Learning about money

An entry on another site here made me think about my earlier life and something important that I missed completely when I was young and in my 20s. More than practically anything else except driving, the only way you can really learn about handling money is to actually have money to handle.

We didn't. We most certainly didn't.

When I was young, my parents had three kids in three years, my mother stayed home with us, and our father didn't make that much money. We had a house, and we didn't starve or anything, but I had a lot of Goodwill clothes when I was young, the vegetables and stuff we ate were always the cheapest we could get, and when my father wasn't home, my stepmother would shut the furnace off and tell us to wear a sweater. Didn't matter how cold it was... I used to have a thermometer in my room and more than a few times it was in the high 30s or low 40s in there in the bottom of the winter.

My father was also one of those old-school guys who was very closed-mouthed about money. He was always fairly private about everything, but even when I was filling out financial aid forms for college, my father refused to provide any of the information they were looking for, and as a result, I got practically no need-based aid.

All this comes down to the fact that when I actually started to make a little money in the 1980s, I was terrible at handling it. I never saved, I was really bad about paying bills on time, my priorities weren't particularly good. You just don't learn about money unless you have some to learn with.

In some ways, I envied Nancy, because she grew up in the suburbs, in a completely different environment. She never wanted for anything, her father paid for her education, she made consistently good money right out of college, she was a saver. I don't think she ever understood, and I could never seem to explain to her, that I just didn't have those skills because nobody around me had... well, shit. It was mostly from watching her that I learned the skills I wish I could have learned from my parents: pay stuff on time, try to live within your means, save what you can, but don't be a slave to frugality as my grandfather was.

So here I am now, in my 40s, I own my house, my unsecured debt is pretty low, I make pretty good money, I have an amount in the low six digits in retirement, a few thousand in savings bonds, a few thousand in the bank, my car is paid off, my credit score is good. I keep wondering if my life would have been different if I could have learned this stuff earlier in life. I just was never around anyone from whom I could learn.

Remind me of this in my next life, OK?