Direct Sales: Just Direct Shoot Me!

Photo by Jenny Main

Okay ladies, it's time to have a heart to heart about all of your side hustles. I love you all, you know I do, and I want to be supportive of you, but this has to stop.

I get it. Direct sales sounds easy and fun and you can do it on your schedule. You have kids and either you gave up your second income to care for them or you are paying through the nose for childcare so your budget is strained to its limits. But the thing is, so is mine. I keep leaving your Facebook groups for your parties that you have added me to without my permission, and somehow I keep getting added back to the group. I try to be nice and buy something every once in a while, but I can't afford to purchase something from all of you every time you throw a "party." And now they aren't even parties in real life where you can socialize, they are online parties where everyone is just chatting through Facebook. I know these online parties are easier and more convenient, but it also means that more of you are doing them and are doing them more often so the rate at which I receive these party "invitations" is just increasing exponentially. And it's alienating.

I feel like I'm insulting my friends whenever I decline an invitation or leave a group and it's not fair. It sends us all the message that I'm only a good friend if I pay for your friendship by buying the useless crap you are selling. Seriously, how many over priced leggings and citrus peelers does one need to purchase before it's enough? It's high school peer pressure all over again.

I know you love your nail wraps and essential oils that make my husband sneeze.  You think you can get your beloved products cheaper if you can just get a few of your friends as excited about them as you are. And then maybe your friends' friends will join in and so on. But for the vast majority of you, the math is not in your favor. Most of you will either lose money or work so hard for so little money that you will be making far less than minimum wage. Few of you have the sales skills to build a direct sales business large enough to earn a decent living, even fewer will get rich doing it.

Direct sales are nothing new. Our mothers grew up with Tupperware and Avon. We grew up with Pampered Chef and Longaberger Baskets. What's different today is the internet. It is so easy to start doing direct sales that new companies are popping up all over the place and seemingly every 20 or 30-something mommy out there has found a product she loves and jumped on the band wagon to try to make ends meet. The market is quickly becoming oversaturated. It's like all of Hollywood's big blockbusters and sequels. They don't even realize when they have gone too far and their profits keep dwindling as they try to squeeze more and more money out of the same pool of people. There has to be a tipping point (and I hope it's soon) when people come to their senses and realize what a scam it all is.

Looking beyond my own social anxiety over how to communicate with my friends that I've had enough, I worry about our kids watching how our friendships are beginning to revolve around the buying and selling of goods. Americans are becoming increasingling wasteful by consuming more and more unnecessary goods. We see this in the amount of food that goes to waste,  our swelling closets, and our bloated landfills as we have shifted to a disposable society. It isn't sustainable and our kids are watching. Direct sales bring the pressure to consume out of the media and into our social interactions. It's one thing telling a salesman in a store who is a complete stranger no, it's an entirely different thing to tell your friend no, especially if all of your other friends are watching.

What do you think? Let me know if you are in direct sales and whether it is working for your lifestyle or if you are more like me and are sick of being hounded by your friends!

Money Matters: Raising Financially Literate Children

It's no secret that women on average make 20% less money than men, but live longer. by five or six years. We leave the workforce more often to care for our children or sick family members, we tend to work in lower paying industries (when we do move into higher paying industries, the pay drops), and we make less in the same job as men (and minority women have it the worst). That's a lot of pressure when it comes to our pocket books, which means women should be the most invested (sorry for the pun) in financial planning.

But when it comes to financial planning, women are actually significantly less confident in their financial literacy than men even though studies show women tend to be better investors than men because they choose less risky investments, trade less often, and are more focused on long-term growth than short-term gain. I see this in my every day life. In my investment club, I am the last remaining woman who is an active member. Four other women have dropped out and two more are silent partners. What happened? Why have the other women pulled out or decided to just trust the rest of us with all of the decisions? I truly can't figure out why so many women do not take any interest in their finances and choose to give up so much power and control over their lives. Is imposter syndrome holding them back?

