Confessions of a Poor Money Manager

I had a secret. For a number of years, I was too embarrassed to admit that while leading others I was often unable to pay my own bills.

The friendly young man was dressed all in black with a crisp freshly starched long white apron around his waist, just like the other servers in the trendy popular bistro we had chosen for dinner that evening. We told him he reminded us of one of our sons.  Truth be known, however, it was the chicken and rice soup and baked lasagna that drew us back at least twice each month. The soup broth could not be healthy, loaded with milk and butter, and the lasagna had the most wonderful crispy cheese crust. Oh yeah, the decadent five-nut brownie topped with Hagan-das vanilla bean ice cream had become one of our secret addictions.

Refined edgy strains from the small jazz ensemble tucked into a small alcove of the bar filled the dimly lit understated restaurant.  Suddenly, without warning a loud cell phone interrupted the music.  I quickly looked at the screen and pushed the mute button.  Less than a minute later, again without any warning, my wife’s phone rang.  She fumbled to find it in her purse and finally silenced the blaring ring but not before several fellow patrons turned their heads to register quiet disapproval.  I suggested we turn our phones on mute for the duration of the meal so we wouldn’t be disturbed again by inconsiderate telemarketers.

 In reality, the calls were not from telemarketers.  They were from bill collectors.  We had become immune to their calls and viewed their persistence as intrusive and insensitive.  After all, what could we do?  Attempts to ‘get blood out of the proverbial turnip’ had not worked in the past to my knowledge and certainly were not going to be successful with us.  We told ourselves that we were ‘peddling as fast as we could’ and doing everything possible to keep ourselves afloat. 

You need to know that neither my wife nor I considered our lifestyle extravagant.  After all, in comparison to many families in our community and church we lived fairly reasonable conservative lives.  We didn’t trade cars every 18 months like many of our friends, in fact, it was during this time period we actually owned a really nice ski boat, but didn’t own a car that could pull it to the lake.  We made the difficult decision early-on not to even attempt to purchase one of the gorgeous pricey new homes many of the leadership families we worked closely with in our church lived in.  The funds simply were not there.  For over nine years, Sharon worked as a secretary at the expensive private Christian school our boys attended to off-set their tuition.  We tithed our income through the ministry of our church, pledged additional resources to the church’s capital fund raising campaign and even contributed additional funds to a couple of other ministries.  Clearly, we did many things right.

Unfortunately, one mistake we consistently made often overshadowed the good we did.  Instead of looking inward and upward for lifestyle direction, we often looked to those around us. Unwittingly, we had fallen into the trap of allowing the secular cultural morays around us to become a significant filter for decision making and evaluation of how we were doing in life. 

With, literally, no legitimate discretionary funds for frivolous expenditures, we consistently attempted to keep up with friends.  Expensive lifestyle choices others could seemingly afford created unnecessary trauma in our household.  For a reason that I confess defies logic, we actually believed we should be able to do with grace and ease what we saw others doing around us.  Even as I pen these words I can feel the gnawing sense of shame I felt then.   

During my college years I learned to appreciate professors who graded on the curve.  Basically, this approach assumes that at least seventy-percent of any group will pass and make a ‘C’ in the class and only ten percent will make an ‘A’ and ten percent will fail.  I always assumed I could at least do as well as the seventy percent around me and a good portion of the time I could probably do better.  If you think about it, it’s actually an interestingly flawed approach to measuring achievement and success in any arena.  This comparison approach to success probably accounts for some of the distorted thinking I have demonstrated a good portion of my adult life.  It certainly has given me a comfort level, albeit subtly, to look horizontally for my standard of achievement.  Effectually, if it did not produce mediocrity it at least allowed me to feel OK with a flawed resource management philosophy and certainly inhibited me from realizing my full potential in important areas of life.

Now the really interesting thing is, we thought we were the only people in the world who were struggling like this. Actually it was worse than that. Serving on a church staff as I was, I did not want anyone to know what we were going through. You would not have known we were struggling to pay our bills, pay our taxes, invest in our future and struggling to give. To admit these failures, in my mind, was tantamount to a moral failure, right up there with all the other BIG failures you read about where a preacher somewhere has fallen

We kept all this, a secret. We put a smile on our face and kept up a good front. For all practical purposes we were doing just fine. Yet, all the while, I had a secret!

Coming Next: I Put Others at Risk!

 Initial article in this series:

• “Eight Things That Will Keep You From Financial Freedom!”