The Love and Respect Experience - Review

After talking about books, I now offer you a review of a book.  The Love & Respect Experience: A Husband-Friendly Devotional that Wives Truly Love by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs. 

This is a devotional, divided into 52 small chapters, with each chapter ending with a Prayer topic and an Action to do with your spouse.  Each chapter deals with a topic common to marriage. I wanted to sit down and read the whole thing through, but since it is a devotional, that didn't seem right to me.  What I did then was to read the introduction and then bounced around the different chapters.

Dr. Eggerichs is know for talking about how men need Respect and how women need Love.  Men and women are made different, looking at the world through different eyes, but if we can learn how to meet each other's needs, our marriages will work better.

A few things popped out at me in my reading:

• Goodwill.  Our marriages need to be based on goodwill.  We need to have the intention, the purpose in our marriage to do good to our spouse.  If a disagreement happens, don't immediately think that they intended that purposefully or maliciously - give them the goodwill benefit of the doubt.  
• Money problems can dig deep and reveal our faults - how mature or immature we are.  We need to deal with the problems together, putting aside frustrations and anger; instead communicate and work through the issue together.  Show love and respect in how we handle money.
• The title of chapter 24 is "It's Hard to be Negative While Being Thankful."  He goes on to describe a tough time in their lives dealing with a son's broken leg and dream and how his wife learned to be thankful even during that hard time.  Developing a habit of thanksgiving drives the negative out - you see others in a more positive light.

All in all, I think this has potential to be a really good devotional.  It's definitely made me want to read the book these concepts come from (Love and Respect by the same author). I look forward to exploring this devotional with my wife.

The Reagan's and Their First Budget

Budget.  What is a budget?  I think the simplest way to describe it is that it's a way to designate where your money goes.  Think of it as a group of buckets, each one with a bright label on it.  Tithe, Rent, Food, and various other categories are lined up on the porch.  It's our decision now how much of our bag of loot goes into each bucket.  Then, that bucket get taken to the landlord, the grocery store, the cell phone, and spent. No more than what is in that particular bucket gets spent.

Brianna and I had the privilege of sitting down last week with our particular bag of loot (last month's income) and divide it up into the different buckets.  Surprisingly it was actually fun to talk about our money and what we wanted to do with it.  We had been discussing, for some time, about getting out of debt and that we needed to have a budget to be able to do this.  We were prepared to sit down and divide out our categories, our buckets.

We set out the tithe first, then the necessary bills and the food.  Then we were able to work on the misc. categories.  Amazing how powerful giving each dollar a purpose made us feel!  Especially when we did it together.  We then withdrew what cash we needed for the envelope system, and made our envelopes. 

Already this week it's become evident that we think more about our money when we have to go to the envelope and make the withdrawal.  I am a big fan of cash now!!

One of the subjects we discussed, was that the categories can be fluid.  We don't have to put the same amount in clothes every month, or even contribute to that category every month.  That gives us a better flexibility to use our money.

One of the most important things we are doing is that we are recognizing that this is not our money.  This money is God's and we are stewards.  We need to be smart with what we have, and He will reward us.  We are blessed in order to be a blessing!

What sort of things do you do to keep on a budget?  Do you have a frivolous category? Where do you save money?