Finances

A few nights ago it hit me.  I attest it to the prophet requesting woman to go on the social media 10 day fast.  I dug out our pocket books and really started analyzing things and then I listened to an entire book in 2 days of Dave Ramsey and then 2 other personal finance bloggers.  All these things swirling around and lots of talking with my husband I decided I'm embarrassed about my finances.  People definitely have things much worse than us and others are much more responsible.  However, in the end, we can do better.  There's always more to learn.  So any personal finance people want to send me advise or pointers they've learned...I may have heard it, but send it anyways.  

Let me share a couple new things I learned.  The first are obvious it would seem...the normal your incoming better be better than your outgoing.  OR every purchase matters, especially the small ones.  The more interesting of which was a blogger sharing...do your dishes every night so that the sink is empty of dishes.  This leads to better finances (weird, right?).  Well, a simple explanation made me feel like I totally missed the mark.  If the dishes are done, you are less likely to have an excuse to not make a home cooked meal.  How many times have I turned exhausted to the husband saying..."I don't even want to make dinner, I have to spend an hour doing dishes before I can even get to making dinner."  Yeah...I should have realized that one.  I love just enjoying the evening doddling with my spouse or on the internet.  There's a better place to put my time (or at least more productive).

Dave Ramsey is full of great pointers.  The big one is we recently financed our used van.  We were actually proud of ourselves.  
1) Yay!  We bought used...good for us.  
2) We didn't get it from a dealership.  
3) We didn't get sucked into some stupid warranty.  
We felt like we learned from our past mistakes.  Then I listened to Dave Ramsey and man, we should have never financed the van.  We could have bought an older, higher mileage van or better yet a beater car and paid cash.  So...yes, more learning for us yet to do.

There's more that was learned...I hope we can stay on the path of watching my budget better and not letting it get away from us.  I'm sure blessed to have a husband that supports that plan with very little disagreements with any of the budget along the way.  Cheers to hopefully not being embarrassed about finances every again (hah! well hopefully not this embarrassed although there's definitely been worse lows in the past).  Growth...right, growth.

I started an app called "Gratitude".  You should too.  Every day I have made it a goal to write in 1 thing I'm grateful for.  It's amazing when I think frequently through the day what my thing will be.  I end up with coming up with more than 1 often times.  Realistically this has only been going on a few days and I'm sure it will get harder some days.  But, it's nice to think more on things I'm grateful for than what is pressing or hard in my day that my mind may otherwise go to.  Refreshing.