Just Enough
Tomorrow Will Take Care of Itself…
by Jan Hart
For as long as I can remember money has been one of the most important relationships in my life.  I’m pretty sure I’ve paid as much attention to money 
as I have to any other relationship. I’m not proud of it. But maybe I’m getting better at putting relationships with people and my environment ahead of money.
I kind of had a fairy tale first bonding with money while I was young. I grew up in a middle class home and heard my parents talk openly about our finances and knew that we got along with money, and at times without it. At 10 I bought my first 4H goat, Valentina, for $40. My father loaned me the money and I paid it off over the next year. He also taught me how to keep track of my income from chicken egg sales and allowance as well as my expenditures for chicken and goat food in a small brown spiral tablet. As long as I was a penny in the black it was good.
I was hooked. Everything I wanted or needed had a price. It cost money for clothes and a ’50 Chevy I bought when I was 17. I managed to get a job at Newberry’s Department Store so I could buy them. Life in the US was a lot easier in the ’50s and I, like so many others, thought it would always be so.
In the ’60s I was lucky to have a Community College nearby where I could do my first two years inexpensively and then transfer to the University of California for my last two years. And I was even luckier to get a National Defense Student Loan, 50% of which was forgiven if I taught school for 5 years. After college many would say I got ‘really lucky’ and married a guy in his first year of medical school. We both worked hard — he studied while I taught high school biology to support us.  We had something akin to the American Dream which promised financial security, happiness and we just took it for granted that we could have just about anything we wanted. As long as we stayed ahead we were fine and it wasn’t too hard to stay ahead then.
The fairy tale ended in divorce and introduced me to a new, more volatile involvement with money in the ’80s. There seemed to be an explosion of things to buy that were attractively dangled in front of our eyes on billboards and TV . We could have it NOW along with a discount if we just charged it on a new account. As a middle aged single parent I worked hard to provide for my family and myself as well as pay off credit cards ‘generously’ extended by banks, oil companies and department stores. I bought my first computer and started down the electronics path of more things to want. I bought my first and only brand new car. My tenuous grasp of money became a series of ups and downs until the mid-’90s, when the precariousness of my American ‘want it all and still make ends meet’ life careened into bankruptcy after an catastrophic emergency medical debt.  I was on a financial decline right along with many other self employed folks walking along the edge of the skillfully obscured quicksand of credit overextension and rising costs of living necessities like medical care, pharmaceuticals, all kinds of insurance, groceries, mortgage and car payments. I slipped into that quicksand when I got very sick.
I managed to rebuild my version of the “American Dream†after my bankruptcy. But my experience shook me. I was waking up.
At the turn of the Millennium most folks were riding high on bubbles of all sorts. It was like we were all dancing on the deck of the Titanic just before 2008 rolled over us. I chose to jump ship and try one more time to get this relationship with money right. This time I had the advantage of plenty of experience and would not be easily seduced by attractive come-ons and dire warnings about how much money or insurance or pharmaceuticals each person needs in order to ‘live’ or ‘retire’. And this time I had nothing more to lose. I moved to Costa Rica and spent the last of my pennies for a simple Tico house in a simple Tico neighborhood.
Last week I had a chance meeting with a fellow Ex-Pat while waiting for an oil change at Gasotica, just a few kilometers from my place. After 9 years here as an Ex-Pat he smiled broadly as he said, “Once I had money but the truth is, I never met anyone with lots of money who was really happy!â€Â His words rang true.
My thoughts flipped back to my spiral tablet at aged 10 and how good I felt when I was just a penny ahead.  Amount had nothing to do with it. Maybe the happiness and satisfaction that I’ve searched for in money is just being a penny ahead. Maybe the reward of a good relationship with money is understanding the idea of ‘enough’. And maybe enough doesn’t have to be very much.
What does living with just enough mean? My parrots and dog, Seurat, seem to know already.
For me it means peace of mind.  Living with just enough is possible here in Costa Rica. I live on my comparatively meager Social Security and get a little more from teaching and art sales. I’ve found that I don’t need much most days and I don’t worry anymore about having insurance or money put aside for emergencies. Now before you break into a litany of accusations about not being prepared for emergencies and not carrying sufficient insurance and not taking the best precautions money can buy – please just hear me. I am learning by example.
My extended Costa Rican family here (my neighbors) are poor by American standards. They have a car which sometimes runs if they can get it fixed or have money for gas. If they can’t they walk. They have food on the table which is meager when they don’t have money and plentiful when they do. They rely on family, friends and neighbors when they are in trouble or need something more. They work when they can find work and always, always they sit out on the front porch in the afternoon and talk and laugh and make plans for the family. The younger kids have hopes and dreams just as I did half a century ago. They live peacefully with the ups and downs and have learned to accept them as part of life. They don’t have insurance. They don’t look too far ahead or entertain many high expectations. They are more interested in family and personal relationships than in acquiring stuff.
