A lot of people who have talked to me recently may have noticed that I can’t stop talking about money.
Money, money, money…
…It’s something that’s often at the forefront of most peoples’ minds. You wake up and think about the rent. You go to work and think about buying new car tires. You go to bed trying to figure out how to afford a bigger apartment…the list could go on for days (years, decades, forever…).
Ever since Paul and I jumped from the warm, pleasant comfort of our wedding day and plunged into the icy reality that is financial adulthood, I’ve been constantly thinking about money. A few months after we got married, we decided to move to Austin, TX. This turned out to be a pretty scary time for us. The job market was terrible, my hormones were raging, my ankles were expanding, and we couldn’t afford to have fried chicken (my pregnant tears demanded it) every night of the week. Needless to say, emotions were often running high. Finally, we decided to to pack up our stuff and head back to Nebraska, where you don’t have to sell anything on the black market in order to afford a 1 bedroom apartment.
Once we got back to the home state, things started to get better. Paul got a much better job and we weren’t nearly as scared as we were a few months prior. Our status quo became a lot more liveable. The thing is, however, had we simply been able to get ourselves organized, we could have actually been financially comfortable rather than “a little less scared.”
Let me just say(because I’m about to do some name-dropping) that I’m not writing this post to promote any kind of product. I’m simply promoting the practice of being proactive with money.
That being said, in January, at the advice of some of my friends, I read “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey. I’m not really sure what it was about the book, but it really struck me. Paul started reading it too, and pretty soon we were both agreeing that it was time for a change.
I’d really like to go into detail about how we got ourselves on track (and why I desperately want to convince my friends to do the same), but that will definitely take more than a page of blogging. Since it’s so beautiful outside here in Lincoln, and I’m sure people don’t want to be spending 45 minutes reading a blog on their computers, I’m going to turn this post into a little mini-series. I plan on talking about what we do, how we stay motivated, and how our lives have changed for the better since we started budgeting.
It’s true that my recent conversations have had a tendency to drift toward the financial side of things. The difference, though, is that I actually enjoy thinking and talking about money now, because I’ve seen the light at the end of the money-tunnel…and that light is glowing and beautiful…like a big neon sign advertising all-you-can-eat fried chicken and donuts.
And that is a beautiful, beautiful thing. Trust me. Stay tuned.