Hey Reader!​
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​This month marks 25 years since I walked away from my career. My brain is still trying to comprehend that one!

I had spent 11 years building a career in corporate finance that I loved. I had worked hard for the position and I knew I was giving up opportunities for growth and an income that could give us a life neither of us had experienced growing up.

I won't pretend that we had it all figured out - it was scary!

I was also giving up something that had always been incredibly important to me: my independence.

I was bringing home the same money Tim was. I felt like an equal, and even though he has never made me feel like I didn't deserve his support, from the time I was a young girl, I had always wanted to depend on no one.

But there was something I wanted more.

I didn't want my children to know what it felt like to be without.

I knew what it felt like to be left out, to do without, to not have medical insurance or the nice things that I dreamed about as a girl. I didn't want that life for them, and I didn't want to always be saying no or the dreaded "we can't afford..."
We both also knew that we didn't want someone else raising our baby while we were both working to build a bigger life.

In the first week of October 2001, we made a decision that didn't necessarily make sense on paper.

We let nearly half of our income go.

Twenty-five years later, my children can't possibly relate to the life Tim or I had growing up. Just this past week, my daughter and I were talking about some of it and she said, “I wouldn't survive.”

She doesn't know the depths of it, and as far as I'm concerned, she won't ever fully know.

That's something I wanted money to do for my life long before I knew how to put it into words.

Today what I want looks a little different.

Every morning and evening when I walk around our farm, I look at the beauty and peace around me. Our whole family loves it here. There is a contentment I haven't felt in many years, and the restored farmhouse is the oldest home I've lived in since 1996!

That wasn't a “Can we afford it?” question, and it wasn't me bullying him into something I wanted. It was a decision question: Do we want them? Do we have room? Do we want more goats to take care of?

Money wasn't making the decision for us.

That's the type of question that I want you to think about today.

What do you actually want your money for?
Not just how much you want to save or how much debt you want to pay off.

What do you want your money to make possible in your life?

Because if you don't know what you want, the money doesn't have much meaning. It's just there and going, and you'll keep wondering what happened to it.

Twenty-five years ago, what mattered most to us was raising our children the way we wanted to raise them. Today, some of what matters looks like a quiet farm, grown children who have choices, time together and apparently the possibility of more baby goats. 😂

The details have changed, the seasons have changed, and our income has certainly changed.

But knowing what we want our money to make possible has changed the way we make decisions with it.
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​Have a blessed and happy Sunday!

Helping you find calm, confidence, and margin with your money

P.S. Take a few minutes today and finish this sentence: “I want my money to give me the ability to ______.” Don't put a dollar amount in the blank. Put your life there.

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