Keep Calm and Carry On

About a year ago I found this poster online and for obvious reasons, it resonated. Not only were we going through some hard times, but it was so quintessentially British, such a clipped, stiff upper lip war-time message that I had to have it. What a perfect inspirational mantra to have in my office while wrangling our finances I thought. Having found the poster through an artsy Swedish blog, I was quite pleased with myself, thinking I'd found something a little bit different.

Apparently I couldn't be more wrong. Oh yes AliBlahBlah, you are so edgy, so hip and urban. Like a pair of Marks and Spencers pants.

Imagine my disappointment, when visiting the Victoria and Albert museum last year to find an entire section of the gift shop devoted to this poster. Oh well, I thought, at least it would still be unusual in the States.

* Funny but true aside- one of the docs I work for asked me in my first year at the practice if I could contact the V and A for him. The Victoria and Albert Museum I asked thinking, crikey, that's a bit odd, but no, the VNA, Visiting Nurses Association. Much more useful for a neurologist but not half so interesting. *

Muppet.

While my Mum and Dad were staying in January, my Dad noticed an article on the BBC website about this very poster, 'the greatest motivational poster ever'. I had inadvertantly bought the 21st century version of the 'hang in there baby' cat poster.

It's a great story though. The poster was found in a dusty book shop in Alnwick and when reprinted and featured in a catalog 'all hell broke loose'. And I don't care if it's common as muck, it means a lot to me, and I may, possibly, be the first person to own it on our street (it's a small street) so that's cutting-edge enough for me.

Given the recent economic climate though, I think this version may be more appropriate:

Show Me Das Geld

One of the disturbing things about having a newborn is developing 'baby brain'. It begins with the exhaustion of late pregnancy, and blossoms into full-blown incompetence within days of the birth. I hate it. I hate feeling scattered and out of control. It's obviously fatigue coupled with concentrating too much of your attention on tiny creatures and not the job at hand.

Or maybe I'm just having my brains sucked out of my boobs.

That would certainly explain my recent 'genius alert' moment. I was sitting on the couch, nursing and watching TV *you lead a fascinating life, really, you should write about it*, and a trailer for True Lies with Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Jamie Lee Curtis came on. 'Hmm' I thought, as more brain cells were leached out of my breasts, 'Arnold Schwarzeneggar hasn't really been in anything lately has he'.

There is much truth in stupidity, and this was a classic example, because yes I do in fact realize that he's now the Governor of this State, which would probably explain his lack of recent Hollywood blockbusters. Then again, he doesn't seem to have done anything even so. Take the recent much publicized budget crisis. California is out of money. The 9th biggest economy in the world and we're broke. One of the 'solutions' or 'patch jobs' they've come up with is to delay issuing State Income Tax refunds, unemployment and disability checks, or issue IOUs which banks may or may not choose to honour. Quite frankly if you were a bank - would you? Precisely. This little bombshell was dropped by my friend R. in the hospital the morning after I had Lucy. 'I hope you weren't counting on that maternity leave pay the way we're counting on our tax refund' she said.

Not the new baby gift I was hoping for.

For those not from the States, you pay a plethora of payroll taxes over here, (which you could consider somewhat ironic given this nation's history). In addition to Medicare, FICA & SDI you pay both Federal and State income taxes, and at the end of the year if you've had too much tax withheld you're issued a refund. It's generally a better idea to err on the side of caution when withholding payroll taxes so you avoid owing shed loads of money to the Government. Or at least it used to be a good idea. Now the people who've played it safe are left wondering if they're ever going to get that money back. That would be us.

Doesn't sound much of an incentive to pay your taxes in the first place does it?

With owning rental properties, and having a mortgage the size of Africa's debt we have always 'banked' (ha ha) on getting money back on our taxes. We were counting on that money, just as we were rather hoping that I would receive State disability money for my maternity leave. Not an IOU, not a 'we're going to delay issuing checks for 30 days or more'. I realize that most councils, local authorities, States etc are struggling to make ends meet in the current economic crisis as there are increased demands for unemployment benefits, food stamps and the like, and I also realize that Arnie is not entirely to blame. People are joking that we should write IOUs for our payroll taxes, for our mortgage bills and the like, but really it's not a laughing matter. That our State should even be considering IOUs for State refunds is insulting. Everybody deserves their tax refunds, plenty of people desperately need the money, have already spent it as they've been 'budgeting on it'. Apparently the State of California is guilty of doing the same.

Men Are From Mars

For a while there, when things were really tight. And hairy. Hairy and tight. We were talking about canceling Christmas. I'm sure a lot of families are facing the same decision this year. We had decided to buy a few things for our niece and nephew, and for Anna, but everyone else, sorry you were SOL. I had already drafted the email in my head.

Then our mortgage company sent an 11th hour Fed-Ex and things are a little less hairy and a little less tight. We don't have to cancel Christmas entirely, but we'd still decided to hold off exchanging gifts between ourselves. I remember the conversation falling along the lines of 'let's not get anything for each other, maybe we could buy something for the house or the new baby that we really need'. Which is how the following conversation happened:

LK: Looking at the calendar. 'Wait, you're working this Friday'
Me: 'Yes, I have to go in, we're short-staffed, but at least we'll get a little extra money for the..'
LK: 'TV fund'
Me: at the exact same second 'Baby fund'

Me: 'Wait, what TV fund?'
LK: 'Er, yeah, remember, something for the house, I thought we'd talked about a flat-screen TV'
Me: "--"
LK: 'Face it, we're going to spend a helluva lot more time looking at a TV than we ever are a baby'.

