Babysitting, Take 2

I'm heading out in a few minutes to meet a woman about a potential babysitting gig. (Why oh why do I always get myself into this?) In preparation, I e-mailed the folks I babysat for in Boston just to a) see how they were doing and b) see if they minded if I gave their number away to potential babysittees. Since I stopped babysitting for them rather abruptly due to some behavior problems with the kid and stuff, I wanted to make sure they were still cool with me.

Mama's last line of her e-mail was, "May you find a lovely wallflower of a child to babysit this time." Ha! I guess they don't hate me after all.

(Naw, I wasn't really worried that they would hate me, but things did end rather weirdly when their kid started spitting at me.)

Financial Planning

Tonight was a very humbling experience, for sure. A couple of weeks ago Jen and I went to see a financial planner that was recommended by a friend of hers. She was a very nice woman and I felt like we could be very open and candid with her about our financial situation. She had a lot of things to bring up that we really couldn't wrap our heads around given our current finances, but I thought that we had been very clear about the number one reason we wanted to talk with someone. I mean, I think I really spelled it out for her.

"Look, we have some money in the bank right now. This could very well be the only time we get this kind of money. We don't make enough to save money regularly, not right now, not in the foreseeable future. What can we do with what we DO have to make it most beneficial to us?"

Well, we had our follow-up this evening and honestly if it hadn't ended abruptly when she realized I was getting really upset, I would have busted out crying at the fancy conference table. She handed us a very fancy looking booklet with lots of charts and colorful diagrams telling us all about what kind of money we would have to sock away yearly to pay for a kid's college and retire comfortably at age 60. (For the record, I don't think that we will be able to pay for a kid's college NOR retire anywhere near 60.) Now, this woman was told with brutal honesty both what we make right now /and/ what we pay out right now. And that we consider ourselves savers but at this time we are not regular savers (as in able to contribute monthly to anything).

So we are presented with fancy documents about how we should be putting away $400ish/month for our kid's college and $30K/year for retirement. Can you see where this is going? Because I can. So I started getting more and more visibly upset until she then gave us estimates for life insurance policies she wanted us to get - hefty life insurance policies - at reasonable prices. She smacked these papers down and all I could think about was, "Oh god, where would we get another $80/month for life insurance premiums?" and when I voiced this, was basically told that because we're having a baby this should be a given.

The heat was jacked (because it was so cold out) and I just started getting warmer and more uncomfortable and more upset until finally I kind of went off on her. I feel bad about it because I'm sure it was awkward as hell but I really felt like we laid ourselves out on the table the other week, as humbling as it might have been, and all of that was disregarded in the report. It was so full of privilege and assumption and I just lost it. I stuck with things that wouldn't make me cry, like dismantling the assumption that my income would increase yearly - social services don't work that way and you almost never get any kind of raise, let alone a cost of living increase or merit increase (I have never seen a raise) - correcting her assumption that her expected full-time social work salary for me was a good $10-15K /more/ than I can realistically make, and pointing out that I felt like the report was a slap in the face - that I felt, coming into the meeting, that we were doing pretty well considering we HAD some savings and wanted to do something productive with it and left feeling like we were total trash because I didn't feel like I could decide if I should put a $1mil life insurance policy on Jen at the deduction of our grocery budget, or feeling like I was putting our baby in jeopardy by not being able to realistically do so.

I was leery about doing this financial planning thing because of our unique situation and I left wishing we had never opened ourselves up to the experience. I don't even know what to do now because I'm upset and hormonal and mortified. Oh well, at least we had good intentions, right?