The Purpose of Work

Due to a gross miscalculation about the time it takes to write a dissertation, my son was born before either of us had finished. So, we lived in a seedy fourth floor walkup in Washington Heights with waterbugs the size of your fist flying into the baby’s bassinet. We were on welfare. My parents slipped us money at family gatherings and dropped off bags of groceries. Suspicious paint flaked up at the window sill.

One day, I walked into the court yard of my building and braced myself for the long haul with kid and stroller up the stairs. As I paused, I realized that the drug dealers had taken their pit bulls off their leash, and the dogs with studded collars were bounding for my kid. “Get your dogs off my kid!” I yelled at the guys in their black puffy coats, hoping that they would leave me alone, because their grandmothers loved me.

We were not only “elaborately educated” but positively festooned with degrees and here we were, living in poverty. After one year, degrees were finished, resumes submitted, but the jobs were too rare. We could either live in separate cities and far from family support or we would have to start over.

We started over. Husband ran out and got the first temp job he could find, an assistant job at an investment bank. We had tried fulfilling work, but it didn’t work out. His new job was demanding and inflexible and not interesting. At first it only paid enough to get by. If I worked, we would go into further debt. So, we assumed a traditional family structure, an imperfect situation for both of us, but the most important thing was to keep the pitbulls off our kids.

The temp job turned into an important job, Finally, after five years, we were able to take the two kids away from the pitbulls and waterbugs and drug dealers, and bring them to a place with a tiny backyard and a good school system.

We’re doing okay now. We still have to work our way through the student loans. And with all those years in grad school, we have no retirement money. We had to buy at the top of the market for the house, so we’ll always have to be very careful. I still buy the kids shoes at Payless and my meat on sale. But we’re okay.

That experience changed me. Made me a utilitarian. The number one purpose of work is to keep the pitbulls off your kids. Everything else is gravy. A fulfilling job. Gravy. A nice social life. Gravy. A job that benefits humanity. Gravy. A job that helps to overthrow the patriarchy. Gravy.

I think that these utilitarian notions of work are more common with my generation than with older generations. We don’t believe that we’ll have social security to rely upon. There are fewer jobs in key fields. Academic jobs were a dime a dozen back in the seventies. We’re saddled with student loans and the knowledge that our kids’ college tuition may exceed a year’s salary. Housing costs are insane. Mobility is much more difficult. There is little room for either gender to experiment with career changes or alternative plans. Whatever is working, you stick with, be it two incomes or one, fulfilling or drab.

Comments

[RCinProv]

It's the last week of classes around here, so my mind turns poetic. Either that, or mush. Anyway, I have assigned Auden's The Unknown Citizen for the last day in Public Policy. And I am suggesting Philip Levine's "What Work Is" for Laura, husband, and the 11D readership. A beautiful poem that puts this issue in perspective, I think.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/levine/work.html

[Ancarett]

Well, the number one job might be keeping someone else's worrisome pit bulls off of your kid. I was happy that my sweet little pit bull spent a good ten minutes draped across autistic youngest's lap today being petted and talked to in an indulgent, loving and gentle way.

It's all in the perspective, but the important thing is that the care and hard work of parenting never really changes, no matter what the threats are. You have to be on call, 24/7, making sure things are taken care of and, as you say, we have few expectations that there'll be anything there to absorb the shock should we fail.

[Lilian]

This was a great post! It puts things into perspective for me. I mean, I sometimes think it's tough to be a foreign student, trying to finish my Ph.D. with two kids under 3, and a postdoc husband whose sallary is our only income, but reading your story made me feel grateful for any and everything we have experienced and are experiencing...

Keeping the kids off the pitbulls. Powerful image.

[Lisa V]

Great post! Truly. Most of the world doesn't have the luxury to worry whether their job fulfills them. I love your outlook, sometimes we do what we have to do.

[timna]

You've got it in perspective. I think our pitbulls were realizing that we were going to be standing in long lines (6 hours +)with the uninsured for school vaccinations when we had grad school insurance. That was my culture shock from moving from Israel (nationalized health insurance) to the States.

But you're right. Five years later, steadier on our feet, we're looking at "sticking with" whatever is working.

Thanks.

