The Writer’s Coin

Recently there was a good discussion going over at The Simple Dollar about how a beginner in despair should begin getting her financial life in order. She had emailed Trent:

I signed to receive your emails last year and I like them very much.
But I need the basics, and you have so much in your blog I cannot find it.
I don’t know how to live within my means.
I don’t know how to make a budget, that’s what I call the basics.
I don’t have a credit card, so I don’t have any debts.
But my salary finishes before the second week every month.
Let me know where the starting lessons are. For beginners.

There was some debate about what this person should do and where to begin, which can be overwhelming. All the ideas and tips being given in the post and in the comments section were sound, but it got me thinking about what it’s like when a person reaches that “breaking point” and decides something needs to be done. Something needs to happen that wakes you up to the reality of “I need to do something.”

In my opinion, all the advice in the world was going to be lost on this person unless she was “ready and willing” to act on it. It’s one of those cliché things people say but is true: “You can’t do it for her, she has to do it for herself.” In other words, any change someone is going to undertake in their life has to start with themselves.

But what triggers that moment? For me, it was reading Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. While there is some controversy surrounding him, my take on him is still a positive one overall: he gets novices thinking and talking about finances—no small feat. I read his book and I realized I knew absolutely nothing about finance, about budgeting, about making money work for me, or about investing. I realized I was ignoring one of the most important aspects of my life. That led to more books, more exposure to new things, and gradually I started turning that part of my life around. Not that I was in debt or in great distress like many people (my story is much less dramatic), but I went from knowing nothing to knowing quite a bit and it’s still something I’m very proud of.

But back to that moment of awakening.

If you read the ‘About Me’ pages of a lot of personal-finance blogs (My blogroll on the right is a good place to start), you’ll read a little bit about how each one of those authors awoke to their own financial ignorance. To me, that moment of ignition where action is taken and a new world is unveiled is super interesting. Why did it happen just then? How did it happen and why did it “take” at that moment and not before? Was it a book? A person? The “right time?”

So I’m wondering what it was that woke you up. What was that moment like and why did it happen when it did?

Tags: financially awake, making changes