Article September 13, 2010 ISSUE

HOW WE FOUND FINANCIAL BALANCE

BY GREG JARVIS

WHEN I LOOKED out at a beautiful sunrise one morning last year, I thought how grateful I was for the opportunity to live in an attractive little house that suited my family well. My next thought, however, was rather unsettling. It was the suggestion that my wife and I were just one small step away from losing that home and many of the things we'd worked for over the years. Not that we believed material things were the most important stuff of living, but our income had been declining and we seemed, like many others, to have borrowed too much over the years.

It didn't take much calculation to determine that the situation needed to change for us to keep meeting our financial obligations. This did, however, mean taking a whole different view of the significance of "things" in our experience.