I want to fully trust my kids when I give them their inheritance one day
I want to have incredible experiences throughout this beautiful earth
I want my family to know deeply that the best things in life cannot be bought
I want to live detached from stuff and attached to eternity
I want to give generously
I want to host my friends and my family in a beautiful, paid for home, with quality heirloom pieces, full of the Holy Spirit
I don’t want my kids to have college debt
I want my kids to know that life and work is more than earning money
I want to anonymously sponsor missions trips, Christmas mornings for single moms, and the electric bill for someone making ends meet
I want to share our (future) vacation home freely with young couples and ministries for rest and respite at no cost
I want my last days to be comfortable, free of worry and stress regarding the proper medical care
I want the local church to be supported by the Ray household

I want money to flow through my hands to all the right, responsible, honorable places, like a river. I never want my grip to be tight.

All of this is directly tied to how I am handling my money today.

Our Journey
Will and I have been on quite the journey together in regards to our finances. I grew up living a very wealthy lifestyle. I was homeschooled, I traveled all over the world as a kid, I would buy anything I wanted at any point. Private school, Clothes, Summer Camps and Horesback riding, my own horse, College, Prom Dresses, you name it – it was all paid for.

Will grew up with two hard working parents. They lived below their means, sacrificing to send their 3 kids to a private Christian school (where we met!). Will knew the value of hard work, he had to pay for his own gas and meals out, and he valued each dollar he made.

Y’all. We were a DISASTER.

Well, almost. We were almost a disaster. When we were engaged, we were introduced to Financial Peace University – Dave Ramsey’s amazing 9 week financial class – that CHANGED our lives and our marriage forever.

Fast forward to 2012: We freaking PAID OFF OUR HOUSE! We had lived in an apartment together for 2 years with no AC, no dishwasher, no washer and dryer, terrible neighbors, and mice. After saving up a lot for a down payment, we moved into our first home in 2010. We lived on nothing but a tight budget for 2.5 years, and we paid off our home!!

Be sure to read this post and listen to Our Debt Free Scream on the Dave Ramsey Show!

I’m going to share with you the tools we use to organize our money, but I want you to know something very important:

It’s about your heart, not these tools.

Money will reveal your heart more than you know. Living on a budget and denying myself of so many “wants” (after a childhood getting everything I wanted at any moment), illuminated some icky sides of myself. But goodness I am SO grateful for the journey.

As Dave Ramsey says, the problem with your money is the person looking at you in the mirror! It all has to do with your emotions, your dedication to reaching goals, your heart.

But if you can allow it to shape you into a responsible, generous person – goodness, it’s worth it.

With that said, here are 6 ways we have stayed organized in our finances throughout the years:

1. Financial Peace University – We took financial peace university as an engaged couple (highly recommend!), and we’ve taught it 4 times since then at our church. There’s nothing out there like it. It’s only once a week for 9 weeks, it’s comprehensive AND funny, it hits all the major important things you need to know regarding your finances – including investing and insurance. It literally changed the course of our lives and marriage.

2. Eliminate all debt (yes: even your house!) – Reaching for massive goals together as a husband and wife has really unified us more than we realized. Eliminating debt is a huge goal! Living without debt allows us to breathe easy, not be stressed or angry when a car breaks down or an emergency happens, and allows us to dream big when it comes to the future. I can’t recommend a debt free life enough. It’s so freeing!

3. Our budgeting system – We use two tools for our budget: Everydollar.com and our cash envelope system. Several of our budget items are accounted for as we make the purchase (for instance, I enter the amount of every single grocery receipt as soon as it happens), but some of our items are stored only in cash in our envelopes (like clothing and gifts, for example). Early on, we used cash for EVERYTHING and it helped us so, so much. There were times when I’d ask the grocery clerk to take back 10 items because there wasn’t enough cash in my envelope. Do you think I’d be that hard core with a card? Not a chance!

4. Regular financial meetings – We have a budget committee meeting every month, before the month begins. We have ad hoc meetings when big financial moves are in the works (Christmas, buying a car, looking for a new home). We have an annual meeting with our financial advisor to make sure we are reaching our investing goals as well.

5. $1000 – $5000 in the bank at all times – I’m talking about our checking account here – NOT our emergency fund. Our emergency fund is kept in a separate savings account, and it accounts for 6 months of expenses. In addition to that, we keep anywhere between $1000 and $5000 in our checking account. This is the account that we do LIFE out of! It’s nice to know we can cover what comes our way without stressing out, and it eliminates any need for a credit card.

