The Globe yesterday painted a soothing picture of life on the unemployment line, pointing at the Ayanna family of Somerville, which is now making do on $35,000 a year and which is just the way life ought to be, according to some "slow family living" group the Globe found.
On Dan Kennedy's Media Nation, Amiri Ayanna fills in some of the details the Globe left out, such as the fact that she, her husband and two kids never turned the heat on in their condo this past winter and may soon have to move to a studio apartment:
... Also, I wanted to clear up one other inaccuracy stated in the Boston Globe article: Ariel is enjoying his family time now, out of necessity, but is very actively and strenuously looking for work, since, as I stated, our financial situation is fairly tenuous. ...
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Comments
Hey, it's easy to live in
By anon
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 10:14am
Hey, it's easy to live in Somerville on $35K! I've done it for years! Of course, I'm single with no kids and live with roommates in a group house, but that counts, right?
Jesus, how out of touch can the Globe GET?!
Im single in my 20's, live
By ShadyMilkMan
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 10:35am
Im single in my 20's, live with roommates, and make more then 35,000 a year and I have a hard time saving money, and I dont consider myself a wasteful person!
I grew up in a situation similar to the one mentioned for a few years, luckily we broke out of it, and also luckily we never had to turn the heat off but it meant living paycheck to paycheck without any frills.
Ah, yes, the joys of having
By anon
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:20pm
Ah, yes, the joys of having a middle class income and living cheaply to pay for the education that secured us that middle-class income.
Lucky for me I kept my
By ShadyMilkMan
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 1:11pm
Lucky for me I kept my college expenses down (I fully self financed minus any grants/scholarships I got) so by 30 I will be breaking free from any debt relating to undergrad. I could have done it earlier, but hey a guys gotta have cable tv!
Thats one of the things that stops me from even looking at places like law school. I would have fears that I would rack up serious debt and then not want to work for a large firm or anyplace that was capable of paying me enough to pay back the loans before I retired.
I had to take loans for
By anon
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 1:28pm
I had to take loans for undergrad, but my grad has fairly low prices and a sane pricing structure. I pay by credit, not by semester, so it works out to about $8k a year if you go part time. Which isn't cheap, but it's not onerous. Then I just have to pay off my undergrad. ...yay?
Law school can be made to work
By neilv
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 1:43pm
I understand that it's pretty common for the highly principled do-gooder types to go do a tour of duty in a big law firm for the experience and paying off the loans... before then going and doing the kind of non-profit or government work for which they went to school in the first place.
When my ex-gf and I visited NYC, we stayed in the nice loft condo of a classmate of hers who was doing corporate law there, and planned to go work for the DA as soon as she could afford to. Two highly-principled other lawyer friends have similar stories, going to the big-name corporate firms when first out of school.
Also, some schools can hook you up with loan forgiveness programs. Go into a dirt-poor public interest job after graduation, and they sigh and write off your loans. :) At least, that's what they said when I was talking with schools, maybe 5 years ago. (I decided that the barrier to me doing law school at that time was *not* the law school tuition. I still had debt from prior educational and do-goodering pursuits, and I couldn't afford to pay the interest on that if I stopped working so I could go to law school.)
Is it income?
By merlinmurph
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 6:34pm
Curious question: If one does arrange to perform public service in exchange for having loans forgiven, are the loans reported as income, and therefore subject to income tax?
I thought anytime a loan is not paid, it is reported as income. Even if you foreclose on a house and leave a $100K note, then the $100K would be income, and you'd need to pay tax on it.
Just curious - thanks.
They should learn to make cheese
By Sock_Puppet
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 11:11am
For blessed are the cheesemakers.
This looks like some awfully sloppy reporting, if you can even call it that.
I'm guessing that Maggie Jackson, who is a graduate of Yale and the London School of Economics, and lives in New York City with her family, doesn't know a heck of a lot about what it's like to try to support a family on $35K a year. It seems she finds the idea somewhat romantic.
It looks like her pet pony is how distraction and multitasking are bad and make our lives worse, and she set out to prove her point with real-life examples of how much nobler and more virtuous those parents newly freed from such a terrible grind have become. So she did an interview, used what little of it fit with her theory, made up a bit to smooth it out, and segued quickly into her unrelated topic. Don't you hate it when your sources won't just shut up about their feelings and say what you want them to?
Oh, here's the funny part: 8 February 2009, she wrote a column called "Tuning in to hear others."
One way it might be possible
By SwirlyGrrl
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:29pm
The only way we made it through some lean years of under/unemployment was because we bought a house in 1998. That meant that our living expenses were stabilized and we could write off a ton of our housing costs and get all our payroll taxes back. If we were renters, we'd be have to have crammed into a two bedroom in Everett for what our mortgage cost us.
