It's the Simple Show. You've got episode 101.

Hi, I'm Tishawkson writer. And I'm Erin Lachner. And on The Simple Show, we talk about saying no and yes to the right things.

In this episode, we are talking about money, specifically budgeting. Before we get going on that,

I just wanted to remind you guys, because it's been a while since I've said something about this, that if you sign up for the weekly email, you will never miss an episode of The Simple Show. So all you need to do is go to the art of simple.competal.net slash email and sign up. You're going to get an email called five quick things. And all it is is a list of five things that we have created on the Art of Simple.

So like Simple Show episodes or a blog. five quick things. And all it is is a list of five things that we have created on the art of

simple. So like simple show episodes or a blog post and other stuff that we have found around

the web that is just inspiring and encouraging and simplifying life. And we write it specifically

so that it can be read in under a minute. Like we test it to make sure that it's a quick read. But that way, you will never miss one of our episodes. So go to the art of simple.net slash email. Okay, Erin, start us off. What do you say no to when it comes to budgeting and money and all that stuff? Because it can feel pretty grown-upy and overwhelming and stuff. So I don't know, start us off

with your thoughts. I will. My first thought is I could talk about this all day. I think it's so fascinating. I know you're not supposed to talk about money, but I just feel like it's so sometimes we complicate it a lot. And so I just, we take a very simple approach. For one, we say no to debt in any stretch.

Like we just,

we just don't do that.

We have been burned before.

You know,

we lost our house in the market crash in Los Angeles. And so even so much as a mortgage payment just did not appeal to us. We just did not want to be, we didn't want to be fighting overhead for the rest of our lives or feel pressure to take a job. We're both freelancers. We don't want to

take jobs that we didn't believe in. We weren't passionate about just to pay a hefty mortgage.

So what that meant is, you know, we just, we cut back in every, in every single area of our life

and our income. So we renovated. We've got a really, really small, very run down, very molded home

in the Midwest. And yeah, we just, we don't do debt and we don't do mortgage. Who's the first thing we wanted to pay off before we had kids. So that's a biggie. I'd say that's our, that's our main one is we just say no to that. So you're completely debt for you then? Yes. Awesome. Yeah.

And that's work. You know, I don't want to like sugarcoat it, but I feel like every time we've made, and I'll talk about this with our budgets. Well, this goes right into, I guess, the second thing that we do. We don't do spreadsheet budgets. You know what I'm talking about? Like Excel. we used to do this when we were newlyweds,

just because, you know,

I think there's a lot of, a lot to be learned for putting

everything down on paper and for tracking. And certainly when you're doing things a different

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