Seeking to Understand

Melody and I have recently completed our Christmas shopping and this year we did it entirely with cash, which was a lot of fun! Since we’ve been budgeting for Christmas for a few months now, we had cash set aside just for this purpose. For the first time in memory shopping for the holidays has been entirely free of financial stress.

In addition to the total cash we had saved up, we also came up with a list of people and put dollar amounts next to them so that we knew exactly how much we had to spend for everyone on an individual basis. This made shopping so much more simple as we could quickly narrow in on a proper price range for items depending on who we were buying for at the time. This also helped significantly reduce some of the shopping stress because there wasn’t a background worry that some people were getting unfairly favored by certain gifts or whatever.

I highly recommend this approach.

Budgeting has been an amazing experience for us and the straight-forward “well, duh” advice of Dave Ramsey has helped clarify our thinking about money and how to handle it. It’s odd that so much stress in life can be caused by money (or the lack of it) and it seems rare to find anyone who stops and thinks about that situation on their own before they crash and burn once or twice. I like to try and think about things many people overlook - but even though my brain is always looking for subjects like that to ponder over, I never once thought about analyzing the hows and whys of money flow until I was introduced to Ramsey!

Is it possible to feel empowered by budgeting without first having been stupid with money? I have to wonder if things like money sense skip generations because the next cannot understand the hard lessons learned by the prior?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.