A comment from reader KML on my recent “bag lady syndrome” piece moved me to think more about this subject. I was going to enter a response as a comment to that post, but by the time I finished typing realized the result was itself a post. And so, more on women’s fear of a destitute old age:
Says KML: Thank goodness! I thought I was the only one who has this “syndrome” I seriously worry about being out on the streets simply bc I am single and have no one to fall back on. I have a comfortable house, good job and a few dollars in the bank, but I still have this irrational fear. Thanks for your post, I feel better just knowing that I’m the only one who wories about this. . . .
@ KML:It’s unclear whether a real psychological condition fitting the description of “bag lady syndrome” exists. It’s a pop-psych/pop-soc term. When you try to track down a little science on the subject, the best you come up with is that some psychologists think it’s a type of anxiety disorder.
Well, to my mind it’s perfectly rational to be concerned about whether your resources—savings, Social Security, kids who can help support you, whatever—will cover you until the end of your life, especially in a time when many people now in their 50s and 60s can expect to live into their 90s…and maybe beyond. It becomes a “disorder” when worrying about your financial security begins to inflict damage on your quality of life. Fear of destitution seems to have been observed among Americans , when psychologists Aaron Beck, Gary Emery, and Ruth Greenberg noted that one man anxious about the future was much helped simply by setting up arrangements to care for his family: talking with financial advisers, writing a will, taking out insurance policies.
A father’s concern about the well-being of his wife and children should he die, of course, is different from a single woman’s concern about her own future. To take advantage of a life insurance policy, you have to die…and that seems counterproductive.
However, whether you’re a man or a woman wondering about the future, I do think you can take a number of steps that help to alleviate that nagging worry:
• Plan your retirement income with the help of a financial counselor. • Budget intelligently. • Try to get yourself into a paid-off dwelling, if at all possible. • If that’s not possible, seek comfortable, safe lodging at a reasonable rental. • Try to get a reliable, paid-off vehicle that will last for a long time. • As long as you’re physically able, arrange an ancillary income stream with a part-time job or by monetizing a hobby. • If you can afford it, buy long-term care insurance. • If you have a partner or a family member who will require care after you’re gone, buy life insurance. • Schedule time once a month to reconcile bank accounts and pay bills; avoid thinking about finances at other times. • Get out of the house frequently, so you don’t sit around stewing.
Most of us can do many or all of these things. And really, maybe the best thing we all can do for ourselves is to recognize when we’re worrying to much and decline to continue with it. As Scarlett O’Hara reminded us, “Tomorrow is another day.”
Sarah Palin has taken down her bull’s-eye map, the one that targeted Gabrielle Gifford, the U.S. Congresswoman just shot outside a Tucson Safeway by some nutcase—or, we’re told on the fly, maybe two or even three nutcases. Lest we forget, let’s take one last look at the disappearing map of Ms. Palin’s target:
Just now MSNBC in Tucson is reporting that Gifford survived brain surgery and is expected to live. But the surgeon said another of the hospital’s patients, a girl estimated to be about nine years old, died.
No doubt Ms. Palin is proud of what she and her supporters have accomplished. Clearly they haven’t the sense to understand the consequences of their irresponsible demagoguery.
A nine-year-old child died because of the hatefulness promulgated by people who subscribe to that kind of thinking. The kind of people who think a map making targets of other human beings is funny.
Got a blog? Post this damnable map.
Don’t let Sarah Palin erase it. Don’t let anyone forget what it was and where it was and who put it in front of a rabid animal with a gun.
Not long ago I mentioned that J. Money of Budgets are Sexy has banded together with some other bloggers to create a charitable enterprise whose purpose is to “drop” a gift on a worthy person or family once a month. The idea is to donate a small amount—as little as a dollar a month—on the theory that there’s power (and wealth) in numbers. Here’s a video about Jill, recipient of the group’s first love drop:
Well, now Love Drop has kicked it up a notch. They’ve started a blogger network, which you can join for free to help publicize each new project. You don’t have to be a PF blogger—as you can see, the list of members is wildly diverse. Join the network, blog about Love Drop once a month, and each month they’ll send you a link to the latest video. Take it a step further: become a team member, donate as much or as little as you can afford and you can join the group’s forums, helping to brainstorm new creative ideas. You also can give a gift or provide a service: gift cards, household goods, football cards/jerseys for the boys, web design services, pampering gifts for the month’s recipient, etc. (email all ideas/questions to team (at) lovedrop.us, and they’ll make it happen).
