Walking a Fine Line: Living in Balance

What is more important: living a balanced life or doing everything you can to strive for your goals?

Of course it depends on your own personal definitions of a balanced life and striving for goals. Defining these will help you make an informed decision.

Sacrificing to Succeed

In the past I asked if you were willing to sacrifice to succeed. The following day I listed out the things we were going to do to sacrifice in order to hit our goals:

cut our individual spending money in half

cut eating out in half

cut trips from our budget (since we have the next two trips paid for)

applying all extra money to our second mortgage

adding in blogging income to pay off second mortgage

That was back in April.

We made changes in late April when we did our budget for May. And it is working thus far. We’ve been able to keep our spending down and will have extra money to apply toward our second mortgage at the end of the month.

Can Sacrificing Go Too Far?

The obvious answer to this is yes.

Of course you can cut too much. You can live like a hermit. You can live a miserable life now in hopes that the future will be much better.

Is it worth it? It would depend on how far you take it. I would never recommend that anyone live like a hermit. Life’s too short for that.

I personally think that most Americans are not on the hermit side of the fence. They’ve been living a free wheeling, free spending, and luxury filled life. Big homes full of financed furniture and big screen TVs.

Sacrificing is Hard

This is what we’re running into right now. It isn’t easy. It isn’t a cake walk. (That’s why it is called sacrificing.)

When is it okay to lighten up a little bit? When should you press on and stick to your budgetary guns?

I’m not sure. We’ll keep moving forward and see if we can make these changes stick.

For now, it’s hard.