Let's compare them for a moment, eating and living in debt. How are they similar? Eating tasty good foods will add to your waistline. Buying things on credit adds to your debt. Eating good foods and buying things when you want them feels good in the moment, but often ends in some sort of remorse. Both are easy to rack up, pounds and debt, but hard to take off.
A good friend once told me that in life you have to repeat lessons until you learn them. At the time she was talking about my ability or inability to work with someone who is passive aggressive. Today I see how this statement/philosophy fits my struggle with both my weight and our debt. I have recently lost a significant amount of weight, but have been on hiatus for a couple months as we have been working on the beginnig of our debt free journey. In those couple months I have kept some of the behaviors that helped me lose weight, while letting old bad behaviors creep back in. I wonder if I can learn my lesson this time? I wonder if I can finally break the cycle of letting bad choices influence my health, both physical and financial.
We recently started on our debt snowball. Paying off our debt, smallest debt first, increasing each months payment as we eliminate each debt. I wonder if our debt snowball has a snowball's chance in hell to accumulate the funds needed to pay down the debt. I feel good about our journey and our successes so far. We have paid down our first 2 small debts, and after this month we will move on to the next. But sometimes the desire to "have" overrides the desire to pay down debt.
These days there are so many things that can sabotage your goal of becoming debt free. Each day I get emails telling me about this deal or that deal. They seem so hard to resist. THEY WILL SAVE US MONEY, the devil on my shoulder says, then the angel replies THEY AREN'T SAVING YOU MONEY WHEN YOU DIDN'T PLAN TO BUY IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Devil: "But you need it." Angel: "You can live with out it another day" (holy moly I have mutiple personalities!) And don't get me started on Nebraska Furniture Mart. Stupid 30month no interest. That just fuels my desire to buy stuff I/WE don't need. I tell you what though, the day I get an email that says a trip to Ireland is like $350...all bets are off! :) I will not be able to be held liable for my actions on that day.
I know if we are going to be successful in this we will have to learn to build in money for fun, and for life. We were successful in doing that this month. Hubby and I knew we were going to go to the Irish Fest (it's kind of our thing) so we built money in the budget to go and enjoy ourselves. It did mean buying less crap from the shops. We normally each would have gotten something and maybe something for the kids. But we had a great night out. I konw we can't plan for everything and I guess that's where your emergency fund comes in. I can't wait for the day when that is fully funded at 3-6 months of income.
Earlier I compared this to changing the habits of eating. I thought I was going to say that this is easier. Truly they are equally hard. I love food! And I like having what I want when I want it. I know to be successful in both it comes down to discipline and making a plan. The days/weeks when I have a menu planned, I eat better. The months we have had a budget, our money went further and we started paying down debt and stopped incurring debt. Now if I could just start doing my menu when I do my budget, maybe we would start killing 2 birds with one stone. Then if we killed 2 birds we could have dinner for 2....wait I took that a little too far.
So as of right now I give our debt snowball a pretty good chance at getting bigger and covering a lot of ground. We are lucky we have people who have been there, done that, who can remind us why we started. OR we can look at the face of our beautiful children and be reminded why it is so important that we continue our journey.
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