Are we there yet?

As most of you know, Ben and I have read Dave Ramsey's books and follow his pod casts and Facebook page. We agree with a lot of his ground work and ideas and have taken them and worked them into our own plan. We have worked through the first few steps and are now working on building up our retirement and future fund for the children. We are not going to force college on any of them, but would love to help with community college, job training, etc...

I kept thinking with each step I should feel something different. I don't know exactly what I expected, but kind of like a grown up "are we there yet?" with finances. We will always have a budget. We will always have every penny spoken for before the paycheck arrives. We will always be investing and saving and postponing gratification. But isn't there a time when the struggle changes? Where the daily battle is different and the crisis changes?

Well, I feel like we reached that point this past week. The well had been acting up for about a week and we thought we could baby it through the holidays and deal with it next year. But on Christmas Eve, it had other plans. We called a plumber, who was able to come look at it right away and get us on his schedule for this week. Then he gave us the estimate. Ouch! We both took a breath, looked at each other and it hit us. We can pay for that. We paid for Christmas with cash, we have our vacation money set aside and our emergency fund is fine. We have the savings to cover this. Nothing has to be cancelled or taken back or postponed...the only thing this will effect is the amount of money we have already saved for the next crisis. Maybe this really does work!

Maybe all this penny pinching and saving and driving old vehicles and eating in and using cheap phones and not having satellite, maybe it is all worth it when the crisis happens...and I realize it isn't a crisis. Are we there yet? Well, I still don't know what I expect that to feel like, but this felt pretty good! Does it mean we won't ever face a crisis we can't cover? No, but it means it will be a much bigger crisis or too many too close together to get us there. We may not be "there" yet, but this was a really cool experience to share together, to share with the children and to encourage us to keep it up!