This is the introduction to a series I will write on how we became debt-free. I’ve posted snippets throughout the last several years, but now that we wrote the last check, I’m ready to tell you how we did it.

I am 32 and my husband is 40. We started our life on $318 a week. We’ve been married 11 years and we have six young children. We own seven rental units and a 54 acre farm. Truthfully, rental properties belong on the liability side of the balance sheet; they are just a pain in the assets. If you are in the market, have I got a deal for you…. But the farm is our dream, and by the Lord Jesus, it belongs to Him.

In this series, I want to write freely without disclaimers. We never had extraordinary circumstances, like a $500,000 hospital bill, and so I am not writing to fix anyone’s life or to tell you what to do with an impossible situation. These are the things that belong in God’s hands. Yet, most people are drowning because the faucet was left on, and not because a tidal wave came out of nowhere.

Please bear with me. I am writing to young people, mostly, about what I knew when I was younger and what I wish I knew. Our journey isn’t perfect, testified by the rental properties, eh? If I had any brains, I wouldn’t own those things.

This story isn’t about bragging. I have a blog title to maintain, you know. I will tell you about my failures in word and deed, which will take a long time to exhaust. I have ideas to do what we did even better. This isn’t a nanny, nanny, boo-boo series. I’m telling you how to become a lender instead of a borrower which is usually a good thing, government bailouts and corruption notwithstanding.

I like games that depend on strategy and not luck. This is my game. There are no quick fixes, just a lot of little-by-littles. I do have a few secrets up my sleeve, but in order to tell them, I need to be able to talk freely without being on the defense.

This is the internet, and I can’t share everything. However, there is enough about our journey to make a great story.

Here is a letter that I received today (used here with permission):

I am curious how you got on this road to self reliance. Where did you start? Why did you choose this path? Were you always so good with money? (I think you answered that in the “I knew I would marry Greg when he fixed my car” post.) Anyhow, I have been doing a lot of thinking lately and you come back to my mind.

You and I have a lot in common, about the same age (I think I am a year older at 33), I have been married 13 years, have 6 children (living) and my husband makes about the same amount of money as Greg.

The differences are we are deep in debt for no reason, have never bought a home or been a landlord to anyone, and we’re not really good with money either. I know you said people don’t want to listen to you when they ask for help but then you share how hard it is. I want to listen.

It hit me between the eyes when I realized our families have been in the same place but you have your dream and here I am still dreaming about it 13 years later.

What was your and Greg’s plan? How did you handle it if you got sidetracked? How did you handle it when you wanted to give up and just go out and blow your money? These are things I think people would like to read about.

I told myself awhile back, when I realized that you achieved your dream in basically the same circumstances as I have had, that if I start over right now then in 15 years I could still reach my dream. I know that owning your own land does not take place of what we do for Christ but I also know that when I think of living from what I grow with my own hands then I feel closer to God. I believe that is what I am supposed to be doing.

Thanks so much for everything, sharing your life and all. Oh and your comment about Pepsi about killed me. My husband has said I would rather die then give up Pepsi so it really hit home. At first it was funny, then really sad because I realized you were talking right to me.

In Christian love,
Mrs. DMG

This is for her and anyone else like her. I will get to the “what now?” part in time. First things first, though. I have to start at the beginning. Join me next time when I talk about the best thing we ever did before we married.

I said that I’d tell you the most important thing we did before we married, and I accidentally thought of two things. One is practical and the other is theological. Just like a good sermon, I will preach first and apply afterward.

God owns it all, not just ten percent
The first thing we settled is that God owned us and we belonged to Him. We desired—now and then– to submit to the Lordship of Christ, and money is just one of those areas. To that end, we decided that God owned 100% of our money, instead of the traditional 10% tithe. This means that it matters.

It matters what we do with all of it. We don’t give God a portion and then use the rest. I don’t believe in a sacred-secular divide, and so I really mean that God cares about all of it. Our spending habits are a reflection of where our treasure is, and the same could be said of our hoarding as well.

We agreed that money is just a tool to do the work that God has given us to do. It’s not an end in itself.

Young men should make the most of their single years
Before he began pastoral and seminary work, Greg took an engineering job right out of college. He was 21 and found himself working a year for a big company in Florida. They sent him to San Francisco his first month on the job. Since the company paid for his convertible, maid service, and apartment the whole year, he socked away his first year’s salary: $30,000. Because my life goes this way, I married Greg after he was no longer privy to the maid service.

