Today, for a little change of pace, I’d like to tell you how to ruin yourself financially. Why choose financial failure over financial success? Well, there’s one main reason: it’s so much easier!
In fact, achieving financial ruin takes only one easy step: hope. All you have to do is hope with all your heart that things will go right, and they won’t!
I’d like to offer a disclaimer. I’ve made poor decisions, but I’ve never actually achieved anything that could be called financial ruin, so remember that this advice comes from someone who’s relatively inexperienced in the subject. Maybe I’m not even qualified to write this. But since I’ve already started, I think I’m going to keep going.
I once watched someone close to me achieve financial ruin. I saw this person court disaster, invite it to lunch, become best buddies with it. Just when it looked like this friendly relationship was going to last forever, I watched disaster suddenly become what disaster always is: disastrous. It was a little painful to watch this person’s hopes get shattered into a million pieces. But you know what, the whole process looked so easy; it seemed to take almost no effort. It was not difficult to understand the appeal of what was by far the least complicated, least painful way of doing things.
This person was my roommate a while back. I lived in a house with four other people, all of whom were really decent, laid-back, outgoing, and fun to be around. One roommate - the female half of a male-female couple and the one who was in charge of all the house finances, including paying rent, purchasing needed things, etc. - wasn’t the most adept at financial stuff. You’d think this might cause some problems since she was in charge of the house finances, and sure enough, it did.
I noticed a couple of warning signs before the real problems started. We were renting furniture from Rent-A-Center to furnish our house, and when I found out how much we were paying for this each month, I nearly fell on the floor. Seriously, don’t ever rent furniture from Rent-A-Center! I recommended buying some cheap furniture from Craig’s List. We probably could have furnished the entire house for one month’s worth of rental fees. That’s how expensive it really is to rent furniture. But buying furniture was “too expensive,” claimed my roommate who was in charge of the house finances. Her perspectively was apparently limited to the extremely short term, since renting the furniture was clearly the more expensive choice!
The real problems started with us getting kicked out of the house we were living in for failing to pay the rent. This caught us all by surprise. But we’d been paying on time every month! Not so, said the landlady. The whole thing was very convoluted but it basically came down to a question of whether the rent for the first month had been paid at the time we moved in or at the end of that month. The landlady claimed it had been paid at the end of that month and that we’d been a month behind on rent ever since we moved in and that she’d been tolerating it out of kindness up until then. My roommate who was in charge of the house finances claimed that this completely untrue and that the landlady was an untrustworthy, greedy person who had also lied about a number of other things, including the completion date for the perpetually half-finished pool in our backyard (the landlady claimed the pool hadn’t been completed because the rent hadn’t been paid).
We moved into a new house together. One day I had left the house and my roommate who was in charge of the house finances called me and told me that some scary people were at the house banging on the door and that I shouldn’t come home. The whole thing struck me as really bizarre. I knew that there was more to this story than was immediately apparent. I went home and sure enough two muscular, tattooed guys were standing there banging on the front door. I kept my distance and called my roommate again to ask if she was really okay in there and to ask again about just what in the world was going on. She admitted that she knew who these scary men were and why they were there. They had come to repossess her car.
Not long after this incident, Rent-A-Center - from whom we continued to rent furniture at the second house - started to come by. Ding-dong, ding-dong, went the doorbell. My roommate would rush out of her room yelling, “Don’t answer it!”
It was clear that this person was in a state of utter financial ruin, and I felt very bad for her. On more than one occasion I went to the door and told Rent-A-Center she wasn’t there when she was and that they couldn’t come in and take the furniture. At the same time, I advised my roommate to let the Rent-A-Center guys in and allow them to take the furniture. Eventually it became clear even to her that there was no other option. Rent-a-Center came and took our kitchen table, our sofa, our TV, our washer, our dryer, and our refrigerator.
My roommate was between jobs while all the really nasty stuff was occurring - which means she had no income - but eventually she found a new job. The only problem was that she didn’t have a car and had no way to make the commute. It just so happened that I was headed out of town for a couple weeks, so on my way out the door I handed her my car key and simply asked that she take good care of it.
I came back to find my car without any gas in it and the house in an even more extreme state of barrenness than before. She had been selling off all kinds of things off to pay the bills.
At this time, as you might imagine, relations in the house were getting strained, and my financially ruined roommate and her boyfriend suddenly announced that they were moving out. There was never any huge blowup, never any confrontation, but people were talking much less and going out together much less than before. In the end, the environment of that house - which had in the beginning been a friendly, pleasant, fun place - was tension- and anxiety-filled. So even though I haven’t exactly experienced it myself, I’m convinced that in that moment, I knew what financial ruin was.
Financial ruin ruins your relationships with other people. Financial ruin is unpleasant in every way. Financial ruin ruins your whole life. But the thing is, it’s so easy!
All you have to do to achieve financial ruin is forget all personal responsibility. All you have to do is hope - hope that the bills will pay themselves, that you can put off your debtors by borrowing money from somebody else and that you can then put that somebody else off by borrowing money from a third somebody. All you have to do is hope that things will turn out right without the strain of action on your part.
Hope is a wonderful thing. The ability to envision yourself in a better situation, coupled with the ability to take concrete steps to actually create that situation, is essential. Life goes nowhere at all without hope, but hope without action is meaningless!
Hope is, in fact, the way to financial ruin. If you’d like to achieve financial ruin, all it takes is one easy step: hope without action.
Although I’ve offered a concrete example of a person who met with utter financial disaster and although I think this is very easy to do in its own way and it probably feels great while you’re doing it, the aftermath is a little more difficult to deal with. Cleaning up the aftermath of financial ruin is actually a difficult, multi-step process. I often wonder what my former roommate is doing now. I guess she either picked up the pieces or found a third or fourth or fifth or six person to pass her debts off to. I’m pretty sure her life right now is not at all easy. Although she did it all to herself, I feel a little bad for her. Things didn’t work out the way she wanted. I think she discovered that in the end, financial ruin is not at all easy.
You can get there without much effort, but when you’re there, you find you want out!
Tomorrow I’ll go back to posting my usual tips about frugality and financial responsibility. I just thought perhaps this was getting a bit monotonous and that you might want to hear something new. I hope you found this story fascinating.
I’d like to close with a quote from Henry Miller, who nailed it when he said:
“In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is, in the long run, the easiest.”
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