3 years, 10 months.

Dear Jack,

It was exactly 8 years ago tonight that Mommy and I fatefully met each other at the taping of an episode of CMT’s Crossroads, featuring Lindsey Buckingham and Little Big Town.

Here we are now, 8 years later; with you, nearly 4 years old.

Back on September 7th, in my 1st letter announcing our family’s new home purchase, I included pictures of the broken ground and foundation. (See Dear Jack: We’re Building A New House In Spring Hill, TN as well as Our 2nd Visit To Our “New House”/ 2014 Lexus GS 450h: Family Friendly Review.)

Well, about a month later, it’s time to update those photos. But first, a quick video I made…

Yesterday we had made the journey to Sprill Hill to check in on the status on the building process. I expected very little progress, if any.

In fact, I was quite surprised when Mommy pointed at our house. At first I thought we were on the wrong street somehow.

Seeing this progress was a great encouragement to me. It’s easy for the process of selling our current townhome, plus the thought of the move itself, to overshadow the fun parts of this.

But just look- this is our house “being born.”

I particulary enjoyed the view out the windows from upstairs. I was able to get a good view of the farmland behind our lot, as well as a view of our next door neighboor’s background; to get an idea of what ours will look like as well.

There’s no doubt this is a scary process, though. I admit that at any given second, I am sort of expecting this to somehow fall through.

However, we’ve went through the budget more times than we can count and we know we can truly afford this new home and still have a decent amount of cash going into our savings. It’s very important to us we don’t become “house poor”; meaning all our paychecks just go into paying the mortgage every month.

Of course, we drive 10 year-old used Hondas, we don’t eat out at restaurants, we don’t have cable TV or smart phones, and the electronics we do own are laughably (!) outdated. So to say the least, we are an extremely frugal family.

If we hadn’t become as ridiculously conservative with our money as we needed to in order to get out of the $60K debt we had worked our way in, there’s no way we could have ever gotten ahead… to get to where we are today.

So having lived through that blessed/cursed learning curve that so many couples in their late 20s (at the time) have to encounter when it comes to the budget, or the lack thereof, we are now (in our early 30s) able to start catching glimpses of what Dave Ramsey has always preached on:

“Live like no one else now so that later, you can live like no one else.”

Based on my financial mistakes in the past, I guess there’s part of me that feels I don’t deserve this house.

Even now, I personally feel… hesitant… about showing info and pictures about our family’s new house.

But it’s important to me that I not only show you this “footage” for future nostaglic and historic purposes, and that I teach you to be as annoyingly frugal as I am… but also because you have many family members on both sides of the our family that want to see the updates on our house.

As for you, you’re still trying to understand that the model home is not actually our new home.

Love,

Daddy

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