It has been far too long since we have updated our blog. Time has gotten away with us, with the summer and vacations and hectic schedules. Our lives have been going through many changes and we are working hard to achieve balance in all areas. Not the easiest task, but our efforts seem to be paying off.
Health Update:
Where we are at: We are three months into our personalized "12 weeks to wellness" Plan. The plan was given to us by our doctor Dr. Jana. As I have mentioned previously I heard her speak at a wellness conference. If you are looking for a personalized plan to wellness I would highly recommend checking her out. Even if you are not local to the greater Nashville area she does consultations over the phone. We have moved into the second phase of our plan and we are adding back more foods and feeling the benefits of the supplements we are taking with our cleaned out bodies.
What I have learned: While I can't speak for Colin on this one I am discovering how food affects my body. When you are starting with a clean slate you can discover what works and what doesn't for your body(whether it's an upset stomach, a headache, change in energy levels, etc.) I am learning to be more creative with foods. As you know this spring we joined a CSA. I love it! It's exciting each week to see what fresh and seasonal produce we'll be getting and deciding what to make. We both love cooking and it's nice to know we're supporting local farmers and getting produce that is so fresh. I have learned to trust in God made things. While I believe modern medicine is a result of the God given talents many possess, I also recognize as a society we have come all too accustomed to running to quickly to the doctor, the pharmacy, the medicine cabinet. There can be a natural solution to a lot of things and the herbs and supplements we have added to our lives has helped me to realize there are other options. And maybe one of the biggest things I have learned is I can survive without grains, commercial dairy products, and traditional flour products! I never thought that could be possible, but it is. And i don't feel like I'm deprived of anything and in fact my body seems much happier.
Financial Update:
Where we are at: We are continuing to work hard at getting out of debt completely. We have made a lot of progress since we began the journey to being debt free 2 years ago. We are working on paying off the last of it and no longer feeling like we are slaves to money. We are very diligent with following Dave Ramsey's plan. I value his opinions of money and like his philosophy. We just started the 13 week Financial Peace University course. It is being taught at our church and we figured we have been working this plan for a while now and we want to make sure there isn't anything we are missing. I also recently read the book Automatic Millionaire. It's a good read. There are some things I don't really agree with and I prefer Dave Ramsey's plan but it was a very useful and informative book.
What I have learned: If you have a financial plan you will succeed. If you are on the same page with your spouse in terms of finances you will succeed. Life is unexpected and financial emergency will come up no matter what, if you are prepared for them and have an emergency fund you can succeed. You don't have to make 100,000 plus a year to save and retire with wealth. Again, if you have a plan you can succeed! I really believe that and everyday I feel we are a little closer to financial peace.
Spiritual Update:
Where I am at: I have almost finished a book I have been reading for a while now Total Forgiveness.
What I have learned: The book has been very eye opening and I feel like I am learning so much from it. I highly recommend it. A good friend gave it to me several years back and I just filed it away with a bunch of other books thinking I didn't really have anything to learn about forgiveness. But I was wrong. As we continue to go thru this journey to balance it all comes back here to God realizing if that component is off your whole life is out of whack. There are always moments of disconnect and and lack of faith where I think I am fine on my own. But when it comes down to it I recognize it is impossible and exhausting to try and do it all alone.
So long story just a little bit longer. These past three months have been such a learning experience. I am grateful to have my husband along for the ride with me.
"Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction" Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Showing posts with label debt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label debt. Show all posts
Monday, July 12, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
DEBT
i mentioned debt before and how we got our motivation to get it out of our lives. i wanted to share the thought process behind being free of debt as well as some tools that have help us get our finances in order. we are FREE of consumer debt and are tackling education debt now. we used to think we were good with our money, but quickly realized the way we were going about paying things off by paying the minimum or sometimes a little more wasn't helping us get out of it.
