Each Other—Where We Are Sandra Steingraber
SOUNDS LIKE A LOT TO ME
Our stories about money—or lack thereof
In 1989, I >nished graduate school
and took a research position at a think
tank in San Francisco. During the job
interview, the institute’s founders mentioned that the salary was $24,000. I said,
“That sounds like a lot.” I’m pretty sure
that sentence does not appear in how-to-negotiate-to-win books. But I was twenty-nine and living on $7,000 in teaching
stipends, so it was a candid, if unstrategic,
thing to say. The founders looked at each
other. Then one of them said, slowly,
“Sandra . . . it’s not.”
Later that year, the Loma Prieta earthquake condemned my apartment, and my
employer, for reasons other than the earthquake, began having trouble making payroll. With my $2,000 FEMA check, I moved
to Chicago, where I became a professor.
My starting salary was $30,000. Three
years later, I quit teaching to start life as
an author, with the help of a fellowship at
Harvard. I cashed out my $3,000 retirement account to pay for the moving van.
The next year, I had an agent and a
book contract. My advance, in the parlance
of publishing, was “in the mid >ve >
gures.” The book took me three years to
write, during which time I lived on the
advance, along with some grants, adding
water to the soup as needed to make the
money last until the footnotes were done.
I married a sculptor whose salary was “in
the low >ve >gures.” Which is one reason
we eloped.
The paperback rights netted an amount
“in the high >ve >gures.” And the advance
for my next book sold for a similar sum. I
used it to buy writing time, pay o= student
loans, and move us to upstate New York
where, >ve years ago, we paid $106,000
for a 1,100-square-foot house. (Monthly
mortgage with property taxes: $998.) By
that time, Je= and I had two children.
When I >le taxes, I feel pleased if our
income as author and artist meets the
median income for a family of four
living in New York ($79,900). We have no
credit card debt or car loans. My retirement plan is to be found sti= and cold at
my writing desk.
That is my >nancial autobiography.
I >rst shared it publicly when I participated
on the table. Or Chopin on the airwaves.
But that was not the message the audience heard. Instead, I received questions
about my complete lack of an investment
portfolio. I explained that, in my life, my
income has always derived from my own
labor and that I had mostly opted out of
interest-bearing accounts. If I had expected
sympathetic nods, that’s not what I got.
Puzzled silence preceded edgy questions.
Had no one explained to me the glorious
arithmetic of compounding interest?
Apparently, many people view money
as an organic, growing thing. For me,
money in the bank is like soup in a chest
freezer. I put it there in June so that when
we all have bronchitis in January, we can
still eat dinner. I don’t expect growth. In
For me, money in the bank is like soup in a chest freezer. I put
it there in June so that when we all have bronchitis in January,
we can still eat dinner. I don’t expect growth.
in a workshop in which four writers
described how we made a living. In so
doing, I told a story, which I intended as
inspiring, about how I once ran out of
money after a writing assignment and a
speaking engagement both fell through. To
pay for my daughter’s piano lesson, I found
$15 in a coat pocket. I then went on to
describe the writing project I managed to
scare up soon after and how you never get
writer’s block when you write to keep food
fact, insistence on economic growth
seems to me an inherent threat to the
planet. In this, I follow political economist
Peter Montague, who points out that
when someone invests $100 and wants a
return of $105, $5 has to be dug out of the
ground somewhere.
Am I alone in my beliefs here? It’s
hard to guess. Even though the Great and
Terrible Oz called Wall Street has now
been unveiled as a doddering swindler,
