Well, I was going to write a post about how to not pay taxes, but I delayed too much and now I’m writing a post telling you about how I’m going to Germany.
I’m going to Germany.
I wasn’t going to go so that we could save money, but then I talked to my host family on the phone and realized how much I missed speaking German, being in Germany, and I really wanted to see them again. Add in the fact that this is probably going to be the last time I can travel easily, since we have one kid already and are planning more and we decided I ought to take the opportunity and go. Fortunately, plane tickets are pretty cheap still pre-memorial day. They’d be cheaper if it weren’t for stupid taxes and fees. Tickets for Haakon and I total cost $250. Taxes and fees were $300 some odd. Talk getting ripped off.
In preparation for my trip, I’ve been watching lots of German TV shows so that my German doesn’t sound like I haven’t been speaking it for 3 years. As a result of this, I have some really funny news stories my libertarian readers might be interested in.
As a result of the “Wirtschaftskrise” (economic crisis), many Germans have seen their retirement funds oblitarated and while there is a similar Social Security scheme, many have private funds as well. So, in order to ease their pain, the German government is guaranteeing all retirement funds. This means that they won’t lose any value at all, ever. They won’t sink below the amount that you put in them (if I understood correctly) and this will be in effect until the economy recovers. Kind of makes me hope it doesn’t so I can see what they try next.
But that’s not the funny part. The reporter than stated that this was causing somewhat of a divide between old and young people and they interviewed a young person who stated that he did not think it was fair that the government was doing this. Then they interviewed an old person, who said, “I think it’s completely fair, but then again, I’m already retired!” That, my friends, should sum up the entirety of transfer payments.
The second humorous report involved a bunch of cars being smashed up that had “schrott” written on them and the reporter discussed something about “Umweltprämien” and a “Abwrackprämie” and how hundreds of thousands had yet to be paid them. So I looked it up on Wikipedia and discovered that the German government has been doing what the American government is thinking about doing: paying people to get rid of their old cars and buy new ones! The perceived benefits of this act are many fold: 1) people will buy new cars that are more friendly towards the enivornment (dubious, but ok) and 2) the autoindustry will be strengthened, since obviously only cars from the European 4 (analogous to the Big Three) can be purchased.
Sigh. Bastiat is spinning in his grave. It’s been hundreds of years since he first disproved the idea that doing such things could have any economic benefit whatsoever but politicians apparently know better. I mean, heck, the people get money for new cars so they’re happy and the politicians get more power, so they’re happy. It’s a win-win situation!
Ob in guten
oder schlechten Zeiten,
ich werde Dir stets
viel Glück bereiten!
My host family sent me a package for Christmas filled with baby stuff and other goodies, one of which was this little man, a Wolmirstedter Glückswichtel. He promises “If in good times or bad, I will always prepare a lot of luck for you!” It’s a heavy promise in times like these.
It’s amazing to realize that I’m living in the first real recession to hit the US in about 30 years and I couldn’t be less thrilled about it. Since the recession started in December 2007, it means we’ve been in a recession the entire time Lasse has been in the country. Consequently, his job search has been long and difficult and certainly not helped by the fact that he would really love to have a job as an analyst in the finacial field. You know, the exact same field that got clobbered already in the recession. Then Lasse stumbled on translation work and we found an undiscovered wealth of work, so I quit my job to have Haakon….and then the translation project that we thought would give us enough income for a year in just a few months got cancelled.
Can you say, “oh shit?” We most certainly did. That began 4 months of no income, from September to January we lived off savings while waiting for Lasse’s security clearance to go through so he could start this other translation job. It sucked ass and there were times when we seriously considered just packing up, moving to Finland and making good on his parents’ promise to find him a “good job in the government” there. But Finland isn’t home…and home is New Hampshire.
Now things are getting worse with the economy and it seems like every day you hear about more companies laying people off, or going bankrupt and people who are about to do the same. Friends we thought were well off are turning out not to be as well off as we thought.
