I Got Better With Money Once I Cared

I Got Better With Money Once I Cared

March 6, 2020 By Big Freddy Smidlap

Sometimes in life you need a reason to do better

Last week I gave you a year by year chronological account of when I Used to Be Terrible with Money.  This follow up explains some of the rationale and motivation to get better with the All American Greenbacks.  It was never a question of understanding or ability before 2005 but more a matter of motivation.

Here I was at 37 years old and just married and newly employed as a low level chemist at a good paying contract job with Big Brother Corporation.  I also had accumulated $40,000+ in student debt that went all the way back to the 1980’s!  Of course I disclosed all of this to Mrs. Smdlap when we even started discussing getting hitched in holy matrimony. 

In the time since I had moved to her place in Buffalo we had survived mostly on her decent salary at an independent record label plus whatever I scraped together form a series of crappy jobs.  I saw this doubling of our combined income as a grand opportunity to set everything right and atone for my financial sins of the past.  This part is key:  you will get some opportunities in life.  You might as well seize a few of them!

I might not have seized the opportunity as tightly had it not been for one big catalyst.  During my 18 year stint of not caring about money or much about the future it was only about me, myself, and I.  I didn’t produce any rug rats or curtain climbers or yard apes and was a happy solo artist in life. 

Then I married a person who was always pretty responsible with money and lived in a $300 art studio apartment in the ‘hood for years to afford a downpayment on the house where we lived. 

She paid off her own student loans just few years after college on a crappy art school graduate/record store employee paycheck and worked her way up from the bottom of the record business.  I like to call this kind of activity paying dues.  Nobody told me I needed to straighten out my finances.  I just naturally felt a certain responsibility to do the right thing now that I was half of a dynamic duo.

Here is the rest of the redemption story as best as I can recall.

2005:  I had just started my temp job the previous fall and even though it paid less than my coworkers were making it was still the most I had ever made.  The first thing I did with my first few paychecks was buy myself a Weber gas grill (we still have and use it 15 years later) and a bicycle. 

Other than those two purchases we basically just kept living pretty dirt cheap compared to our income.  The single biggest thing we did to seize the day in ’05 was to implement the The Smidlap Bucket System for Major Expenses.  We were never going to be the ultra frugal nerds who saved 97.4% of our income and merely existed in the world. 

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

https://freddysmidlap.com/2020/03/06/i-got-better-with-money-once-i-cared/