In life, there are forks in the road. What you choose at this moment is significant. Greg made an important choice here that we–his wife and six children –benefitted from many years later. I can’t take credit for any of this good thinking because I was still in ninth grade worrying about important things like my hair.

Greg put one year’s salary in the bank. He didn’t treat himself to a vacation, a new car, or a gadget. Everyone gets these choices and what you do with them are the reason you are where you are today. Looking back, the money should’ve been invested more aggressively (and not in a money market), but the fact that he saved a year’s salary while he was young was the best thing that ever happened to us.

Tough love alert
This isn’t crazy. Think about it. What are these young men doing anyway? Stop playing video games and grow up. Get a job. Put the money away. Don’t buy a sound system for your truck to impress your girlfriend; you can tell a woman worth keeping by how much she cares for these things. These are young men who can stand to drive a rusty old pickup truck, eat beans, and wear the same jeans for a year. Make the most of the time before you have a family to support. You can stand to bust your rear; it will give you character (and muscles).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch
Greg loved his job and performed well, but feeling called to ministry work, he left the job after only one year to serve as a pastor and begin seminary. Otherwise, we’d be millionaires, since he had several years before he met me and started a family. His next job would make the saving go a little slower because of the salary and the fact that he was paying for his master’s degree. Which is to say, money is not the driving force.

When we married, Greg was serving as a pastor. Greg’s salary was $318 a week + health insurance. How did we live on it? I will tell you that tomorrow, because the next thing I will say is more important.

This is the second fork in the road: We had the money as a cushion—but, get this—we never, ever touched it. We could’ve, but we didn’t. We chose not to. We saw $318 as our budget—and when I worked as a public school teacher before we had children or taught piano lessons part-time out of our home—we never used that either. That wasn’t “fun” money. It went toward our future. Our fun money came out of our budget: $318. That’s what we lived on. No joke.

I believe that we shouldn’t just spend less than we make, I believe that we should budget and spend significantly less than we make. We did that in poverty and we do that in wealth. It’s a principle to apply no matter what. This way, money is a tool and not a ruler. It’s not about how much we can get to live it up.

I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich. I’m the same ole’ grump either way. It’s just stuff. I value peace more than I value junk. We may have been broke, but meeting the budget was always more of a challenge or a game, rather than a reason to be depressed.

Three take aways:

God owns everything, and nothing is outside his lordship.

We received interest payments instead of making them. The power of compound interest is the backbone of our story. This means, effectively, that our lifestyle is cheaper than our neighbor’s lifestyle since ours comes interest-free. We can live on less.

It is easier to stay out of debt than to climb out of it. Starting a marriage with an emergency fund in place is a very good idea.

When I pull out The $318 Story, people want to know how we did it. This is my only frugal post, as there’s so much more to it than that. More is coming, but not today. Today we are talking about washing out Ziploc baggies, because that’s what I do even now when I don’t have to. I can afford lots of baggies.

I don’t want this to turn into a Frugal Blog, not because I don’t love all things frugal, but because other people are already doing that and doing a much better job at it. Get The Tightwad Gazette and pour over it.

There are people talking about debt– like Dave Ramsey. Now, I enjoy Dave, except for the part about cutting up your credit cards even if you know how to pay them off every month, but I get his point. I want to take he and his wife out for dinner and pay with a Visa that I flash. Just because I’m like that. Which is to say: Dave Ramsey has his Debt Snowball, but I have The Burger King Factor.

Ahem. We’ll upgrade this show when we go big time, but for now, it is what it is.

The Burger King Factor
When I was a very broke college girl, there was a group of us who went to Burger King (on purpose) after church on Wednesday nights. The guys would always order a Whopper Meal for $2.99, wolf it down, and then sit around stealing the French fries of anorexic teenage girls.

That’s when I told them.

If you order a Whopper Jr. Meal for $1.99 and a Whopper for .99, then you will get two hamburgers, fries, and a drink for a penny less than you are stupidly paying for the regular $2.99 Whopper Meal.

They told me I was a genius, but I was flat broke so I passed on the complement. I figured if I was so smart, I’d make that work for me on a bigger scale.

There is a bigger scale. It’s called life.
Frugality is a state-of-mind. You don’t just decide to cut spending one day, and then watch the money roll in. You are always looking around, thinking about, and resisting the traditional path. That path is, “Consumerism.” Find something else to make you happy.

