Appreciating Enough

Written by A Guest Speaker on May 21st, 2008

Appreciating Enough
written by Lightening

When my husband and I were first married, we were forced to live on quite a small wage. At the time he was working on the family farm and being paid a pittance for his time. During this period of time I felt we were somewhat hard done by and didn’t appreciate the struggle. Now that I have the hindsight of time, I can see that this period of struggle taught us many things which we’d find helpful in later life.

I remember sitting down and contemplating how much we would need in retirement. We plucked a figure from the air and decided that if we could retire on the equivalent of $30,000 in the current days figures, that would be a VERY comfortable way to live.

$30,000 sounds like SO much money when you’re attempting to live off around $15,000.

As time went on, my husbands wage improved little by little. Within a couple of years our income surpassed our $30,000 “dream wage” and yet for some reason we still seemed to struggle to have “enough”.

It seemed that the more we earned, the more we spent. In fact, we started to spend around 10% more than our income at the time. What had seemed like such a wonderful income to us only a couple of years earlier just didn’t seem to be enough.

After a couple of years of spending several thousand dollars a year more than we were earning, we started to contemplate the idea of returning to a two income family. With the justification of the expense of having children AND rising costs of living, my staying home until our children were at least 5 started to feel like an unrealistic dream.

It was at this point that we decided to sit down and take a long hard look at where our money was going. We’d always been good at formulating a budget but were rather poor when it came to keeping any kind of record as to whether or not we were actually STICKING to a budget.

In essence our budget was USELESS. A few scribbles on a piece of paper that at the end of the day meant NOTHING.

I started to record where our money was going. At first I just recorded our grocery spending. Without knowing WHERE the money was going, we were powerless to make changes.

The power that I felt in actually KNOWING how much we were spending on groceries inspired me to begin tracking other areas of our spending. The tracking alone seemed to slow down our spending somewhat. Having to be accountable, even if it was only to a piece of paper, seemed to reduce the urge to spend.

From there I started working on babysteps toward decreasing our spending in some areas. I found a wealth of information on the internet that gave me ideas for ways to achieve the same end with less dollars spent.

Within the first 6 months I had reduced our spending by $7,000. Enough to curb our ever rising deficit AND help us to catch up on money that had been spent BEFORE we earnt it.

So, what had happened to us? We had gotten caught in the trap of ENOUGH being “just a little bit more”….

You may be familiar with the saying that has made it’s way around in various forms where a rich person is asked the question “how much is enough?” And the response given goes along the lines of “just a little bit more”.

“Enough” isn’t a figure. It’s a mindset.

It’s about learning to live within your means rather than accumulating credit card debt in a bid to fulfill some kind of unspoken urge for more.

Lightening is the author of the Blog Lightening Online where she writes on a variety of topics including money management and frugality as well as a comprehensive series on Reducing the Grocery Budget.