The Wolverine
It all started with a girl. In my youthful heyday, I moved to Idaho Falls convinced I would marry a girl who we will affectionately call “Wolverine”. Why? Because she was short, aggressive and walked around like a muscular superhero. She was a ballet dancer, so this last trait was a feature, not a bug.
While I technically lived on Easy Street (actual street name behind Winco), my life was pure misery. I was unemployed when I moved, so the first job I could find to pay the bills was as a telemarketer. Before the AI voice bots, I was that guy who called you when you accidentally clicked on a banner ad. “Hello, my name is Nathan and I’m calling from a quality monitored line…” Anyway, that’s when I learned to budget for real.
My dad would require a spreadsheet as part of a funds request any time I wanted money from him. But when I would fudge the numbers, he would respond with a request for more granular itemization. If you’re wondering how I got this way, dear reader, now you know…
I had recently dropped out of college after a career ending football injury and massive trepidation about becoming a wage slave. So I took a look at what little cash I had and my food stamps balance and began to plan. At first, I thought I could out-cook my bills. I meal-prepped. Those commercials about kids living on $5 a day in Africa? That was me living on tuna, lentils, and canned vegetables. My spices were lemon pepper and hot sauce on every meal and my only relief was a 30 minute lunch break where I would do calisthenics as far away from the regular chain smokers subsisting on frozen burritos and tobacco, turning off my phone so I wouldn’t have to respond to the bill collectors who were calling me every couple of hours. It was in that year as a lowly call center operator that the truth hit me harder than a Winco bag of canned tuna: life was getting more expensive and I wouldn’t be able to adjust. Families like mine (and probably yours) are being squeezed between food, rent, small humans, and a million other unexpected expenses that are somehow now expected to be paid on a subscription model.
Spreadsheet Jesus
My time as a starving African in rural America had given me a breakthrough.I realized if I didn’t get square with my budget, I’d stop being broke and start being truly poor. Not temporarily broke, but systemically broke. The kind of broke where financial stress becomes your freeloading roommate who steals your food when she comes home from a night of drinking. I had to become a monk overnight. Here’s how I managed it.
Become a Nanny State. I collected data on everything. I tracked every dollar I spent and every calorie I consumed. What began as a necessity, I’ve kept up to this day. Waifu weighs my food on sticky notes 🥰. About the only thing I didn’t track was change, but I used handfuls of coins for Slurpees as my weekend treat meal.
Play the Hunger Games IRL. I got lean by grouping all my expenses into two categories: above the line and below the line. If it was above the line, it would mean getting kicked out onto the streets or starving (rent, groceries, meds, etc.). If it was below the line, it was dead to me. Anything non-essential got sold or removed. I had a dog at this point, so he got gatorade bottles as chew toys and I used Winco bulk food bags as pooper scoopers. If I wanted to survive, the wants couldn’t survive.
Learn To Do More With Less. Every day I checked my bank account to make sure I didn’t have a bill coming that would overdraft me. Every spare moment, I spent reading and improving my financial literacy and time management skills. I later went back to finish college, where I dubbed myself spreadsheet Jesus because my budgeting and YouTube research had led to a familiarity with Microsoft Excel that caused my professors to think I had plagiarized my charts.
That’s right Mr. McCollough, it was all me.
I became a professional athlete of productivity which is how I got through undergrad with two majors in Marketing and HR and three minors in Statistics, Entrepreneurship, and Microbiology, all while working a part time job as the state coordinator for DECA putting on a thousand plus attendee event for high school business students, being the president of a student run marketing consultancy, and building a fraternity from scratch. Times change. Shit happens. Adapt and overcome.
The Calm After the Storm
My relationship with Wolverine deteriorated and we had a come to Jesus meeting. I asked her how long she thought it would take to work out our issues and she said six years. I said I thought we could tackle them in six months. Either way, it was too long for her to wait. I finished my degree, moved out of Idaho, and started a career in finance. When I got my first job with actual benefits, I nearly cried in my boss’s office after reading the salary on the offer letter. I wasn’t rich. But I wouldn’t have to panic every time I bought groceries. Honestly, it took a couple years to get that out of my system and now I still freak out a little bit when the computer takes too long to say “Approved” on the kiosk. But I could finally predict my bills. I had the dregs of an emergency fund and I could afford to buy red meat and a gym membership.
Financial clarity is cheaper than therapy and more effective than denial. By fixing your financials, you can rest easier at night knowing you’ve done something good for your future self. This is all about the future. They say you should live in the present, but if you don’t allocate any time to designing your future, you’ll have to adjust to EVERYTHING on the fly. The older you get, the more responsibility you accumulate, the less you need to or want to change every aspect of your life for survival. Once you’re out of the hole, you can start to dream again.
I still struggle with getting excited. Excitement is a tool used by marketing companies to shut down your logic brain and get you to buy. And I got so tired of the buyers' remorse that I just cut off the emotion. Having a surplus allows you to get excited about the future. Building a financial bulwark is fundamental to a life you live on purpose. Become like Wolverine, heal from your wealth wounds and grow stronger every time.