I had a rough week last week. In short, I was stressed about money. In the past seven years we have learned so many valuable lessons about budgeting and living beneath our means and staying out of debt. Were it not for that, when Mike lost his job two years ago we would have been totally screwed. But we weren’t. We breathed in and out and then said to each other, “We’re going to be okay.” First of all, God has never let us go hungry. He has always made sure we have everything we need and more. Second of all, we have very little debt now and low monthly living expenses.

Mike has been working a part time job since April and that has been helping to cover the portion of our monthly expenses that my income does not. He’s driving for a limo company. It has been a huge blessing. He can take the jobs that fit around my schedule (nights & weekends) and it’s something he loves doing. He loves to drive and he enjoys meeting new people. We knew things would still be tight and we would still need to be careful to stay within our budget, but it’s been a good thing.

And then last week. Last week we were informed that our monthly expense was going up effective now. The short notice and the impact it is having on our household budget sent me into a tailspin. I have been running the numbers and looking for areas to cut and Mike is trying to get extra work, but on paper it still doesn’t look like it’s going to be enough.

There is no question that we need to figure out how to get our income up. And what I want to do is obsess about it and plan and scheme; basically I want to solve the problem. But I can only do so much. We as people can only do so much. God is the sovereign one. He knew this was coming and we have to trust that he has a plan to get us through it.

I get nervous that we won’t have enough money to provide my children the things they need. Then I sometimes regret that we won’t be able to also give them the things they want. God has a wonderful way of putting things into perspective for me and he sometimes uses my own children to do it.

This afternoon my son said to me with a smile beaming across his face:

“That was fun Mommy… I love you.” 

What had he just done that he found to be so fun? He rode the mechanical horse at the grocery store. How much did it cost us? Two cents.

I’m having apparent balance issues. It must be a pregnancy thing but I can’t prove it. I fell last week and then I fell again on Wednesday. Although this time was a bit worse. I was walking down the stairs with my son and I must have taken a wrong step. Totally bit the dust. I’m just thankful I didn’t fall more than a few steps and that I didn’t take Luke with me. The ironic part is that I hurt the other side of my butt, the side I did not fall on the baseball with last week. My brother says at least I’m thorough. I was feeling a little lopsided. I apparently banged up my entire right leg because I’m having pain all the way through, especially around the ankle. I don’t think anything is sprained or damaged but the pain keeps threatening to put me in a bad mood. You could say my pride is a touch bruised but I’ll get over that. At least I was with family when it happened so they could have a good laugh

On the up side, I’m noticing my investments are creeping back up. They’ve been dropping value so much lately (as everyone’s has) so I had to do a double take to be sure I was interpreting the numbers right. “Yup! Three is higher than two, and seven is higher than six.” Awesome. I’m not retiring or sending any kids to college soon but for those who are, I hope it means that things are turning around for the better. Good news is way overdue.

(I realize those are two completely different subjects, but we’ll just call it a two-for-one deal, shall we?)

I don’t stress about money as much as I used to, but occasionally I come away from balancing the checkbook with a crummy feeling in my gut. Not because of the numbers. The numbers look fine. Miraculously, we are doing fine right now. More than fine, really. God is providing for us. Yet still I have this crummy feeling. It’s the control freak inside me screaming, “What’s the plan? What’s gonna happen next? I need to know!” And as much as I scream, God never tells me what’s next. It’s really freakin’ annoying. And the old saying, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future” does not offer any reassurance. I am still human no matter how many times you say that to me. I still want to know!

I have so many variables up in the air right now and it is driving me crazy. But the good news is that it’s only been driving me crazy since yesterday and that crummy feeling will dissipate in a few days. That’s usually how it goes. Oh I’m sure it will come back to haunt me but it never stays for long. Thank God for that. And thank God for providing for us and for NOT telling me what’s coming next. Because if he did, you know I would just have to get my grubby hands in there and muck it up.

Ok, this is funny. This was in one of Dave Ramsey’s recent email newsletters, taken from his member forum:

Stimulus = Prophylactic

It allows for inflation, halts production, destroys the next generation, and gives you a false sense of security while you’re actually being screwed.

HA!

I keep hearing rumors that interest rates are at an all-time low, it’s a great time to refinance, blah, blah, blah. Guess what? It’s true! We looked into refinancing our mortgage and found we could lower our interest rate and save loads of money. Here’s the deal: We’re currently paying 7.5% interest on a 30 year mortgage. We bought the house 7 years ago, so we have 23 years left on the current mortgage. We are able to refinance for a 15 year mortgage at 4.625% interest. And yes, we have to pay closing costs to do it but we will break even in only 10 short months (meaning in 10 months the amount we’ve saved in interest will be equal to the closing costs). And the best part? Our new monthly payment will be the same as it was before! So we’re not paying any additional out of our pockets but the interest we’re saving enables us to pay off the house 8 years earlier. Though we’re hoping eventually we can get our income up and pay it off sooner That’s this girl’s dream. Forget about diamonds, I want a paid for house!

