Home Economics No. 10: A Tenured Professor Living Upstate on $94k a Year
The childless cat lady edition
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Hello, everyone! I’m really excited about this week’s edition of Home Economics. But honestly, when am I not? It’s such a privilege to edit this series: I love to read each entry that people submit. (I’ve received more than 50 since I launched it in January!) It can be hard to choose which one to run. I try to make sure each one is a little different so that you readers can get a different story/perspective/lifestyle each time.
When I first read today’s submission, my immediate thought was: Here’s a childless cat lady! Which a month ago would have been a pretty rude thought, but in this weird and wild election cycle, it’s turned into something of a badge of honor. (And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a good explainer.) I’m all for taking back this insult and turning it into a superpower. I know many badass childless cat and dog ladies who I absolutely adore. (Also, don’t fret: I told today’s writer about the childless cat lady idea when we spoke, and she laughed!)
I write quite a bit about motherhood in this newsletter, and being a mother is very important to me. But being a parent doesn’t somehow make me a better person, and I certainly don’t think being childfree (whether by choice or because of fertility struggles) means you don’t have a real stake in the future of this country. Writing those words still makes me feel so angry. How dare someone suggest that?
As you read this edition of Home Economics, I hope it will be easy to see that I chose to feature this woman’s story not just because she has cats instead of kids. Like most of us, she’s so much more than the category small-minded people want to sort her into. She’s a partner, a professor, an introvert, a daughter, and, as I learned during our 30-minute call last week, someone who is very smart and funny. Also, she talks openly about how ADHD has impacted her finances, an important topic I hope to cover more on The Purse in the future.
I want to tell all kinds of different stories here on The Purse—to have the opportunity to show the many sides of a person through their finances while also showing how our financial situations, like marital status or race or gender or job or fill-in-the-blank qualifier, doesn’t wholly define who we are. We contain multitudes.
If you want to tell your story, you can submit your own Home Economics entry here.
Age: 56
Location: Upstate N.Y.
Relationship status: In a long-term relationship since 1999.
Age of partner: 50
About me: Hmmm. I'm a reasonably dull introvert with ADHD and the attendant “tax” of needing regular dopamine hits (most of which cost money!). I don't have kids, but I do have a partner and a cat. I’m a reader, traveler, and “sitter” (I love just sitting around).
All expenses are monthly unless otherwise noted.
Income:
Your job title/salary: Tenured professor, $94,000 a year. Most faculty work on a nine-month contract, but my employer spreads my paychecks across the summer (luckily). This means that, technically, I am paid for and am obligated for about nine months of work, and technically I can refuse to do college-related business in June and July. But more typically it has meant that I work a lot in the summer for free.
Partner’s job title/salary: Self-employed, $3,000/year, though this year has been less.
Your monthly take-home pay (paycheck amount after taxes and other deductions): $5,600
Partner’s monthly take-home pay (paycheck amount after taxes and other deductions): $0 usually; paychecks are few and far between this year.
Additional monthly income: I sell things online, making $50 on average in a good month. Sometimes I pick up an extra class ($4,900 after taxes) or do some consulting ($100/gig). I wrote some books, and occasionally I see a royalty statement, which would average to about $30/month. All of this is “extra,” and I can’t count on it, budget it, or plan for it.
Total monthly income: $5,600, on average
Account balances:
Checking account balance: $5,602.46
Savings account balance: $1,013.96
High-yield savings account balance: $7,734.51; about 2.5% APY
Monthly contribution to savings account: $200. I have an automatic contribution where a set amount gets sent to savings every other day or so (like $9). This is a really good way for me to save and not notice it or feel the absence of that extra cash.
Retirement account(s) balance:
Roth IRA: $189,875.16
Traditional IRA: $60,727.10
403(b): $425,121.30
HSA: $14,148.72
Monthly contribution to retirement accounts: $861 to my 403(b). My employer adds some, too, but the percentage keeps shifting. It was 0% for a couple of years, and now it’s back to 6.5% (I think). So employer “match” is about $500/month. Some years I can add $1,000 to my Roth IRA, but that’s usually just once a year, on April 15, to take advantage of the tax benefits.
