You may recognize the title of this post as the slogan on my new logo. I just wanted to explain the meaning of “Living The Dream, The Hard Way” a little because, well, because….
We, as a family, live our life pretty well. My wife and I get to do the things that we like to do. I have some cool toys that guys like to have and she drives a nice, newer car. Our kids have toys of their own plus get to do the activities that they have always loved to do. We don’t live like kings, but we do live.
One of the most difficult things when creating a budget and getting your finances in order is to make the necessary sacrifices to fall into line with that budget. When you are a family and accustom to living life a certain way, making a drastic change, no matter how necessary, is difficult at best.
In our situation, as described above, we are Living the Dream. However, it’s all relative. For instance, imagine living the way you do right now, but without the debt that you have hanging over you. Imagine your kids doing their activities without even flinching (much) about the cost of those activities. Wouldn’t that be even more like Living the Dream? Still the same game, but under a new set of rules, and these rules are more forgiving to the little financial surprises that arise on a daily basis. Wouldn’t that be awesome? While we may be living our version of the dream, the issue is that we are not doing it smartly, or at least we haven’t been up until now.
Falling into debt for the purpose of chasing your dreams is easy work. People do it all the time. We have done it several times now. I guess that would put us under the “professional” category, haha.
The difficulty lies in getting out from under that debt without disrupting the lifestyle that you have created for yourself. It’s possible, but it’s going to take you a lot longer to make the strides that you seek to make a diffence and for personal satisfaction. If you really want to make a difference, it’s going to take a little bit of sacrifice.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you what you must do, not in this post at least. I’m just going to say that if you want things to change, then you must make changes. Those changes may be simple or they may be difficult. The choice is yours. Just remember that you cannot do the same things over and over and expect different results just because you want things to be different. They only get that way when you make them different.
You can read a little more about this right HERE.
To achieve what you never have, you must do what you’ve never done.
So now it’s up to you to decide if you want to continue living your dream the way you are, or the way you want to be. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t trying to be inspired by my menial words. You would be reading a book like Divergent, or 50 Shades of Grey for the fifth time. So what’s it going to be? How are you going to take that step and make that difference today? Post up your ideas in the comments, because maybe yours are better than mine, and we can share them with everyone.
Dave