Painful lessons

I have to admit, I have always been the kind of person to avoid problems and situations that I thought were ugly or uncomfortable. My grandmother often says that I live like an ostrich and bury my head in the ground at the first sign of trouble. I would rather just ignore some things that I don't like and pray they just go away. Dealing with money is one of those things. I have never liked to know how much money we had in the bank because that way, I could pretend like we had money.. If I went to the ATM - I NEVER looked at the receipt with the balance on it. I would seriously crumple it up as soon as I pulled it out to avoid seeing the awful truth. I can't tell you how many problems this has caused. We have several married friends who keep their money separate. They have individual accounts and they each pay their respective portions of the household expenses. I could NEVER do this simply because I am horrible with money - I would never be able to keep up with how much I have and how much I owe. Britt would still be left with the burden so why bother having it split? I may be tooting my own horn, but I am proud of the way I am now hitting our budgeting and bill paying head on. It's hard - to look at things that need to be taken care of and figure out the best way to get the job done. Especially when I haven't worked in a while and things are so tight. BUT - we are doing it. I think I am going to love the envelope system and hope to be able to incorporate it in a bunch of different areas once we get things organized and get to a fully working budget. Right now we are using it only for groceries and gas. I can see how it would work for school clothes, pet needs, birthday presents - and so many more things. Dave Ramsey has a program for kids too - I would love to get Elijah and Hannah both started on it now so they won't have to go through 20 years of making mistakes and having a hard time with money like I did.
Financial Peace is a good thing.. I wish I had been smarter years ago and could have worked toward this much sooner. We are trying to get things taken care of that cause stress that we can control - there are too many things that Britt and I deal with that we can't do anything about. Having a bit of control feels really really good.