Investment account balance: I don’t have any of these.
Emergency fund balance: It’s my “high yield” savings account, and I need to grow it more.
Goals oriented savings account: $4,000 in the “dream fund,” which is a basic savings account my partner manages.
Other accounts: I have several random tiny accounts, two at military credit unions. They require about $10 “shares”; I have two of these. I also have a small account at an online bank, $123.56 (with 4.75% APY).
Total in checking, savings, and investment accounts: $708,346.77
Housing:
Size of your home: My partner and I live in a three-bedroom, 1.5-bath house.
Mortgage: $1,450. This includes property and school taxes in escrow. Taxes are actually more than my mortgage, which is only $555 of this total!
Current home value: $355,000
Current mortgage balance: $26,042.49
Year you bought your home: 2003
Price you paid for your home: $142,000
Mortgage interest rate: 5% (Those were the days...early aughts.)
Home taxes: It’s rolled into my mortgage payment because the bank collects them, holds them in escrow, and pays them, but my taxes are about $875/month.
Home insurance: This is also rolled into my mortgage payment but is about $100/month.
Electricity: $85 in the summer, about $55 in winter
Water and sewer: $75
Internet: $98. Our internet provider requires we have a landline, and that cost is included in this total.
Natural gas: $35 in summer, about $100 in the winter
Cell phone: $100 (for both of us)
Trash: $12
Transportation:
Monthly car payment: $0. I drive a nine-year-old car that I paid off 36 months after purchase. My partner’s vehicle is also nine years old and paid off.
Car insurance: $122.63, for the two vehicles. I allow the company to track my driving via an app, in exchange for “competing” for discounts on my policy. My partner refused to play with tech in this way! But my discount for safe driving will be 15% off the six-month premium, renewing in August and saving me $12 a month.
Gas: About $30 in an average month. I don’t drive much or far. This month I have taken several trips and driven about 1,500 miles, so it was more like $150.
Car maintenance: Averages about $7/month. Knock wood, my car has been really low maintenance and has required only oil changes twice a year ($60) and inspection once a year ($25).
Parking: About $5/month for parking meters, which I tend to use mostly while doing errands.
Monthly public transportation: $0
Ride shares (Uber, taxi, etc.): $0
Children:
Number of children and their ages: No children. There’s no story here; children just were never in my plans.
Debts:
Student loan total balance: Now $0, thankfully. Between us we had about $65,000 at high interest rates (8 and 9%). At some point we paid off with a home equity line of credit, which had a 3.25% interest rate (pre-Covid). It took like 20 years, but we finally paid it all off.
Personal loan total balance: $9,505. The interest rate is just 2% because I found a good deal via a small bank and my credit score is excellent.
Personal loan monthly payment: $800. I really want to pay that off within 13 months.
What did you use the personal loan for? Ugh, we used it to pay off consumer debt on our credit cards. We consolidated the payments on a personal loan, and the $0 balance on our credit cards has provided a good incentive for not spending like that again.
Credit card balance (if you carry a balance month to month): Right now, having paid off the credit cards, my partner has a $110 balance, and I have $700 (mostly groceries). The goal after we consolidated our debt was to pay off our cards every month, but this month has gotten financially icky. A family member died very suddenly, and I had to spend $1,300 to fly to the funeral, plus two hotel nights, and I had to rent a car because the airport/hotel transport would otherwise cost me more. And then I have a work conference, for which I will not be fully reimbursed, so I’m looking at about $500 in those expenses. Finally, we just had to replace the roof on our house, which cost $1,700 more than the estimate. So no, I cannot pay off my credit card this month (!!!). But I have my eye on my discretionary, impulsive, and emotionally laden spending this month and heading into fall. No kids = I can have some control over my other purchases. Though I admit to spending about $15 buying myself “new school year” things—folders, binders, pens.
