by Renee leNobel | Sep 26, 2016 | Divorce
If not, there’s a good reason.
My divorce was a Collaborative Divorce. What does that mean? On the surface, it means that you agree to keep your divorce out of the courts. That was one of the reasons why I agreed to try the process when I was getting a divorce from my husband. There had been more talk about the Collaborative Approach to Divorce at the time of our separation as the family law in British Columbia was undergoing a change and as part of that change, lawyers were required to begin informing their clients about Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR – an acronym that lawyers use a fair bit – did you know what it means?).
So we heard from many at that time that the Collaborative Approach to divorce was the new way to get a divorce. It was the better way and so those two concepts (new and better) convinced me and my husband at the time to try it to get our separation agreement so we could get a divorce.
So we tried it.
And I really did not like it.
Of course, divorce is incredibly stressful and trying to come to an agreement with someone that you are in conflict with is already a challenge so it is no wonder I didn’t like it. But I think I hated it even more than what I imagined the alternative was, which was to have a no holds barred fight.
I had been trained all my life to avoid conflict. Many of us are. I had also been trained to think I was a reasonable person that could deal with almost any situation. What this meant for me was that I tended to let things go a lot. But I didn’t really let them go. Instead, I buried them and sat on them and then tended to explode when I couldn’t do that anymore. That was where I was at when I finally separated from my spouse and had to figure out a way to now come to agreement so we could get a divorce.
The Collaborative Approach is the opposite of the all consuming war that I had been training up for and which I have to say many of us envisage when we think divorce. We think fight. We think courts and nasty revenge. We think there will be at least one loser in this war and often there are two. We have been trained by society (TV really) to have a certain picture of what divorce looks like.
The first four way meeting in our Collaborative Divorce we went to with our lawyers I almost had a coronary. I should explain what a four way meeting is. It’s a meeting with you, your spouse, your lawyer and your spouse’s lawyer present. You get to a separation agreement by way of these four way meetings. I don’t know if either of our lawyers could have talked any slower. And the stuff that was coming out of their mouths? Seriously? I felt like I was back in kindergarten where I was being told how important it was to share. At the same time I was thinking “this is costing us two hourly lawyer rates to sit here and learn about manners.”
I already knew what the answer to our problem was and so sat through this “Collaborative Approach.” for 8 months until we got there. In the end, the agreement we got was pretty close to what I had wanted. “Hey – I guess the Collaborative Approach worked for us” is what I thought at the time.
Little did I know that I never really understood “Collaborative” even after we were done.
Why is that? How could I have spent 8 months in meetings with 4 different professionals that practiced the Collaborative Approach to divorce and still not understand how it was supposed to work? They had all explained how it was supposed to work – at the beginning of the process, during all the meetings and at the end where they said – “see, we have an agreement – it all came together.” And when I think back on it now, out from the fog of emotion, I know that they did. They were explaining it clearly but something was preventing me from hearing and understanding it.
How did that happen?
Well, I think part of the reason that happened is that I had each spent 40 years learning a different way to resolve conflict. I had spent my life learning how to avoid conflict. Then I had learned that if the conflict was still there and bothering me, I had to really stand up for myself and battle through to make that conflict go away. My belief about myself was that I don’t get all bent out of shape over minor issues but watch out if someone crosses me. I switch from being an avoider to being a highly motivated person who is going to win at all costs.
So instead of seeing how we had just resolved our conflict a different way than I knew; because how can you learn a new way of doing conflict in 8 months after spending your entire life training a different way to do conflict, I slotted our divorce into my old way of seeing things. I had avoided separating from my husband and then when I realized it was unavoidable, I found a solution and hammered it through. Because deep down, I felt like I had been the one driving our agreement process. I had made sure the meetings happened, I made sure my ex did the “homework” and I made sure our agreement got signed.
And….
How can you learn a new way of doing conflict when you are at your most emotional point in life? I was not calm or rational. I was alternating between being sad and angry on a minute by minute basis. The only thing I was focused on was revenge. I could not hear a thing those professionals were telling me. I was living in an extremely stressful situation where I was sharing a house with a person I did not want to have anything to do with anymore and I had two small children that I was extremely worried about. I was not at my best for learning new concepts.
So, while we used the Collaborative Approach to divorce, it was only on the surface. We stayed out of court. Oh wait – no we didn’t. We ended up in court after we were separated and divorced.
Our agreement allowed us to get a divorce but we were still in conflict and were still not able to resolve it. We reverted to our old patterns and styles of managing conflict as soon as we were released from our professional team.
