Life is tough … but it’s tougher if you’re stupid

My wife, Dianne, and I started our journey of becoming financially intelligent by doing something crazy.
Now, I warn people to learn from our example. I don’t recommend that anyone should take the crazy, high-level risks that we took.
While there’s a message here, this is certainly not a model for you to follow.
Dianne and I both come from a working-class background. We grew up in poor families, surviving week to week on wages with no concept of the world of investments. I was raised in rental properties and my parents bought their first home when dad retired at the age of sixty. Remarkably, Di and I bought our first home before my parents bought theirs.
I cannot recall my parents talking to me about money management, saving, or budgeting. My dad loved a bet on the horses and often told me he was going to get rich through lotto.
“I’ll call you on Saturday after my numbers come up,” Dad would often say.
Sadly, I never got the call. He only had bad luck and I never saw any wealth come to me through his endeavors.
The harsh truth is, Dianne and I were financially illiterate. We had figured out the basics of working hard, living frugally, giving generously, and the power of regular savings. However, we were financially ignorant ,
Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but we certainly lacked an understanding of how money worked beyond a week-by-week, hand-to-mouth experience.
This ignorance did not serve us well.
Although we scraped and saved to build our first home, we didn’t have enough money to buy curtains or floor coverings. My income dropped thirty percent when I went from a well-paid government clerical salary to a youth pastor’s wage. We struggled financially for years and ultimately ended in the dreaded hole of credit card debt.
As we talked about our predicament, we knew we couldn’t go on living this way. We took action and cut up our cards, saying never again. It took some time, but we gradually paid off the debilitating debt.
So, what was the crazy, radical step we took?
We sold our family home.
Crazy, eh?
Again, I remind you, do not follow our lead.
We knew we had to do something radical to shift our scarcity mindset. We had to get off the hamster wheel of just surviving, so like fifteenth-century explorers, we plotted a course that involved immense risk but had a modicum of wisdom.
With a deep hunger to become financially intelligent, we moved with purposeful intent. Wisely we parked most of our home equity into a long-term deposit account and left it to grow. Then began our education, which continues today and has proven both life changing and illuminating.
It has been over twenty years since we started this journey, and as we sit and reflect, it is with grateful hearts to Jesus who has given us the courage, faith, and vision. The rewards are both material and spiritual but before I elaborate let’s take a closer look at what we did and what happened after we sold our home.
Our Next Step
After parking a healthy chunk of our equity in the safety of a long-term deposit bank account, we embarked on the risky elements of our education.
Firstly, we bought blue chip and speculative shares.
I’ll never forget the day I pressed the buy button to become the owner of shares in a speculative startup with plans of selling their food technology to McDonalds. While the stock was riding high my first, rather despairing, lesson was discovering how much greed I had in my heart. I wanted the stock to boom and give me instant riches.
It was a rude awakening but a substantial increase in my financial intelligence when I discovered I had bought near the top. Within weeks the stock’s fortunes reversed and plummeted to zero.
Losing-money-pain could be likened to kidney-stones-pain but harder to face. Trust me, you can’t avoid the pain of passing a kidney stone.
The pain you feel when losing money makes you want to hide. You feel gutted, shame even. You certainly don’t brag to your friends about your agony of this hard-learned lesson.
Thankfully, I had learned about risk spreading and had bought blue chip shares in an insurance company. These shares did way better than my speculative, loss-laden, food-technology shares.
The blue-chip shares proved to be the pethidine to my pain, bringing relief to the sting of losing out with my speculative gamble.
Buying shares opened a whole new world of trading, but more especially I became keenly aware of greed and fear. Fear gripped me just as strongly as greed. Trading exposed my deep-seated carnality.
It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t have the right skillset and temperament to be a share trader. As it didn’t suit my temperament, I eventually sold all our shares.
While we were exploring the wild world of share trading, we ventured into property investment.
As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound.
We bought a block of land in Brisbane and signed a contract to build a house. Brisbane is on the other side of the country to where we lived in Perth, thousands of kilometres away.
We’d heard it was an excellent place to invest in property, so in our naivety we jumped in.
Then disaster struck as the builder went bankrupt. We were getting a very expensive education, and Di and I were stressed to our limits. However, whether by dumb luck or the Lord’s great mercy, we managed to sell the block of land for a profit. And now we thought we were investment gurus. I mean how easy is this?
Little did we know.
Our journey continues
Our financial intelligence journey had begun, and continues today, over twenty years later.
Your journey does not need to be as radical or crazy as ours, but you can grow in financial intelligence. You can be a savvy financial person who manages money well, gives sacrificially and invests prudently.
As John Wayne said, life is tough … but it’s much tougher if you’re stupid.
Jesus doesn’t want us to be stupid. Wisdom precedes honor and the Lord will give us wisdom if we ask Him for it and pay heed to the lessons that come on our journey to financial intelligence.