Welcome to another post in my Forgeative Experiences series, in which I bore entertain you, Dear Reader, with stories of events that have shaped me and my approach to money/investing. Your all-but-assured mocking of me may not be welcomed, but it’ll certainly be expected.
No, nothing party
Growing up, my dad and step-mother owned a small retail store in the industry that my dad had, as an employee, worked in his whole working career. Pre-and post-store opening, dad and stepmom’s aggregate income was good as far as I knew. But the message — implicit and somewhat explicit — of moderate frugality was set to a fairly constant drumbeat. My brother and I really never asked for much because we were stupid knew the request likely would be met with a firm “no,” unless, perhaps it was for something school-related.
We did, however, typically take a one-week vacation to Florida or Arizona each winter break. While that vacation was moderately expensive, we took no other vacations during the year.
Trip wired
After I scampered off to college, and my brother did the same a few years later, my dad and stepmom started taking annual vacations to locations around the world. Africa. Antarctica. The Galapagos. Bali. And so on. They soon got in the habit of taking more than one annual vacation. I don’t know the cost of these vacations. But I do know that they had to have been expensive, and that dad and stepmom didn’t know anything about travel hacking.
I’d occasionally wonder about the expense. But given the frugality message in my house and that I’d always . . . always . . . been advised by my dad to have contingency plans, I assumed that the trips were well within the budget.
As for other expenses, dad and stepmom didn’t otherwise appear to live markedly lavishly when they became empty-nesters. But they also didn’t appear to scrimp. And as far as I knew, their store did well, too.
So it appeared to be for a few decades. Then my stepmom, who’d managed the books for the store and household, unexpectedly died.
52-card pick up
Dad then had to go through all the papers for the household and store. While he hadn’t really been involved in managing the books, he assumed that he had a macro understanding of the state of affairs.
Yeah, it turned out not so much.
Dad discovered that they (which now meant “he”) owed several hundred thousands of dollars on several credit cards. To say that dad was surprised would be a gross understatement. And for the first time in my life, I saw dad freaked out about something money-related. Really freaked out.
Dad ultimately got out of his predicament. But I’m sure the credit card companies were none to happy with him because of the (legal) means he ultimately employed to resolve the situation.
Lasting impressions
And so the story more or less ended for dad. Not for me though. I was pissed. Really pissed. I felt as if the message that had been driven into me about frugality had been delivered by, in the case of my stepmom, a hypocrite.
Mind you, the frugality instinct is one that I am immensely grateful to have. It is invaluable. And I grant that it’s possible that my stepmom believed and lived by the code of not living above one’s means. But that at some point she let something slide, watched the problem grow, and then was paralyzed by fear and became incapable of dealing with a problem quickly spiraling out of control.
But whether or not I’m being irrational, these events really upset me. And they made me think that my frugality instinct is as harmfully strong as it is in part because of the messages I received growing up. “Live a little” was not a message delivered to me.
On top of that, I didn’t need more to make me an even greater skeptic as to my elders or many so-called “experts,” but this event managed to do that. It changed me from a “trust but verify” to a “don’t trust, but verify” type of person. That might serve me well at times, but it also makes me sort of sad.
Dear Reader, I hope you don’t find yourself feeling similarly hoodwinked.