6. Setting big goals – Yes, this keeps us organized. If we didn’t have goals to reach toward, we wouldn’t be intentional with our spending and saving. I wouldn’t be as motivate to make my business healthy and profitable. We set personal financial goals, as well as giving goals.

Don’t forget to read Emily’s “How we do it” post on finances today, too!

The other day, I was talking with my friend Em about an old series I posted on my blog that people LOVED. I had more interaction with those blogposts than I expected! It was a simple series on how I organize specific areas of my life:

Time.
Finances.
Personal Life.
Work.
Spiritual Life.

Em said, “What if we brought that blog series back, and wrote it together, and added a few more? Including..”

Relationships.
Kids.

I gave her a resounding YES!

So… I’m so excited to kick off this organization series with my dear friend, Emily Thomas. Her blog, Em For Marvelous, is warm and helpful and witty and informative and intriguing… all the things one would love about a blog. So, I’ll be sure to end every Organization Post we share with a link to hers as well, because I’ll be honest: I’m super excited to read what she has to say!

Each Tuesday for the next two months, you will be hearing all about How We Do It! Excited to have you follow along.

How We (Emily and myself!) Do It: Organizing Our Time

I’ve always been fascinated with time management. ? I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a personality thing, maybe it’s my weird love for efficiency (my husband has rubbed off on me), maybe it’s the fact that I constantly find myself needing more help in this area. Whatever the reason, the truth is this: we all have the same hours in a day as Beyoncé, amirite? So there’s more to living life than just letting life happen as it happens, ya know?

Disclaimer: I get pretty nerdy here. Some of my favorite books are on productivity and time management! 168 Hours, What’s Best Next, Ordering your Private World, to name a few. But this whole “Organizing our Time” subject is too important to not take some time to learn. I’ve officially decided:

I WANT TO BECOME A STUDENT OF TIME MANAGEMENT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

Because my heart is the fullest when I know my hours have been spent well. Matt Perman says it best: “You are satisfied with your day when there is a match between what you value and how you spend your time.”

Over the last 10 years I’ve read many time management books, I’ve run a business, I’ve managed a team, I’ve had two babies, I’ve volunteered with the youth and the worship team at my church, I’ve run 3 half marathons, and I have had to put some systems and tools in place to help me do all of these things well. Today, I want to share my favorite tactics for time management with you! I’m confident that even if you adopt just ONE of these, it will change your days for the better.

8 Tactics to Organize Your Time

1. Track Your Time

This is an exercise I learned when reading 168 Hours, and it was the BIGGEST eye opener. Highly recommend that you do it for 2 weeks straight, then assess. It works like this: You write down how you spend your time in 30 minute increments. (I usually would do life for 3 hours or so, then fill it out so I wasn’t stopping every 30 minutes.) You can highlight the big chunks of your time: work, sleep, leisure – then accurately know how you are spending your days. We tend to exaggerate how much we work, and we don’t give enough credit to sleep or leisure time, OR we realize just how much time we spend on our phones. #facepalm. It was so eye opening and helpful for me, you should absolutely do it this January. Grab your FREE Time Tracker Download by CLICKING HERE!

Funny story time: one time I posted a picture on Instagram of how I tracked my time when Will was the youth pastor at our church. One of the lines said “sex!” Yep – I totally put that in how I tracked my time. All the youth leaders were cracking jokes that night and we had no idea what they were talking about, until one of them pointed it out to me! I was terribly embarrassed and took it down immediately, but we all got a good laugh out of it!

2. Big picture planning for the year

At the start of each year, Will and I write in the things that we know we want to set aside time for. Examples for 2018: Camping Trip, Father’s Day in Beaufort, Anniversary Trip (we’re going to Europe for 10 days!), Myrtle Beach, Mountains at Thanksgiving, My Speaking Engagements, and Training dates for his work. Putting these things in our calendar helps us fight for them, or at least reschedule them when other invitations come up. If we didn’t do this, these trips that mean the most to our family simply wouldn’t happen.

3. Create an Ideal Week

I first heard about creating an ideal week from Michael Hyatt. It is brilliant and quite helpful, but to be honest, it’s a bit more difficult to live by when the babies are small. My best advice it to draft your ideal week, then allow for flexibility. With that said, I’m still a HUGE believer in this practice, and I plan to draft one for 2018 this week!

4. 3 Priorities

“Efficiency doesn’t matter if you are doing the wrong things in the first place.”
― Matt Perman

This is where we win and we lose our time, friend. PRIORITIZATION. This also is my biggest struggle. I’m constantly getting distracted by things that need to get done (laundry! clean out that drawer! reorganize the girls clothes!) instead of the things MOST important for THAT particular day. Here is one simple tip that is so dang simple it’s crazy:

Set your 3 Priorities for TODAY before you do anything else.

