The Boredom Has Set In

I have watched WAY too much TV, checked out WAY too much Facebook, and sitting around doing WAY too much of nothing.  I don't do sick too well.  At first I thought this rest stuff would be awesome.  No grocery shopping, no laundry, no cleaning, just sitting...doing nothing.  It was awesome for about 2 hours.  Then I got antsy.

I absolutely love to read, but I only check out books from the library.  Since I wasn't planning this whole flu thing, I didn't check one out last week.  Silly me.  Next time, I'll be sure to plan.  Luckily, I had two Dave Ramsey books on hand, Total Money Makeover and Financial Peace University.  I was already halfway through Total Money Makeover so I finished that up and began Financial Peace University.

First off, I love both of them.  I love the message they convey.  I love the whole use every dollar every month.  I love the 'Tell Your Money Where To Go' attitude.  I love making a new budget each month to fit what happens in that month.  I love it all.

Steven and I have never been bad with our money, but we definitely live on a very limited income since we opted for me to stay home with the kids.  We don't have debt outside of our mortgage.  So why FPU (Financial Peace University)?  Frankly, we wanted to be more intentional about where our money goes.  More disciplined.  So far, we are almost one month down and this is definitely a new way of life for us.  It gives us so much more control and PEACE.  Shut the front door, right?

Since beginning this new lifestyle, I've had multiple questions and comments about what we're doing.  I think it's great to see so many people curious about changing the way they handle money, and how many of my friends are ALREADY doing this.  It's awesome.  Simply awesome.

What's not awesome are the statistics in this book.  I get so heartbroken at what people around me are going through with their finances.  Take this excerpt...

Now, if you live in a middle-income neighborhood, out of your 100 closest neighbors there is at least one house empty from foreclosure, plus one foreclosure under way, and four to seven of your neighbors are more than three months behind on their house payment.

~Dave Ramsey, Financial Peace Revisited

Good grief!  This is terrible...and real.  What really rocks me to the core is when I reference this with comments made by others.  

I could never do the whole cash thing.  I don't want to be that restricted.

If I want to go out to eat and not cook dinner, then that's what I want to do.  I don't want to wait on the cash to be there.

But what do you do if there's a really good sale?  How can you pass that deal up?  It will cost you more later?

So is our needs to have stuff more important then our needs to live within our means.  Are we really willing to put our homes in jeopardy because we want the stuff?  Crash our future finances for a great meal at the restaurant everyone has been talking about?  Maybe the people who own these comments really know they can afford to do all their 'wants'.  We can't.  This is why we opted for a more disciplined approach to our money.  Does it totally suck to decline invitations because we don't have the cash in the designated envelope?  Yep, but it doesn't suck to know what we are working towards just got a little more attainable.