Incidentally Mormon May 22, 2009

I just finished reading a book called Zippedby Laura and Tom McNeal, it was pretty good, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for fairly lightweight teen fiction, but that’s not the point.  (If that were all it was, I wouldn’t bother mentioning it.)  The reason that I bring it up is that there’s a Mormon character in the book.  It’s not LDS fiction, it’s set in New England somewhere (I imagine that it said specifically but it wasn’t crucial enough for me to retain) not Utah, and it’s just this one girl and her mother that are Mormon. 

And as soon it was mentioned that she was Mormon I was on alert.

Was this going to be anti?  Was she going to leave the church and realize that she had been brainwashed? (I have other objections to the whole “brainwashed” designation but that’s something for another post.)  Was she going to be some sort of wooden characeture rather than a fleshed out person?  Or some kind of holier than thou, miss priss?

And she was none of those things.  She was a real girl who liked and apparently believed in her religion.  She was slightly conflicted but she was a teenaged girl, as teenagers weren’t we all at least slightly conflicted?(Aren’t we still?)  She had a crush on a missionary, he had a crush on her, they chatted, even acknowledged the crush, she made him a plate of cookies, they even were as daring as to hug once.  It’s not the kind of behavior that is recommended in the mission handbook but it’s not going to get anyone ex-communicated either.  They wouldn’t even send him home for that.  (Transferred sure, but not sent home.)  And they didn’t.

The girl wasn’t the main character of the book, she was the girl that the main character liked.  So even the thing with the missionary was really just to add a little conflict.  End of story.  She didn’t leave the church, she didn’t even have a big crisis of faith.  She was just a girl.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve run into that in fiction, and the more I think about that the weirder it is.  I mean, there’s a lot of us, we’re all over the place.  You expect that in Utah of course.  I can’t imagine that anyone would write a book set in Utah in which there were not Mormon characters (but then I’ ve never read a book set in Utah that wasn’t Mormon fiction) but it’s not like there are only Mormons in Utah.  I grew up in Virginia.  I was one of maybe 20 Mormons in my high school, not an overwhelming majority by any stretch but I think it’s safe to say that everyone in the school knew a Mormon.  Probably most of the kids in the school would have counted at least one of us Mormons as a friend.  We were characters in their lives who just happened to be Mormon, not necessarily good, not necessarily bad.  We may have been having big religious crises but for the most part probably not, we were just going about our lives.

I don’t see that in the books that I read.

It turns out that at least one of the authors is probably Mormon.  She graduated from BYU anyway, I haven’t looked up her church records or anything so I’m just extrapolating here but it seems a reasonable assumption.  It’s harder to tell but my gut feeling is that her husband, the other author, is not.  (The girl’s father is not Mormon, and … I don’t know something about it just makes me think that that part is somewhat autobiographical.) But I digress.

The point is that it’s a little sad to me that as soon as I run across a character who is Mormon, I’m immediately afraid that somehow the book is going to say something negative about the church.  I was surprised and, I have to say, delighted, to read a book with a character who was just incidentally Mormon.

A Movie, a Book, and an Announcement February 19, 2009

I’m not pregnant.

Let’s just get that out out of the way right now, because apparently that’s the only news a married Mormon woman in her 20s or 30s can have, but that’s not my news.

Moving on.

I watched “the Pursuit of Happyness” last night.  It wasn’t my first time through but I found that I was bothered by the same thing this time that bothered me on my first watching (That isn’t always the case you know, sometimes those things don’t bother you the second time through or sometimes you realize that you missed something the first time or…) first of all, it’s one of the more depressing movies ever made.  A single father with his kid spending the night on the floor of the subway bathroom, give me a break!  But that’s not my real problem with the movie.  The thing is, he doesn’t spend the movie pursuing happiness, or even happyness, he spends the movie pursuing money.

Now I get that while we all know that money doesn’t buy happiness it does actually contribute greatly to it when you’re to the living in the bathroom in the subway station kind of poverty.  But well, they wouldn’t have been living in the bathroom in the subway station if he’d have g gotten a job.  I’m pretty sure that McDonalds was hiring, even in the 80s.

Of course then we couldn’t have all the touchy feely follow your dreams lessons that we get from the movie, never mind that it would be a really crappy boring movie, but a lot of me thinks that when you have a kid to feed and clothe and protect from pedophiles, maybe your dreams aren’t quite as important as all that.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that he meets this guy who drives a nice car and that’s all he knows about him.  He doesn’t know if he’s happy, he doesn’t know if his wife just left him because he was sleeping with his secretary, he doesn’t know if he’s contemplating suicide (rich people do you know) all he knows is that he drives a nice car.  So he puts himself and his son through hell so that he can too.  Doesn’t that make you all warm and fuzzy?

Speaking of money-

I recently finished reading “How To Debt-Proof Your Marriage” by Mary Hunt.  I loved loved loved it for the first three quarters of the book.

The first third of the book is really a lot more about marriage than it is about money and while it wasn’t information that I particularly needed (a lot of her suggestions were things that I was already doing (Dangit, I’m a good wife!)) it was pretty good and she made some really good points.  (Why is it that we’re more comfortable talking about anything, ANYTHING in our society than we are money?) Seriously, sex v. money, which would you rather discuss?

