What Do You Do When Life Changes Your Plan?
I remember it like it was yesterday. I was sitting with my wife, or maybe she was my fiance. I don’t remember other than it was very much at the earliest point of our relationship. I was speaking with my Aunt Josie, one of the celebrated matrons of our extended family. I was happily yammering away with updates on my life including my five year plan. My aunt, being the most outspoken member of the family, guffawed and shared with me her unfiltered thoughts about the potential to achieve my goals. Her point was that life happens, and no matter how carefully you plan it, usually all your dreams go to hell in a handbasket. Sadly, when I look back on it, she was 100% right. It did all fall apart. Then after I got things in order, it all fell apart again. Once again, I tried to create some plans, and yet again the unexpected reared its head and we had to reset everything. Our goals, the plans we had to meet them, and everything we thought we could count on all fell apart because Aunt Josie’s prediction came to fruition. Life happened.
So what happened to me? In my case it was macro economic trends that are very difficult for someone with limited life experience to see. From a career perspective, I didn’t have much in the way of good training related to a specific end goal. “What kind of job do you want” wasn’t part of the decision making process during my early college years. I just studied what was interesting to me at first, and then what major I could get into with the grades that resulted from my lackadaisical study habits. To this day I refer to my original college degree as a BA in BS. A joke that gets more apt as the years progress. Also, after graduation I lived in Orlando Florida. Orlando is not a hotspot for professional jobs unless food service or driving a bus in a theme park is your idea of a great career option.
After several fits and starts, I wound up falling into a job that felt like a career. Unfortunately it was in an industry that was fueled by the dot com bubble. As I’m older now I think I could have read the tea leaves and been better prepared for when the bubble burst but I was younger then and less experienced. I never once thought about the trends and general health of the industry I was working in. The layoff along with many other macro economic trends led me to a string of bad jobs which lasted many years.
Another career oriented “Life Happens” moment can happen even if you are self employed. I have one friend who had a thriving bulk mail business. The business was growing, they had employees, and had even purchased a warehouse. Then, somewhat suddenly nearly every customer of the business moved to emarketing virtually overnight. My friend had little time to pivot the business and was forced to close it. Changes in business are expected, but when an industry disappears over the course of a few short months, it definitely falls into the category of life happening.
I’m focusing on work, yet that is hardly the only thing that can go wrong when life happens. Another massive area of concern is health. Specifically when there is an unexpected illness or a cascading series of health issues which derail your life plans. A health situation can have severe consequences. I have one old friend who’s never had a career of any measure. He was fine in highschool but shortly afterwards ran into a string of health issues that sidelined him for the rest of his life. It’s not just the malady that we have to work around. Nearly any major healthcare issue can bring on crippling debt. When you have high levels of debt, you typically have stress from things like relentless bill collectors or everything involved with bankruptcy. Yes, there are a small number of people who are wired to not feel stress in any measure, but for the rest of us, too much of it can be as dangerous as the health issues that brought on the stress-inducing debt.
Then there’s another issue, interpersonal relationships. This is a huge one, maybe bigger than a sidelining health issue. More specifically families, and family breakups. When considering the 50% divorce rate, I think it’s demonstrable that we don’t live in an era where couples having issues stay together for the kids. I say divorce, but when I’m talking about marriage, I’m also talking about longer term monogamous relationships that mirror traditional marriage.
I do think it is safe to say that the majority of those 50% never intended to break up or get divorced in the first place. So why do we break up? Well, there are many reasons. When I looked around, I found some research confirming the causes for divorce. The research found the most common reasons people give are lack of commitment, too much arguing, infidelity, marrying too young, unrealistic expectations, lack of equality in the relationship, lack of preparation for marriage, and abuse. Many of the common reasons people give for their divorce can fall under the umbrella of no longer being in love. In effect when we get married or enter into a longer term monogamous relationship it’s usually based on feelings rather than identifying a multifaceted life partner who we can work well with. So when the problems arise, and the warm and fuzzy feelings naturally go away for one of the partners, divorce and / or big breakups happen. It’s not infrequent to have one partner in the marriage or relationship totally blindsided by the other partner deciding they have had enough and are leaving.
Because our significant others are usually life partners who are heavily integrated in the minuta of our day to day lives, when major and unexpected relationship changes happen, then chaos enters into people’s lives in nearly every aspect. The big issues are financial, emotional and social. In the financial side, all the benefits of a two income household generally go away. Incomes are volatile, and getting more so. Two undulating incomes can average into something that is sort of stable. One volatile income is just completely unpredictable. There are also tremendous negative emotional feelings and all that comes from it. This is true for both partners. There are stages of grief and some people really don’t go through them easily. Suicide, depression, and other major emotional issues can result from a breakup. These emotions can really impact decision making when a negative relationship life event happens. Of course there are big social ramifications. A couple interfacing in social groups with other couples is very different then a single person interfacing with those same groups. Often in a breakup, friends will naturally gravitate to one person or the other. Realigning a social circle can be extra challenging logistically and emotionally if you haven’t been fostering a growing circle of friends for some time.
