What’s a 99 percenter to do when she wants to travel to another country for her grandparents’ 65th wedding anniversary but is living paycheck to paycheck? Sell everything she owns on eBay? Collect soda bottles for three and a half years for the cash deposit? Learn how to hotwire cars and then sell them for their parts? No, no, and…hmm…wait, no.
My grandparents were celebrating their nearly three quarters of a century together and I desperately wanted to be there to eat, drink and pepper them with questions about how they stayed together for so long. I had the very strong intention of going, and now the rest of the plan simply needed to fall into place.
First I tried going on a diet just to save the cash, but that didn’t work out too well when I realized that it meant giving up food. Then I tried donating blood, but it turns out you have to give it over time; they don’t take ten pints in one sitting. Finally, I tried doing it the old fashioned way: putting aside some money from every paycheck right off the bat.
Turns out if you put ten percent away as soon as you receive money, a little magic happens. Because I have been squeezing by from one paycheck to another, the idea of putting aside any portion, no matter how small, filled me with anger and defiance. “I need every penny of that check just to cover my basic needs! And that’s not even including toilet paper!” I did the math and the numbers always showed me that lopping off eighty, fifty or even twenty bucks a week would leave me living in a cardboard box in the alley and eating my shoes for breakfast.
But I really wanted to take this trip back home. My grandparents weren’t getting any younger, and I certainly wasn’t getting any richer. So I took a leap of faith. Ok, a baby step of faith. I started putting ten percent of each paycheck into my savings account as soon as I received it, and inexplicably I managed to get by on what was left. So voila! within a couple of months I had saved up…oh, only $230? That wasn’t going to get me to Vancouver.
Apparently, my intention to get my ass up to the Great White North was so strong it altered the very molecules of expedia.com, and when I checked the fares that day, I found that they had dropped one hundred and fifty dollars, making a plane ticket to Canuckland exactly…$230. Holy crikey! But now what was I going to use for funds during my week-long trip? Beaver pelts and hand-crafted axes?
The magic continued. Meals were consumed at friends’ and families’ homes, old pals took me out for coffee, and the toque-ful* of loonies and toonies** my boyfriend gave me covered even the most atrocious parking meter costs (five bucks an hour?? Does that at least come with a wash and wax?).
So, I don’t know how this all worked out. The numbers told me it wouldn’t. But my deep desire told me it had to. And in the end, I was able to travel to another country for a week on a dime (ok, more like $295, but still…).
* “knitted woolen cap” to my American friends
** Canadian one- and two-dollar coins
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