In 2018, for my 50th birthday, I was given a pair of Bose headphones from two family members, as they cost a lot more back then. In fact, I didn’t pay for them. For some reason, they were purchased around my 51st birthday, one year later, as I had refused a big 50th birthday party that my dad had offered me numerous times.
Thus, my dad probably saved between $1,000 and $3,000 on my 50th birthday—likely around $1,000—by not having the party. You could go back to February 2018 and look for venues in NYC, as well as other expenses like the number of guests, cake, etc. If we’d had the party and an older person died beforehand, he would make money off that person’s place if it were priced that way. That’s an example of Girl Math.
Given that most people seem to have a hard time even using the word “died,” for fun, I could Girl Math my own funeral. Actually, no joke, I know someone who looks up the average number of years he has left (being around 93) and is Girl Mathing the hell out of his estate. He’s giving max untaxed money gifts to his kids and grandkids, saving a ton on estate taxes and probably capital gains taxes, too.y
My own dad did some sneaky but totally legal Girl Math about ten years ago. He offered each of his kids one of his very fancy watches. My sister picked a Rolex. I am the proud owner of a seriously beautiful Omega watch with a gold wristband. It doesn’t look like a “man’s” watch, and he even paid to have the wristband adjusted to fit me. Who knows what those watches might have cost his estate? I could find out; maybe I got it wrong, and he saved nothing but got the high value of giving me something while he’s still alive.
Gifts have extreme value, as they involve the joys of the moment of giving and receiving, and then thinking of the person—alive or dead—and feeling joy and nostalgia. Okay, this is a post in itself.
Basically, planning out your estate is obviously important. Whether you have valuables or money, it’s complicated. Wealthy people can afford to pay experts for their eventual demises. For me, my death, despite my having some assets, would cost money, whether hired or not. Free labor isn’t free—it’s time, and you only have a certain, unknown quantity until you also die.
On a tangent, at a party in SoHo many years ago, while ostensibly flirting with a very specific human very special to me (after about 25 years), I argued the point that just because other people die, there is a chance that I, for example, will not die since I haven’t died yet. I wasn’t even drunk during that discussion. I didn’t know about the “Would you rather be invisible or fly?” thought experiment, so I posited one I’d always wondered about: If your uncle died healthy and put it in his will that he wanted to be cooked, served, and eaten in lieu of the usual rituals, would you honor his wishes and eat him?
It turned out there had been a conversation among the members of a band about whom to eat first in a lost, starving, no-food situation. In that case, it pays to be small, as you wouldn’t be worth eating first. That’s why the witch had to waste time feeding Hansel before trying to cook him.
Obviously, spending time going through someone’s art journals is valuable. If I died, given my ADHD, there would be so much arduous and annoying work to do going through my stuff. I don’t have a will, which is embarrassing, but, given the law, my one kid would get everything, so I save on a lawyer. I am about to move out of my studio and put things in storage, which I’ve started, and it’s highly stressful. I would advise taking money out of my bank
6 Impossible Things For Breakfast 