Debtor's Prison (a high-pitched whine)

Every Tuesday, I get together with three of my best friends to play Diablo III. One of them is in Ohio, one splits his time between State College, PA and somewhere near Ann Arbor, MI, and the third one lives about six miles from me and works about a mile from my building. I went to law school with two of them, I was in two of their weddings and attended the third's (on a day where I thought I was supposed to take the MPRE but got the dates mixed up and Pam, O Pam, you dragged me through the brambles over that one). Two of them were in my wedding. We're great friends and we get together on Google Hangouts every Tuesday to talk while we play a video game.

While we're all logging in and checking our characters' inventories and tweaking our builds, we talk about stuff. It's one of the few times I get to vent openly about whatever bothers me.

The thing that upsets me the most, of late, is how, with all this education and resources, my wife and I were living paycheck to paycheck for the last few years up until about February. Between moving and changing jobs and hustling to find the right place to stand and not get terrible sunburn, we have had to burn our savings, max out credit cards, and defer student loan payments basically forever.

In all this, we have been kind of screwed by the bank that gave us loans on houses in Akron that we couldn't really afford way back when, just like everyone else who got loans back then, and our credit has been crushed. Every little thing puts us further and further away from actually settling down and planning for the future. But we've finally gotten over the hump and squeezed a few of our assets to get some liquidity and pay down some debts. Finally, about eight years after law school. Even then, it's not great--we've managed to dedicate all of our free money for things that are ultimately going to tank our finances anyway, but it won't be as bad as it could have been. More on that later.

We're not alone in this. Many of my friends are just sort of coasting or crawling along, doing everything they can to secure future paychecks and maintain some level of happiness along side that goal.  The painful part is when we actually talk about the details. On paper, Carly and I make a lot of money. We aren't eligible for a lot of tax credits that regular people are. Based on our income, we're in the top 5% of U.S. households. It doesn't feel like it. If you look at our student loan debt (about three times the rent I paid in law school) and rent (more per month than my first car cost) and other expenses and it puts us somewhere closer to the median. And still, no summer homes or white picket fences in our future for a while.

Now I feel like I'm whining. But it's somewhat justified. I'm most concerned with how the Wolf is going to make it through his first decade or two. In the last few years, we've moved four times. We're looking at doing it again in a year and a half. We want our kid (maybe another one by then, who knows?) to have some kind of stable physical home. Because of that, I have set my career aspirations on a slightly different path and I'm pretty sure we'll never move back to the NYC area. 

We're going to live in the Great Swamp forever, I think. Carly really loves her job. Mine's good enough--I have opportunities on the horizon in DC. I don't want to cause another move again for a long time. I want to buy a house. I am considering changing my phone number to a DMV area code.

Before all that, we need to bail out of two houses in Akron and pay down about $10,000 in credit debt. It's do-able. Hopefully this year. We have a realtor and a plan.

But hell. Maryland still has goofy blue laws.