The Covid-19 pandemic has created such a shock to people’s lives, it’s prompted a financial reckoning akin to a midlife crisis.
Just ask Stacy Small, 51. The Maui resident’s profitable high-end travel business had allowed her to buy her dream beach house and drive a Porsche Cayenne. On March 20, she was forced to cancel a year’s worth of bookings, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. Within a week, she cut ties with 28 independent contractors. Around the same time, three close friends were diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, while others battled Covid.
And then she had a near-fatal car accident on April 21. “Covid killed the travel business I spent 15 years building,” she said. “The car accident could have killed me. It truly was a wake-up call to make a lot of huge changes.”
With no options, she sold her house in September. She stopped focusing on making money and began concentrating on her emotional wellbeing. As part of her healing process, she began baking cookies. She has since turned it into a business — Stacy Maui Cookies — investing $50,000 of her own money, along with an investor/partner and a “pretty significant commitment” for a licensing agreement with a fast-growing healthy food franchise.
“Now I’m living a much simpler happier version of life,” she said. “Renting a beautiful, ocean-view home, driving a Jeep.”
What happened to Small was what some have traditionally thought of as a midlife crisis. In the public imagination, these lead to men buying sports cars and having affairs, but often their effects are more common and muted. Brought on by health scares, behavioral shifts or job losses, people start to question their life choices and ponder the realization that no one’s immortal.
And while the phenomenon became associated with people between 35 and 50 years old, psychologists say it isn’t tied to an age, but simply a jolt similar to what the pandemic has brought.
“Some of us went into certain fields of work because we felt they would be more secure,” financial coach Amanda Clayman said. “We said, ‘I’ll make some sacrifices between how exciting and passionate I’ll get about my work, because it will be reliable and support other values that are important. And then, when that financial security is actually taken away from us, it’s, ‘Why am I doing this in the first place? That’s not the deal I made.’”
Michael Woodcock, 40, was furloughed from his job in late March as the front-desk manager at a large hotel chain in Boston. It was an unpleasant wake up call. “When they said they were furloughing people, some people were kept on,” he recalls. “I started thinking, ‘What did or didn’t I do to be one of those people to be kept on?’”
Losing his job, which he loved, made him question his career choices and identity — and whether he could provide for his wife and 9-year-old daughter in Beverly, Massachusetts. He took a job delivering packages, refinanced his home and spent less, while leaning on his wife’s paycheck.