And you know what? It makes me feel pretty damn lucky. If Lasse had gotten a job in finance field like he wanted, odds are he would have lost it by now. Most companies seem to fillow a “Last In, First Out” policy on their human inventory. We would have been stuck without an income and no backup. Currently, Lasse has 4 jobs. They’re all contractor positions, which means that some months are very good income wise (like January, for example) while other months are slim pickin’s (March). But, it also means that he’s home all the time and has a lot of spare time to do things with me and the baby when work is slow. If Haakon has a bad night and I didn’t get much sleep, Lasse takes the baby and I get to sleep in. He does laundry and has time to work on side projects, such as his blog (which you can find conveniently located in my blogroll. It’s the one that’s not in English. You should go there and coughclickonadscough.), going to the state house for bill hearings (which we’ve only done twice, but we’re doing it again tomorrow), and that sort of thing.
It helps, of course, that our expenditures are very low. If we needed to, we could live on $2000 a month (and $950 of that is rent). We have no debt and used to have savings (we’re working on rebuilding those…). We’re very lucky that we didn’t give into temptation and buy a couch and recliner or a new car or anything that we wanted since we got our apartment. We still use the futon I bought off of craigslist when I moved to New Hampshire and my car is 14 years old, but still going strong. Everytime I think something’s wrong with it, it turns out to be something very minor, such as the battery being dead, or the cap for the clutch fluid not replaced properly. We’re hoping our patience will have paid off and we might be able to get a couch at least this month, from January’s income. We’ll see, though.
We’re also very lucky that both of us are healthy and that Haakon had a normal, uncomplicated birth. Apparently, it costs $16,000 to have a baby in a hospital in New Hampshire. My boss was complaining about it to me because our insurance at work only covered 80% after the deductible. “So I still have to pay over $3,000! Kids are expensive!” He stared at me when I mentioned that I only had to pay $1,000 because the midwife only cost $5,000. If there had been complications, it would have been a lot worse, not just financially. One of my co-workers had an emergency C-section at 32 weeks due to pre-eclampsia and her son was transferred to Boston’s Children’s Hospital. They had to continuously travel down there until he was well enough to be released and it was quite some time. I couldn’t imagine not being able to spend time with baby and having him an hour’s drive away.
We’ve also been very lucky in that we have hardly had to buy Haakon any clothes at all. Most of them have been given to us, some at our baby shower an others from friends who didn’t need them any more. My host family sent me two large packages of clothes from a friend who had had a son earlier. A former neighbor of mine has been generous enough to give me all the clothes her grandson grows out of, though the story behind this is rather sad. Her son knocked some girl up who was on crack and the baby was born addicted, so they took him away as well as her daughter and gave my former neighbor custody of them both. He’s grown up well though and is now fat, happy and well bonded to his grandmother. The amazing thing is that I pretty much have clothes for Haakon until he’s two, depending on how fast he grows.
The funny thing is that I have so many clothes for Haakon, I have really too many. So, I’m looking to give some away. A friend in Germany is pregnant with her first baby and it turned out to be a boy, so I’ve packed up a box of baby clothes for her so she should have a good selection of clothes at least for the first 6 months. The good thing is that her baby is being born in the spring, so a lot of the newborn clothes Haakon didn’t get to wear in the fall should be perfect for her baby. I figure it’s one of the ways I can spread the luck around, so to speak. It’s nice to be able to give occasionally, instead of just receive.
I don’t know how bad this recession is going to be (though I’m hoping for the best, I also like to expect the worst), but I do hope that no matter how bad it does get, I can at least look at the bright side of things. Or that the Glückswichtel will work his magic. I put it on Lasse’s desk, just in case.
We arrived back home on Thursday evevning and man, what a trip it was.
