Why You Should Live On A Budget

I know we are still a few weeks from Christmas, but this time of year has me starting to wish for normalcy again. Ha! The craziness of the holidays is a welcome change, don't get me wrong, but in my old age, I've become a fan of routine, and I'm already yearning for the simple days of January when everything is fresh and new, and resolutions actually mean something.

Listen, I love the holidays as much as the next person, but the stress around them is something I've never been okay with. This year, I'm paying even more attention to the money we are spending on Christmas. Since starting our debt free journey, our monthly budget has been a key factor is our success.

I wrote a blog post about how we budget, but I think it's even more important to talk about the why.

You see, the why behind your goals and the way you live your life is ultimately the motivation as to if you will succeed or not. The why needs to be powerful, something that you value above money. When we first started our debt free journey, my why was to get in control. But that didn't get me past the moment we finally got in control. I needed to dig deeper.

As I started changing my perspective and listening to other people's stories, I realized that by getting in control of our money, it allowed us to think beyond the next week or six months. David and I started dreaming about a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now. We wrote our dreams down, and these dreams have since become goals.

Right now, we are on Baby Step Two - getting out of debt. I've had to come to terms with the shame that comes with having all of this debt, especially since more than the majority is from my student loans. However, in the six months since we've started budgeting and prioritizing paying off debt, we have paid off almost $15,000!

This was all possible because we started to dream. Our dreams became bigger than our daily purchases.

So, are you curious as to what our dreams look like?

I'll save the specifics for a later post, but ultimately, we are debt free, we live in a specific color home with a huge front porch and a fireplace outside, my business is thriving, David travels to fish around the world, and our kids are happy. Oh, and our kids don't have to worry about paying for college, cause we've got that under control.

The EveryDollar App

I want to help make your budgeting experience as easy as possible. I've teamed up with the EveryDollar team at Ramsey Solutions to give one of you a subscription to the EveryDollar app. This is the exact budgeting tool David and I use and absolutely love. It's so simple, and it connects with your bank account (securely) so there is no need for manual entries. Also, there is a free version of the app that doesn't connect to your bank account, but is still helpful in setting up your budget each month!

If you check out my Instagram stories later today, I'll be walking through how we make our budget each month.

Here's how the giveaway works - you will receive one entry for each of the following:

'Like' Simple and Inspired on Facebook - here

Follow me on Instagram - here

Like three of my last Instagram photos - here

Comment on this blog post below

Signup for Simple and Inspired's newsletter - here

Winner will be contacted on Thursday, December 12th. Good luck!