I said in a comment on the thread below that the University paid Greg to go to school. Fork in the road moment: What I really meant, though, is that the money Greg could’ve used for room and board was saved while he lived at home. He didn’t do what everyone else was doing –something “unpopular” with most college freshmen – and it was by choice.

A lot of choices like that and you have a million bucks.

Life is a string of ordinary moments. There are a bunch of them, and when you put them together, you have –forgive the allegory, I’m grasping today—a pearl necklace. One little pearl by itself isn’t worth much, but collectively, they are.

This is why you can’t go out and just get a lone pearl and expect a necklace to poof into action: decide to use coupons today, but don’t change your mindset for life. You have to live in such a way that you are always collecting pearls. Does that make sense?

Does your foot automatically slam on the brake when you pass a garage sale? If I was driving a laboring woman to the hospital and happened by a garage sale, the poor woman would get whiplash. It’s just instinct. I can’t heeelllllllp it. (No, I wouldn’t stop and shop. Please! I have standards. If it was her first baby, though, I might see if she needed to “walk.”)

If you gave me a choice between a Hawaiian vacation or a field of blueberries getting planted on my property, I’d pick the blueberries. One is a depreciating asset and the other, if you weed it, is an appreciating asset. I know, I’m crazy, but I’m also not broke anymore. Don’t knock it.

———

Coming up: getting beyond frugality, differentiating between appreciating and depreciating assets and why you’ll never be rich if you don’t know this, how to get stock tips, and a lot of other things.

Greg tells me to give credit where credit is due, and that’s to his parents. Greg writes:

One aspect I wanted to touch on is the fact that my parents made is possible for me, in more ways than one, to get off to a good start in life financially. In addition to all of the bits of financial wisdom instilled in me along the way, there were the very tangible things they did to get me started.

For example, my parents allowed me to live at home during my college years and a little beyond. This allowed me to save money I would have otherwise spent on room and board. With compounded interest over the years since, that relatively small amount of money grew into a significant nest egg. In the same way that debt compounds debt, savings compounds savings.

Even if we cannot achieve our goals in our lifetime, it is certainly possible to set our children up for what we could not achieve.

I’ve noticed that people are more than happy to give credit to another person for their failures, but it is rare to blame one’s success on someone else. If I am a wretched drunk, it’s because of my miserable childhood, but if I’m a big success, it’s because I had the brains to overcome whatever fill-in-the-blank I can pull out of the past. Kudos to Greg.

Our children will have advantages, but of course, it is up to them whether they capitalize on them or sell their birthrights for bowls of porridge. Sometimes I wonder what my children will tell their therapist about their childhoods. Then there are days when I look at a situation and say, “Yep. This one is going down in the files…”

I will be blamed. “What for?” is the question.

Sorry for the length of this post. I just find it easier to write in the same way that I talk. This means that it is unorganized; it is a live-stream.

I find it incredibly easy to write self-deprecating posts. There’s lots of material. It’s not so easy to point out what we did right. Partly, because I know there is always some part about what we did right that we did wrong. (That was a clue that I might be a perfectionist who needs therapy.) Now, I am staring at a blank screen and saying, “Well, what exactly was it?”

Let me just get right to it. Blurt it out, and then backpeddle. That is the extent of my social manners, but I was homeschooled.

“Spend less than you earn” is good advice, but it is not great advice. No matter what money you make, live significantly below it. An electronic transfer will help you keep the accounts balanced and automated. If you never see it, you won’t miss it. Unless you are getting Bailout money, you should never spend more than you earn.

I admit it’s hard to make quick progress on a small salary, but we weren’t just saving money, we were saving habits. If Greg never changed occupations and never saw a monetary increase, we would’ve “paid ourselves” to rehab a house. In fact, given the current economic situation, that’s exactly the strategy we’d use if we were just starting out. Either way, after nine years in ministry (three of those years, we were married), Greg left for an engineering job.

Our salary more than doubled. That’s not saying much, but for us, it was big. Instead of adjusting our living standards to “the real world,” we kept our frugal lifestyle, allowing a little more breathing room like an occasional babysitter so I wouldn’t go crazy. This is a fork in the road. We kept the same living standard when the salary increased. Don’t eat your dessert first no matter what the Red Hat Society says; it’s bad manners. Greg worked a lot of overtime in those days, and so that also went into investments.

