Goals Part Two: Finances

As we talked about in Goals part one there were four sections in my life I was working on, we already talked about fitness goals.  Today I want talk financial goals, financial goals are important for a number of reasons.  Biblically speaking the bible tells us we cannot have two masters, we either serve God or we serve Money. Christ tells us “No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

 (Mt 6:24) If we are living in a great deal of debt it is the debt that begins to control our lives.  We have become extremely dependent on Credit Cards.  The average American carries about 15,622 dollars according to Nerdwallet.com.

I feel it is important to discuss how Autumn and I have come up with goals for our finances.  We decided that we do not want to be controlled by debt.  We have a car loan and the house mortgage, we have a credit card and normally pay it off every month.  Notice I said normally this is what we are working on in finances.  We have realized that we make a budget every month and with every intention to follow it, but we get busy and forget to sit down write down we are buying.  What happens is we overspend on groceries, or entertainment or whatever.  We have come up with a plan we have put partially in place. The plan consists of rules to help guide us so we don’t have to dip into our savings to pay off the credit card at the end of month. 

Rule number one:

 we have to tell each other what we are buying, this isn’t asking permission, it is more of making sure we know what has been spent.  But we do ask each other, here is an example.  The other day I was on Amazon and saw a movie we both really enjoyed, we do not normally buy movies anymore because we found we never watch them enough for it to make sense.  I asked Autumn and she said do you really think we are going to watch it that much.  I stopped and thought about that question for a few days and decided not to buy it.

Rule number two:

We are going to start working on the budget together each week to see where we are at and how our spending is going.  What this does is makes us think more about where the money is going and do we really want to spend our entertainment money on that or maybe we want to save it for another event. 

Rule number three:

Slowey get rid of recurring payment on things we really don’t use that often.  The biggest item on that list is our cable bill, we have been very slowly getting rid of it, we need the internet but we really do not watch that much T.V. we have found other places that would allow us to watch football live and news stations that would be cheaper.  The big hold up on this is the cable company I call them about every three months get more cable taken off, but they are not wanting to give us a good deal on just high speed internet and phone.  It is a process that I feel in the end I will win.

 The goal for our finances is to become good stewards of our money, so we can give more to charity and people in need.  The other part of that is so we can save money for projects around the house and retirement.  We are use a budgeting tool I found through Dave Ramsey’s site called EveryDollar.com.  We are working to get complete control of our money so it never controls us.