I think this is what it is like for many people. Everyone has learned a certain style of conflict. Some people may have learned a more collaborative approach to resolving conflict and when they enter the Collaborative Approach to divorce, they get it and things progress and it works.
So what about the rest of us? Those of us who have been trained throughout life not to do things collaboratively?
We need more help. We have to be told again and again what it means and how it works because it is a difficult concept to grasp when you are in the midst of emotional upheaval and have years of resolving conflict in a different way.
I myself only started to understand what it meant about a year after my divorce was finalized and after I had started to train to become a Collaborative professional myself. Here is part 1 and part 2 of posts I wrote when I finally did start to understand what Collaborative means.
Now I find myself helping people with their own Collaborative Divorces. I have heard them say exactly what I said during my divorce: the meetings with the Collaborative professionals are slow, it doesn’t seem like actual issues are being addressed and the divorce is not progressing.
These words have become signals for me to sit up and pay attention. I have to remind myself how much time it took me to understand how Collaborative works. I realize that the best way I can help people is to help them gain that understanding too. I have to fight my natural inclination to go back to my life training to be a problem solver and solve these people’s problems and remember instead I am helping to facilitate a Collaborative process so they can figure out the best way to move forward with hope.
by Renee leNobel | Sep 18, 2016 | Divorce
I was trained to believe that being busy means you are important. This wasn’t overt training. It was training I chose to believe from observing the world around me. OK, there was a bit of overt training in school. I see it now when I see what I’m doing to my children at the start of the school year. The school year has started and the pressure to sign my children up for all sorts of extra-curricular activities has begun. And I have bought in. My older child is resisting hard and I think I’d better let him win this one (after I sign him up for a few things – swimming, choir, cross country – hey it’s only a month and I’m only doing it so he gets the bus ride home to the park near where we live). I am in such a quandary over signing him up for dance though.
I put him in dance a couple of years ago because he does not appear to like the team sport thing. Plus, whenever we were at the beach – a place he claims to hate with a passion – he would break out in dance. I decided that dance was the happy place he needed to go to so I figured he would love it as an extra-curricular activity. So I put him in dance and he did well and frankly I loved the year end concerts and hearing that he was a natural from his teacher. But he doesn’t want to do dance. He tells me that it is boring – they repeat the same moves over and over again and it has become a chore for him. Just one more thing to do to please people, including me, the woman who runs the dance studio and the world. Despite knowing this, I still want to sign him up because if I don’t, how is he ever going to figure out what he loves in life if he doesn’t try it and keep practicing it? He is going to get left behind by his peers. He is going to lose the thing he loves!
Yes, this is the argument that is going on in my head that is leading to me badgering my child to sign up for dance again. Sometimes I really hate self-awareness.
Yet self-awareness is hitting me over the head with a hammer this weekend.
Why?
I am alone.
Why am I alone?
Well, I was supposed to go on a big hiking trip with some friends but then it turned into a torrential rain weekend (of course it did – it was the start of soccer season) and we decided it is not much fun camping and hiking in a torrential downpour.
So I have no kids – they are with their dad this weekend – and I have no plans.
This is a place I found myself in A LOT when I was freshly separated. It was a place I really could not mentally handle at the time. When I was freshly separated and alone I spent a lot of time crying. A lot. I equated being alone and not busy with being useless and a failure. I had no career to bury myself in, I had no kids to take care of (they were with their dad) and all my friends were extremely busy with their families.
It sucked big time and drove me to depression.
Then my coach helped me understand the importance of alone time (especially for introverts like me and my son). She told me it was OK to sit on the couch and cry. She told me eventually I would get tired of it and move on to something else. She also told me to start figuring out what it was I enjoyed doing and to just start doing it when I had that alone time. She told me to recognize the guilt that would crop up when I was doing something that I enjoyed that I didn’t think was a “valuable use of my time” according to the old rules I had taught myself. She told me to push through that guilt and not let it stop me from doing what I enjoyed.
The great thing about this for me was that she prescribed alone time and fun time for me. I am a rule follower, a lot of us are as we are trained to be in life. So I did what I was told and sat very uncomfortably in my alone time because she told me to. I also started to go out and do things that I had enjoyed in the past. Because at that point in my life I didn’t enjoy anything. I was depressed. I repeated this prescription for a couple of years and in fact sometimes I have to go and get a new prescription for it.
This weekend I got a new prescription for it.
