Marathon

My husband turned 30 last summer and he's running in his first marathon tomorrow. I can't tell you how unbelievably over the top proud I am of him - that and a little freaked out. I mean... 26.2 miles? What on God's green earth would possess someone to do that? Especially when the first marathon runner keeled over dead?

"Well that activity killed a man... I think I'll give it a try!"

"Goodness gracious mercy me Mabel" is all I have to say to that!

That, and "I'm proud of you baby, you go get em!"

This marathon, in his thirtieth year got me thinking about my upcoming thirtieth year. I started thinking about what I want that year to look like and what I want to put in my life and take out. One of the prevailing items that my heart kept putting on the "add back in list" was this blog, my forsaken blog. I joined the ranks of the bloggers who deserted their readers and I regret that, but I long to come back because this blog is something that I loved, still love, and would love to continue.

What kept me away? Well, we decided to buy a house. We wanted to buy a duplex in our home town and rent it out to family. Instead of coming clean here with our change of plans I stopped writing and didn't remain true to my readers. I felt like we would let everyone down and didn't want to face the music. So I just stopped writing.

We looked at homes via our family and talked it over and seriously considered it before deciding against it.

After that decision was made we made another decision that we were only going to save up 20% toward a down payment and then go back to beefing up our retirement accounts.

Then we decided again to buy a house in our home town. We put an offer down and everything... then changed our minds again. (are you getting sea-sick from all this wishy washyness?)

We'd saved up a considerable amount at this point and once that house decision fell through all of that money was just sitting in an easy to access money market account. That's when my wheels started turning. Ideas started spinning in my head. I thought of all that money and all the things we could do with it and then I had it. I knew exactly what we needed to buy. We absolutely NEEDED an RV. I just knew it. We talked about it, looked at one, made some calls, talked some more... and decided against it.

Then I checked our neglected retirement accounts again and realized that we'd actually made quite a bit on the tiny amount that was in there and could have made a lot more if we'd invested that house money instead of playing around with it all year. So after nine months of swaying back and forth we moved the majority of our beloved house savings into our retirement accounts safe from my hair-brained schemes.

Now we're back down to a teeny-tiny house fund but we've also gone back to our original goal of paying for our first home in cash. However, this time our goal will be to do this in conjunction with funding our retirement account with 15% of our gross yearly income. It will take us an absurdly long time to do it, and I have a feeling I'll change my mind a million times in the process but hopefully continually change it back so that by the time my husband retires from the Army in 14 years we will be able to write a check to purchase our first house.

If you're still with me, and can forgive my past transgressions of leaving you all in a lurch, then I would love for you to re-join us in this journey of saving up to buy our first home in CASH.