Adjusting to America: Financial Planning
I had to fill out an expense sheet for our financial planner today. While this may seem like a mundane task, trying to complete a detailed American-style cash flow analysis based on a year in France is not a straight-forward exercise.
I searched in vein for the expense line for cheese. None. Next I hunted for the line item for our bakery budget, wondering if they would want us to list our bread and pastry expenses separately. Nothing. What about our considerable expenditures in the local chocolaterie? Nada.
I was stymied. I considered figuring out how much this year cost us and putting the total under the “vacations” category. I realized that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Marty actually worked in France, and I could jeopardize his entire career with such a flippant gesture. No, I had to, in Marty’s words, “tough it out” and find a rightful place for our French expenses in the American budget.
Desperate, I took another look at the categories on the form thinking that perhaps our cheese, bread, pastry and chocolate expenses were simply listed by some other, more American-style names like dairy industry special interests, wheat-based industrial manufacturing or cocoa cartel. No luck.
I was relieved to find a line for “liability umbrella.” We did, after all, buy a new umbrella when I carelessly forgot mine in a London restaurant. Since it is a splashing disaster to be umbrella-less in London in November, I splurged six pounds for a new umbrella. I suppose it was a bit of a liability, but I was a little surprised to find this liability umbrella category on our expanded expense worksheet. How could they have known?
I became suspicious, however, when I saw that they wanted to know how much we spent on pool service, pet care and pedicures. Why, there was even a line item for “spontaneous gifts.” (For reasons that will remain a mystery, “not-so-spontaneous gifts” were omitted from our American cash flow worksheet.) Perhaps it was time to own up: we had become, financially speaking, cultural misfits. American budgets do not put a great deal of value on cheese, bread, pastries and chocolates. Where did our country go wrong?
I’m sure that there are Freudian conclusions that can be made from this absence of culinary pleasures, or necessities, depending on your cultural perspective. Can we blame it on John Calvin? Martin Luther? Those dreaded Puritans? Forget Iraq, forget Abu Ghraib, forget Guantanamo Bay. The demise in our country’s values clearly began when we forgot the simple pleasures of cheese, bread, pastries and chocolate (and some of you sinners may want to add wine to that list of guilty pleasures). Our French budget would simply have to be considered “Other.”
Our financial planner will enter this somewhat dubious expense information and other details about our finances into some magical program that uses an analysis named after Monte Carlo. Having been to Monte Carlo, I admit to more than a little skepticism. What is the only thing you think of when you think of Monte Carlo? Yes-that’s right-you think of gambling. There is absolutely nothing else to associate with Monte Carlo except perhaps we could add the image of filthy rich people losing their fortunes to this gambling image. It does make one wonder why we would actually pay for an analysis that has something to do with rich people losing money.
Truthfully, we pay for this Monte Carlo money mystery because we are fond of our financial planner. She’s fun. She has perky short hair. She laughs a lot. She quotes Scoobie-Doo. She even listens attentively when Marty tells his entire family history by way of answering her simple inquiry, “How are you?” Since we like her very much, we do whatever she tells us to do with our money. This is the degree of our financial sophistication. All we have wanted is to pay someone we like to tell us what to do. It’s what we call in modern parlance a win-win situation. We could never be happier.
Of course, we don’t really know if we will win financially. By the time these things play themselves out, the players are either dead or drooling in a wheelchair. The deciding factor is if the wheelchair is in a lovely long term care facility where they serve asparagus tips with mustard sauce or in a back alley. No, we will never know if our financial planner was right, but it doesn’t matter. We sleep better at night knowing that we are being responsible adults by blindly and completely subjugating all our free will to our financial planner. We consider it a faith-based solution.
After the requisite churning and sputtering, the Monte Carlo program will spit out many pages of information that will tell us how comfortable we are with losing our life savings, how much money we require to live, with or without the savings, and where we should invest our savings in case we don’t want a future without them. Now of the many pages of lovely graphics, colored pie charts and eye bending tables provided in the stylish report of our analysis, there is generally only one page of interest. You see, the other information about how comfortable we are with losing our life savings, how much we need to live, etc., is all information we actually provided. Apparently, we’re not supposed to realize that they are charging us to give us back information that we gave them, albeit in a neater graphical format. No, the only page of interest is the one that describes what we are supposed to do with our money. France and the strong Euro tried to take care of that problem by sucking out as much as they could. Perhaps the only remaining legitimate indication of the strength of the American dollar is that we have a few left.
