Seems like a pretty thoughtful piece.

Sorry. It just yaks at me… like Jesus is not transcendent enough to work in suburbia, or the notion that somehow people who live in cities or rural areas are somehow inherently more spiritual. I’ll have to read the article.. but man…

Deacon & Usher

deaconandusher.wordpress.com

I heard Suze Orman address this once. She said that a common financial mistake is when people get a bonus or raise, they use it to buy the stuff they wish they’d had all along, like financial vengeance.

She thinks that’s a bad idea. (I’m being silly. Sometimes one must state the obvious.)

And for the record, we have a 27″, non-flat TV that rests in an armoire so that when our small group comes over we can close it off and put a Bible on top.

42 inches is so 5 years ago.

” Goetz lists what he calls suburbia’s “environmental toxins,” such as “I want my neighbor’s life” and “I am what I do and what I own.” ”

Having been, raised in the burbs and now raising my own in the exact same burb, I had (and still have) not really put a great deal of deep thought into the spiritual challenges of relative comfort. It is good for me to read about this and to think about it a little. My awareness has been raised. Now back to consumering.

This seems distantly related. Today I spent a good portion of my energy and thoughts about my problems and stresses, and how much I needed to do to help resolve my own stresses. I did not feel very simple today. I did notice that on our calendar for this weekend, there is precisely nothing for both days. That in and of itself brings my stress level down.

But, there’s something to the fact that, as income grew, expenses didn’t increase in proportion.

When G and I got married, we were pretty thrifty with our pennies, mainly because we had to be! Also, we had both been raised in households that valued financial discipline, saving for the future, delayed gratification, all that good stuff.

Our first apartment was in Orange County. Yorba Linda, to be specific. Where your life is measured by the size of your SUV and the cut of your lawn. It was amazing to me to watch how quickly our financial habits were altered by being in that environment. Things that we formerly thought of as excess became the norm - eating out, $4 coffee, new cars. I think we absorbed the values of the people around us, uncritically, and measured ourselves as behind in “the race” because we didn’t live that way. So, we started to live that way, in small ways.

It took an unpayable credit card debt ($12,000 for us, at the time, felt like total disaster), and a humble trip to the folks for a loan to pay it off before we realized how much our financial values had changed.

Fast forward 8 years, and that loan is paid off, we haven’t carried any credit card debt for years, and I think we’re drifting back toward the financial values that our parents tried to instill in us.

It was a lot of fun to sit down with our mortgage broker a few weeks ago, at the initial meeting, and get to lay out for him our current financial situation. We felt like responsible adults!

Now we get to go blow that whole track record by getting a massive house, totally remodeling it, and spending 2/3 of our monthly income on housing! Sweet!

Oh wait, was that not your point?

It really is a challenging read. I highly reccomend it for further insight into this subject.