But wait, it gets even worse. Not only are we making less and having to make it last longer while simultaneously opting out of being involved in planning for our future, we have to spend more just for the privilege of being women. That's right. Women are charged more for female versions of products ranging from clothes and shoes to hygiene products like lotion and shampoo. On top of that, we are conditioned by social norms to spend more on our appearance (make-up, manicures, etc.). If that wasn't bad enough, advertisers have woken up to the fact that women do most of the consumer shopping and we are now facing an onslaught of marketing trying to get us to buy more and more products. I have found this pressure to consume the most intense when in comes from our own friends in direct sales (LuLaRoe, Pampered Chef, Jamberry, DoTERRA . . .). I don't think a week goes by when I don't see an invitation come through on Facebook to attend someone's direct sales party. While I appreciate the schedule flexibility these jobs can offer, especially for stay at home moms, I resent the pressure to support my friends by buying products I don't need so they can earn a meager amount of money (or actually lose money). It's simply consumerism at it's worst. There has to be better ways for women to support each other, but that is a topic for another post.

Every time I see a new article out talking about the differences between the way men and women handle money, I'm always shocked. I just can't relate. My mom was the financial wiz in my household growing up and now that I'm an adult, I have taken on the role of CFO of the household finances. This doesn't mean that my husband isn't highly involved in decision making, but I'm the one who pays the bills, researches what to do with our savings, and plans for the future. My husband is highly capable of filling the CFO role, but it landed on me more as a default because of my husband's travel schedule (yes, there were a few late bills before I took it over), and as I have found myself increasingly obsessed with financial planning as I age, I am happy to take on this particular responsibility.

All this inequality means that it is especially important that I raise both of my children, but especially my daughter, to be confidently financially literate. While I have plenty of time (my daughter is 3 and my son is still a baby), I have already been researching the best ways to teach them to handle their money responsibly. I am confident that I already model good financial habits, but as my daughter starts to learn math, it will soon be time to let her practice with her own money. I have already started to talk to her about money in simplistic terms when she asks me for impulse purchases at the store (no we are not going to spend twice as much money to have her ingest twice as much sugar just so she can have the yogurt with Ana and Elsa on it), but there are so many differing opinions on how to handle an allowance out there that I find myself a little at a loss. On the one hand, attaching chores to an allowance can teach kids the value of hard work and also gives me the option of very specific consequences (no money) if those chores aren't completed to my satisfaction. On the other hand, keeping them separate and making chores just part of contributing to the family could make my kids less entitled and better with money.

Currently, my daughter is more apt to be upset if we don't let her help fold laundry, make dinner, feed the dog, or whatever chore we might be doing. But that could fade as she figures out those tasks aren't really as fun as she thinks they are. My hope is that her "I can do it myself!" slogan will continue and I can easily keep chores unattached without issue. Even better if that independence is modeled for and then imitated by her brother as he gets older. But I am fully aware that he could go the opposite direction just as my own brother and I had very opposite reactions to chores and money.

What do you think? How do you handle chores and allowance in your household? Let me know if the comments!

Improving Life Through the Power of Habit

Photo by Jenny Livingston

I believe whomever thinks having a second child is easier than the first must have been specifically referring to the raising of the second child, not life in general. I would whole heartedly agree that my son has been a lot easier to manage (aside from him being a better sleeper and his personality being a more easy-going overall than his sister), my husband and I are more confident and experienced parents. Thankfully, I haven't had any of the middle of the night, punching my pillow in frustration episodes with my son that I experience in the first year with my daughter. Whether that's because of my improved parenting abilities or his personality, I really don't know. Either way, I am grateful for the improved sanity this time around.

However, this second time around has been a lot harder in other respects. Yes, I have been getting more sleep, but I get far less "me" time. If one kid is sleeping or otherwise entertaining themselves, the other one is in need of attention. There is no down time throughout my day. With my husband's demanding main job combined with a side hustle, I am often left with daycare drop-off and pick-up (until recently I also had my son with me at the office), and sometimes even getting both kids to bed. On top of that, I do the majority of the domestic chores, although we do pay someone to clean our house twice a month, including most of the cooking, laundry, and yard work. I am not trying to insinuate that my husband is irresponsible, he works very hard at his day job and side hustle, but I am trying to illustrate why I don't get any time to myself. By the time both kids are down for the night, I pump my remaining milk so my breasts don't feel like they are going to explode in the morning, and I eat a snack (because, well, breast feeding). By then it's about time for bed so I can get up early and start the whole routine over again.

