The Power of Cash and the Consequences Thereof

I'm thinking a lot about money today. There's a live Stereophonics track I'm gonna put on repeat when I'm done writing this -- "Every Day I Think About Money".

I'm a product of the modern North American marriage. My parents' good marriage disintegrated because of their wildly contrasting spending habits. My mother was wise and thrifty, my father oblivious and wasteful.

I have managed to merge the best and worst that each parent had to offer me. I'm always in debt, living cheque to cheque, but I never go too far astray. My attitude about it is wrong, too. Conscious of being in debt, I feel I'm plagued by it. The truth is, it's a highly surmountable thing. My debt? About $7K. Total.

Why any debt at all angers me is because I know, deep down inside, I have what it takes to accomplish a little in the investing world. I remember back in '87 when I was 14 and my mother and I were talking about stocks. I said she should buy stocks in a condom manufacturer 'cos the AIDS thing was gonna get worse before it got better. I think I freaked her out.

But I was strangely more informed about the world and business when I was a newspaper fiend. Now that information is everywhere, I've somehow found myself unplugged from it. I'm pondering it a lot this morning. Moneysmart is something I know makes sense for me. Now that my income is finally stable and I have gained solid footing at my four-month-old job, I'm ready to make the next step and take myself out of this position. I mean, $7K? I should be completely debt free in a year, if not a matter of months, with a savings to show for it.

It's a day of steady pounding rain here on the Wet Coast. A perfect day for a lazy writer girl to tackle her homestead and do some thinking. I've lived debt-free before and I'm pining to do it again. I've earned the right to say I'm in control of my life, but now I want cold, hard proof of that fact. I want to know I'm in the black, putting down security funds against the inevitable -- age and illness.

I wonder sometimes how much something like being financially secure and able to truly say you're self-sustaining -- and the future isn't filled with boogeymen -- affects who you are on a day by day basis. Is it that niggling sense of financial insecurity that transforms you into a somewhat insecure person overall?

My mother was an incredible woman, come undone by a merciless real estate market in which more people floundered and failed than succeeded. In the years that preceeded her death, my mother made $27,000, $12,000, $11,000, and $7,000. Her short-term, post-divorce, 5 year savings of $177,000 was eaten up by a skeletal market that left homes sitting on sale far past their best-before dates. She died broke with my paltry retail clerk income paying most of our groceries and utilities for that last year.** I endured her death to find myself nearly $15K in the hole the next year. That number grew because of my low income for the next year after that.

I wound up about $27k in debt -- the second time in my adulthood to hit debts of that amount -- and have succeeded in paying it down to about $7k now, but the goal is to make it all vamoose this year, and to prove for once and for all that I can control money and make it grow, like my mother had been able to do before the market died on her.

When I get there, I plan to start playing the stock market with some of my funds. I'd like to see if I can clue in on the speculation game and find out where my smarts can take me.

Maybe this posting seems out of place on here. I don't know why it would. I think that every aspect of who we are is relevant to every other aspect. I think the confidence and self-assurance that finds us from personal success directly affects how much we're able to feel powerful and in control in other areas -- like sex. And why shouldn't it? Each of these areas is just another series of threads that combine to form the fabric of who we are. Cheesy, but true.

And, hey, look at me. I'm self-improving on the cheap. I didn't pay $295 for a life-transforming three-day seminar. I've got PBS and a pot of coffee, and I never had to change out of my cut-off jean shorts to do it, either.

I'm gonna try to be a little more accountable in every way on this bloggie. I feel like I'm so close to being a person I can really, truly dig, that I'm getting sick of falling just short of everything I want to be. So close yet so far, and I'm not alone. Most people like themselves a lot but have those small things they'd like to change. My first achievement is that of realizing just how far I am from my goals... but also realizing how close I have come. And that's something.

**(Real estate in BC at that time made it illegal for agents to hold a second job and keep their r.e. license. Thus, if the market failed you, you had no ability to make income any other way without losing your r.e. privileges. It was a big price to pay, considering one house sale at the time could net you $12k or so in commission... Not long after my mother's death, the r.e. board changed their standing on income and conflict, and that law was changed; real estate could be a sideline to a different career. One could be a busdriver and sell homes on the weekend. Took them long enough to have a common sense approach, but a little too late for it to be of any use to my mom. Bittersweet victories and all...)