I find it easier to decrease your spending rather than to increase your earnings, nevertheless, Greg went back to school to get an engineering master’s degree. For the same work he was already doing, Greg was paid a better salary, so it made sense to us to jump through the hoop to increase the salary. I think young people ought to get all the certifications, degrees, and what-have-you early on, so that their earning potential is exponential from the beginning.

If you take home $50,000 a year, the way to financial freedom is to live on $30,000 and save $20,000. Five years of wise investing, and you will be set to buy your property outright–one you can afford, none of this subprime business (again, ignore this if you’re getting a bailout). We did not pay cash for our house, but instead, paid off our conventional 15-year mortgage in just a few years.

Since we did not spend Greg’s entire salary, we split our extra funds between the mortgage (five percent interest) and investments (which were averaging ten to fifteen percent at the time, much more now that we’re paying for the advice). Now, you already know that I am Doomsday. Even my kids say, “Great. Here we go again. Doomsday supplies.” Problem is, the only thing we’re really prepared for is if the world runs out of toilet paper. If we lose everything, we will have toilet paper, but I think that’s important.

The problem with my saying “how we did it” is because I would not do it again this way if I were making these sort of decisions given the current economic conditions. I would not be long on stocks and mutual funds, as we were until this year. We got out. I would not buy, rehab, and sell real estate as we did, even planning a whole business model on the concept. I don’t think real estate is close to the bottom.

To reiterate, that’s the way we did it, but I am not recommending that you invest in real estate or go long in the market. (If you do not know what “go long on the market” means, then chances are really good that you are, in fact, long.) I will not give investment advice. If you are not on the short side of the market (options, PUTs, and shorts—not to be confused with naked short selling), it’s my opinion that your money is safer paying off your debt instead of enduring these wild swings in the stock market. This is not my area of expertise. We actually pay for investment advice, so that means that I am not smart enough to give it.

I just don’t want anyone to read my story and then go out and get a mutual fund. That would give me a heart attack.

If you are not Doomsday like me, you will position yourself on the other side. It is up to you. I am just saying this is what we did, and at the same time, I am saying, “Please just pay off the mortgage and get out of the market with the least pain possible, staying in only if you know what you’re doing and have the risk tolerance.”

Frankly, I don’t know what to say anymore. I feel really silly telling anyone to pay off their mortgage when some guy Greg knows just got $60,000 off his principle just by not paying his mortgage on purpose. These are the things —when wrong is good — that destroy the very fabric of a society, and now that “the rules” no longer apply, what do good people do? And what of our culture when basic civility and goodness is no longer a virtue?

I cooked up a good scheme that would have us sitting pretty before the bottom falls out of the Bailout. I told Greg about it. He added a few details to make it even better, but he was doing it for fun while I was serious. When I got to the end of my story, the triumphant punchline, Greg says, “Yeah, but you’re a Christian.” I tried to wiggle out of it with the fact that I hadn’t broken any laws, but you know… I still scheme, but that is because I worry more about the bad guys prospering than I do about God’s wrath.

How does a person resist the urge to splurge?
The reason I never had the urge to spend crazy is because I’d run the magic numbers in my head before each purchase. Let’s say your husband clears $25 an hour and you stay home with teething toddlers all day long. You want to get your hair colored for $100. Is it worth staying home with said teething toddlers for FOUR HOURS by yourself (for argument’s sake, let’s say that none of those hours include naptime) just for a few highlights? Some people say “yes” and some people say “no” and that’s why I really don’t look at the way other people spend their money. Everyone has different thresholds. It’s just that it was easy for me to think: Greg taking the kids to the park while I do my own highlights vs. having him away working overtime to pay for extras while I am alone again with the kids and no adult conversation. It was just never worth it.

I don’t highlight my hair, so I don’t know where that example came from. I am just saying that an extra is anything that doesn’t have to do with basic food, shelter, and giving to widows and orphans.

The Magic Number in my head is always changing. Greg’s salary has had wild swings over the years. But I know The Magic Number for today, and now, some things that used to not be worth it are worth it now. We own a Million Dollar Mutt. Life isn’t about money. It’s just a tool that is able to be used with more leverage when you handle it right from the beginning. Of course, you can always resharpen the blade and get a better grip as you go. There is redemption as long as you are alive.

