This is a post from Make Love, Not Debt staff writer, Stacy Cowley.

photo: angusf

Personal finance blogger Eilene Zimmerman had a post recently that really intrigued me: How Money Can Hurt Your Marriage.

Eilene hits right on the head a thing that has always played, subconsciously, into my own relationship dynamics: the way finances become a power tool.

Eilene’s then-partner significantly out-earned her. "One of the biggest problems in our marriage was his demanding job (that paid well) and that the power in our relationship was – at least from my vantage point – all economic," she writes. "I felt like I had no right to ask for anything I wanted – not material things, but more like time away from the kids, time to work, time to go out with friends, essentially time – because he was working so hard. And although money is empowering in many, many ways, it made me feel powerless, because I didn’t have much of my own. My income was tiny compared to The Husband’s, so how could I declare I would be taking a nap on Saturday afternoon?"

Ding ding. That’s a thought process I suspect is common to a lot of women. Maybe it’s prevalent with anyone, of either gender, in an income-imbalanced relationship, but  my impression is that women are more susceptible to it. Including me — on both sides of the equation.

Money matters because the most important thing it buys is flexibility. Greater financial resources means greater control over where you live, what you do, how you allocate your time, and a vast swathe of other variables that shape our lives.

But it’s easy to let money become something else: a way of keeping score. Beyond the ubiquitous cultural programming that tells us money works meritocratically, with more flowing to those who work harder/better/smarter/longer than others, it’s just easy. It’s why people are drawn to sports. The results are black-and-white, simple to compare, to rank.

And the kicker is that it’s very easy to say "money doesn’t work like that; incomes aren’t neatly correlated to effort," but like most things in life, this is a gray area. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t.

In college I made $7 an hour working the popcorn machine at a local movie theatre; now I make much more money doing a job I think is way easier and more fun. I don’t work "harder" now than your typical retail worker. And, of course, I make a tiny sliver of what your average Wall Street financial type pulls down; you can guess how much "harder" I think their job actually is. (I’m not talking about skills and qualifications; I’m simply talking about the strain and labor involved in getting through a typical day of work.)

But then, there’s cases where income does reflect effort. One of my friends works about 70 hours a week, on two jobs; her less-employable (and, honestly, lazier) partner works half as many hours.

This is where the gray sneaks in. There’s a ton of factors — some controllable, many not — that affect income. And when you have two people in a relationship with financially intertwined lives, the only way to avoid tension is for both to be in synch about how money, especially when it’s imbalanced, should affect everything else. Time, chores, goals, priorities, everything.

David and I had our own wrangles with this last year. In the middle of an epically bad market, he quit the job he’d held for almost a decade. With nothing new lined up.

While I understood and agreed with his reasons, I was still not what you would call 100% cool and supportive about the move. ("Shrill" and "cranky" would probably be better adjectives to describe some of my comments about it.)  Yes, we could scrape by with just my income, but did I really want to? I started expecting David to do a hell of a lot around the house, because part of me wanted him to "prove" he was doing as much work as I was. I was bringing in a paycheck, my little brain-voice said; what tangible thing was he doing? I was definitely using money to keep score, even as the rational part of my mind knew that wasn’t really fair.

(Caveat: This equation becomes a very different thing when you add in kids, illness, dependent relatives, or other complications beyond a relationship of two fully functioning, equally competent adults — which is, of course, the situation most married couples face at some point in their lives. That’s a whole other column.)

Then David got a new job, with a salary slightly smaller than his old one. That left our incomes even more out-of-whack than they’d been before.

But that gap doesn’t faze me at all. We both work full-time, office-type jobs; mine just happens to be in a field that pays better than his does. He loves his new job and it’s a great fit for him. Since my income is higher, I cover more of our expenses, but it seems to me that it would be ridiculous to expect him to do more than I do around the house to "pay off" the salary differential.

So … sometimes I keep score with money, and sometimes I don’t. And though there are times when it’s clearly, actively destructive — most times, I’d guess — it also feels like a thing humans will inevitably lapse into doing.

How do you sort it out?

photo: Andres Rueda

Over the past few months I’ve chosen to close a few credit card accounts. I think that in each case, the card carriers were going to start charging an annual fee unless we started using the card. The most recent example was my Citibank card, as they wanted us to spend at least $2400 per year to have them waive a $60 fee.

The problem with all of the recent cancellations are that 1) the cards were among the oldest that I had and 2) they had pretty high credit limits. Cancelling those cards has reduced the average age of my credit history and has decreased my overall credit limit. I do still have a relatively high overall credit limit around $35,000 and my oldest card was opened in 2000, with others opened from 2005 to 2007. But still, it sucks that I had to cancel those cards.

