It always happens at the end of the month. I look at my bills, and I look at the number in my checking account, and I run through a series of mental acrobatics.
If this bill has a grace period of five days but this one is a firm deadline, maybe I can pay the other one on payday and delay the first bill until the others have cleared and then pay it with my credit card, but only if the credit card bill clears in the first place...
Then, because I just can't help myself, I throw in some emotional nuance.
Of course, I wouldn't be in this position if I hadn't bought that one coffee last week, like some kind of Uncle Moneybags. And if I was really serious about saving, I would have dumped Netflix ages ago, but I'm a lazy, terrible, addle-brained consumer. This is my just desserts for being so confident and buying new glasses. What a fool I am. A fool with vastly improved vision and really nifty glasses.
Yeah, a lot of it is self-pitying and exaggerated. It wasn't just the one coffee. It was several coffees, and several weekends of going out to eat, and taking the puppies to get their vaccinations somewhere other than the specifically low-cost clinic (because I'm a little scared of that clinic, but maybe for the sake of paying bills on time, I need to buck up). Little budgeting things that I should keep an eye out for, and yet, feel somehow indignant that I have to watch out for them.
And that's because I've never had to worry about my spending before.
I'm privileged as heck, and while I try to be aware of it, I'm often straight up oblivious. Take last night's dinner, for instance. I'd baked some frozen fish sticks, and Kelsey asked for ketchup for them. I teased her for it, and we did a bit about me being unfamiliar with the condiments of peasant food. I hadn't grown up on frozen fish sticks, after all. I'd had grilled salmon with quinoa and fresh roasted vegetables, not ketchupy Kroger-brand fried pollock.
It's a silly example, but there was a ring of truth when Kelsey commented on how I hadn't grown up playing jump rope with the poverty line. My childhood needs were always met, with room to spare. Sure, money was discussed, and in the Scottish tradition of thriftiness, I was taught to carefully police my spending from an early age. But the stakes were low. An over-expenditure once in a while would never result in coming up short on the electric bill.
My parents paid for my college. My scholarships were the equivalent of a part-time job in terms of funding, but I never had to work that job, and I never had debt. After graduation, I didn't have loans lunging for my throat. I immediately got a good paying job, and began to save money, and sock away retirement funds, and never once felt like cash was tight.
I never blinked at the end of the month as my automatic payments pulled. I knew they'd clear, and I'd be fine, and I'd not have to regret the beer I had with friends the week before, or the new sweater I'd purchased that month to beef up my winter wardrobe.
But I can't live like that now. Which leads me to the other invasive thought that hits me in the tail end of each month:
Things wouldn't be like this if I had just sucked it up and stayed at my old job.
With that thought comes a tsunami of guilt. Guilt about my depression and anxiety, guilt about not being the pillar of financial security I thought I could be for my wife and my roommate, guilt about not being strong enough to survive a simple office job.
Except it wasn't a simple office job, and if I had stayed, I know for a fact I would have died. For once, I'm not exaggerating.
That understanding is all well and good, but it's not enough to chase away the guilt, because part of the guilt comes from my new job, in which I'm studying to be a Certified Financial Planner.
Which sounds hilarious, considering I've gone from "If I maintain this level of contribution, I'm ahead of schedule for my basic retirement needs!" to "My retirement plan is to work until I can no longer physically manage it, then wander into the woods to perish, like they did in the old days."
I'm neck-deep in these CFP classes, and it's no secret that I'm terrified of them. I want to be good at this. I want to help people plan their futures and find security. But I feel lost... I didn't study business, and standard education skimps on important practical subjects like taxes and finance. Not only that, but I can't shake a sense of bitterness about the whole thing. It feels like the world is collapsing... what's the point of portfolio management when the apocalypse is on the doorstep?
Again, an exaggeration... I hope. But the feeling remains. Not just for me, I imagine, but for many Millennials, particularly the 63% with more than $10,000 of student debt. We're supposed to be in our accumulation stage - that is, slowly paying off debt, but also contributing to retirement plans, and developing savings. But on top of the greater debt load, we're earning 20% less than our parents at the same stage of life. That 20% would look great in a savings account or an IRA, or as down payment on a house, or as a loan payment.
But it's not there. With 20% less to work with, it's hard to justify putting cash toward a future that looks increasingly, uh, nuclear. Small wonder ours is the most depressed generation on record. Even our humor is tainted by a virulent nihilism.
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I have to remind myself, though, that everything changes. I won't always be doing mathnastics (like gymnastics, but mathematical) at the end of the month. I'm capable of generating change, and so are you. I got myself out of a personal deathtrap job, and things got psychologically and physically better for me. I made a change, and made an improvement, even if it wasn't an immediate one, or a financial one (at least for now).
Despite the odds stacked against us (I say us as in Millennials, but it's applicable to us as in humans, too), we do have power, and we do have a future, as uncertain as it may seem. For now, it's a matter of finding wealth in a non-financial sense. Reach out to your friends and your family. Pursue your passions. Protect your mental health. Change things for the better, even if they're little itty bitty things about yourself.
I'm going to do my best to overcome my financial panic, and to learn to be a planner. And if I'm not in the right place to be a planner right now, I'll take other steps to get there, or find another way to contribute to the wealth management firm I work at.
It's all about doing your best, because most of the time, that's all you've got. And that's OK. And that's enough.