The Story I told myself about money

by | Feb 10, 2016 | Money

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The Story I Told Myself About Money

The stories that play in our heads usually get planted there by whatever’s happening in the world around us as we grow up. We absorb them from parents, friends, and the wider culture, and depending on how loud and constant they are, we tend to adopt them as fact.

Growing up, the story in our house was: be careful with money, save for the rainy day that’s definitely coming. Good luck doesn’t last, and you’d better be ready when it runs out. That story wasn’t unique to my family. Most of our parents had grown up under parents shaped by war and depression, and they’d had the same story drilled into them. They passed it down.

Everyone interprets an inherited story differently. Some people hear “good luck can’t last” and decide to spend freely, so there’s nothing left to lose when the bad day comes. I went the other way. Every purchase became an internal debate: do I need this, or should I save it for the day I can’t earn anything and end up destitute? The rainy day always won. So I mostly just stopped spending.

The only exception was spending money with someone else who was operating from a different story than mine. As a lifelong people-pleaser, I weighted other people’s arguments more heavily than my own; if someone told me it was fine to buy the thing, I’d buy it, then spend the rest of the day quietly justifying it to myself, wrapped in guilt.

Sometime in my thirties, I noticed how extreme this had gotten and dialled it back a bit. But the core belief that ruin was coming eventually never left. Then I got married, had kids, and my ability to save took a real hit. I worried about money constantly. It was exhausting.

Then I got divorced.

And there it was: proof. My story had finally been confirmed.

Starting over after divorce is hard enough. Starting over while genuinely believing the world has ended and you’ll never see financial stability again is a different level of hard. The day I’d spent my whole life bracing for had finally arrived. I was going to be financially unstable forever. That’s a difficult belief to build a life on. I tried to limit the damage by taking no risks at all, hoarding whatever savings I had left and making them last until I died.

Then I started noticing other people telling themselves different stories. One that fascinated me: if you run out of money, you go find a way to make more. Really? That was allowed?

Another was the gratitude story: friends who felt genuinely lucky to live where they lived and have the work they had, who seemed to move through life with more actual joy because of it.

Slowly, I noticed something else too. Doomsday hadn’t come. I hadn’t become destitute. I had only believed I would. That belief was never true; it had just been busy manufacturing my reality anyway.

So what did the story actually do for me? It helped me save, and I’m genuinely grateful I came out of my divorce with some financial stability because of it. But did I need the guilt and buyer’s remorse that came bundled in with the saving? Honestly, no. I could have saved just as well without any of that extra weight. Pay yourself first; that’s really all it takes. I did that automatically every month. The guilt over everything I spent afterward wasn’t doing anything useful. It was just the cost of believing a story I’d never actually tested.

Do you have a story about money running in the background of your own head? What is it actually doing to how you live?

No Hobbies

by | Jan 27, 2016 | Money

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No Hobbies

Do you have your own business? Are you thinking about starting one? I’d tell you to put some structures in place for work-life balance.

Or not.

I was conflicted about this for a long time. I loved my work so much that everything else basically fell away. Someone once asked me what my hobbies were. Hobbies? I genuinely didn’t know what to say. I was too embarrassed to admit that Netflix had become the closest thing I had. I felt bad about it for the rest of the day.

Once I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started beating myself up over it. How had I ended up here, when my old tagline used to be something like “the only thing Renée is truly passionate about is her leisure time”?

Part of it was practicing gratitude. Once I started looking at my life through everything I was grateful for, including the work itself, it felt completely different. I wanted to be doing it. I’d chosen all of it. No one was making me.

But there was something else going on too. When you work for yourself from home, there’s no clean line between the workday starting and ending. The moment you’re awake, you’re potentially working.

A friend put it well once: someone with a nine-to-five has clearly defined hours they’re not being paid for. A sole proprietor doesn’t have that boundary built in anywhere, which makes it easy to just default to working whenever nothing else is scheduled, especially when you actually love the work.

That’s exactly what happened to me. I did what needed doing (the kids, the laundry, the shopping), and every remaining hour went to work by default. If nothing else was on the calendar, I worked.

As much as I loved it, I could see where that was headed: burnout, too many hours at a screen, not enough of anything else.

What I eventually landed on was that leisure time has to be scheduled deliberately when you’re self-employed. Just having free time doesn’t actually work. It’s a vacuum, and work rushes straight into it.

So I booked a weekly exercise class and paid for it upfront, since accountants hate wasting money more than almost anything else. I gave myself an actual non-work schedule and held myself to it the same way I’d have held myself to a time card if someone else had been the one setting my hours.

Marriage Is a Credit Card

by | Dec 21, 2015 | Money

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Marriage Is a Credit Card

I’ve been getting some strong reminders lately about the importance of planning. Very strong.

The core lesson keeps repeating itself: skip the upfront planning on something important, and things can go badly wrong. Do a little work ahead of time instead, and life tends to go a lot more smoothly.

One place I don’t think enough planning happens is marriage. Plenty of wedding planning, sure, but not nearly enough marriage planning.

