All Around Growth — reflections on faith, freedom, and finding purpose through Orthodox Christian living, formation, and the long work of becoming. Earlier episodes available to supporters.
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Join Rob as he discusses acknowledging and recognizing the progress that you've made as he discusses inversion tables, FPU Baby Steps, and more! Today's episode is very loose and casual - very similar in nature to a "free talk" style of episode, but with a bit more structure.
Hey there, welcome back to the show. Today we are going to talk about inversion tables and the baby steps. That's right, inversion tables and the baby steps. Today is Tuesday, September 21st, 2021. Like I said, welcome back to the All Around Growth Podcast. My name is Rob Kaiser and I am your host. This is a show that is intended to provide insight and tools to building the life and homestead of your dreams. So why inversion tables and baby steps? Well, a couple reasons. I don't know if this is going to become part of my new routine or not. Letting the dog eat in the morning while I invert myself, but the idea came to mind that this would be today's show topic. While hanging at 60 degrees. And boy, how do we tie all this together? That is the question. Let's find out. So Labor Day weekend. I assembled this teeter fit spine inversion table. And I will link to the exact model that I purchased in the show notes because I purchased it or not used, but I purchased it as a refurbished item off of eBay directly from the teeter store on eBay where they sell all their used, repurposed, refurbished models that people have returned. And it was a great I was very pleased with that. I'll get into that later. Well, or maybe I'll just get into that right now. I'll get into the way I bought it later because that ties into and will make a nice segue into the baby steps. So what's up with this inversion table? I'm sure you've probably heard about it before. Uh Joe Rogan sponsors, teeter. You probably know someone or read something about it at some point. And that was the case with myself. As we get older, we talk about our body's changes and our back pain and things like that with other people. And at the day job, one of our drivers, his name is Mark, good dude, was telling me about his experiences because he spends most of the day sitting, and I found that as I spent more time sitting, more time behind the computer, that I had some pain, I guess, for lack of a better term, in my lower in my lower back. And this has been going on for quite some time. And we first started having these conversations a couple of years ago, uh like a couple of winters ago, because he hangs around the farm in the wintertime because we're really not running that many deliveries of plant material, but he helps the mechanic with routine maintenance on everything, and on this, especially the trailers. So we like I said, we spend a lot of time talking, and he first introduced me to this idea a couple of years ago, but I was still in debt, and I was just I wasn't buying anything that I didn't need. I had canceled all subscriptions, no Amazon Prime, no Netflix, no nothing. I was paying down debt. And if you've ever looked at inversion tables in general, there's a wide range of models and different makes of the various models and manufacturers. However, from the people that use inversion tables on a regular basis, and the ones that seem to swear by them, they own the teeter brand inversion table. And I feel like with something like that, a piece of equipment like that, you want a high-quality piece of equipment. And rather than buy a piece of junk and have it turn into an expensive clothes rack, I decided that this was going to be on my list of things to purchase once I got out of debt. So I kept grinding and I kept grinding and I kept grinding. And as of June last year, I did exactly that. After following the baby steps as outlined in Financial Peace University for years, I finally got to the point where the lifestyle changes that I began making clicked to a point where my progress was enough that I could for the first time in my life say that I was debt-free. I was in baby step three for the first time in my life. I was in baby step three. And for those that don't know, when you are in the baby steps, baby step one is assemble $1,000 as a baby emergency fund. That is what we do immediately. Baby step two is we pay off our consumer debt using the debt snowball method. Baby step three is save three to six months in expenses, and baby step four is investing 15% of your income. Now, I had gotten to the point where I was well over that three months of living expenses. I was approaching six months of living expenses, and I was feeling very comfortable about where I was at financially. And I decided that having made the progress that I was that I'd made, I could I wanted to purchase two things in particular. There were two high dollar items that had been on my radar for quite some time. One was a computer, and I've done several episodes about custom computing and the whole thought train behind a new computer. And two was this inversion table. So I had done stretching and yoga and things like that specific to my back and had good results. But I wanted to add this into the mix of options for stretching out and what I'm now including as movement in my life. One of the four pillars