In Defence of the Imprudent

As if sitting in on an end-of-life lunch conference wasn't bad enough (and imagine trying to discreetly work your way through a pasta salad when discussing Terry Schiavo and feeding tubes) I had the joy of sitting next to two self-congratulatory muppets holding forth on the credit crunch.

I did not weigh in, although I may have given my broccoli spears an extra vicious stab or two. It's a refrain I hear too often these days, smug fixed-raters happy to lay the blame for the current financial meltdown squarely at the feet of those 'stupid enough to take the loans in the first place'. People who happily bought their homes five or more years ago that were lucky enough to find properties they could afford without incurring excessive risk.

We are certainly not in this happy group. We did end up buying at the wrong time and with a horror story of a loan. We probably do deserve everything we are likely to get served up to us. I am putting this down in defence of the imprudent, the stupid, the people who made their own beds and are now forced to lie in them. I am writing this so I can get it off my chest without engaging any self-righteous twits the likes of whom I sat next to this afternoon.

If Bridget Jones can have her 'smug marrieds' I can have my 'smug fixed-raters'.

In my (our) defence, we are not stupid. I had heard of negative equity well before the credit crunch. We were faced with a town where real estate was so ludicrously out of our reach that renting was the only option. In the time that we sat quietly, prudently squirreling away our nest egg, the most basic, squalid, 2-bedroom condos sky-rocketed by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those people we watched take dodgy loans to get a foothold in the market were coming up smelling of roses. Santa Barbara real estate was always a safe bet, there had never been a downturn, if anything only a plateau, way back when the rest of the country took a bath. So we took a chance, because we'd already wasted so much time doing nothing. It was good advice, a sensible decision, and I am terminally sensible. It was the only chance we had.

I still think the decision we made was prudent. If things had gone faster, smoother, we would have been chuffing laughing. We bought an income property with the intent to switch four apartments in to four separately saleable condominiums. Divide and conquer. The City of Santa Barbara worked on our conversion application at a deliberately glacial pace. There were too many hurdles to mention (archeological surveys, sounds surveys, sewer lateral surveys, survey surveys), but we finally did get planning approval and permits issued.

Too late it appears, the financial tide had turned.

We are still in the fortunate position of being able to collect rents. Our position would have been infinitely worse if we'd bought a condo back in 2005. It still leaves us with a nuclear mushroom cloud of a loan, and a hell of a job trying to hang on, but you better believe we're getting creative on that end!! Who knows, you may see creature #2 on Ebay in the near future. At the very least I may be jogging for a 'tax baby' at the end of December.

So while you're busy patting yourselves on the back and applauding your fiscal good sense, perhaps take a moment to consider how much luck played in to your success. We are not all spendthrifts putting 'I want, I must have' things on credit because we feel we are entitled to a lifestyle above what we're prepared to work for. There are plenty of people in this mess, who through job-loss, illness, sky-rocketing interest rates or other unforeseen circumstance are no longer able to afford a basic right -­ a home.

And yes, in the words of Norman Tebbit, we can just get on our bikes. No-one made us live in this rich-man's town. Except it's my husband's home town, where he wanted to stay and raise children, and we tried to make it work. Trust me, nothing can put a strain on a marriage like running in to trouble fulfilling someone else's dream.

I don't blame our mortgage broker, he was only doing what every single loan broker in this town now denies doing; helping people into properties they knew they couldn't afford so that they could at least have a chance at taking a risk. I do blame the mortgage companies for allowing these loans, which caused property values to rise exponentially, and I'm sure they in turn have regulators they would like to slap. And yes, this is a 'correction' and people should be made to pay, capitalism will have it's pound of flesh. I see how unfair it is to take tax-payers monies to bail out those who made bad decisions. But this is bigger than that -­ this is everybody's savings, their pensions, their ability to get a loan to make a better life. This is scary. This is working hard and going backwards. You better believe I will be telling Anna the 'Robert the Bruce and the spider story' over the years to come.

See, this is what happens when I eavesdrop on other people's conversations instead of listening to this month's guest speaker on the topic of 'Advance Directives, How To Die With Dignity'.

Armageddon Wet

It's raining
It's pouring
And my old man is snoring....

LK works outside, so when it rains, he pours.....himself another large cup of coffee and settles in to watch the Australian Open. And crikey did it pour down today. It may not rain often in this dear old town, but when it does it is a thing to behold. No polite British drizzle here, the storms slam in straight from the Pacific and literally spew rain.

Here's a quick shot of some disappointed car owners only a couple of blocks from our house:














So there's me thinking that after working all day, dealing with feisty transcriptionists and a backed up office sink gushing rainwater that I'd earned some downtime. In our cobbled together marriage rules, working trumps not working in terms of Anna-sitting and sundry domestic duties so I'm driving home thinking, I'm chuffing golden.

Imagine my surprise when I suggest the vaguest possibility of going to the pictures with the girls and he says:

....'but you had a bath last night'.

If there was ever a sentence that summed up marriage after children it would be that one. And for the record, I did go to the movies, which must kill my free time allowance until about March I'd say.