There's a blogger who frequents another very popular PF blogger's site and comments in a way that reminds me of another person who used to squat on generally popular blogs: All Financial Matters, Single Ma's blog, I can't remember where else, but definitely at least those two, named Minimum Wage. Does anyone remember MW? I can't recall if MW was male or female but MW was a down and outer, and ze was determined to crap on everyone and everywhere. It did not matter what the conversation was, ze had something negative to say:

"I wish I had that kind of money."
"I wish someone would give me that kind of job/salary/bonus/promotion/praise. I've been working for minimm wage for the past XYZ years....."
"I wish I could have that kind of vacation. I haven't had a day off since ....."
"I wish I could have that kind of car. I can't even drive a working car because ...."
"I wish that was my life. Must be nice."
"I wish I could have retirement savings - boy I wish I could even think about retiring someday, I will never get to retire because all I make is less than [wait for it] minimum wage and I will never get out of this rut and life."

Sunny, hm? And the second anyone made the slightest move toward asking after what MW did or made in the hopes of offering any sort of suggestions that MW might use to lessen the plight, WELL.  You might well have spit in MW's face.

Eventually MW faded off the scene in some way, but today I discovered that one of our fellow PF bloggers has a rather pestilent commenter who is persistent in crapping all over his blog and while I'd noted the name once or twice before, I didn't realize ze had a blog of zir own.  Curious whether there was something more behind this person, I tarried for a moment and found that actually, this person was only a couple years younger than me and my.. my oh my oh my oh my.  This was rather a prime example of the sort of personality that the older generations tut tut at and say: we're screwed.  As a dear friend said: FAIL.

So very much of the blogger's posts were just for lack of a less kind word: whining. The blog seethed with entitlement.

For example: A very small debt had blossomed some multiples beyond their original principle because ze hadn't paid and eventually ended up going to court and settled against zir.  Ze has decided that there's no gain to be had in paying it. So ze refuses.

Ze also refuses to work a full work week because ze "hates zir job". Ze won't find a better job ("can't"), so instead presumably mopes about but defines the remaining time in the week as time for doing stuff like chores or exercise or blogging. Anything but working or going to school. Those latter two are definitely not on the list. And so ze declares zir job and loathesome bloggers who are successful in life and making any better salaries in any way, those despicable people who have found a way and means, anathema.  They and the people who patronize zir job are brats.  Ze cannot be one, of course, because ze has no means, the lack thereof clearly demonstrated by the poorness of which ze is plagued.

At this point, I lost my mind a little.  I very nearly left a comment.  Really? Ze is not a brat?  REALLY??  Ze works hours that wouldn't qualify as half a job's time, can't be bothered to plaster a fake smile on zir face, and openly scorns doing that much and the rest of the world that shuts up and puts up??  And has the nerve to hide behind the lesbian card? The people of color card? The woman card?

Throw 'em on the table. Throw them all on the table. Anything else you got?  Oh, "lives with your parent" was the concession. Well that's neither here nor there in the game of brattiness.

Well, here's a little PSA. Brats come in all genders, drive all kinds of vehicles, are present in every economic band. It's all in the attitude toward others and willingness to put everyone else down as "Other" and say that they're just not going to put up with any kind of anything from anyone because they will be treated precisely one kind of way from only THIS sort of people.

Brats certainly are the people that you don't like here but they are, alas, not so far away as all that from the picture you have painted of yourself. And being abusive is only half a step away from inviting and creating an abusive environment.

It's a shame that you heap such vitriol on bootstrappers when that's actually the way that most poor people find their way out of poverty. It may be hard to see from their positions now just because they "have so much" and maybe some of their advice rings hollow just because they have anything more than you.

I'm not going to give any advice. I'm just going to say it's shortsighted, intentionally or not, that you're dismissing and in fact attacking a group of people who by definition were once much like you.

I worked myself out of relative poverty working 80 and 100 hour weeks for umpteen years, and my parents took more than 20 years before me because they were strangers in a foreign land to start over. That was on top of the 15 years they'd already spent working out a living in their native land. But without fail, 365 days a year, year after year, they put a smile on their faces and went to do whatever jobs they had at the time whether it was picking up after someone else's animals or children or land or mopping the floors or building a fence or laboring in the sun or rain.

Did they like it? Of course not. Did they want to do it? Of course not. They did it anyway.

Did I like my ridiculous hours? Heck no. Did I want to work 14 hour days? Of course not. But to make sure that the bills were paid and we didn't carry debt forever, I did it.

