This is wise advice. My first thought regarding this quote by Jefferson are those payday advance businesses. They encourage people to spend money they don't yet have and then when they have it they owe it back plus interest therefore keeping them in a cycle of debt. Of course, there are credit cards which are also a form of "payday advancement." What gets a lot of us in trouble with spending what we have not yet earned is impulse buying. Well it gets me in trouble anyway. Impulse buying serves the same *need* as comfort eating or binge watching TV does - we get triggered by something and to ease the discomfort of the trigger we engage in a behavior - be it the eating or for the purposes of today's post, impulse buying. But there is help for the impulse buying and figuring out the triggers that get us to engage. Here's one article I found.   Maybe the problem for you isn't impulse buying, maybe you just spend your money in the wrong ways an...

I'm bad with money. I understand the value of saving it and all that. I understand the need to steward it well so we can pay our bills and feed our children and all that. I do, I understand. But I'm really bad with it nonetheless. It's a thorn in the side of my marriage. And after 22 years of marriage my hub and I have come to a place where I try - I fail - and I try again. And he does his best to juggle it all. It's not ideal - y'all don't need to tell me that. So for me to enter into the topic of money is a bit laughable but it's my attempt to try (see above cycle I mention *grin*). Here's what I do believe about money for sure - it's a balancing act. To have money and to hoard it is just as bad as spending it all and having none for necessities. There's a balance to be lived.  Out of balance means you are controlled by money rather than being in control of it yourself. How do you think about money? (Rhetorical question - you don't...

Darn that stupid website. You know which one I'm talking about right? amazon.com *said in a whisper* And then on top of that they offer the prime and it's all over. Free two-day shipping on a site than you can find ANYTHING on. Darn it. Today I'm challenging myself - and throwing down the gauntlet to *you* - to examine money in light of the temptations of Amazon and free two day shipping. And maybe it's not Amazon that gets you, maybe it's another online shopping site. But online shopping is online shopping and even the most frugal of people can fall prey to its traps.  

Debt. It's a word that causes health problems, relationship problems, and money problems. Yes, I just said that debt causes money problems which may seem obvious but I'm not sure it is all that obvious to some people. My hub and I constantly look around at the huge houses that surround ours with the 3 car garages that house gas guzzling SUV's and boats or some other weekend toy. And we ask, out loud to the universe, "what do those people DO?" The reality is a lot of these people are living beyond their means. They have multiple credit cards that they juggle and they have loans and other ways they get money but are in debt.  When we were looking to purchase a home we were told how much we were approved to spend. That was great except there was no way we could actually afford those monthly payments. We knew that just because someone said we could spend that much money didn't mean that we could in reality. So we limited our search to homes in the r...