A Money💲tory: Part Three

This is a four-part newsletter series I'm releasing about money...

If you missed Part One and Two, you can read them here.

I ended the last part about the darkness before the dawn and I just want to interject that while this feels very vulnerable for me, it's not just an exercise in bleeding on the page. If you have struggled with your own financial recovery, I hope my transparency helps you and provides you with some hope for your own financial recovery.

I got married in my late twenties and I was the bill-payer in that relationship. We lived paycheck to paycheck but I did a decent job at managing our finances. We even paid for a cesarean birth of my son out of pocket and put a down payment on a house. But when our marriage fell apart seven years later, I had no savings, a two-year old and a drinking problem, so barely-getting-by was not a  structure that was going to support me. 

Those first few years after our separation were hard and because it felt unmanageable, I disassociated more and more from the severity of my debt. When I finally sold the house, I took my half of the equity and just repeated the pattern I'd mentioned in Part Two: depravity was always followed by spending as a reward. I bought myself a digital camera and enrolled myself back in school to learn digital editing and while that may seem like a smart investment, I never paid down my school loan and other bills I'd abandoned after the divorce. Oh, and I was drinking more than ever. 

I won't make you suffer through every detail of this slow and excruciating death of my finances, but I will tell you what it looked like when I finally quit drinking in 2014: I lost that camera to a pawn shop as well as many family heirlooms, I lost my bank account after losing thousands of dollars in overdraft fees, I borrowed money from people that I couldn't pay back, I stopped paying my student loan and credit card bills, I took money from my children to buy alcohol. I'm sure I left some things out but I think you get the picture.

If anyone can turn this turd sandwich into something positive, it's me. And it may only seem like I'm bypassing that horror show by moving onto the gifts, but know that I came back from that, one painful, hard day at a time. It took every second of five years. I'll never forget the day I walked out of the credit union with my new bank account. It took me most of the day to convince myself that the bank didn't make a mistake. And the positive byproduct of this experience is that it really transformed my spending habits. I had no money to spend and because I was sober and working on my overall health, I really got to examine my patterns, as I spoke about earlier.

In Part Four, the last chapter of this Money Story, I'm going to tell you how I did that and how I modeled my financial recovery after my recovery from alcohol. I'm going to end by telling you about my big dreams for the future, because it wouldn't be a letter from me if I didn't talk about the future.  

And I can't talk about the future without mentioning the 25% discount I'm offering to newsletter subscribers to work with me one-on-one through Change Your Story. If you're tired of doing the same thing and expecting to get different results, I can help you with that. Invest in yourself now, and we can start when you're ready. Offer is good only until the end of the month. Just enter STORY2020 for 25% off at checkout. See you there.