by Michael Skinner

Created on: March 23, 2009   Last Updated: June 25, 2010

When I was young I traveled the land and performed high tech contract jobs. The jobs paid well and I did not have to be particularly careful about credit or expenditures. In each place I would set up shop in an inexpensive apartment and buy cheap furniture.

When it was time to leave to go to a new city and get a new job I would give the cheap furniture away to anyone I knew who might have need of it and I gave any furniture that remained to the Salvation Army. They gave me a receipt which I proceeded to loose somewhere so it was never available at tax time.

When I was working a job at Fort Knox a number of the lectures about money that I had been hearing forever finally took hold. I finally asked myself the question the little man in the radio had been asking the callers to his show. When I paid interest on that credit card, what was I getting in return? Nothing. I finally understood. From that day to this I pay off my credit cards every month and I have reduced the number of credit cards to two.

I was between hurricanes on the east coast of Florida when the next financial revelation hit me. It came from my bosses boss. Oddly enough I got the feeling that he never liked me but I never figured out why. Maybe it was an oil and water thing. Or maybe it was a difference in religion: I was after all a Dallas Cowboy fan and he like some Florida team that resembled a fish or something. But here's where my generosity of spirit came to the fore. I could learn from anybody. One day, when we were having a meeting about I subject that I have mercifully forgotten, the bosses boss mentioned in an aside, that he could not understand why anyone subscribed to the movie channels on cable. He said that they rarely had new movies or even movies he wanted to watch. And on those rare occasions when they did have something he wanted to watch, they played the movie over and over again when he only wanted to watch it once. I was thunderstruck. Were the true economics of the situation that simple? Was I paying at every one of my stops throughout the country for something I didn't even value? Yes it was true. Renting movies that I actually wanted to see was a better and cheaper choice.

On various other stops I learned to stop buying expensive coffee on the way to work. I now either make my own at home or buy cheaper brands. I also learned that I could buy a completely filling meal off the dollar menu at McDonald's so I stopped spending quite so much at lunch.

I saved and invested the money that I was no longer wasting. When the down turn hit and I was laid off, my nest egg tied me over until better things broke for me.   Moreover, I am still saving money in an IRA for that fabled retire that lies somewhere in the future.

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