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!

Reaching our goals in life often takes baby steps. Goals should be worked on as part of a series of events, and they shouldn’t be dependent on just one major event happening.

Think of it this way: If your goal is to retire with a million dollars, there are two types of ways you can do it. One way to get a million dollars all at once at the last minute, by winning the lottery or having a really great idea come to you out of nowhere. Winning the lottery is something like trying to hit a home run in baseball with every swing. This strategy might win one or two games through the whole season with a lot of fanfare, but Major league coaches know that consistent winning comes through stringing together a few hits and good strategy rather than trying to have every player hit a home run every time up. This is the equivalent of saving up smaller amounts all throughout life in order to reach the million dollars. It suggests that we should leverage the power of interest and savings in our investment plans.

As Seth Godin has said, “the home runs you almost hit don’t count“. Each time we swing for the fence, we don’t have anything to build on when we miss.

Success in spirituality is achieved through the same means that it is achieved in our daily life, through regular and consistent achievement of smaller goals. No one act can get us into heaven. Achieving our goals through baby steps lets us build on our previous successes, and we can start to achieve forward momentum in a world that is constantly pushing back on us.

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.