Switching Financial Roles

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There’s an old saying about walking a mile in the shoes of someone else to gain wisdom and understanding. That’s true in many aspects of life, including your finances. I’m not talking about living a day in the life of someone significantly more or less off financially, I’m talking about your significant other. Let’s be real, as much as we might talk about doing finances together, there’s usually one person that drives the family’s finances more than the other. There may be financial meetings and discussions to keep everyone on the same page, but in most cases one person carries […] Read more »

Applying Agile Principles To Your Finances

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I spent three days last week in a workshop learning advanced concepts of the Agile Methodology. If you’re in software or project management you may have heard of Agile as a methodology in which the requirements to achieve a goal are constantly reevaluated, and course corrections made through incremental and iterative work segments. One of the workshop facilitators stated that she found Agile practices spilling over into her personal life.  As she made that statement, I could feel my eyes roll back into my head. The thought that a project management technique used for complex software development being applied to […] Read more »

Budget Reset: Falling Off The Financial Wagon, and Climbing Back On

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My wife reminded me that we needed to sit down and talk finances. She was right, as she always is. I knew it was going to be a long conversation, as it was the first one that we’d had since our annual Memorial Weekend party. We both knew this was going to be an in depth, serious conversation. We both knew that as we prepared for the party we essentially ceased to execute every single technique that had resulted in us successfully handling our finances over the last few years. It turned into a full fledged, throw the budget to […] Read more »

Improvement Requires Change

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I’m looking to achieve some big goals in 2015. It all really boils down to being the very best I can be in the important areas of my life. One of the biggest categories is fitness. I want to tune my diet, helping me to become a healthier and much trimmer athlete. At the end of each day, I spend a little time reflecting on what I consumed. If you’ve never done this, I highly recommend doing this at least once. Each time I do this, it’s very obvious why I’m not at my goal weight. The amount of complete […] Read more »

Your Kids are Watching, What Are You Teaching Them?

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In a rush of memories recalled by the video being projected onto the wall, I was reminded of countless times my parenting skills didn’t qualify as Father Of The Year material. It was the last session of my son’s driver’s education class and parents were asked to attend the last half of the session. The instructor was attempting to drive home the point that the only way we will ever create a culture of safer drivers was for us parents to put in the time and effort to teach our sons and daughters how to be good drivers. The video […] Read more »

My Journey Out of Debt Has Brought Me Closer To God

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In November I had a series of posts published in the CareOne Community discussing positive things that have resulted from my journey out of debt. This post was meant to be the last in that series, but I held back writing it because quite honestly I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable revealing this previously undisclosed part of me to my online friends.  However, as the weeks have gone by, I have felt a growing desire to write this post. As is typical of many young children, I gave my parents a hard time about having to get up on […] Read more »