Yo! It’s me...
When I was younger, I’d ask myself, “Self?”
“Yes, Louis…”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, who does know?”
“Shit, I don’t know that either.”
It took me twenty years, but I finally started getting answers from myself.
👀 IN TODAY’S STASH
I stopped going out and started staying in (my dumbass still blew the money)
The F word that drives us
A Flying Chicken Slingshot won’t fix what’s bugging you
🌳 THE SHADE
Last time we journeyed down memory lane and discovered that I was a moron with money back then.
Grab some shade brother cause today we are traveling to darkest Ignoraimia to see what other dumbasserie lurked in the jungle of my younger years.
🌰 THE NUT
Yes, I was a moron with money back then.
But who isn’t when they are fresh out of high school?
I didn’t know what I didn’t know… or did I?
On many levels I knew that I should have been better with money, maybe not spend it all on going out, or… well I guess that was it.
When you don’t make much, and you go out all the time, there’s not much left for anything else.
I was reminded at the end of every month when I had to juggle bills around that I was being financially stupid.
I knew there was a problem that needed solving so I did what any red-blooded American oddball would do… I took an extreme measure and stopped going out entirely.
It worked. I didn’t have to juggle the bills anymore and at the end of the month I even had a little left over.
Was this sustainable? Hell no.
I was so repressed that I found ways to blow what little I had left.
DVDs, delivery… I had pretty much replaced my going out and blowing all my money with staying in and blowing money.
If Mistress Maggie’s House of Weasel Flapping and Navel Waxing had an at-home service, I’d have probably opted for an in-home treatment.
Why was I this way? Why was I so bad with money?
It wasn’t like I didn’t understand the consequences of spending all my money.
And I damn sure knew that I should be saving money.
What if something happened and I needed to pay for a car repair or a medical expense? I knew would be S.O.L. if it did.
So the big $64,000 question is, if I knew all this why did I still spend all my money?
Hey, do you guys remember that old Irish Spring commercial with the whistling? Yeah? Well that has nothing to do with this.
After many years of pondering this very question, closest I can figure is that I felt a little empty inside, and I tried to counteract that with distractions and buying shit I didn’t need.
So why did I feel that way and why did I think that blowing paycheck after paycheck would fix it?
No clue.
If I had those answers, not only would I have saved enough money to buy that 67.2538746% of a house, I might have written a book entitled “How to Not Spend All Your Money on Shit You Don’t Need and Other Bits of Worldly Wisdom.”
Sounds like a book you’d see on the NY Times bestseller list.
So what hem-hocking screwdoodly-doo does this have to do with retirement?
Well… it’s the F word.
No surprise to anyone but the way we feel motivates the ever-loving p-turkey out of us.
I was feeling a certain way and I decided that, to feel [whole / distracted / something different / whatever] I would spend money.
Some of us turn to drugs, others to food or spending. We all do something to fill the void. And if we are dumping money into a pit, we aren’t dumping it into a retirement account.
Shoot, for a long time I thought it was normal, just part of being human. I had no clue that I was coping. I had no clue that the coping I was doing wasn’t touching the root cause of that feeling.
If you don’t know it’s broke, ya can’t fix it.
Fixing the thing can be a long road and it’s worth taking your time with it. So for now, we are not trying to fix the thing, we’re only trying to identify what is motivating the behavior.
I hope you find the journey as rewarding as I do. I still have work to do but I’ve made a lot of progress.
Everyone is different. We all have different responses. We all have different go-tos to cope.
And if you’re buying shit you don’t need to cope with something, here’s a news flash… That Flying Chicken Slingshot party favor that whistles when you launch it at your sister may fill that need temporarily, but it’s not going to last.
🐿️ THE STEP
So this week, dig around a bit.
Look in all those deep, dark, hopefully not so dank, corners of yourself and see if you can identify what drives you to spend money.
I ain’t talking ‘bout bills or rent or car payments, I’m talking about “I could use a pair of those hand-painted, limited-edition, Elvis tribute underwear with a built-in sound system that says ‘thank you, thank you very much’ when you put them on.”
That kind of spending.
You find out what drives you and how to effectively deal with it and you’ll have power over it instead of it controlling you. It won’t be such a fight to control your spending, and you’ll see more cheddar in your account.
I speak from experience.
Until the next Stash, protect your nuts brother.
