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“Getting money and keeping money are two different skills.”
Fresh out of school and into my new jobs, I was not as frugal as I wanted to be. That was a skill I was forced to learn later when my contracts ended and the money ran out.
I was proud of myself for getting paid what I was being paid on a bachelor’s degree. However, I “invested” a large portion of my money into other projects that didn’t pan out. I thought betting on myself was a good thing. It can be, in a certain context, but this wasn’t that context.
When I left that job, I was fortunate to have a diversity of skills that kept food on the table and the utilities still running. But was I thriving? If I stretch the definition of thrive, maybe. However, I knew that what I had was not enough because I didn’t exactly feel as financially secure as I wanted to be.
That lack of security could absolutely throttle me if a rainy day turned into a hurricane. Morgan Housel, author of the book, The Psychology of Money illustrates this point perfectly.
In his book, he talks about two stock traders of the roaring twenties: Jesse Livermore and Abraham Germansky. Both men enjoyed rousing success in the booming stock market of that era. But as we all know, the roaring twenties went out with a whimper when the Great Depression hit in 1929.