Haakon did very well on the airplane rides and I learned that having a baby who is screaming is a great way to get through security without a second glance. Now I wish I had smuggled somesort of weaponry with me. In Helsinki on the way home, we accidently smuggled a bottle of water through and felt very rebellious. At any rate, Haakon slept through the plane rides and didn’t really seem to care much about them, which was a relief for us since no one spent the whole flight glaring at us.
Lasse got his first “I’m back in Finland” shock shortly after the plane landed and we went outside the airport to catch a bus. He asked a bus driver if this bus went to the train station and the bus driver’s curt reply: “Can’t you read?” He then refused to load our luggage on, so we had to do it ourselves. Once we reached the train station, he didn’t unload it either, so Lasse ended up doing that, too, for us and the other passengers. We managed to just barely catch our train, but since it was a Friday evening, all the seats were full and we had to spend the whole ride in the corridor by the doors. That was bad enough, but there was a drunk on the train, too. He was in business class at first, but the conductor kicked him out of there because he didn’t have a business class ticket, so guess where he went! Into the corridor, where we were. And he stayed there the whole train ride, hasseling my husband, the two kids also riding in the corridor and any other passenger that went through there. Now, while other countries may have thrown him off the train, the Finns didn’t. They either ignored him, glared at him, laughed at him or tried to calm him down so that a fight wouldn’t break out. Fun times.
In case I haven’t mentioned it on the blog before, Lasse didn’t tell his family that we were expecting a baby, or that the baby was born, or anything regarding having a child. So, aside from visiting home and burying his grandpa, this trip was planned to tell his family he had a kid. Great plan eh? His sister surprised us by meeting us at the train station and immediately jumped on Lasse and gave him a hug and started crying because she missed him so much, so she didn’t notice the baby in his sling. Then Lasse pointed him out and she still didn’t get it because he was pretty well bundled up. I think she realized a little later, but the reaction was fairly anti-climatic.
His parents’ reactions were better. I was changing his diaper and throwing the dirty one away in the kitchen when he’s parents came in and his dad walked into the kitchen first and went, “Uhh, uuh, oooh….(something in Finnish I didn’t understand.”
His mom wasn’t in the kitchen, so she had no idea what was going on, and asked, “Mitä? Mitä? (what? what?)” followed by something else in Finnish I couldn’t understand. Then his dad replied, “Blah blah blah lapsi blah blah!” (something in Finnish I couldn’t understand child followed by more stuff I couldn’t understand). And then she walked into the kitchen and saw him and I felt very embarrassed.
On the whole, their reactions were good ones. No one yelled, screamed, or had a heart attack and his mom was quite taken with him. So was Lasse’s dad, but his mom moreso. She always held him, played with him, spoke to him a lot in Finnish and that sort of thing. “I hope Lasse will speak much Finnish to him so he will learn it!” So do I because man, I doubt I’m going to be speaking Finnish any time soon.
Another goal of our trip was to register Haakon as a Finnish citizen. For this purpose, we brought along his New Hampshire birth certificate as required by law and headed down to the magistrate in the town where Lasse’s parents lived. They were friendly and took all the stuff while Lasse explained what we wanted to do…and we hit a brick wall. “This doesn’t have the Haague Apostille on it.”
“Erm, the ‘62 Haague Convention Apostille?” Lasse guessed.
“Yes, that one. We need it in order to process this.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that…every place requires something else.”
“Well, that’s alright, we’ll just keep the birth certificate and we should be able to register him and then you can come by tomorrow once everything is in the system and apply for a passport for him.” Sounds good, right? Wrong! We went home and then got a phone call. “Sorry, we can’t actually process the application because you aren’t a resident of Pori. Your last listed residence in Finland is in Turku, so you have to register him in Turku. We called the Turku Magistrate and asked them if we could just send the paperwork over to them, but they said they wouldn’t register him without the Haague Apostille.”
So we’re back at square one. We can’t register him without the Haague thingy saying that this is indeed the official stamp of Manchester, NH that is on his birth certificate, etc. What a pain in the ass. Oh well.
