Financial Resources
Let's face it. We need money to make it through the day - food, clothing, shelter. Unless you are able to farm, spin yarn and sew, and build your own home, all the while trading for materials, you need money. But that doesn't make it a bad thing (the Bible says it's the love of money that is the root of all evil, not money itself). Here's a quick story about a couple who learned that the Credit Card Shuffle could quickly turn into a fumble:
Kelly Richards stood at the grocery checkout, frantically digging through her purse. Her one-year-old son, Steven, sat in the cart leaning his head against her arm. He’d been running a fever all day and was beginning to fuss. Steven’s three-year-old brother, Brandon, was whining for the neon package of gum just out of his reach on the checkout shelves. Kelly knew that she had used her last check that day at work, but she wasn’t concerned because she could just put the groceries on her credit card. However, the clerk was now handing back her card with an apologetic look on his face.
“Sorry. Declined.”
She handed him another with the same result—and then a third. After a long day of teaching high school and then picking up her two boys from daycare, she just wanted to go home and sink into a chair. This was the last thing she needed.
Kelly and her husband Luke are not in a financial crisis. They both make good salaries and they don’t live extravagantly. They’re keenly aware that paying off interest is not a wise use of their money, and they’ve been making efforts to get out of debt. To do that, they’ve been shifting credit card balances from one account to another in order to consolidate payments and lower interest and finance fees.But this day the timing was off. The necessary transactions had apparently not gone through and therefore the money from one account had not yet arrived in the other. Here stood Kelly in the checkout line with a cart full of groceries and no way to pay for them, mumbling under her breath a half prayer, half protest.
Sometimes the credit card shuffle turns into a fumble. A manager in a red vest and an overly perky smile shuffled Kelly out of the checkout with her two crying boys and directed her to customer service.
Besides creating and maintaining stability and success in the other areas of our lives, we do need to work on our finances. And knowledge truly is power. Financial Life Coaching can certainly help you with that. And below are a variety of resources that our personal finances coaches believe can help strengthen your finances. If you have come across other resources that you wish to share, please let us know so we can post them.