Food:
Groceries: $575. We make two big trips a month, plus a couple of smaller trips here and there for bread, milk, etc. Sometimes, I will get itchy and want to spend money somehow, some way, so I buy a few groceries because my little spender voice says, “It’s fooood! It’s gooood to buy fooood!!!”
Dining out: $75, though we more likely will have several months in a row with $0 in this category. We discovered a new breakfast place and have gone there about once a month for the last few months. Otherwise, we prefer to eat at home, and I bring lunch to work. It’s not really a budgeting thing, just a personal preference.
Socializing and Entertainment:
Subscriptions (streaming services, magazines, etc.): I just canceled some of my subscriptions after seeing that I had A.) too many streaming services to enjoy, and B.) duplicate news/magazine/media sources. I consume a lot of media, in part because my ADHD pushes me to seek dopamine hits. Streaming = New stuff! Apple News = New and more stuff! Streaming: $110 (includes eight streamers and the $6/month I donate to PBS so I can use its Passport service + $30/month for Apple News+). I also pay separate subscriptions for magazines and newspapers, which come to $50 a month.
Memberships (museums, etc.): ~$104 annually. I have a couple of memberships to museums that I don’t live near but I like to take advantage of their virtual programs.
Movies, concerts, other events: Averages about $12/month for a movie at our local indie cinema.
Entertaining and socializing: $0. Please refer to my “About me.” I believe I used the words “dull” and “introvert.” Let me say it loudly again, “I am a dull introvert!”
Miscellaneous:
Clothing: This varies so much. Lately I’ve been seeking my ADHD dopamine hits via clothing, so $175 for the last few months (even though I rationally know that this won’t actually provide more than a second of dopamine).
Home supplies: $30 for cleaning products, laundry, etc.
Exercise: $78/month for the gym I haven’t seen the inside of since...? Typing this reminds me that I’ve been afraid to cancel it because I don’t want to pay a higher rate when I do “want to go to the gym.” And I do actually want to exercise, but I am like the opposite of a powerlifter in that I am a powersitter these days. There’s an a$$-shaped groove on my couch in my favorite spot….
Personal and self-care (haircuts, manicures, massages, etc.): Once a year I get an amazing facial ($200), but I stopped doing much else. I get a haircut about once a year, too ($75). I should add that I do spend money on other “self care” things. I subscribe to an app that helps me optimize/track my moods, food, etc. ($10/month), and to a neat online community of people interested in wellness, nutrition, and self-change/growth ($100/month). I also spend about $40 a month on supplements—vitamins, probiotics, and digestive/gut items.
Pet supplies: Our cat eats about $2/month worth of dental treats, plus about $5/month of “mid-range” natural cat food. Every 10 months I have to buy her dental gel ($15). About every eight months I buy her prescription dental food, which she eats in “10 crunchies/day” increments. That food is now $55/bag, but luckily I am buying it infrequently. She sees the vet only once a year so far ($85).
Donations: $110 on average, mainly to small (non-SPCA) animal rescues
Events: $0. Please refer to my previously stated realities (dull, introvert)
Travel: Most months I am reasonably sedentary and happily living within my city and environs. Several times a year, I travel to see family, and those months would typically include about $100 for gas round-trip. I stay with them, so I don’t have to pay for lodging. When I travel for fun, it’s usually extended weekend trips, and I prefer smaller hotels, inns, or Airbnbs. I have a ceiling for lodging charges—$125/night, except for the rare work travel where I am choosing virtually nothing about the travel (and may have to stay in a pricier hotel because of meetings). This year I have taken one extended weekend vacation trip: $200 Airbnb, $25 gas (it was only a 180-mile round trip), $35 food (a friend bought my dinner one night!).
Insurance:
Health: $289.46. This is deducted from my gross pay by my employer.
Life: $50, split between a privately held policy and employer's basic policy. (Why do they always include “accidental dismemberment” in the options we can pay for!?)
