Tag: music

Thursday Think Tank: Bad Bar Bands and Cowboy Brawls

Dave Johnson4 Comments

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At a certain point her table decided they needed some air, and stepped outside. The Buckboard had these massive windows on the front of the bar that allowed you to see outside to the front parking lot. As I stood playing “Brown Eyed Girl,” I saw my wife and her friends standing on the front porch of the bar, chatting and smiling.

Enter the villain of our story…

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It’s 4th of July, and I don’t have any great 4th of July stories. I mean I could tell about the time that my Mom and her best friend took 4 of us children to a Native American reservation to purchase illegal fireworks for their husbands, but aside from the ludicrous premise, it was a relatively uneventful trip.

So instead I thought I might focus on one of my redneckiest of experiences growing up in Small Town, USA. When I throw a term like “redneck” around, understand that I do not imply any negative connotations. While I may have traded in my blue collar roots for what is now a very white collar, climate controlled, callus-free life, it doesn’t mean I don’t hold tremendous admiration for folks who live that life. I think most of them are proud of the “redneck” moniker in terms of the positive aspects of the label, and I hold those aspects near and dear to my heart.

Now about that time I almost got my ass kicked by a bar full of cowboy rednecks…

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Tangent: Before I go any further, I just wanted to let you know that my stories are real. I may embellish a detail or two for the sake of telling a good story, and I may get a fact or two wrong due to the passing of time, but overall the stories mostly happened the way I detail them. In almost every case I have witnesses, and in the case of this story I’ve easily got 150.

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I used to play in a bar band. Two of my absolute best friends in the world and I started “jamming” in my Dad’s shop when I was 12 or 13, and we eventually formed a cover band that played the local circuit of dive bars and honky-tonks. We got pretty good, and the owners of the various establishments would book us every weekend to play classic rock and country tunes for folks to dance to.

We were kind of a big deal.Read More »

Tuesday Tip Jar: How to Save Money When You Suck at Saving Money

Dave Johnson2 Comments

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One of the problems is that the money is so damn accessible now. I’m old enough to remember pre-internet life where if you wanted to put money into savings you had to physically drive your car to a bank and deposit it with a paper deposit slip. Usually while someone stood next to you smoking a cigarette and talking about the latest episode of Magnum PI. If you wanted to withdraw from your savings, you got back into your Trans-Am, popped in an REO Speedwagon cassette, and drove back to the same bank where you filled out a withdrawal slip and took your money out.

Starting Credit Card Debt (01.01.19): $126,310.77
Current Credit Card Debt: $109,570.87
Total Paid Off: $16,739.90
Income Going to Savings: 2%

[06.27.19 Update] – Just got an email from Marcus saying my new APY is 2.15% and not the 2.25% called out when I wrote the post below. Make sure you check their site for the latest rates before signing up.

I suck at saving money. Growing up I lived in a household where if we made $15 bucks that month, we spent $15 bucks that month. If we made $1500 bucks that month, rather than just spending the $15 that we managed to get by on the month before, we instead spent all $1500. My family didn’t really save money, and for the past 25 years, I haven’t really saved money either.

One thing I want to be clear about is that I do have some money in a 401k account. On this blog I often talk about having zero money in savings, but when I say that I’m referring to my standard savings account.

Part of the problem for me was always ease of access to my savings. I’d put $500 in savings and tell myself I was NEVER going to touch that money unless it was due to some unforeseen emergency. Two weeks later AC/DC would announce a world tour and I’d think, “Well I need to see them. They are getting pretty old, and this will probably be their last tour. This really is basically an emergency.”

Once at the show, I’d buy a t-shirt, food, pay for parking, and of course buy a pair of those light up plastic devil horns to wear. Can’t be the only one in the crowd without plastic devil horns on after all.

So I’d pull that $500 bucks right back out, and have it all spent in a matter of two weeks. The next month I’d start all over again, each time finding some kind of “emergency” to spend things on.

One of the problems is that the money is so damn accessible now. I’m old enough to remember pre-internet life where if you wanted to put money into savings you had to physically drive your car to a bank and deposit it with a paper deposit slip. Usually while someone stood next to you smoking a cigarette and talking about the latest episode of Magnum PI. If you wanted to withdraw from your savings, you got back into your Trans-Am, popped in an REO Speedwagon cassette, and drove back to the same bank where you filled out a withdrawal slip and took your money out.

In other words, it took a fair amount of work to get your money in and out of savings, and thus once it was in, it tended to stay there.Read More »

Thursday Think Tank: That Time I was a Radio Disc Jockey

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

The Thursday Think Tanks are semi-random thoughts that may not necessarily fall directly into the category of finances, but I still feel are worth sharing. Read at your own risk!

