Getting Back To Basics When Life Throws You Off Course

We were so busy in the month of August that I didn't even have time to realize that our days in what once was our "forever home" were numbered. Then one day I got home from work and was half-way out of my car when it dawned on me, "This is our last night in our house."

Dani and I have decided to move in with my Grandmother for the time being as we continue our attempts to sell our house. By doing so we hope to save on some heating costs this winter while giving Grandma some much-needed helping hands around her home.

With this change in our living arrangements our financial situation has changed some too. It will likely change again once the house sells and we're out from under the burden of homeownership, and it will change again in a year or so when we find a new house... or apartment... or something.

All of this means we need to take a "back to basics" approach to our budget, which, when you think about it, isn't a bad thing to do every now and then anyway.

Since leading Financial Peace University, Dani and I have kept in touch with some of the people who attended. Some are doing well. Others have backslidden. One lady approached me last week and said, "I hope you're not planning another FPU reunion because my husband and I have made no progress with our finances at all!"

People in that kind of a situation think I'm going to be mad at them or disappointed, but there's no way I can fault them for their mistakes when I make plenty of my own. The more important thing is no matter how many times our financial mistakes trip us up that we dust ourselves off and get back up. Sometimes that may involve a budget "Reset," especially if you haven't been keeping track of your income and expenses.

We live in a society of perfectionism, where one mistake by a political leader or celebrity earns them a lifetime of public shunning, unforgiveness, and hatred. Anyone remember actor Mel Gibson's drunken anti semitic outrage back in 2006? Of course you do. Because despite his numerous attempts to publicly apologize for the incident and seek forgiveness from the jewish community, Gibson is still far more hated in America today than he is loved. Why? Because we found out he wasn't as cool and collected and heroic as the characters he portrays in film? Because we found out that he's a real human being with real problems?

Our culture, while admittedly imperfect, demands perfection. The moment someone doesn't live up to our expectations we diminish them.

Instinctively we apply this type of thinking to ourselves far too often. When we're faced with a project we can't complete perfectly, we quit. When stuck in a marriage that doesn't reach our standards, we divorce. When we're unable to follow a financial plan, we ignore it.

We know we're imperfect.

We say we're not striving for perfection.

Yet we fault ourselves, and others, when perfection is not obtained.

I don't know about you, but the word "absurd" comes to mind.

Perfectionism isn't really about being meticulous and perfect anyway. Essentially, it's about fear. We fear failure. We fear making mistakes. We fear disappointing others. Which is why people act so ashamed when they admit to me that their falling short on their financial budget.

Look, it's no surprise to me that you've fallen short. What would surprise me is if you said the budget is working great, that you've never screwed up, that you follow it to a T, you love it, because at that point I would just assume you're lying!

Maybe it's time to get back to some basics. Don't let the latest mistake keep you down. Revisit that budget, find out where you went wrong, and get back on track. Cut the fat. Mind the frivolous spending. Start putting money into savings again. Don't give up just because you've messed up.

Dani and I are going to be making lots of changes to our budget in the months ahead because our financial plan, as we laid it out years ago, has not become what we wanted it to be. Some of that's because of mistakes. Some of it's just plain the result of life interjecting the proverbial monkey wrenches. But all of that doesn't matter as long as we don't throw in the towel.

So, bear with us as we continue to figure it all out. And, while you're at it, pick up that budget, dust it off, and dive back in!

Keep pinchin' :-)

How Will You Choose To Be Generous Today?

In the wake of the death of superstar comedian Robin Williams has come a wave of stories regarding an aspect of his life that few knew anything about—how "crazily generous" he was. Williams had a deep appreciation for our armed forces, his colleagues, and for people in general, which he demonstrated through immense giving of material things and his time.

After actor Christopher Reeve was paralyzed in a fall from a horse on May 27, 1995, Williams arrived at his hospital room dressed as a doctor and announced that he was there to do a proctological exam.

"For the first time since the accident, I laughed," Reeve later wrote in his autobiography, Still Me.

