Down the Up Escalator by Barbara Garson

Author:Barbara Garson [Garson, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-53275-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

Susana Elsemeer and I are small, wisecracking, middle-aged women with almost the same Brooklyn accents. We were both single parents, and we both spent our prime years managing the family’s finances alone. The big difference between our two financial systems was savings—or capital.

Before my daughter was born, I had put away about $30,000 from a play I wrote. It was easy to save since I earned the money all at once. My system from then on was to put all my book advances (also earned all at once) in the bank and spend them as slowly as possible. I never had much more than $30,000 during my single years, but I was always ahead of the game.

When my daughter broke a tooth, I paid cash; when Susana’s house broke a water main, she borrowed. That meant that the $6,000 repair cost her $10,000 or $12,000 or more as she paid it off. Meanwhile, she had that much less equity in the house.

Susana borrowed on her parents’ house in order first to buy and then to maintain it. Then she borrowed from her pension (and not for the first time) in order to put enough cash back into the house to get a mortgage payment she could afford. She’s already hollowed out her two most obvious sources of savings, her house and her pension. How will Susana ever get ahead of the game?

What about saving out of her wages?

Even cheap as I am, I’m not sure I could have come up with a budget that would have allowed a school secretary to set aside enough cash to cover a mortgage of close to $3,000 a month in so deep a recession.

Susana had deliberately rented through a foreign school so she wouldn’t be dependent upon more economically insecure local renters, she’d told me. Though that is what she has now. But she considers them stable since her friend the realtor helped her to find them. Susana herself never mentioned being black or living in a black neighborhood as an economic problem. Still, she’d “diversified” in a manner that would leave her less vulnerable to black or even U.S. unemployment. But she hadn’t prepared for a global recession.

When it came, the Elsemeer finances were precarious enough that despite a good union job (formerly known as a regular job) it took two miracles—a windfall of time plus a windfall of credit—for this single earner to save her house. But save it she did. And though she’s fallen behind a time or two since, she will keep it, I’m sure.

I was still hoping to find someone who got his house free and clear because the bank couldn’t produce all the pieces of the sliced-and-diced mortgage. Frankly, I was a little disappointed that Susana hadn’t used Judge Schack’s decision to say, “Show me the mortgage—or at least, give me a lower interest rate.” But in fact, I had just seen the happiest housing outcome I ever would.

I wish I’d taken a picture of Susana and Samuel Elsemeer waving from their town house steps.

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