A Letter to My Son and Niece - Day 7

I think the part of my life that I was the most naïve about was finances.

I take that back, there were a lot of parts of my life that I was naïve about.

This will be a ramble, not sure I have much of a point, yet.

Finances.  Growing up, we had it pretty easy.  I had all of my basic needs met (by far), we traveled, went out to eat regularly, I had birthday parties, my brother and I got a weekly allowance and my parents owned a nice home.  But we didn’t talk about money, or financial savviness.

The biggest discussion about finances that I remember was one summer when we were taking our annual (sometimes twice-a-year) roadtrip out East to visit my grandparents, and extended family.  As we stopped along the way for meals, I remember my dad mentioning several times that we needed to pay for everything with credit card, not cash.  To this day, I don’t know why.  There must have been some big payment that they had to make out of the checking account, and didn’t have the cash on hand saved up for the trip, but wanted to delay payments.

I never heard anything else about that one and only ‘financial struggle’ in my childhood.  Finances (as well as a lot of topics) were discussed ‘behind closed doors’ – probably just after I’d gone to bed. 

My first experience with ‘financial freedom’ was in high school, when I got a part time job at a coffee shop.  I didn’t have any expenses and I quickly discovered that my preference was to save money for the future.  So my bank accounts increased (as did my wardrobe of cute dresses).  The money that I saved, eventually became my funds to spend on books plus wants & needs when I went away to college. 

My college was fully paid for because my dad was a college professor, and I specifically chose a school that was part of the tuition exchange program, leaving my folks with only the burden of paying for my room and board – which was within their means.  The money I had saved up from my high school job (and subsequent summer jobs) was enough to keep me funded with Bojangles biscuits and Sprite throughout the years without worries.

After college I got my first job at a furniture store.  I did not like the job, sales is not my forte (now I could probably do better, but trying to be a pushy salesperson was not in my wheelhouse at the time).  I saved all of my money.  Took out a student loan to go back to school for an AutoCAD certificate (probably completely unnecessary), but this was my first experience with debt.  And it took me YEARS to pay off the small loan. 

I knew nothing about credit – didn’t have any credit cards.  I went to a financial advisor once – as recommended by my parents, which was absolutely a good thing – but he didn’t dig in deep with me about my financial knowledge.  He saw that I had about $10,000 in savings and assumed I knew what I was doing (I didn’t).

I ended up quitting my job in furniture sales to focus on school, and quickly blew through my savings.  Then I got my first job for an Architecture firm – knew nothing about how to negotiate salaries or benefits – but was thankful for the opportunity. 

I worked there for far too long – even when the owner was 1 ½ months late on giving out paychecks due to cash flow issues.  By this point my finances were completely unstable.  I had combined finances nearly immediately with my then boyfriend – fiancé – husband and finances swirled further and further out of control for years. 

I tried lots of budgeting approaches, but nothing stuck.  We needed a complete overhaul and coaching on how to get there, but it was a struggle to get both of us on board at the same time.

Finally, after getting separated, I was able to be solely in charge of my finances again – more importantly the spending aspect of the finances.  I’m using the You Need A Budget program, and am near where I was in my assests in 2002 (18 years ago), but still feel like I need to learn more.

Financial stability is something I want to make sure to help Annabelle and Charlie learn about.  Recalling all of this makes be realize how vitally important it is.  And that I need to make it a priority for me to learn how to teach them.