Just relax

You have a job (almost). The weather is perfect. In this enforced break in the action, can’t you really take a break? Relax.

Easier said than done. After two years of pushing hard to figure out the financial world as it shattered and reformed itself into unrecognizable shapes, after a year of attempting not only a new business but a new way of relating to the world of commerce, I seem to be hooked on anxiety.

Last week, I went to a movie for the first time in….well, in years. I’ve been on the treadmill every other day. Two or three, sometimes four dog walks a day. Bubble baths and reading in front of the fire. A couple of days ago, my shoulders lost their accustomed tension. I could breathe. I notice that even when I play solitaire, I play more slowly, no longer driven to top red with black with red, to strive for an outcome.

Back in the era when I had regular vacations, I went to Deer Isle for three weeks for pottery camp. What a wonderful break that was! All that was on my schedule was sitting at the kickwheel, making pots, occasionally glancing up to see whales spouting out beyond the firs on a rocky shore. Other people to share projects and meals, all cooked for us, and nightly meteor showers for our delight. And still, it took me a good two weeks to unwind. The third week was restoration.

It’s been a long time since I had a real vacation. I have had adventures and expeditions sandwiched in between work trips and, more recently, shorter breaks to enjoy a day trip to Canada or New Hampshire, or just to contemplate Vermont. There is a lot to contemplate in Vermont!

So when last week I was informed that I should expect a job offer in a week or so, to be followed by a couple weeks (or so) for background checks, my brain informed me that this was a good time for a break. It is always possible that this job offer could evaporate, but if it does, I’ll only have lost a few anxious weeks of job hunting. And I will be better for the break, of that I am sure.

Now if only I can continue to slow down my brain, tune up my muscles, and open up to a new life.

Limbo spa

Well, this is a strange turn of events. I think I have a new job, but there are hurdles. Steps to go through. It is working for the Federal government, so everything has to go to Washington for approval. I didn’t know that Washington even knew about me, much less cared, but it appears that they (whoever they are) do.

In this intervening time, I’m declaring a spa month. Lots of walks with dogs, some serious exercise every day, good food, green tea. The kids are excited, and so am I. How often do we get a chance to relax and rejuvenate while looking forward to a new life? This back-to-school time has always seemed to me like a new beginning.

It couldn’t be a more beautiful time to take a break. Foliage is peaking: great washes of color light up the horizon. All across Vermont, people are picking apples, carving pumpkins and reveling in beautiful, crisp days. Even a rainy day like yesterday appeals, as the bright colors shine through the mist.

I have some goals for this period, but one of them is to work hard at not being so goal-directed. Yesterday I drove down to the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival, almost. It seemed that as I got closer to the festival, it rained harder and harder. And I was getting tired, so when only a few miles from my goal I made a wrong turn, I surrendered and came home.

Actually, I stopped at the mall, another rare experience. For the first time in many months, I was able to buy something frivolous in the fabric store and something necessary (pantyhose and a new calendar) without worry. It is nice to contemplate a regular paycheck. I’m unlikely to go too crazy, but I did consider buying spring bulbs, a luxury that I have not been able to afford for some time. I still might do that, but not until the Federal Government makes up its Washingtonian mind whether to bring me into the fold.

Meanwhile, let’s just relax! I have to go now. There seems to be a pressing need for the morning walk to the pond.

Reframing

There are giant bugs pounding on my window!

No wait. Not bugs at all. They are hummingbirds, seven or eight of them.

Someone who knows birds tells me that it is migration time. Sure enough, when I look, there are songbirds of every shape and color...everywhere. They particularly like the crabapple tree outside my picture window.

Not giant bugs, tiny birds on their way to South America. How cool is that?

Bravery

Denial is a lovely thing. It allows us to hide behind our perceptions of the world, our ideas of who we are and how we fit. Or think we do. But sometimes the puzzle pieces come together with blinding speed, moving so fast that we cannot even parse their trajectory. It’s as if we were there….and now we are another place altogether. Here. Reality has shifted.

People think I am brave. I am the one who packed a seventeen-foot truck and left Brooklyn to move to Vermont. No job, a rented apartment. Stepping off into the void. Brave, right? Maybe not.

