Why should you read this site?
This is a web site for all the people out there who, like my family, are searching for solutions to common financial problems: the mounting debts, the lack of savings, and the stress and worry that comes from living paycheck to paycheck. If you are like us, you are working hard and earning money, but it never seems to be enough.
This site is about how my husband and I have engaged in a new financial management system of our own design to allow us to take better care of our money. In the process, we have changed how we view money and are deciding what we want our money to be doing for us; prior to this it seems as though it was the other way around: "Ask not what your money can do for you, ask what you can do for your money."
We have never looked to be extravagantly wealthy (it would be nice, but that is not the goal here), but what we want, and suspect that what many other people want, is to have enough money to live nicely, comfortably, in a good home, with reliable cars. Maybe you would like to fix up your house, but you do not even have the money to maintain it, let alone renovate it and make it beautiful. Maybe you would like to take a vacation and not worry about the money you are spending for it. We are interested in the basics of a good, comfortable life that would allow us to stop worrying about money. This does not mean that our goal is to no longer think about money, but to think about it sufficiently that we know what we are doing when we make a monetary transaction, and we know how that transaction affects our financial situation. What I have learned is that a stress-free approach to caring about money does exist -- but only if you take control over your financial situation. What I have attempted to do is stop the cycle of unplanned spending, unplanned borrowing and all the other things that allow us to lose control over our money. Instead, we have embarked on a plan that has several essential parts: Organizing our Finances, Taking Control Over our Spending, Taking Control Over our Debt, Taking Control Over Our Revenues, and Taking Control Over our Savings and Investments. After a lot of research and thought, my family has decided to take a number of steps to change our financial situation in small, but dramatic ways. This site was written to both keep us accountable for our changes and to save others the time and energy that it has taken us to find out the information contained in these pages. We hope that as you read you will find ideas that you think are useful, or ideas that you do not. We hope you will identify with our struggles and successes and that those struggles and successes will motivate you to take action, and we hope that you will contact us with your own suggestions, ideas or stories to tell. We have decided to be our real selves here: money is so often taboo as a subject of polite conversation that most people do not actually know how anyone else works with their own money. Maybe if we talked, we could learn from each other. We hope that this helps us begin a long conversation and that through that conversation we can gain understanding and insight into our own financial situation and that you will also. Aside from the hoped-for dialogue with our audience, we will be researching issues related to money and updating this site frequently with that information. We will share what we learn from the experts as well as from our own experiences. If there is a topic that you are interested in, but you either have never understood it or do not feel like researching it, write to us: if you want to know about something we probably do also. If so, it could be the basis for a future article. We really want this site to be interactive. In fact, I have created a new feature that asks a question that you can respond to in 10 or less words. So, join the conversation; this may be the only chance you have to talk openly about money. Young or old, feel like you are on the verge of bankruptcy or fairly well off, married or single, with or without kids, in fact, anyone who wants to participate; there is a place for your stories and a place for you in our site. What I can't do is tell you the secret of QUICK FINANCIAL SUCCESS. I've worked long and hard at everything I've ever done, and, I know that nothing in life is ever "quick." Plus, if I knew a way to quick financial success, I'd be out enjoying my millions rather than working at creating something new like this web site. What I can do for you is to help you better take control over your money by teaching you what I have learned, how I have been using that knowledge and how it is going so far. I AM NOT PERSONALLY SELLING YOU ANYTHING. If there are sites I have used, or products I have used that have helped (or not), I may talk about those and you can choose whether or not to look at them yourself. They may try to sell you something; but, I'm not.
So, you might ask yourself, what's the catch? Why did she spend a good deal of time and energy researching web sites and their design just to give advice to me. I haven't. I have three goals in mind in creating this website:
(1) to chronicle my family’s journey to greater control over our money and force me to keep at it so I can keep writing about it;
(2) to help my family get out of debt and begin to experience the type of life that we would like to have; and
(3) to learn as much as I need to about creating a web site for personal and commercial use.
I hope you will enjoy the trials and tribulations of going through this process with me and my family. If you do, bookmark the site and come back to it as often as you like to see changes. What comes next is the information I have used and that has worked, the plans I have for the future and lots of advice and suggestions to get your family on the road to financial freedom! Enjoy!