Jay is a Religious Studies professor in Maine. He has a toddler, a newborn, and a new outlook on money. If you want to be on What We Spend, we’d love to hear from you: write us at [email protected] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Jay and what is his family situation?
Our guest today is a 38-year-old religious studies professor in Maine. He's a parent of two kids, and he's asked us not to use his real name. So we're going to call him Jay. How old are your kids?
The oldest is two and a half. The youngest is seven weeks and one day.
And how many hours of sleep are you working off of right now?
Oh, today is a good day. Today is a really good day because the in-laws got the toddler. So I've got like nine hours of sleep almost.
For new parents, having kids comes with all kinds of life changes. And it can bring up all kinds of anxieties, new and old, that you have to figure out how to confront. And a lot of times, those anxieties are around money. That has definitely been true for Jay. This week, we'll take a peek into his life with a toddler and a brand new baby in the house.
And listen in as the week of diaries shows him something he didn't expect. I'm Courtney Harrell, and this is what we spend. how would you describe your relationship with money?
Extremely unhealthy, borderline abusive.
Tell me what that means.
I have so much anxiety about it. It's just awful. Like every decision I make is cost benefit analysis. It's not even benefit. It's just cost analysis. Like, is this, do I want to spend this money? It's not, do I have the money to spend? It's do I want to part with this money? Do I want to go through this expense?
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Chapter 2: How does Jay describe his relationship with money?
And so that means for me, like in my experience, physical pain when I have to buy something, when I have to like spend money on something, I'm like, ah. shit, is this... I'll just do it later. And then I'll just try not to do it.
What do you think was the biggest abstract kid money anxiety before you met kids? Pre-kids.
Daycare. Because I knew from in-laws having kids that this is going to be $25,000, $30,000. This is a substantial percentage of our total income. How are we going to get by...
Jay and his wife are both educators. His wife works for a Waldorf school and makes $60,000 a year. Jay makes $92,000 a year. How do the two of you manage your money together? Like what's your system?
System is a strong word. So effectively we have all of our money in a joint account in terms of budgeting. It's a very vibe based situation. Like when back before kids, it was like, oh shit, we got a good amount of money. Let's put some in Vanguard. Maybe I'll add more to my IRA. Now it's more along the lines of, okay, we got to get something. What do we get? Can we afford it?
What are we going to do? Should we do this? Should we not do this? So I do have a budget of like what things should cost per month. And the thing that I took away from that budget was it doesn't fucking matter because of childcare and just the cost of children. So you could have this perfect plan of like, okay, every month we're going to have like $1,000 left over. No, you're not. No, you're not.
Because you have kids and like they always need something. So I just don't bother budgeting per month. And every time I sit down and actually think about it, I'm like, what am I going to cut? Reasonably, what can I do to save money on a practical level? We're eating a lot of chickpeas. How else can I change my lifestyle that will make me not want to just die?
And my wife is like, look, I'm not compromising quality of life to save a few bucks. Because it would be really like, at this point, we'd be eating Wonder Bread and jam. That would be a meal. That's why I don't really keep a budget anymore.
Let's get into Jay's numbers. Remember, their combined income is $152,000 a year. That's before taxes and health insurance. And they share their expenses.
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Chapter 3: What are Jay and his wife's income and budgeting strategies?
Jay's referring to something called private mortgage insurance, or PMI. It's a fee that banks tack onto your mortgage when your down payment isn't big enough. So Jay is paying an extra $67 a month until they pay off 20% of their mortgage.
So that $3,200 is all of that stuff?
Their utilities really fluctuate in Maine. In the summer, they usually pay $300 to $400 a month, mostly on electric. In the winter, when the heat pumps kick in, it goes up to about $1,000 a month.
phone bill is 30 bucks a month because I'm on a family plan. And even though I'm 38, my mom still is like, I want to pay this. So I have to like, I'd like fight her to let me pay her something. And so $30 is what it is.
Does your wife have a phone bill too?
She is also on her family plan. I think she might be like several years in arrears on that one.
Transportation, $280 a month for their gas and tolls. Groceries, about $800 a month.
Wi-Fi, sons of bitches. It was $40 a month and it just went up to $43.
Their car insurance is a couple hundred bucks a month. And health insurance for the family is $383 a month. Medical debt, all baby-related, $170 a month.
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Chapter 4: What are the main household expenses Jay shares?
