Debt is bondage, and not the fun kind, so I’ve always despised it. Most of my adult life was spent assiduously avoiding it, even when that meant making choices that seemed unpalatable to my peers, like using Tracfones that couldn’t browse the Internet or brown-bagging lunch every day for years on end.
Lucinda Williams, the bard of my heart, captured my credo when she sang “Never take nothin’ don’t belong to me/Everything’s paid for, nothin’s free.” And so when I met Crankenstein, a newly minted physician with more student loans than she could count, we both entered unfamiliar new worlds: she had to become more fiscally aware, a prospect she found mildly terrifying, and I had to learn how to live with her debt, which became ours when we joined our lives together.
The first thing you need to know about the two of us and money is that our role models were lacking: Crankenstein’s parents cycled through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University a couple times when it was sponsored by their church, but she doesn’t recall the lessons ever outlasting the course.* My dad’s an entrepreneur with a hearty appetite for risk (i.e., debt) in both his personal and professional lives, which has backfired more than once, while my mom is irrational about money in the opposite direction: she’s often penny-wise and pound-foolish. They’ve bickered about money my whole life. Heck, they’re probably arguing about it right now.
As a kid I was a natural saver, motivated to work as early as grade school so I could establish my own bank account and watch its balance grow. In my late teens or early twenties, I started reading books like Andrew Tobias’s The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need, which taught sensible spending strategies for household staples that still guide my shopping practices today. Though I didn’t articulate it to anyone else, I knew from an early age that my financial future was entirely up to me — there would be no inheritance, no stratospheric salary, no expectation of a partner to help with living expenses — and I didn’t want to screw it up.**
After meeting Ex in my mid-twenties, my financial priorities shifted to ensuring, in perpetuity, her future comfort and security. I couldn’t do it the easy, conventional way, by purchasing adequate life insurance in the event of my premature demise, because underwriters won’t touch me with a 10-foot pole. If I wanted us to own a paid-off house that she could manage however she pleased in my absence, whether that meant living there forever or selling it and banking the proceeds; and if I wanted her to never again lack the material comforts and conveniences that had eluded her during childhood (such as privacy, dishwashers, central air conditioning and decent transportation); and if I was going to ensure we were financially comfortable enough for her to do — or not do — whatever she desired in life, the best time to start planning was yesterday.
My determination to provide for her wasn’t solely motivated by my questionable longevity, and it wasn’t money itself that I was concerned about: it was freedom. I wanted us to have options and flexibility orders of magnitude greater than anything our parents and grandparents experienced. If that sounds like an unattainable goal for two people with nothing more than high school diplomas who lived on one small income, it wasn’t — financial security doesn’t require astronomical sums; what you spend is of much greater consequence than what you earn. Working backwards from the 4% rule then favored by most ‘FIRE’ hopefuls (we’ll get into what that means later), I calculated what size nest egg would support enough in yearly distributions and withdrawals for us to comfortably do things we couldn’t otherwise afford, from travel to pursuing low-paying but intellectually or artistically rewarding endeavors.
None of it meant anything to her. She’d gone from being supported by her parents to being supported by me, and until you’ve funded your own existence, much less that of a partner, you’re unlikely to understand the devotion it takes for someone of limited means and imperfect health to say “Go ahead, pursue whatever you want, even if it’s staring at clouds all day. I’ll take care of it.” But after years of encouraging her to study something that interested her, or to start her own sideline or business if she wanted to be her own boss, or to make specific plans for the future that we could work toward together, we’d gotten nowhere. She wouldn’t commit to anything but spending too much time online, marinating in depression, and blaming me for her problems.
