Anchored - A Crown Testimony

Before Crown, I was very nervous, I would cry almost every night, and I just had overwhelming anxiety. I was stressed all the time, scared and worried. We were surviving, not thriving. We were doing it paycheck to paycheck. The bills were always catching up to us. We always joked that every two weeks something bad would happen, and it somehow did. Every two weeks we would have a gigantic thing that we had to figure out. A bill would come and it would throw us off our budget. We had some direction, but we were kind of getting tossed around the ocean a little bit and felt a little bit unanchored as to how to do what we needed to do. We weren't surrendering our finances to the Lord. Okay, we're going to have breakfast soon, okay, so let's sit down. Dear God, please help me have a good eat, and please help me rest, and please have this I'm a pastor, and God always provides, but we're not living in luxury, and that's totally fine. We don't want to. But we knew that we had these expenses that were coming, and my salary wasn't increasing. So I went to the church and said, we have a single-salary family, three boys growing, and there's just nothing really that I guess they could do. I was scared because I just didn't know how we were going to make it work. And so in that moment, honestly, I feel it was the Holy Spirit, but the name Crown popped into my head. And that afternoon, I went on your website and found The Budget Coaching. I signed up, and about two days later, we got a phone call. So we did this journey together. The budget really is now part of your lifestyle. It's not a punishment, but it's a lifestyle. So how is your lifestyle going? It's going really well.

We're still able to keep the budget weekly. I try to sit down and just have everything written down. There's been a few bills here and there that we can't control. When we were told that we would get budget coaches, I thought maybe we're going to get someone that was going to look at our budget and say, you need to do this, this, and this. But it was full-on discipleship, and that blew my mind. And it was A-plus. It was so good and so great. And it felt like friends, but they also felt like kind of godly mentor parents at some point, too. And so we just looked forward to meeting with them and talking with them. They asked us tough questions about finances, which we wanted, but they also asked tough questions about the heart. It kind of exposed in our own lives maybe some of the things we were holding onto that we didn't even know we were holding onto that affected the way we viewed money. The first thing we learned was, this is the money God has given you, and this is what you're going to do with it. All the other resources we found always just told you steps, and if you do these three steps, you're going to have it figured out. But if the heart is not in the right place, you're just going to continue to make the same mistakes. So Crown just laid the biblical foundation for good stewardship right away. We were like, oh, okay, I guess there's just more to being a good steward than just doing the three steps. So that was the first thing I noticed. Before we did Crown, we didn't really have savings because all of our money would just go out the boot the minute the paycheck would come in because we didn't have any discipline or guidance in how to deal with our budget. But after we were able to finish the course, have the right mindset, we realized that we were actually able to save.

And even though sometimes it was hard because we had to stick to the budget, it gave us a peace of mind that we haven't had in years. One of the most significant lessons for us from the course was the money map. It felt like my blood pressure dropped because I just looked and I was like, this makes it simple. You do these three things, and when you've done them, you check it and you move to the next one. It just clarified the whole process so much and then gave us a clear pathway forward. One of the biggest milestones was just to reduce our debt greatly, and one of the biggest payments was the van. We were able to focus what we were spending things on that weren't completely necessary. We were able to pay off our van and just even having that extra money a month, it felt like we got a raise, which we didn't, but we just had the freedom to do more things for the kingdom without having to worry where the next paycheck, where the next bill was going to attack us. Our financial stress was definitely our biggest stress in our marriage. And I think a lot of it came from the way we viewed money and were raised around money. As soon as I saw something on the bank app, he would get a phone call and I would say, why, what was the $2 in here? What was this? It's not, you already spent your walking around money or you did that. And he goes, oh, I didn't realize it.

So he would come home. I would already be angry with him. It just brought so much stress to me because in my mind, if you don't have the money, you don't buy it. I would feel guilt sometimes for my kids thinking, well, they're just going to miss out on these things and we're not going to get time back. But now I think even when we can't do those things, they're actually really good opportunities for teaching stewardship and stuff with our kids rather than saying, no, we can't do that. It's like, well, here's what we're doing and here's why. And this is what God's blessed us with. And also teaches us contentment and satisfaction with what we have. You know, growing up, they tell you about how much God loves you, how he created you, but they don't really say that what you have is because God gave it to you, but you have to be careful with it. It just reminded me that God is in everything, including my finances. And even when it's difficult and when it's hard, he still is in control, but I have to surrender that. If we would have done the course before we got married, things would have been a lot different for us. This course, it helps you fall more in love with Jesus and God's kingdom purposes. And when that happens, all of a sudden,

the money becomes a vehicle to do that rather than to use it on yourself. For us to have purpose behind what we're doing makes it exciting and fun. Crown Budget Coaching revolutionized our life and our marriage. We have a plan and a hope. We're satisfied. CrownBudget Coaching Revolutionized Our Life CrownBudget Coaching Revolutionized Our Life