Household Finances
linusb4 on sxc.hu
My wife and I are both in our 20’s and it seems that our friends from high school and other friends our age which we have made tend to live very different lives. We have an interesting story to our lives really. OK maybe not interesting, but odd for sure. We find that a fairly normal path of life is to get into debt until you are in over your head and not deal with it until much later in life. We have witnessed this in family members as well as many others and we see our friends headed right down the same path. We made the decision not to go that way. Here is what we did.
The first thing we did seems contrary to the process. We decided that if we were going to raise a family that we would like to be a single income family. So we made some adjustments to our budget and she quit her job. This was a huge change, but an important one.
Next we used our mortgage to our benefit. We refinanced all of our debt-school, cars, credit cards-into it. Many people are against this, but we are very blessed with a low mortgage payment still so it was a wise decision in this case. We made a decision at that time not to ever have another car payment or loan except the mortgage. The only exception has been my recent return to school which we had accounted for.
We also made huge changes to our lifestyle. We have Netflix instead of TV as an example. We cut back everywhere we can. We have found that living outside of the excess makes you appreciate what you have so much more.
All that being said, we live very normal and typical American lives even though we live just slightly above the poverty line. We never go without food and good food at that. We never go without entertainment. Most important, we never go without anything we need. Making changes like this now will make it so much easier to plan for retirement when we are older because we won’t be held back by our debts. We believe very much that God has used us in many ways because of our commitment to financial responsibility and hope to see that more in the future.