And were my clients and shoppers nice to me? [Hysterical Laughter] How many diatribes did I listen to? How many insane people did I encounter? I can't even begin to remember anymore. (I do remember having the same flipping conversation with the same old man every two weeks for five years straight because he could not remember a thing. We smiled every two weeks.) Does it matter now? No. Because it doesn't matter in the end. What mattered was that I always did a good job, kept my eye on the important things, got through the days good or bad, and took care of my family so that my physically sick and mentally ill mother did not have to keep working with and listening to the abuse of the bullying crappy coworkers who always had poor attitudes and felt like they were always having a bad day and could take it out on the poor weakest one in the shop.

Not everything goes your way. In fact, very very little ever does without an immense amount of effort. But there is a bigger picture. Whether you can or will or want or don't see it - that's your call. I'm a bootstrapper whose family was poorer than dirt and we fought long and hard each and every d*mn day to win against the grind and still fight it every day because life is just not that easy.

The real lesson here isn't who can make it in life because they worked harder or who can shout "lazy" louder or who has more money. It's about who has the gumption to try and find the way to be happy because I'll be darned if there's a one of us PF bloggers trying as hard as this one to beat Minimum Wage at zir game of Misery.

It’s been weeks of waiting, though not with bated breath which brings back memories of an awful man who punned “baited breath har har” and thought he was terribly funny when he was only terrible.

Waiting for the next shoe to drop ….

Waiting for decisions to be made ….

Waiting to make my next move….

Waiting….

There was life to live these many weeks, one day after the next, and so much to do in the name of survival but most of the time it all felt very much a hidden game of suspense. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but I was, the whole time, admonishing myself not to play to any perceived or imagined result during this waiting game. [Great advice in that link, by the way.]

Just a week and some days ago, one of the few people I felt free to speak to in some way about this asked after my progress when I had reached my Zen state and he was astonished that I wasn’t fretting over the length of time I'd spent waiting.

But having progressed to the next stage of waiting, I’m sharing the fact that I’m waiting. For a thing. I can’t say for what publicly until I have a result - that's just my rule, I can only say that I am.

I’m not worried, precisely. I’m not afraid of the results whichever way they go, I’m just waiting to see what develops from here. It’s a strange place, this.

This time last year, I started the research to consolidate all our phones (his, mine, my parents') into a consolidated plan in order to streamline the finances and save money. I had always been pleased with T-mobile's customer service in the past and the cost of their plans so I suspected that would be the service we would end up with.

In June the right plans and the free smartphones came up so we committed to a fresh set of phones and plans.

The first phones we picked were PiC's G2s but I absolutely hated mind and swapped it for a MyTouch just in time before the month was up.

It was much lighter and the functions were a little smarter: it had copy and paste, the text messaging function showed time and date, unlike the G2, and some of the apps were more useful.

Using non-Gmail email clients is a pain, though, as this phone doesn't allow you to respond in-line; you can only write completely new emails that include the previous message when you like it or not and the web browser is incredibly clunky.  It doesn't accommodate multiple tabs or windows very well at all, it loses the open windows or freezes up.

In general, it still handled fairly nicely at first.

Seven months later, the thing is like a half functioning brick. The phone itself freezes up regularly - the touchscreen becomes non-responsive so I have to plug it into the charger, unplug it, repeat several times, etc.

The battery life is nearly non-existent. Without use, the phone lasts on stand-by no more than 6 hours (if that) - and only 1-2 hours with any use so that it's often completely drained to the dregs before the end of a workday. I can't ever go to work without a charger. Same for overnights: it can't last overnight even after being fully charged without discharging itself entirely.

The visual voicemail function is pretty much a joke - it only works part of the time, it may or may not actually convert messages to the visual function but it also duplicates voicemails to the dial-in version and the notifications for the dial-in portion will go off constantly. And I don't know about you but I've gotten to the point where I am completely over receiving and checking voicemails the traditional way - I hate hate hate dialing in and listening to the messages and having to use the menu to save/delete/skip/etc.

We had a relatively decent plan but it rather got my goat that I couldn't cancel my mom's line after she passed.  Evidently, it just doesn't matter who the phone line was intended for - because I was taking responsibility for the plan with all the lines, the death of the user of a line counts for nothing so far as the phone company is concerned. I suppose I should have known that would be the case, it's just another thing that's draining a resource that could be better used some other way. I'm considering taking the issue up with them again through corporate but haven't had time.