It is amazing because even knowing that being alone is OK now I still can’t quite handle it. I still equate being alone with many bad things and it takes me a lot of (wait for it…ALONE) time to realize how important being alone is.
So on Saturday I woke up and stared alone in the face again and started to get antsy.
I texted my friend that I was supposed to go hiking with to see if she was up for a hike even though it was pouring. Nope. So I sat on the couch and started to see the weekend stretch out before me. I RAN to my closet and put on my exercise gear, hopped in my car and drove myself to the Grouse Grind. I did that, drove home and started to work. I did that for a while until I started to beat myself up again for having no life outside of work and exercise and then I started to text all my friends. My dear friend recognized I was sliding a bit and offered me the opportunity to come over and help her prepare some healthy food.
Um. I hate cooking. I can do it and I can do it well and it has taken me many years to admit that I hate cooking. My family are all fabulous cooks and foodies. My sister reads cookbooks for fun. I should like cooking. Shopping for healthy food at the local markets, cooking and healthy eating are all the rage. OK – this is turning into another post but when my friend asked me if I wanted to come over and help her cook I realized I would rather be alone. Heh. She heard me recognize that and told me to just go make lists of everything I have to do (because I do have work I could be doing) and she knew that would give me something to do so I would’t be obsess about being alone AND I would get something done which I still haven’t let go of as being important.
This is turning into a very long blog post. Is anyone still with me? I work out the analytics of things as I write.
So I started to list all the stuff I have to do and then I realized I was losing my alone time. It was vanishing before my eyes. OMG – I have a lot to do and not much time to do it in. I need more alone time!
I decided I had to go to yoga – it is like alone time. It has meditation built in. I went to yoga.
I came out of yoga and my dear friend had asked me over for pizza (that is how first met in life – she randomly asks strangers if they want pizza as they walk by her house).
Of course I wanted pizza (it had bacon and potato on it!) and of course I wanted to hang out with my friend.
Then I came home and it was still Saturday night and I was alone.
It was then that I finally FINALLY recognized how well and truly I have been trained to think that there is something wrong with being alone with nothing to do because I realized I still subconsciously believe this fallacy.
Then I recognized what my alone time that day had brought me.
I had re-learned what is important to me and I got re-charged doing the things I enjoy. I actually got very excited about life again and I was grateful that I had gotten alone time to get reminded of these things. It really was the best day ever. I felt happy when I woke up this morning. Happy.
To bring this post full circle I now recognize what I am doing to my children when I fill up their schedules with extra-curricular activities. I am teaching them that being alone and being bored is bad. I am also not giving my introvert son enough time to figure out what it is he enjoys. He is being told what to do and he does it because he is a rule follower just like me. I am setting him up for a future mid-life crisis. Someday, he will have to learn that being alone is not bad. He will also have to learn what it is that he loves because he will never have had a chance to figure it out for himself.
I subconsciously knew that I was not letting my son be OK with himself and what he wants. I was trying to convince him he is wrong about stopping his dance class. This is the other awareness I had this weekend in my alone time. I realized that though all I’ve ever wanted for my kids is for them to be happy, I’m still following a set of parenting rules that does the opposite. I am still following the rules that I thought I had unlearned.
So, to be clear and because it seems it takes a lot to unlearn 40 years of training, I am reminding myself that alone time is good – not only is it good, it is awesome.
So this is my reminder and I hope it helps you too.
by Renee leNobel | Apr 6, 2016 | Tools & Tips
It’s that time of year again. Busy season for accountants! The Canadian Personal Income Tax filing deadline of April 30, 2016 is approaching quickly!
I was contemplating why it is still so busy for tax preparers as preparing your own taxes is getting easier every year. The tax software is getting cheaper and cheaper (and you can often find free offerings) and it is fairly straight forward to use.
I’ve been wondering why more people don’t prepare their own taxes. I’ve also been on the receiving end of extreme gratitude when I do prepare people’s taxes. The look of relief on some people’s faces when I tell them makes me feel fairly awesome!
I also know a number of people (many people, so don’t think I’m talking about you) that have not prepared their taxes in years. They owe the Canada Revenue Agency many years of tax returns.
Let me be clear, I’m not talking about complicated tax returns. Sometimes if is very wise to hire out to a specialist. It allows you to concentrate on what you are good at. I’m talking about tax returns for people that are employees and/or have a sole proprietorship small business.
What is stopping people from preparing and filing their income tax return?
Everyone has a slightly different excuse or reason, but I think most of them are based in fear.
