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My husband and I live in a relatively small apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the gossip – the news, as it were – traffics in our cramped elevator or basement laundry room. Behind its thirty doors, our building houses a flutist, a filmmaker, lawyers (both corporate and public sector), interior designers, a nurse, an accountant, a grad student, an expatriate retiree who feeds the birds in Central Park, and the usual coterie of mystery inhabitants: They’re around, even during the weekdays, they own cars (unusual in this area, where parking spaces start at $400 per month), they seem to be supporting themselves comfortably, but we’re not sure how. The building has units from rectangular studios to penthouse two-bedrooms. Perhaps what sets the residents apart the most is how long each lived here. Considering how real estate values have tumbled upward in recent years, the newcomers are consistently quite a bit better off than those of us already here. Five years after moving in, for example, our mortgage – the one we stretched our debt-to-income ratio to the absolute outside limit to get – is about equal to what the down payment would be now. In this environment, the most prized fruit of the grapevine is which apartment is being sold, and for how much. So when our neighbors right next door to us put their place on the market, you can be sure we were interested in who was moving in, and at what price. And then we heard. In the elevator. The seller told me that a young couple our age was buying it – for over the asking price – and that they were paying cash. Cash? Somebody’s daddy has some money! our neighbor guessed.
There were two possibilities as to how the buyers accomplished this
very large cash purchase, and my husband and I speculated about them
at length. Either, as the seller thought, Mommy and Daddy helped
them out by writing an enormous check (and that’s how we referred to
them, “Mommy and Daddy,” as opposed to when our parents helped us
out, in which case they were referred to simply as “our parents”);
or they belonged to that dreaded class of twentysomething dot-com
millionaires. We weren’t sure which was preferable. Both seemed
frustratingly undeserved. Going away for the weekend? I asked. Yeah, I’m just waiting for John to bring the car around. We need so
many things for the apartment – we’re going antiquing upstate. After making small talk about antiquing, I turned to the elevator and pushed the call button, but I was interrupted by a question: Can you recommend a good cleaning lady? I froze. We all have different definitions of financial success, and
mine is being able to afford a cleaning lady. I had a boyfriend once
who lived in his parents’ six-bedroom place off Park Avenue, with a
live-in cook and a cleaning lady who spent every other day scouring
the apartment. It was like living in a five-star hotel, or what I
imagined that would be like. Thick white towels were always folded
and fresh. When you threw anything into any wastebasket, it blinked
back at you from the bottom. Clutter never had a chance. Nor dust,
nor dirty dishes. The best part was that my boyfriend never had to
give any of these chores a thought. To my mind he dwelled in
housekeeping nirvana: total comfort, zero effort. But our new neighbors, they evidently already had enough money, and they could afford a cleaning lady. Rather than play along, I decided to confront the envy by just being frank. No, I told her. Actually, it’s my dream to have a cleaning lady,
though. So what’s changed recently? I wanted to know. Whence these cleaning lady funds?
I’m not proud to recount my conversation later with my husband.
“Antiquing?” I mocked. “And who keeps a car in the city, anyway?
That’s ridiculous. It’s cheaper to rent one whenever you need it.
Insurance, parking, not to mention the cost of the car itself –
what’s the point of paying for all of that when you can hardly ever
use a car here anyway?” ## They are the Joneses, and we are not keeping up. However much we
understand that we are not, not, under any circumstance, to covet
our neighbor’s anything or to attempt to keep up with the Joneses,
we can’t seem to help it. We are gripped by this involuntary urge, a
drive to compare and compete that is ingrained, at least in
Americans, if not all people. It’s not just that we want more for ourselves but that we specifically want more than, or at least as much as, what others have. That’s how we know how much we deserve: It depends on what the other guy has. Since the days of Cain and Abel we have been bickering and jostling over who has the better lot. Wealth and well-being are largely a mindset, and how we’re doing in relation to the company we keep is key to our contentment. It would seem logical that the people we envy the most would be
those at the top of the ladder, the rich and famous. It’s true that
we are fascinated by the wealthy and celebrities, and might
fantasize about living their lives, but we are driven by just that,
curiosity and fantasizing. We don’t really expect that with enough
hard work and some good luck we will end up with millions in the
bank and our whereabouts splashed across the cover of People magazine. It might happen to some, but we don’t count on it. It’s not pretty. We’re certainly not proud of it, and usually don’t want to admit that we are in its jaws. That leads us straight into troublesome secrecy. The don’t ask, don’t tell policy of life that lets us live around other people. On the rare occasion that someone admits bald-faced envy, we nearly crumble with commiseration and relief. A treasured quote from writer Gore Vidal: “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” We can laugh that off as an artistic temperament, but when we’re honest with ourselves we know that there is more there, that we suffer similarly, by letting our relative positions in our various groups affect our well-being, whether we mean to or not. So we can’t help ourselves from quietly scoping others’ situations, from private investigating to figure out what others have and, consequently, what we should have too. ## Tina invited me over for a late-afternoon glass of wine, to get
further acquainted. My Honeymooners plan was progressing. As we
walked up the stairs to her living room, she asked me what I do and
I told her I’m a journalist. “No way!” I said, while I really did think to myself, NO WAY! A
competitive mushroom popped out at me like an airbag. I might not
care about her wearing better clothes, but when it comes to career I
didn’t need competition living next door, on staff at the Times.
