Financial Gardening

Welcome back to the newly renamed Desperately SeekingThis week I was seeking clarity, I wanted to know why people pick up gardening in midlife who’ve never shown much interest previously and along the way I realised it’s exactly the same reason people who’ve previously been somewhat messy with money will decide to get a handle on their person finances. I was talking with a friend recently about gardening. She too is in her 40s and finding herself suddenly taken with the idea of bulbs and seeds and planting things in general. We were debating the reason this seems to happen in middle age. I come from, what I’d describe as, a garden heavy family, but when did my Dad really pick it up? He probably wasn’t in the greenhouse with him Mum in his 20s, was he? Lee and I have often laughed about the generic gifts for men being football, beer or garden related, when he’s interested in none of the above. All jokes aside, if you search for a ‘Grandad’ card, it’s probably going to have a shed or a wheelbarrow on the front of it.For the longest time, I assumed the retired community just had more time, and they do.. just not in the way I thought. When you’re young, you look at the back of a seed packet and thing, ‘6 months? thats ages!. When you’re 40, you think, ‘oh that’s not time at all’. The older you get, the longer you’ve lived, the shorter the years feel. Planting a sapling, knowing you may not see flowers or fruit for 5 years, is ridiculous in your 20s. You don’t know where you’ll be in 5 years, that’s a lifetime away. I realised recently that we’ve lived in our home for almost 10.. how can that be? I’ve been making YouTube videos for 16… but I’m only 25!!! So it’s not so strange that we pick up gardening in midlife really. It’s not just that we’re boring and old, it’s that we see time differently. But how does this relate to money? I’m so glad you asked. We saw someone in a flash car yesterday and Lee said, ‘as you get older, a car payment on that makes less and less sense.’ - same logic, but in reverse. When you’re young, you’re living for the moment. Savings and pensions are something for your adult self to think about, you’re still just a kid - but now you have access to money, sometimes money you don’t even have.Taking out 5 year finance on something is not just easy, it's not just instant gratification, you have no frame of reference for what they really means. 5 years is a social construct.. time isn’t real. You don’t know how it will feel to have a payment taken from you for SIXTY MONTHS. I got myself in some sticky situations as a kid. When I turned 18, I said yes to every line of credit that was offered and I wasn’t earning a great deal. This was pre-2008, when banks were even less scrupulous about lending .. but that was a problem for another day, it would be fine. I ended up with an £8000 consolidation loan at 20, and absolutely nothing to show for it. You’d think I’d learn.. but no. I kept repeating the cycle of getting in debt, working hard to pay it off, getting in debt.. etc etc.. Once I was diagnosed with ADHD, a little switch flipped in me. I had been operating at a deficit. I didn’t have the same tools as everyone else. I wasn’t a failure, I was set up to struggle. Something about that helped me to see things more clearly. Once you know the problem, its easier to imagine a solution. Beyond that, I was in my late 30s and I was just sick of myself. I didn’t want to keep doing what I’d been doing.. it was miserable to feel like I couldn’t just get my s**t together like everyone else. I decided I wanted to get a handle on my finances and I started looking through everything I was spending. Now, this is a long game, I’m still very much a work in progress, but this is how it began. I recognised some patterns, set myself some goals and challenges myself to spend less. I started looking through previous years and kicking myself for the money I’d wasted. ‘If I had that money now’ I thought. Where did it all go? At the time, it felt fluid and free, it felt like I had infinite years to earn money so, who cares? Turns out, it was me.. just later.Now, I look at the money coming in, the money I’m wasting on interest, the money I’m paying in to my pension at work… I’m realising what it cost me in the long term to never consider the future. My mindset is completely different. I don’t want to live in my overdraft anymore. I don’t want to have to work forever. I don’t want to have to always be worrying about making payments. Now 5 years doesn’t feel so long away.I didn’t see the point in saving money for a rainy day because I hadn’t experienced enough of them. Now I stop myself from picking up those cute pillows or that lamp because it’s not just £50, it’s £50 every time you go in that shop and that’s £200 a month, and that’s £2,400 a year… and it’s probably all on a credit card. I am struggling with the yolo on experiences right now, because I told myself to do more with this big birthday year, but I’ve checked myself and reigned it in. Checking my budget every month and where my money is going has made me want to see that number going down more that I want to get that dopamine hit from the impulse buy. I started my first every regular saver last year that I actually stuck to, and at the end of the year I had a large chunk to put towards my tax bill - which I paid on time for maybe the first time. I’ve started putting random sums in a different saver this year, because we have a big holiday coming and I don’t want to be scrambling for cash.. I want to already have it. I don’t want to be relying on my overdraft, I want to have planned ahead. I am sowing seeds because I know that 6 months is no time at all. If it’s no time at all, I can afford to tighten the purse strings for that long, and I will see those savings come to fruition on the other side of the summer. The Summer holidays used to be LONG, now they feel like, blink and you’ll miss them. So, it’s not just that we’re getting boring in our older age, it’s that we can play this tape to the end. ‘Later’ comes around sooner than you think. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit mikhila.substack.com/subscribe