With my son joining his sister at daycare and my childcare costs ballooning, I have been exhaustedly wondering if there is another way. I spend the months leading up to the birth of my son and much of my maternity leave nesting hard. And while I'm always fairly frugal and don't turn up my nose at hand-me-downs or Craigslist items, I feel there is always room for improvement when it comes to spending and saving. A bonus to all of the health benefits of breast feeding is that it carves out some reading time for me (I am so grateful to be raising my kids in a time after e-readers were invented so that I can read one-handed and in the dark), so I've been going down a rabbit hole researching ways to streamline our finances and our life. This includes reading about what many would call "extreme" lifestyles of the likes of Bea Johnson, the Zero Waste Home expert and Mr. Money Mustache, famous for retiring young by saving over 50% of his salary.

But the more I read, the more I find that I am at odds with myself. On the one hand, I yearn for the simpler life, modeling a small carbon footprint and frugality that lets us focus on travel and activism. On the other, I want to plop down $50k to add a bonus room to our house and fix up our yards. My initial reaction to reading about these lifestyles are that the people who lead them must have extreme discipline to be able to save so much money or reduce their household waste for a year to a single jar. And it does take discipline, but not the every day is a struggle with themselves kind of discipline, but the discipline to decide what their goals are and then create habits that allow them to reach their goals. It takes discipline to change a habit, but once it's formed and fully integrated into your life it becomes a routine and no longer a struggle. You can run on autopilot.

An example of this is when I decided to walk my dog (a puppy at the time) every day to help her behavior and improve both our health. It took me a little bit of time to settle into a specific route and amount of time, but now we have our set route that covers about 2 miles and takes roughly 40 minutes. On the rare occasion something prevents us from taking our walk, we both miss it and my dog drives me crazy for the rest of the day with her excess energy.

So what exactly do I want to change about my life? What old habits do I want to break and what new habits do I want to create?

In the short term I want to reduce my expenses to cover the additional cost of my son's childcare expenses, but I also want to teach my kids about conservation in the process. So, what habits can I change to achieve that? Keep in mind, it can't just be me. None of this works if my husband is not onboard or I risk his bad habits cancelling out any new good habits I form. I have to choose my battles wisely. For instance, while I love the idea of cloth diapers and we were able to make them work when my daughter was a baby until her daycare would no longer allow them, this time around they just haven't been feasible. Beyond my husband and I both being over scraping poop into the toilet (which just gets more and more disgusting the older they get), my son has consistently leaked out of every brand I have tried with him. And honestly, as busy as I am currently, I just cannot handle the extra laundry at this point. My environmentalist heart (and my wallet) breaks little bit every time I though a disposable diaper in the trash, but "you can only do what you can do." This is one of those lofty goals I just have to let go.

My first step, therefore, is coming up with a list of goals for changing my family's habits. These are still a work in progress and perhaps a bit unrealistic, but this is where I'm at:

Short Term Goals:

1. Reduce expenditures in categories we can easily cut down on (gifts, restaurants, clothing, etc.). When a gift is truly necessary, try for experience gifts or books. This will not only reduce our expenses, but also help model anti-consumerism for our kids. Break our Amazon Prime habit! I have already unsubscribed to all non-essential email and catalog lists, which has the added benefit of cutting down considerably the amount of time it takes me to check my email.
2. Streamline our lives. By this I mean, try to reduce the amount of stuff we have to take care of both physical possessions as well as social responsibilities. We need to truly analyze everything we do each day and decide if it's a worthwhile action or if it can be eliminated. This one is going to be hardest on my husband because he hates telling people no, but I know he has already been trying to work on this one. We have often fantasized about moving somewhere new where we don't have family and friends in order to reduce our commitments as well as our expenses (there is a very high cost of living where we currently reside), but for now I think that might be chucking the baby out with the bathwater. 
3. Start a vegetable garden. I grew up gardening with my father and have always loved it, but a combination of gophers, a long drought and two pregnancies have lead to the current sad shape of our yards. So, I am start with a few galvanized troughs (we already have two in our garage I could put to use) on our patio to at least get a small garden going, even if we can't afford a complete yard transformation yet. And as my daughter is both a picky eater and obsessed with watering our (mostly dead) plants, even the weeds, I secretly dream that if we start a small vegetable garden she will be more interested in trying new foods if she has grown them herself. Since she loves to help me make salad but won't even try it herself, this may be wishful thinking on my part, but growing our own food will be good for the budget even if it doesn't turn my daughter into a foodie. 
4. Post to this blog on a regular basis. Even though writing has always been my dream, I have struggled to set aside the time to regularly to work on it. Whether it is posting to this blog (I have a whole list of half-finished posts waiting for me) or working on my many fiction ideas, I seem to always work in fits and starts. I want to create a habit for myself to sit down and write routinely.

