Family Financial Challenge with Gail Vaz-Oxlade #SavingMadeSimple #PGmom

Pigheaded Discipline

This month our family will be taking a challenge presented to us by P&G and inspired by personal finance expert Gail Vaz-Oxlade.

You’d probably agree with me that keeping on a budget is one of the harder things to do in life. Most would admit it is just as hard as working out. Keeping on a budget requires “pigheaded discipline” (got that from a great business book I read) it requires some prep work, knowing were your money is going, setting goals and all hands on deck.

Did it then.

14 years ago fresh out of high school, together with my then boyfriend (now amazing husband) we bought out first house. Began our life together well our friends were off to college, still living at home and parting at the bars we were investing our money into our future with an investment in real estate. Looking back that was the best decision we ever made. We sold out first home 10 years later and moved into a much bigger home (we are in now) with lot’s of wiggle room.

During that first year I remember putting ourselves on a budget with the help of my FIL and some guidance from our financial advisory we were set. Back then having personal computer was a huge investment. I remember investing over $3000 on a HP compact just to have our budget work in excel because that was how we were taught. We tracked every dollar in our excel and to get some extra dough in we converted our basement into a full apartment. Within our first year we had 2 full-time incomes and a 3rd being our tenant. Back then we weren’t much into reading self-help books or business books (but much has changed these days) but we together came up with the envelope budget. Each pay we would pull out all the cash we needed for that week and place them in envelopes. What we didn’t spend carried over to the next week and we only used cash.

This worked so well for us that together we paid cash for our whole wedding, hosting 100 people to celebrate our beautiful day. For a 20 and 23 year I would say we had things under control. Till this day, I believe that it all happened so smooth for us because right from the start we were in this together as a team. It was never his money or my money, it is and always will be ours. Personally I believe this is why our success has been so strong.

Today

Today we have four children, one income and a little blog that gives us experiences along the way. Which I must add have all been apart of the dream. Much has changed in our budget but somethings haven’t either. We still work as a team, we still dream, we have goals, we have visions and this is why our success still is holding strong. However, along the way we lost our envelope budget, but my hubby still works hard at his excel on a much more modern computer.

I am excited to learn from personal finance expert Gail Vaz-Oxlade and up our savings with her jar system as the cash flows through my fingers rather than my debit card.

Short Term Dreams

We believe in order to be successful in saving money you need to have long-term and short-term goals or dreams set in place. I will keep this post short and sweet and skip listing out our long-term dreams that would be a few posts in themselves. Because the only way to live productively in life is to have a dream to reach for.

This Spring it is on our dream list to build a deck off the front of our country home. The sun sets beautiful in the front of our house and right now there is no room to sit and enjoy natures beauty. Our goal for this challenge is to save money to go towards our new deck supplies.