“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes. You must look into that storm and shout as you did in Rome. Do your worst, for I will do mine! Then the fates will know you as we know you”
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
When my last post went live, something unexpected happened. People reached out. A lot of them. Messages, comments, check-ins from people I hadn’t heard from in years. And the thread running through almost all of them was the same: Are you okay?
First — from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much. Genuinely. That kind of care is not something I take lightly.
But I want to answer that question properly, because I think the post may have landed more emotionally than I intended. The image of a man walking away in the rain carrying a cardboard box will do that.
So here’s my honest answer:I’m okay. And I want to show you exactly why.
First, Let Me Introduce a Framework
A while back I came across something called the Financial Order of Operations — a framework built by Brian Preston and Bo Hanson over at The Money Guy Show. Think of it as a knowledgeable friend who’s also a financial advisor telling you exactly where your next dollar — or cent — should go, and in what order. It’s a 9-step sequence that removes the guesswork at every stage of your financial life.
The steps, in order:
- Deductibles Covered
- Employer Match
- High-Interest Debt
- Emergency Reserves
- Roth and HSA
- Max-Out Retirement
- Hyper-Accumulation
- Prepaid Future Expenses
- Low-Interest Debt
Now — some of these are very US-specific. Roth IRAs and HSAs don’t exist here in the Philippines. But the philosophy behind the sequence? That’s universal. Take care of the urgent before the important. Take care of the important before the optional. Build the foundation before you build the house.
I’ve been quietly working through this framework for years. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But deliberately. And when the wrench is thrown — when my primary income disappeared — I found out exactly which steps were holding me up.
What the Wrench Actually Does
Here’s something nobody tells you about a financial framework: it doesn’t just work on the way up.
When you lose your primary income, the order of operations doesn’t disappear. It shifts. Some steps you stop contributing to. Some steps you start drawing from. And some steps — the ones you quietly worked on long before any of this — turn out to be the whole reason you’re still standing.
Let me walk you through mine.
The Steps That Are Holding Me Right Now
“You don’t know what your foundation is made of until something pushes against it.”
Step 1 — Deductibles Covered. ✅ Before anything else, the FOO asks: if something goes wrong today — a medical emergency, an accident, an unexpected bill — can you absorb it without going into debt? This one was checked. It wasn’t glamorous work. It was just making sure the floor wouldn’t fall out from under us before I built anything on top of it.
Step 4 — Emergency Reserves. ✅ This is the one people kept asking about. How long can you last? The emergency fund is the answer to that question — and because I had been tracking my expenses (see the last post), I didn’t have to guess. I knew. That knowledge alone is worth more than the number itself. Panic makes bad decisions. Clarity makes good ones.
Step 9 — Low-Interest Debt. ✅ (In progress, but well ahead) While my primary income was coming in strong, I wasn’t just spending it. I was throwing it at debt — aggressively and intentionally. I’m not completely debt-free, but I’m in a very different position than I would have been if I’d just been coasting. Every cent I knocked off that balance is one less thing pulling at me right now.
The Moves I Made Before I Needed Them
“The best time to prepare for a storm is when the sun is shining.”
Here’s where it gets a little more personal — because some of what’s protecting my family right now isn’t just from the FOO checklist. It’s from decisions we made in the last year or two that, at the time, just felt like the right next step.
We sold both cars. That sounds dramatic. But think about what a car actually costs — not just the purchase price, but insurance, maintenance, registration, fuel. Two cars is two of all of that. Gone. Our monthly expenses dropped significantly, and so did the mental overhead of managing them.
We moved our family to the Philippines. This was a bigger decision — one that involved family support, which I’m very grateful for, logistics, and a fair bit of faith. But the FOO gave me the confidence to try it. When your foundation is solid, you can make bolder moves. The cost of living adjustment has been significant. And because of it, our runway is longer than most people probably assume when they see a “man walking away in the rain” headline.
Our property mortgage? Covered by our renter. We’re not paying it out of pocket. That asset is working. Not perfectly, not passively in the Instagram sense — but it is working.
The Steps That Are On Pause
And now for the honest part.
Some steps are simply not happening right now — and that’s okay. That’s actually the point of having an order of operations. You don’t have to do everything at once. You just have to know where you are.
Employer match? No employer right now, so nothing to match.
Hyper-accumulation and maxing out retirement? Paused. Every available cent is staying liquid and close.
This isn’t failure. This is triage. The FOO told me what to build first — so when I needed to stop building, the structure didn’t collapse.
Why I’m Sharing All of This
I’m not sharing this to say “look how prepared I am.” I’m sharing it because when I first came across the Financial Order of Operations, it felt like a framework for other people — people with more income, more options, more margin.
It’s not.
It’s a framework for exactly this. For the ordinary Tuesday when the infamous wrench flies by and you need to know if the ground will hold.
If you haven’t started working through it yet — start. Not because you think something bad is coming. But because you’ll never know when it does.
The umbrella you carry matters more than the rain.
Have you mapped your own financial order of operations? I’d love to know where you are in the sequence — drop it in the comments.
