Make a Change

All I can really share with you is my own experience.  I’ve worked this plan for financial fitness, and I know it works.  It worked for me.  Let me tell you a little bit about my story. Some of this is very hard to relate.  

In 1992, I escaped from a long-term abusive marriage and fled my home, with my 2 kids in tow, for a chance to start over in life.  I had attempted to do this a few times previously by staying near our family home, but found it impossible to really start over, since my husband would continue stalking me until I finally gave in and agreed to reunite the family.  Things would be better for a few months or a year, and then the insanity would start again.  After going through this cycle of trauma and abuse a few times, I knew the only way out was to get far enough away from him that he couldn’t come after me.  I had to leave the state where I was born and had lived my entire life up to that point and move to a new place. After a while I knew this was the only solution to my on-going dilemma.

I had a childhood friend who had moved to the Denver area years before, and she offered to give me a place to stay until I figured out what to do next.  She had a tiny, 1-bedroom apartment in the southern suburbs of Denver, and that’s where we spent the first two months of our lives in Colorado. Many other traumas lay ahead for us over the next couple months and years, but I was able to find a job within 6 weeks of my arrival, a place I ended up working for the first 7 years of my life here.  When we first arrived here though, I had no idea if we would be here through that summer, or stay until the following spring, or what.  I was initially just trying to put some space between us and the crazy man.  I turned 36 years old 3 weeks after we arrived here on Colorado Day, 1992.  My daughters were 7 and 12 years old at the time. 

Thus began my journey towards the healing of my mental health, physical health, and of course, financial health.  When I arrived in the Denver area, I had not worked a job since 1987.  During one of my marital separations, I had taken the real estate exam and began selling real estate in SoCal for a couple of years.  It was hard work getting that career off the ground and very time consuming. I wanted out of the 9 to 5 rat race, and I wanted more flexible hours so I could spend more time with my kids. I couldn’t give my time to it completely though without returning to life with the crazy man.  So, I did.  Things went ok for a while and my real estate career started to take off.  I was making a sale about once a month.  I wasn’t making a fortune, but it was something. 

Then one night, my husband and I had a conflict in our appointments.  My real estate broker called and told me that another Realtor had called him and informed him that they wanted to present an offer on one of my listings.  In those days, that required getting dressed in business attire, leaving the house, going either to the real estate office, or to the home of your client, hearing the offer presented, then discussing with your clients and deciding whether to accept the offer, or write up a counteroffer.  It could take a couple of hours to do this.  My husband also had an appointment on his calendar to meet with one of his clients for some reason. We had two little kids at home.  My husband screamed and yelled and threw a fit saying he also had an appointment, and he made more money in an hour than I made all month.  Therefore, I should let him go and I should stay home.  More stuff happened and more nasty things were said, but I did end up going out for my appointment.  I sold that house, but it’s the last real estate deal I ever did.  It just wasn’t worth it.

Running a business from home, at least at that time, meant any of your clients could call you at home at any time of the day or night.  And they did.  Sometimes they literally called in the middle of the night. Usually, they were mad about something. And not my clients only, but my husbands’ clients as well, since he was a contractor, and was running a very busy and profitable business at that time. During the time of the late 80’s he was making a LOT of money.  I could hardly complain about that.  We had purchased a new home and we each had new trucks, (and truck payments).  He had a chevy dually and I had a Ford Bronco that I could use to schlepp the kids back and forth to school.  We also had credit cards of various kinds, and of course, credit card payments.  We bought some furniture on time.  The American Express card needed to be paid in full every month, but it wasn’t a hardship if he was working. We spent at least one long weekend a month at the beach in La Jolla, a beautiful place.  We easily spent $1,000 on shopping and dining out every weekend.  From someone who looked at us from the outside, we had a good life, but it was very stressful.  My husband wasn’t handling the stress very well and this caused some real problems at home as his mental health deteriorated during the last 12 to 18 months before I ended up leaving for good.

I relate all this only to let you know what my life was like before I was able to make a clean break and then start over.  For the first few years I was in Colorado, I was considered “un-bankable”.   I paid all my bills with cash.  I cashed my payroll check at the grocery store and got money orders to pay my utilities. I paid cash everywhere I had to shop or do business.  I don’t know if there was even a thing called direct deposit of paychecks in 1992 or 1993, but in any event, I wasn’t able to do that without a bank account anyway.  So, everything was paid for cash on the barrelhead. 

Little did I know at the time, but this forced cash-only money management system allowed me to flex some budgeting muscles I didn’t even know I had.  Times have changed since then, not only for me, but for all of us, as we are most of the way through the transition to a cashless society.  The truth is, I rarely carry any cash at all these days, but that’s another story.

Before I allow this story to get too long, let me finish by saying that before I could get my life under control as a young mother, I had to get really serious about it.  It’s true, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but I was DOING SOMETHING.  I had to get serious enough about it to be willing to make any changes I needed to make to be a free person and to protect my kids. I had to be willing to change the way I did everything.  I had to be willing to start completely over, move to a new state, return to a regular job, take whatever lumps came my way, and persevere. I think my martial arts training really helped with this as well.  I learned how to take the proverbial punch and punch back at life when necessary. 

One day, within the last year of my life in California, I remember getting up and looking at myself in the mirror and realizing that if anything was ever going to change for me, I was the one who had to change it.  Me.  No one else was going to be able to pull me out of the situation I found myself in, either physically or financially.  My husband had reached a point where he was unable to work any longer because of his mental health, and our situation at home was getting more dangerous and disintegrating big time.  Let’s just say the cops came out several times. I wasn’t working and neither was he.  It’s hard to maintain a highly leveraged lifestyle when you have no income or cash flow.  I could see the future and it wasn’t at all appealing.  Ultimately, I made the changes I needed to make.  It wasn’t easy. 

Now everyone’s situation is different, and the point at which you “hit rock bottom” as they say in AA, is different for us all.  But the bottom line is, we all must reach the point somewhere along the line where we’re willing to look at ourselves in the mirror, recognize that we are responsible for our life’s outcomes, and take whatever action is necessary to make change happen.  You don’t even need to know what you’re going to do next; you just need to do something.

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Make a change.