Editor's note: In the coming days, members of the Consumer Reports Money staff will be sharing family lessons about money, both positive and negative. You're welcome to share your experiences, as well. Here, the seventh in the series:
My parents’ marriage ended with an angry divorce that led to foreclosure of our home and left me scrounging for pennies. I remember going to the bank with all the change I could find – expecting the teller to convert the coins to bills that I could use to buy gas. (I walked out yelling when she refused because I didn’t have an account, the customers staring at me.) For a brief time, my mother had us on welfare, and I eventually was taken in by my friend’s parents.
As you might expect, this all had a dramatic effect on my life, especially on my financial view of the world.
For me now, happiness comes from stability itself, from a bank account fat enough that, even if I lose my job, I can go years without having to once again experience that dread, the kind that goes with driving a car so rusted that rain water splashes through the floorboards as you go through puddles.
From the time I got out of college (paid for mostly with financial aid), I’ve been on a budget. I recall decades ago entering my spending and income into a vinyl-bound ledger and using a calculator to tally the results. I’m still budget-fixated; although now it’s all neatly done in computer spreadsheets, with bright, colorful, happy pie and bar charts. I feel satisfaction watching them update as I enter my income, which always exceeds my spending.
I never fail to stop to pick up an abandoned penny, no matter how grungy or marred, heads or tails. I’m comforted knowing that these days there’s always a teller who will be more than happy to count my coins.
I get preachy when anyone tells me they’re carrying a credit card balance or taking out a car loan – signs to me of living on that precipice I had toppled over so long ago. I haven’t bought a house, fearful of carrying the debt. I’ve resisted marriage, afraid that if it goes wrong, I’ll end up entangled in a conflict that could leave me sitting destitute in a boarding house, as my father did in his 60s.
My mother stayed on the public dole until she died. My aging father eventually married a woman who, though not rich, was comfortable. Following her death, I helped him invest and track his assets, creating for him the same spreadsheets I have. But with his wife now dead, the money didn’t give him much satisfaction. He’d often say that he’d trade it all just to have her back, his eyes glassy behind his thick lenses.
When he died a few years ago at 98, I took my share of his estate and added it to what I had–expanding my colorful pie and bar charts–feeling that feeling you have when you know there’s nothing to fear, when you know that you’re safe, no matter what.–Anthony Giorgianni, associate editor
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