How To Stay The Course When Life Gets Hard

Ep: #1 - Running to the debt-free finish line can be exhausting and tiresome. In this episode, I share why you need a tribe of cheerleaders in your corner and how to deal with the negative people around you. 

Example: Say your baby is learning how to walk and by some miracle, your baby can talk like a 5 year old. We’re just pretending. Stick with me. As your baby is learning how to walk, he complains that he keeps falling down every time he takes a step or two. He continues to say that it is too hard and he doesn’t want to try anymore. 

As his parent, do you allow him to quit? Do you tell him that you know it is hard and that he should stop trying? 

No, because you know how this is going to play out. You know that with encouragement from you and with constant time and practice, his legs will get stronger, his balance will get better, and he’ll learn to walk. With time, it becomes second nature. He won’t even have to think about which foot to use first when he stands up. It’ll just come naturally. 

We can use the same example when it comes to budgeting. When you first start out doing a budget, it won’t come naturally to you. You WILL have things that you’ll forget to put in your budget. Things like school supplies and field trips. 

One of the biggest mistakes we made was calculating how much we needed for groceries every month. We had previously been spending about $800 a month, we could live off of $200 right? Nope, that was a budget buster for sure. 

You’ll have to move money from one category to another to make it fit just right. It usually takes about three months until you get pretty comfortable with your budget. 

So like our baby example, the key is to be consistent and keep doing it. Give yourself grace and know that the more you keep working at it, the more confident you’ll become. For us, we’ve been doing a budget for over 5 years now and it’s like second nature to us. There’s not a lot we need to change every month because our expenses are pretty much the same every month. 

I’m going to give you three tips on how you can stay motivated and focused on a long debt-free journey.