I’m hereby joining up. Join me in joining Love Drop!
I suffer markedly from bag lady syndrome, the haunting sense that one of these days I’m going to end up living on the street. Sometimes I wonder where the hell it comes from. Really, there’s enough in the bank to support me without my ever having to lift a finger in paying work again…but I do lift fingers—all ten of them—in that cause. What am I so scared of?
Late last summer, Sandy L wrote a post at FirstGen American that threw some light on the issue: she suggests many women are subjected to verbal abuse that leads to negative self-talk. We convince ourselves that we’ll never amount to much, because we’ve been told so. Often.
Although my father was not a drinker like Sandy’s, I spent my childhood and early adult life watching my father manipulate my mother by exploiting the fact—and it was a fact—that she couldn’t take care of herself financially. When, as he did every now and again, he would tell her that if she didn’t quit spending “his” money he was going to leave her, he was abusing her.
Now, it’s true that neither of them would have seen it that way. My guess is, they both would have regarded the basis of his threats as ordinary reality. The most she ever earned, working full-time, would not have paid our rent.
Like most women in her generation, she couldn’t support herself on whatever tiny salary she might have been able to earn. To this day, it’s a fact that a large proportion of elderly women end their lives in poverty—even if they spent most of their years in the economic middle class. As the Great Recession was about to descend on us, among women 65 and over, 37 percent of those who were divorced or separated were living in poverty; 28 percent of widows lived in poverty; and 22 percent of single, never-married women lived in poverty. Think of that. Over a third of divorcees, over a quarter of widows, over a fifth of singletons are spending their “golden years” dirt-poor.
It explains a lot about why I live in fear of ending up in a campsite beneath the Seventh Avenue Overpass. I was brought up to think women—particularly me—can’t take care of themselves. As attitudes go, it’s a very difficult one to overcome, particularly when the reality of senior women reinforces it.
My father treated me like an idiot. He made it clear he thought I was stupid, strange, and incompetent. A Phi Beta Kappa key, a doctorate, and three books published through high-quality presses did nothing but confirm his suspicions.
And yes, I was a weird little kid. Like other girls in my generation, I was brought up to be a housewife and urged to get training as a secretary, “just in case” I should someday need a job if the real breadwinner was incapacitated, died, or abandoned me and his kids. My craving to grow up to be an astrophysicist was beside the point; “you can,” I was told, “always have astronomy as a hobby.”
How fortunate I was that his influence was counterbalanced by the women on my mother’s side of the family! Though I don’t buy into Christian Science, the worldview to which my great-grandmother and great-aunt subscribed, nobody espouses “positive thinking” more powerfully than do Christian Scientists. These two, who took in my mother as a teenager and partly raised her, lived together in a pretty little Berkeley foothills bungalow after my great-grandfather died. During the process of his dying, the existence of a long-term mistress in San Francisco came to light. As you can imagine, my great-grandmother, affectionately known as “Gree,” was in no hurry to remarry after having spent a lifetime laboring as a man’s house servant, and I suppose the effect must have reverberated with her daughter, my great-aunt.
Gertrude, said great-aunt, lost her young husband in the 1917 flu epidemic, shortly after her son was born. She became an executive secretary (today the position would probably be a middle manager) at Crocker-Anglo National Bank, and from then on her pay, which must have been fairly modest, supported her, her son, and her mother in a pleasant home and in a cozy enough lifestyle. She sent her son to UC Berkeley and had enough to help him purchase land and build a beautiful house in Kensington, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. He became a vice president of Standard Oil.
They didn’t live like Queens of Sheba, but they never wanted for anything. They each lived to the age of 94, and at no time could they have been said to live in poverty. When, late in her life, I asked Gertrude if she had ever thought of remarrying, she gave me a funny look and said, “Why on earth would I ever want to take care of another man?”
The object lesson I took away from Gree and Gertrude was that you can think yourself sick and you can think yourself well: positive thinking in fact is very powerful. So is negative thinking. You can convince yourself that you should be afraid, be very afraid, and you can convince yourself that you are or easily could be helpless.
