“Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of.”
– English Proverb

Over the last few years I have let myself get into some bad habits in various areas of my life.  It is amazing how easily they creep in and how they can go unchecked for so long.  The excuses I have made in my mind are somewhat entertaining when I look back on them…and kind of sad.  Tackling my soda habit has caused a snowball of ‘cleaning house’ in my life.

Money, Money Monday

A bad financial habit is coming around to bite us in a few weeks.  The bad habit is LAZINESS, perhaps you’ve heard of it.  I am a minister which makes for some interesting finances.  Our church is very generous and I feel well provided for.  We are able to afford to have my wife work just two days a week as a nurse which provides health insurance for our family, brings home some additional money and allows her to be home with our children as much as possible.  My system of saving to pay big bills requires active money management…not laziness.

At work I get paid every two weeks.  We are blessed to not live paycheck to paycheck, because of great jobs, the example of our parents, frugal choices and always hustling to make a little extra cash.  Within our bank account I have sub-accounts where I am supposed to deposit a certain percentage of each paycheck so that at the end of the year we will have a nice lump of money to pay property tax, insurance, and income tax.  Guess who got lazy and didn’t do this in 2012?  That’s right…me!  Fortunately we didn’t go wild spending money that we didn’t have so the funds are still in the main account to pay our property tax bill at the end of this month.  It’s a BIG bill and I am glad I don’t have to worry about how to pay it even though I was lazy.

Some of you might be asking – “Why are you paying your own property tax if you pay a mortgage?”  When we first took out a mortgage when we built our house in 2007 I was very active in managing our money.  There was not a penalty to opt out of the escrow fund for property tax and home insurance so I collected the money throughout the year and made a bit of interest off the funds as they sat in a money market account.

My first paycheck of 2013 is ready for deposit and I will be getting back onto track with purposing money into the various accounts.  I have sub-accounts for home, car, tax and IRA.  I always go inside the bank to do my business and I can fill out a deposit slip so that the funds are automatically distributed in the proper percentages into these accounts.  There is a certain amount of security in knowing that these funds are set aside for when the big bills come and that there will be no worry or last minute scrambling to scrape together funds.

I think it is important to note, when talking about purposing money, that I don’t set aside funds for our weekly contribution at church.  We will give the amount we have purposed every week until we have no money left to give.  We believe in giving to God from the first of what we get, not what’s left.  If times get tight we will not cut back on giving, we will cut back on other areas – on comfort items and such.

So that is my tale of laziness with money.  I suppose we all fall into that trap in various areas.  I am glad to say that my laziness didn’t get us into too much trouble, but it could have easily gotten that way.  What areas of your financial life do you need to work on?  Do you have a budget that you work from?  Have you reviewed your monthly bills lately and called your providers to ask for discounts and lower rates?  There is always money to be saved somewhere, even if it is just a couple of bucks.

And now for the soda update…  It has been another good week.  I have been able to avoid drinking too much of the sugary stuff, staying inside my goal all but one day this week.  Saturday evening we went out for pizza as a family and I had 2 styrofoam cups of Dr. Pepper.  Now that I think about it I wound up not finishing the 2nd cup so I might have actually stayed pretty close to 12 ounces.  There is something about pizza that really requires Dr. Pepper.  I think it is perfectly fine to let loose every now and then.

I haven’t felt this good in a long time.  Cutting out all the sugar has caused a significant decrease in fast food consumption as well.  I did 24.48 miles at the treadmill desk last week.  Probably about 6-7 miles of that was at a 1.0 incline.  (I’m not sure how many degrees that is on this machine.)  My body feels great.  Some mornings my legs are a bit stiff but it is the good kind of stiff, the kind where I know my muscles have been working.  I’ve been battling a tender foot.  I was horsing around with our 5 year-old and she landed on my foot and made it fold up in an odd position.  It has been tender ever since but I believe it was just from muscles or ligaments being stretched that aren’t used to it.  It stops hurting after 10-15 minutes of walking.

Something else to note on the health front – Our 5 year-old got really sick on Saturday evening after we got home.  She has her Mama’s immune system and rarely gets sick.  This is the first time she has had the ‘technicolor yawn.’  She was doing that all through the night – every 30 minutes – until she was too exhausted to even get herself up off the bed.  It wound up being a variety of strep throat.  Kudos to my wife for being the best Mommy and nurse that a little girl could ever ask for.  She has been right by her side the whole time.  My point…  I am not sick, yet.  I have always been the sickly one of the family.  I am hoping that getting a reasonable amount of sleep, walking at work everyday, and avoiding all the junk food I have been consuming has allowed my body a better ability to fight of germs.  Time will tell.  If I miss my regular posts on Tuesday or Friday you know what’s up.

My blessings to you as we start another week!  I hope that it is a great one for you and that God allows you the opportunity to share the blessings you enjoy with others.