Their relatively care free life is possible because of some important safety nets here in this country. The government provides universal health care. For non drivers there is an inexpensive bus service in nearly every community. Electricity is charged by a tiered system. If you use little, you pay at a low rate and if you use a lot you pay at a high rate. The basic diet of rice and beans is healthy and inexpensive. They get by, confident that their basic shelter, health care, electricity, food and transportation needs are secure. If something major happens their friends, family and neighbors will help.
Recently my surrogate daughter, Anita told me that the family’s car radiator needed repair. I asked when it would be fixed. She shrugged her shoulders and said that it would be fixed when they had the money. I understood. How could they possibly know when that would be? The future is unknown and it would happen, poco a poco (little by little) as it always had. Life would continue without the car until it was fixed. And sure enough, the day came when the car was fixed without the family spending precious time and energy worrying….
Slowly, slowly I am learning this way of being, this way of understanding. I’m a penny ahead today and I have enough. Tomorrow will take care of itself. I have just enough now.
Jan Hart is an artist, teacher, and adventurer. She is the author of The Watercolor Artist’s Guide to Exceptional Color (2007). More information about her work can be found at: www.janhart.com.
Jan,
1What makes your story more intriguing is that the period of prosperity that you describe was based upon the creation of money out of nothing: a bankers game of monopoly.
Economic growth is measured by ‘gross domestic product’: a statement of the value of manufacture and sales of products by enterprises in every country across the world.
In 2012 global GDP was $71 trillion.
Any national GDP is taken as a statement of the size of a national economy.The largest is $15.8 trillion in the USA; $8 trillion in China; $6 trillion Japan; $3.5 trillion Germany; $2.4 trillion in the UK.
GDP may be seen as national income. It can be seen as ‘growth’ if the income exceeds expenditure. In this way, growth is sponsored by gross domestic production. When there is a surplus, a country is judged to be ‘growing’. When there is a deficit, then the country is subject to depression or recession. At this time many countries are subject to deficit, and have to look elsewhere for sources of money.
In times of decline, deficit, or depression how is growth possible ?
Many people, including myself, think that money is created by the exchange of services, facilities, products, labour for tokens such as currency/coins/notes. The growth of an enterprise depends upon the availability of finance for production, transport, marketing, advertising.
But this begs the question as to where the currency comes from originally. During 2012 it has become much clearer that new money is created, printed by the Central Banks of countries, and given value.
In the UK, the Bank of England has created GBP375 billion in the system. The US Federal Reserve, and the European Central Bank have been doing the same: the Fed has created $1.02 trillion, the ECB printed 500 billion euros. The Bank of Japan has been printing money without limit so as to stimulate inflation in an attempt to put a stop to 20 years of deflation: in 2012, 50 trillion yen, and plans for 91 trillion yen in 2013 [15 times the GDP] This new money is not a product of bank deposits nor savers deposits.
Initially, this new money goes into banks as equities. The Central Bank buys the stocks and shares of commercial banks. It is intended that the funding converts into lending and business investment, and economic growth. In the UK, the current plan of the government is to expand funding for lending. Accordingly, named banks are given funding so as to increase their lending to enterprises to enable growth to occur. In this way, growth is sponsored by the printing of new money.
It is clear that GDP generates more money than Central Bank printing. But, production by corporations relies upon business loans from commercial banks. Corporations may offer up collateral worth $1 million, and borrow $70 million from a commercial bank. The amount of the loan is more a product of the trust of the bank in the corporation. These loans are not based on savings. They are based on the business confidence of the commercial banks. Any corporation that is totally trusted by its bank can borrow any amount from the bank. In this way, growth is sponsored by commercial loans, money that is created from nothing.
In these ways, we now know that growth is made possible at the whims of the bankers.
We “progressives” mock the “Just Say No” approach to drugs, sex and rock-n-roll, but Wendell Berry bemoans the fact that the word “forbearance” has gone out of use in the English language, particularly in America. To forbear is to consciously decide that enough is enough.
We of the modern paradigm mistake our evolutionary position at the top of the pyramid as the most important place, when, in fact, it is the bacteria at the base which supports the entire biotic edifice and our pinnacle is the most precarious and least essential to the web of life.
Similarly, we will soon realize that what we dismissively labeled the “third world” is, in truth, the foundation of a sustainable lifestyle, while we of the “first world” will be the first to tumble off the high-rise, house-of-cards structure of a money-centric global civilization.
2