Generosity

Term has started so I've been busier than during the summer.

I'm settling into the house alright. The excess furniture has been moved around enough that we can live with it. Sharing my home with Sweetie and with Intrepid Anthropologist is a joy. We have our wobbles, and our disagreements, and so far we have managed to negotiate them with warmth, respect and generosity.

My finances are very poor at present. The plan is to get some teaching work locally, which will eventually enable me to abandon my time-hungry commute to the Wilds of North London where I currently teach two evenings per week; once that happens I can get even more teaching locally. At the rates I charge it should be possible to live on relatively few hours of "work" in terms of contact time, but building up a class of students is likely to take a few years. Everything is word-of-mouth in this business.

In the meantime I am trying to keep my spending low. That's hard when my biggest expense is rent and my current income doesn't cover it! I am very thankful that Sweetie is supportive and generous; he has been making up the gaps. That isn't always comfortable but it is a better alternative than trying to do office work (which would destroy my mental health in about two months), assuming I could even get such a job in the current economic climate.

Something I have thought about before and want to explore again in more depth is the idea of creating a sort of artificial stipendiary situation. I would like to live with more security and a higher standard of living than I did as a student, but I'm well aware of lifestyle creep, the ease with which one can spend more and more and more and then end up needing a higher and higher salary to support that spending. I don't want to be on that treadmill. I know I tend to be a bit of a spendthrift, impulsive about buying things for myself or others if I have the money to hand, and so it seems that perhaps the best way to do this would be to limit the portion of my income that I can access easily. The rest could be donated to charity, or perhaps held in an interest-bearing account and the interest donated (I have ethical concerns about usury and need to research this more), or simply spent on others when I see they are in need.

There are some obvious benefits of attempting to live this way, of un-hitching my spending from my work. One would be that as long as I was earning enough to cover my stipend I could do my work without having to worry about whether it would be efficient financially. I could participate in voluntary collaborative projects more freely, without worrying about whether it would impact my paid teaching work. I could take on students who otherwise could not have lessons. I could choose one-off projects based on whether I like them, rather than constantly needing to assess whether they pay enough.

Another major benefit of this type of working pattern would be a certain amount of financial simplicity. I don't mean just the fact that I wouldn't have a lot of spending money and so wouldn't be able to buy too many shiny things... though that is definitely a factor. But as a freelance musician, my actual earned income is always going to be scattered, hit-and-miss. If you've always had a regular salary (at least while you've had regular outgoings) you might not realise how difficult this can be: I can't predict from one month to the next how much money I will have. This is not comfortable. I think it does contribute somewhat to my tendency to spendthriftiness, actually: if there is something I need or want and I do have the cash to get it, I tend to purchase right away because I know I may not have the funds later. Knowing how much I have to spend, even if it's only a little, seems pretty attractive. Even if I were not inclined to give away my spare money, I would need to do some sort of income-leveling exercise anyway.

But I think the real benefit to imposing a structure like this will be that when I find that someone else really needs money I won't be thinking "darn, I could have done without that book I bought last week if I'd known so-and-so didn't have the money for such-and-such" but should be able to be more generous. Maybe that would also be achievable by much more mindful spending on my part, and of course there will still be conflicts (easy example: Person A needs some educational material and Person B needs shoes that fit but I've already spent it all on train tickets for Person C to go visit an ill family member), but the hard thinking about what I actually need vs what I want, and how to balance that against the needs of others, will already have been done.

For now this is all pie in the sky, and it will remain so until I am earning more sustainable amounts on a regular basis. In the meantime I am trying to keep spending low and also to keep track of what I do spend so that I have some sort of guideline as to what is reasonable. I'm also thinking about the logistics, about how much I sensibly need to save before I can just give the rest away, about how much I might try to donate even now. I'm thinking about whether it would make more sense to allocate funds as I usually spend them -- impulsively, based on what comes to my attention -- or whether it would be better to make a commitment to a cause over the long term (something like short-term, interest-free loans for local families having trouble). Perhaps a little of both is the obvious answer there.

If you could choose your own stipend, how would you do it? How would it change your working life if you could be paid enough to live on (but not much more) and be told "Now go do whatever work you think needs doing"? Do you think you'd work more, or less? How would you decide what "enough to live on" actually is? Does this strategy sound at all manageable on an individual level, or does it require big bureaucratic structures? (Remember that I'd have to do most of the paperwork myself anyway!)

If you are already on a stipend, what is the best thing about it? What is the worst? Am I completely bonkers? Oh wait, we all know the answer to that last one.