Surprise! I'm a single parent


crunch crunch crunch
March 10, 2009, 2:39 am
Filed under: economy

Is credit crunch real? Well it’s a word. Officially! It’s been added to the Oxford Dictionary. It sounds like some kind of bad tasting cereal . As far as I understand it the credit crunch began when overseas banks became too nervous to lend to humans and to each other. At the heart of the problem were borrowers with mortgages built on metaphorical sand.  Just a little over two years ago I first heard the words ‘sub prime’. For a while I thought sub-prime mortgages was a sort of company  but no its a sort of risky investment.

 

Prime mortgages are ones which banks give to people with excellent credit ratings. Sub-prime mortgages is lending to people who do not.  This is a harsh life lesson we all learn at some stage when we lend money to a friend and then we don’t get it back.  We get a little savvier about assessing credit risk. Well apparently there is a lesson to learn at the corporate level here too and the global economy is just cottoning on.

The idea was that the value of houses would increase and so would peoples equity in the houses.  If they ran into trouble they could borrow more against their house. But the bubble burst. Hmmmm It was a pyramid scheme of sorts. Layers of banks we’d never heard of emerged in the public domain and there was a crisis of trust in the banking economy.

How did we go from credit crunch to global economic downturn?

During the hey day of investment in dodgy borrowers debt was onsold to investors. Mortgage-backed securities went into hedge funds who thought they were a sure thing. But the bubble broke, mortgage holders started to default on their loans and the peculiar 20th century culture of ‘BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTH IT’ became BECAUSE YOU’RE WORTHLESS’’.  

The rapid freefall of the American economy is impacting on American consumers, businesses and markets.  Jobless rate are at their highest highest point in a quarter century and consumer confidence is low. The value of stock investments  shrivelled. The burgeoning retiree market is in tatters as retired people must cut back on sending. For others retirement is now much further off unless it is enforced by unwanted unemployment.

Economists see the stabilising of the credit market as what is needed to stop the slide. New Zealand economists are still debating what the effects will be here in Godzone. On the national radio recently Jim Morah and friends were saying is it really happening here? Jim and co clearly hadn’t had to sell a house last year for 100 thousand dollars less than it was worth the year before and they hadn’t looking at rising unemployment figures. However on the whole I found this quite refreshing because most of the other media commentaries are gloomier than Paris Hilton in flat heels and you find yourself wondering  if this doom mongering might not be contributing to the economic downturn.

Just about every major metropolitan newspaper has published their top ten or 12 or twenty tips to survive a depression. Most of it doesn’t seem worth the surfing energy. Ive read The observer, The Times, The Telegraph, The Listener, and to save you the bother here are my favourites:

1.       Don’t take on more debt. Well I never. So obvious but every good list mentions it.

2.       Cancel the gym membership and the cleaner and gardener. OK its clear that people who read The Times are still living in Mary Poppins land and if things get worse they will possibly fire the nanny.

3.       Don’t buy a 2000 pound exclusive Louis Vutton bag as sported by Madonna as it can be hired for as little as sixty pounds a month!!!! Yeah right. I really read this in a serious list. Perhaps the serious translation of this is now isn’t the time to buy even if you can get credit – maybe rent for a while and see what happens.

4.       Freecycle – this is actually a good tip – get out of the false economy and into the community economy. You join an online group based on your geographical area. Regular newsletters tell you what people want to get rid of, what they want and what’s been taken.  So far Ive gotten of an old aquarium, broken barbeque, a chest full of old video tapes, music stand, .. and Ive gained the dvd player Miss 7 got for Christmas, some garden furniture and organic tomatoes. The other thing I’ve gained is some interesting new community contacts.

5.       Switch broadband – overseas there is a lot of competition for new clients with attractive rates for new customers. OK I don’t know about this one here but the basic idea is query what you are paying when there is a choice and probably with competition hotting up there could be some bargains to be had.

6.       My tip: Beware the sites that say they will find you best and cheapest service! The other day I was looking for a miniskip and entered my details in a site which said it would compare all bin hireage in my area. The skip they selected and said I could book online was  $165 but when I called a company direct I got what I wanted for $135.

7.       Get a flatmate. Other sites recommended a boarder to help share your costs – in my experience this can be hard to achieve but if you aren’t eating out any more its nice to ahve someone else who cooks the odd meal and breaks out the vacuum cleaner and can split on a dvd new release instead of a movie.

8.       Get walking! The global economic crisis has outshadowed the bloat of the You Deserve It culture that was creeping into the country and had snuck at least 3kgs on my frame. Any day now me and the kids are planning to walk to work. Any day. Some day soon. One of these days. ….

