My husband and I watched the movie “UP” last night. I’m torn on liking it or hating it. It was really depressing. But I did really like the moral at the end. Even if I haven’t decided if I loved or hated, it got me thinking…
I have known my husband for eight years. And through all of those eight years we’ve been together, we have taken one vacation.
One.
And it was our honeymoon.
For the past eight years, we’ve been worrying about “the next step” — whether it be digging ourselves out of college credit card debt and student loans by consolidating them to make the payments more manageable, or saving money while he went to school, or saving up for our honeymoon, or taking a hiatus from credit cards so we could buy a house, or stockpiling money so we could live while I took maternity leave (unpaid, mind you) and eventually quitting my job. A lot of these worries may revolve around finances. Money isn’t the answer to life’s problems, but it does make a lot of situations easier to deal with. Saying this though, whether someone has no credit history, for example, there are sites like Nova Credit that could offer advice in this aspect. Additionally, if someone has a poor credit score, it isn’t too late to make a change. There’s hope for pretty much anyone when it comes to managing finances. But at the moment, it can seem like a struggle. I’m sure a lot of people would agree that it’s difficult to pay off debt as there never seems to be any money spare to put aside. This is a constant struggle, however, one of my friends did recommend a website to me that has a number of suggestions on how to save some money every month. As my friend is a new mother, she needs all of the financial help she can get, so she told me that one of the most effective methods for her was negotiating her car insurance down. Apparently, that saved her quite a bit of money, so she suggested that I do that and learn more about some of the other ways to save money too. Perhaps I’ll have to look into that.
But now? Now we’ve done all of those things. And yet, we’re still waiting for the next step. What is the next step for us?
After we watched the movie and we were talking about the things we liked and disliked, my husband said, “I can’t wait to retire so then we can go out and do those things and be adventurous.” And I looked at him, and as lovingly as I could muster, I said: “Absolutely not. We are not waiting until you retire to go explore the world, and take vacations, and do things that we normally don’t do. Didn’t you learn anything from the movie? I don’t want to be old and decrepit and wait my entire life to do these things!”
So we decided, last night, in the very office that I type my blog, that we will not stash away our money like post Depression Era elderly folks did (and do). We will enjoy life, take risks (minimal, of course, now that Snarfy is in the picture), take vacations and have fun.
Of course we will still live responsibly and make sure we have enough money to eat, pay our mortgage and buy diapers, and every day life is fun and rewarding, but we are going to make a conscious effort to make sure we are exposing Baby Love to new things, vacation and adventure more than once every eight years of his life.
Thank you to the good people at Disney for making my husband see that we don’t need to live so “carefully” anymore.
Paradise Falls, here I come!