Of the remaining credit cards that I have, I use two of them regularly. Both are rewards cards, but one of them has a $45 yearly fee. Oh, and Her also has that card as well. So yes, we’re paying the $45 annual fee twice.

So naturally, I’m contemplating closing that card as well so that we don’t have to pay the annual fee more times than we need to. The problem is that card is also the second oldest card that I have and has the second highest credit limit; closing the card would effectively halve my overall credit limit. I don’t want to take another ding on my credit score. I’ve had this card for almost 5 years, so we’ve paid $180 in fees so far - soon to be $225. We have definitely received much more in rewards (5-star hotels in Europe are a very nice perk), and so far have accumulated enough points to go on more awesome vacations.

Do you think it’s worth it for me to still have this card? What alternatives could you think of instead?

photo: David Dyte

My cat broke. Expensively.

It started when we noticed that his front teeth were noticeably protruding, more so than usual. "Let’s nickname him Fang," I suggested.

"Have you had a vet look at that!?" my more observant and empathetic friend asked a few days later.

Kea was about six months overdue for his annual checkup, so I opted to do the responsible thing and make an appointment.

"His teeth seem a little odd," I told the vet when we arrived a week later.

"Yes, those will need to come out," she answered.

Come. out!? There’s nothing like being told your critter is about to lose his teeth to make you feel like a neglectful guardian.

It turns out this isn’t uncommon in cats. They’re not terribly diligent about teeth brushing. For $10, you can buy a cat-tooth-brushing kit at any pet store, but — those of you with cats will share my incredulity at the idea of convincing a feline to go along with regular tooth-brushing. I already have scars, prominent scars, from my occasional attempts at claw-clipping. I can’t handle the blood loss tooth-brushing would entail.

So at age 5, Kea was about to lose his teeth. And our Amex was about to take a $650 hit.

Now, I’m more-or-less reconciled to this sort of thing. It goes with the territory of having pets, kids, a house, a car, or anything else prone to sudden, catastrophic, and expensive failure. And my husband David and I are in-sync on the financial priorities and burdens of pet ownership — one of the reasons I’m quite fond of him is that he’s very softhearted when it comes to small, furry things. There’s basically no amount of money he wouldn’t spend to do the best thing possible for our critters. So off went $650 and out came Kea’s teeth.

The topic spins around regularly on personal-finance blogs: What does a pet really cost?

The ASPCA has a handy breakdown, suggesting that your budget should run anywhere from $35 a year for a fish to $875 for a large dog.

(Guess what the second-most expensive pet is, saith the ASPCA? Not a bird, cat or small dog. A rabbit.  Rabbit owners, I ask: Does litter really cost you $415 a year? What in hell do rabbits require for litter, shredded euros?)

But my experience is that it’s the back-end costs that really whack you.

I got my first very-own cat for my 11th birthday. I had been pleading for a cat pretty much nonstop ever since I encountered the concept, and after five-ish years of begging, my parents were either softened up or worn down. I sealed the deal by returning from the grocery store one day having spent my allowance for the month on a plastic food dish and single can of cat food. "What’s that for?" my mom asked. "For the kitten I really, really, really want for my birthday next month," I answered.  Guess who got to go to the pound and pick out a birthday kitten?

The adoption cost was about $50, if I recall right, and for the next decade Max didn’t cost a whole lot more than that. He went through about $5 of dry food a week, one $5 box of litter every two weeks, and a $150 vet appointment each year. Total annual ownership cost, roughly $400.

Then Max got to be a middle-aged cat. That’s when the trouble started.

Max stayed in Maryland while I went off to college, so my Dad is the one who really got stuck with the tab for my aging kitty, but I vividly recall Max getting the diagnosis of hyperthyroidism. It’s a very common condition for older cats — and the surgery to treat it costs about $2,000. Ouch.

Max got the surgery, and lived almost three years more years before slipping away quietly in his sleep one night.

Capital Expenditure on Cat: $2,000 / (365 x 3) = ROI on cat ….

I can’t do the math. That’s the reason I’ve kept having cats, even though I know they will sporadically break and throw my budget out of whack — and will, less sporadically, claw my couch, throw up on my favorite sweater, wake me up at 4 a.m. by attacking my toes, bat fragile glass things off countertops, and in general act like a troublesome and problematic creatures.

They’ll also purr, cuddle, stalk random bits of dust, and make me laugh at least once a day at their antics.

As I type this, Kea is draped across a box of books trying to figure out how to thoroughly kill the computer cord peeking out from the box. It is clearly an enemy computer cord, and my toothless cat is committed to defending the household from its advances.

I think that’s worth the occasional $650 bill.

photo: alykat

I’ve always had a pretty laisser-faire approach to calculating "my share" of financial transactions with friends and family. It stems from my previously mentioned commie streak — instead of allocating shares of bills dead equally, I’m inclined to let the person of the most means shoulder a larger share. Throughout most of my 20s, that person was almost always me.

