Priorities

Do not spend money for that which is of no worth... 2 Nephi 9:51

Artyom was an Armenian man, approaching middle age, who lived in southern Russia with six or seven other men. They had come to Russia to work and send money home to their families, because there were no jobs in Armenia.

When we met him to speak about the Gospel of Jesus Christ, he was at home from his job in construction, and relaxing. To relax, he smoked cigarettes and drank. Now I knew something about cigarettes - with all of the second-hand cigarette smoke in Russia, I figure I became an expert on brands available in Russia. I always feared the cheap Russian brands, especially the unfiltered ones - and I always felt a little bit relieved when someone pulled out a pack of Marlboros or Parliament. His alcohol was also relatively expensive.

His apartment, on the other hand, was certainly not an oasis - eight construction workers in about 700 square feet.

Artyom explained to us that he was very rarely able to go back to Armenia to see his family, since he had to save as much money as he could to send back to them.

"More important to me than anything else are my family, and my health." Said Artyom.

I'm not sure Artyom realized at the time how much better off both his family and his health would be without the expensive liquor and cigarettes. But as I've thought about it, we all have similar habits that are very damaging to our goals and priorities.

For any budget, these are the best expenses to drop first. Go through your expenses, and try to find any items similar to these:

• Excessive amounts of food that is unhealthy and expensive - fast food, soda and other unhealthy snacks
• Expensive television packages that just add more excuses not to interact together as a family
• Purchases of inappropriate movies, books, music or other media
• Anything contrary to the Word of Wisdom, of course
• Overly expensive clothing

These are the types of items where spending less will actually lead to a better standard of living - and should thus probably be the first things to go when building a budget.

The way money is spent is a good indicator of where one's real priorities are.

Using Your Computer as Your Television

A year or so ago, we stopped using our television. We didn't get very good reception in our apartment, so we primarily watched DVDs anyway. Since then we've discovered quite a number of benefits to this.

• The computer is in our main room, where it should be.
• One LCD display is cheaper than two. Most TVs can be used as computer monitors anyway, with the proper adapters.
• It's a good excuse for me to have a large computer monitor.
• We can hide everything in a corner cabinet (that closes). This makes our living room look much less like a shrine in which to worship the television.
• Less power consumption.

We actually have a device to receive standard TV signals on the computer, but rarely use it (once again, bad reception in our apartment). There are plenty of other sources for excellent television content. Here are a few:

• Hulu.com: Free television shows and movies, including many current shows.
• Netflix.com: A huge catalog of DVDs that can be sent through the mail. You pay for the number of DVDs you'd like at once, and set up a queue of titles that you're interested in. The variety and sheer number of videos available has made this far more useful to us than any other source for television shows or movies. They also offer free, unlimited streaming of many shows over the Internet. This means that I can watch Columbo whenever I want.
• YouTube.com: Less valuable than the above two sources, because there is a very high proportion of entirely useless content. The best way to use YouTube is to just look at channels of organizations and people that you are interested in. The LDS public affairs channel, for instance: LDS Public Affairs on YouTube. My basic rule is to only use YouTube if I know what I'm looking for in advance (this is a good general rule for the Internet, actually).
• Various television channel websites are also available. Television channels from around the world broadcast their content, often live, over the Internet.

Now, instead of paying for both Internet access and cable television, we just pay for Internet access. (This also gives me an excuse to pay a little extra for the faster Internet plan)

We also get to pick which content is available in our home, instead of sitting down in the evening and surfing channels trying to find something that isn't completely useless.

Give it a try! Netflix has a free trial, and everything else I listed is free.