Let’s Talk About Money

So I think I’ve mentioned a few things about money previously, maybe just hints about it. But I want to go a little bit deeper and talk about what I’ve learned over the past 2.5 years. First, there is nothing that can prepare you for the massive adjustment you have to make going from two incomes to one. Now, I was in a pretty great position financially when I left, but I never anticipated things going in the wrong direction and having to modify my expenses to accommodate an income I wasn’t used to.

Let me back up. Prior to recent years — VERY recent — I was not very good with money. I would get it and spend it, and was always hungry for more JUST so I could spend more. It was like watching a coin circle down a funnel. I would spend it and watch it go down the center of the funnel, slowly at first and then faster and faster until it disappeared. There was no control. This unsustainable method started at 15 when I got my first job at Six Flags. I’d dedicate most of my time in the summer walking in the Texas heat to whatever food service station I would be assigned each day to sell chicken strips or cheeseburgers and fries. It was fun answering people’s dumb questions like, “Can I have the number 1 with cheese?” I would answer snarkingly, “So would you like the number two — the cheeseburger?” I mean, there were only three options: number 1 plain burger, number 2 a cheeseburger, and number 3 a cheeseburger with bacon. I’m sure these people thought they were being so creative, saving a few pennies by ordering the cheaper option — the plain burger — and adding cheese as an à la carte item…but adding the à la carte item would make the order add up to the same price as the cheeseburger. Let’s make it make sense, people!! Anyway, I thought that the money I earned serving chicken strips and cheeseburgers was just to fund my extracurricular activities. I didn’t really learn about saving and strategically spending dollars, or using money as a tool. I bought snacks, got my nails done, and I would spend so much time at the mall with my friends, sinking every silver dollar down that funnel. So it was no different when I grew up and got my first full-time job.

I worked at a call center for a bank and I was making $13.75 an hour (if I remember correctly). A huge jump from the $7.50 I made before. I bought a car — not my first one — but the first one I bought for myself. Of course, I didn’t think about the insurance, the registration, or the gas that also came along with owning a car. Keep in mind this was the very early 2000s and $13.75 wasn’t terrible. A single person could technically survive off that by stretching every dollar until the next paycheck. I did just that. And then I got kicked out of my mom’s townhome because she thought I was spending too much time with the guy I was dating. Yep, that guy was the same one I was married to for 15 years. We lived together for 3 years before we got married, and we were always struggling financially. I crashed my first car and had to get a new one, and that car was repossessed because we couldn’t afford the payments. We were always on time with high-priority bills — rent, electricity, water. The thought process was: we had two cars, so we could manage if for some reason we had to function on just one car. We just didn’t think we would have to get there.

In our defense, not only were we 20 years old making real grown-up decisions, we were naturally disadvantaged. Most Black people never really get taught the financial skills that others who don’t look like us might get. As a whole, we are poor with money. I hate generalizing us like that, but I’m sure there are statistics to support that.

When we had our first daughter, 1 year after we got married, we often only had $2.00 between the both of us until our next paycheck. I remember feeling so protective of the growing human in my body that I felt sorry for deciding to bring her into our unstable orbit. I felt that I had already failed her as a mother. I shared this with him and he comforted me. He loved it when I had to rely on him to save me. He would tell me, “It’s us against the world! We will find a way as long as we are together.” He actually gave me the strength I needed to want to make it work. I fought for the best jobs I could find. Neither of us were ever without a job for long, especially after our daughter was born. We had to grow up fast. We were 23 years old and not living. We had to survive the life we chose. We had to be scrappy, creative, and most of all, we had to depend on each other. Not because we had to, but because we isolated ourselves from those who wanted to help us. His idea was that we only needed each other. At the time, all I wanted was for him to need me. Even after he would cheat or degrade me. All I wanted was for him to feel like he needed me so badly he would be weak without me. I always wanted him to feel like that first time I tried to leave him — that time I left him on the curb, spilling tears and snot. He felt like life wasn’t worth living without me. Our financial situation was partly responsible for keeping us in that constant state of push and pull. But we didn’t stay that way.

After spending all of our twenties fighting to live, we were finally able to relax as we headed into our 30s. This is the time we moved to Taichung, Taiwan. This was my first time living a life of luxury. We could dine at the fanciest restaurants. Our children could go to the best private schools. I had a nanny and a house cleaner. We vacationed in Bali. I was seemingly living the life most women who cared about this sort of thing craved. But I was miserable. We were finally able to live, but I started dying. I started smoking cigarettes. If you really know me, you would think that was very odd, being that people close to me would often consider me a health nut. But smoking was the catalyst in my rapid decline. After repeating the pattern of escaping and then reuniting with him so many times, I didn’t realize how much I’d exhausted my soul – the very thing that kept me churning. The source of my creativity, my ambition. The last bits of me were shutting down. I no longer had the capacity to make the decisions to sustain life. I was leeching his toxic energy, poisoning myself. But I wanted for nothing.

Five years into the last leg of my death sentence, I found a job that I didn’t realize would become my career. Most people who turn a life in the healthcare staffing industry into a career stumble into it. I stumbled and tripped into a life I loved. I had to learn complicated things about healthcare. I had to work with nurses and pitch them jobs that would help their way of life. I would staff nurses who would save lives, or school psychologists in an ISD that desperately needed help for the children they taught. It was invigorating to use my brain in such a way that awoke my memory of ambition. I thought finally this was my opportunity to become who I always wanted to be. What he didn’t anticipate was how seriously I was taking this job. How hard I wanted to make it career. It was the first job I ever had that I loved. I know you are surprised, but trust me, no one likes working at Six Flags except maybe the people who operate the roller coasters.

