Overcoming Financial Failure: A Peace Treaty with the System

By Andrew L. Hicks

For 35 years, Andrew L. Hicks bucked the system. Now he proposes a treaty.

This is a book about getting real with oneself. Taking an honest look in the mirror. Accepting responsibility.

How to go from the gutter to the top. Rags to riches. Transcend limitation forever...

Overcoming Financial Failure is an exercise in realtime transformation. Come with Andrew as he stares his demons in the face and lays them out on the page.

This journey changed the author for the better. It could change you too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew L. Hicks
• Release date: Feb 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781540714978

Book preview

ii. Acknowledgements

Thank you from the bottom, top, sides, and center of my heart to:

Yann, Diana, Amber, Rawnald, Scott, Kim, Ian, Jordan, Sage, and/or you.

iii. Dedication

Someone out there opens their car door and empty Robitussin bottles fall out along with other trash.

This book is dedicated to you.

1. I’m a financial disaster, and this is my book on finance

I belong to an atypical stereotype. I’ve never seen myself accurately represented in a book or movie. I feel like an anomaly.

Sometimes people tell me that I am not as special and unique as I think. I believe those people. I refuse to believe that I’m as alone as I feel. If that’s true, that means here is a whole invisible world of people like me, who have slipped between the cracks.

We are the underground, and we have no voice. No one understands us, including ourselves.

I read lots of inspiring books and blogs, and I’ve tried to apply lots of advice from those sources. I love the work of James Altucher, an entrepreneur who has made and lost and regained millions, multiple times. I like his approach, his way of thinking. He’s been to the bottom of the barrel and peeled himself off the ground and found a way to live in this weird-ass world.

But I am not James Altucher. Not only have I not made millions, I have hardly been able to hold a job. Most of my jobs were in retail and food service. I can’t work in retail anymore because there’s a retail fraud (shoplifting) charge on my criminal record. And even if I could, I wouldn’t want to. Every attempt I’ve made to start a business has failed miserably before getting off the ground. I don’t understand or relate to money. I can’t remember what a hedge fund is, even though I’ve Googled the term repeatedly while reading Altucher’s work.

In simple terms, I am financially illiterate. I tend to impulsively spend what little money I do make, as quickly as I can make it. More quickly than I can make it, actually.

In 2005, my girlfriend and I had just been evicted and had to move in with my dad. We were at the store one night, and saw this kiosk. Sign up for a credit card, and get a free five dollar gift card and two liters of pop. The way I remember it is, my girlfriend pestered me into signing up because she wanted that damn soda. That might not be true though. I probably just blamed her so I’d feel less stupid in retrospect. Anyway, I signed up, thinking that my credit was so messed up, there was no way I’d get approved. I’d just been evicted! And before that, my credit history was abysmal.

Alas, a few weeks later the approval came in the mail for a fucking 4,000 dollar credit limit. My girlfriend and I said, Well, we’ll just put this away for emergencies. Yeah, right. We were both unemployed. We had drug habits we were trying to kick. We didn’t stand a chance. Maybe two months later that credit card was maxed out and then some.

Then, we broke up, and I blamed it all on her and her stupid $5 gift card and soda. But it was my fault. It was in my name and my name was mud.

I could tell you any one of dozens of tales to paint the same picture: I am a natural born idiot about money and work.

I am thirty-five years old, and had my first job when I was fifteen. In the past twenty years, I’ve had something like twenty-four jobs, and there are multiple gaps of unemployment wedged in there, some lasting two or more years. Some jobs, I worked one or two days before quitting. Most jobs I left, I was a no-call/no show. I was too anxious and embarrassed to call in and explain. Those times, I was even too embarrassed to go in to collect a paycheck.

Some people probably think I am just lazy, and I am. But it’s deeper than that. So deep I cannot even fathom it, and I’ve spent years trying.

I took a Starting a Business course a few years back, and dropped out because it made no sense to me. I was getting an A, but wasn’t learning anything. I have wanted to start a business since I was a kid, but I’ve always failed, because like I said, I’m an idiot about money, and none of it makes sense to me. I’ve come to suspect that starting a business is actually simpler than I make it out to be in my mind. I probably overly complicate it until it doesn’t make sense. Maybe I’ll figure it out before I die, but even then it will take a lot of hard work and focus. And I’m lazy, and long-term focus is hard to come by. I shift a lot. Change my mind a lot. Get distracted by shiny objects, and forget what I was doing two seconds ago.

And it seems like the more I strive to improve, the more hysterically I fail. And yes, it is hysterical. Like, funny, objectively. And depressing, objectively. It’s comical because for some reason there is amusement to be found in having pristine intentions but making asinine choices anyway. It’s depressing because this is someone’s life. My fucking life.

So when I read the work of James Altucher, part of me goes, Listen to this guy whining about making and losing a million dollars while I’ve never in my life had over $2,000 all at the same time, and I am halfway to seventy years old and don’t even know what a hedge fund is.

Of course, it isn’t James Altucher’s fault that I’m an anomaly. I am only bitter because I wish I could pick up one damn book written by someone I can completely relate to. Someone who has been where I am, in this jungle of ineptitude, and who grabbed a machete and cut their way out. Made a map. Passed it on.

Maybe that book is out there somewhere. But I haven’t found it. And I’ve been searching.

