Hey, Lilty Cash -- are you named after the almighty buck? Just curious. I really like your user name -- for some reason I always want to say it out loud when I see it -- but I've never posted with you before. I've just been lurking in Press.

In another, she's a 30 year old whose parents pay her rent. I wouldn't mind being the former, but would rather not buy anything ever than be the latter.

Yeah. It's weird how some people just have no issues with letting their parents pay for stuff well into adulthood, and then there are people like me who feel vaguely mortified when Mom sends a birthday card with two $50s inside.

When Chandra Levy disappeared, one of my minor fixations was how she paid for her apartment (which was in a very nice building) on her reported salary. It made more sense when I read somewhere that it was mommy and daddy.

My friends and I (and now Hec and I) wobble back and forth between the cheap nights at each other's homes and the occasional splurgy meal. I know very, very few people (that I'm not related to, which would be a whole other set of posts) who have had consistent, steady income growth over the last decade; mostly, myself included, incomes have fitfully bounced up and plummeted down at bizarrely random times.

Almost everyone I know has either treated me to nice things I couldn't afford or been treated likewise by me, or more likely both. None of us have any real idea what we owe each other or who's in whose debt, and none of us worry that much about it. Which is a huge relief, and very beneficial to our collective sanity.

I also envy Steph's rent.

You know, I took pics of my purple wall and new curtain.

Didn't post them because I live in a box, which is sort of more than embarassing sometimes.

We can never, ever, ever retire.

Betsy, are you committed to that particular house after the kids leave the nest? The move my folks made to a cute one-story over Dad's mobility issues had the pleasant side effect of knocking about 20% off their monthly expenses.

ION, Porn in teen magazines!

Gah. This is so fucking self-indulgent of me, but I can't resist. I almost did it first, and that would have come off better, but oh well.

Salary: $11K
Rent: $0 ($285 in utilities)
Debt: $450

If you count the household, double the salary. Oh, and if you count the tax check coming due, add another $1000 to the debt. Actually that's the fun part of being your own company -- our gender salaries are absolutely equitable. And 50% of the company's executives are a minority! Shouldn't I get an award?

In 2001, we were making $100K. Had we not stepped away in October, we would have both been unemployed immediately that year.

So, anyway, we're thinking pretty hard about moving, possibly building (straw bale!) so we'll need to up our salaries by about a grand a month. But that's a lotta work, so we'll see.

Hey, Lilty Cash -- are you named after the almighty buck?

Actually, it's a Wonderfalls reference. When I found the Buffistas, I just thought up something that made me giggle. I didn't actually imagine I'd stick around. I've been thinking I may change it to just Lilty, though. Or something more related to my own name or something and not so completely random. But I've found myself sort of endeared to it.

Porn in teen magazines!

"Result of human error," they say? Someone's getting their ass fired.

About the friends thing, well, clearly it's an issue for us, and probably worse because if our friends are well off, they're probably supporters of ours, which makes things awkward anyway. So they almost always pick up the tab for us, which makes us feel skeevy, but then if we try to pay, they feel like, are we splurging their support money by taking all our friends out, or what?

We do have one wealthy couple who are close friends who let us pay as often as they pay for us. It's just that we pay at the pizza joint, and they pay at the $30 a plate breakfast buffet.