Episode 85 - We've got some exciting news! - Taryn Scarfone joins me.

Taryn and I share some exciting news. Hopefully, we can encourage you as you pursue the goals the Lord puts on your heart.

Transcript

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Paul, Welcome to Catholic money talk, where we talk about all things money and finance, and we try to do it through a lens of being Catholic, where our ultimate goal is to one day be in Heaven with the Lord. I am your host. Paul Scarfone, thank you for being here today. Welcome back to Catholic money talk today, I am joined by my wife, Taryn. Hi everybody, and we've got some news to share, but before we do that, let's say a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, Heavenly Father. We thank you for this day. We thank you for all the ways that you love and bless us. Lord. We know that you have an awesome plan for us. Thank you for your Holy Spirit. Please allow us to yield to your Holy Spirit so that we can follow you in all those daily invitations that you invite us into. Lord, just give us great peace no matter what situation we might find ourselves in, fill us full of hope and allow us to pursue you. We ask all this in Jesus name, amen, name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. So turn and I have some news, but before we share that, I want to just remind everyone of if you've been with us here on Catholic money talk for a while, there's been something that I bring up every now and then on different podcasts, and one of the things I'll talk about is goals. And it's important to have a goal that you are working towards. A goal is helpful. It gives you confidence, it gives you direction, it gives you motivation. And your goals should be reflected in your budget, and so Tara and I have had some goals that we've had reflected in our budget. One in particular, it's come a little sooner than I thought it would be. But Taryn, what is the goal that we've been after for Well, seven years now to pay off our mortgage. And so why are you here today? Because we did it. We did it. We paid off our mortgage. That's so awesome. So we did we paid off our mortgage, and I did not think it would come as early in the year as May 2025 but it did, and and we're going to talk about that just a little bit today. We're excited, so we wanted to share it, and this seemed like a good safe place to share it, because anyone that's been listening to podcast knows that's something we've been working towards. We're not gloating. We are not nothing. It's all just so good, we are so excited. It's the biggest goal that we've worked on together and that we've achieved. And when we bought the house seven, almost seven, it's not even seven. Six and a half years ago, we bought it, the bank told us we could, we could spend X amount. We chose a lesser amount because we wanted to pay off our mortgage as soon as we could. When we first bought the house, we thought, oh, let's it'd be great if we could pay it off by the time Josh graduated high school, and I think after the first year, we kind of knew that that wasn't going to happen. At least the trajectory. There were some expenses that came up. We want to put a fence around the yard just for safety and different things. And those costs, right? They all take away from we only have a finite amount of money that comes in every month, so when we choose to do other things with it, it's less we can put towards our goal. So after the first year, we thought, oh yeah, we're definitely not gonna be able to do that. Well, maybe we could pay it off by the time our second oldest child was going to go to, was going to graduate high school, and that's kind of what we had. We've been plugging away. And then last year, and I remember sharing this in one of the podcasts at the end of the year, I had kind of messed up with taxes a little bit. We had a bigger refund than we expected, and we switched some business things on my wife's business. So that gave us almost like an extra month's income, because one of our business partners that we work with changed their terms on paying us. Instead of doing 75 days, it was 45 days. That kind of gave us an extra month of income. So we had some extra money, and when we put all that extra towards the mortgage, it got within striking distance, and we thought, Whoa, 2025, might be the year we could probably do it. And that's how we came into the year. And then couple weeks ago, or just last week, I was talking to a friend about our goal to pay off our mortgage, and they said, Really, you want to do that? Like, how? What's your rate? Like, don't you make more in your savings account? All that was true. What I said to them was, I want to pay off the mortgage. Because people I've met that have paid off their mortgage are super excited. I've never met someone who had a regret about it, and they're usually more excited than people that got a phenomenal interest rate on their savings account or 15. Percent, or 20, 30% rate of return on the market for a year. The people that more excited are typically the ones that paid off their mortgage. And they're fewer of those people. Those people are weird. They don't really exist. But we do. We do so we paid it off we I came home and I kind of calculated some numbers. I said to Taryn Terren, what if we what if we pay off the mortgage this week, and she looked at me, are you serious? And I saw, like, almost a little tear in her eye, and I'm like, what she's like, are you serious? Like we could, I could tell she'd be really excited. So I decided, yes, we have to be able to do this. So we kind of pulled money from everywhere, little ancillary accounts, different places, and it all came together to be within about 100 bucks of having to pay it off. And so Thursday last week, we have a little chart on our fridge. It's our floor plan. We color it in every month based on how much of the house we've paid