It’s OK to be Broke at 50
By the time you’re fifty, it’s kind of an expected thing that you’re successful. You should have paid off your house, have a nice car, have a great career (senior management of course) and be well on your way to retirement. How are those investment properties doing? Not you? Not me either.
It’s so hard listening to our peers go on and on about this investment property, that share portfolio, their holiday house, upgrading to an electric car. Meanwhile, we’re sitting here, paying rent on a house that is below our expectation, paying the gas and electricity bills, throwing $50 here and there to the kids when they need it, and generally not getting anywhere.
What the hell happened to us?
A LOT.
We had great plans for ourselves by the time we got here. But life was not kind to us or
we just didn’t really give too much thought to setting ourselves up for this time in our life.
Here is some sage advice for you as well. Those investment properties, holiday houses and electric cars? Most of them are on credit. It’s rare that in a middle class neighbourhood that anyone has these ‘investments’ paid off. Especially if they’re talking about it to you and kind of rubbing your nose in it. Ask yourself this – why do they need to talk about it? I’ll tell you why.
It’s a self assurance thing. They need to know that they are OK and way better than you and that the credit bubble they’re in is going to last until they can just get themselves sorted out.
We may not own much, but what we do own, is actually owned and not shared with the bank. We feel the need to provide for our children after we’re gone but at this point, have no idea how we’re going to do that. It keeps us awake at night. It stops us buying that extra piece of cake because it’s $5.00 we could use elsewhere.
It’s OK that you’re here with me. We’re all hiding in the shadows hoping no-one notices us, ashamed to admit, that we kind of fucked up our financial lives.
I used to win Monopoly all the time and I thought I was a financial genius and life was going to be sweet. I could not, ever, replicate that success in real life. Nothing seemed to work out the way I planned.
I have come to terms with it now, but it has taken a lot of emotional strength to do so. Recently, I lost the little I had left to use as my leverage to my greatest success. I feel like I completed fucked up but my kids (bless) can see that it was the forces of the market running against me, rather than anything I did.
Want to know how I continue to be a loser (financially)? Keep reading over the next few weeks and you’ll get snippets of what the hell went wrong. The book is being written as well so if you want to sign up to be told when it’s ready, please do.
If you liked this post please share with your friends on social because I can really use as much help as I can get.
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