Humble Does It

I am not interested in using AI to create content as this exercise is mostly for my own mind. I started college striving to get a degree in Architecture – I figured I was creative and liked to build, but what I didn’t know was that I also had to be a skilled drawer, which I was not. I transferred colleges and majors after my freshman year and went to journalism school in a very hippie town in Southern Oregon. I like to write and could fill inches in the school newspaper in a flash and that is what I am trying to reignite at age fifty. I have also lived a lot and believe that I have absorbed a lot of key principles that have made me semi-successful depending on the definition of such a thing.

My lessons in financial manners started with my mother at a very young age. She got me interested in stocks and looking at the ticker symbols in the newspaper via some small investments that she guided me to make. I was an entrepreneur from birth – I always liked money and didn’t enjoy having to ask someone else for it. I started mowing lawns at age twelve and grew the business substantially in my neighborhood until I was mowing multiple lawns on a daily basis – I had wads of cash that mostly went into candy and soda at the local 7/11. My mother noticed my growing stack of cash and got me to invest – she told me to pick a company that I believed in – and at the time, I loved McDonalds, so I invested in McDonalds stock in the 90’s. Of coarse the candy, soda and McDonalds does not fit the healthy lifestyle that is another topic of this blog, but that will be discussed in another post.

Making money is a very important part of creating wealth – it was the only part I was good at all the way through my 30’s – I liked to spend every dime I made on life experiences – travel, alcohol, drugs and occasionally material items. The life experiences, mainly my heavy use of drugs, got me locked up at the age of 27 and by the time I was back in my wife’s arms I was past 30 and penniless – not only broke, but in debt to the IRS and many other unsecured credit institutions. My addiction had cost me a lot, but the most important thing in my life, which was the woman who loved me, hung in there despite her friends telling her to run while she could. She got on a payment plan with the IRS and we ignored the thirty thousand dollars worth of credit card debt and started to build our life back. It is hard for a felon to find a job, but I was lucky to have a friend in the marine electronics business in Houston that put me on while I was in the halfway house and once I was released back to my wife’s apartment, I was able to find a job as a pool cleaner – there are lots of pools in Houston. Going from successful business owner and part time drug dealer to pool boy is a humbling journey, but I decided to be an excellent pool cleaner and to pick up any overtime that was offered.

During my pool cleaning days I discovered a radio program which pounded a lot of common sense financial advise into my head, “The Dave Ramsey Show”. I listened daily as Dave berated people for taking on debt and living beyond their means. Before I went to prison, my wife and I had rented out our home, which we owned with the bank, and we moved her into a small apartment. I remember getting on my knees one day at work, right before I was going to turn myself in for my sentence, and praying for my wife to get a job at a teaching fair she was attending that day. It is amazing how quickly I turned to God when I realized that I didn’t control the world – I truly thought I was invincible until the day I wasn’t. My wife did get offered a job that day – she became an art teacher at a great little elementary school in the heart of Houston. She had the strength to hold onto her husband and to keep our house while she lived in a shitty little apartment in a not-that-great neighborhood. There is an arc to this story – we went from me owning a business, a home and doing whatever we pleased and putting it on a credit card that we paid minimum payments on to owing the world a pile of money and destroying our credit for at least eight years. We kept the house rented even when I came back home and started living by Ramsey’s rules, we really had no choice.

These may have been the wealthiest moments of my life as I wasn’t looking to be anything more than a husband and hopefully be lucky enough to be a father. Life did not seem difficult even though we had less – it felt like we finally had runway to take off and that I wasn’t trying to crash the plane as I had done for so long. We moved to Pennsylvania to be by my wife’s family and to start a family. It was a fresh start, not without its pitfalls, but fresh none-the-less. I went to work for her father in the power tool business and she went to work at a junior high, which resembled my days in prison – at least she got to come home at night. We lived in a duplex with her parents on the other side – the two sides were connected with a hallway in the middle, so we were very much intwined. I was hoping that family would cleanse us, but it wasn’t that simple, my father-in-law treated me like the criminal that I was and it took quite a bit of time to earn his and my mother-in-law’s trust. I think I won over my mother-in-law, but I am still trying to connect with my father-in-law as is my wife – she’s got fifty three years invested, I’m just working on twenty four.

We made two babies over the next three years, fixed up our side of the duplex and I was able to find a job as an automotive coatings salesman that allowed her to quite her treacherous job. We did what Dave said – we ate our meals at home, we paid off the IRS and we sold our home in Houston and put the profit in the bank to some day buy another home – we were halfway through the seven years of dead credit. Second chances and humility got us back into the general population and the prosperity was bubbling up all around us.