The weight of this world is heavy enough. It is better to live without self-imposed weights around your neck. If I am poor, let it be because the Lord ordained it and not because I was lazy or foolish. Bitterness, envy, strife, anger, lust— they all compete with our affections to our Savior, and the love of money or things is just another thing in that list.

The Christian is one who lives for something other than today. He stores up treasure in heaven. This life isn’t about now, and so for the Christian particularly, I don’t see delayed gratification as a foreign concept. It is just translating the spiritual to the physical.

To close, no matter what the salary, live on significantly less than you earn.

Rating: PG-13.

In college, I took a World Literature class. It was taught by a barefoot middle-aged woman, who by eccentric people’s standards, was still pretty eccentric. Over the semester, I pieced together her tragic story of betrayal and violence, playing out the nitty-gritty dramatic details in my imagination. Every love story — real and imagined — seemed to end in tragedy, even my very big deal love story at the time. Don’t I wish I could tell you that one.

The class went like this. We’d read a poem about sailboats, but wasn’t about a sailboat, if you know what I mean. It was about the wind, who was really a female, who crushed the sails, who was really the man who deserved it, yada and etc. Girl power. I felt pretty bad for all the guys in the class. The class was 90% discussion, and so the fighting over this or that was amusing.

After the discussion died down, I’d raise my hand, “Maybe it’s just about a real sailboat. The author is a fourteen-year-old island boy.”

Boo. Hiss.

I had trouble connecting with the professor with my writing, though truthfully, I see now that it was probably just because I was a terrible writer. The best evaluation I could hope for was, “Interesting….” Oh wait. It was really, interesting with a question mark like this: “Interesting….??????”

So one night, the day before a major paper was due, I went over to another student’s apartment to get some help. He was of the male gender, but somehow he’d figured out how to do well in the class.

“Just tell her what she wants to hear.”

So together, he typed while I paced the room thinking up the most colorful, ridiculous analysis I could muster. Lustrous, boisterous, voluminous adjectives, all were used to describe normal, everyday objects. And sex, lots of steamy sex – the kind this professor needed to unwind herself a bit. When the description was only stupid and not outright ridiculous, he’d grab the thesaurus to get something to put us over the top.

We had many high-fives that night. We even concluded the essay with, “Ergo…” Nobody uses the word ergo anymore, but we were thrilled with the effect.

We read the final copy aloud with theatrics, and at the conclusion he said, “I think you should turn it in.” Easy for him to say, it was my grade on the line. But hey, it was what it was.

I got an A+. Nobody had ever gotten an A+ from this professor. It might be the only one in history (or it might not).

The key to success was to find out what she wanted and then give it to her. This is not a way we ought to live life, of course, especially if you’re a parent or a spouse or a tax accountant. It is a precarious thing to be an agreeable person to live with and to be an honest person at the same time. I am trying to do that — be agreeable and honest — with the financial series, but it’s a wobbly plank to walk.

When I brought Oreo home, she had a broken leg and a chewed up ear. Our kitty was very skinny and malnourished. She walked with a limp, hobbling around and looking pathetic. When predators, definitely not named Doogle and Cocoa, came to hassle her, she just cowered. She never ran away. I’m afraid for her, because she doesn’t have any street smarts. In a world of survival of the fittest, I don’t know how she made it this long.

When it comes to money, most of us start out just like Oreo. We hobble along. Like Oreo, we had a bad start. Greg had a great start, but more people are like Oreo.

When I realized that I had to make my own way, I knew I needed to be a quick study. I was 16 when I spent $100 on a business idea. I was already working for other people, and I knew that I hated it. There was no money in that. So, I mailed my $100 to some scam artist to get a cassette tape of The Top Ten Best Business Ideas Ever.

Just to clarify, this is not a recommendation to send money to shady ads in the back of magazines. I ran into a dead end every time I followed up on an idea. But the point is, I decided that I was responsible for my financial life, and it was no use whining about my misfortune and my poverty. I knew that I had to be proactive instead of sitting there and letting life happen to me. I already tried that and it didn’t work.

If there is one thing that I hope to communicate, it is that you have more power than you think you do. You have the ability to work hard, work smart, and adjust to circumstances. With God’s help, you are your own best asset– not the government, your parents, or the evil rich people who keep you oppressed. I knew this intrinsically as a young woman, but only because my hand was forced. There is a certain Providence that no one can thwart, but most people struggle because of their foolish choices (or lack of choices at all, just sitting there, which of course, is a choice in itself) and not because of a frowning Providence.

