During the first installment, I learned some pretty terrible money concepts in my childhood. I believed that money was the method to buying instant happiness and that accepting free things was wrong. I also missed out on any opportunity to learn about personal budgeting or finance simply because there was no opportunity for it.

When I became a teenager, I began to have opportunities to raise money from my own work. I became heavily involved in the Future Farmers of America at school, mostly because it was the only vocational extracurricular program that my small school offered. It was through the FFA that I first had the opportunity to make money – and to make my own enormous financial mistakes.

I was given the opportunity to start a vocational agriculture program, in which I would learn how to make money using agricultural practices. Given my home situation, I was paired with a local farmer who provided oversight (and some free resources I didn’t have at home) over a pair of small projects: I grew a patch of tomatoes to sell to local grocers and at a farmer’s market and later I raised three hogs for market.

The work wasn’t the hard part: I was used to doing chores around home and I learned a great deal about the process of raising tomatoes and hogs. What I didn’t learn is any sort of financial sense.

My first mistake was I kept no records of any sort. Instead of keeping track of the hours I invested in the projects, the amount of tomatoes sold (and their value per unit), and even the market value of the hogs, I instead just pocketed the money and essentially made up numbers on the data sheet that I turned in each year describing my project. I didn’t view financial records as important, mostly because I had no example of why financial records were important.

My second mistake was I didn’t do anything productive whatsoever with the money I made. I bought all sorts of frivolous stuff with it – and I didn’t put a dime into any sort of savings account. My parents told me that my FFA earnings were mine to do what I pleased with. Even at that late stage, I could have been imbued with some idea of the importance of saving, but instead I learned how great it was to get a Sega Genesis.

My teenage mistakes didn’t end there. An old friend of my mother’s turned up around my sixteenth birthday and he was flabbergasted that I didn’t have the money to buy a car, nor were my parents even considering buying me one. He gave me a 1985 Buick Skyhawk for my sixteenth birthday – a gift that my parents wanted to turn down, but my excitement at being a sixteen year old with a car was too much to overcome.

My third mistake was I didn’t value any asset that I had. The car ran beautifully, but it had a few problems, most noticeably the leak around the passenger side of the windshield. Rather than spending what would have been a small amount to fix it, I merely drilled a hole on the passenger side floorboard to let the rainwater out. You can guess what happened: within a year, the passenger floorboard was completely rotted out.

Even worse, I literally ran that car into the ground. I would drop the pedal to the floor on a regular basis and eventually I started doing stupid stuff like slamming it straight from drive into reverse while going 80 miles an hour – I was a stupid kid with a car that I didn’t respect the value of, what can I say? Eventually, the car I had been so ecstatic about when I got it just died, with more repairs needed than it was even worth. Rather than having a car I could drive to college and perhaps eventually trade in for something better, I had a piece of junk that wound up sold for pennies as scrap metal.

Even though I was born poor and obviously made some poor choices, I still managed to get into college. Even though I could have left for college with a car and several hundred dollars, I left with nothing. How did I get into college? What kinds of mistakes did I make there? Read on to find out!

Want to jump quickly to the other Road to Financial Armageddon posts? Here’s an index to help you out.

#1: The Earliest Mistakes
#2: Early Profits … Lost
#3: Cash & College
#4: The First Taste of Real Money
#5: Love & Marriage
#6: The Yuppie Years
#7: Here Comes Baby
#8: Meltdown
#9: The Road to Recovery
#10: What I Learned

A wise man once said “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” It took me a long time to summon the courage to admit that it was my own mistakes that led me to financial armageddon. It required me to admit that not only had I been making mistakes since my earliest days, but also to admit that many of the ideas I had learned in my life and built through my own experiences were completely wrong.

In order to understand these mistakes, I am initiating a ten part series of posts, a part to be posted each weekday for the next two weeks, in which I outline those various mistakes and what they did to pave the road to financial armageddon. More importantly, I hope to learn (and perhaps you will learn, too) how these mistakes can be corrected, not only for myself, but for others around me, such as my children. Hopefully, my mistakes laid bare will bring some insight into your own financial mistakes and perhaps lead you to your own epiphanies.

The best place to start is the beginning. I was born into poverty, a family in which both my mother and father had been raised in poverty, too. Both of my parents were used to the concept of living from payday to payday, never having enough saved for themselves to survive more than a week or two. To some degree, this was out of necessity; there was often not enough money to put food on the table.

At first, you might think that this was a great background to learn hard lessons about personal finance, but instead I watched my parents make mistake after mistake. Perhaps the biggest mistake was that whenever a windfall would occur, they would celebrate by buying things that they didn’t need or buying gifts for us kids; it was because of a windfall that I was able to have a Nintendo and, later, a television in my bedroom.

As a child, I believed that this was a normal situation. I believed that when you had money, you were supposed to spend it on something that brought you happiness immediately. Money was the key to happiness, I thought, because it could get you stuff that you want. I didn’t understand that putting money in the bank might not buy you that immediate burst of joy, but it could provide a steady level of peace in the security that it could provide for you.

Another problem with our level of poverty is that I never really had an opportunity to manage any money of my own until rather late in my teen years. I didn’t receive any sort of allowance and any gift money I received was turned over to my parents for “saving,” which actually turned out to be merely an emergency fund for keeping food on the table.

On the rare occasion that I did have any money, it was usually slipped to me by my grandmother or a wealthy aunt that I had, who would whisper in my ear not to tell my mother and to spend it quickly on something fun. The intention was good; they wanted to bring joy to the life of an impoverished boy. The problem was that it didn’t teach me any sort of financial skill whatsoever. I would go to the store as soon as possible and buy a video game or some baseball cards or something frivolous which brought immediate joy, but afterward I would go back to having no budget.

Another problem is that I believed that accepting help from anyone was bad. My parents were strict libertarians and in many ways I respect their philosophy, but their personal beliefs kept them from ever accepting any handouts or assistance. Even though we would often scrape by on a single part-time income, we were never on welfare or food stamps and we didn’t go to soup kitchens or other such free offerings. The pastor at the local Presbyterian church practically begged us to eat at the church on Wednesdays and Sundays regardless of whether we attended, but my parents refused all handouts. I was led to believe that accepting a helping hand, even in time of dire need, was a sign of weakness.

To summarize my earliest lessons, I believed that money was the method to buying instant happiness and that accepting free things was wrong. I also missed out on any opportunity to learn about personal budgeting or finance simply because there was no opportunity for it.

It wasn’t long before I found myself maturing into my teenage years, where I began to apply some of the lessons learned during my childhood, only to find that I was to continue an already-proud tradition of financial mistakes. What did my transition into adulthood teach me? Read on to find out!

Want to jump quickly to the other Road to Financial Armageddon posts? Here’s an index to help you out.

#1: The Earliest Mistakes
#2: Early Profits … Lost
#3: Cash & College
#4: The First Taste of Real Money
#5: Love & Marriage
#6: The Yuppie Years
#7: Here Comes Baby
#8: Meltdown
#9: The Road to Recovery
#10: What I Learned