Cancer. No matter who you are, where you’re from, or how much money you’ve got in the bank, you know someone or ARE someone who has been affected by it. Cancer doesn’t care what you’ve done with your life, how good or bad of a person you are, or how many people it will hurt if it takes you.
Cancer is a word that carries a lot of meaning with me, with my family. You see, I’m a nurse, and I’ve seen this word turn people’s lives upside down. I’ve been there when we had to deliver the diagnosis to a child’s family, held the hand of someone who knows the end is near, and seen the pain in families’ hearts as they wanted to help but could do nothing. More than that I’ve watched my dad shed the only tears of his life as he delivered the news to my sister and I that my mom was sick, and I’ve held my husband’s hand as I looked at his lab work and knew in my heart what it was.
“Cancer doesn’t care who you are”
Cancer can’t beat everyone though. Both my mom and husband are doing beyond well these days. My mom fought quite the fight and has been in remission for 17 years from breast cancer. My husband was beyond lucky and his cancer was caught nearly accidentally which saved his life from something that had a 2% survival rate. Also, in all of the sadness at the hospital, I get to see glimmers of hope and relief in those that are winning the fight.
Cancer is a word that touches everyone, BUT what cancer taught me about life, about money, is something I am almost thankful for.
I’ve put off this post for a long time. My husband suggested it and I kept giving him excuse after excuse why I couldn’t write it that week. Whether it was “but I have another post I have to write first”, “once we get through this next podcast”, or “I just don’t have time”, the excuse didn’t matter but I sure had a lot of them. And as I write this, I can tell you that it hurts. A lot of emotions are stirred up and this was something I was avoiding, but what I learned, what my family learned, is something I’m hoping I can share. It’s something I hope you can realize without feeling the pain of cancer, and if cancer has already touched your life, it’s something I hope you can take from that pain and see for yourself.
What Cancer Taught Me About Life and the Importance of Financial Independence
You never know so always have a plan.
My husband had been unexplainably sick for a little while. He was in incredible shape, he was young, and he never thought too much of it. When I came along he called them “attacks”. He would take long hot showers for the pain, get IV fluids at work if he would get too dehydrated from throwing up, and barely complained. One night I came home from work to find him unconscious in the shower. I loaded him in the car and drove him to the emergency room that I had just gotten off shift working in. Thanks to some further testing, and his mom’s perseverance to have an exploratory surgery, that event led to us getting answers. Even if they weren’t the answers we wanted to hear.
“Cancer doesn’t care if you’re fit. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re young. Cancer doesn’t care if you’re ready”
Cancer doesn’t announce itself years before it is coming. Cancer shows up out of nowhere and expects you to either give up or deal with it. If you choose to deal with it there is going to be a bit of a battle and, I’m sorry to say, but those battles cost money.
The same goes for so many things in life: car accidents, flooding your house, even loss of a job. These things aren’t expected, but if you have a plan, then you prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
My parents were very private while my mom was sick. My mom was trying to protect us, I’m pretty sure my dad wanted to be pretending it wasn’t happening, and they both were trying to keep their business afloat. It wasn’t until years later that I knew the financial strain it took on their marriage, on their lives.
They were in the beginning of their “financial journey” when all of this hit. They owned a marina and were doing their very best but they had taken on a lot of debt to get it started and, before mom’s diagnosis, were making strides to pay that off. The combination of the business and the medical bills could have crippled them, but I have very strong parents. To this day I have no idea how they did it. What I do know is that after the dust had settled my mom came up with a plan for the future, for the possibility that something that catastrophic may hit again.
Having a plan in place won’t stop cancer, or anything, from happening. Bad things happen. They just do. BUT by having a financial plan in place it allows you to focus on the problem and not on the money.
There are so many things I could tell you to do, but everything is based on you as an individual. I will say the MOST VALUABLE thing to do is keeping your savings rate high. What does that mean? Don’t live beyond your means. If you can, live far below it. This gives you an incredible cushion in case disaster strikes.
We choose to max out our retirement funds, have an emergency fund covering nearly 1 year of our living expenses, and put away what we can in other taxable investment accounts each month. This makes our take home money nearly 60% lower than our actual income. We made ourselves used to living on that number through budgeting, and I can promise you we are not depriving ourselves. We are simply optimizing the money we have and not wastefully spending.
Trust me I know our emergency fund is MUCH larger than what would be considered optimal, but that is OUR FAMILY’S plan. The key is to create a plan for yourself or your family. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
Don’t live in fear.
