Getting Rich Slowly

Get Rich Slowly (http://www.getrichslowly.org/) is a dandy personal finance website that combines nuts-and-bolts money info with reflections on why we keep being tempted by big shiny expensive things. Also it doesn’t a) hector you b) drone on about hedge funds.

They’ve called for personal financial stories, and if you tell yours you even get a shot at a Wii, so sign me up. Here’s the story of how I rose from rags to riches, or pencils to -- even more pencils.

After college I lived in New York for two years, which basically involves spending every penny of income on rent. So let’s draw a veil over that, financially. Although I did share a place with a seductive actress who had an exciting social life involving Al Pacino.

Then I went off to graduate school in England, and frugal does not begin to describe my life. Sometimes I’d bicycle in to the library in the morning, and get myself all set up in the manuscript room, and realize I had forgotten my pencil. They don’t let you work with medieval manuscripts unless you work in pencil. But buying a new pencil was beyond my means. So I’d cycle the three miles home again, retrieve my pencil, and cycle back again. If you think about it, this was the ideal lifestyle. Nowadays I pay a gym to let me cycle pointlessly in place for hours. In grad school, not only was the exercise free, but I saved 20p on a pencil. And I was very fit, let me tell you. Cycling against the howling wind as I crossed Parker’s Piece ... but I digress.

Eventually I got a job at a university in the north of England, and I commuted up there on Mondays and came back down to Cambridge on Thursdays. This meant I needed a car. I had been typing people’s dissertations for money (I still know more than you’d ever want to about sixteenth-century Spanish drama and early anthropological theory). So I took all the money I’d stashed away in my high-interest-paying post office account and bought the only car I could afford. It was a Toyota Carina, which is a high-end model not sold in the U.S. (possibly for good reason). But it had seen better days: for instance, the trunk (a.k.a boot) was not watertight, being severely corroded with rust. And after I’d had the car about a month, it refused to start unless you siphoned some gas (a.k.a petrol) out of the middle of the system and poured it into the carburetor. “Don’t do this,” said the man from the AA, which is their equivalent of AAA. “Of course, if you want it to start, you may have to do it. But don’t do it. Because of the possibility of the shooting flames.” Needless to say, I did it for two years. The car cost £500.

Although aspects of this frugality were a bit severe, I had a whale of a time anyway, and I got the PhD with less than $5000 in debt. BUT --

After long years of this frugality, I got a real university job and moved back to the States. And then I went nuts. I went in to work one day and realized I’d forgotten my pencil, and prepared to trek back home and retrieve it. Suddenly I realized! I could buy another pencil! Any damn time I wanted to! I could buy tenpencils. I could fill the house with pencils.

So I let loose for a while. I bought expensive books, like collections of Annie Liebowitz portraits and books of sermons from 1540. I bought nineteenth-century Indian child’s moccasins. I did not save. I got a credit card (my first). I carried a balance from month to month. I spent as though pencils were going out of style.

After about five years, I woke up. I had nothing for my efforts except a lot of things that needed dusting, and I had a bad feeling. I bought a finance book, started an IRA, paid off the credit card (and the $5000 school loan), and lived slightly lower on the hog.

Flash a few years forward, and suddenly I was a new single mother with money still flowing out the door. Time to get serious. That’s when I really began to look at how money comes and goes. When you’re a poor grad student, you don’t have any choice. Then when you’re newly flush, you put it off. But the day of reckoning had arrived.

I calculated how much I was watching my fancy digital cable TV (not much). I turned off lights. I looked at all the monthly expenditures and whittled away at them. I decided to let months elapse between newspaper subscriptions. I switched to more infrequent garbage collection. All told, I managed to save about $400 per month. I hardly noticed the difference in lifestyle. Keeping an eye on interest rates, I refinanced my house at an ideal time, and my mortgage payments went down to less than my rent had been.

And then somebody crunched into the side of my car. The body shop vowed that it would cost $2000 to fix. $2000! To un-dent two panels in a car! If I hadn’t owned the car outright, the insurance company would have made me fix it. But I did own it outright. So they handed me over the $2000. I looked at the car for a while, and I looked at the check. Then I used the $2000 to put a new roof on the house.

For a while I felt like a pretty trashy person, driving around with a dented car. But less than a year later, when my car was totalled by a pizza-delivery driver running a red light, boy was I glad I hadn’t spent that $2000 fixing the stupid dent.

The insurance company gave me some piddling amount for the car. But I asked everyone I knew, “You’re not selling a car, by any chance?” Someone I knew was moving to Britain, bless her, and she was selling her car. It was a basic six-year-old Toyota with stick shift and no frills, and I mean no frills, not even a radio. (I made the mistake of putting in a radio. It broke. So much for luxuries.) But you know, the trunk was watertight and the car actually started without aid of the gas-in-the-carburetor technique, so things were on the upswing. It had 24,000 miles on it and I got it for $1200. It is now thirteen years old and has 48,000 miles on it. (Why so few miles? Because I made sure to buy a house a mile and a half from work, and I bicycle in usually anyway, with or without my pencil. My bicycle is used and has three speeds and I got it for $75 and I love it, so there.) I suppose I could have spent $30,000 on one or two cars in the meantime, cars that had their very own working radios, but I’d rather work less.

So it’s not that I never squander money on doughnuts or travel or, God knows, books. But I do feel as though I’ve come out the other end of the pointless extravagance phase. In fact, Get Rich Slowly has gotten me so fired up about eBay and half.com that I’m going to sell the early printed books, the Annie Liebowitz book, and the Indian moccasins.

And now the Cambridge University Library manuscript room sells its own pencils. The temptations are worse for this generation. In honor of my affluence, I bought a pencil last time I was there. I try to remember to take it in to school with me, so I don’t have to cycle home and get it every time I need it.