Am I too young for a mid-life crisis?

Because I think I'm having one.  Seriously.

I have run the budget for our family from the get go because I am the scrooge when it comes to spending.  There is a running joke that started 12 odd years ago of when Michael found a $1 bill on the street.  He told his father, who was there to witness the lucky find, that I would KNOW that the numbers were off.  Sure enough, when I was taking inventory of the cash on hand I found the extra dollar and wanted to know where it came from.

I have come to hate Christmas as an adult because it means spending obscene amounts of money on STUFF that will become floor fodder within weeks or even days of being opened Christmas morning.  As a compromise solution I have come up with the Gifts of Christ which is another blog post entirely, and I might add that the children say is their favorite part of Christmas.  But I digress.

I have had some rather lofty financial goals.  Visions of grandeur, really.  The extent of my expectations has caused me to look at any non-essential purchase in direct conflict with the long term goals that my husband and I like to dream about.

Then I hit a wall.  I looked back, thanks to my Quicken software, at all the money I've spent trying to get ahead.  The sum was....obscene.  I  mean punch in the gut SEVERAL times ...just obscene.  Contrast that to the pitiful sum spent on going places in the last ten and a half years.  The majority of that number was spent recently on a planned trip to Disneyland this last December. 

Then I look at my children at all the experiences we haven't had.  All the memories we didn't make because it would cost money that was "better spent" towards this apparent pipe dream.

Some people have done it.  I have tried and tried and tried and apparently it is not in the stars for me or my family.  What is truly tragic is all the time and energy that could have been spent enjoying my children.  Doing things as a family.

I'd like to be able to pay for the boys to go on their missions.  I'd like to be able to pay for a nice wedding reception for Elle.  I'd like to be able to go on a mission with Michael when the kids are all grown.  I'd like to not have to work until the day we die.  I'd like to take the children to see the world.  I must at some point relent that all of my efforts have been in vain.  All of my time, wasted.  All of the money...lost into nothing.

I have started making suggestions about all the things we could do.  Michael thinks that I have lost my mind.  Well, I suppose when you go from budget Nazi to suggesting we blow $900 on box seats at a baseball game, I can see where he may be confused.

I've had it.

I got a call from an I-don't-know-who real estate guru saying we had VIP free tickets to some seminar.  "I don't know how you got my name and number, but if you could take my name off your list that would be great."  Click.

It's embarrassing really.

Rich Dad Poor Dad can suck it.  No seriously.  That was the first step on my personal road to ruin.  Ten years ago I had bought pretty much all of his books that he had published up to that point.  I ate them up.  On his website I found his personal coaching program.  I put far too much confidence in this man and I told myself, "I trust Robert implicitly.  This will work because it is HIS program."    We didn't have the money to pay for it so I put it on a credit card thinking that it would get paid back through the awesome personal guidance I was going to get.  Let me just say that more time and energy was spent into getting me hooked into buying the program than was ever spent actually doing what they purported to do.  Sure, there was a "get your money back" window of opportunity, but of course that expired before you ever got to talk to your "coach".  After I talked to my assigned coach the first time I realized that she was not the experienced, head-in-the-right-place, mentor I had expected.  She was working a "J.O.B." and wasn't too thrilled about it, but maybe "we" can have some success "this time" even though she had never known anybody for whom it actually worked.  She was working as a Robert Kiyosaki mentor after years working for Ron LeGrand and watching people fail doing that program.  I realized after our first conversation that I had made a horrible mistake and went into the bedroom and cried.

Then there was Franklin Squires and Rick Koerber.  The man could talk.  He had a free radio program that opened my eyes to a lot of things I hadn't seen before.  He was a Mormon broadcasting out of Utah and knew how to put just the right gospel spin on what he was teaching.  He really did convert me to principled capitalism.  But then again, I should have just gone straight to Adam Smith, Ayn Rand (on most everything except personal morality), Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, Murray Rothbard. 

Koerber taught 13 princples.  Good stuff, but he just organized it from other sources.  One principle, probably the most important, he missed or omitted in order to serve his own purposes.  Principle of Prosperity #14: DEBT IS A FORM OF SLAVERY.

I am still living with the consequences of what that man was able to talk my family into.  The philosophies of men....mingled with scripture.  Should have set off alarm bells.  Live and learn.