My Road To Financial Disaster: The Yuppie Years

Photo by Steve Hopson
One of my biggest mistakes that I had made back in the big hair days (1980’s) was living a “yuppie” existence. I only bought the finest furniture for my rented unit, a giant TV (27”) a leather sofa, A stereo surround sound system, all the latest whats it’s in my kitchen, a new giant dining room set and chairs, a new bedroom setup, you name it, and I had it.

The worst part of this whole process was that I was replacing things that were still useable. Everything had to be nice and new classy, and I paid thru the teeth for it.
Well actually, I didn’t directly have to pay for it really, and that was my second mistake: I began to finance this “yuppie” lifestyle using nothing credit cards. I was already in a fair amount of debt at the time but I proceeded to rack up $10,000 thousand dollars in credit card debt buying all of these unneeded items in a very short time. The really sad part was that I had a gorgeous dining room table set, and it was stacked full of credit card bills.

I wanted to live in a small community, so I made my third mistake. I lived in a place that generated a lot of transportation expenses. I worked in two cities that were separated by about forty-five minutes, so rather than living in one of these cities; I opted to move in the center of both places. This meant that rather than giving me the inexpensive ease of using public transportation to get to my work, I had to maintain my vehicle with gas, periodic repairs, insurance, ad-nauseum. This rapidly became a colossal money pit that wore me down over a long period of time.

Even worse was the complete lack of availability of local services. My only choice for foodstuff, for example, was either a fifteen minute drive or a very exclusive local grocery store. Either choice meant that each time I purchased food, I was losing money by living where I was at. Given my standard of living, though, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I spent appallingly high amounts of money (life energy) on groceries because of this aspect, without even giving it a passing thought.

I also had to choose this most unfortunate time to get caught up in financially pricey hobbies. Rather than choosing hobbies with a low price per hour of pleasure, like reading books, I chose hobbies with a high price per hour of enjoyment ( DVDs). This made for some high monthly entertainment expenses, far outside of anything reasonable for my income to maintain.

The end result is that I lived like a real consumer, digging myself further and further into debt while I wandered through my 30s. Then I made an even bigger financial choice: I decided to get married. Little did I know the financial collision that it would have on my situation. As time went on I eventually paid off my debt and never again looked back. I learned that money = life energy and that saving was much easier than bleeding. The final straw was a failed business venture. More on that later.

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