I am the one who quit a job without having another job. I was hoping to build a practice as a financial advisor, because I love the work, loved the clients even more. On purpose, could I have picked a worse year to try this? Launching into a new business venture, it is important to be appropriately capitalized. But how does one capitalize for a hundred year event? One doesn’t. I didn’t.

There is a woman I know slightly who is far braver than I. She has the bad gene for breast cancer and cervical cancer, and this fall, she will undergo surgery to remove both breasts and her uterus. She approaches it as a matter-of-fact choice. She wants to live to see her children grow up and to play with her grandchildren.

In many ways I envy her clarity. I have neither chick nor child, so I didn’t know what to look forward to when I gave up my last job, still don’t. But I know when I don’t have a choice. When staying feels wrong, it is time to go, and there is no real choice. It’s not a matter of bravery, just a matter of keeping faith with whoever or whatever you hold dear. Time to move on to the next chapter.

Moral dimensions of financial crisis

Last week I met a man who was enraged. Like so many of us, he had lost about forty percent of the value of his investment portfolio, and he was at a loss to figure out where to put his anger. Yet he sensed that the other side of his anger and grief, there was a different perspective. He was anxious to get there, to be free of his distress. He wanted to move on.

Most of us weren’t dealing with confessed fraudsters like Bernie Madoff. So should we be angry at our advisors? Maybe. Certainly, Bernie Madoff and his like should be put in prison, regulation should be re-written and actually enforced, and the pay structure at financial institutions should be brought in line with performance over some reasonable time frame.

But I think there is a bigger issue here. I think most of us are really angry at ourselves. At least for a short time, we believed in bubbles. We believed that real estate prices would go up and up. We believed that the inflated price our neighbor received selling last year would drive the price of our own homes next year.

We believed that credit would always be easy to get. We believed that huge financial institutions could not, would not fail. And, most dangerous of all, we believed that the crazy things that happened in some markets (sub-prime, alt-A, CDOs) would not affect us as long as we were not directly participating in those markets. We were wrong.

I think this means that if we want to get past our anger, we need to stop looking outward and start looking at our own lives. Fundamentally, this is a moral crisis. We had money, we thought, and now we have less of it. Things like this happen, as the disclosures on our brokerage accounts and retirement funds say: You can lose money. If your financial advisor told you otherwise, then your advisor may belong in jail with Bernie.

We were wrong. We lost money. And now we need to forgive ourselves for it.

If anger at our advisors represents the first layer of the onion, and anger at ourselves is the second, then the next layer of the onion is fear that we may run out of money. Thirty-somethings are a lot more likely to be able to shrug off big losses than sixty-somethings, who have less time to catch up. Those of us who are older are facing the necessity to retire later than we planned, work part-time in retirement, travel less than we had dreamed, or make other adjustments along two themes: planning and stewardship.

I’m a planner by nature, creating alternatives for a variety of contingencies, so this is second nature to me. I chose my house partly because it has a first floor bedroom and bath, although I trust I am a good thirty years from needing to live on one floor with a caretaker upstairs.

If I lose more money before the time I need to start drawing on my retirement plans, I can sell my house and live somewhere more modest. That’s a contingency plan, and it is also a nod to stewardship, by which I mean not taking more than I need.

Right now, I live on two acres, I drive a car that gets 36 miles to the gallon, and I limit my trips to my Burlington office to two per week. I compost. I garden. Could I do more? Yes. I could live in a smaller house, even shared space. I don’t want to do that because I am a very private person, and I love having large dogs. But if I had to give up privacy and dogs, I could do it.

Not everyone is as fortunate. Many people in these times have cut their use of resources, their own and those of the wider world, to the bone. So they need more from the rest of us. That means our charitable contributions, our taxes, the prices of goods and services are going up. Which brings me to the next layer of the onion: anger at other people who now need help so desperately, our anger that drives a wedge between humans.

And our anger was supposed to be about money? No, it is about unfairness, taking more than belongs to us, stewardship of our own and others’ resources, forgiveness of others who need our help more than ever, and perhaps most of all, forgiveness of ourselves. Once we get past the moral dimensions of this crisis, we can focus on rebuilding financial plans.

