money, money, money

This being my 30th year of life, you would hope that in most arenas I would feel like a grown-up. For the most part, this is true. One area that I sometimes still feel like a college student in is money. This morning I took action on something I've been thinking about for a long time...moving my savings into a higher interest-yielding account. The best rates nearly match CDs or US Treasury Bills (I've been doing research!) and have more flexibility. The only reason I haven't done this earlier is sheer convenience of the status quo and the inability to gather enough momentum to actually make a change. I also played around with retirement planning calculators and such this morning. The program recommended that I start saving an additional $760 a month in order to have $2,000 a month to live on from age 65-95. That's the thing - the recommendations often seem so out-of-reach that it's easier to hide one's head in the sand.

Money also makes me think about working. Along with that Midlife Crisis book, I've recently picked up "How She Really Does It: Secrets of Successful Stay-At-Work Moms" by Wendy Sachs. A few things about women, working, and money have stood out to me. One is that for some, the idea of not working is foolish considering the fact that many couples get divorced and that afterwards men's standard of living increases 15% while women's goes down 45%. Another factoid is that women who continue working through age 40 make 40% more than those who have taken a break before age 40.

I always get depressed when I get my Social Security annual report. I don't have enough points, yet, to really receive anything. There are so many issues involved - working to make a contribution to society, for self-esteem, to feel like an equal partner, for money, to make a contribution to the household. Then there are issues of trust, of pragmatism, of motherhood. So my idea at the moment is to take time to raise a family (God willing) but to try to keep my foot in the door of the workforce somehow. Another trend is that women of my generation tend to follow the footsteps of their own mothers which means I'm more likely to be a stay-at-home mom than a woman whose mother worked while she was growing up.

In other news: my analyses for study 2 of my dissertation are chugging along, though I have more missing data than I would like; training my new research assistants is going pretty well; Ezer is home which is wonderful; we watched The Constant Gardener, a fairly good thriller that takes place in Kenya; had a couple nice lunches with women; heard De Niro is filming just up the street; saw a mouse in the kitchen - bah;

Cool providential, "Thanks, God" moment of the day: I was trying to find the website of this organization that focuses on family research. My Google search turned up various pages I had looked at before, but weren't the right one. One of these was the Supporting Healthy Marriages page from the MDRC website. They are involved in work sponsored by grants similar to the Healthy Marriage Initiative my prof and I applied for from the federal government and is someplace I'm interested in possibly working at. Anyway, I looked at their slide show and saw that the woman heading up this project is named Ginger Knox. I decided to Google her to see if I could find out more information, thinking about possibly setting up an informational interview. My search turns up an announcement from the Columbia School of Social Work - behold, she is going to be speaking at their brown bag lunch seminar this coming Tuesday at 1pm! Perfect!