Williams supported scholarships at The Juilliard School in New York City, actively raised money for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, and also supported the San Francisco Zoo, which named a monkey after him in June—which was, appropriately, a howler monkey. In California, where he lived, Williams was a friend of the Challenged Athletes Foundation and would cheer competitors on at the finish line of the San Diego Triathlon Challenge. He was expected this weekend at a race in Northern California.

"What I think a lot of people don't know, and you're starting to hear all these stories come out now, is how crazily generous he was," said late-night talk show host and comedian Conan O'Brien on his show earlier this week. "He was so generous."

"And not just in a material way, but with his time," added O'Brien's co-host Andy Richter. "He spent so much time entertaining the troops, which I didn't really know about which means he didn't really talk about it. He didn't do it for publicity."

Williams hung himself on Monday, August 11, at the age of 63 after a decades long battle with depression and substance abuse. His plethora of movies made millions laugh. His charitable work brought hope to countless others. Despite the horrific tragedy of his death, the legacy of generosity he left behind should touch us no less.

Robin Williams is probably the first actor to die who I was really familiar with. I mean, in just the last few years we've lost wonderful actors like Heath Ledger, James Gandolfini, Paul Walker, and Michael Clarke Duncan, but their stars had risen to fame fairly recently; I knew who they were, but they hadn't made the impact on my life that Williams did. Robin Williams has been a staple performer ever since I was a little kid. He—along with Bill Cosby—was probably the first comedian to ever make me laugh. His voice work in Aladdin and FernGully, his on-screen charism in Hook, Patch Adams, Mrs. Doubtfire, and Jumanji, all played a small part, I think, in the development of my own sense of humor and family values.

His passing makes me sad.

In looking at all the ways Robin Williams helped others, I find myself contemplating one question: how am I going to be generous? Generosity is not just about helping others. For Christians, especially, it's a necessity of obedience.

"In all things I have shown you that by working hard in this way we must help the weak and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he himself said, 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" —Acts 20:35

How am I going to be obedient to the will of my Lord by helping others and caring for widows and orphans?

Though Dani and I do what we can with our time and resources, it's the dream of both of us to one day give much more once we're out of debt. We have a passion for adoption, and we deeply love our church, which are two things we'd love to give more to. Some day we want to have a home that can be the epicenter of the lives of our friends and family, a place for pastors and missionaries to come and rest and have fun, and a place to host friends who need some R&R.

What about you? In what ways do you dream of being generous once you're debt free?

VIDEO BLOG: Batman versus Superman

Here's some frivolous fun for your Friday the Fourth!

The upcoming "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" movie is still a couple years away, but that doesn't mean I'm not as giddy as a face-loving puppy in a room full of toddlers. So here is the first of what I hope to be many video blogs about life's various frivolities.

Some people may call me biased on the topic of Batman versus Superman because I'm a die hard Batman fan, but it's hardly bias when my evidence comes from decades of established mythology. So there! Thbbbpppt!

In all silliness, enjoy the video!

The World Cup: An Exercise In Mass Denial

It's time for me to come out... as being completely apathetic to the World Cup.

First off, as anyone who knows me can attest, the whole concept of sports perplexes me. From the highest echelons of the over-payed professional athletics, to the lowliest kiddie matches at your local elementary school where hundreds of adults try to convince children that "winning isn't everything" yet celebrate the winning team, is completely weird to me, and, ultimately, completely irrelevant.

But the World Cup manages to be a different kind of weird. It somehow manages to get millions of people who don't care about sports to watch. If it were any other sport I might understand, but, well... it's soccer. Soccer is a special kind of boring. It's like watching your clothes tumble around in the dryer, but it also demands the kind of unwavering attention a detective would give a crime scene because if you're not watching closely you'll miss the important stuff.

Furthermore, even though most Americans don't care about the World Cup, we're made to feel like we should, which, to me, makes soccer feel like communism. To me, the World Cup is an exercise in mass denial, a desperate attempt by the runner-up nations of the world to convince everyone that their dying pastime is something cool that we all should take part in.

Whatever.

