Growing up

Choices are never easy and how do you decide which way to go when either one is good and bad at the same time. My husband and I are in this prediciment as is every other middle class family in America. We are faced with too many choices, too many things; and what we have never really seems to be enough. My husband and I seem to be the typical "buy now pay for it later" kind of upper-middle class folks. Yet what do we really want. We think we want to be out of debt--oh what would that be like, but then we also want to fix up or 80 year old house that had been neglected by the family who lived in it for 50 years. We have lived there for nearly 6 without doing much to it other than window and some new flooring. Fixing up a house is expensive and we like to go out and vaction. So we always spent our money--or our credit on those types of fun things. Now we are faced with our own aging. We are in the process of adding one or two new members to our family. There are things that we want for them--a nursery that is liveable and nice, a kitchen that isn't dangerous and a family room that isn't filled with random clutter and crap. All of these things cost money.

What are our priorities? What have they been? Is there any hope? We want to be happy at home. I would be happier with a house that was fixed up with a little bit of debt than a dump and no debt. What a tangled web we weave when at first we try to decieve. Who were we decieving you ask? Well ourselves of course. We tried to tell ourselves that it was okay to allocate funds for this or that and buy what we wanted when we wanted whether we had the money for it our not. Now we are paying the price and are forced to answer the question--"Do we buy the things that will really add value to our life or do we suffer for our past mistakes?" If only the answer was easy.