What a contrast



A recent MBN group writing project was “Then and now” — comparing your finances 10 years ago with your finances now. While I’m not a member of the network, I liked the topic — probably because there is such a stark contrast between my finances now and 10 years ago.

10 years ago I was finishing up graduate school. I’d taken out a loan for the 2nd year of it that was large enough to pay my tuition, books, and all of my living expenses for the entire year. So, $20,000. My then-husband had done the same thing, except that he was an undergraduate. We both quit our jobs. I expected to be back at work in a year, and he expected to be starting graduate school in a year, so we planned on 3 years before he would be back at work.

I remember the day I quit. It was the first time in 14 years that I hadn’t worked full time, usually while doing extra work on the side and often going to school full-time too. I was so happy at the thought of actually be able to focus strictly on school that the $20,000 only gave me a slight pang. With 80+ hour weeks in graduate school, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spare. I did work then as well, but it was unpaid, part of an internship requirement, and directly related to school.

So, lots of old credit card debt and new student loan debt for both of us. Plus our son still needed daycare. We had a negative net worth, lots of expenses, zero income, and plenty of money-related fights. We ended up getting two months behind on our newly-bought house’s mortgage, because we had to wait for our second financial aid payment to cover it. (We’d already spent the first half of it.) Oh and we took little vacations during that time too. And spent quite a bit of money replacing extremely-ugly-but-otherwise-fine flooring in our new house. Thank goodness we didn’t get sick either, because no jobs equaled no health insurance. About the only responsible things we did during that time was to only have a single paid-for car and get our degrees.

Somehow, all that seemed like a good idea to me at the time. And I was the designated “financially responsible” person in our marriage. Clearly I needed to revise my definition of financially responsible…

Fast forward to now.

New husband. Decent jobs. Positive net worths. Emergency funds. Replacement/repair/various other funds. Paid-for cars. Investments. Retirement accounts. Health, life, and disability insurance. Estate-planning vehicles in place. Only mortgage debt (and if things go the way we intend, we’ll have enough money to pay that off in 3 years.) Home improvement projects, furniture, vacations and, well, everything, all paid for in advance with money that we actually HAVE.

What changed? It’s hard to pinpoint, because it was such a gradual process. Getting divorced taught me to prepare for things you never thought would happen. It certainly helped that I later married someone with an extremely similar outlook on life and money. My mom’s illness and death taught me the value of being organized and leaving your estate in good shape. Being unemployed for four years taught me how to live on pretty much nothing, along with the value of not having “bills”. I no longer think of debt as ok or normal. I think of it as a trap. Writing this blog has helped too, because many of the positive changes I mentioned came about as a direct result of spending time on the topic of money. Probably the biggest change has been my outlook. I learned (and am still learning) to PAY ATTENTION and THINK about potential long-term consequences.

Related Websites

Posted in Financial health on May 25, 2008

Comments are closed.

←
→

  • bluntmoney.com