40 lessons I've learned in my 40s
Funny, financial, fertile, finnicky and frank lessons I've learned by the age of 42
A couple of months ago, I worked on a project regarding anti-aging. The advice on diet, dating, exercise and supplements came in droves. There was even advice about why in-person scientific studies needed to be done to examine the skin.
It was an educational job to do, primarily because I was patting myself on the back for my second round at veganism. But the whole time I was editing the marketing docs, I kept thinking, “Why are people so unhappy with being alive for another year? Why are you pissed off for waking up another day?” I can’t relate.
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There was no greater punishment for me as a child than for my mother’s (questionable) friends suggesting that I sit at the “kids’ table.” On both sides of my family, my blood relatives never tried to segregate us. My favorite hangout days were with my parents’ landlord, and I could talk for hours on end with my grandfather, my Girl Scout leader or my great great aunt. (R.I.P. to all of them now.) I have always been an old soul. Even my Barbie collection (almost 30 dolls) had an itinerary and their clothes changed on a daily basis. I’m not even slightly surprised that I’ve mirrored the lifestyle I wanted my Barbies to live, dog included.
But there have been a load of lessons I’ve learned over the past 42 years (Veteran’s Day birthday: 11/11) regarding finances, fertility, being finnicky and frankly funny moments that still make me laugh. Here are all 40!
10 financial lessons learned after turning 40
YouTube videos from people telling you why renting is way better than buying a home are 99.9% likely to be landlords. Do not listen to them — even if you don’t live in these four home-friendly cities: Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Houston, Texas; or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Every time you see a video of them emphasizing rentals, they always have another video confirming they own a home.
Form 1098, the mortgage interest statement, is my absolute favorite form to download (or get in the mail). As a full-time freelancer, I would be digging in my couch for change if I didn’t get some kind of break after paying property taxes and mortgage interest. (Refer back to #1. You get no tax write-off for renting.)
If you suck at saving, don’t ever opt out of letting your mortgage company pay your biannual property taxes. It’s tough enough when you find out your monthly mortgage payments are $300 higher than they were six months ago. Thanks for nothing, Chicago!
Always know the deadline for the property tax appeal letter. It’s better to hear “no” than to do nothing. Six months can’t come fast enough!
Create your grocery list on Google Tasks. Otherwise you’ll be staring aimlessly in the grocery store, buying everything you wanted and regretting it all when you return to your kitchen full of nothing you needed.
I hope my economics teacher is still alive, well and swimming in money like Scrooge McDuck. I talked nonstop through his class; half-heartedly read the newspaper sections he assigned; and have been scrambling to put all his advice into Stash, TreasuryDirect and an IRA over the past few years.
Geometry, trigonometry, biology and chemistry classes were a waste of time, and I knew this when I was a grumpy teenager taking those mandatory classes! But that typing class at the age of 15 has been lucrative every day of my life — from clerical work to transcriptions to reporting to web editing. 81 words per minute, thank you!
Tom may have been a mandatory friend on MySpace, but that guy was the actual friend I needed who gave me the opportunity to learn a lot about HTML coding. If not for messing around on that social media platform the same year I graduated from college (2003), I don’t think I would’ve ever been hired for any digital editing job. I was messing around with HTML coding for five years before a newspaper hired me as their Web Editor. Granted, the Chicago Tribune’s content management system platform improved what I learned, but MySpace has been more useful career-wise than Facebook, Instagram and TikTok combined.
Unless you really want to do something that your undergraduate degree doesn’t offer, going to grad school is overrated. I owed only a few thousand in student loans when I got my bachelor’s degree. Then I spent three times that amount to change my major THREE times (Communications, Public Relations, Writing) and became a grad school dropout. I was acting like Lisa Bonet at a super expensive, private, Catholic school. I’m not even Catholic!
Instead of fluctuating between 30 days banning food delivery and the next 30 with a “takeout pass,” watch cooking channels. I used to watch Justin Wilson's “Louisiana Cookin'“ show with my grandparents all the time, and I see now why it gave them an extra battery pack in their backs to cook more. Nowadays, even if I have it, I think, “This one order is equivalent to a week’s worth of groceries. Turn on a burner, play a video you saved on YouTube and get to work.”