Even though we have a plan, even though we financially prepare for the worst, I’ve learned that you can’t fear that day.
It is so easy to get in to your own head, and for a while I did. For the longest time, every time my mom would look tired or get sick I would worry that the cancer was back. Every time my husband had unexplained pains or felt “funny” I would worry that cancer was back. Every time I let my mind wander I would think terrible thoughts and worry that cancer would come again.
That fear is what holds you back. That fear keeps you from enjoying the life around you.
My mom, the strongest woman I know, she beat that fear. She didn’t let cancer stop her from anything so why should I? My mom would look outside the window when she was sick and appreciate the shining sun, the chirping birds and the beautiful flowers. She would make us laugh even though she was hurting. She wasn’t going to let fear ruin the life around her.
To this day I notice the smallest things to enjoy and appreciate: the breeze on my face, my daughter’s giggle, a butterfly floating above the heads of our firemen as they laid their brother to rest. Even in sadness you can find things to bring you joy and peace. I can thank my mom for changing my fear to appreciation of life and the positivity it brings.
Enjoy the life you live.
Many hear that we are on a budget and automatically think that we are depriving ourselves from many of the pleasures in life: eating out, traveling, buying nice things, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
With my husband getting his diagnosis so early in our relationship, we realized that we didn’t want to take any day for granted. Yes, that sound cheesy, I know. But, it’s true. We loved to travel, spend time with family and friends, go on culinary adventures, and we wanted those things to be the biggest parts of our lives. So that’s what we did.
We didn’t even know it, but we were building the basis to our financial plan. Find the things that bring you joy and happiness and focus on them. We just had to learn to stop spending money on the other things!
When we started budgeting my fear was that these things we loved would have to be put on hold, that we would have to give up our gourmet meals, travels, creature comforts and daily adventures. That’s not at all what budgeting meant.
By creating a budget it actually forced us to focus even more on the things that we loved to do with one another, on the things that brought us joy. After all, we only had a certain amount of money to spend. Would I rather go shopping to buy another outfit or go out to a nice dinner with my husband? Would I rather buy another purse or save that for a trip to Italy? Would I rather be conscious of my spending or look at my bank account with a question mark on my forehead at the end of the month wondering where all of our money went?!
I chose to enjoy the life we have. I chose to save for travel and adventure, eat good food, and forget all of the rest. We have faced death together far too many times, and we wanted to know that if we ever faced it again we knew we hadn’t wasted the life we were given.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Cancer taught our family not to worry about the little things in life. Cancer may be one of the most horrible things that can happen to you or a loved one, and it’s already happened. That really puts things in to perspective. You’re car getting a flat tire, your blow dryer breaking or spilling that quart of milk pales in comparison to the things you have faced.
Most things seem to work themselves out and, chances are, you’re getting stressed over something that means absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.
This is an ongoing process for me, I seem to always worry if the house is clean, if the baby and my husband have everything they need before a day out, or if I sent out those thank you notes on time. These are my little quirks. We all have them, but some people seem to dwell on them more than others. Life is too short, that disaster you think you are dealing with today will mean nothing a year from now.
There will always be speed bumps, but it is how you look at them that make the difference between them ruining your day or making you stronger.
Knowing you could have lost someone you love makes the argument you had about them picking up their socks seem petty. Life is too short to be upset. Take a deep breath, put things in perspective and choose what ruffles your feathers. It shouldn’t be the small stuff.
This also makes your idea of what an “emergency” is quite different from most of the world. We have yet to tap in to our emergency fund, but that savings rate percentage that I talked about earlier has saved us multiple times in the past.
Our daughter was recently hospitalized for over a week. The fact that we didn’t RELY on every paycheck allowed my husband and I to be by her side 24 hours a day, never once worrying if we would be able to pay the bills. Trust me when I say that if you have a sick child, being able to focus 100% on them without the financial stress looming over you is more than a blessing.
That same savings percentage rate saved us when my PRN position was slow, and hours were cut. In previous years we would be scrambling, floating our bills on credit cards, and dipping in to savings to get by. Today, we simply don’t put as much in to savings that month, focus on tightening expenses where we can, and enjoy the time we have off together.
The plan we created, the experiences we’ve had, and the perspective on life we choose to focus on has allowed us to have an entirely different view of what an emergency is, of what we should be getting upset over.
“Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff… When in doubt see sentence one.”
