You can tell how old you are by counting the rings in your magazine subscriptions.

No, seriously. You can. When I was in high school, I read Seventeen. College and young married? Glamour and Cosmopolitan. (I had to give up Cosmo pretty quickly though: just reading all those italics made me hyperventilate)

I really knew I had hit The Beginning of The End when I let Glamour slide in favor of my Better Homes & Gardens subscription. I finally let *that* one go when I realized two things:

1. The houses in BH&G are not anything like the house I live in. I live in a tract home in the desert, with stucco walls and tile roofs that looked really exotic when I was growing up in Philadelphia but now are all ho-hum. The houses in BH&G are interesting. They’re the homes that George Washington slept in or on the beach or on a lake or in a forest. I kept looking through the mag trying to find pictures of rooms I’d like to replicate (the only way I can decorate anything) and realized that I wanted what was outside the windows: the forest, or the meadow, or the ocean. Anything but the desert landscaping and my neighbor’s wall.

2. BH&G was never going to feature a house that was like mine. When they have a magazine called Tract Homes & Dog Runs, I’m gonna be all over it.

I thought I had found Magazine Nirvana when I found a magazine called Real Simple. It’s subtitled “Life made easier” and it really did, in fact, make my life easier. Cool ways to use old things, great comparisons of products…it was wonderful.

Until yesterday, when I read the continuing feature: One Woman’s Money Diary. The idea is simple: woman sends in her money worries and a certified financial planner analyzes ’em and helps the worries go away.

June’s Financial Centerfold is a woman who is married with a baby. She stayed home with him after his birth and quit her job. She and her husband are facing these traumas, even after she quit her job:

– no debt, other than their house
– when they moved, their mortgage went down by $1,000 a month
– they earned $285K in profit when they sold their old house
– they save 12% of the husband’s income in a 401(k) and
– put $500 a month into the baby’s college fund and
– still have a ridiculously low monthly outlay

Her dilemma? She can’t feel good about spending any money on herself.

Ahem.

I don’t want to minimize anyone’s pain here, but could we get someone with a real problem? I can’t learn anything from this other than I obviously should have married someone who worked in technology and maybe done a little better with birth control.

This woman has anxiety? Try the anxiety of knowing that your husband’s last camping trip (and supporting trips to REI and Cabela’s) sent your checking account reeling so hard that you came within thirty-seven cents of bouncing six checks. Or realizing that you’re either going to have to work until you’re about 86 or pray that those life expectancy tables that chart you to live until you’re 102 are dead wrong.

That’s anxiety.