#mtmo

                                 For months now Josh has been on me trying to get me to switch over form white rice to brown rice. "It's healthier!" he would often tell me to which I would simply reply "I know." For the longest time I didn't want to eat brown rice simply because of the flavor. Eating white rice had been a life long habit - but so had been my money spending habit. I thought that if I'm capable of changing how I spend my money, then I should be able to do the same with my diet. So now I'm all about the Jasmin brown rice. It took a bit getting used to, but it wasn't as difficult to switch over as I initially thought.  Here's some comparisons between the two that I thought were interesting:

A cup of cooked, medium grain white rice has 242 calories vs. 216 calories in a cup of long grain brown rice.

White rice has only 0.6 grams of fiber per cup compared to 4 grams of fiber in brown rice.

White rice has 53.2 grams of carbs per cup vs. about 45 grams in a cup of brown rice. In addition, the 4 grams of fiber in the brown rice brings the total net carbs down to 41 grams.

Harvard researchers found that eating five or more servings of white rice per week raised a person's risk of developing type 2 diabetes, while eating two or more servings of brown rice per week actually lowered a person's risk of developing the disease. 

A cup of brown rice contains 84 mg of magnesium compared to 19 mg in white rice. This is because white rice is created by removing several of the outer layers of a grain of rice. Many vitamins and minerals are lost in this process. While some of them are put back into white rice (hence the term "enriched rice"), many, including magnesium, are not added back in.

According to a Harris Interactive survey conducted for the AICPA, couples argue more about financial matters than any other topic. If you are following Josh and I towards financial freedom, you and your spouse need to be on the same page.

There are many things I love about Josh, one of those things is that he and I are financially in sync. We have a financial goal that we can only achieve through teamwork. In order to reach that goal we have to make sacrifices. Around November last year I had planned to surprise Josh by getting him a Harley... but of course I couldn't really surprise him since it was a large purchase, a purchase that required a discussion. After agreeing on it, we decided to talk to the dealer on base. We ended up getting a deal of $9,000 for a brand new Harley. The only thing we needed to do was pay $300 to "lock the price". Now this was back in the November - December time frame, prior to committing to Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover.

So far the only funds that we put into that motorcycle was the original $300. So today Josh and I had another discussion about the Harley and decided that it would be going against our financial goal if we proceeded with the Harley.