One fear is that taxes are too hard to prepare, mistakes will be made and the Canada Revenue Agency will come down with heavy penalties and interest for those mistakes.
Other people worry that they may have made too much money during the year and will owe major taxes. On the flip side, some people will realize that they did not make very much money at all and may take that as a indicator of their own self worth. Better just to not think about it as thinking about it leads to painful thoughts!
Another concern is that it preparing taxes will be a lot of work. If you own your own business and you haven’t got a system in place that tracks your revenue and expenses (money coming in and money going out) then it can be fairly daunting to to think about compiling a year’s worth of information! I understand that fear. I have some clients that hand me their receipts in a shoe box and I don’t like doing that type of work so much either. It helps to know that I will get paid.
All these fears stop people from paying attention to a big part of their lives. I’m a firm believer in researching and gathering as much information as possible about things in life. It allows you to make informed decisions, plan better and generally be more successful. If you are burying your head in the sand about your financial situation, it is likely that you are getting yourself stuck and are not as successful as you could be.
So,,, what can you do to get yourself unstuck and start paying attention to your financial situation and taxes?
Well, if it is truly overwhelming, you can hire someone to help you. When choosing an accountant, choose someone that you are comfortable talking to. Ask them to explain what they have done so you could perhaps repeat the process yourself next year or at least start to gain clarity about the process – this often gets rid of fear. Yes, that accountant may charge you by the hour to explain things, but in the long run, you will save yourself lots of money.
I have an even better suggestion though. Why don’t you hire yourself? You would be doing yourself a big favour. Pay yourself to do your taxes. Decide what your time is worth and sit down and tackle those taxes. When you’re done, calculate what you are owed and then go and spend that money on something that is going to make you feel happy. If it makes you happy to put it in the bank account and save it, then do that. That said, one way to get happier is to have memorable experiences, so maybe you can put those earnings towards a fun experience.
Then next year when it comes time to do taxes again you can look forward to it. It’s an opportunity to earn yourself some funds to do something fun.
by Renee leNobel | Mar 23, 2016 | Tools & Tips
My life just got a bit easier with the new 2016 Federal budget that was announced on March 22, 2016.
Under the previous government I had three different calculators to figure out how much people would receive as tax credits and benefits related to their children but this has all disappeared with the new Liberal budget.
Previously, families received the Universal Child Care Benefit (“UCCB”) of $160 per month per child under the age of 6 and $60 per month per child aged 6 to 17. These amounts were taxable and included in the income of the lower earning spouse.
Families received the tax-free Canadian Child Tax Credit of $1,471 per year per child in 2015/2016 that was clawed back completely if your family income exceeded $118,251 (if you had one or two children) or $157,601 if you had three or more children.
There was also a National Child Benefit Supplement of $2,279 per year for the first child, $2,016 per year for the second child that was also clawed back if family income exceeded $26,021.
Finally, each family was eligible for the Children’s Refundable Fitness Tax Credit of $150 per year and Children’s Non-Refundable Arts Credit of $75 per year. These are each being cut in half for 2016 and will be gone by 2017.
To further complicate things, I was usually trying to figure out these amounts so that divorcing couples could figure out how to split these amounts that the government was going to be giving them for their children. These would then need to be outlined in their separation agreements.
Under the new Liberal government, this has all changed and I have to say hooray.
The budget states that families will receive $6,400 per year per child under the age of 6 and $5,400 per year per child aged 6 to 17. These amounts will slowly get clawed back based on adjusted family net income and will disappear completely for families with income exceeding $140,000.
Here is a link to the Liberal’s calculator.
So while I’m happy about the simplicity of the new Liberal Canadian Child Benefit, most families will be happy because they will be receiving more money with this new benefit. The fact that the entire benefit is tied to a family’s income makes it more fair than the system under the old regime where everyone got the UCCB and Fitness and Arts Credits regardless of how low or high their family income was.
by Renee leNobel | Mar 15, 2016 | Finances
I have a few friends that are in the dating stage of their lives right now. It is a fascinating topic of conversation. Of course, being me, I find the money part particularly interesting.
How come? Well, pretty much every girlfriend I have claims that it is the guy’s obligation to pay for dinner and drinks on a date. And one friend told me she was out recently where she tried to pay and the guy told her “come on, let me be a man” and insisted on paying. Another friend of a friend uses dating to fund her dinners out. Whenever she is low on funds, she goes online and finds some random guy to take her out for drinks or dinner. The guy always seems to pay.