off. And we had, I think, half the living room and the kitchen, I think that still had to be colored and everything else had been paid off and colored in. And so our kids come home from school, and we're there in the kitchen. Terrence got her computer to make that final payment, and we've got the floor plan on the island, and we tell the kids, we're, you know, we've been doing this, we're gonna pay it off now. And they look a little excited, little not sure what's going on, and we paid off when our one of our middle kids, she's like, Okay, can we go now? Like, and I'm just, you know, my other daughter's like, You guys are so much more excited about this than we are, and that's true. And I told them, Well, 1520, years from now, you're gonna look back and go, wait, wait. Mom and dad paid their mortgage off when they were in their mid 40s, in their lower 40s. I'm in my early 40s, early 40s. I'm in my mid 40s. So that's what we paid off our mortgage. So hopefully that'll be inspiration for the kids. But we thought it appropriate to share it here, but also talk about a couple of the key pieces that we really want to highlight and encourage all of you with and just to also reflect on ourselves. So I'll go first. I had there was three points that I thought were key, three elements that are key into achieving a goal like this, and not just paying off a mortgage, but any type of goal that's going to require you to put time and effort and attention towards. And so those three elements, the first one was just surrendering it to the Lord. And what do I mean by that? We had prayed about this. We didn't just like, hey, let's just do this. This seems like it'd be cool. I saw, you know, I heard someone talk about paying off mortgage. It sounds like fun. Let's do it like we really prayed about Lord. What do you want us to do when we have extra dollars that come in? Like, what's the top priority and we just surrender it to the Lord, and He is faithful to us. So we pray about financial decisions. We seek wisdom from others. We pray. And so I feel like the the top thing that is important something like this is to make Jesus the Lord of your finances, and to seek His will in these things, and he will help you achieve it. So the first was just being faithful to the Lord, second is working together. I think that was key. If, if we didn't have each other as accountability, if I would say something like, Hey, can I buy this thing? Or, what if we do this or that? And Taryn would say, we're trying to pay off the house. So once the house is paid off, then we can do those other things. And so that was a good reminder. And vice versa, I probably said the same thing to you. And if one of us wasn't on board with this, it wouldn't have happened, agreed so being the two of us working out together, and then the third part is just living on less than we make. And so, you know, it's really about creating those funds. I talk about in other episodes, when I talk about our lifestyle, and trying to avoid lifestyle creeping. When I think of lifestyle, I think of our cup, and I'm referencing Psalm 23 where the Lord says, or where the psalmist is talking about the Lord's my shepherd. There's nothing I shall want. You know, it's my head with oil. My cup overflows. And so how do you get overflow? You you have a smaller cup, right? And so whatever the flow is, you know that could be your income, just God's blessings. If our needs and wants, our desires, is small, there's it creates overflow. So if there's if you have a small cup, there's overflow. If you have a swimming pool, you might always feel empty because you're never getting full. And so when you're prayerfully making decisions, and you're prayerfully determined, What size is your cup, your lifestyle cup, your financial lifestyle cup, when it's the appropriate size, whatever the Lord's. Blessing you with you create overflow that you can do other things with. You can be generous. Can achieve fun goals, like paying off your house, and so you only do that through living on less than you make. And that's one of the things we talk about here, just how to manage your money well so that you can achieve those types of things. That could be goal setting. It could be having a budget. Could be working with your spouse. So for me, those were the three things, surrendering our finances to the Lord, working together and living in less than we make, and we were able to achieve our goals. But when we were talking about it, you were excited, because you remember a moment that you felt help propel I agree with all of those things, but for me, there were two, two moments in particular when we had first starting, started working on our budget, and we went through a course, and we were listening to some talks. And there was one story that really struck me. The presenter was said that he had a friend who was, he was a wealthy man, and at one point of time, he spent like $70,000 and he took his kids, his grandkids, a whole big group of people, on an all expense paid cruise. And he said, like, how wonderful it was having that family time. But then a few months later, he bought bicycles for inner city kids, to the tune of two tractor trailers full and $70,000 and his family went and they handed out the bicycles to all these children. And part of why I wanted to pay off our mortgage, because I want to have the freedom to do things like that, and if we have hundreds of 1000s of dollars worth of debt, that is not a possibility for us. I want to be able to take my family on a cruise, and I want to be able to give away bicycles. And having those kind of goals and dreams was just one thing that really helped me stay motivated and and that story, if you remember when he was kind of interviewing his friend, asking about that story, he asked his friend, he said, of the cruise or handing out bicycles, which did your family enjoy more? And they said, handing out the