I have had about 1,000 business ideas. Greg nixes about 99.9% of them. He is the brakes on my machine. He is cautious and I am wild. He is steady and I am unstable. He is smart and I am ….. nevermind.

I saw a piece on Jet Blue on 60 Minutes many years ago. The CEO seemed to have a good business model, and I liked his style. So I put my entire IRA in Jet Blue.

Stop laughing. This is my future you are mocking. I will be an old lady eating dog food, and then you will feel bad. Obviously, I’m a total idiot, but as I said before, there is always redemption. Here’s how the turn around happened.

Back during the housing bubble, I kept moaning about how it wasn’t sustainable. I argued, while people laughed at me. They were taking a lot of money to the bank. I wasn’t. We lived in Florida, remember. I couldn’t flip a house because my conscience wouldn’t allow me to take a debt that we couldn’t repay for the entire life of the loan. Knowing my luck, ahem, we’d be caught when the bubble burst. This kind of stuff happens to me.

I didn’t know that there were other people who thought the same thing. The premise was simple. Incomes weren’t rising proportionately with prices, and ergo, it wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the people who sold a house at the peak would stop rolling over their profits into a new house, and who will your buyers be then? Not a regular person with a regular job. They couldn’t afford it. Problem was, that’s the majority demographic: regular people with regular jobs. Of course, investors kept this going for an artificially long time (aided by all the crooks in the mortgage and securities businesses and the government), but it had to run out.

I sent Greg a link to Mike Morgan’s blog last summer. Ladies, don’t start a conversation with, “Honey, there’s this guy with a blog….” That won’t work. Trust me.

So I wrote, “This guy called it. I believe this stuff. We’re going down.” Here was the thing I did right: I knew enough to know that I didn’t know anything. I bought Jet Blue for crying out loud. But I found someone who knew what he was doing. Of course, he’s like a gabillion times smarter than me (and that much richer) and understands the intricacies. I am a big picture person. I only knew the ship was sinking because I saw the iceberg sitting there. When Mike got his license to give financial advice, we paid him.

You don’t need to know everything about investing. You just need to know what you really know and what you don’t know. This is true about more than investing. It will help to figure this out before you buy a retail shop, or let’s just say, low-income rental properties.

So my IRA account went from $800 to $2500 in four months. I’m not a math whiz, but considering everyone is down 25% right now, that’s pretty good. Our other accounts are performing just as well. I linked Mike’s $25 offer in my sideblog, and he told me that only two people took him up on it.

He wanted to offer it for free, but I told him it wasn’t a good idea. I told him he’d be swamped. Charge them something to cover your admin time, I said. I pay Mike over $225 for the same service he’s offering you for $25. I know there are more than 2 people with a sinking IRA. (I do understand that many of you do not have time to learn to trade, but we found the time it took to learn well worth it.) Of course, if you think the market has hit bottom and your IRA in Jet Blue is going up, then you don’t want to spend $25.

You guys are asking me to be honest. I don’t get a dime for mentioning Mike’s services. I think the education alone is worth $25. People who want a plug have to buy ad time in my sidebar. I’m mentioning it because I believe in it. I really think that a year from now, this country won’t look the same. There were wild swings in the stock market during the Great Depression. It’s not so much the direction, as the fact that there are wild swings. Today the DJIA had the fourth biggest drop in history.

Take a successful business woman out to lunch. Ask questions. People like to talk about their passions. Give your favorite frugal girl a gift and then ask her for tips. Be open.

Read a book. Maybe you’re thinking about the economy, frugality, or raising dairy goats for a profit. After you read a book, ask someone in that field about a specific point the author made. This is a better way to ask a question. Cold questions are OK, but educated questions are better. Knowing that you put the effort into learning beforehand will make an “expert” more willing to spend a lot of time and care with your answer.

I wish I had better news about Oreo. In the movies, she’d win an award for saving a drowning canary. She’d have her picture in the newspaper. She’d be the town hero. Unfortunately, she still cowers and doesn’t have the good sense to get out of the rain. She doesn’t run from predators.

Some of the predators are consumerism, envy, discontentment, and debt. I still make mistakes. I bought out-of-state rental properties and stock in Jet Blue. That’s just the beginning. Talk to your friends. Learn from their mistakes. Instead of watching movies on Friday night, invest in your education. Read. Work hard. Save harder. And take the time to learn. It’s never to late for that.