Anxiety Released

For the last couple of years, like many people, I have had anxiety about money.  I am in a situation in which I have the great fortune to not work, and so our income is based on the work of my wife.  This means that if she loses her job we would have no income.  No income means that we would not be able to pay our mortgage and so would have to very rapidly sell our house.  The housing market has been extremely depressed and our house has many problems.  To successfully sell the house at a level that would not dramatically reduce the amount of money we would have we would have to put many thousands of dollars into it (water heater, furnace, electrical work, painting the whole house, etc..) 

While we have tried to save money over this time we have largely been unsuccessful because of problems with the house and our belongings.  We have had to get pool equipment fixed so that we don't have an algae filled pond in our back yard.  We have had to replace all the pipes in our house, get electrical work done, electrical work, and we just spent several thousand dollars on our cars (cheaper than buying).  It is part of my job to organize finances and work on the house.  My darling wife's entire job is to go to work.  It works well for us.

My darling wife works for a Spanish energy company linked to the Spanish government.  You may have heard of the desperate straits of the Spanish economy and government.  The company is in trouble.  Five years ago it was borrowing money to expand its holdings across the world.  With the economic crash it is having huge difficulty paying the bills.  Under these circumstances I was worried that my darling wife would be laid-off, creating the situation described in the first paragraph.  As the number of employees dwindled and the news worsened my worries increased.  My wife seemed relatively serene about the situation and the difference seemed strange.  Like most of us she hates looking for a job, and she didn't have the desperation I was expecting with an impending job loss.  I tried hard not to needle, poke, cajole and beg.

About two weeks ago my anxiety was hugely reduced for two reasons.  The first is that apparently the loan money used to buy the company for which my wife had worked had guarantees attached.  That is that if the company is closed down there is a payment necessary of hundreds of millions of some currency.  The parent company cannot afford it.  So, the company cannot afford to close down the company for which my wife works.  The company is "underwater" and intimately connected to the Spanish government.  It is too big to fail.  She is the only person in the company who does her job.  There is a hiring freeze and she makes less than average for such a position.  Essentially she cannot be laid-off.  Her job is about as secure as a job can be in this economic climate.  I did not know this.

The second reason is based on our retirement investments.  The method we are using to make investments for retirement is two fold.  We want to reduce our living expenses primary by increasing the amount of equity we have in our housing.  Ideally we would pick one house to live in for a long time and remove the mortgage.  Our costs would be utilities and property tax.  Secondarily we have what I call a "fire and forget" system.  In this system we take the maximum 401K money and just put it away.  Neither of us ever see it leave a paycheck, and I generally don't look at the reports.  We are putting money in and I don't know much about it other than we trust our financial investor and we are putting a big chunk away.  Otherwise we have an automatic payment taken from paychecks and put in an account.  Not knowing means that you don't count on it, and that strongly encourages financial discipline.  All I know is that we are putting a very good chunk of money away that I will look at in something like twenty years.  I don't know about investing other than over decades the stock market goes up a lot.  I found out two weeks ago that some of our investments are in a form that we can take out as cash with minimum penalty.  This is a large enough amount of money to solve the problems of fixing up the house if suddenly necessary.  I did not know this.

Of course, my wife knew both of these things, and I suppose I probably should have known about the second.  However, my fire and forget policy means that I try quite hard to keep us within our means.  I despise and worry about credit card debt enough to do whatever I can to pay the entire amount off each month, and it quietly eats away at me if I don't manage it.  I think of credit card debt as time that must be spent working for no reward.  Indentured servitude.  I don't want me wife to be an indentured servant.  The situation with the company I simply didn't know.  Do you ever have times where you could have sworn you told someone something but they have no idea what they are talking about?  That's what happened here.

This news reduced my anxiety.  We are not in danger of having no income, having to sell the house immediately for a huge loss, and joining the ranks of those searching for work.  We are financially safe.

I am sure that many of you reading this would consider this anxiety petty and foolish.  Even the worst case scenario here is much better than most people in the USA, and certainly better than the vast majority of people in the world.  I was worried about how many tens of thousands we would have.  Fifteen years ago I would have leaped at the chance to be in this situation, I expected to never be in this sort of financial security.  But this is my life and people adjust themselves to their new reality.  If you move from an apartment to a house, moving back to an apartment sounds terrible.  If you can regularly drink Starbucks, Folger's Crystals sounds terrible.

I know my anxiety was ridiculous, I knew it all along, but I still feel a lot better for its removal.