Here’s my evidence: ask anyone who’s been through a divorce, and they’ll likely agree that getting married is a walk in the park compared to getting divorced. Divorce is hard enough that some people just stay in unhappy marriages rather than face it. No escape plan, so they simply don’t leave.

A good comparison is credit cards and credit card debt.

Credit cards are easy to get, and a lot of fun if you haven’t thought much about what happens once the statement shows up. You get the card, you go shopping, and the first couple of months feel great. Then reality lands: wait, I have to pay this back? Plus interest? And if I don’t, I’ll be paying it off for decades?

At that point, getting out of the hole takes real, sustained effort. Getting into it was effortless.

Marriage works the same way. It was easy to get married when I was practicing, roughly a hundred dollars for the license, a few hundred more for someone to say the actual words that make it official. And then you’re married.

I hope you did some planning together about what the marriage would actually look like, and even more planning around what happens if it goes wrong. Because getting out is nowhere near as simple as getting in. You can’t just tear up the license.

You need a separation agreement, and those are hard to get precisely when you need them most. Once you and your spouse have reached the point of divorcing, you’re usually not getting along especially well, which makes agreeing on anything harder. So you hire help: a lawyer, a mediator, a counsellor, a financial planner, an accountant. Those professionals charge considerably more than the marriage commissioner did- several hundred dollars an hour, in my experience- and reaching an agreement could take a long time.

Or you skip all that and let the courts decide, representing yourself and leaving your future in the hands of a judge who’s never met you. Most people don’t take that gamble and hire a lawyer instead. A court divorce generally costs thousands more than a mediated or collaborative one.

The way around all of it is planning. Build a marriage agreement with a qualified professional before the wedding, not after things fall apart.

Yes, it costs money, and no, planning for a hypothetical future divorce isn’t remotely romantic.

But look at it this way: reaching a marriage agreement takes far fewer billable hours, because at that point you and your soon-to-be spouse are still on the same page. You’re about to get married, after all.

Not on the same page? Struggling to reach that agreement?

Then I have to ask: why are you getting married?

Believing in the Plan

by | Sep 23, 2015 | Money

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Believing in the Plan

I hate spending money. Some genetic combination of Scottish, Dutch, and a Depression-era family upbringing turned me into someone who gets anxious just walking up to a cash register. Some people call shopping retail therapy. It’s never once been that for me. Every purchase kicks off an internal debate about whether I actually need it, and that internal chatter slows my decisions down, skews relentlessly negative, and keeps me up at night.

Eventually I got tired of feeling guilty and anxious about something that happens almost every single day. It was exhausting, and I couldn’t keep doing it to myself.

What actually changed things wasn’t much. I just made a decision: start believing in my own spending plan.

I’d always been something of a spending-plan fanatic. Every month, for years, I tracked everything I spent in a spreadsheet. A couple of times a year I’d review it and adjust the plan for the year ahead. It only took about two hours a month, less onerous than it sounds.

But despite years of tracking, I’d never actually bought into the process. I never went back and checked whether a prior year’s plan bore any resemblance to what I’d actually spent. I never looked critically at whether the plan reflected what I genuinely wanted to spend on. I rarely came close to spending what the plan projected anyway. I did it because a financially responsible person was supposed to. I still agonized over every purchase and still felt terrible making them. The plan wasn’t doing anything for me except eating up my time to build it.

So I decided I wanted two things: to stop feeling guilty, and to actually get some use out of the plan I’d already built. To get there, I sat down and really looked at what the plan actually said.

It turned out my spending plan was a fairly accurate reflection of my own values, built up over years of the choices I’d actually made. I don’t spend easily, so if something showed up in my tracking spreadsheet, it meant I’d believed in it enough to spend on it in the first place. My spending stayed remarkably consistent year over year, and I’d built in a cushion for the unexpected. And critically, I always had enough coming in to cover what was going out.

Once I saw that clearly, the logic followed: if something’s in the plan, it’s fine to spend on it. Even the unexpected stuff, because the cushion exists precisely for that. All of it, allowed, without the guilt attached.

This shift has taken time, and I’m not fully cured of the guilt even now. I still don’t love spending money, but it no longer stalls my decisions or eats up days of anxiety, most of the time. September used to be brutal for me, business expenses landing all at once, plus the usual pile of kid-related costs, after-school activities, hot lunches, school fees. Before I trusted the plan, I would have spiralled over all of it for days, second-guessed the whole decision to run my own business, maybe even considered shutting it down. All my energy would’ve gone into stopping the bleeding instead of actually moving forward.

This time, when the bills landed, I felt a little icky, grumbled about the cost of running a business, same as always, but then reminded myself: this is in the plan. It’s allowed. I’m not going to make myself feel bad about paying for professional liability insurance.

If you carry your own money anxiety, tracking your spending and building an actual plan is still the best remedy I know. Without one, every purchase becomes its own little interrogation. With one, you get to move through your spending with something closer to clarity.

Divorced and Still on the Hook

by | Sep 15, 2015 | Divorce and Separation, Money, Parenting & Co-Parenting

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Divorced and still on the hook

Growing up, I was always told I’d be responsible for paying my own way through university. My parents wanted me to go, but they also wanted me to learn financial independence early. I’m honestly not sure if that was a deliberate philosophy or just how things had always been done in the family; both of my parents had paid their own way through school too, and my dad had sold his beloved ’57 Chevy Bel Air to cover his tuition. There might have been a little martyrdom baked in: I sacrificed my car, so you can sacrifice too.