Yes, I know, statistics will tell you that soccer has grown in popularity in America since 2006, but that means nothing when you consider that the 2014 match between the US and Ghana only drew in 12 million American viewers, which, when compared to the 108 million viewers of the NFL Championship, is quite sad. So saying Americans like soccer is like saying the fat kid in second grade who always gets picked last is everyone's favorite.

According to an article by CBS that listed the "7 Reasons Why Americans Don't Watch the World Cup," Americans look at soccer with a collective yawn, wondering when they can just go home and nuke some leftovers.

Here's my top ten reasons why the World Cup isn't that important to America.

1. IT BRINGS NATIONS TO A HALT
Don't even think of going to Europe or South America while the World Cup is going on because all of the countries involved virtually come to a halt, and when a country's national team is playing few people even bother to go to work. I have trouble taking seriously any sporting event that holds such a Darth Vader-persuasion over the populace.

2. IT PUTS BOSTON'S RIOTS TO SHAME
As an American, I've done an embarrassed face-palm just like everyone else when cities like Boston celebrate their team's victory with such enthusiasm that it turns into rioting and chaos. But the World Cup garners an even more intense kind of fan enthusiasm. World Cup fans are like invading armies coming to conquer all the other nations. It sparks riots that go from a nationwide embarrassment, to a global one that makes me sad to be a human.

3. IT'S SOCCER
I know they call it football, but soccer is not football. American football is football. Not that I care about the terms, but when I see grown men running around like sissies, trying not to get hurt, doing things that make the commentators say, "Nice footwork!", and with no padding, I think, "There aren't nearly enough concussions for this to be football."

4. IT'S TOO LONG
We already have the Olympics, a weeks-long sporting event where nations come to compete in the things they are actually good at. Ok, that's cool. But the World Cup is ANOTHER weeks-long sporting event that demands you be good at one thing: soccer. And it goes on for weeks. And it's boring. And it goes on for weeks. And when something is boring and goes on for weeks it seems even more boring. I think this is why the World Cup generates so many riots, because, like inmates in prison, fans riot because there's nothing else to do.

5. IT BRINGS OUT THE SNOBS
In America anyway, the World Cup seems to be an excuse for people to try and sound sophisticated because the World Cup is so chic, so in, so European. To these soccer snobs I want to say, "If soccer were so great in the first place, people would care more than once every four years!"

6. IT BRINGS OUT THE HATE
Like the Olympics, people love to say that the World Cup is a sporting event that brings nations together. Uh-huh. Sure. Brings them together on the brink of war maybe. With its fans who take the event too seriously, the protesting throughout the city in which it is held, the hooligans in the stands, the bad refs, the lack of cheerleaders... it's a melting pot of animosity and trivial pride.

7. IT LACKS EVERYTHING THAT MAKES MOST OTHER SPORTS INTERESTING
Americans like scoring. They like action. Maybe it's the fault of our instant gratification culture, but even then 90 minutes of kicking and running with one goal scored doesn't exactly move heaven and earth. Scoring is such a lightning-strike rarity in soccer that once a team gets up by two points the game is pretty much over. There's no chance of a comeback, which is one of the most exciting aspects about any other sport.

8. IT'S ALL ABOUT THE DUDES
I'll give the World Cup credit for breaking down many racial barriers, but there are NO women involved in this sport. None. Not even cheerleaders—who could at least breathe a little life into what is otherwise an absolute borefest. The Olympics, on the other hand, manage to break racial barriers, have nations competing in lots of different events, AND give women their fair share in the limelight.

9. IT DOESN'T CHANGE
In peewee soccer little kids run around and kick at a ball for an hour until a ref finally goes, "Ok, 0-0 score. Game over. Great job everyone!" In professional soccer, with the exception of the players being much bigger and much faster, they're pretty much doing the same thing they were doing in little kid school—running around, kicking after a ball to a 0-0 finish. And if there is a score they all flip out and scream and jump around because, in soccer, when someone scores it's like finding a leprechaun.