This is interesting. I have asked if there is any discussion around this when it comes time to pay the bill but from my limited polling of friends they say there is not. The woman may make some half-hearted attempt to pay, but that is generally to be polite.
How is this still the norm? I should mention that my friends are all in their 40s and they are all at least as well off as the men they are dating.
What does this payment dynamic do?
Well, another friend went out on two dates with someone who paid for both and after the second one, she decided that they were just not suited to each other. He emailed to ask her out again and she spent two entire days agonizing over how to tell him this. She felt like she owed him something more for the $40 he had shelled out on her behalf instead of the standard “I don’t think we are on the same page – see you later,” email that she did eventually end up sending him. As we discussed this, she said it would have been way easier to break it off if she didn’t feel like she was in dinner debt!
A more extreme example of this involves a friend that went out with a guy some years ago. He took her out for a fancy dinner and when she did not “put out” at the end of the night, he made his displeasure known and never contacted her again. Good riddance in that case is all she could say. That said, it was an unpleasant experience. Fortunately, she is a strong and independent person and does not let people wield power over her, but not everyone is as strong as her.
So, my opinion on all of this? Guys get to buy power for the cost of a cheap dinner. Pretty good deal. Women are handing over their sovereignty for dinner and drinks. Am I being a bit extreme? Maybe. After all, some women are using it to fund their nights out as noted above and may know exactly what they are doing but they are helping perpetuate a system that does not serve anyone.
This dating and paying system is establishing a pattern where women are asking men to take care of them. This dating and money pattern potentially sets the precedent going forward if the relationship between these two people continues. When you are suddenly being supported and taken care of by someone else it changes the entire dynamic of the power in the relationship. Just ask my kids. I pay for them and I am the decision maker in the household.
Do women need to be taken care of? What do they really need out of a relationship? They need to be loved and respected and in my opinion, automatically assuming that a woman cannot pay and take care of herself is not showing respect.
I have met a number of widows in my capacity as a volunteer income tax preparer for seniors. These women outlived their husbands and in every case, they have were not the financial decision makers in their households. It is challenging to say the least to start learning how to deal with money as a senior citizen.
How do stop this pattern? Well, I believe it begins right at the beginning. Going on a coffee date? Pay for you own coffee.
by Renee leNobel | Mar 9, 2016 | Divorce
From my very unofficial polling of people that I come across in life, it seems that money and parenting issues are the major causes of divorce. I had a slightly funny and slightly tragic conversation with a friend the other day. We were commiserating on the fact that we both separated from our spouses because we could just not get along when it came to money or parenting. Then we both looked at each other and said – “yup, and we still have have to deal with our ex’s on those issues even though we are divorced.”
For all you newly separated people, I’m sorry to be the bearer of this bad news.
That’s the irony. Just because you get divorced does not mean you no longer have to discuss parenting and money with your ex. In actual fact, you end up having to do more communication around these two subjects. And it will require more effort because you live in separate dwellings. Not to mention the fact that you likely aren’t very motivated to talk to this person that causes you emotional angst. You will probably have to hire lawyers and counsellors too and spend lots of money to figure out how to communicate once you are in the divorce process. Then once you have a separation agreement you will have to spend a couple of years figuring out how to implement that separation agreement. Because you know what? Even when things seem clearly written down and understandable in an agreement, you and your ex will likely interpret it differently.
When we signed our separation agreement I was so relieved. I thought that finally things would be clear and we had a map to resolve all future parenting and money issues. I was so wrong. I was naive to think that we would interpret our agreement the same way when we could never do this before. We continued to fight and argue about what each sentence in our agreement meant. Our kids continued to be caught in the middle of our conflict.
Our agreement could not solve our problems. The only thing that could help us solve our issues was learning to effectively communicate with each other, a thought that I had resisted for a long time but came to adopt after spending a year of being continuously surprised by how my ex interpreted our agreement. I realized that figuring out a way to communicate with my ex was a better option than living on an emotional roller coaster.
So as I see it, eventually you are going to have to learn to communicate with your partner about the big issues like parenting and money. You get to decide, do you want to do it before things start to go horribly awry or do you want to be proactive and figure out if you can live with this person and start a life and family together before you actually do so?
How do you start? Here is one way.
by Renee leNobel | Mar 2, 2016 | Finances
I recently met someone who has the following strategy. He works on a contract basis for six months and makes good money. He pays off the debt he accumulated when he wasn’t working and then he quits and gradually builds up debt until it gets to be unsustainable and then he goes and works again.