I began growing in my recruiting role and then was promoted to an account manager. I was managing our client relationships and recruiters who did what I did at the start of my career. I excelled in that role! During COVID, everyone excelled. People made a great deal of money. I did too. But I worked so hard I grew one of our dormant accounts, and expanded their spend to become one of the top 3 accounts for our entire company. I loved what I was doing even more. Nothing like having your reward for doing a good job exceed your expectations. But my money management didn’t change.

Now, this brings me to the point I started to make earlier. After all of this, even though my soul was reviving itself, I was still terrified of what might happen if I left. The man I’d known for 18 years — the man I’d known since I was 18 — was no longer going to be part of my life if I was to leave. I wouldn’t have the financial backup. Even as I was falling out of love with him, I was still reliant on him financially. At this point, with both of us making so much money, we could afford whatever we wanted. Even though we were making close to 400K together, we were still living paycheck to paycheck. Ridiculous! Bonkers to make so much money and have NO savings!

Before I left, I started siphoning money into a separate account. Oh, one mistake I will NEVER make again is combining money and having no account of my own. The reason being, we couldn’t agree on how to manage our finances and I always felt trapped because he could see my every move. He always wanted the best of the best and wanted me to control my spending to only what was necessary for the family — grocery shopping, house cleaning supplies, and a few other things that I had to make a case for. But shopping for myself was excessive because we needed every dollar we had. He didn’t even really like me dedicating money for our children to be enrolled in extracurricular activities — gymnastics, dance, music. He protested all of these things.

So as I was siphoning my money, I figured I would start to pay down some of the debt we had accrued. I kept it a secret, but he figured it out because I kept taking larger chunks out of my paycheck to allocate to my own accounts. He started to add things up when he started wondering how one of my credit cards had a lower balance when we weren’t supposed to be making payments on it. But during that time it was a secret, I began managing my money so well that I thought I didn’t need to be so reliant on him and I could actually survive on my own. That, along with a few other things, gave me the strength I needed to finally make the decision to divorce.

After that, I continued to make a lot of mistakes. My impulses would get the better of me. And even though I’d been promoted again at my job, I had simultaneously decided to flip my life upside down. It affected my performance, and I found myself between a rock and a hard place. I was either going to get fired or I had to quit. They called it a mutual separation in the end, and I was lucky enough to get 6 weeks of severance — 1 week for every year I served. Needless to say, the life and sole income I was dependent on was about to take a deep dive off the side of a cliff.

Luckily, though, I’d made such an impact with some important people when I was in my prime that one of those people blessed me with another opportunity. I was very grateful, but that opportunity came with a significant salary deficit. I had to learn how to stop making my budget fit the lifestyle I wanted and start making my lifestyle fit my budget. In the learning process, I made even more mistakes. I was paying too much for my high-rise apartment, my luxury vehicle, and had racked up an enormous amount of debt trying to replicate what I had developed with him.

I ended up filing for bankruptcy. My life of faux luxury was exposed. I was proving to myself that none of what I thought I had was real. None of the things I’d accumulated were important. I was forced to shift my mindset. I had to start asking for help — something I’d been conditioned not to do. It felt weird at first, but I didn’t have a choice. It’s amazing how, if you let it, life will slap you in the face with the most beautiful lessons.

I started to wake up even more. It was the worst time of my life financially, but I was constantly filled with joy. I was finally at peace because I was reviving more parts of myself. I was falling in love with the support I was receiving from my family and those who cared for me. My soul and spirit were connecting again. I remembered what it felt like to be loved healthily. This is when I believed the truth in the cliché: money can’t buy happiness.

I don’t think there is any amount of money that I can make that would surpass the feeling of stillness that I have now. Am I making the same amount of money I was making before? Hell no. Hell, I’m in a fucking Chapter 13 bankruptcy. It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that — but I’m also proud to admit it. Because I refused to be put on life support again. I don’t want to keep putting band-aids on unhealed wounds. I want to complete myself again. So I think of this as a cure to my sickness.

This forces me to think smarter about my finances, and it gives me reassurance that I can do hard things.

I think of Brené Brown and her philosophy on shame. We feel shame because of what we were taught early in life. But as we grow, shame is the most vulnerable part of us, and we don’t experience courage without the fear of shame. Courage requires conquering shame. And if you aren’t in the arena with me, you don’t get my energy.

At first, I thought, wow, I’m another statistic — a divorcee filing for bankruptcy. But you know what? If you had cancer and you wanted to live, would you not try everything you could to do so? If you broke your arm, would you not go to a doctor to repair it? This is me repairing myself.

My understanding of money was shattered before I even met him, and whatever foundation I had dissipated entirely. I’m not afraid to admit that I had damaged my body so much that I chauffeured myself to diabetes. I’m not afraid to admit that I was diagnosed with Bipolar II disorder, anxiety, depression, and ADHD (even though that isn’t formally diagnosed). I’m not afraid to admit these things because I am taking care of myself again.

I’m no longer dying or surviving. I’m learning and living for the first time in my life — and I’ll be 40 in November.

I learned that I didn’t talk about money enough. Not in the way that mattered. I had to be catapulted into changing my life. I was punched awake with lessons I would have never learned with him. I found joy — funny enough — when I was broke. I found joy because I wasn’t isolated this time. I wasn’t starving myself of connection. I wasn’t balancing my life on pride or codependence on the grim reaper.

I don’t think I need to say it, but this is what healing looks like. It’s resetting those bones. It’s resetting your heart rhythm with electrical cardioversion. Healing looks like a Picasso painting — jumbled beauty.

This is a feeling I wouldn’t give up for all the money in the world.

I will choose life every time.