This week, Darla and I are headed for Cincinnati, to the Healthy Communities/ Healthy Youth Conference. I’ve attended this conference many times over the years and have always been inspired and motivated after leaving it.

My kids have often come with me as well, usually helping with my exhibitor booth for Empowering Youth. In the photo below, Darla is only six, as she hands out brochures to conference attendees at the National Service Learning Conference in 2002.

And at last year’s HCHY conference, she even facilitated a breakout session with me (photo above), based on my book, Empowering Youth: How to Encourage Young Leaders to Do Great Things.

But for the first time, this year Darla is the headliner for our breakout session. She was named a Youth Leader for Literacy last year, and as a part of the project, she’s promoting her neighborhood book club idea, Bookworm Wednesday. She’ll present the ideas put forward in her article series, “How to Start a Book Club” and together we’ll facilitate small-group activities to help participants begin to visualize this kind of project in their own communities.

I remember a time about eight years ago when I had just started my company and was assembling SPARK Peer Tutoring Handbooks in our screened-in porch. As I laminated cards and collated papers, I watched my young children zip around the backyard in their battery-operated Jeep.

In my mind’s-eye, I had a vivid flash of those same kids in high school, traveling with me to speak at conferences and school districts around the country. I remember smiling to myself, thinking, “That would be so cool.”

And it is.

This year, a new law went into effect in Wisconsin, allowing 10-year-olds to hunt. My motherly protection made me wish for my 10-year-old to ignore this law, and my survival instinct wanted all of us to stay out of the woods entirely. But since I married into a family of hunters, my vote didn’t really carry.

The new Wisconsin law requires all 10-12-year-olds to be accompanied by an adult mentor who had completed hunter safety. So both my son and husband took the course together this summer. For my husband, all the material was review – he’d never taken the course before and had been “grandfathered” in. But his own dad was such a stickler about safety, he may as well have already earned the certificate 30 years ago, when his dad started taking him into the woods.

Father and son dutifully went to the class this summer and I’ve never seen my son study for anything like he did this class. He practically memorized the book, and made note cards to practice the questions he thought would be on the test.

Both passed the course and earned their hunter safety badges.

A couple weeks ago, they participated in Wisconsin’s “Youth Hunt” – two days designed to give youth hunters ages 10-15 an opportunity to hunt deer and gain valuable hunting experience at a time when other hunters are not authorized to hunt deer with a firearm.

I couldn’t have been prouder to hear my 10-year-old explain that “he just couldn’t squeeze the trigger” because he wasn’t sure it was a clear-enough shot. Craig didn’t want to wound the deer without killing it. He let Dad take her down and they got another doe tag for the next day, but never got another shot.

Though this can be a dangerous sport, I’m comforted to know both the men in my life approach it with such serious thought. Craig told me, “I think next time I’ll be ready to squeeze the trigger.”

If you’ve been reading this series, you know our goal is to have our second mortgage paid off within a year. Part One in this series is here.

You may think our plan is silly, or unattainable. You may think we’ve been frivolous in the past – or that the cuts we’re making are ludicrous. Whatever frame of reference you’ve come from, I hope I’ve offered some food for thought.

A FEW LESSONS WE’VE LEARNED

We tend to spend what we have – in order to make mortgage-paydown a priority, we need to budget it like a bill.

If we didn’t look at the cumulative savings, we wouldn’t choose to tighten the belt at all. Saving ten dollars here and there did not offer us enough incentive to bother with a budget. A complete budget recalibration was in order. When I did the math to look at annual savings in multiple areas of the budget, I finally understood how much money was slipping through the cracks.

We don’t miss what we’ve cut out of the budget. So the fact some of the cuts are short-term (like travel) should make this whole process far simpler than we thought it would be.

Our pay-down went faster once the loan amount was less. The bank gets most of your payment early in the amortization, so the quicker you can reduce the balance, the better.

For instance:
• If you owe 100,000 at a rate of 5% and amortized at 15 years, only $375 of your $800 payment goes toward the principle on your loan.
• If you’ve paid it down to $50,000, $575 goes to principle.
• At $25,000, $685 of your $800 payment pays down your loan.

An excellent credit score translates to thousands saved in closing costs. Know your score and if it’s low, figure out what’s bogging you down.

Spreadsheets can be FUN - especially when you watch the loan balance decrease by leaps and bounds. The decreasing loan amount and budgeted monthly expenditures are tangible outcomes that validate your efforts when achieved.

Some budget cuts should be permanent. Some can be temporary. Both are good.

Ours is just a smaller second mortgage. But you have to start somewhere, right? Other families may need to start by paying off their car loans or credit card debt. Will we pay it off in a year? I hope so. Either way, we know we’ll have developed habits that last a lifetime – and we’ll have passed on these habits to our kids.

Our first mortgage? Well that’s a different story – and one that looks to be about 15 years from its conclusion. But with our new habits in place, after we reach our first goal, I bet we’ll find room in the budget for accelerating these payments as well – while loosening up on some of the sacrifices too.

Thank you for joining me on my Mortgage Payoff 101 series. What is your debt-control goal?

MORTGAGE PAYOFF 101 SERIES:
Getting Started
Monthly Charges
The Credit Card
Sell Your Stuff
Lessons Learned

My girl had her first major haircut a few weeks ago. At age 12! She cut off a foot and donated it to Locks of Love.

Going…

going…

Gone!

Her hair was so long that it’s still long after removing a foot, but it was a big step for her. She’d thought about it for a long time before cutting it. Of course, I sniffled a bit with the last snip, but the most shocking part is that after the hairdresser cut a few layers, her light blond hair was totally gone. It’s darker now.

Some little girl is going to get some beautiful hair to use while she recovers from chemo…

I’m a real fan of youth service and dedicated a whole chapter to it in my book. Since writing this month’s Positively Speaking column, I’ve read about many outstanding projects initiated and implemented by young people throughout the world for Global Youth Service Day. My daughter posted her literacy project on a map at the Global Youth Service Day website, and so can you!

One of our community’s service projects:
Fourth- and fifth-grade youth leaders are teaming with high school students to paint game templates on the blacktop. It’s been a very involved process, meeting weekly to discuss which games will work the best and fit in the space we have.

After the games are painted on the blacktop, the 4th and 5th grade youth leaders will partner with the physical education teacher to teach the games to the younger students. It’s all a part of the Peaceful Playgrounds curriculum.

What a fun and worthwhile project!

Now here’s your chance to share your own community’s youth service projects. Please share what your community’s young people are doing for Global Youth Service Day projects. We’d love to get new ideas for next year. Just describe the project here in comments, or leave your link. Be sure to mention the ages of the young people involved in the service.

Thanks for spreading the word about this outstanding global initiative!