Tag Archives: discipline

Who is this really for?

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I recently came across an address by Robert D. Hales that shared valuable insights into money and how we perceive it. I thought I’d share some of it here.

All of us are responsible to provide for ourselves and our families in both temporal and spiritual ways. To provide providently, we must practice the principles of provident living: joyfully living within our means, being content with what we have, avoiding excessive debt, and diligently saving and preparing for rainy-day emergencies.

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How then do we avoid and overcome the patterns of debt and addiction to temporal, worldly things? May I share with you two lessons in provident living that can help each of us. These lessons, along with many other important lessons of my life, were taught to me by my wife and eternal companion. These lessons were learned at two different times in our marriage—both on occasions when I wanted to buy her a special gift.

The first lesson was learned when we were newly married and had very little money. I was in the air force, and we had missed Christmas together. I was on assignment overseas. When I got home, I saw a beautiful dress in a store window and suggested to my wife that if she liked it, we would buy it. Mary went into the dressing room of the store. After a moment the salesclerk came out, brushed by me, and returned the dress to its place in the store window. As we left the store, I asked, “What happened?” She replied, “It was a beautiful dress, but we can’t afford it!” Those words went straight to my heart. I have learned that the three most loving words are “I love you,” and the four most caring words for those we love are “We can’t afford it.”

The second lesson was learned several years later when we were more financially secure. Our wedding anniversary was approaching, and I wanted to buy Mary a fancy coat to show my love and appreciation for our many happy years together. When I asked what she thought of the coat I had in mind, she replied with words that again penetrated my heart and mind. “Where would I wear it?” she asked. (At the time she was a ward Relief Society president [ed. leader of the church’s women’s charity auxiliary] helping to minister to needy families.)

Then she taught me an unforgettable lesson. She looked me in the eyes and sweetly asked, “Are you buying this for me or for you?” In other words, she was asking, “Is the purpose of this gift to show your love for me or to show me that you are a good provider or to prove something to the world?” I pondered her question and realized I was thinking less about her and our family and more about me.

After that we had a serious, life-changing discussion about provident living, and both of us agreed that our money would be better spent in paying down our home mortgage and adding to our children’s education fund.

These two lessons are the essence of provident living. When faced with the choice to buy, consume, or engage in worldly things and activities, we all need to learn to say to one another, “We can’t afford it, even though we want it!” or “We can afford it, but we don’t need it—and we really don’t even want it!”

My wife has often been my backstop on financial issues, questioning the criticality of some of my desired purchases. I may not always have appreciated it at the time, but I do appreciate her keeping me grounded. I’m grateful for the partnership we’ve built through the years around managing our money. I do the bulk of the management and bill-paying, and she the bulk of the household shopping. This works well primarily because we share the same goals and we continually communicate.

Of course you don’t need a significant other to establish and maintain financial discipline. One of the key skills is to learn to distinguish between needs and wants, and when considering wants, understanding the root of that want. Developing the ability to police yourself and say, “I may not want this thing for the right reasons” is invaluable.

The bottom line with money is that either we learn to master it, or our money will become our master–or rather, those to whom we end up owing money. The more control we gain over our finances the greater freedom we will enjoy.

Controlling your money? or just monitoring it

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I’m a budgeting fanatic. Or at least I have been before, and I am once again. For the previous several years I’ve been more of a monetary monitor until I finally realized what I was doing and decided I had to stop it. I’ll get to that in more detail later. But let’s start from the beginning.

I love to organize things. Not everything, mind you. My desk is a mess, and I’m pretty sure my poor mother despaired of my room ever being clean. But some things were worth organizing and tracking. Like Halloween candy. I always found Halloween to be something of a letdown. It’s fun getting the candy, and it’s fun glutting yourself on all that candy, but then it’s gone, and you realize you never really appreciated what you had.

One year, probably around the time I was eight, I decided to change that. Rather than eat all my Halloween candy I instead ate some, and saved the rest. I actually inventoried my candy, and found places in my room where I could hide small stashes of it–partly because I didn’t want my older brother to find out and eat it, but also because I wasn’t sure if my mom would approve. The goal was to eat only one piece of candy a day, and I mostly stuck to that plan. I’m pretty sure there were some days when I allowed myself “just one more” a time or two, just as I’m also sure there were days I forgot. In any case, I stretched my Halloween haul out past Valentine’s Day.

I wasn’t as good with money. Around that same time period I got a newspaper route–with my mother as a partner, since I wasn’t actually old enough. We’d split the monthly take, and according to our deal, I’d set some aside for tithing and for savings, but the rest was mine to do whatever with. Sometimes I’d see something I wanted to save up for and do so, but most of the time I could have it all spent by the next payday.

Though I changed jobs and increased my income, I continued that pattern pretty much through college. I always made sure I set aside enough for tuition, but I wasn’t overly great at saving for a rainy day.

