On Monday, I had a bit of a meltdown.

I was home sick and was weary enough not to change out of my pyjamas, but just functional enough to use the internet (which, essentially, sounds like my constant state of being). I decided to use my time off to get a few things organised for my visit to a tax agent in a few weeks’ time and do a cheeky pre-emptive tax return estimation to get a rough idea of what I could expect to receive.

This, especially given my current state, was a baaaaaaaad choice.

I discovered that my silly notion of not taking holidays in my previous job, which I had left in the first half of last July, meant the lump sum payout when I finally quit was included in my total earnings for the financial year just gone. And this meant I was bumped up over the threshold for repaying my HELP debt for that financial year. The consequence of this was that the decent chunk of change I’d originally thought I was entitled to upon a previous estimate had diminished by an obscene amount.

The money I’d already spent in my imagination disappeared from my grasp, and I didn’t even get to enjoy the thrill of gambling it away or dramatically setting it able to make a point about capitalism.

Needless to say, I wasn’t in a great state after this discovery. I was snotty, I was tired and I was soberly aware of how poor my financial decision-making skills were. I was in a rut, and it was all my own doing.

Compound this with the episode of Insight I happened to catch a short while after this nasty surprise. I usually love Insight. It’s one of the best programs on television. Jen Brockie is fabulous – she’s compassionate in a non-condescending way and is non-judgemental and removed without being cold – and each episode is real food for thought. But this week’s episode was hard to swallow.

I’d caught an afternoon rerun of the program, which focused on older women living in difficult conditions as a result of the financial state they found themselves in. Some of them were divorcees, some of them had businesses go bust and some of them were just never in a position to get themselves ahead financially. One woman lived in a campervan. Another lived in her car. These brave women shared their stories and some of them didn’t appear as if they’d have happy endings.

It was devastatingly sad and kicked me right in the guts. It didn’t just make me think about my own lack of a financial planning and insight, but made me aware that even if I did make all the right choices, I may one way be in a similar position.

I spoke on the phone to Mum about it, asking her if she’d had a financial plan as a woman my age. She hadn’t really, nothing overly concrete.

It’s easy to hear these stories and, being removed from the individual situations, label the women as foolish or complacent. It’s easy to say “you should have bought a house” or “you should have thought ahead”.

But what does that actually mean? What could they have actually even done? And how do I apply this to my life, being at the pivotal age and position I am to influence the course of my life for better or worse? It got me thinking about my own plans, and where I expected to end up at my mother’s age.

I do have a plan for my retirement. When both our husbands are dead, my childhood best friend and I plan on buying a beautiful old house just a few kilometres outside the town we grew up in. It’s a pretty ideal way to live out your days – among the olive trees with a lifelong friend, with plenty of wine and fresh, country air. But it hinges on a lot of assumptions and a lot of unknowns. We assume that we’ll both marry. We assume our dearly beloveds will cark it around the same time. We assume we’ll out live them. And we assume we’ll have enough dollars to not only buy the house, but to live comfortably in it.

There are so many logistical details to this plan that we simply haven’t thought out – how we’ll con some poor schmuck into marrying us, how we’ll ensure they die before we do and where we’ll find this money.

We have an end destination, but have in no way mapped out how we’ll reach this end point. My steps to get there are simply “be wealthy” and “don’t die”. The nitty gritty deets that will ensure this plan goes ahead just aren’t in place. Practical steps to this broad plan are missing.

The last practical plan I came up with was deciding to have a small dinner at 5.30pm so I could have toast and vegemite, my third breakfast of the day (I had cereal for actual breakfast and an acai bowl for lunch at like 4pm) for dessert. And hey, I’m not knocking this plan. It’s a great plan. And at just after 7.30pm, I am reaping its benefits. There’s truly nothing like enjoying a cup of tea and some buttery, salty toast on a cold, stormy night.

But unfortunately I don’t apply the same meticulous planning to the big picture aspects of my life as I do to triple breakfasts.

So what do I do now? What’s the plan? What’s my future?

Well, considering my livelihood is based on my humour writing and I’ve just written a deeply depressing post, I may have to fall back on some of my other “plans”.

Unfortunately, Plan B for when everything goes completely to shit isn’t really a plan, but more of a gimmick. It’s based on my big idea of a burger joint where the buns are exclusively garlic bread. That’s it. That’s my backup. Garlic bread burgers.

Beyond that, Plan C is being hit by a fancy, fancy car and living off the compo.

Suddenly that rule about multiple-choice exams and always going with C when you don’t know an answer seems so incredibly poignant.