Managing Your Money

Lesson 2: Where are you Going: Your Money and Your Character

Wake Up and Smell the Carmel Frappuchino

Have you ever been driving a long distance and felt yourself dosing off? I remember many road trips when I was at the wheel. I would look ahead of me and see nothing, but nothing ahead. Sometimes this was enough to make me drowsy. Other times the sheer time spent behind the wheel was enough to make me nod off while driving. At these times it was the sudden realization that you were veering to the left or slowing down abruptly that made my head jolt up in terror.

I think my bankruptcy filing was like driving a long distance while being half asleep at the wheel. I was incoherent, unaware of how dangerous my circumstances had become and in no way able to make conscious decisions given my foggy state of mind. Filing Chapter 7 was like pulling over to the side of the road to avoid getting into a deadly accident. I pulled over because I knew I could not go on.

I filed bankruptcy because I finally woke up to my reality. I couldn’t sleep through it anymore. I was in trouble and I had to recognize it and get help.

According to Paul Lim’s book, "Money Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make," “like an underachiever who sits in the back of the classroom and doesn’t even try to learn because he fears he won’t be good at school, tens of millions of us have given up on building savings because we just don’t think we’ll be successful at it.” I would venture to say so many people in the United States and even other countries are driving while drowsy.

We make impulsive financial decisions. We don’t think coherently about what we want to do with our money, so we do anything that comes to our minds and we spend more than we have. Others are so fearful of spending that they are paralyzed and leave their money in the bank where it is sitting there, not paying off bills and not even making good interest.

Overall, it is our thinking and our life experience that are like maps that lead us through life. For some people, their maps get them to a good place, a place they want to be, but others need to pull over, throw away their old outdated map and get new directions. Some of us need to pull over and get a nice caramel frappuchino.

In my relationship, I wanted to ignore how desperate my financial situation had become. I was also too ashamed to ask for help because I had made such a mess of my finances. "Money Drunk, Money Sober" has a brilliant term for this called “terminal vagueness.” Now that I think back, I know it probably seemed like my head was in the clouds or like I was living in a different reality. Cameron’s point is that people with money troubles often use coping mechanisms to block the pain of financial disaster.

This notion will be discussed in Lessons 3 and 4 when I will discuss some of the actions I took leading up to my financial collapse. My actions included ignoring bills, ignoring calls and ignoring reality. I wanted to be ignorant. I wanted to ignore my problems and pretend that I could afford to decorate my apartment with leather furniture and buy big abstract paintings. I loved hearing people say my apartment was beautiful but looking back, I would have preferred a plain apartment to save myself the heartache of trying to pay credit card bills.

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