Health insurance was a similar source of contention: I felt it was reckless not to have it and she didn’t. Unable to stomach her uninsured status any longer after she emerged unscathed from a minor accident, I purchased a pre-ACA policy for her. Ex huffed and rolled her eyes and insisted she didn’t need the coverage — she’d always gotten along fine without it. To me, that was the point: her parents had long neglected her health (and their own). She had painful chronic conditions that could’ve been treated by doctors, and I would’ve sold a kidney to make it happen even if she’d been uninsurable, but we never saw eye-to-eye about that.^
Gay marriage, illegal then, would’ve handily solved that problem by allowing me to share spousal benefits with her. (Domestic partnership benefits, which are typically more expensive, weren’t an option due to the size of my then-employer.) It would’ve also allowed us to receive more favorable tax treatment and, if we’d remained married long enough, collect on each other’s Social Security records. Tax-advantaged retirement investing, a non-negotiable in my book, would’ve also been easier had we been eligible for spousal IRAs, which allow married couples who file joint tax returns to each contribute to an IRA even if only one of them has earned income.
Ex paid enough attention to my spiels to say she understood the basics of compound interest and how front-loading Roth IRAs in our twenties would pay off handsomely by our sixties. She saw the utility in contributing to a Roth and worked (very) part-time to do so, but I’m not sure she ever believed the math behind it or that money squirreled away throughout one’s twenties — assuming it was placed in boring, dependable investments — could turn into $1 million over the decades. We opened her retirement account as the country emerged from a horrible financial crisis, but it already had respectable gains by the time she drained it to leave in early 2014 — and she inevitably complained about that, too.^^
One of the hardest lessons I learned from that relationship is that people either value security and stability or they don’t. You can want those things for someone else more than anything in the world and it’ll never matter if they don’t think they deserve it, or if they’re too emotionally damaged to regard it with anything but scorn. Those experiences and the heavy toll of trying to sustain a one-sided partnership with someone who was, through no fault of her own, incapable of the trust, maturity or generosity of spirit any long-term relationship demands, left me bewildered and depleted enough that I wasn’t sure I’d ever attempt it again. How could I trust my own judgment?
If I was ever brave (or crazy) enough to return to that well, I vowed not to make the same mistakes twice. It’s hard to explain how devastating and disorienting it is to invest everything in a relationship for so long, only to be left with the distinct impression by the end that you were viewed less as a person than an irritant or inconvenience; a means to an end who had outlived her usefulness. Any woman I dated in the future would have to be fully self-supporting, an unromantic criterion that makes her sound like a bra or a dishwasher, and have her financial act together. Crankenstein, who was quietly waiting in the wings, had other plans.
* Financial Peace University, or FPU, is a debt reduction course popular among fundamentalist Christians. Though I prefer Suze Orman in the battle of the best-known financial gurus, I used to watch Ramsey on YouTube pre-pandemic. He’s a homophobic wingnut who doesn’t understand how medical school works (the physician-scientist pathway isn’t feasible for most applicants), and the investment returns he promises are wildly unrealistic. But boy, some of his callers had interesting dilemmas.
** I doubt my attitude would’ve been terribly different had I been straight. Most of the women in my family, my mother included, left school or the workforce early to marry male ‘providers,’ few of whom could adequately provide for their families; they died prematurely, or unexpectedly became disabled, or ran off to escape their responsibilities and started new families. What made being gay different back then — and could make it different again in the future if marriage equality is rolled back — was even if your relationship worked out there wasn’t a safety net. It was normal (and legal) for surviving partners to be treated like dirt, to lose homes and possessions and jointly amassed wealth, if their partner predeceased them, and we weren’t eligible for Social Security survivor benefits.
^ “Sweetie, no offense, but no one wants your janky organs,” Crankenstein is likely to contend.
^^ Our bank was paying around 0.10% interest then; even five-year CDs had rates under 1% at the time. Had she tossed the money into a savings account, the interest would’ve yielded bupkis and the principal would’ve been eroded by inflation. Instead she had decent gains in her Roth, money that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. Rather than feel pleased to have that extra money, even if the growth couldn’t be withdrawn until retirement age, she castigated me for making poor investment decisions. I was baffled by that for years — the money was in either a Vanguard Target Retirement Fund or VGSTX, both of which she’d approved since they were quite conservative, which matched her risk tolerance. It was only on a long delay that I realized how little sense she made in general at that time. Prematurely withdrawing those contributions robbed her of a low six-figure sum in future returns, which used to leave me feeling dazed: how many people can say someone paid six figures to get away from them? Of course, that was a drop in the bucket compared to everything else her new life would cost.