Money Moves: Goodbye to a weird year
Hi friends,
I usually find it impossible to summarize a year—so much happens! This year though, I feel comfortable saying: The vibes were off. That's what this week's main essay is about. If you have more thoughts on why this year seemed so terrible, feel free to send them my way.
In this week's issue:
1. One cool thing
2. Saying goodbye to a weird year
3. Links: Alicia's work edition
One cool thing
My first impulse when I read this article about the Luddite Teens was to make fun of it (and I did)—you have to laugh at young people discovering the #classics like Into the Wild and basing their entire personalities on them.
But honestly...this is very sweet and cool and something adults (not me though...well...) struggle with as well. A lot of us could get spend less time online and engage with the physical world more.
I don't mean to sound like, well, a Luddite, but the amount of media/posts a lot of us—and it seems especially teens and children—consume is bad for us as individuals and bad for society. As a journalist who wants you to read her newsletter online this may seem hypocritical. Maybe just make time to read this and then put your phone away for the night?
Saying goodbye to a weird year
How do you sum up the economy in 2022? I've been fascinated by all of the videos/tweets/posts on social media I've seen from people stating we're in a recession when...well, we haven't been, technically. Unemployment is low. Layoffs are more or less restricted to the tech sector (of course there will be outliers. I'm talking broad trends). Yet the general ~vibe~ of 2022 has been that things were really bad and only likely to get worse.
I'm not an economist, nor am I an economics reporter—I don't have any particular insight into where 2023 will take us. But it's not difficult to understand why people feel this way. Even as unemployment remains low, inflation has been out of control. More people were getting raises, but we were all paying more for everything, too. Crypto imploded, and the Covid-19 pandemic laid bare how precarious everything is—and how most of the people in charge just won't do the "right" thing, or know what the right thing to do is in the most dire situations. It's possible we all got a little more cynical this year.
My goal for the new year is, as always, to save more money, and I'm prioritizing my emergency savings because the recession fears are getting to me too. I'm also saving for a house (!), despite it being the worst time in a long time to buy one (not my words). Maybe I'm an optimist after all.
Thinking about buying a home and what that means for the future is surprisingly energizing. I was ambivalent about the prospect of home ownership until about a year or so ago; now it's all I think about. I'm checking the FirstTimeHomebuyers subreddit every day, reading every article about buying advice I can find, and saving interior design ideas on Pinterest. (If you know of any good home buying podcasts or podcast episodes, I'd love to hear about them.)
It's very easy to fall into the trap of thinking everything is terrible and doing nothing to change anything—I've been guilty of that sort of stasis myself. I'm reminded of this article I wrote earlier this year, about young adults who save despite it all.
I'm not sure "normalcy," whatever that means, will return next year. But the basics remain the same: You have to decide what's important to you—buying a house? helping your family? having some financial cushion? curbing consumerism?—and take the steps you can to accomplish those things. Do something small every day. It may have been a weird year—hell, a weird three years—but that doesn't mean you can't take some control over future ones.
Links
Here's some of the work I'm most proud of from the past year:
The life-altering cost of long Covid: ‘It’s a full-time job to get better’
IRS will no longer use controversial facial recognition software to verify online accounts (look I'm not going to claim complete credit for this—but IRS did backtrack after I wrote an article about the change and it caught the attention of Sen. Ron Wyden)
Applying for student loan forgiveness was supposed to be ‘seamless and simple.’ So far, it’s been anything but (and all the rest of my student loan coverage)
No, I haven’t hit all of these big financial milestones at 30. And that’s okay
The end of Roe will cause ‘chaos,’ financial disaster for many women
Americans saved a record amount of money during the pandemic. So why don’t we all feel richer?
What to do when trying to save for an uncertain future seems pointless
What a year. Here's to a brighter 2023.
Have a great week,
A
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