Anyone else feel like they have no time to do anything?

Over the past four years I have had practically no time that wasn’t already called for. It’s mostly my fault. After moving to Montana we kept our rental place up in Canada thinking it wouldn’t be that bad to be three hours away since the unit was mostly self sufficient. We even did one better. After seeing the real estate market sky rocket up we decided to buy another place just because…I was going to make a bunch of excuses but will leave it at we bought another rental place three hours away. Disaster really. Lost a bunch of money but worse yet lost a bunch of time.

What ensued was about twenty trips to Canada every year to deal with rental house business. Not to mention time spent dealing with evictions, rental collection, maintenance issues, fights with Milly about business tactics, etc. Poor Ringo has crossed the border so many times the border guards started giving him suckers and calling him by name.

On top of the rental places I’ve taught night classes at the local college every Tuesday and Thursday night, have been fairly active in my church and have worked the normal day job.

Something had to change.

One night I nonchalantly picked up a get out of debt type book that Milly had picked up at the library and started to skim the book. I couldn’t put it down. Something deep down told me we had to get out of debt. The book is called “The Total Money Makeover” by Dave Ramsey and the ideas that came from reading that book changed my life. No longer did I like debt and think it was a tool to build wealth. I started to see the house of cards we had built around us. In my schooling I’d learned debt was good up to a point and I wanted to believe it but I knew if I lost my job we were fried.

Over time we decided the only way we could pull ourselves out of the mess we created was to sell our rental places, sell our house and possibly build a smaller house on the only thing we didn’t sell, our land. We sold the rental places this past year as well as our primary residence. I’ve also stopped teaching at nights and we are planning our move fairly soon. The smaller house is still to be built.

But in this process something amazing has happened. I have time to do what I want at night and on the weekends. Our business dealings outside of my normal job is minimal. We get way less mail and phone calls. So much so I’m not sure anyone really knows where we are. It feels like we are in hiding almost. Ha. I’m OK with it for the time being.

So instead of driving to Canada to get suckers from our favorite border patrol guys I get to spend my time writing silly blogs and making up silly names for my in laws.

Thanks Dave Ramsey.