Backsliding

I suppose it was bound to happen. It started as it often does, with a little extra cash. I got the tax refunds that I wasn’t sure I’d get. One hundred dollars went to pay bills for the business. Eleven hundred went to savings. (for future expenses) Sixty dollars went to some expense that I can’t remember and then I had forty-nine dollars I could blow. Except I spent that 49 dollars twice - once in anticipation of getting the refund and once after it arrived. Tricky, eh?

I started spending the extra twenty or thirty dollars that sometimes ends up in my paycheck. Then I started spending more than the extra in the check. I forgot about the bills I need to save for and convinced myself I had extra money to spend. I took myself out to lunch for a treat and then ate out twice more in the same week.

I was brought back to consciousness about this by a mini panic attack. I’m starting to have a lot of respect for anxiety. I find it’s usually a message from a healthier part of myself, letting me know I’m screwing up. This little anxiety attack reminded me that I have winter heat, car repairs and car insurance bills in my future. I need to save for those bills.

This whole process, from splurge to panic, took place in less than a month. I function much better in a financial crisis, than when I have enough or – God forbid – a surplus. I know that one of my challenges is to learn to handle money sensibly when I have more of it. Meanwhile, what does one do when one has screwed up one’s own plans? Start again, of course.

Health

I’m on a forced hiatus from my business. Well, “forced” isn’t entirely accurate. It’s a choice that the universe is conspiring to strongly suggest I take. Like a loanshark strongly suggesting I pay my debt pronto. I’ve been sick lately – a lot. This is not unusual, but it’s getting annoying.

I generally spend a lot of time obsessing about what I’m going to do with my free time. I want to make money while indulging creative pursuits and that’s what I obsess about. I’m too sick to do much of anything when the free time finally arrives. I suspect that obsessing about my free time is a lot of the reason I end up being sick.

Living within my means is changing this dynamic. There is no impending financial crisis. I want to indulge in my habitual panic about money, but it’s not necessary. Everything is fine. How odd.

Yesterday, I realized that my next task is to get healthy. I need to forget about making money from creatiivity until I can maintain good health on a regular basis. I know all the things I need to do to be healthy. I even do some of them now and then. You know – eat well on Wednesday, exercise Saturday, floss on Monday, meditate next week. It’s not enough.

To get healthy I also have to make it a priority to have fun. You would think this would be easy. You would be wrong. I’m not used to combining the pursuit of pleasure with fiscal responsibility. I either willfully ignore my financial condition to do whatever strikes my fancy or continually postpone enjoyment while pursuing an endless list of financial goals. Moderation is not my forte.

So Thursday I spent a lot of time sitting on the porch with my feet up on the railing. I watched the trees and the birds and my dog and cat. I pulled some weeds in the garden, went out for lunch, then drove up a long country road just to see where it went. It was a beautiful day and I felt good afterwards. I may learn to enjoy good health.

Enough Is Enough

For the past year and a half, I’ve been burdened by a freeloader in my life. It’s my own fault. I invited her in. I did nothing, month after month, as she drained my resources. She’s charming and fun, but she never cleans up after herself and she doesn’t pay her bills. Who is this freeloader? I’m sad to admit, she’s my very own quilting business, By A Thread.

I started this business with money I’d inherited from my mother. I was happy to pour this money into any tool or service that might establish and grow my business. I’ve had fun. I’ve made some beautiful things. Complete strangers have spent their hard-earned money on them and been happy about it. Unfortunately, there haven’t been enough sales to come close to covering the investment I’ve made in this business. Sure, one has to invest to build up a business. But By A Thread has become fat and lazy on the artificial cash flow. It’s time for her to get in shape and start paying her own way.

After her last infusion of cash, By A Thread has about $30 in her checking account. Any future purchases for this business will have to come out of this $30 and future sales. She can have my time, but not my money. I had to take a stand. I sure hope she makes it on her own.

Report From The Field

I made the choice to follow through on being frugal. I am now enjoying the gift of time I have purchased for myself. In my regular day job, I work 36 hours over 4 days. Assuming I can learn to live on that, I have the luxury of 3 days per week completely to myself. I’ve caught up on rest and self-care after working 6 days per week this winter. I can now choose how to spend my ample free time. I am rich!