I searched in vein for the expense line for cheese. None. Next I hunted for the line item for our bakery budget, wondering if they would want us to list our bread and pastry expenses separately. Nothing. What about our considerable expenditures in the local chocolaterie? Nada.
I was stymied. I considered figuring out how much this year cost us and putting the total under the “vacations” category. I realized that, despite all appearances to the contrary, Marty actually worked in France, and I could jeopardize his entire career with such a flippant gesture. No, I had to, in Marty’s words, “tough it out” and find a rightful place for our French expenses in the American budget.
Desperate, I took another look at the categories on the form thinking that perhaps our cheese, bread, pastry and chocolate expenses were simply listed by some other, more American-style names like dairy industry special interests, wheat-based industrial manufacturing or cocoa cartel. No luck.
I was relieved to find a line for “liability umbrella.” We did, after all, buy a new umbrella when I carelessly forgot mine in a London restaurant. Since it is a splashing disaster to be umbrella-less in London in November, I splurged six pounds for a new umbrella. I suppose it was a bit of a liability, but I was a little surprised to find this liability umbrella category on our expanded expense worksheet. How could they have known?
I became suspicious, however, when I saw that they wanted to know how much we spent on pool service, pet care and pedicures. Why, there was even a line item for “spontaneous gifts.” (For reasons that will remain a mystery, “not-so-spontaneous gifts” were omitted from our American cash flow worksheet.) Perhaps it was time to own up: we had become, financially speaking, cultural misfits. American budgets do not put a great deal of value on cheese, bread, pastries and chocolates. Where did our country go wrong?
I’m sure that there are Freudian conclusions that can be made from this absence of culinary pleasures, or necessities, depending on your cultural perspective. Can we blame it on John Calvin? Martin Luther? Those dreaded Puritans? Forget Iraq, forget Abu Ghraib, forget Guantanamo Bay. The demise in our country’s values clearly began when we forgot the simple pleasures of cheese, bread, pastries and chocolate (and some of you sinners may want to add wine to that list of guilty pleasures). Our French budget would simply have to be considered “Other.”
Our financial planner will enter this somewhat dubious expense information and other details about our finances into some magical program that uses an analysis named after Monte Carlo. Having been to Monte Carlo, I admit to more than a little skepticism. What is the only thing you think of when you think of Monte Carlo? Yes-that’s right-you think of gambling. There is absolutely nothing else to associate with Monte Carlo except perhaps we could add the image of filthy rich people losing their fortunes to this gambling image. It does make one wonder why we would actually pay for an analysis that has something to do with rich people losing money.
Truthfully, we pay for this Monte Carlo money mystery because we are fond of our financial planner. She’s fun. She has perky short hair. She laughs a lot. She quotes Scoobie-Doo. She even listens attentively when Marty tells his entire family history by way of answering her simple inquiry, “How are you?” Since we like her very much, we do whatever she tells us to do with our money. This is the degree of our financial sophistication. All we have wanted is to pay someone we like to tell us what to do. It’s what we call in modern parlance a win-win situation. We could never be happier.
Of course, we don’t really know if we will win financially. By the time these things play themselves out, the players are either dead or drooling in a wheelchair. The deciding factor is if the wheelchair is in a lovely long term care facility where they serve asparagus tips with mustard sauce or in a back alley. No, we will never know if our financial planner was right, but it doesn’t matter. We sleep better at night knowing that we are being responsible adults by blindly and completely subjugating all our free will to our financial planner. We consider it a faith-based solution.
After the requisite churning and sputtering, the Monte Carlo program will spit out many pages of information that will tell us how comfortable we are with losing our life savings, how much money we require to live, with or without the savings, and where we should invest our savings in case we don’t want a future without them. Now of the many pages of lovely graphics, colored pie charts and eye bending tables provided in the stylish report of our analysis, there is generally only one page of interest. You see, the other information about how comfortable we are with losing our life savings, how much we need to live, etc., is all information we actually provided. Apparently, we’re not supposed to realize that they are charging us to give us back information that we gave them, albeit in a neater graphical format. No, the only page of interest is the one that describes what we are supposed to do with our money. France and the strong Euro tried to take care of that problem by sucking out as much as they could. Perhaps the only remaining legitimate indication of the strength of the American dollar is that we have a few left.
posted by Nancy at 8:50 PM
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