It's all a bit disappointing really.  We haven't saved much money (if any) since switching to T-Mobile and it's been one annoyance after another with the less than smooth transition, the poor quality phones and the rapidly deteriorating performance. The decision was made knowing that the switch was going to be a bit inconvenient but I figured it'd just be a month or two of transition. This seems like it's going to be a rough year and a half to ride out the rest of the contract.

This time, the "smart" financial decision feels pretty dumb. 

This reader story on Get Rich Slowly is the most impressive set up of an estate for an executor I have ever seen.

Her father familiarized her with all of his key financial people, negotiated legal and funeral fees, made all the  funeral arrangements that he could prepay himself, keeping all the necessary copies of records for her, and settled his money on the children in such a way that accounted for the extra work that she'd be doing as the executor.

He outlined and folder-tabbed the process of settling all the major and most of the minor aspects of the impact of his death on their lives long before he passed. If that's not love, I don't know what is.

~~~

For my side of the family, I had nothing but the funeral to settle and pay for when Mom passed, because I had long taken financial responsibility for just about everything else. The funeral arrangements still cost a fair amount of money, not to mention the travel and other costs.

Dad is now free to earn a bit of a living for himself, and is doing so, but there is no expectation on my part that his efforts will yield more than enough to pay for his basic needs, and just some of them at that. 

I'm the first in my family to worry about any kind of estate planning and while I have the framework mentally shaped, it is nowhere near the level of organization that I know a true, developed estate will one day require. And for the moment, that's ok. My own finances weren't there yet a few years ago when I started the process, and neither are ours right now. I will be taking the post shared by Jody as a blueprint.

For PiC's side of the family, we have no clue what the estate plan looks like.  As they actually have some sort of family money, that scares me at least a little bit. I have no interest in the money or the estate itself.  Marrying into money of any kind was the last thing this Make-it-Entirely-on-Your-Own girl wanted, but I do have concerns as a principle.

Handling any estate is a fair job and handling one with any real value well requires time and diligence that I just don't see at anyone's disposal. And by George, I can only imagine the mess of sorting an unfamiliar estate when you haven't got any of the groundwork laid.  Because of this, I've long encouraged PiC to have a conversation with his parent and siblings. They should have a clue about where to begin, end, and how the middle bits join up.

~~~

One good friend's elderly mother, now in her mid 90s, is comfortably well off but frets over saving her pennies.  There's no good reason to, my friend scolds, her children most certainly don't need, want or expect any money from her so she shouldn't have to worry about anything but keeping her health and enjoying her days.

Another friend is into her 70s and is hale and hearty but is still working.  Partly because of a late in her years divorce which left her financially stranded, partly because it keeps her busy. I don't know if she's also trying to leave something to her children.

Friends in our cohort who are just starting out with young families are just saving or new to investing and haven't really begun "disaster" planning yet. To my mind, though, anyone with dependents really has to get that set down on paper. I would never want to assume that my children would automatically go to the surrogate parent or family of my choice without making certain of it and be raised or supported in the way I hoped. There's no guarantee that an estate plan wouldn't going to be needed until the children were well into their adult lives and were ready to assume the relevant duties of executor or help as necessary.

A little over a year ago, I got engaged and promptly shut down the news cycle on my side of the family beyond my parents lest the wedding juggernaut roll over my intended and me and leave just two imprints in the cement.  The tradition, it is that strong.

With plenty of angst and worry over defying my cultural tradition, depriving my parents of the last rites of parenthood, I fled to Meg's domain (literally), A Practical Wedding, to discover that other brides, to be, had been, years past, had shared the same need for a simpler? quieter? less "but everyone says" wedding.  There I found that so many similar issues were being discussed and debated in a warm and welcoming forum that the wedding thing seemed just a little less daunting. Bridal parties, stage fright, budgets, families, oh families.

Not less so that I didn't end up running off to fauxlope. I'm still me, after all. And to date, that's been the toughest decision to live with. I remember being so happy but the memory of the day is layered with so much sadness now that it's defined as the last time I ever saw my mom. That's always going to be part of that day. And whether she was fully there for that day, well, that's another thing.

Reading A Practical Wedding the website as a survival guide up until I actually got married, and now reading the book as a survival guide until we celebrate the marriage has been nothing short of a lifeline.

I was sure it would be, so I bought five copies.  Selfishly, I'm keeping one for myself.  The other four? I can bring myself to share some of them with you good people.

Enter using the Rafflecopter submission form below for each type of entry. Javascript is required to see it, I'm sure, but it's dead useful for organization.

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