Column: Something About Nothing

My household is shutting down. The two people that reside in my household cannot balance our budget nor can we agree on a plan to balance our budget.

Working together never has been our strong suit. Usually we agree to disagree but when it comes to the budget we are on opposing sides.

I made a list of the things that I thought we should eliminate. On my list were turning out lights in our home. We have oil lamps and we have oil. It stays lighter in the evenings so we could use our oil lamps instead of light bulbs. After all we did that last summer when our electricity was out and it forced us to listen to the quiet and actually talk to each other.

One of us thought we could turn off the natural gas. One of us felt that we don’t need heat during the summer and we could live on cold food and cold showers. One of us loves hot baths and showers and will battle to the end for the right to a hot bath.

I thought I was compromising on our television choices. We could drop the sports channels, racing channels and the golf channel. My husband thought we should drop HGTV, Own, and my soap channel. There is no compromise there.

I was asked to give up my cell phone and my internet. I couldn’t agree to that. I thought he should give up his golf club membership.

Our grocery bill could be cut. I don’t think we need Doritos or chips or pop. They are a non-essential item. Our frugal grocery money should be spent on fruit, vegetables and healthy products. He would cut out yogurt, coffee and doughnuts. Again, we can’t agree.

Can you believe this? He would make me cut out my quick stop at Caribou for a treat when we buy groceries. I don’t think so.

One of us wants to give more to charity such as the Salvation Army, St. Judes, homeless shelters and church and put less in our IRA’s for retirement. The other one wants to cut back on those donations and put more in our retirement accounts.

Negotiations have broken off. We are at an impasse. We need to call in a negotiator. We called in Sam our faithful pooch to deem essential services that need to be paid. Sam decided we need to continue our grocery buying. Each of our little food quirks keeps us in a good mood and more apt to give Sam treats.

Sam thought we should give up our vehicle and walk him everywhere. We both decided we were not happy with our negotiator so we bribed him with a bone to retreat to his corner.

I do not know how long my household will be shut down. We have ceased talking about the budget. It is easier to talk about our kids, our dog, our relatives and anything that doesn’t have to do with our budget.

We do agree on one thing that we think we don’t need to pay. We could cut out paying our state taxes. The state is shut down so they should not need to collect our taxes.

Agreeing on one thing is a start, perhaps in a month or two we might see things differently and decide that our household being shut down and our needing to be right attitudes is not the best way to handle our situation. Then again I really like my Caribou coffee, my HGTV, my soaps and having my own way. It could be a long summer.

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send email to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net.