Wealth Well Done: Merging Lives and Finances
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While we're happy with how we are managing money, I love hearing from other couples on how they handle their finances.
It's usually a little peek into how they communicate and work as a team. Each couple has their own dreams and goals for their money and marriage.
Bill and Amanda were kind enough to share their thoughts and take on what they're working on together.
Embracing Our Goals
Hi I’m Bill, and my wife is, Amanda from Wealth Well Done. We write about finding purpose, meaning, happiness, and financial freedom.
In the personal finance community, I think there are 2 main goals people have:
The first is to get out of debt and learn to use the cruise control button with their finances in life.
The second is to become a Rock Star saver and investor and find unique ways to fill your life with purpose, meaning, and freedom so you can inspire others with your time alive.
We primarily fall in the second group. We paid all of our debt off before we were married, and have now entered the rock star saving and investing stage of our lives. (You can read more about that HERE.)
But we have bigger goals in life than just reaching financial freedom. We want to share our own unique style with the world.
We are entrepreneurs and helpers at heart. Our dream is to build, Wealth Well Done into its own full-time ministry and business so that spend the rest of our lives helping and inspiring people to find their own purpose of life.
Our dream is only to serve God with our lives. We define wealth as something much bigger and more powerful than numbers on a bank account statement.
We believe purpose, meaning, and happiness, are just as important to building wealth as financial numbers are. You can read how our journey started HERE.
Our relationship goals are to make the next few years feel like a honey moon period.
We’ll be honest: We’ve been married for 2 years, but the first two years were HARD for us!
We got married, and bought a house at the same time. Amanda was immersed in full-time work and graduating school that first year, and we barely had any time to enjoy our relationship in that first year.
We started our marriage coming from two very different family backgrounds, and it was really difficult for us to find agreement on how we should run the new family we were starting inside our home together.
Because we are very strong-willed, independent, and vocal people, we argued a lot!
Our first year of marriage was full of arguments and fights over every issue OTHER than money!
But somehow we survived, and eventually we started to find our groove as a happily married couple. You can read more about that Here.
Six months ago, my wife was having lunch with a friend who has been married for 6 years longer than us.
My wife, Amanda, vented that we never really got a “honeymoon period” to start our marriage because we were arguing and fighting, and finding our style all the time.
Her friend stopped her and said, “Who cares about the first year! You can make a honeymoon any time you want in marriage if you just work at it together!”
So that’s what we’re trying to do now as we head toward our future.
We now realize that you can create a honeymoon stage in your marriage at any time you want, if you just serve the other person and work for it!
The biggest goal and dream that hold our relationship together are that we both want the same life.
We might argue and fight over the individual steps we need to take to get there, but we never disagree about the life we’re trying to reach.
We both want to serve God, help people, and be financially-free so that we have more time to find our purpose in life and do what makes us happy. This makes us feel like we’re fighting for something bigger than us when the daily struggles of marriage get frustrating.
Coming Up with Our Plan
We run our own independent sales business providing branded apparel to corporate accounts, so at this time neither of us are dependent on full-time jobs.
We work from home, so that gives us the freedom to work on many projects at once.
We love our sales business, and the clients we work with, so we don’t want to quit this business. But deep in our hearts I think we both know we want a bigger calling and deeper purpose for our lives than just selling apparel and earning commission checks.
Over the next few years, I think we just want to build up Wealth Well Done into a major site that helps inspire people to live their dreams.
Then, we can just let God lead us to the next step where we can find our true purpose in life.
Learning to Work Together
I’ll let my wife, Amanda answer this one:
There were a lot of goals I, Amanda, had to work through and compromise on from day #1 of our marriage.
I didn’t realize it when I moved into our home with my husband, but I came into our marriage with a lot of trust issues with men.
My husband never did anything wrong to me, but because of the trust issues I experienced my past, I didn’t trust my husband from the beginning. That led us to experience more conflict than we probably should have or needed to.
I thought it was necessary that I keep my independence in our marriage. But now after two years of marriage, I now see that I was wrong. Independence shouldn’t be the goal of marriage.
Harmony, oneness, and mutual enjoyment should be your goals to work toward!
I now see that I was actually fighting to keep the bad parts of my independence the first year of our marriage.
Because of my deeper trust issues, I was stubborn, prideful, and arrogant too often towards my husband.
It took me two years to overcome those trust issues, but I am now on a quest to change my attitude.
I now look at my husband as someone who is here to make me better, and help me. He’s not here to control me. That has changed everything in our marriage!
One of the biggest things I have had to learn is that it’s easier to change your life as a whole, by changing yourself first.
I’ve learned that at all times, you are the only person you can control. If you want to change your life, start by changing yourself first.