Truth talk: it was a rough day yesterday.
To say I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel is an understatement.
I have this old-school piggy bank, right? Well, I guess it's not terribly old-school. Instead of the classic pink pig you think of from Toy Story, it's a shiny gold pig with fat $$$ signs on the side. It was originally a gag gift I bought for my younger brother when he turned 16. The card that accompanied it said something like, "Life is hard; you'd better start saving." I thought it was funny at the time, but he didn't because he didn't take it with him when he went off to college.
Anyway, now the golden pig sits on the second shelf of my awesome, "tied-to-the-wall" (more on that later) lamp, greedily devouring all the clinking change that sometimes accumulates in my pockets. When my bank account is getting slim, I'm always slightly comforted by the thought: "It's been a solid year or so. I've got a decent amount of change saved up in there. No need to worry."
And usually I'm right. I've never been in dire enough need to where I've had to sacrifice the pig.
Until this month.
They say that the only things that are consistent in life are death and taxes. Well, I'm venturing on adding rent to that meager list of constants.
Freaking rent.
Death comes once in a lifetime. Taxes only once a year. Rent, though, is a constant, nagging succubus that rears its ugly head every single month. I've lost more sleep to worrying about how I'm going to pay rent than worrying about taxes or death. Tax season usually pads my bank account, and I know where I'm going when I die.
But rent....
The destroyer of bank accounts.
The silent killer of all things savings.
The murderer of my golden pig.
Truth: I'm short on rent this month, and for the last three days I've been nervously contemplating if the money stashed in the swine will help me make up the difference. It was like I was secretly hoping that the more I thought about it – the more positive, mental energy I put towards it – the more money would magically appear.
If only piggy banks worked like that.
So there I sat on the edge of my bed. Four quarters to a dollar; ten dimes to a dollar; twenty nickels to a dollar; and don't even count the pennies because you always think you have more
than you really do and the change machine is going to eat them anyway. Along with the coins, I also had the foresight of stashing some dollar bills in there as well. Lucky me.
At the end of the exercise, I was surprised by what my prized pig had gotten me.
$135 and a lot of pennies.
In any other circumstance, I would have been beyond stoked at my new found fortune. With spare money like that, first thing on the list is a fancy sushi lunch accompanied by a generous tip.
But there stood rent like an evil task-master, demanding the generous offering that the pig had yielded.
Needless to say, there will be no sushi lunch.
I'll only have $15 in my bank account as of tomorrow.
And my golden pig sits empty on the second shelf yet again.
Just a day in the life of a creative entrepreneur.