Forget the Honeymooners, that was two generations ago. Times were
gentler. I wanted to go back down the stairs and ignore our new
neighbors and their wealthy parents and paid–for apartment
forevermore.
“No, I work in Web development.” My relief was short-lived. By the time we reached the top of the stairs it came to me: Web development . . . the Internet . . . dot-com millionaire. ##
Everyone heard stories of twentysomething millionaires minted in the
late 1990s. They couldn’t be avoided. They were on television, they
were on the covers of magazines, and there weren’t just a few junior
moguls, they seemed to be everywhere. The economy was shaken up like
a snow globe, and money really did seem to grow on trees, there for
the plucking. The idea of building up a career or business through
years of hard work was actually mocked. People used to ask me what I
was doing still writing for newspapers and magazines, those relics;
Why didn’t I get an Internet job?
In the United States, at least, where productivity is valued more
highly than anything and is generally measured in dollars, this
comparison and competition is inbred. It feeds the system. The drive
to consume more, to have more and better things, and continually to
raise our level of comfort, is stronger here than any other place on
earth. Climbing over the Joneses isn’t only a social and financial
phenomenon but an economic one. Moving up is our reward for hard
work. Desire and envy are the engines that keep us going. Trade up.
Earn more. Improve. This is what keeps our capitalist economy
throbbing. So while we’re told not to attempt to keep up with the
Joneses, tsk-tsk, we’re also shown that that is exactly what we
should do. If we all minded our own business, if we were all content
with our lot as it is, the economy would slow and our standard of
living – which we measure, for the most part, in things – would
tumble. “An economy primarily driven by growth must generate
discontent,” writes psychologist Paul Wachtel in The Poverty of
Affluence. “We cannot be content or the entire economic machine
would grind to a halt.” ## As soon as John and Tina got back from their tropical honeymoon, she quit her job at the Times. The economy was in the midst of a major slump. Nobody who had a job was complaining, or at least nobody was quitting. But that’s what dot-com millionairehood was all about: You did what you enjoyed, you worked while it was exciting, and then whenever you felt like it, you walked away. And so she did.
“She was in the right industry at the right time, that’s for sure,” my husband said with a sigh. “It must be nice to have two incomes, though!” No kidding that’s what it felt like, because that’s what was going on. I just couldn’t come out with the truth. Privately, money was making our life miserable. I got itchy and
irritable trying to work in a home office with someone else at home.
He left when he could, but without being able to afford recreation,
he resorted to wandering the streets or sitting alone in the park.
It made matters worse that he had left his entire social circle
behind to move here. ##
We were feeding our frustration with assumptions. If we had hunted
down statistics and believed that they referred to just some of the
people in our own circle, and if we could have heard them describe
their own struggles, we wouldn’t have felt so isolated. We certainly were not the only ones whose relationship was being strained by financial issues. We’ve all heard that money is the leading cause of problems in marriages. Some research on bankruptcy shows that couples who file for bankruptcy are at least twice as likely to file for divorce as the general population.
As for unemployment, the fallout it causes, ranging from temporary
malaise to social and emotional implosion, is a shared experience
but one that isn’t discussed openly. “People who have lived through
downward mobility,” explains a book on the subject written by an
anthropologist, “are often secretive and cloistered or so bewildered
by their fate that they find it hard to explain to themselves, let
alone to others, what has befallen them.” Therefore most of us don’t
hear about it, don’t understand it, and are never prepared for
handling it.
