National Debt and My Radical Wife

I see there is another round of budget debates going on in DC and can't help thinking that it kind of reminds me of some events going on in my life that are a little bit closer to home.

You see, my wife and I have been having some financial trouble lately. Really we get along pretty well in all other things but our financial situation seems to cause us to have... well… we fight a lot about money. Now I’ve been pretty busy lately filling out credit applications, and handling letters from people that we owe money to, and had to think pretty long and hard just to rearrange my schedule so that I could take some time and write this article.

Let me back up from the current situation and explain a bit what’s going on that seems to be the cause for the contentiousness.

There’s no other way to put this other than to say that she’s super hot. Even after our many decades together she’s still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. Even in our ever advancing years she still holds a visual appearance and poise better than most of the women who are a mere fraction of her age. You’ve heard of love at first sight? It is one of those things that you can’t really believe in until it actually happens to you. When I first laid eyes to her she literally took my breath away. I felt like she was spawned spontaneously and directly from my dreams and somehow, by some miracle of God, made manifest in the real world. It was not a feeling of first sight so much as it was a sudden recognition of someone that I had known forever, was intimate with, and yet somehow had never met. Her eyes met mine and instantly I felt I could see to the very depths of her soul.

I could see by the expression on her face that she felt the same way. It was that type of look which only comes of the kind of personal familiarity that you would expect of a long lost close and passionate love. The sudden recognition that I’m sure was on my face was reflected in hers.

There was no restraint. There was not even the slightest thought that I should hesitate or hold back in any way for fear of her thinking that I was being too forward or creepy. We stepped together, took each other rapidly in our arms and passionately kissed in a way that even now, to recall it and attempt to put words to it, could only be described as a soul melting experience. Hers blended with mine and mine with hers, and together, like an alloy of metal, we became the strength of each other, much stronger than we were when apart.

Whether it was seconds, hours or eternity we spent together in this way I cannot say. All I know is that when we finally separated, I looking into her eyes as she looked into mine, we said together as if from the very same breath, “I have been looking for you for so long.” As it was obvious to us that we were meant to be together forever, as we felt we always were, we immediately began to arrange our lives to the point of making our individual lives into one.

Part of our decision making process, naturally as in all relationships in the practical world, included how we would spend our money. She likes to say that she’s being “very responsible” with money. Even before we met she preferred to save her money and use it only for specific things. She proposed a specific list of basic things that we would spend our money on. This list includes our house, taxes, medical bills, cars, utilities, food, things we need for our many children we planned on having, etc.

She wrote out what she was thinking of and I, being totally enthralled by her beauty as well as her good sense, agreed. She called it her “List of Authorized Expenditures.” Honestly it reads something like Article One, Section Eight from the United States Constitution.

As the decades went by our lives expanded. Our family grew to six children, three of the most beautiful daughters that there have ever been on God’s green Earth and three of the most heart melting—or at least so their girlfriends told me—handsome lads one could ever know. The girlfriends became wives and the boyfriends became husbands. Before we knew it my wife and I were embracing grandchildren as our financial empire flourished and prospered. I don’t wish to discuss specifics about how much we make and how we make it, it’s not important to the underlying principle I’m discussing in this article, but literally we have on the upper side of six digits coming in every year. Some years we break into seven.

However life, being as it is, is not always perfect. There, growing in direct proportion with our annual income, has always been this disagreement regarding how our financial lives should be handled. You see, she has always been very conservative with her money. She says we should only use the credit cards and loans for emergencies and after the emergency is over we should work to pay the debt off as rapidly as we could.

I like to play a little bit more of the wild side. I like to invest my money in our family’s future happiness, entertainment and education. And what’s the big deal with carrying a bit of debt as long as we can make the payments? And if we get into trouble our credit is good enough that we can always borrow more.

Now she seems rather pissed off that I’ve been spending 40% more on an annual basis than we make. What could possibly go wrong!?

Remember that “List of Authorized Expenditures” I mentioned earlier? Well, at some risk to our relationship I have to laugh a bit at her about that because that list is only about five to ten percent of our total expenditures! Imagine that, in the modern world, having an actual list of things that we are only allowed to spend our money on! She does kind of have a point that if we stuck only to that list, while at our current income, we would be able to pay off all of our debt within a couple of years. Hell, sticking to that list would solve any deficit problems within the next hour or two.

However for the general welfare, as I see it, of the entire family, I keep spending to the point that we’ve racked up so much debt the credit agencies, which I mentioned at the outset of this article, are threatening to downgrade our credit ratings. This is a big problem because as I planned it, running our finances a bit closer to the edge, then relying on our good credit for emergencies, would not work. If we can’t borrow more money to handle emergencies, and realistically there are always emergencies in life, then how would we be able to pay to solve whatever problems occurred?

Make no mistake; this situation has put a lot of stress on our relationship.

What she wants is to do some irresponsible and radical thing like balance our budget so that I would actually be spending less than we take in and use the difference to pay down our soaring debt. But that’s just too radical and besides, it's for the general welfare of the family and our children!

Well, between her radical selfishness and my kind and generous spending habits, I’m very happy to announce that we have negotiated a deal between us that will certainly fix everything. Instead of me spending 40% more than we take in I’m going to spend 39.999975% more than we take in over the rest of this year. Over the next ten years I’ll work that number all the way down to spending only 38.6% more than we take in, unless, of course, something else happens that we absolutely have to pay for. I'm sure it will work out just fine and make us look good with the credit agencies because of our serious and extreme efforts to reduce our deficit.

The cuts I’ve had to make have been cruel. Why in fact I’ve decided that instead of building a ninety-five thousand foot warehouse to house the family’s toys, to building only an eighty-five thousand foot warehouse! Maybe I’ll have to just give up on a couple of the more expensive toys. It’s brutal I tell you but somehow I’ll just have to try and get by! And some of the grandchildren who are now grown up and having children of their own? They might have to learn how to make their own money to pay for their own lives, educations and medical expenses! Oh the humanity! I hope the family can endure such radical extremes. I’ve been very happy living my life, even with my wife’s radical tendencies, and I’m hoping beyond all hope that this rift in our relationship doesn’t end in divorce.

Now I'd like to write more about it but I'm far too busy filling out the applications for these new credit cards that I need to use to pay our bills.