Life, Death and Money
I write this post with a heavy heart. A few months ago I wrote a Yahoo!Finance column about a couple, Patrick and Suzy, who had been married three years and had just bought a home in Seattle. They decided to wait a year or two before having children while they paid down debt and built up their savings. Last week, while the couple walked their dog in the park, Patrick was killed by a falling tree limb. He was 32.
Patrick felt strongly about preparing fi- nancially for parenthood, while Suzy was ready to get started. When he asked my opinion, I agreed with Patrick that it made sense to wait: They needed both of their salaries to cover the bills, carried some heavy student loan obligations and didn’t know how they would afford daycare. Maybe they could have worked it out. Now we’ll never know.
I am wondering if I led them astray. Patrick was firm in his thinking; a friend reassures me that I was just a “data point” on the couple’s decision-making spectrum. But what if I had suggested they go for it, start a family and figure out the money later? What if I had advised them simply to have faith in themselves and in each other, to be flexible and open to major adjustments that might occur down the road, and jump in with both feet?
After all, my own parents took that approach. Good Irish Catholics, they had eleven children; I was the tenth. It was a different world, of course. My mother stayed home and never had outside help. (She went back to work part-time when the youngest was in first grade.) She made our clothes for a number of years. We thought nothing about sleeping three to a room. My parents never spent a dime on car seats; we all squashed into a station wagon, my brother and I squabbling in the space between the middle and back seats.
If we did “enrichment” it was a sport or activity at school, and it was free. There were no summer camps; we just took off on our bikes in the morning and came home when the streetlights came on. We drove to Michigan exactly twice on vacation when I was a kid. For years we had just one television, with a dozen channels. We spent a lot of Sundays at museums and in forest preserves, playing games and jumping in leaves.
And it worked out, because both my parents labored around the clock for decades, and prayed mightily for divine support. They had no “me” time scheduled into their calendars, and when we were small, their couple time typically involved sitting in the living room after we were all in bed, my dad rubbing my mom’s feet. In the dark, under the covers, we could hear them laughing. They were deeply committed to their child-rearing enterprise, regarding it as their purpose in life. Married 49 years with nary a public quarrel, their faith made all the difference. (My father died in my mother’s arms a week before their 50th wedding anniversary.)
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it creates lots of options. A lot of parents, myself included, use money to try to get things right with our kids – the right safety devices, the right neighborhood and schools, the right tutoring and enrichment, the right 529 savings plans, the right colleges — so we can launch them on the right path. On the other hand, money should never replace creativity or commitment. My parents had both in spades.
Maybe money is something you should watch out of the corner of your eye when you’re contemplating decisions about life and your purpose on the planet — rather than letting it hover front and center, like a roadblock. Maybe when your heart’s desire is involved, a certain leap of faith is called for, because things can work out. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I wish I had told Patrick that when I had the chance.
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