Above Yourself

Welcome to Above Yourself, a blog about self-improvement and faith. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe in a reader or subscribe by email. Many of the topics here are related to my faith in Jesus Christ and Mormonism, but all are welcome to share their own beliefs. Thanks for visiting!

As a follow-up to a previous post entitled “Forming Habits: Daily Scripture Reading“, daily scripture reading for me has not yet become an automatic habit like it was in my high school days when the mornings were filled with early-morning seminary. As part of building a new goal, it’s important to set reminders for yourself so that you can train yourself to turn this goal into a habit. This daily email reminder is the most important feature of ReadtheScriptures.com and the main reason to use this website.

Reading Statistics

Right now the website keeps track of how much of a book of scripture you’ve read and displays the percentage as a small bar. As someone who grew up memorizing the backs of baseball cards, I’d love to have more detailed statistics than this, including some information about how many pages I read per day or how many days I’ve missed my reading schedule.

Read at your own pace

On Read the Scriptures you decide which book of scriptures you’d like to read and how fast you’d like to read it. A few schedules are all set up and ready to use, such as 30, 60, or 90 days to read the Book of Mormon. You can also set up your own reading schedule which will let you read at your own pace.

Work as a team

A newly-upgraded team feature lets you join teams with others and get basic statistics on their reading. Again, I’d love to have more stats here, but it’s enough to tell me that my wife is quite a ways ahead of me in her reading.

Keep notes as you go

I like to keep notes on scriptures, but I sometimes wish I could write more than what I can fit in the space of the margins. Read the Scriptures has a web-reader feature that lets you read and write at the same time, without limiting the length of the notes you can write.

Talking to your family members about finances can be intimidating. Different family members have different backgrounds and preferences when it comes to finances, and we all worry about coming off a little opinionated, especially if their views are very different from ours. Here are a few tips to remember when discussing personal finances with others.

Share Personal Experiences

If you want to share something that you know, you can bear witness or testimony of that thing. Just like it can be difficult to share your testimony with others, it can also be difficult to share your experiences with personal finances. Don’t be afraid that your personal finances will make you look different from others. In a world where everyone tries to keep up with the Joneses, you can show them that we’re not all Joneses. Sharing personal experiences is something I’ve set a personal goal to do, and that’s a major motivation I have for writing here.

Act Your Wage

This is a phrase stolen from personal finance extraordinaire Dave Ramsey. If you don’t live up to the principles you learn about personal finance or even about being a good, upstanding person, you negate any influence your testimony may have. If you try to advocate staying out of debt but you buy things you just can’t afford, your testimony means nothing.

Be Sensitive to Others

Don’t offend others with strong words, but use them to stir others to action. If you wish to use strong words, follow the teachings of Doctrine and Covenants 121:43, “Reproving betimes with sharpness, when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou hast reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy”.

Among all these ideas, you can also help them get started by giving them a copy of the pamphlet “One for the Money: Guide to Family Finance” from Provident Living.

This post is the final step in the series Family Finance Overview. Be sure to read the other posts in this series.

After you’ve built a budget and a plan for sticking to it, you’re ready to build up a reserve of money to be used as an emergency fund. It’s alright to start out small, but be sure to add back what you take out, and only use it in emergencies (such as a medical need, temporary unemployment, etc.). This principle echoes overall preparedness, and is an important part of a financial plan. Without an emergency fund, it can be very hard to get out of debt when we’re trying to pay off all the money we owe instead of saving a bit. Start out small, such as one or two thousand dollars, and build it up to about three months expenses that you can keep in savings accounts where you can have quick access to the money should a need arise.

Speaking about building a reserve, President Gordon B. Hinckley said:

“Set your houses in order. If you have paid your debts, if you have a reserve, even though it be small, then should storms howl about your head, you will have shelter for your wives and children and peace in your hearts” (”To the Boys and to the Men,” Ensign, Nov. 1998, 54).

Building a Reserve is the fourth step in the Family Finances series on Above Yourself.

The third step of our Family Finance Overview is to use a budget. This is one of my favorite of the five beginning steps to finances, probably because it is one that we have recently implemented in our household. Although financial stress will always arise, having a budget will greatly relieve that stress.