After the marriage advice she started talking about how to manage your money.

First- Give away 10%. Oo, I like this.  It sounds sort of… familiar.  Now she’s not Mormon, the book was written from a non-denominational point of view (if I had to guess, I’d say some sort of protestant, not quite praise Jesus enough to be baptist, maybe episcopalian)  but she does say that the first 10% belongs to the Lord and so you ought to give it back, not necessarily to a church but to some sort of charity or worthwhile cause.  I can get behind that, I thought, go on.

Second- Save 10%. She says that we should have saved somewhere in a fairly liquid account, enough money to live on for 3 (it should be 6) months.  This one’s a little harder for me.  It’s advice I’ve heard millions of times (including in the sealing room just before I was married (and from a really rich guy, no less))  and it’s even advice that I follow.  Sort of.  Unfortunately, the money that I save for two months inevitably goes to covering the power bill in the third month.  Still, hearing it again and seeing her put a number on it (she says $10,000 although the book was a bit dated and I don’t think that is very reflective of 3 months income for most families today) helped me to rededicate myself to this idea and resolve that I WILL DO IT!

Third- Bills. You’re supposed to compile all your bills.  Regular monthly bills like water and power are easy, irregular bills like car repairs and home improvement expenses are harder.  Monthly bills should be reduced if possible but then paid as usual.  A separate bank account should be opened for irregular bills (she calls it a freedom account and while that’s fairly descriptive, I also think it’s pretty lame so I’m going to call it … something cool) and then money should be regularly deposited into that account for those things.  Figure out how much you spent on car repairs last year, add a few dollars (your car is another year older after all) and divide by 12.  That’s how much you should put aside for car repairs.  The same goes for clothing, gifts, Christmas, whatever.  Ingenious.

Yes, I know it’s obvious but some of us need it spelled out in a little different way.  Shut up.

There’s also a plan in there for paying down debt, pay exactly what you’re paying now on all cards regardless of how the minimum payment go down and once you have one paid off apply that amount to the next card and so on, you’ve heard it before.  It’s a good plan.

This is the point where the book sort of fell apart for me.  Part of it, of course, is that I had unrealistic desires.  What I wanted, what I think everybody who picks up a book like this wants, is for her to give me some magic formula for spending less money without my actually having to, you know, spend less money.  Instead she talks about reducing spending.  WHAT?! I’ve got to say, at this point I was not much of a fan of Ms. Hunt’s.

Luckily I stuck with her long enough to read that we should not over-pay our taxes.

Again, this is something that I’ve heard countless times before.  And I flatly ignored it.  I viewed income tax as my involuntary savings plan.  And it worked, sort of.  Every year when I do the taxes we get money back.  A lot of money back. and that money nearly always goes to paying off a credit card that we had to use because we had to have the car fixed a month earlier.  (Maybe I should have mentioned up-front that we really don’t carry much debt, it’s just the unexpected car problems or plumbing bill that isn’t a part of our normal spending that we end up putting on credit cards. And we usually pay it off within a few months.)  She also made a big point throughout the book of telling you that you do not need to make more money, you just need to live within your means.  Whatever?!

The final chapter is called something like “finding money you didn’t know you had” but it really should be called “just don’t read this chapter because it will turn you off to my whole system because here I’m going to teach you how to be really cheap which involves a lot of self deprivation which obviously you’re not a fan of or you wouldn’t be in so much debt in the first place, stupid”.

No really, it’s comprised of some, I’m sure, great money saving techniques but to anyone who actually needs the book to get out of serious debt it’s going to be a tough pill to swallow.  It includes things like, scour the grocery ads every week and buy only the stuff on sale. (Who has time to really study that stuff and then go to three stores?) She devotes a paragraph or two to getting cheap internet (dial-up what?  Not a chance, you saw what happened to me when I needed a cord, can you even imagine what I would do if I needed a phone line?)  She talks about spending less on groceries, spending less on cleaning supplies, spending less on your car … by getting rid of it, or, buying a used domestic car (used, I can get behind, domestic not so much (she argues that domestic cars are cheaper to repair.  She may be right but for my money my Honda or Toyota requires fewer repairs than her Dodge.)(said the girl who drives a Mazda.)) be patient, save the money first, go without, crazy stuff like that.

In all honesty I think that the last chapter in the book was a mistake on her part.  It’s all good advice but a little, no a lot, distasteful to someone unused to focusing on saving, and maybe slightly offensive (not a good idea to tell people that they’re crazy/stupid to want to buy a brand new car) and it’s liable to kill any remaining desire the possibly newly financially responsible person has to actually be financially responsible.  It almost did that for me.

But her ideas kept rattling around in my head.  (There’s not much more in there after all.)  Until I put together the fact that I get a lot of my own money back when I do the taxes (enough that in theory we could have had an extra $750/ month last year) and if I had all that money all year then the credit card to buy the tires would not have been necessary.

So I think we’re going to try it.

Hey, speaking of making more money, even though I was assured I didn’t need to, I keep looking at my three little boys and thinking that before too long they’re going to be three teenaged boys and somebody’s going to have to feed them.  So, I’m going back to school.