A 7-Month Lease on Life

I’ve been committed — to hanging around ’til October

God willing, I have agreed to Remain until October.

Granted, it is not due to typical reasons, like love, life, and family.

No, it’s to see the 7-month CD I just opened through the credit union I belong to through to its maturity. It is one of about a dozen banks that I do business with. I have ended one banking relationship this month although I gained one in return.

I still go to sleep, wake up, consume about a gallon of coffee per day, go to work, eat, drink, spend as much time with my ailing baby as I can, walk 7 miles per day, work some more, read a bit, drink a bit, do some writing, and pay for shit, like lots of shit, more or less out of habit.

I will never be happy again, but every so often I get a brief moment of solace. They are few and far between, but do happen now and then.

When it comes to financial matters, I have always been a grinder and a provider. Go to work, don’t complain too much, pay our bills, pay for college, and send somewhere between a thousand and two to our adult children every month.

By no means are we upper middle class. We are always on the outside of that classification looking up at our friends and (most of our) family from below. I won’t bore you with details, but we are among the lowest-income and wealth-holding families out of all of our friends and my side of the family.

It’s not so much that we’re trying to Keep Up With the Joneses, but sometimes it just cannot be helped. Most of the time, we’re not even in the same league.

All as a preface to sharing that as a card-carrying member of the American middle class, I typically have several debts to repay. First and foremost among them is our mortgage. I have had one for twenty-six years, so I have spent half my life with one.

I “only” owe $80,000 for our old suburban split-level, but at the age of fifty-three, I never thought that I’d still be making payments on a home that is, quite frankly, only about a tenth as nice as I imagined owning while growing up.

Again I share that many of our relatives and friends own those kinds of homes — and outright — but, alas and alack as my wife says, it was not in the cards for us.

Interestingly enough, looking up my mortgage for this story, I found that I am obligated to make ninety-nine more payments. I write “I” because I refinanced the mortgage in my name only a few years ago.

We have a joint tenant deed, so my wife will own our home outright someday.

Subaru Guy

Without drawing things out, I like Subarus, my wife does, and now our daughter does, seeing as how she took possession of our nicest one when she moved last summer.

We let her Because Reasons.

I leased another new Subaru for my wife this past July and owe twenty-eight more payments on it before we must decide whether to turn it in or, more likely, purchase it off the lease as I did with our last two leased vehicles.

New bathroom

We waited until our tub completely gave out, leaking into our basement every time we used it. Rusted tub, rusty pipes, tub surround falling apart.

Again because of my depressed state, rather than seek out quotes, we got hornswoggled into signing this huge contract to redo it with one of those businesses from the Yellow Pages called Bath Planet.

They did a pretty good job, completing the project in one long day.

The cost was nearly $12,000! I made a down payment for half on my credit card, leading to that month when $16k flew away two months ago.

I am on the hook for twenty-one more $249 payments to Wells Fargo, so kinda want to remain around to at least pay off our bathroom.

Daughter’s college, son’s law school

I could write a 20-minute read on this, but suffice it to say that I should remain around to pay for our daughter’s college when she finally gets around to committing herself. She currently takes a few classes at a community college.

I saved more than $100k per kid for college, more like $120k for her. We are chipping away at it since I use a portion to help pay her rent and also pay about $3k per semester for her tuition.

Our son is basically on his own at law school, borrowing heavily and I mean heavily. About half our mortgage debt every year for three years!

He intends to follow in my younger brother’s footsteps. He is an extremely successful civil rights attorney who handles many class-action cases, often settling in the millions.

Both of my children would be devastated, but I’m not sure that is reason enough for me to remain.

But for now it is.

The 7-Month CD

Besides my other financial obligations, I decided to pool my two emergency fund accounts, both of which had fifty-some-odd thousand in them, into one 7-month CD at one of the numerous financial institutions that I conduct business with.

This one happens to be with the credit union that I joined five years ago intending to refinance our mortgage for around two percent.

Of course, as a master procrastinator, I waited years until the interest rate was five percent to refinance.

But I kept that five hundred dollars and change on deposit.

Without boring each other to death, I cashed out two other “rainy day” funds that I had fifty-some-odd grand in, added another five grand from my Capital One account (that I will soon close), and voila! One hundred and twenty large to deposit, plus a week’s worth of interest on one account ($135) plus $500 of the $571 that I had on deposit for the past five years.

I mathed it out at the CD calculator, and figure to collect about $3,800 for the privilege of letting the credit union hold the bulk of my hard-earned and hard-saved emergency fund for the next seven months.

Beyond that?

I cannot commit.

But I do hope to find some other reason, beyond just cashing out an investment, to remain among those who continue living, eating, breathing, reading, writing, working, and walking.