Child care, $1,325 a month. And then when the second kid goes to care, it will be $2,025 or so.
And what kind of care is it? What are you paying for?
That's a good question, Corey. I'll tell you what I'm not paying for. I'm not paying for help with potty training.
A family gym membership at the YMCA is $93 a month. And they pay about $50 a month for a combo of Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, and the New York Times game subscription.
I get New York Times for free through my college, but they don't include the games and I'm a crossword guy. And so I had to pay for the games.
When do you think like this kind of relationship with money started for you?
I don't know. I never really had a job in high school, but I also I never had money. I just never had money to spend. Like I just got whatever my parents gave me.
Jay went on to college at a prestigious university that gave him a lot of grants. His parents did help him out a little too, taking out $10,000 in loans. And then he had a work-study job to pay for books and other needs.
And I knew at that point that I had no safety net. I had no backup. So I think once I got to that stage and then realized that I'm on my own 100%, it probably developed over time.
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Chapter 5: How did Jay’s childhood and family background influence his money mindset?
He didn't see it as a kid, but now as a young adult confronting the reality of his parents' finances, he thought about the ways his mom would spend money when he was growing up and the ways that was probably shaping his spending now.
I remember, for example, for Christmases, my mother would buy my stepdad and I, it would be no exaggeration to say between 10 and 15 presents each. And they're like, it's not like a deck of cards. It's sometimes expensive things. And then she'd buy a joint gift. Okay, we're a family of three. Joint gifts included. Trampoline. Full-sized. A basketball court. To reiterate, I am an academic.
Even as a young boy, I think I leaned that direction, not towards basketball. I didn't know this, but I put it together now. They were spending all of their disposable income basically as it came.
Wow.
Basically as it came. I tell my wife a lot, like whenever my mom comes to visit and she does this, go to the bakery, buy like $80 worth of shit. Like no joke, like $80 worth of stuff. Yeah. And a lot of it gets thrown away because like, you know. And I'll just tell my wife, now you see why I am the way I am. I cannot abide this thoughtless, wasteful spending.
After the break, we'll dive in to Jay's week.
End of day one. Today, I didn't do terribly much. I dropped my kid off at daycare. I did a lot of baby holding and care of a newborn. You know, my wife and I just kind of switched. We're on man-on defense at this point. And we're both off for winter break. I guess that leaves a lot more time to like spend money because today was a brutal one. I just paid for a copy of a birth certificate.
I got two copies just in case because the second copy is like cheaper once you order the first one. There's like a discount on the second copy for some reason. So it's 21 bucks for two birth certificates. But that's going to pay for itself, man, because we're taking a trip in a week or two and the newborn girl gets to fly for free because we can prove that she's six weeks old. So whatever.
21 bucks is going to be money well spent. Spend number two, had to order some stuff at Costco. Even though we're a pretty small family, even when we're only a family of two, we were ordering stuff at Costco because certain things are just easy in bulk. But now that we've got a toddler and newborn, like Costco's godsend, today we got animal crackers, two boxes of applesauce.
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Chapter 6: What unexpected expenses has Jay encountered as a new parent?
And the heat pumps are efficient, I think, up to below zero. But efficient does not necessarily mean cost-effective. So running the heat pumps when it's that cold is really expensive. So what I have to figure out is, is it cheaper to use the, the oil heating downstairs and the heat pump upstairs? Because the oil heating upstairs is a nightmare with two kids.
Like the rooms are completely different temperature. One will be like 75 degrees and the other will be 65. It's crazy. And like, we don't really want the newborn in 65 degrees. And the other calculus here is not simply how much this costs, which has so many variables that we don't know, but it's what will my wife tolerate? Because I am willing to keep this house like three degrees above freezing.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, she is not willing to do that. And so every night there's this negotiation with her getting increasingly frustrated with me as the winter goes on. And I know I'm already, I'm prepared to do battle over this, but I'm also prepared to lose because of the fact that there's a newborn in the house. I just know I'm not going to win this.
And so maybe I'll go quietly into the dark night these two nights as I say this out loud. Not a lot of expenses today. $65 for childcare. Got my internet bill, and I noticed that it went up by $3 a month from $40 to $43, and that's just because the company decided to raise their prices. It's like this nickel and diming stuff that really gets to me.
