Dumb Money Choice #2: Thinking Nothing Would Change

A little while ago, I started a series of posts regarding all the bad financial choices I made in my 20s.  I made a bunch, I can see now (with my 20s way, way behind me), and I am still paying for them now.  Today, let’s talk about one of the big mistakes I made:  not planning for the future.

I mean, as I must have thought at the time, everything was going to stay the way it had been, right?

The Recap

As I have said, I wasn’t necessarily intending to make this a series when I first mentioned the idea.  And yet, here is the second post in the series now.  The first one, you will recall, involves not investing in my 20s.

This post kinda-sorta envelops the first post.  It all comes down to not planning.

The Backstory

When I first entered the job world, I was working at a high-flying tech company.  Work there five years, and I’d be a millionaire, or so I was told at the time.  (Yes, really.)  And that may have been true, for people who started there 2-3 years before I did.

Let’s go ahead and stop there.  Can’t you already see the danger?  I thought not only that I would work at one company forever, but that I would be comfortably well off.

I honestly thought that would be the way things went for the foreseeable future.  That, alas, was not to be the case.

The Future Changed

About two years into this misconception (and about a year after I won that March Madness contest), a lot of the financial world was seeing what I hadn’t.  The tech bubble was bursting, and it took a lot of tech workers with it.  Including me.

How blind was I, really, to the writing on the wall?  Quite a bit, I would say in retrospect, and possibly I was blind willingly.  I didn’t want to think anything of the fact that the perks were starting to disappear.  Free drinks, free video games, and so on?  Gone.  And I continued to think nothing bad was coming…or at least that nothing bad would happen to me.

And then it did.  The tech company, which had, for so long, prided itself on never having a layoff, laid off 10,000 people in a day.

It got worse from there.  As I said above, it turned out, as almost anyone who lived through that time knows, that the whole tech sector was having problems.  And it also turned out that the specific job that I had had at my now-former employer did not translate well to other companies.  Long story short:  I spent too long out of work and eventually moved to a somewhat different field.

This could have been me during my unemployed period, aside from the socks and my being male.  Image by tookapic from Pixabay.

Needless to say, I had not planned for the future.  We got through the period of unemployment (thankfully this was before kids), and things improved.  Eventually.

But the future isn’t all bad

Please do not get the idea that we should expect Murphy and his law to be lurking around every corner, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to get us.  Yes, sometimes bad things happen to us and shift our future.  But it cannot be denied that many things for which we should be planning are quite good.

An obvious example:  our future changed dramatically once we had our first child.  Were things different afterward?   You bet they were.  But, of course, we wouldn’t have traded that for anything.

So how should I plan for the future?

I’m hardly breaking new ground with the first thing you (and I) need to do, but you’ve got to have an emergency fund.  Eventually you’ll want to have several months’ worth of expenses, but if you’re just starting out, you might consider Dave Ramsey’s first Baby Step and just save $1000.  You can always add more to it later.

Aside:  This, of course, assumes that you have debt at the moment.  If you don’t have any, then by all means, save those six months’ worth!**

Then, of course, you want a budget.  Or, rather, I do, since it’s been quite a while since I had a budget.  It helps to know where my money is going.  If nothing else, it beats the heck out of sitting around at the end of the month wondering where it’s all gone.

Who knows what will happen?

As it turns out, the writing of this post got delayed, partially because of the COVID-19 lockdown.  Who could have foreseen all of that?  Thankfully, my day job is still safe at this time, but I know that there are a great many people for whom that, unfortunately, has not been true.  The next time something happens, it may be me, and it serves as a reminder to plan ahead.

A closing aside:  The other main reason this post got delayed was that the license I hold as part of my day job requires continuing education every year, and I had to get several hours before the end of last month.  I had 12 months to get those hours done.  Hmmm…perhaps I still don’t plan ahead all that well!

* Oh, I may have also been putting money into company stock.  Unfortunately, this was a tech company, right before the bubble burst.
** Another aside, of course, is that you might not be the biggest fan of Dave Ramsey. In this case, though, his advice is still quite good.
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