Enough Tacos to Get a Spaceship Past Neptune: Small-Time Dreams for 2016

My buddy Tom denominates financial windfalls in tacos. It’s an easy conversion; tacos in his neighborhood cost around a dollar per. The advantage of a taco over a dollar, conceptually, is that a taco has heft, a physical reality that money abstracts. Would I rather have this computer, or 700 tacos? Could this month’s income plausibly feed me for a year? Taco math obscures ongoing costs, necessary expenses, but this simplification is the root of its power. When a friend owes you money, you can obsess over the things you could buy with it, or you can say: Am I willing to fight for 20 tacos? Some days, the answer is no. Others, yes. Each of us has a taco tipping point.

As for me, I take an inverse approach and go totally abstract. I think of money not as an amount, but as a vector. My money is a line with an arrow at the end, moving through space over time. I approach money this way because I am an artist, and my income is highly variable — sometimes a reasonably-sized fellowship, sometimes nothing at all. The effort I put into something bears almost no relationship to whether I get paid for it; I can do the same thing twice in a row and be paid wildly different amounts. Essentially, I am always living off my savings, which in a good month grow instead of shrink; I am always retired, even though I am working, and even though, yes, I make money.

So when I think about how to approach discretionary spending, it’s not useful to look at how much money I have, in isolation; it’s a nest egg that shouldn’t be considered disposable. Nor is it easy to guess in advance how much I’ll make in the coming year (unless I work a day job; my husband and I trade off who does this). I think of all money, even earned money, as a “maybe” until it’s sitting in my bank account.

Imagine that I am a spacecraft, hurtling away from Earth, and at a certain point, I will run out of fuel and have to land on something. My goal is to not land, to continue exploring uncharted territory, as far as I can go. As I travel through space, I might synthesize more fuel (which could work against me if it’s a process that forces me to slow down my spaceship); meanwhile, if it’s obvious I’m going nowhere, I might have to course adjust, which requires extra fuel. But assuming everything continues on its current trajectory at its current rate, I like to know what piece of stellar flotsam is likely to be my final resting place, so I can mentally prepare myself. (That’s a stressful way to picture what I’m doing, which is why I stick with a line with an arrow, graphed against a grid of dots.)

What I’m talking about, and maybe you’ve already figured this out, is burn rate, the dotcom buzzword for how quickly a not-yet-profitable startup will exhaust its current cash pile and have to either shut down, monetize, or find new investors. Thanks to the show Silicon Valley, I always hear the phrase in the concerned but hopeful voice of Zach Woods. He stands invisibly beside me with a whiteboard, an easel, and a dry erase marker.

I’ve managed to avoid the encroachment of business terms on my personal life, but this one hits me where I live. I have battled, for ideological reasons, to define myself as a human instead of an economic construct — I don’t talk about my “brand,” don’t have a “triple bottom line,” won’t call myself “a creative” — but burn rate? I definitely have a burn rate, and I think about it all the time.

My dream for 2016 is that I’ll know what it is.

It seems simple. Track my spending for a month and extrapolate, right? I’ve done that, but I’m not satisfied with it. Compared to four months ago, I’m living in a different country, with a different currency and different tax rate. I’ve only gotten one set of utility bills so far, and they each covered multiple months plus set-up costs, some of which may instead be recurring usage charges. (Utility bills in Italy are no less stuffed with obfuscatory jargon than the ones in the United States.) I’ve had a lot of one-time costs as I’ve bought necessary household goods that would have been cost-ineffective to ship over (or would have required the wrong electrical voltage). I’m still in the middle of filing for my long-term residency status, and eventually citizenship, which requires the payment of various stamp duties.

Meanwhile, I don’t have an intuitive benchmark for the costs of things I’ll need in the future. I walk a minimum of 4 miles a day in the course of my normal commute, which I didn’t do before I moved; how soon will I need to replace my shoes? Will it cost more to buy a new coat or to re-line my old one? I’ve never visited an Italian tailor, or even a dry cleaner. I’ve had a dental cleaning, but don’t know whether that cost will drop once I’m on the Italian medical system; likewise, I’m currently paying for birth control out of pocket.

However, the real barrier between me and knowing my expenditure rate is the fact that my husband and I are financially interdependent, and while we’re both pretty good about talking about money instead of ignoring it, we’re overstretched right now; uncommitted hours are a precious resource, particularly uncommitted hours that overlap, and sitting down with a calculator and ledger to try to recall where every dollar went in the last month isn’t his idea of a good time. (For me, yes. For me it is a pleasure superior to Sudoku.) One of our subdivisions of labor is that I deal with the financial stuff; I say whether we can afford a big-ticket item, and I set whatever spending and saving rules we have. It’s annoying to both of us when I can’t make these decisions autonomously.

When we lived in the U.S., I was able to ballpark everything without nagging him, by looking at credit card statements; we did everything on cards for this very reason (and to get cash-back rewards). The same strategy cannot be applied here; transactions in Pescara are typically cash-only. Furthermore, my husband’s payments from private clients are in cash as well, so ATM withdrawal history is similarly useless.

So we talk about it. And talk about it. And it’s never settled, because it’s ongoing and speculative and atypical. We tug back and forth over whether it’s responsible to keep guessing at variables we can’t know yet, or a neurotic waste of time. Unfortunately, it’s both.

In my glamorous future life six to 12 months from now, I like to think we’ll have established an Italian bank account, and that all Italian income including cash income will be deposited there. (Currently, the transaction fees from our American bank would make it costly to do this.) Italian expenses will be paid from that account, or cash withdrawn from that account; it will grow or shrink at a predictable rate, plus or minus normal variability. (I’ll know by then what normal is.) I’ll only have to pay close attention if a month falls well outside the standard deviation.

The most beautiful part of this golden future is that the American accounts will only be used for dollar-based expenses, like student loan payments. Which means that any excess dollar-denominated income will be, by its very nature, not dedicated to household expenses (unless the currency exchange rate, which is currently around parity, diverges wildly enough that we’d be fools not to transfer it). I’ll be able to dedicate the overage to debt service without worrying I might need it for groceries, and once that’s discharged (probably more like 2017), I’ll be able to look at investment vehicles.

A whole separate “untouchable” account that I can grow like my own little garden! It’s like an impossible mirage, the tantalizing fantasy with which you tempt the righteous hero — except it’s something that’s normal for plenty of people, and it’s prudent instead of corrupting. Really, the biggest life change of 2016 isn’t living in Italy; it’s that for the first time in more than 10 years together, I’ll be part of a two-income family, even if one of those incomes is terribly undependable (mine). Up to this point, one or the other of us has been in school, or has been a full-time caretaker to a relative who needs round-the-clock supervision. If we both have incomes, the second one, even if it’s small, is fun money, where fun is that special kind that involves sober retirement decisions. (My kind of fun.)

Maybe, just maybe, I’ll someday be the kind of person who has a clothing allowance, or a vacation account, or I’ll be able to increase our charitable giving above its current 5% of joint income. But for now, I’m happy enough to think that next year I might get the other half of the blanket. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

This article is part of The Billfold’s 2015 end-of-year series, “Our Best Selves in the Coming Year.”

Romie Stott’s genre-bending fiction and poetry have appeared in Arc, Farrago’s Wainscot, Strange Horizons, Punchnel’s, Dark Mountain, and LIT. As a filmmaker, she’s been a guest artist at the National Gallery (London), ICA Boston, and Dallas Museum of Art. Her online portfolio is at romiesays.tumblr.com.

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