Long Term Goals:

1. Save enough to be financially independent. By this I mean have enough passive income so that we no longer need to work and can focus on what we are truly passionate about. For me, this would be having the ability to focus on my writing instead of working full-time while raising two kids. Of course, with the steep cost of childcare, we may not be able to make much headway for 5 more years when both kids are in school, but I am hopeful that we can make at least some progress in the mean time. I want to model for our kids how to set goals and work towards them so they learn perseverance instead of feeling entitled to having their dreams handed to them.
2. Publish my first book. I don't think this one requires any explanation.
3. Fix up our outdoor spaces. We have a useless front lawn and a dead, gopher hole riddled back lawn. Throw in a roof that will need to be replaced soon, a driveway being pushed up by tree roots and rough stucco siding that is a spider haven, you start to get the picture of the tall order the outside of our house is. I would love to replace our crumbling driveway with some beautiful pavers, our front lawn with a mixture of drought tolerant and edible landscaping while actually having a nice back lawn for the dog and kids to run around on. Some raised vegetable beds and a nice patio for dining and lounging would round out my ideal backyard. Add in a new roof and resurfaced stucco and all of this equals A LOT of dough.
4. Build a bonus room? This goal has been turning into a bit of a question mark for me. It has always been my dream since we bought our little house that we would one day build a bonus room off the back to act as an office/guest room/extra family space, but lately I've been wondering if we streamline our stuff enough can this drop off the list all together. I used to think our kids would need to share a room because we couldn't possibly give up our office/guest room, but then the thought of kids waking each other up at night brought us around to the idea that maybe we could go without and we made it work.

That's it for now. What are your goals for improving your life? Let me know in the comments section.

Girls Can Be Anything

Photo by Jenny Livingston

“Don't tell kids "girls can be anything!" They wouldn't have thought otherwise- just raise them strong, dummy.”

~Sarah Silverman, Facebook

My husband, a big Sarah Silverman fan, recently read that quote to me and I immediately wished I could reach through the computer and give her a hug. Finally, I thought, someone who gets it! Someone who understands that a big part of the battle for gender equality is rooted in the fact that we are reinforcing gender stereotypes simply by loudly fighting against them. 

A girl who wants to build houses when she grows up but from a young age is hit over the head with images of only male construction workers, architects, and engineers will probably lose interest at some point no matter how forcefully we tell her she can do whatever she wants. Yes we are telling her she can do it, but we are also pointing out that she is going to be different from her peers if she does at a time when most children are doing their best to fit in. But let’s back up and look at why we feel so compelled to tell our kids “girls can be anything!” 

Imagery and visualization are essential to to our ability to think critically and process the world around us. For children, whose young minds haven’t yet learned to evaluate the images that surround them, those images have enormous influence on their development. The segregation of children’s toys not only sends girls the message that science and math hold no future for them, that their brains are not built to process complicated equations, but it also sends boys the message that girls don't belong in those fields.

Girls don’t shy away from toy construction tools or action figures because they don’t have the visuospatial acuity to use them or because they naturally gravitate toward dolls and toy kitchens. They gravitate toward “girl toys” because they see the pictures of girls on the packaging and in the commercials for those products telling them that these toys are made for them and because starting from birth the gifts that roll in from well-meaning friends and relatives tend to adhere to segregated norms.  

