Hello friends. Welcome to the first blog of this new series on personal finances in a way you may not have thought about them before. Before we get into too much, let me introduce myself.

My name is Amanda and I am a married Mom of two, a daughter and a son. My husband and I have been married for 8 years and love our life and little family. It isn't always easy, it isn't always pretty or Instagram ready, but it is ours and we love it.

Several years ago, however, we were really struggling. Financially struggling, but it was spilling over into other areas of our life. We were fighting more and more, frustrated at everything, and just tired all the time (and not the tired of having a small baby, different tired). Looking back now, I can see we were living out Proverbs 13:7: "One pretends to be rich, yet has nothing; another pretends to be poor, yet has great wealth." We looked fine on the outside, but inside our financial house was crumbling.

This was also the first time I really started looking at our finances and I was horrified at what I discovered. Up until then, we were doing the things. Paying bills, going out from time to time, things like that. We knew what was in our bank account, but we were not following a budget or plan and we were not really paying attention to what we were spending money on. When I listed everything out and really looked, we were over $186k in debt, and that did not include our house!

I couldn't believe it. What had happened? Where did it come from? I have a Master's in Finance, how could I have that much debt and not know it? That is when I realized that personal finance is much different from corporate finance. And, personal finance has very little to do with math and numbers and is much more influenced by our emotions and thoughts. So, for all of you reading thinking things like "I'm not good at math" or "I don't really do numbers", that is an excuse you are telling yourself and that is helping to keep you in the place you are in now and feeling stuck.

Needless to say, I was embarrassed. Horrified at the mess I found us in. I felt such shame that we had made such a mess without even paying attention. And it wasn't that we were making big, extravagant purchases, we didn't drive new cars. It was bad habits that added up, bad advice and teachings that put us on a bad road. What's the saying? It was death by a thousand paper cuts.

When the Wake-Up Call Comes

This is when we got to work. Our life had to change, we had to do things differently, and we needed to clean this mess up. Like yesterday. I started down the rabbit hole of personal finance and found all kinds of information, some good and some not so great. A lot of it focused on creating a budget and sticking to it. Which sounded great, and I understood the concept, but there was a piece missing. 

The question that kept nagging at me was this: Why were we having these issues when our grandparents and great-grandparents didn't? Our parents sort of were in the same position, so what had changed? That's when I started digging into the history of it all.

A big piece that changed was the introduction of credit cards, auto loans, and student loans. Those all became more mainstream around the same time, the 1950s through 1970s, right when my parents were growing up and starting out. The marketing of those was so good people were all over them like white on rice. And now, just a couple of generations later, we have a mess on our hands. As of Q2 2025, Americans have $1.21 TRILLION in credit card debt, $1.66 TRILLION in auto loans, and $1.77 TRILLION in student loans. Y'all, those are serious numbers that require some serious talk.

We've normalized borrowing money for everything. New car? Finance it. College? Loan it. Want that thing now instead of saving for it? Put it on the credit card. Proverbs 22:7 tells us plain as day: "The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender." Slave. That's a strong word, but when I was $186k in debt, that's exactly how I felt. Enslaved. Trapped. Controlled by payments and interest and stress.

The Missing Piece

But here's the other thing that changed, and honestly, I think it's the bigger issue: church attendance and Bible study in families declined. As we added more extra-curricular activities, we took that time away from reading and studying how God wanted us to live. How we were to use the resources He gave us. 

I had read my Bible, we went to church, but I had completely missed where God told people how to handle their finances. He had laid it all out there in the Old Testament to the Israelites: how to save for the future, live on less than you bring in, give back (tithe), take care of the community. All of it is there, has been there for thousands of years, and we missed it.

The Israelites were taught to store up during the good years to prepare for the lean years (Joseph and the seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine in Genesis 41). They were taught not to harvest the edges of their fields so the poor could eat (Leviticus 19:9-10). They were taught to give the first fruits back to God, not the leftovers (Proverbs 3:9-10). They were given a whole year of Jubilee every 50 years where debts were forgiven and land was returned (Leviticus 25). God knew we needed structure, boundaries, and reminders about how to handle what He gave us.

And somewhere along the way, we stopped teaching it. We stopped living it.

It's Not About the Math

Here's what I learned through all of this mess: getting out of debt and building wealth isn't really about the math. I mean, yes, you need to spend less than you earn. That's basic arithmetic. But the why behind our spending? The emotions driving us to buy things we don't really need with money we don't have to impress people we don't even know? That's not a math problem. That's a heart problem.

We buy things to fill voids. We spend money to feel better about a bad day. We finance things because we've been told we "deserve" them, even when we can't afford them. We compare ourselves to everyone else and come up short, so we buy more to keep up. None of that is math. All of that is emotion, comparison, pride, fear, and sometimes just plain exhaustion.

And until we deal with the why, no budget in the world is going to fix it. You can write down all the numbers you want, but if you're using shopping as therapy or eating out because you're too tired to deal with meal planning, those numbers on the page won't mean much when the emotions hit.

What's Coming in This Series

So that's what this blog series is going to be about. We're going to talk about the emotions behind money. The lies we believe about what we "need" versus what we want. The generational patterns we've fallen into. The way culture and marketing have shaped how we think about money. And yes, we're going to talk about what God says about all of it, because He has a lot to say and it's all really, really practical.

I'm not going to pretend I have it all figured out. My husband and I are still on this journey. But we've paid off that $186k (praise God), we've changed how we think about money, and we've built a life that feels peaceful instead of chaotic. We're not perfect, but we're intentional. And that's made all the difference.

Proverbs 21:5 says, "The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty." We were hasty for years, spending without thinking, buying without planning. Now we're learning to be diligent. And I want to share what we've learned with you.

If you're feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or embarrassed about your finances, friend, I've been there. You're not alone. And it's not because you're bad at math. It's because nobody taught us how to do this well, and the world has spent billions of dollars convincing us that debt is normal and spending is happiness.

It's time to learn a different way. The way our great-grandparents lived. The way God designed it to work.

Let's do this together.

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Next up: We'll dig into the biggest lies we've been sold about money and why believing it is keeping you broke.