In light of the interest in my previous post about budgets, I figured it would be good to resurrect a serious I started a while back on financial lessons. These aren’t complex or fool proof, but they are some steps on how I think about money. I think these will be my Wednesday posts for a while.Financial Lesson #1: Discerning your Needs and Wants
You must sit down (and if you are married, you both need to sit down) and draw up a list of your basic NEEDS (That you spend …

Thanks for all the feedback on the last couple house posts everybody! I’m realizing there are quite a few more interested parties then I originally realized. I mentioned earlier that one of the reasons we are excited about doing this, and taking seriously paying off our debt, is that we want to have an opportunity to serve as an example to others of taking debt seriously and paying things off. The ultimate goal for us, is to live on only what we need (more discussion here later) and to continue …

Joanna, at Keeping Feet, wrote a great piece called Sick of Stuff, which I thought was worth checking out. Here’s a snippet:
Christian author and theologian Richard Foster puts it this way:
The lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.
I stole that quote from my pastor’s sermon a couple weeks ago. The topic is Practicing the Economics of God’s Kingdom, and the second catalyst he talked about to encourage us to change …

I reposted about this topic in December, but I wanted to highlight the podcast, which I think is worth a listen. A while ago I chatted with my friend Nate about simple living and some discussion we had had on our blogs and others comments. It was quite interesting.
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For the original post, On Simple Living and living “a dollar above” the poverty line

I’m a visionary of sorts. What I mean is that I often think about and dream about what would happen if… the big radical amazing changes we long to take place actually took place. In an effort to encourage my imagination and spread the vision of change to others, I’m gonna start writing once in a while some of these thoughts. Don’t know if I’ll call them by a unique title or not, any ideas?
In reflection on yesterdays post on Jesus’ statements on Wealth…
What if Everyone Who Read The Bible …

The Conversation about housing got my wheels turning and I started thinking about different ways we might live creatively outside the box of what we are currently used to in our culture. I’m gonna write a few things this week about just ideas I’ve had of ways to live out our convictions creatively. This is the first.
Instead of taking out huge Mortgages and taking years to pay them off and effectively paying three times the cost of our houses, we should pay each others mortgages. I’m not quite sure how …

We’ve had a fabulous discussion over at the Home Sweet Mortgage post, and I’d love to continue it. The thing is, the direction I would really like to take it is into the area of creatively brain storming how a Christians might live and function if they decided Debt really was completely unacceptable.
I’m not saying it is (Mindy and I have chosen to take loans out for her to finish school), but I’m contemplating what things might look like if we firmly believed that it was. You see, I think …

At the place we’ve been hanging out on Sunday’s here in Nashville, a number of people have purchased homes in the last 1 1/2 that we’ve been there. It’s not a large community so it was a significant percent of the people that were making this major life decision/change/move. I posted on the online forum and tried to strike up some conversation about it, but was met mostly with perplexed looks. Basically, I wanted to know how as people of faith, they processed through choosing to purchase a home. I …