As a toddler, my daughter showed more interest in her older boy cousins’ toy tool bench and screw driver set than they do because it hasn’t occurred to her yet that those toys are only supposed to be for boys and luckily no one in our family has ever discouraged her from playing when them when she visits. Her favorite gift last Christmas was a toy jig saw that was intended for her male cousin. My daughter doesn’t gravitate to her “girl” set of Duplos more than her gender neutral set or prefer her Little Mermaid chariot over her hammer toy, but now that she is three and heavily influenced by the other girls in her preschool, it is turing into an uphill battle to keep it that way as she becomes more aware of the gender rules promoted through advertising and other media.

To blame this gender segregation completely on modern toy manufacturers would be looking at the issue too simply. They make toys they think will sell and market those toys to the kids they think will buy them based on previous experience. They know girls have always been their main market for dolls and boys have been their main market for action figures. As profit is their main goal, they really have no incentive to re-educate consumers. Marketing toy construction equipment to girls is a risk that may pay off in the long run, but they have no motivation to try, and so the cycle of gender segregated toys continues (side note: my father-in-law recently bought my daughter an eco-friendly pink and purple dump truck he found in independent toy store that my daughter now uses to drive her dolls around, particularly Supergirl when she is too tired to fly; however, these sorts of toys are not readily available in mainstream toy stores). That being said, toy manufacturers do seem to often willfully ignore ideas that would start to change the status quo. A good example of this is the recent limited edition Research Institute line of Legos that features 3 female scientists with no pink or purple to be found. Despite it massive popularity Lego apparently has no plans to mass produce this line or anything like it.

So what is effective at changing these gender norms? Do we simply chuck our girls' Barbie and Bratz dolls out the window and replace them with erector sets? I would argue, no. The problem isn't with the individual products, but the lack of diversity of products marketed toward girls.

When we look at the history of social progress, some of the most effective catalysts for social change has been the imagery in popular media. Whatever you might currently think of Bill Cosby, The Cosby Show was extremely successful while depicting a highly educated upper-middle class black family surrounded by a highly educated upper-middle class black community, something that was unheard of at the time. Bill Cosby was a pioneer in a movement to change the United States’ narrative of the black community and fight racial stereotypes. Will and Grace arguably did something similar for the LGBT community helping to pave the way for last year's historic Supreme Court ruling. I mention these two shows as an illustration of the effectiveness of imagery on our collective conscience in shifting our perspective of what is normal. I doubt anyone would say that either of these shows caused a tipping point for either minority community as both clearly have a long way to go before they achieve true equality, but they have been important pop-cultural narratives that have aided the gradual shifting of America to a more equal society.

To look at it another way, when we introduce new foods to our children it can take several times before they accept the texture and flavor into their repertoire of acceptable foods. It is much the same for changing our society’s collective norm. We need increasing exposure to a new idea or habit before we internalize it. This is why it can take several months before a routine is truly established and why social change can be so laboriously slow.

“For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth.”

― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

If we want our children to grow up in a more equal world, we need to raise them surrounded by the images of the society we want them to inhabit. Their collective acceptance of these images will turn them into reality as their generation grows and their views come to dominate our social conscience, just as the LGBT community has gained wider acceptance as Millennials, who are far more likely to be accepting of the LGBT community than previous generations  If we want more women (or any minority groups) in STEM fields, we need to raise all of our children surrounded by diverse images of children playing with Legos or chemistry sets and make it the norm, not an exception to the rule.

So, what do we do if toy manufacturers won’t change their tunes and Production Studios still churn out the same old male-dominated media that they always do? We start small and take matters into our own hands or support entrepreneurs who are trying to change the dominant business models. Many of Hollywood’s leading ladies are doing just that as the well of good female parts have dried up by creating their own studios with the express purpose of producing women-centric films such as Reese Witherspoon’s recent film, Wild.  As inevitably controversial as the GoldieBlox toy company used Kickstarter successfully to fund the creation of their toys that encourage girls to be engineers. As my long-time boss always tells me, “we will just Little Red Hen it!” In other words, we must do it ourselves. We must create the books and movies and toys we want our kids to read and spread them through grassroots channels and support efforts of others who are creating products to inspire change (my current go-to birthday gift for my daughter's friends is the book Rosie Revere Engineer). I'm even working on my own children's book project (let me know if you are an illustrator looking for a project).

Tell me what you think in the comments below.