Permission To Spend (eBook)

Introduction

Hello, my name is Diane, and I am a saver. I was raised by two savers. As an adult, I am finding that this is a rare combination for couples. I married a spender, a free spirit. For the first time in my life, I had to deal with someone else’s spending habits, and they were wildly different from my own. I had no idea what to do. Luckily, our incomes outpaced the spending, but when the company I worked for shut down while we were expecting a child, we had to make changes—immediately. We cut back on everything we could think of, and then, little by little, we cut back even more. We decided that since jobs were scarce in 2009, I would take this time to stay home and raise our little one until the economy turned around. I quickly realized that no matter what the economy did, I still wanted to stay home with our child. 

However, even with the spending cutbacks, I was struggling to save money. I was always worried that we wouldn’t have enough. Flashback to my childhood: When I was about eleven years old, my dad, an electrical engineer, lost his job. In my memory, it was because the Cold War ended, and whatever it was he was designing was no longer needed. What made a HUGE, lifelong lasting impression on me was that we lived off his savings for about a year—a family of five and two of us kids in private school. When I grew up and got my first job, I squirreled away as much as possible. I was laid off, not once, not twice, but three times. I lived off my savings the first two times. It was the third time when I was sharing the finances with my husband that my life changed. We viewed money completely differently. My husband thought that if he worked harder and earned more money, he could play now and pay later. This line of thinking stressed me out to no end.

At this point, I started tracking our monthly expenses. Tracking, not budgeting. Each month, I showed my husband how much money we spent and would tell him, “We need to save more!” Some months we did, and some months we didn’t. I would worry every time the property taxes were due or when we had to buy gifts. I was a ball of nerves during every holiday season, and thinking about retirement sent me into a panic. I had no idea if we were saving enough. Most years we maxed out the 401(k), but there were years when stocks went down, down, down. There were times that we justified not maxing it out. We wanted to save for a house, or we were stretched a little thin. It yo-yoed. For years, I tried to find out if we were saving enough, but I never got a straight answer or a plan to follow, even from financial advisors. What about vacations? Taking the money out of the savings account for plane tickets and hotels was gut-wrenching! Why? In my mind, we were robbing ourselves of the security that came with growing a nest egg. Worse than that, we could not agree on how to spend or save our money. 

Then, I heard about a finance course for couples and signed up. My spender husband was not happy. He asked me why we were going to a finance class when I already knew what to do. That was the problem—I didn’t know what I didn’t know. In fact, I was one hundred percent positive that I didn’t know everything I needed to know about how to handle our finances. As the years have gone on, I realized that this is everyone’s problem. No one knows what they don’t know. Duh. This stuff—this money stuff—could be manageable. Society has conditioned us to think that talking about money or salaries is rude, but that line of thinking has kept generations in the dark when it comes to their finances. Unless our parents taught us well, we struggle. Unnecessarily, we struggle. 

That first class is where I learned how to budget. The dreaded budget of which everyone is afraid and people resist with all their might. What a game-changer! I learned that while there was room (a lot of room) for improvement, we were doing OK in some places. In the areas we weren’t, we now had a plan to take care of it. Once we were taught, it wasn’t hard. A few skills can change a person’s life. Knowing this gave me so much peace of mind and a sense of security. Passion for financial success replaced our fear. I began to read everything I could on how to save and invest. Seriously, I read a lot. I read blogs and articles and books. So many books! I slowly made changes to the way we saved and spent our money. It was a process, one change at a time, and my husband and I got better at it as time went on. The “dreaded budget” changed our lives. It changed our future! It has the power to change yours, too.

Then, a crazy thing started happening. People were asking me to help them with their own finances. One day, my sister-in-law suggested that I start an online group to post the articles I’d read and forwarded to her, thinking it could help other people, too. I was apprehensive, but I didn’t think it could hurt. The next thing I knew, I had a few hundred followers, and my group was growing. I wasn’t getting a ton of interaction, but people who never commented or interacted online kept telling me in person how much an article or tip helped them. As a result of this positive feedback, I kept posting. Guess who started telling people to make a budget? My free-spirited husband! Now, he’s the first one to encourage people to get on top of their finances. He says that his greatest fear was that we would take that financial class, and we suddenly wouldn’t be able to have fun anymore. Having to limit the life you live is a common concern for many people who I talk to about their financial matters. People are afraid that they have to suffer or sacrifice to manage their money. In reality, what it did for us was enable us to spend without guilt or fear. We could take those vacations and not stress out about it! We could buy gifts, go out to dinner, and not cringe when we paid. For us, the permission to spend was true freedom. It turns out that the dreaded budget was the best thing that ever happened to us.

After I had the online forum for awhile, I began hosting the same two-month finance course that my husband and I had taken a few years earlier. Helping people get on top of their finances became my top priority, and I started buying and giving people finance books I liked. People started telling me about their situations, and I found that far too often, people were scared, just like I had been. They would say, “Oh, you don’t even want to know what our finances look like!” or “I am clueless. My husband/wife/partner handles all of that.” The most common comment was, “We tried a budget, and it didn’t work.” They were worried about mountains of credit card debt or never getting to the bottom of student loans. They feared they started too late to save enough for their retirements. Listen to this carefully—It is never too late to make a difference in your future. The earlier you start, the easier it can be, but do not let starting late derail you from starting at all. Your only enemy is procrastination, and you are one hundred percent in charge of that.

More and more people asked me to sit down with them and sort through their finances, and hearing their stories lit a fire in me. I wanted to help people, but I also felt like I needed some structure to help them, so I found a financial coaching course and signed up. Suddenly, everything was coming together, including the idea for this book. I wanted to take the system I had been using and create a step-by-step guide that anyone could follow without being overwhelmed.

You might be feeling anxious about making changes to how you save and spend. Maybe you’re afraid you won’t do it right. Perhaps you have an irregular income, so you think you can’t budget. Let these fears go because you absolutely will not do it perfectly the first time, the second time, or maybe even the seventh time. It isn’t about being perfect. A good process, even done imperfectly, will create positive changes. Think about the stress and anxiety in your life that is caused by financial uncertainty. This book will help you overcome that. Step by step, by filling in these pages, you will discover how you want to live your life and what it will take to get there financially. What money and financial awareness means to you will be different from someone else. For you, it could be saving to take a vacation of a lifetime, getting out of serious debt, or finally understanding what your actual financial situation is and making a plan to become financially independent. It might even be different from your partner, so this book will help you get on the same page or decide how to align and make all your goals a reality. 

You have the power to make your goals and dreams come true. However, you can’t do that if you don’t know where you stand. A map is useless if you don’t know where to start! Stop beating yourself up about mistakes or hardships you have with money. Once you fill in this book, you’ll have a clear picture of where you are financially, and where you’re heading. This book will be your map. You’ll have filled in the holes and solved problems you might not have even known you had. Stress and anxiety caused by your finances will no longer nag at you or keep you up at night as you wonder about what you don’t know is happening financially. That’s when you’ll be able to live your best life!

There is one more important consideration that you must think about. Besides improving your quality of life, there is also a very real, grave reason that everyone needs to understand very clearly when it comes to your money. Someday, you...