Core Truths

“Do as I say and not as I do.” How many times have we said this to our kids? Sometimes they listen, and sometimes they don’t. For as long as I live, I will remember the feeling I had when I realized, he listened. As I sat in the driver seat of our car, watching the taillights of his car drive away, with singular tears making their way down my cheek, I knew, he had listened. As Brandon and I talked on the way home about the choices our son made and what those choices mean for his future, we knew his life would be forever the better. This particular night really dates back to our son’s freshman year of high school when he needed a new phone. We have a deal with our kids that we will buy their first cell phone for them at an age that it is convenient for us that they have one. For our oldest son, it was in fifth grade when he was staying after school for extra-curricular activities and was going to basketball practice in the evenings. By the time our son was a freshman in high school, he ...

In this three-part blog series, we have shared how we learned to have a good budget meeting and how we create our monthly budgets. In this third and final post, we are excited to share what has probably been our favorite part…reducing expenses! In the past, when we have thought about reducing expenses, we think of going without something and choosing things to give up. While that can be a part of it, there’s more to it than just that. The downside is that reducing your monthly expenses can take up quite a bit of time. Shopping around for better savings and actually making the switch can take months to finalize, but don’t let that stop you from giving it a try. Once we got started, it was almost like a game or a new challenge to see how low we could go on some of our recurring expenses. Our first bit of advice on this one is to go after one thing at a time. This is important when you are looking at expenses like wireless service, internet providers, and home and auto insurance coverage....

  In part one of a three-part blog series, we shared how to have a good budget meeting. We mentioned some of the things we have learned, such as schedule the meeting, meet offsite or away from all distractions, use budgeting tools to help you budget, come up with your plan, and execute. And of course, be ready for the unexpected. In this post, we want to share some of the budgeting tools and how-tos that have worked well for us. Most of what we have found to work comes right out of Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University teachings. One key to good budgeting is creating a zero-based budget, meaning you budget and account for every single dollar that comes in and goes back out. What this means is after you have accounted for all your expenses, whatever is remaining is used towards debt, thus your bottom line is zero. Sounds great, right? It is, except this requires you to predict how much money is going to be spent before your budget month or week has even started! For me, the Ever...

  There’s no better way to get control of your finances than creating and sticking to a budget.   Sounds easy enough, right? In this three-part blog series, we will share with you the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to how we started having good budget meetings, how we actually create our budget using budgeting tools, and ways we were able to reduce spending to have more money to put towards our student loan debt.   So first things first, we had to learn to talk to each other about money…and not just when we would run out of it! I don’t know about you, but it turns out, Brandon and I had very different viewpoints when it came to how we should budget our money. Turns out, we also had very different viewpoints when it came to how we should pay off debt. If there was one viewpoint we did share in common, it was that we wanted to pay off those student loans. Turns out, the only way to do that was to find a way to face these differences and to come up with a plan tog...

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...