Then I graduated, got a real job, and moved in with my older brother for a few months. Consciously or not, my brother became my financial mentor. He and his wife were making good money, and were in firm control of it (much to my surprise; my brother could spend money even faster than me when we were younger). He’s the one who taught me to budget.

Then I got married, and to borrow a colloquialism, “excrement became concrete.” I married a gem of a wife who had lived in the former Soviet Union, which is the more recent equivalent of having lived through the Great Depression. Twenty years, three kids, and several pets later we are still amazed we were able to live on what we had then. I’m pretty sure we spend more on groceries in a week now than we spent in a month back then.

As time passed our income increased, but we managed to keep our expenses from increasing to meet it. Then I lost my job in the Great Recession of 2009-2011. We tightened our belts and cut back on the budget, and were able to make it for two years before I found another job that came close to matching our previous income. We had to relocate to another state, but everything looked fine once again.

But about that point something went wrong–or perhaps a number of things all went wrong. The area we moved to was more expensive than we thought. The house we bought needed some work. Part of my income (residuals from a business venture I had to leave behind) was unpredictable. The kids started getting expensively older. I had grown weary during my prolonged unemployment of worrying about money. I don’t know; one or all of these played a hand it it. The bottom line is I stopped paying close attention to money.

I was still tracking it. I still had my budgeting tools. But so long as we had money left over at the end of the month I was okay with it. I didn’t worry too much beyond that.

A few years ago that began to change. I think my kids were the main catalyst. My oldest, a daughter, was about to graduate from high school and wanted to go to an art school in Canada. I didn’t want to be the one to crush her dreams, so I told her if she would focus on getting good enough at art to get accepted, I would worry about paying for it. I had another son who took tennis lessons, and another who discovered competitive mountain biking. We were covering it all, but I could see the time was rapidly approaching when we wouldn’t be able to keep up.

It was about then I realized that tracking our expenses wasn’t cutting it. It was about the same as standing on the corner of a busy intersection counting how many car crashes occurred. I knew where our money was going, but I was doing nothing to determine whether that was the best use of it, let alone trying to slow the spending. Something had to change.

First step was to start paring down our budget. Little extravagances had been creeping in year after year, along with quiet increases in the cost of living. I got as brutal as I could be and found a couple hundred dollars a month that we didn’t need to spend. We made the kids start getting jobs to cover some of their fun on their own.

But I still wasn’t using my budget correctly. I was still only keeping track of where the money was going. Finally, around six months ago, I decided my tools weren’t cutting it any more. I started looking around for something better.

Enter my older brother, again.

He told me about an online tool he used, one that he paid a small monthly fee for. Double red flag! In spite of my career in IT (or perhaps because of it) I don’t really trust “the cloud”, and definitely didn’t like trusting my financial information to it. And I didn’t like the idea of paying a monthly fee, however small, for something I could do for myself for free. But my brother recommended it, the first month was free, and Quicken was going to force me to a subscription plan as well soon. I decided to try it.

The tool was called You Need a Budget, or YNAB. And I didn’t really “get” it. Yeah, it was similar in approach to an old spreadsheet I’d built once, but as the end of the free trial rolled around I didn’t really see the benefit, other than it was easy to use. And about that same time I learned my job of eight years was going away at the end of the year. Subscription software? No way.

But I gave it one more month, partly because my brother would get a free month if I did (and I was already sponging off him for several streaming services), and because something told me that, even if I wasn’t “getting” YNAB, there was still something there to be gotten. I kept going. The monthly fee wasn’t that big, and even cheaper if you signed up a year at a time. And I could still cancel it.

The year and my job ended, and then suddenly I had landed a new job–with a nice jump in salary. And over those two months I’d learned some more things about YNAB that made a huge difference. I changed my way of thinking about money, and found that YNAB along with some other strategies (also from my brother, come to think of it), was giving me what I had been missing before: control. I was no longer a passive observer, dutifully noting the flow of money toward bills. I was making conscious decisions about each and every dollar, and was finding that more and more of them were going into savings and into investing.

When we first moved and I got started in my new job I swore to myself that I would carefully control my budget so that the residual I was making from my former business would always be “extra money.” Everything I needed to be spend would be paid for from my regular income. In hindsight I’m not sure I ever achieved that goal, except perhaps a month here and there during the subsequent eight years.

I’m pleased and relieved to say I’ve finally accomplished that goal. And just in time, too, as my business is in budgetary freeze right now because of the Coronavirus. It’s getting by, staying afloat, but there are no residuals coming right now, and there probably won’t be for several more months yet. I realize I’ve been quite fortunate that my new job hasn’t been impacted, and I’m very grateful for that. But I’m also very glad to have my budget back under control again.

It really feels good.

I’ll be reviewing YNAB at some later date, but if you’re already interested and would like to check it out, use this link. If you like it and sign up, I get a free month (worth $7), but don’t do it for that reason. Also, check out their videos on their YouTube channel, so hopefully you’ll “get it” quicker than I did.