Professors at Harvard and the University of Miami conducted a survey
about income. They asked over 250 people whether they would prefer
to earn $50,000 per year while those around them earned $25,000, or
to earn $100,000 while those around them earned $200,000. More than
half chose the first scenario, giving up having twice as much total
money in order to have relatively more than others. ## Tina decided to launch a new career as an interior designer. “My mom has a really good decorator,” she explained, “and I’ve always been interested in it.” She started taking classes at the same time my husband entered business school. The two of them commiserated about having homework; John and I commiserated about having to do the cooking while our spouses studied. But on our side of the wall, our talk was not about how similar we were to our neighbors but about how aggravatingly different. When my husband was accepted to business school we nearly cried out of relief and happiness. We had decided that if he didn’t get in, he would have to go back to his country and work there again for a while. Going back to school meant our taking on six figures of student loans and braving two more years on a single income, but it also meant we could stay together, and it meant – or we had to believe it meant – nearly being guaranteed a well-paying job after two years. Tina, on the other hand, had voluntarily given up a well-paying job and was going back to school on a whim because she happened to be interested in it. To fill her idle time, apparently. To amuse herself. Or so we figured. After a few months of classes, something shocking happened. Okay, I was not deliberately eavesdropping, but our building has
very thin walls. Really, everybody knows this.You don’t have a
conversation in the hallway or while waiting for the elevator if you
don’t want the neighbors in on it. Usually this is a drawback. And here’s what I – inadvertently! – discovered: things were not as they had seemed. As I heard what she told her friend, I was not only fascinated but guiltily thrilled. “We’re paying $115 for cable. Say, $90 for our cell phones. Car
insurance is, like, $120 a month. Electricity, a hundred bucks,
about . . .” This kind of goody doesn’t land at your doorstep every day – or, normally, ever. I quickly and shamelessly compared their tab to our own. “And that’s before, you know, just living,” she said with despair. She didn’t know how they were making it, she reported. The fact was, they weren’t making it. # # The worst part about comparisons is that we often make them based on
misinformation. We try to keep up with the Joneses, then it turns
out, as it did in our case, that the Joneses as we know them don’t
even exist. Even when someone does in fact have the money it looks
like they have, which is often not the case, the funds do not add up
to contentment. Among American households surveyed that earn more
than $100,000 per year, 27 percent said that they did not have
enough money to buy the things they “really need.” That gives new
meaning to the concept of personal finance. Our financial situations
and what they mean to our personal lives really do depend on our
individual circumstances, surroundings, and mindset. We cannot, even
if we wanted to, step into somebody else’s life and experience what
appears to be so good about it. Whatever we thought we would enjoy
of theirs – if we only had what they have – wouldn’t be the magic
bullet we envision. On the surface it was gossip, but on a deeper level, learning of our
neighbors’ troubles was significant to us because we had come to
feel so achingly alone in our bleak financial world. Just as we had
read into their having a fully funded, joyful life together, now we
could project that just as we sometimes lost sleep over money, so
did they. We no longer felt singled out for suffering financial
stress at the beginning of a marriage. We had some proof that a
couple just like us could be in a somewhat similar situation, even
though it didn’t look like it from the outside. # #
Some information and honesty go a long way toward curing the
comparisons that ail us. If we would only talk to one another about
money and status, about our desires and discontent. If only it were
okay to reveal what really goes on in our financial lives, not just
factually but emotionally, how much better off we would be. Truth is
healing. Like having daylight return after a night spent worrying in
the darkness, constructive confessions can banish our loneliness and
soothe our financial fretting. How much damage we do ourselves by
hiding our money misgivings, and how unnecessary this collective
burden is. Our financial and emotional welfare depend not on earning
more or owing less but on opening up, and coming to understand the
reality of those around us. The Joneses lose their power over us
when we get to know them, and understand what their own lives are
really like, behind what is usually a tightly closed door. You are about to learn the intimate details of what has been called