of health that I'm learning about in functional medicine. Nutrition, movement, sleep, and stress. And the massage therapist locally that I had been seeing recently offered a discount package on massage and body work, but I decided to forego a purchase of that for purchasing this inversion table. And again, I'll link to the inversion table in the show notes so you can see the where I bought it and the different options within the teeter store because there are models that are a little bit lower end, and there are also used refurbished models. Well, refurbished, when I say used, lightly used. Maybe they were, I don't know what happened. Doesn't even look like it was taken out of the box. But refurbished models of uh lower end quality and also of the highest end quality. Now, in doing and making these purchases over the last couple of months, the reason why I decided to pull the trigger now instead of waiting until the winter time when I will most likely receive a bonus. Again, I don't count on it, it's a bonus, but it's been consistent, and it's one of those things where I'm not doing anything that's going to make me or break me as far as the spending of the money is concerned, but it is something that I've put a lot of thought, effort, and energy about with the inversion or into regarding the decision-making process. But this inversion table, this dates back several years, and really it's about the same amount of time with the computer. And it was but the the computer is a little bit more complex than the inversion table, and a little bit more expensive as well. And it took a little bit more time to to assemble the um the purchase of the computer. But nevertheless, uh, like I was saying, the reason why I decided to pull the trigger now instead of wait, is so that specifically with the computer, I could get everything set up and functional so that by the time winter came around, I could actively begin spending time on the highly efficient new machine instead of spending that time putting it together. So I can spend time putting it together and getting myself ready for the winter work and for the goals that I have for 2022, which I'm hoping to have outlined by Thanksgiving, so that I can make any necessary tweaks the final month of December and kick off the new year in stride and in shape with my goals and objectives for the following year. Now, in doing so, those two substantial purchases put a big dent in my emergency savings. Well, my savings fund. I guess it's my emergency fund, three to six month fund. I dipped below that three-month mark. Not by much, but I did. And then when I built the computer, I decided that I was going to level up some things with regard to the home server and things like that, and bought additional hard drives and some hardware from Start9 Labs, and went a little spent a little more than I had allotted for, but I think it's going to be worth it in the long term. Much like this inversion table. But needless to say, it it made me feeling a little uncomfortable knowing that I had taken that much out of my savings. And although I'm exact I'm in a better position than I was a year ago, with the amount of money that I have saved up, I feel significantly more uneasy about it. Okay, so isn't that weird? I've made I with the consistency of making lifestyle changes, when we return and come full circle to a place where we've been in the past, sometimes we find ourselves feeling more uneasy about it in the present than we did at that time in the past. And it's important to take those lessons away from our experiences because when we do, it is a very strong indicator of the growth and progress that we've made. And if we don't remember that, that's a shame. Because you are making progress, you've come a long way from where you used to be. And sometimes we take a step back. That old saying about two steps forward, one step back, is true. But the way life on life's terms works, my friends, is that sometimes we take one step forward and two steps back as well. And life is a journey. And that's why we talk about walking this path and choosing a life path. And Dave Ramsey refers to the protocol outlined in Financial Peace University as steps, baby steps. And then we have other sayings, such as the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Sometimes we're not always where we want to be, but that doesn't mean you've not made the progress from where you once were. So remember that. It's easy to get discouraged. It's not easy to see the progress that we've made because we are our own worst critics. When we take time, it's simple to see the progress, but it's not easy. Well, alright, my friends. As you can hear from the background noise, I just pulled into the tree farm. We are here at work on this rainy Tuesday morning. Luckily, it appears as though the rain is going to stop by within an hour or two. And that's nice because there is some work to be done outdoors. It's going to rain all day tomorrow, as far as I can tell. And I'm hoping to get a lot of work done here outside so that I can spend a lot of time inside tomorrow doing that computer work. All right. Check out the show notes for links and information on how to share, how to review, how to rate the podcast, and why. And with that said, I hope you have a great day today. Thank you for listening. This is Robin Hunter.
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