annieology

Money that is.  How much you make does not define your worth.  It’s just a game that we put way too much importance on.  I’m saying this as a reformed money grubbing freak.  I have never had to sleep outside.  I have never, ever, ever had to go hungry.  I did not come by this attitude naturally, or quickly, but really it is just a game.

A grocery budget becomes a little more fun when you don’t look at it as I NEED this money to eat.  You don’t.  When you take a step back and say “I have $X – I need to feed Y people for a period of Z.  Let’s go see how much I can get for $X.”  You’ve taken the misguided fear of death off of the table.  What’s worse than death? Watching your kids die. They won’t.  Someone, somewhere will feed them.

Don’t believe me?  I know people who haven’t had a job in years, trust me, they haven’t missed many meals.  I know people who barely work.  No one at their house is starving.  I know people who make a lot of money who cannot afford food.  Assuming afford means, not going into debt to purchase it.

It’s been over a year since I destroyed my credit cards.  I have nothing with my name on it that can put me into debt.  A quick pulse check indicates that I am still alive.  I have gone on vacation, with four kids for a week, to VEGAS, did not use credit.  Hubby had the other two on a two week vacation.  We  give away 10% of our money.  Still alive.

The reason I had credit cards in the first place was ‘just in case’.  Just in case we needed more food, just in case our car broke, just in case somebody needed something that we couldn’t afford.  Guess what, we always “needed” something.  It was a never ending cycle.  Then I had an “aha” moment, if I weren’t spending $400 a month to pay off a credit card, I could get stuff I needed.  Duh!

Five years ago, my husband was out of work.  We were supporting eight people with $2400/month.  We were tithing, we were also giving and extra $750/month to the church for the building campaign that was underway.  So, really, we were only able to use about $1400/month.  Now, hubby did occasional bit work, but we could only count on $1400/month.  Don’t tell me your budget is tight.  Did I mention that our AC died? Yep, it did.  In the middle of June, in south Texas, with eight people in a house that couldn’t afford to leave.  Guess what? We got an AC.  We did not finance it.  We got some a very gracious gift, and worked a deal with the AC guy.  We were able to survive because we didn’t have two $500 car payments, and $50,000 in credit card debt.  We had enough to pay the monthly bills down to the cent.

That was early in our foster career.  If you’ve been around here for awhile, you know the early days of our fostering did little for our marriage.  No one had taught us about triangulation, and we fell for it pretty hard.  Eventually it all crumbled at our feet.  Hubby and I were cordial to each other, sometimes.  Most of the time we were just ships passing.  I started using credit as therapy.  He did his thing, I did mine.  Even after being completely out of debt three times in less than 10 years, there we were again.  I would guess things started getting better two years ago.  We slowly started trusting each other again, and last year I knew I trusted God and hubby more than I did the credit card company for providing for my needs.  I cut up all the cards.

There have been times when I would have used them had I had them.  Turns out I didn’t need them.  I’m also a pretty severe Coke addict.  I have not paid for a twelve pack since I started CVS’ing.  Well, that’s not true, I did get 18 twelve packs for $10 recently.  But I couldn’t pass up that good of a deal.  I’ve got a pretty decent stockpile of several things going.  I’m not going to be able to do much more because of the lack of room I have for storage.  Guess I could clear out a few kids….that would provide us a little more room.

But seriously, this money thing, it’s not a matter of life and death.  Money is not your provision, rely on God for what you need and the money thing? It’s just a game.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 28th, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under annieology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.