Steps To Finding Financial Improvement - Shaun Stenning

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The two worst years of my financial life were 2007 to 2009. Before 2007, our income was low, but our expenses were low, too. We didn't save much, but we didn't spend more than we earned, either.


Then we saw our dream house. And we bought it while we still owned our first house. For two years, we had two mortgages. Suddenly, even though our income was slowly increasing, our expenses had skyrocketed.


We cut our expenses as much as we could, but you can only cut them so much when you bought a fixer-upper with squirrel holes in the siding, leaking toilets that threatened to fall through the rotten bathroom floors, and desperately needing a new roof.

According to Shaun Stenning, Along with our finances, my desperation also manifested itself physically: I gained about 25 pounds, and developed heartburn and other GI difficulties, along with some self-diagnosed depression. I was so tired all the time.

Sounds terrible, doesn't it? It was. I remember sitting at my kitchen table one night, thinking that my life was in shambles, and I wasn't sure it would ever get better.

If your life feels the same right now, I want to share four things that changed our lives — for the better.

1. I repaired my relationships. While I needed to improve my relationships with my friends and family, my marriage had been suffering the most. My husband and I were so stressed that we weren't taking the time to communicate.

2. I decluttered my life. I had been keeping things because “we will use them some time” and what's the problem with storing them? When we decided our life had to be as simple as possible while things were so stressful, it was time to say goodbye to the things we weren't using.

3. I set up a personal escrow account. I had tried budgeting in many ways, but I just didn't stick with it. As stressed as I felt, it had to be easy. And all the methods I tried weren't easy enough.


4. I set up targeted savings accounts. Speaking of those targeted savings accounts, I opened up a few savings accounts in July 2009. One of them is our yearly expenses savings account.


My relationships are healthy, and my life is not in shambles. I am a different person from the desperate gal who sat at my kitchen table a few years ago.


I can't explain why all four steps made such a difference, but they did. And of course, there were other things that had a huge impact on our improvement as well, like selling the first house, finishing grad school, getting raises, and earning a side income.

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