Type of Life You Want -A Financial Education

While reading this, you may wonder what it has to do with kink or living a kinky life. The answer is this: living for you, as the best you, starts in many places, and none of them are in the bedroom. Financial security and independence walk together hand in hand with living the life you want, kinky or not. The first step is realising and defining what that life looks like. The second is knowing what you are willing to do to get it.

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Humble Beginnings

Being brought up in foster care, I have seen many lifestyles. Ritzy houses with Porsches parked out front. Backwood cabins with a rusty 4×4. And once, an old, transformed school. Not the one-room schoolhouse depicted in Little House on the Prairie. A modern school, with a gymnasium and 14 classrooms where we were shuttled around in a minivan. But I didn’t start in those places. I started in a dilapidated trailer, in a rundown trailer park, the car out front dated and sounding like a chainsaw when you would try to get it to start.

My biological mother had (and still does have) what I call, poor man mentality. She lived from paycheque to paycheque, barely getting by, never hoping for more because it seemed too far out of reach. We were often lacking for even the necessities, simply because we couldn’t afford it. Or that was what we were told. You see, to my mother, we couldn’t afford it because she didn’t know what to do to get it. Money, I mean. She had always been taught (and many of us are) that money comes from doing well in school and getting a good job. But what of those who don’t do this, what becomes of them?

Education, Not Schooling

I remember being taught how to balance a cheque book in a high school math class. Our teacher went over the debits and credits, how you use red ink for outs, and blue for ins, the total always calculated in black. She took the time to teach us how to save and what portion of our paycheques needed to be tucked away for rainy days, emergencies, and so on, giving us a 30/30/30/10 model. 30% goes to housing. 30% goes to bills and other everyday things, like transportation. And 30% goes to food and recreation, where she suggested using half of our recreation fund for savings, like travel or rainy days. The remaining 10% was for emergencies.

She emphasized that no matter what, you put that 10% in the bank, or a jar, and unless it is life or death, you do not touch it. If there comes a time when you need it, you replace it as soon as possible. This would mean you’d always have what you needed and would never have to live paycheque to paycheque.

A Higher Education

Most of my classmates did what teenagers usually do. They dismissed it. But coming from less than nothing, I already knew I did not want to live like that, so I listened, and I listened hard. One day after class, I approached her and asked if she could teach me more about how to save. Her reply is something I will never forget. She said, “I’ll do you one better, but first I need to ask you a question. What type of life do you want to live?”

No one had ever asked me this before. I had been asked what I wanted to do when I grew up. Like anyone truly knows the answer to that (I’m nearing 40 now and have changed my profession more times than I care to admit). I had been asked where I saw myself in 5 years’ time. Again, how does an adolescent mind even wrap its head around that concept? And finally, I had been asked what I enjoyed doing. This is probably the best question I had been asked. It gave me the idea that I could focus on what brought me enjoyment, but not once did someone ask me what type of life I wanted to live.

Opening the Mind

I was confused by this and wondered why we weren’t asking everybody this very simple question. How do you want to live? It seemed so easy, and yet without the right education, I learned, it’s not easy at all.

That teacher went on to teach me how to do taxes, by hand and in my head. How to calculate interest on a loan and even took the time to teach me how compound interest worked. I received the education that the education system refused to give. You see, schools (here in N. America, I can’t comment on those abroad) are designed to make you become a part of the herd. Get up, go to school, get a job, pay taxes. Sit in neat little rows and put your hand up when you want to speak. But she went beyond that and taught me to take charge of my future, finances, and ultimately my life. I spent many afternoons in her classroom, outside of school hours, and looking back, not a single one of them was time wasted.

When I graduated high school, she asked me again, what kind of life I wanted to live. Two years before I had not a clue but on that day, with confidence, I was able to say, “one where I live beneath my means and never have to borrow, beg or steal.” She smiled at me and replied, “Now, what are you willing to do to get it?” And once again, I was given a question that no one had thought to ask before.

The Student Becomes the Teacher

It was years later, and I hadn’t followed my lessons as well as I should have (more on that next week when I write about debt) when I stumbled across a book. It was called Rich Dad, Poor Dad- What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That The Poor And Middle Class Do Not. The title sparked my interest, and I picked it up. I wasn’t even through the first chapter when I decided this may be the best book I’d ever read in my life.

To summarize, it goes something like this. A young man is raised by a traditional guy (poor Dad) and spends all his spare time with his best friend and his father (rich Dad). Poor Dad has a Ph. D and tells him the only way to make a good living is to study hard, get a good job and climb the professional ladder (sound familiar?). His mindset is based on prize stability instead of independence. It is more of the same, from generation to generation. It’s about playing it safe and not taking risks.

The Rich dad is a high school dropout, who now owns an empire and employs thousands of people. His mindset is that the rich don’t work for money, they make money work for them. They take chances for big payouts. They invest in theselves and their business.

It’s all in the Mindset

The first mindset is the rat race. It’s the daily grind, the 9-5. We fear not having money, so we work hard. But then we get the money we want, and think of all the great things we can buy and it is spent. We still want the money, so the cycle repeats.

The second mindset teaches us to invest and create assets, not liabilities. A house is a liability but if you rent it out, it’s an asset. The difference is more than just the building. The difference is getting money to work for you. Sometimes it’s about taking chances. Sure, there are risks, but you fail at 100% of the chances you never take.

What are you willing to do to get the life you want?

The book also goes on to talk about what you need to be willing to do to get the life you want. Suddenly, I was taken back to those afterschool classes and those two unique questions: What kind of life do you want to live, and what are you willing to do to get it? Let’s just say, that simple thought changed my life completely.

At not even 40, Mister K (50) and I have a home that is 100% paid for, two older (but paid for in cash) cars that drive fine, and less than $5000 of debt on a line of credit that has an interest rate of 4%. You can get money to work for you instead of working for money. You just need to decide what type of life you want to live, and what you’re willing to do to get there.

It wasn’t always like this. We had to make big changes, sacrifice some things and ultimately change the way we perceived money. But not putting hard earned money into interest payments each month saves us close to $12000 a year. What could you do with an extra $1000/month?

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This post is part of May Mores’ ad hoc meme #Lifematters #moneymatters and consists of 4 parts. You can read part 2 – Getting out of Debt, here!

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