[Brooklyn Mama]

This is us too. We're still in the catching up phase, though (therefore no back yard). And I'm having a tough time reconciling our former hopes with our present realities.

[Brooklyn Mama]

This is us too. We're still in the catching up phase, though (therefore no back yard). And I'm having a tough time reconciling our former hopes with our present realities.

[Sandy]

I love your use of the word "gravy". Great imagery.

For four years of grad school and then five years staying home with my son, we lived in HUD-subsidized townhouses in one of the few "bad" neighborhoods in Ann Arbor. There weren't any pitbulls, but our neighbors almost burned our unit down, there was a shooting in our parking lot, drunk and stoned guys commonly urinated in our garden, and once the SWAT team was called in for a neighbor's ex-husband who was threatening to kill his former wife.

Whenever anyone starts in about "the ivory tower" and how disconnected academics are from the real world, I remember the Arrowwood Co-op with some strong anti-nostalgia.

[Wendy]

Laura, you've mentioned student loans twice now. I'm curious--do you pay more than your minimum payment to pay down the loans more quickly?

[Laura]

re: the loans. They are bad, because we married loans. Our school provided no financial support or subsidized housing. And it was located in Manhattan. My loans were relatively okay because as a poltiical scientist, I could work for a public policy institute. I switched from theory to American/policy, so that I could work. I worked between 20-35 hours, while maintaining a full class load. This extended my time in school. Even with all that work, it wasn't enough, and I had to take out an occasional loan.

My husband was a historian, so could only adjunct. Teaching two classes a semester brought in $4,000 per semester. He took out more loans.

When the kid came around, we could only afford to pay husband's minimum. I was able to defer my loans, because I wasn't working. At that time, we were just getting by.

Things are better now, so our plan is to keeping paying the minimum on a monthly basis. When husband gets his bonus at the end of the year, we'll pay a big chunk. I did the math once and figured out that you pay less interest that way.

[baa]

But don't your realize that you took a scarce grad school spot away from some other worthy and dedicated applicant, and are thus morally *required* to adjunct at 4k a quarter in perpetuity? That's the only way you can defeat the patriarchy! We are all very, very disappointed. Especially, the pit bulls are disappointed (and hungry).

[Wendy]

OK. You almost made it sound in the other post that your husband was working this demanding, soul-sucking job to pay off your student loans, and I have to admit I had a gut reaction that that was a foolish move.

The way I look at student loans is as follows:
1. No one can take away your PhD.
2. I've never heard of anyone repossessing a house because you didn't pay your student loans. Maybe it does happen, and I'm sure if it does, I'll hear about it. :) But to my mind, paying off the student loans is the least of my priorities simply because it is a very low risk thing. Paying a mortgage, if I had one (we rent), would be more important because the house could be repossessed and we'd have nowhere to live.

We have a phenomenal loan amount too (well, it was back in the late 90s--don't have a clue what it is now nor what is now considered a phenomenal amount), but I just never think of it. The loan company takes the minimum out of our checking account every month, and I'm out $363 a month (we consolidated the hell out of them) and that's that.

I have to say--were I in your position, which of course I am not nor am I a financial adviser in any sense of the word, I'd spend the money on paying down the mortgage because if the economy tanks, your house value will drop, and the more equity you have in it, the better. The student loans are a low-risk debt.

But what do I know? I'm just an English professor with total assets in the negative range, no house, and a 7 year old car.

[Laura]

We consolidated, too. You would be surprised about how many of my friends never took care of that when the rates were low. Their loans were even worse than mine, too. Major league denial going on.

The soul sucking job isn't just because of the loans. Loans were one factor. Housing, transportation, food figured in, too. Also, there weren't any academic jobs in the area. It was soul sucking or nothing.

baa -- laughing.

Ross -- thanks for the link. I am going through the guy's webpage. He sort of reminds me of an urban Cormac McCarthy.

[Jeannette]

gravy...

or lagniappe...

[Jeannette]

gravy...

or lagniappe...

I'm in it now.

[Jane Galt]

Having started out with 90K in student loan debt (at one time my payments were $1000 a month on 40K annual salary), I now consider myself something of an expert on the problem.

