Month: May 2013

If Jesus were alive today…

Posted on by Phil Corbett

The argument could be made that if Jesus were alive today, he would not need to die on the cross to save us. The public crucifixion he would receive daily through the media, from all directions, might be enough.

In our 24-hour news cycle, sound-bite, talking-points-driven world, a man challenging convention using parables and other messages requiring deeper reflection and thought would face many challenges getting his word out. Opposition would be mobilized within moments to attack him because his message would be upsetting many powerful apple carts. Clever Facebook posts distorting his message would become viral and the Twitter universe would be flooded with tweets and retweets disparaging him.

One side might call Jesus elitist, out of touch and insensitive in response to him saying, “the poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want, but you will not always have me.” (Mark 14:7) Another side might call him anti-family if it got out that his response to the request by one of his disciples to “permit me first to go and bury my father” was “follow me, and allow the dead to bury their dead.” (Matthew 8:21-22)

Fortunately, we have 2000 years of study and reflection to base our beliefs upon now. If any of us lived back then, though, could we honestly say if we would have been disciples or detractors after hearing Jesus speak? I know I am just glad I live now.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, people are still being persecuted for saying things that make others uncomfortable and for upsetting their apple carts.

It is not that we have to agree with what everyone says or that there are not times when there is a need to speak up and forcefully respond to what others say. Sometimes, though, it is just too easy to attack the person and distort the message.

That is why, no matter how frustrated or irritated I may get, I try to keep myself open to the messages of others that make me uncomfortable – that upset my apple cart. By doing so, I may strengthen my own beliefs and put back my apples in the same exact way, with more conviction than ever. I also might put them back in a different way with a better, though changed, understanding of my beliefs.

Either way, I will have grown from the experience.

My Family is Not Normal!

Posted on by Phil Corbett

What many people may have suspected for a long time was confirmed last week. My family is not normal.

We actually set a goal to be not normal and are very proud of it. We even celebrated the day it happened. I guess that makes us even more not normal.

What happened to relegate us to the not normal side of life?

On May 15, 2013, we became debt free, excluding our mortgage.

Two years ago, my wife and I were tired. We were tired of being an average American household with student loan debt, credit card debt and home equity loan debt. We were tired of just making monthly payments but never making much of a dent in our debt – often increasing it. We were tired of the financial conversations we had that led to frustration and fear and most often ended in an argument. Though I had gotten pretty good at the introductory-zero-percent-interest-credit-card-balance-transfer-offer shuffle, I was tired of trying to convince myself that by the end of the grace period we would have the balance paid off.

We were tired of drowning in debt.

So, on May 15, 2011, after reading The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, we decided that instead of hoping things would change in the future, we were going to make things change in the present. My wife and I, along with our kids, set out on a journey to become debt free. We cut up the credit cards. We began using cash for most of our purchases, though we still used our check cards.

Most importantly, we started to live on a written budget. Instead of running a report at the end of each month to find out where our money had gone (I am a Quicken nerd so everything we spend gets tracked), we sat down each month to decide where our money would go. If we did not have the money in the budget to buy something, we did not buy it. If we took in more money than we expected during a month or spent less than we had budgeted, we paid down our debt. In the past, we would always have been able to justify spending at least some of it – usually most of it – on something we thought we needed or deserved.

It was not easy. Early on, budget meetings could still be tense and we often had to have several meetings per month to rework the budget when unexpected expenses came up. Because we had the same goal, though, in time our budget meetings became less stressful and we were able to communicate much better regarding our financial situation.

The week before we made our last payment on our home equity loan, the last debt we needed to pay off, we were faced with an unexpected car repair bill. When I called my wife to tell her how much it was going to cost, she worriedly asked if it was going to delay us paying off our debt. I told her no. I reminded her car repairs happen and we had budgeted for them each month and whatever we didn’t spend went into our savings account. We had more than enough saved up, under car repairs, to pay the bill.

She said that was her moment of realization, feeling an overwhelming sense of relief, that our lives had changed.

So what is ahead for us? We will continue to live on a budget but the money left over at the end of the month will now go towards our savings, our retirement and other things we deem important. We will even start to budget money each month to go towards future vacations from which we will return home with only memories and not a credit card bill. We still need to pay off our mortgage, but because we no longer have a home equity loan, we will be able to get a much better rate and will be able to pay it off early.

What we are most excited about for the future, though, is knowing our children will experience living debt free and will hopefully continue to live debt free when they are on their own.

Oh, by the way, if you wondering how much we paid off, I will tell you, but I have to admit, I am proudly bragging a bit by sharing it. At the same time, I also want others in the same position to know becoming debt free is possible.

Drum roll please…. we paid off $57,626.65 in 24 months – exactly 731 days. But who’s counting?

We sure are!

P.S. If you are tired of being in debt, I strongly recommend reading The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and checking out the other programs he offers. The book gave us the framework and the tools to get out of the debt hole we had dug, though many find going to his Financial Peace University classes helps them stay accountable. I also listen to podcasts of The Dave Ramsey Show for encouragement and inspiration. Hearing other people’s stories about becoming debt free made me even more determined to become debt free.