His money strategy makes me a little nervous. Ok, it makes me a lot nervous He’s still fairly young, but I can’t help but wonder what will happen when he gets to a point where he doesn’t have the energy to do these intensive spurts of work. Not to mention, what if something happens to him and he can’t work or he can’t just pick up and find well paid work? Yes, I have a worry gene. This person does not appear to. I wonder if it will kick in for him and what age that will happen if it does?
He argues he likes to live life as it comes and he certainly is living in the “Now” which is a popular thing to try to do these days.
On the flip side, he clearly sees work as only a source of funds and does not appear to get any other value out of his contract jobs. He puts in his time to make money and then gets out as quick as he can. I wonder how he perceives those six months when he is working flat out. I bet it is a bit of a struggle for him and that those six months feel a bit like a jail sentence.
I am also curious as to what will happen as he get closer and closer to retirement age. Will he panic? Will he live in denial and just keep doing what he is doing?
Generally, as people get older they seem to get more anxious about retirement. I’ve noticed that most people tend to have a negative outlook towards retirement. Especially those that do not have any savings. I have not met too many people that imagine the wonderful life that they will be living when they retire. Instead they seem to think that they will not have enough money to maintain a comfortable standard of living.
And, instead of investigating what they need to do to maintain a comfortable standard of living in retirement, they worry. Worrying does not provide more clarity about retirement. Worrying may feel like you’re doing something, but you’re not really. You’re just sacrificing your current happiness to the worry about some uncertain future.
These fears of the future are powerful and can leave you feeling trapped. They can make your life take on a terrible hue. Instead of enjoying your present life, you are living somewhere in an unhappy future. They can also lead you to make decisions that are not the best for you.
For example, you may take on work that you are not suited for. This may be sustainable in the short term, but what if you have to keep working at this type of work after retirement age because you didn’t save quite enough money? This is what my client appears to be doing. He will continue to work these six month contracts for money and money only. What if he found something he enjoyed doing and decided he didn’t want to stop after six months? What if he enjoyed it so much, he wanted it in his life after he retires?
Here’s another decision people often make. They use their home as their retirement plan. They build a life and community in a neighbourhood and then completely change their lives when they sell their home and move somewhere cheaper. This may work for some, but as we get older, we lose some ability to make big changes. It is hard to pick up and start over completely somewhere new when you’ve already had one big change (retirement).
What if instead of procrastinating the planning or living in denial, you started thinking about your retirement right now and you thought about it with hope?
These are the steps I would take:
- I would assess what my financial standing is today.
- I would assess the amount of cash inflows I need as of today to cover my cash outflows as of today.
- Then I would look to what is missing in my life and what is going well in my life.
- I would think about what I still want in my future life and then I would project what my cash inflows and outflows will be when I am older and not able to work as much.
- I will project how much money I will have when that day comes and if it is not enough, I will try to find a source of extra funds or I will figure out what can go now and cut my spending.
- My new sources of cash inflows will tie into what I need in my life. I will try to find work that I enjoy and can sustain and I will get rid of spending that does not contribute to my well being.
I will start doing this self reflection at least once a year and try to bring sustainability to my life. I don’t want the type of retirement where I quit everything I have been building cold turkey. I am building a life that I want to enjoy while I’m living it. Why would I suddenly change everything when I retire? You may be surprised that there are certain parts of work that you actually need in your life: connection to others, contributing to society, personal growth and yes, of course money.
There are people out there that are already doing this. In fact, it seems many people do this. My grandparents continued to work into their 80s because they loved it. Aren’t those the people that you know that seem to live forever?
So what can you do if you are getting older and you are starting to worry about retirement?
Start looking at your life now. What can you start doing that has potential cash inflows for a long time? What can you get rid of that you don’t really need that is costing you money?
Then you can stop worrying about how horrible your life is going to be and you can start planning how you want your life to look.
It is never too late to do this.
by Renee leNobel | Feb 24, 2016 | Finances
Retirement takes up a lot of space in society’s consciousness. It dominates the financial stories we hear about. Retirement is what we are all mainly saving for, right?
Retirement. Talking about it is particularly prevalent now as many struggle to make ends meet while working flat out!
How can we save for retirement when we can’t manage now?
I guess we should all give up. Maybe the world will end by then – who needs savings anyway?
Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Interestingly, many people are still saving – what stories are they telling themselves?
