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The Magical Dresser

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By whyshewrote

Babe,

I know I complain a lot about the budget and your new leader, Dave Ramsey, but I wanted you to know that I really do want to learn how to live on a budget and get better with our finances. Being able to take a vacation and not having to worry about paying the bills would be really nice, and I know we can do it. Just give me a little time. It's hard to adjust to not getting the kind of food I want all the time, especially when I am pregnant and craving things all the time! Maybe after Maya arrives, I'll be better :) I love you!!!
Email written to Andres a few days ago


I had a wonderful dream last night. We lived in a big, beautiful house and had a few friends over for a party. One of our friends mentioned something about being strapped for money and was worried about losing his house. Andres and I took him into a room that only had one piece of furniture in it, a dresser. We opened one of the drawers and there was bundles of money in it, and when we took some out, more of it magically appeared. We gave him all the money in the top drawer and told him we didn't need it back. We just wanted him to use it wisely. Imagine if we all had a magical dresser that just handed us out money whenever we needed it?

When I woke up, I thought about how we have been trying to budget, and maybe on some level, we are trying to create that magical dresser, something that we can always fall back on. I started thinking of Dave Ramsey's baby steps and especially, the Envelope System which we have been trying to put into effect. So far, we only have two envelopes: one for gas, and one for weekly groceries. I was thinking that we probably need to take that next step and start adding more envelopes to this system and like Dave says, "When it's gone, it's gone." This is something that we're bad at. If the money is gone, we'll still try to find a way to come up with more of it and end up spending money that we really didn't have to begin with.

I have to admit that I've had a little resistance with this whole budget thing. But Andres said the other day that one of the things he would really like to do when we're finished clearing our debt is to take a vacation (and pay for it all in cash). I keep thinking about how we have never really had a stress-free vacation in which we weren't worried about paying bills once we got back home. Even on our Honeymoon, we were worried about how to make ends meet once we arrived back in Dallas. I want to try to put more of an effort into the budget, and really work together to get something that we want. Maybe all it takes is a dream to change your mindset, because that magical dresser sure does sound nice at this point.
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