I cannot count on anyone else to show the way. That much is obvious. No one knows what to say. Nobody knows what to do about me. It’s up to me to grab my own machete and blaze a trail out of this jungle of ineptitude.

Then if it proves true that I am not as unique as I feel, and there’s a voiceless underground of people just like me, maybe someone will find these words, and within them the map I wish I had right now.

And if not, at least I’ll have made the map for myself that I wish I had right now. That’s probably good enough.

And so, I embark on the most preposterous of journeys.

Seriously, this is in the top ten or so most ridiculous sentences I have ever written or read or thought: I’m writing a book on personal finance.

Earlier today I was reading a book by Yann Girard, calledI’m everywhere and nowhere. And I own nothing and everything. That book is actually what inspired me to dust off my neglected Medium account and write these words. A passage in Girard’s book talks about how people should only write about what they know.

Which is why it’s so funny to think of myself writing a book about finance. I know absolutely nothing about being financially successful. If I were to pretend otherwise, I’d be doing you a great disservice.

One thing I know a lot about, though, is how to be an utter financial failure. So, I’ll just write about that. Then we can reflect it in a mirror, turn it around. Reverse engineer the thing. And if we’re lucky, turn it into a machete.

Or maybe I’m forever screwed, doomed to die in obscurity on the fringe of a society that makes no sense to me and never will. If that’s the case, 1) make extra certain not to take any advice I accidentally give by writing this, and 2) I hope you’ll spare me a bite to eat when you see me holding a sign by the interstate. That’s probably my fate if I don’t figure out a better way.

Let’s hope for a better way. Sound good? Sounds good. Let’s do this.

This book was written over the course of thirty days. Each day, I published a chapter on Medium and my blog with the intention of self-publishing at the end. It’s been quite a little by-the-seat-of-my-pants adventure, for sure, and I would like to thank Yann Girard for inspiring the idea.

2. How my life fell apart (but was never really together)

Between 2013–2016, my life has completely fallen apart. Bigtime.

The thing is, I never really had my life together to begin with. By not having it together, I mean I’ve not been self-sufficient. I have either lived with friends, family, or significant others, was homeless, or have been in some way financially dependent on other people.

Before these past few years, I was going to school and working at my college as a writing tutor. It was pretty great, but I was not making much money and poorly managed what I did make.

For a while I thought I wanted a career in human services; that is, social work. That’s what I was in school for. It was a pretty typical case of having a dark history with substance misuse, and wanting to transform the demons of my past into a way to help people. I had an internship at a behavioral health agency where I worked with people facing societal and personal consequences of substance use. It seemed I’d found my calling, but I secretly battled my own dependencies on alcohol and gluttony.

This led to my downfall as a human services aspirant, but there were other factors too.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I got it in my head that my life would be so consumed by social work that I’d never live my dreams. Also, I have a bit of a rebellious streak when it comes to putting policy, paperwork, and money ahead of people’s actual needs, and it seemed apparent that a career in social work would be a career of either endlessly fighting the system or becoming its impotent drone. I am not sure if I was right in my thinking or not, but these factors contributed to a long-deliberated decision to drop out of college to focus on writing and other creative endeavors. That was near the end of 2013.

However, without an academic focus, I felt directionless. After a couple years of having a focal point, I was suddenly adrift. I was also passed over for a promotion at work, a promotion I honestly didn’t even want. What I did want was to feel like I was moving forward in some way, and that I was valued by my employer. The truth is, my employer did value me, and the applicant pool for that promotion was highly qualified and competitive. However, I felt deeply disheartened when I didn’t get the promotion. I tried to play it off, but inwardly I took it entirely too personally.

I was writing, but had about six projects going at once, which amounted to slow progress. To this day, none of the projects I was working on then are complete.

In early 2015, I felt rather lost and stuck. I had just gotten mixed up in a chaotic relationship too, and my heart kept rapidly alternating between brokenness and cloud nine. During this time, I started using drugs other than alcohol and junk food, for the first time since 2009. Most prominently, I used dextromethorphan, the active ingredient of Robitussin, which doubles as a powerful dissociative. This led to me being unable to sustain my job. Further proving that I was valued by my employer, my boss worked with Human Resources to keep me on board. They even gave me a paid leave of absence to get help and come back to work. But the chaos in my mind and life were too much. I ended up having to quit around April of 2015.

It was a heartbreaking and confusing time. I had deeply traumatic falling outs with almost all of my friends and family. I lived on the streets through much of that summer, though a family member let me sleep in their garage for part of that time.

Around October 2015, I got in trouble with the law and was put on probation.

In 2016 I became so depressed that I could not function at all. I was a complete recluse, so bogged down by anger, loneliness, and resentment that I constantly wanted to die.

Probation was too much to handle. Between drug testing and court-ordered counseling, I had to pay between $120 — $200 a week. I had zero income and was relying on a girlfriend to get me through. She probably would have kept my head above water through probation, but my pride would not allow it. But without her support, I was in perpetual violation of probation and the shadow of jail loomed over me enormously and oppressively.

It was one of the worst times of my life. I just laid around my apartment and ate too much and slept. When I talk about eating too much, I mean way too much. Enough food to last a week or more, all in one sitting. Sometimes I couldn’t possibly fit any more inside of me, so I’d fall asleep, then wake up and finish. Then fall asleep again, because everything was terrible.

After I could not afford drug tests anymore, I said