Biggest Kitchen Table - Living Deliberately and Money

Hello everyone, thank you for joining me in this most important monitoring task. I hope that through these simple audits, we'll all be able to look at what we're doing at home and make changes if they are needed. As usual, check the comments here because many of our readers will give you excellent ideas for changes and modifications.

No Spending Week
Tomorrow we'll start a no spending week. If you're in the USA and will be going out to enjoy your Independence Day celebrations, please start your no spending the following day. Everyone please make sure you have enough food on hand to last a week. Hanno bought two litres of local milk for us yesterday, so we will be fine with what we have in the house and in the backyard until the week is up. If you've never spent a week, or any time, when you decided not to spend anything, it might be quite confronting, and if you're tempted to spend, think about your purpose and the life you want to live. Rewards are waiting as long as you can stick with this. If you continue to spend, you're just staying on the same old merry-go-round you've always been on. Try to jump off with the rest of us.

Today's topics are 1. Living Deliberately and 2. Money.

1. Living Deliberately
Living Deliberately can be confusing at first. All it means is that you think about your life, plan the direction you want to go in, then follow your plans. If you want your life to be focused on family and the home you make plans to make that happen. If you want to retire early, work from home or homeschool your children, you plan those things so they happen as part of a planned and careful process, not one that is haphazard and chaotic. Making prudent plans increases your chance of success.

Over the past few decades we have been conned into thinking that we need all manner of products and services to be happy and successful. The problem with buying those products and services is that we have to work more to pay for them. Working more means spending more time away from our families, and almost all the research I've read about what makes the average person happy, tells me that we are made happy by our family and friends. If our family makes us happy, why do we think that spending more time away from them to earn more money to buy products that we don't need will make us happier? It doesn't make sense.

I encourage you to think about your own life. Talk about your hopes for the future with your partner and together, make a plan to create the kind of life you want. Live a life you care about. Don't go along with everyone else - either as a spender, or living a simple life if that is not what you really want. Think, talk, dream, discover, and make a life that reflects you and your values. Remember that your life and aspirations will change as you grow older, plan now for two or three years into the future. And write your plan down on paper so you can monitor how you're progressing. If you don't know what to write down, or if you're new to this, be guided by the list we will follow during our audit but in every stage, think about your own circumstances and hopes and make your list, and then your life, reflect your unique beliefs and needs.

Just Do It
Old post on Living Deliberately

2. Money
Although money is not the most important aspect of a simple life it is the glue that holds it all together. You need to organise you money well - have on hand not too far above what you need to live, nor too far under. If you earn much more than you need, pay off all your debts fast or make some provision to donate or invest your money so it isn't there tempting you to spend it. If you don't earn enough to cover your expenses, cutting back on non essentials, cooking from scratch, gardening and mending may help you make ends meet. I don't want to trivialise anyone's circumstances, but these posts need to be short, so I have to generalise.

Above all else, pay off your debts as soon as you can. You will be rewarded with freedom.

We use the envelope system here and it works very well. We wrote up a budget, and labelled ziplock bags (or envelopes or jars or read Heather's post at the Co-op here) to put in the month's money for that category. We know at a glance how much cash we have for each item and how much is left over. Any money left over at the end of the month is paid into our savings account because we have no debt. If you have debt, it can go towards an extra credit card or mortgage payment. So my envelopes are working as they should, I have no need to change them. I am happy with how we're organising our money.

The envelope system is a very good way of keeping an eye on your money. It's simple, yet effective. But I want to add a way to track and record our money from month to month. I found this free download that I'm quite happy with - Budgetpulse software. So far, it looks very good and it provides money tracking and budgeting tools without linking to your bank account like Mint does. So that is one change for us - using software to track our money and keep records.

We have a pretty good idea of how to handle our money and we are in a phase of life when we don't have a need to add much to what we already own. If you're at a different stage this part of the audit many be difficult for you. Comment on your problems and we, the readers and I, may have some ideas for you. If you use an effective way of handling your money, please share it with us.

These posts on the various aspects of our audit have to be quite short. But I want you to take the ideas here and use the ones you like in your own life. Remember, nothing is set in stone, modify ideas to suit yourself, twist things around, fashion everything to suit YOUR life. There is not only one way of doing this. If there are lots of comments on particular subjects, we can go over them again in other posts after the audit. The main thing now is to start. So let's get moving.

Tomorrow's subject is food.