Pete Goldfinger - I Am Not My Grandfather… Though I Resemble Him

 

 

My grandfather immigrated to this country when he was 11 years old. With nothing more than a fifth-grade education, he raised two girls in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. When the time came for him to retire in the 60s, he didn't have a lot of money. But his accountant told him that his son-in-law worked at an investment firm and that it was going pretty well. My grandfather invested there and it went pretty well.

 

And in the 1970s, he invested $10,000 in my name. Over the years, I would always hear about this money that, “You can't spend it. It's just for emergencies. And if you save it, it will grow. You should put more money into it whenever you can.” And so, when I reached my 20s, saving money became a religion to me. Well, it actually is a religion. It's called Judaism. [audience laughter]

 

But the best example I can think of to illustrate this was that I lived in an apartment just south of the 101 on Vermont, where I lived in a basement studio apartment. Every time that it rained, feces would come up through the drain. I would be really happy, because it meant that my landlord was only going to charge me for a half a month's rent. [audience laughter] And it never dawned on me that like, when your financial plan involves rooting for shit to come up through the drain, you might need a better plan. [audience laughter]

 

But eventually, I met a woman who agreed to marry me. Despite these peculiarities, she was very taught well. There was one time where we had this oven that was leaking gas, and she came to me and said, “I'd like to get a new oven. Do you think we could use some of that money?” And I said, “Oh, no, no, my grandfather said that was just for emergencies.” [audience laughter]

 

But eventually, we had a daughter. As sometimes happens in this town, I sold something that I wrote, and it provided me with a check for enough money to put down the down payment on a house in the valley. We didn't have enough money for the mortgage payments. My wife convinced me, I don't know how that we could maybe use some of this money to help make the mortgage payments. It was with great trepidation that we bought a house in October of 2008.

 

And then, on December 15th of 2008, it was a very big day for us. We found out in the morning that my wife was pregnant with our second child, which gave me the better part of the day to figure out how I was going to pay for her college education. But that night, just as we were going to bed, I opened up Yahoo and the splash page said, “Little known financier Bernard Madoff indicted in Ponzi scheme, “It's gone. It's all gone.””

 

And that was when my grandfather's golden opportunity became my curse. [chuckles] I told to my wife, I turned to my wife and shaking, I told her, “We have no money. We are completely broken.” My wife said to me, “Honey, I am so sorry to hear that.” She rolled over and slept peacefully for the next nine hours,- [audience laughter] -where I spent the night pacing the house and just trying to think of things that we could sell. We didn't really need a television set or an oven. [chuckles] At one point, I just ground myself, I would go into my daughter's room and look at her sleeping in her crib and I would think to myself, “Can we sell that crib?” But the next morning, when my wife came out, I'd been up all night and I had a list of ways that we were going to save money.

 

And for the next few months, there were a lot of mornings and a lot of lists. Some of the highlights from those lists were the time I showed her an article that said that, “You didn't need to use laundry soap to wash your clothes,” which is true. And another time, I told her that if I gathered all the extra tangerines from the tangerine tree, I could go to the farmer's market and sell them out of a basket. [audience laughter]

 

My wife was so great during this whole time. She would always just look at me and to be supportive, say, “Okay.” She knew I was going through a hard time. She was there for me. The night when at 03:00 AM, I thought I was having a heart attack. She took me to the emergency room, where the doctor diagnosed me with high blood pressure. And that, along with the rash on my back, he told me that he thought it might be stress related. [audience laughter]

 

And so, this went on for a long time, until one day, after about eight months, my wife came in, and I was working on a spreadsheet that I was now doing every month to try and figure out where we were spending all the money, and she said to me, “You know, Bobbie and I are going to walk to the market to get some salmon. Would you like to come?” And I said, “No, no, I'm busy right now. By the way, do you have to get salmon? It's very expensive.”

 

And this time, her okay was very different. This time, it came out like this, “Oh-kay.” She turned and started to walk away. I realized that probably this was an ill-advised thing to say to your wife when she's eight months pregnant. I went after and I said, “Honey, I'm just so sorry. Of course, you can buy salmon. I don't know what I was thinking and I just really want to apologize to you. I know that I've been very difficult these last eight months.” She said to me before leaving, with a sad smile, she said, “You know, honey, I don't know if this is going to make you feel any better or any worse, but these last eight months have not been that different than the eight years before we lost all this money,” and she left. [audience laughter]

 

Yeah. And as you can probably guess, it was one of those moments where you really hear something that was said to you. As I watched, my daughter and my wife walked down the driveway holding hands. I realized that this was a golden opportunity for me to do something that my grandfather had never been able to do. Albert Einstein said, “Within difficulty lies opportunity.”

 

What I realized is that happiness does not begin when you have enough money for your next month's mortgage. Happiness does not begin when you have enough money to send your kids to college. Happiness certainly doesn't begin, because a bunch of numbers on a page tell you that everything is okay. Happiness begins the instant that you say it does. I closed those spreadsheets, and I went outside to join my radiant wife and my beautiful daughter. Thank you.