Getting Debt Free

This weeks marriage challenge is to sit down and talk with your husband about his vision for you family for the next several years.

Just a little background information:
When I met my husband he was in the US Navy and so I have traveled a lot with him and was left at home alone a lot during our first 5 years of our marriage. A lot of my friends used to say, "I don't know how you do it, I couldn't be married to a military man." Well, my reply was usually - "You don't really choose who you fall in love with, but you can choose to make a good life with the one you love." During those time, the military pretty much made our "vision" for us - told us where to go and how long to be there.

Now that he is out of the Navy, he works for an oil company in Texas which still requires a little bit of travel but not nearly as much. With his job, I was able to stay at home with our daughter, which is a huge blessing for me but something that is just as important to our husband. It is a bit of a struggle because before moving to Texas, we both worked and made a good bit of money, but we didn't hardly have any bills and no children at the time and we were terrible at saving. What little we did save, was used up during the move while my husband was looking for a job.

Since, I am a stay at home wife/mom, I am not able to contribute to the household income at this point - or I haven't found a way to do it and not take attention away from the things that are important to my husband, my daughter and our family. One of the "goals" that my husband has for our family is to be free of the debt that we incurred in the move here - it is a great goal! I have tried to help out in this area by clipping coupons to save money on grocery shopping, but for some reason I end up spending more than I did before. It seems that I am always asking to spend money on something lately - a baby gift for a friend, going out to eat with out of town guests, new crayons or toys for our daughter, etc - this I have realized is putting stress on my husband about reaching our goal.

My prayer is that I can get on board with my husband in this vision and really help out so that when our family is free of debt we'll be able to buy those things that we "want" but for now I need to be still and content with what God has blessed us with, which is far more than we need and let my husband lead us to a place of financial stability.