Gather Little by Little

This week has been incredibly busy for me. Work has been just nuts and football season for my oldest son is in full swing with 3 practices a week from 6pm-8pm. We are heading to the mountains for the long weekend and can’t wait to get away for a few days! I did manage to allocate some time to catch up on all of the various PF blogs. Here’s my article “gathering” for this week:

From the M-Network:

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• Moolanomy talks about the super-size problem here in America
• Plonkee asks “Who do you donate to and why?“

Getting out of debt is much harder than getting in debt. I know, I know that’s obvious right? Well sure it is. The problem is people don’t seem to think about it when they overspend, buy things they don’t need, and live for the moment.

We live in a “I deserve it now, therefore I’m getting it now” world. Living this way is not honoring God first with your wealth. Deuteronomy 8:17-19 says: “Otherwise, you may say in your heart, ‘My power and the strength of my hand made me this wealth.’ But you shall remember the LORD your God, for it is He who is giving you power to make wealth…It shall come about if you ever forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I testify against you today that you will surely perish“.

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In the real world, I manage a group of software developers. Prior to managing, I was a software developer myself. Software developers for all intent and purpose are engineers. Engineers like to solve complex problems with complex and elegant solutions. Doing so is in our nature.

What is interesting though, is through the years I have found the complex solutions are not the best solutions. While they make for great research papers and graduate thesis, they aren’t easy to support, maintain or enhance. They make it difficult for people to learn, and thus training of new developers is difficult and time consuming. Complex solutions cost more money in the long term than simple solutions.

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The Carnival of Money Stories #23 – The Fire Edition is up on Fire Finance. My article You Never Know What Tomorrow Holds, So Be Prepared was included.

Make sure you link on over to Fire Finance and check out all of the great money stories including the this article from PaidTwice, also a member of the elite M-Network.

I was reflecting last night on how our lives have changed since we decided to get our finances under control. We strictly follow a budget, put as much money as we an towards paying off our debt and slashed our expenses. One thing in particular that I have done is to avoid temptation.

I intentionally avoid going to stores where I tend to spend money. Places like Best Buy, Circuit City, HHGregg, car dealerships, Auto Zone, etc. are all places where I am surrounded by temptation. It is extremely difficult for me to visit a place like this and not walk out with something.

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A couple of my articles were included in carnivals today:

• Free Money Finance is hosting this weeks Carnival of Personal Finance. My article, 7 Helpful Tips When Moving was featured.
• Mighty Bargain Hunter was the host of this weeks Carnival of Debt Reduction. My article, Good Debt?? There is no such thing.

In addition to reading my articles, make sure you visit the carnival pages and read all of the great articles submitted by M-Network and other PF bloggers. Getting ready to each some lunch and read a few myself!

This is a guest post by Michael Martine.

With more and more everyday activities moving from the physical world to the virtual
world, it becomes possible to save money by eliminating redundancies when these
activities create more than one cost. Doing this means you need to actively seek out
opportunities to eliminate redundancy and that you need to feel comfortable getting
around online and on your computer. If you’ve used email and made purchases online
before, you can follow these tips to save over $1500 a year.

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It’s time again for school to start. All of my children but 2 will be heading off on the buses Monday morning, their new backpacks full of clean paper, new pencils, and crisp folders. They are so excited and can’t wait until Monday. Their mother is as well! Every year I reminded of my youth, when summer break seemed like forever and I was excited about the return to school only to remember within the first couple of weeks why I looked forward to summer break again. This summer has gone by so fast, much faster than previous summers. It would seem there is trend. The older I get, the faster time seems to go by…getting old stinks!

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I am not sure why, but every time I read MOMA Meme, my mind automatically does so with an Italian accent…”Moma Meme, it’s in there!”

Moving right along…It would seem I have been tagged with the MOMA Meme from Pinyo at Moolanomy. Actually, all of us in the M-Network were tagged last week. I am not a big Meme person, and wasn’t going to participate but Pinyo is a pretty persuasive guy and he said please so what was I supposed to do?

If you don’t know what a meme is, than read this article on Wikipedia. Don’t feel bad, I didn’t at first either, I mean…Meme…what a weird word…it looks like a typo.

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This article is part of the series How to Get Your Finances Under Control

As some of you may have noticed, it has been about 2 weeks since I published, Step 6 Get Out of Debt of my How to Get Your Finances Under Control series. The reason for this to be honest is I have been struggling. Not so much as to what the steps are, as I have those and have had them since I first began the series. Nor has it been due to trying to determine what each step should contain, as I have that for a while as well. I have been struggling due to an integrity issue: Should I tell my readers how to do steps that I have not yet done?

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