Living on the Far Side

One day last week as I drove up the hill where I live, I looked to the left and counted thirteen in my neighbor’s front yard, then another fourteen to the right in the open fields.
A few days without snow cover, and there is grass to eat, but the deer seem to have to range far to find enough. They are out at dawn and at dusk, as we might expect, but also in broad mid-day. The deer are hungry.

Constrained to the house more than usual, my dogs watch out the windows and let me know when more deer appear. I have become vigilant, doing a complete scan all around the house before anyone goes out even for a quick pee or to run the ten yards or so to the fenced dog run. Still, a couple of times when I thought there were no deer, we stepped outside to see a whirl of white tails. Thank goodness, my dogs come when they are called, at least if I speak quickly before they are in full pursuit.

The deer seem to be getting stronger, but they don’t move away quickly even when human or car approaches. They stand and stare, as if to say, “Please, let us eat this nice grass. There is nothing for us in the woods.” It’s a little spooky, a little like living in a Far Side cartoon. It makes me feel as if I should rush from car to house and lock the door, lest I hear the sound of hooves on the front porch and see antlers framed in the front windows.

Meanwhile, the back window—one of only two on that north-facing side of the house—has broken. No trees nearby, no falling snow or ice. I have to wonder if a bird flew into it with enough force to crack the glass. And from the front windows, I just saw a flash of black and white fur. Skunks back in the barn. Nature is on the move. It must be spring.

Don't jump

From a family member:

A protester's sign in front of the New York Stock Exchange: "Jump you fuckers!" with the comment "I try not to forward things, but I just had to send this. Points for creativity and brevity of message."

My response:

Zero points for forgetting that your sister worked across the street from the New York Stock Exchange for seventeen years.

It's fun to demonize someone else, isn't it? But the majority of people who work in financial services in New York are just regular folks, trying to cover their bills. Think folks like Doug and Carrie in The King of Queens--that's what most people who work in financial services are like. Then there is a layer of professionals very like me...in fact I was one of them.

The financial industry expands and contracts much more than other industries. I haven't seen the job loss numbers in a few weeks, but I seem to recall losses of over 170,000 jobs in the last survey I saw. That's not just in banks, investment banks and insurance companies--it also affects cab drivers, coffee shops, hair salons.

I can tell you from personal experience in 1998 when I was laid off the first time that it is a double hit when these waves of job reductions occur. Not only do you not have your old paycheck, but there are very few jobs to compete for. And the bills keep coming. Not surprisingly, there were a few people who jumped. One woman I knew jumped under a subway car.

I know you didn't intend to offend me, and you didn't. But I do find these flip responses annoying. There is plenty of blame to go around for this crisis, and plenty of pain as well.

Was there greed on Wall Street? Yes. But if you rounded up the people who were driven solely by greed, I believe you would be able to fit them in the average small town high school gymnasium. Add the ones who simply did not understand the complexities of the financial instruments they were selling, and then you need a much bigger venue.

But that is the nature of the financial industry. Do you think that the people who sell variable annuities with guaranteed income streams really completely understand the embedded risks? Very few do. We have to rely on regulators to bullet-proof the products that are sold, and regulation tends to focus on the general public, not on the supposedly sophisticated investors that bought mortgage backed securities. Regulators failed us in the years since mortgage requirements were relaxed. And individuals who took out mortgages that they couldn't afford deserve blame as well. Plenty of blame to go around.

Personally, I have lost about 40% of my retirement savings if you measure it today. But I have great confidence in the US financial system to rebound. I was on Wall Street (literally, in an office overlooking the New York Stock Exchange) in 1987 when the market crashed.

And I was there on 9/11/01. We really thought the world was ending then. This crisis does not feel anywhere near as bad as that--we were unsure whether the markets or the city itself would survive the attack. An attorney I worked with briefly appeared on the front page of the New York Post head down on his way out of an upper floor window of the World Trade Center. Another jumper.

