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 …

I’m going to keep this short and practical. I realize budgets will vary from city to city and based on circumstances, but I think we can have a fairly frank talk about the amount of money we are spending. I’m not saying we’ll settle on a ‘Jesus says you should live by this budget’, but we will hopefully have a honest discussion about things. I’ll just throw this out off the top of my head to get the discussion going:
Monthly Budget 

Rent/Utilities/etc- $500
Food- $100 (per person)
Car (insurance/gas)- $100
Miscellaneous- $100
Emergency- $100
Fun Money- …

The brief discussion last week about paying off a home mortgage quickly, has me realizing we need to talk a little bit about finances here. I’ve talked finances many times before and I think now would be a good time to start the discussion up again, both to articulate my views and to encourage discussion about them.
From what I can tell the readers of this blog come from a lot of backgrounds, stages of life, income levels, etc. So, there isn’t a great way to address all of our situations …

We plan on paying off our mortgage in no more then five years (possibly a little more if you include school loans). This is not something that is encouraged or supported in our debt-driven culture. Even with hundred’s of debt relief books and websites out there, I’ve rarely, if ever, heard encouragement to pay off your mortgage as quickly as possible. People always seem to speak of a house as an ‘investment’ and ‘equity,’ rather then acknowledging that it is also debt.
We’ve decided to purchase a home and we’ve decided …

Sometime in the next couple months my wife and I will likely purchase our first home. As a friend of a friend said concerning that and my values which I clearly convey on here about money and community, she said:
“Isn’t that Hypocritical?”
The honest truth is, it might be. For the next few days though, I want to try and articulate some of what has gone into the decision and where we hope to go in the future. In hopes that even friends of friends will continue to hold me to …

Experiments in living that step us out of our normal life experience can be invaluable tools. I think they are the sorts of things that begin to help us question our current lifestyle. One Josh writes:
It’s a shame that as a culture we are so used to excess that we don’t even recognize it anymore.
And it’s a shame that I’ll probably wrestle with this decision for another month. The entire time talking about ethics and Jesus and taking the moral high road. Feel good about myself. And then break down …

I’m not special. I happen to be just one of the six billion people that live on this planet. Whether your religious or not, the way I see it, we are all part of the human family, one great big, interconnected, multi-generational, inter-cultural, spread out, and fairly dysfunctional family. But, I’m not special, I’m just one more member of the family. It’s only fair that I share equally with the rest of the family, this great big planet that we live on. Above is a picture of my …

I’m not sure how much money was raised through Comment Love in the month of June, I do think it was close to $30, which is worth an applause for you. If you don’t know what Comment Love is, basically it’s an opportunity for you to raise (out of my pocket) $0.25 for every comment you make at Trying to Follow. Each month we’ll decide on a charity to give the money to and every comment will earn a quarter toward that cause (up to $40 normally).
Since June involved a …