P.S.S. As always, if you like what you read, please share it with others and consider following my blog. I have been posting every Wednesday, hoping what I write encourages those who read it to look more positively on the world and the human beings inhabiting it. Because a person’s Facebook posts only show up in a small percentage of their Facebook friends’ pages, the best way to make sure you get my blog post each week is to click on the Follow button and follow the directions. You will received a confirmation email with instructions on how to confirm your follow request.

Before there was Google…

Posted on by Phil Corbett

I am not very mechanically inclined but, every so often, I need to dismantle my washing machine in order to fix a “no spinning” problem. A few months ago, I dismantled my dishwasher because the dishes seemed to be dirtier coming out than they were when we put them in.

I am very proud to say I have been somewhat successful at fixing both appliances and getting the most out of them.

Where did I acquire the knowledge to accomplish such impressive feats of appliance repair?

Google. I typed, “washing machine will not spin” and “dishwasher not cleaning” in the search bar and in each instance, before I knew it, a video illustrating exactly what I needed to do was playing.

With a world full of knowledge at our fingertips, it is almost difficult to imagine what people did before the Internet when they had a life problem to solve.

I know what my mom did. She actually talked to a live person – Pat Olstad.

Still fresh in my mind, one case in point occurred nearly 40 years ago when I was in grade school at Sacred Heart Elementary in Staples, MN.

Sitting in class one morning I began to feel the need to scratch the area of my body upon which I was sitting. This need became so overwhelming I asked to be excused to the bathroom to remedy the problem. Having the privacy required, I proceeded to scratch in manner I figured would sufficiently do the job. Unfortunately, any relief was only temporary.

Possessing a touch of Catholic guilt, I wondered what venial misdoings I had committed to warrant such an affliction and was anticipating my next confession to cleanse my soul. As each successive scratching session became more intense, followed by an even more intensive need to scratch, I replayed each day since my last confession to determine what I may have done to deserve this wrath. As the plague progressed, a genuine and heartfelt Act of Contrition followed each trip to the bathroom.

Well, the torment relentlessly continued throughout the day and even past the final bell. The moment I got home, I dramatically shared my story with my mom only to learn each of my seven siblings reported similar experiences.

A call to Pat Olstad solved the mystery. Pat asked my mom the right questions and soon the problem became clear. It seems the last time my mom had washed the whites, she included the living room curtains, which happened to be made out of FIBERGLASS!

So what does this story have to do with anything important?

Other than hopefully providing you a little bit of humor and a little bit of advice (scratching when you have fiberglass in your skin only makes things worse – much worse!), it reminds me that though using technology can often be a more efficient way of getting the information we need, it can’t solve all of our problems.

Often times the best thing to do is just call up the Pat Olstads in our lives and have a real conversation.

No teeth? No problem.

Posted on by Phil Corbett

I am impressed!

Through her recent travels, my wife has become very adept at navigating airports and the entire airline process. Whether it is finding the cheapest flights, finding a place to park or knowing the best places to eat in the airport, I have a feeling the next time we take a flight together, I will be keeping my mouth shut and just following her lead. (That is if I am smart enough, which is questionable.)

There is still room for improvement regarding ground transportation, though. She has made great strides in this area but, from time to time, she finds herself in some interesting predicaments, if not scary.

To be fair, her struggle to overcome her directional disability is a daunting challenge because she inherited it from a close relative. Once, on a trip to Milwaukee, this close relative chose to follow a car to Chicago instead of taking the Milwaukee exit because the driver of the car ahead seemed to know where she or he was going.

Well, on a recent trip to Chicago, this disability once again reared its ugly head. My wife was given detailed instructions on how to get from the airport to the place at which she was going to be staying. She made it through the airport all right but things went a little south when the instructions told her to take the bus to Lot F and take the train from there. As she entered the bus loading area, she noticed a group of people getting on a bus and she chose to follow them. After 15 or so minutes on the bus and no sign of a Lot F, she figured she had erred.

Realizing her mistake, my wife got off the bus at a train station and attempted to figure out how to get back to the airport to start all over again. She asked the bus driver and an employee of a coffee shop for help but for a variety of reasons, neither was able to provide much assistance.

Lost, scared, and alone in an unfamiliar city, her anxiety increasing with every minute she spent in the rather small train station, she fought back a panic attack as she walked from wall to wall looking at the maps to determine a way out of her nightmare. Feeling like a complete idiot (her words, not mine), her distress should have been obvious to the others at the station, but unfortunately, most were either oblivious to what was going on or seemed to be too busy staring into their smartphones to offer any assistance.

Finally, she noticed the only person talking to anyone in the station and looking friendly was a scruffy, disheveled man, his face weathered and wrinkled, who was missing his two front teeth. She asked him for help and to her relief, the man calmed her down and took the time to explain how to get back to the airport. After about 20 minutes of explaining what she needed to do, the man even walked her to the bus stop.

Feeling grateful to this Good Samaritan, my wife offered him some money for the help he provided, which he initially declined but reluctantly accepted after my wife insisted.

As they parted company, the man cautioned my wife to not talk to strangers because there are some scary people out there.

I wonder if the scary people to whom he was referring were the scruffy, disheveled people, with weathered and wrinkled faces, missing their front teeth or the nicely-dressed people with smartphones.