And then, you know, the funny thing is, I guess I do the reverse where I nickel and dime the shit out of things. So my wife and I had a long conversation tonight about a trip we're planning to go on next week. We're flying to Florida to visit her parents. So we're going to drive to the airport and take our kids and go to Florida. Now the question is, where do we park?
So the main parking garages are 15 bucks a day, but there's sort of a surface lot that you need to take a shuttle to that's 10 bucks a day. And we're going to be there for like 13 days or two weeks or something like that. And so the additional cost of the garage is like $65.
And the discussion we were having is whether it's worth the effort to drop her and the newborn and our luggage off at the airport while the toddler and I drive to the service lot. And then catch the shuttle to go back to the airport. Because then we have to leave the house earlier than we normally would. Which is already going to be pushing it with two kids.
And then also it's just going to be a huge pain in the ass to do all that. But is it a $65 pain in the ass? Like am I willing to do this on the way there and on the way back for $65? And I'm thinking it's not going to. I'm thinking we're not going to do it. Which physically pains me.
The amount of trouble that I have gone through in the past in my life to save a fraction of $65, like, you wouldn't believe. But the kids factor just defeats me. And so I think I'm going to have to lose a little bit of my willingness to put up with inconvenience in order to save money.
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Chapter 7: How does Jay manage heating costs and other winter expenses in Maine?
My wife's dad actually Venmoed us half of our flight to visit them in Florida. So it was like 420 bucks because he's just super generous and he always likes to do things like that. It's quite humbling actually to have him be that generous in, in certain ways because, um, there's, there's, there's no aspect of my life now that I don't owe to my father-in-law, which is pretty crazy to think about.
Um, because I've worked pretty hard in a lot of ways. Like I've had a lot of side jobs and I've been like very dedicated to the academy and it was like working towards this professorship and, um, doing anything I can on the side to like make money and save money and pay off student loans and whatever. Um, it's amounted to nothing, like literally like fucking zero.
Um, you know, I think the biggest, like the largest that my checking account ever was, um, Um, before I married my wife was after, um, after I got hit by a drunk driver and I got an insurance settlement for like 12 grand. I don't even remember how much it was now. And so like at some point in my checking account, I had like $15,000 and I was like, damn Bruce Wayne.
Like I'm just really killing it right now. Maybe I'll be a venture capitalist now. And then when my wife and I went to get married, her father cut us. He gave us an option, actually. He said, look, I'll pay for your wedding outright. Pay for whatever you want. Or I'll cut you a check for $30,000. And we were like, we'll take option B, Bob. Like, shit.
Then, a few years later, when they wanted to buy a house, his wife's parents helped them again. This time with $25,000 towards a down payment, which Jay says would have otherwise used up more than half of their savings.
It's not upsetting. It's not upsetting to think that, like, the amount of effort I put into, like, being fiscally responsible and independent and stuff, um... has amounted to basically nothing in comparison with like two checks this family has written. I mean, I guess it is upsetting. It is upsetting in a way. You know, this was completely out of reach for me five years ago. 10 years ago.
Oh, 10 years ago would be a joke. What was I, 28? Oh, yeah. This never would have happened. But just this family generosity made it happen. I just got to think about this more. I'm not really sure how I feel about this. It's certainly not bad, but it's not a negative feeling. It's just complicated.
You talked in your diaries about her parents giving you all money.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What daily expenses and small decisions impact Jay’s family budget?
What about it bothers you?
The receiving of the money does not bother me. So I can say what doesn't bother me. Being gifted substantial amounts of money does not bother me by her family. I think what's kind of alarming, maybe... is that me as this working class kid trying to make good, it would have taken me another 15, 20 years to get to a position that I am now because of that generosity, right?
So like with just a few strokes of the pen, they were able to effectively quadruple the amount of savings I had.
Right, it puts what you have done up to that point in a totally different light.
Yeah, you know, It's difficult, too, because... This is bringing things up that I don't think about often, and I try not to, but... I start to wonder how I look in the family's eyes. Because on the one hand, just sheer appearances. Professor at a good college. Cool. Great. The more they know me, and the more they know my background...
And like my financial background, it's like, Oh, it's this, this kid who sort of clawed his way up into the stable thing. And he's always trying to overcome. And I think that might bother me. Being viewed maybe as the scrappy kid who pulled his way up and like his accomplishments are only accomplishments by contrast with what he was or where he came from.
Oh, I see.
I think that might be, that feels belittling.
It lessens it.
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