HSA: $0, not part of my low-deductible plan
FSA: $0, not part of my low-deductible plan
Total monthly expenses (excludes travel): $4,489
Tell us more:
What are your top financial priorities?
I’d love to unchain myself from my dependency on spending money and buying things for the hit I get from the (online) shopping/looking, choosing, waiting for shipping/waiting to use. Priority #1 is to be more mindful, slow myself down, wait out my impulses, and thus spend less on stuff. Priority #2 is to become a budgeter, to have better guidelines for my money (which I work super-hard for, and which supports our household in its entirety). Priority #3 is to save specifically for future travel. I’d love to be able to travel again and do so knowing that I am spending what I saved specifically for that purpose and not going into credit card debt. And my #4 is to become more divested from my terrible sense of shame that I do not earn more money, and my sense that my worth or value is connected to what I earn.
How do you feel about your current financial situation?
I feel okay today for one main reason: Consolidating my and my partner’s credit card debt into a lump sum personal loan feels good, since it gave us $0 balances, and now I have a clear incentive to keep the credit cards underused. It is complicated to be the sole earner in the family, as money can be a dreadful form of power that I do not want and do not enjoy. I wish my partner had better cash flow and more people paying for their services. We can afford what we need and often what we want, but I really want to close down some of my impulsive ADHD wants and redirect the money to savings. Some days it’s half a step forward and two steps back. For example, the other day I impulsively bought a coffee maker for my office mainly because I imagine that one day, I might want to drink coffee...in my office...which I have not done in the last 15 years.
What are your money stressors?
Feeling—frequently—like I am lagging on retirement savings. My partner just started the self-employment thing but was always under-employed, and I should’ve been saving for both of us. I really worry that Social Security will be belly up a year or two before I’m eligible for it. I worry about not having enough money in the future to pay for medical care or a nursing home/assisted living. Without kids, I worry that I will be alone and desperate when I am older. I’d prefer to have much more robust emergency fund monies. At my job, we didn’t get any raises or cost-of-living increases for three years, which has created some stress, as basically every other bill I have has increased.
Do you expect to receive (or have you received) an inheritance from a family member?
I received $20,000 when my grandfather died. It became my house down payment. Without it, I would not have been able to buy; I had $600 in savings at the time (mostly from rolling my coins and returning bottles/cans). I received $6,000 when my great aunt died, which I used to pay for a long trip. Eventually, my partner and I both expect to inherit something from our Baby Boomer parents. Both sets of parents earn more in retirement, from investments and IRAs and so forth, than I earn from working ~50 hours a week for most of the year. It’s hard to know what the inheritance will be; perhaps their houses. We are fortunate that our parents started with very little money and were able to be frugal, so we don’t have to worry about them paying their bills now. (It’s a huge relief!)
Do you receive any financial support from your family?
My mom was a teenage mother who then slowly earned a college degree and worked in a field that was always underpaid. She always felt guilty about our straitened circumstances and my constant childhood anxiety about money, getting evicted, having to move because the rent got too high, etc. Eventually things got better financially for her (I was out of the house), so it feels as if she has tried to assuage some of her guilt from the past via money. She has begun to give me expensive gifts a couple times a year—she’ll help with work-related expenses that aren’t reimbursed (for research and professional development). In the last five years, she gave me a newer used phone and a new iPad (this is not an annual thing, note). I assume this will be the norm for the next handful of years: If electronics need replacing, she will chip in or help fully.
Do you financially support any family members beyond yourself and your nuclear family?
I expect to be responsible for a relative who has a lot of barriers to more full participation in life and who’s unlikely to be able to work in the future. My parents handle some of this now, but they are getting old, and it will need to be my turn at some point.
How do you and your partner split your finances? How did you decide to go that route?
We have separate bank accounts. Initially, there was income disparity that we hoped would even out (it never did). It’s been easier to maintain separate accounts and thus some sense of independence. The problem is that it’s harder to create shared goals, though we do have a “dream fund” that theoretically tackles this problem. But with separate accounts, now that I am the sole earner, I have to do a few steps to get monthly monies moved to their account.