Dave Ramsey is a big believer in paying the smallest debt first and paying the minimums on everything else. so when you do your monthly budget and you figure out how much you NEED to spend on the basics, whatever is leftover should be applied to debt. You should pay the minimum on everything except your smallest debt which should get the remainder of everything leftover for the month. this method will help you to see a quick reward of paying off a small debt and once that is gone you take what you were paying towards that combined with what you are paying toward your second smallest debt and put it all toward that. Dave Ramsey goes into more detail on this on his website and has plenty of free tools and information that are worth checking out.
Another tool we utilize is the envelope system. several financial folks recommend this method as a way to have a clearer picture of what you are spending. when we do our monthly budget we use an envelope system for items that can be paid for in cash such as: groceries, entertainment, gas, clothing, etc. for example if we have budgeted to spend $200 a month on groceries, when we go to the store we pull cash from the "Groceries" envelope. when the envelope is empty we don't have any more money left to spend on those items. so instead of just going out and buying things we may or may not need we think about what we are purchasing and if we need it right away or at all. since we have started eating more healthfully, we have noticed we have needed to spend more on food during the month. so when we do our budget we adjust it accordingly, shifting money from other things that are of lower priority.
even though we still have a little ways to go we feel so much lighter knowing we have already accomplished so much. it helps us to really think about what we are spending our money on and what we really need not what we think we need. there are more people who are out there giving financial advice aside from Dave Ramsey, we just trust and respect his advice, which is why we refer to him on here.
Dave Ramsey is a big believer in paying the smallest debt first and paying the minimums on everything else. so when you do your monthly budget and you figure out how much you NEED to spend on the basics, whatever is leftover should be applied to debt. You should pay the minimum on everything except your smallest debt which should get the remainder of everything leftover for the month. this method will help you to see a quick reward of paying off a small debt and once that is gone you take what you were paying towards that combined with what you are paying toward your second smallest debt and put it all toward that. Dave Ramsey goes into more detail on this on his website and has plenty of free tools and information that are worth checking out.
Another tool we utilize is the envelope system. several financial folks recommend this method as a way to have a clearer picture of what you are spending. when we do our monthly budget we use an envelope system for items that can be paid for in cash such as: groceries, entertainment, gas, clothing, etc. for example if we have budgeted to spend $200 a month on groceries, when we go to the store we pull cash from the "Groceries" envelope. when the envelope is empty we don't have any more money left to spend on those items. so instead of just going out and buying things we may or may not need we think about what we are purchasing and if we need it right away or at all. since we have started eating more healthfully, we have noticed we have needed to spend more on food during the month. so when we do our budget we adjust it accordingly, shifting money from other things that are of lower priority.
even though we still have a little ways to go we feel so much lighter knowing we have already accomplished so much. it helps us to really think about what we are spending our money on and what we really need not what we think we need. there are more people who are out there giving financial advice aside from Dave Ramsey, we just trust and respect his advice, which is why we refer to him on here.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Journey
it all started about a year and a half ago, this shift in thinking. it crept up on us as we were in the process of buying our first home. and it hit us hard when we got said house, moved in, and starting living our new lives as homeowners. DEBT. the house, school, some stupid decisions, etc. we were determined to live debt free lives and enjoy the things we had rather than see them as a burden. i started listening to Dave Ramsey and getting serious about debt. i shared what i was learning with my husband and we decided to make some changes in our lives, get a "real" budget and start paying it all off.
in the process of paying everything off we began to see how important this new lifestyle was in relation to our relationship with God. we have been Christian's for a while now. my husband for 13 years and me for almost 8. we were quickly beginning to see how a cluttered life is distracting. when you are worried about paying off debt you become obsessed with it. we wanted to be better off for being debt-free and find a healthy balance between hating debt and obsessing over it. i should mention we were not in a terrible place, we weren't struggling to live, or pay or mortgage or anything like that. and if we continued down the route we were on we would have probably just ended up like most Americans with a balance on a credit card or two not thinking too much about it. but the point was we didn't want a balance on a credit card, or school loans, we wanted to have the freedom that comes with being debt free.
