Core Truths

It’s time for me to share the toughest budgeting lesson I’ve learned...time to share my cold hard truth. Budgeting is a two-person job! I will be honest, I’m the one who held budgeting hostage. I was the one who was in charge of the bills, budgeting, reconciling, etc. If things were good, we kept moving along. If things were bad, I tried hard to keep things moving along anyway. I mean, who wants to be the bearer of bad news? Unfortunately, when there’s more month than money, you eventually have to talk about it. Unfortunately, that means the only time we really talked about money/budgeting was when things were bad. Unfortunately, for all these years I equated money talks with bad news. And that’s a hard habit to break! But, we’re doing it. It took Brandon setting bimonthly budget meetings. We first started meeting offsite for our meetings. This made it feel more like a meeting we couldn’t cancel, and it got us away from the distractions at home. The more meetings we’ve had, the easier ...

  There’s nothing like taking on some big project, something that at first might seem impossible, and then little by little you see it come together.   A couple of months ago we started to redo our kitchen by painting our kitchen cabinets (I know, now you feel bad for us). We knew it was a lot to take on, we knew it was going to take a while to complete, and we knew that anyone who has ever painted their kitchen cabinets will quickly say that is a project they would never do again. We knew all of this and we started the project anyway. Yes, it is now two months later and we are still working on it, but I have figured out, I don’t hate painting kitchen cabinets. I actually kind of enjoy it. It’s not bad…you simply put on a coat of paint, show a little patience, wait a couple of hours, then put on another coat of paint. No big deal.   But there has been a part of this project I have hated. Hated so much I thought at one point we were going to give up. It’s not the painting…...

Recently I did something big for our family. It may seem small and insignificant to most (unless you’ve ever tried to toast anything at our house), but to us, it was kind of a big deal. It’s something I could have done a long time ago, but doing it now is a sign the winds are starting to come in differently. My big move is that I bought our family a new toaster. Yes, that’s right, a new toaster. Let me explain. We’ve had our current toaster for somewhere between the last 10 to 20 years. It’s either a wedding gift from 20 years ago, or a cheap replacement of a wedding gift from maybe 10 years ago. Notice the colorful design on the side which is a result of a bread bag that had the unfortunate chance to be too close to the toaster and melted all on the side of it. If you’ve ever tried to toast anything here, you would know that it only toasts one side of each piece of bread at a time. No matter what setting it is on, it never automatically pops up, therefore it will definitely burn, unle...