When Did You Have Your Epiphany About Your Finances?

Over at Gather Little by Little today they have a post asking this question:

When did you have an epiphany about your debt or your finances? How did you react to that epiphany? Are you still maintaining your progress to make a change for the better? …share your financial epiphany!

While we have never been in a huge amount of debt, there have been times when my wife and I have overspent on our credit cards due to vacations, emergencies and so forth.

While we haven’t been huge spenders, we also haven’t been as frugal as we could have been (and I suppose we still aren’t to some degree).

I can’t really say an exact time when I had an epiphany about our finances, but I know that one time that I really realized how important keeping track of our income and expenses better was around the time that my wife and I were buying our house at the end of 2006.

At the time the housing market still was on the high end, and the bubble still had yet to burst. The home prices in our area were pretty high, and when looking at the state of our finances, we realized that we were going to have to do some fancy footwork with our accounting to be able to come up with the down payment we needed. Then there was the problem of all the other miscellaneous fees that go along with buying a house. The closing costs, realtors fees, taxes, homeowner’s insurance and so on.

For our situation to work out just right we would need to have the townhouse we owned sell for our asking price (or higher) as well as needing to have some additional income to cover all of our costs in selling.

To make a long story short, after much prayer and hard work we sold our townhouse for exactly what we were asking. While the buyers had a few things they wanted fixed, nothing was out of line and the costs were minimal.

At work I got a raise and a bonus, which added to our bottom line. That allowed us to have some additional income to put towards closing costs.

Finally the new house that we were building dropped in price by a few thousand dollars, so we saved some money right off the bat on the closing price of the new home.

Only through some answers to prayer were we able to buy the house that we are now living in, but it impressed upon us that we needed to be a bit more aware of the state of our finances, and where money was coming in, and going out.  It underscored our need to keep on top of our family budget, to always know what was coming in and going out, and that while finances aren’t the most important thing, they are important.

So our biggest moment of epiphany happened during our home buying process. How about you?

LINKS:
When did you have your Epiphany about your finances? from Gather Little By Little
3 Financial Moments that Changed My Life Forever From My Money Wizard
The Epiphany From Paid Twice