A Tale of Two Siblings

Fun fact about your humble blogger. He has a sibling. In keeping with the complex naming convention that I use on this blog to refer to people in my life, this person will hereafter be referred to as The Sibling. 

Message received

Anyhoo, The Sibling is about three years my junior. We lived together until I went off to college. After that, we lived under the same roof for a few more summers, until I went off to live on my own at 22. In the aggregate, we spent about 16—mostly formative—years living in the same home. 

During that time, we attended good schools, and education was a priority in the family. We mostly hung around good kids whose parents also prioritized education. We also were, as far as I’m aware, imparted the same messages across a full range of subjects by our parents. No more so than as to money. 

Those messages as to money, which pretty much were drilled into our brains, amounted to: live within your means, have contingencies for when things don’t go according to plan, and have contingency plans for those contingency plans. The result for me was a hardcore scarcity mindset. 

To be sure, lotsa drama that’s far rarer and pretty grim not so pleasant happened during these years, too. Some The Sibling and I experienced together, albeit, notably, at different ages when the events occurred. Others, The Sibling experienced alone. Some of those other experiences had major, far-reaching effects that persist to this day. I certainly don’t mean to minimize that in this blog post. But those other experiences didn’t break The Sibling, who today is a fully functioning adult and parent. 

Add in the similar upbringing, and one might expect that The Sibling and I would have similar feelings about, and approaches to, money and personal finance. To some extent, we do. As best I can tell, The Sibling shares my hardcore scarcity mindset. In fact, their’s might be even more hardcore than mine. No small feat. 

But as it’s turned out, The Sibling and I have taken wildly different approaches to our personal finances. Closely shadowed by financial fears for decades, I always lived within my means. And once I discovered FIRE and the iron dome of financial safety it could provide, I was in. All in. 

My early years as a working stiff were lean ones. Although I now know that I could and should have lived more frugally, I was living pretty frugally as it was. There wasn’t a lot of fat to cut. But, still, I sacrificed. Foregoing fun and bigger purchases along the way so that I could keep The Good Ship Solvency afloat. 

You go this way, and I’ll go that way

As our income increased, we increased our spending. Tho not as much as could have been, as much of the extra monies went to pay down my law school debt, save for a down payment on a home, and invest in retirement accounts. Once the debt was paid off, the property was bought, and the retirement accounts were getting increasing funds thrown at them, we increased our spending yet more, tho still quite responsibly. But we put a tighter cap on the outflows once I discovered FIRE. 

I wrote a history of much of all this in my Money, Man! series of posts. Between it and what’s written elsewhere in this blog’s pages, you can get a pretty good idea of me, my relationship with money, and my personal finance experience.

Unlike me, The Sibling hasn’t had a career. Rather a series of jobs. And at one point, The Sibling started a business with their spouse. It folded after a few years. The Sibling also was a stay-at-home-parent for several years, during which time finances ranged from precarious to verging-on-disaster.

All this to say that pretty much at no point in their life was there a reason for The Sibling to break with their scarcity mindset. Much less spend like a baller. If anything, I’d have expected The Sibling to live like a hermit cuz that’s sure as heck what I’d likely have done under the circumstances.

Things . . . uuummm . . . unfolded differently.  

Oh, the places . . . your money will go

To be fair, The Sibling has never lived as if they were a trust-fund kid. Rather, they always lived pretty modestly. But far less so than I would have under the same circumstances. And to a degree that some or many of the troubles encountered over the years easily could’ve been mitigated. Or avoided altogether. 

The Sibling started their working career with a job that paid the bills and provided at least a little pocket change. The Sibling had a roommate in those early years, and although they didn’t live in a low-rent place, the rent was by no means extravagant. 

But as far as I could tell, The Sibling was having far more fun than what I suspected their means allowed for. That suspicion essentially was confirmed when The Sibling told me that they couldn’t pay off a not-necessarily-small-but-still-relatively-modest debt. To save The Sibling many troubles from not paying off the debt, The Missus and I swooped in and paid it off. Owing to my law school debt and our living expenses, we then were only barely better positioned than The Sibling to part with this money. But because we’d been so diligent about living within our means and having at least something resembling an emergency fund, we could do so notwithstanding the consequent knock we took.

The Sibling didn’t seem to cut down on expenses or laser focus on boosting income before or after the debt event. Neither after marrying. 

I discovered FIRE during this timeframe and told The Sibling about what I’d learned. I even gave The Sibling to specific helpful information, and to provide a somewhat tailored roadmap. All that was met by polite nods. But in some cases mocking laughter. Once or twice, I tried to double down on imparting the messages. All in vain. Sigh.

At some point in their mid-30s, however, The Sibling’s finances at last caught up with them. Things have been tight since then. Really tight. And they’ve only gotten tighter over the years.

Piper dreams

It didn’t have to be this way. While The Sibling didn’t enjoy anything like the high salaries that I in time secured in the latter half of my career, they easily could have reached coast FIRE by this time in their life. Instead, The Sibling likely will never be financially independent. Nor be able to retire. Such an unpredictable outcome given our upbringing and many shared life experiences. 

While the piper is, sadly, at last getting his due from The Sibling, it’s clear that, for better or worse, The Sibling and their scarcity mindset finally have become as close of associates as they’ve ever been. I still have reason to believe that The Sibling is making several foolish decisions that result in adverse consequences. But I’m equally sure that that scarcity mindset is doing them a world of good. Sadly, tho, The Sibling’s conviction that they can never get ahead is just as ingrained as the scarcity mindset. Escaping this vicious circle will be no small feat.

And in the end . . . 

I dunno how all things ultimately will shake out for The Sibling. I’ll continue to hope for the better, but always wish I could’ve knocked some more sense into them at some point.