Alcohol isn’t the only addiction that I have in my life. My name is Jenny, and I am addicted to spreadsheets. My entire life is mapped out in one big Excel document. I look at it every single day and my little accountant heart just sings with the structure and organization of it all. I have debt reduction plans, savings plans, investment strategies and a monthly budget (mapped out three years in advance) at my fingertips every day. It’s my very own digital woobie.
For those of you under the age of 30 it may boggle your mind to know that we didn’t all grow up with Microsoft Office and laptop computers. We didn’t go to the grocery store armed with a Notes app on our iPhone to remember to get sweet potatoes and toilet paper. We wrote lists. Oh yeah, handwritten lists. As a kid, I sat at the kitchen table while my mom rattled off items we needed from the store and I wrote them very neatly on my notepad. If I left the kitchen for a few minutes and she thought of something else, she had to wait for me to come back to write it down because if anyone dared put their messy handwriting on my no-less-than-perfect store list I would rewrite the entire thing. So, you can see how Excel and I were destined soulmates from the start.
With my keen sense of organization and attention to detail, one would think that I paid very close attention to how each and every dime was spent each month. Well, in my case, the devil really was in the details. I didn’t track how I was spending my money, only how much I was spending. As long as my rewards credit card stayed at a reasonable balance each week, that’s all I needed to know. I lived in that blissful state of ignorance for more than three years.
A week after I decided to give up alcohol for good, I had the nagging feeling that I needed to take a hard look at how I had spent my money for the last few years. I’ve known for a long time that the truth was going to hurt, and I wasn’t ready to face the gut punch of knowing how much money I have spent on booze. I added a new tab to my spreadsheet and started going back through every bank and credit card statement for the last year and mapped out how much I had spent at liquor stores each month. I added a few bar charges here and there that I knew were only alcohol, but the bottles I picked up at the grocery store or Costco were impossible to track. Since I get the majority of my wine at liquor stores, I figured it was a good baseline.
$7,000. That’s my annual baseline. It’s more than that, I’m just not sure how much more. I never left Costco without at least half a case of wine and couldn’t begin to calculate how many times I bought two or three bottles while I got groceries.
That means in 2016, 2017 and 2018 I drank $21,000.
If someone handed you a stack of $21,000 in cash, no strings attached, what would you do with it? This is the question that has been circling my brain for the last couple of weeks. In every other area of my life I’ve become so focused on financial security and stability. I closed a yoga studio that I owned three and a half years ago, and it’s been an uphill battle to recover financially. And yet no matter how well I managed every other area of my life, I refused to acknowledge that alcohol might be hindering my success at all.
I’ve made a vision board at the beginning of every year for the last few years. As I think about the new goals that I’m setting for myself I can’t stop wondering…what will I do with $21,000?
Mocktail Moxie 