Fairport Women

Rebuilding Home: Fear of Becoming a Bag Lady

By Deborah Feldman

Isn’t this an interesting title? It is a fear that almost every widow experiences at some point in life. I remember the feeling, and although I was widowed years ago, the fear and depression feels as if it happened yesterday. I wondered how I would build a future when I really wasn’t prepared to do much of anything. Scary thoughts crept in, especially in the middle of the middle of the night. I spent many sleepless nights pondering the future of my young sons and myself. It was a very dark, depressing time and it took a couple of years to figure out where and how I was going to fit in the world.

So, fast forward to the year 2002 – I had established myself in a career that I loved, namely helping people identify, design, and arm them with the tools to what would become the path to living their best lives. This was the year that we hired a business consultant to help us more clearly define our value proposition, what we offer to our clients. His name is Andrew, and while he was hired to work with us on our business plan, he ended up becoming a friend and a client who challenged me to do something I had avoided my whole life…public speaking. He believed that I could help more women if I did some kind of outreach, a seminar covering financial topics targeted for women. I strongly resisted his suggestion, but he persevered and much to my amazement, I agreed to do it. Once the concept was committed to paper, we had to figure out what the seminar would cover. This was the easy part. Since my passion was helping women in crisis, the seminar would focus on educating women on various financial concepts. My fear of public speaking led me to enlist the assistance of my very cooperative, creative, intelligent co-worker Robin. She would be my co-presenter as I figured that two speakers might be a less intimidating way to ease into public speaking. And my intuition was correct – I vomited only before the first presentation – I was good to go at the second one!

Robin and I got to work creating a seminar entitled “Money Bags or Bag Lady, Which is in Your Future?” We quickly realized that we didn’t want to be “talking heads,” we wanted the attendees in our seminar to participate in identifying the problems and the solutions. To engage the audience, we created a vignette where Robin and I, childhood friends, were reunited at our college reunion, and began to reminisce about our lives over the past 20 years.

I began the conversation talking about what happened in my life – how my husband had passed away unexpectedly, leaving me with two small children to raise, a half-finished house, absolutely no interest in finance or money matters, and no means to support us. I discussed my fears, life choices, good decisions (most were pretty good…) and some of the regrets (fortunately there weren’t too many). All in all, I presented a somewhat sad, but stable life. 

In contrast, Robin’s story since graduation was a lot more entertaining. She walked into the room wearing a fur coat, a flashy diamond ring, designer clothes – in short, she was dressed to impress. She shared that she was divorced, and described some of her terrible life choices that left her finances and future in dire straits.

The seminars accomplished what we set out to do – they created a safe place for women to learn about finance, get questions answered, and gave us the good fortune to meet and help people who would become long term clients. One of the attendees was a 45-year-old woman named Carly, she is the daughter of one of my mother’s relatives. She called a few weeks after the seminar and wanted to set up an appointment to speak with me. Her husband had died when she was 40 and she said that she needed financial advice. She nervously began our conversation by telling me that she was hoping to get on the “magic car” that would put her on the road to financial success. Her statement brought out a laugh for both of us, and I began asking her qualitative questions to discern what advice she was looking for. When I asked her what she learned or liked best about the seminar, she answered in a barely audible voice, “I am a Robin.”

Over the next few weeks Carly and I had several conversations about her attitudes towards money, her life, her goals (or lack thereof), what she valued most, her expenses and her financial statement. By now I had a pretty clear picture of what was going right and wrong in Carly’s life. For starters, she had violated at least 6 of my “Money Rules.” The most flagrant violations were #1 (spending more money than income each month), #7 (maintaining large credit card balances and only paying interest each month), and #8 (limited monetary resources and spending money on life’s “wants” before “needs”). After pondering her circumstances for a few days and armed with the knowledge that she would not be able to change a lifetime of bad financial habits overnight, I decided to focus first on #1 and #8. 

I gave Carly a journal and asked her to write down every time she was tempted to make a purchase, evaluate if it was a “want” or a “need” and we would discuss the purchase before she took any action. I cautioned her that if her income was $6,000 for the month, she could only spend $5,750 and not a penny more. She had to get used to living within her means and saving a bit for a rainy day. She told me that I was ruining her life, but she would give it a try. We initially spoke once a week and it was disheartening to hear her tell me that $200 eyelash extensions were a “need” or that she couldn’t find a winter coat for less than $2,000. Fortunately, I am a fairly patient and determined person, and after several months of conversations, she began to take what she called “the ruination of her life talks” as a challenge. She found that she was able to live within her means and it felt pretty good. Was the feeling good enough to begin to tackle rule #7 (or the other three rules that she needed to address)? Rule #7 was postponed for about a year before she started paying down the credit card debt; and, years later, we are slowly working on the remaining 3. I love her commitment to what she now calls her “infrastructure improvement plan.”

For more insight from Deb, you can read the previous issue of Rebuilding Home here, or stay up-to-date on new issues by following Deborah Feldman’s blog on LinkedIn.