Yesterday afternoon the United States Postal Service dropped a week's worth of bills, junk mail, mail-order boxes, and Christmas cards in my mailbox. It's the first mail we've had since last Tuesday, but I digress.
Amidst the Christmas packages and credit card offers was a small envelope from the bank. It contained the title transfer document for the van. We recently paid it off, which means that we paid off all three vehicles early.
I took a moment to think about that. For the first time in a decade, I do not have a car payment. The truck, the Irish Woman's little beep-beep, and the minivan are all paid off.
It feels very liberating to be able to look at my budget for January and see that nice chunk of a few hundred dollars that can be directed somewhere else. My plans are to put about a third of it into the general budget to ease up some of the restrictions I've put on our expenditures. The rest will be used to pay off other debt we have run up over the years. If I play my cards right we will be debt free except for a mortgage in twelve to eighteen months.
This makes me think about our government and its seemingly endless inability to stop spending money like water. Every year it seems there's another reason to borrow an even higher level of debt. One year the Air Force wants a whole new fighter fleet, the next it's a president's pet social project. My grandparents' generation set up a basic social safety net in the 1930's. This was expanded greatly in the 1960's, and President Obama is doing his best to expand its scope beyond even FDR and LBJ's wildest imaginations.
Look, I have compassion for poor people and old folks. But I'm also a realist. Unlike my parents, I fully expect to pay into Social Security and Medicare my entire life and never see a dime for it when I finally stop working. Unlike the Baby Boomer generation, I understand basic economics to some degree. I realize that we as a nation can't continue to spend the money our grandchildren will be making and expect for there to be anything left in a few years, much less the two to three decades I plan to continue to work.
Austerity is needed. Across the board, the government needs to at the very least stop the growth in spending. Every program that takes money from the public kitty needs to be scrutinized and pared down or eliminated. The military, as much as it pains me to say this, needs to swallow hard and cancel programs that replace systems that are still serviceable. There probably needs to be a needs test for Social Security and Medicare. The money being spent on the wars on drugs and terrorism needs to be evaluated. All of those nice pet project earmarks in legislation need to be stripped out. Even normally untouchable popular expenditures like student aid need to cut back for the good of the country.
Austerity programs are rarely popular, and usually hurt some more than others. Life's tough, and it's rarely fair. We've been on a drunken bender of spending for two generations in this country. We need to wake up, sober up, and grow up. Until our financial house is in order, we need to be honest with ourselves and stop spending money on things we can live without. Some will suffer, but we will all benefit.
Amidst the Christmas packages and credit card offers was a small envelope from the bank. It contained the title transfer document for the van. We recently paid it off, which means that we paid off all three vehicles early.
I took a moment to think about that. For the first time in a decade, I do not have a car payment. The truck, the Irish Woman's little beep-beep, and the minivan are all paid off.
It feels very liberating to be able to look at my budget for January and see that nice chunk of a few hundred dollars that can be directed somewhere else. My plans are to put about a third of it into the general budget to ease up some of the restrictions I've put on our expenditures. The rest will be used to pay off other debt we have run up over the years. If I play my cards right we will be debt free except for a mortgage in twelve to eighteen months.
This makes me think about our government and its seemingly endless inability to stop spending money like water. Every year it seems there's another reason to borrow an even higher level of debt. One year the Air Force wants a whole new fighter fleet, the next it's a president's pet social project. My grandparents' generation set up a basic social safety net in the 1930's. This was expanded greatly in the 1960's, and President Obama is doing his best to expand its scope beyond even FDR and LBJ's wildest imaginations.
Look, I have compassion for poor people and old folks. But I'm also a realist. Unlike my parents, I fully expect to pay into Social Security and Medicare my entire life and never see a dime for it when I finally stop working. Unlike the Baby Boomer generation, I understand basic economics to some degree. I realize that we as a nation can't continue to spend the money our grandchildren will be making and expect for there to be anything left in a few years, much less the two to three decades I plan to continue to work.
Austerity is needed. Across the board, the government needs to at the very least stop the growth in spending. Every program that takes money from the public kitty needs to be scrutinized and pared down or eliminated. The military, as much as it pains me to say this, needs to swallow hard and cancel programs that replace systems that are still serviceable. There probably needs to be a needs test for Social Security and Medicare. The money being spent on the wars on drugs and terrorism needs to be evaluated. All of those nice pet project earmarks in legislation need to be stripped out. Even normally untouchable popular expenditures like student aid need to cut back for the good of the country.
Austerity programs are rarely popular, and usually hurt some more than others. Life's tough, and it's rarely fair. We've been on a drunken bender of spending for two generations in this country. We need to wake up, sober up, and grow up. Until our financial house is in order, we need to be honest with ourselves and stop spending money on things we can live without. Some will suffer, but we will all benefit.
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