What matters most?
Posted by Jess | Filed under Jess
For those of you who have read Gail’s book, you are familiar with chapter 3: priorities. You have probably sat down with a paper and pencil ready to list all of your life goals, and I hope that you are keeping them in mind. When my man and I got to this chapter of the book we thought we would just skim it—we figured we had fairly similar priorites: finish school, get out of debt, get big kid jobs, buy a home, have babies. Boom, Done. Turns out, there are some conflicts in that plan, the biggest one being: its near impossible to be successful FT students and work enough to pay down our debt as per Gail’s acceptable timeline of 3 years.
Now What?
Over Christmas holidays, it got to the point where the numbers were being so unfortunate in constructing a new budget that I considered dropping a class or two in order to make more time for work. This would have offset my projected graduation timeline and delayed all those other pretty goals. It was definitely not something I wanted to do. That’s when we arrived back at chapter 3. Our priorities needed a little bit of reorganization. Gail, just bear with me on this one.
FT school meant we could keep our grades up and graduate sooner, therefore leading to the big kid jobs and better income
Slowing down the schooling meant we could work a bit more at jobs, that we know are not our careers, and chip away at the big ol’ red line.
It was not easy to accept, but what a relief of stress when my man and I discovered that school was more important to us right now that kissing the debt Goodbye in “3 years or less”. Of course we are still Jar Living, and our credit cards still live safely out of our wallets, but our debt repayment is far less aggressive while we are in school. It’s all about what matters most, and our degrees matter most to us right now.
Since starting this whole process, and especially at the realization of priorities, I have been a bit of a trend setter. I have focused friends struggling with saving for weddings; parents that are looking ahead at that magic age of retirement and starting to quake in their boots; siblings and colleagues that are considering post secondary education—I always come back to the same point: What do you want?
So if you are feeling the same way we were: all these goals but together they don’t seem to be feasible, take some time to consider what matters the most and the steps necessary to get there. Maybe it means letting something fall down lower on the priority list, something as simple as those three coffees a day (ahem…), or something more complicated like debt.
That isn’t to say go out and rack up your credit cards simply because the top of your list is to travel to Europe, all I am saying is that we weren’t able to focus on our top priority until we realized that our other goals were hindering it, rather than helping it. At the end of the day, I ask you, what matters most?
A twenty-something FT university student and wife from the wonderful west coast, Jess’s husband is also in school FT. They are both PT coffee slingers. Not surprising, they are in debt. As Jess says, “We love to say yes to each other.”
February 23, 2012 at 11:16 am
Good post – when things get tight, you really do need to sit down and really prioritize what matters most. In a perfect world, you can meet all your goals, but usually, something needs to be cut over something else.
I think you’re right in that even when we think we already have a “plan”, you can get caught up living your day-to-day life, and the desire not to get your hands dirty again and re-budget / re-prioritize can be really strong.
I think you guys made the right choice – while young, focusing on getting the schooling done as fast as possible should be number 1 priority. Do what you can to keep out of further debt for sure, but draw the line at prolonging schooling to take on another job, etc. The fact that you are both going through this at the same time makes it that much easier – you’re both on the same page, can keep each other motivated and encouraged, and can live the frugal student lifestyle together. It’s much harder when one person is done school and one person is trying to finish – two different lifestyles can be harder to gel together! Good luck!
February 28, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Thanks Tyler-Chris. It was a big ol’ horse pill to swallow, that we may not be debt free in three years. But with four classes and about a billion other extra curriculars that we’ve each taken on this semester, I don’t think I could have handled squeezing the extra hundreds of dollars out of our budget and into debt repayment. Thanks for the luck! We’re gonna need it.
February 25, 2012 at 12:44 am
I totally agree! School is hard enough not worrying about a budget, if its killing you loosening the reins on the budget a little is good for helping your morale and making everything seem doable. If you constantly go over an extremely tight budget the ‘failure’ of not quite making it can hurt your whole attitude to budgetting in general.
February 28, 2012 at 12:25 pm
Qi, you get it! So glad to hear people get it. When I come across people that don’t get it, that wonder why we are both in school and working and conscious about our debt and and and, I always need to step back and remind myself that they don’t get it because they haven’t done it, because their priorities are different. It’s a breath of fresh air to hear from people who understand.