bicycles, of course, of course. So yes, paint, having goals, getting rid of debt, whether it be, you know, good debt or bad debt, whether it be a mortgage, like we just did, it just frees up money. And we've, you know, our mortgage was $2,000 a month, and we had been paying probably an extra 2000 or more a month, if you figure out just the averages. So literally, that opens up almost $4,000 a month. And there I'm giving real numbers like I'm not not impressed or embarrassed by it, but that's just the truth of it. So when think of your own situation, could you imagine if your mortgage that you're paying was gone, right? Yes, it would take some extra money every month. If you squeezed and carved that out and put that on your your your regular mortgage payment, how quickly would your mortgage be gone? And then what happens when it's gone? Well, all that money that you've been paying paying is now freed up in your budget to do whatever you feel Lord's calling you to do. So cool and Taran, you had another story too. What was your other story? The other thing that really propelled me towards this goal was Paul and I went on a marriage retreat, that's right, a Catholic marriage retreat. Catholic marriage retreat. At this point, it was about seven years ago, our fifth, fifth child was a baby. He was an infant, and he was with us on the retreat, but one this was when we had decided that we wanted to move we wanted to move closer to our children's school. We needed a bit more space for our family, so we were starting to look at houses and think about listing our house, and the bank told us we could afford x, and we had decided we should probably spend less, because we'd like to be able to pay off our house. And that was all reinforced when you saw, yeah, I was on the retreat and just in the bathroom, was a sign that said, live simply, so that others may simply live. And I really found that so that was really just a sign from the Lord, for me personally, that we should not max out our budget for this house, that we needed to still have space in our budget to be able to tithe and be generous. And what happened was, when we were looking for a home, it was hard to find one. The price range we had, I think, was 400 to 550 for the house we were looking for, and most of the things that we found were flips that we just didn't like. And. And I remember talking to Taryn saying, Hey, we probably need to increase our price range to find something. And Taryn said, Well, we could look a little lower. And we looked in a town that we hadn't really looked in much, mostly because we didn't understand the bussing reimbursement situation. That's a whole nother topic, but in New Jersey, they're in certain towns, if there's bussing for your kids to get to school and you go to private school, you can apply to the town for transportation, and they will say, No, we are not getting you to and from your school, but we will give you some money for you to figure out your own transportation. And so we were looking in towns where maybe we could get some bussing money. That's what we call it, bussing money. And we didn't know much about this town. We didn't know anyone that lived in it, and all of a sudden, Taryn says, Hey, there's a house for I think it was 390 and she sent me a listing, and the front of the picture just looked ugly, because it like, clearly there were some additions and like the street, the curb appeal wasn't great, nice landscaping, but that just a house. And I said, All right, well, we'll go look at it. We drive down the street. It's the last house on a dead end street. Now we're coming off a busy, double yellow road across from a hospital, so driving down the quiet dead end street, I was like, We'll take it. I think our realtor was like, well, let's go look inside the house first. And we walked in, and there was, we love this room in the back that you could just it's surrounded by windows, and it's just beautiful. We're like, we'll take it and and we bought it, and that's the house, and we've been here. It was seven years in August, and in less than seven years, we paid off the house. So who needs a 30 year? Who needs a 15 year? We had a six and a half year mortgage? So really cool. Thank you, Taryn, for coming to join me today, and again, we're sharing this. We're excited. You could probably tell, maybe even a little emotional. You could probably tell, but mostly to just say they this is possible for you, but you need to work together. You need to pray and ask the Lord to like clearly show you what your goals and prayers need to be. You need to work together. You need to have great unity, and then you'll get there. You live on less than you make. Have a plan for managing the money, figure out the behaviors that you need to have hold each other accountable, and you will get there. So you can pray for us as we try to determine what's the next goal in front of us. Taryn mentioned to me that the other day. She's like, I feel an emptiness. I'm like, because we don't have a mortgage. She's like, No, because we don't have this big goal that we've had, right? So we've got to pick the next big goal. So, yeah, think of us. Pray for us as as you pray. We're trying to figure it out, but we will go through I have some podcast episodes on goal setting, so we're going to go through those and be, you know, open to that process, to see what the Lord puts on our heart next. So thank you for joining me today. Taryn, thank you for listening to us today. Hopefully we've been able to inspire and encourage you to get a clear goal and go after it. I hope the Lord, I hope you can hear the Lord speak clearly to you as you try to define some goals. Thank you for joining us today. God bless Thank you for listening to Catholic money talk. I hope you join us again next time, please click Subscribe in your podcast app to get notified of new episodes. God bless you and have a great day. You. I'm.