Now, I have to add some personal commentary here. I’ve always thought that leaving a relationship because you aren’t in love was a bogus excuse. I say that because people, and how people love, changes over time. These types of issues have been around forever. It’s why I feel most religions stress commitment over feelings when it comes to marriage. Love has nothing to do with an effective partnership where each partner provides some stability for the other. It’s the modern era’s relative ease of divorce and the general acceptance of it that makes this ‘life happens’ event so prevalent but it can still be argued that there are some real positives to sticking together even if the wiz bang emotions don’t exist anymore.
These are some of the big “life happens” categories. There are of course many others and the point of this article isn’t to go over every single event that can cause a major life disruption. That would be impossible. The real point is to identify strategies to deal with major life events. To that end there are two ways to think about what to do when life changes your plan. The first way is to think about what to do when you are hit with the unexpected. As challenging as these types of situations can be, the answer is fairly simple. Do what you can and roll with the punches. For example, if all of a sudden your ability to generate income unexpectedly goes away, then you follow what Dave Ramsey calls the four walls, meaning make sure you pay for food, utilities, shelter, and transportation. Everything else goes by the wayside. It’s the same with health or relationships. Respond as best as you can to right your life ship as quickly as possible.
The second way really is about preparing for the unexpected. If dealing with the unexpected emotionally requires fortitude, then preparing for the unexpected requires flexibility and preemptive planning to be so. With fortitude, you have to be ready to just accept what’s happening. Flexibility requires finding areas where you can pivot in every area of your life. This isn’t as easy as it sounds, at least not emotionally. By its very nature you have to ask very uncomfortable questions like “What do I do if I get fired from my job and can’t get another one?”, “How do I handle it if I have a major medical event that keeps me from being able to work or live my life as I want?” and “What do I do if my relationship ends unexpectedly?” These are the types of questions that many, if not most, people don’t want to ask. Still, it’s a very healthy mental exercise. It forces you to think about how prepared you are in life.
Sadly I know the answer to the question of what I would do if I lost my job and couldn’t get another because it’s happened to me. That experience is one of the inspirations for this article. Life happened to me and I had to adjust. Because of that, I have a plan for today. I know I may need to move to the boonies, but if I lost my job I have enough equity in my home where I could sell it and pay for a house with cash if it was the worst case scenario. Also, transportation won’t be a massive issue. I don’t make payments on cars, I buy them for cash. This has always meant second hand vehicles and forgoing luxury accouterments. Yes, I’ve always driven value oriented cars but this has meant that I only have to worry about repairs, not repossessions.
For the house, to be flexible, you have to look at it for what it is. It’s just a house, on land. That means we are talking about wood and dirt. There are many people who make emotional connections to a house. “It’s where we raised our children” or “It’s been in the family for generations”. You can always go back and buy that dirt again someday, or you can go back and rebuy what you had to sell. Normally that doesn’t happen as we eventually move onto something we value more than the old stuff but it is always a possibility. The same things can be said for relationships, personal and social, as can be said for the homestead. As time goes on you can go and revisit the old ones and see what they look like.
Planning for this flexibility covers many different areas I have already alluded to. Fiscal planning including savings, no debt, and insurance. This also covers health issues. A little bit of insurance and diligence can go a long way to dealing with a great deal of health issues. Keeping as many friends as possible so if your social circle implodes, you have other community outlets. You always have to be considering your options. In effect you always need a plan for the unexpected, or as much of a plan as you can conceptualize.
Going back to Aunt Josie, I know that she understood the general futility of life plans because she was at the end of a long long life and had probably experienced many of the disruptions that exist when life happens. She knew most five year plans will end far short of where they were supposed to. Ironically I’m starting to become a bit like my aunt in that I’m already old enough where I’m hearing all the plans of the next generation. I know that most won’t ever achieve the aspirational goals that this new generation feels is so certain. Like my aunt I’ll probably try to share some insights as to why this generation’s version of the five year plan may not work out as intended. Unlike my aunt, I’m pretty sure I’ll also offer some illustrative examples and some suggestions on what can be done to better prepare for the unexpected. I doubt if anyone will heed my warnings and embrace my solutions because most people in the early part of their adult lives are very sure of themselves and their plans. That being said, you never know. Some may take my suggestions and run with them. I say that because if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that the unexpected always happens in life.
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