This post hit very close to home -- my fiance and I have been recently learning about managing our finances wisely and in a God-honoring way (we're getting married in March). A few weeks ago, our different classes both talked about this very topic. People in our generation expect to have what our parents have, but without working the 20 years needed to get the money. So what do we do? We charge everything and go into large amounts of debt very early on.

I was talking with my roommates trying to figure out why we expect to have all these nice things right away, and I think we found one reason: starting with our parents' generation, couples started waiting longer to have children. As a result, their children (our generation) can't remember a time when life wasn't great and our houses weren't big. I hear my parents talk about living on a graduate student income in tiny apartments, but my memories are only of our comfortable life after that. Until I came to college and befriended young families who are struggling to make ends meet, I always expected that I would live well when I got married.

Thankfully, I've changed my expectations, and my fiance and I are figuring out right now how to live within our very limited means. It'll be a challenge, but I think it'll be fun, too! Actually, I've been having a blast the past couple days looking at blogs about decorating apartments on the cheap. We certainly won't have the best-looking apartment in town, but I think we'll love it.  

This was a great read-- My husband and I have been married for just three months and we're already feeling a tinge of envy towards other married couples our age.  We are still in college and that presents financial challenges of our own, but amazingly we have been able to get through college thus far without any debt (God is good, I don't even know how we did it).  We live in a tiny apartment, scrimp & save with our just-over-minimum-wage jobs, and rarely spend money on things like going to the movies, fancy dinner dates, new cars, new clothes and the like.  We know other married couples who are also students, but they live differently from us.  They have newer cars, attend major sports events in Boston, go on vacations/cruises and have expensive monthly subscriptions to online games to name a few things.  For a while my husband and I were wondering what we were doing wrong and if maybe we weren't handling our finances correctly--why weren't we to live like that? Aren't they in the same situation we are?

But the fact is, most of these other couples are drowning in debt, some even pay their rent with their student loans and are just repeating the debt-producing financial patterns they learned from their parents.  I don't want to judge them in that I think they are bad people, because I know some of these couple really love the Lord.  It's so easy to get caught up in this "get what you want and get it now" kind of consumerist culture. Not good!

This is something my hubby and I constantly talk about. It seems that the more we get to know other couples, the more we realize how different we all are. We have friends on both sides of the spectrum...we know some couples who are in massive amounts of debt because they've built a new house, furnished it, bought(leased) new cars, gotten pets, etc...and on the other hand we have friends who are frugal, living without cable, driving used cars, and living debt free!

We've been married two years and we've been learning to be content with what we've been given. And we just remind ourselves that the best is yet to come!