My father was born to immigrant parents during the Great Depression and the lessons he learned about how to manage money have greatly shaped the way I view money management. If you add to that my career in bookkeeping and accounting and that my main interest in my work is in cash flow forecasting and budgets you can see why I started this blog.
I am not much different from anyone else as far as how I live my daily life. We have a mortgage loan and although we have a small college fund for our daughter I'm sure she will have college loans. We have credit cards and we use them quite a bit. We live like any other middle class American family with some unnecessary toys like a Wii and a kayak and my two horses. We travel twice a year to see our families in other parts of the country and we always have enough to eat. The difference though is that other than our mortgage we don't have any debt. Granted I think our retirement accounts are too small, but that is a challenge I am working on.
That we don't have any debt other than our mortgage is not because we make a lot of money, we actually don't have a very big income compared to a lot of people we know. It's because we are both very conservative about our spending. And we can't buy all the toys we want or travel everywhere we want. We have to live within our means. Surprisingly, we do not feel deprived when we're not able to buy something we want but don't have the money. That is a misnomer in our society that in order to live within one's means a person needs to be deprived of their needs.
I hope with this blog to be able to share some of the ideas and methods we use to manage our money and I hope to hear from others on how they save money and live within their means.
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