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Three years ago, while staffing a gallery opening at SF Camerawork, Sarah met fellow volunteer and future partner Julie, a talented graphic designer and part-time instructor at the California College of Arts. At the time, Sarah was finding her MFA program at San Francisco State University difficult and uninspiring and had more-or-less decided to drop out in order to pursue her new-found passion–event coordinating! In fact it was via coordinating a private corporate event for a client at SF Camerwork that Sarah learned about its interesting gallery events and volunteering opportunities.
Julie and Sarah hit it off right away, talking about art, about learning about art and about creating art. Sarah loved art, but wanted a break from the sheer effort of creating and being disappointed with the results. She wanted to focus on making people happy for awhile, like when she was a part-time waitress during college and enjoyed the simple pleasure of serving food to hungry people.
A native New Yorker, Julie moved to San Francisco in 2004 with her freshly minted Yale MFA and a singular passion for design. Hers was a story of doors continually opening: design and teaching opportunities presented themselves at a dizzying pace until she found herself hopelessly over-committed and tired. Sarah’s cheerful humility and willingness to listen, sometimes for hours on end, to Julie’s academic treatises on art and design, provided welcome relief from an otherwise hectic lifestyle. The two became inseparable.
It was when Sarah asked Holly about converting her traditional IRA to Roth to protect Julie from excessive taxes in the event of her death that Holly started to wonder about this relationship of 3 years. The women are both the same age, but they do not have equal financial circumstances. Though Julie is quite frugal and a big saver, Holly knew this couldn’t adequately explain why she was able to purchase a gorgeous Victorian flat in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. Sarah explained that Julie’s parents had essentially given her the down payment.
This conversation, which took place in same said well-appointed flat, punctuated long pauses of silence during which Sarah read and reread the same page near the beginning of a book, God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley.
“Why are you reading that?” Holly asked, thinking that Jack and Sarah probably hadn’t ever heard of Buckley, at least not from Heather.
“I was just curious–I saw it on Julie’s shelf,” Sarah said. “Julie says Buckley is her Dad’s biggest hero, but honestly, I have no idea what this guy is talking about.”
Oh this should be fun, Holly thought, having two Buckleyites in the same room at the next family gathering: Julie and Holly’s Dad Stephen. That is if Julie really is a Bucklelyite. Hmm. It was all starting to fit together in her mind, Julie studying Art at Mount Holyoke College then Yale, the gift of the down payment, the quiet confidence, the doors opening before being pushed. The life of the privileged and well-connected as Jack liked to say sarcastically in reference to herself.
It struck her as ironic that two siblings from a liberal but somewhat anti-intellectual background should have ended up in relationships with conservative intellectuals, and that this difference in backgrounds would play itself out so predictably in their nearly opposite attitudes towards money.
Holly advised Sarah to go ahead and convert her Traditional IRA to Roth, since she’s in such a low tax bracket anyway, and to make Julie beneficiary. On the other hand, since the property agreement Julie wants Sarah to sign seems to carefully exclude Sarah from any interest in Julie’s separate property, Holly wants Sarah to have a Family Law attorney review the agreement before signing. No sense in volunteering to give up potential claims to shared property, that is if it’s a committed relationship for the long term.