There are other benefits that I’m already seeing from this lifestyle. For the past few weeks, I’ve kept to limits on spending for gas and food. I’m always tempted to spend additional money from my cushion on the day before I get paid. I resist and now I notice a little lift in my self-esteem when I do that. I’m starting to trust myself and feel like I can, indeed take care of myself.

I’ve discovered one danger of the road is the knee-jerk reaction to eat mostly carbs. Pasta is cheap. So are potatoes. Don’t go there. In one week of the all-carb diet, I gained 4 pounds. Eeeeek! I’ve now taken off two of them, but it’s sure slower coming off than it was putting on. And it is totally unnecessary to gain that weight. Especially when you have one of those handy discount food stores around. I’ve got two, just over the river in New Hampshire.

It does take planning and cooking. And calculating the cost of everything. It can be fun to do that. One day I had $10 to spend on food and I was amazed with what I got – broccoli, chickpeas and a pepper to make my favorite salad, cheese, yogurts, biscuit mix. I think I got some fruit too. It’s satisfying to eat well on a small amount of money.

Looming on the horizon is the need to accumulate the $3000 I’ll need for heat next winter, but I have time. Right now it’s May and the flowers are blooming. Robins are nesting in the garage over my car. Life is good.

Yikes!

This past Thursday, I had a “come to Jesus” moment regarding money - or perhaps in my case, a “come to Buddha” moment. It was an awakening to my financial situation and not a pleasant one. I looked at my financial situation in the morning, then spent the rest of the day shaking in fear. It had to happen sooner or later.

The reason it had to happen, is because I have been living beyond my means – again. For the past two years, that has been enabled by the money I inherited from my mother. That money paid for a couple of vacations, car repairs, equipment to start and run my online business, and the everyday difference between my salary and what I spent. To tell you the truth, I really loved not thinking about money. But that time is over, and consciousness does have it’s own rewards.

So Thursday I paid some bills and figured out how I was going to pay the other 2 bills I have as well as the May rent. Some of you may remember that two months ago, I had $3400 in savings. Paying my bills next week will require taking money out of my savings that will bring my savings down to $1100. This is what sent me into a panic attack that lasted the whole day.

My income is about $350 per week or $1400 per month most months. If I spend $100 per week on gas and groceries, the remaining $1000 per month is enough to pay my rent and utilities, excluding heat. I have figured out where the extra $2300 went. $1500 went to my landlord for 3 months of heating bills and for last summer’s grass cutting. $250 went to vet bills and medicine for my sick cat who died a couple of weeks ago of lymphoma. $100 went to car maintenance. I lost $200 because I was out sick two days. The other $250 is pure unconscious spending more than I have.

I had a dilemma. Should I get an additional part-time job? Should I move someplace cheaper? Try to find a roommate situation? I’ve lived alone for more than 20 years, so the roommate solution is unappealing. I have a cat and a dog and I like where I live. I hate the process of moving, so I’ll avoid that as long as I can. My knee-jerk reaction is to try to get an additional job. In my mind I think I can always just work more. But this winter I had an additional part-time job and it made a mess of my life. I was working overnight which had something to do with it. My diet got messed up, I gained weight, felt horrible and developed back problems. I had no time to socialize or do much of anything. By the time it was over, I was totally ungrounded and miserable. I’d like to avoid that in the future.

I’m probably getting about $1200 in tax returns which can restock my savings. I have started to feel sane and balanced from having time to take care of myself and my animals. I want desperately to avoid getting another job, so here is what I came up with.

From now on, my payday routine will be to pay bills, leave $100 in my checking account for gas and groceries, and put the rest in my savings account. This will make it easier for me to stick to the $100 a week for gas and groceries. My paychecks are actually usually $370 or $380 so there is a little more money that will end up in savings. Also, every 3 months, there is an extra paycheck in the month that can go to savings. Since we are at the end of this year’s heating season, I have a few months to see if I can follow this plan and actually save enough to pay for irregular expenses like car repairs, insurance and next year’s heat. I’m also working hard on my business. Hopefully soon, it will not only pay for itself completely but will also contribute a bit to those irregular expenses. If not, there’s always that part-time job.

You’ll be hearing more about this. Wish me luck.