What are the 3 things that you want to accomplish today? That if you did those 3 things, at the end of your day, you could say, “Hey! That was a great day and I did what I needed to do.” We do this every day in my work with our Morning Huddle, and it has been a game changer for us. We are more focused and more productive. Here’s where the problem is: On a day with a LOT to do, it’s easier to just jump in and start working on all the things. This goes for work and for our homes. I just want to feel accomplished, and I’m overwhelmed, so I GET AFTER IT. Well, the problem lies in that quote above: “Efficiency doesn’t matter if you are doing the wrong things in the first place!” You have to set your priorities FIRST, then you can methodically tackle the most important things and truly know your hours were spent well.

5. 10 Minutes with Each Kid Each Day

This will change your family if you let it. I must give credit where it’s due: Amy McCready of Positive Parenting Solutions (an online parenting course we are taking that we LOVE), calls this “Mind Body Soul Time.” Every morning and every evening, each parent must set aside 10 minutes for 1 on 1 time with each kid. This time is completely focused and undistracted – no phone, no tidying or cleaning, no multitasking. And the kid gets to decide how he/she wants to spend that time with you! We are still working on our morning time, but to start, we just do evening time with our kiddos. (Hope to implement mornings soon!) So, for Will and I, it looks like this: for 20 minutes every evening, we set a timer. We start with “Milly Mama / Daddy Lyndon” time. When the timer goes off after 10 minutes, we switch kids. Milly’s behavior has improved so much since we’ve started this little parenting time management tool, and we are incredibly grateful. (This parenting course is worth every penny!)

6. Do one thing at a time

Yes, I’m a woman, and yes, I’m terrible at multitasking. It’s true. My husband can vouch for this. But I’ll keep this short and sweet: science has proven that we are much less effective when we multitask. So don’t do it! Embrace undivided focus and doing one thing at a time as much as you can.

Side note for mamas: one thing I’ve been trying to do a lot more of lately? When I have a big task to do in the home, I invite Milly in to help. I am still focused on the task, and yes it will slow things down, but she LOVES to help where she can. So I try to tackle things with Milly, but if it requires too much thinking or decision making, I tackle it during a nap or while she’s watching Frozen!

7. Set Boundaries around emails

Here are my two biggest tips for emails: first, do NOT open your inbox first thing. Accomplish something before ever opening your inbox, or you will be in your inbox all day. Second, set a time boundary for how long you will be in your inbox. Set an alarm on your phone, do as much as you can within that allotted time, and when the alarm goes off, you are DONE for the day. It causes you to be ruthless and effective in your inbox.

There’s a whole episode about how I am an Email Ninja – just for you!

8. Plan your leisure and your rest

Have you ever come home from a vacation completely worn out, needing another vacation? That, friend, is the difference between leisure and rest. Leisure is “the use of free time for enjoyment.” This includes being active and doing things for fun, and it’s so so SO important to plan these times! However, it’s equally important to plan to REST. Rest is “to cease work or movement in order to relax, refresh oneself, or recover strength.” See the difference?

We plan our leisure in the form of travel, family fun days, races we like to run, things we like to experience. We plan our rest weekly in doing our very best to maintain a Sabbath – a day free of any kind of work, a day of enjoyment of our God and one another, a day to cease. I’m so passionate about this because it’s a key to such a fulfilling life, and yet we all (including myself) struggle with this. Why? There is ALWAYS stuff to do. It’s not part of our culture. We don’t think the Sabbath applies to us anymore.

I encourage you: plan time for both leisure and rest. Put it in your calendar, or it won’t happen. Will and I try to decide on our Sabbath day at the start of each week, so we can plan for it throughout the week. (Hello paper plates, crock pot meals, caught up laundry and movie nights!) If you don’t plan for this in the pages of your calendar, you’ll reach burnout before you know it. And because I’m so passionate about it, I made a freebie about this too! Listen to Work & Play Podcast Episode 25: Work Hard, Sabbath Hard.

Last but not least, my favorite tools for organizing my time include:

Tools
Cultivate What Matters Powersheets (for prioritization and big picture thinking)
Simplified Planner (for day to day scheduling)
iCal (for appointments, travel, and childcare planning)

Books
168 Hours
What’s Best Next
Boundaries
Ordering your Private World
What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast
I Know How She Does It

What are your favorite Time Organization books, tools, and tricks? I’d love to hear them!

Don’t miss Emily’s Post!! How We Do It: Organizing our Time by Em for Marvelous