Always move forward.
If you choose to fight the battle then every step is a step forward. It’s all perspective, and if you lose that perspective you start to lose the battle. This, of course, doesn’t mean that everyone can “win” with cancer from the perspective of curing it, but if you think of the battle as winning your mindset, it changes the game.
Having a financial plan and living and financial independence (FI) lifestyle allows you to have one less stressor in this fight. You can not win the mindset battle every day, but you can wake up each morning and try again. The quote I always come back to is from the great Jimmy Valvona speech at the 1993 ESPY Awards “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot tough my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul. And those three things are going to carry on forever”.
This applies whether you’re battling cancer or the debt created from it. My mom would celebrate a day without getting sick to her stomach, or a day that she felt strong enough to do a load of laundry. She would also celebrate when she paid off a loan or the day that they finally paid off the mortgage on the marina. That was probably the proudest day of her life.
What she wouldn’t do is focus on the setbacks. She would almost ignore them as if they never happened. She wouldn’t let them upset the progress she had made, the moves forward she had made. This taught me to do the same with everything in life. Celebrate your accomplishments and do nothing more than learn from your mistakes and setbacks.
“No matter what your goals are, you have to make an effort to reach them. Things won’t just happen if you sit around wishing for them. You have to actually do something to make them happen.”
Trying to pay off a seemingly impossible debt? We’ve been there. Between our trying to conceive our daughter and a few of my husband’s leftover medical bills we were in over $120,000 in debt. It was daunting, terrifying and what I thought would be bills we would pay on for the rest of our lives. BUT, little by little we started paying them off. We created a plan, stuck to the budget and always moved forward. We ignored the little setbacks when the budget wasn’t perfect for the month or an unexpected expense came up and celebrated EVERY billed paid off and every dollar we were under on the budget for the month. We were always moving forward until the day that we could say we were officially debt free.
Never lose that perspective. It’s all about perspective and making strides towards your goals whether that’s paying off debt, achieving your career goals, or beating cancer. Always move forward.
It’s been 17 years since my mom won her battle and it’s been 5 years since my husband won his, but the things I learned about life, about money, and about myself will go on forever.
No matter how sad I get thinking about the past, how much pain I know my mom silently went through, or how much fear my husband’s diagnosis brought our whole family, I am thankful for the changes those experiences brought to our lives. I am thankful that we learned to have a financial plan in the face of a true emergency, to not fear life but live it, to enjoy little moments and not sweat the small things, to always move forward, and to never give up on our goals.
Working around death each day has certainly shaped our views of life and money, but not in the “You only live once” mentality where blow all of your money because tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. In fact the opposite, to love the life that you live now, and to set up a lifestyle which affords you the time and resources to do the things that bring you joy while ignoring the rest.
Cancer doesn’t care who you are, what good you’ve done in life, or how much money you have to your name. Cancer comes with no announcement and can leave your world upside down. From that pain comes a new understanding of life, of money, and of yourself.
A few articles if you want to get started on your financial journey:
- Let’s Talk Budget
- 5 Tips for Budgeting When You Know Nothing
- You Want to Budget. Now What?
- The KEY to Budgeting – Talking to Your Spouse About Money
- How We Paid Off $120,000 in Debt in LESS than 24 Months
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Thanks for being so vulnerable. My grandma went through cancer when I was in jr high and high school, and it really changed the way I look at life, too! It’s a lot more precious and fragile. My husband and I are hoping to have quite a large emergency fund, too. Because illness runs in our family, and the one-year emergency fund really resonates with me, even though the money could be doing more elsewhere.
Moriah,
What I’ve learned in the past few years of budgeting is that it’s YOUR budget. There are a million ways to do this, and even though it’s really nice to get some guide lines and ideas on how to do it, you can’t just use someone else’s budget. And you don’t ever have to say you’re sorry for doing things differently 🙂 Everyone looks at life, and money, in different ways and for us the large emergency fund is our little life raft.
I’m sorry to hear about your grandmother, hoping she is doing well.
Wow!! Such a beautiful post! I’m so happy to hear both your mom, and your husband beat cancer. We are very fortunate here in Manitoba, with free health care. I couldn’t imagine the bills. But you both seem to know how to handle your money amazingly. Cancer is horrible, and it really does show up without warning. My husband and I watched his auntie die from cancer, just over a year ago. You’re right when you said it’s give up or fight. She passed away a week before our son was born. I’m glad your husband convinced you to write this post!