Welcome to our Affording Our Lives blog. We are excited to share our financial journey to affording the things we want in life. It is our hope others will be able to learn from our story to craft a better life for themselves.
We live in a time of opportunity and knowledge sharing, yet for many of us we feel financial pain. We have too much debt. Or we don’t feel we earn enough. We buy things we don’t need and cannot afford the things we really want. For many years, our family felt wronged. We blamed our circumstances and couldn’t understand how we were not getting ahead. Despite trying to follow what we thought was the right way to live our lives financially, we struggled. We were doing what we thought everyone did and that was largely part of the problem. We eventually realized that maybe “doing what we are supposed to do” was not the answer. This realization caused us to do some self reflection and investigate a better way forward.
Affording Our Lives Story
Over the past nine years we have come a long way toward achieving financial literacy. We continue building a strong financial foundation for our family. We spent many hours doing research, engaging in consultation with others (including financial planners), reading books, building a robust budget (more on this here: https://affordingourlives.com/home-budget-for-your-improved-financial-benefit/) and doing some experimentation with the strategies we found along the way. The process was long because we didn’t exactly know where we were heading. It didn’t help that we were constantly changing the vision for affording our lives.
When we started out we thought we had a decent understanding of how to operate financially. The more we read, the more lightbulbs went off and we realized that there is no one right way. At first that frustrated us. Yet, as we learned how many opportunities existed to live the lives we want, optimism and desire grew.
We knew we had to figure out what we really wanted in life. Then we had to find or develop tools to get there. Some of the strategies came naturally, as we had grown up doing them. Others were traditional things we learned and had not yet implemented. Some were quite different from anything we had learned prior.
As we develop this site, while evolving our goals and strategies, we will share what we learned. That includes not only the good stuff, but the bad as well. Our journey has not been easy. We continue to hit road bumps that we overcome. We developed some resiliency and safety in learning these lessons. These “failures” have driven us to make changes for the better and in many ways have become blessings. They made us say, enough with the status quo.
Our Hope
We hope by sharing our story we can help grow of community of people who are looking for a better way and show that there are ways to achieve your goals even when it feels like they are out of reach.