We recently started Dave Ramsey's 7 Baby Steps to being debt free. Millions of Americans are thousands of dollars in debt. We only have a measly couple thousand (except our home), but our frugal family wants that debt dead and buried.
MisterKidd and I are already "gazelle intense" with everything we do. Since starting our debt free journey in June, we are well into Baby Step 2. It has taken serious discipline and a lot of saying "no" to ourselves to get here. Along with trying to save money, we've been looking for ways to earn more for our cause, including selling some of our stuff.
Enter: Serious Regret
I was doing a pre-move/debt free purge one day, and I set my sights on the bedroom TV. "It's so decadent to have two televisions," I thought. "We just need to read more books." I had been trying to talk MisterKidd into selling it for some time, but he always insisted that we used the TV more than I thought. We were dangerously close to completing Baby Step 1 at that point. So close we could taste it.
Marriages are made of opposites: a spender and a saver; a nerd and a cool kid; an introvert and an extrovert; a pack rat and a purger. I'm definitely the purger in my household, so I'm usually the one who goes on the selling sprees. Because we were trying to live like no one else, he finally agreed, and I posted it online that day.
I sold it for way less than I wanted, way less than it was worth, but more than I had before I started. And then I felt the sting.
I'm not a TV junkie by any means. Some days (when I'm not postpartum and trying to keep a toddler occupied), it doesn't even get turned on. But I like to see a few Gilmore Girls episodes when I'm folding mountains of clean laundry on my bed. And I have a few "sick movies" that work better than any prescription ever could.
Enter: Serious Regret
I was doing a pre-move/debt free purge one day, and I set my sights on the bedroom TV. "It's so decadent to have two televisions," I thought. "We just need to read more books." I had been trying to talk MisterKidd into selling it for some time, but he always insisted that we used the TV more than I thought. We were dangerously close to completing Baby Step 1 at that point. So close we could taste it.
Marriages are made of opposites: a spender and a saver; a nerd and a cool kid; an introvert and an extrovert; a pack rat and a purger. I'm definitely the purger in my household, so I'm usually the one who goes on the selling sprees. Because we were trying to live like no one else, he finally agreed, and I posted it online that day.
I sold it for way less than I wanted, way less than it was worth, but more than I had before I started. And then I felt the sting.
I'm not a TV junkie by any means. Some days (when I'm not postpartum and trying to keep a toddler occupied), it doesn't even get turned on. But I like to see a few Gilmore Girls episodes when I'm folding mountains of clean laundry on my bed. And I have a few "sick movies" that work better than any prescription ever could.
I sheepishly admitted my regret to MisterKidd, and he was very gracious (Ahem. "I knew you'd miss it!").
So the lesson I've learned is that there's a difference in having a 60 in TV in every room of your house and sitting huddled in the dark with no creature comforts in the name of being debt free. The balance is a tiny little TV in the bedroom.
But if you give a wife a TV, she'll need a DVD player to go with it. Because I sold that, too.
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