No Money Mania

No Money Mania (Part I)

 

My wife and I were having a conversation regarding money, budgeting and spending. Ok, maybe it wasn’t a conversation but more along the lines of an argument. I was adamant that she didn’t understand the point I was attempting to make and she was determined to enlighten me about our spending as she unraveled a bunch of crumbled receipts that were in her purse. As she went through the receipts and calculated the sum of those receipts, I began to realize that we were spending just as much money as we both made. So this conversation or shall I say argument was not about money; it was about being broke. Who likes being broke or living paycheck to paycheck? I truly believe no one enjoys scrambling to pay bills or even worse; borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. This was the way we lived for years and I always came to the same conclusion; “We need more money!”

          One morning while getting ready to live inside of someone else’s thought (going to work), I asked my wife how much money did we have. She stated that we had about $150. My next statement was, “We need to make that $150 last until payday”. I know that I’ve made that statement numerous of times in my life but for some reason it just stuck in my mind. As I couldn’t shake it, I pondered as to where that thought came from and the answer was, it came from my mind. What I thought about money displayed itself in how I used money. You see, the statement, “We need to make that $150 last until payday” sounded like I wanted to be responsible but the logic behind that statement was, “We only have a certain amount of time in order to spend that $150!”

          What I discovered about myself was that I was suffering from a common mental infection called “No Money Mania”. The symptoms were obvious; normal sleep when broke, inadequate rest while there was money, feelings of entitlement(I work so I can buy what I want), conditional depression when there’s no money, eating out on payday but packing whatever I could find days before the next payday because I was broke. Other symptoms included; episodes of mania when there was money in our account, taking payday loans, title loans, pawning items and the infamous, dodging bill collectors. Since we struggled most of the time, you can imagine what happened when we came across a lump sum of money; we would spend it. My wife and I could go through five thousand dollars in a weekend and justify this sick mindset by telling each other this simple phrase, “We don’t ever get to spend money on ourselves, so it’s ok if we spend every last cent this time”. I came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter if I had five thousand or a million dollars, I would always end up broke. Part II Tomorrow