9.       Get to know your neighbours. Your family and your neighbours are your backstop in a crisis. The me me culture distances us from the real treasure of our human relationships. The TV program Dallas might have brought the Berlin Wall down but greed has also seen people evicted and lost

10.   Joanne Black at The Listener last year wrote a piece on the new frugality. I think she is on to something there – there is no shame in buying second hand, making do, and waiting before you buy. Now more than ever nobody is going to think you are a loser. In fact it’s cool.

 



BBQ
March 8, 2009, 2:09 am
Filed under: community

I have been thinking for a while about how people don’t know their neighbours so much anymore – it’s not like when I grew up and we all knew each other (or so it seemed to me as a kid). I wanted to do something to get our neighbourhood together.

I’m really fortunate to have a woman who has become a good friend who lives three doors down the road. She has two kids who sit in age just ahead and just behind my youngest. They go to different schools but every afternoon they are at one another’s houses. Last year we were all excited when some people bought the place next to my friends and they had two kids in the same age group again. The kid web grew but that didn’t mean the parents were really getting together.

So we organised a barbeque between some of the families nearby so people could get to know each other. I think one of the most surprising things about this was how excited the kids were about it. One of the highlights of the event was the sight of seven children making their way through the broken fence between the section with the trampoline and the section where the adults were cooking and sitting around in the sun.

The lovely obliging neighbours who hosted ran out of gas on their barbeque as soon as he had started to cook and my friend turned to me and asked if we could go grab the gas of my exs barbeque. My ex had been invited but he wasn’t so keen. And I have to say I was OK with that. Now they wanted his gas bottle and they wanted me to get it. So I said it would be better if someone else asked him and off went my friend with my eldest daughter.

They got back with the bottle having re-extended the invitation and apparently my ex was going to turn up for half an hour or so. A couple of hours later I read my cell phone and my ex – never one for details – hadn’t realised where the barbeque was and there was a nasty text implying I had somehow omitted to tell him. So that was a bit of a damper, but as always these days the things which would have made me feel guilty and stupid now have the effect of demonstrating that my ex always did and still sometimes does seem to find blame with me when there are only the flimsiest connections. And that he no longer has the ability to hurt me like he did. These are my I DID THE RIGHT THING moments.

Meanwhile I think it was on step forward for our community in terms of being more than just people sharing geography.



Is Eight Enough?
March 7, 2009, 2:45 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

Yup only in America does a woman give birth to Octuplets and she’s already a single parent to 6 children.  Shock horror!  I don’t know why she didn’t just go work in early childhood.

The debate here is around intentional single parenting and intentional access to state support and, just how many is enough children – both at one time and altogether. The Octuplets Mum appears to be  greedy with fertility treatments, grasping for state support  and blatantly doing without a Dad.

She’s an extreme example that lets us see our prejudices, values and morality more clearly.

While it wasn’t my gig, I do have a couple of girlfriends who have become a parent with various forms of donor ingenuity.  I also have a few more friends who have made incredibly unwise choices to have children with very unsuitable men. I fear far more for the offspring of the second group because like almost nothing short of incarceration is going to stop their no-good Dads having some negative impact on their lives. If I were choosing between Mr Almost right, Mr Suspect and Mr Test-tube I know who would cause the least grief in the long run.

 



I’m still not in bed with a lawyer
March 3, 2009, 2:33 am
Filed under: Uncategorized

In an earlier blog I brainstormed how I might select a lawyer. I thought I should mention I still haven’t got one. This is largely because of the feedback I’ve had regarding their general usefulness.  Their main skill seems to be taking money off people without progressing settlement particularly well. What I have taken from this is that if you are able to talk to each other you might as well negotiate your own settlement, if you cannot talk to each other you still might as well negotiate your own settlement because all you gain from a lawyer or two in the mix is a greater barney with a price tag.

One of my friends has spent several thousand on a lawyer and gotten nowhere – she’s got another lawyer now.

My ex has a lawyer. A last minute, slow, and somewhat illiterate lawyer. Strangely he doesn’t want me to know her name. This would seem to be an impediment to negotiating with her. So I have gone from selecting a lawyer for me – to detecting the lawyer of the ex.

I feel a bit sorry for the ex-lawyer because I am now in stage 5 of the separation stages. These stages are:

1. I’ll settle for nothing just to get out

2. He can take anything he likes as long as I can feed the kids

3. Actually there are a few things I came to the marriage with and I should keep

4. Hang on a minute I worked the whole time and earned more and still did all the housework – I deserve half

And now stage 5: screw it I’m gonna take everything I can this guy has kept me waiting too long and now the blinkers are off I realise I’ve been totally walked over for 15 years and I’m not taking it anymore.