On Saturday I attended a birthday party for a very special woman. Her name is Eloise, and she is my grandpa’s second wife. She married my grandpa shortly after my grandma died of breast cancer. She was a widow herself, and she and my grandma had been best friends. It seemed only fitting that she would keep her best friend’s husband company during his remaining days

Eloise is exactly 90 years old today. As I read today’s headlines alerting us that the United States economic recession is official, I am reminded of Grandma El’s words on Saturday night. Having lived through the Great Depression, she learned a great lesson that she still lives by today: “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without“. This was a saying that circulated during the Depression but is just as applicable today.

Mike and I thank God every day that we still have a roof over our heads and a warm meal at night. We are thankful that He taught us about living beneath our means and getting out of debt before all this happened. Had we not made drastic lifestyle changes five years ago, we would have reacted very differently when Mike got laid off in May of this year. Instead of panic we had peace. 

We are in some hard times. I know it’s real not because I read it in the papers, but because it has hit close to home. So many people I know and love are struggling with job losses, mortgage foreclosures, bankruptcy, etc… and I know that these financial struggles suck big time, but think of it this way: this is an opportunity to learn how to be prepared for the future.

Up until now, debt has been deemed acceptable in this country and in some cases, necessary. I have been saying for awhile now that debt is too big a risk, that it’s not worth it. We don’t know what the future holds, yet we spend as if times of plenty will continue forever. Now we know that financial abundance is not a guarantee. We are feeling - really feeling – the consequences of not saving for emergencies. We no longer have that false sense of security to keep us in denial. It may be difficult to do at this moment, but I believe when we all come out of this we will be thanking God for the experience.

When my grandmother spoke at her 90th birthday party about life during the Depression, she did not speak with a tone of bitterness or anger. In fact, she had a sort of warmth about it, how it brought her family and community closer together and taught them to value the most important things in life: God, family, friends. When you boil it down, that is all that matters. I pray that God is teaching you to see and value what He has given to you. I know He is with me.

I heard Dave Ramsey read this on the air and just had to pass it along. I don’t know much about science but this made total sense!

The Heaviest Element Known to Science

Lawrence Livermore Laboratories has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science.

The new element, Governmentium (Gv), has one neutron, 25 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons, and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert; however, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction that would normally take less than a second, to take from 4 days to 4 years to complete.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years. It does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium’s mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of morons promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

Listen to Dave talk about this on-air

* Dave Ramsey did not write this. It has been circulating around the web for some time but seems more fitting than ever right now.

So, that V.P. debate was interesting. Of course many of the statements made by both candidates were stretches of the truth or altogether false. That is so frustrating. As I was checking up on all the facts I came across this gem:

Who Caused The Economic Crisis?
So who is to blame? There’s plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn’t fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn’t do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of “layered irresponsibility … with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role.” Here’s a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

• The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.
• Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.
• Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.
• Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.
• The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.
• Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.
• Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.
• Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.
• The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.
• An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.
• Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

I agree with this wholeheartedly. There are multiple factors that caused this problem, and one swift $700 billion move from the government is not going to solve it. Everyone, and I mean everyone needs to be committed to turning this thing around. I’m not an economist so I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some insight as far as what we hardworking Americans must do to insulate ourselves from this sort of crisis: Stop borrowing money. Live on less than you make. Save for the emergencies. Save for the future. Forget about the Jones’ – they’re broke.

My sister just bought a house. A small one. Small by anyone’s standards, really. We thought she was nuts at first, but you know what? I’m a little envious! The layout of the house is great and has all the space she needs for her family of four. No more, no less. There are huge advantages to this, number one being that the cost is well below their means and will leave breathing room in the budget. Breathing room is an absolute must. The other advantage, the one that makes me so envious, is that her small space forces her to keep only the things she needs and say no to the rest. She has a built in defense against clutter!

It doesn’t matter what other people think. People may say my sister’s house is too small, or that mine is the junkiest on the block, but we don’t care! We can sleep at night not worrying how we’re going to pay next month’s mortgages. And more importantly, we are surrounded by family and friends who love us no matter what our houses look like.

Today is a great day. It’s my dad’s birthday, which by itself is fantastic. Just like that he’s another year older. With the added years comes added wisdom. He’s a terrific dad and I love him immensely. He taught me that word - immensely. It means to an exceedingly great extent or degree. That’s a lot of love, folks.

The other reason this is a great day (and Dad, you’ll be so proud of this) is that we paid off my car! See? Please take special note of the Filing Date and the date the Lien was released. I hadn’t realized it, but I bought the car on May 14th of last year. I was going to pay it off on Monday but I kept forgetting to bring the title with me to work. So with a little divine intervention my car is paid off exactly one year later, to the day. Hallelujah!

Okay, who wants to go shopping? Just kidding, we’ll most likely be paying off my car with our Stimulus Tax Rebate. But since I hate shopping, paying off my car is way more exciting

Go to the IRS website if you want to know where your Stimulus Rebate is: http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=181665,00.html

Oh, and an interesting detail my coworker found out the hard way:

If filing or preparation fees were deducted from your 2007 Refund or you received a rapid refund, you will be receiving a check instead of a direct deposit.

This means that if you filed via say, Turbo Tax, and they took their preparation fee directly from your refund, you will be getting a paper check. The IRS will begin mailing paper checks no later than May 16. Check the payment schedule to find out when you can expect your rebate.

You can also find out the specific status of your rebate by going HERE, but not until about one week before your payment is scheduled.

Happy Friday!