Hi! I’m Rose,
• My formal education is in Business and Accounting.
• I worked as an auditor and bookkeeper for most of my career.
But what actually makes me qualified to teach you about money?
I am a person who, professionally knows about money way beyond the average. Yet, I had problems with spending, racking up debt and mortgaging a home that made me house poor. I didn’t think I had a problem until the stress of living paycheck to paycheck got bad enough to where I wanted out.
I thought I was living normal; the bank gave me a mortgage that I couldn’t afford, the car dealer gave me a car loan on a SUV and it was for 72 months and a large payment. I was living paycheck to paycheck like my parents did. But, I had some flexibility in my spending for vacations and such. This is pretty normal right? But what I found was it’s not the right way to live if you want to get ahead.
I could go on and on, glimpsing back for another decade of dumb money mistakes. I recognize the errors made in my past now. Yet, at the time, I thought this is just how the middle class lived. I really had a belief that I just didn’t have enough, that middle class workers just don’t get paid enough.
I identified as middle class because my parents did and so did my grandparents. Yeah, this money thing is a multi-generational mindset problem. I grew up watching my parents struggle with their finances. My Mom overspending then cutting the cards up and throwing them away. To this day, she still struggles. All she has are excuses, lack of discipline and a poor mindset from a history of limiting beliefs that she isn’t willing to deal with. I found that all I can do is provide the information, I can’t do the work for her…
So yes, I started down that same road, then I got tired of living in debt, with out-of-control spending and not being able to save. So, I moved out of the expensive home that was making me house poor, I traded my luxury SUV for a cute little Jeep. Then I worked on selling stuff and paying down the consumer debt that I had racked up.
You know what I found? Getting rid of payments left a lot of money free. Money that I could save and most importantly, buy my freedom.
Living paycheck to paycheck and being responsible for all those monthly payments steals your freedom. I bought it back, my financial freedom, by using a budget to learn where to put the dollars. It wasn’t restrictive, it was freeing. It gave me confidence and clarity.
I learned to stop spending money on things that didn’t matter to my family. This allowed me to begin to utilize a budget in a way that pushed us toward financial freedom yet still allowed us to spend money on the things that matter the most to our family.
As I unpacked what I was experiencing I realized that it wasn’t hard work, it was just a few simple new strategies that I needed. Most important though was the behavior or actions that contributed to the problems, I needed a shift in the way I thought about things. A ‘mindset’ shift.