So we began the journey and started dreaming of a future sans debt. more time to do the things we loved, more money to do it, a future, more to give to causes we wanted to support. along this journey that we are still on (but we see the light at the end of the tunnel) we have learned that as we started shedding these small debts we were understanding more about God and ourselves. if we were responsible with the things God had given us, how much better and more rewarding our lives could be.
that journey in part lead us to a new one. a little over a month ago i went to a women's wellness conference. I've been to conferences before but most either focused on health or spirituality alone, but this conference brought both topics together. it only echoed what i had already been thinking, that every decision we make, or don't make, all these things are tied together from where we spend our money to how we treat our bodies. what if we could be debt free, healthy, and spiritual. what if being spiritual is already encouraging those things in us, and therefore it is God's plan for us to live that way.
So again we have expanded our thinking. past getting out of debt to encompass healthy living. and realizing that healthy living to us was is having no debt, treating our bodies as temples, and having a relationship with God. we started seeing a "natural" doctor. one that didn't want to put my husband on medication because his cholesterol was slightly elevated, one that thinks there is a better fix for problems than swallowing a pill and moving on. just like how we learned to see paying for something with a credit card is not a solution. it's just a big band-aid.
so here we are now, a few weeks into our new nutrition lifestyle which our doctor calls "12 weeks to wellness". we are in the first phase of the process which helps to get all the toxins out of our bodies that we have been accumulating for years with medicine and heavily processed foods. Our food options are a little limited right now, but it is forcing us to think about what we are putting in our bodies. we'd like to use this blog to talk about our journey to a less cluttered life. we want to share articles we love, the food we're eating, tips, observations, frustrations, decisions and anything else we may encounter along the way.
in the process of paying everything off we began to see how important this new lifestyle was in relation to our relationship with God. we have been Christian's for a while now. my husband for 13 years and me for almost 8. we were quickly beginning to see how a cluttered life is distracting. when you are worried about paying off debt you become obsessed with it. we wanted to be better off for being debt-free and find a healthy balance between hating debt and obsessing over it. i should mention we were not in a terrible place, we weren't struggling to live, or pay or mortgage or anything like that. and if we continued down the route we were on we would have probably just ended up like most Americans with a balance on a credit card or two not thinking too much about it. but the point was we didn't want a balance on a credit card, or school loans, we wanted to have the freedom that comes with being debt free.
So we began the journey and started dreaming of a future sans debt. more time to do the things we loved, more money to do it, a future, more to give to causes we wanted to support. along this journey that we are still on (but we see the light at the end of the tunnel) we have learned that as we started shedding these small debts we were understanding more about God and ourselves. if we were responsible with the things God had given us, how much better and more rewarding our lives could be.
that journey in part lead us to a new one. a little over a month ago i went to a women's wellness conference. I've been to conferences before but most either focused on health or spirituality alone, but this conference brought both topics together. it only echoed what i had already been thinking, that every decision we make, or don't make, all these things are tied together from where we spend our money to how we treat our bodies. what if we could be debt free, healthy, and spiritual. what if being spiritual is already encouraging those things in us, and therefore it is God's plan for us to live that way.
So again we have expanded our thinking. past getting out of debt to encompass healthy living. and realizing that healthy living to us was is having no debt, treating our bodies as temples, and having a relationship with God. we started seeing a "natural" doctor. one that didn't want to put my husband on medication because his cholesterol was slightly elevated, one that thinks there is a better fix for problems than swallowing a pill and moving on. just like how we learned to see paying for something with a credit card is not a solution. it's just a big band-aid.
so here we are now, a few weeks into our new nutrition lifestyle which our doctor calls "12 weeks to wellness". we are in the first phase of the process which helps to get all the toxins out of our bodies that we have been accumulating for years with medicine and heavily processed foods. Our food options are a little limited right now, but it is forcing us to think about what we are putting in our bodies. we'd like to use this blog to talk about our journey to a less cluttered life. we want to share articles we love, the food we're eating, tips, observations, frustrations, decisions and anything else we may encounter along the way.
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