Addressing the Financial Disease, Not Just the Symptoms

Addressing the Financial Disease, Not Just the Symptoms

By  Trent Hamm  10.15.19

 Getting Started

When Sarah and I first hit our financial bottom, our natural response was to deal with the immediate problems.

We simply didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay our bills. At that moment, the money in our checking account wasn’t enough even to pay the bills we owed that were due before our next paycheck, even assuming we spent $0 on food or anything else in that timeframe.

We had a lot of debt – multiple car loans, a pile of student loans, a bunch of credit card debt, and some other loans, too.

We had an infant who had just added a bunch of additional expenses to our life – child care being the biggest, of course, but far from the only thing.

It was a hefty list of challenges, but we tackled them head on. I took charge of selling off a bunch of items from our closets, including some vintage sports cards and Magic: the Gathering cards and DVD box sets and video games, and used that to rapidly eliminate the worst of the debt.

We started eating all of our meals at home. We started engaging in a bunch of intense frugal “money free weekends” and 30 day challenges to curb our spending. I threw myself into freelance work and side gigs and other opportunities to make a little more money – in terms of work, there were a few years that were basically just a blur.

Unsurprisingly, we hammered a lot of that debt really quickly. We got ourselves back on track with our bills, with a nice little emergency fund to boot. We blew through paying off all of our debt in a little over a year – we were debt free a little over a year after hitting that financial bottom. Things seemed good.

However, there was still a core problem underlying all of this. Our default habits were still oriented toward spending everything we brought in, if not more. We were absolutely more mindful of how we were spending money, but our instincts were still very oriented toward spending, even as our debt went away.

During that period when we were paying down debt, I found myself alternating between being thrilled with my financial progress and then, almost in the next breath, resorting right back to those bad financial habits that put us in a bad situation to begin with. Things were going in the right direction, but for every three steps forward, there were two steps backward.

In short, we were really good at treating the symptoms, but we were completely missing the disease.

The Symptoms

The symptoms were obvious. We were in debt. We had a bunch of bills that we were unable to pay. If something bad were to happen to us in the short term, like an illness or a job loss or a car breakdown, things would get really awful really quick.

Those symptoms, just like the symptoms of a disease, were the things that would actually affect our day to day life. We could definitely feel the impact immediately from a maxed out credit card or a car breakdown that we couldn’t pay for. We felt it in terms of stress. We felt it in terms of not being able to buy groceries at the store or go out to eat. It impacted our life immediately.

Yet, those were just the symptoms.

The Disease

So, what was the disease, then?

The disease, as I see it now, was that we didn’t really have a clear idea of what we wanted out of life, and because of that, it was very easy to have our thoughts and desires become oriented toward the impulsive desires for things in the short term. The disease is a short term focus on life. The disease is living life through momentary desires and impulses.

There was a sense that we needed to “live a little,” but that sentence translated from actually having meaningful experiences to just buying things without any real rhyme or reason, just chasing the things we wanted in the moment.

To continue reading, please go to the original article here:

https://www.thesimpledollar.com/addressing-the-financial-disease-not-just-the-symptoms/