Tis the season to be budgeting...

Fa la la la la la la la cha-ching!

Rachel and I just started attending a class at our church on Monday nights called Financial Peace University. It's a series of teachings on finances by Dave Ramsey, a Christian author and radio personality. I had bought his book, The Total Money Makeover, a couple of years ago and really liked the principles in it. But, much like a diet, good principles are simple to understand but difficult to apply to daily life. Otherwise, everyone would be thin and rich! Rachel and I have found ourselves in some pretty tight financial times during the last 18 months, and we’re determined to bring ourselves back to financial health.

Our first step is to start living on a budget that works. We’ve never consistently been on a budget, and December seems like the worst month to start!! But, I was strangely comforted by Dave Ramsey’s words, reassuring us that our budget definitely wouldn’t work the first month, and probably not the second month either! The main idea for the budget is to create a “zero balance” budget, where you spend all of your money on paper at the beginning of the month, telling each dollar where to go. He says “If you don’t tell your money where to go, you’ll always be wondering where it went” (my paraphrase). I can’t tell you how many times we’ve asked the question “where did all our money go?”. We intend to answer that question every month, starting this month.

In other news, I just finished participating in my first Math Trade on BoardGameGeek, with pretty good results. This is a process where a bunch of people list board games that they want to trade. Everybody can view the list and add to it until the deadline. Then, you create a want list for the games on the list that you’d like to have in exchange for your game. Then, the trade organizer runs all of that information through a computer program that uses mathematical algorithms to create trade loops. Like this:

Person A sends their game to Person B
Person B send their game to Person C
Person C sends their game to Person A

Except that, for this math trade, some of those loops contained upwards of 200 people! I decided to trade my copy of Arkham Horror, a game that is pretty cool and very high quality, but just hasn’t been particularly fun for me to play. I’ll be sending that to a guy in Pennsylvania, while another guy in California sends me the board game Metro, along with the card game Set. I’ll definitely be participating in one of these again. It’s a great way to further my gaming hobby without spending much money (just a few bucks for shipping). And these days, counting the pennies will be of utmost importance!