My financial biography:

Have we established that I am a deadbeat who is no good with money? I wish the opposite were true, but I have never really been able to get any kind of financial traction.

We are taught not to talk about money. I’d like to break that taboo. I do not come from money. I am the youngest of six kids. My mother was a homemaker and so my father’s income supported eight people. As a pastor and then a professor, he never made much. My parents help when they can, keeping me in used cars and the occasional gas money, but I have essentially always been on my own financially. I have never owned a new car. I have never paid more than two thousand dollars for a car.

I was a kid at seventeen with three grand saved up from waiting tables for my move to California. I got my first credit card in case of car trouble. After months of looking for work in that California recession of 1991, which later spread to the rest of the country, I came back to St. Louis nearly broke and had to charge a car repair in Tahoe. I got new glow plugs for my 1980 diesel Rabbit: the first of many charges.

The whole California plan was designed to get me a cheap college education in the UC system. Unfortunately lots of other people had that same plan that year, the year the state’s seven major employers moved to Mexico or Nevada to avoid environmental legislation and they fired all the humanity professors in order to extend welfare benefits. So I came home to Missouri and enrolled in Northeast Missouri State University.

Because I took a year off I was not eligible for Missouri scholarships through a program called Bright Flight. So, five years of undergrad later I was in the hole in student loans for all of my tuition, despite my four point GPA. That was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars. With capitalized interest it is now around forty two thousand. I have been financially able to pay on the debt for only one year of my working life.

For the first couple years of school my odd jobs didn’t rack up to much of a taxable income. I always worked part time while I was in school and much of the money was under the table in tips, so it’s hard for me to really say what I lived on. I did get in the habit of doubling my official income from one year to the next. I made two thousand, the next year was four, the year after I made eight thousand, then I made sixteen as a graduate student and bartender, also my tuition was waved since I was teaching. How do you live like that for ten years? Credit cards. I broke my arm without health insurance; that put a few thousand on the cards. My financial aid didn’t come through one semester so the whole semester went on the cards.

Then the university hired me full time and I double my income again to the low thirties. I moved to St. Louis and transitioned to my administrative job, where again I was in the low thirties. Unfortunately the move and the interim unemployment between jobs was all on plastic. This is when I quit teaching. I was hired on at Meramec and worked there for a semester, but I couldn’t pay my bills on what they were paying adjuncts. My credit card debt at that point was matched to my income, right around 30,000 dollars. People ask why I stayed at that last job for three years and the answer is simple: soul sucking paycheck. My 42,000 in student loans was on hold and I paid down a substantial portion of that ugly 30Kcredit card debt. I hated that job. It was killing me.

Now I am back in school, back on the adjunct dole that covers gas money and little else, and I am into Uncle Sam for an additional 16 K in student loans. It’s possible that when I graduate I will get hired for something in the low forties. I’ll boost that by continuing to adjunct and teach summer school. My credit card payments and student loan payments will reduce my living wage by more than half for at least the next ten years. Missouri also has a teacher’s union that has percentage dues that you really wouldn’t believe. I will be paying several hundred dollars a paycheck in retirement. I suppose that is a good thing because my brand new 401k retirement account through my adjunct job has eleven dollars in it right now.

I suppose we all struggle. I’ve been willing to sell out for years now, but no one is buying what I have to sell.