Scary times, new beginnings...

I admit it, I am a ‘bad’ blogger. I can go weeks and even months between posts. It’s not that I don’t have lots of comical/interesting things to post about, it’s just that I am SO FREAKING BUSY. So why am I going back to work next week????

Well, to pay the bills, for one. And two, well, there really isn’t a two - because I really don’t want to go back.

The past year and a half has been a very sobering and humbling period for me. Our family experienced a fall from grace of epic proportions….and we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Part stupidity, part foolishness, and honestly, quite a bit of arrogance led to the demise of our financial security.

Bad economy? Eh, we are fine, we are better than fine – let’s just get whatever we want, whenever we want it! A deck as big as our house? nice cars? nice clothes? fun toys? fun trips? cleaning lady? – you name it, we had it. Until December 8th 2009. When I lost my job I thought “no problem, we are good – we are better than good – we will make this work”. Which is true, we could have made it work, had we taken the time to examine our financial priorities and adjusted our style of living. We made some cutbacks, but not nearly enough, and not nearly as quickly as we should have. For example, the $80 a month we were paying (direct withdrawl) to AT&T for a phone line that WE NO LONGER EVEN HAD! I didn’t discover this little ditty until last summer – about 6 months AFTER I lost my job. Sadly, this gives you a very real picture of how well we managed our finances.

I’m not posting this as a ‘cry in my beer, oh pity me’ plea for compassion, but a wake-up call for anyone out there who is miraculously unscathed from the ‘financial crisis’ and is STILL thinking that they are bulletproof. If it can happen to us, it can happen to anybody…only now we are humble enough to admit that we are no better than anyone else, and that we need to make some drastic changes if we ever want to get it back to good.

This week, we started Dave Ramsey’s ‘Financial Peace University’. What an eye-opener! Brady & I thought we had a pretty good idea of our budget and debt….wow, were we wrong. Just reading the first couple of chapters we both realized that we are such a statistic it’s downright SCARY. Fortunately for us, we are not too far gone to repair the damage.

To our awesome friends –we will be doing plenty of ‘hanging out’ this summer. Gone are the nights out to dinner and movies…but we will gladly have you over for a drink on our deck! With as many bad things that have come out of the past year, there have been SO MANY good things as well. As a family, we have realized that all of the things we have been coveting is just ‘STUFF’ and that, quite frankly, we have waaaaay too much ‘STUFF’ - but we don’t have nearly enough of each other.

Nope, I’m really not looking forward to Monday. But I am looking forward to a couple of years from now when my family is free from the chains of debt that have plagued so many of us. I’m also looking forward to getting back to the basics, and teaching my children fiscal responsibility so that they may avoid the traps and pitfalls that their parents didn’t.

So when we sell the Mountaineer and buy our new ‘hooptie’, please feel free to laugh - because we will be too. Because if you can’t laugh at yourself, then really what’s the point?