{ Going Against The Grain }

I hope my sister doesn't mind but I'm going to use a recent email exchange as a launching off point today. A few days ago, this was in my Inbox:

"Sis, your blog is killing me." (Literally, that was the whole email)
My reply: "Why?" (Literally, that was the whole email)
Her reply: "Because that is so NOT how we were raised."

The picture of my sister, laughing as she read about my white envelopes and me picking up 20 chickens (with bones, no less...a long family joke), ran through my mind and made me giggle. But she was SO right. My sister and I were raised by parents who worked their butts off to make a better life for us but our Mom was a shop now, pay later kinda girl. That's not to say she was irresponsible, far from it, but we were not raised with a "wait till you can afford it" mantra. Nope, it was more like, if you want it, buy it and work longer hours to pay it off.My views on money, money management and debt...they are not easy, or second nature or even instinctual.

I've said it before, I'm not formally trained in anything money or business. I've learned it the hard way. We have paid off not one, but two student loans and a mountain of personal debt in the last 16 years. My business experience began quite quickly when I opened an itty bitty shop, in an itty bitty town, with friends two weeks after 9/11 (clearly, the planning happened before). I had never worked a bookkeeping software before that first month in my life and my entire buy in was on my credit card, not my recommendation at all! (That little shop has now grown into a big shop http://www.thepaintescape.com/ owned by our former employee and dear friend, Tina. Check it out!)

My soap box lectures come from a place of been there, done that, don't need to go back. The life I strive for today is different. It's a life of not of running to stand still, but of just standing still. When I post about Operation Feed Ourselves, it's a project to see if we can raise more of our food in our little garden to save money and support of local economy, but it's also time to be still in my yard, with my family, with myself. I fight every day against the easier road of "just don't think about it, make it easy" but I know that if I listen to that voice, I won't be OK in 10 or 20 years. I watched my Mom work her whole life and we buried her at 56. She always thought she could stop and relax later but later didn't come. As long as money drives you, you are not driving yourself and that, at its core, is why I am taking this not so easy path. Sharing it with you just keeps me honest.