On a hot July Sunday in 2002, I sat at the kitchen table with my husband, Lee, and a pile of bills. The swamp cooler rattled and whined atop our trailer house in the middle of the New Mexico desert, yet the air inside clung to us like a sweater. Lee mopped his bald head with a bandana.
He picked up the next bill in the stack and read it aloud. “Mastercard. Minimum monthly payment two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”
I wrote this in the right-hand column of the legal pad—the expenses side. House payment. Lot rent. Propane. Groceries. Bills.
“Federal student loans. Minimum payment twenty-five dollars a month.”
The right-hand column stretched much farther down the page than the left. The income side held just two lines, each a three-figure number.
“That’s the last one,” Lee said. “How are we looking?”
My stomach tightened as I tapped each number into the calculator and watched the running total rise.
“Not good,” I replied. “We owe about two hundred a month more than we’re making.”
Lee nodded and gestured for me to pass him the budget.
“What can we cut?” he asked after looking it over.
We never should have gotten that credit card. We’d treated it like free money. We’d bought all kinds of stuff we’d never use. A camp stove. Sleeping bags. We never camped. I hate camping.
“I could get a second job for awhile,” he offered when I didn’t reply, “pay off the credit card, at least.”
Lee never bothered about money. To him, money was a river: always flowing. Sometimes a trickle and other times a torrent but always flowing. To him, the answer to a trickle was easy—increase the volume.
To me, it wasn’t that easy. We could only work so much. Lee already spent eight hours a day on his feet and an hour commuting.
And I had goals. I wanted a retirement fund. Here we were, in our early forties and not a penny saved for our golden years.
“We have to stop spending so much,” I said. “We’ve got to cut back on things.”
Lee shrugged. He passed the budget back to me.
“What’s our goal?” I asked. “Do we want to keep living hand-to-mouth our whole lives?”
“No,” he said right away. “I agree. We’re too old to be living like this. We need a financial cushion, not credit card debt. We need to make some hard decisions.”
I ran my finger down the expense list, going item by item to see which items could be cut. Gasoline. No. Clothes. Maybe shift to thrifting.
“I can give up DirectTV,” I said, “and you can cancel the science fiction book club.”
“It’s one of my few splurges. I don’t want to give it up. Besides it’s only, what, ten bucks a month?”
I thought about this for a moment. “The way I see it, every financial decision we make right now does one of three things. It either moves us toward our goal, moves us away from our goal, or keeps us stuck where we are.”
Lee got up and turned on the stereo. Alt-rock music flowed from the speakers, courtesy of the university’s FM station. My head hurt. The swamp cooler squealed louder than ever. Maybe Lee could climb up there and oil it today. I looked at the budget numbers again. Maybe we should sell our second car. It would save on the insurance.
“You’re right,” Lee said from across the room. “I’ll cancel the book club.”
Any bachelor’s
I’d just finished helping an honors student figure out the copier, a reminder that I’d worked my way up the university administrative ladder to a job where my biggest challenge was solving the Xerox machine.
A new message pinged my inbox from the College of Nursing.
Introducing the Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing program, a sixteen-month curriculum open to all university employees with any other bachelor’s degree.
I leaned back in my chair and squinted at the ceiling. I had a bachelor’s degree. In creative writing, true, but the email said “any” bachelor’s.
At home later, I told Lee about it while he puttered at his workbench.
“I can admit it was dumb to take out student loans for a creative writing degree,” I said, “but now I have a chance to turn that into something useful. I mean, I’m sick of being stuck in these stupid administrative jobs. I’m sick of competing with two hundred people for one crappy opening. As a nurse, I can have two hundred employers competing for me.”
“And nurses make good money,” Lee said, fiddling with a piece of wood and a pipe clamp. “Do you think you can do it, though? Physically?”
He had a point. It was 2006, and I was 45 years old—and not exactly in good shape. I would be 47 by the time I graduated. Assuming I graduated.
Before I could reply, he set the pipe clamp down and tilted his head back. “Let’s think about this logically. If you succeed, it will be a huge leap forward for you, professionally. You can use tuition remission for it, so even if you drop out it won’t set us back. If you don’t try at all you’ll stay stuck in your job, waiting for people to die or retire so you can move up a slot.” He laughed. “I think you should do it. I don’t see any downside here. You’ve always wanted to be a nurse.”
My pulse quickened at the idea of diving into nursing school at midlife. I’d never taken on a challenge of that magnitude.
“Well, I’ll try,” I said. “They’re limiting the number of spots because it’s new. I might not even get in.”
“What are the requirements?” He’d picked up the assembled clamp to fiddle with it again.
“I have to do some prereqs—microbiology, anatomy and physiology. And write an essay.”
Lee turned to look at me. “An essay?”
I grinned. He put his arm around me.
“That seals the deal.” He laughed. “You’re in.”
The heart of the matter
Two decades after that conversation, I sat at my desk reviewing RN2writer’s budget. I’d built this company over five years on the strength of paid advertising. Revenue exploded. I retired from freelancing. I believed for a while that I was building something I might one day sell. But the budget in front of me told a different story. Revenue had been climbing for years. Profit had not.
I printed out the budget-versus-actual report and ran my finger down the expense column, going line by line. The hard part wasn’t the math. It was that some of those line items had names.
I clenched my jaw. What could I cut? Or who?
The echo of an old budget conversation was not lost on me. I didn’t have Lee to bounce my ideas off anymore. He’d lived just ten more years after encouraging me to go to nursing school. This was a decision I’d have to make on my own.
I grabbed a pen and started drawing red lines through items in the expense column.
Sometimes the best business strategies don’t come from a book. Not from a guru. Or an influencer.
Sometimes the best business strategies are the ones that arrive when you have no choice but to think clearly. And they keep working long after the original pressure is gone.
I’m wondering if you’ve ever had a framework arrive in your life this way — not from a book or a course, but from a moment when you didn’t have any other option but to think clearly. Here’s my question for you this week: What’s a hard-won principle you learned outside of any formal training that still guides decisions in your life today?
Please hit reply to this email and tell me. Also please know that while I can’t respond to everyone who replies, I do read every response. That’s all for this week. See you next Sunday.
