Snowball Thursday.
“One winter morning Peter woke up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen during the night. It covered everything as far as he could see.”
—Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowy Day
This week’s blog is weird. It’s Black History Month, and climate change means we haven’t seen a good snowfall all winter.
Why write about snow, then? Well, this past weekend, I paid off my master’s student loans in part because of Dave Ramsey's "debt snowball" method. Me and the Dave Ramsey show have a weird relationship. (Those of you who have known me for a long time know all about my evangelical-adjacent past.) Dave has helped me figure out personal finance issues, but I disagree with him politically and interactively. (Screaming at poor people doesn’t make them less poor.)
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my own journey with money lately.
The first realization that my folks weren’t exactly rich came when I was 5. The 1980s were a label conscious, “greed is good,” shallow and colorful repudiation of 1960s and 1970s counterculture. I have always joked with my Millennial and Gen-Z students that they love 80s revival because they didn’t actually live through the crack era, Reaganomics, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic before AZT was developed.
(The music was better, though. We’ll never see popular music quite that good again.)
Anyway. I started kindergarten in the fall of 1982, and some of the kids had Jordache jeans…
“You want WHAT?” said my mother, befuddled by the request. “Ask your dad.”
Dad sat me down at the kitchen table. “Come here, Boo.” With pen and paper, he showed me the family budget…
There was no extra money for designer jeans.
Fast forward a decade, plus a couple of years years. The blur in the years between kindergarten and 12th grade consisted largely of my pain and embarrassment because I was never one of the kids who were “fresh to death” with the latest clothes, hairstyles, sneakers, and jewelry.
Money became a huge consideration for me in my teens. I hated feeling and looking poor as a kid. Never mind my folks’ assertion that I was “clean” and “neat,” that I’d never gone hungry or homeless a day in my life. I wanted to signal that I, too, could fit in. Alas, it wasn’t to be. My childhood ended the way it began: in discount and thrift stores, clearance racks at the mall, and Payless Shoe Source.
25 years ago this fall, I was a new undergraduate at Florida A&M University. I accepted their offer for a full ride scholarship because at age 17, I thought that I would go into business. I was sick of being broke, and I wanted to help my hometown and my people.. Back then, we didn’t have Internet proliferation. Beyond my understanding of historic and continuing racism, I figured that if I majored in finance and learned how to make money, maybe someday I could open a financial institution that would be able to help out folks who needed money.
I got to FAMU and absolutely hated SBI. Even at 18, I knew that the values of corporate America just weren’t my values. (FAMU, like Penn, is dominated by its business school. Everything about the university’s culture is influenced by it.)
I switched to education. Friends’ parents who were teachers warned me that I was signing up for a lifetime of genteel poverty. While I was not poor during the 7 years I taught K-12, what threw me off balance were student loans, which were necessary, and credit card debt, which was not. So many of my life choices as a young adult were influenced and constrained by my indebtedness.
Along with Dave Ramsey’s yelling and shaming channel, I’ve also been watching a few other personal finance channels, like Millennial millionaire Graham Stephan and Marko's Whiteboard Finance. Not only am I understanding how the everyday “middle American” understands capitalism, it's helping me understand the mindset that elected 45.
Beyond my personal financial journey, something else needs to be said.
I only began to watch this stuff, and achieve first- and second-rung financial goals, after I was tenured at an Ivy, bought a house, and started to level up with speaking and consulting.
This genre of social media only makes sense for those who already have a leg up, so to speak.
Team Personal Finance sincerely believes that poverty is a matter of ethics and character, but that's not the case at all. So much of your socioeconomic status (SES) under capitalism is based on luck, fortune, blessing…
I've been lucky throughout my lifetime: 1) raised sheltered by parents and grandparents with good union jobs, 2) maternal grandparents and great-grandparents were actually middle class for those times, 3) bio dad was upper middle class & always paid child support, then supported me directly in my teens and early/mid 20s, 4) attended what I've characterized as "Talented Tenth" Detroit schools, 5) couldn't get pregnant, so didn't have a kid until I decided not to, 6) had a full ride bachelor's degree from my HBCU, 7) state of Michigan highly subsidized my master's and PhD, 8) continuously employed in education - low/moderate pay, but great benefits, 9) went from regional R1 to Ivy, 10) made tenure at the Ivy, 11) wrote a book on a topic where there wasn't much in the category, 12) used social media for fun and visibility, which led to speaking and consulting opportunities.
Nothing financially went wrong for 21 years. Then, 2 huge things happened this month. Barring catastrophe or the revolution, I'm on the road toward being debt free except for my mortgage by the end of next year…
It took 22 years. I’ll be 44.
If I were an asshole, I could say, "I'm a Black woman who grew up working class in Detroit, and I’m going to be debt free.” All of that is true.
However, as I point out to anyone who asks, my ability to achieve and prosper under capitalism were both constrained and aided by external factors. Like many other striving Black extended families, it’s definitely the case that my mother’s people would have been quite comfortable were it not for structural racism. And, union employment helped ours and many other Detroit Black families attain middle class lifestyles without formal education or generational wealth.
My come up in higher education has been the direct result of an exploitative system. It is the case that graduate students are not paid a living wage. It is the case that contingency is a horrific and inexcusable problem. It is the case that the academic job market is in crisis across fields. It is the case that the status quo is unsustainable.
The snowball that I am thinking of is not the one that Dave Ramsey has taught millions about, and that I’ve finally been able to latch onto instead of being steamrolled under...
The coming snowball racing toward us is the momentum of a new world.
And in that new world, neither debt nor money nor snowballs will exist...
Bring on the snowstorm.
What I Am Reading, What I Am Writing, and Being/Doing/Going are on hiatus this week.
Word(s) of the Week
Gut wrenching. Both literally and physically. Highs and lows. Looking forward to my digestive system — and my email! — cooperating with me for a change.