I suspect that that earlier money may have gone into college funds for the kids, retirement investments, paying off the cost of law school (huge money there) and getting a down payment on the house/paying down the mortgage.
In a related Jounralistic development...
By anon
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 11:55am
Live Pyschic chat with Joanne Gerber on www.boston.com at noon.
Retire at 35
By johnmcboston
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:11pm
I was impressed they were living on 35K and saving money. If they had lived like that and saved money while he was making 170K, they'd have quite the savings account.
Im assuming they must have
By ShadyMilkMan
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:15pm
Im assuming they must have quite the savings account now because if he was making 170,000 a year(!!!!!!) and his mortgage was less then 2,000 a month, and according to them they did not lead a lavish lifestyle then there must be a huge basket of cash lying around somewhere (unless he did the "smart" thing and invested most of it, I use quotes because that was the smart thing to do around the time he was making that money.)
Been there, done that, Globe: You're clueless
By david_yamada
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:28pm
Sometimes it's really, really hard to rally for the Globe. This paper is a few botched labor negotiations away from extinction, yet they're still running these insipid silver-lining-amidst-economic-meltdown pieces to show us how delightful it is to make it on, say, 20% of your previous income.
It's also a bunch of crap.
Even for those have been making $35k all along, the struggle continues. It means sweating it out to the next paycheck, doing without, and sometimes borrowing a few bucks from friends to buy lunch. If you have a family, it means struggle, and more struggle, and juggling credit card payments to keep a step ahead of the dogs.
True, today I can get all soggy about what it was like to earn $20k as a newly-minted Legal Aid lawyer living in NYC and paying off student loans in the mid-80s. But back then only my blithe assumption that nothing dire would happen to me and my youthful attraction to "bohemian" living allowed me to ignore how close I was to being in big trouble financially.
Two theories
By neilv
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:29pm
It could be another lifestyle trends piece to reassure the new humble peasants about their virtuous lot in life.
Or it could be to promote this slowfamilyliving.com company and their ironically pricey workshops.
Third theory
By adamg
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 12:39pm
Speaking here as a one-time junior-grade reporter:
The idea is just a cool story and newspapers don't have fact checkers.
Scratch Option A
By fenwayguy
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 2:43pm
It wasn't written by Lifestyle Trend Specialist Sarah Schweitzer, who most recently spotted the "low-key Brahmin chic" trend, only a month after her jaw-dropping "Waist reduction" piece was immortalized in newsprint.
Maggie has an agenda, and I think Neil's right: it ends in .com.
I dunno
By neilv
Mon, 05/11/2009 - 3:53pm
Just to be clear, I don't mean that I *believe* the intent of the piece was to promote the company. I just couldn't tell that that wasn't the intent.
The Globe knowingly mixes crud in with their good stuff, and I can't always tell when a piece is good-Globe or crud-Globe.
2001, I was a dot-commer at
By anon
Tue, 05/12/2009 - 2:03am
2001, I was a dot-commer at roughly the same age a few years out of school, making about 1/4 of this guy's salary. Single, lived in Cambridge, little savings, no help from my parents, etc. I collected unemployment, too, and it was hard to make ends meet. Anyway, that's not the point I want to make.
Whomever wrote the Globe article is batshit insane.
Being out of work does offer a nice change of pace possibly, and allows time to reset your life a little bit. However, being laid off, job hunting, and knowing that it's really tough out there is HARD. It's demoralizing, frustrating, and really scary. EVERYONE I know who went through this all felt about the same.
The general tone of this article is trying to spin their situation into sounding like a lifestlye choice, which, when you're out of work, or your income is low, is just a plain lie. The family may have chosen to live frugally, but at least they would've had the choice.
Good luck to you
Yeah seriously, looking for
By ShadyMilkMan
Tue, 05/12/2009 - 9:21am
Yeah seriously, looking for work is like a full time job. It is putting yourself on the line each and every day, and in this economy it means getting doors slammed in your face every day as well. Its one thing to be in sales and have your service/product rejected out of hand and a complete other thing to be selling yourself only to be told that your not wanted. I am very happy I have a job now, even though I am looking to take the next step up, and if I were to be laid off tomorrow Im sure I would make the most of it, but I sure wouldnt be happy about it (well maybe for the first day or two, but that would only be because of the 24 hours of drinking, after that its all gloomy.)
Has anyone e-mailed the reporter about these discussion threads?
By Ron Newman
Tue, 05/12/2009 - 11:24am
I'm thinking of letting Maggie Jackson know about the multiple discussion threads (here, at Media Nation, and at the Somerville Journal blog), to see if she wants to respond. But maybe someone has already done that? If so, please speak up here.