All about the money?

Darn it. I unplugged my laptop by accident and lost a whole post. :(

Basically it was a rant about money matters. I'm actually fairly lucky, money-wise. For a graduate student, I'm well-paid. I have a small supplemental fellowship that allows me to have a one-bedroom apartment to myself in a nice area of town. I have a summer job. Because I went to a state school, I was able to patch together a full-ride set of scholarships for myself, so the college fund my kind parents set up for me many years ago is still untouched. Those same kind parents are still helping me with smaller financial matters to this day.

But this afternoon I was feeling very bitter, in relative terms, about my cash flow. Most of my friends are paid more than me; some are paid much more. Boyfriend, this fall, will be going to grad school full time, with no teaching or research-assistant duties for the first year -- and he'll be collecting his full salary, which is between two and three times my annual total from school-year and summer work. My summer job, which normally pays for summer housing, and adds a per diem for employees who have completed at least a bachelor's degree, isn't giving me either of these benefits, because my having a job at all this summer is a bit of a special favor; taking my current rent as The One True Rent, this amounts to at least a 40% pay cut.

Adding to my own feeling of monetary suffocation is my fanatical insistence on saving for my retirement. In my mind, the benefits of compound interest are too great to ignore, and the possibility of being forced to scrimp and save when I'm older (and perhaps have more people than just myself to pay for) frightens me much more than the prospect of more-or-less choosing to be frugal now. Besides, I'm very seriously considering staying home with my children when, someday off in the future, I have them, and that will effectively remove me from the money-making-retirement-saving pool. I have to get a head start now in order to keep options like that open for the future.

I'm not exactly starving on the streets; I have a nice apartment, I eat good food, and I can pay for weekly riding lessons and the occasional book (many more books if I hadn't signed up for the riding lessons!). I have enough money to give some to good causes, although I'm a bit paranoid about figuring out who, exactly, my money is going to, and so I seldom end up giving as much as I plan to. I have reinstated a regular savings program -- my summer paycheck is higher than my school-year paycheck, so I'm saving the difference, plus an extra $50 or so just to get me in the habit of living on that little bit less. Automated savings programs are a really good idea. And, as an extra bonus, my advisor decided that I couldn't be an effective grad student if my dying laptop battery kept me tethered to the wall, so he bought me a new battery out of one of his grants!

So why am I so annoyed at Boyfriend and at our other friends for having more money than me, and for being able to think (for instance) that $8.50 for a movie is a reasonable expense and not highway robbery? Certainly I'm spoiled; I miss being on my parents' dime, when a laptop battery was a little thing. My mother still thinks I'd be better off living partly out of my savings instead of keeping such a tight budget. Boyfriend suggests that I journal, or something, and try to think of solutions instead of just biting his head off whenever I'm reminded (as I was today) that eeeeeverybody makes more money than I do.

This money stuff keeps getting all tied up with feminism (it definitely seems not to be sexism, so why am I making less than my friends, who are mostly boys? is it a coincidence that one of my few[er] lower-paid friends is also female? how do I pay my own way on dates, and still do what Boyfriend wants to do, when he's making so much more than me?) and with figuring out my Life Path and One True Career (should I even be caring about the money stuff? would I still do what i'm doing if it didn't pay? how do I bring up money things and not look like I'm just in it for the cash? and how on earth do I decide about this stay-at-home-mom thing, and shouldn't I start planning now so I have all the options?) and so on.

Anyone got any Sage Advice?