My children are all grown-up now. Though that is true, I still “mom” all over things, as my oldest would say.
Though, we, as parents, don’t need to feed or clothe our children anymore, we are still not done worrying about all the lessons they need to learn. Maybe these are lessons that I still need to learn.
Here is our reality. I am approaching retirement (within the decade for sure) and my hubby has been forcibly retired for a number of years now.
We (actually mostly me) are looking closely at our finances, possibly for the first time ever.
Isn’t that odd? Over the years, we have bought a few cars, a house, and whatever was needed to fill it. We have raised a couple of kids which means we fed and clothed them as well as paid for needed therapies, braces, activities and whatever they needed for school… All of that, and only now, we start to look at finances more closely.
I hope what I am finally learning will help my kids and maybe others along the way.
The first lesson I learned was that life is full of surprises; some good and some bad.
Ha ha! I bet you were waiting for what I learned financially.
The reality is the cost of surprises whether joyful or scary are more than the energy they demand and the reorganisation of your life. In our case, it went from the joys of having babies and buying a house to dealing with broken bones to worrying through brain surgeries and rehab to readjusting to a forcible retirement.
I have been known to jokingly say, as of late, that I know having an emergency bank account is a good strategy … but with the multitude of crazy emergencies through just a few years of our life, believe you me, we haven’t had leeway to have one, pretty much ever.
First lesson to my kids: SET UP AN EMERGENCY ACCOUNT!
We are walking proof that you need to put financial things into place just in case.
At the same importance as paying your rent, electric bill, insurance and food, should be putting a small amount in an emergency account. Even $25.00 paycheck adds up to $650 a year. Bigger would be better obviously but starting it is what is important.
Second lesson: NEVER CARRY OVER CREDIT CARD DEBT.
I love credit cards companies right now. They indicate the time it would take you to pay off the bill if you pay the minimum payment. When you see it would take 10 or 15 years to pay off what you spent this month should scare you senseless. Who stops using the credit card after the one month of shopping? Common sense then tells us to clear what was spent every month.
I wish the companies made it clearer that you pay the full amount of interest if you did not clear the card completely by the end of the month, even if you were pennies short.
(Though lines of credit are a lower interest rate, it is still credit so be careful to be able to clear it as well.)
Third lesson: LIVE BELOW YOUR MEANS.
This is what saved us the most since we didn’t have an emergency account as the kids were growing up.
You see, we did not listen to those telling us how big a house we could buy. We bought smaller. We didn’t buy a bunch of must-have new gadgets when we had the kids. We were pretty old school. We were so old school that we even had out babies in cloth diapers.
Though we are fairly reasonable, we still got into some hot water, especially when both of us were off work at the same time. (A story for another time)
We were lucky despite the debt our crazy ride gave us. We never slid so far down the slippery slope of debt where we couldn’t start climbing out of it.
We are now on a path that brings us to the possibility of a reasonable retirement, which makes us amazingly rich.
Obviously, if we don’t run into any other emergencies…
Come back next week when the battle of the sexes will be looked into with the blog entry Mental Charge.
Please share in hopes that the blog lands on a screen of someone who may be supported while on their own crazy ride.