I lived at home during university and paid tuition out of my summer job earnings. My parents helped some, covering half a car and its insurance for the years I was in school, and living at home saved me a considerable amount on its own.

So when I think about my own kids and university, I don’t automatically feel obligated to fund it. That said, things cost a lot more now. My tuition ran about $2,000 a year. Today it’s closer to ten thousand, and minimum wage hasn’t come close to keeping pace with that jump. I’ve also always felt like I missed out on something by staying home for school. So I’ve been going back and forth, leaning more toward wanting to help fund my kids’ education if I can, while still believing that support at that stage is a choice, not an obligation.

Then I learned something that reframed the whole question. A friend of mine was still paying child support for a stepdaughter in her late twenties. It turns out parents remain financially responsible for a child pursuing their first university degree, unmarried, essentially regardless of age.

That got confirmed again during my own divorce, when my lawyer walked me through it directly: under the Divorce Act, child support obligations end when a child marries, becomes self-supporting, or turns nineteen, unless that child remains a “child of the marriage” because they’re unable to become self-supporting due to illness, disability, pursuing an education, or another qualifying reason.

Here’s the interesting part: divorcing your spouse can actually leave you with a greater ongoing financial obligation to your kids than staying married would have. Married parents can simply agree together that their adult child is on their own now. Divorced parents, if a child chooses university, generally can’t make that same call unilaterally.

I understand why the law exists. I’ve seen how badly things can go without it: a parent encourages the kids toward a school far from home, then refuses to help pay once they’re there, leaving the other parent to fund the bulk of it alone, occasionally with some help from the kids themselves. I’ve watched a situation like this play out over several years, court decisions repeatedly siding with the parent seeking support, and payment still not materializing. The frustration of getting a ruling in your favour and still not seeing the money is its own particular kind of exhausting.

Even with the law clearly on your side, enforcing it can turn into a long, draining process. Much of the difficulty lies in the details: figuring out exactly what amounts should be split and tracking and accounting for them over years.

The way to avoid landing there yourself is communication, early and often. Talk to your spouse about what you both envision for your kids’ education. If you’re separating, get clear, specific language about postsecondary funding written directly into your agreement, not vague gestures at “supporting education,” but actual clarity on amounts and how they’ll be calculated and tracked. If your current agreement is silent on this, start that conversation with your co-parent now, ideally before your kids have already set their hearts on a school far from home.

If your co-parent genuinely isn’t on board with sharing the cost, that’s worth a hard, honest conversation with yourself: can you fund it alone, or do you need to start helping your kids adjust their expectations of what this stage of their life is actually going to look like?

And if you do decide funding their education matters enough to you to do it regardless, take a real look at your financial situation to see whether it’s actually possible, and if it’s not yet, what would need to change to get there.

Redesigning your Life around your values

by | Nov 6, 2014 | Divorce and Separation, Money

Redesigning Your Life Around Your Values

You’re stuck somewhere in your life. In debt, in conflict, something’s just happened, and you’re running on autopilot just to get through the day. If any of that sounds familiar, I’m asking you to stop, take a real break, and get clear on your personal values.

I can guess you’re having some version of the thoughts I had in that exact spot: that’s crazy, I don’t have time to stop, I’ve got things to take care of, and if I pause for myself even for a minute, everything’s going to fall apart.

So you keep going. You force your way through a life you don’t actually buy into, not deep down.

You can do that for a long time. I did. Then I hit my wall: divorce. I got there because I wasn’t clear on my own values, my ex wasn’t clear on his, and naturally, neither of us was clear with each other. We were both living in a situation neither of us liked or understood, and we took that confusion out on each other instead. It’s not hard to see, looking back, how we ended up exactly where we did.

Eventually, the cost of not living according to your values surfaces one way or another. A lot of us seem to hit that particular wall in our forties. Midlife crisis, anyone? My ex and I were together ten years before we got married, and we managed fine that whole time; there wasn’t much at stake yet. Then we got married and suddenly had real decisions to make together. Getting married probably should have been the first hard one, but we assumed it couldn’t be that difficult since we’d coasted so long without much friction. We bought a house. We had kids. We moved countries, then moved back. Then we got divorced.

I’m grateful for the divorce now, since it forced me to actually go looking for my values in the first place. I finally made the connection: setting myself aside was driving my unhappiness all along. I spent months resisting the whole process of figuring out what my values even were, and now I spend my time retraining myself to actually operate from them. I still struggle with it. But I know it’s the only way forward.

I can hear the excuses you’re building right now, because I build the same ones for myself most days, excuses to quietly slide back into my old patterns. But I can’t unsee the connection between setting myself aside and my own unhappiness, and I can’t undersell how much joy shows up when this new way of living actually works, because I’m finally living according to what I actually value.

Building a new habit takes real time, and it’s easy to slip back into the old one. Consider this another nudge toward redesigning your life around your actual values.