Until my generation a lot of women were socialized to think like this. It was objectively true: most women were not allowed into the workplace and could not earn enough to support themselves. When, in 1966, I went into a bank and applied for an opening in its management training program—the very same kind of job my male classmates in all majors were landing with no problem—I was told the bank didn’t hire women into their management training program, but I’d be great in the secretarial pool.
The feminist movement of the 60s and 70s changed things for all American and European women. Because of it, the world is a different place for women. But in some respects, things haven’t changed so much. Even women of considerable wealth and accomplishment, the likes of Lily Tomlin and Katie Couric, have admitted to bouts of bag-lady syndrome. In the MSN Money article that reveals that gem, Certified Financial Planner Kathy Boyle observes that this widespread fear is not altogether unrealistic:
“Being single costs 80% that of a couple, and women are seven times more likely to be single and live six years longer. . . Given a 50% divorce rate and that the average age of widowhood is 56, there’s probably good reason to be concerned.”
I’ve never succumbed to the symptoms described in this article—refusing to think about finances or feeling unable to make a decision. And I don’t stash all my assets in low-income financial instruments (to the contrary, I’ve taken some breathtaking risks…). But I do worry a lot about money, sometimes to the point of obsessiveness.
Just as you can’t deal with money by pretending it’s not there or it doesn’t matter, so you can’t deal with it by obsessing over it. Best thing to do is get the advice of a trustworthy financial advisor, learn what you can about budgeting and wealth management, make a few basic decisions, and then revisit the issue no more than three or four times a year.
One night as I lay awake worrying over money, shortly after I had divorced my husband and set out on my own, I found myself asking the question, “Can I do this?”
Those are the words that coalesced in my mind, there in the darkness.
Then I heard my great-aunt’s voice, just as clearly as if she were sitting in the room. She said, “Of course you can, my dear.”
SDXB called the other day to say he’s going to get rid of his land line. Figures it’s going to save him a ton of money. Not only is he going to ditch the land line, he’s also going to kill his Cox high-speed Internet connection, effectively taking his computer offline. His plan is to haul his laptop to the library whenever he wants to read his e-mail. Won’t that be fun?
He’s not alone on the land line issue. The other day Echo, over at Boomer and Echo, reflected on the joy of land-line freedom, listing three good reasons to get rid of the thing.
Me, I’m not so sure. If you don’t already have a cell phone, which I don’t because I can’t afford it and I don’t deeply want one, several reasons argue strongly in favor of keeping the land line. Even if you do have cell service, there’s no reason to rush to judgment. Consider…
Cost
Around here, cell phone service runs about $60 a month—that’s before you buy the gadget, which can cost several hundred dollars. Get yourself into a cell phone plan, and you may not be able to get out, even if the service stinks. Experience suggests that most service from most communication providers stinks. I would, for example, never go near Qwest again, and all you have to do is enter terms like “Verizon,” “Comcast,” or “At&T” into the Consumerist search bar to be given permanent pause about cell phone providers in general.
Cox’s land line costs all of $29, half of what SDXB pays for a cell phone connection that does not keep him in touch if he goes hiking very far into the sticks, exactly when you would have the most need for such a connection. So, while yes, he will save money by canceling the land line, he pays twice as much for the privilege.
Convenience
Own a cell phone, and you have a cell phone: that’s one, count it, (1). When it jangles or vibrates at you, you have to find it. That may be easy enough if you’re a guy, because you probably tote the thing around in a pocket everywhere you go. But most women’s clothes don’t have pockets. So that means the cell gets put down…wherever you happened to put it down, or wherever you happen to have last dropped your purse.
So, every time the thing goes off, what are you gonna do? Run all over the freaking house trying to find it, that’s what.
Last time I bought a land-line phone—it was very cheap, by the way—it came with not one, not two, not three, but five extensions. I’ve got a phone in every room, and every one of them has its own squawk box. If I set one down and can’t find it quickly when someone jangles me up, all I have to do is walk into the next room to pick up another unit. My phone is never lost!
