Unhelpful Money Narratives

When I was in high school I was a dipshit about money.

But my lack of education began many years before that! As a pre-teen I opened an account at the local bank marketed to kids as “Jammin Summer Savings’ and featured regional sports celebrities in its marketing. Hip! Cool! Jammin! I’m sold!

I think this was my family’s attempt to introduce me to the concept of interest. However, when you have $10 in your bank account, two cents of interest earned over the course of a year is not impressive and the lesson did not stick.

Who are these jokers even kidding?

Gimme my fucking money back so I can splurge on Big League Chew, a Rocky Road, a Dr. Pepper, a pack of baseball cards and a pack of smokes to bring home to my Mom!

I earned practically nothing from my measly sum - but more importantly - I didn’t have the mathematical foresight to think about this interest lesson in terms of percentages, or the awesome compounded accumulation of wealth over time, or even the imagination to think I’d have greater sums of money in the future that I could leverage. In fact, I was still several years away from my first jobs and from discovering the cruelty of the slow-motion Faustian bargain that robs people of free time to spend with family, friends, traveling, making art - and that is capitalism in the 21st century.

Unfortunately this lack of imagination and anti-intellectualism would largely continue throughout my life until my mid-30’s.

My parents are awesome - but like many people experience - I didn’t have the best financial example from my parents. I recall getting lessons from my mother about keeping and tracking spending in a checkbook. It’s really easy when you don’t have any to spend or track! But when my step-dad moved into the house I knew less about how money came in and how much was available. It became a subject that wasn’t discussed and that as a kid, I wasn’t supposed to know about. I perceived that he was rich (he wasn’t) because our standard of living increased dramatically upon his arrival. No longer was I eating brown rice and oats for every meal! I would sometimes see him pouring over numbers and figures under the glow of a computer screen. But I had no idea what he was doing. I presumed finances was a heavy intellectual lift (it isn’t) and left it at that.

I suppose I accepted our family’s internal culture of silence around money issues, but my parents sure didn’t. There was no subject they fought over more than money and finance. To this day I can’t remember what was said or discussed, maybe it was my mom’s habit of buying premium Patagonia clothing for me, or our habitual trips to the local food Co-op … but mostly I just remember the way I felt as I heard them arguing from my bedroom upstairs as I clutched my blanket over my face at night.

My family was very frugal otherwise. It was only later in life that I learned my parents saved virtually nothing during my entire childhood until I moved out of the house. Thus began the official marker of 25-years of their wealth accrual period.

In high school, I recall thinking that I’d become a successful musical performer and earn millions of dollars and travel the world. I really believed it. I grew up in a sheltered town on a sheltered street in a sheltered home and anything seemed possible at the time. And it probably was possible at that age, I just didn’t anticipate the hurdles, variables and continued learning that would pull me away from that singular mindset. I also didn’t know that truly talented kids often had familial exposure to musical interests (I didn’t) plus a regimen of lessons and personal training and diligence that I had little patience for.

As I branched out into the world I’d continue to run into money lessons that went over my head.

During Freshman orientation at college some guy gave a talk about saving $100 per month and noted that if invested in a broad-based index fund, it’d be worth a million in 40 years. It was another demonstration of compound interest that passed over me like a ghost and headed off to find its place in a graveyard full of other great ideas that were presented to me and ignored.

Shiiit, who even has a $100 a month to save?

After college I had to invent strange new money rules to accommodate my primary desire which was a desire to delay hard work or any responsibility that would pull me away from my passion of writing and performing original music. Influenced by the questionable and impoverished (yet hip!) friends of the time, I developed an idea that it’d be easier to focus on music, practice, tour and perform if I held a part-time menial job and lived for cheap in other people’s homes while pursuing my career.

What an idiot!

If I could do it all over again I’d work a full-time job, use my PTO to go on seasonal and weekend tours - which is equivalent to the duration of most of the tours I experienced anyways - and earn enough money to live comfortably and invest while having ample time to pursue my art.

However, at the time, as I came to grips with the reality that it may be hard to become a multimillionaire from my fledgling music career, I continued dismissing or avoiding financial responsibility. In my new narrative I’d invented the idea that I’d inherit money anyways, just like I saw my step-father experience. So no need to pursue rigorous self-discipline! This allowed me to push off any serious thought of personal finance for another decade.

As I sit here at nearly 44 years old I haven’t inherited any money from departed relations.

And it’s really hard for anyone to have the foresight to think about what to do with excess money if they never have any! I didn’t start earning a decent income until my early 30s and so I didn’t have any cause to think about it until then.

Fortunately, I abandoned magical ways of thinking about personal finance nearly ten years ago and chose to take my financial destiny into my own hands. I learned about the FIRE movement, and I’ve begun to pool those learnings into the fokefire project, whereby I hope to earn a million dollars performing music by maxing out my ROTH IRA each year.

Math for the win!

Course the feat is considerably more complicated now that I have to move my money into a traditional IRA, before performing a Backdoor ROTH IRA conversion - but that’s a topic for another blog.