From one of our recent newsletters, here are a few other downturns for your consideration:

October 1973: Arab Oil Embargo launced a financial crisis, time to market improvement was 12 months
October 1974: Franklin National bank collapse (bankruptcy), time to market improvement was 2 months
May 1984: Continental Illinois bankruptcy, time to market improvement was 2 months
May 1986: Drexel Burnham Lambert bankruptcy, time to market improvement was 2 months
October 1987: US market crash (financial crisis), time to market improvement was 2 months
February 1995: Barings Bank bankruptcy, time to market improvement was 0 months
September 2001: 9/11 attacks (political crisis) time to market improvement was 12 months

There is no guarantee, of course, that we will see a near term recovery in the markets, but my experience of past downturns gives me a lot of confidence in the future.

And I hope that nobody jumps over loss of a job or part of an IRA.

Sunshine at my back

Recovery of a window in my dining room has had more impact than I ever could have expected. The light is different throughout the entire ground floor, all four rooms in this simple and traditional Vermont farmhouse.

As I sit in my new most favorite place, I can see out windows in all four directions. First, I imagine eyes in the back of my head, looking across the porch to the dawn. To my left are two majestic maple trees and a wide expanse of pasture, the old dairy barn in the foreground. Ahead, I glimpse the crabapple, which seems to bloom only one year in three, periodic victim to harsh Vermont winters. Beyond the crabapple, the forsythia, even more sensitive, and beyond that, the valley stretches down to the village. To my right, perhaps the most fraught, a single small window looks to the maple grove and the northern wind. Vermont farmers knew how to build, windows few and small to the north, many and expansive to the south.

I could sit in this spot for years, analyzing portfolios and answering correspondence. Puppies at my feet. A pot of tea at the ready. Taking breaks to run to the raspberry patch or the vegetable garden. Perhaps I’ll get a chicken or a few.

The downside of my new profession is that I must, must, must make calls to people I know little or not at all. If the payoff is sitting with the sun at my back and German Shepherds on my feet, I’ll hit that bid all day long.

German Shepherds on my feet

As I spend more time working from home, my contentment in this house grows. I find myself tweaking furniture placement, finishing up construction projects, opening the curtains wider to better enjoy the views. To the east and south, the Nebraskas lie beyond wide vistas of pasture, forest and valley. Out back, old Mr. Trombley’s prized maple grove still stands. The trees are enormous and very old. Nobody taps them now, and every now and then one falls. Except for half a dozen, they stand on my neighbor’s land, and none is near enough to threaten my cozy nest. There is only one window to the back, not a very large one, the winds of winter coming from that direction, but I can see the maple grove from here.

My dining room, where I now sit and type, is all new since yesterday, the culmination of a project to remove a clumsily placed closet and put in its place my large breakfront cabinet, formerly in front of a window. There are now three windows in this room, and the entry way is more graceful. From the porch, you have a welcoming view right into the dining room, or at least it is welcoming to those already acquainted with my two German Shepherds. And from the dining room, you can see out to the porch, orange and gold nasturtiums perched all around the rail. Sunrise happens through this window, and before today I had never seen it save from the porch.

I’m working through what it means to work from home. Do I have my office-office and my home-office in the same space? Will I really allow clients into my home? Do I try to create an upstairs space that is psychically extra-personal? How do I feel about cluttering the dining room with laptop and files? All of these are good and intriguing questions. In the winter, this room with its three windows, two interior doors and one exterior door may be chilly, but right now I sit with the dawn at my back, views to the outdoors on every side, and toasty German Shepherds on my feet.

August morning

On Sunday, my friend shook his head sadly. He travels throughout the region, and already he was seeing leaves—just a few—changing on the trees at elevation. Surely, I rejoined, it must be only stressed trees. We were only a few days into August. And we scarcely feel we have had a summer, so much rain have we had this year.

Ten inches one week. The farmers despair of their hay. Children are whining, and so are adults. We are missing the opportunity to soak our bones in intense summer sunshine, to pack away remembrance of warmth during the proverbial two weeks of Vermont summer. We specially need warmth now, as we face winter with unprecedented fuel prices.

Today as I walked to my car, I could no longer deny the signs. Not one colored leaf, but many. True, I don’t see them in the branches yet, but all over the front lawn lies confetti of red and gold. August 7. Usually, we get another week or even two before a certain chill turns the air, and we know. Winter is on the way.

Life will speed up now. There are kids to get ready for school, insulation to wrap around pipes, wood to stack, vegetables to freeze. Once we see those first leaves and feel that first chill, it’s time to get busy.