Why WE Chose to Budget

I thought that before we begin this journey together it might be helpful for you to understand where my family is coming from in this.  What our perspective might be and why. So, I will jump right in to our “money” story.  

My hubby and I both came from families with pretty simple means. Ends were met, but often by stretching those means. Money was never discussed openly in either of our homes, except for maybe my parents telling me they couldn’t afford something I wanted. 

Neither one of us knew much of anything about money when we got married, except that you worked for it, and you needed it.  We both came into the marriage with plenty of debt of our own kind – mine credit card debt (and lots of it), his student loan debt.  So, we had a lot of things going against us when we started.  

But, let me tell you, we thought we were doing okay. And we did, for a time. We paid our bills on time, we had money left over, but we were still carrying a considerable amount of debt, and we weren’t really concerned about paying it off…. Years went by.  Years of things not adding up – meaning the income was enough to pay the bills, but allowed for no unexpected, or expected extras. But, through it all God was faithful in providing for us. We have sooo many stories of how God delivered us out of a difficult financial situation. 

Our church started providing a class about finances called “Financial Peace” – maybe you’ve heard of it, maybe you’ve taken it.  Well, from the beginning I knew it would be fabulous for us, but hubby was a little harder to convince.  After all, why in the world would you spend $100 for a class giving financial advice when you didn’t have the $100 to spend…that’s why you were taking the class.  After several years, however, I was able to talk him into it (after much nagging).  It revolutionized how we handle money – no lie.  Of course, probably the biggest change is that we learned how to “talk” about money, rather than fight about it. 

We still have a lot to improve on.  We are still no where near close to millionaire status – ha!  But we are far better off than we were in the beginning.  What can I say to sum up why we budget?  I guess the best thing to say is, we got tired of working so hard for money we were just going to give away to other people.  We wanted our money to work for us.