My Journey with Money & Learning About Investing

by Matt Spillar · May 6, 2019

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money journey

Hi guys, I’m really excited to share this post with you all. After 175 posts and 3 years of writing, for the first time, here’s a very special guest post from Mrs. Spills herself! She talks about her money journey, and I know you’ll love reading it.

Finances and investing have never been a top priority for me. In fact, I would say they were at the bottom of my list. My theory growing up was earn money and spend it. You worked hard for that money, why not spend it on things you love?

I remember when I got my first paycheck, how awesome it was to finally be able to have my own spending money and not have to rely on my parents to go out and have fun with my friends. All through high school and college I worked and earned paychecks, only to spend most of it that month on things I “thought” I needed. Trips to Target, food, and hangouts with friends. What else is a young working adult supposed to do with their money?

Learning About Money While Growing Up

I would make sure I had money in my checking account and if I had some sitting in there, I was ok. I was never taught about investing or finances growing up. I didn’t have the knowledge about saving my money and frankly I didn’t care to learn. I hated math and money, and didn’t want to deal with it.

Growing up, my dad was the sole provider for our family. I admired my dad for working had and providing income for our large family of 7, but I also watched him become increasingly frugal to the point of being overly careful about every single dollar that was spent, out of worry that our family would go over budget each month.

I understood his worries, as we were a large family, and that meant we didn’t have a lot of extra spending money to go around. I saw first hand what it meant to be on a tight budget. Through this I feel like it really helped me to value the money that I earned, but I fell into what society tells you about money: earn it and spend it.

I remember sitting in my room one night and checking my bank account, shocked to find that I only had 46 cents left in my checking account. You can imagine how that felt. It was that night that I decided to make myself a budget.

Taking Control of My Finances

It wasn’t until after college when I got my first full-time job working as a preschool teacher that I finally began to save. Matt and I had just gotten engaged and needed to start saving money for the upcoming wedding. I had saved almost all my paychecks and in just one year I saved $10,000 dollars to put towards wedding expenses! This was my first big win with money. I had carefully saved, and it paid off. It felt good to be able to say that I saved money. I think what finally helped turn the lightbulb on was that I finally had a real “reason” to save for something.

After marriage, Matt and I spent as little as possible and stayed very frugal, since we weren’t making very much income. It wasn’t until Matt found a new job after 6 months of looking, that we were finally able to create a consistent budget. Before we just hoped that we didn’t spend more than we earned, but we didn’t actually track our expenses. When we finally created the budget and attended a “Financial Peace University” class at our church, we were able to save and learn how to control our finances in a healthy way together. Only a couple years later here we are completely debt free! It’s a feeling like no other to not have to worry about owing someone money.

Completing a Challenge

When I first read my father-in-law’s challenge, I cringed. He challenged me to read an investing book, “Invested” by Danielle Town and Phil Town. I didn’t want to read any financial books or write about what I learned. I will be honest in saying it was a struggle, but it feels good to have completed the challenge and I learned a lot more than I thought I would about investing. Surprisingly it wasn’t as horrible as I expected it to be.

When beginning this book, I had no idea what value investing was. After reading this book I feel like I have a pretty good basic understanding of it. There are a lot of terms I don’t fully understand, but I know if I put more time into it, I could understand more fully.

My thoughts on value investing are that it requires a lot of work and a lot of time. At this point in my life I don’t feel like I have the time to put into researching like this. I would much rather put my money into index funds and let them do the work for me. This is not to say that I would never dabble in value investing. I think that it would be cool for Matt and me to be able to do this at some point, researching and buying into a company we are both passionate about.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I feel like this book was good for me because it really taught me a lot about financial terms that I never knew, and how important investing is for my future.

I am thankful for a husband who finds passion in this topic and can share that with me, even if I do it kicking and screaming. Reading about it has opened my eyes to its importance and helped me to realize it’s not just a fun hobby of Matt’s, it is something that helps us be prepared for our future together when we retire. I’m glad my father-in-law challenged me to read this book and helped me learn more about a topic that I usually avoid. It wasn’t easy, but I am glad I was able to complete it.

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