I don’t happen to think having to carry an electronic tether everywhere you go is especially convenient. Nor is it convenient to have to remember to turn it off whenever you go into a restaurant, a theater, a church, or choir practice. At choir, we pay a $5 fine every time our cell phone goes off. One of our members underwrites cake and cookies for 50 people with her repeating fines.
Freedom
Speaking of having to carry an electronic tether around, that’s exactly what a cell phone is. If you’re hauling that thing everyplace you go, you really have no excuse not to answer it.
What happened to privacy? What, hevvin help us, ever happened to alone time? Who needs to yak on the phone while driving, while walking around the grocery store, while sitting at a restaurant, while strolling down the street, while hiking in the desert? About 99.9999 percent of phone calls can wait until you get home or to the office.
When people can bombard you with phone calls everyplace you go and demand your attention right now, you’re never free. Your time is never your own. Even turning the thing off doesn’t really free you. You’re expected to check in regularly, or let the phone nag you by vibrating at you. If you don’t, you feel guilty and antsy until you do so and then get back to callers, often not at your convenience but right this minute.
I appreciate hearing from my friends and business associates, but I feel no need for that degree of connectivity. Or for that degree of immediacy. Except for the occasional car wreck, nothing really needs to be dealt with instantaneously. When I’m out and about, I’d rather have the peace and quiet, thank you, to focus on what I’m doing and who I’m with. When I get to a landing spot, that’s when I’ll deal with callers’ issues.
As for freedom from nuisance phone calls, I rarely get telephone solicitations anymore. The National Do-Not-Call List proved to be surprisingly effective. For those rogue solicitors and off-shore pests who scoff at the law, a handy device called the TeleZapper disconnects almost all of them. Phone solicitation stopped being a problem for me several years ago.
Contrarianeity
The cell phone is one of those gadgets that brings to mind my mother’s favorite old chestnut: Just because the some of the sheep jump off the cliff doesn’t mean we all have to. IMHO, the very fact that everyone else is doing something is a good reason not to do it. Especially if it costs you money.
Does anyone ever consider how silly a person looks, walking down the street yapping on the phone and not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything around her? How annoying her blatting voice is as she shares her private business with ten or fifteen people who don’t. want. to. know? How insulting it is to interrupt a face-to-face conversation to pull a phone out of your pocket and answer an inconsequential call? Or how spectacularly dangerous and stupid it is to drive with one hand on the steering wheel and the other punching numbers into a cell phone?
Now, I’ll admit I’d love to have one of those swell smartphones, which really are less telephones and more extremely portable computers. But that’s not going to happen, because I can’t afford it. Failing that, I don’t see any good reason to tie an electronic tether around my neck.
A land line lets you stay in touch, without making you look like a fool or putting you at risk. By and large, it keeps you in control of who you’re going to speak with and when. I wouldn’t get rid of it, even if I could afford a smartphone.
“Akismet has protected your site from 21,974 spam comments…”
It has? How d’you suppose it did that when it was supposed to be turned off?
Turns out it wasn’t off. Last time I updated WordPress, I did a bulk disable of all Funny’s plug-ins, and then blithely bulk re-enabled them. Akismet has been sitting there for the past year or so, dormant after it blithely throttled the site on BlueHost. I never deleted it, because I prefer Akismet to the WP-Spamfree that substituted for it. Secretly I hoped that maybe one day it would rise again.
Well, apparently it has risen and apparently it’s no longer throttling FaM, since the site has been running with no hassles ever since the last WP update.
Not only has Akismet risen from the dead, it’s been going after FaM’s commenters like Dracula on meth! A whole bunch of regular readers who commented on the New Year’s Resolution site were marked as spammers, among them Echo of Boomer & Echo, Betty Kinkaid at Control Your Cash, Money Beagle, Joe Plemon, Daniel at Sweating the Big Stuff, Khaleef at KNS Financial, Barbara Friedburg, Evan at My Journey to Millions, Kay Lynn at Bucksome Boomer, FB at Fabulously Broke in the City, Robert at The College Investor, Kari Shaffer, Tara Schultz, Longview Bound, and Juggling Mama.
Quite the shifty crew, aren’t they?
Well, you’ve all been despammed, approved, and sprung from the spam holding tank. My apologies for not having responded to everyone—and many thanks for dropping by and commenting!
disconnects almost all of them. Phone solicitation stopped being a problem for me several years ago.