They cannot take away your house: student loans are unsecured debt. They can however, screw up your credit rating, which will keep you from getting a house for a long, long time. Defaulting on a student loan will stay on your credit record for seven years, during which no reputable lender will want to touch you. If you have trouble meeting your payments, the lender will almost always help you with a reduced payment plan or a forbearance; they don't want to get the government angry at them. But don't risk default.

If your student loans were consolidated (as some of mine were) at a sub-2.5% interest rate, it makes little financial sense to pay them off quickly, since inflation is running at roughly that amount. Pay off the mortgage instead.

And here's a bonus tip for paying off any loan more quickly: divide your monthly payment into two, and schedule your bank to send a payment every two weeks (the schedule most of us get paid on). This results in your automatically making roughly an extra payment a year, which advances the termination of a thirty-year loan by eight years. As a bonus, if you do it this way, instead of waiting for bonus time, you accrue a little less interest on your debt, which can be material if you have either a very large principle, or a relatively high interest rate. As a further bonus, with student loans, this will advance the date your next payment is due by one month a year, which gives you a little breathing space if something goes wrong.

[Laura]

Megan, I can't get on your blog anymore. Can you help? I wanted to keep the conversation going, but I keep getting a 403 error.

excellent advice about the twice a month option. I'm going to get that set up ASAP.

[jen]

I'm struck that people are so uncritical of the academy. Obviously people make their own decisions about their education, but I know of no other industry that preys on the 18-25 YO set and puts them in hock FOR LIFE and yet seems so totally unaccountable.

[Jane Galt]

I'll tell our tech people; I have no idea what the problem is. But try hitting refresh--sometimes I get errors saying I can't access a page, but if I hit refresh a couple of times, it goes away.

[don]

Much of academia is run like Hollywood. The superstars get all the fame and money. The vast majority either get no jobs or barely get by. The only difference is that the disparity between the top and the bottom isn't quite in the Julia Roberts to West End waitress range.

Always remember, the top schools could probably fill their faculties with good professors even if they offered a salary of zero dollars per year.

[Wendy]

Jane, awesome advice re the twice-a-month payments. Yeah, my credit rating took a slight hit when I missed a few payments, mainly because each payment counted as 6 separate loans (long story, or perhaps familiar). So now there's an automatic payment and I don't think about it. But it can be automatic 24 times a year instead of 12.

But we think we can buy a house within the year, so I am psyched, even though the prices here in MA are comparable to the NYC area, though probably less than the Bay area.

[Jane Galt]

If you'll take my advice--not that anyone ever does--wait a couple of years to buy a house. Most experts currently think the market will either peak this spring, or already has, and the time from peak to trough is generally about three years. So if you wait two or three years to buy your house, you'll probably end up buying somewhere near the bottom, which not only means you get a great price, but also means there's little chance you'll end up upside down on your mortgage (i.e. have negative home equity) if you have to move for any reason. Plus, it's another two years to save for a down payment, which will make a difference if interest rates rise like most people expect them to.

THe idea of splitting the payments is that you actually make 26 half payments a year instead of 12 full ones, meaning that you actually end up making an extra payment every year. But because it's timed to your paycheck, and is a smaller amount, it feels a lot less painful. It hurts at first--you are spending a little less out of every paycheck--but unless your budget is tighter than even most Americans who think they're "cutting back", you won't miss it after a few months. And the extra security of paying down debt certainly helps me sleep better at night.

[Laura]

Megan, you should hire yourself out to universities to give lectures to upcoming graduates. My fellow students were completely clueless. Oddly, they almost took pride in their financial ignorance.

I want to just tack on a happy note to our bad story. Our financial woes were temporary. Once the husband switched fields and got the temp job. He moved up the ranks really quickly. They are making him vice president this month. He acquired a lot of skills in grad school that translated into business. Who knew?

Sadly, our neighbors are still there. But a couple of them might might make it out. Like Big Tony on the first floor who lived with his two daughters in a studio and socking away every penny to get his girls out of the city. And Juana, our babysitter, who watched as many as 8 kids in one room in order to save enough money for her two girls to go to college. I met some really amazing people who understood work.

[Wendy]

Jane (Megan?), thanks again. I set up the bi-monthly payment today, and then on top of it I rounded off the number to the nearest hundred, so we're paying a little extra a month to principle.

Re house-buying: it's hard to wait. But you're right that it makes sense to wait a few years. My husband feels the same way as you, and we have a rental deal that is terrific--great school district and only 5 miles from both workplaces. But I am impatient.

