Tight fisted

There are a lot of things I don’t have control of in my life, but for me I do my best to control one thing and that is money/cash flow.  With Josh the only debt we had was the house. When we got married I paid off his car and after that ever credit card was paid off at the end of the months. We never spent more then we could afford. You can thank my parents for this good trait even thought it was a bit obsessive to some, we never had to “really” stress about money and that is saying a lot due to the times we live in. I’m referring to the downturn of economy and housing crash.  I have to say at times we were jealous, as people around us were all buying new TV’s, furniture, cars.  Then we were annoyed as people stopped paying their mortgages all together and were living free till they modified their loans or lost their homes.  But we just reminded ourselves that we didn’t have to live with the stress of not knowing where we were going to live or how we were going to afford to feed our family or put gas in our car.  Not once did we have that worry. Looking back I have some regrets. We were a bit too tight with our money.  I remember one trip we too to IKEA and I nearly had a nervous break down at the check out.  I just couldn’t bear spending that much on stuff we “REALLY” didn’t need. I think we ended up putting 99% of the stuff back. Looking back at it we both laugh because the total probably came up to less then $50 but I was so hell bent on saving money that I just couldn’t do it. 

Since divorcing Josh I have changed. It wasn’t an easy change as it was so engrained in my head growing up to save every penny for the future that I was unable to really spend any thing and enjoy it. There were things I always wanted when I was with Josh, but never got due to this concept. But instead of just sitting around regretting and feeling sorry for myself I have done something about it. (And the truth is if I could go back and do things all over I would probably do it the same as it worked for us at the time. We had a good life. We never had any real wants that weren’t fulfilled and the wants I talk about now are just material things and the reality is they really aren’t that important. They aren’t the end all of life.  There are things that are far more important then these small insignificant material things.)

One thing I always wanted to do was go to Europe, but we never went, as it was so expensive. When I left Josh it rose to the top of my bucket list and I went. I don’t regret blowing all that money going, I do kind of regret taking Randy, but not too much as I got to go and that was what was important. And I have lots of amazing pictures that he’s not in, call that divine intervention, but I was able to redo my album from our honeymoon with just pictures of me and you wouldn’t even know it was a honeymoon as I didn’t have to Photoshop or even crop anyone out.  I had enough picture of Me alone that it’s perfect. In the end it really was “A trip of a Lifetime.”