Sunny’s Very Personal Finance History, Part 1

Hi, I’m Sunny, and I’m a both a personal finance enthusiast and a financial fuck-up. I started this blog for folks like me whose financial lives are a mixed bag with some financial successes along with financial fuckups and setbacks, many of which we caused ourselves.

I’m queer, newly sober artist with depression and ADHD in the messy middle of my journey from financial instability toward financial independence and back again. I’ve been a personal finance enthusiast since my mom gave me a copy of Get a Financial Life when I graduated from college in the 1990s. I learned about investing by reading the Motley Fool blog and took a few of Dave Ramsey’s baby steps, and I’ve been lurking on the edges of the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early – or Ever if you identify as a financial fuckup) community for years, bingeing the Optimal Finance Daily and Afford Anything podcasts during my periods of higher financial functioning. I keep hoping their messages of self-discipline, planning, optimization, and prioritization will sink in and help me change my financial disposition. It often works, for a little while. Other times I impulsively buy concert tickets in Mexico. Fuck.

The truth is, my journey to financial stability has had a lot of setbacks and false starts, some from my circumstances and some from my financial psychology.

So many FIRE stories are about folks who made mistakes in their twenties and then got their shit together and kept it together until FIRE. Sigh. I wish that was me. I for sure made mistakes in my early financial life, racking up $40K of student loan and credit card debt in my twenties – in the 1990s when that kind of debt was uncommon. It was easy to do as an art student living in New York City with minimal financial support from my family. I eventually got my shit together and started paying it off once I started working full time like a grown up. But just when I started making real progress, as soon as I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, I impulsively decided I needed to have a baby with my (now-ex) husband. And move to Florida. You see where this is heading. We depleted our savings and racked up more credit card debt moving to Florida and supporting ourselves during my maternity leave. And I instead of paying off my student loans, I deferred them.

It took a good five years after my first child was born for us to get back to some kind of financial stability. We paid off our credit cards and car loan, built up some savings, and as soon as we were coasting on our way to paying off my student loan, our only debt other than our mortgage, I got bored. I wanted another child. We were in a much better financial position this time around because our lives had stabilized over the last five years. Lower stress meant I had more capacity to manage our money attentively and intentionally. And yet, subtle cracks began to show in our finances and our marriage. I was always the money person in our relationship, and my ex trusted me and agreed to live within our means. More or less. He also asserted that since I was the one who wanted a second child, he should get something he wanted too… a classic car. No shit. So, we opened a home equity line of credit to buy him one, and figured we wouldn’t spend it all but keep it open “just in case.” Famous. Last. Words.

Once life settled down after child #2, I was bored again. This time with my career. When I lived in NYC after finishing my BFA and MFA in Painting, I worked as a legal secretary. My student loan payment was as high as my monthly rent and I didn’t have the kind of financial flexibility that allowed some of my other artist friends to work part-time or hold out for art-related jobs in teaching, design, art handling, or arts administration. My bosses were great and I learned a lot, but as someone with a terminal degree I was miserable and thought the work was beneath me. In Florida I changed careers after my first child was born and became a public-school art teacher. My first few years were more demanding than I ever imagined, and more engaging than any job I’d ever had. Maybe it was the challenge? After 6 years of teaching, I was ready for another challenge. I started a Ph.D. program in Art Education at Florida State University with two young kids at home. We were still in a stable financial position with no consumer debt, and I could defer my student loan payments in grad school. My student loan balance was down to a manageable $16K at that time. I felt confident I could pay that off easily after I finished my degree, and it didn’t keep me up at night. I also got a fellowship that allowed us to live modestly without taking on more debt. What could go wrong?

When I lived in New York City in my twenties, I noticed an interesting phenomenon – most of the couples I knew who had moved to New York together in their twenties or early thirties ended up breaking up. I figured this was because people moved to New York to change their lives, and when you are seeking a big life change, you can’t predict how it will change you or your primary relationship. This happened to my ex-husband, in fact. I was his second wife. As often as I saw this happen to my friends in New York, I did not see the writing on the wall when I started my Ph.D. program. My first two years were great. I loved my new flexible schedule that allowed me to eat and pee when I wanted, unlike public school teaching. I was happy and engaged in my studies, and I started making exciting new friends. I especially connected with a group of queer MFA students when we took classes and worked as teaching assistants together. Maybe you see where this is heading, too…

By the end of my Ph.D. program, I was reckoning with a queer identity I had suppressed for decades due to trauma, rigid binary conceptions of gender and sexuality that prevailed when I was first questioning in the 1990s, and a lack of queer role models who had children, which I desperately wanted. And when I say reckoning, I mean fucking around with multiple queer partners outside my marriage. Although I was honest with my ex about my behavior and desires at the time, we now differ over whether I ethically non-monogamous or just cheating on him. It was messy and painful, but sometimes the only way to find out is to fuck around. Both/And.

When I finished my degree, I landed a tenure track college teaching position in North Carolina, and we were out of money when we needed to move. Since I was technically graduating in the summer, I registered for 6 credit hours of dissertation work so I could take out student loans to get us through the summer until I got my first paycheck. All told, it took me $30K in additional student loans for me to finish my Ph.D. program to support myself and my family during my last year of dissertation when my marriage was falling apart. I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to be careful or deliberate with our money anymore. Fuck it.

We moved to North Carolina together even though our marriage was on shaky ground. We had two young kids, and I knew if we split up, they would end up with me full time. I didn’t think they could handle leaving their dad, and I didn’t think I could parent grieving kids and start a new job all on my own. I buckled down and tried to make it work. Similar to the classic car deal when we had our second child, my ex decided that since I got to “quit work and take a break in grad school,” he deserved a sabbatical when we moved to North Carolina, even though we couldn’t afford it. Maybe he was trying to get back at me and make himself happy. Regardless, we weren’t playing on the same financial team – it was more quid pro quo than give and take and it didn’t end well. It took him months to find even a part-time job, which sunk us deeper in debt and created more conflict and division in our marriage. As it became clearer to me that I was too queer to stay in a straight marriage, I felt increasingly guilty about hurting him and took on more financial and parenting responsibility as if this would even things out. It didn’t. It just made me resentful and tired.

We lasted a semester. He moved back to Florida, just as my student loan payments. kicked in.