Do You Enjoy Worrying About Money? Have a Baby!

I am a WGA writer who is on strike. I am a parent. I am worried.

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My daughter is just shy of 18 months old, which means I’ve been so nervous about money for the last 18 months that I’m bored of my own anxiety. 

For most of my life, I’ve been stupid about money. I spent most of my twenties intermittently ducking my landlords until my paycheck cleared and anxiously avoiding checking my bank account balance. I deferred my student loan payments or skipped them entirely until my credit was so decimated when I hit 30 that the only credit card I could qualify for had a limit of $500. I lived hand-to-mouth and paycheck to paycheck. I was the closest thing to the made-up avocado toast millennial that existed in real life.

I didn’t grow up with money. Nobody talked to me about money. I do not have a Trust Fund Dad or a Stock Market mom; my mother was a public school teacher and my dad was a social worker. Their house cost something like $40,000 when they bought it. My grandparents were farmers, lunch ladies, custodians. When my parents pass on– I hope, many, many years from now– I do not expect to inherit very much if anything at all, which honestly doesn’t bother me and never has. I’m probably never going to have to worry about fighting with my siblings about an inheritance, and for that I’m grateful.

I never cared about amassing wealth, driving a fancy car, living in a mansion. My goal was to make enough money that I didn’t have to think about money anymore, and then use all of the mental real estate I’d once devoted to financial anxiety for something else. A life free of the burden of worrying about money was the only luxury I wanted. 

For a few years, I felt like I’d gotten there. I had cobbled together a decent life between working in news media, TV writing, and podcasting. I only had to look after myself. It was a nice time. I read a lot of books. 

But then I made one of the worst decisions a person can make, from a purely financial perspective. I had a baby. 

My daughter can’t get a job for several years (thanks a lot, child labor laws), and in the meantime, she’s very expensive. Some estimates place the cost of raising one child from birth to age 18 in the US at around $300,000. But the cost of living across the US varies cartoonishly, and we live in a very high cost of living area, where we are stuck until studios are less spooked by the specter of the Sony Hack and my husband, who works in film and TV advertising, is allowed to work entirely remotely. Besides, even at their highest, scariest balance, I never owed $300,000 in student loans.  

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Last night, after months of lead-up, the Writers Guild of America, of which I’m a member, announced that no deal had been reached with studios, and therefore TV and film writers were going on strike. I voted to authorize it; almost 98% of my fellow guild members did as well. But I didn’t feel good about it. That old familiar money pit in my stomach opened up. How long was this going to last? Were we going to be okay? 

I understand why the WGA strike needs to happen. If writers don’t get what they’re asking for, it will no longer be a sustainable profession. Studios have innovated so many novel ways to pocket as much money as possible that should be going to writers that the WGA is playing a sort of studio greed whack a mole. It’s funny; one of the grumbles that I hear most from other writers is that Hollywood executives are “not creative,” but they’re actually extremely creative when it comes to ways to keep as much money for themselves as possible. Some of the stuff they’ve come up with – phew! I’d never even think of it! It’s like a season of White Lotus.

At the same time, we’re in the middle of another mini-apocalypse in digital media. Buzzfeed shut down its news division. So did Vice. There are rumors that Vice might declare bankruptcy. I’ve worked in digital media for long enough that I’ve seen multiple apocalypses. They’re always stupid, panicky, stressful times, and the people who made the bad decisions are never the ones that have to suffer the consequences. The people creating content are.

Money, again, has moved back into that little anxiety pocket from which I’d evicted it years ago. Hello darkness, my old friend. 

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Does every parent, no matter their circumstances, feel like everything could collapse at any moment?

“Don’t have kids if you can’t afford them!” is a thing that stupid people love to bark at financially strapped parents, or people with multiple children, or people who want the government to do a single goddamn thing to support them. But the truth is that very few people living in America today can comfortably afford children without worrying about money at least a little bit, given how many unforeseen, uncontrollable factors could lead to financial ruin. The amount of help available to families is laughably small compared to the amount of help that families may need. My family is doing fine on paper, but I’m terrified of how close catastrophe feels. 

Even the most well-researched parent can experience some sticker shock when it comes to things like group child care or nanny care. My husband had no idea that when you pay for child care, you need to pay for your spot, even if you don’t or can’t use child care on a particular day. If your arrangement is that you take your kid to day care three days per week, you pay for three days per week even if your kid is sick and needs to stay home. Even if the child care center closes because some kid is sick or your provider has a family emergency. You pay regardless; it’s the only way that child care as a profession is sustainable to its workers (and even then, it’s barely sustainable). I have had to explain this to Josh several times, and he had such a hard time understanding it. It was like watching a puppy try to read a map. In his defense, I don’t think men talk to each other about these things. 

I don’t even want to run the numbers on how much child care is going to cost us, cumulatively. I’d rather just pay a la carte and not do any math. I had a friend who was paying nearly $5000 per month for child care for her three kids. With costs that high, for many families there comes a point when one parent– almost always the mother– decides to quit her job in order to look after the children herself– a move that can save some money short-term but almost always kneecaps the mother’s career prospects long-term. I read an article once about how to afford child care, and– I shit you not– the top piece of advice was to have family members watch your children for free. Great advice; I’ll get right on that right after I follow the advice on how to afford a new house by “having somebody give you a house.” 

Having a child is a little like getting a scratch-off lottery ticket where the jackpot is “FINANCIAL RUIN.” My daughter was born with some issues that have required ongoing specialist care. The possibility that one day somebody working in an insurance billing department might decide that she doesn’t actually need it and that it’s time that we pay for it ourselves haunts me. I wake up at 3 am worried about it.

I worry about her future interests. How expensive will those be? Are we talking something with very little equipment to buy or pyramid scheme-style classes to take, like soccer, or are we talking something like hockey or ballet or, god forbid, improv?

One day, out of nowhere, I snapped “Juniper is not going to ski when she gets older.” I don’t know if she’ll even be able to ski or have a desire to do it at all, but I can tell you right now that I don’t think we’ll be able to afford it even if she does.

I once nannied for a family who had rented a tiny apartment in Kenilworth, Illinois so that their children could go to the good public elementary school. The building was shabby. The neighbors were weird. It took me a few weeks to realize that the family didn’t even live in the apartment, and I only figured it out because the younger kid, the boy, told me. “Miss Erin, you know this isn’t our real house, right?” Oh?

The family got mail delivered there and had enough furniture so that it looked like it was possible that a person could live there if a person from the school happened to stop by, but it was all a scam. The shower didn’t even have any soap in it. After school, I would take the kids would go back to their sock puppet apartment and watch Lazytown on the floor of the living room, which didn’t even have a couch in it. They’d bother me about giving them more snacks. After a few hours, the mother would pick them up, it turned out, to take them to their real house, which was located near a “bad” elementary school. It seemed like crazy lengths to go for a school at the time, but now I get it. 

Renting an entire fake apartment and pretending to live there is probably cheaper than private school.