10. IT RUINS MY INTERNET
During the winter my news feeds are filled with winter storm reports and Christmas stuff. In the summer I get to see my friends' vacation photos on Facebook, fireworks, news stories about shark attacks, and summer blockbusters at the theater, but during the World Cup all I see is:

Ok, seriously, it's not that I'm against soccer. I certainly don't fault anyone for enjoying it. Nor do I think Americans are necessarily against it for any reason. In America, we just look at the World Cup, shrug our shoulders, and say, "Meh. What else is on?"

:-)

Society's War On Boys Has Gone Too Far

Stock photo by S Braswell
www.freeimages.com

Welcome to Penny Pinching Prose where we talk about finances, marriage, rap music... and occasionally devolve into infantile ranting about pet peeves and social awkwardness.

Such is today.

An issue that is near and dear to my heart is how boys—and even men in general—are treated in this culture. Now, Dani and I don't have kids... yet... but that doesn't mean we know nothing about raising children. We have parents. We have close friends who are parents. So we at least have an idea of what's involved. And when I see today's boys being told they can't play cowboys and indians because they may offend several different social groups, my heart hurts for them.

Moreover, I fear for the boys I'm (hopefully) going to have some day and the social repercussions they're going to face because, I'll be honest with ya, we're going to play cowboys and indians TO DEATH! And we're going to use toy guns and wrestle in the living room and set off rockets and learn about bows and knives and practical, every-day guy stuff, and, you know what?—damn a society that tries to tell me not to treat my boys like boys.

I take major issue with the rampant "anti-bullying" message currently plaguing our public school system. Don't get me wrong, there is a line that shouldn't be crossed when kids are being mean to each other and that line should be enforced by adults, bullies should be punished, and kids should be taught to stand up for themselves, but, NEWS FLASH: kids are kids! They're going to call each other "Poopyhead" and "Four eyes" and "Ugly fuggly dirt eater." Such is the realm of Kiddom. You can't coddle every child whose feathers get ruffled because another kid played harder than he did during recess.

The reason I take such issue with this strict anti-bullying stuff is because the great majority of it is aimed at boys who are, a lot of time, doing nothing but being boys. Boys run. They push. They shove. They fight. They like guns. They like adventure and being aggressive, but sometimes they just don't know how to express that stuff and so feelings get hurt. In the last 10-to-20 years America has seen a virtual war on masculinity that aims at making men better girlfriends to their wives while taking away their God-given nature to fight and protect and be strong and courageous and adventuresome.

American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has recently released a new book called The War Against Boys, in which she talks about this very issue. She says it's past time to make elementary schools more friendly to boys, and she has four ways to do that: turn boys into readers; inspire their imagination; get rid of zero-tolerance policies; and bring recess back. “Being a normal boy is a serious liability in today’s classroom,” Sommers said in a short video lesson for Prager University, a conservative video series. ”Increasingly, our schools have little patience for what only a few decades ago would have been described as boyishness.” To no one's great surprise, Sommers is being met with tons of politically correct resistance.

I was recently hired to videotape an elementary school play when a couple of 7-to-10 year old boys noticed the pocket knife in my camera bag, which I keep with me because it has some handy tools I use with my camera gear. The boys were so unaccustomed to seeing a knife on their school campus that they took a lot of interest in it, but as soon as the principal noticed what they were so gaga about she confiscated it.

"You're not allowed to bring that onto school property," she told me.

She locked the pocket knife in the school cafeteria as though it had done something wrong, until the play was over and I had to leave, at which point she kindly returned it to me.

Our schools have become too sanitary, too feelings-centered, and so competition-free that the instinctual needs of boys are not being met. It drives me nuts, and it's one of the main reasons why my boys won't be going to public school. They'll be homeschooled where they'll learn tons of useful stuff, where they'll be taught respect and kindness, but not browbeaten when their youthful energy results in "boyishness."

And when the zombie apocalypse finally comes it will be my boys who lead the resistance for the simple reason that they'll be the only ones who know how.

