I had chemistry lab today, and managed to have my experiment (which was distilling quite nicely so far) suddenly go into a mild explosion which left me cleaning stinky dark green slime off the sides of the fume hood.  Sitting here at home still trying to get the stench out of my memory, I couldn’t help but think how much my finances used to be like my ill-fated chemistry experiment.

I used to cruise through life thinking everything would be just fine, happily ignoring any and all warning signs if they were present, until BOOM!  Some financial situation would blow up in my face…and it usually stank just as bad as my chemistry slime.  (Did I mention it was really rank under the fume hood and my arms aren’t long enough to clean it from outside the hood?)

Tuition?  Car repairs?  The water heater breaking?  The roof leaking?  I didn’t plan for those things before!  What was an emergency fund?  I had never heard of it before a little over a year ago, much less the phrase “sinking fund” which is used for planned and expected expenses.  Retirement?  I didn’t think I would live that long!

One would have thought after cleaning up two stinking divorces along with the things mentioned above…maybe I should have gotten a clue.  But just like I had no idea my distillation was about to “bump” as the professor called it, previously I had no idea things would go bad and cost me thousands over the years.  I lived crisis-by-crisis and enjoyed the times in between the crises without any forethought for the next situation.

Oh, people DID try to warn me.  The professor today warned us about “bumping” and listed the warning signs.  But sometimes things will blow up without any warning.  My experiment didn’t change colors, didn’t give a small warning “bump,” the distillation drip didn’t change speed…it was going along beautifully then BOOM! I had that stinky smelly dark green slime everywhere, including in my product…so I had to do it over.  Just like I have been “doing over” my finances for a little over a year now. 

The second time I distilled my experiment, it went perfectly…except I had lost quite a bit of my product down the drain and on the walls.  This time as I redo my finances, it is going great…except I have lost 17 years of saving for retirement.  I can’t get either back, but I can write up the product loss in my lab notebook…and I write about my financial loss here.

And for the handful of fellow chemistry geeks reading this: it’s the conversion of cyclohexanol to cyclohexene in organic chemistry using concentrated sulfuric acid and 85% phosphoric acid.  Good thing for fume hoods and goggles!  Yes I had plenty of boiling stones, and had already turned down the rheostat.  It still bumped big time, about 3 minutes before the gal two hoods down had the same problem.