John Singer Sargent and Edward Shenton: Two Artists in The Great War
Since I didn't (and still don't) get a regular paycheck I put that one down and picked up another and read "Make sure to direct deposit your regular paycheck into your bank account so you can, blah-blah-blah... ", I put that one down, and picked up another, and quickly found that all the books written on personal finance say the same thing! They make the assumption that you receive a regular paycheck, and the rest of the advice about saving, planning and investing hinges on that being in place. Many of us at this point would toss the books in the air and run screaming, having confirmed that indeed there is no instruction manual for someone with a fluctuation income.
But I read those books, and about a hundred more. To get deeper, I started taking finance classes with the goal of answering the question: How do you plan for the future if you don't know how much money you're going to make?
The easiest thing to do, and what many of us have done for long stretches of our career is... nothing.
We may be paying our bills on time, keeping up with our student loan payments, and hopefully even staying out of credit card debt - and that feels good. It feels responsible, like we're keeping our sh*t together, and living like adults. And when you don't know what you can expect to come in a month or two down the road, it feels safer to leave the check you got today in your checking account to wait for future bills. It may even feel irresponsible to sock some portion of that money away, when you might need to fill an unexpected lull. And this is precisely what makes it so hard to plan for anything farther away than the current month.
For years my financial planning was comprised of keeping a mental tally of expected checks and future work, ticking-off this month's bills, then next month, and inevitably funneling my money towards the noisiest expenses without any thoughts of the future. But the dangers of this scenario are threefold:
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John Singer Sargent was drinking tea with his friend Henry Tonks in a café somewhere in the Somme Valley near Arras, France. It was a foggy morning in late August, 1918 when they got word that there had been a battle in the nearby town of Albert. The British of the 2nd and 3rd Divisions were in the process of pushing back the Germans but they had met heavy resistance which included a massive gas attack. The sixty-two-year-old artist picked up his sketchbook and headed for the forward dressing station on the Doullens-Arras road, where gassed solders were being treated.
Sargent had been commissioned by the British Government to produce a large, heroic painting celebrating Anglo-American cooperation, but that cooperation was hard to locate. He complained that the only time he saw British and American troops together was when they were occupying the same crowded road. When he arrived at the front he saw "... a harrowing sight, a field full of gassed and blindfolded men." He immediately took out his sketchbook and began to draw. The subject of his commission had just changed.