Perhaps the savers are noticing that there are a lot of impoverished and vulnerable seniors out there, and it is scary to think that you could end up a senior with no savings and no ability to earn more money. That’s a good reason to try to start saving.
Or perhaps they have hope for our world. Or maybe they are simply hedging their bets.
What stories are you telling yourself about saving? Because it’s the stories you are telling yourself right now that are impacting your ability to live and save.
I began noticing how our stories impact our day-to-day lives when volunteering with the Community Volunteer Income Tax Program. In one particular year, I helped prepare and file 44 personal tax returns for low-income seniors, and the highest earner in the bunch made $28,000.
During tax season, there is a line up out the door and around the corner at the Senior’s Centre. The criteria for having your taxes done for free is that you must earn less than $30,000 for the year, but again, this is high for most people in that line. The income for most seniors in the line comprises Old Age Security benefits ($9,341.40 per year in 2023) and Canada Pension Plan (CPP) benefits, which were a maximum of $15,678.84 in 2023. If you worked all your life, contributed the maximum to CPP, and have no other savings, you will earn $25,000 per year. That’s a lot of low-income seniors,and they all have different stories.
One lady I help has lived in subsidized housing for 20 years. She moved in when her husband died suddenly of a heart attack, and she discovered he had gambled away all their savings. She was 65 at that point, had not worked her entire life and had nothing other than about $20,000 she had inherited from her mother. She has since lent that to one of her children, who no longer talks to her – a terrible situation and every time I see her (I have seen her three times now), she reminds me of it. It is the daily story that goes on in her head.
The other thing I notice about her is that she is very put together. She looks fantastic at 85 years old. She gets around quickly, seems in great shape, and has a lovely home in a great location. She has grandchildren and great-grandchildren who visit her, but she is not focusing on those things. She is focusing on her story, and I can see the worry and stress emanating from her face.
I helped another gentleman at the same housing complex. I don’t know what his story is. How did he end up as a senior living in subsidized housing? He offered me tea while I prepared his return, and we talked about the music we like and our hobbies. He had a dog that he tries to walk daily, though walking is getting hard for him. He seemed upbeat.
What is the financial difference between these two seniors? Nothing. They are both in similar financial situations, coping and living within fixed and minimal means.
Yet, they are living very different stories.
We all find a way of coping with what we are given. How we choose to manage and the stories we tell ourselves make a difference in how we perceive our lives and present moments, impacting our future.
Most of us will eventually retire. There will come a point where we just cannot earn money or work.
I do recommend planning for retirement. If you want to know where I stand when it comes to financial planning – it’s in the “I’m hedging my bets,” category. It is easier to remain positive and hopeful when you feel you have financial control over your life.
Next week’s topic? How do you start planning for your old age when you don’t think you have enough money to retire? It’s always possible to change and take control of your life.
by Renee leNobel | Feb 16, 2016 | Finances
I am curious about the stories people tell themselves about money. I have been gaining self-awareness about how my stories have majorly impacted my life and so I was interested to learn if other’s stories have had the same impact on their own lives.
A friend kindly offered to share her story with me. She already knew she had “issues” around money and so was happy to explore this idea with me.
She recently came to understand that she has a deep seated belief that she does not deserve to have money. She joked around about it and said “as what we believe tends to come true, is it any wonder that I feel like I don’t have money and never will?” She has been pushing money away her entire life.
So how did she get to the point where she believes she does not deserve money?
Well, as in many of our lives, she inherited the seedling for her belief from her parents and her life experience further solidified it in her psyche.
She grew up in a small town with the following story:
As a girl she was told that she needed to find someone to take care of her, she was not allowed to be driven as that is not considered ladylike. Women that go after money are mean and hard and that is not the type of girl to be.
She was abused as a child and so therefore learned to try to make herself small so as not to be abused again. She learned to stay out of the way and keep quiet. The abuse led to other thoughts that she was a bad person and undeserving. In her words, she was dirty, unworthy, had no value and was stupid.
At the same time, she learned that it was important to put others first and to be grateful. Christian charity was drilled into her every week at church. You must feed and clothe others before yourself and simply be grateful for what you have as it is more than many others.
All this experience made her feel like she was at the bottom of the list of deserving people.
What did all these thoughts do to her spending habits and money patterns?
She believed money belonged to other people, but not her.
She believed that she was never good enough. There was always one more thing she needed to learn or become to command the salary or wages that she was entitled to.
This story she was telling herself created layer upon layer between herself and elusive money.
