BlogHer asked yesterday about the good habits we have that were hard to start, but that we’re glad we stuck with. I apparently skipped that day, and I wrote about today’s topic instead… so if you’re looking for a chat about a habit I wish I had, check out my discussion here on being an insane night owl who gets not nearly enough sleep…
Good habits though… I can think of one. Honestly? I don’t know if I have many habits I’d consider to be really good ones. I call my grandmothers fairly often and they really like that….
Anyway.
Last year around the end of December, that 52-week money saving challenge started going around. I decided I was going to give it a try, and if I was successful, at the end of the year I’d have enough money to buy myself both a new violin and an iPad. I’ve wanted an iPad I think since iPads were invented, but I can’t justify the purchase because I truly don’t need one and I’d likely not even use it that often, I just really want everything Apple makes. It’s a consumerist disease and I don’t know what the cure is… but I digress. I actually bought an iPad once and was so wracked with guilt within three days that I wiped it clean and returned it. I couldn’t even look at the thing. That was 18 months ago, and I’m back to wanting one…. but I still don’t need one…. Moving on.
I started with 1 dollar and added another dollar per week with each passing week of the calendar year. I entered the amount for each week into my iCal on my MacBook (see? Apple disease…) so I would get reminder alerts on my iPhone (….) and would therefore remember to put the money into my Savings Account.
I was doing very well, watching the money add up, and in fact I completed the challenge. I even put an additional 50 dollars per month into my savings account just for kicks, because I felt that especially at the beginning of the challenge, 1 and 2 dollars into my account weren’t enough. Then in June, I lost my cell phone. I lost my iPhone. I was devastated. Not just because I lost one of my precious Apple products, but also because of the dramatic amount of money it was going to cost me to replace it. I was only 18 months into a 3-year contract, so I had to buy that out. In all, I ended up spending almost 650 dollars on the entire process, and do you want to know how much I’d managed to save up to that point? 647.00. I transferred the entire balance of my savings account onto my VISA to pay off the foolish mistake of leaving my phone on a school bus after a field trip with my grade 1 and 2 kiddos. It felt like it was all for nothing, though I know that it wasn’t, because otherwise it would have meant my VISA bill was up by 650 dollars when I had no means to bring it back down.
This brings me to the habit part. I really grew to like the feeling of saving money, and throughout the course of this year, God has been working on my heart in a way I’m not entirely comfortable… I’ve taken a hard look at my life, understanding that I make a very generous amount of money as a Canadian teacher, and that I could bless many, many people with that very generous amount if I didn’t have so much debt. Between my mortgage and my line of credit, I sit at a not uncommon but not healthy either 200,000 dollars (give or take a few thousand) that I owe in various places. I understand that most of it is mortgage, and some of it is school debt still unpaid, but some of it is also because I’ve been living the “Canadian” dream, without the means to do so. And in a consumer culture I know that’s pretty standard. But I look at the world around me, not just in other countries but literally the space around me, and I see people who need. Not just people who want. I want. I need NOTHING.
It really makes me grateful for those habits of saving that I learned last year, because now I’ve headed into 2015 with those habits and skills in place, ready to pile money onto my debts so that I have more to give away, because I can’t stomach the idea that I literally belong to the 1% over here, and I’m not doing enough about it while people in my city go without basic needs. That’s not ok.
125 Pounds to Freedom 