Dear Dave

Dear Dave,

We finally did it.

We’re certainly not going to be the poster children for your organization. Maybe we’ll encourage some other old (or young) fools, that even if you’re not where you want to be and you feel like you’ve made a mess more often than you care to admit, you can make it!

Dave, thanks so much for your help. No, seriously, we’d never have made it without you. Your podcasts of ranting away at the world we live in. Your advice to those hurting. Your willingness to say, “You’ve got an income crisis” or your bluntness of “If you want to get out of the hole you are in, you need to stop digging.”

It was a bit like running a marathon, no one really tells you their time, they just tell if they’ve finished. Finishing feels really good.

Your budgeting system Every Dollar has made the biggest difference of all. Being able to make our budget and then keep track of the spending and making adjustments, when our grocery bill went out of whack, like it seems to do… Doing it together, phew! That was a big one, agreeing on where we were going every month. I remember right after Every Dollar came out and we were finally making some progress, then My Loving Spouse got hit in the head with a chain saw. I remember sitting in the hospital, while he was in surgery, crying and thinking…’We were finally getting out of debt…Oh, this might actually be what Dave would call an emergency’, so we added a few medical bills to the mess and gratefully regrouped.

We are blessed, but we are not lucky. Luck had nothing to do with it.

I mowed fields (sometimes successfully) to make more money. We sold stuff, rented out the extra barn and kept on. We struggled. We struggled some more. Our income was a tad stinky for quite a while, it was frustrating… Progress was made slowly, but it was made. It was always a choice to move in the direction we wanted to go, which often meant hard conversations, and saying ‘no’ to stuff that might have been fun or tasty or both. Our old home and it’s renovations were always more than we planned, we had to make adjustments.

The first few steps of accomplishment getting rid of some of the small stuff felt great! The last step of paying off the mortgage, well, I wanted to dance!

I carried a lot of shame over money. There were old powerful messages that said, I should do better. I have never heard you shame anyone, Dave, but you are pretty clear about some of the dumb stuff we people do with money.

This post is to be an encouragement to whomever needs it. You can do it too, become debt free. It may not be easy and it may not always be fun, but owing no one, is worth it!

We are blessed and “better than we deserve”.

Happy New Year!

PS: Anybody want to borrow my book, The Total Money Makeover?