Buddhist Marketer

Sleeping on a floor; chucking my sunk cost bias

I’ve been sleeping on my living room floor the past couple of weeks.

Okay, okay, not quite. The first night I pulled out my queen sofa and got yelled at by my old-lady back the next morning. Lacking the plywood board I’d been toting from apartment to apartment from 1998 - 2007, I decided to make a bold move to my twin size Aerobed.

But, there I am, living in my living room, protected from my pants-optional sixty-something bachelor neighbor by scraps of my former clothes that I’ve fashioned into a curtain. My other window I simply avoid by changing clothes in the part of my room that prevents my friends Dan and Melissa from the across the courtyard from being able to see me less decent than they have come to expect (and the bar is low).

My bedroom contains a summer law associate from Toronto. She’s been here for two weeks so far with one week to go. Unexpectedly, her fiance has also been here the entire time, keeping the air conditioning and many a DVD cranking all day long. This factoid is annoying as energy costs are up and this is 8 - 10 hours of additional electricity consumption I had not factored into my roommate price. Grumble.

But all in all, the experience has been secretly satisfying:

• I get to complain about it. I like having reasons to whine; it sates my inner need to feel somehow exploited and taken advantage of. Poor me! Boo hoo! I like sympathy points and having to bear, as a thirtysomething, the injustice of a roommate and her over-cologned, 24-pack buying fiance breaking my picture frames, ripping the curtains that took me so long to hang out of the wall, demanding more clean towels, refusing to wash their own dishes and jumping up and down on my bed with the a/c cranked to eleven while I develop scoliosis and sweat my balls off on a hissing aerobed gives me great reason to kvetch.

• Now I feel like a real Manhattanite. This was the experience I really wanted, wasn’t it? To be in a bizarre housing situation if only to live in a neighborhood with a walking score of 98?

• If I can live like this, I can do anything. I was worried that in my old age I had become habituated to long-thread sheets and furniture that did not involve cinder blocks and/or pilfered milk crates. “The next time I visit Berlin,” I sniffed to myself, “I am so not crashing on Sandeman’s floor!”

The last bullet is the most important. The experience has proven something to me: I can actually hang with purpose-driven ersatz poverty. So long as the curtailment has a goal, I’m actually cool with it.

So what’s the purpose of all this? Long short: I’m going back to school. No, not for an MBA, and I’m not sure who will accept me and my patchwork quilt of unsubstantiated-by-transcript-data maff skillz, but I’m now willing to trade a good salary for a legitimate permission slip to Think About Stuff. I think it would be wicked awesome to turn vast undulating sheets of data into my personal trampoline, to juice meaning out of numbers, to translate findings into reams of journal articles, and to stand in front of a bunch of kids and make math relevant.

1. Wait, but don’t you juice meaning out of numbers already in your day job? Yes, true, but I want to take it to a different level.
2. And, wait, but didn’t you stand in front of a bunch of kids and make math relevant back in the day? (Favorite class I designed / taught: Architecture & The Stock Market. Teaching geometry, ratios, and fractions to seventh graders was never so much fun.) Yes, and I loved it, and I want more.

So now that I know that I don’t mind sleeping on the floor, I’ve been considering jamming all my stuff into storage and subletting around New York City until I know where I’ll end up for grad school. (It won’t be New York because my soul needs to leave the City; Columbia & NYU aren’t options.) (Assuming I could even get in, of course.)

But the issue of sunk costs weighs heavily on my mind. I had to pay $2,640 to a realtor to find the place, $500 or so in forms for the co-op board for a sublet approval, $900 for a new range (whatever, the one that was here was subprime), $3,300 for movers (coming from a three bedroom in Brooklyn … I have a lot of stuff), $1400 for painters (the walls were yuckers) … That’s $8,700, or about $730/month for a year. Which brings my rent to nearly three grand a month, a 300%+ increase over what I was paying in Brooklyn.

… Unless I amortize over a two year period, which then makes it a less painful $360/month, or $2,600 a month all in. I mean, this is what I figured when I incurred the expenses to begin with: that I’d be there for a couple of years and then either be madly in love and cohabitating with my future baby daddy, or making more money and thus ready to upgrade to something with, like, granite countertops.

I never thought that I might be actively looking to substantially decrease my income.

So, that’s the crossroads I’m at. Bite the bullet and say sayanora to $8,700 but potentially curb expenditures for the next year, or pay the $300 sublease renewal fee and keep finding people to sleep in my bedroom that I can kvetch about on my blog.

* sigh *