She learned to tell people – “you don’t need to pay me for that (I don’t deserve it) – I’ll do it for free.
At the same time, whenever she got into a relationship she gave up all control over the finances as that is what she had learned. She was to be taken care of. So any money that she had saved while she was single, she ended up spending once she was in a relationship. As she described it: it trickled through her fingers and disappeared.
So what happened to help her get out from under this heavy story?
In her words:
“Actually, what I did was was take a good look at the “story” and examined it and then rewrote the story for myself with help from a coach. We rarely if ever think about our thinking… the thoughts that were there whether loud and clear or a whisper. I removed them and replaced them and on a daily basis I work at keeping my thoughts right…”
I know this about her – she is battling her money story and she is winning.
by Renee leNobel | Feb 10, 2016 | Finances
The stories that play in our head are often put there by what is happening in the world around us as we grow up. We hear the stories from our parents, friends and society and depending on how loud and prevalent they are, we tend to adopt them as our world view.
When I was growing up, the story that was playing was that you have to be very careful with money and save for a rainy day that was surely coming. We could not continue to count on our good luck as someday it would change and we needed to prepare for that change.
There are many reasons why this story was prevalent in our household and in similar middle class households around us. Most of our parents were children of war and depression impacted parents and they had had this story drilled into them. Our parents simply passed along their beliefs.
Everyone interprets the stories they hear differently. One person might take the story that good luck can’t last and go out and spend their money so there is nothing to lose when that bad day comes. I chose to believe that I had to save every dollar that wasn’t going to a clearly defined necessity such as food or shelter. Every spending decision for me became a debate in my head: “do I really need this or would it be better to save my money for the day when I will not be able to make any money and will therefore otherwise be destitute?” The rainy day always won the debate in my head and I simply stopped spending money.
The only time I spent money on “fun” things was if I was with someone else who had a different story playing in their head. As a self-proclaimed people pleaser, I would tend to weigh other people’s arguments more heavily than my own. If they were telling me it was ok to spend my money on that item of clothing or fun night out, I would do it. And then I would feel horrible guilt and would spend time justifying my spending after the fact.
Sometime in my thirties, I began to recognize that I was a bit extreme in my spending habits and I modified my behaviour slightly. However I still strongly believed the story that I was going to be broke someday. Then I got married and had kids and my ability to save was severely impacted. I worried about money all the time. It was fairly exhausting.
Then I got divorced.
Well, this was all the proof I needed that I had been correct that someday things were all going to implode. My story had been confirmed.
Starting out again after a divorce is challenging. Starting out again after a divorce with the belief that the end of the world just happened and there is no way to ever get back to even a remote semblance of the financial stability one had before divorce is even more challenging.
That day that I had been planning for all my life had finally arrived. I would be financially unstable for the remainder of my life.
It is hard to move forward with that belief. For me, I tried to mitigate the damage by not taking any risks. I would horde my remaining savings and make them last until I was dead.
Then I started to notice that other people had different stories. One story that I was particularly fascinated by was the one where if you run out of money, you can simply go out and figure out a way to earn more. Really?
Another story I noticed was the gratitude story. Some friends were grateful for their good fortune of living in Canada and having jobs and felt like they were living in abundance. I noticed that they seemed to have more joy in life.
I also began to realize with time that in actual fact doomsday had not come for me. In reality, I had not become destitute. I just believed that I had. It was not true. I realized that my story was creating my not so fun reality.
What did my financial story do for me? Some people might argue that it helped me save and saving is a good thing right?
That story did help me save and I am grateful for the fact that I had some financial stability coming out of a divorce.
But did I need that story playing in my head while I saved? Did I need guilt and buyer’s remorse as my constant friends as I went through life? I would have to say I could have done without it.
I could have saved and set aside for a rainy day without all the extra baggage of guilt going around in my head. Really, it is quite easy to do. What is that saying? It is “pay yourself first.” I did that. When I got my paycheque every month I put a percentage aside as savings. That part was not hard. Why did I then have to continue to feel guilt about spending the money that was not designated savings? Because I truly believed a made-up story.
Do you have a story about money that is playing in your head? How does it affect your life and spending patterns?
Recognizing the stories we tell ourselves can illuminate how we are making decisions in life. Are you doing things based on a made up story or are you living your life according to your true values and beliefs?
Next week I will tackle a friend’s story. In her words: “my story is that it is ok for everyone else to have money – not me…at least not yet. I don’t know when it will be my turn”.
If not, there’s a good reason.
