My money and I have a troubled relationship. It’s always trying to run away from me. It’s not that I’m not nice to my money; I’m always taking it out to shows or shopping or for a nice dinner, but at the end of the evening it’s just gone. If I thought I could entice it back with a bouquet of roses and a box of chocolates, I would.
The sad truth is that it takes hard work to gain and maintain a solid relationship with money. Unless, of course, you happen to have relatives who are both wealthy and generous. Unfortunately none of my relatives had the good sense to be born rich so I can’t count on them to enlarge my fortunes.
As a child, I had a flirtatious relationship with money; mostly the kind that jingles in your pocket. I reluctantly did a very few chores and my parents reluctantly paid me a very few dollars. The point (as I later explained to my own children) was to teach me the value of money. What I actually learned (and what my children explained to me) was that an allowance didn’t go very far. When I was old enough to seek a summer job, I took work at a local amusement park cleaning the attractions.
I learned a lot that first summer. I learned that people aren’t very careful about what they eat or about what they ride or about what they ride after they eat. I learned that you can never have too much hamster litter. And I learned that work is hard.
It was all worth it, though, when I got my first check and realized that I could easily pull down a four-figure income every two weeks if I could solve the trivial problem of working more than twenty-four hours per day. If I had to stick to the usual eight-hour-per day schedule I’d be lucky to clear a hundred bucks.
On the upside, that experience clearly pointed out the value of getting some kind of post-high school education. So long as I stayed clear of a philosophy degree, I had a decent shot at a escaping my job as a pixie-dust spreader on the Tilt-A-Whirl.
In time (a lot more time than I care to admit) I earned a degree in Elementary Education. This isn’t the kind of degree you normally associate with wealth-building. You’re not likely to see faculty parking filled with BMWs, Jaguars, and Mercedes. And you never hear a faculty lounge discussion about how hard it is to find good servants these days.
Not that I’m complaining about my career choice. Being an educator has taught me a lot; like how to manage my money very, very carefully. It’s taken a while, but I’ve finally found a money management scheme that is both simple and effective. It requires almost no effort on my part and has been enormously successful. You can apply my techniques for yourself. All you have to do is be married to my wife.
Really.
Well, not really, she’s already married and her current husband — me! — wants to keep her to himself. Which is your loss, because in addition to being a wonderful wife and mother, she is an awesome financial manager. When she took over our budget, she whipped it into shape like a Drill Sergeant transforming a group of corn-fed farm boys into deadly soldiers. If she could have ordered the budget to drop and give her twenty push-ups she would have.
She started by working out a budget. All of the financial advice books say that you should start with a budget that outlines how much money you bring in and how much you expect to spend. I never really understood the point of this because all it ever showed is that I needed more money than I had.
When I was in charge, I tried budgeting a few times. By the time I laid out the vital expenses (food, shelter, satellite TV) and the important expenses (transportation, video games, movie tickets) there wasn’t anything left for the optional expenses (education, insurance, and retirement savings.) My wife took issue with my approach, but I told her it didn’t really matter what I actually wrote in the budget.
Month after month, my idealized budget collapsed under the unexpected onslaught of real-world problems like a match-stick bridge failing under the weight of a freight train. My cars, in particular, enjoyed trashing the budget. For months they’d roll along, happily hiding the symptoms of their major automotive illnesses like crankcase rot, inflammation of the transmission or carburetor senility. They’d wait until the worst possible moment to reveal the depths of their pain and I’d find myself having to choose between keeping up the payments on my iron lung or buying four new tires.
I always went for the tires, which brought a whole new set of issues. The cars I drive aren’t new in the sense of having been manufactured within my children’s lifetimes. They’re paid for, but every time I undertake some major improvement such as buying new tires, changing the oil, or filling the tank the value of the vehicle goes up dramatically. I have my insurance agent on speed dial so I can call him up and confess that I’ve engaged in a willful act of automotive maintenance and need to significantly increase my coverage.
My wife is better at anticipating life’s little setbacks and has budgeted appropriately for them. This is a good thing because it makes our lives a little less stressful and we’re better prepared to handle what comes up. On the other hand, my relationship with money is mostly mediated through my wife now. She gives me regular cheerful updates on how the money is doing as if it’s just off at a health clinic getting stronger. I wish I got to see it more often, but I’m comforted knowing its there when I need it.
