Luck

a short story about the silly stories we tell about money

(This is a long introduction; if you want to skip to the story first, or only read the story, skip down to below the line.)

(English translation: “Alcohol lies.” “Business owners create wealth.”)

I’ve felt pretty out of control and frustrated when it comes to money for most of my adult life. Given the paycheck-to-paycheck household I grew up in, I suppose it’s no surprise that I wouldn’t be an expert at accruing it in great amounts, but oh, how I’ve tried!

Part of my folly is having spent, so far, my “wealth-building” years in Mexico rather than the States; incidentally, many of those who did are now jumping ship and coming to Mexico for the lower cost of living. I am not myself a recently-arrived digital nomad, having showed up over 20 years ago when the only jobs available for someone like me were English teaching at “institutes,” where my first full-time job earned me approximately $700 USD a month. Oh, what we do for love!

I’ve done some form of intellectual assembly-line work ever since, and while I often enjoy and am good at my work, my choices here are limited to either extremely low-paid in-person jobs (at said institutes) or a bunch of higher-paying independent contractor gigs that offer little stability or predictability. My bills and expenses, unfortunately, are incredibly stable and predictable.

Attempts to break out on my own have always been false starts, as the gigs I must keep going in the meantime to survive pop up and down like whack-a-mole dolls, making the possibility of a dedicated schedule for building a business so far fairly impossible. Plus, I’m one of those people that need, like, 8-10 hours of sleep every 24-hour period to function.

The questions constantly at the back of my mind: am I just going about it all wrong? Am I making it harder than it needs to be? Am I just not smart enough to figure out how to get more of it, or not ruthless enough in my unwillingness to exploit others to get it? Did I doom myself when I was 22 and in love? Or was it simply a mistake to have been born in 1981, just as Reagan was beginning the still ongoing project of wealth transfer from the middle class to the uber-rich?

I’m the oldest of a generation that just missed the boat in terms of being able to achieve US-style middle-class status. I likely would have achieved it if I’d stayed in the US rather than coming to Mexico. I don’t regret coming here, but I do worry a lot: without some major changes or major luck, home ownership seems about as likely for me as a vacation to Mars, let alone a retirement fund. Trying to save for my future has so far been futile because I need everything I earn to live now; modern life is expensive.

What will happen when I can no longer work, or can no longer work at this pace? My hypothesis, and I hope that I’m wrong, is that most adults my age and younger will be digging through trashcans and dropping dead on the street. The generations after us will use our suffering as a “never again” example to build a new New Deal-style social safety net.

***

Looking out on the landscape of so many jobs that companies need to function and make money that don’t pay enough or give the kind of stability that can meet workers’ basic needs, I used to ask myself incredulously, “What do they expect people to do?”

Now I know the answer: they (“they” being the powers that be) don’t care. Or at least they won’t care until there aren’t enough people who can afford to buy what they’re selling. Or maybe they’ve had enough of our riff-raffing ways, and think it would be so much more convenient now to just have slaves, or at least a good old-fashioned feudal system again?

It’s not a good long-term plan, but I fear I won’t live long enough to see the inevitable revolution it births. In the meantime, it feels a little like everyone’s just a bit delusional, willfully ignoring a problem they can see out of the corner of their eye and in a frenzy to get what they can before the tsunami hits. Those 15+ years old than me, now comfortably living on or getting ready to live on pensions from jobs that both paid enough to save and still offered pensions when they worked, seem to not want to admit that anything has changed for their spunky sobrinos and grandchildren. The fact that so few people earning wages currently can afford to make the kinds of investments that will help them breathe in old age is ignored.

A crisis is slowly rolling in. The advice? “Keep trying, you can do it,” or, more unkindly, “If you’re not taking enough action to assure your future now, you deserve exactly what you get,” a view that assumes all economic outcomes are based on individual effort rather than systematic planning.

So anyway! This disconnected “let them eat cake” kind of advice inspired the below story, written a couple of years ago.

At last: Luck.

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“Your luck doesn’t run out; you just give up too soon.”

My sister repeated her favorite phrase as she signed the $5,000 check for my broke ass once again. She was always willing to give me money, on one condition: that it all be spent on lottery tickets.

“It’s a numbers game; you just have to keep playing and you’ll come out on top,” she said.

This, for me, had not so far been the case. For every thousand dollars I was given, I’d “win” back, on average, about $200.

“Can’t I just use this to pay off my debts?” I asked. But I knew the answer.

“Let me ask you something,” Mary said as she clapped her checkbook shut. “Would you rather have five thousand dollars now, or five million dollars a week from now? Really, Shelly, I don’t even know why you’d consider something so short-sighted. Careful with that attitude, too. How do you want a bunch of money to appear in your life if the universe hears you rejecting it all the time?”

We were the daughters of eye-roll-inducing college professors who had a knack for naming all dependents to come into their lair half of one literary name – their dogs were named Victor and Hugo. Mary had wed early to a man in his late 70s. He’d made a name for himself in the world of professional gambling, and though he was long gone, she seemed convinced that she’d somehow created half the wealth that she’d inherited herself.

“I mean if you’re going to give me five million dollars a week from now, yes, I’d prefer that,” I answered.

“That’s exactly what I’m doing,” she said as she winked and handed me the check.

I rolled my eyes and muttered a thank you as I folded it up and opened my purse to put it into the hidden side pocket. If nothing had changed in the past four years, it certainly wasn’t going to change now.

As I drove to my poverty-wage job at the daycare – a lot of good my early childhood education degree had done me so far! – I fantasized about what I would do with the money. Not if I won the lottery, which I knew was not going to happen, but about what I would do if I could spend the gifted money on actual expenses.

I’d tried a few times to use it for those things anyway, but Mary had caught on and was now asking to see the receipts for my lottery tickets to make sure the money was going toward what it was meant for. It was the opposite of what most people had in mind when making charitable donations: “Well, I’m just afraid they’d blow it all on alcohol or drugs or gambling.”

Before going to work, I stopped at a gas station for some lottery tickets, the same one I always did.

“Feeling lucky today?” the cashier said with a wink.

“No.”

Later at work, my cell phone rang. “Did you win yet?” Mary asked excitedly.

“20 dollars that I spent 100 on, just like always,” I said with a sigh.

“Hey,” she said. “At least gambling is kind of working for it!”

“Whatever. There’s a kid about to jump off the window air conditioning unit in a cape, I’ve got to go.”

A few months later, I hit a minor jackpot: $75,000 dollars.

“See?” texted Mary excitedly. “It’s 50/50 every time: you either win or you don’t!”

I ignored her and went straight to the person I’d picked out at my local credit union to help me manage any larger amounts of money should it magically come about. “Tell me how to manage and grow this,” I said, finally feeling a sliver of hope for my financial future.