Fantasy Life

Most of the time, I read mystery novels for relaxation, but occasionally I read fantasy novels. The name is apt. I’m usually looking for fantasy when reading those novels. One of my favorite scenes is when a main character comes to the marketplace. There is usually excitement in the air as the hero encounters the varied characters and the wonders for sale there. Or perhaps there is danger in the air as our hero is pursued through the labyrinth maze of shops. It reminds me of the feeling I have going to a café or a bookstore or a farmers market. Not the danger, but the excitement. The crowds are gathered. There are wondrous creations on offer. There are all sorts of people to watch. It’s the perfect escape from one’s life.

I have a friend who has a different relationship to shopping. Her shopping adventures come from a genuine desire to obtain items for some purpose. When she comes home from shopping, she immediately unwraps her treasures, puts them in the appropriate place, and basks in the satisfaction of a need well met. If she’s bought food, she immediately starts cooking. If she bought shelving, she immediately fetches the hardware and installs her shelves. I, on the other hand, dump my packages on the kitchen table, then wander away to check the telephone answering machine, my email, facebook.

The trip to the marketplace is what holds appeal for me. I buy fantasies of what my purchases represent. I buy books because I would like to think of myself as a person knowledgeable about their subjects. I buy household goods to imagine myself in a palace or a county cottage. I buy clothes for an event I’d like to attend someday.

In the “Your Money or Your life” program, there is a step where you ask yourself if your purchases brought you satisfaction commensurate with the amount of life energy you spent acquiring them. This encompasses not only the morning you may have spent at the mall shopping, but also the hours of working and commuting time you spent earning the money to buy that thing. Is it worth it to you?

I find excitement, distraction, and a sense of community in various marketplaces. My challenge is to separate the search for these things from spending money.

Visual Inspiration

Last week I heard a couple of news stories on NPR about winners of memory contests. Apparently there are national and international contests where people compete to see who can display the best memory. Like any competition, the competitors train. In this case, they train to remember strings of numbers, words, playing cards - whatever.

What I found fascinating about this, other than the fact that scores of adults do, in fact, compete in a contest like this, is that they use visual images to remember pieces of information. Images stick with us. A reporter trained, competed and won a championship using visual images. Take a look.

I started quilting a few years ago and started to make a business of it about a year and a half ago. I’m starting to immerse myself in visual images. I’ve been a writer for most of my life, so learning to express myself in visual images is a whole new skill.

I read in the blog, Do What You Love, about a woman who wrote a book to teach artists to make right brain business plans. (See the interview here.) I was intrigued. I’m also trying to be frugal, so rather than rushing to my credit card to buy a copy of her book, I tried to imagine how it could help me. In the interview, this author talks about “guiding readers through a visual and creative process to identify their vision.” I took a stab at visually expressing my vision for my business. Here’s what I came up with:

This is basically a diagram of how I want my business sales to progress. The first circle, containing two little smiley faces, represents the current state of my business - an average of two sales per month. The circles progress to the last circle with 50 smiling faces representing 50 sales per month (to 50 happy customers.) Even 50 sales per month would probably not entirely support me, but it’s as much as I could imagine at the moment.

So what use is this chicken scratch, you might ask? This little diagram immediately brought home to me, in a very visceral way, that I was not prepared for 50 happy customers per month. My first thought on finishing the drawing was, “I’ve got to get organized.” I got a clear mental picture of the well stocked, organized studio I needed to create to pull this off. Every time I look at this drawing, it’s a reminder that I need to ramp up to get where I want to be in terms of sales. And it helps me to imagine doing that. I would never have predicted this result from trying to draw a business plan.

This brings me to the book, Your Money or Your Life - my money bible. For those who haven’t heard of it, Your Money or Your Life is a 9 step program to make peace with money in your life. The result of following the program can be to arrive at a place where you no longer have to work for money because you’ve pared down your expenses and amassed sufficient savings to live off the interest.

One of the things you do in this program is to chart how much money you spend every month. When you begin to build savings, you chart your monthly interest income. As your spending first decreases, then levels off, and your interest income gradually increases, you arrive at a place where the two figures meet. This place is called enough.

I’d like to be able to show you this, but I haven’t done this charting for more than a couple of months at a time. I did chart my debts when I was trying to pay them off. I put the chart on my refrigerator and watched the line go down as I got closer and closer to being debt free. It helped keep me motivated. Unfortunately, as soon as my debts were paid, I put the charts away and got in financial trouble again.

I see some new charts in my future.