My wife and I started a popular cd based financial peace class yesterday on our date day (I know…I’m so romantic! “Come on baby; I know it’s not a cruise, but let’s sit on the couch and do a money class together. Look deeply into my eyes and listen to the voice of a humorous financial guru.”) Though we had taken financial classes many years ago, we felt we were in need of a refresher to help dispel the bad habits that had claimed squatters’ rights in the abandoned wreckage of our personal financial principles.
We have definitely become over-consuming, ad susceptible, materialistic squid (you know, lots of grabbing tentacles and no backbone) …funny how the “must haves” of teenage children can weaken your resolve and cause you to make even more unwise financial choices. We felt it was time to go in and try to rescue our money management skills before they sink to a point of salvage only operations.
I recently did one of those life-circle exercises that evaluates several areas of your life like spiritual, family, friends, finances, career, adventure, etc and plots them on a wheel graph (from http://darrenhardy.success.com/) … I wasn’t too surprised by the results. Based on the ways I have invested the hours, days, and weeks of my life over the last several years there are some areas that couldn’t help but grow, others, however, are like starfish stumps just starting to grow back. The self-study revealed the ways I’ve have become like a flounder, myopically focused only in one general direction, but totally missing anything from other directions. It would explain why we were so easily caught by some medical, house, and vehicle financial snags in the last year.
Even with another 8 hour/wk job, money seems even tighter. Of course we added braces, cheer uniforms, camps, cool clothes, more fuel, car insurance increases and various other pubescent necessities. But it is not like this is some kind of life surprise. (“Well look honey, those little varmints grew up. They are eating everything in sight and outgrowing their clothes every week. How’d that happen?”) We knew this was coming, but the teenage tuna net somehow it snuck up on us anyway and we joined the millions of people being dragged into the cargo hold of the U.S.S Credit Card Debt. (It is one of a huge fleet that promises to finance the dreams of many, but somehow the commodores seem to benefit far more than those on their ships.)
Somehow, just like sedentary barnacles, we have become financially complacent bottom feeders who don’t care that the build up of useless life stuff has slowed the forward progress of our life’s own dream ship, so we thought it would be a good idea to abandon ship and pay someone else a premium to tow us along, but we’re finding out they are not charted for the destination we had hoped. Like Nemo, we hope to swim against the tide and win our freedom.
We’ve prayed about it and have kept giving our tithe, but now we have to work on the self-discipline to make wise choices with the money He entrusts to us.