Everyone has one. Human's tend to associate value with currency, so much so that we think of money several thousand times per day and base real decisions solely on money. Empirically, this is mankind's greatest flaw. My past has been a struggle, a grind, so I'm human just like you.
When I was younger (I'd say 7), I was caught stealing baseball cards from a CVS when my brother told me that it was fine. After being spanked and sitting in the back of our white Toyota station wagon completely alone with my tears. I realized my parents and my brother knew something I didn't. We were poor. My love for baseball cards stayed, and I would work at my dad's construction sites sweeping sawdust in order to buy a few packs on the weekends. While my dad, my brother, and I were at the card shop, my mom was shopping her way into severe red numbers without looking back. My two older sisters quickly took up her habits; what chance did we have?
I wondered why my parents fought each other so much and through their words, I realized it was all about the vast debt that my mother had accrued that leveraged against most of a year's salary for my father's paltry construction salary. Fights got worse, and I saw my parents less and less and somehow isolated myself through cartoons and video games. From the time I was 10, I was left alone playing San Francisco Rush and sports games in a mostly empty house. My brother stuck to baseball and skateboarding. I was too young and different for my sisters to spend time with me. The divide grew greater, and just before my twelfth birthday, I asked my dad while we played HORSE what a divorce was. My mom kept the house, the kids (except my brother), and subsequently applied for every government aid imaginable. She forced ritalin down my brother's throat at times while she told me to take adderal. I felt like we were stealing, and I never knew how we had so many groceries each week.
I was 14 when my first niece was born into a house with me, my 2 sisters, their boyfriends, and my mother. I was driven crazy by the amount of money she still spent on useless shopping. We had 4 dogs in the backyard and a few in-house pets at one point in time. I was fed up with the mess, the stress, and the poverty that was needlessly created by each financial misstep. I began liking numbers and would give my mom advice at the age of 15, and she told me it was good, but she had too much to deal with to listen. Most of it was about her spending and about my sisters having ancillary income streams. I gave up. I began playing golf on the weekends and spent the week taking care of my niece and training my Collie. Dad payed for the golf and I saw that he wasn't as bad as my mom said. I spent the rest of my teen years with him and quickly moved away for college and then out of the state.
Now, I see powerful opportunity. I can lead people financially so that they don't have the stress that I had as an indirect but extremely substantial result of poor spending habits. My parents never encouraged me toward a career, so it took me until the age of 25 to find my calling. I still love my family for always being there; no matter if we struggled, we did it together.
To this day, my mom and dad can't speak to each other; not on the phone even. I attribute the impasse to lack of financial intelligence. I know that the divorce was because of the hole that mom was burning in dad's pocket. I look forward to a future where my wife and kids think about money in thousands of positive, creative ways each day instead of debilitating, stressful ways. This is also a goal for my community: save each dollar for the safety of family and future income streams.
