The Journey Begins

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Posted on by chriscanuel

drowning
Let’s be real. When it comes to our finances, many of us feel just like the person in the picture above. We are drowning in our debt and barely hanging on for our lives.
This was certainly the case for me until about 2 years ago when I finally decided that I’d had enough. While my wife and I certainly don’t make a lot of money, we make too much money to feel so poor. Every month it was (and oftentimes still is) a struggle to stay afloat.
We have 7 kids (yep, you read that right) so we buy lots of food and diapers, but they don’t eat and poop THAT much. What was the deal? Why does this happen EVERY month? Finally, we decided to take a closer look at our finances…
What we discovered was that our biggest problem wasn’t that our kids ate too much. Our biggest problem wasn’t that things were too expensive. Our biggest problem wasn’t that we didn’t make enough money. SOOO…what was our biggest problem?!?
Ourselves…
We were lazy and we were stupid. We ate out too much, we spent too much on credit cards, and we were living way above our means. Something had to be done.
As we continue on in our journey, I will go into much more detail about why and how my wife and I finally realized how lazy and stupid we were being and what we began to do to fix it. (Like I said, we are STILL a work in progress…)
But here is the biggest thing we all need to understand right now…we have to stop blaming everyONE and everyTHING other than ourselves. If we are ever going to right this financial ship of ours, we are going to have to start taking responsibility for ourselves.
Decide today that you no longer want to be drowning in your debt and poor financial decisions. Decide today that you CAN and WILL begin to do what’s best for you and your family’s financial future.
First steps:
  1. Look over your bank statement and figure out how much money you are making and how much you are spending. (This is often eye-opening, because we all tend to overestimate how much we make, and underestimate how much we are spending.)
  2. Create a budget, and look for ways that you can cut spending.  (Do you really need to eat lunch out 5 days a week? What if you packed a lunch instead?)
  3. Don’t get overwhelmed. (Repairing our finances, like all of life is a process. Take it slow, and take baby steps. You can’t eat an elephant in one bite, nor can you correct years of bad decisions in one day. Piece by piece you CAN get on track, and begin to make real progress towards your financial goals.)

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