(Editor’s note: GregoryBresiger.com, in a serialization of a book, will present a series of articles over the next months. The book is about how effectively to save, invest and use credit. The series will detail the money problems of millions of average people but it will also explain how one can overcome them and achieve financial independence).
As the legendary actor Mickey Rooney said: Life is too short.
The same is true about your finances. You need to get going on achieving financial independence, or almost any other monetary goal, as soon as possible. Time is running out.
Getting Off the Road to Financial Disaster
This book is designed to ensure you don’t miss that chance at financial independence. It is something that has been missed by tens of millions of Judys, an average person who was detailed in the previous installment. Tens of millions of would be Judys are also heading down that same sad road.
By the way, my wife, the ever-comely Suzanne Hall, and I were on the Judy Road some 30 years ago just after we were married. But we decided to take another road. We agreed on a few basic money steps. These were steps that seemed difficult at the beginning but soon we were used to them. They became as much a regular part of our lives as paying any monthly bill or buying groceries on a daily basis.
What were they?
We agreed on responsible spending, regular saving and investing. Quickly they were a normal part of our lives and we didn’t even think about them.
“Civilization,” a philosopher once said, “advances by the number of things we can do without thinking.”
We stopped thinking about saving and investing. We just started doing these things automatically.
How I Got Here
Part of why we got on that better road is in the middle of my career as a reporter/editor I reluctantly switched from writing about pols—something I enjoyed as much as going to the circus as a kid and guffawing at the clowns—to writing about personal finance, advisors. and their products. That was actually a lucky break although I didn’t realize it at the time. I started to learn a lot more about the most effective techniques of saving and investing, in part because it was my job to write about them.
I had always been interested in economics but now I became very interested in investments because it was a big part of my job. I regularly spoke to and interviewed financial professionals. I wrote about their products and services. I took much of their advice. I applied it to my life.
I ensured that my wife and I started saving and investing on a regular basis, with the goal of beating inflation. We adopted sensible spending practices. I will note some in these pages. They are simple techniques that almost anyone can use, especially those who are start with a nice round figure: nada.
I also took a series of second jobs to ensure we had enough to aggressively invest. One of them was as a part-time ESL teacher. Sometimes students, many of them Hispanic and knowing I was a business journalist, would ask me questions about saving and investing. I preached the long forgotten Victorian gospel of thrift. I argued the idea so vigorously that one of my wonderful students dubbed me “El Mas Tacano de Todos” (The Stingiest of Them All”).
I took the name not as an insult, but as praise. And I urged my students to become Tacanos. These are people who are in control of their financial lives. They make few money mistakes. In baseball terms, they never throw to the wrong base and give away runs. They will not only prosper; they can help others in a number of ways because they are financially independent.
I felt good in the first years of marriage—a marriage now north of 33 years—because, for the first time in my life, my wife and I were in control of our finances. Before our marriage each of us had a checkered history. Both of us, as single people in our 20s and 30s, had missed rent checks; had lived from paycheck to paycheck and had almost nothing in assets.
Now we were headed in the right direction; the direction of being able to run our own lives and not worry about the next bill.
Yet, even before achieving financial independence in about twenty years, we enjoyed many things such as travelling and eating out but we did it in a responsible way. We did in such a way that we could be confident that when the bills came due, we would be able to pay them. We didn’t have to worry about next month’s credit cards bills. This book is about how you can do the same, even though you’re not earning a lot.
Average Earners Please Read On
Indeed, I assume that you are like me. You make, made or will make a middle-class income. You’re not a corporate big shot or a star pulling in a six or seven figure income. Although some of these big shots should also learn some of the lessons of MoneySense.
Why?
Remember some of those big shots in high tax brackets also ran into money woes. That’s because many of them violated the principles of MoneySense and ended up in a worst financial position that my wife and I, even though we made a lot less.
I never made more than $90,000 a year even with multiple jobs and my wife also never made big bucks, yet we are comfortable today. And while we did well with our investments, we weren’t Warren Buffetts. Buffett consistently makes 20 percent a year a return, which makes him the Babe Ruth/Josh Gibson of investing.
How did we achieve financial independence on middle-class incomes and solid yet not spectacular investment returns?
Consistent saving, investing and rational spending are why we won the money game. It is a game played badly by millions of Americans every day.
Why?
Most welfare state nations have a culture, a tax code and an economic orthodoxy that preaches the opposite of MoneySense—spend now and forget the consequences. By contrast, my wife and I rediscovered the beliefs of our parents and grandparents.
Like me you might come from a small neighborhood or from any of the millions of small towns in America. Mine was a neighborhood in the South Bronx called Highbridge. Later it was a neighborhood in Queens called Woodhaven. This was an area right out of Archie Bunker’s county. My wife’s was, among others, from the modest Garfield neighborhood in Pittsburgh.
I want you to have what my wife and I have now achieved. But in trying to obtain almost any goal remember this. It is likely more difficult than you think: There are lots of hurdles blocking even the most diligent person. Let’s examine them and advise you how to avoid them or have them do the least amount of damage. And believe me, in our high tax, consume today and forget about saving for tomorrow culture, there are limitless roadblocks to prevent you from achieving financial independence.
In our next installment of MoneySense, we’ll look at some of these traps.