America’s last secret. I didn’t get all of the details right away, of course. I had to ease into it. Even though I ask questions for a living, it is, shall we say, not normal or acceptable to knock on your neighbors’ door and ask them what’s been going on with their money. But I did it. For me and for you. Because I know you’ve been wondering about your neighbors too. And if I can show (which I will) that things are not as they seem, we might all stop paying envious attention to what other people have – or seem to. I called Tina from my side of the wall and asked if I could come over for a chat. “Yeah, the door’s open!” she said. I slinked over there. She was a few months’ pregnant and had quit her job, again. How smoothly their plan seemed to be progressing: starting to “pop out the kids,” as she had said they would. She was reclining on the couch with a day-by-day pregnancy notebook. It seemed so luxurious to me, staying home with an entirely silent child and reading. And here I came, the researcher, to ask about their finances. Well, I didn’t put it that way, exactly. Since we were neighbors and friendly, I used the excuse that I was researching an idea for a book about the social side of money and wanted to talk to people about it. All of that was true, I just didn’t tell her yet that she and her husband held a special spot in the story. I told her how I had been inspired by hiding some of our own financial stresses. I didn’t have to say any more. “Money is, by far, my number-one stress,” she declared. That first meeting I got a very general picture of their issues, but I didn’t ask specifics. She said that she and John have very different attitudes toward money: She had been raised in the materialistic suburbs and described herself as “practically a compulsive spender.” He, meanwhile, “was raised by a Marxist and can live on practically nothing. That causes major problems.” They couldn’t live on her husband’s salary, so her parents helped support them. (Even though her father, an accountant, thinks of her as a failure, she said, for not being able to manage money.) They couldn’t afford the trip they were taking to Paris that weekend, but they were going anyway. As far as the luxury of not working went, she explained that now that she had quit her job, she realized how much our society defines everyone by what they do for a living, and she dreaded people asking her the question. She couldn’t wait for the baby to be born so that she would have a legitimate occupation. Soon after that conversation, Tina and I were walking into our building together and stopped to pick up our mail in the lobby. We both read the label on a box from Bloomingdale’s before we saw that it was for her. She snatched it up, groaning, “Oh god, you’re seeing what a spender I am.” She was right that I had a different perspective on the string of
packages arriving for them after I learned that her spending was an
issue between them. But still I did not pick up on her hints that
the problem in their household went deeper than her just being a
dedicated shopper. Dan and Tammy grew up in working-class families in the South and were married shortly after high school. He started out at minimum wage on the ground floor of a retail chain store, she worked as a secretary. They lived rent-free with family to save money, then moved into an apartment of their own. Dan wondered, at times, why Tammy was so cautious with their money. Often when he suggested they go out to Olive Garden for dinner, she turned him down and instead went to the Publix grocery store. Her father had worked in manufacturing and her mother was a homemaker skilled at stretching a dollar. For many years, Tammy drove the car her parents had given her when she turned sixteen. Not until Dan and Tammy made the five years of payments on Dan’s car did they invest in a new one for her. Their frugality paid off: in their midtwenties, when most of their friends weren’t even married yet, they bought a quarter-acre lot of land and had a house built. They waited several years before starting a family. Both were working hard, both got promotions, and children seemed like too huge a responsibility. Eventually, though, everything seemed to come together at once. Dan was promoted to a manager position, Tammy was pregnant, and when they were relocated for Dan’s job, she stopped working to be a stay-at-home mom. They lived in a rental close to the beach while having a three-bedroom house built nearby, in a fast-growing coastal community in southern Florida. They spent a pleasantly anguish-filled year deciding on the property, the house’s floor plan, then the fixtures and the finishes. They expected to be settled in there for a long time. When it neared completion, Dan considered it the nicest house on the block. The community was friendly and relaxed, home to many retirees and middle-income families. Among their closest friends, who, like them, were all married with young children–one husband worked as a sales rep for a flooring store, another was a technician at a hospital, and a third was an aviation mechanic. Dan and Tammy had met them all through the local play group. Tammy’s days revolved around meeting the other mothers for story hours at the local public library or for play dates at their homes, where the living-room floors were covered with toys.