Our first adventures in budgeting were triggered by some exceptionally large medical bills from unexpected complications at our daughter’s birth. We realized that if we wanted to give our daughter the best life possible, we would have to budget.

Make a plan

Dave Ramsey calls this “giving every dollar a name”. I’ve found that it’s best for us to plan out our expenses monthly for our family budget. Our monthly budget is divided into several categories such as rent, gas, etc. We spend every dollar on paper at the beginning of the month, including tithing money and money for savings. Every time we spend money on something it goes into our budget, which then calculates how much money we have remaining. At the end of the month we assess how we did, discuss how to make improvements, and adjust next month’s budget.

Spread out the occasional expenses

We have several expenses that we don’t pay every month, but are too large to be included in a single month’s budget. Our car insurance payment is a good example of this. Since we pay every six months, we divide our total payment by six and put money into the “car insurance fund” every month. This money sits in the bank until it’s time to write the check, and our current total is kept in our budget as well so that we get it in our minds that this money is already spent.

Make room for fun

When my wife and I were about to get married, her bishop suggested that we plan our finances so that we each would have a little money to spend by ourselves, unquestioned by the other. This doesn’t have to be a lot of money, but it can add up as we save for new “toys” or other things.

Do what works for you

We do our budgeting in Google Docs & Spreadsheets so that we can have easy access to it anywhere we have the Internet. Others I know use Quicken, Microsoft Money, or even paper. Everyone has their own style of how to do this, and it’s best to find what works for you. If you won’t use fancy budgeting software, don’t buy it. Be sure to explore others’ ideas of tools to use, but when you find one, make it your own.

Be sure to communicate

As with so many aspects in marriage, be sure to communicate when budgeting. The idea of a budget is to have a plan, not a strict set of guidelines. Be forgiving to yourselves when you spend over your budget, but be ready to make the adjustments necessary and accept the fact that this budget belongs to both of you. Plan it together, and don’t leave it to just one spouse to do all the budgeting. If you’re not married you can ask these same questions of yourself.

Using a budget is hard work, but the rewards are great. It can be fun to track your progress and see how your budget influences your spending habits, and it’s a great way to apply the previous steps mentioned in our
Family Finances Overview series. Use it to get out of debt, and use it to save for the future.

The second step of our Family Finance Overview is to avoid debt. This might sound like an oversimplification, but avoiding debt is all about spending less than you earn. The key here is that you must have a plan for your money. If you are in debt, set up a timeline to move out of debt, such as a debt-elimination calendar. Regardless of your debt situation, you should also have a family budget so that you can measure your progress toward becoming debt free and saving what you earn.

Determine your needs and wants

When you are paying of debt, you can’t afford to buy everything you want. Train yourself to tell the difference between your needs and wants. Basic needs include shelter (your rent or mortgage payment), food, and transportation. Wants can sometimes sneak their way in to these categories when we want to rent or buy houses beyond our needs, eat out at restaurants, or drive fancy cars, especially if they are leased. It’s not wrong to have these things, but they can turn our wants into needs in our mind.

Getting and Staying out of debt

From Provident Living:

We should avoid debt. There is nothing that will cause greater tensions in life than grinding debt, which will make the debtor a slave to creditors. A specific goal, careful planning, and determined self-discipline are required to accomplish this.

President N. Eldon Tanner taught: “Those who structure their standard of living to allow a little surplus, control their circumstances. Those who spend a little more than they earn are controlled by their circumstances. They are in bondage” (”Constancy Amid Change,” Ensign, Nov. 1979, 81).

Staying in control

Debt has a way of causing rifts in marriages and enslaving us. If we do not control our debt, it will easily take over and control us. In the May 2004 Ensign, Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin states:

Remember this: debt is a form of bondage. It is a financial termite. When we make purchases on credit, they give us only an illusion of prosperity. We think we own things, but the reality is, our things own us.

Some debt—such as for a modest home, expenses for education, perhaps for a needed first car—may be necessary. But never should we enter into financial bondage through consumer debt without carefully weighing the costs.

Avoiding debt is the second step in the Family Finances Overview series.