The Real Risk

Fin was ‘sposed to be helping me with the electric project. Instead, he was training the cows to eat apples from his mouth.

I was thinking last evening about my comments yesterday pertaining to saving money. Specifically, I was thinking of my poor uncles Kent and Bruce, devoted readers of this space, and how they probably spent the entirety of the night in sleepless agony, fretting over my family’s capacity to weather the proverbial rainy day. For instance, perhaps I am attacked by a piglet and whilst running from said piglet, I stumble into the bacon-smoking pig, and no one notices for days (why? Hell, I don’t know… this is all hypothetical) and by the time they’ve found me, I’m frostbitten and hypothermic and have forever lost feeling in the tips of my fingers. No longer can I type.

The thing is, you have to take my comment about saving money in context. For starters, we have no debt. None. No mortgage, no credit card, no car payment. Penny even paid off her note at the hair salon (man, those frosted perms… crazy expensive), and I finally whittled my bar tab down to nothin’. But in all seriousness, what’s it worth to not have a mortgage?  In other words, if we did have a mortgage on this place – 2,000 square feet and 40-acres – what would it cost us every month, every year? Twenty grand? Even more? So long as we muster our property tax bill, ain’t no one taking this place from us because I fell in with the bacons and can no longer toil in service to the bank.

Second, in this house right now, guarded by razor wire, security cameras, and two shotgun-wielding prepubescent boys, we have at minimum a year’s worth of food put up. And not just any old hash, but real friggin’ food of the sort you pretty much can’t buy at any price. But if you could, what would that cost you annually, for a family of four heavy eaters? Another twenty large? I bet so. Probably more. So as you can see, already we’re up to nearly $50k in savings.

Third, we have the skills and resources to replicate this food production year after year after year. We have breeding animals on the hoof. We have some of the most productive gardens I’ve seen anywhere. We have fruit trees and berry bushes and a barn full of hay and a woodlot full of firewood and saw logs. We know where to find woods nettles and wild mushrooms and chokecherries and blackberries and lord knows what else my boys are eating out there. We have neighbors and friends and family we care about and who care about us. What is all this worth? How much in savings does it equate to? I can’t even put a number on it.

Here’s the truth: If I could live my life in a way that was meaningful to me and have a wad o’ money in the bank, I would. I truly would. I’d like to think I’d do something purposeful with that money, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t allow it to creep into my thoughts and emotions. But even if I couldn’t muster the former, and even if I did fall under its thrall, I’d probably take it. I’m not an idiot; I only play one in this space.

But that is not my path, and I am unwilling to exchange the incredible privileges I am fortunate enough to claim – of doing work that matters to me, of rising every morning truly excited about what the day will bring, of spending the bulk of my waking hours in the company of the people I love most in this world – for the ability to amass money and material resources. Some people, I know, hold both these birds in hand – that feeling of purpose and those financial resources – and I salute them. I hope they know how good they’ve got it. But in my experience, limited and anecdotal as it is, too many people allow the pursuit of those resources to become an impediment to living the life they dream about.

Some people may view our choices around money as risky, perhaps even irresponsibly so. Perhaps my accounting above will go part of the way toward making them feel differently. Or perhaps not. Whatever the case, to me (and to Penny, whom I’m normally loathe to speak for, but I know well her feelings on this issue), the real risk isn’t whether or not we have enough money saved. It’s whether or not we’re living.