Getting Ahead of Myself
Some of these habits were ones I started to develop within weeks of my wife's sudden and unexpected death back in 2010. A combination of factors, including her deteriorating health over most of two decades, leading to formal disability, and the should-be-criminal, predatory, for-profit health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, had gradually dug me into a pit of debt despite my being steadily employed and technically insured all along.
I needed to dig in and get serious about my finances, and part of that was getting into the habit of allocating resources to my best advantage, and getting ahead of any new and recurring debt. I want to stress that this really wasn't possible back when we were having to deal with all of the ongoing expenses due to her condition. Oh, there could have been some additional belt-tightening, but we would have started to enter the zone of No Reason to Live.
Anyway, with the day-to-day dynamics hugely changed, I set about controlling everything I could, consolidating the debt into the lowest interest rate I could manage, then throwing all reasonably available monies at it. I still kept at least the minimal 401K allocation in place to keep having the company match to their limit - I had to think of the long game, too, and it would have been foolish to turn away free money, even if I wouldn't be able to spend it for many years.
It was sometimes exhausting, and felt tediously slow and minutely incremental in the moment, but it worked. Were it not for some substantial expenses over the past four years (some for me, some for close family members) that took multiple, $4K+ chunks of cash (hospital stays and vehicles) from the liquid savings I've managed since getting back up to ground level, I'd have more in savings now than I had in interest-bearing debt nine years ago. So, real progress.
Still, that sort of thing is anything but easy for me. Maybe if I manage to make it work for one or more issues I'll finally learn - really learn - that this is the way to go. For now, though, it isn't. I will avoid many big tasks or challenges for as long as possible, at almost all costs. That's a huge driver for my binge-watching. When distractions fail, I will just collapse into a miserable depression. Whether this is simply a character flaw, mental illness or a learning disability, who knows? If I anticipate that moving X is likely to reveal more awful or at least irritating details to deal with in trying to deal with whatever the larger problem is, I'll let X sit. If I'm reasonably sure something is a direct one-and-done item, I'll get to it much more quickly, but I'm seldom that confident there won't be complications. Life usually doesn't work that way. I'd much rather have my problems go away.
I'm not a religious man, but if you can hear me, Superman...
Okay. End of that digression.
So, while there are several very important issues I continue to let sit, unaddressed - a few of which might flatten me suddenly - I am handling some other things, from small to large.
Some years back I did some of this - working ahead - more routinely. Paying my efforts forward to my tomorrow self. Making next week, month, or whatever a little nicer for myself.
One subset was Christmas and birthday presents. I used to commonly, casually buy items as I came across likely gifts, setting them aside months ahead. When the kids were young, it was a natural activity. That's one of the many things I fell away from in the past decade or so, and it feels right to be getting back into this. Sure, it still tends to lead toward imbalances, as some people are so easy to shop for, while others are so difficult. If it's not paid attention to in the details it can lead to an almost obscene pile of potential gifts for X, but little to nothing for Y and Z, while in the final run-up to a holiday it'll still be more likely that new "perfect" choices for X will continue to present themselves. That's also a topic, potentially, for another time.
Related, I've started to buy additional birthday and blank cards when I find myself out shopping for a specific one, so I have an assortment at home to choose from in a pinch. This is another resurrected habit, as I'd done this years back, only to carelessly fall away from it.
Some of this return to working ahead is a side effect of giving much more attention to planning for things years down the line, particularly involving retirement. That's a huge and complicated issue unto itself, both in the details of the planning and even what one means by "retirement", but that's not what I'm writing about today. However, it is a topic that encourages both planning and calculated actions years in advance, so it bore a quick mention.
Some of this is coming from a return to blogging, particularly since Garbo kindly recruited me to be the Friday fellow in the Consortium of Seven, with my entries at least initially focusing on television and movies. (When you have a few moments, go take a look. Garbo's assembled an interesting group, each working a single day of the week, with each of the others generally doing more interesting things with their space than I've been doing with mine.)
The timing of the invitation was excellent, as I'd been having an itch to get back to something like this for months, and this was apparently the nudge I needed. Having a weekly deadline since the back half of September has found me working a little ahead. I'm still not doing it comfortably, but I've at least managed to hit the deadline so far, even if the results have been more wooden than I'd hoped. I remind myself that I'm doing this mostly as a mix of personal discovery and rediscovery. Trying to reawaken dormant skills, refine them, and find some focus. I'm not doing it as if it's going to lead to something professionally. It's stretching, flexing some old muscles, and trying to bring some of myself back to life. Hoping to reconstruct life in a way that I have something other than obligations to get me out of bed in the morning.
So, have you had any success with this sort of thing? In general, or in some narrow focus?
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