Lessons Learned from Financial Adversity

I constantly get asked how we are able to keep all of our purchases at a total of $400 or less per month.  Here’s a little background.

When we first married our salary was a joke.  Truly.  We were on a single teacher’s salary before there was a state protected minimum salary law. Nearly 1/3 of our income went to medical insurance. The first few months we were also paying for a semester of grad school before we decided that it would be better to pursue the masters degree part time while working.  Had we stopped to think about it we would have qualified for food stamps.  To be honest we never really felt like we were that needy, because God had provided for our every need. Debt was not an option in my mind so we chose to be very careful with what we bought.  I shopped at Walgreens so we spent next to nothing on our personal care products.  We didn’t buy any new clothes to speak of and we kept our food budget to $100.

Simply put, we chose to be content with what we had and to recognize what met our needs instead of giving in to our wants. Over the years we’ve eased up a bit and even had some splurges along the way, but those hard times of scrimping to stay within our means taught us a lot.

1. It’s possible to eat a beans/rice type of diet 7 days a week, but we burn out very quickly.  It’s better to shoot for an inexpensive but filling diet where we can alternate more expensive meals with the less expensive ones.
2. Even if we had a few bucks left over we didn’t spend them frivilously.  Using extra funds to buy things on sale that we would need in the future allowed us to continually have more extra money in the budget as we had fewer and fewer things we needed to buy each month.
3. We’ve learned that it’s just as comfortable to lower the heat a few degrees and snuggle in a robe or blanket.
4. Staying home and playing games or watching a movie is just as fulfilling as going out for a movie or other entertainment.
5. It’s futile to envy what our friends have and get to do, because we’ve discovered that many of them are carrying the weight of huge debts to have/do all those things.
6. When we thought it would be really tough because funds were so sparce, it was really just fine because we chose to be happy with what we had.
7. Because we were good stewards of what God provided us He was faithful during the tough times of my husband’s battle with cancer and Turkey’s eye surgery.

Anything is possible if you set your mind to it.  Don’t allow our American culture and media to convince you that you need to have the latest and greatest of everything, or that faster is better.  As a society we’ve become an impatient group of people that always wants what someone else has instead of being thankful for and enjoying what we already have.  I think it’s high time we realized we already have enough.

What do you have to be thankful for? What lessons have you learned through tough financial times? I’d love to hear your thoughts.