They hadn’t even finished unpacking in their new house when Dan got
a call from work: You’re being transferred. He was being moved to
Orlando, to manage a bigger store. The couple had to sell their
brand new house, at a loss, and relocate. Or at least that’s how it could have gone. It’s a definite problem, especially when thousands of people think they know you personally. That’s the position national politicians are in. Capitol Hill, when you dig down to the level of the politicians’ personal lives, is in some ways a Potemkin Village: What we think we see going on is much rosier than what is actually happening. As Jack Buechner, a former member of the House of Representatives
from Missouri, put it: “The minute you’re elected, you immediately
become a Prince or a Princess.” Everyone knows that those kinds of
characters lead fairy-tale lives, that they don’t have to contend
with the financial problems of ordinary folk. “Dad,” he said, “the kids at school are saying, ‘Your dad’s a Congressman, your family must be rich!’ “ Then the boy had to ask: “Are we?” The congressman’s reaction fell somewhere between amusement and frustration: “No. We’re not rich. But…we’re comfortable.” The family was comfortable, yes, living in a four-bedroom colonial in a suburb of Buffalo. However, they were not as comfortable as some other politicians, the ones who get a lot of press for being independently wealthy. At the same time, the family was nowhere near as comfortable as people assumed they were because of Quinn’s high-profile job. In that context, the family wasn’t doing nearly as well as people expected. Quinn’s salary of over $130,000 per year would be considered a lot of money to most constituents in the district he represented in Congress until 2004. At first it seemed like a lot of money to Quinn too. When he was elected to the House of Representatives he was working as a town supervisor making half as much money. Not that he got into politics to make money, but he and his wife, a nurse who worked part-time, naturally thought that doubling his income would mean a respite from squeezing the budget so hard for their household of four. That didn’t quite turn out to be true. This is the inside story that
even the insiders don’t talk about. “Why would they?” Tucker asks. In his mid-fifties now, he has learned it on his own. “Who’s going to tell you that when you’re younger? If they did, you’d say ‘That sounds too hard!’” At some point, it just scrapes against you. And you have to handle
it, however you can. Privately. What they don’t tell you is: The
money won’t always be there. “That should have tipped me off,” Tucker says. It should have tipped
him off to the financial realities of life, to the tradeoffs. “It
didn’t.” Tucker’s parents told their children to go to college, to broaden their intellectual and cultural horizons. When Tucker got into an Ivy League school, his parents helped him pay some of the tuition. The rest of the bill he paid by working at factory jobs in the summers and by taking out student loans about equal to the price of a Ford Pinto. His parents sent fifty dollars now and then, and it went far. He never worried a moment about the student loans he took out. He even had the thought, Fuck it. If I default, what can they do to me? “I thought for about fifteen minutes about what I wanted to do with my life after graduation,” Tucker says. “I just said, That stuff will take care of itself.” It didn’t. “That’s where the gorgeous homes are,” she told me, then added with disappointment, “not that you can see much, since they all have high hedges.” I didn’t tell her that I expected to see plenty, that my interview was going to be behind the hedges. I was, to be honest, slightly nervous. When I had arranged the interview with an assistant, I had been invited to stay overnight. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would I be dealing with staff? Would my sources appear for the interview and then disappear for the rest of the day? What would I do the rest of the time? Or were they just like any family? Maybe we would curl up in the family room and watch a video after dinner? My flight was delayed and I had to call the residence to tell them. I thought about calling the assistant instead – they seemed to like everything filtered through the assistant – but then thought, That’s silly. Just call. The wife, Middy, answered the phone herself, even though it took me a while to realize it was her. She thanked me profusely for letting her know about the delayed flight, and said she would be picking me up herself. She described her car for me: a blue something. Oh no, I thought, I’m terrible at recognizing cars. Since we live in New York City, I drive once or twice a year at most and my sisters laugh at me when I describe a rental car as “um, an SUV?” “What kind of car is it again?” I asked Middy, hoping to understand the general shape of the thing. “A big blue convertible.” Ah-ha! Now she was speaking my language. When the gates opened to their property, we drove in beneath the palms, took a turn, and Middy announced, “We’ll drop you at your house first, so you can get settled.” “Wow,” I said as we pulled up alongside gardens and a golf-green-clipped lawn, leading to a large villa. “This is beautiful!” As we got out of the car, knowing I would be impressed with the property, Middy said outright, “You want to write about money? Now you can see money.” The car, which she had to point out to me was a Bentley, was meant as an appetizer. “Yeah,” I said, “but you’re supposed to be telling me about the downside.” She froze for a full second, then recovered her congeniality. “I’ll tell you that too,” she promised. And she kept her word. The preoccupation we have with money, and the security and comfort
it represents to us, is pretty deeply ingrained, and still baffling.
We don’t have to pretend that money doesn’t matter. It does, to a
degree. It can, of course, provide some comfort, some opportunities,
some entertainment, some mental and physical respite. We shouldn’t
be shunning it by any means, nor giving up our striving for more
material success, as long as we take pleasure being on that path. |