Six Things I Wish Would Go Away

My wife may say differently, but I like to think that I'm a fairly easy-going person. Minus the charming smile and 2% body fat, I sort of see myself as the Ryan Reynolds type—laid back, carefree, rolling with the punches. I have my diva moments, but at least I'm no Julia Roberts who earned the nickname "Tinkerhell" on the set of Steven Speilberg's Hook because of her notoriously difficult personality.

I don't know yet what kind of a dad I'm going to be, but this is the picture I get when I imagine myself with kids.

ME: All right, who pooped in the shower?
KID: Daddy, I had to go real bad.
ME: Well, at least it was near a drain. High five.

Because, you know, life is just too short to sweat the small stuff.

Like most people, however, there are a few things that just irritate me to no end, like steel wool rubbed vigorously across that sensitive piece of skin under your eye. It's my opinion that these six things need to be erased from all existence.

1. That Song from Frozen
"Let It Go" is like crystal meth for every wannabe singer in the world. It has gone from a well-executed Disney hit to a particularly frightening obsession among young girls because it's witty, catchy, and the music is totally predictable, which makes it easy to sing—seriously, you can sense every musical number building from a mile away. The movie is now five months old, but people are still churning out "Let It Go" parodies on YouTube. In fact the trend has become so tired that "I Hate Let It Go" parodies of "Let It Go" are starting to become a thing and... I'm tired of talking about this.

2. Celebrity Name Abbr.
Thanks to the 140 character limit that Twitter introduced and the growing annoyance of texting shorthand, many celebrity name abbreviations have made it so far into the cultural lexicon that people are actually speaking them as though they're too lazy to say the person's whole name. Jennifer Lopez has become J-Lo. Scarlet Johansson is ScarJo. And Kristen Stewart is now K-Stew, which sounds like a cheap brand of beef soup.

Then there's the celebrity couple names—which almost deserves its own category on this list. Names like Bennifer (Ben Affleck/Jennifer Lopez), Brangelina (Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie), TomKat (Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes.) These absurd "uni-names" are used to describe a celebrity power couple, but instead these words just make the people who use them sound like fad-crazed teenage girls at a slumber party after a Lady Gaga concert.

3. Instagram
In all fairness, Instagram is a great invention. It's got cool filters and tools that make improving photos a breeze, but the crafty use of this application has been lost into the void of the one resource our country will never run out of: stupid people. Thanks to morons everywhere a tool that once thrived off creativity and imagination is now used to post unimaginative pictures of things like people's dinner which are promptly uploaded to Facebook where everyone gets to not care about them over and over and over... and over... again.

What's worse, thanks to Instagram's photo improvement filters, millions of teenage girls are tricked into thinking they can be models, which leads me to number four...

4. Selfies
The internet calls them selfies, but I call them by their medical term: narcissistic personality disorder, named after a mythical Greek boy who fell in love with his own reflection. For those who don't know, a selfie is the act of turning your phone or camera toward yourself and snapping a photo, which you then promptly plaster all over the Internet. A Facebook page filled with selfies says one thing to the world: my life is all about me! And that's not a good thing. If you're a teenager, selfies are excusable, but if you're over 20... no, scratch that. Selfies are just wrong.

And speaking of selfies...

5. The Duckface
The duckface is when a person poses for a photo and presses their lips together in such a way that they look like they have a small duckbill. The phrase was coined to mock people who were trying to look like Angelina Jolie—one of the few people who actually looks good doing a duckface—but the duckface caught on and is now a trend. The duckface is a weird entity because some people do it right—like Ang-Jo—but most everyone else who does it just looks stupid. Either way, when you see someone making the duckface, the question arises: Why are you trying to look like a duck? Ducks are not sexy. If you look like a duck you look like a rapist. Plain and simple. Not sexy. Go away.

6. Miley Cyrus
It's not just Miss Cyrus who has become an insufferable irritation, but the entire craze surrounding her. Even her innumerable detractors have become annoying. (I'm annoying myself right now just writing about her, so I'll keep it brief). The twerking. The foam finger. The syphilis tongue. Stop. Just... stop.

What about you? What sorts of cultural oddities do you hope to see die—hopefully in a painful way—this year?