About Personal Fixer Upper

Started as an accountability booster, Personal Fixer Upper, is a personal fitness and finance blog. It is an account of my journey to financial freedom and personal wellness.

I am Drew and previously in life, I have eaten poorly, considered working my “workout”, lived off my credit cards, and only worried about money, when I was cutting it close on paying bills. After sitting down one night out of pure boredom while in a hotel room, with no hockey on tv, I did a little number crunching and realized that I couldn’t continue living this way. I looked for things to cut from my life that I didn’t need, but I had no clue what I was doing. My only education in finance was from high school. The one semester long class taught me the 1040 short form, how to balance my checkbook (I don’t use checks), and how to apply for a loan. About a week later I got the chance to drive a truck from Northeastern Wisconsin to Northeastern Ohio, a 9 hour drive one way. I picked 2 podcasts to start on this 18 hour journey. The Mad Fientist, and Listen Money Matters, opened my eyes on how to fix my financial situation. Since then, I have watched my net worth go from -$14,381, to positive. I still have a long way to go on that front, but each day is progress toward being “bad debt” free and financially free.

Health wise, I used to think that working an event where I would get over 10,000 steps was good enough of a workout. I’m sure it was when I was a poor college student and didn’t have an entire catering buffet to choose from when I do most of these shows. on an average year I have about 150 “show days” that I will be setting up, tearing down, and/or working an event. This contains loading/unloading trucks, setting up lighting equipment for a large variety of shows, lifting equipment up to 90 pounds. You can work up quite the sweat, but after 3 hours of load in, the rest of my 16 hour day is sitting around waiting for the show to start, and then a couple hours of tearing down. as we say in the industry, Hurry up and wait, Hurry up and wait. I used to hover around 175 lbs and had a little bit of a gut, but I wasn’t too bad. I always thought that I was still in that range until I sat on a pipe we had rigged up with a load cell to weigh some of our cases for future reference. I sat and saw 220 lbs. I was actually closer to 215 after I went to get my own bathroom scale and tool off the tool belt. Needless to say, I was embarrassed that I had let myself go. I joined a gym near my apartment and realized how bad I was. I could hardly do any cardio, I did about 10 minutes on a bike and watch an elderly gentleman show me up on several machines. after a couple months of no progress, because I was eating garbage, I gave up. Defeated. I was able to maintain the same weight for about a year, because I stopped going out to eat every day for lunch. I’ve further cut out bad food like processed dessert snacks, which I had loaded my lunches with. I haven’t followed any certain diet, I’ve just slowly revised what I’m eating and how much I eat. I’ve finally rejoined the gym, and forced myself to make the habit of exercising and keeping unhealthy snacks out of my pantry. My end goal is to be at or below 175 and maintain that weight.

I welcome any questions, conversation, or support you may have. I even welcome criticism, as I am always revising the design work I do every day in my job. Even if you need encouragement to get better financially, or physically, I’ll be willing to help both of us challenge each other.

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