Ascending the Pyramid of Financial Shit-Togetherness
This may come as shock to you, but I don’t know how to ski. It’s taken countless hours of self-reflection to get to the point where I can say these words out loud, but it’s true.
While we are on the topic of earth-shattering admissions, I might as well go big or go home: I can’t juggle either.
Bad news comes in threes and I hope I still have a family to return to after this revelation: I can’t do the super loud, two-finger whistle thing.
But what I can do, and have done, is get my financial shit together.
My inability to ski, juggle, and super-sonic whistle hasn’t caused me to lose a single hour of sleep or flush a deep shade of crimson at a dinner party. If you haven’t gotten your financial shit together yet, it shouldn’t cause you to do those things either. Because mastering your personal finances is a skill - nothing more, and nothing less.
And just like skiing or juggling, it can be learned1
For whatever reason, the skill of personal finance is lumped into a separate category and you often hear things like “I’m just not good with money”. This drives me absolutely nuts because it’s utter horseshit. I can guarantee you that no one in the history of time has described me as “just not a juggler”.
There are millions of people who beat themselves up on a regular basis because they haven’t yet learned these skills. People feel like they aren’t good people or aren’t capable adults because they lack a mythical “money gene” that prevents them from maxing out a new credit card every month.
I’m not a bad person because I don’t know how to ski. And you’re not a bad person if you haven’t yet learned how to master your personal finances.
My dad is a tremendously skilled guy. He has a successful home inspection business that he started after 40 years spent doing contracting, historic renovation, and remodeling. He built a beautiful cottage for his sister on the Mission Point peninsula in northern Michigan.
When I say he built it, I mean he built the whole fucking thing from the ground up. His work ethic is a thing to be marveled at – he’s one of those guys whose weekend doesn’t really look all that different from his workweek except that he takes the time every Saturday morning to have brunch with my family and my sister’s family.
He also happens to be the most selfless man I’ve ever known. After my mother was diagnosed with early onset dementia in her forties and could no longer live independently, he took her into his house and cared for her for over a year. This was almost 10 years after my parents divorced and he did it without hesitation.
I could go on about my dad for hours but here is the TL;DR – he’s a talented, incredibly hard-working, moral human being.
But until relatively recently, he hadn’t really gotten his shit together, financially speaking. As a result, he is still demonstrating that killer work ethic, week in and week out, as he’s knocking on the door of his seventies.
We’ve had many conversations about how one of his only true regrets is not developing this skillset a few years earlier in his life. That is a big part of why I’m so passionate about helping people climb the Pyramid of Financial Shit-Togetherness
Even if your DadBod isn’t in the financial domain, mastering your personal finances will go a long way toward supporting your progress and growth in all the other areas of your life. Think of it as maximizing the amount of DadBod destroying resources at your disposal.
Over the course of the next six posts, I’m going to show you the concrete steps you need to take to move from Level 1, where money is coming in, but you can’t predict how much, when, or where it’s coming out, to Level 4 where you can sleep soundly at night knowing that at long last, you’ve got your financial shit together.
Step #2. Learn how much money you make and how taxes work.
Step#3. Understand your debts and plan how you are going to obliterate them.
1Lest you think these skills are trivial compared to the time and effort required to gain a handle on your finances, here is an embarrassingly long list of things that I am completely unable to do which almost certainly require more skill than getting your financial shit together:
- Cook and/or bake.
- Handyman skills more complicated than hanging a picture.
- Drive a stick-shift, change my oil, navigate without complete and total reliance on GPS, or use jumper cables without googling instructions and then visiting a second website to confirm the accuracy of the first one.
- Anything remotely artistic in any way.
- Garden.
- Speak more than one language.
- Field dress a deer.
- Surf.
- Chop wood.