerati that we are, a fast internet connection is essential. Our primary entertainment is playing "Guild Wars". We spent $130 on the two games: his regular price at $50, mine $80 for the collector's edition. We have been playing for months, at an average of 3 hours a day each. Ninety days at 3 hours times two people...24 cents per hour of entertainment and counting. We didn't even have to drive to a theater and stand in line for tickets.

We have been living on next to nothing for years. After "rent", credit card payments and the ridiculously large ($685) car payments that the in-laws "helped" us get in their name, so Patrick could pay off their Montero for one year, there was hardly ever anything left over. It's gotten old. We despair of ever having money, of ever getting out of debt, of ever being free of payments, of seeing beyond the current pay period.

Numbers, however, do not lie.

By my calculations, our net worth over the past few years our net worth has increased by an average of $5k every year:
2002: -14,983.54
2003: - 9,724.48
2004: - 6,362.80
2005: - 1,000.00

This time next year, we will be debt-free (with the exception of the new car loan); our net worth will be positive for the first time in our married life; I will be back in school; and there will be $3,000 in my retirement account.