Not, I hasten to add, that I was swimming in cash. My life is a very distant cry from The Hills or NYC Prep , where a typical afternoon out means dropping the kind of money that would keep me in rentmortgage payments for three months. But I started working half-time at 19, and by 20 I’d ditched my senior year of college in favor of a full-time job. It was entry level and paid sustenance wages, but that still put me a fair sight ahead of my friends pulling $6 an hour from work-study gigs. And by the time they graduated into their entry-level gigs, I’d taken a promotion and changed jobs for a higher salary, and on it went. While those around me job-hopped, went to grad school, explored different fields, or suffered from pot-dot-com-kaboom layoffs, I inched up the career ladder in the same field I’ve been working in since I was 16. So at lunch, I often grabbed the check away from the friend I knew had a harder time than me making ends meet.

And I always did that with my three-years-younger sister, who left college with a fancy diploma and the requisite five-figure debt load that comes with it. I knew she was constantly fighting to keep up with student loan, medical and credit card bills on a salary that was never more than half of what I made. When we went out for dinner or took a weekend trip, I paid.

And then I turned 30. 

Suddenly, in the past year or so, a whole bunch of those I hang out with have leapt forward financially. The friend who used to be a broke law-school student got a job at a ritzy white-shoe law firm with an eye-popping starting salary. The friend who was a teacher is now a principal, running her own school. The math grad student became Dr. Bonnie and had two universities bidding for her services.

And my sister landed her dream job, which pays a very reasonable salary and comes with the unbeatable perk of free housing. (Before anyone gets too envious, said housing is in Ciudad Juárez. It has a lovely backyard — surrounded by alarms and barbed wire.)

Of course, the recession hasn’t totally whooshed by and left my social circle unscathed. I also know people who spent small fortunes on grad degrees and now can’t find work in the field, fellow journalists left stranded as their publications closed, and friends muddling through gigs they’re overqualified for because it’s all they can find.

But instead of being the most financially secure of my friends, I’m now somewhere in the middle of the pack — and falling. Most of those I know are in fields with much better salary-advancement prospects than mine.

That doesn’t bother me in a financial sense (for now — check back in 10 years and see if I’m regretting this whole "write words for a living" thing), but I’ve been surprised by the mental reprogramming it’s required. I still start to reach for checks and then remember — I’m not the only one with regular paychecks anymore. I can let other people leave the extra cash for the tip, or pay a bit more than their share if we all have $20s and no change. Or let my friends treat if they offer, without feeling guilty.

The splitting-the-bill machinations many be a me-specific thing, but I think it’s pretty universal for those in their 30s to suddenly find their whole social-circle financial landscape shaken up. People get married, get promoted out of entry-level gigs, have kids, leave grad school, ditch waiting-tables-and-acting for jobs with health insurance, and generally grow up into situations that are more complicated, but also usually more lucrative. And the salary disparties become starker — instead of everyone being young and basically broke, suddenly some people are doctors or investment bankers making much more than the friends who became teachers and office managers. 

The whole thing really hit home for me when my sister came to NYC a few weeks ago for a final pre-Juarez-departure visit. We went to Babbo, where we first journeyed eight years ago in our initial foray into pricey Foodie Nirvana Restaurantland. I saved for two months to field that bill, which came to almost a third of my monthly rent at the time.

This time, after a four-hour wine-and-pasta extravagance, we surveyed the financial damage. I started to reach for my Amex … then realized that for the first time I didn’t have to vehemently insist that my sister put her own credit card away. Thanks to the whole free-housing thing, her take-home pay is probably better than mine these days.

So I left her take care of more than half the bill. It’s an adjustment, but I think I can get used to this.

original photo: Photos8.com, modified in compliance with its Creative Commons License

On last night’s season finale of How I Met Your Mother, we’re reminded that almost all of the gang has seen his or her corresponsing doppelganger roaming the streets of New York, except for one (Barney, of course, for all of the HIMYM fans out there, HOLLA).

Anywho, at the end of the episode Ted compares the Robin of today with the Robin of 5 years ago. He says that the Robin of the past was great, but her doppelganger, the Robin of today, is AMAZING.

That got me to thinking: As my doppelganger from 5 years ago, how have I changed financially?

I think that the me of 5 years ago would be shocked at the current me. Not only because I’ve kept my boyish good looks, but because of all of the financial obstacles that Her and I have overcome. The me of 5 years ago had little financial knowledge, and had even less knowledge about our financial situation back then. I don’t know if the me of 5 years ago would even believe everything that has been accomplished.

What about you? What would the you 5 years ago think about their doppelganger of today?

(yes, this post doesn’t exemplify the best use of the word "doppelganger", but just run with it, ok?)