while we served them and never bothered to warn us that we’d probably never be paid. They expected us to suffer alongside them.
“Hey, this is only a $50,000 fee for you,” one CEO would tell me. “Suck it up; I just lost my business.”
And then necessity forced me to cross the line from the business to my life.
Regardless of your habits and social standing, making serious adjustments to the way you live is not easy. I had to confront my own feelings of entitlement, of having earned it, of having paid the price. I have close friends who lost their jet, and they’re still scarred by it. Deep down I thought it should have been easy for them to move on. But because the jet represents success and achievement to them, losing it represents the reverse: failure.
Perhaps I could procrastinate a bit longer on dealing with my financial plight, I thought. Instead of deciding what expenses could be cut at home, I reflected on how compartmentalized I had let my life become. My overall life scorecard was warped by too much weight on success at work. If things were going well there, I felt the wind at my back; if not, I could barely move.
I started to think about changing my own wiring; I had put too much emphasis on revenue, profit, income, and growth. Of course, a change like this is easier said than done.
I came to realize, for the first time, that I hadn’t handled big downturns gracefully. The 1990-92 recession was the catalyst of my separation from my first wife, leading to divorce. The 2001-03 recession propelled me to a new personal “best” of 210 pounds on the scale.
I needed to rework my scorecard to suit a different purpose. Earlier I had built a map of my life’s priorities to help me stay true to my commitments.
My Life Map
Earlier, the map had helped me explain to my kids what my commitments were to them, and where they fit in my universe. They understood that, while I couldn’t tuck them in every night, they were my first priority. It also showed them what my other commitments were, such as caring for my widowed mother and playing various roles in my community.
Now, I was going to use the map to explain why I was going to need to also spend more time at work. Ironic, considering that the exercise was meant to decrease the stranglehold of work on my life.
I stuck with the map exercise. I wanted to make sure I would focus daily on a specific positive outcome for each of the key stakeholders in my life, and on my health, my marriage, my mother, my kids, and my community. I defined a goal for each and some smaller actions I could take that would move me toward achieving the goals. In anticipation of how I was going to handle the business and its effect on our household, Leslie and I revisited our family values, which we had developed when our kids were younger. We came up with a list of values, in no order, as a way to drive our major life themes, as opposed to following a more traditional spiritual path.
Family Values
Contribution
Excellence
Adventure
Learning
Respect
Health
Love
Fun
We knew we needed to review and crystallize our guiding principles to help raise our privileged children in a period of deep financial and lifestyle uncertainty. For the first time in our family life, we were going to have to make decisions that would require a substantial adjustment on everyone’s part. It would need to be explained in a kid-friendly language, linking decisions to respect, learning, contributing to each other, and maintaining family fun.
As is often done at the office, we put our new commitments on the wall at home, a visual prompt to keep us concentrating on the basics.
We created Sunday-night family meetings to discuss our respective preparation for upcoming events during the week, plan our family fun, and work in the new austerity program. All of us – including our daughters – took turns chairing the meetings. We learned a new language, with words such as “re-use,” “conservation,” and “contentment with what we have.”
Our ambitious family project involved cutting out 25 percent of our annual spending, a budgeting exercise I hadn’t done in years. It was a great lesson in how we can become prisoners of the choices we make when times seem endlessly abundant.
Not surprisingly, itemizing and debating everything was not a fulfilling family exercise. It created its own level of tension.
Budgeting activities that were ingrained in me as a teenager and young adult now had to be revisited. It was time to fire up the Excel spreadsheet and start the cutting. The first $100,000 decisions were painful but obvious: The Toronto Maple Leafs season tickets had to go, a $40,000 cut (yes, rail seats, but this didn’t hurt too much: I am a Montréal Canadiens fan); we would become a one-car family, saving us $25,000 annually; I wouldn’t be attending the annual client golf event in the Muskoka region with seaplane – another $8,000 gone; annual family trip – $7,500; gold patron at the Toronto International Film Festival – $5,000; family golf membership at the cottage – $1,500.
Other cuts were fun. No more buying wine; let’s drink our own wine cellar instead of collecting (an idea we got from a neighbor in the same situation). If we needed to travel, we’d do so on points. Honey, do we really spend $3,500 a year at Starbucks? OK, let’s become baristas and buy an espresso machine instead.
Others were brutal. Is this $5,000 for gardening? OK, I can learn to love gardening at that price. What – $3,000 for Christmas lights? $4,000 for your hair? $2,000 in dry cleaning? Argh. These conversations would lead us to new romantic highs – not!
A close friend would sagely advise, “If you cut out some of these small things, then you will suck the life out of your marriage; you and your wife will be doing stuff you don’t want to do and it will spiral down from there.”
I couldn’t hear it then.
Our second big project, after cutting our budget, was to make the necessary adjustments at home. Leslie would be going back to work as an executive coach after eight years at home. Each of us would have to pitch in to ease the transition.
October 11, 2008
I got up in the middle of the night with a headache and a clenched jaw. Just like the night before, and the one before that. I walked outside and looked at the yard, half grateful for the view, half worried.
I’m 44. How did this happen? I asked myself. Feels like I should have seen this coming. I beat myself up for 20 minutes and went back to bed to try to sleep. It was pointless. In the last week, we had lost 20 percent of our stock portfolio due to the collapse of the stock market.
“Only five more years of work to make up for that loss,” a friend shared with me in disgust.
Five years is not my problem right now, I told myself. If this maintains itself, it will be ten years. My burn rate was now well over my income. I was spending money I no longer made
