Man, November 27, 2017. I remember seeing that headline floating around. I was always a sucker for seeing what some stranger thought about my money situation, especially when things were already feeling totally upside down.
I read that crap, laughed it off, and got back to the dumpster fire my life was turning into. That week wasn’t about checking my money outlook; it was about watching my entire outlook get torpedoed. It wasn’t some external financial market crash or anything; it was all self-inflicted stupid mistakes, layered one on top of the other.
The Week My Wallet Died
I had been floating along, thinking I was smart because I had a decent job and enough savings to make me feel safe. That particular week, Monday the 27th, I got hit with three things almost simultaneously.
- One: The side hustle I thought was going to be my ticket to freedom? It failed. Not a gentle fade, but a sudden, spectacular implosion that left me owing more than I had earned.
- Two: An unexpected, massive repair bill for the house. The heating system just decided to completely crap out. Needed a full replacement, and of course, the warranty had expired two weeks prior.
- Three: My main paycheck for the month was delayed. Just a little accounting error, they said, but when you’ve already promised money you don’t have, even a one-day delay feels like the end of the world.
I sat there, looking at a checking account that was, no joke, about to hit zero, maybe even dip into the negative for the first time since college. All that supposed safety—gone. Wiped out by a bad bet, a broken machine, and a slow payroll office, all within a few days of each other. I was completely screwed.
I remember trying to figure out what to do. I called my bank. I tried to pull money out of my retirement fund—which they rightly told me was a terrible idea, plus the penalties were insane. I drove around town looking for quick cash jobs, but seriously, who needs a guy with my background to do manual labor at the end of November? Everyone was gearing up for Christmas, not hiring panic-stricken idiots.
The Pivot: Going Small and Silent
It sounds dramatic, but I seriously thought about selling my car. The one thing that saved me was my old buddy, Mike. He didn’t give me a loan, which I appreciate now. He gave me a job. Not a fancy one—not the kind that requires a suit or a LinkedIn profile.
Mike ran a small web maintenance firm. He had a backlog of tiny tasks: fixing broken image links, patching super old CMS security holes, simple crap that didn’t pay much but was constant. He told me, “I can’t give you a salary, but I can send you ten or twenty small jobs a day. You finish them, you get paid. No excuses, no fuss.”
I took it. I locked myself in my dusty home office. I stopped reading horoscopes, I stopped watching the financial news. I stopped trying to find the next big thing. I just worked. Ten jobs turned into thirty, thirty turned into fifty.
I figured out that the secret wasn’t some cosmic alignment or a market boom—it was just doing tedious, necessary work that other people didn’t want to do and charging fairly for it. My “practice log” from that time wasn’t about coding or business strategy; it was a simple spreadsheet:
Date: 11/29/17. Tasks completed: 14. Earned: $112. Ramen consumed: 1 packet.
That was my life for the next six months. No glamour, no big returns, just survival.
The Aftermath
What I learned from that November 2017 scare is that all those “money outlooks”—horoscopes, stock tips, guru advice—it’s all noise. They were distracting me from the one thing that actually worked: putting my head down and working consistently, even when the work was boring as hell.
Now, years later, I still keep that same principle. I run my whole life on micro-tasks and small, achievable goals. I built the infrastructure for my current business the exact same way—one broken link, one security patch, one small, ugly client at a time. I never went back to relying on someone else’s prediction for my money. I earned it back, dollar by boring dollar.
When I see those headlines now, about checking your money or what some angel says, I just laugh. My money outlook is determined by how many small, annoying tasks I knock out before lunch. That’s the only astrology I trust.
