I should honestly be the last person on earth writing anything about finances. I am absolutely careless with money. Or, as my husband likes to put it, 'I could be making a million dollars a month and still somehow be bankrupt by the middle of it.' And he is probably not entirely wrong.
To his credit, he has never really questioned my spending. At least, not until a few months ago, when my increasingly frequent requests for him to Zelle me money for ridiculously trivial expenses apparently became too difficult to ignore. For the first time in more than a decade, my husband looked at me and asked: “How much do you actually make? And where is it all going?”
Excellent question. I would also like to know.
How we have successfully run a household all these years is one of the great mysteries of our marriage. Between mortgages, car payments, daycare, three kids and their never-ending extracurricular activities, not to mention my own college tuition for the better part of the last five years, I seem to have somehow rallied myself into believing that the secret to making more money is…spending more money.
Manifestation, but with credit cards!!!! (Ughh..I hate all those manifestation Instagram reels that made me buy into this horsesh*t!)
I was very young when I realized that money ran the world. I just wasn't wise enough to learn how to make it, manage it, or save it. Not then.
Apparently, not now either.
Many years ago, while I was going through the divorce proceedings of my first marriage and all the emotional chaos that came with it, I did things with money that make absolutely no sense to the version of me sitting here today. I am not kidding when I say that I have flown from the United States to India for a weekend. A weekend!!!
I missed home terribly. My parents were dealing with a lot with their health, and there were times when the distance simply felt unbearable. So I would board a flight Thursday evening, land on the other side of the world, spend whatever little time I could with them, and fly back in time to return to life Monday morning. No planning. No budgeting. No waiting for fares to drop. I would buy economy tickets at three times their normal price because, at that point in my life, money felt far less important than getting home.
I had no one depending on me. No children whose futures I needed to save for. No real reason, in my mind, to think about ten or twenty years down the road. So I threw caution (and apparently my bank balance) to the wind.
Now?
I have expenses I couldn't finish listing if you gave me an entire page. I have three children I should be saving for. College funds. Activities. Birthdays. Vacations. Shoes. So. Many. Shoes. And, dear God, the change of seasons!! Nothing terrifies me financially quite like the arrival of fall.
These tiny humans look exactly the same to me every winter, and yet somehow their clothes mysteriously shrink while sitting untouched in their closets. Every. Single. Year. Fall arrives, and suddenly nobody owns pants. Nobody has a jacket. Nobody's boots fit. And somehow all three children have completely outgrown every single fall and winter outfit from the previous year, right down to their snowshoes. The snow shoes particularly offend me. We used them thrice last winter! They still look brand new. And now I have three beautiful pairs of practically untouched snow boots that fit absolutely nobody. Exasperated doesn't even begin to cover it.
So here I am again, entering that magical time of year when I become a full-time investigator of sales, coupon codes, clearance racks and “extra 20% off” emails.
Here's the thing. I love being financially independent. I love earning my own money. I love knowing that I can take care of myself. I love not having to ask permission to buy something I want.
But when financial independence comes with the additional responsibility of figuring out how much to spend, how much to save, how much to invest, how much to allocate for the children, how much to put away for emergencies, and how much I am allowed to frivolously blow without destroying our retirement…I detest it!
Why can't financial independence simply mean - I have enough money to buy what I want, when I want it, without having to think about it? That's it!
That's the level of financial literacy I aspire to. I am not asking for a yacht. I am not trying to buy a private island. I don't even ask for diamonds ( I watched the movie Blood Diamond and now I cannot allow a diamond anywhere near me!)
My needs are extremely reasonable. I just want to be able to buy my Series 12 Apple Watch because I suddenly decide that the perfectly functional Apple Watch already on my wrist has emotionally exhausted me. I want the gold-framed Ray-Bans because, for reasons I cannot adequately explain, I have simply lost interest in my gold-framed Prada sunglasses. And if one random Tuesday morning I look at my minivan, the perfectly practical, family-friendly vehicle designed to transport three children and approximately fourteen thousand forgotten water bottles, and think - You know what? I think I would rather have a Maybach.
I would like my bank account to quietly respond - “Of course. What color?”
You get my drift?
Because perhaps my definition of financial independence is slightly different from what the financial experts mean. They talk about budgets. Emergency funds. Investments. Retirement accounts. Compound interest. I am talking about reaching a point where checking my bank balance is no longer part of the decision-making process.
And yes, somewhere between three children, three pairs of useless snow boots, mortgages, tuition payments, and my husband's increasingly concerned questions about where exactly my paycheck disappears every month, I am beginning to suspect that achieving my version of financial independence might first require learning their version. Which is terribly inconvenient. To me!
But perhaps that is the irony of it all. For years, I thought financial independence meant earning my own money. Now I am beginning to understand that earning it was only the first part. The real independence might just be learning how to keep enough of it that one day, when I walk past a Maybach and think -Why not? The answer doesn't have to be - “Because you bought four pairs of snow boots last year.”!!!!
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