What is one financial goal(s) you still want to achieve?
Feeling less shame about money and my habits; less shame about growing up poor; less shame about my ADHD whimsical, impulsive spending; less shame about not earning more after all this time working (I’ve been working legally since I was 15, but have been hustling for cash since age 10). To accomplish this goal—less shame—I am trying to be thoughtful, curious, and open to myself and to what’s going on emotionally and stressfully in my life. I would like to shift my “money emotion” to feeling contentment, calm, and peace when I realize I am saving regularly and contributing to my own stability, now and in the future.
Tell us about one financial accomplishment you’re proud of.
Since starting full-time employment (after grad school ended), I have never bounced a check, and I have never paid a bill late. I bounced a check in grad school and felt paralyzed by shame, so I resolved to do whatever I had to to ensure that I would never bounce a check again. Online bill pay has enabled me to easily pay bills myself or set up auto-pay, but more importantly, paying my bills on time every month has calmed my anxiety so much. That’s a massive win. It has also enabled me to boost my credit score, so though I don’t need to apply for new credit any time soon, I feel good knowing that my sole good money habit has had a positive effect.
What do you regret spending your money on the most?
Oh golly...I mean...SOOOO many things. Objects. Stuff. Tons of makeup I no longer even wear and clothing I can’t fit into and never wore some of anyway, and shoes (tons of shoes), and cute dresses (that I no longer wear!).
What is one thing you spend money on that makes your life better?
Paying my bills on time—anxiety reduction or eradication happens when I know I have the money in my account and that I have ways to ensure on-time payment. Paying for utilities (and my mortgage) means that each day I wake and feel immediately grateful for plumbing, electricity, and four walls, some with windows.
What is one thing you spend money on that drives you crazy?
Clothing. Seriously. I don’t really have any style, and I don’t think any of my clothing has been complimented in, oh, at least seven years. So why am I buying new clothing? Who do I think I am dressing for? What do I think another new shirt is going to do for me? Buying new clothing just fuels my anxiety, and I have begun, with mindfulness, to wonder if it’s an “easy” way to amp up my anxiety about having too much, accumulating too much, and feeling too guilty about having “so much.” It seems weird—why would I do something that stokes my anxiety? But I know that my ADHD has helped to create a high-speed infinity circle of jittery anxieties, impulses, actions, and reactions/consequences.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
As an adult, I have come to feel grateful for having been poor as a kid and teenager. It has given me perspective on money and the future. I do regret that I was not taught to invest some of my teenaged or subsequent paychecks. And I regret that I did not know about nor think of compounding money, so that I would have the option to retire before age 66. (If I could retire today, I absolutely would.)
Please comment with kindness!
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Random Extras
Tomorrow, August 8, at 5:00 p.m. ET, I’m joining Katie Gatti of Money with Katie and Lindsay Dorf, founder of Astor, for a digital salon around the psychology of money. I think it’s going to be a really interesting conversation! You can register here, and the event is FREE with the code THEPURSE.
Networking is treated like a dirty word, but
is trying to change that narrative with her new series, The Net. I chatted with her about how important my network is to me, and how I wouldn’t be here without them.I love the newsletter
, especially her recent piece on her struggle to decide how to spend an unexpected $15,000 windfall. A fun and thought-provoking read I think you Purse subscribers would appreciate!
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I really enjoyed this diary and the writer sounds lovely! I am probably projecting, but I thought it was very interesting that the writer doesn't seem to have much stress over the fact that her partner is not contributing any (or hardly any) income to their partnership. Given that one of the biggest stressors in any serious relationship is money, I wonder if they can give us all some advice!
Does anyone else feel like this column is financial therapy? For us, the readers, as well as for the person we're reading about? I love seeing the openness to understanding ourselves better through our relationship with money. This "childless cat lady" in particular let us see her vulnerability in ways that help me look at myself. Well done.