Starting Credit Card Debt (01.01.19): $126,310.77
Current Credit Card Debt: $108,870.87
Total Paid Off: $17,439.90
Income Going to Savings: 2%

As a kid, I was obsessed with music. Keep in mind that I grew up in the 80s, and radio was still one of the best ways to consume music if you couldn’t convince your parents that Columbia House was the deal of a lifetime. So I would spend hours listening to my radio or watching MTV to consume as much free music as possible.

As I neared high school graduation, I set my sites on a career in radio as a disc jockey. I could talk endlessly and had a knack for entertaining people, and that coupled with my love of music made life as a DJ seem like a natural fit.

During my 1 (and only) year of college I decided I would major in Broadcast Communications, and become the next Howard Stern. We were from a small enough and conservative enough town that our station didn’t even carry Howard Stern, but I just knew he was the biggest name in radio and that’s where I wanted to be one day!

That summer I took a job at a local radio station in that same tiny little town. It was the smallest of small town operations, and was managed by its morning personality who I will simply refer to as “Steve.” Steve was a somewhat disheveled and grumpy human being who seemed bright and energetic on air, but was a sarcastic lump of clay off. I hardly said two words to him in my interview and was hired as an intern on the spot. I do remember him saying, “Kid, nobody wants to work in radio. There is no money, next to no growth, and the chances of you making a decent living are about as good as the chances of me living past 50, which ain’t happening.”

Despite this ringing endorsement for my chosen profession, I took the job/internship anyway and was on my way!Read More »

Six Strings of Stress

Dave JohnsonLeave a comment

All of those sleepless nights and feelings of utter terror could have been avoided had I just been a bit more of an adult and realized that I didn’t really need any of that garbage.

Starting Debt (01.01.19): $124,310.77
Current Debt: $107,793.15
Total Paid Off: $16,517.62
Income Going to Savings: 1%

Last week I made a joke about buying Eddie Van Halen’s guitar. I have to come clean and say I didn’t *really* buy that model of guitar (nor did I buy a chunk of a President’s brain in a jar), but I did buy a different guitar. This is the true story of that purchase.

I vividly remember purchasing my Les Paul guitar from Guitar Center. I can almost still smell the new strings as I pulled it down off the wall, plugged into a store amp, rotated the volume knob all the way to 11, and ripped into a power chord. The feel of that instrument in my hands (having seen countless guitar heroes of mine play that exact same model) was one that truly made me feel like a GOD.

With just one chord strummed, I knew then and there I had to own that guitar. It wasn’t cheap and I didn’t have the kind of money it took to purchase it outright, so I (of course) registered for a store credit card on the spot. I was not going to be denied such a beautiful piece of hand-crafted ROCK-N-ROLL!

The dopamine drip was flowing that day and I felt like a million bucks. In fact I felt so good I was even considering taking guitar lessons to actually learn how to play my new purchase!

I was feeling that good.

Years later as the overwhelming stress of six-figure debt was crushing my soul like an industrial jackhammer, I felt like breaking that Les Paul in half. And not in the cool Rockstar way where you slam it on the stage for your final encore as confetti showers from the rafters, but more in the way where you take it into the driveway and run it over with your car while no one is watching.

You see, that guitar represented (I guess the correct term would be “represents” as I still own it) everything I did wrong. It represented me not being able to control my desires and purchasing something that I really couldn’t afford. Sure this one purchase was only $2,000 worth of something I couldn’t afford, but that coupled with the countless other times I had done it had led me to six figures worth of an entire home of somethings that I couldn’t afford.

I look around my house today, and I see lots of little reminders of this type of behavior. Lots of little trinkets and worthless garbage that I thought I just “had to have” at the time, without having the actual money to pay for them.

I’ve had serious health problems as a result of this stress. My blood pressure is through the roof, my sleep cycle is all jacked up, and I know I’ve probably shaved at least a year or two off of my ride on this rock because of the mental torture I’ve gone through wondering if I’m going to have enough money to buy my kid a slice of pizza.

All of those sleepless nights and feelings of utter terror could have been avoided had I just been a bit more of an adult and realized that I didn’t really need any of that garbage.

In a later post I’ll share some tips on dealing with stress, but honestly the best way to deal with stress is to avoid it when possible by making good choices in life.

Oh… and that Guitar Center credit card? It had an interest rate of 29.99%. TWENTY-NINE POINT NINE NINE. I paid nearly a thousand dollars more for the guitar than the asking price by time I paid that thing off.

I did not get the call to join Guns N’ Roses. I didn’t get to go on tour and make millions. What I got was yet another lesson in my journey towards financial responsibility. It took me a long time to get to a point where I can reflect and comprehend just how silly some of those mistakes were, and I hope others can read this and avoid them far sooner than I did. Trust me when I say that the stress of debt is no fun at all.

Side Note: I did eventually learn how to play the damn thing at least, so if you know Axl Rose, go ahead and give him my number please.