[charles]

Wendy,

Why would having a bunch of equity in your house help you if the economy tanked? If the value your of your house went down, you still have a place to live and (usually) the value will go back up later. It would be much better to pay off any and all debt, put aside some money for emergencies ( 6 months bills)and then work on saving for retirement, kids college, payoff mortgage, etc. I'm not Dave, but check out www.daveramsey.com, but make sure you put on your thick skin .

[hmm mmm]

I posted most of this somewhere else, and thought it might ring true here too. Let add as a preface that my wife is a post-doc in the sciences. She has had the luxury of waiting to see if she can find that dreamy tenure-track job, because I earn great money. Her post-doc gave her a flexible schedule for the kids, so it worked out while they are young.

But one thing I learned from watching her, which I pass along to anyone considering a PhD: DON'T $%^$# DO IT! Not unless you are a trust fund kid or blessed with a high-income spouse. Getting a PhD is an act of consumption when you consider all the costs, and from a financial perspective it just doesn't pay. (Mind you. my wife's research speciality is pharma. drug design, and she still finds it tough to get work that pays enough to justify the expense! Fortune 500 companies hire people like her regularly. Think about that grim fact, Mr. Art History grad student.)

Anytime advice on personal finance does not begin with the qualifier, "Assuming you don't have to pay for daycare..." I move on. Anyone who works *and* raises young kids knows that this particular cost blows a hole in all these wonderful bits of wisdom about saving. For those years while kids aren't old enough for school, you just make sure the debts don't get bigger.

My savings rate will be positively Asian once I stop sending a medium-sized mortgage payment each month to my kids' daycare providers. Until then, I shuffle along, paying off a debt here and there, yearning for some extra cash flow.

Could I find a cheaper daycare? You bet. I could also cut my kids' medicine tablets in half when they are sick and save money that way too. Both methods are really, really stupid ways to save a buck, at least if you think your kids are priceless.

Seriously, how many of you folks who are providing all this smug advice about money are also raising multiple kids below school age? Don't be shy...

I thought so. Sorry for the caustic tone, but it always chaps my @ss when people speak in absolutes about how you need to cut expenses, and how everything beyond food, water and a lean-too is a luxury. If you have young kids, they absorb an amazing amount of cash just to make sure they remain safe and fed while you go out and earn a buck. I make pretty great money (top 5% percentile), but with mucho student loans for me and my wife and two kids, we live lives similar to familes in the bottom 20% to keep costs under control. (My older daughter actually thinks we are poor because of where and how we live. No kidding.) I honestly have no idea how other people make it today.

Anyway, the lack of acknowledgement and discussion of this fact by alleged financial advisors strikes me as another instance of "umarried marriage counselors." There should be a separate analysis for people with young kids who are still early in their careers.

[Marla]

My savings rate will be positively Asian once I stop sending a medium-sized mortgage payment each month to my kids' daycare providers.

--> What does "positively Asian" mean? It is like "Neutrally Black"? "Negatively White"?

[Hmm mm]

Marla, you defaulted to American racial/ethnic classifications rather than geographic classifications.

The reference is to the difference in savings rates found in different parts of the world. Households in certain industrialized Asian nations have very high savings rates compared to Western industrialized nations. A household savings rate of, say, 30% in Japan is unsurprising. In America, it would make you a miser.

As for the use of the word "positively", one of the uses (i.e., accepted definitions) of the word is to provide an emphasis on the following word. Alternatively, I could have used "utterly", "absolutely" or "very much like".

[Laura]

hmmm hmmmm --

It's true that we married/kids/academic/student loans types have dug ourselves into a fairly unique and sizable hole. Putting 20% aside for our 401K is impossible even if we eat tuna fish seven days straight. But the rest of Megan advice (buying in bulk, paying off loans, holding off on the house) is very applicable. Megan isn't preachy, so be nice to her.

But this is a good conversation. Academia is a highly risky profession, best practiced by the single or the wealthy. Kids entering grad school need to understand what they are getting themselves into. They need to understand the burden of student loans, the impact of having no money set aside for retirement until 40, the cost of childcare compared to annual salaries.

The best financial advice for people like us is just never to get into this position in the first place.