By Jurassic Tart
Posted Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Posted Thursday, June 16th, 2016
Hi, my name is Jurassic Tart [not my real name], and I’m in debt. There, I admitted it. Finally. After hiding it from family and friends this past year (except for one friend, and believe me, we’ll get to that story in a minute). And I’m not in the okay kind of debt--student loans, car payments. Oh, we have those too. But I’m specifically talking about credit card debt. And it kills me. I am a very careful budgeter, after getting into credit card debt in college due to careless spending, and it taking me half a decade to pay off.
Now, I work tirelessly to keep our credit scores high (Mr. Jurassic and I have credit scores of 750+!! I am so proud, since my credit sucked a decade ago), and our balances at 0 at the end of every month. But, I have lost the battle. Nearly $10,000 lost the battle. How did we get here?
First, my husband and I decided to have a child. I have just completed grad school, where I made $28,000 for the past 6 years. My husband was a high school teacher. But that’s okay, I carefully budgeted for our one child so that we could afford everything we would need and full time day care and continue to pay down his student loans.
At our first ultrasound, we found out though that it wasn’t one child. We were having twins. I burst into tears. The ultrasound tech looked very uncomfortable. So, the extra money we were using to pay off student loans now went towards day care, and I had to start working at home a couple days a week because full time day care for twins was not going to happen. There is no buy one get one free, despite what the oh-so-clever stranger at the supermarket says.
Second, my husband lost his job when the twins were 8 months old. It’s okay, I said. I will apply for a full time research position, as I was nearing the end of grad school. But, I ended up having a miscarriage during the full day interview (that’s another story), was a BIT distracted, and didn’t get offered that job. So, grad school for one more year. And unemployment for my husband, which he could get for 6 months. I was on the job market, and a job in academia could mean a move anywhere, so we decided that it would be better for him to stay home with the kids for a year, while I finished my PhD, and then look for a job once we knew where we were going.
In the meantime, my husband moonlighted at a community college. He taught one class a semester there as an adjunct. If teachers are the salt of the earth, adjuncts are the dirt. They get walked all over and paid very little. One class helped, but two would have been better. Each semester, he was promised two classes, and each time, a week before the semester started, his second class was cancelled due to low enrollment. Bye bye, extra $10,000. We hardly knew ye.
On my end, I negotiated with my advisor to finish my PhD 6 months early and get a pay raise. But when it came time to receive my raise, it worked out to be about $5000 less than anticipated. See, I thought I would be paid the going rate for a postdoc in my field. But she decided to pay me the going rate for a postdoc at our university, which is lower because those poor saps in the Humanities make next to nothing.
So, now, after a year of struggling and things falling through, we are here. In debt. Oh, it will get better. I have a new, higher paying job, and my husband has found a new job as well. But most of his salary is eaten up by daycare for two toddlers, and a huge chunk of mine goes to pay down both of our student loans (about $1600 a month. Yeah. Education in America, kids). Even with the pay increases, it will take us a year to pay down this debt. A year that we could have been using to get ahead. We never took a honeymoon, and we were planning a vacation for when I got my PhD instead. Bye bye vacation. I cried the day I realized my cruise had sailed without me.
About that friend I finally unburdened on? Her response was two-fold: “Maybe this is a positive learning experience for you about how to budget.” I responded, “Let me cut you off right there. This is offensive. I know how to budget. Budgeting wasn’t the problem.” My socially inept friend plowed ahead though with this second gem of wisdom, “Well, you actually could have prevented it because you should always anticipate that someone is going to lose a job and that you are going to overspend every month. If you just had reserve money, you would have been fine.”
First off, fuck you. We had reserve money. It wasn’t enough. But did I make mistakes? Yes, and they are paying way too much for college, so that now we are crippled with student loan debt, and that is as much as our rent payment each month. Also, we had kids too soon, I suppose. We should have waited to pay off another loan or two. But the timing worked best with our careers, and who anticipates twins?
Anyways, I write this huge confessional so that you know that it’s not always someone’s fault they are in debt, or poor (though we are not poor. I do not want to diminish the struggles of real poor people by lumping myself in that category). Next time someone is struggling, before you are quick to judge, ask what they did wrong, etc., take a step back and think about where you would be if literally everything went wrong in your life at this moment. It could happen. It happened to me.
About the Author:
I am a scientist and mother of twin girls. I enjoy murder mysteries and feminism. My best friends currently reside on the Internet.
